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Windows 8 Milestone 1 Build Leaks | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | (milestone 1, of 3) is passing, as I write this, through the tubes of the internets. There are leaked screenshots showing off some, but not all (this milestone isn’t nearly feature-complete) of the new features coming in this version. Are you the curious type, who ran custom builds of Longhorn for a couple years back in the day? You probably are reading this on Windows 8. Of course, we don’t condone piracy or the spreading of this information. But we’d be remiss in our duties if we didn’t at least mention that it’s out there. [via ] |
Meet Duolingo, Google’s Next Acquisition Target; Learn A Language, Help The Web | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | In 2005, then-Carnegie Mellon PhD grad student had an idea for a game. In one of the first examples of true crowdsourcing, he had people looking at images and labeling them to improve image search. Google acquired ESP Game in 2005 and renamed it . In 2007, now-Professor von Ahn had another idea. He realized that all the time people wasted typing in CAPTCHAs could be used for some good: helping to digitize books. Out of Carnegie Mellon he launched the project as reCAPTCHA, a startup. And guess what? In 2009, . Now von Ahn is back again. is his latest project. It has been for the past day, though not too much is known about it. But we got a chance to get a bit more out of von Ahn, and not surprisingly, the idea is very cool. Von Ahn notes that over the past year and a half, his Carnegie Mellon team has been quietly working on this new idea. It originally arose from a single question: how can you get 100 million people on the web translating everything into different languages for free? One problem is that there aren’t that many people that are truly bilingual. Another problem is the whole “free” thing. So along with his PhD student Severin Hacker (yep, that’s his name), von Ahn twisted the idea on its side. Instead of getting people to do something that felt like unpaid work, why not spin it as a learning experience? That’s exactly what Duolingo does. “ von Ahn writes. ,” he continues. Smart. Von Ahn didn’t want to give too much else away as their still finalizing the service. He notes that it should be ready for a private beta in a few weeks. “ ,” he says. He also says that while it’s currently just a project under Carnegie Mellon, he and Hacker may turn it into a company. And if they do, the countdown to Google buying them will officially be on. I give it 6 months until that happens. Tops. |
Leaked Intel Roadmap Holds No Big Surprises | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 12 |
, but it’s nothing crazy. Intel doesn’t really do anything crazy, just tick-tocks its yearly advances, and 2011 is no different. Sandy Bridge will get a tweaked successor in the E series, which will allow more CPU cores and more graphics bandwidth. Then the next gen “Ivy Bridge” hits in 2012. Should you wait? Nah. If you aren’t pressed for time, wait to see AMD’s new Bulldozer platform in the next couple months; if it doesn’t fit your fancy, it’ll at least help push prices down. [via ] |
Kiip’s Brian Wong On Taking Risks As Young Entrepreneur | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | After his mobile ads startup out of stealth on Monday, founder has a lot on his plate, mainly putting a recent $4.3 million in funding and a novel product and business model to good use. And Wong can’t even drink legally yet! We brought him into the TCTV studio this morning to talk about about the inspiration behind Kiip among other things. Wong says the idea came to him after he did an “iPad creep,” or sneak-peeked at everyone’s iPads while walking down an aisle on a plane. He realized that everyone was playing games, that games were “a holy grail of engagement,: but that game ads basically took up a piece of the screen without adding any value. Wong then came up with the idea of providing real life rewards, After graduating from the University of British Columbia in 2009 (after skipping four grades), the 19 year old got a job in business development at Digg, until a layoff left him looking for the next opportunity. Despite being so young, Wong is an advocate of staying in school, Wong also talked about the risks involved with raising funding, and how people might underestimate him and other entrepreneurs because of age, Well Wong obviously convinced somebody he was on to something, as True Ventures, Hummer Winblad and blue chip brands like Carl’s Jr, Sephora and PopChips have now given him the vote of confidence. So what’s his secret to success? |
Could Flip Have Survived On Its Own? (TCTV) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | When people build startups, we measure their measure success not only by how big is their exit, but also by how many lives their products touch and how long their brands lasts in the minds of consumers. Cisco’s decision today to two years after paying for it raises a series of questions which startup founder/investor Chris Dixon and I address in the video above. Why didn’t Cisco sell the business? Was the tax write-off bigger than anything Flip could have fetched? But namely, was it inevitable that Flip would have failed on its own because it , or could it have adapted if it stayed independent? There is no right answer here. Imagine if Netflix had been acquired early on by Blockbuster or some other lumbering giant—it would never be where it is today. On the other hand, Android is great example of a company that flourished because it was acquired by Google and given the resources to become the powerhouse that it is today. It’s not so much about the product. Android originally was working on a Sidekick-like device. “Great founders don’t move linearly,” says Dixon. The best acquisitions seem to be those where the acquired company is left alone. But it is easier to adapt to a changing market if you are a standalone startup than if you are part of a larger company. Could Flip have survived on its own? And what would it be worth today if it hadn’t sold? |
MeeGo UI Upgrade Is An Improvement, But Is It Good Enough? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJAzuhogdHk&w=640&h=390]
Right now the only serious player in tablets is Apple, followed at a great distance by Google and then by Microsoft. Intel’s MeeGo, which I expected to fade away after a rather poor showing at Mobile World Congress, has been given a puzzling upgrade, at a recent Intel event in Beijing. I say puzzling because it doesn’t look bad at all. Keep in mind this isn’t necessarily a “vanilla” MeeGo, but rather a build created by manufacturer Tencent, but it still impresses. The main “home screen” is organized into a sort of ribbon; the effect is a bit much for me, but this is still early software. They’ve got a new customized version of Opera Mobile 11, and the widget-type apps look pretty nice. It appears responsive, and it’s running on the new Oak Trail mobile platform, with a 1.5GHz Z560 Atom and a gig of RAM. The hardware it’s being shown on looks pretty chunky, but of course this isn’t a consumer device, it’s just a work-in-progress prototype. If I’m honest, by the time this thing gets out to consumers there will likely be iOS 5 and Android 3.1 (or even 3.5) to deal with, but the improvement to MeeGo in such a short time is good to see. Apparently Chinese vendors aren’t loving the Honeycomb, so maybe Intel will get some traction over there in the Far East. |
Xoom's MicroSD Card Slot Enabled Through Custom Kernel | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 12 |
It’s ridiculous that the s microSD card slot doesn’t work out of the box. I don’t understand it at all. No matter, the good ol’ XDA boys figured took it upon themselves to unlock the port. It requires a custom kernel, which in of itself requires the Xoom to be jailbroken, but the whole process is like jailbreaking any other Android device. (read: just follow the instructions) Hopefully an official update enables the device natively but Moto has so far been mum on the whole subject — which is also ridiculous. [XDA via ] |
BookingBug secures $350,000 Angel round to scale up | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | Online booking and reservation system has been bootstrapped for some time now, but today it announces the inking of a solid Angel round to the tune of $350,000 from a small group of Angels. Among them, Philip Crawford (ex-Oracle, current chairman of Lombard Risk plc and Avanti Capital) is joining the board. BookingBug enables businesses to share their availability – by hour, day, week or as classes, courses or events – and take bookings and enquiries online. The system is both realtime and distributed in that it’s booking and enquiry widgets can be embedded onto other sites, or affiliate partners and through social media. , the company’s founder and CEO admits it’s “only a small round” but it’s designed to “pursue more aggressive growth” – by bringing on more key hires – and is in preparation for a further, larger, funding round in the future. BookingBug recently partnered with Levi’s to allow customers to book personal shopping time in 250 stores across 22 countries in 6 languages as part of their Curve ID campaign. Back in 2009 it of partners to an affiliate scheme. While and are another competitors, they lack the innovative affiliates model. It also the wiki-style business directory , that lists 27 million business globally. |
Eye-Fi "Direct Mode" Upgrade Sends Photos Directly To Your iOS or Android Device | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 12 |
This is a pretty solid feature, I have to say, and maybe the one that makes me an convert. We’ve seen some iOS camera tethering options, and of course the Eye-Fi is already pretty useful for when you have your laptop around, but this super easy send-to-device feature could be really compelling to the average non-tech-savvy user. We , but it’s actually rolling out this week. Basically you just up the card ahead of time for , and it learns to use an ad-hoc wi-fi network to send your pictures directly to your iOS or Android device. It’s not quite as immediate as tethering, but it’s a lot easier, and if I’m not mistaken, it basically can use your other device as a secondary memory card. That’d be nice for some easy workflows: shoot on your point and shoot, they appear on your iPad where you peruse and delete a few, and then when you plug in and sync, they go over to iPhoto. And I’m sure you could figure out a similar process on your Android phone or tablet. The photos can be sent to your gallery, then you can use your own apps or the app provided by Eye-Fi. The new 8GB cards with Direct Mode enabled cost $80, or you can download an update later this week if you already have an X2 card. |
null | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | null |
Media Hardware Gets Thunderbolt At NAB | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 12 |
Although isn’t found on PCs yet, it’s already made its , and that’s enough for some. And now accessory makers are getting into the game as well, following up on the initial gear from and . Three companies (so far) have announced new devices supporting or shortly to support Intel’s new standard. Blackmagic Design put out the breakout box, AJA showed off a preview of an editing accessory device it called the Phaser, and Matrox announced its line of I/O boxes will ship with Thunderbolt in July. As expected, these first devices are aimed at professionals for whom that increased bandwidth really means a productivity boost. But it’s far from clear whether Thunderbolt will be adopted at large by consumers, so chances are the big guys like Logitech and Western Digital are prototyping internally and waiting for the right moment to strike (or not strike). [via ] |
NASA Names The Space Shuttles' Final Resting Places | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | 30 years ago today the Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off on the first shuttle mission. Two missions ended in disaster, but a total of five different shuttles spent a collective 1289 days in space over 132 missions. The program is set for retirement after Atlantis’ final voyage later this month. The three remaining shuttles, along with the Enterprise prototype, are going to need cozy homes. Of course every museum around the US wants one, but there are only four shuttles to go around with one already reserved for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The shuttles new homes are to cover the $28.8 million cost of prepping and transporting the massive shuttles, but those costs should be easily recovered with ticket sales. NASA has been talking with suitors for the last few months and used the historic anniversary to announce the winners. Somber fact about the Discovery: After her final space mission this past March, she became the only original Shuttle to survive her final launch and unlike the Challenger and Columbia. She’s going to end up at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to replace the Enterprise prototype. The Atlantis first took off from Kennedy Space Center in April of 1985 and flew for the last time on May 14, 2010. She logged 120 million miles over 32 missions. Her final destination will be in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center after NASA removes all the dangerous fluids and equipment. Save a disaster, the youngest Space Shuttle Endeavour is on her way to the California Science Center in Los Angeles after flying her Space Shuttle mission later this month. The Enterprise is to be moved from its current home at the Smithsonian to the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum located on Manhattan’s West Side. While it never actually reached outer space, the Enterprise conducted upper atmosphere test flights and actually flew over New York City in 1983. Likewise, NYC itself never had a major historical claim to the Shuttle like several other vying locations, but the 1943 warship museum does pull in close to a million visitors a year and helped recovery early NASA launch vehicles. : Atlantis is the final shuttle mission and the post was updated as such. Thanks for pointing out the error. |
Review: Monster PowerBeats Sport Headphones By Dr. Dre | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | That red cord. You’ve seen it. Maybe it was at the gym; maybe it was on the bus — but you’ve seen it. With their Beats By Dr. Dre line, Monster has done what they do best: take a commonplace item, and turn it into a status symbol. How? By making their offering retail-level luxury, so to speak. They price things cheap enough that brick-and-mortar stores will still put it on their shelves, but expensive enough (that is, more expensive than most of their Best Buy competition) that many shoppers would inherently assume that they’re the best available. But you, dear friend, know better. You know that more money doesn’t necessarily mean better performance — and you have the Internet! We took one of Monster’s latest addition to the Beats By Dr. Dre line, the PowerBeats Sport Headphones (complete with !), for a spin. How’d they do? Find out after the jump.
For the price ($179 MSRP, around $150-160 in most online shops), the PowerBeats sound good, but not great. The bass is surprisingly strong, while mids were a bit weak — combine the two, and vocals often seemed a bit muddled. I’ve owned plenty of headphones that cost less but threw out better sound (like the $79 Klipsch IMAGE S4s, or any of Nuforce’s recent sub-$100 stuff). As the “Sport” bit dropped in the name implies, the PowerBeats are built for activity. A soft plastic arm wraps around the top of your ear, keeping things from slipping out whether you’re running on a treadmill, bicycling, or wrestling bears. I’ve probably ran around 20 miles total with these things on, and . Unless you straight up punch the cord or something, these things aren’t going anywhere. One of the bulletpoints Monster offers up here is “passive sound isolation”, which is really a fancy way of saying that the fit is intentionally 100% air tight. Why? Because if you’re running, you’re likely running on roads. Roads have cars, and cars tend to honk before they hit you. If you’ve got a 100% air tight fit, chances are good that you’re not going to hear the honking. Though I do feel that this affects the sound a bit, they’ve done a good job of limiting noise leak and the like while still allowing some level of ambient noise in. A few months back, Monster started adding iPod-compatible in-line music controls to a number of their headphones. On most of their offerings, the controls are built into a simple rectangular box. Here, they decided to get a bit fancy. Unfortunately, said fanciness didn’t really work out in their favor. You see, both the top and bottom of the control are tapered, buttonless surfaces. To crank the volume up, you squeeze the top — conversely, you squeeze the bottom to turn things down. Here’s the catch: while the top control is wider than it is deep, the bottom control is almost exactly the same on both dimensions. The problem with that? It’s really, really difficult to tell if you’re squeezing the bottom control the right way without stopping whatever you’re doing to look. Given that the entire reason for the in-line control existence is quick, sight-less control of your music, it sort of defeats the purpose. Having to stare down at your controls while you’re on the last leg of your treadmill sprint because you can’t find the damn “Volume Down” button sucks. So, the question that it all boils down to: If you’re looking for amazing sound for the $180 price tag, look elsewhere. If you’re looking for that combination of decent sound and a pair of headphones that cling to your head like a baby koala, these are a reasonable option. Alas, the wonky design of the in-line control really hinder the product as a whole. Own the Powerbeats? Let us know about your experience below. |
The Moral Of The Story Is Never Sell Half Your Company For $1,000 | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | Paul Ceglia may just be a con man, or he may turn out to be the greatest tech investor who ever lived. After all, anyone who invested early in Facebook looks like a genius today. Peter Thiel turned his in Facebook into a 10 percent stake that would be worth at least $5 billion today at the latest . Facebook investor Jim Breyer of Accel Partners . And now we have Paul Ceglia, a convicted felon who in 2003 for $1,000, and he has the contract and emails to prove it. He later put in another $1,000 for a total investment of $2,000, but if he gets anywhere close to what he’s asking for (half of Zuckerberg’s share, which could be worth as much as $10 billion), he could go down as the best tech investor in history. The purported emails, which Facebook says are fake, . They paint a picture of a young Zuckerberg playing Ceglia for some extra cash to help develop Facebook when it was only a dorm room project (Zuckerberg was doing work for hire for another Ceglia project, and got him to fund development of Facebook as well, at least according to Ceglia’s latest complaint). Facebook will either end up fighting this in court or settling with Ceglia for a princely sum just to take the risk of the lawsuit off the table. Whatever happens, this incident holds several lessons for any would-be entrepreneur or engineer. In the video below, angel investor and Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon and I discuss what every founder needs to know before they give away any part of their company. The decisions made in the first 6 month usually end up being the most important. The biggest takeaway from this incident: Don’t ever sell half your company for $1,000. |
Exclusive: The Bleak Financial Numbers From The MySpace Sale Pitch Book | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | Back in 2008 MySpace was on a roll. They racked up in revenue and the company was still growing. But a year later top execs started to bail (the ). Within two months cofounder and CEO . We’ve gotten a copy of the confidential MySpace pitch book that parent company News Corp. has distributed to potential buyers. Notably, that pitch book doesn’t include any historical financial or user data about MySpace at all. Everything is projected out and forward looking, and even then it’s bleak. Revenue for fiscal 2011, ending June 30, 2011, is expected to be just $109 million. Expenses for the year are projected to be $274 million, and the company will lose a whopping $165 million for the 12 month period. That’s after massive waves of layoffs, although I expect much of the costs of the layoffs are included up front in 2011 expenses. After 2011 the pitch book turns to pure fiction. After losing $165 million this year, they expect to actually have $15 million in ebitda in fiscal 2012. How? Revenue will decrease to $84 million, but expenses will fall from $274 million this year to just $69 million. The company will then be profitable, says the pitch book. That means about $205 million would need to be found in operating cost savings in the next 14 months. That means even more massive layoffs. And yet somehow News Corp. argues that revenue will only fall 23% in the next year. Costs will decrease 75%, and revenue will fall just 23%. Believable? Nope. But at least on paper it makes MySpace profitable. The pitch book predicts 2013, 2014 and 2015 revenues to be $101 million, $119 million and $139 million, respectively. With the company every month, it’s hard to see revenue stabilizing and then actually rising. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone believes the projections in the pitch book are possible. Which is why News Corp. is in the unfortunate situation of trying to offload a money vacuum, and will be lucky to be able to even . The real question is how much News Corp. should be paying someone to take this off their books, not the other way around. MySpace, in other words, needs a dowry. A sad fate for what was once the . |
Survey: Dutch Artists Say P2P Doesn't Hurt Them Financially | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | You may have heard that the Dutch Government now to outlaw music and movie (and whatever else) downloading. That seems pretty prosaic: since when was it legal to infringe on someone’s copyright? Isn’t that the whole point of copyright? No matter, for in the lead up to the Dutch announcement’s announcement was taken. “What about the survey?” you may ask. Well, said survey that a good number of artists believe that they’re not hurt financially by piracy, and that it’s about time to re-think the artist-fan relationship with respect to DRM. The survey asked 4,000 artists (musicians, authors, photographers, etc.) for their views on all sorts of piracy-related subjects. For example, only 12 percent of respondents said they believed file-sharing hurts them financially. Artists with more schooling’ under their belt tend to be among those who don’t believe file-sharing hurts them financially. So much for the claims by certain organizations that artists are being put in the poor house because of BitTorrent. What else? Oh, that file-sharing helps spread the word about their work. So says just north of 50 percent of respondents, though this number may change as more and more streaming options break into the mainstream. A sort of, “Online music services help spread the word about my work.” All of this being said, the Dutch artists aren’t a bunch of hippies who think everything should be free forever. Nope, with a majority saying that the penalties from illegal file-sharing should be more serious that the current penalties on the books. |
In The Post-Client Era, Did Tweetbot Just Swipe Twitter's iPhone Crown? | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | Don’t focus on making new Twitter clients. The message has been very clear — well, — for weeks now. If you’re a third-party looking to develop in the Twitter ecosystem, you should focus on data or niche experiences. Good thing Tweetbot didn’t listen. If you’ve looked at Twitter tonight, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the massive amount of buzz surrounding Tweetbot. It’s a new Twitter iPhone client made by Tapbots. And yes, it is very good. It’s so good that it has a number of people promising to walk away from Twitter’s own iPhone client. And that’s interesting for a few reasons. First of all, while apps like Echofon, Twitterrific, Seesmic, TweetDeck and other have their fans, Twitter for iPhone has been the undisputed king of Twitter iPhone clients since it was still . In fact, that’s why , along with developer Loren Brichter, and turned it into Twitter for iPhone (making it free in the process). Second, Tweetbot isn’t free — it’s $1.99. It apparently doesn’t matter, people are still insanely excited for this app. Third, Twitter is in the midst of a big push to get everyone using their own clients, and have been touting that shift taking place. Obviously, if Tweetbot actually does catch on, that could throw a wrench into things. The backstory of Tweetbot is equally as interesting. It was a year ago yesterday that Mark Jardine on Tapbots blog exposing the Tweetbot project to the world. At the time, they had been at work on the app for nearly 3 months when something funny happened: Twitter bought Tweetie. This caused them to second guess not only the pricing of their app, but also continuing to develop the app itself. As Jardine notes in his “concerns” list at the time: Will they [Twitter] eventually kill all 3rd party iPhone/iPad clients to prevent confusion between their app and all the rest? A year later, that’s sort of what Twitter would like to happen (though obviously they wouldn’t use the word “kill”). But recently, Twitter had a bit of a nightmare with regard to Twitter for iPhone when they decided to — I mean the — I mean the quickbar into the app. It was ill-advised and . Still, it has planted a seed of doubt in many users head about the direction of the app. Enter Tweetbot. A year after it was first announced we have the app. Both and have very thorough reviews of just what makes it so good. I’ve only been using it this evening, but my initial impression is that I too might be willing to replace Twitter for iPhone with it. It’s simply very well designed and great for power users — particularly those who use Twitter Lists. I also love the idea of adding some chaos into the mix. If Twitter doesn’t own the most popular mobile client, what does that mean? Would they have to buy Tweetbot? Do they make moves to shut it down or limit it? What if ? It’s enough to keep a blogger busy for weeks. — again, it’s $1.99, but worth it. |
TechCrunch Review: RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook Enters The Tablet Wars | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | In the tablet world right now, there’s the iPad and then there’s everyone else. Sorry, Xoom, despite your hype, . But a new challenger is just about to take the stage and it comes from a somewhat unlikely player: RIM. People have been talking about the BlackBerry PlayBook for months now following its buzz-worthy unveiling at CES back in January. But at the time, RIM noted that there was much work still to do before it would be released. And that work is continuing right up to the April 19 launch next week. But the product is complete enough now that RIM felt comfortable giving out review units. We got one of them and have had a chance to use the device extensively over the past week or so. So how is it? |
Intel-Based Honeycomb Tablets On The Way This Fall? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | Despite the fact that all the major players in the business are using non-Intel hardware, the semiconductor giant isn’t about to give up. They got a black eye from ARM in this first bout, but , they’re ready for round 2. Suppliers say that Intel has finalized negotiations with Google and will be aiming at putting Intel-based Honeycomb devices on the market as soon as the third quarter of 2011. I find it difficult to believe that a serious competitor will emerge so quickly, but a simple proof of concept device from one of the majors that demonstrates the advantages of the platform will work wonders, and maybe they can make something real come out by January. What does this mean for ? Well, , Intel seems to be guiding it towards the netbook segment. That doesn’t make a lot of sense for me, though, and I feel like might be making some inroads there by the time MeeGo is street-ready. Ah well. Nobody knows, and that’s okay. An official announcement from Intel is still probably a ways off, so don’t expect much news except of the back-channel variety for a while. |
AngelPad Opens Up Its Summer 2011 Applications | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | , the incubator found by ex-Googlers in order to help a select 15 startups make it here or anywhere, has officially opened up its for its summer 2011 cohort. AngelPad selects startups twice a year and is looking for its third round of contenders today, putting out it’s application tonight in order to find the best and the brightest. In case you’re debating about whether to apply to YCombinator, 500 Startups or AngelPad, founder Thomas Korte tell me that what makes Angelpad different from other accelerator programs is its size (small) and its emphasis on product and market. When I asked Korte what AngelPad was looking for specifically in a company, he said, [Writer’s/Editor’s note: Ha.] In addition to office space, mentorship and vetting, current and future AngelPad companies will receive $20K funding in exchange for around 6% of the company in common shares (which means a valuation of about $333k, which isn’t the point). Prospective applicants must supply their basic info, a LinkedIn profile and two minute video in stage one. In case you think this sounds like a piece of cake, 95% of applicants don’t get to stage two so try hard if you’re applying. If you are in the fortunate 5% that make it, you’ll need to provide a a long form application and real life interview after you pass. Korte says that the actual value add of joining AngelPad extends beyond equity, Those interested can apply
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Analysis Of Apple's A5: It's Not What We Know, It's What We Don't Know | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 13 |
When the A4 came out, I was at the fanfare surrounding it. Why such a big deal? Apple was now designing their own chips, isn’t that great?— came the echoing chorus. But they weren’t — the A4 was almost entirely a Samsung design implementing existing ARM processor tech. But Apple touched it, so it turned to gold. I kind of expected Apple to ride that wave for a while and just “overclock” the processor for the , but to my surprise, out came the A5. The decision to use a mostly off-the-shelf piece for the launch of a potentially disastrous product line (the iPad could easily have been bad, or at any rate unpopular) was one of economy; why go to the great expense of truly redesigning a chip, when tweaking an existing design will serve, and for a fraction of the cost? Chances are that development of a new chip would have happened sooner or later, but the success of the iPad made it a necessity to differentiate after that first volley.
(based on the Chipworks images from ) is five pages long, but is mostly meta-discussion, and the only real conclusion (considering how little is actually known about the SoC) is that while the CPU and GPU are licensed, the rest of the chip is kind of a mystery. By surface area, the CPU cores and GPU take up less than half the die. Assuming the usual business of memory management and I/O takes up another 10% or so, what is Apple doing with fully half of its design? There’s no answer at present. But EE Times raises the possibility of a set of specialized cores set to do the kinds of calculations and transformations that Apple knows are absolutely necessary to the device. It could be the reason for, say, the smooth and responsive scrolling on web pages. A processor has to track those pixels, perform the little calculations that describe the input, and so on. Many little tasks that Apple may have essentially set aside die space for: a core or a fraction of a core totally dedicated to image filtering, JPEG decoding, accelerometer smoothing — things that might have been integrated by OEMs in the components, but which Apple could easily take over and bend to their own purposes. It’s a truly custom-built system, and what makes it exciting is that these unknown functions could be almost anything — even . They could easily be for something like hardware video transcoding, or physics calculations, entire instruction sets that have yet to be implemented, but leave plenty of room for expansion in directions Apple has already charted. I was bearish on the A4, but I’m bullish on the A5. I think we’ve only barely begun to see what it can do. : Reader writes to say he’s taken a look at the chips as well. These pics help give a little more perspective on the size of the A5 and the departure from the A9 reference design:
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Acer Outs A Pair Of Large 3D Friendly LCD Monitors, Glasses Still Required | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | isn’t new to the 3D monitor game. The company released the way back in the wild days of 2010 and the firm’s latest monitors are a nice step down the evolutionary trail. The HN274H stretches 27-inches from corner to corner and features a 100,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. The $689 monitor also ships with a set of Nvidia 3D glasses and the monitor itself features a built-in IR emitter, eliminating the need for that pesky external box. Inputs includes one DVI-D, one VGA, and three HDMI 3D inputs, making this the first 27-inch monitor able to accept 3D signals over both DVI-D and HDMI. THe 23.6 HS244HQ (pictured) is much of the same with the sans one HDMI input and the included 3D glasses feature Acer branding. The dynamic contrast ratio is 12,000,000:1 and the 120Hz screen has a quick 2ms response time. Just like its big bro, the 23.6-inch version also carries a premium price of $450 MSRP. Both should be hitting major electronic retailers as soon as today. |
DIY Your Camera Into A Radiation Detector | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Q7VfWdgEg&w=640&h=390]
Here’s an interesting little project that anybody with some foil, gaffing tape, and a scintillator can do. It’ll let you see for yourself the natural radiation associated with elements like K Potassium, and of course any radiation coming off things like reactors or Godzillas. The project is really simple; I suppose the hard part is getting your hands on a few scintillation crystals. I’m just going to admit right here that I had no idea what were until I looked them up just now, though there was a scintillator-type device in a Donald Duck comic back in the day. Gyro was using one to keep track of Huey, Dewey, and Louie. , though you can probably find some for less, and the plastic ones used in this experiment are almost certainly cheaper. You put the crystal in front of your camera, block out all visible light with the foil and tape, and let the radiation from a banana or box of salt do its thing. The scintillator should produce enough visible light for the sensor to detect it, and with a little savvy image analysis, you have yourself a working radiation dosimeter. Science! [via , , and ] |
TechCrunch Review: RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook Enters The Tablet Wars | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | In the tablet world right now, there’s the iPad and then there’s everyone else. Sorry, Xoom, despite your hype, . But a new challenger is just about to take the stage and it comes from a somewhat unlikely player: RIM. People have been talking about the BlackBerry PlayBook for months now following its initial unveiling last September and a buzz-worthy showcase at CES back in January. But all along, RIM has noted that there was much work still to do before the device actually came into existence. And that work is continuing right up to the April 19 launch next week. But the product is complete enough now that RIM felt comfortable giving out review units. We got one of them and have had a chance to use the device extensively over the past week or so. So how is it? Well, right now it’s a total mixed bag. There’s a lot of room for improvement, but there are plenty of signs that point to such improvements — and they could happen relatively fast. The first thing you’ll notice when you hold the PlayBook is that it’s clearly meant to be used in the landscape orientation. This took a little getting used to for me since I’m an iPad user who predominantly uses it in the portrait orientation. But the PlayBook in portrait mode is sort of odd. My fingers overlap behind the device (because it’s so small) and the screen itself feels elongated and cramped. In fact, some apps don’t even rotate to work in portrait mode. And the most telling sign that RIM means this to be a landscape device is the fact that “BlackBerry” is written along the bottom of the border to be read in landscape mode. So a horizontal orientation is where it’s at. And the device, which as you’re probably aware is significantly smaller than an iPad, feels great in that orientation. It’s easy to navigate and it’s easy to type on the device’s very nice virtual keyboard. I think it’s fair to say that the 7-inch form factor is a pretty great one for a device that will predominantly be used in landscape mode. When you’re holding the PlayBook, you’ll also notice that unlike the aluminum back of the iPad, the backing here is more rubbery. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just different. Though in my opinion, it does make the device slightly cheaper than the iPad — more plastic-y. It almost feels as if the PlayBook has a case around it that’s permanently affixed. This goes right up to the front bezel which is slightly raised above the PlayBook’s screen itself. On the top of the device (when held in landscape mode) are the volume controls and a pause/play button. To the left of that is the power button. Let me rephrase that: to the left of that is the power button. I can’t for the life of me figure out RIM’s thinking here. The button is so small and very hard to push — I have to use my fingernails. I suppose this prevents accidental hits, but it’s laughably bad. The top of the device also has the standard headphone jack. On the bottom of the device are the inputs/outputs: micro-USB/HDMI and charger/dock inputs. A couple things about the PlayBook design that I prefer over the iPad include speakers that are front-facing (and produce a nice, loud, crisp sound). And a camera that is centered on the back of the device. Oddly enough, the front-facing camera on the PlayBook is off-center. Despite being much smaller than the iPad, the PlayBook is actually a little thicker than the iPad (the iPad 2, at least). And while it does weigh less, it’s hard to perceive a major difference when you’re holding the two. Again, the iPad just feels different since it’s so much larger. The screen on the PlayBook is very nice. It’s a 1024×600 WSVGA capacitive LCD touch screen. It’s certainly not a “Retina” display, but the iPad doesn’t have that either. The cameras on the PlayBook clearly blow away what the iPad has going for it. The camera around back is 5 megapixels. And the one on the front is 3 megapixels. Though the iPad 2 can shoot 720p video, still pictures are technically less than even one megapixel. When you look at pictures taken by the two side by side, there’s a very clear difference. The PlayBook rear camera is also capable of shooting 1080p video. ( : I’m told the front camera can shoot 1080p video as well!) The battery life of the PlayBook is solid — I’d say comparable to the iPad. And I’d hope so given that this thing is thicker than the iPad. But like any tablet, it’s the software that is actually going to make or break the device. And in the PlayBook’s case, the homegrown stuff makes it, while the use of ported apps or web apps breaks it. Again, mixed bag. The new BlackBerry Tablet OS itself is well done. When I first received a walk-through of the device, RIM representatives were quick to point out how they had paid attention to little things like transitions between images in the photo app. This is the kind of stuff that Apple always pays attention to but most of their competition simply doesn’t seem to care about. And it always shows after prolonged usage. So I’m happy to report that RIM has paid attention to a lot of the little things. Overall, the feel of the OS is solid. The way you navigate around is also pretty well thought out. Because the PlayBook has no “Home” button like the iPad, to bring up the home area when you’re in an app, you simply swipe up one finger from the bezel onto the screen. A second swipe in this way brings up the full slate of apps on the device. Meanwhile, doing the same gesture from the top of the device brings down the settings (it’s nice to have these so accessible). Or if you’re in an app, this swipe from the top will bring up app options. There’s also a swipe from the upper right corner option to bring down the menu bar which contains the time, date, media player controls, orientation lock, Bluetooth control, WiFi, power, and options. This all takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it’s a breeze to use. The OS is also built to give users a much more complete multitasking experience than other mobile OSes offer. This means that if you’re in an app and you want to go to another one, you can swipe up to bring up a list of other apps and the app you’re currently using will keep doing whatever it’s doing. If it’s playing a video, that will continue. If you’re playing a game, that will also continue. I’m not sure that’s the best idea in the world from a usability perspective, but it makes for a good demo. When you’re in an app, you can swipe from the left or right to go to another open app. It’s sort of like a carousel, and similar to the multi-touch gestures currently buried in iOS 4.3 meant for developers to test out. One thing RIM clearly wants everyone to know is that the PlayBook comes with Adobe Flash baked in. The company says they worked closely with Adobe for several months to make sure everything works. And it does work — it’s just a bit wonky (like Flash is pretty much everywhere). If you go to YouTube, videos play just fine, even in full-screen mode. There are a few jitters here and there, but it’s much better than the Flash experience I’ve seen on any other mobile device. If you go to a site that is Flash-heavy beyond single videos, like ESPN, things get a little dicey. Autoplaying videos (and ads) slow things down, and there’s quite a bit of lag all around. The major problem with Flash on the PlayBook is that most sites simply aren’t optimized for touchscreens so Flash elements become almost like landmines. I often find myself accidentally clicking on a Flash element and getting whisked away to some other random page. This happens often when I’m just trying to scroll down the page. And it is very, annoying. This also speaks to a larger problem the PlayBook has: the browser simply isn’t very good. First of all, there’s a weird pause between typing in a URL and the page actually starting to load — it looks like nothing is happening for a few seconds. The site eventually does load and simple ones are displayed fine. More complex ones run into issues though. Twitter is a great example. Even though Twitter is one of the “apps” bookmarked by default on the PlayBook’s main screen, it runs like a nightmare in the PlayBook’s browser. Because New Twitter is fairly JavaScript-heavy, everything seems to slow to a crawl. And sometimes things just don’t work at all. Worse, quite often the browser just crashes after a few minutes of playing around with Twitter.com and other JavaScript-heavy sites. I was told that these crashes should be fixed with software updates. But I received two during my review time with the device and neither fixed the issue. Another JS-heavy site, Facebook (also bookmarked), runs relatively smooth. But that seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. There’s also an issue when you switch orientations and the browser looks like it’s displaying television static for a couple of seconds. Simply put: the browser still needs a lot of work. But there are other big bright sides for the PlayBook in terms of performance. One of them is video. The device can handle 1080p video playback with ease. These videos look great on the device and look even better when you use the HDMI-out optional accessory to hook the PlayBook up to your HD TV. It’s pretty amazing that this small machine can power video of this quality. And the really neat thing is that you can do other things in the background on the PlayBook as it outputs this video. It’s impressive for a device that has the same type of dual-core setup as the iPad (though the PlayBook apparently has more RAM). If there’s one glaring downside to the PlayBook right now, it’s the complete and utter lack of native applications. RIM has tried to play up the fact that it can run all the web apps out there, but as I’ve seen with Twitter, that’s less than ideal — they need native apps. Right now, beyond the standard ones they’ve built (music player, photo viewer, etc), I only have had a chance to play with two games made by EA: Need for Speed and Tetris. Both work well and reinforce the need for more apps. RIM says that over 3,000 have been submitted so far to their App World store (many ported using Adobe tools), and they have a roster of companies who have pledged support. But that won’t matter to consumers who buy this thing and look for the apps on day one. One huge light at the end of the tunnel is the PlayBook’s promised ability to run Android apps. This won’t be ready until the summer I’m told, but I did get a sneak peek at it in action, and it looks solid. Thanks to the PlayBook’s big processor, it can runs the apps smoothly in a sort of virtualization mode. Of course, there’s still the matter of getting all the touch elements in line and other optimizations, but I’m sure RIM is working on all of that. Perhaps the coolest thing about the PlayBook — and potentially its biggest initial selling point — is BlackBerry Bridge. Essentially, this allows you to pair your tablet with a BlackBerry phone and access all your data on that device on the tablet. The key to this is that like the BlackBerry itself, all of this information can maintain the highest security if that’s important to your business. And it gives you a set of apps which are oddly missing from the device itself: Messages, Calendar, Contacts, etc. This pairing (which works over Bluetooth) also allows you to use your phone’s data plan to use the PlayBook while working remotely — and it’s completely free for RIM customers. This is key since right now, the PlayBook is Wi-Fi only. As a whole, I’d say that RIM’s first attempt at an entirely new product is a valiant effort. The problem they face is the same one that everyone in the space faces: Apple. Is the PlayBook comparable to the iPad? No. Between the (lack of) app support and the wonky web browsing, there’s just no way around that fact. But RIM was smart to make the PlayBook a completely different form factor and give it BlackBerry Bridge to appeal to corporate users. So in that regard, there could be significant interest in this device. But given that it’s selling at the same price points as the iPad, I find it hard to imagine they’ll be able to compete in the consumer space right now. Maybe if they can nail the Android app support that will change the scene a bit. But Google and their partners are undoubtedly hard at work to make sure something like that doesn’t happen as well — can you imagine the humiliation if a non-Android tablet outsells the Android devices thanks to it being able to run Android apps? What’s promising is that even just in the time that I had my review unit, RIM pushed a number of updates that did improve the device quite a bit. If they continue to move that quickly, this may be a completely refreshed device in six months. So why not wait until there’s a little more polish to get it out there on the market? It’s a good question — one that Motorola and Google should have asked themselves with the Xoom. But the fact of the matter is that we’re now in the full-on tablet wars. And the early players who can iterate quickly are perhaps the only ones that have any hope against Apple’s huge head start. And RIM knows they have all those loyal BlackBerry users who will be very interested in the Bridge options. There’s a reason they’re calling this “the world’s first professional-grade tablet.” It’s a smart play. Now it’s just a question of selling other people on the idea. |
"Roundtail" Bike: Cool Or Just Loopy? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 13 |
Just take a look at that. What’s going on here? This radically different frame design is called the , and inventor Lou Tortola claims that circular rear makes for a way more comfortable ride. I’m not entirely convinced, though, it should be said, I’m not an actual bike designer myself. Tortola says that replacing the standard triangular read frame portion with these hoops provides 10 times the vertical flex and 60 times the shock absorption — which, I have to agree with the others commentating on this, sounds like a too much. Yet Paul Taylor, who built the frame for Tortola, says that it’s undergone extensive testing and passed just fine. I’ll wait until the bike mags get hold of this thing before I pass judgment, but I get the feeling it won’t catch on. That said, lots of people thought hardtails were weird, and now they’re all over the place. They say there will be titanium and carbon frames, of both mountain and hybrid varieties, coming in the fall, and they’ll be at in September. [via and ] |
Hertz to launch network of rent-by-the-hour electric cars in London | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | Last year launched a new service at an hourly rate in New York City, with expansion of the service to San Francisco, Washington D.C. and markets in Texas and China by the end of 2011. One of the cities on that list was London, and this Friday the service goes live. makes electric vehicles (EVs) available to rent by-the-hour. The scheme is launching with 16 charging points set up across the capital. Cars on offer initially will be the iMieV, Nissan LEAF and Renault Kangoo van. This Friday they will be demonstration of the cars from the London Marble Arch location in London. Clean energy catalyst, investor and serial entrepreneur, — who was a cofounder of Vista Research, and a co-architect of the US federal — is working with Hertz to set up the new EV service. Hidary is driving this forward with what he calls “smart grid, and smart cars” which includes information about the charging stations and their availability via a web app or a mobile app. Ideally so a driver doesn’t get sent to a charging station that’s in use. |
Another Group Photo Sharing Service? Yeah But ZangZing Actually Works | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | The digerati ponder and its tens of in financing. It will become the next Cuil, or it will turn Facebook into a buggy whip, or both, depending on who you talk too. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the actual user experience is horrific (luckily the product seems happily disconnected to the company’s hype). Meanwhile, I still want to make on the fly photo albums during events. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and there aren’t many options out there. Flickr has some limited but it’s too onerous for one time events, and works better for long term groups (butterfly lovers or whatever). MG for a weekend trip to Mexico that ended dramatically if not surprisingly with a bout of Montezuma’s revenge. Few others will bother until the app has gone through a few more versions. Anyway, new startup will fit this need nicely. It’s a beautiful photo repository that focuses on sharing and presentation. If you’re at an event, say a wedding, and you want to start a group album, just upload a picture from the wedding via email and then invite your friends. They can reply with their own photos, which are added to the album. And they can add new friends by email invite as well, unless someone’s changed the privacy setting to make an album private or even password protected. There’s no need for anyone to create a new account, simply by responding to the email with photos they’ve begun the process, and can finish the rest later, if they like. It’s one of the ways , by making account creation so simple that you’re done before you even know you’ve begun. ZangZing hasn’t launched yet, but it will soon and I’ve been testing the service. Pictures are beautifully displayed, with very little distracting text and certainly no advertisements. Scrolling through photos is a very Flash-like experience but, wonderfully, the site is entirely Flash-free. The wonders of HTML. And they’ve integrated a very nice desktop downloader into the browser experience. No more broken Flash uploaders to deal with, either. And ZangZing says they want to be your long term repository for photos. It will be a freemium service where you will eventually pay a fee for increased storage. But if you discontinue paying they won’t hold your photos hostage, like . “We’ll always give users access to their photos,” says cofounder (a promise we’ll hold him to). he says for long term users they may just send them a DVD on request with their photos to save the days and days of downloading required for huge numbers of photos. I imagine they’d charge a few dollars for that, but it would be worth it. Flickr should do the same. Anyway, this is just a teaser for now, the company doesn’t want any screenshots out there yet. , by the way, has some serious chops. They’ve self-funded so far with $1.5 million. Serious photographers will probably always have their favorite sites to show off their photos. But the social/sharing/group photo crowd space is still wide open, other than Facebook. I think there’s room for a service like ZangZing to capture our imagination, particularly if they integrate with Facebook and eliminate the need for another social graph. |
Living the Knowledge Life: A Thiel Fellowship Finalist's Response | Vivek Wadhwa | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | Over the last two days I’ve received dozens of messages from friends asking my opinion about the conversation between and on TechCrunch regarding the now-controversial . So many people have sent me links to these two articles because I am one of the finalists for the Thiel Fellowship. I was unschooled for half my life. For those not familiar with the practice, unschooling is a form of homeschooling wherein the learner directs her own education. Self-directed learning has been my shtick for the last eight years, and I believe that the world is my classroom. Self-directed learning does not mean solitary learning: unschooling never involved learning in my pajamas. To the contrary, unschooling allowed me to learn in the real world—how, where, and when I wanted. I am biased against institutionalized learning. I disagree with that education should only be gained in school. I dropped out of liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas because I’m behind a social movement called UnCollege which supports Mark Twain’s mantra: I am not part of the academic binary: I do not believe that college is all bad, nor that college is everything. I believe that learning is everything but should not be limited to academic institutions. UnCollege is about enabling people to value learning that happens anywhere and everywhere — be it inside the classroom or in the world. Universities should not limit how we learn or live. Ultimately, I hope to change the notion that obtaining a college degree is requisite for professional success. Wadhwa writes that I do not think everyone should go to college — nor do I think everyone should drop out of college. Pedagogy should not be applied ubiquitously. Education is not the place for generalizations. There is no best path. Everyone learns differently. Individuals should take whatever path to success — irrespective of how you define that term — that suits their learning style. For most people who have come from classically educated backgrounds, college is the accepted path to adulthood, but there should be more to college than putting one foot in front of the other. I do not think that universities today are preparing students to face the world, a point that Jim Plummer, the Stanford School of Engineering dean, would debate. A dichotomy has arisen between “college” and “life.” This is not an artificial crevasse I have imposed. I hate drawing this distinction: I think that life and learning should be mutually inclusive. I always operated on this assumption until I went to college and met students who dreaded “life in the real world.” Academia gives students a false sense of security. Laundry, cooking, and paying bills are but three things that most college students do not think about. When we keep students from directing their own education, how can we expect them to direct their lives post-graduation? Plummer says that I hope he’ll be open to listening to my comments as an unschooler. Plummer continues that School isn’t going away anytime soon. Millions have found success through the school system, and I am the first to acknowledge its virtues. Friends have asked me what I will do if my plans go awry. The worst case scenario? I can always go back to college. It’s not going anywhere. People assume that because I’m leading the UnCollege movement I’m against school. I’m not against school; I’m for learning, and I think that learning happens everywhere — not just in the classroom. There is value in structured learning: I went to public school through 5th grade. School taught me how to follow directions, meet deadlines, and work in groups. These skills have proved invaluable, but these skills do not take twelve years to master — a few well-taught classes suffice. You can gain knowledge through many methods: structured learning, individual study, mentorship, service learning, project-based learning, group study. However, the skills you learn from each method are different. Skills do not relate to knowledge but to ability. If I learn through group study I develop leadership skills while if I learn through individual study I develop concentration skills while if I learn in a mentorship relationship I develop interpersonal skills. There are advantages and disadvantages to each type of learning, but we should understand which learning styles lead to which skill outcomes. Plummer goes on to say that because I agree that we should not assess education in terms of earning potential (even though we as a society continue to do so—see the methodology for any college ranking), but I do not think that learning is an end in itself. I’m a lifelong and lifewide learner. I believe there is no end to learning. Plummer uses his observation as a reason to pursue education, which he presumes to be narrowly defined in a collegiate context. But if he is arguing that we should learn for the sake of learning, shouldn’t he support people pursuing whatever type of education allows them to learn best, even if that education happens outside academia? Wadhwa ends his post noting that without a college degree. This statement is sad but true. The college degree functions a signal to society. It says, “I’m arbitrarily trainable, can meet deadlines, and follow your directions.” It does not convey information about you or your talents. As we asymptotically approach a point at which everyone has a Ph.D, how are we going to choose between potential employees? Require everyone to get two Ph.Ds, then three? I hope not. There will come a point when society realizes that our accreditation system is a functioning fallacy. I’m leading UnCollege to hasten that realization and prove that a college degree is not requisite for success. I do not want to burn down classrooms. I do not want to put professors out of work. I do not want to do away with college or university. While going to college is the societally accepted path to professional success, it is not the only path. I want to help others understand that obtaining a college degree is not the only path to professional success. I believe institutionalized higher education limits possibilities, and that if we allowed people to learn from life instead of confining them to academic intuitions we could unleash human potential and allow everybody to change the world. |
Razer's Switchblade Gains Traction With Tencent/Intel Alliance | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 13 |
When the Razer Switchblade , I have to say I was pretty skeptical — and I’m still skeptical now. Not that they won’t put this thing out, but that they’ll be able to do so for any kind of affordable price. Still, it’s good to know they’re taking serious steps to make it a reality. Today they announced a partnership with Intel and Chinese gaming biggie Tencent to provide some launch readiness for the experimental gaming device. The agreement is basically a three-way partnership to make Tencent’s popular games work perfectly on the platform — that means optimized drivers by Intel, customized assets by Tencent, and of course the hardware from Razer. It certainly looks cool, but until we give it a real try, it’s impossible to say whether it lives up to its promises. It’s good news for rich Chinese gamers, but will we see similar partnerships on this side of the Pacific? Hard to say. The hot emerging market right now is tablets, and everyone is trying to sell a million on iOS. Will there be room for this comparatively hardcore gaming device? And will gaming companies, already torn between PC, consoles, handhelds, and mobile/tablets, want to further extend their development juice? I guess we’ll find out. Here’s the full press release: Three of the largest technology brands in China to optimize games for mobile play on the Razer Switchblade Beijing, China – April 13th, 2011 – Razer, the world’s leading high-end precision gaming brand, with Tencent, China’s leading provider of games and internet services, and Intel, world leader in computing innovation are proud to announce a strategic partnership aimed at expanding the entertainment possibilities for Chinese gamers. The Razer Switchblade concept has been designated as the flagship concept to lead this mobile PC gaming revolution. All Chinese gamers can rejoice, as their favorite Tencent titles like Dungeon and Fighter, Crossfire, League of Legends, QQ Speed and many more are optimized for portable play on the Razer Switchblade. You can now fight, shoot, cast spells, race or just socialize with friends while on-the-go, as Tencent strives to ensure their software delivers the best gaming experience through perfect synergy with Razer and Intel’s hardware. “This is the first time three of the biggest technology brands in China have come together,” said Min-Liang Tan, CEO and Creative Director, Razer, “we’re united by a common goal to deliver the best portable gaming experience to as many gamers as possible. With the Razer Switchblade’s adaptive tactile keyboard, Intel’s range of processors, and Tencent’s popular games, this is no lofty goal – it’s happening right now.” The Razer Switchblade concept was created from the ground up by Razer designers and engineers, focused on enhancing the entire user experience of playing PC games on a handheld device. It features an ultra-sensitive multi-touch screen, adaptive tactile keyboard, and an intelligent user interface that adjusts the configuration and key layout on-the-fly based on game content and user requirements. And at the heart of the concept device is an Intel Atom processor designed for next generation small form factor computing. “Intel is committed to creating and extending the personal computing experience for end-users together with our ecosystem partners,” said Ian Yang, President, Intel China. “The collaboration with Razer, Tencent and Intel will provide optimized experiences for the rapidly growing gaming community in China.” “Like Razer, we want gamers to have just as much fun playing our games on-the-go as they would at home or at a PC café,” said Mark Ren, SEVP, Tencent. “We’re really excited to bring the revolutionary Razer Switchblade to millions gamers connected to our games, allowing them to experience our world of fun anytime, anywhere”, said Steven Ma, VP of Tencent. Razer, Intel, and Tencent are committed to growing China’s PC gaming market, and will be announcing exciting updates to this strategic partnership in the months to come. About the Razer Switchblade Concept The Razer Switchblade concept is a revolutionary mobile PC gaming device that allows gamers to play on-the-go without giving up the precision and control normally associated with a desktop gaming system. Integrating a multi-touch seven-inch screen, an innovative adaptive tactile keyboard and housing the next generation Intel Atom processor, the Razer Switchblade concept delivers the full desktop experience in a netbook-sized solution. For more information, please visit: http://cn.razerzone.com/switchblade |
null | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | null |
Apple To Release White iPhone 4 "In The Next Few Weeks"? | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | The white iPhone 4 No Yes No Yes STOP PLAYING WITH MY HEART, RUMOR MILL. Today, we head back to “No it’s not!” land, with claiming they’ve got “three people familiar with the plans” all saying the same thing: the white iPhone 4 is coming in the next few weeks (with one saying “by the end of April”) for both AT&T and Verizon For those keeping track: it’s now been 10 months since the white iPhone 4 was originally supposed to hit the shelves. |
Motorola Looking At A Rugged Enterprise Tablet With Android… 2.3? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 13 |
I’m not really sure what to make of this. Engadget detailing plans within Motorola to create a new enterprise-oriented . But it’s also going to be ruggedized. And it’s also going to run Android 2.3. Huh? My best guess is that they’re going for a sort of all-purpose device that can be used throughout the workplace, be it in the stockroom, the warehouse, or the front desk. HP currently makes a lot of specialized equipment for this kind of thing, and perhaps Motorola thinks they can beat the market leader by… well, part isn’t clear yet. The 2.3 thing isn’t too much of a surprise though, really: Honeycomb is still very unproven and potentially very vulnerable, and while Gingerbread doesn’t really strike me as the natural choice for secure communications, it’s a more mature OS with more security support. Anyway, don’t expect to see this thing in any window displays; like the HP Windows 7 Slate, this is going straight to businesses. |
Let Me Goo.gl These New Features For You | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 13 |
Back in September, Google , the official URL shortener from the tech giant. The service first went into operation late in 2009 and was tied to Google’s own products, like Google Toolbar, but now it’s a direct competitor to the myriad consumer-focused shorteners, the most famous of which is bit.ly. Today, goo.gl has a handful of new features that should make fans of the service happy. First up is easier copy and pasting — after you submit a link, Google will automatically highlight the resulting shortened URL, which means you can immediately hit Control-C to copy it. No, not a huge deal (and rivals like bit.ly already do the same thing), but if you use this as part of your workflow, you’ll appreciate it. Next, you can now remove URLs that are shown on your dashboard. Again, another minor feature — but one that comes in handy if you’re a big Goo.gl user. As you use the service, it builds a list of URLs you’ve generated and displays how many clicks each has received. But that list got cluttered fast if you frequently used it. Now you’ll be able to highlight your most important links while hiding the ones that you don’t care so much about. Google also goes out of its way to say that it has had zero downtime since the service launched in September, which is notable because URL shorteners are often criticized for adding additional latency and points of failure to the web. Finally, you can now spammy links. Hooray! |
4INFO Nabs Mobile Ad Exec Ray Colwell As Chief Revenue Officer | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | Mobile advertising company has made a key hire today. The company has added advertising exec Ray Colwell as chief revenue officer. Most recently, Colwell was the vice president of national and direct sales at display ad network . Colwell has helped to create mobile campaigns for brands including Discovery, Bank of America, Procter & Gamble and Ford and was previously vice president of mobile video ad network Transpera (which was by Tremor Media). He was also senior vice president of Third Screen Media (which was ). Colwell has also held several sales and marketing positions at Yahoo, Lycos, Engage Technologies, Adsmart, Pointcast and Ziff-Davis. Founded in 2005, 4INFO has dominated the SMS ad space, with roughly 3,000 publishers on its msgHaven platform. This publishing platform, which allows clients to manage the content and delivery of their SMS campaign, delivers around each month (which has doubled in the past year). The network, which has raised in funding, also reaches 78 million uniques a month in mobile display/apps through its AdHaven platform and audience network. The company is now profitable and pouring that money back into R&D and hiring. |
TC Cribs: Inside The Snuggified Home Of Posterous | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | It’s time for a new episode of TC Cribs, and this week we’re showcasing the home of one of the easiest-to-use blogging platforms around: , the service that lets you turn an email into a blog post (among ). As you’ll see in the tour, the Posterous office is located in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District so there’s always something exciting going on outside the window. The team has also developed a strange affinity for a certain inexpensive beer… and Snuggies. Oh, and don’t worry if you’re not sure how to actually pronounce “Posterous” — in this episode, we answer the question once and for all. Once again, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the great editing. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the past episodes of TC Cribs: |
WebOS 3.0 Leaked, Looks Pretty Nice | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | This is an early build, but got their hands on a WebOS 3.0 beta emulator and they’re reporting that this build, while strong, is still lacking some features.
However, what we are seeing here is a robust, tablet-based OS that may make some of HP’s upcoming devices considerably more compelling. While find it dubious that WebOS will survive this decade, it’s still an important part of the mobile ecosystem and folks who don’t want iOS or Android will probably love it for the brief time it is here with us on Earth. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvqzXR0JkuY&w=640&h=390] |
For Your Consideration: How TV Ruined Your Life | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzdgkF_cMmU&w=640&h=390]
It’s possible you may have managed to avoid ever running into Charlie Brooker’s columns at the Guardian, it being a British newspaper and all. But even if his of UK shows are no longer appearing regularly, there’s a newer piece of Brooker no one should be missing: . I thought I’d recommend it after watching the fifth episode (above), which blames TV for our adoration of progress, technology, and gadgets. The rest of the show is brilliant as well, and is an excellent indictment of a single technology that has made its way into our deepest emotional and social norms. In 20 years, do you think there will be a ? I hope so. |
Google Is A Bit Unpolished When It Comes To Chrome | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | Today during the call, Google had a few things to say about Chrome and Chrome OS that were interesting. Well, more like intriguing — because they were a bit odd. First of all, a few times during the call, Google executives touted the fact that Chrome now has 120 million active daily users. This is supposedly up 40 percent in the past year, which . But they also said that they’re now seeing 30 percent growth quarter to quarter in terms of usage. The problem is that they’ve given out this exact stat 120 million before — . Yes, exactly a quarter ago, Google also said they were seeing 120 million daily active users of Chrome. So if they’re growing 30 percent quarter to quarter, shouldn’t they have significantly more users now? I asked Google specifically about this, and all a spokesperson had to say was that 120 million is the most recent number they had. During the same call, new SVP of Commerce and Local, Jeff Huber, noted that Chrome OS was coming “later this year”. This wording led some to wonder if that means yet more delays for the fledgling OS — after all, Google has been saying for months that users should expect to see the first Chrome OS devices this summer (after delaying them from last holiday season). So why wouldn’t Huber say “this summer” or “soon”? “Later this year” seems to imply something further off than a couple months from now. I also asked Google about this. Their response? Chrome OS is still on-track for a mid-2011 launch. Mid is June. As in two months from now. We’ll see. At another point in the call, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette noted that Chrome was being heavily invested in by the company because each user is a “locked-in”. “Everybody that uses Chrome is a guaranteed locked-in user, in terms of having access to Google,” was the actual quote. Probably not the best way to phrase that. And it’s not even fully true — when users load Chrome for the first time, they have the option to select between Google, Bing, or Yahoo as their default search engine (though I’m sure the vast majority do choose Google). But it’s not like they’re really “locked-in” — you can always change this in the settings. Towards the end of the call, a couple questions wondered if Google would be using Chrome as a way to alter search results or to introduce new products? This is a bit of a touchy subject since Google has been playing up Chrome as an “open” browser for the web (though technically it’s Chromium that is the open source version). None of the Google executives shot down these ideas and in fact, they played up these possibilities. In other words, yes, Chrome could eventually be yet another way Google is following your movements online and using it to their advantage. Again, probably not the best way to answer those questions. So overall, Google’s management of the Chrome message today was unpolished at best, and just wrong or misguided at worst. You would have thought that if they were planning on talking about the product this much, they would have trotted out their newly minted (with a ) SVP of Chrome, . I have the feeling that at the very least, he would have given some better answers. : In a comment below, Google Biz Dev Manager Bob Meese explains the first discrepancy: Regarding your first point, at the December Chrome event the number was 120M but the metric wasn’t DAU (it was a more generic “Active Users”). Here’s Danny Sullivan’s article, which has a picture of that slide: . I think the move to a more standard metric like DAU is probably a good thing. |
Lasers Suck, Says The War Nerd | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 14 |
We get excited about lasers here at CrunchGear, mainly because they’re lasers. Lasers are something we’ve wanted since our childhoods, when we watched Star Wars and thought “Man! I’m so glad they don’t have guns in the distant past, or this movie would have been boring!” Yes, these brightly-colored rays captured our hearts, even if our brains kind of knew that things didn’t really work like that. Fast forward 30 years or so, and here we are, watching a of the Navy setting a boat on fire with a real-life laser. Shouldn’t we be jumping for joy? Well, it’s not that simple. we should be laughing at this demonstration of laser-based weapons, which is in actuality just melting some plastic over the period of a minute or more. If that was our weapon, and then someone said “hey, watch this” and fired an artillery shell or guided rocket at that thing, we’d freak out about how amazing these futuristic weapons are that destroy the whole boat in a second! It’s true, lasers are pretty weak, which is why the draw is not what they are, but what they could be. The fantasy of a laser is a different thing from the reality of a laser, and what we’re celebrating (in our undeniable geekdom) is that we are, however imperfectly, attempting to make that fantasy a reality — it’s the closest thing we can get to the childish joy of playing pretend. That said, there is a budget for these oversized laser pointers that could be paying for food and housing. That’s a whole can of worms I don’t want to open here, but it is worth pointing out that pie in the sky shouldn’t cost billions of dollars in real money. For my dollar? [via ] |
RIM CEOs: PlayBook Reviews Not "Fair," Device Is "Superior" | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | Early of the have been unfavorable, but optimistic, mostly concluding that the was launched half-baked, lacking some basic and promised functions like a native email client and Android app support. RIM’s executives have gone on the defensive, but their statements, , aren’t really convincing. Mike Lazaridis described the form factor and technology as “superior,” and industrial design VP Todd Wood said the design was “iconic,” hearkening back to items like Picasso and Hemingway’s notebooks. Of course, those notebooks had completely different purposes and usage methods, and, for the record, folded up when you were done. And despite the fact that the PlayBook arguably technically superior to many tablets out there, it’s not superior in many ways the average consumer is likely to notice — yet. Instead, consumers will notice that they have to use the browser to access their email or that the selection of apps isn’t as great as they’d like (though 3000 is nothing to sneeze at, if they’re good). Co-CEO Jim Balsillie said of the allegations that the device is missing key features: “I don’t think that’s fair. A lot of the people that want this want a secure and free extension of their BlackBerry.” If that were true, don’t you think devices like the Folio and Redfly would have taken off? Furthermore, if RIM expects to sell iPad numbers of these devices, they can’t hamstring their ambitions by positioning it as a glorified BlackBerry accessory. The proportion of business to party in the PlayBook has never been clear, and the launch hasn’t helped. After reading the reviews around the net, I’m pretty convinced that the consistent message is no conspiracy and no accident. RIM felt they needed to put this device on the market, and they put it out leagues short of feature parity with the competition. Any launch will have its faults, and features will be filled in over time, but RIM may not be able to recover in the consumer space if the PlayBook doesn’t come into its own within a couple months. Does it still have legs in enterprise? Trends are still too preliminary to really say too much on that front. Many businesses have integrated iPads, but that could easily be because the competition in the first year was so negligible. Some say tablets themselves won’t ever trickle up. One thing is for sure: BlackBerry is still a big brand in business, though for advantages that are easy enough for Apple and Google to approach. While RIM is busy keeping the lawn in order by appearing to be competitive in the tablet space, one of their competitors might just sneak in the back door and steal their lunch. |
Sensor In Fujifilm's X100 Outperforms Micro Four Thirds | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 14 |
A lab analysis by DxOmark of the has found that the sensor performs better than competing compact manual digitals. Of course, the X100 is a different type of camera, but they’re aimed in the same direction. At any rate it’s a testament to the engineering and the benefits of a fixed-lens system. Hopefully we’ll have one of these guys to test out soon. [via and ] |
Want To Know Your Co-Workers' Salaries? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | Meet a simple salary comparison service that lets you anonymously pool salaries with your co-workers, friends, people on Twitter or anyone you feel competitive with really. Create a pool, send the link to four people who will disclose their salaries and the site will reveal the salary span, without revealing who makes what. Inspired by a HackerNews thread about the folks at tech job posting site created the page as a way to help developers and other wage slaves better gage where they compare, without spilling the beans about who exactly is making millions and who is working for food. Salaries indeed are a point of discomfort and/or pride for most people but especially here in the tech sector, where a Google intern might make tens of thousands more than a startup CEO. You never quite know where you stand when accepting an offer, I mean imagine my surprise when I realized that all the guys at TechCrunch were paid at least 100K more because of some weird rule that Mike has.* |
Wii Successor Rumors Heat Up: Far More Powerful Console To Show At E3, Launch In 2012 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | We that a new console was slated for an E3 release. We also heard more recently that the Wii is getting a in May. The rumor mill is grinding, grinding, and an anonymous source claiming Nintendo is already showing the console to developers is adding grist today. says they’ve “heard from multiple sources” that the new, HD-capable system will be launching at E3 — if not before. that the system may actually leapfrog the PS3 and 360 in terms of power. The console would be announced at E3 but wouldn’t actually ship until 2012. Nintendo has teased its consoles a long ways ahead of time historically, so this wouldn’t be a surprise. They’re planning on launching with a strong third-party lineup, perhaps hoping to right the wrongs of the Wii. Do we think this is for real? Personally, I think if Nintendo doesn’t really throw down something big at E3, they run a real risk of being hammered in the console sector, though they’re probably safe in handhelds. Last year it would have been a surprise, but this year, not showing something would be a surprise. : More rumors (tracked ). Maybe someone just got fired and is info-dumping at some bar: HD screen in controller – I’m not buying the HD, but a screen in the controller would make for DS-style control of inventory, commands, etc. That’d be pretty cool. But why not just use a DS? I’d guess that this theoretical “HD” screen will have the same resolution as a 3DS bottom screen. |
Kima Ventures invests in Astrolome to bring you real-time personalized horoscopes | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | If you’re one of those people that thinks that horoscopes are a load of nonsense and simply vague statements that could essentially fit anyone, you’re definitely not alone. But is seeking to change that. The Israeli startup has just closed a seed round of $300K with and some additional business angels in order to develop a real-time personalized horoscope platform. The company’s secret sauce lies in using an individual’s birth chart (date, time and place of birth) and current location to provide a more accurate reading than the majority of horoscopes – which give strictly sun sign information. Therefore, each user receives a more customized astrological reading rather than generic information designed to pertain to as many people as possible. In addition, the platform is complete with social features, enabling users to rank forecasts for accuracy and share comments on various events with their friends and other users. Now, I feel pretty much the same way about horoscope as when he covered a while back. I have not the slightest clue what it means for Mars to be in the 6th house or how to interpret Pluto. But while I may be tempted to call it all a bunch of hocus pocus, that doesn’t mean it should be written off entirely. Plus, some of the readings can be highly entertaining. The platform – which is currently in beta and free for a single user account – is planning to introduce a small fee in order to add multiple users to the same account. A free is also available so that you can get readings when you’re on the go, with Android and Microsoft mobile apps arriving shortly (in addition to other premium services). Oh, and you can also follow the readings for celebrities like Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, Justin Timberlake and Lindsay Lohan. In fact, going strictly off of the current celebrity list, Astrolome seems targeted towards a young adult crowd. I admit that it’s a bit of an unusual investment on behalf of Kima, who has previously invested in companies like , and more recently, . Nonetheless, Kima co-founder is thrilled and believes that there are many possible sources of revenue in this particular sector. Let’s just hope he isn’t going by the stars on that one. |
KupiVIP secures $55m funding to become the Amazon of Russia | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | , Russia’s largest private members shopping club for designer fashion and luxury brands, has landed $55 million in third round funding, something that appears to be a record for the Russian e-commerce sector. Three new investors participated in the funding: Balderton Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Russia Partners. The new investors join existing investors including Accel Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners. The site will use the funding to move into selling consumer goods as continuing with discount offers, mashing up Amazon’s and Vente Privee’s model. A white label platform will act as a way for Western retail brands to launch stores in Russia and the former Soviet states. This will be useful. Western firms have found it very hard to break into the Russian ecommerce market. 11 out of the 15 top internet sites are Russian. KupiVIP says it has seven million registered members and revenues have been growing 600% year on year. Although online advertising and ecommerce has lagged Europe – but there is an uptick underway. Russia is poised to overtake Germany as the largest Internet market in Europe with 60m users (out of a population of 142m). Germany has 90-100 million in population in the DAUCH region. Internet usage is Russia is growing 30% YOY and Ecommerce 35%. It’s also fair to say that despite its wild-west image, a high profile IPO by mail.ru creating a $5.7bn mkt cap show that Russia is going to be a gangbuster market in Europe. Not for the faint hearted however… KupiVIP is headquartered in Moscow and was founded by 28-year-old Oskar Hartmann, a German-born entrepreneur. Hartmann says “KupiVIP has only begun to scratch the surface.” The company has 750 staff. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 13 | null |
Who Is More Trust-Worthy with Our Data: The Government or Big Companies? (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | We invited and — two of the biggest thinkers in the Valley– into the studio to talk about what Hoffman calls “Web 3.0.” He argues the next wave isn’t as simple as MOBILE! As he first discussed at SXSW, it’s about companies running on any platform or in the real world using the last few decades of data being gathered on our virtual and actual selves to build stunningly innovative new products and services. In this segment, we talk about the obviously frightening implications of that and whether we should fear government or business more. Tomorrow, we’ll focus on the good of the trend, including a segment on the business opportunities in Web 3.0 and one on some way-out-there potential new applications that could change our lives. Enjoy! |
UK's Datanomic acquired by Oracle | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | , a UK tech company, has been acquired by Oracle, according to a . Datanomic provides customer data quality software and related applications for risk and compliance screening and had $6.3m in funding from 3i and DN Capital. The rumours are that DN Capital owned up to 70% of the company. Terms were undisclosed. Datanomic’s dn:Director, an application for data screening, and dn:Dashboard, a Web application that delivers configurable data quality metrics in graphical form. These amount to solutions for operational and strategic insight for automotive, central government, engineering, financial services – basically you name it. The company was founded in 2001 and is based in Cambridge, UK with additional offices in New York, New York. |
Mionix Puts Out A Mechanical Keyboard, The Zibal 60 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 14 |
While there are plenty of keyboards to choose from between Microsoft, Razer, Logitech, and SteelSeries, Sweden-based Mionix wants you to know that they’ve got a solid device too with their . Can’t say it one-ups any of these guys on features or price, but hey, it’s an alternative to the usual suspects. It’s got mechanical keys, as I mentioned, for that clicky, long-travel keydown feel. The keys themselves are backlit, and while it’s just one color, you can dim them or select just WASD to light up. There’s 6-key rollover, headphone and mic ports, and two USB 2.0 ports. It’ll set you back $150, which is the same price as the SteelSeries 7G (which I’m typing on right now) but almost twice as much as the basic (I reviewed the $130 Ultimate) from Razer. Is it worth it? For the price, you’re getting better USB speeds than the 7G, but fewer features than the Razer. That said, I prefer the feel of the 7G. Ah well! It’s impossible to say. Looks like a solid piece of hardware, anyway. |
Adidas Now Has The Lightest Shoe In All Of Basketball. You Might Even Call It Crazy Light. | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | You’re looking at the lightest shoe in all of basketball. It’s the Adidas , and it weighs a mere 9.8 ounces. With the Crazy Light, now has the market cornered on lightest-footwear in three sports: basketball, football, and soccer, soccer being the best sport of the three, of course. The adiZero Crazy Light follows the path led by the other two lightest bits of footwear: it’s 15 percent lighter than its nearest competitor, and it took two full years to develop. What have you been doing for the past two years, because I’ve certainly done nothing of note. Derrick Rose, of Chicago Bulls fame, has given the shoe his stamp of approval, saying that “it will no doubt make [him] faster on the court for [their] playoff run.” High praise from someone who would know about the sport. I should probably say that it’ll be available from June 3 for $130. |
Think Tank's Retrospective 5 Is An Understated, Compact Camera Bag | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 14 |
If the bag I reviewed last week seemed a little too large or expensive, take a look at . It’s a similar messenger/flap style, but smaller and less geared towards waxed canvas fetishists like myself. I can’t actually tell from these pictures whether it’s nylon or canvas, no matter how hard I look, but either one would be fine by me, really.
It’s got removable interior barriers for organizing your stuff, a couple exterior pockets, and considerately includes the ability to “silence” the velcro fasteners so you don’t get that noise when swapping lenses during a wedding. Looks like a totally solid bag if all you want to carry is your camera and a couple accessories — or indeed a mirrorless camera and quite a bit more. It’s not available quite yet, but it’ll cost $129 as soon as it is. [via ] |
Source: "The labels put a gun to Spotify's head" | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | Spotify is in a quandary. Unlike normal web business models, when it comes to streaming music, it actually gets more expensive the more you scale, not less, as we point out in . The royalties charged by record companies see to that. In addition, despite the fact that many of the major record labels are known to be , the startup is in a love-hate relationship with them of Shakespearean proportions, as . On the one hand record labels hate – and I mean – free streaming music sites which turn music into a service, not a product business limited by supply. Hence why the monthly play time for the free service has been capped so that you can’t suddenly replace your record buying habit with Spotify, as – in theory – you used to be able to do. Our sources say Spotify has been deeply reluctant to do this. They know that the free product is driving users towards the premium one. Once you have built your playlists and shared via Facebook, Spotify takes on a life of its own. But after three years and a million paying customers it’s not doing it fast enough for the record labels’ liking. So Spotify needs its free service like humans need oxygen. As a well placed source told me “Spotify would never, ever choose to do this. The labels put a gun to Spotify’s head.” “Every similar service will be capping streaming soon” they added “Spotify just had to balls to do it first.” The question is, can Spotify work its magic in the US and get the file-sharing younger demographic hooked? It’s a hard question to answer, especially when the guy who is who is feeding you is also pointing a gun at your head. |
Google On Its "Amazing Blazingly" Mobile Business: "We Tripped Into $1 Billion" | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | During today’s , one analyst asked for some color on Google’s mobile business. CFO Patrick Pichette didn’t give much more in terms of specifics, but he did offer up some color. “Without any radical effort, we already announced at end of Q3 this is a business,” says Pichette. Mobile is “growing at an amazing blazingly pace,” he says. “We tripped into $1 billion.” Mobile search is definitely something Google is keenly focussed on. Senior VP of Local Jeff Huber noted on the call: ” In terms of where it trends over time, the smartphone is becoming an extension of the person, and how they do everything.” Google is tackling that opportunity with mobile search obviously, but also with Android, which comes with Google search built-in as the default. Google is seeing 350,000 Android devices being activated a day. Asked whether Google would have to build out a local salesforce with feet on the ground to take advantage of the new mobile and local advertising opportunities, sales chief Nikesh Arora didn’t rule out any possibilities. “we will use a combination of existing sales teams and methods and others that might be required,” he responded. Sounds like Google is picking itself up and going after the next billion dollars or two in mobile search. Photo credit: Flickr/ |
Spotify, the American Dream, and why freemium is a broken record | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | There’s a certain irony that just two days after the who’s-who of the London startup scene were out toasting as the Telegraph newspaper’s inaugural , the music streaming service announces an about turn and all but begins ditching its non-paying users. It looks like free music doesn’t pay after all. Then again, it’s not like the UK startup community hasn’t got drunk on the kool-aid before. But actually, Spotify’s announcement today that it’s that its non-paying users can consume as well as the freedom that comes with it, isn’t all that surprising. The dirty little secret that no one likes to talk about is this: free, ad-supported, unlimited, unrestricted music streaming pay. It’s that simple. Worse still, even when the model is off-set with a paid-for version, the sums still don’t add up. When it’s applied to music streaming, the freemium model is clearly broken. The economies of scale that support a freemium model . Costs come down per-user in the same way as a classic Software-as-a-Service, which after upfront and varying ongoing development costs, can keep adding more users at a fraction of the cost. Therefore, a service that fits the freemium model can potentially support a high ratio of free vs paying customers. However, in the music streaming business, in theory each user or, more specifically, each track streamed costs the same because of the royalties charged by record companies. Put simply, it doesn’t become any cheaper the more you scale, so supporting non-paying customers comes at a substantially higher cost compared to other types of Internet services. It’s no wonder then that Spotify is weaning its users off of the “free” in freemium. But what about Spotify’s competitors? It’s not like they are the only music streaming service in town. Well, in the UK at least, Last.fm has pretty much after huge losses, while a long time ago. Also notice earlier that I used the words ‘unlimited’ and ‘unrestricted’ when I said free music doesn’t pay. That’s because so-called Internet radio services in which the user has less control over what is played and can’t play tracks from the same artist one track after another, for example, actually cost less to run as they have a different royalty rate to a pure on-demand service. Another Spotify competitor, we7, has just , claiming that’s how mainstream users want to consume music, although it’s convenient that it also reduces costs not insubstantially. Perhaps the oddest thing about Spotify’s new terms for non-paying users, however, is that after 6 months they’ll only be able to play each track up to a total of 5 times. This, of course, produces artificial scarcity and therefore it could be argued that it will push more users to pay for a subscription. But it also feels arbitrary. Why five plays? Is the sixth play more expensive to serve than the previous five? Not as far as we know and certainly not if we simply apply the on-demand vs Internet radio test. So where did the idea come from and why now? The answer, I suspect, lies in Spotify’s . As the company gets closer to those licensing deals it needs to launch across the pond, something had to give. So idiosyncratic is the five plays-only rule it could only have come at the request of the US record labels. My guess is that Spotify is putting this in place as a prerequisite to a US launch. Unsurprisingly, the company this. |
Please God, All I Want Is A Phone. Any Phone. | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | I completely lost it today. I want to be able to make a phone call from our office. I can’t. It’s not a big thing really, but it’s driven me crazy, eating away at me little by little for half a year. I actually think I’ve gone a little over the edge. Like the . A blogger doesn’t need much to be productive. Give her a computer, a phone and a quiet place to work and she’s going to exhibit classic nesting behaviors, settle into a contented and productive zen and make a ton of content. TechCrunch, though, has been plagued with Internet and phone issues, and our office is a ghost town because of it. Writers stay home to get work done. It’s a boiling the frog issue that’s built up slowly over time so we don’t really notice how ridiculous it is, but today was the day I broke. This is really an internal TechCrunch/AOL issue. But I can’t actually resolve it, and ranting here is probably the only way to move forward. To try to find peace and go on with my life. You see, I need to make a few phone calls, and I can’t. We’ve always had mobile phone issues in the office, and trying to use them means missed calls, dropped calls, and a just general failure to have actual conversations. We have a couple of office lines but they’re always tied up by the sales team or whatever. Writers often end up using Skype or some other PC-based VoIP product to make their calls. Mostly they stay home and work. Maybe six or seven months ago I made a pretty simple request – a phone line at the office that I can use and tie to Google Voice so anyone calling my mobile number can get through. It was a broad request with few conditions. A VoIP line would do. As would a traditional copper line. a dedicated geostationary orbit satellite. Whatever. I just wanted a small gadget that I could pick up, hit a few buttons and then speak with another human being somewhere else on the planet. I could then use the information gathered in that phone call to write a blog post. AOL can put up ads next to that blog post and receive revenue in exchange. In other words, I wanted to conduct business. I made a request. It was decided that a copper line was best. At some point the line was installed and I was notified on my arrival to the office. I responded that I needed a phone to plug into the wall to be able to use the phone line. Maybe three months had gone by at this point. My next trip down from Seattle there was still no phone, there was some confusion over my request. Since I’m a roll up my sleaves kind of guy I bypassed the red tape and I ordered one on Amazon myself for delivery to our office. My next trip down there was the phone but my request that someone plug it into the wall to test the line and charge the handset had been lost. So no phone that day (and I was really excited about it that time too). But I plugged the phone in and charged it overnight, excited that the next day I’d be using it. The next day I tried to make a phone call. It made outbound calls but inbound didn’t work (meaning it couldn’t be linked to Google Voice). Some business across town was receiving those calls. I put in a request to have someone look into this and resolve the issue. Meanwhile I worked from my hotel where my cell phone had access. Next trip to San Francisco. This trip. The phone makes inbound and outbound calls, but it’s now tied to our other TechCrunch phone lines and all inbound calls ring that phone number too. I spent my morning yesterday talking to a food delivery person waiting out front and a few people who wanted to talk to the sales team. Then I stopped answering. Today I dramatically drew a line in the sand. I WILL HAVE A PHONE, I declared to a mostly empty office, or I will leave the office and work from home. I will return once that phone works. And not before. I noted that telephones have been a fairly straightforward technology for more than a hundred years, and that making a firm decision to have one wasn’t an outlandish demand. I’ve also now sent an email to a variety of AOL executives with my demand for a phone. They’re probably bemused, and a little concerned for my mental health. This is, of course, just a rant. But it’s something all businesses need to be mindful of. Details matter. Endless cycles of bureaucracy and inattention can hurt an otherwise healthy business. And one other thing comes to mind, something a mentor told me a long time ago. he said, In part two of this post I’m going to talk about how we all complained that we had almost no Internet access at the office for months, and how much time was spent complaining internally and to our provider. I finally stopped asking for it to be fixed and one day just did a basic check of our networking equipment. I found that we had three wifi routers. Two were stacked together on the floor beneath a table at the far end of our office. One was behind a metal door in a small room. Just a few short weeks later we had rewired things and placed those routers within shouting distance of the people who were using them. That was a small victory, but one I’m particularly proud of. |
Google: 3 Billion Android Apps Installed; Downloads Up 50 Percent From Last Quarter | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | On Google’s Jeff Huber, Senior VP Commerce and Local, revealed that there have been over 3 billion Android apps installed. And downloads of Android apps are up 50 percent from Q4 2010. Huber also mentioned that 350,000 Android devices are being per day, a data point which was revealed this past week. In terms of breaking out share by device and market, Huber said the company doesn’t reveal these numbers. But he did say that with device partners, there is strength in U.S., Japan, Korea, and Europe specifically. He added that international is growing as a whole in terms of Android usage. To put the 3 billion stat in perspective, Apple just passed in January. But thanks to the fast growth of the sale of Android phones, Google’s app downloads are growing fast. The first billion installs took 20 months, the second billion installs took another 5 months, and the third billion took only 2 months. I’m guessing the 4 billion mark will take less than It’s also important to note that because of Google’s open platform, Android users can download apps from a number of marketplaces, including Google’s Android Market. Amazon just launched an a few weeks ago. What’s also unclear how many of these apps installed were free compared to paid apps. We’ve heard in the past that compared to Apple’s apps. In the Q&A portion of the call, Huber said there are many exciting products and innovation coming along to the Android platform, but didn’t reveal any specifics. In the call, CFO Patrick Pichette commented that the Android platform is growing “amazingly blazing” and that Google stumbled into a billion dollar business with respect to Android and mobile. |
Kickstarter: The Flow Is A Capacitive Paintbrush, Kind Of | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 14 |
The secret to liking the is knowing what you’re getting. Art on the iPad or other capacitive devices can be difficult due to the fact that interaction with it doesn’t really feel like drawing or painting. You can finger-paint, basically, or use a stylus to draw, and either way there’s a disconnect. The Flow isn’t going to change that, but it does provide a way for you to actually use a paintbrush on a touchscreen, more or less the way a paintbrush is supposed to work.
It’s basically a bunch of current-carrying fibers mixed in with normal brush bristles, allowing the brush to register on any capacitive touchscreen, be it Apple, Android, HP, or what have you. The trouble with this approach is simply that touchscreen software usually just reduces touches to points or circles; it’s not registering a hundred tiny fibers, or even the irregular aggregate brush shape, any more than it’s registering your fingerprint when you touch it normally. Furthermore, capacitive screens are digital and don’t register pressure, so you can’t make a “light” stroke. It’s just taking the shape of the brush and estimating a shape out of it — so technically speaking, it’s not much better than a stylus or finger. So what’s the point? Well, it’s amazing how much more naturally things can be done when you’re using tools familiar to you. The Flow will probably make for better iPad paintings (for what it’s worth) simply because it’s a more natural way to paint. And it’s forward-compatible with screens and apps that will actually use complex shape detection, since it’s such a basic device. If you think this is a good idea (and don’t feel like putting your own together), drop a few bucks in the jar. |
Firefox 4 Hits 100 Million Downloads After A Month | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | Mozilla released its new exactly a month ago today and within a day it had twice as many downloads as Internet Explorer 9 after its launch. Some where around midnight tonight the browser build will hit 100 million downloads after one month in existence, according to the Firefox download What’s more impressive is that the browser has now taken over 7.94% of the worldwide browser market to StatCounter, with Internet Explorer 8.0 at 29.99%, Firefox 3.6 at 24.43% and Chrome 10 at 15.35%. When compared to the two days after its launch it looks like Firefox 4 has taken a solid chunk out of Firefox 3.6 usage: On March 22 IE had 45% of the global market, followed by Firefox 3.6 with 30% and Chrome with 17%. Firefox 4 was at 1.95% then. Like Erick I too had Firefox because it was so excruciatingly slow, and was pleasantly surprised at how much faster 4 was compared to 3.6 and even compared to Chrome when loading Flash-heavy sites. But maybe being speedier isn’t enough to win the high stakes browser wars? On the Firefox 4 launch day, Chrome came out with its Chrome 11 beta, including support for an HTML5 speech input API (which essentially means that you’ll be able to ). Jeez. |
Y U NO HAVE LAME BILLBOARD HIPCHAT? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 22 |
Enterprise chat platform has entered the 101 , putting up the above memetastic masterpiece on the 101 North after the Whipple exit this past Friday. For the uninitiated, the “Y U NO USE HIPCHAT?” billboard is a take off of the startup friendly meme, which has already spawned at least one run by YCombinator hopefuls. Billboards on the 101 cost a whopping 30K, so companies haven’t always been so willing to use that expensive real estate to appeal to those of us used to trolling . But the billboard creative in SF and SV has really upped the intellectual ante ever since younger startups started buying the roadside placards: HipChat co-founder Peter Curley explains. (Why is it always Microsoft?) And the company’s appeal to the more internet savvy of drivers among us seems to be working, as search traffic for “HipChat” has gone up 300% since the billboard went up, according to Curley. Also, they got another TechCrunch post. Here’s the HipChat “Arrington” emotion. Yes, this exists.
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Tim Armstrong, Dennis Crowley and Chris Dixon To Be At Disrupt NYC | Elin Blesener | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | We couldn’t wait any longer to announce another batch of special guests for this year’s in NYC. We had around 80 speakers last year and we have even more this year. We are pleased to announce that Tim Armstrong, Dennis Crowley, and Chris Dixon will all be with us on stage at Disrupt NYC. They will join the guests we announced —Charlie Rose, Ron Conway, Roelof Botha, and Arianna Huffington. As you can see, we are not messing around. We said Disrupt would be big this year and we meant it. Tickets are still on sale and you can find the best deals . As we said before, make sure you purchase them as soon as you can since prices will go up as we get closer to the event. We are giving away 1 free ticket each week, and our giveaway for this week at 10am PST. We will be picking the winner tomorrow, so if you want to enter make sure you do so soon!
CEO and Chairman, AOL Tim Armstrong was appointed CEO and Chairman of AOL in March 2009. Before becoming the CEO of AOL, Armstrong presided over Google’s North American and Latin American advertising sales and operations teams. His team provided customers with local partnerships as well as centralized sales and services. They worked with some of the world’s most widely recognized brands and advertising agencies in addition to some of the fastest growing medium-sized companies. Armstrong joined Google from Snowball.com, where he was vice president of sales and strategic partnerships. Prior to his role at Snowball.com, he served as director of integrated sales & marketing at Starwave’s and Disney’s ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures, working across the companies’ Internet, TV, radio, and print properties. He started his career by co-founding and running a newspaper based in Boston, MA, before joining IDG to launch their first consumer Internet magazine, I-Way.
Co-founder, Foursquare Dennis Crowley is a co-founder of Foursquare, a location-based social networking service. Previously, he co-founded Dodgeball, a network of the same nature which sold to Google in 2005. He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine, Newsweek, MTV, Slashdot and NBC. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
CEO and Co-founder, Hunch Currently, CEO & Co-founder of Hunch. Previously, CEO & Co-founder of SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee). Personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode. |
Microsoft Has Sold 350 Million Copies Of Windows 7 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 22 |
Congratulations to Microsoft, who somehow in the face of teasing from very important bloggers like us, has managed to sell quite a few copies of Windows 7 since that OS’s release 18 months ago. |
Senator Al Franken Thinks My Future Is Bright, And I Have The Letter To Prove It | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 22 |
As if needed another boost. Last month at SXSW, I had the opportunity to interview Senator Al Franken, who was speaking at the conference to discuss the importance of Net Neutrality. The interview went well (I doubt you can tell he was my first Senator), and as I walked out of the room Senator Franken slapped me on the back and said I had a bright future ahead of me. Instead of responding with one of my famed witticisms I mumbled something about keeping my fingers crossed and went on my way, only to begin cursing myself a few moments later. One of the most level-headed members of the United States Senate had just complimented me — and I had failed to ask for it in writing. Bright future, indeed. A week later I sent an email to Franken’s staff thanking them for helping to arrange the interview. I may have mentioned that getting the compliment in writing would be nice, but I included a winky face to indicate that I was joking. But it seems the members of Senator Franken’s staff could see past the winky face into my heart of hearts. Three weeks later, something special arrived at TechCrunch HQ. You’ll find it above. Can’t miss it. So thank you, Senator Franken. I can only hope to become half the man was. In the mean time, you’re looking at my new resume above. And here’s the interview for those of you who missed it. |
Conde Nast Taking A Breather On Tablet Editions Of Its Magazines | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | Despite enormous sales of the and , it seems like the digital publishing world isn’t quite ready to support the digital magazine editions coveted by media giants like Conde Nast. This is the company, if you’ll remember, that was busting to get iPad editions ready . It seems, though, that these well-laid plans, or at least extravagantly-laid, aren’t quite paying out just yet, . “They’re not all doing all that well, so why rush to get them all on there?” said an anonymous Conde Nast publisher, who praised the company’s position, saying it made them look smart – ambition but no rush. Seems like a kind interpretation of the fact that the company simply pulled the trigger too early. Despite there being perhaps 20 million tablets out there right now (all inclusive), it doesn’t appear that people are really eating up the digital edition — Popular Science of its iPad subscriptions, which at 10,000 aren’t microscopic, but are still dwarfed by paper sales. Conde Nast isn’t reporting any statistics, but it seems safe to assume that they’re seeing similarly disappointing results. While Conde Nast is definitely in the front line here, I think they neglected to consider some aspects of the new platform. For one thing, tablets are at the moment primarily used for casual gaming, email, and light browsing. It’s just what they’re good for. Not a lot of storage and (on the iPad) sub-HD screens make media consumption secondary, and many other functions it performs are also done by smartphones, making many applications superfluous. Furthermore, people are still naturally attracted to the enormous volume of free content on the web, some of which they’d be paying for unnecessarily by subscribing to this or that (like the recent NY Times paywall). What will it take to bring digital magazine subscriptions in line with paper? More volume in tablets, for one thing. And a lot of tests looking at how and why people pay for and consume various digital items in a “light computing” environment like the iPad. Despite being over a year old, the tablet market is still very much in flux, and adjustments are being made. Conde Nast is probably doing the right thing by tugging on the reins after being in too great of a rush to begin with. Focusing on creating a razor-sharp product even if it doesn’t sell, and taking the losses necessary, is a step that they can afford to take. But I’m guessing the board saw the numbers and decided to lose a little less. |
More From Miyamoto: After Hardware Development, Expect Lots Of Games | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | Shigeru Miyamoto, who has apparently eluded his handlers, is dropping information left and right about and other enticing issues. After pretty much and talking about Super Mario 3DS, he has now mentioned that the lack of big games from Nintendo lately is due to their focus on finalizing the 3DS and developing the new console. “We spent a lot of time developing 3DS, for games for the future,” , “so from now on I think we’ll focus more on gaming and we are releasing lots of games this year.” He also stressed the upcoming 3DS eShop and the ability to provide remakes of much-loved games. And which has he got on his mind? “I think A Link To The Past. Do you remember Xevious? It’s two-layered and I really wanted to create that at the time. So to see Link To The Past in two layers would be quite attractive for me.” Attractive for you, me, and everybody I know, buddy. If they redo it right (a la Ocarina, which seems to be getting a loving repolish), LttP (one of my favorite games) could really shine on the 3DS. Miyamoto also, in another set of comments, for the next console. It’s a translation, though, so take it with a grain of salt. |
CrunchDeals: $100 Off The G-Slate | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | We liked the – it’s a very nice Android tablet and worth looking into – and now you can get $100 off by calling into T-Mo and ordering before April 27.
To get the discount (reducing the price to about $429) you have to call 1-866-464-8662, select option 3, and give the offer code GSLATE100 when you order. |
Pictures Leak Of New Sony NEX C3 Camera | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 22 |
Some rogue in the has posted pictures of the next entry in Sony’s NEX series, the C3. We just recently heard that the was being discontinued (though it still seems to be available) so perhaps this is its successor. Rumored improvements are a improved shutter and sensor, as well as physical changes – but no 1080p yet. There’s also that cool new external flash, which one forum member insists will be back-compatible with other NEX cameras. Sounds good to me. The leaker seems to have found . |
Act.ly Weathers Amazon Cloud Disaster On Earth Day | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | Everyone’s favorite under-estimator of social media, , might get a chuckle out of Amazon’s EC2 problems this week. First, they took out Foursquare, Reddit and Quora service, as TechCrunch’s . The disaster in the cloud put a stop to those who would Tweet the revolution via Act.ly, a site that gets petitions going virally, online. The site and service was still out of order as of publication. founder Jim Gilliam said: “We usually get several thousand activism tweets a day. That hasn’t happened for 36 hours, because of these issues with Amazon and another service provider we use, Heroku, also effected. I can’t access the data to tell you what our petition creation, retweets and general user interactions looked like last year on Earth Day, because I don’t have access right now. But the timing on something like this is a bit of a shame, really.”
According to Gilliam, petition creation and sharing tends to spike sharply around particular events, from the earthquake in Japan, to a calendar holiday like Earth Day. Act.ly petitions in the past have ranged from environmental to entertaining. They have encouraged “web citizens” to demand that phone manufacturers source materials used in their devices sustainably, or to get the EPA to regulate ostensibly harmful pesticides and food additives more carefully. Staff members at The Young Turks, the popular political news series and site, regularly send out Act.ly petitions, and got in touch with Gilliam to vent and gripe about the Earth Day blackout. Gilliam is also the founder of , a site that he says is not effected by the problems in the cloud. Anyone can use Act.ly to whip up awareness and inspire problem solving around a cause, online — at least when it’s up and running. |
null | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 14 | null |
How a Tweetdeck, UberMedia deal could cut down Twitter's bird | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | In the world of Internet startups people can become obsessed with the function of a product or app, often ignoring how a company can change the dynamics of a market just through its sheer existence. More often than not, it is not just a case of just having a better technology than the other guy. Equally it can be about a creating an incursion into a competitors’ space which forces them to manoeuvre, destroying value for them, and creating value for yourself. No greater example exists of this today as the dramatic moves being made around the rumoured sale of . I have been talking to sources well acquainted with the issue and what they have to say suggests a fascinating drama – which we are about to see played out. The scenario: Back in February we reported that , for $30m, although no party released any official statement at the time. If true then this would have given Bill Gross’ company, after buying EchoFon, another popular Twitter client, roughly 20% of the userbase of . Tweetdeck reportedly has 11% of active Twitter users. But as any journalist or social media expert will tell you, these are power users, producing many of the most influential content. Indeed Cornell University and Yahoo! Research found that a tiny minority of users – around .05% of the site’s population or 20,000 elite users – are generating around half of all the Tweets. These are divided into celebrities, media, organisations (such as Google) and blogs. My sources tell me that UberMedia had a 30 day exclusive on that deal. But negotiations took too long and it expired, allowing Twitter to emerge with a $50 million offer for Tweetdeck. The battle was on for Tweetdeck’s high end users. But there is much, much more to this than meets the eye, and there are earth-shattering implications if Twitter makes the wrong play. The question is this: what is it worth to Twitter to keep Tweetdeck out of Bill Gross’ hands? For in Tweetdeck lies the balance of power in the Twitter eco-system. Let’s run through the scenario. Choices: UberMedia buys Tweetdeck, thus gaining around 20% of the userbase of Twitter. With one fell swoop UberMedia has market power relative to Twitter, plus most of the high value users. As a result, UberMedia has the power to say to Twitter “We have 20-30 percent of Tweets. So, are you feeling lucky? Are ya?” UberMedia can then say “Unless you let us sell our own advertising, not yours, against those Tweets, we will have to migrate our user base onto a different platform.” * Boom * This is the .44 magnum Bill Gross is holding to Twitter’s head. UberMedia is already selling its own adverts on some of their applications. That is a huge threat. You can imagine that Twitter’s management will wondering how to deal with this threat. But exactly why is this so likely as a scenario? Let’s work through the numbers. Twitter’s original business plan said: we will get to sell 100 percent of the ads on the network. But remember, advertising follows an 80/20 rule. In any advertising network, around 80% of the revenue is made from 20% of the audience. So if UberMedia becomes the owner of Tweetdeck, the most valuable 20% of the audience would not be owned by Twitter. Thus, sitting in the Twitter’s boardroom, Dick, Ev, Biz and Jack will be saying something along the lines of: “Either Tweetdeck agrees to our deal and we own it, or they do a deal with UberMedia in some way, take a LOT of our users, and we have to cut a deal with them.” Remember, keep in the back of your mind that research about those 20,000 elite users who tend to use higher end client apps – the apps Bill Gross has been busily acquiring. (All the monitoring is done on other platforms – these are less valuable). You see, Twitter’s assumption was that no owner of a client app would stand up to them. Most of the client owners were young guys, just product guys, not commercial people. It’s one thing to deal with those guys, another to say to a company backed by , “no more client apps”. What Twitter needs to avoid is a situation where UberMedia says “Guess what? On our client apps WE run the ads, not you.” So the question is: Do you fight UberMedia with the risk that those high value users are ported to a totally new platform or do you cave in to them and say, “OK, you have us by the balls, we’ll let you sell your own ads.” Let’s try out the latter scenario. After losing the most valuable part of the ecosystem, Twitter’s ad revenues will have dropped by 80% to 20% of what they were GOING to be when Twitter owned the entire Twitter network. In this scenario, UberMedia cuts a deal with Twitter. UberMedia says to Twitter, “we’ll do our own own thing, our own content, but you can run the infrastructure.” UberMedia might also say to Twitter “Look, we’re nice guys – you can take the Tweets created on our platform and sell your own ads against them.” Then again UberMedia might even say: “We’ll send the Tweets from our platform, but we’ll take a revenue share on the ads.” Either way, in this scenario, Twitter’s share of revenues on their OWN PLATFORM has dropped from 100% to between roughly 20-40%. Since the value of the business is in the cashflow, the challenge for Twitter is if they don’t buy Tweetdeck they will have created a monster that can bargain against them and take a samurai sword to their business model. We’re not talking about losing 5-10% of the business here – we’re talking about a crushingly large amount of Twitter’s business disappearing. It’s not 11% of the Tweets that matter with Tweetdeck, it’s closer to 50% of the ad revenues in a combined UberMedia business. If UberMedia ends up buying Tweetdeck, Twitter can eviscerate their business by shutting them off (and thus, a large swathe of their top users). Or they come to a deal, but it would be based on UberMedia’s terms. Under this scenario Twitter actually becomes more like a utility. Remember, it’s currently valued at $10bn because it’s forecast to get 100% of the ad revenues on its network. For argument’s sake, let’s call it $1bn in annual revenues. But now, with UberMedia controlling TweetDeck and other clients: not so much. Under this outcome, Twitters revenues only reach half their potential – more like $500m. So is Twitter now worth $10bn or $5bn? Looks like 5, kids. But wait – back in our other parallel universe, Twitter has won the day and acquired Tweetdeck. No, UberMedia doesn’t have a strong hand. But that is the ONLY real reason for Twitter to buy Tweetdeck. In a world where Twitter buys Tweetdeck, then Twitter might still lose a bit of its revenues to Uber but not as much. Unfortunately this is a beggar’s choice. Buying Tweetedeck does not increase Twitter’s value by much, but it DOES protect it from dropping revenues by 50% (because of the threat represented by Tweetdeck falling into UberMedia’s hands). So what is Tweetdeck worth to Twitter? Well for starters, it’s a LOT more than $50m. It could be as much as $250-500m – because that’s the price Twitter might have to pay to protect 50% of its entire business. That deal would have to be done in cash and a FUCK LOAD of Twitter stock. Remember, sitting in TweetDeck’s boardroom are people who realise that the moment they sell to UberMedia, Twitter is fucked. That is possibly the biggest bargaining chip in the entire startup world as of today. Iain Dodsworth and his investors will not sit there and say to Twitter, fine, we’ll take 5% of a $5-8bn company – they could ask for 15% of the damn company. Because if you don’t agree, then we’re going to destroy your business by selling to UberMedia. Meanwhile, back in the negotiations with UberMedia, TweetDeck will be looking at its offer. This is where things get mighty interesting. While the offer might be $25-30m from UberMedia (about 25% of its equity) at a $100m valuation, UberMedia might eventually be worth $1bn final exit value if it can sell the lion share of Twitter’s most valuable Tweets. So Tweetdeck’s stake in this would go to $250m, should they choose to go with UberMedia. Hold that $250m figure in your mind. Now, in the case of Twitter’s offer, this $50m deal being talked about right now is at Twitter’s $10bn valuation. But assuming Twitter is around for the next 10 years (as have all of the other big Internet giants like Yahoo and Google), what of the next 10 yars? Imagine Twitter goes from a $10bn to a $20bn valuation. Tweetdeck’s stake goes from $50 to $100m over that period. So, as a founder and investor in TweetDeck, are you better off talking the $25m deal from Uber to realise a $250m exit, or should you go with the $50m offer from Twitter to realise only $100m? Exactly. In fact, even if Twitter offered $200m for TweetDeck, that would go to $400m when Twitter double in value over a 10 year period. But what if it doesn’t? What if it this picture of UberMedia still stealing a lot of ad revenue means (even without TweetDeck) and Twitter goes from its $10bn to a $8bn valuation? Now you’re not sitting on $100m, you’re sitting on about $160m and the $250m offer you were getting from UberMedia actually looks a lot sweeter. The end game is clear: Twitter must, at almost all costs, acquire Tweetdeck. Or they will be royally screwed. Lucky there’s another royal wedding on to take their mind off things. |
ValueClick To Acquire Mobile Ad Network Greystripe | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | The value of mobile advertising networks is well established at Google and Apple: for $750 million and for $275 million. So far though the independent ad networks have stayed on the sideline. Until now. A source tell us that (NASDAQ: VCLK) has acquired mobile advertising network for $75 million in cash. Greystripe has raised in funding to date over four rounds. They have a direct sales force that sells rich mobile ads directly to brands, and are on pace to bring in $25 million – $30 million in revenue this year, with about $6 million in gross profit. ValueClick has formally the acquisition of Greystripe, which is said to serve media impressions to over 30 million users through more than 3,500 application titles and mobile websites across all major mobile platforms. Under the terms of the transaction, ValueClick paid approximately $70 million in cash, and Greystripe’s management team and employee base have been retained by ValueClick. There are still a number of independent startups in this space looking to be acquired or even have a public offering. is among the strongest, and focuses on the platform (app) side of the business over the sales side. JumpTap recently $20 million and has raised a total of nearly to date. is said to be considering an IPO in the near future. |
One Tax Break Later, Twitter Announces Plans To Move To Central Market SF Office | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | It’s finally official: Twitter has just on its blog that it will be moving to Market Square in SF’s Central Market neighborhood, just on the edge of the Tenderloin (one of the city’s most blighted areas). Twitter says it expects to move into the new office in mid-2012. The announcement has been a long time coming: Twitter was engaged in much-publicized negotiations with San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors over a proposed tax break incentive that would give a six year payroll tax deferral for net new jobs (the city earlier this month). San Francisco typically requires businesses to pay on payroll (including stock options), causing Twitter, Zynga, and other tech companies to threaten to leave the city and take thousands of jobs with them. The tale is perhaps best illustrated by the goofy video below. From the Twitter blog post: We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Mayor Ed Lee; the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (in particular Supervisor Jane Kim and Supervisor David Chiu); Jennifer Matz and Amy Cohen from the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development; Charlie Malet from Shorenstein Properties; and, everyone who worked with them for their vision, effort and perseverance in spearheading legislation that will help revitalize an area of San Francisco where office space has sat vacant for decades. We are proud that Twitter will be among the first companies moving into the Central Market area and will be playing a role in its renewal with the city and with other businesses, arts organizations, and the numerous community organizations that have been doing hard work in the neighborhood for many years. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aGtXLdLLys&w=640&h=390] |
Beer Gardens NYC App Goes 2.0 For Beer Garden Season | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | Beer, the sweet elixir that draws me to the doom of oblivion, is apparently available in places called “Beer Gardens” here in NYC (and in various other locations, but this is NY-centric.) These “Gardens” are not actually gardens at all but are, in fact, large patios where people can sit and drink beer until they reach a heightened level of joviality and fun and convivial relations (until, of course, you have to fight your way to the bathroom.) But how is one supposed to find these “Gardens?” Are they secret, like in that one movie? Or are they like a mysterious Brigadoon, appearing and disappearing every few eons? Nope. They’re real, and thankfully, there’s an app for finding them. We talked about the app last year and they’ve just updated the app to integrate Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter checkins along with more gardens. You can also share tips with your beer drinking friends. As before, beer garden entries include a description of the scene, photos, and videos. A directory of 900+ beers is searchable by venue and brand. You can grab the app on the app store and it works with and . It costs a mere 99 cents and I think it’s an interesting app in that it reduces the “tour guide” app down to a very specific formulation, focusing on beer and beer only. I’d love a app for Paris, for example, or a whiskey app for Kentucky. |
Vayable Is A Marketplace For Unique Travel Experiences | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | Like an for travel experiences, secondary market place launches today to offer travelers the opportunity to buy experiences in exotic locales all over the world, from Rome to Rio as the well worn cliche goes. Founders and tell me that the key difference between Vayable and that other is that Vayable is targeting travelers specifically, especially those who are tired of the relative banality of activity offerings from travel sites like Orbitz and Expedia. Wong and Samrat actually met on Airbnb themselves and were roommates for about two weeks when they came up with the idea for Vayable, attempting to provide a solution to the travel problem. The service currently has a modest 200 users, but there are still plenty of interesting things to do on Vayable, including a taking in NYC, a local king on a fishing trip in Fiji or indulging in a weekend sailing experience in Italy. Jeyaprakash explains. The site currently has 70 listings and while the offerings are admittedly sparse, activities like and a trek through Singalila in India are unique and inspirational enough to become the focal point of trips yet to be planned. Vayable monetizes by taking a 15% commission from those offering experiences (which you can sign up to provide on the site if you’re a “local expert”) and a 3% from travelers. It also plans on eventual affiliate partnerships with companies who offer accommodations and flight services, eh hem Hipmunk and Airbnb. Vayable’s grander vision is to become the go-to spot for curated “hi-res” travel experiences, Jeyaprakash tells me, exaggerating slightly. [vimeo 20269960] |
As Greenpeace Knocks IT Sector For Bad Energy Habits, Google Buys More Wind Power | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | On Thursday, Greenpeace published a study on energy consumption and choices made by IT companies including Akamai, Amazon.com (Amazon Web Services), Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo, entitled . The study roundly criticizes the sector, especially Facebook, for using “dirty energy” — power produced from hydrocarbon based sources, especially coal — to meet growing IT demand. It also criticized companies for concealing details about their own, overall energy footprint and practices. Greenpeace specifically noted (excerpt from the environmental activists’ own summary): Companies in the sector, as a whole, do not release information on their energy use and its associated global warming emissions One of the most popular social media companies, Facebook, is among the most dependent on coal-powered electricity at 53.2 percent
Shortly after their report circulated, Google announced that Google Energy LLC had signed a to buy 100.8 megawatts of wind-generated electricity to run its Okalahoma data centers from a Minco II Wind Energy Center under development in Grady and Caddo counties in Oklahoma. The companies hope the wind plant will be operational in late 2011. If you’re familiar with PPAs, skip this paragraph. If not, here’s some detail: PPAs are usually conditional agreements between a renewable energy development company and a power purchaser that really begin if or when a proposed facility comes online. This deal amounts to Google saying to NextEra Energy, we will buy this wind power if you build the facility and deliver the power as promised. Technically, there’s no guarantee when a PPA is signed that a given project will be completely financed, or completed at the scale proposed. Likewise, there’s no guarantee that the amount of energy produced by a proposed facility, will in reality live up to the amount offered through the PPA. Even Greenpeace praised Google’s efforts, and issued a special statement to the press about Google’s new wind PPA. But how much of a difference do PPAs make? Are such purchases meaningful, in the grand scope of Google’s energy consumption? TechCrunch reached out to , to try to obtain further details. We asked: How much energy do Google’s data centers in Oklahoma consume in a year? How much power did Google consume, overall, last year? How much of that came from outside, renewable sources? How does Google measure its energy footprint? Does the company use metrics like those modeled by ? Weihl declined to comment on the nitty-gritty details, for now. He did note:
“We have cut our energy consumption by more than 50% over the last five to six years through improvements in server and data center designs. We’ve also been reporting the operational power usage at a number of our large facilities for more than two years.”
He referencesd which include Power Usage Effectiveness numbers, representing “the ratio of the total power consumed by a data center to the power consumed by the IT equipment that populate the facility.” (They’re not the user-friendly stats that some investors, environmentalists and energy professionals would prefer to see.) Weihl was able to discuss what Google looks for as far as technology, projects or contracts in the green energy space. He said:
Efficiency is critical, but it is not enough…We will continue to look for improvements, there but we’re also working on these energy initiatives. We only invest in things that make economic sense over the long-term. Here’s what we look for: If you’re talking about changing server architecture and the data center, we need to know what the capital cost is, and what’s the total cost of ownership going to be over the life of the equipment. In the case of a PPA, we need to know what are the power costs. On PPAs in particular, that whole area is complicated in some ways. A big issue for Google is the question of “additionality.” Basically, we ask: will our purchase [of power from a renewable energy provider] result in something happening beyond business-as-usual. If we go to our local utility, see they have 20% wind power they can offer, and ask them to assign that to us, are we considered that green? If the utility just assigned it to us, and the same amount of ground power is still going to other people, not reducing the emissions, then it’s not ideal. We try hard to look for projects and agreements that result in more renewable power being put on the grid.
Whether the efforts of Google — and other IT giants — are enough to satisfy Greenpeace today, making IT cleaner, and more efficient is increasing in importance throughout the sector. A survey of 650 IT business executives, out from this week found: “In 2009 only 9 percent of firms rated green IT as an upper half organizational priority. That number rose to 37 percent in 2011, and is expected to rise to 54 percent in 2013.” |
Google Responds To Smartphone Location Tracking Uproar, Says Android Is Opt-In | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | Over the last few days there’s been quite a hubbub over the location tracking going on in the background on iOS devices, namely the iPhone and iPad 3G. The that sparked it all focused on a database file stored on iOS devices that stores a record of the rough location of the device over long periods of time — and is unencrypted. Senator Al Franken subsequently sent a to Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking for an explanation. Then, last night the Wall Street Journal published with a new revelation: Apple and Google (with its Android devices) are both sending some location data from these devices back to their home servers. That sounds pretty sinister, but as a long-time Android user it didn’t ring true to me — I vividly remembered a checkbox that asked if I wanted to allow Google to collect anonymized data, which means it isn’t really a secret, and you can opt-out of it. Unsurprisingly, Google confirms that this is indeed the case. Here’s their statement: “All location sharing on Android is opt-in by the user. We provide users with notice and control over the collection, sharing and use of location in order to provide a better mobile experience on Android devices. Any location data that is sent back to Google location servers is anonymized and is not tied or traceable to a specific user.” But, even then, the WSJ article also refers to data that isn’t actually being anonymized by Google: Google previously has said that the Wi-Fi data it collects is anonymous and that it deletes the start and end points of every trip that it uses in its traffic maps. However, the data, provided to the Journal exclusively by Mr. Kamkar, contained a unique identifier tied to an individual’s phone. Google explains that when a phone transmits data back to its servers some location data is actually assigned a unique identification number, but it says that this number is in no way associated with the device’s IMEI, the user’s name, or other information. In other words, they’d have a hard time associating a user with that data.
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Lightbank Leads $1.2 Million Round In Enterprise Mobile Startup DoubleDutch | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | Enterprise mobile startup has raised $1.2 million in funding, led by with , Launch Capital, , , , and angels participating in the round. DoubleDutch allows companies to essentially build their own Foursquare, enabling the development of mobile, location aware apps that connect employees, customers, and communities. It’s kind of like the Ning of geolocation apps. The startup’s platform can create apps with location-based networking, social interactions, employee mapping and more. And apps can be customized with logos, content, splash screens and more and supports development on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry platforms. The startup’s customers include Cisco, HP, Adobe, Gannett, and TED. For example, DoubleDutch’s mobile conference collaboration platform allows companies to build apps around conferences and trade shows, which combines location functionality with basic event information like scheduling, content, and more. Or the startup can help create an app for a company’s mobile and remote workers to correspond about job activity. |
DogWars: My Thoughts On The Android Dog Fighting App | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | Sports Illustrated and others are on an Android app that lets people “feed, water, train and fight their virtual dogs against others.” The app is created by . The outrage is reminiscent of the of Grand Theft Auto and other violent video games. Retired dog fighting enthusiast and occasional quarterback Michael Vick is taking a firm stand against the app: “I’ve come to learn the hard way that dogfighting is a dead-end street,” Vick said in a statement posted on the Humane Society’s website. “Now, I am on the right side of this issue, and I think it’s important to send the smart message to kids, and not glorify this form of animal cruelty, even in an Android app.” I’ve thought a lot about this app and the articles I’ve read today about it. Here are my thoughts: Michael Vick is, was and will always be, an asshole. |
First Lawsuit Filed Against Apple For Undocumented Location Database | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | With no real statement from Apple regarding the present , the obvious next step is to take it to the courts. Actually, the next step should be a rigorous federal investigation into whether or not Apple has broken any laws. Then, if it has, sue away. And if it hasn’t, sue anyway just in case. Vikram Ajjampur and William Devito are a little impatient, however, and have against Apple already. Now, I’m all in favor of suing Apple — as soon as the facts are known. Apple gets a chance to defend itself against the allegations (time is running out, by the way), and if it doesn’t do so to our satisfaction, then that’s that. This nearly instantaneous lawsuit (filed April 22), however, seems slightly opportunistic.
Claim 12, for instance: “Apple collects the location information covertly, surreptitiously and in violations of law.” I’m not saying this isn’t the case, but when this information was only announced on the 20th, they seem a bit quick on the draw to decide that it’s “covert” as opposed to “undocumented,” like many files and features. It doesn’t take a lawyer to come up with mitigating circumstances or arguments that could potentially exonerate Apple. Use your imagination. On the other hand, one doesn’t need to wait for the indictment when one has seen the smoking gun. It looks to me like Apple is breaking its own rules here, and in a pretty stupid way at that. An unencrypted log file? Even if it’s only reachable by root (and therefore, Apple may argue, inaccessible to anyone using the phone or any known exploits), it’s a stupid and insecure method and Apple should know better. But let’s refresh ourselves on Apple’s location policy (from its ): (b) Location Data. Apple and its partners and licensees may provide certain services through your iPhone that rely upon location information. To provide and improve these services, where available, Apple and its partners and licensees may transmit, collect, maintain, process and use your location data, including the real-time geographic location of your iPhone, and location search queries. The location data and queries collected by Apple are collected in a form that does not personally identify you and may be used by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. By using any location-based services on your iPhone, you agree and consent to Apple’s and its partners’ and licensees’ transmission, collection, maintenance, processing and use of your location data and queries to provide and improve such products and services. Not using these location features will not impact the non location-based functionality of your iPhone. When using third party applications or services on the iPhone that use or provide location data, you are subject to and should review such third party’s terms and privacy policy on use of location data by such third party applications or services.” Emphasis mine. But then in the : We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising. We’ve got dueling location policies here. But what matters is whether Apple broke the law by not disclosing this particular file/method of tracking, or whether it was just bad and slightly creepy policy on their part. At any rate, you can download the lawsuit . My guess would be that this one will be obsoleted once more facts come to light, though another (indeed, several) may follow. And I would also guess that the most significant consequence of this episode will be an industry-wide clarification of stances on tracking, and perhaps some slight rewording of the relevant sections in a few terms of service documents. |
CampusLive Raises $3.1 Million To Help Brands Connect With College Students | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | , a college-focused startup that’s part Groupon, part free ‘Offers’ provider (more on that later), has closed a $3.1 million funding round led by Highland Capital Partners and Charles River Ventures. CampusLive is all about showcasing special offers to students to help brands increase awareness and engagement. But the site differs from Groupon and other deal sites because no money actually changes hands — instead, students are given special deals (or are entered into a contest) in return for clicking a brand’s ‘Like’ button, completing a branded game, or signing up for a news letter. After signing up for the service and picking your school, CampusLive will present you with a main Challenge for the day, along with several additional challenges if you’d like to complete more. Challenges sometimes will offer a guaranteed, small incentive alongside a sweepstakes. For example, you might see a big banner for Jason’s Hamburger Stand offering students a $5 dollar coupon — and a chance to win a trip to Hawaii — in return for simply clicking the business’s Like button. Users sign up with their email address, and the site regularly sends them new offers. CampusLive charges brands and businesses for each completed challenge (as opposed to per impression), at a rate that varies depending on what the challenge entails and what kind of prizes the business is offering. CEO Boris Revsin says that since launching the service November 15, over 100,000 students have completed a challenge and that nearly 500,000 challenges have been completed overall (obviously some students have done many challenges, and some only did one, but Revsin says the majority have come back for a second Challenge). The bar graph below shows the breakdown of how many users came back to complete ‘n’ many offers. My biggest gripe with the service right now is the fact that brands can offer challenges that only give you a at being rewarded (e.g. “Become a Facebook Fan and get a chance to win $500!”). Which sounds a whole lot like the countless spammy emails and flyers all of us have learned to ignore over the years. Revsin says that this is just an option though, and the site also uses virtual currency to keep users engaged even if they aren’t guaranteed a deal.
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Looks Like Facebook Deals Is Being Unveiled Tonight With Credits And Partners In Tow | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | Whoops. Looks like The New York Times has a little embargo breaking situation on their hands. ( — !) They’ve just put up a story with the URL: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/latest-rival-to-groupon-livingsocial-facebook- / (bolding mine). That page is obviously no longer found, but it was live for a bit. And it is a big one: Facebook’s Groupon/LivingSocial “killer”. Okay, it’s hardly a secret that the service called Facebook Deals was close to launching. In fact, the landing page has been . But the NYT early story has some details. It looks like Facebook will launch the service initially as a test in five cities: Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco (which were all listed on ). Not surprisingly, the service will also focus on activities that are best done with friends — things like concerts and events. The deals can spread both via email and via the all-important News Feed. That last bit will be the key if Facebook does hope to contend with Groupon and LivingSocial. They’ll have a huge amount of leverage right off the bat to the tune of 600 million+ potential eyeballs. The other key? Facebook Credits. NYT quotes Facebook’s director of local Emily White as saying that Deals will be the first product that uses Credits for real goods (rather than virtual ones in games). Also mentioned are initial partnerships with OpenTable, PopSugar City, Zozi and others. More to come, I’m sure once the chaos is sorted out. : From Facebook’s PR team: You mention that Emily White says Deals will be the first product that uses Credits for real goods (rather than virtual ones in games). You can’t use Credits to directly buy real goods. You can use Credits to buy Deals, and you get a voucher that you can print out and take to the merchant to redeem your deal. But you can’t use Credits to actually buy a real good. Might be confusing to some people. : And NYT has put the post back up . Another embargo bites the dust… |
YouTube Amping Up Its Movie Rental Library With Major Studio Participation | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | Sharon Waxman over at The Wrap has about a Video On Demand service about to be launched by YouTube that would be a What the article fails to mention is that YouTube already has a Video On Demand service, . Those interested can rent movies like , and on YouTube for around $2.99 each. So while the streaming functionality already exists, it’s the deals with Hollywood studios like Warner Bros, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, Lionsgate and Kino Lorber that are important to note. Mike that Google was planning a major expansion of its movie offerings back in December of 2010. If Google is indeed serious about increasing the quality of YouTube content and offering a movie rental service than it has to compete with Apple’s iTunes, which currently has deals with Disney, Fox, Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, Sony, MGM, Lionsgate and New Line Cinema, charging $2.99 per rental. The partnerships would mean a new era of content cooperation for YouTube/Google and would possibly have repercussions for Google TV, which lost multiple major studio partnerships launch last year. Paramount and Fox (which also blocked Google TV) have declined to be a part of the streaming movie service according to Waxman’s report. A YouTube spokesperson gave us the following statement, While The Wrap holds that the initiative might launch this or next week, a better estimate might be during Google’s i/o conference on May 10th where Google is scheduled to debut a Google TV-themed . MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka has the report. |
Yammer Finally Works And Makes Work Possible On The iPad | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | Our love affair with is pretty hot and cold. On one hand, they launched at and a few years back. And they seem to be kicking ass on the business distribution front. On the other, the apps they put out there (which we use for TechCrunch day-to-day business) are often very buggy and more or less infuriating day in and day out. iPhone, Android, Web, AIR — they all have issues. But issues are one thing. For the past year or so, I simply have not been able to get Yammer to work on the iPad — at all. It would launch and then crash. I tried this on four different iPads (both the first and second generation). Same result. Today. Finally. They have released a native iPad app. And it works! Version 4 of Yammer’s iOS has just hit the App Store. Previously, the app was optimized for iPhone/iPod touch only (which should still work on the iPad, but again, didn’t), but now it’s a universal binary build (meaning the iPad version is baked in as well). The iPad version works in both landscape and portrait mode and borrows Twitter for iPad app in giving you three columns to work with: menu items, your feed, and individual yams. Aside from the ability to actually work on the iPad, the app brings some nice tweaks and refinements across all versions. For one thing, the app seems much faster. There is also now a conversation thread view which looks nice. And they’ve also promised that this build is more stable. Push Notifications, which have been a constant headache for us iPhone users, are also said to be improved. So far, I haven’t seen any proof of that, but we’ll see. The app remains a free download and if you already have the iPhone version, just update your app to get the iPad version as well. . The new app — which they in March — also finally means they can match in terms of availability. Now about that AIR app, Yammer… (hint: maybe just buy ) |
Google Acquires TalkBin, A Feedback Platform For Businesses That's Only Five Months Old | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | It’s been a good day for Y Combinator. Hot on the heels of news that YC portfolio company Wufoo landed a exit, YC alum has just announced that it’s been acquired by Google — less than five months after the company was founded. TalkBin offers a platform that lets customers give immediate feedback to local businesses (users submit their opinions and critiques via mobile applications, and it looks like the businesses can read and respond to them from a web app). TalkBin’s homepage shows screenshots of both Android and iOS applications, but I can’t find them on either marketplace (I’m not sure if the apps were pulled or if they simply haven’t been released yet). The mostly-stealthy Montain View-based company was founded in December 2010 by Qasar Younis, Michael Ma, and Sunny Dhillon. Given how new the service is it seems that Google is after the team, but it also apparently sees potential in the product too — Google will be shutting down TalkBin temporarily, but it plans to reopen the service to new businesses down the line. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Google gave us this statement: “We’re thrilled to welcome the TalkBin team to Google. They’ve built a cool way for customers to engage with local businesses, and we think they’ll be a great fit for our mobile and local teams.” Here’s the message on TalkBin’s website: We are excited to announce that we’ve been acquired by Google! When we started building TalkBin in 2010, we set out to find a better way for consumers to connect with their local businesses in a more personal way. While we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, we believe Google’s awesome mobile and local teams combined with their consumer reach will help us make our bigger goals a reality. We appreciate all the support and positive feedback we received from all of our partners and we’re elated to join Google and get started! |
Netflix Won't Announce Its 3 Billionth DVD Shipment: "Focus Is Really On Streaming" | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | just announced its and they’re cause for optimism, with earnings at $1.11 a share on revenue of about $719 million, out-performing analysts expectations of $1.08 per share on $704 million in revenue. The company doubled its profits, at $60.2 million versus $32.3 million at the same time last year. The company is hedging its future on its streaming subscription services, and called its DVD business a “fading differentiator” in its shareholder letter. .” This attitude was further evidenced during today’s earnings call when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was asked about DVD shipment milestones, which the company traditionally on its blog. The company announced it’s 1 billionth shipment (a copy of ) in February of 2007 and it’s 2 billionth shipment ( in April of 2009. When asked whether the company would be announcing its 3 billionth DVD shipped (which should be sometime soon judging by the shipment pace), Hasting replied that there would be no such announcement moving forward, he said. In growing its streaming business, Netflix faces competition from Amazon Prime Hulu Plus and the streaming service Dish Network is about to launch. Its competitive strategy is basically grow as fast as it can and put all its eggs in the streaming basket, if you can glean anything from today’s announcement. Netflix currently offers a pure streaming plan as well as a hybrid DVD/streaming option. No word on whether they’ll start announcing the streaming milestones. |
Netflix Now As Big As Comcast Cable | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | As Netflix’s (global) subscriber base is now bigger than Comcast’s national one, a happenstance that should send fear into the hearts of cable providers everywhere. The numbers came from an earnings call today.
In this past quarter, Netflix reached 23.6 million subscribers, up from 14 million last year. We know that Comcast ended 2010 with and assuming at even a significant uptick in subscriber numbers, we can assume that Netflix is on parity or has surpassed Comcast’s base. Netflix also hit $719 million in revenue and expects to have 24 million subscribers by the end of Q2. |
Printed Clock Doesn't Quite Work But Is Amazing Anyway | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | This doesn’t have a working escapement yet (that’s in the works) but it does prove that you can build complex mechanical objects using . The best part is that the Maker who designed it depended on others in Makerbot’s to build and test it. It’s true, open-source R&D and I’d say 3D printing is, in a way, the next step in the evolution of open source technology. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 22 | null |
Son Of Kaspersky Lab's Co-Founder Rescued | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | Good news, Internet. Russian police pulled off what sounds like a legitimate Hollywood kidnapping rescue and of Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder, Yevegny Kaspersky. The short story is the 20-year was returned safely, but the long story is much more interesting. The kidnappers, Nikolai Savelyev, age 61, and his wife, one grown son and two adult friends, asked for $4.3 million Euros in exchange for the boy. That amount is thought to be needed to pay off a bank loan owed by the kidnappers. Eventually the police drew out four of the kidnappers by claiming to have a down payment on the $4.3 million. Instead, they detained the four during a routine auto document checkpoint. While that went down, police raided the home and found Ivan Kaspersky stashed near the house in a “banya,” a Russian steam bath. Police even leaked the wrong info to the media along the way as part of the operation. The five kidnappers are being held in custody awaiting kidnapping charges, which run 15 to 20 years. [ & ] |
CrunchDeals: Buy An Android Device On AmazonWireless, Get A $25 Amazon Appstore Giftcard | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | Amazon has an Android App Store. They also have a brand new section of their site, , where they sell, amongst other things, Android phones. Realizing just how well those things fit together, Amazon is running their first cross-promotion between the two. From this morning until 11:59 pm on May 1st, any Android handsets purchased through AmazonWireless will come with a giftcard good for $25 bucks on Amazon’s Android Appstore. Think about all you could buy with $25! That’s like a million copies of Fruit Ninja! Or, you know, 25. But still. Not a bad deal, considering that Amazon’s prices on most Android handsets are amongst the cheapest out there. |
Pioneer SPH-DA01 AppRadio Docs Hits The FCC Sporting An iPhone-ish Center-Mounted Button | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | Fresh Pioneer Corporation docs just landed in the FCC database of a so-called AppRadio, or as it’s named in one document, iPhone Control Receiver. The unit, SPH-DA01, has a whole host of testing documents in the database but only two are are all that interesting. The user manual names this device AppRadio and then there’s an unflattering picture that shows a center-mounted iPhone button.
Unfortunately said manual seems to be only the first couple pages and not the entire thing, leaving more questions than answers. The manual doesn’t have any screenshots, fancy graphics or descriptions supporting the tantalizingly name. However, in standard FCC operating procedure, there are external and internal photos of the unit and the external one clearly shows a glossy unit with an iPhone-ish center mounted button and a volume rocker off to the side. The whole design is a clear departure from Pioneer’s traditionally style that generally includes lighted capacitive buttons and a matte screen. The rest of the documents talk about iPhone connectivity but that’s a standard feature on today’s car audio head units. Still, this one just feels right. That button, the model number clearly describing a first-gen device, even the timing as Apple is pushing into more niche markets makes this one feel legit. Hopefully Pioneer or Apple doesn’t keep this one under wraps for long. [ ] |
GameRunner Gaming Treadmill Now Available For Pre-Order, Fools Can Part With Their Money For $495 | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsgHMMk0Q2U&w=640&h=510] It is rare to find a gaming accessory so ham-handed and ridiculous that you just know this is going to be a patent troll situation where they start suing Microsoft for stealing their “gaming standing up” idea. But you have to hand it to this guy for his tenacity. There are plenty of YouTube videos up showing him showing it off and the real money shot is where he’s brought in a “real teenager” to declaim its virtues. This thing is basically a treadmill with a joystick on it. You run around, turn the joystick, and play PC games. Then, when the joy wears off, you can start using it as a clothes hanger and then, when you’re finally sick of the thing, you can put it out on the street for some other sucker to find and take home. Anyway, it’s available for pre-order now for $495. It works with Macs and PCs without drivers. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsjcWybARXE&w=640&h=510] |
iPad Dropped From The Sky, Survives To Play Another Round Of Fieldrunners Thanks To G-Form Extreme Sleeve | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKNdknJI53Q&w=640&h=390]
Ready for another shameless marketing video for the iPad G-Form Extreme Sleeve? Last time the encased iPad survived a 12lb bowling ball. This time they’re dropping an iPad 500 ft. from an ultralight aircraft. Does it survive? EXTREME PROTECTION, BABY! [via ] |
Is This The iPhone 4S? | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | The iPhone rumor mill has been all off-kilter for the past few weeks, primarily stemming from the idea that there may very well be no . And yet, the rumor-mill continues to churn. According to whispers over the past few weeks, Apple’s busy toiling over a handset that looks very much like an iPhone 4, but with a few lil’ tweaks to its guts — namely, it’s purportedly packing Apple’s A5 CPU, and a slightly bigger screen. If we were to follow that rumor even further, a handful of big-named developers supposedly have prototypes of these slightly-revised (which, believe it or not, happens from time to time. From what I’ve been told, Apple rolls in, clamps the thing to a desk, makes them sign a mountain of papers, and rolls out). Some have taken to calling this spiritual successor the “iPhone 4S”, though there’s no reason to believe that’s Apple’s official name for it just yet. obtained the shot above — which, if real, certainly seems to be showing an iPhone with a reduced bezel and a bigger display. Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen — but this time, they’re not quite as easy to debunk. What do you think: is this the real deal? |
Netflix Earnings Up 88 Percent, Adds 3.6 Million Subscribers | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | Netflix just released its first quarter earnings. Earnings per share were $1.11, up 88 percent (3 cents above the consensus estimate of $1.08). Revenues came in at $719 million. And Netflix added 3.3 million U.S. subscribers in the quarter, plus another 290,000 interantionally, to end at 23.6 million. The 3.6 million new subscribers is slightly below the analysts were hoping for, but still double the growth from a year ago. Depending on how many subscribers Comcast reports this quarter, Netflix might surpass it to become the largest entertainment subscription business in the U.S. Netflix ended the quarter with 22.8 million U.S. subscribers, exactly the same number of subscribers Comcast reported at the end of 2010. Net income was $60 million, and free cash flow in the quarter was $79, a 55 percent increase from the fourth quarter. Netflix saw a rise in domestic operating margins to 16 percent, from 14.9 percent in the fourth quarter, largely due to an increase in streaming-only subscribers and price increases on hybrid subscriptions. Margins should fall back to around 14 percent as streaming and marketing costs continue to rise (offset by declines in DVD shipping). Netflix is licensing more video from broadcasters, and also last quarter commissioned its own mini-series, a r with Kevin Spacey. But in its quarterly letter to shareholders (embedded below), Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells write: Rather than a shift in strategy towards original programming, our decision was driven by a desire to test a new licensing model using a small portion of our content budget. Netflix is hoping to license two or three similar shows in the future, but doesn’t expect to spend as much as it did on House of Cards. The company did not break down its licensing cost for that show. However, overall marketing expenses rose 39 perccent to $104 million in the quarter. That includes content streaming deals with all four TV networks and others as well. The letter also tries to downplay the threat Netflix poses to traditional cable providers, suggesting that there is more “cord mending: going on than “cord cutting.” Essentially, you should think of Netflix as “rerun TV.” From the letter: Recently, the CEO of an MVPD characterized Netflix as “rerun TV”. While we don’t plan to use that line in our next marketing campaign, he is fundamentally correct. As for competition for streaming online video, it’s coming from Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime and possibly: We also think Dish Networks is likely to launch a substantial subscription streaming effort under the Blockbuster brand. Some other stats from the quarter: Below is Netflix’s quarterly shareholder letter: [scribd id=53877594 key=key-1315gt1edjapacwq9e9f mode=list] |
Social Music App SoundTracking Passes 250K Downloads | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | , social music app has announced its quarter of a million milestone today, surpassing 250K downloads in just six weeks after launch on the iPhone. With 100K downloads taking place in the app’s of existence, SoundTracking is experiencing rapid growth for an iOS app without without a previous app or website to drive installs from. Another music sharing app, , has also hit 250,000 downloads in half the time on Android. While founder Steve Jang wouldn’t disclose numbers of daily active users or users, he does tell me that over 50% of SoundTracking users are using the app to share their music moments on both Facebook and Twitter, which might explain the increased signups. It seems like every five minutes or so someone else is following the SoundTrack to my life. The latest app update now allows people to search by user name and search for venues as well as ID and share songs that they’re listening to, and Jang tells me that he’s starting to see music and location interests graphs form on the site, SoundTracking is a part of Schematic Labs, which creates “ Jang plans on creating more apps based on communities around tastes and is sniffing around the fashion/shopping space next. |
Sizing Up Apps For EV Drivers: Coulomb Upgrades, ECOtality Goes Mobile, And Xatori Grows Community | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 4 | 25 | How many apps does it take to recharge a vehicle? Apparently, one is not enough. Several companies offering mobile apps to drivers — to help them find a place to charge up or refuel in an environmentally sustainable way — made product and milestone announcements around Earth Day. Here’s the run down. ECOtality ( ) — a San Francisco company that’s building electric vehicle (EV) technology and infrastructure in the U.S. and China— unveiled its Blink Network mobile app (screenshot, above) to help users find and reserve a nearby, available charging station at the conference in Washington D.C. Reservation and status-update features made ECOtality’s app distinct from other charger-finders for about a minute. On Monday, however, Coulomb Technologies announced an upgrade to the app, including similar functionality. ECOtality’s app will be available for English-language users of iOS and Android devices in the next few weeks via , while Coulomb’s ChargePoint app is available now. Both companies map the charging stations within the networks that they install, own and operate on behalf of their customers. Both companies supply stations and software to: companies with large vehicle fleets; employers that want to offer EV charging at work; retail store and garage owners; homeowners; and municipalities or utilities. Several other web and mobile charging station finders, however, map any and all charging stations — which could make more sense for cross-country drivers. One such app is provided by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the . The app uses Google Maps technology to show the location of publicly accessible EV charging stations, clean vehicle equipment suppliers, and biodiesel, hydrogen and other alternative fueling stations. The open source site , which is expected to spin out a mobile product this year, includes user-contributed data a la Wikipedia to show charging and clean fuel stations. A newer entrant, the (images, below) maps publicly accessible charging stations, along with volunteer homes or businesses that are willing to share their outlets with EV and hybrid-plugin drivers. PlugShare today claimed that its users comprise the “largest consumer electric vehicle charging network” in the United States. According to company reports, about 1,500 outlets have been shared under the PlugShare collaborative consumption model to-date, across 48 states in the U.S. The app has 13,000 some users so far. Xatori chief technology officer*, Armen Petrosian, said that PlugShare is functioning as a kind of social network, and discussed features the company plans to add to it: We are seeing two main types of communication occurring in the [PlugShare] network. One type of communication occurs between members who have shared outlets 10 to 100 miles apart…and are making a request to charge when one member is away from home. Users who are 5 miles apart or less— [sometimes want] to chat with a like-minded individual. I’ve experienced this first-hand as several members in my neighborhood have contacted me just to say hello, see if I have an EV, etc. There are a number of features that we hope to add [to PlugShare] but a couple stand out right now. One is a reputation system so users can rate charging locations (private and public) and add comments. The second is a way to add or edit public charging station information, so that it can be kept up-to-date by the community.
has not yet determined how the open data and volunteer-inspiring app will generate revenue. The company is focused on building a large user base, first. Meanwhile, Coulomb’s ChargePoint app helps the company generate fees from mobile payments— fifty cents per transaction, plus 7.5% of whatever the station-owner adds as a transactional fee for drivers. A veteran engineer and advocate for clean vehicles, Kristen Helsel, vice president of EV Solutions at Aerovironment, believes that apps of the greatest use to electric vehicle drivers, and the industry, should present data about charging stations agnostically. is sold on a “white label” basis, and is included in a number of other brands’ stations and networks. Helsel explained her position further: “At Aerovironment, we work to enable all of the mapping services to have the most up to date information about where we install public charging stations. We don’t expect customers just to rely on us. What’s really important is that the information is available, and that drivers experience confidence when they want to access EV infrastructure. It will be just as important in the future to make data available about all renewables; where are the chargers that are powered by wind or solar, where are the biofuel stations? The networks can go up, and can be limited. But we have to have open architecture in terms of the data.”
Richard Lowenthal, founder and chief technology officer of Coulomb Technologies noted:
“Home grown apps are great. They don’t offer features, and real-time data like we can. We offer [back-end] support with billing and asset management that tells you which stations are working and not, lets our customers [who purchase Coulomb’s charging stations] set pricing and more. We have phone support for drivers; if someone is having trouble charging, they don’t go into the store, or to the receptionist, they call our 1-800 number. As long as we need to offer our own app to show off all of the benefits and features of our network, we will add to and offer it as a standalone. We do have an open API and offer data to everyone who wants it, PlugShare, TomTom, NREL or anyone. We are not trying to stifle any of them, in fact it’s quite the opposite.” ECOTality’s president and , believes there is value in providing an app that’s brand-specific, as well. In an interview with TechCrunch he said: “I take my hat off to the community service providers, I really do. There’s sort of a brotherhood in the industry. I think that for this EV movement and charge infrastructure to succeed, though, it has to be commercially viable. We cannot rely on good will and trust, or government completely. We need to make sure that EVs and charge infrastructure can stand alone, make money, be profitable so [clean energy] can proliferate with or without subsidies and volunteers. I think the task of building EV infrastructure in the U.S. will be somewhat like the early stages of the cell phone business. We look to create the largest network, and provide the greatest depth of service through our apps. We’ve built the Blink Network app to be a part of an overall system that will eventually include not just the ability to make reservations, but also to make payments, use home energy management programs and devices on the go, experience connectivity and access a network of hundreds of thousands of charging stations.” ECOtality — with the help of a — is set to install approximately 5,700 commercial charging stations in the U.S. by the end of this year. |
Obama ‘Situation Room’ Photo Is Already Half Way To Becoming Flickr’s Most Viewed Pic | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 5 | 3 | If you ever wanted a glimpse of what the Spiderman looks like actualized, take a second to digest the of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and various other in the White House Situation room, captured as they Because I look exactly like Clinton when I receive Not surprisingly the unnervingly human photo has captured popular imagination over the past day and a half, becoming the point of origin of a which range from being placed in the Situation Room, to the Royal Wedding’s Grumpy Flower girl joining in on the fun, to everybody wearing Princess Beatrice’s absurd Royal Wedding hat, which was particularly inspired. Sure this is great guys, but I’m still waiting for the Tiger Woods , and insertions, granted I’m a dork. The photo was posted post-Bin Laden death announcement on May 2nd at 10am PDT via the White House’s Flickr account. Flickr for some reason was tracking the pic, and graciously has given us the following viewer stats; 390,000 views at 3:30pm (5.5 hours later at 71,000 views per hour),
600,000 at 5pm (7 hours later at 140,000 views/hour) and
1,400,000 at 11am today (25 hours later at 44,000 views/hour). The White House Flickr account averages 100K views per day, and yesterday it received 2.5 million views, and as of 7pm today it already had 3.6 million views — An order of magnitude greater than normal. People are saying that this is the probably the fastest viewed ever photo on on Flickr. Flickr itself will only officially say that it’s the fastest one they’ve tracked and that a certain photo from the Royal Wedding has amassed over 1.3 million views since Saturday. At 1,597,561 views currently, the Situation Room image is already more than half way towards beating the current most viewed Flickr photo, the of Nohkalikai Falls, Cherraphunjee which was taken in 2006 and has garned 2,978,625 views after five years. The Situation Room photo amassed its 1,597,561 views after a little under 38 hours. Damn. |
iPod, Meet Spotify; iTunes, Say Hello To Your Future Rival | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 5 | 3 | , the music service Americans don’t get to enjoy, announced several very cool new features today. The European music service is rolling out new versions of its desktop and mobile apps today, which will allow all users (even those pesky ad-supported freeloaders) to sync Spotify desktop tracks with mobile devices, be they iPods, iPhones or Androids. And just in case it wasn’t clear whether or not Spotify intends to compete directly with iTunes, Spotify is also introducing its own music store, or “download service”, in which users can buy a range of MP3 “bundles” at 10 songs for roughly 8 pounds. Or 100 songs for 50 pounds. (Roughly the equivalent of $13 and $82, respectively.) So, not only will Spotify be offering its more than 10 million registered users a music store, it wants its music player to become the default mobile app on its listeners’ devices. To encourage this adoption, Spotify has enabled desktop-to-mobile sync-ing over WiFi. (Something iTunes, cough, doesn’t offer.) Spotify users have been clamoring for these features now for quite some time, and it’s taken almost a year for Spotify to get all of its proverbial ducks in a row. Following to put on its free service, Spotify is now clearly making a more concerted effort to add significant benefits for its non-premium customers. Allowing free users to fully take advantage of integration and syncing with mobile devices is important, and the Swedish music company clearly figures that mobile will be the future onramp for new Spotify customers. Again, up until now, mobile access has only been available to premium customers. , said Spotify Chief Product Officer Gustav Söderström. Another cool feature announced today is the ability to manage your iPod from within the Spotify desktop app. All you need to do is connect your iPod to your computer via an USB cable, and your Pod will now appear in the “Devices” section of Spotify’s sidebar. It will be interesting to see if Apple has anything to say about this. Obviously, iTunes will remain the only way to get music onto an non-jailbroken iPhone, and Spotify will not be reverse-engineering or anything like that, just using USB storage, for example. But I could see this potentially raising some eyebrows in Cupertino. That being said, these new features could be absolutely huge for Spotify; it will make the service’s free users become more regular, repeat users, and will no doubt begin to open the door to new customers. Sure, Spotify is still years from becoming a real iTunes competitor, but it’s moves like this that continue to put that goal within the realm of real possibility. Next, Spotify needs to work on filling out its sometimes thin catalog — and expand its Euro reach beyond Finland, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K. Then the overall service might be enough to make an American like me jealous. And speaking of that, there was still no mention of when Spotify might reach the U.S. a Spotify spokesman said. They better be. I’m getting anxious over here. |
Ubisoft Opens Its Own Movie Studio | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 3 | reports that French developer Ubisoft ( ) has established a sub-company, Ubisoft Motion Pictures, that will be in charge of adapting its games into movies. I’m guessing Ubi isn’t investing hundreds of millions in sets, property, cameras, and such, and this is really more of an administrative thing. Its major franchises are almost certain to be adapted, and if Ubi wants to bring them to the same standards as their games, a serious licensing and oversight body should be formed. That said, as much as I enjoy Assassin’s Creed, I can’t say I’m looking forward to the movie. |
Be A Sky Pirate At Last With This Sweet Kite | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 3 |
Some kids wanted to be firefighters, doctors, and movie stars. I wanted to grow up to be either Boba Fett or a sky pirate. and helped nurture this ambition, and while I’m no closer to it now than I was then, at least there are kites like this that remind me that the sky one day be mine. and handmade “in Bali by father Mâdé and his 2 sons.” Looks like it might need a pretty fresh breeze to stay aloft. [via ] |
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