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Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | A lot of things about Facebook have been impressive, even by the Silicon Valley standards. Almost no other Valley company has reached so many people around the world so quickly. Few Valley companies have been considered important forces in causes as disparate as planning a party or a political uprising. Rarely has a kid in his early 20s held onto the CEO reins this long. And of course, no other Valley company has been made into a star-studded, over the top Oscar-nominated film. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the Facebook mafia– made up of high profile alumni responsible for building companies like , , , and — has also emerged so early and become so distinct, well before Facebook has come close to a major liquidity event. Like most of the things that make Facebook unique, part of this is due to Facebook itself, and part is due to the time in which the company was formed. But before we get to the specifics of the Facebook mafia, it bears noting that not all companies produce bona fide mafias. It’s more than just alums doing well. A true “mafia” is a collection of co-founders, early hires and top engineers who’ve been battle-tested together with an enthusiasm and financial resources to start many different ventures immediately. There’s also a communal sense of co-investing in and supporting one another, hence the idea of keeping it “in the family.” While plenty of smart entrepreneurs and angel investors came from or filtered through Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and Microsoft, those gargantuan successes didn’t really create a mafia that catalyzed at a certain moment of time, resulting in an cluster of cool new stuff. In fact, few big successful, lasting companies spin out mafias, because those companies grow to such a large size that the unique DNA of the culture gets watered down. And for financial reasons, insiders used to be tethered to the company until after its IPO. By then, they’d missed being in the middle of the next big startup wave. Instead mafias tend to fall out of companies that didn’t go as far as they could have. It creates a frustrated sense of still having something to accomplish, or as Peter Thiel said about the PayPal mafia, “You had a lot of smart, competitive people who all needed something to do.” Think of the most noted mafias in Valley history: Fairchild Semiconductor with a high-profile exodus of core talent that encouraged others to do the same. Netscape was another huge one, post AOL sale. Netscape was such a world-changing company, it was hard for anyone who was a part of it to go back to a regular day job, and Netscapers had more cred than anyone in the dot com heyday. There was , and Khosla Ventures’ to name a few members of the diaspora. Of course, the biggest result of the Netscape mafia was the angel portfolio of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who also founded Opsware selling it to HP for $1.6 billion. That angel portfolio included early bets on companies vital to the early Web 2.0 movement, including Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. And that angel portfolio led to the formation of , which has funded everyone from Zynga to Foursquare to Skype. Excite@Home spawned another mafia. For those who don’t remember, Excite@Home was an $6.7 billion mash-up of two hot companies that proved to be one of the highest flying dot-com disasters. But out of Excite@Home came Joe Kraus who founded JotSpot and is now a partner with Google Ventures, Brett Bullington an angel investor and board member in several Valley companies, Craig Donato of , David Sze who would fund Facebook, LinkedIn, and help revitalize Greylock’s West Coast brand. Excite’s mafia may not have founded the next billion dollar company, but they’ve funded several of them. And, like most mafias, they do things collectively. Donato was funded by Sze and Bullington is on his board. Find an industry conference and you’ll find these guys clustered at a back table joking about the good-old-days. Mafias aren’t just about people who had a certain company on their resumes starting something new– there’s the cultural aspect of doing it together that makes them unique. Of course, the most written about Valley mafia was the PayPal mafia. The three founders alone had a tremendous impact. Max Levchin started Slide which sold for $228 million to Google, and incubated Yelp, which has a good shot at becoming a billion dollar company. Peter Thiel started Clarium Capital and Founders Fund which backed many PayPal mafia companies and most famously, backed an early Facebook when no one else would. Thiel was an important early mentor for Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk invested in , and founded and . Tesla has already gone public and revolutionized the automobile world, SpaceX and Solar City are expected to go public sometime this year. Oh, and the three founders have produced movies too. And let’s not forget the biggest exit so far of the PayPal mafia: YouTube’s $1.65 billion sale to Google, which cemented the reputation of Sequoia’s then new partner, Roelof Botha– once PayPal’s CFO. Second biggest was IronPort, built by Scott Banister and sold to Cisco for $830 million. And soon, we’ll see the debut of the PayPal mafia’s first IPO, when LinkedIn– founded by former PayPal executive Reid Hoffman– goes public. Hoffman, too, has funded and mentored dozens of Web 2.0 companies. And let’s also not forget some newer, promising companies from the mafia like David Sacks’ . Sacks was PayPal’s COO– and the guy who came up with that early viral marketing scheme of paying users cash to refer their friends. And PayPal’s Keith Rabois is one of the top executives at , a company leading the next wave of fundamental disruption of the financial industry. eBay loves to trumpet how fabulous PayPal was as an acquisition. But the PayPal mafia has created many more billions and changed the world far more. I once asked Peter Thiel if PayPal made a mistake selling too early– something we fixate on in the Valley. He answered that he’d wrestled with that a lot, especially seeing how big PayPal has gotten under eBay, and imagining how much bigger it could have become as a stand alone company. But ultimately, he said, looking at all the companies that had been created as a result of those smart competitive people needing something to do, it was hard to argue selling PayPal was a mistake in the macro sense. You could have the same conversation today about the good and the bad of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of dollars of secondary share cash-outs, which has largely made this early mafia possible. The secondary sales have been a challenge for Facebook, because it makes retaining some of those early employees harder, and I’ve argued before that it contributes to the Valley’s increasingly short-term, instant-gratification, mercenary culture. But if Quora, Path, Asana and others can live up to the early hype, the Valley’s ecosystem will get its cake and get to eat it too: Facebook keeps growing, seemingly unstoppably, to become the biggest company of this generation and we get a wide impact of startups spinning out of it too. So what does the Facebook mafia look like, and other than its surprising early existence what makes it different? I wanted to examine it, because I was struck by three things: The continuing Valley , Dave Morin of Path’s almost rejection of Google’s $120 million purchase offer and the about Dustin Moskovitz’s Asana that reminded me philosophically of the early days of Facebook, even though the product is decidedly not a Facebook for the enterprise. That got me thinking about other Facebook spinouts we don’t write about as much like and . So I decided to spend much of the last two weeks interviewing more than a dozen people who were early advisers, investors and insiders at Facebook on and off the record about what it was that was making the companies spinning out of this young mafia so striking, in so many different ways. Here are some of the core characteristics, and how they stand out from startups I’m seeing in the Valley at large. To a person, the early Facebook people I spoke with all mentioned Zuckerberg’s July 2006 rejection of Yahoo’s $1 billion purchase offer as a seminal moment that not only changed Facebook, but changed their thinking personally as entrepreneurs. In hindsight it looks like a no-brainer, but the outside world deemed Zuckerberg arrogant and delusional at the time. Inside Facebook, his decision caused a split within the company. Dustin Moskovitz remembered several people saying to Zuckerberg at the time, “If you knew you didn’t want to sell, why did you take us so far down this path? Because that’s what was so painful, getting to the alter and then breaking up.” After that, Zuckerberg never went down the aisle again. And similarly, Moskovitz’s company Asana has refused to engage in conversations about a flip, and sources say Quora has the same philosophy. And then, there’s Path– a mobile photo sharing site that doesn’t even have a million users and turned down a purchase of more than $100 million. As Mike said in his post, Morin is definitely crazy– we just don’t yet know if that’s a good crazy or a bad crazy. During the weekend Morin was agonizing over the decision, he holed up with his biggest angel investor– Moskovitz. Moskovitz was one of the only people who didn’t make Morin feel crazy, and it played a big role in giving him the confidence to do what he knew he wanted to do, turn the insanely generous offer down. These companies all revolve around engineers in almost a cultish way. Their investors and competitors always note how good the team is– which is saying something in a Valley locked in a full-scale talent war. They are insanely picky about hiring engineers and when they find a good one they will pay him nearly anything. Asana gives engineers $10,000 to pimp their desks. Zuckerberg has described Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo as one of the best — if not the best– engineers he has ever met. And Path’s team was reportedly one of the assets Google was so willing to pay up for. But unlike companies like Google and Amazon who rigorously hired based on college degrees, GPAs and standardized test scores, Facebook and the companies that have spun out of it have hewed toward sheer, raw, hacker-like genius. That’s created a more entrepreneurial culture inside the company. Justin Rosenstein– who was at Google and then Facebook before leaving to co-found Asana with Moskovitz– says that working at Google is often described as a wonderland for academics, while Facebook’s early days were more of an extension of a messy dorm room full of engineers hacking away all night, then collapsing most of the day. One thing that made Facebook so distinct from its early Web 2.0 peers was how much money it raised and how rapidly it scaled up. In the aftermath of the dot com bust, there was a paranoid fear of taking too much money or doing in house what you could outsource. But Zuckerberg had missed the bubble and the bust, and built the company as he deemed appropriate. Likewise, some of these companies still have small teams, but it’s not for the sake of being small. They’ve not been shy about raising money, and because there’s not an emphasis on selling the company, they have no problem hiring or raising more when needed. And as the salaries and perks paid to engineers show, it’s not a culture that wastes time nickeling and dimeing the important things. The hallmarks of each of these products are around efficiency, not sprawling messy communities. Quora seeks to organize information to benefit the person answering the question, not the person asking it. As such, some people posing the questions get annoyed that they don’t get the right to retain more control of the dialogue. Similarly, Path is an efficient way to jump in and out of friend’s photo streams. Like Facebook, the emphasis is on engaging with the app seamlessly throughout a day, not spending hours in it at a time. And Asana controls work flow and collaboration through a core news-feed like layout. The emphasis again, is on living in the app, engaging with it throughout the day, not spending an hour doing things inside of it. It’s that difference between being a “utility” and a “media” property that Zuckerberg talked so much about in the early days. Here’s a core difference between these companies and many I see in the Valley. Most companies put an implicit value on size for the sake of size, and doing any cheap viral game in the book to get there, even if it means a low percentage of users ever engage with your app or return to your site again. In the last five years the value of a unique user has been almost completely eroded. Instead, many of these companies take a cue from the way Facebook rolled out with a deliberate controlled pacing that allowed it to scale as it went from just Harvard, to include Ivy League schools, high schools, work places, and eventually the world. Facebook had a confident sense of not being in a hurry, that helped keep its community from becoming overrun and eroded. Likewise, Quora’s press, valuation and influence has far outstripped its user base. Path has a small fraction of Instagram’s users. And Asana has more than 5,000 companies on its waiting list to use its product. These companies may all become huge one day, but that’s clearly not their priority now. Perhaps it’s because the founders were at Facebook before, and it would take something big to get them to leave. Or maybe they’re all idealists who want to change the world. But each of these companies has a big sense of mission. None of them started from building a cool app or site for the founder and his friends, they all started to solve a big problem. And what’s more: That problem isn’t typically a new problem. This is where you get these companies biggest : The people who say Quora is just Yahoo Answers, the people who say Instagram beat Path before it got the chance to get started, the people who look at Asana and see yet another collaboration software play. But here’s the thing: The core problems still exist despite billions invested in solving them, particularly in the case of Quora, Asana, and Chris Hughes’ Jumo, an ambitious play to organize the messy world of nonprofits. We can all see the pitfalls these companies will face, because we’ve seen companies fall into them before. But call it arrogance, confidence, delusion or some insight we just don’t understand from the outside, these founders all think they have a key to solving it. It’s hard not to compare this to Facebook. The biggest reason people wouldn’t fund it in the early days was because of the great flame out of Friendster. Then, when MySpace took off, no one thought Facebook had a chance of catching them. Those naysayers were all wrong. And like Facebook, companies like Asana, Path and Quora are trying to solve problems that are inherently social. Not social in the capital-S SOCIAL MEDIA! sense of the word, rather social in the sense of the messiness that results from people trying to interact online and bringing all the messy aspects of human interaction, communication and relationships with them. They are problems that machines can’t purely solve and people can’t purely solve, and each of these companies tries to use both to solve them, rather than Google’s slavish love of the algorithm or Yahoo’s early belief in directories and curation. They are all likely problems that have no one solution, but a long road of getting closer. Moskovitz says it’s less like they’ve all gone their separate ways, and more like they’re all still working in one bigger, deconstructed company that stretches through the Valley. He’s still trying to solve problems he was working on within Facebook, but on a bigger scale and for all companies. He uses Cloudera’s data processing engine and Quora to handle some of their press and messaging, and uses all the others on a personal level. At the end of the day, this is exactly what makes Silicon Valley irrepressible as an entrepreneur hot spot–more than the money, the universities, and the rest. You can trace a whole lineage of mafias coming out of mafias. Facebook had its roots in the PayPal mafia, which had its roots in the early University of Illinois days along with Netscape and Mosiac. And Netscape grew out of Silicon Graphics. It’s this lineage that has taken decades to develop in the Valley that no government programs or well-meaning civic boosters can replicate. |
Hands On Video: The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0mvxdprN0w&w=640&h=390] I just got my grubby mitts all over Samsung’s brand new 10.1″ Android 3.0 tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (or, as all the cool kids seem to want to call it, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2). Once you’ve torn through our hands-on video up above, take a glance behind the link below. There be first impressions and a hands-on gallery over in them thar hills.
It even depressed my camera. After a minute or two of battling with my lens, I realized that the default void-like wallpaper was just too emo-kid for my camera to be able to auto-focus on — hence the super cheery flower wallpaper in the hands-on video above. Alas, I still won’t be giving up my iPad. Why? Netflix. What about you: are you making the jump to the Tab 10.1, be it from the iPad, a different tablet, or the world of the tabletless? If not, what’s keeping you? |
Hands-On With The Samsung Galaxy S II | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYZTZdWptRg&w=640&h=390] We’re fresh out of Samsung’s “Unpacked” event in Barcelona, where the Internet connectivity (be it WiFi or 3G) was about as stable as a skyscraper built out of warm butter. Fortunately, Samsung brought along a new toy to make up for their lack of Internet: the Galaxy S II. We just spent some hands-on time with it and brought back video footage of every glorious second — check out the video up above, then hop behind the jump for our first impressions and a gallery of hands-on shots.
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Samsung Releases 10-Inch Entertainment Galaxy Tab | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | It’s official: the Samsung 10.1-inch tablet just dropped at MWC complete with a Dual-Core Tegra 2 processor and Honeycomb on board. The device supports HSPA+ (so expect it on T-Mo or AT&T on our shores) and an 8-megapixel rear camera. We’ll have hands-on, but if the smiles of the ladies above is any indication, it must be a lot of fun.
Samsung expands the Samsung GALAXY Tab range with a 10.1” Entertainment Powerhouse Global launch of Samsung’s first Honeycomb-based, Dual Core smart media device BARCELONA, February 13, 2011 – Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a provider of smart media devices and the global leader in Android™ tablets, in partnership with Vodafone Group, today announced the Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 (Model: P7100), a powerful Dual-Core Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) Smart Media Device, designed to deliver the ultimate mobile entertainment experience. “As a leader in the Android-powered tablet market, Samsung is committed to providing a variety of feature-rich, always-on devices” said DJ Lee, Executive Vice President and Head of Sales & Marketing. He continued, “The Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 is a valuable addition to our expanding portfolio of smart media devices. Sporting a large 10.1 screen and dual surround-sound speakers, it enables users to enjoy multimedia to the maximum extent without having to compromise mobility. Patrick Chomet, Vodafone’s Group Director of Terminals, said: “Vodafone customers in over 20 markets around the world will be the first to get the GALAXY Tab 10.1 when it goes on sale this spring. Samsung have produced a stylish, market-leading implementation of the new Android 3.0 platform which will be the first Honeycomb device to arrive in many of those markets. Vodafone’s competitive data tariffs and reliable, high-speed networks make using the GALAXY Tab 10.1 a great experience.” “Samsung continues to develop innovative products that contribute to the continued growth of the Android ecosystem,” said Andy Rubin, Vice President of Engineering at Google. As the tablet market experiences unprecedented interest, Samsung and Vodafone have partnered to cater to customer demand and offer them the perfect way to enjoy the huge variety of opportunities the Android platform provides. Whether playing games, reading eBooks or updating your Facebook status, the lightweight, ultra-slim Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 is the ultimate entertainer and builds on the industry-wide success of the two million-selling Samsung GALAXY Tab. The Ultimate Entertainment Experience A 10.1” (WXGA TFT LCD) display with crystal clear resolution (1280 x 800) makes the Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 an unrivalled device for experiencing the hundreds of thousands of games and applications available from Android Market™. To compliment the amazing visual quality of the device, the GALAXY Tab 10.1 includes dual surround-sound speakers to immerse you even more fully. The device also includes an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera with Auto Focus and a 2 megapixel front-facing camera which lets users capture experiences with the best-in-market full HD record and play as well as easily share them. With the Android browser and Flash 10.1, the Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 is the perfect tool for consuming the world of the internet content wherever you are. Performance and Speed Combined with the latest version of Android’s tablet-optimized operating system, Honeycomb, Samsung has created a device that is powerful and lightning fast. The Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 includes a 1GHz Dual Core application processor, giving you the kind of fast and powerful multimedia and web browsing experience. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1’s Dual Core processor, low power DDR2 memory and 6860mAh battery, make it perfect for task management in an energy efficient way. Maximized Portability At just 599g in weight and mere 10.9mm- slimness, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is lighter, slimmer and more portable, meaning users are free to enjoy its many features while on the move. With the need to remain constantly connected, Samsung has also included super-fast HSPA+ 21Mbps, Bluetooth® 2.1+EDR and Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n connectivity to support rapid mobile download speeds and reduce data transfer times. [Image ] |
Instagram Finally Gets A Better Website — For The Grammys. A Sign Of What's To Come? | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | When it comes to , there are generally two complaints: 1) there’s no Android app yet. 2) the web experience is severely lacking. Today they’ve finally taken a stab at the latter. Well, sort of. The Instagram team has put together a what they’re calling a “microsite” as . Why? Because some of the team is at the Grammys right now and they’re working alongside MTV to cover the event in the filtered, square images that are Instagram’s hallmark at the moment. It’s a nice partnership for Instagram to grab to help increase their exposure. But the bigger deal may be what’s going on behind this microsite. As you can see, images are coming in in realtime and the page automatically updates with the newest ones. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a rudimentary look at part of what they’re thinking about for their main site as well. Currently, the Instagram website is just a static landing page pointing you to their iPhone app. Meanwhile, each image has its own landing page as well, but you can’t do anything on the page besides see the picture and see who took it. You can’t even click on people’s profiles. But co-founder Kevin Systrom has made it clear that on their web presence but want it to be really good and different — more than just a static stream of photos that replicate the app photo stream experience. Or perhaps they’ll make these types of live-updating sites for each . That could be perfect for events such as this. |
The Power Of Voice: A Conversation With The Head Of Google's Speech Technology | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | For all the whiz-bang graphics and nifty apps appearing on smart phones these days, there are still few things that feel more futuristic than pulling out your phone, uttering the words, “find directions to the Exploratorium”, and having Google immediately do your bidding. The technology is becoming widely available via apps on the iPhone and deep integration into Android, and this is really only the beginning. Earlier this month I had the chance to sit down with Mike Cohen, the man who leads all of Google’s speech technology efforts, to get a look behind the curtain at why Google has invested so much into voice, and where things are going from here. Before we discuss where we stand now, it’s worth looking at Cohen’s past, which also serves as a good history lesson on speech technology. Cohen has been at Google since 2004, but he’s been straddling the intersection of voice and technology for decades, getting his start at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1980s. Cohen says that in the 1970s there were two main camps working on speech: linguists and engineers. The linguists were all about rules — they’d identify various trends in grammar and pronunciation and how each interacted with the others. The engineers were taking a different approach: rather than trying to painstakingly identify each rule manually, they set out to build complex statistical models that improved as more speech data was fed into them. By the late 70s and early 80s, when Cohen started doing research at SRI, the engineers were in the lead. But there was a problem: the improvements seen in their models were starting to asymptote. Cohen explains that because these models were always the same, feeding them more data was eventually going to provide diminishing returns (for example, their models were bad at recognizing how pronunciation depends not only which words are being said, but also their context). The engineers needed to find a way to build richer models — so they finally began to collaborate with the linguists. And a research boom ensued. By the early 90s speech technology had gotten sufficiently advanced that researchers could create the DARPA-funded Air Travel Information System (ATIS) — where a user could walk up to a terminal, say, “Show me the flights from Boston”, and the computer would spit back the relevant data. The system could understand countless variations on such commands (you didn’t have to memorize certain keywords) — pretty amazing given the fact that this system was built around the time Windows 95 came out. Based on the success of the ATIS, Cohen decided that the technology was ready for commercialization, so he and three cofounders left to start . The company focused on building automated enterprise call systems, which it then sold to major businesses that had to deal with high inbound call volume — things like an automated stock quote system for Charles Schwab, and customer service for phone companies. Given his history as a researcher, it isn’t surprising that Cohen was looking at ways to improve Nuance’s speech recognition software. And, as it turned out, the huge number of call recordings coming in were even more useful than the data he’d had access to while a researcher at SRI. He explains that there are things that can’t be reproduced in a lab environment — a dog barking in the background, a child crying, and so on — that were present in these inbound phone calls, exposing Nuance to important new challenges in speech analysis. But there was one big problem: despite the fact that its technology was dealing with a huge volume of data, Nuance would have to approach each of its enterprise customers and ask for access to this data for research purposes. Enterprises stood to gain because they’d reap any improvements in the technology, but some of them were wary anyway. Which set the stage for Cohen to finally make the jump to Google. In 2004 Google’s voice efforts were basically non-existent. But Cohen saw an opportunity: even then it was clear that mobile was going to have a big impact on the future of technology. And because Google faces the end-user directly, any incoming voice data would be immediately accessible for research purposes. So he made the switch to the search giant, and began what became Google’s free 411 voice service, GOOG-411. The service in 2007, offering a straightforward and handy feature set: you’d call in, ask for some basic information like a business’s phone number, and it would immediately give you that information free of charge. Cohen says the main motivation for launching GOOG-411 was the fact that it’s useful, but it had an important secondary function: it allowed Google to begin building up a massive corpus of voice data. Remember the data models discussed earlier? Google’s speech systems use similar concepts, but at a much larger scale. GOOG-411 was in October, but Google now has more inputs of voice data, including the microphone button seen throughout Android and the Google Mobile application for iPhone. And Google can look at text-based search queries to identify what terms appear most often after each other. All of which means Google can train its language models relatively quickly. These days, Cohen says that Google uses 230 billion search queries to train the language model used by Google’s speech recognizer. To give an idea of how large that volume of data is, he says the training would take 70 years to be completed on a single CPU (though Google obviously has far greater resources). The technology is now used across a variety of products. YouTube millions of videos. Google Voice attempts to transcribe inbound voice messages (with some pretty hilarious ). And voice search is going to play a much bigger role on mobile devices — don’t be surprised if we start seeing cars with media centers running Android in the not-so-distant future. You can bet they’ll be voice-enabled. Cohen was happy to talk in broad terms about Google’s voice efforts, but he was opaque when it came to sharing stats, upcoming features, and predictions. He wouldn’t discuss the kind of voice search volume that Google sees, though he did acknowledge that it fluctuates widely depending on if a new voice-enabled feature has launched and if there has been recent coverage in the press. When I asked him how long it would be before voice search would become accurate to the point where we take it for granted (and didn’t have to check for typos), he declined to really offer a projection (he noted that he could say something like “five years”, but that that’s just research terminology for “I have no idea”). I also asked him what he thought about Apple’s voice efforts — the company acquired Siri last year, and it seems obvious that it’s going to begin incorporating voice into iOS. Again, Cohen didn’t have much to say here (though this wasn’t really surprising). He did say that Google has the natural advantage of having already released a product that gives it a massive volume of data, but ultimately it will come down to what Apple builds and who they partner with. But while he wouldn’t get into specifics, Cohen did share Google’s long-term vision for this technology: it wants speech input to be completely ubiquitous. “We don’t ever want there to be a scenario where speech would be valuable, if only it had been available — just like you can enter text with a keyboard anywhere, you should be able to do it with speech.” And accuracy is a big part of that: “It needs to work so close to perfect that the choice isn’t based on performance, but on end-user preference.” |
The PS3 Move Ain't Got Anything On This Rig: Mouse And Book Make Motion Sensor | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CYrlHry0dw&w=640&h=510] (him on ) wanted to control Quake 3 with a real gun. Instead of, you know, doing electronics he decided to do something amazing: he taped a mouse to a keyboard and then taped a book to his desk. The result: a motion-controller that works wildly well. |
Sony Ericsson Finally Unveils The Xperia Play, Coming To VZW In Spring | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | It began its life around the rumor mill as “The Playstation Phone”. It ran the full rumor gamut from there, with everything from “Fake!” to “Cancelled!” to “Will Lay Golden Eggs!” being pinned on it by on pundits at one point or another. And today, it becomes a reality. Well — it’s not really any more a reality than it was a week ago, given the innumerable leaks and Sony Ericsson having acknowledged the device’s existence a handful of times before.. but hey, it’s official. Oh, and it’s coming to Verizon!
Here’s what you need to know about this long-mythical game-centric handheld: And the big news all of our US readers are waiting for: yeah, it’s coming stateside. They’re not getting super specific with the dates, but Sony Ericsson says it’ll hit Verizon sometime in Spring. It’ll come pre-loaded with a handful of games (Sims 3, Asphalt Adrenaline, Tetris, etc), and Sony Ericsson’s promising at least 50 Xperia Play-centric titles to be available by the time it launches. So what do you think: is the world ready for a gaming-oriented smartphone? |
Samsung GALAXY S II Is World's Thinnest Smartphone | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | Bam… another smartphone has just hit the streets of Barcelona. The Galaxy S II is the “world’s thinnest smartphone” at 8.49mm. The Gingerbread (Android 2.3)-powered phone has a 4.3-inch 800×480 Super AMOLED screen. No availability but it runs HSPA+ so expect it on T-Mobile or AT&T. Samsung announces the GALAXY S II, World’s thinnest Smartphone that Will Let You Experience More with Less Global launch of Samsung’s most powerful smartphone delivers unmatched performance with a Dual-Core application processor and best-in-class viewing experience by Super AMOLED Plus display in sleek and lightweight design BARCELONA, February 13, 2011 – Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a leading mobile phone provider, today announced the Samsung GALAXY S II (Model: GT-I9100), a beautifully thin (8.49mm) and lightweight, dual-core smartphone that combines an unmatched viewing experience with incredible performance. The Samsung GALAXY S II uses Android™ 2.3 Gingerbread, the latest version of the world’s fastest-growing mobile operating system. The next generation smartphone includes access to Samsung’s four new content and entertainment hubs, seamlessly integrated to provide instant access to music, games, e-reading and social networking services. “In 2011, we will take Samsung’s leadership in Speed, Screen and Content to a whole new level,” said JK Shin, President and Head of Samsung’s Mobile Communications Business. “With the GALAXY S II, Samsung wants to set the new standard of quality viewing on mobile, powerful performance, and slim and modern design.” “GALAXY S II is a natural and powerful evolution of GALAXY S. Building on the phenomenal success of the original Samsung GALAXY S, we are proud to unveil the ultimate smartphone. Consumers no longer have to contain themselves – the Samsung GALAXY S II allows them to design their own smart lives.” “We’re pleased to see Samsung bring another Android-powered device to market to help grow the Android ecosystem,” said Andy Rubin, Vice President of Engineering at Google. Powerful Performance Incorporating a dual-core application processor and advanced wireless network (HSPA+ 21) connectivity, the Samsung GALAXY S II has the speed and power to provide an unrivalled mobile performance. Dual-core application processor delivers compelling features such as fast web browsing, multi-tasking comparable to a PC-like environment, supreme graphics quality and instantly responsive 3D user interface on the large screen. The GALAXY S II also delivers seamless multitasking, switching between applications instantly. Superior 3D hardware performance makes games and video incredibly fast and smooth. With super-fast HSPA+ connectivity, the GALAXY S II offers rapid mobile download speeds while BlueTooth® 3.0+HS considerably reduces data transfer times. The Samsung GALAXY S II has been equipped with an 8MP, high-profile camera and camcorder with 1080p full HD recording and playback. With Samsung’s patented AllShare technology, customers can capture, create and then share their experiences hassle-free. A Next Level of Viewing Experience The Samsung GALAXY S II has been equipped with Samsung’s new crystal-clear Super AMOLED Plus screen, the most advanced mobile visual display ever created. Setting the standard of quality viewing on mobile, Super AMOLED Plus introduces the best in quality in color gamut, contrast ratio and edge sharpness. Using RealStripe screen technology and a greatly increased sub-pixel count, Super AMOLED Plus complements the mechanics of the human eye to recognize images look clearer and more detailed than ever before. With a wider viewing angle and increased visibility in outdoor, the Samsung GALAXY S II provides a more vibrant viewing experience than any other mobile devices. Even with its unrivaled performance, the innovative Super AMOLED Plus display does not compromise battery performance. A significant reduction in power consumption from Super AMOLED display means it is also more energy-efficient than other comparably-sized devices, allowing Samsung to minimize device weight. Samsung GALAXY S II Goes to Work Samsung has introduced a new range of enterprise mobility solutions, expanding the business capabilities of the Samsung GALAXY S II and helping enterprise customers empower a flexible and connected mobile workforce. Samsung has partnered with IT industry leaders to offer the most relevant enterprise solutions to the Samsung GALAXY S II, working seamlessly on the Android Gingerbread platform and paying special attention to securing data and network. These solutions include enhanced conferencing and connectivity services from Cisco, the most comprehensive mobile implementation of Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and secure remote device management from Sybase. A New World of Entertainment and Smarter Interaction Samsung has selected the Samsung GALAXY S II as its premium mobile product with which to launch Samsung Hubs – integrated mobile applications designed to fit every element of your life. With Samsung Hubs, the Samsung GALAXY S II delivers rich catalogues of books and magazines, music, advanced mobile games and control of your online social life, all from a single device. • Social Hub Premium: The future of communication – talk to whoever you want, however you want, all from one place – your contact’s list. Communication history, IM status, and updates from social networking sites are all readily available. From here, users can access all types of messages (push e-mail, text, VM and SNS) and respond directly without resorting to individual applications. It truly acts as a hub for entire social life.
• Readers Hub: Carry an enormous library of books, magazines and newspapers on-the-go. Through strategic partnerships, Samsung Readers Hub provides over 2.2 million books and novels, 2,000 global and local newspapers in 49 languages and 2,300 popular magazines in 22 languages.
• Game Hub: The easiest way to download and play best-in-class mobile games. Featuring a 3-axis gyroscopic sensor, the Samsung GALAXY S II unleashes a world of gaming possibilities. Try for free and download premium titles from partners like Gameloft, or ‘enjoy Social Network Games (SNG) powered by mobage including ngmoco’s We Rule and We City’.
• Music Hub: Make Samsung GALAXY S II a personal music manager and access over 12 million tracks from 7digital. Discover what’s hot from top charts, search for favorite music, get recommendations on albums, enjoy previews and download them directly to Samsung GALAXY S II. The Samsung GALAXY S II gives customers more choice in personalizing their smartphone experience. New for the Samsung GALAXY S II, Samsung has introduced Live Panel, a service that aggregates live web and application contents to a single customizable home-screen. Customers can design the lay-out of their own Live Panel, online services and mobile apps to appear on-screen. SNS feeds, information and many more applications can all be embedded and accessed instantly through the magazine-like layout. With the enhanced voice technology on the Samsung GALAXY S II, customers will be able to do more with less. From opening the app to controlling the messaging, social media, email and calling, Samsung Voice Solution will recognizes voice and convert it to text and vice versa. Customized Voice Translation application makes the Samsung GALAXY S II the perfect travel companion, translating voice or text into – and from – a range of languages: simply speak a word or phrase into the handset and it will instantly translate it, with audio and text output. For swift and simple device management, Samsung has introduced Kies Air. With Kies air, consumers can manage their smartphone contents from their PC, via local WiFi connections. download photos taken on the built-in camera, listen to music, check missed calls and send messages in the web browser on their PC. For added connectivity, WiFi Direct allows consumers to connect to wireless-enabled PCs and printers without the need for wireless access points. According to market requirement, the GALAXY S II is able to incorporate Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to support emerging mobile payment service and other services with mobile operators.
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You Want A Better Search Engine? Sortfix Suggests Better Search Terms | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | It’s interesting that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington about the current problems with search. Because it’s clear that while few players feel able to take on the might of Google, there remain a few startups out there trying to attack the problem from different angles. One of them is Israeli startup , who I met on a recent trip to Tel Aviv in Israel (more on that soon). Previously, SortFix tried concentrating its search functionality directly through its website and through its . But now SortFix has created a FireFox extension for Google which makes use of SortFix’s algorithms to generate suggested words to improve your search. It’s still in beta . |
Nokia Keeps Pumping Meego And Symbian – But What App Developer Will Now Bother? | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has been on stage tonight at a Mobile World Congress press conference talking about Nokia’s future relationship with Microsoft. Various blogs have been live blogging (here’s a from Engadget). But sitting back and listening to Elop’s explanation about how Symbian devices will still be shipped and a Meego device, due to ship this year, will be used for experimentation and “disruption”, one has to ask the simple question: Where are the apps? While the first MeeGo product will ship this year with a Qt framework, Qt is unlikely to go onto Nokia’s Windows Phone, thus killing off all those developers who studied Qt. “If we encourage a fork in Windows Phone’s development platform, we could create a situation where we confuse developers and consumers,” said Elop tonight in Barcelona. Bang goes that talent base, then. |
Close or View | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | There’s something about the time we’re in right now that reminds me of the brief period before FriendFeed went realtime. Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit were experimenting with realtime updates, a conversational format where comments paged in as they occurred. Seemed like a minor feature request at the time, before Google Wave and certainly no comparable Twitter functionality. And as much as some of us clamored for it as a Track replacement, most users could care less. In fact, most of the discussion about realtime was about how to keep up with, or pause, the stream. FriendFeed took a radical approach, adding new comments and their parent thread at the top of the interface. Last in, first out. In so doing, the tyranny of the chatty commandeered the Twitter posts that also appeared in pseudo realtime. Partly a chat session, partly a news feed, the swarming characteristics of the social crowd were exhilarating, sometimes nasty, and destined for attack by economic blockade. Twitter provided most of the utility, and then most of the failwhaling. Whether technical or just business, the firehose was rendered unreliable by a series of outages and turf gamesmanship. Luckily for Twitter, Facebook was either too busy or too focused to compete directly for a realtime experience, and aggregator strategies such as FriendFeed couldn’t reduce Twitter dominance by merging multiple streams. FriendFeed didn’t want a direct confrontation with Twitter, and Facebook wanted the co-founders. End phase 1 realtime. In the aftermath of FriendFeed realtime, Twitter has finally pulled even with most of the capabilities if not the UI of phase 1. The center of the platform is the iPad client, or will be once Dick Costolo has his druthers. The iPhone is similar in features, but pales next to the larger device’s ability to go right from update to post. The website still has its moments, particularly when Google Track alerts send you to the web client rather than the iOS app. To more or less the same effect, you can navigate to citations from direct messages, @mentions, and @replies from all three. My favorite UI is the iPad app and its sliding columns. Click on an item to retweet, reply or email (I don’t use favorite), and then walk the neighboring tree of someone’s posts or @mentions by clicking on their picture and the appropriate stream below. It can get a little ungainly as column after column slides in and replaces the preceding one, but you can swipe them to the right to backtrack. But the rewards for this slightly goofy UI are that you can catch up on folks you don’t see frequently in the stream, or bounce from person to person in a kind of cloud-hopping scenario. You might think Facebook updates were a big loss in the Twitter scenario, but I find the one-way nature of the Facebook stream (in from Twitter but not back) blurs the possible value I’m missing. Occasionally I’ll venture over to see what I’m missing and find that bucolic Facebook conversation among friends and acquaintances. Not a waste of time, but nothing I can’t catch up with in a few minutes once every few days. Recently the Twitter to Facebook push seems to have slowed to a crawl, or perhaps it’s being more selective than the Likes, posts, and comments I push from FriendFeed. If someone comments on one of those reposts, I get email notification. Now that Chatter @mentions and Likes are online, I’m getting email alerts. I’m subscribed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post breaking news emails as well. I get email from Plancast, Twitter follows, News.Me daily updates, and so on. Here’s where it starts to get interesting. The Times pushes notifications to iPad and iPhone. CNN pushes breaking news to the iPad. Facebook pushes pictures, Foursquare check ins, and a new firehose from Twitter: @mentions and direct messages. The only way I can quantify this is as phase 2 realtime. Right now it’s a hodgepodge of interfaces: Safari Web, iPad or iPhone but all push notification. It’s that little feature that tips us over into the next world, just as realtime pushed FriendFeed to a complete revamping of its experience and eventually existence. When a push appears, you have two choices on the iPad — Close or View. It’s a modal window, meaning you have to click on one or the other to either swap windows or get back to what you were doing before the interruption. If multitasking were uniformly enabled, that would largely be a no-brainer. If I could jump to the incoming alert and return seamlessly to where I was in the prior application, I’d choose View 90% of the time assuming I cared about the alert. But different apps handle things differently. The New York Times app is pretty good; it saves the index page I’m on and for the most part the actual story. The Wall Street Journal app is abysmal; no matter where you are in any of the seven days of archived issues it holds, it reloads the current issue’s home screen when you return. Twitter is in some ways the best of both worlds, offering a separate browser instance within the app from which to escape the tyranny of the iPad’s Safari instance. It will save the page you were last on in Safari, but forces clicking on the index icon to navigate between the 9 pages in its landing screen. Twitter lets you view a citation within the column interface, or click to widen to full screen, or push the page directly into Safari. Not the true multitasking panacea of Android, but not the battery crisis either. Email has its own semi-universe in this pseudo-tasking environment. Exchange (or Active Sync) vibrates but doesn’t push work email to the alert window; appointments make a chime sound and let you click to bring up conference call numbers and codes. Gmail vibrates after synching recent messages, triggered once Exchange has notified. That’s largely a good thing, since Gmail is where all my email notifications go and would kill the battery not to mention what’s left of my sanity. But because of the poor state handling of iPad apps, I have to choose between losing my place or waiting to find out what’s new. As a result, push notifications are the new prime time, water-front property, Boardwalk and Park Place of phase 2 realtime. The domino effect of this alert mechanism will transform the iPad and therefore the downlevel iPhone and Web clients in turn. Soon we will be able to write filters directly to that middle layer buffer where state is stored, with business rules that let some things through to compliant apps and push data from weaker clients to second class citizenship. This in turn will provide powerful incentives to clean up wayward apps, as iPad economics propel such power features for an additional price or more targeted information about user interests. At the time of phase 1, much was made of FriendFeed’s failure to achieve a broad-based popularity. Certainly the service plateaued and then collapsed once the buyout occurred. But the lessons learned were quickly absorbed into Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook and Google Buzz. Most significantly, Likes and @mentions have now largely recreated the underlying realtime Track structures that are now being harvested in Chatter. From phase 1 to acquisition took a very short time, a matter of months. No doubt Apple is paying attention to phase 2 in a similar way. With signs increasingly pointing to new hardware in the next month or two, the iOS advances could be as or more significant than size, camera, etc. Integrating video chat with state-saving features and the social stream could spell doom for an Office already under pressure from being shut out of the iPad and maybe the Mac as it goes iOS. And killing the laptop market will put a rather significant dent in Windows sales too. With friends like HP running WebOS apps, Steve Ballmer can be forgiven for wondering who needs enemies. |
10-Year-Old Talks About MakerBot At Ignite Phoenix | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyZxzkd-Jsk&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3] We love us some at CG and clearly this young man loves his as well. Watch has he describes the magic of actually making stuff with his MakerBot at Ignite Phoenix this year.
It actually warms my heart to see a guy like this fall in love with rapid prototyping. Imagine if, back in the olden days of yore, you could make your own cars, action figures, dolls, and army men. How much fun could we have had and how much more creative would we be today? |
Zynga's Reported $7-$10 Billion Valuation Surpasses That Of EA | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | My friends over at the have been knocking it out of the park lately, reporting that social gaming phenomenon is raising a new $250 million round of funding that values the company at between $7 – $9 billion according to, eh hem, sources. Then today Bloomberg on the news, naming names in terms of players in the talks, including Fidelity investments and T.Rowe Price (who coincidentally also has signifigant shares in gaming company ). Bloomberg also reiterated the same price for the round at $250 million and bumped the valuation range up to continuing down the well worn path of hinting at market exuberance by running down the checkpoints signifying a tech industry investment bubble, er frenzy: Facebook at $52 billion, Groupon at $15 billion, Twitter at $8 – $10 billion as well as the laundry list of IPO filings including Demand, LinkedIn and Pandora. Last time the media concretely checked in on Zynga’s valuation it was at $4 billion, when it papers issuing new stock. The Bloomberg article states that Zynga’s valuation on secondary market Sharespost is currently equal to about $6.2 billion versus NASDAQ’s $6.2 billion for console and PC gaming giant Electronic Arts, which was once to be considering Zynga as an acquisition prospect. A quick glance today shows those numbers are about $6.15 billion on Sharepost versus $6.17 billion on NASDAQ respectively. This means, that even when you put aside the overlapping valuation range reported by Bloomberg and the WSJ, the market is willing to pay more for Zynga than traditional gaming company EA right now, however incremental. Dean Takahashi in October that EA’s estimated $3 billion in revenue for 2010 runs laps around Zynga’s $850 million (with $400 million in profit), but as we’ve seen again and again with Facebook, the market is not gaging in multiples of current revenue, it is gaging in perceived with regards to potential audience and ad spending. The metrics for what constitutes a gaming hit have changed since Super Mario Bros. According to AppData, Farmville and CityVille now have between 96 million and 51 million monthly users respectively. In contrast, it took a decade for a best selling EA title like the The Sims to 125 million units sold. Zynga has its sights set much higher than moving units or in its case virtual currency, it wants to to be the Google a.k.a the entrypoint of gaming. The company now has 275 million active monthly users across all its titles, numbers higher than the traditional video game industry has ever seen. It has acquired 9 companies in just as many months and has offices in 6 countries. User numbers are comparable to half the population of Facebook (valuation: $52 billion). Divide the current Facebook valuation numbers being tossed around by two and you’ll understand the company’s ambition. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a pro tip that is perhaps the scariest part of living in the frenzied now: The easiest way to get people to shut up about skyrocketing valuations is to say,
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null | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 2 | 13 | null |
Millennial: For The Second Month, Android Leads iOS For Mobile Ad Impression Share | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | has released its monthly mobile report this evening, and it looks like Android has continued its reign at the top of the network in terms of mobile ad impression share, after overtaking iOS for the . Millennial, whose ads reach 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81 percent of the U.S. mobile web; is reporting that Android ad impression share increased by 8 percent month-over-month to capture 54 percent of the network’s ad impressions in the U.S. in January. iOS trailed behind with 28 percent of mobile ad impression share, which is decrease of 4 percent. RIM followed with a 14 percent impression share, down 2 percent from last month. Apple iOS ad requests increased 47% month-over-month, with Android requests growing by 32% month-over-month. RIM requests remained relatively flat month-over-month, Symbian requests increased 24% and iPad requests increasing by 43% from December. Smartphones increased 10% month-over-month in January and accounted for 66% of the Smartphone, Feature Phone & Connected Device Impression Share on the network. iOS continues to dominate the Connected Device category, largely due to the popularity of the iPad. Apple continues its reign as the leading device manufacturer on Millennial’s network, with 26 percent of the Top 15 Manufacturers impression share in January, a 24 percent increase month-over-month. But Android manufacturers are continuing to grow as well. HTC grew 36 percent in January to claim the number two position and Samsung moved to the number three position, with the the Samsung Epic and the Samsung Galaxy 5 entering the Top 30 Mobile Devices for the
first time in January. RIM continued its domination in terms of the number of devices on the list, wth five of the Top 30 Mobile Devices with a combined impression share of 10 percent in January
Smartphones accounted for 23 of the Top 30 Mobile Devices with a combined impression share of 55 percent, up 15 percent in January. While last month’s report certainly favored Android in terms of growth, January’s Mobile Mix report indicated that iOS is still growing, and beating Android, in terms of ad requests. According to a Millennial is the third largest network behind Google AdMob and Apple’s iAd, so data shared on Millennial’s network is certainly indicative of the state of mobile advertising. But there’s no hiding that Android is continuing to grow in terms of both reach and and that means that more users are interacting with advertising on the platform. |
Merrell Barefoot Trail Glove Reviewed | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | If you’re a big fan, you may have been thinking about moving toward a more closed shoe for trail running but didn’t want to sacrifice the delicious toe splay offered by “real” foot gloves. a new set of trail shoes designed to mimic the benefits of VFFs and they were quite well-reviewed at our favorite site dedicated to shoes, . The ultimate decision? I’m really liking my Merrell Barefoot Trail Gloves and recommend them as a solid contender amongst the emerging options in the minimalist footwear category — they are certainly top of mind in the non-five toed shoes category! That said, it’s important to keep in mind that every foot is different just as every person is different — there’s a good reason for the cliche “if the shoe fits, wear it!”
Some choice quotes: The sole, while not having five separated toes like the KSO Trek, is reminiscent of the Trek in that the end of the sole has four ridged, implied “toes” (see pic at right). These ridges provide some added traction — particularly when ascending steep uphill climbs on the trail. Elsewhere on the sole you’ve got some decent knobbing that lends to overall traction on the trail. Since the sole is made by Vibram, and ssuming you’re running form is efficient, which is to say that it minimizes friction, you could probably expect these soles to last quite a long time. I’ve worn my Trail Gloves a good bit for walking, some road running, and trail running over the past two months; thus far, the soles show no appreciable wear. The Merrell Barefoots are zero-drop shoes meaning the heel is not elevated. My handy calipers measure the forefoot thickness at a smidge over 10mm — same at the heel. For reference, my KSO Treks are more around 8-9mm. Compare the Merrell Barefoot Trail Gloves’ zero-drop to the NB Minimus Trail, which has a 4mm heel-to-toe drop and is overall a bit thicker-soled at 15mm or so at the heel (The New Balance NB Minimus Trail is slated for release in March 2011). |
Canjo: You Know, A Banjo Made From A Can | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | [blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYKhtmsC] So I learned two things today: companies in and, more important, once you empty those cans you can make a Canjo. These things, built buy Wisconsin-native John Elwood, have a charming look and great resonance.
“These are three-string, robust instruments, have the scale dimensions of a violin, and are inexplicably pleasant to the ear,” says Elwood. “I blame it on the excellence of the cheese.” Elwood doesn’t seem to sell his creations but you can build your own with the plans below. |
Xetum Releases Limited Edition Watch With Carbon Dial | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | Our good buddies at are offering a post-Valentine’s treat: a new, limited-edition Tyndall with carbon-fiber dial and automatic movement. Xetum makes some of the best and most handsome American-designed watches I’ve seen in a while so pop over and visit them early and often.
I reviewed the , finding it surprisingly handsome and legible and a great value. |
Angry Nerds: IBM's Watson Finishes Night One Of Jeopardy Challenge Tied For First Place | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | Did you all just see that? The kicked off tonight, and Watson, the IBM-developed artificial intelligence absolutely more than held his own against his human competition. Mechanical men! At the end of day one (it’s a three-day tournament), Watson, along with Brad Rutter, leads with $5,000. Poor Ken Jennings has only $2,000 to his name. Double Jeopardy beings tomorrow, while (where I got that “ ” barb) is the place to be during the show. I can’t even pretend to be impartial—I’m pulling for Watson all the way here, and I, for one, welcome our new artificial intelligence overlords. |
JumpBox Now Offers One-Click Installs On Amazon's Free Usage Tier | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | Last October Amazon launched a feature that’s exciting for developers: a that provides a limited amount of access to EC2, S3, and Amazon’s other cloud products free of charge. It’s a big deal because it lets developers roll out new projects without any upfront cost (they only have to start paying when their project takes off). But it hasn’t been particularly useful for average consumers, who don’t know how to set up projects on Amazon’s Cloud. Now , a startup that offers ‘Open Source as a Service’, has launched a feature that makes this free usage tier accessible to just about anyone. The feature supports one-click installs for WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, and Joomla — you enter your Amazon secret key, create some JumpBox credentials, and you’re off and running. JumpBox benefits from getting exposed to new customers (who may also opt to install other apps at a premium) and Amazon benefits because these users may eventually hit the limits on the free usage tier and switch to paid plans. The good news for JumpBox is that this feature is now being promoted on the AWS free usage tier (you can see the promotion widgets at right). However, I’d expect many of the people arriving at that site know how to install WordPress or Drupal on their own servers already. Also note that this isn’t the only service to provide one-click installs on cloud platforms — we’ve previously written about that offers some similar functionality. |
First AOL Q1 Luge Update Since HuffPo Acquisition: We've Got Work To Do (No Kidding) | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | It’s that we get access to insider information as AOL employees here at TechCrunch HQ, so we have to rely on our mad reporting skills and the strength of our inboxes in order to figure out the goings on over in Dulles and at 770 Broadway. We’ve received this “Winter Luge and HuffPost Quick Update” email multiple times today, but none through any legitimate AOL channels. So I guess this means we can take off our and just repost it (yay pageviews!). In the email, AOL head honcho welcomes content maven to the AOL family with colorful exaggerated reference to the written about the AOL/Huffington Post acquisition last week, apparently signifying an AOL comeback. The email goes on to explore how close we are to our very ambitious which are indeed very very ambitious. The prognosis? Not so close. We’ve got a lot of work to do AOL Lugers! There’s a lot of juicy stuff here, but for the sake of brevity let’s just take on our goal of double the pageviews to the AOL homescreen by March 31st. The email trumpets a 6% traffic increase of 50 Million homepage pageviews from December to January. Working backwards based on those numbers, the AOL Homepage got approximately 833 million views in December, 883 million views in January, and we’re aiming to hit around 1.66 billion monthly views in just two months. (I’m assuming these are internal AOL analytics since the Comscore numbers for the AOL Welcome Screen actually show a decrease in views.) Damn. Is this in any way possible to achieve? Well we could amp up IRL marketing, pick Huffington’s brain on maximizing search traffic and social while we wait about a month for The Huffington Post’s to clear and work on redirection among all branded properties (Hi ). But even if we increased at rate of 10% a month, for the next six months, we still wouldn’t hit that number. Sprechen sie ? ———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Armstrong, Tim
Date: Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 1:23 PM
Subject: Winter Luge and HuffPost Quick Update
To: “Armstrong, Tim” AOLers – We are on the comeback and if the 4,000 articles on AOL and The
Huffington Post over the last week didn’t send that message, nothing
will. As we discussed last year, opportunities are opportunities
because not everyone can see them and we now have an even bigger
opportunity in front of us. Arianna Huffington and the team at The
Huffington Post see the same vision we see and we will accelerate
together. Staying right on course, AOL is aiming to be the largest high-quality
content producer for digital media – locally, regionally, nationally,
and globally. By producing great content for consumers and offering
differentiated advertising solutions (Project Devil and Local), we
will have a profitable, growing, and sustainable business model built
for where the web is going. This week, there are a number of areas we
will begin planning this week in connection with the deal closing, and
as an employees-first culture, we wanted to share some of the areas of
opportunity we will be looking at: · Journalist / Creative Culture Investment: We have a big
opportunity to create the next evolution of the content culture.
Creativity has been a big part of the AOL comeback and it will be an
even bigger part of the future with The Huffington Post Media Group. · Local to Regional to National to Global: We can help
consumers and marketers from the world they live in to the house they
live in. AOL and The Huffington Post are uniquely structured to
create the new way information gets shared across the globe and across
your town. AOL’s large, local reach and focus/investment in mobile
platforms are extremely powerful when coupled with The Huffington
Post’s global reach. · Video: AOL has invested in video production and distribution
around the globe over the last year and we have strengthened our
position in many markets. The Huffington Post was about to invest
heavily in video—now our combined company has the ability to create a
video version of The Huffington Post and continue growing video across
AOL properties; this offers our partners many valuable options. · Brand Advertising: Project Devil went live on the AOL.com
homepage yesterday and we are just beginning to see the impact of the
brand ads movement online. The Huffington Post and AOL have combined
audiences that index very high on education and affluent income levels
and we can have a significant offering in the advertising market. If
you want to reach the most valuable consumers one-on-one, we’ll be the
place. It’s time for brands to step into the web and we have the
first and best step for them to make. · Culture of Help: AOL’s number one value is to help others
and we have done a great job of that with our volunteer days and our
homepage cause marketing support. The Huffington Post has provided a
platform for many of the causes and cause leaders to blog and has a
full-time cause marketing team and many partnerships. Together, we can
help drive the civic-minded solutions the world needs. · North Star Goals: Our goals are still the same and will be
accelerated by this deal – grow unique visitors, grow brand
advertising, scale locally – and underline those three goals with
video and mobile. Over the course of this week, we will start to sketch out the future
of the combined companies. Our executive team and Arianna’s team are
working closely together on planning the integration of the two
companies and we would expect to move quickly with any changes once
the deal is closed. We need to all remain laser-focused on our Winter Luge goals. We are
at the halfway point in our ambitious plan for the winter and I wanted
to give you a quick status update on what we have achieved so far: Grow ad sales revenue by a double-digit increase—Entire sales and
sales support team has been trained on AOL Way for Advertising and
presales has been reorganized to line up to the top 100 accounts. Double homepage traffic—Grew monthly PVs on AOL.com by 50MM (6%) in
January vs. December and late night grew 212%. Minutes per visitor per
month have increased 33% yoy to 40.4 minutes in January—this leads all
competitors (MSN – 36.5 minutes; Yahoo – 32.9 minutes; NYT – 30
minutes); we still have a lot of work to do, but this is a huge win. AOL Way for Media—Entire media team has been trained on the AOL Way
and the operations team has created great reporting tools to track our
progress. Achieve 99.9% reliability for email—Thoroughly analyzed all components
of the mail system and have started implementing a series of fixes and
process improvements. The team is working on the V2 architecture for
long term reliability and functionality improvements. Double Patch engagement—Visits/UV grew 6% in January while UVs grew 32%. Ads/Content Platform + Devil everywhere—Only 24 Blogsmith migrations
remain; Seed 2.0 in Alpha; Dynamic ad sizing for Devil 2.0 in
production. We are now focusing on implementing AdLearn 5.0, improving
our DSP solution, and making booking an ad campaign 70% faster Close partnership / M&A deals inline with our strategy—GoViral and
Huffington Post deals signed; also partnerships with Everyday Health,
SportingNews and Move.com signed. Culture luge—We have made great strides in growing our culture of
performance and accountability, we have celebrated our successes with
the weekly Attitude Alerts and Accelerator Thursdays and are
furthering our culture of teamwork as we moved the New York office to
sit in their teams and towns. Recruit top talent—Job applications for open positions have gone WAY
up, the world is watching and is noticing the huge cultural shift; we
have filled 33% of the top 12 open positions. We have accomplished a lot in the Winter Luge in the first half and
need to maintain this sharp focus through the end. Let’s finish the
Luge strong! As we discussed at the all-hands meeting a few weeks ago, we have a
long-term vision for this space and we will continue to move AOL into
a leadership position in the digital content business. The comeback
is on and we’re going to deliver to our consumers, customers,
partners, shareholders – and most importantly – you. Let’s keep
getting it done and have fun doing it. Go AOL – TA |
Apple Now The Most Valuable Tech Company By $100 Billion; Google Closing In On Microsoft | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | It’s hard to believe that it wasn’t even a year ago when I wrote the following post: . It’s even harder to believe just how many people thought I was crazy for saying that — it just two months later! And while plenty seemed to think that the passing of the torch to Apple as the most valuable tech company would be short-lived, let’s look at where we are today. As of market close this afternoon, Apple is now a full $100 billion past Microsoft. Yes, Apple is the most valuable tech company in the world by $100 billion dollars. To put that in some perspective: the market cap of HP is $105 billion. Apple is now worth an HP more than every other tech company. When I wrote the initial post last March, Apple’s market cap was at $208 billion, while Microsoft stood at $261 billion. By the time Apple passed Microsoft in May, both had market caps around $227 billion. As of today, Apple’s market cap is now $330 billion while Microsoft’s is $228 billion. In these past 9 months, Apple has gained $100 billion in value. Microsoft? $1 billion. In fact, not only is it clear now that Microsoft will not be re-taking the crown as the most-valuable tech company any time soon, but they’re flirting with being knocked down to the number three — or even number four spot. In the past year, while Microsoft’s stock is down slightly, Google’s is up nearly $100-a-share. This has allowed the search giant to surpass the $200 billion market cap themselves. And they’re now just $28 billion away from Microsoft. To put it another way, Google is much closer to Microsoft in terms of market cap than Apple was when I wrote that post last year. Another killer quarter and Google may be able to take them down as well. Meanwhile, IBM is a little bit closer at $202 billion. Their stock is up nearly 40 points in the past year. They have a shot of passing Microsoft too. And just to pre-empt all the “market cap doesn’t mean anything” comments that are inevitable, time has proven that it may mean something. When Apple passed Microsoft last year, Microsoft was still comfortably ahead of Apple in terms of both revenue and profit. Wall Street didn’t care. Investors saw the writing on the wall. Sure enough, by October, Apple Microsoft in revenue for the first time about two decades. This part quarter, Microsoft was able to hold in profit, but that is very likely to fall next quarter as well. Apple is the most valuable tech company for a very good reason. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Apple is still a little over $90 billion away from becoming the overall most valuable public company in the world. Exxon’s market cap stands at $422 billion — and the stock, much like Apple’s, continues to be on a tear. |
#MWC11 – Twitter's Dick Costolo says Twitter will be everywhere and on every device | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 2 | 14 |
Dick Costolo started off his speech at Mobile World Congress mentioning the fact that Twitter is very multi-platform, and how that’s a huge advantage. He siad the goals going forward were that Twitter should be instantly useful and highly mainstream. Right now the experiences are dis-similar between devices, but the “experience should be the same. I shouldn’t think how to use Twitter.” In addition he said Twitter wanted to be always present – such as not having to switch applications just to tweet. “We used to create experiences for our users but now users are creating experiences for each-other.” He cited special initiatives Twitter did with Haiti not because there was commercial benefit, but because it created value . DigitaCell Haiti had proved to be the most effective promoter of Twitter during the earthquakes because it helped the aid initiative. A Tweet which embodied a mission for the company talked about who had done their shopping and commented on the sunset. It’s that kind of simplicity and personal connection which is effectively the life-blood of Twitter. He also revealed that 40% of all tweets are created on mobile devices. 50% of active users are active on more than one platform. Costolo also said he wanted to air their ‘diry laundry.’ In the sense that that they had noticed that when people join Twitter they start to follow accounts that don’t follow them back. But this happens slowly. So the awareness of twitter and engagement has to become much shorter – because that builds engagement. The money-shot for mobile operators listening in the conference hall was working with mobile operators to achieve this, and creating a ‘virtuous circle’ of engagement with mobile devices. During the Super Bowl there were 4,000 tweets per second. In 2008 it was 27 tweets per second. During the World Cup last year it was 3,000 p/s. So now they are sustaining tweets at a massive scale. The high point so far has been New Years Eve in Japan: 6,000 Tweets per second, four seconds after Midnight. It’s also not just happening with live sporting events, but with real game shows in the UK – There are now Twitter hosts for these shows. Producers in Hollywood are now finding people are pulling TV shows off bittorrent so they can watch shows at the same time as viewers in the US. The show Glee sees a massive Tweet level – “We’ve discovered the second screen. It already exists,” says Costolo. Costolo talked about how brands, like airlines, are ‘transacting’ with customers over Twitter, citing JetBlue and Comcast. Regarding world events, Costolo said Al Jazeera ran an ad campaign on Twitter called #DemandAlJazeera to get TV subscribers to ask their providers to put the station on their service. With Tunisia and Egypt he sia Twitter had been blocked for a while, but “people live in the desert because they know a way to water – and just like that people found a way back to Twitter” But, “it’s not our place to comment” on world events, he said. “It’s not just us” or any one of these technologies changing world events. “All we care about is allowing people to instantly connect.” Conan O’Brien selling out a show with one tweet. A joke about the BP oil spill – all are just grist to twitter’s mill (not Costolo’s words BTW, but you get the drift). “We’ll be successful if we are instant, simple and always present.” We could be “like the water in David Foster Wallis story and all we’ll see is each-other.” |
OMG/JK: Where There Are Tablets, There's Love | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | There’s no better way to spend your Valentine’s Day than a new episode OMG/JK (I’ve been practicing my rhyming). So grab some chocolates, pull up a chair, and hold your laptop close as you sit back for this week’s show. This episode is all about tablets. From rumors about the iPad 2 (and 3!) to HP’s upcoming WebOS tablets, it’s been a big week. We also touch on the new relationship between Microsoft and Nokia, and how it might affect the smartphone market. Here are some posts relevant to this week’s show:
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Shock Study: Energy Drinks May Not Be The Healthiest Things To Give To Children | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | Bad news for those of you in the audience who love , particularly those of you with children or younger siblings. Well, and if you make a habit of giving energy drinks to said youngsters. A University of Miami study that—and this will shock you—that energy drinks may not be safe for young children, primarily because we have no idea how the combination of ingredients usually found in energy drinks, including caffeine, taurine, and guarana, affect young children’s physiology. Reminds me of how people used to use put radium in toothpaste and other household products because of its “curative” powers. Makes sense. The doesn’t necessarily say that energy drinks are bad for you, the healthy adult, just that there hasn’t been any real work done trying to ascertain their effects on younger folks. What the study say is that “have no therapeutic benefit to children, and both the known and unknown properties of the ingredients, combined with reports of toxicity, may put some children at risk for adverse health events.” “But wait!” you may interject. “Doesn’t a cup of coffee has as much caffeine as your standard can of Red Bull or whatever?” True, but a cup of coffee probably doesn’t have random quantities of relatively obscure ingredients like taurine, now does it? It’s the of these disparate ingredients that has scientists so concerned. |
Nasa To Bother Temple 1 Comet Again, See How Things Have Gone For It Lately | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | Where will you be tomorrow morning at 0437 GMT? If you’re a Nasa engineer odds are you’ll be glued to your many monitors, keeping a watchful on your Stardust spaceship . The Nasa spaceship will be approaching the comet in part in order to take a look at the impact crater created by a previous spaceship’s probe back in 2005. Stardust, the spaceship in question, has been hurtling through space since 1999, a time before and , a time when was still in his prime. Its primary mission was to capture dust particles of another comet, Wild 2, and study their makeup. And it did just that, but to Nasa’s delight there was enough fuel in the tank to aim it toward Tempel 1. Temple 1 has been been on quite a journey since we last smashed probed into it back in 2005. It’s made an orbit around the Sun, for example, meaning Stardust will be able to check out and compare the comet’s makeup to the previously collected data. The overall point of carrying out this type of mission? Says Stardust’s point-man at Cornel University, Professor Joe Veverka:
We know that comets preserve interesting molecules, some of which could have been involved in the origin of life on Earth. So, the overall objective of these studies is to get to the point where we can return sizeable samples of cometary material for chemical analysis to answer the question, “Are we comet stuff or not?”
I believe Moby that we’re all made of stars, but what’s our relationship to comets? |
OpenSignalMaps crowd-sources mobile signals with Android app – 80,000 downloads and counting | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | I’ve been wandering around Mobile World Congress and I managed to bump into a startup which – although unable to can’t afford the expensive stands here – actually has an app that stands out from the crowd by quite some way. You see, it’s obvious to people that getting a decent signal on your mobile is crucial. You’ll no doubt recall how the launch of the iPhone suddenly created a massive interest in the quality and reach of mobile phone networks across the planet. Imagine being able to work out which mobile carrier was best for you based on where you are, in real time? does just that. They are addressing a common problem. Carrier coverage maps are often outdated, exaggerated by marketing and it’s rare that you can mash up maps to fairly compare the signal strength of each network’s base stations. All the while people make actual life decisions based on whether they can get a good signal strength or not, like travel plans, working out where they should locate their new apartment or office, or just picking a mobile provider. The OpenSignalMaps team consists of four former Physics graduates: Brendan Gill, Sam Westwood, Sina Khanifar, and James Robinson. They were inspired to start OpenSignalMaps after working with customers of their first startup, , which sells mobile base station repeaters for domestic use in the US. They got to thinking: what would happen if you could map the world’s wireless signals with the users themselves? In much the same way Waze is solving the mapping problem by growd-surcing maps, OpenSignalMaps is crowd-sourcing the signal strength of mobile base stations. And it’s doing that with an Android app and aggregating that data in real time. You’ll be glad to know that an iPhone app is on it’s way. The free OpenSignalMaps Android app acts like a “dashboard” for cellular signals by providing information on signal strength, data, speeds, and the cell towers nearby. Users can share the data the app gathers with the OpenSignalMaps site, where the information is processed and visualized on a map. Thus you can drill down into the data by network and network type and find which network has the best coverage for a location – assuming someone has been nearby and running the app. In the US they’ve been able to track the rollout of Verizon and AT&T’s 4G networks, for instance, by sipping the different 4G signals. Pretty awesome stuff. And so far, that’s a reasonable number of people, with no marketing. The app has been downloaded 80,000 times, contributing millions of signal strength readings and covering 626 carriers worldwide. In the future, the startup plans to add download speeds on different networks to its data and increasingly verify claims made by carriers about the performance of their networks. Plus, they could start mapping WiFi signals as well. Incredibly they say they don’t need venture backing at their Repeater business is funding the startup from cashflow. Whatever the case, I predict big things for this startup. They are solving a real-world problem and there are multiple ways to monetize the data – from selling it back to carriers, to mapping the rollout of signal in merging markets. |
Video: Buying A Cell Phone In Portlandia | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 22 |
I’ve been looking for an excuse to post a clip from the new sketch comedy show , a dead-on parody of the Northwest and modern online life. I just found it. This is from episode four. The context is that the mayor has disappeared, not that it’s really necessary to get the mobile-related jokes. “It’s just a one time fee that you pay annually.” It’s funny because it’s true. Yeah, it’s on Hulu – sorry to our international readers. If you haven’t seen yet, check it out — it’s on IFC. Call them up. Tell the man you want it. |
Jack Ma Flies Thousands of Miles to Palo Alto, Still Doesn't Want to See Carol Bartz | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | Burn! According to sources, Alibaba Group’s CEO Jack Ma is in town and he’s not even paying a courtesy call to his estranged partners at Yahoo. Ma was spotted dining with Taobao CEO Jonathan Luk and other Alibaba executives at Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto last night, and a spokesperson for the company confirmed they were in town for meetings. Another source close to the company, who requested anonymity, said Alibaba was here to meet with several big Silicon Valley companies about potential partnerships with Taobao– and that a meeting with Yahoo was specifically on the agenda. Ma’s issues with Yahoo and desire to buy back Yahoo’s shares in Alibaba have been . Also documented is Ma’s other US partnerships, even though the one with Yahoo has turned sour. His ecommerce and epayment properties are so dominant in China that international expansion is the natural next step. A lot has changed since the last time Ma was in negotiations with Silicon Valley. Back then it was companies like Yahoo that were surging, while China seemed an uncertain gamble. Today, two of the five largest Internet companies are Chinese, and TaoBao and payments company Alipay are two of the hottest private assets on the global Web. As we saw with Tencent’s of Riot Games this month, a decade after most Valley companies failed to do well in China, China is getting more aggressive about expanding in the US. Carol Bartz’ loss seems to be John Donahoe’s gain. eBay’s CEO Donahoe was cozying up to Ma in China last fall, appearing on stage at a conference together, and apparently swapping caricatures. Donahoe called Ma a good friend, and “We have the same dream, the same purpose, face the same group of SME clients… This is the case today, and even more so tomorrow. I believe Alibaba team and Taobao team are always cooperating with the eBay team, and I think in the future we will cooperate more closely.” If you catch a sighting of the two, drop us a note at tips@beta.techcrunch.com. [Update: Yahoo PR notes that Bartz is in Barcelona, which is interesting but seems to miss the point of the post. Alibaba has still made a point to come here looking for Valley partnerships and not meet with the one company with which it has a partnership. There are certainly other members of the board and management team who aren’t in Barcelona, and considering Alibaba is one of the main forces propping up Yahoo’s stock price, you’d think they’d be open to a meeting if Ma were interested. The bad blood between the two is well documented by this point. I’ve asked Yahoo PR for any sign that’s changed. No word.]
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New Final Cut Pro Is Real, And It's Spectacular (And It's Expected Spring 2011) | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | Because it seems like it’s I’d thought I’d throw my (very small) hat in the ring. More than a year has passed since last release and we’ve seen two reported Steve Jobs emails talking up a product that many thought Apple had given up on ( and ) but no product itself. This might change soon however, as we’re hearing that the highly anticipated revamped release of Final Cut Pro is imminent. According our very own people familiar with the matter, a small group of video editors were on the Apple campus recently in order to preview the new version of video editing software, which is in the same space as Avid and Adobe Premiere. Apparently Apple is still putting the finishing touches on and wanted pro user feedback. Emphasis on “pro.” One source described the new release as encompassing everything from low level architectural changes to a complete redesign of the user interface. It’s safe to say the newest version will be 64 bit as that’s what users have clamored the most for. Early reports from people who have demo’d the new Final Cut Pro (FCP 8?) say that the changes are and should alleviate that Apple has shifted its video editing focus from the professional to the consumer space, shutting down work on FCP . Apple plans on releasing the new product in Spring 2011 according to our source, in a launch possibly coinciding with the National Association of Broadcasters conference. |
PSA: SSDs Are Difficult To Securely Erase (Update: Well, They Can Be) | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 22 |
: As some have pointed out (thanks Robert and others), it’s not that SSDs are fundamentally difficult to erase exactly, but that methods well-known as ways to securely delete data are ineffective. Lenovo and Intel, among others, offer tools specifically designed for securely deleting drives, so be sure to avail yourselves of their solutions if you find yourself in need of irreversible erasure. If you’re in a business that handles sensitive information, or are just conscientious about your privacy, you might want to read this study on SSD erasure. As you know, there are ways of erasing traditional magnetic hard drives that are more or less totally irreversible. Writing all zeros, writing garbage, zeroing again, and so on. After a few cycles it’s fresh and clean. are a different beast, though, and right now it looks like most SSDs aren’t really equipped to fully delete data. The issue lies in the fact that the system driver that lives on your computer sends data to the SSD to be written, and the SSD’s onboard controller writes it… but where your system thinks it is and where the SSD controller actually writes it don’t really match up. Think of it like a coat check. You go and drop off your coat and a few of your friends’ coats as well. As far as you’re concerned, your coats are “at the coat check.” But in reality the coat is at position X, indicated by whatever’s on the ticket, and the coat check people really know where your data is. In a similar way, your computer knows where your data is, but doesn’t actually know (and can’t know, since these on-SSD systems aren’t standardized yet) where exactly it is on the SSD. And for some reason when it tries to erase things securely, it doesn’t erase where that data is, only where it it is. Something like that, anyway. The end result is that it’s very difficult to erase SSDs by the old method. The solution? Encrypt your drive from the start and then lose the key when you need to erase. They may make this more intuitive in the future, but for now that’s your best bet. [via and ] |
Study: Cell Phone Radiation May Cause Brain Activity, Whatever That Means | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | Do cell phones cause cancer? Some say . Some say . Nobody knows. The frequencies and powers of the radiation used in them haven’t been in use long enough for us to get decent long-terms studies out of them. Sure, the FCC makes sure you’re not frying your cortex with clearly harmful emissions (talk radio doesn’t count), but it could be that after 30 or 40 years, we all get head cancer. Or we all get super powers. It could go either way. A new study has shown that, at the very least, . That’s not an insignificant finding; we’re all saturated by radio waves all day long, and it doesn’t appear to affect us, so it would be reasonable to think that mobiles would be the same. But the study found that mobiles raised brain activity near the antenna by about 7% on average. What does this mean? They don’t know. That’s not how science works. They’ve gotten results from an experiment, and now it’s up to more scientists and more experiments to add to that data and give it meaning. Personally, I find that when I hold my phone to my head, it stimulates the part of my brain that makes me . I can’t be the only one experiencing this phenomenon. |
Bandwidth.com Acquires Dash Carrier Services To Add Emergency Calling To VoIP Applications | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | , a supplier of VoIP network services to Skype, Pinger, and others, has acquired a provider of emergency calling telephony services (i.e. 911 calling). Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but we are told it is an all-cash deal. Bandwidth.com provides millions of phone numbers annually and billions of minutes of calls for over 6,000 business customers in the U.S., including Skype, Pinger, Yext, and IfByPhone. For small and medium sized businesses, Bandwidth also provides integrated office phone systems, smartphones, as well as business-grade Internet connectivity. The company’s Google Voice competitor Phonebooth is a VoIP service for individuals and small businesses that provides users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to any cell phone and landline. It also offers voicemail transcriptions, and an auto attendant feature that allows users to route callers to different employees. Dash Carrier Services essentially allows VoIP applications to include emergency services, including 911 calls. Dash also provides 411 services, live nationwide directory listing, and other dialing services. Bandwidth was already using Dash’s emergency calling technology in its own VoIP offerings but will now be able to use the technology more broadly within its products. Bandwidth believes that eventually the FCC will require that companies like Skype and Pinger offer emergency calling functionality, and Dash will allow the company to integrate this into their wholesale network offerings. Together, Bandwidth and Dash are forecasted to reach over $100 million in revenues this year and both companies are profitable. Bandwidth, which just for lower call connecting fees, has flown under the radar for the past ten years despite its success. And the company is looking to IPO in the next 18 months and will most probably soon announce a fairly big venture financing in the next few weeks (this will be the first large round of funding for the company).
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Intel To Debut Light Peak Alongside Apple's New MacBook Pros? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | Intel has released a statement “a new technology that is about to appear on the market” on Thursday, the day expected by some to bring updates to Apple’s MacBook Pro line. Coincidence? I think not. It’s almost certainly the roll-out for Intel’s big new interface, , which was supposed to hit in 2010 but was delayed. Apple was to have a hand in creating it, but that although the source of the rumor may have been (I’m speculating) talks between Apple and Intel about developing and adopting the tech. It’s true that Apple didn’t come up with it, but they might have wanted to get in early, seeing it as something that would further differentiate their products. Could Light Peak be implemented in the new MacBook lineup? And could that be the mystery port on the ? I don’t know. Anyway, this isn’t really about Apple, and they don’t have a monopoly on the tech. Light Peak, which may be revealed under a different commercial name, and would be far faster than USB 3.0, bidirectional, and able to be used for stuff like video out instead of HDMI or DisplayPort. It really would be a massively useful thing for us all to switch to, but adoption will be a problem since USB is so dominant. I’m interested to see how things will turn out. |
null | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 2 | 14 | null |
A Sleeping OS X Lion Stirs | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | The iPad 2 nears! An is on the horizon! iPhone 5 is coming! Maybe ! New MacBook Pros! New iMacs! Maybe even an Apple television! Of all the right now, there’s a odd lack of talk about something we know is coming — and soon: . Back in October of last year, Apple gave an of Lion and stated that it would launch in “summer 2011”. The first official day of summer is exactly 4 months away. And yet, Apple has been largely silent about the new OS since that preview four months ago. We now have the Mac App Store which we know will be a key ingredient, and to some other things about the OS as well. But there has been no official update out of Apple about Lion. So where does it stand? Well, first of all, from what we’re hearing, Apple is now using it internally. That they’re testing it shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s apparently being used internally. Recent statistics seem to confirm this. Looking over the TechCrunch logs, it seems that OS X 10.7 (Lion) has been seeing a surge of usage in recent weeks. After peaking in late August/early September, stats fell off a bit. But now they’re soaring again, indicating that full-scale internal testing is underway. And while we already know some of the new features thanks to Apple’s preview, there are still a few surprises, apparently. One of these is a much-anticipated UI overhaul. But that means that developers are going to need to be ready when it rolls out. And along those lines, we’re hearing that a developer beta should begin soon. There’s no firm timetable for this yet, but again, we’re only 4 months away from the summer. Apple has also been busy the lastest version of OS X Snow Leopard, 10.6.7. And developers have been receiving builds of it for weeks now. But that development cycle will remain separate from the OS X 10.7 track. Meanwhile, new MacBook Pro updates are slated for this Thursday, and that may include hardware slightly modified to run the new OS X better. These are likely to be the last hardware updates before OS X Lion hits. Bigger trackpads for better ? A dedicated SSD element for the OS? We’ll see. All we know for sure is that the sleeping Lion is stirring, and about to get a lot louder so it can roar this summer. |
DARPA's Hummingbot UAV Now Looks Like A Hummingbird, Flies For 10 Minutes | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEHI_pB3Br4&w=640&h=390]
Okay, this is pretty amazing, but also pretty scary. The DARPA “Nano-UAV” project we’ve before is entering the uncanny valley. The aim was to create a small, winged robot that could hover in one place, perhaps providing video or carrying some tiny payload. The previous versions were very robotic-looking and could for more than a few seconds. This new one? Looks just like a hummingbird, has an onboard camera, and flies for Watch the video. The device, designed by Aerovironment, has a wingspan of 16cm, or 6.5 inches, and weighs only 19 grams — less than an ounce. Yet it still has its own battery and motor, and can send a live video signal to a palmtop controller/monitoring station. Welcome to the future, people. And, of course, welcome to the . [via ] |
Motorola Atrix 4G Gets Torn Down To The Underground | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | Our little buddy is working on his Atrix review as we speak but that didn’t stop the kids at from tearing down the 4G model for us all. Inside they found what they call “microchips” and a “battery cell,” all of which combine to offer telephonic communication with outside parties.
The most important chips include the Tegra processor and a cavalcade of stars including: |
Years later, France is still giving Skype a legal headache | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | This morning, French publication L’Express published stating that “ doesn’t respect French law and operates illegally.” Except that this is kind of yesterday’s news. Or news from 4 years ago, actually. Back in 2007, , the “French telecommunications police” (or the communications regulations authority, if you want to be politically correct about it) went after Skype for 3 reasons: it failed to allow the inception of calls for security reasons following a court ruling, the way that it routed emergency calls and for distributing mobile phone numbers (SkypeIn). In other words, Arcep considers Skype to be a telco whereas Skype…well, doesn’t. But this could be because Skype’s doesn’t want to have to adhere to the rules for telcos (which could also apply in other countries) and pay the related taxes. Skype’s response at the time was simply to close-up shop and run European activities out of good old Luxemburg. But now, several years later, the French Attorney General can finally come after Skype with possible imprisonment and an oh-so-hefty fine of €75,000 (outlined in article of the electronic communications code) – mainly because of its likely . In France, it’s not just the government that causes Skype a bit of a headache; operators Bouygues and SFR have reportedly blocked Skype use on all mobile handsets as well as the iPad. Guess that means France hasn’t been particularly good to Skype. |
OnOne Remote DSLR Controller Comes To The iPad | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 22 |
You might be familiar with , an app used for controlling tethered Nikon and Canon DSLRs remotely. Well I just thought I’d let you shooters out there know that it’s been updated to support the iPad, which in my opinion makes it much more useful. The larger UI makes for error-free adjustments, and the higher-resolution viewing area means you can check focus and other details more easily. It’s not cheap: $50 for the iPad version and $20 for the iPhone version, but it looks like it might be worth the scratch. Check it out. |
Review: Keyport Slide | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 2 | 22 |
The Keyport Slide is about as sexy as a key ring can get. It says loud and clear that you’re above silly key chains and all that nonsense. It is without question the best way to carry your keys and break the ice at a hotel bar. It’s just too bad that it won’t replace my key chain. : :
: The Keyport has fascinated me since it first busted into the gadget scene back in 2007. I hate keychains. Or rather, I hate carrying lots of keys. The Keyport Slide counters that by stuffing all your keys into one compact package. Sounds perfect to me but then I got my tester and discovered a nasty secret: it’s not for me. Oh, the device works perfectly. I adore it. I even took it over to friends’ houses just to show it off. Everyone agrees the design is stunning. The Keyport Slide is a case study on industrial design with the amazing functional and compact design. The little key blades fit perfectly in their respective channels, just waiting for someone to depress the spring-loaded nubs and slide them forward. The main compartment’s aluminum skin hides the plastic skeleton. Even the little plastic caps seem durable enough. The Keyport isn’t going to fall apart. It’s a sturdy little device without a hint of body movement or chintziness. It’s a stretch to say it will last a lifetime, but it feels solid enough that you’ll likely lose it before it breaks down. Previous versions of the Keyport required you to send in your physical keys so they could be cut to size. That’s no longer the case and Keyport makes it easy enough. When you order your Keyport, the company asks you to photograph your keys on a special form and then they’ll send you the appropriate blades. You then take these blanks down to a local hardware store or locksmith to be cut. It’s less hassle than it sounds. Keyport also sells these blades separately for $6.99 apiece so you can order more as you go. Here’s the sticking point for me, though. My Dodge Magnum’s key has an integrated key fob on the top of the key. It’s a massive beast and Chrysler used this design for years. Keyport has RF chip blades to counter one hurdle associated with car keys, but then most cars also have a key fob that needs to accompany the Keyport. So all of a sudden, your sexy Keyport Slide has an ugly conjoined twin attached by a short (and thin) cable. I also carry a small Beretta knife on my keychain. My wife finds the little blade comforting as if she’d stab someone in self defense. Whatever. However, I did carry it last week with just the key fob for the Infiniti I’m reviewing. The Keyport Slide worked as advertised. The additional bulk wasn’t that substantial but still not that much less than a traditional key ring thanks to the key fob. Look at your key chain. If it has a few keys, a small key fob for your car or house, then the Keyport Slide would likely take your life from boring to fan-freaking-tastic. But if your key chain holds more than just keys, it might not be for you. I mean, it’s still without a doubt in my mind one of the most satisfying gadgets I’ve ever used, but at $60-$100, you may wanna analyze your situation before dropping the cash on what’s, if I’m honest, just a fancy alternative to a ten cent keyring. |
ShopSavvy Integrates Groupon To Bring You More Relevant Mobile Local Deals | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | In one more step towards the -ification of everyday life, , the app that to scan in a barcode, do a product lookup and find comprable deals on products nearby or online is announcing a greater push into geo-location today. ShopSavvy will be partnering up with Groupon and offering its over 10 million users the ability to see relevant local deals in its “Deals” tab. ShopSavvy boasts almost 50 million product scans a month and its “Deals” function takes into account a shopper’s location, shopping history, and preferences when serving up most offers. The app shares a crowded space, competing with apps like (really creative guys), and now Groupon itself. But the land grab for mobile here is in hyper-targeted relevancy of deals and if it can pull that off using data from its bar code scan history it will have a leg up on the competition. Right now the Groupon function only considers geography, but more specific targeting should be available shortly. “ co-founder Alexander Muse confirmed. You can find ShopSavvy on in Android, the iPhone, Nokia and Windows marketplaces. |
Forget HomeAway, Inspirato Is Like Timeshare For The Wealthy | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | Companies like and cater to the wealthy by giving them access to luxury home rentals at relatively reasonable prices. If you’re traveling with a family or multiple couples, it ends up being a lot less expensive than staying at a high end hotel. And it’s definitely a better deal than buying a vacation home, unless you expect big gains in property values. There’s a big “but” though. Like country clubs, you have to pay a large fee to get in. Hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a member. Here’s how the Exclusive Resorts/Quintess model works: Pay a few hundred thousand dollars and then you get to rent the homes they own for about $1,000/night. That’s not bad for, say, a $4 million home in Tuscany with five bedrooms. A home like that usually rents for 4x that. The picture above is one of the Exclusive Resorts Tuscany homes. The companies use those up front membership fees to buy the homes. That means they’re a real estate company, hoping for rising values, as well as a hospitality company. It’s modeled after country clubs, where you pay a big fee to get in and then play golf for free. The model works. Exclusive Resorts has some 3,500 members and is growing. Quintess has a few hundred members and an almost identical business model. Members get perks like an on-site concierge, daily housekeeping service and access to chefs and other amenities. And if they ever want to leave, 75% of that initial membership fee is reimbursed. Sounds perfect? Some people think it is. But when the economy goes south and everyone wants their refundable fee back, the model breaks. last year based on too many people trying to bail out. Exclusive Resorts and Quintess are still around and financially healthy because they have limits on people leaving. You can get out but only if new people come in. That means the companies are doing well financially, but there are hundreds of people on a wait list to get their membership fees back. Another problem with these companies is the holiday rush. Everyone wants to be in Tuscany in the Summer, Hawaii over Christmas and a ski resort in the Winter. You have to plan your vacations a year or more in advance to get the best properties at peak times. Enter . They don’t buy their homes, they lease them long term from owners. And they have a variable pricing model that gets rid of the holiday rush. You pay “just” $9,500 to join plus another $2,500 per year, and you can then rent the homes they offer, which range from around a few hundred dollars a day to a few thousand, depending on the property and time of year. Think of it as without the hassle of guessing which homes are going to be great and which ones are duds. And you get the same perks, like an onsite concierge and daily housekeeping. include the cofounder and former CEO of Exclusive Resorts, Brad Handler, and his brother Brent Handler. The company also has an innovative marketing model. If you’re a member and refer a new member you get a $1,000 credit to use towards rentals. And anyone that new member brings in gets you a $1,000 credit, too. It’s like a benign pyramid scheme, and it seems to be working well. Since launching in January, Inspirato says they’ve signed up over 100 new members. Inspirato raised in capital in August 2010. |
Pro Tip: Fruit Roll-Ups Make Solid Flash Gels | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 25 |
Photographer John Crane was out hiking around a few days ago, and came across a sweet ice cave that he felt would look great if he used a green filter on the flash. Unfortunately, he left all his gels at home — but his friend suggested using one of the Fruit Roll-ups they’d brought along for snack time. The lesson here isn’t really that Fruit Roll-Ups are awesome photography accessories, but that creativity doesn’t end in the composition or post-work. A photographer should be ready to improvise, use what they’ve got, put himself and his camera at risk if it means It’s for this reason that I dislike studio photography and big setups. I think there are control issues going on there. [via and ] |
Sweet History Of QWERTY Poster With Dismantled Typewriter | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | Yes, it has only been a few weeks since the last time I posted a piece of art with an on it. What can I say, I love these things and is actually a poster, by Hyejung Bae, telling the story of QWERTY, from its origins in the 1800s to the mutations and new typing paradigms of the next century. It’s a bit too much type for my taste in a poster (typographical specimens get a pass on this), but the artful arrangement of the bits making up a traditional typewriter might look good on your wall. If you scroll all the way down on the artist’s page, there are some pics of just how messy it is to take one of these things apart and photograph it. I’ve got a couple sitting around my apartment, but I think I’ll keep them in one piece for now. [via ] |
Clock Clock Is A Clock Of Clocks | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/18789600 w=620&h=349]
This timepiece/piece of art is made by , a Stockholm studio apparently composed of people my age, and that seems to specialize in clock-based clocks. I can imagine having this around would be quite mesmerizing, though I don’t think I’ll have to worry about that, since they only are making five. [via ] |
Weekend Giveaway: Rebtel Wants You To Have A Motorola Atrix | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | is offering us one hot little Motorola Atrix to give away this weekend to one lucky reader. How do you win? Well first you have to be very very nice to animals and the environment and then you need to click through to comment. Rebtel, FYI, offers cheap VoIP calling on , , and devices and they want you to try the service on a brand new Motorola Atrix. To enter, comment below about how you rebelled today and we’ll pick one winner on Monday at noon Eastern. To be clear, this is an AT&T Atrix without service so if you want to use it here or overseas, you’re going to have to find your own SIM card. Otherwise, comment away. UPDATE – Congrats to Adrian Mace for winning the Atrix |
Crush Notifier, From The Makers Of Breakup Notifier, Finds Mutual Crushes | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | creator should just give up on (his actual job) and just make a whole network of these types of things. After having his wildly popular app Breakup Notifier by Facebook, Loewenherz has dusted himself off and is back in the game, trying to with From : Unlike Breakup Notifier, which if selected friends had changed their relationship status, Crush Notifier (on a more positive note) allows you to choose people that you are crushing on (you can buy “Crushes” with Facebook Credits) and sends them the below anonymous notification email, replete with a cute love-related quote. If the feeling is mutual (i.e. if the person you’ve selected also selects you) you get a similar email notifying you of your match. says Loewenherz. Let’s hope Facebook can keep its hands off this one. Loewenherz tells me that interested TechCrunch readers can sign up for a special “15 Crushes for 10 Facebook Credits” deal after creating an account, |
Nintendo 3DS Now Available In Japan | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | We won’t be getting the 3DS for another month ( ), but in Japan, thousands of people are lining up to nab their handheld from retailers across the country. It’s safe to say it’s going to be a quiet, indoors weekend for many in the land of the rising sun. Our Japanese readers are probably waiting in line, and so won’t be reading this, but the rest of you might want to take a few minutes to peruse our and check out the latest news, , , and so on. is also going over the launch in more detail, since they’re… you know, a games site. |
Oh My God, OS X Lion Finally Lets Mac Users Resize Windows From Any Side | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRoMIuzAfbc&w=640&h=390]
This has been a thorn in my side for… going on 20 years now. On my Windows machines, I’ve always been able to resize my windows from any side, which is extremely handy for uncovering icons, organizing your desktop, and so on. Really just an indispensible and basic function I use every single day. Then I get on my Mac and… god damn it. You always have to go down to the corner to resize a window, which isn’t always the best option. No longer. I don’t know if this was widely known before now, but I just found out that OS X 10.7 will let you resize windows by pulling on any edge. My decades-long nightmare has ended! |
Facebook Valuation Back At A Cool $70 Billion On SecondMarket | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | And we’re back again with our now weekly update on the insanity surrounding Facebook’s stock in the auctions. , the stock saw the beginning of a rally back to $27 a share, good for a $67.5 billion valuation (based on roughly 2.5 billion shares outstanding). This week, the good times continued to roll. Facebook’s stock hit $28 a share, to push the valuation of the company back to a cool $70 billion or so. This is still slightly off the record high of $28.26 a share (a ) set in mid January, but it’s clear that Facebook’s stock is storming ahead once again, and quickly. This was the 11th auction SecondMarket has done on the stock. Do I hear $75 billion next week? Below, find the full email sent out of the folks buying this stuff up: To Facebook market participants: This week’s SecondMarket auction successfully cleared 225,000 shares at a per share price of $28.00. Read more details in the attached auction results report. Next week’s auction will require a minimum sale and minimum purchase of 10,000 shares. If you are bidding for fewer than 100,000 shares, you are required to open a brokerage account with SecondMarket. Please email XXXX@SecondMarket.com to receive a Brokerage Account Opening Form and return the completed form by Monday, February 28, 2011 at 5:00 PM EST. Please email your completed Seller or Buyer Information Forms to XXXX@SecondMarket.com by Wednesday, March 2 at noon EST. To verify receipt of your order, you must receive a confirmation email from XXXX@SecondMarket.com. If you do not receive a confirmation email, your order has not been received by SecondMarket and may be excluded from the auction. Responses are typically sent within one hour. Next Week’s Auction Timeline: • Friday, February 25 at 7:00 PM EST – SecondMarket will begin accepting Seller Information Forms, Buyer Information Forms and Brokerage Account Opening Forms • Monday, February 28 at 5:00 PM EST – Brokerage Account Opening Form due, if bidding for fewer than 100,000 shares • Wednesday, March 2 at 12:00 PM EST – Seller and Buyer Information Forms due • Wednesday, March 2 at 5:00 PM EST – Participants informed of auction results • Wednesday, March 2 at 8:00 PM EST – Transaction documentation distributed to buyers and sellers • Thursday, March 3 at 5:00 PM EST – Wire of 100% of gross purchase price to escrow account due, if allocated fewer than 100,000 shares • Friday, March 4 at 4:00 PM EST – Completed transaction documentation due from buyers and sellers • Friday, March 4 at 7:00 PM EST – Notice sent to Facebook, Inc. By reading this email, the recipient acknowledges and agrees that all of the information contained herein is confidential and that the recipient will keep this information confidential. The recipient further agrees that it will not copy, reproduce, or distribute this email in whole or in part. Please contact us at XXXX@SecondMarket.com or XXX.XXX.XXXX if you have any questions. Please note that the information in this email does not constitute an offer to sell to, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy from, nor shall any securities be offered or sold to, any person in any jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. Regards, Terrence |
null | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 2 | 22 | null |
Cool Video: Robot Teams Collaborating On Navigation And Targeting | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 25 |
ABC Television in Australia has , or I suppose I should say , on the competition, which is put on by the Australian Defense Department. I mean, . It’s an open challenge to put together a team of robots that must navigate and map a large course, target “enemies,” and generally function autonomously — and the teams this year have put together some really amazing stuff. Unfortunately I can’t embed the video here, but in glorious 400×220 resolution. It really is a very interesting little segment. And hey, it’s Friday. You deserve it. |
Chrome Extension Fixes Twitter's Grammar, Tells Us "Whom" We Should Follow | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | All is right with the world, as genius (and Googler!) has made Chrome extension that corrects Twitter’s subject/object discrepancy on its feature. Grammar snobs (I KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU COMMENT), rejoice! In case anyone’s still confused about “Who” vs. “Whom” usage, here’s a quick tip to differentiate courtesy of : You can change your entire life by downloading the extension Now if only Steiner would make one that eliminated all the typos on TechCrunch. |
Apple Patent Would Put Touch-Sensitive Buttons On MacBook Cases | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 25 |
is looking into further de-buttonizing their laptops with this new . This one doesn’t have a lot of meat to it — as you can see, the illustration shows pretty much just replacing the battery text button with a less button-y touch-sensitive button. The patent mentions other uses, though, like media control buttons. I can’t seem to pull up the patent at the USPTO, but AppleInsider (who found it) Could this tech make it to the iPad as well? |
PSA: Own An Android 3.0 Device And A Mac? Install This. | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | Unless you’re the , a , or the super-early-adopter type, chances are pretty good that you don’t have an Android 3.0 device just yet. But when that day comes, you’re going to need to transfer files back and forth — and if you’ve got a Mac, things aren’t going to be as straightforward as they were on pre-Android 3.0 devices. Whereas simply plugging in the USB cable was once all you’d need, Mac users will now need this here utility. Windows users should be a-okay out of the box. That step has managed to confuse just about everyone we know who’s acquired a 3.0-device so far (read the manual? LOL! NERD ALERT!), so consider this a little future-proofing PSA. |
"Feature Phone", "Sexting" and "Rumor Mill" added to the Oxford Dictionary | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | As anyone who’s been reading MobileCrunch for a while knows, I refer to the rumor mill in just about every other post. Usually it’s when I’m decrying the rumor mill as a cruel, cruel vixen, hell bent on crushing our spirits by setting our hopes on itty-bitty candy-powered iPhones, only to smack us in the face with silly things like logic, feasibility, and whats-actually-happening. Sometimes, I worry that new readers won’t know what the rumor mill is. Will they think it’s a real place? Will they try to go to there? Fortunately, I can now just send them to the , which added the term to its catalog today.
The Rumor Mill, according to the Oxford Dictionary: used to refer to the process by which rumors and gossip are originated and circulated among a group of people:
Sure. That works. We also would have accepted “used to refer to the ambiguous, impalpable source of sometimes-true-but-often-not blurps of information”, or . Two other mobile-ish words added to the dictionary today: “ “, and “ “. They also added the term “ “, which has absolutely nothing to do with cell phones but is absolutely glorious regardless. [Via ] |
Gosh! Even Napoleon Dynamite Is Now Using Kickstarter | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | I love . It’s maybe the best enabler site ever. In the short time it has been around, we’ve gotten everything from open source to to . But one of the aspects of the service with the most potential is movie funding. A few of these projects have popped up already, and it apparently caught the eye of Napoleon Dynamite himself, Jon Heder. As today, Heder has on the service to get funding for a movie he hopes to make. Alongside collaborator Nick Peterson (who would direct the film), he hopes to raise $27,000 over the next month or so. Given the fact that he’s well, Napoleon Dynamite, he should blow past that in no time. I mean, the iPod nano watch got . If you watch the video they put on their Kickstarter page, you’ll see that the duo hopes to make a half animated/half live-action short film about dripping filth, or something. And while you have to assume that Heder could easily just pay for this out of pocket, it’s interesting that he’s crowd-sourcing the funding. You can pledge as little as $1 to help out, but if you’re a high-roller and give them $10, you’ll get your name in the credits. Even better, if you pledge just $250, you’ll get an associate producer credit! As anyone in Hollywood would tell you, that’s a total BS credit, but still! The real killer option is for $5,000 or more, you get a full producer credit, a private screening of the film with Heder and Peterson in LA, and everything else they’re offering others (HD copies of the movie, etc). Wait for it…. lucky! |
Solo Drivers In Los Angeles Will Soon Be Allowed To Drive In Carpool Lanes For A Fee | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | This week, — which was acquired by Xerox (NYSE: XRX) in February 2010 — announced that it’s building a new, electronic toll system on the two busiest highways in Los Angeles, to allow all single car drivers, even those in diesel guzzling Hummers, to shift into carpool lanes for a fee. When average traffic levels in a carpool lane rise overall, so will the fee. The company and city plan to calibrate the systems to keep traffic at a steady 45 miles per hour in the carpool lane (at least). Once equipped with the new toll system, the carpool lanes along Interstate 10 and Interstate 110 will be called ExpressLanes, instead. Los Angeles and Xerox are building this project with the idea of reducing highway congestion overall, according to a press statement from ACS and reports by . Is the death of the carpool lane as we know it environmentally sound, though? The faster, wide open appeal of a carpool lane is supposed to motivate Los Angelenos to roll with their homeys, instead of style; remember that distinctly not-green-scene where Vince Vaughn and his friends drive individually but together to party after party? At least, a carpool lane’s supposed to encourage drivers to buy clean vehicles. The Department of Motor Vehicles and state law in California allows vehicles with a qualifying “clean alternative fuel vehicle sticker” to drive in high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes. Ken Philmus, senior vice president and managing director of ACS Transportation Systems and Services, believes that a pay-to-switch-lanes system is a win for the environment, of course. Here’s why, he explained: “When people are stuck in traffic, watching the other lane, they might be encouraged to get into a carpool, later. Only 10 percent of vehicles [in Los Angeles] are multi-occupant, generally. So, there’s under-utilized capacity in [high occupancy vehicle, or HOV] lanes. With this system, as the HOV lane gets more congested, the toll to shift over goes up, which should result in fewer [single car drivers] going in, and a free flow that’s maintained. It should not damage the occupancy of the lane. But it should maintain or improve environmentally positive aspects of the lane, by getting people out of stop and go traffic. That’s where the air quality situation becomes worse, usuall.” ACS and Xerox are not charged with studying things like improvements in air quality, or reduction in diesel consumption in Los Angeles, resulting from this project in any official capacity, Philmus said. That job will be up to the likes of the , local air quality management offices and departments of transportation instead. To participate, Los Angeles drivers will need to sign up for a FasTrak toll account, and install a small transponder in their vehicles. They will be asked to set a switch on the transponder to indicate whether they’re driving solo and the system should charge them; or if they’re part of a carpool and can drive for free in the ExpressLanes. Sensors installed along the interstate will calculate the dynamically priced tolls and deduct the proper amount from a driver’s prepaid account, automatically. The ExpressLanes Project in Los Angeles is projected to open to traffic in late 2012. Similar systems have been installed in Miami, where they’re known as , and are averaging around $3.50 or $4.00 a toll during rush hour, and are about 16 miles per hour faster than regular, free lanes according to reports in the Miami Herald. Image: |
Startup Kansas: Kickanotch Raises $1.1 Million For Its One-Stop Mobile Marketing Shop | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | In July, , a mobile marketing services startup based in the outskirts of Kansas City, raised $500K from a bunch of angel investors and was “incentivized by” the , a private/public partnership created by the state of Kansas to promote technology-based economic development and support local entrepreneurship. And it seems that they’re not the only ones rooting for Kansas startups, as Kickanotch Mobile today announced that it has raised another chunk of outside investment: A $1.1 million series A round led by of Salt Lake City. The company said that it will use its new funding to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering teams, as well as accelerate the development of new features for its mobile platform. Kickanotch provides mobile application and mobile marketing platform services to allow its clients, which include TV broadcasters, radio stations, publishers and corporations, a way to increase brand exposure and better utilize mobile revenue channels and consumer engagement opportunities. Brands can take advantage of its mobile marketing and monetization applications and platform management SaaS without having to involve developers or spend a lot of time worrying about marketing spend. The startup has built a mobile platform that includes native apps for all major devices, as well as an easy to use control panel, analytics dashbord, and an ad delivery solution all under one roof. Its newly launched “REVkick platform” does exactly this, giving clients an online web control panel to manage campaigns, track user data, and manage web content in realtime. The startup has some in the mobile advertising space, but its solution has already drawn more than 50 broadcast, publishing and corporate brands and its media partners’ apps have been downloaded in more than 100 countries with user growth consistently doubling month over month. The team thinks that its newly launched features, like mobile analytics, lead tracking, and sponsorship marquees can drive significant boosts in mobile ad revenue, while the ability to engage mobile users with social features, deals, and “free, we hate spam” offers, can drive 3-times the engagement of current solutions. For more on Kickanotch’s mobile apps, . |
100Plus Raises $500K From Founders Fund And Peter Thiel To Predict Your Health | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | Want to predict what your personal health will look like tomorrow, or 10 years from now? Well, look no further than a new stealthy health startup founded by , a healthcare and health data research specialist and Ryan Howard the Founder and CEO of . Essentially, 100Plus is a personalized health prediction platform that uses data analytics and game mechanics to show just how much small changes in one’s behavior can lead to a longer and fuller life. And for their own financial health, the startup announced this morning that it has raised a $500,000 round of seed funding from via its own founder and managing partner, Peter Thiel. Thiel, for those unfamiliar, is the co-founder and former CEO of Paypal and was the first investor in Facebook. It’s no mystery why 100Plus’ mission is appealing to investors. The healthtech space is booming, and entrepreneurs and investors are looking for smarter and more effective ways to leverage the ever-growing healthcare dataset to build smart solutions that lead to healthier lifestyles and longer lives. Unanimously, we all want to be healthier, and we also want to know how our current behaviors are going to effect us down the line. is a great example of this, as it is attempting to build the largest dataset and resource for genetic information on the planet as well as offering genetic analysis to let users see if they are at risk for a number of diseases. Obviously, the possibilities are many. Like 23andMe, 100Plus is building an interactive health application that leverages large clinical datasets. Using its own algorithms to parse that data, it will then show users personalized predictions of their future health as well as allow them to compare their health those with common dimensions of health and habits. The startup then adds a bit of game mechanics to that analysis to give users a more enjoyable way to make incremental changes in their behavior to improve their health and live longer. As to its data, 100Plus builds on the Practice Fusion Research Division’s proprietary clinical dataset of 24 million de-identified records and public datasets from the CDC and HealthData.gov. The startup then uses this anonymized data to create predictive models of future health. “When you’re 80, will you be riding a wheelchair or a bicycle? How do your health decisions today impact your quality of life in 50 years?” said Founders Fund Partner Brian Singerman. “By generating predictions about health, based on enormous datasets and user behavior, 100Plus gives us life-changing insights.” 100Plus is currently in stealth mode, hard at work on building these models, and is planning a beta launch to the public in mid-2012. The startup also is hiring and seeking new partners looking to incorporate additional valuable health data into its model. |
Groupon Files SEC Form For Another $16.2 Million | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 25 | Wait wha? According to form, daily deals site has raised another $16.2 million. There’s no word on whether this is an add-on to its recent $950 million round or just a smaller mini-round, in any case it seems unrelated to any M&A activity. Listed on the form are Groupon’s board members , and , among others. Groupon recently turned down an offer from Google, and has raised over $1.13 billion to date when you include the amount on this form. When asked whether this was part of a new round, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason said, Groupon recently named Starbucks founder Howard Schultz to the board, who then made a to the company. Perhaps that’s actually what we’re seeing here — The date of the asset sale is February 10th, the that Schultz’s board seat was announced. |
Zynga’s Newest Title CastleVille Combines Rich Storylines, Fantasy, And Social Gaming In A Medieval World | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | As Zynga at an event a few weeks ago, the newest title in the “Ville” franchise, which includes FarmVille, FrontierVille, and CityVille, is . The newest title from the social gaming giant allows players to build mini-empires from castles, craft art and armour and trade, and defend your kingdom in a medieval world. The game was created by the Zynga Dallas team, which was part of the social gaming giant’s Zynga Dallas director Bill Jackson explains that the studio took key elements of each ‘Ville’ title and brought the best into CastleVille. He explains that CastleVille combines with elements of self-expression from FarmVille, the ability to build the fantasy city of your dreams with CityVille, and the rich narrative and storytelling features from FrontierVille. The game is also experimenting with new ways of being social, and self-expression. When first beginning the game, you’ll need to choose your character and build your look. Jackson says this is the most expansive character building features to date, with dozens of looks to choose from. Once immersed in CastleVille’s medieval world, peasants, princesses, pirates (and players) will choose their own path in the game by meeting new and different characters, completing quests and exploring mysterious areas. The basis of the game is around building the castle of your dreams and transforming the unexplored land into your very own kingdom. Along the way, you’ll encounter a number of characters, who are all involved in the storyline of the game. You’ll first see Duke, who will help you build your castle and is from a neighboring kingdom. There’s Yvette (the beautiful songstress), Giselle (the lovely maiden) George (the friendly village Viking), Sonja (a sexy pirate), Rafael (a playboy woodsman) and Tom (the rough dragon slayer). As Jackson says, this game has the most intensive storyline, which is why there are so many characters. Zynga also wants you to feel like you are immersed fully in the world, bringing in elements of fantasy and adventure. “You have to do work yourself and be part of the adventure to success at the game,” he explains. You choose your own path to discover mysterious locations, find rare items and reveal hidden characters within the game. Another feature that makes the kingdom more real is that this is the most graphic-rich, expressive game to date. You’ll see actions like fish-hopping in the pond, trees shaking, and other sound effects tied to actions from within the game, In terms of social interactions, you can visit your friends’ kingdoms and gift them art, armor and potions to help complete quests and challenge the forces of the Gloom. There is also a reputation system that gives you more points by how social you are in the game. Basically, the more social you are, the more reputation points you earn, and the faster you progress in the game. Obviously, this gives you more of an incentive to interact with friends and buy virtual goods. Jackson says this streamlined social experience makes it easier and more fun to play the game with friends. CastleVille will be available to play for free in the next few weeks in 17 languages (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Turkish, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Japanese and Thai). Zynga has been churning out games over the past week months. The company launched , , , and we know that developing new hits is a big part of Zynga’s business model and that of this year because of the lack of any new game launches in the first half of 2011. We haven’t seen Q3 numbers yet, so it’s hard to tell whether these new launches are actually making a meaningful difference in Zynga’s top line. According to Inside Network’s Empires & Allies seems to be doing the best out of all the new titles with 19.8 million monthly active users. This is followed by Mafia Wars 2, with 13.7 million users. Of course, CityVille and FarmVille are the top games for Zynga, with 54.2 million and 28.2 million monthly active users, respectively. Perhaps the next Ville to top the list will be CastleVille. |
Canon Goes All In On EOS With C300 Digital Cinema System, New DSLR | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | In this evening of dueling announcements (RED announced their compact high-res camera system tonight as well), Canon has shown that it’s serious in the area of digital cinema with its new Cinema EOS system. The first camera in the line is the C300, a compact camera that, contrary to expectations, doesn’t produce a 4K image. They’ve instead focused on maximizing the performance of a Super 35-sized sensor producing 1080p footage. To many this resolution will be a disappointment, but Canon has something for that crowd as well (though now quite in complete form): a DSLR “concept” which they stopped short of calling the 5D Mk III, but which seems to fill that role, complete with 4K recording: It’s a new focus on pro but not super-pro cinema (i.e. not $100k cameras) using the EOS branding and EF mount, and it builds on Canon’s existing reputation in that area. , and it looks like Canon is aiming at keeping the strengths while mitigating the weaknesses. While the DSLR is less than real at this point (though it likely just lacks final design and manufacturing), the C300 is as real as it gets. It records 1920×1080 images of the red and blue channels, and 1920×2160 for the greens, in semi-traditional RGBG style, for a 1080p stream at up to 24fps and 50mbps. As far as the numbers go, it’s a far cry from RED’s scarlet, which at half the price offers four times the resolution and eight times the datarate. But specs aren’t everything and what matters is how well these perform in real life situations. The C300, in PL and EF mount versions, will be available in January and March of 2012 respectively for around $20,000. |
RED’s Scarlet Gets Official: 4K For Under $10K | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | For more than , upstart camera maker has been teasing the Scarlet, a compact camera in the same class as their more powerful, but bulkier, RED One and Epic cameras. We actually saw one at CES this year, but they’ve completely redone the design and capabilities. They were going to publish all this information on their website, but they’re apparently under attack so we’re doing this live. It used to do 3K and have a fixed 8x zoom. Now it’s essentially the same type of camera as the Epic (that is to say, a sort of chunky “brain” onto which you can fix lenses and so on), just for a much lower price. The brain:
Fully accoutred:
, as it’s now called, will sell for $9750 and will be shipping as early as November 17th – the date they said they’d ship earlier, at least after they revised the shipping estimate a dozen times or so. So what can it do? Well, it does 4K, for one thing. That’s 4096×2160, at up to 25FPS, or quad HD at 30. This is at compression rates that are superior to what they’ve been shooting movies on for years, yet at a data rate that’s still eight times what Canon’s new C300 system shoots at. That’s 50 megabytes per second, or 400mbit/s for those keeping track. The full sensor size is 5120×2700 for stills. It’ll also do 3K at 48fps, 2K at 60fps, and 1K at 120fps, which is fairly low-resolution but retains the color depth and so on. It’s a Super 35-sized sensor and they’re using leftover chips from Epic brains, which cost almost three times as much. In fact, if you shoot the same type of footage with the same lenses using the Scarlet and the Epic, the images should be “identical.” Here are some datarate specs for those who like that sort of thing: Aesthetically, it’s similar to the rest, since it’s compatible with all the accessories, but it’s “battleship grey,” as RED founder Jim Jannard described it, and it doesn’t have “ribs,” because “she’s a girl, she’s smooth.” It’s shipping November 17th, but only if you’re willing to shell out an extra $1500 for the titanium PL mount. The new aluminum Canon mount they’re putting on it will be available starting on December 1st. That $9750 price gets you the brain and an SSD; Jannard said that a fully-functional camera, with LCD, lens, rails, and handles will set you back around $13k.
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Groupon Prices Its IPO At A $12.7B Valuation, Has A Lot To Prove | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | Groupon has priced its IPO at $20 a share according , which would give the company a $12.7 billion valuation and mean that it’d be seeking $690 million in tomorrow’s offering, only 5.4 percent of its shares. Right before the pricing news hit, I sat down with founder and Groupon shareholder to talk about the strategy behind the company’s decision to go public. Clavier guessed accurately that Groupon’s IPO pricing would be about $20 a share and dismissed earlier reports of a as unrealistic. On the more modest pricing; “They need a warm reception in the public market, because they have all this baggage — They have all this bad history of press and analysts hating the company,” Clavier said, referring to of their unconventional accounting on Groupon’s S-I as well as its tricky international expansion and scaling issues. Despite the offering being Clavier emphasized that whether or not people actually buy the stock tomorrow and don’t dump it six months from now as the key harbingers of whether Groupon has what it takes to avoid being of our time, “In the long run it’s an interesting viable long-term business. [But] they have a lot to prove as a public company that has gone from zero to IPO in three years.”” |
Barnes and Noble To Debut $249 Nook Tablet On November 16? | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | Amazon’s turned its fair share of heads this past September, but rival Barnes and Noble wasn’t just sitting around twiddling their thumbs with the Fire grabbed headlines. Barnes and Noble has already tested the tablet/reader concept with the Nook Color, and now reports that the company is ready for round 2 with the new Nook Tablet. At first glance, the Nook Tablet looks just about identical to the original Nook Color — hopefully the resemblance is close enough that older model accessories will be able to see continued use. The screen still comes in at 7 inches, but the BN swapped the original display for an improved VividView IPS touch panel. Under the hood lies a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, and a WiFi radio. Oh, and it supports enough file formats to make you go cross-eyed. It’s undoubtedly a solid package, and it’s coming down the pipeline fast: it’s slated debut on November 16, with a $249 price tag. So, what exactly does the extra $50 net you? Well, double the amount of RAM, for one thing: the Nook Tablet pits 1GB against the Kindle Fire’s 512. What’s more, the Nook Tablet takes microSD cards, so media hoarders will be able to lug entire seasons of Doctor Who around on a whim. B&N also appears to have quite the media environment built up for their new tablet: a closer look at the leaked imaged confirms support for Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora right out of the gate. In short, Amazon’s going to have a real fight on their hands soon. |
Kevin Rose’s Oink Hits The App Store | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | Oink, the first app from Milk, Kevin Rose’s startup lab is now available in . Oink is an app that lets you rate things at different places, and uses social reputation to help others figure out who to trust about what topics. Rose gave a preview of Oink a couple weeks ago at the Web 2.0 Summit. At the time, I : Oink is a mobile app that lets you rank things in different places. So instead of ranking a restaurant or point of interest, you can rank specific things at those places. Rose showed an example of one of his favorite places, The Samovar Tea Lounge. On Oink, you can rank the different teas at the lounge, and see how they rank against the other teas there and teas you can get nearby. Everything is based on hashtags like #tea, and each type of #tea is ranked by place or within a geographic radius. You can chose to find the best #teas within 1 mile, 5 miles, 25 miles, etc. And they all show up on a map Okay, I am off to see Kevin Rose to get a demo. Try out the app and let me know what you think. : the full app is invite-only, but you can check out most of the features without an invite. Milk will be letting in thousands of people a day. |
Disrupt Hackathon Winner Docracy Raises $650,000 From First Round | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | Following in the footsteps of GroupMe, another startup born at a Disrupt Hackathon is moving on to becoming areal company. Last May, was one of our , and now it’s raised a $650,000 seed round led by First Round Capital. Vaizra Investments, Rick Webb and Quotidian Ventures also participated. When Docracy launches publicly, it will be a repository for legal and business documents such as NDAs and term sheets. Anyone will be able to upload a document, which will be translated into native HTML5. The documents can be redlined, shared, and even signed. The more a document is signed, the more social proof it gathers that it is a well-accepted document. Founders Matt Hall And John Watkinson were frustrated with how hard it is to find standard business documents online they could trust. They want Docracy to be “a place for documents to live and be discussed,” says Hall, so that people can figure out if it is the right document for them. The usage stats will be key here. Once you find a doc you like, you can edit it to suit your particular needs. Here is a . It is time ro liberate documents from PDF and .doc files. |
Keen On… Robert Levine: Is Google Killing Our Culture? (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | According to the author of the just published the Internet is destroying the market for high quality culture. Blaming both the ideology of free culture and online piracy, Levine that the digital world is making it increasingly hard for professional writers, journalists, musicians and film makers to make a living selling their content. Levine, the former executive editor of Billboard magazine, isn’t necessarily the to make this argument – but Free Ride is probably the most and book to date on the impact of the Internet on our culture. Free Ride has already ignited controversy for its portrayal of Google’s central role in the free culture movement. “Follow the money,” Levine told me, when he came into our New York City studio last week to talk about Free Ride, and you’ll find Google bankrolling organizations like Harvard University’s and which pursue extremely permissive positions on copyright reform. So is Levine right – could Google really be killing our culture? |
Hands-On With The HTC Rezound For Verizon: Fat And Fast | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | With and , there’s not much reason to rehash HTC Rezound deets. So I’ll just cut to the chase and hit you guys with some first impressions. As you must already know, the Rezound touts a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, and was snappy enough to prove it. Combined with 1GB of RAM and Verizon’s 4G LTE network, that speedy little processor offered up one of the smoothest experiences I’ve had with Gingerbread. And even better, the Rezound will ship Ice Cream Sandwich-ready, with an update to be released “early next year.” I never experienced any hiccups, though there was a slow down with a handful of apps running at once. HTC’s Sense UI happens to be one of my favorites (if forced to choose between manufacturer skins), but many of you may still want to ditch HTC’s UI for something a little more vanilla. The 4.3-inch 720p display is just the right size, as HTC clearly isn’t concerned with the “giant screen” trend we’re seeing from its competitors. But that’s good news. If resolution and pixel density is up to snuff, there’s no real reason for a 4.5-inch screen, unless of course you’re a hardcore gamer. In that case, you may need a tad more screen real estate than the Rezound offers. Speaking of ignored trends, the HTC Rezound is heftier than some of the smartphones it’ll be lined up against in-store, including the . That said, it’s still a pretty slick phone, especially for those who lean toward the HTC design style. Super similar to the HTC Droid Incredible 2 in design, the phone sports a nice soft touch back panel, with a little textured patch in the middle for a better grip. Just like the HTC Rhyme sports a female-friendly purple casing, the Rezound seems to aim itself at the male demographic with a hefty helping of red on black. As far as the camera is concerned, the Rezound’s 8-megapixel shooter can get the job done, whatever that job is. We shot a little 1080p video and snapped a few shots with one of the tester units at HTC’s media event in New York City, and quality was right on par with what the specs promise. Sense also brings some fun into the camera app, offering up Action Burst, Instant Capture, and Panorama options, along with other cool effects and photo editing tools. In fact, you can even shoot video or pictures with the effect already applied in the view finder, just to make sure you don’t miss that special moment by applying the wrong effect. Oh, and if that weren’t enough, the Rezound’s camera can play back 1080p video in slow motion. Thanks to the , the Rezound packs Beats audio support which includes a pair of Beats earbuds and a special Beats profile that boosts bass and volume when toggled on. To be honest, I was a bit skeptical over whether or not Beats would make a big difference, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the Rezound and its audio quality. I was really able to hear those low notes in a way that’s lacking on my iPhone and other phones I’ve tested, and anyone who’s all about the tunes will surely appreciate Beats integration. The HTC Rezound will be available on November 14 with an on-contract price of $299.99.
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Kicksend Grabs $1.8 Million From True Ventures, SV Angel & More For Dead Simple File Sharing | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | In August, Y Combinator grad launched in beta to make sending and sharing large files easy as pie, especially for the non-technical crowd. ( .) Since then, founders Pradeep Elankumaran and Brendan Lim tell me that they’ve been heads-down fixing, tweaking, and developing some big new features. While those are not yet ready for broadcast, the startup is today announcing that it has raised $1.8 million in seed funding. The seed round was led by , with participation from , , , and Milo Founder and CEO . Kicksend will be using its new capital to grow its team and push out several big enhancements to its file sharing service. Though the founders said that they’ve seen a number of businesses using the site to share and send files, Kicksend remains focused on the consumer, particularly on creating a simple, intuitive user experience that even your grandmother can use. To date, the service is available both on the Web and on the desktop, but mobile apps are on the way. For those unfamiliar with the service, Kicksend’s value proposition lies both in its simplicity and the fact that its platforms are connected in realtime, enabling users to drag and drop big batches of files from their desktop app and have them delivered instantly to the recipient’s desktop and web apps, their inbox (and soon) their mobile apps. What’s more, in comparison to other file sharing media, Kicksend has no size limits, is private, and works effortlessly and asynchronously (unlike IM). In contrast with syncing backup solutions, the service removes the need for share folders and permissions. It’s a nifty tool for those looking to effortlessly send large batches of files and with backing from some notable VCs, there’s surely more interesting stuff to come. Check out , or read our .
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LinkedIn Beats The Street; Q3 Revenue Up 126 Percent To $140M | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | In its as a public company, LinkedIn posted Q3 earnings today. Revenue for the third quarter was $139.5 million, up 126 percent from the third quarter in 2010. GAAP Net loss for the third quarter was $1.6 million (or a loss of $0.02 per share), compared to net income of $4 million for the third quarter of 2010; Non-GAAP net income for the third quarter was $6.6 million (or $0.06 per share), compared to $6 million for the third quarter of 2010. Analysts LinkedIn to break even on an earnings on a per share basis with revenue expected to come in at $128 million. Members grew to 131.2 million, an increase of 63% from the third quarter of 2010. “LinkedIn had a strong third quarter, with significant, broad-based growth across all of our revenue streams, member engagement metrics, geographies, and sales channels,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. “Our results underscore the long-term strength of our global platform and our business model.” Revenue from the U.S. totaled $94 million, and represented 67% of total revenue in the third quarter of 2011. Revenue from international totaled $45.5 million, and represented 33% of total revenue in the third quarter of 2011. LinkedIn’s main revenue channel, from Hiring Solutions products, totaled $71.0 million, an increase of 160% compared to the third quarter of 2010. Revenue from Marketing Solutions products totaled $40.1
million, an increase of 113% compared to the third quarter of 2010. And revenue from Premium Subscriptions products totaled $28.4 million, an increase of 81% compared to the third quarter of 2010. In terms of the outlook, revenue for the fourth quarter of 2011 is projected to be in the range of $154 million to $158 million. Revenue for the full year of 2011 is projected to be in the range of $508 million to $512 million. As you may know, LinkedIn and has seen its stock remain steady for the past six months. And the product itself has been luring in more engagement and activity. Traffic is and LinkedIn now has more unique monthly visitors than MySpace and Twitter. The company reported average comScore unique visitors of 87.6 million per month, an increase of 64% from the third quarter of 2010 and total page views of 7.6 billion, an
increase of 51% from the third quarter of 2010 And LinkedIn is now every second. In the third quarter, Linkedin continued to products, unveiling a new feature , which gives the professional social network’s users new insights and networking features to connect with fellow alumni of colleges and universities. The company also , and adding HTML5 technology to its mobile site. And LinkedIn is seeking to open up new revenue streams with The company was more acquisitive this quarter, buying real-Time, . AllThingsD that LinkedIn bought social contact management startup Connected. And in September, LinkedIn for a town hall. LinkedIn’s stock is down around 5 percent in after hours trading. We’ve embedded the Earnings call for LinkedIn, which will start at 2 pm PT. We’ll live blog the call. CEO Jeff Weiner and CFO Steve Sordello are leading the call. LinkedIn users conduct over 4 billion searches on the platform in a given year. More than 15 million people joined LinkedIn in Q3. Hundreds of thousand of job applications have been submitted with the new Apply For LinkedIn button. Mobile page views are up 400 percent and mobile visits accounted for more than 13% of LinkedIn’s unique visits LinkedIn has 7,400 customer using its hiring solutions product. More than 180,000 domains use the LinkedIn Share button on their sites, an increase of more than 250%. LinkedIn added 200 employees in the quarter. Q: This is the second quarter where you have been overly conservative in you guidance-why have you been coming in above your guidance? What does Q4 look like from a hiring perspective? A (SS): The top line revenue flowed through to the bottom line in the third quarter. We take a long term perspective on our business. In Q4, we are trying to pull in some of the 2012 hires. We are going to pull in 500-600 more employees especially in consumer products, technology, and sales. (JW) We’ll be able to manage this hypergrowth of employees. We won’t hire folks that we aren’t capable of being productive from day one. Q: Mobile page views-what percent of pageviews are from mobile and how did that compare to Q3 last year? (SS) Mobile page views are north of ten percent of total pageviews, last year was immaterial. Q: How will mobile usage differ from usage on the desktop? (JW) We are trying to learn as much from mobile interaction as possible and leverage that into interactions. Mobile is our fastest growing service and we are going to think next year about how we monetize mobile. Q: Any update on new product talent pipeline? (JW) It has yet to be rolled out officially, we will have pilot partners that will use the product in the next few weeks. It’s the first step in making our recruiter product into a platform Q: You talked about an interesting growth area with students and recent graduates? What are the monetization opportunities there? (JW) It’s consistent with the existing business model. There are nuances about that demographic, such as adjusting the profile so that it is unique for a student vs. someone who has been in the industry for a few years. We also rolled out the alumni product (mentioned above). Q: You mentioned record levels of engagement, can you expand on this? What impact do new products have on engagement? (SS) We’re very pleased with the engagement this quarter, our page views are growing faster than our unique visitors. In terms of the financial impact, it’s much more directly correlated with online businesses. |
Art.sy Raises $6 Million Series A From Peter Thiel, Thrive Capital, Wendi Murdoch And Dasha Zhukova | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | New York City’s , which wants to change the way people buy fine art, recently closed a $6 million series A. personally led the round, with existing investors Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, Wendi Murdoch, and participating. The startup previously raised a year ago. Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, and Jim Breyer also invested in that seed round. Art.sy first in May, 2010, but the site still has not launched beyond a small private beta. The company is taking a long-term approach to digitizing the art world, striking deals with top galleries before it opens up so that it can launch with some of the best art in the world. So far, it has deals with 180 galleries in 40 countries. This approach is akin to what Spotify did when it took two years to line up all the record labels before launching in the U.S. Art.sy is creating a website that makes it easy to browse and discover paintings and other fine art, and connect prospective art collectors with galleries. The art world is a high-end industry which has resisted the encroachments of the Web. Art.sy hopes to change that by making art more accessible to a broader class of consumers who are currently ignored by the art establishment. The company will use the funds to more people (it is currently looking for a top-notch Web designer and director of museum relations). |
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Meet Verizon’s New HTC Rezound | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | The HTC Rezound (formerly the Vigor) has been on our radar , but we’re here in New York City for HTC’s big event, and they have just officially pulled back the curtains on their next Gingerbread-powered smartphone. Fear not though, Ice Cream Sandwich fans: the Rezound will ship ready for Ice Cream Sandwich, and HTC and Verizon are aiming to push it to the Rezound early next year. One of the first things you notice about the Rezound that it bucks the recent trend of super-slim smartphones. It’s not terribly thick, but it easily makes devices like the Droid Razr and the Galaxy Nexus look downright skeletal in comparison. Fortunately, the Rezound’s edges taper pretty dramatically, so it feels much less bulky than it looks. It takes more than few design cues from the Droid Incredible family too, right down to the red accents and the translucent red body under the battery cover. To make up for the heftier body, HTC saw fit to fill the Rezound to the brim with some impressive innards. The Rezound is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM, which should be plenty for power users to enjoy. It comes with 16GB of internal storage, and the truly media hungry can take solace in the fact that it can also comes with a preloaded 16GB microSD card. As expected, the Rezound also sports a sizable (but not overly so) 4.3-inch 720p display. Just above the screen is a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, and around the back (just above the funky textured finish) there sits an 8-megapixel camera with an f/2.2 lens and a dual LED flash. HTC has tried to address some of the flaky camera issues that have appeared in early HTC devices, and added new functionality like panorama support and action burst modes. The camera is also capable of shooting video in 1080p, so mobile cinematographers should have a little bit of fun with it. Like the Thunderbolt before it, the Rezound is a Verizon LTE device, so people lucky enough to live within Verizon’s 4G coverage area should be able to enjoy some pretty snappy network performance. Fortunately, after having seen how lackluster their first LTE phone’s battery was, HTC has outfitted the Rezound with a 1,620 mAh battery for a little extra longevity. Since we’re talking about HTC here, the Rezound also features the latest version of the Sense UI over Android 2.3. We’ve seen it before on devices like the Sensation and the Rhyme, and while it adds a pretty layer of paint to the UI, ardent Android fans may still swap it out in favor of a more basic approach. If you happened to miss the Beats logo on the device’s backside, the Rezound is the first HTC device in the U.S. to feature Beats Audio. HTC’s Beats Audio functionality consists of two major components: a pair of included Beats earbuds, and a special audio profile on the phone. Once the headphones are plugged in, the Beats audio profile automatically kicks in, and plays with the sound output to give it some extra oomph over the pack-in cans. All things considered, HTC may have a holiday winner here. It’s not the slimmest, sleekest device you’ll ever see, but it packs plenty of horsepower and enough nifty frills that it will probably top many a geek’s wishlist. You’ll be able to pick up a Rezound from Verizon Wireless or Best Buy on November 14, with a $299 pricetag.
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With Growth Surging, Gogobot Raises $15 Million For Social Travel | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | , a social travel site that launched less than a year ago, is on a tear. The company has racked up accolades including being named one of Time’s top sites of 2011 and winner of the 2010 Crunchie award for Best Design. They’re seeing very strong growth. And today, they’re announcing that they’ve raised a very large Series B funding round of $15 million. The round is being led by Redpoint Ventures, with Battery Ventures and CrunchFund participating. Redpoint General Partner Satish Dharmaraj will be joining Gogobot’s board. This brings Gogobot’s to $19 million, after a $4 million Series A in June 2010. Given how young Gogobot is there’s a chance you haven’t stumbled across it before. But there’s also a solid chance that some of your friends have: Gogobot founder and CEO Travis Katz says that the site is now the biggest social travel service on the web, and that its userbase has grown 10x in the last six months. Two weeks ago the company a mobile app, which is now a top-10 travel app in 31 countries on the App Store. And it’s the biggest travel-related app on Facebook. The company isn’t sharing any specific user stats yet, but it sounds like things are going very well. Gogobot’s pitch is one that seems obvious: it’s combining social with the immensely lucrative travel market, allowing you to connect with your friends to get their advice on where to visit, what to eat, and where to stay. You can use the service to plan things ahead of time, or you can poll your friends on the fly. Thing is, this is an idea that I’ve seen many times over the years — and the majority of Gogobot’s competitors haven’t managed to get nearly the same traction. So why are they taking off? The key to Gogobot’s success, according to Katz, is largely one of experience. Gogobot includes many of the social mechanics you’ll see on other sites: viral loops, badges, rewards for engaging with friends, and so on. Katz says that building a social site is something that sounds easy, but in practice, getting all of these things right is much harder than most people think. But Gogobot’s team knows what they’re doing. Katz was an early employee at MySpace, as are several other key Gogobot employees. And Katz’s cofounder, Ori Zaltzman, built Yahoo Answers. In other words, they’ve had a lot of experience with helping services go viral. Another key factor in the site’s growth is its attention to design, which looks significantly more modern and user-friendly than incumbent travel sites like TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor, by the way, is the biggest player in this space (it’s headed toward an IPO), but Katz says Gogobot has a few advantages over it. For one, he points out that most TripAdvistor reviews are left by strangers, so you don’t have much context as to the reviewer’s personality or tastes. And he says there’s “a ton of fraud” on the site from employees at various restaurants and hotels. With Gogobot you’re being presented from your friends first-and-foremost, who don’t have any incentive to leave misleading reviews. |
Welcome TechCrunch’s Newest Writers, Josh Constine And Eric Eldon | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | Ever since I became Editor of TechCrunch in September, I’ve been looking for great writers to help fill out our coverage in Silicon Valley. And now I am pleased to announce that I’ve hired not one, but two: and Both come from , where Eldon is the editor and Constine is the lead writer. Very few bloggers understand the ins and outs of Facebook as much as them. Constine even has a Masters in Cybersociology from Stanford (he’s that into it). Not only is Constine adept at breaking news, but he also brings a level of analysis that shows the long-term impact of the latest developments. He’s young, smart, and hungry—a deadly combination for a tech blogger. Eldon is an old pro among tech bloggers. He was the first employee at VentureBeat (where he first recruited our own MG Siegler, who is now our ). Eldon was instrumental in helping to build Inside Facebook and its parent company Inside Network, which was acquired for earlier this year. But I didn’t ask Eldon and Constine to join TechCrunch just to write about Facebook. Their deep knowledge of the social web will help them write about everything from startups to Google. They will be joining our editorial staff in San Francisco. Constine starts Friday, and Eldon in two weeks. Please give them a warm TechCrunch welcome. (And, yes, I am still hiring). |
Siri Experiencing Extended Outage | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | Maybe we need a new website, IsSiriDownForEveryoneOrJustForMe.com, because it looks like Siri is experiencing an extended outage, according to several tipsters, tweets, and our own internal tests. When you try to use Siri on the iPhone 4S right now, the usually perky virtual assistant just responds: and does nothing. According to , who spotted this news first, people are beginning to tweet about the Siri outage, but folks seem to be usure as to whether or not they’re the only ones experiencing the issue. It appears that the service, for some at least, has been down for a good part of the day. Granted, Siri is still a beta product – and this is what happens to beta products – but when Apple promotes Siri as one of the best and new features of its latest device through its cloying new , it’s worth noticing when the service . http://twitter.com/#!/bigrich0272/status/132152274683297792 http://twitter.com/#!/martinbowling/status/132163213868544000 http://twitter.com/#!/robertcarlsen/status/132162973585260545 http://twitter.com/#!/Gojohnnyboi/status/132158784465416193 http://twitter.com/#!/gbailey/status/132154729651384320 http://twitter.com/#!/davidfine/status/132143932946653184 http://twitter.com/#!/ismashphone/status/132157695418564608 http://twitter.com/#!/DevilHate_/status/132181513029693440 : Given that we don’t know how long today’s outage will last, I’m going to remove “first” from the headline until we have some hard data on the length. |
Google’s New Algorithm Update Impacts 35% Of Searches | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | Today, Google a change to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of Web searches. The change builds on top of in order to deliver more up-to-date and relevant search results, specifically those in areas where freshness matters. This includes things like recent events, hot topics, current reviews and breaking news items. Google says that the new algorithm knows that different types of searches have different freshness needs, and weighs them accordingly. For example, a search for a favorite recipe posted a few years ago may still be popular enough to rank highly, but searches for an or the latest review of the iPhone 4S should bring the newer, fresher content first, followed by older results. For searches about recent events and news, Google may now show search results towards the top of the page that are only minutes old, the company says. For regularly occurring events, like the , the Oscars, a football game, company earnings, etc., Google knows that you’re likely interested in the most recent event, even if you don’t specify keywords indicating that. That means a search for “Apple earnings” won’t (in theory) require you to also type in “Q4 2011” in order to see the latest information. It will be implied that you this latest quarter, without the need for the extra text. Of course, Google was already ranking news items and stock symbols at the top of the page when users performed financial-related searches or searches for current information, but this algorithm change has an impact on the organic search results, too, not those from the verticals (search, finance, images, etc.) which have been integrated into Google’s . For items that see regular updates, like consumer electronics reviews, reviews of and more, Google will also feature the most current and up-to-date information above the rest. This “freshness update,” is an extension of with Caffeine, an under-the-hood improvement that, among other things, helped Google index content quicker, so results were more realtime. This year, Google also brought out its , which was meant to decrease the rankings of so-called “content farms” – SEO-optimized entities that critics said filled Google with low-quality results. Now, it’s clear that Google understands that the most relevant search result is more often the one that’s relevant – the one that’s bringing you new information. The update’s impact on Google Search is fairly substantial, with Google claiming that roughly 35% of search results will be affected by the changes. Google used to have a search vertical specifically for the most recent updates at www.google.com/realtime, where it was indexing Twitter updates. However, when the contract with Twitter expired, (it now redirects to the Google homepage). Google said at the time that it planned to re-open the site with Google+ search results alongside other realtime sources of information. But with the new Google search update, a specific vertical for realtime information feels less necessary. |
ExtremeU: Facebook To Offer Product Strategy, Design Mentorship To Toronto Accelerator | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | , the Toronto and Palo Alto-based early-stage venture firm, today announced that it is launching a new-and-improved version of its accelerator program, — also known as “ExtremeU”. Extreme Venture Partner’s accelerator program has been up and running since 2009 and is aimed at becoming a training ground and valuable ecosystem for Canadian startups targeting the social, mobile, and local spaces. Extreme University graduates, like and have gone on to raise millions in follow-on financing rounds. , a current ExtremeU participant that’s turning iPads everywhere into 3-D controllers. Extreme University’s revamped model will consist of a 12-week program, in which five selected teams will share office space at the venture firm’s offices in Toronto, along with access to its network of founders, advisors, and developers. Extreme University will run two 12-week programs a year, each with five participating startups. What’s more, founders will also have the opportunity to participate in weekly personal sessions with experts and advisors, as well as work directly with key members of of some of the tech industry’s biggest companies. Case in point: The accelerator is today announcing the first of its collaborating partners, which is none other than the social network of record, Facebook. Representatives from Facebook (which will include Elmer Sotto, FB’s head of growth in Canada, and his team) will work with startups to design and build socially-enhanced products in addition to offering product strategy and design mentorship, including educating founders on the best ways to leverage its Open Graph to create powerful distribution channels for their products. Facebook reps will also enable startups to test new features on the platform and offer feedback on the tools startups create during the program before they’re launched to the public. In addition to this awesome collaboration with Facebook, the startups chosen to participate in ExtremeU will receive $50,000 in funding. The venture firm will be taking an equity stake in the companies chosen to participate. While the exact level of equity taken has yet to be decided, it will likely be between 5 to 10 percent. Among the mentors that will be sharing their wisdom with ExtremeU’s class of startups will be former Facebook VP (and the founder of Social+Capital Partnership) Chamath Palihapitiya as well as Albert Lai of Kontagent, Tomi Poutanen of Yahoo Answers, and more. You can . Extreme Venture Partners has forged (and is forging) some deep relationships with Facebook, Google, and other well-known tech companies that have significant presences in Canada. While Y Combinator, TechStars et al get a lot play in the media (and deservedly so), it’s nice to see our neighbors to the north building a valuable resource (and ecosystem) for early-stage companies — and encouraging them to stay in Canada and help to build Toronto into a vibrant tech community. For more on Extreme Ventures, . Startups . |
Ron Conway, FCC Chairman Genachowski And Other Tech Stars Team Up To Fight The Spectrum Crunch | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | FCC Chairman , SV Angel’s , Andreessen-Horowitz’ , Twilio’s , Foursquare mobile VP and Lookout founder all gathered at HQ this afternoon for the awesomely titled “Desperately Seeking Spectrum” panel, where discussion centered around freeing up broadband spectrum for the US mobile industry to use as it continues its formidable expansion. Genachowski referred to predictions that mobile broadband traffic will increase 35 times over the next five years. Smart phones, which use 24 times as much broadband, are replacing feature phones, and tablets, which are becoming increasingly more prevalent as they continue to displace the PC market, use 122 times as much as smart phones. “The app economy didn’t exist three years ago,” Genachowski said on why this spectrum hogging isn’t entirely a bad thing, ” And how many jobs are created per app? More than one. That’s hundreds of thousands of jobs [across all apps]. Facebook has created around 15,000 jobs. And when you really look at the jobs that have been created by companies that are building to the Facebook platform and the jobs that are created by the mobile economy, they’re not just engineering.” Genachowski and the other panelists held that the techology industry — which is undeniably becoming more mobile-centric — is the primary catalyst for job growth in the US and an ample amount of broadband spectrum is crucial if we’d like to continue to be a (positive) disruptive force in the global economy. “As we build our products it’s critical that we’re reaching a point that we care about data,” said Foursquare’s Leudorf. “The tech community wants to be proactive on this issue,” Conway explained, “We don’t want to wait until it is a crisis.” Genachowski’s interim solution is something called , which is why he and Conway are garnering support for measures that will allow the FCC to incentivize old school broadcast companies that voluntarily give up some portion of their spectrum allotment to mobile. A law that would give the FCC the power to hold these auctions is currently making its way through Congress, recently passing through a Senate committee with a vote of 21-4. “What we saw here today was a series of examples from entrepreneurs and innovators that are creating our economic futures. We know exactly what the biggest threat to them is, [that] the infrastructure they rely on is finite, spectrum is finite. Demand is going up, supply is flat,” Genachowski later told me in a duel interview with Conway. “If we don’t increase the supply of spectrum we’re going to throttle the growth, the opportunity and the job creation we can get from mobile innovation.” |
PageLines To Launch An ‘App Store’ For WordPress Drag & Drop Sections, Plugins And Themes | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | , PageLines announced the release of , a drag and drop design framework for WordPress. The product offered some cool CMS design options, a drag-and-drop layout editor, and a fully configurable template builder for creating custom websites. PageLines’ Platform has since been downloaded 400,000 times and has become one of the most popular frameworks on WordPress.org over the last year. Back at BlogWorld Expo today, announced today that it will launch version 2.0 of its framework on December 8th, which will include a nifty new marketplace: The PageLines Store. For developers, designers, or people who want to build cool websites without worrying about coding, this should be of interest. The store is basically an app store for “drag & drop” sections, plug-ins, sections, and themes — all of which have been built by developers for the PageLines community. Apps in the store will range from drag and drop sections that customize the style of a website to an integrated system for eCommerce or a community forum and other functionality. For developers, the PageLines Store offers the opportunity to get exposure to several hundred thousand users, while taking a 70 percent cut of every sale. And developers get to set the price. The startup is also announcing the PageLines Developer Community, Workshops and LeContest, which will all be “focused around educating and helping designers and developers become successful with PageLines”, . In terms of the contest, all developers have to do is build a cool plug-in, drag & drop feature, etc., and PageLines will select a few of the best entries to launch at LeWeb ’11 in Paris this December. For more info, . As for PageLines v2.0, the new framework will include an improved layout editor, an intuitive UI, responsive design, dynamic color handling, and improved performance, says PageLines CEO Andrew Powers. The new framework will be sold via PageLines’ website, and the cost for a regular license will be $197. The developer version, which will include integrations for Mediawiki and Vanilla forum software, will be available for $397. |
Hands On With The AppXRacer From AniApp | John Biggs | 2,011 | 11 | 4 |
If you’re a fan of the Parrot AR.Drone, you’ll probably get a kick out its earthbound relative, the AirXRacer by AniApp. I got a first hands on with this iPhone- or Android-controlled racecar in Shenzhen and you will be able to pick it up this holiday season. The car is a standard RC racer that, as you can see, is quite fast. You control it using your phone’s accelerometer or using an onscreen “wheel,” a method that offers a bit more finesse. The creator, Jeff Luo of AniApp Labs, said the cars would be available in Radio Shack and Brookstone this holiday and the apps . It was a bit hard to video in the dark, but rest assured the control scheme was solid and the car was quite rugged, able to hit chair legs and ankles without shattering. No pricing yet, but look for it at a massage-chair dealer near you. |
Rap Genius Plans to Explain The Meaning Of Rock, Poetry and The Bible | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | If rap lyrics like “Real G’s move in silence like lasagna” stump you, check out . The crowdsourced hip-hop lyrics explanation site will inform you that Lil Wayne is describing how skilled gangsters can assassinate someone without making a sound, like the letter ‘g’ in ‘lasagna’. But the three-man team behind Rap Genius aren’t satisfied with their current vertical. Today they told me they’re preparing to launch a site for rock music lyrics called Stereo IQ, and one day hope to expand to sites for country music, poetry, legal documents, and religious texts. While presently focused on user growth, the network of sites could monetize through sponsorships of brands mentioned in or related to the explained texts. Rap Genius Co-Founder Mahbod Moghadam tells me “Google wants to index all of text. But what’s more interesting is to try to all of text, anything that lends itself to line-by-line analysis.” While a lofty ambition, the bootstrapped startup site is off to a good start, receiving several million unique visitors a month. There’s plenty of runway in the industry, as Mogahadam says 2% of all Google searches are for lyrics. Dozens of lyrics sites now exist, but most are plagued with inaccuracies and awful user experiences cluttered with intrusive ads. This includes frontrunner MetroLyrics, which as of a few years ago had and $10 million a year in revenue. Mogahadam and his co-founders were inspired by VH1’s Pop-Up Video, initially writing all the site’s explanations themselves. Eventually it opened up to contributors using a Wikipedia-style peer review system. Mogahadam says, “I had all this paranoia that the crowdsourced explanations were gonna be shit, but if you have a strong hierarchy of reviewers, crowdsourced content can be even better than using professionals.” Soon people started adding explanations to all sorts of text, not just rap lyrics. The site now features the , excerpts from , rock songs, and poetry by Emily Dickinson. Currently, all this is hosted on Rap Genius but Mogahadam wants to launch standalone sites where tight knit communities can gather around specific content. When asked about Quora, which sometimes receives questions on lyric meanings, Mogahadam says “Mad respect for the guys who started it, but I think it’s too big — trying to do all of knowledge in one site. If you look at answers in areas other than technology, they’re not as good.” He says he’s willing to forgo the SEO benefits of a single site in favor of creating destinations that enthusiasts of particular verticals will keep coming back to for the latest explanations. For monetization, Rap Genius currently offers branded merchandise that doubles as promotion, and is reluctant to sell ads. I told the company I think it’s best bet is to get brands that are name-dropped in their lyrics or explanations to buy for sponsorships or site take-overs. If you just found out your favorite rapper is talking about Ciroc vodka or Audi automobiles in his songs, you might be highly susceptible to marketing from those brands. Rap Genius is quickly becoming the top result for some songs and seeing more “[song title] rap genius” queries. While individual rap lyrics can be difficult to decipher, standalone sites for rock, country, legal, and religious texts could provide macro-level analysis on what entire songs or passages mean. There’s also potential for the original authors to add official explanations that could draw more people to the sites. Says Mogahadam, “I want to see what The Strokes think about their own lyrics.” |
Hands On With A Transparent iPhone | John Biggs | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | Photos were a little hard to grab but I got to see a real, live “transparent” iPhone last night in Shenzhen. The kit is apparently quite easy to install – a few screws on the bottom and then you just slide off the back. I had seen kits before, but this is the first time I’ve seen on in real life and, oddly enough, it’s kind of endearing. One more shot below, but it’s a clever and cool mod and it’s really striking, in a Visible Man sort of way, if you’re into modded iPhones. [slideshow] |
The Groupon IPO: What’s Everyone Worth? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | After going from to being a 10,000 employee-strong business in three years, Groupon had its to much fanfare and well, the opposite reaction. The offering was priced at $20 and experienced an exuberant opening pop of $28, which after a day of trading settled down a bit to close at $26. While Groupon’s co-founders and high-level executives notoriously off the table in an earlier round of funding, they still had notable skin in the game today, as evidenced by the share allocation on Groupon’s . Biggest winner? Lightbank founder , who is now a billionaire three times over with a solid 28.1% voting share. CEO , by comparison, is now worth $1.2 billion in Groupon stock. VC firm and the Samwer brothers are also in enviable positions post IPO, each netting about a billion in Groupon equity for their troubles. It’s probably safe to say that just about everyone on this list is on a customary six month lockout with regards to selling their shares, and God only knows what the stock will be trading at then. While we all wait, here’s a video of Mason and I back when he wasn’t such a fancypants. [Hi Andrew :)] |
Loren Brichter, Creator Of Official Twitter Apps For Mac And iPhone, Leaves Twitter | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | , the extremely talented creator of Tweetie — which begat the official Twitter applications for iOS — has just announced that he’s leaving the company. Brichter wrote in a that today is his last day at Twitter, and that he’ll be “taking some time to figure out what’s next”. Brichter’s path to Twitter was an unusual one, and also the source of much developer angst. In November 2008 Brichter’s one-man company launched Tweetie, a highly polished Twitter client for iPhone that quickly became a favorite among Twitter users. He followed that up with the subsequent release of Tweetie 2 in 2009, which was also a massive hit. Then, in April 2010 Twitter that it had acquired atebits and its iOS app — which later turned into Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for iPad. Tweetie for Mac, which was in development at the time of the acquisition, has also gone on to become Twitter for Mac. The notion of having an ‘official’ app was a huge blow to Twitter’s developer ecosystem, whose third-party apps had largely paved the way for Twitter’s success in the first place. But Twitter argued that the lack of official apps was causing confusion among new users, and so it stepped in with its own. Aside from the iOS and Mac apps,it’s also launched official apps for Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Of course, it’s hard to fault Brichter for any of that — Twitter’s management was behind the decisions — and he created some fantastic applications. Twitter will doubtless miss him. |
Liftopia: Because You’ve Always Wanted To Rent A Mountain | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | Finally, there’s a way for me to carve up the slopes with my pizza-wedge turns without having to endure the condescending smirks of strangers. That’s because , the startup gives you steep discounts on ski tickets and other snow-related activities, has just added a new feature: full-mountain rentals. Which means you can keep the slopes to yourself if you’re willing to spend enough cash, or, if you wanted to go with a more pragmatic route, you could bring 249 friends or coworkers along with you. Depending on the resort, you’ll be able to rent an entire mountain beginning at $3,000. And if you don’t need to accommodate so many people, some resorts will let you rent out portions thereof (one venue will even let you rent a dedicated tubing hill). Liftopia is positioning the feature as a great idea for company off-sites or club snow days, which probably make more sense than my lone pizza-wedger fantasy. So far available rentals include Plattekill Mountain Resort (NY), Mt. Abram (Maine), Whaleback Mountain (New Hampshire), and Camden Snowbowl (Maine), and more will be coming soon. Liftopia, for those who haven’t used it, lets you order ski lift tickets ahead of time online, often with steep discounts (you can save up to 80% off the walk-up ticket fees at some resorts). It’s a largely win-win situation: consumers save money, and resorts can adjust their prices to suit demand, so they have fewer off-days. The company launched back in 2006, but because of initial industry skepticism it wasn’t until 2008/9 that things started to . It a $1.3 million funding round last month, and the roster is now full of well-known ski resorts. In fact, the company is also announcing today that it’s added the four famous Aspen/Snowmass mountains to its catalog. Here’s a breakdown on the pricing from the initial resorts for the full-mountain rentals, and more will be coming in the near future: Plattekill Mountain Resort:
· Full-Mountain Rental for up to 250 people for $3,000 · Private Tubing Hill Rental for 75 people for $900 · Or a Full Mountain and Tubing Hill Rental for $3,600. The full-mountain rentals are offered Mondays through Thursdays (non holidays) for the moths of January, February and March and is based on availability. Mt. Abram:
· The Private Mountain Rental is available for $4,600 for up to 250 people · Or exclusive private access tointermediate and expert terrain for 250 people with the Private Mountain Rental, Intermediate and Expert Terrain Only package for $2,800. · The packages are offered Mondays through Thursdays (non holidays), based on availability. Whaleback Mountain:
· Private Mountain Rental for 200individuals is $3,000 · Available any non-holiday Monday between 9AM and 4PM. Excluded Holidays are: Dec 26, 2011, January 16, and Feb 20, 2012. Reservations require 2 weeks advance notice, based on availability. Camden Snow Bowl
· Private Full Mountain Rental for 250 participants for $5,000 · Available for four hours on Mondays and Tuesdays during non-holidays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., based on availability |
ThingLink launches service for third party apps to tag anything with rich media | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | Back in June image tagging startup Rich Media Tags for publishers, allowing anyone to interact with an image tag which might be embedded music, video, words, pictures and tags for people. But this is still a product aimed at publishers. The real power to come from image tagging is going to be setting it free. Thus today it’s launching a rich media tag creator enabling app developers to build custom ThingLink-powered applications. Until now users and image owners needed to get ThingLink to give them a customised service for their app. Now they can do it themselves via this API. Rich Media Tags can be applied to any image, enabling the embedding of links on YouTube videos, Spotify tracks, Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and other platforms. They increase the amount of time people spend interacting with an image, and thus on site and can lead to transactions. ThingLink CMO Neil Vineberg wants “corporations and small businesses to build a presence on the ThingLink Image Network by creating branded applications and promotional content for their services.” Canadian pop punk band, Simple Plan, is using it to reveal details of their new album via the album for instance. And Berlin’s Morning Post used it to explain the in May. Competitors include and , though these tend to be more geared to ecommerce. It feels like ThingLink is making a play here to become a global platform. Thinglink has received early-stage funding from European investors Inventure and Lifeline Ventures. |
Top Videos From TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing (TCTV) | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | The sun has set on our first ever TechCrunch Disrupt conference outside U.S. soil. The Beijing event ended this past Tuesday, as won the Disrupt Cup. With the 12 to 15 hour time difference between the U.S. and China, watching it live wasn’t the easiest option. We . But here’s a look at some of the highlights you might have missed:
The TechCrunch team and local partners had some time to explore adventures in Beijing. Here’s a ride Greg won’t ever forget. You can find all the Beijing Disrupt videos and all the posts . More news from Disrupt can be found in our posts on the Complete Guide to Disrupt Beijing and . In addition to our regular Disrupt Music, which you can download , we added a new track just for China. [ ]
Our custom music comes from based in New Zealand. |
More Info And First Impressions: Canon’s New C300 Pro Cinema Camera | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | Cinema tech isn’t a big focus on TechCrunch, but with Canon it makes sense, especially when that cinema tech represents a major overlap with consumer gear. The Cinema EOS line introduced last night is just that, and I’ve just had the chance to get my hands on the new digital cinema camera (and a little quality time with the new as well). I also got to put a few questions to Chuck Westfall, from Canon’s R&D department. The most obvious thing about the new camera is how compact and handling-friendly it is. I sought out the most minimal setup, which is pictured above and (except for the lens) the default package for purchasing the C300. It was quite light and well-balanced, and the controls felt convenient for thumb or off-hand operation. While I doubt any AAA features are going to be filmed on this micro setup, it does demonstrate how minimal the minimum viable camera unit is. I’m actually surprised that it comes with a built-in EVF, which isn’t particularly high-resolution (1.5 million dots, somewhere around 840×600 pixels or so) and is redundant for many filmmakers. And it does increase the options available. I talked with Chuck Westfall about the camera, and he said that they had interviewed a lot of crews and cinematographers, who liked the small size and easy operation of DSLRs, but disliked the lack of ports and image quality issues. The C300 is a direct response to these concerns. The lenses, too, are designed with motion photography in mind. The 360-degree focus ring and stepless iris (which feels smooth as butter and would be really nice to have in certain situations) are cinema-oriented, and they even gave the elements a different coating to reduce contrast and leave more up to the filmmaker. How the iris, which doesn’t use traditional stop numbers, will record or communicate that data to the camera is unclear, and Canon reps couldn’t answer my questions, citing the fact that most of the gear was pre-production. But they did confirm that aperture control is totally manual. I asked about the choice to go with 1080p; puts 4K recording at a very reasonable price and I was wondering whether Canon felt threatened. Westfall explained that “for an initial product” in the C series, they wanted it to fit into as many existing workflows as possible. Although 4K is clearly in Canon’s future (as demonstrated by the announcement of the 4K DSLR concept, they wanted to put something out that would plug right into the many productions that are shooting in 1080p. Which is a lot — you’d probably be surprised to hear how many are still shooting to tape or film. As for RED’s product and how it related or competed with the C series, Westfall said diplomatically “the market is going to tell us which approach they prefer.” And while it’s true that RED’s Scarlet represents a serious value, the totally new workflow is only just beginning to make inroads on the industry at large, and the familiar Canon systems will still be preferred by many. Westfall convinced me of the company’s dedication to getting as much accuracy and quality from the sensor as possible, but comparisons will have to wait until the C300 hits studios.
This thing is a beast. It’s enormous, heavy, and it takes pictures like a machinegun shoots bullets. I have serious gear envy. Without looking closely at the shots it’s hard to say, but I saw a big increase in noise after around 12800 (naturally) – but it was a nice even noise pattern, not too chroma-y. The rapid fire is ridiculous. It’s very pro. Any real impressions other than this would take more time and more comparisons with other cameras and such, so I’ll just leave it at that. Specs and such are .
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Intel Itching To Work With Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | Intel hasn’t been able to make much of a dent in the smartphone or tablet markets, but they’re not about to give up just yet. reports that Intel is working to make Ice Cream Sandwich-powered devices a part of their future. The mobile space represents a huge opportunity for Intel, which is made all the more maddening because they’ve never really been able to crack it. Less than a handful of Intel-powered Android tabs ever saw the light of day, and most (like the , which ran Froyo of all things) were geared heavily toward enterprise use. Meanwhile, if you were to peer into the innards of nearly any smartphone or tablet on the market, you would likely see an ARM-based processor. It’s a reality that can elude some, as processors can bear ostentatious names like Snapdragon and Hummingbird that obscure the nature of their architecture. Now, it looks as though Intel is about to roll their sleeves up and fight ARM’s onslaught. Intel showed off some frankly impressive and reference designs at a developer event back in September, both of which ran on Intel’s Medfield plaftorm. The company has also promised that the first Intel-powered smartphone would see the a release sometime next year, so it’s apparent they’re beginning to get the lead out. Given that Intel has their eye on both the smartphone and tablet markets, their apparent zeal for Ice Cream Sandwich makes complete sense. Ice Cream Sandwich is intended to be Google’s unifying OS, one that will bridge the experience gap between smartphones and tablets alike. If Intel can ensure that Ice Cream Sandwich will run without a hitch on whatever mobile chipset they go with, they stand a serious chance at popping up in your next tablet. For the time being though, Intel is stuck playing the waiting game. According to an Intel spokesperson, Ice Cream Sandwich “includes OS optimization for x86,” so the actual work of getting ICS running may not be too difficult. Still, a concerted effort can’t begin they actually get their hands on the software, so Intel still has a little while to go before they get cracking. |
Masabi Secures $4 Million B-round From m8 Capital | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | , which develops mobile ticketing technology for the transport sector, has secured $4 million from London-based m8 Capital, the majority-owned affiliate of AGC Equity Partners that targets mobile startups and technology. This is a B-round, following the $2m A-round of last year and is designed to push the company into the US. |
Kevin Rose Shows Me His Oink (TCTV) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | Yesterday, Kevin Rose’s new mobile app, Oink, . You can the app, but you still need an invite to unlock all of its features. About an hour after the launch, I showed up at Milk, Rose’s mobile lab startup, near San Francisco’s Mission District to get a demo. In the video above, Rose takes me through the app and explains what he is trying to accomplish. Oink is a location-aware app that lets you rate things in specific places and uses hashtags to identify those things. So you can rate the #sushi at a Japanese restaurant, the #burrito at a Mexican place, or a #bikepath in a park. You can rate anything, just add a hashtag or see what’s popular nearby. You snap a picture and rate the thing, then other people can add their ratings so that you can see the best #sushi or #beer ranked by location. You can gain cred for a particular hashtag if other people add their votes to yours. Once Oink learns what things you are interested in, it can start showing you the best #tea, #sushi, or #beer wherever you happen to be. If Rose can get people to use this app and collect data about the real world, there are all sorts of interesting things he can do, from real-world recommendations about the things you care about to hyper-targeted offers. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 11 | 3 | null |
RootMusic Boosts BandPage Virality By Adding Like Buttons to Songs | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | , Facebook’s most popular music app, just upgraded to HTML5 and now includes a powerful new viral channel. Using the Open Graph capabilities launched at f8, all songs within the app’s musician profiles now include Like buttons that instantly share playable tracks to the news feed. RootMusic’s Director of Pages Matthew Conn tells me “I would expect very large increases in sharing”. Considering BandPage has 28.6 million monthly active users, the volume of songs shared could be massive. The updated app will make the news feed a better place to discover music, and since BandPage doesn’t auto-share listening activity like Spotify, there’s no risk in exploring. Without an official solution from Facebook for artists who want to stream their music, RootMusic’s BandPage has snowballed to host over 300,000 musicians. The company employs a freemium model built for bands scrounging to make rent, with most functionality offered free and premium accounts costing just $2 a month. Still, competitors including ReverbNation and Bandcamp are trying to undercut RootMusic by offering entirely free apps that instead charge musicians to sell their songs. To stay ahead, RootMusic has been steadily releasing new features and making more of them free. While snazzy video players and customizable design improve the experience for existing fans, what most bands really want is exposure that nets them new fans. That’s what this update is about. When users play a song or video on a BandPage they’ll now see Like and comment buttons that let them share media that can be played in-line from the feed. Previously, users had to click multiple times through a foreign proprietary sharing flow to publish songs. Conn tells me BandPage’s faster, more familiar sharing flow will increase clicks because “users now do what they’re used to doing on Facebook: Liking and commenting.” More sharing means more friends listening to songs in the news feed and clicking through to artist BandPages. This virality will help bands gain new fans and drive downloads and concert tickets sales. In turn, today’s update makes BandPage a better streaming solution that more artists will want to use and pay for. |
comScore: As Smartphone Usage Increases, Android Continues To Gain U.S. Market Share | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | ComScore just its U.S. mobile subscriber numbers for the three-month average period ending September 2011. According to the report, 87.4 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in September, up 12 percent from the preceding three-month period. Google’s Android OS was top smartphone platform with 44.8 percent market share, up 4.6 percentage points from the prior three-month period. Apple continued in the second position, growing 0.8 percentage points to account for 27.4 percent of the smartphone market. RIM ranked third with 18.9 percent share, down 4.6 percentage points from the preceding period, followed by Microsoft (5.6 percent) and Symbian (1.8 percent). During the time period, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices. Samsung ranked as the top manufacturer with 25.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (steady from the previous time period), followed by LG with 20.6 percent share and Motorola with 13.8 percent share. Apple came in at number 4 with 10.2 percent share of mobile subscribers (up 1.3 percentage points), while RIM rounded out the top five with 7.1 percent share. comScore says that more than 40 percent of mobile subscribers us browsers and applications in their daily use. Browsers were used by 42.9 percent of subscribers (up 2.8 percentage points), while downloaded applications were used by 42.5 percent (up 3 percentage points). In September, 71.1 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, up 1.5 percentage points. Accessing social networking sites or blogs via mobile phones increased 2.4 percentage points to 31.5 percent of mobile subscribers. And mobile game-playing was up by 1.9 percentage points to take 28.8 percent of the mobile audience, while 20.9 percent listened to music on their phones (up 1.9 percentage points). Since this study only went up to September, it should be interesting to see how the newly released iPhone 4S, and the addition of the Sprint network, helps boost Apple’s U.S. mobile subscribers. |
Masabi secures $4 million B-round from m8 Capital | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 11 | 4 | , which develops mobile ticketing technology for the transport sector, has secured $4 million from London-based m8 Capital, the majority-owned affiliate of AGC Equity Partners that targets mobile startups and technology. This is a B-round, following the $2m A-round of last year. In June last year, m8 in the location-based startup , the startup which pre-dated Foursquare but which is now focusing on the B2B market. Masabi says the new funding will be used to expand in the US where it’s getting traction amongst US train operators. Masabi’s Ticket Machine in your Pocket allows “secure, usable ticket purchase and display” on mobile phones (both so-called feature phones and smartphones). commuters can use their phone to purchase tickets using a credit or debit card, with the tickets themselves redeemed either by being displayed on the phone’s screen via secure barcode technology, or printed at the train station. The idea now will be extended to include NFC. “We have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from consumers using our mTicketing solutions, proving that mobile phones can revolutionise the way we travel,” commented Ben Whitaker, CEO of Masabi. Back in December 2008 Masabi’s design for a secure barcode ticket was adopted as a national standard by the UK Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC). |
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