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The iPhone 4S Camera Upgrade Explained | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | It may be that the most compelling new feature of the isn’t iOS 5 or the A5 processor, but the new camera. I’ve given phone cameras a lot of guff for the that results from a small sensor and bad glass, but this really is a problem that camera-makers have been trying to alleviate. And the iPhone 4S is looking like the best effort yet. Why should you care about the iPhone’s new camera? Let’s go down the list and make sense of the new features. . Well. This one is self-explanatory, but really the least important. Other phones and small cameras have high megapixel counts, and really, you don’t want or need that many. The thing is all those tiny pixel wells have to be packed into such a small place that you end up with image quality problems. In this case your best photos will look better and it probably won’t affect other shots negatively. . As above, not really amazing in itself; other devices this size and smaller shoot 1080p. We’ll have to see how it looks in action, but I’m guessing you’ll be seeing a lot of distortion during camera movement due to the rolling-shutter effect on smaller sensors. 1080p resolution doesn’t mean 1080p quality, but if the sensor supports it, there’s no reason not to enable it. I’m just hoping there will be hacks to enable some better framerates. “ “. The new sensor features “next-generation backside illumination,” an upgrade to the upgrade that made the original iPhone 4 camera much better. We won’t know for sure who makes the camera until the teardown comes, but Omnivision did the last one and they have a newer version (the pictured) with the exact resolution specified. It’s in the EVO 4G as well. The improved sensitivity probably isn’t the jump from 3GS to iPhone 4, but better low light performance is always welcome. Backside illumination essentially flips the sensor over so light strikes the light sensitive bits without having to navigate a forest of circuitry. . The new sensor was described by Schiller as being “1/3rd faster,” which is a phenomenally vague description, but I’m guessing the onboard electronics are able to offload the image data 30% faster. But with these small sensors, what matters isn’t getting the image off the sensor but getting it processed, encoded, and displayed to the user. The A5 processor is , but it’s no secret that a major focus was on graphics enhancement. As I suggested in that link, having a chunk of the CPU entirely dedicated to JPEG processing is a given. Chances are the next iPad will have similarly enhanced photo-taking abilities. So the combination of a faster sensor and an expedited pipeline for that image data to go through makes the iPhone 4S camera twice as fast as the competition (i.e. about a second faster by their measure, your mileage may vary) at making the shot happen. It also allows for more accurate white balancing and color tweaking, so your shots won’t look like they were taken next to a bunch of lava or under a blue sun. . The most important part of a camera is… the photographer — but right after that is the lens. And the lens of the iPhone 4 was already pretty solid for a camera phone: F/2.8 (apparently limited to F/3) at about 30mm equivalent focal length. The new one is f/2.4, about half a stop better, which doesn’t sound like much but at this point of the aperture scale counts for a lot. It’s a pretty big increase in the total amount of light hitting the sensor. The focal length wasn’t specified but Schiller mentioned it was “super wide,” which if wider than 30mm equivalent starts putting the iPhone into true wide-angle territory (starts around 24mm equivalent if you ask me) — but he may have been referring to the aperture. At any rate the half-stop improvement is real enough. . This is a nice feature for small cameras, since, lacking heft, they tend to wiggle around a lot. I’m assuming it’s not optical stabilization, since that would require more space than they’ve got, so it must be electronic stabilization based on live image analysis. Again this is the A5 at work. By designing the camera’s image processor around the hardware (and vice versa), they can do this kind of heavy graphical analysis without taxing the battery too much. Based on the specs it’s probably the best camera system attached to a phone on the market right now, though real-life tests will have to be performed next month to determine image quality and evaluate the veracity of Apple’s speed claims. The changes aren’t superficial, though, and the camera should be on the short list of reasons to consider upgrading. : points out a (PDF) that has the Omnivision OV8830, not the OV8812, as the sensor (and it does make more sense, though the pixel counts are identical). |
Watch: Here’s Apple’s iPhone 4S Video Intro | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | Can’t navigate around Apple’s site right now because ? Still want to see the snazzy 5 minute video they made to introduce the iPhone 4S? Don’t worry — we’ve got you covered. (Also, thanks to Apple for using the beat from Adele’s “Rolling In The Deep” as the background jam. I hadn’t heard that song in at least 7 minutes, and was terrified that I might eventually have it stuck in my head.) |
Twitter Now Has 1,600 Advertisers | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | Twitter’s Chief Revenue Officer took the stage at today and revealed a few milestones for the communications platform, specifically in the advertising area. Bain said that Twitter now has using the platform to reach consumers, and currently has an 80 percent retention rate with advertisers. Back in July Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that the number of advertisers on Twitter had gone since last year when it was in the hundreds. Back in March, Twitter to launch the trailer for new film SUPER 8 on Twitter. Bain that Twitter helped Super 8 sell 1 million sneak peek tickets, and opening weekend box office exceeded projections by more than 50 percent. Another example of on Twitter, was with fashion line Burberry, who launched a fashion show on Twitter and saw 14 percent higher engagement, and saw a 10X lift in brand mentions. Bain told the audience today that engagements on Twitter ads are defining by clicks on links and retweets. Costolo a few weeks ago that advertising is a key strategy for the company. “Our advertising method is the only one we need to be a big business,” he said at the time. eMarketer indicating that Twitter’s ad revenue is expected to be lower this year, but will grow significantly over the next few years once the platform’s self-serve ad product rolls out. In fact, in 2013, eMarketer estimates worldwide ad revenues at Twitter will reach nearly $400 million. Photo Credit/ |
Apple Stock Drops 5 Percent After The iPhone 5 Fails To Appear | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | Investors were not blown away by Tim Cook Apple event today. With at today’s Apple event, the Cupertino-based company is seeing its drop in value. Apple’s stock opened at $374.57, and dipped as low as $355 in intraday trading before starting to rebound. The stock dropped nearly 20 points after Apple didn’t reveal the much awaited (and hyped) iPhone 5. Instead, Apple debuted the , which looks a lot like the iPhone 4, but includes a new processor, a CDMA/GSM chip that makes it a world phone and a new camera. Plus, it will be available via Sprint now (but this isn’t an exclusive deal, as previously reported). Apple’s stock has been performing particularly well over the past few months, passing in late July. Apple hit a high of $422 in September. The level the stock is at right now still gives Apple around a $330 billion market cap, so investors are still doing just fine. And the company revealed some around Apple’s dominance in the music, mobile device, and app economies. But some of what was revealed today was announced earlier this summer at the company’s WWDC developer conference, including an in-depth . Clearly, today, investors were hoping for a major surprise. But then, you can never please Wall Street. Apple closed at $372.50 today. |
TCTV: Is The iPhone 4S A Worthwhile Upgrade? | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | iPhoned out yet? (Don’t worry Android fans — .) TechCrunch Editor Erick Schonfeld and I sat down for a few minutes today to riff on all things iPhone 4S, from the merits of the device itself to whether or not the tech community at large is being a bit too harsh. Plus, the question of the hour: who should buy it? |
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Apple Announces “Cheaper” iPhones: The Old Ones | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | Despite predictions to the contrary, Apple did not announce a cheaper, mass market version of the iPhone today. Instead, it announced an upgraded iPhone 4 called the iPhone 4S. It’s the . However, there are more affordable iPhones now on the market: the old ones. Apple says it’s keeping the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 around. Not only that, it’s dropping their prices. Why would Apple keep these aging devices alive? Simple. To battle Android, Symbian, RIM and Windows Phone – especially in emerging markets. , the iPhone 3GS is now free with a contract. The iPhone 4 has been reduced to $99. While the new lower prices are based on 2-year agreements with mobile carriers, the fact that the phones are not being killed off entirely is important. These are the “new” cheaper, mass market iPhones. Apple didn’t specify where these discounted devices would be sold, only noting that the iPhone 4S would be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, U.K., France, Germany and Japan. It would not be surprising to see these older models used as Apple’s inroads into emerging markets, though. Here’s why: More people are buying Android smartphones than iPhones. That fact is not in dispute. According to , Android’s U.S. market share is 41.8% to Apple’s 27%. , where Symbian still reigns, it’s 22.3% for Android vs. 20.3% for iPhone. Worldwide, some analysts now peg Android as having . What iPhone lacks in volume, though, it makes up for in profit, in Q2 2011. One could even argue that Apple does not need to provide a low-cost iPhone – it was doing just fine without one, thank you very much. For Apple, however, not having a presence in emerging markets was a challenge it needed to address. Take for example, India – the second largest telecom market after China. According to a recent , Apple accounted for just 2.6% of India’s smartphone shipments in a market with 602 million subscribers. That’s fewer devices than it shipped to Norway, Belgium or Israel. Nokia dominates the Indian market, with 46% of shipments in Q2. Even struggling handset maker RIM reached 15% in shipments there. And Samsung, who plays the field with bada, Android and Windows Phone devices, reached 21% (source: IDC). Bloomberg cites issues with iPhone availability, advertising and the Indian carriers, the latter having just started to launch their 3G networks this year. (Without 3G, much of what the iPhone could do, it only does well when Wi-Fi is available.) Price, too, is an obvious concern. Meanwhile, in China, the iPhone is expensive, sometimes even costing more than it does in the U.S. That’s ironic, given China’s role in iPhone manufacturing and assembly. It’s also only available through the country’s second-largest carrier, China Unicom. However, stated that Apple CEO Tim Cook (then COO) was looking to bring the iPhone to China’s largest carrier, China Mobile, which has 600 million subscribers compared with China Unicom’s 200 million. Despite the technical challenges of launching in these regions, not to mention the competition from name-brand competitors and knockoffs alike, Apple knows it can not continue to ignore the need to compete in these markets. China and India, of all the emerging markets, are important due to their sheer size – after all, Apple doesn’t generate all its income from device sales. Failing to capture market share in these regions is simply a missed opportunity to generate revenue. Even Cook admitted during China’s importance to Apple’s growth in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as its importance to the company’s overall results. According to Cook, iPhone sales in China were a “key driver” of Apple’s $8.8 billion in revenue for the quarter. And Chinese Apple stores have the (4x the traffic as their American counterparts) and highest revenue of any Apple stores in the world. Today, , Cook talked about the opening of two new retail stores in Asia this past week: Hong Kong and Shanghai. The Shanghai store, now the largest in Asia, saw 100,000 visitors on its opening weekend. For comparison purposes, it took the L.A. store a month to hit that same number. So while a “cheaper” iPhone in these markets would mean lower margins on Apple hardware, the incredible size of the markets means there’s an opportunity to make up for that loss through device sales potential. Competitors Android, RIM, Nokia and Windows Phone often battle iPhone on price, as their app ecosystems and content businesses (e.g., Zune is no iTunes, Google Music doesn’t even sell songs) are still lacking in comparison to Apple’s. With price out of the equation, Apple’s growth potential has just been radically changed. In other words, with the new iPhone 4S, Apple continues to cater to the high-end crowd who would have upgraded anyway. With the iPhone 4 and 3GS, Apple goes after the market that wanted a smartphone of any kind, as long as it was affordable. It goes after those who wanted the iPhone, but didn’t have the money. That said, a discounted iPhone alone may not be enough for Apple to take the market share lead in smartphones, given that there hundreds of Android devices vs. just these three iPhone models. It stands to reason, though, it will at least make a dent in Android’s seemingly unstoppable market share growth. Oh, and the won’t hurt either. |
Where Was Facebook At The Apple Event Today? Not There. Stay Tuned. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | One of the things noticeably absent from today was Facebook. After all, other were reporting that they would for sure be a part of the event. Late last week, hearing that be the case, but that the two sides were still talking and that Facebook had a back-up plan just in case Apple didn’t give them the go ahead. And for good reason. We’ve heard from a source that sometime late last night, Facebook was told that they would not be a part of Apple’s event today. This is nothing new. Companies are told to prepare to go on stage at these events all the time only to get pulled at the last second. It’s just a bit odd that a company as large as Facebook was passed over. Instead, look for Facebook to send out invites to their own mobile-themed event sometime very soon. Again, both their HTML5 mobile platform (aka “ “) and the iPad app are ready to go — in fact, for Spartan was briefly live on the web late last week. And well, before. This all reminds me a bit of the Nuance/Siri situation. In the months leading up to WWDC this year, on a deal reached between Apple and Nuance to deliver voice technology to the iPhone by way of Siri. We also reported that a key ingredient to this was the use of . But at WWDC, there was no mention of any of this. , Apple decided to make it an iPhone 4S feature. And sure enough, today we saw the of the new Siri app integrated into iOS. Just because something is not shown on stage at an Apple event doesn’t mean it’s not coming. It just means that it didn’t make the cut for one reason or another. Stay tuned. |
The Original Siri App Gets Pulled From The App Store, Servers To Be Killed | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | Long before today’s announcement that the Siri Voice Assistant would be an integral part of iOS, Siri was a third-party app. It wasn’t as pretty, and not nearly as well integrated, but it had one big advantage: it ran on just about any iOS device. Then Apple . It immediately became clear that Apple was making a push into voice — and yet, the app stayed on the store. It lived on un-updated, but it lived on nevertheless. Then Apple introduced Siri… exclusively for the iPhone 4S. And with that, the life of Siri (the application) came to an end, making way for Siri (the feature). For something that most would never notice, the pull down was masterfully choreographed: when Siri was first mentioned on stage, the application was still easily available. By the time the demonstration was over, the app was no where to be found — and unfortunately for the folks who might have already nabbed Siri in the past year or so (or worse yet, those who have come to consider Siri a part of their everyday lives), it appears as if the servers that Siri (the app) relies on were shut down at the same time. : After a brief downtime, the servers came back up.. with a message of their impending demise: “ So, why take it down? Two reasons come to mind. For one, it’s pretty tough to up-sell current iPhone 4 owners to the iPhone 4S if one of the biggest features is already available (albeit to a limited extent) as a third-party app. Less nefariously, having a third-party app (especially one that hadn’t been updated in around a year) available with the same name as a feature would be beyond confusing. If it were solely about avoiding confusion, though, why pull down the server for those who already have the app? |
Everything You Need To Know About Today’s Apple Event | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | It’s been a busy morning in Cupertino at Apple’s ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ keynote. The big headline was the iPhone 4S, but no iPhone 5. Perhaps you had a hard time following all the news from Apple on the iPhone, iOS 5, other iOS devices and apps. Apple didn’t offer a live online webcast to the public. But the TechCrunch team, on two continents, has been busy tracking all the Apple news. Click on any of the headlines for more info: This page will be updated. |
“Access Denied”: Apple.com Goes Down Post-iPhone 4S Event | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | In case you were nowhere near Twitter for the past twenty-five minutes or so — where “access denied” is now trending — has been going down and then back up, down and then back up for almost a half hour, showing the above error message. No one is quite sure why the site went down (according to one source familiar with the matter, it is possibly a hack attempt) but I’m sure the millions of geeks hitting refresh with bated breath isn’t helping. A Whois lookup via Carlos Granier shows that there is fishy going on with Apple’s DNS. But it’s not clear whether that is due to hackers Looks like it DNS spammers responsible for the wonky Whois lookup — my above source was looking at the same thing. The issues might just be plain old server problems — boring, I know. https://twitter.com/#!/mattbuchanan/status/121302333622726656 https://twitter.com/#!/stevenjayl/status/121300964710944768 https://twitter.com/#!/taylorbuley/status/121300900219338752 |
Apple iPhone 4S/5 Rumors: What Was Right, Wrong And Just Plain Crazy | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | Rumors and speculation run wild prior to any Apple event and most often the announced product does not live up to the hype. That’s essentially what happened today. The Apple rumor mill promised an iPhone 5 with killer specs, a huge screen and nothing less than a built-in teleportation device. We got the iPhone 4S instead. Here’s what the interwebs got right and wrong. It’s called Siri. Apple feels these voice controls are essentially the next paradigm in personal computer. Android users will cry foul, though, because their mobile OS of choice has long featured similar functions. We also wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft fans make a couple comments, as Mango has some pretty extensive voice control features, too. Apple solved what must have been a frustrating supply chain issue and used a dual-mode GSM/CDMA radio for the iPhone 4S. This allows Apple to make, distribute and sell just one model. It likely wasn’t an easy task building multiple antennas into the iPhone 4S’s small frame. Apple debuted the dual-core A5 CPU with the iPad 2. It is now at the core of the iPhone 4S where it can dish out CPU tasks twice as fast and graphics seven times faster. Angry Birds will never be the same. It was just an innocent picture of bland sushi. That one picture sent the Apple crowd into a frenzy, though, claiming through simple math that the iPhone 5 would have an 8MP sensor. The iPhone 5 wasn’t announced today but the iPhone 4S in fact features an 8 MP sensor with 60% more pixels than the 5MP camera used in the iPhone. Apple then covered it with a five element lens and claim the A5 CPU allows for 26% better auto white balance. Phil Schiller, “I’m really pleased to talk to you about the iPod. We started the iPod simply because we love music. We still love music, and we’re still making great iPods” and then went on to introduce updates to the iPad nano and touch. The iPod is not dead. Yet. Up until this last weekend, the predominate rumor involved the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5. The iPhone 4S would be an updated iPhone while the iPhone 5 would feature an iPad-inspired design complete with a larger screen and thinner casing. Apple announced just the iPhone 4S today. After the iPad app was absent from Facebook’s F8 event, that claimed Facebook long-awaited app would launch along with a redesigned iPhone app at Apple’s “iPhone 5 Event”. That clearly didn’t happen today. However, in Mashable’s defense, the iPhone 5 didn’t launch today either. Apple had a chance to utterly destroy the competition by introducing a less expensive iPhone. But that’s not going to happen. The latest iPhone will debut at the same $199 intro price as previous versions. Rumors surfaced months ago by way of leaked cases that the next iPhone would have a wider and taller profile. This sparked the logical conclusion that the next iPhone would have a proportionality larger screen. There’s still a chance that those cases are indeed for the iPhone 5, which will launch at a later date and feature a larger screen. The iPhone 4 was rumored to launch with edge-to-edge glass. That didn’t happen and it didn’t make the cut for the iPhone 4S either. Perhaps Apple is saving that for the iPhone 5. Leaked bezels told a story of a redesigned, elongated home button. Speculation stated this longer button would allow for gestures and even multitouch options. But the phone announced today, the iPhone 4S, features the tried and true round home button. Sprint reportedly bet the company on the next iPhone. Some reports even pegged Sprint getting the next iPhone incarnation exclusively. That didn’t happen although the iPhone 4S is headed to Sprint — along with Verizon and AT&T. |
The Email From Tim Cook, Apple CEO, To Apple Staff | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | An email from Tim Cook to the Apple Staff, sent today. Team, I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today. Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple. We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email rememberingsteve@apple.com. No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much. Tim |
Steve Jobs: “Death Is The Destination We All Share” | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | We’re going to go into whatever the blog equivalent of a moment of silence is here, because many of us are still staring at our computers shocked by the . In lieu of keeping up with the tech news churn and/or returning to the hamster wheel of funding posts immediately, we’re going to take a little time to honor Steve. In the meantime, I’ll let one of the most inspiring men our industry has known (if not the most inspiring) speak for himself, in his own words — about life, death and the love of technology. This speech, from a widely regarded Jobs gave to Stanford students in 2005, never gets old, no matter how many times you watch it. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&w=630] I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last-minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now. This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much.
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Statement by Apple’s Board of Directors On The Death Of Steve Jobs | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | Steven Paul Jobs was 56. He died today after publicly fighting advanced pancreatic cancer since 2004. He, along with co-founder Steve Wozniak, built one of the most “commercially successful” personal computers and founded Pixar animation studios. The Apple Board of Directors wrote: We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts. You can share remembrances with Apple at . Here is a post
Do not therefore consider this life as an object of any moment. Look back on the immense gulf of time already past; and forwards, to that infinite duration yet to come, and you will find how trifling the difference is between a life of three days and of three ages. Let us then employ properly this moment of time allotted us by fate, and leave the world contentedly; like a ripe olive dropping from its stalk, speaking well of the soil that produced it, and of the tree that bore it.
-Marcus Aurelius, |
TCTV: Reflections On Steve Jobs And His Legacy | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | It’s been a hard night and Erick and I thought it would be fitting to reflect a bit on Steve Jobs and his legacy. We’re both understandably crushed by the news but rather than look back we wanted to look forward, forward to what comes next in a world without one of its greatest thinkers. Steve Jobs is important to us because the gifts he gave mankind are innumerable. He gave us the gifts of elegance, of clarity, of drive. He gave us computers that spawned industries, phones that paid millions of salaries. He made it so I can Facetime from the road with my children before they go to bed and not have to worry about connection issues, downloads, fiddling. The stuff he made just works. Call him prickly. Call his products overpriced and underpowered. Call Apple a toymaker, not serious, not real. But remember that everything Steve Jobs touched was a masterpiece of engineering in a world where “just OK” is increasingly the norm. His products outsell almost anything else by an order of magnitude. He’s not being praised here because millions of people are bewitched and ignorant. He’s being praised because millions of people see the future as he did: a place where things get increasingly better, where we are more connected, better informed, and generally happier. There’s a reason the old Apple logo was a human and a computer smiling at each other. That smile is primordial. It’s the smile of a worker with his best tools. It’s the smile of a thinker over her favorite book. It’s the smile of a man, alone in a hotel room, watching his daughter read Cinderella to her dolls. |
VC Builds #TodayKicks So You Can Share Photos Of The Shoes You’re Wearing, What? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | You know sometimes when you interact with a lot of startups, you start thinking that every problem that needs to be solved has already been solved. Well think again! VC and a gaggle of other New Yorkers like MessageParty’s and , former Zappos UX director , Foursquare Biz Dev director and Techstars designer Rebecca Zhou have built , a mobile and web platform for “sneakerheads” — or people who are obsessed with shoes but not in a creepy way — to interact with other Twitter users who share the footwear fetish. Upload a snapshot of your shoes to Today’s Kicks (see mine above) and you can choose to send it to either Twitter or to the app itself. Today’s Kicks pulls in all images that use the hashtag #today’s kicks to populate , and you can search for shoes through Newest, Best, Mine (your own) and Loved (most liked). Barnes says he came up with the idea when he started posting pictures of his sneakers to Twitter with his own made up hashtag #todayskicks and it caught on. It turns out that another dude (who coincidentally turned out to be Friedman) had bought the domain and the two ended up partnering up to create a new way to discover awesome shoes. Peyton tells me that the ultimate vision for Today’s Kicks is as a vertical vehicle for mobile commerce, and that the company plans to sell through the app what the community deems as the sickest kicks. On that note, have you seen a certain Mr. from YouTube? Who got the keys to the Jeep? |
Nokia and Monster To Team Up For New Headphones? | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | It wasn’t that long ago that HTC partnered up with Beats Audio to give their phones a boost in the audio department, and now it seems Nokia may be contemplating something similar. A newly leaked pair of images popped up earlier today, and they reveal what may be the first Given Monster’s history, it’s really no surprise that the first product to surface would be a pair of headphones. Dubbed the Nokia Purity HD Stereo Headset (try saying that three times fast), the images sent to PocketNow depict an electric blue pair of portable cans that seem to lack cables. There’s a solid chance that if real, the Purity HDs will be run off of a Bluetooth connection, but sometimes headphone manufacturers leave unwieldy cables out of their press shots. With Nokia World just around the corner, more specifics are sure to surface before too long. While it seems doubtful that the partnership could ever reach an , it still seems like quite a coup for Nokia. I daresay it’s been a long time since the Finnish phone giant was considered cool, so co-branding a product with a known entity like Monster could be a step toward generating some street cred. Then again, the idea could also backfire terribly. Monster Cable is best known to many for peddling overpriced cables, and that ultimately may not sit well with some of Nokia’s customers. We’ll have to wait and see how things play out, but here’s a quick word of advice for Nokia: it doesn’t matter how awesome your new headphones are if your new Windows Phones aren’t up to snuff. Keep those priorities straight, that’s all I’m saying. |
Siri, Do You Use Nuance Technology? Siri: I’m Sorry, I Can’t Answer That. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | The most talked about element of yesterday’s Apple event had to be Siri. of the iPhone 4S, born out of in 2010, looks amazing. But one thing never mentioned during the keynote was a key piece of technology behind Siri: Nuance. We first reported that Siri would be a key part of iOS 5 . As we dug deeper, we learned that Apple and Nuance were to make sure this could be a reality. You see, Siri does not work without Nuance. Though they initially tried Vlingo, Nuance was found to be the better technology. In fact, Siri was using Nuance right up until from the App Store yesterday. So, is Nuance a part of Apple’s implementation of Siri as well? Yes. Though, don’t bother trying to get anyone to admit that. Given what we had previously reported about the relationship between Apple and Nuance — such as — I just assumed that Nuance was a part of this new Siri package and figured that Apple simply didn’t want to go into the weeds, as it were, about how the technology works. But then I got a strange email pitch immediately following the iPhone event. It was from Nuance’s PR team, sending a release seemingly about nothing. The headline heralded: “Voice: A Mainstream Interface for Mobile”! That may sound like a release about Nuance powering Siri for Apple, but it’s not. In fact, neither Apple nor Siri are ever mentioned once in the entire release. Apple is briefly mentioned in the pitch lead-in I received. That starts: Today is an exciting day, as Apple unveiled its new iPhone 4S with a compelling integration of voice technology that signifies an endorsement for voice from arguably the most inspirational innovator in mobile. And while these technologies are not new, voice as a mainstream, primary interface will be in the hands of millions and millions more consumers around the world. Hmm. Nuance seemed to be going out of their way to that they were powering the awesome new Siri feature of the iPhone 4S. In fact, it almost reads like a company that just got its hat handed to it by Apple, and wanted to give the “it’s great to see a massive company validate the space” statement. So I decided to ask the representative directly: is Nuance powering the new Siri feature? The only thing said in response: “Apple licenses Nuance’s voice technology for use in some of its products.” Followed by, “The company is not authorized to comment on specific capabilities or devices.” Heh. In other words, yes, Nuance is powering Siri. But Apple clearly struck a deal with Nuance which precludes them from talking about it. This is Apple technology, this is not about Nuance, is how I imagine Apple may put it. Apparently, Nuance is happy enough with Apple’s undoubtedly large check for this licensing agreement that they are willing to keep quiet. Or could it be about Apple eventually replacing Nuance as the backend to Siri, as Siri co-founder Norman Winarsky a couple days ago? Maybe, but that seems fairly unlikely anytime soon. As Winarsky admits, “Nuance has far and away the most IP in speech synthesis technologies in the industry.” As we’ve stated in our previous posts on the matter, that’s a key here. Even if Apple wanted and tried to come up with their own voice technology backend for Siri, they would have a hard time doing so without infringing on some of Nuance’s patents. Patents which Nuance CEO Paul Ricci is very well known to enforce to their maximum extent. That’s why there are so few players in the space. One of them is Google. And guess who built that technology for them? Another Nuance co-founder (and key patent-holder) Mike Cohen. Apple doesn’t have a Mike Cohen on staff to build their own Nuance-style system. At least not yet. So for now, it’s Apple and Siri sitting in a tree — with Nuance sitting behind Siri in an invisibility cloak. |
Electric Aircraft Competition Wraps, With $1.35M Prize For Plane That Out-Economizes A Prius | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | A little more than a year ago, we posted about . At the time, we also mentioned an upcoming competition that would test the mettle of these flying batteries: the . It’s a NASA event (and purse), sponsored by Google, which like the aims to fund innovation through competition. Entrants would have to fly 200 miles in under two hours, while using less than a gallon of fuel (or equivalent energy) per passenger. Tough terms, but put their designs in flight in a quiet, efficient battle for the $1.35 million prize. The competition just wrapped last week, and at an expo in Mountain View on Monday. The team taking home the big prize was Pipistrel’s Taurus G-4. The four-seater more than doubled the required 100 passenger MPGe, traveling the 200 mile test distance with the electrical equivalent of just over over gallon of gas, and at an average speed of over 100MPH as well. Here they are holding up their “very large check”: The runner-up was e-Genius, a two-seater that hit 375 PMPGe. It received $120,000, plus a bonus prize for being the quietest: at takeoff, they recorded only around 60 decibels. That’s probably about as loud as me typing this. Joe Parrish, NASA’s acting CTO, said that the $1.6 million in funding used to create the competition had generated over $4 million in spending by teams and their sponsors. The winning team, from Penn State (but actually based in Slovenia), vowed to reserve $100,000 of their prize money for a future competition for electric aircraft. Elon Musk, who has evinced interest in creating such a fantastic conveyance, is no doubt pleased at this development. [via ; photos: NASA] |
Steve Jobs Has Passed Away | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | According to a statement just issued by Apple’s Board of Directors, company co-founder and longtime CEO has passed away. Apple has also put up . They’re asking for “thoughts, memories, and condolences” to be shared by way of this email address: It was only that Jobs stepped down as CEO saying at the time, “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.” Jobs remained Chairman of the Board at the company, as well as director and an Apple employee. He recommended that company COO Tim Cook take his place as CEO. Yesterday, Cook gave his first keynote address as CEO, unveiling the new iPhone 4S. While that device had been the focal point of Apple’s website for the past 24 hours, is now simply dedicated to Jobs, using a famous picture of him (above) that will also grace the cover of his upcoming biography by Walter Isaacson due out next month. Jobs had battled cancer, and in 2004 had an operation related to the disease. In recent years, illness had forced him to step back from his role as CEO of Apple on separate occasions. He also had a liver transplant in 2009 during one of those medical leaves. But after each battle, he came back and continued his amazing work at Apple. In 2007, he unveiled the iPhone. In 2010, the iPad. His last appearance on stage was at Apple’s 2011 WWDC event in San Francisco. There, he laid the groundwork for Apple’s latest innovations including iOS 5, OS X Lion, and iCloud. That performance as well as his announcement that he was stepping down as CEO of Apple for the final time, led to two of my favorite posts that I’ve ever written. Both were about Jobs: Steve Jobs was 56 years old. Rest in peace, Steve. The release from Apple: Statement by Apple’s Board of Directors CUPERTINO, Calif. — We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts. The statement from Jobs’ family: Steve died peacefully today surrounded by his family. In his public life, Steve was known as a visionary; in his private life, he cherished his family. We are thankful to the many people who have shared their wishes and prayers during the last year of Steve’s illness; a website will be provided for those who wish to offer tributes and memories. We are grateful for the support and kindness of those who share our feelings for Steve. We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief. Tim Cook’s email to Apple employees: Team, I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today. Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing
human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple. We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email rememberingsteve@apple.com. No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much. Tim The message on Apple’s website: |
DRM-Curious? You Can Create An UltraViolet Account Now | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | You may remember the “one DRM to rule them all” we heard about last year, . It’s essentially a DRM scheme that are getting behind, from device makers to content creators to distributors. Everyone, that is, except for one 800-pound media gorilla: Apple. The last we heard of it was over a year ago, with nary a peep since then except the odd mention here or there and a more official debut at CES. But it seems that the sleeping giant wakes, as they’ve opened up registration for UltraViolet accounts. I’ve gone ahead and made one so you don’t have to if you just want to see what it looks like in there. No, not a lot going on. It’s basically an empty shell at the moment; no one knows what UltraViolet is, and no one has any devices that support it — or if they do, they don’t care. Until more of the system is up and running, the functions and limitations will remain somewhat obscure. I’m not enthused by the design, but we’ll give them some time to tweak it before laying into them. One thing to note is the constant use of “our” instead of “your.” That doesn’t mean as in UltraViolet, but you as in you and your family and friends. The sharing of rights and permissions will be a key part of the scheme, though whether anyone will want to spend any time configuring “rights lockers” is doubtful. As soon as we start seeing devices and services that support UltraViolet, we’ll give them a spin on the new management platform. If you’re interested in poking around the FAQ or want to be ready when the first devices and movies hit (early 2012, supposedly), |
After A Cancelled Keynote, Benioff Strikes Back; Talks Future Of The Cloud (From A Restaurant) | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | The fun continued this morning at in San Francisco. Or, I should say, the fun continued at a restaurant across the street. Fine dining and location aside, for those unfamiliar, yesterday afternoon Oracle CEO Larry Ellison cancelled a keynote that was planned for this morning by none other than his former employee and frenemy: CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff. , Benioff tweeted , “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!” Though Oracle representatives were quick to say that the cancellation was simply a result of “overwhelming attendance”, and that Benioff was offered a keynote later in the week, it’s hard to say that this isn’t the result of something more than a full schedule. Puh-leeze. Then again, whether or not it betrays the simmering feud between Ellison and Benioff (and who has the keys to the “real” cloud), it was also just a genius promotional move by the Salesforce CEO. Let’s call a spade a spade. In an address to reporters this morning at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco (ahem, not the Moscone Center, the scene of OpenWorld), the Salesforce CEO said that he had petitioned Oracle last night, specifically Judy Sim Oracle’s CMO, who Benioff says he’s known for years, hoping to win his spot back on stage. Sim was apparently not in favor, and as Benioff is scheduled to fly to Ohio on Thursday, Oracle was obviously unwilling to double back and offer Benioff the opportunity to give his keynote today. In reference to the seemingly passive-aggressive move by Oracle, Benioff said, “normally, no one would have cared what I had to say today”, but because of the traction the cancellation was able to garner last night on blogs, Facebook, Twitter et al, many more people are paying attention to this than might have otherwise. And I daresay the Salesforce CEO was enjoying it. Benioff said that Larry Ellison had once taught him to read and internalize “The Art Of War” by Sun Tzu, in which the high ranking Chinese military general and strategist advised readers to “ignore the anger” and use it for good. All Ellison had to do in response was say to his staff “let me know what he says, and thanks for bringing it to my attention”, he said. What’s more, according the Salesforce CEO, Oracle knew exactly what he planned to say in his keynote, as they gave Oracle the slides he would share during his keynote beforehand, which he said were very similar in nature to the talk he gave at Salesforce’s Dreamforce Conference . Not to mention, , a keynote speech at a top conference like OpenWorld can cost the speaker up to $1 million. According to Benioff, Oracle offered him his money back. So, clearly, they weren’t particularly eager to reverse their position. Outside of their business strategies, the Salesforce and Oracle CEOs both are quick to acknowledge their mutual respect and admiration, but when it comes to the future of technology, the future of the cloud, and the different approaches that each company takes to their business strategy and revenue models, there’s little to no love lost. Last year at the OpenWorld Conference, Benioff seized the opportunity to take a few digs at Oracle’s philosophy and its software, most notably calling Oracle’s Exadata system “the false cloud” that is far from aligned from what enterprise customers want and need in today’s cloud computing world. And, of course, Ellison was not one to retreat from the jab, using his keynote to express problems with, in particular, the security of Salesforce’s architecture, saying, “You’ve got many customers and their data just coexist in the same database, and since there’s no fault-isolation, a system failure brings down many customers”. Ellison then showed the audience a slide of Benioff’s most recent book “Behind The Cloud”, that had been altered to say, “ Behind The Cloud”. Oh snap! Some might say that this is just “all in good fun”, or pointless drama. But today shows that there is indeed a more-than-superficial divide between these two companies, and even though Microsoft and Oracle are the dominant players in the space, as Oracle, for one, has approximately $36 billion in revenue and a market cap of $144 billion (compared to Salesforce’s $2 billion in revenues and market capitalization of $16 billion), the hardware company is certainly all too aware of how quickly the eager young upstart is gaining. And if Salesforce is gaining, might it have something to do with Benioff’s conception of the future of the cloud? In the past — and again today — Benioff has been outspoken in his belief that IT companies must become social enterprises — that the social revolution is very real and needs to be a significant part of the IT industry’s future. Of course, Ellison is quick to point out that Salesforce isn’t a real cloud company, because it is applications-only, rather than apps backed by that all-important cloud infrastructure. And Oracle, Ellison believes, is more typical of a cloud computing company with its end-to-end stack is far from a partial cloud, nor does it lack the virtualization traditionally pictured when one thinks of the cloud — and something that he believes Salesforce does not offer to the same extent. On the other side, Benioff said that his company’s strategic acquisitions of Heroku, the Ruby-based cloud app deployment and scaling platform, Radian6, and Jigsaw over the last 18 months, while expensive, were important moves forward in allowing the company to realize its social future. “We can’t believe everything ourselves”, he said. In particular, Benioff was so excited about the Heroku acquisition that he led it himself — largely because of the appeal of Heroku’s multi-language and multi-tenant platform, which is what enterprise cloud customers really want, the CEO said. Because of Salesforce’s tight integration with Facebook, with the Heroku acquisition, Salesforce has allowed developers to go straight to Facebook to build applications right on the social network that automatically integrate social features and make the Salesforce experience more in tune with the current needs of businesses. While showcasing Chatter (Salesforce’s Facebook for the corporate customer) today, Benioff admitted that his company’s adoption of non-proprietary software and social media is “contrarian”, and many in the industry (including Ellison) disagree with this direction. Yet, he is firmly of the belief that “social technology is shaking our industry at the core” — and don’t expect the company to be pivoting on its social mantra anytime soon. “The message of this show is proprietary hardware and software are the future”, the Salesforce CEO said, “our message is beware of the false cloud. It is not efficient, it is not democratic, it is not open”. And who does Benioff see as the main proponent of the false cloud? Take a wild guess. It has also become clear that Benioff’s tweets from last night irked Ellison — as well as others at Oracle, as MarketWatch reported that NetSuite Chief Executive Zach Nelson criticized Benioff’s words in an email saying, “Last time I looked, Salesforce.com is built on the Oracle database, so I think Marc slamming Oracle for not being a cloud provider is a bit bizarre”. Benioff responded by saying that Oracle’s technology is one part of Salesforce’s infrastructure that also relies on technologies like Dell to make Salesforce hum. Concluding his question and answer session with reporters today, Benioff was of the view that, today, Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference has become a “bigger venue and a more exciting conference” as a whole. While Salesforce may not have proprietary mainframes, he said in a dig at Oracle, Dreamforce is now big enough that the company no longer needs Oracle’s conference to get their message out. Thus, in reference to his company’s future (or at least his own future) at Oracle’s conference, he concluded: “This is probably our swan song”. And just like that, the standoff takes another step forward. But wait, did Benioff just beat Ellison at his own game? ( .) Thanks to Reuters for the Excerpt image |
Twitter Launches An Issue Tracker And Other New Features For Third-Party Developers | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | In early September, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to developers asking for feedback on how the network could better serve them. From the post: It looks like Twitter has taken this feedback into account, and has a number of new features for developers based on their responses. One of the main developer requests was a centralized issue tracker. Twitter has now launched a dedicated Issue Tracker, hosted on , which will replace the existing Google Code Tracker. Another piece of feedback was a clear policy on API changes. Twitter will now give developers a minimum is 30 days advance notice before ‘sunsetting’ anything. For more broad, sweeping changes, Twitter says it will be flexible with developers and give them as much time as possible. Rate limits for Twitter developers and the company says that it permits 350 requests per user (oauth_token) per hour if you’re making authenticated calls and 150 per hour against the calling IP address for unauthenticated calls. The goal is to scale usage of the API with the growth of a developer’s user-base and as they bring on more users, they will get greater access to the APU. Twitter also said that it is committed to push Site Streams, which will allow apps to receive real-time updates for events such as mentions, follows, timelines, and more, out of beta by Q1 of 2011. Twitter promises to be more communicative overall with developers and especially help third-party developers work through authentication issues using oAuth. By investing in creating new tools and features for developers, Twitter is clearly making a more concerted effort to work with third-party developers. In the past, there have been come miscommunications and it’s wise for the network to start listening to what developers want and need. In March, Twitter to avoid competing with them on native clients. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t want developers to build off their platform, they just don’t want developers to build clients that mimic Twitter’s own services. As we’ve written, this is Regardless, it’s good to see Twitter taking actions to smooth things over with developers. |
Apple Finally Shows MicroUSB Some iPhone Love (But Just Barely) | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | Uh oh — your phone’s dying? No big deal, as long as it was made in the past year or two. Just grab a microUSB cable! Unless it’s an iPhone. Then you’re stuck hunting around for the ol’ white 30-pin — which, while ubiquitous in its own right, isn’t nearly as multi-talented. Back in 2009, Apple committed to the European Union that they’d support microUSB — but to what extent? Would they ditch the dock connector altogether? Of course not. Would they add a microUSB port to the device as a handy alternative? Probably not. Would they release a Dock-Connector-to-microUSB adapter and call it a day? We — and sure enough, that’s what they’ve just done. Currently turning up only in Apple’s European stores (sadly), the new dock adapter will go for just £8.00 (around $12.50). Not bad, considering that Apple’s other adapters generally average out between $20 and $30 bucks. It’ll be available on October 14th — which, given that that’s iPhone 4S launch day, suggests that the European iPhone 4S might just include these right in the box. This adapter should work well with most of the previous generation iPhones, save for the original. Does a dock adapter really fix the problem? , not really. If you can remember to pack an adapter to make microUSB cables work, you probably could have remembered to pack a 30-pin cable to begin with. But given that Apple is unlikely to sacrifice aesthetics to add a secondary charging port any time soon nor would they willingly stop tapping that sweet, sweet “Made for iPhone” licensing nectar any time soon, this is probably about as good as it’s going to get. |
null | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 4 | null |
Hipster Changes Its Strategy, Now Wants You To Send Digital Postcards | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | , a service I’ve written about countless times, is unveiling its first open-to-all product today — and it is not, like we’ve written about and , a local Q&A service. Hipster has joined the mobile social local photo sharing locomotive and made an app that yes, lets people share photos, with their phones. When asked the question in bold above, which is likely to be any logical person’s first question upon seeing the product, Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow replied, “Sending a postcard is the first step in Hipster’s very, very long journey, and we decided to start this journey with a feature that is fun, beautiful and viral.” Ludlow says that the company’s eventual goal is to capture “the most important information, the most fascinating people, and the most interesting moments that take place in the locations around us,” and eventually hopes that people will pull out Hipster to get a good sense of the stories surrounding a given location. The postcards are just a “wedge feature” he emphasizes, a way to get people to actually use the service. When Hipster soft launched at SXSW, the 37K people who signed up for the beta were promised that “something cool is coming to your city” and Ludlow says that the products they’ve been iterating on, local Q&A, postcards and countless others that no one saw are all attempts to solve the loneliness problem exhibited by many services when they attempt local (Color is one that immediately comes to mind). “If you’re the only person on most location-based services,” he says, “it’s a terrible experience.” To send a Hipster digital postcard, sign in with Facebook and/or email, snap anew or use an already taken photo and choose from one of ten postcard “themes,” which are basically different photo filters, font choices and styles. The app lets you edit your location, add what you’re doing and who you’re with to the card as well as share to Facebook and Twitter. Other Hipster users can like and comment on the as of now landscape oriented photos. Ludlow plans on adding the ability to take portrait shots and see Likes through the mobile app in a later release. To view photos on Hipster, simply sign in and select Friends to see postcards from people you’re following, or Nearby to see additions from people nearby. Swipe a given image and it will turn around, just like a post card, revealing its location and other data. You can also see the postcards mapped out on Google Maps. When asked what differentiated Hipster from the most popular contender in the photo-sharing space (other than the fact that Hipster actually has a robust web interface), Ludlow said that the differentiating factor was Hipster’s emphasis on location, and that he sees Hipster’s postcards as more of a visual check in, or a “check in evolved,” “I’m not going to pretend that we’re much different from the 30 other social media services,” he says. “If I think we’re going to disrupt anything it’s location-based services like Foursquare.” With $1 million in seed funding from , , , and others, Hipster plans on trying out various ways to monetize including selling the printed versions of its digital postcards, advertising and yes, local deals.
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Lack Of NFC In iPhone 4S Won’t Impact Market | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | While not entirely surprising, did not include a mention of NFC (near field communication). Although many hoped for the inclusion of the short-range wireless technology which serves as the backbone for current and planned mobile wallet systems, Apple still has plenty of time to integrate NFC into future handsets. It’s possible that NFC will even arrive in the upcoming iPhone 5. But will Apple’s decision to skip NFC in the iPhone 4S have an impact on today’s market? Not likely, say analysts. NFC forecasts, to date, have varied. ABI Research estimates there will be 35 million handsets shipped this year, and double that will ship next year. IHS iSuppli forecasts nearly 550 million handsets by 2015. Meanwhile, Berg Insight AB expects there to be 400 million handsets by 2015. Whatever the true number may be, the consensus is that the technology is years out from consumer adoption. Apple can wait. Although nothing Apple does goes without notice, ABI analyst John Devlin says he doesn’t believe the news will have an effect on current market conditions or trends. “Having Apple on-board would have been a great driver for NFC – even if only for competitive reasons,” Devlin tells us. “I don’t think it will negatively impact the market. [NFC] has been heating up, companies are now launching, and strategies are in place,” he says. Charles Golvin, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, agrees, noting that had Apple announced NFC, it would have jump-started the industry and accelerated competitors’ offerings, but the iPhone 4S’s lack of NFC is neither a death knell for the technology, or a statement about NFC’s long-term viability. Apple’s skill is often in reinventing and polishing the end user experience, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the first to launch a new technology itself. And in the case of NFC, the market just isn’t ready. “Putting devices into customer’s hands is only one step towards adoption,” explains Golvin. There also need to be point-of-sale terminals that support NFC and customers have to be able to input all their credit card information into the mobile version of their wallet. “It doesn’t really fly until the mobile wallet is the same as your real wallet,” Golvin says. Today, for example, only Citibank-branded MasterCards work in , and the carrier-led mobile wallet venture has yet to launch. Another factor influencing Apple’s delay with NFC, besides general market readiness that is, is Apple’s potential to be disruptive upon entering the competitive landscape. “Apple likes to own the ecosystem, but the incumbent payment networks are too entrenched,” says Devlin. “However, Apple is incredibly cash rich so the acquisition of a payments-related company would not be out of the question.” “Similarly, in order to maximize NFC and the different user experiences that it could deliver,” he continues, “it would make sense to feature NFC in a range of products, such as the iPad, MacBooks, etc., and these upgrades are not yet ready.” Meanwhile, other companies are now launching their own NFC-enabled payment systems. Google, as noted above, has Google Wallet. Isis, the joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, from the majority of leading device makers, including HTC, LG, Motorola, RIM, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. NFC is progressing in other areas, too, such as Windows 8 tablets – something Apple is likely watching closely. ABI says it’s not changing its position on NFC forecasts due to the iPhone 4S. It still expects 80 million NFC handsets in 2012, and believes Apple will enter a more developed ecosystem in a year or two’s time. Forrester doesn’t have a specific handset forecast, but Golvin says that by year-end 2012 to mid-2013, the technology will be much more ubiquitous. By that point, says Golvin, “it will be difficult to find a smartphone that doesn’t include NFC functionality.” Maybe the NFC-enabled 4G iPhone 5 will be there, too. |
Buckyballs? So Passé | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | Just in time for the Ides of October, ThinkGeek brings us magnetic BuckyCubes, small, 4mm cubes that slide and slip together to create unique shapes. The kit comes with 125 rare earth magnets that can be combined and organized into various shapes. ThinkGeek already sells but coupled with these cubes you can be truly a God among Buckyfans. The come with a small carrying case and cost $24.99. Note: Do not eat or snort BuckyCubes. BuckyCubes are not alive. BuckyCubes cannot replace human contact. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCs2zu0CMNA] |
Michael Robertson Gets A Cease & Desist From Univision For DAR.fm, His “TiVo For Radio” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | is no stranger to legal threats from the music industry. The founder of MP3.com fought a against Universal Music Group in the 1990s over digital music copyrights, which MP3.com ultimately lost. He was by the music labels a couple years ago as the CEO of , and now he is raising the ire of the industry with his latest startup, . He just received a cease and desist letter from Univision (embedded below) for making it possible to record 26 of its radio stations. Dar.fm, which stands for Digital Audio Recorder), allows consumers to record Internet radio streams and listen to them later. “It’s a TiVo for radio,” argues Robertson. There are 16,000 radio shows from 5,000 different AM and FM radio stations listed on DAR.fm—everything from NPR’s Fresh Air to Rush Limbaugh. Users can find radio shows on DAR.fm and record them for later playback. But isn’t that the same as rebroadcasting copyrighted content? Contacted for comment, Robertson writes in an email: “We don’t believe people recording broadcasts is a copyright infringement—even if done via a cloud service… . It is not rebroadcasting just like your VCR is not rebroadcasting. It is personal recording. Courts have consistently ruled that personal recording of broadcasts is not a copyright infringement and does not require a license. This is why consumers can have and use a Tivo/DVR. DAR.fm is simply the identical service for radio.” Univision’s lawyers don’t see it that way. In its letter, they write: “we disagree with your characterization that your website allows users to record audio content in the same way that a DVR allows recording of audiovisual content for purposes of time-shifting.’ What Univision takes particular issue with is a new feature DAR.fm launched about a month ago, which lets users download their recordings from Dar.fm to their mobile devices, including iPhones, iPads, Android phones, and Blackberries. “Clearly, you should know that by enabling subscribers to download their recordings as MP3 files, your website is essentially opening the door for users to engage in copyright infringement, since unlimited copies can be made from downloaded MP3 files and then distributed to others.” Univision is demanding that all of its radio stations be removed from DAR.fm’s listings and blocked from being added to user’s personalized station playlists. Just as with MP3.com, which got in trouble for copying songs on its servers, the issue here seems to be the ability for user’s to copy and download recordings of the broadcasts to their own devices. But this is a murky legal area because if it is legal for people to record radio shows to their own devices, why shouldn’t that protection extend to the cloud? And vice versa, if they keep a personal recording in the cloud, why shouldn’t they be able to download that to a device as an MP3. If they then go ahead and rebroadcast that recording, then the copyright laws would kick in, but DAR.fm does not allow for rebroadcast via its service. “DAR.fm is bringing radio into the 21st century, by giving it the same capabilities that TV broadcasting has: time shifting, interactivity and portability,” argues Robertson. “The last decade is proof that time shifting TV was a great boon to the TV
industry. People watch 40% more TV now than 10 years ago and much of that credit is due to the DVR. Would anyone even know or watch on the History Channel without a DVR?” Well, he does have a point about . [scribd id=67630283 key=key-e4cg6f4uou9vgnrnqom mode=slideshow] |
Microsoft Doubles Down On Media, Reveals New Xbox Content Partners | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | You already know about Verizon bringing live TV to the Xbox 360, but it turns out that was just the tip of Microsoft’s great big television-related iceberg. In an effort to transform the television experience, Microsoft has struck deals with nearly to start injecting more media into their gaming platform. The full list of companies that Microsoft has forged alliances with is a veritable Who’s Who of the entertainment industry. Here’s a quick breakdown of Microsoft’s new stateside “entertainment partners,” and what we know about their new Xbox offerings. These companies join Microsoft’s existing line up of partners, like AT&T, ESPN, Netflix, and Hulu Plus. International readers shouldn’t fret at the sight of all this US content, because Microsoft has also struck agreements with more worldly sources of entertainment like the BBC (UK), Canal+ (France/Spain), MediaSet (Italy), and SBS On Demand (Australia). Check out the full list to see if your favorite international media outlet made the cut. In truth, a lot of the particulars are still up in the air at this point, but one thing is clear: Microsoft is dead serious about making the Xbox 360 the platform to beat. |
Socialcam Crosses 2M Downloads, Adds (Wait For It…) Video Filters! | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | , the ‘Instagram for Video’ that launched shortly before this year’s SXSW, has crossed a major milestone this week: it’s now been downloaded 2 million times across iOS and Android devices since it launched six months ago. It’s also launching the 3.0 version of its app, which adds a feature that makes the comparison to Instagram even more apt: you can now add video filters. You can find it on the app store . Yes, starting with Socialcam 3.0 you can choose to give your videos a “70’s” or “Bohemian” or vibe, or you can use experimental filters like “Electronica”. You can see the effects rendered in the viewfinder before you start recording, so you have a sense of what each looks like beforehand. The service has added several other features since we last wrote about it. For one, it’s now possible to create private accounts, where you specify who has access to your videos (before now everything was technically public, though it was hard to find videos of people you didn’t know). And you can now set the app to launch directly to the camera rather than the Socialcam UI — which is key if you’re planning to use it as your default camera. Socialcam was originally created as a side project at Justin.tv — it spun off as an independent startup (Justin.tv’s then-CEO Michael Seibel became Socialcam’s CEO, and Justin.tv cofounder Emmett Shear took his place). |
Zuckerberg: “I Really Do Use Facebook All Day Long.” | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 2 | developer posted the following earlier today, postulating that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is too busy wheeling and dealing to actually use Facebook, “In the same way drug dealers don’t use the product they sell, I doubt Zuckerberg is on Facebook all day. Visionaries don’t idle online.” Well, the proof is in the pudding as they say; From what it looks like, Zuckerberg immediately replied to Cohick’s status update, “No, I really do use Facebook all day long.” Perfect. Thus far 1,732 people have liked Zuckerberg’s response, 243 have liked Cohick’s original comment and 32 people have shared the exchange mostly because it humanizes Zuck, bringing him down to our level. I mean, if he was trolling Facebook enough to see that random person’s comment in the first place then he probably does spend a lot of time on the service. In my humble experience, Internet visionaries do spend massive amounts of time online, because having a deep and continually updating understanding of how people communicate and interact here sparks the visionary process. Besides, that drug dealer thing is mostly an urban myth anyways. |
Head Mounted Displays, DIY Augmented Reality And More At InsideAR | Jay Donovan | 2,011 | 10 | 2 | I was able to attend last week in Munich and check out many new and updated Augmented Reality concepts at the event. Several concepts I saw at the trade show portion resonated with where consumer AR is headed and some were merely for entertainment. But pretty much everything I saw tried, in some way, to push the envelope of technical possibility. I saw some cool new AR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) from and Sony (although Sony would not let me photograph their prototype), lots of furniture configurators, augmented textbooks, a DIY content authoring system and more. If you’ve read some of my posts here you will know that I am an Augmented Reality geek. Smitten the first time I watched The Terminator and his neato heads up display; I have pondered the concept ever since. I could try to describe the demos and products I saw at InsideAR, but instead I captured as many of the relevant examples as I could, on video, because a picture is worth…well, you know. In any event, the concepts/products I saw that seemed the most compelling and relevant were the Vuzix HMD, Metaio’s Creator software and the augmented textbook by linked-concept.de Here are links to all the companies in the videos.
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PayPal On Barriers To Google Wallet: Mass Adoption Of NFC Is Years Away | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 2 | As you may have read, Google its mobile payments platform recently, which allows you to pay for products in the real world by tapping your NFC-enabled Android phone against a compatible card reader. Shortly following the in May, payments giant PayPal went on the offensive, against Google and two former PayPal executives who now are in charge of mobile payments at Google. Allegations of “misappropriation of trade secrets, and “breach of fiduciary duty” were thrown out against these individuals. Clearly, it’s messy. While the lawsuit itself spoke volumes about PayPal’s view on Google Wallet, the eBay-owned company has not really commented on Google Wallet over the past few months. Until now. We sat down with PayPal’s director of communications, Anuj Nayar, who candidly gave me the company’s opinions on Google Wallet and NFC technologies. We know that eBay and PayPal have a somewhat interesting view on NFC technology. In a , eBay CEO John jokingly said merchants refer NFC “not for commerce.” But PayPal has in the NFC pool with support for Android, which Nayar explains as ‘keeping an eye’ on the technology. Nayar says that one advantage he sees with PayPal’s payments platform vs. Google Wallet is that “we’re not asking anyone to do anything different.” He points to the fact that in order to use NFC right now, many consumers would have to change phones to the NFC-enabled Nexus S. “There simply aren’t that many NFC enabled phones out there and we don’t see NFC as something that will happen very quickly,” he explains. Another challenge to the adoption Google Wallet’s platform and NFC, says Nayar, is trying to get merchants to change their behavior. As my colleague Greg Kumparak wrote in Wallet, merchant adoption is still limited. Nayar says that mass adoption of NFC is still at least three years away but even then, the technology will not replace mobile payments all together. Of course, he explains that PayPal is watching the NFC space closely (by launching their own integrations), but the sense is that the company isn’t heavily investing in the technology because of some of these barriers to adoption. An area where PayPal is investing in is a to integrate PayPal into the checkout experience. Later this year, PayPal will be rolling out a one-stop shop for merchants, both online and local businesses, to manage payments from customers. Details are sparse but PayPal says that new features will include location-based offers, making payments accessible from any device and offering more payments flexibility to customers after they’ve checked out. And soon, you’ll also be able to use PayPal in physical payments gateways at stores as well (where you would normally complete the credit card swiping process), and will have the ability to access realtime store inventory, receive in-store offers, and real-time location-based advertising from stores. The company is expected to announce a number of in-store partnerships with large retailers in the near future. Nayar says that PayPal’s solution is more complete for merchants, and is capitalizing on a huge factor in the end-to-end shopping experience—data. He explains that relevant data and personalization will play a big role in the new payments experience, so that PayPal’s 100 million-plus users will be able to see more relevant offers and experiences and merchants will be able to target customers. PayPal isn’t the first payments company to go on the offensive against NFC. Keith Rabois, COO of mobile payments company Square, that NFC “has no value proposition for consumers and merchants.” Still it’s hard to ignore the fact that Google, as well as other mobile tech companies like HTC, LG, Motorola, RIM, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, are Even credit card companies are making bets on And MasterCard, who is a partner in Google Wallet, has said that NFC is a As my colleague Sarah Perez points out, the merchant adoption hurdle to NFC is valid, but is already in more locations than consumers may realize, even if it’s somewhat underused. While there’s no crystal ball to tell us whether NFC will be around in a few years or ten years, clearly PayPal isn’t making a huge bet on the technology and is investing in other in-store technologies. However, even if NFC is years away from mass adoption, Google is gambling that being early to the game will help the company dominate the mobile payments market in the future. It will be surely be interesting to see whose foresight pays off in five years. And in case you were wondering, Nayar says there are no updates to the status of that PayPal v. Google lawsuit. |
PassMyWill Is A Will For Your Online Assets And Passwords | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 2 | This is a morbid topic to think about, but now that we have so many email, social media and other password-protected accounts, what happens to the access to this accounts when you pass away? Enter , which launched a few weeks ago at TechCrunch Disrupt’s hackathon. PassMyWill is basically a will for your online assets. The site distributes your social network passwords to your trusted loved ones after you die. Here’s how it works. On the site you create an account with your name and enter who your next of kin is and their email address. You also enter an encryption key that the recipient would know (i.e. the last four digits of your social security number). And then you enter the data, passwords and more that you want your next of kin to takeover once you pass. When you die, this information will be passed on to the recipient. So how does PassMyWill figure out when you are actually dead? You connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts on the site, and the startup will monitor how often you are posting and what is being posted on your wall. Once PassMyWill is convinced you may be gone, your next of kin receives the ‘Dead Man’s Switch’ e-mail. Founder Danil Kozyatnikov, who traveled to Disrupt from Siberia, Russia; assures that all data stored on PassMyWill is completely encrypted. Check out our video with Kozyatnikov (whose Startup Alley company as an audience choice winner) below. |
Amazon “Punches Apple Hard” With Kindle Fire’s $199 Price | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 2 | With the Kindle Fire, Amazon is making its first foray into tablet computers, a market where Apple dominates with its iPad and nothing else has even made a dent. The Android-based Kindle Fire is an and that the device itself is only part of the equation. It is merely the front-end of a set of end-to-end services which will deliver digital media from Amazon’s servers to people’s hands. But the Kindle Fire is no iPad, and Bezos knows that too. So he is using something else to differentiate the Fire from the iPad: price. The $199 price of the fire surprised almost everyone. It is $300 lower than the cheapest iPad 2. So even if it is not as fully featured, doesn’t work as smoothly and will launch with a laughably small number of apps ( about 15 percent of the number of apps available on the iPad, which is currently over 100,000), all of that may not matter. Because if it is good enough, millions of people will decide to buy it for $199 instead of spending $499 for an iPad. One of Amazon’s advantages as a retailer with scale has always been price. And it is using it effectively with the Kindle Fire, which is already the second-best selling Kindle on Amazon (the first is the new $79 Kindle). There is a reason the Kindle Fire is not launching with 3G service, and only WiFi. Amazon had to do everything to get it down to that $199 price point. Bezos knows he can’t take on Apple head on. Instead, he is doing everything he can to carve out a new space in the tablet market for Amazon, and price is a big part of it. In a letter to customers that is currently on the homepage of , he “punches Apple hard,” in the words of investor . The letter starts: There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp. Bezos made the same point during the launch announcement of the new Kindle line last week. “We are building premium products at non-premium prices,” he said. Apple, of course, builds premium products at premium prices. Will it have to respond by lowering the price of the iPad even lower, or can it stick to the high road? https://twitter.com/#!/Borthwick/status/120139578047864832 |
Driving on the left | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 10 | 2 | Driving on the left side stretches the muscles, especially including the one in your head. When Larry Page named Google as Google’s biggest problem, he was talking as a leader not just of the search giant but of the whole industry. Anticipating the first Apple event since Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO, it feels good to see others step up to the task. It’s not that any one of these leaders will fill that intuitive role. Jeff Bezos did it this week with his stunning price point, cloud browser, and clicks and mortar media streaming business. He’s not the only one, and neither is Marc Zuckerberg. But each in their own way are together shaping not just the technology business but the way we work together. And the answers are not easy or obvious. I work for one of these leaders. Marc Benioff has always had the leader gene in him, in ways that I recognize from my days in the record business. It’s like those baby pictures of a child. At the time you’re taken with the innocent smile, the wide-eyed wonder and something that looks fragile but is only waiting for the information. Sometimes the information is delightful, sometimes a loud startling noise, but always the signature of what some call the soul. Years later, you look back at these pictures and you see that now-grown up teen or adult staring right out at you. In some way it’s not that they grow up, but we do. I’ve seen the look in musicians in the studio, the purposeful relaxation that comes from working in the now. Listening yet knowing they are somehow born to get to that room at that time with those people who can play together. Collaboration is not an art, but getting there is. And once there, staying there. It’s a supple balance, living in that sharing space. Zuckerberg seems to understand what it should look like. Bezos seems to understand how the world can have an Apple and have room for more. Benioff understands the rhythm of the place, the surging of the business instantiating the resources for the next round of validating inspiration. On the ground next to these guys, it’s exhilarating in a way that gives way to an appreciation for how difficult it is to harness the minds and souls necessary to do big things. Like a fractal fragment, you can see in your own role the same structures, blockers, ideas, and moments of humor that carry you and the team forward. These social media tools can be understood for their value to our enterprise, but they also can provide the musical constructs that keep us coming back for more. These leaders, in differing ways and amounts, are writing the score of this time we’re in. Songs with no chorus, songs with codas and shifts in rhythm, the magic of the bridge that never returns. We don’t get confused by more than one leader in the business that used to be called music. Coltrane stood next to Miles, and Dylan and Harrison and Lenny and Winehouse. Some survived and some didn’t, but who they were and are is timeless. Hendrix sounds like a live stream, like the notes can be the same and the intervals the same and the blues the same and yet it keeps growing like it’s busy being born. Driving on the left is complicated by the lack of context; you aren’t yet comfortable with the intuition you’ve grown used to, the sense of danger and limits, of detaching from the road with the illusion that you’re the only mind you need to tend. The signs are the hardest part, crossing over from right to left brain or whichever it is, from the rhythm of the road to the logic of the structure, the mission of the directions, the choices that loom and then are replaced by recalculation and another rush to that same decision point. But as you collide with not enough time and not enough listening, you begin to learn how to distinguish the underlying rhythm of decisions, immutable in their logic and Darwinian in their implications. And then, suddenly and without any real announcement, you get it. You get the dance of the roundabouts, the coursing flow of living in the stream. It’s as though you were there all along but waiting for the hindsight to see it for what it is. And when you come back to the right side, it’s so familiar that you don’t lose what you’ve gained from finding that magical land, the one where you learn to hope for rain so that you can find the rainbows. |
Shoutz Mobile App Marries Video With A Twitter-Style Social Network | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | To add to the ever growing list of social networks out there, a “Twitter for video” mobile application called Shoutz is just making its way into the App Store and Android Market. The app allows users to connect with friends (or followers), along with their favorite sports stars or celebrities by both sending and receiving 15-second video clips, aka Shoutz. Much like and now Facebook, Shoutz lets you choose who you’d like to share certain Shoutz with, whether it be a one-on-one convo, a message to your family, your weekend softball team, gambling buddies, or your entire community of followers. The app has also partnered with different groups like the Nascar Members Club and NFL Alumni to let users join fan clubs, through which they can see Shoutz from their favorite drivers, players, artists etc. Users can only send Shoutz from the mobile application, but there is a that lets Shoutz users check in on the clips streaming across the Shoutz platform. The interface features tabs for trending Shoutz, a Fanclub-only stream, and Shoutz that are posted by friends. The app also integrates Facebook and Twitter, naturally. This, along with Shoutz role as a partner to many of these celebrities, brands, and advertisers, offers up what could be an interesting ad platform. For each public shout, Shoutz will display a small banner ad along the bottom of the screen, micro-targeted based on age, location, and the users’ social behavior. In the same way that celebrities have actively engaged with their fans on Twitter, the same could be true for Shoutz in video form — as long as the app breaks through its “empty room” phase quickly. The Shoutz app is available now from the and .
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Google Soon To Release Source Code For Ice Cream Sandwich | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Well, developers, it looks like Google will soon be releasing the code for Ice Cream Sandwich to the Android Open-Source Project. Thanks to a , the Technical Lead of the Android Open Source Project, and his link to an email written by , we do indeed have confirmation that Android 4.0 source code will see the light of day. “We plan to release the source for the recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it’s available on devices”, Morrill said in his Google Groups post. This week, Google officially announced Android 4.0, a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich, at an event in Hong Kong, in which it revealed the sexy new Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first phone to run ICS. You can check out . While Ice Cream Sandwich may usher in a new era of awesomeness for Android, developers were quick to note that the introduction ceremony (so to speak) was lacking in the release of any and all Ice Creamy source code. Some wondered if Google would take the same approach to Android 4.0 that it did to its predecessor, Honeycomb, and avoid releasing the source code to the public. At the time of its release, Google decided not to make Honeycomb available due to its being targeted at tablets, and, as Google VP of Engineering Andy Rubin : “To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs … we didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones”. Google didn’t want to take a chance of “creating a really bad user experience”, so it kept Honeycomb’s code out of public hands. that it will be publicly documenting its calendar and text-to-speech APIs for Ice Cream Sandwich. Which will mean some changes for those who have been using undocumented APIs. For more on that, . And . More to come. |
Weekly Watch Round Up | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 2 |
The . Durable titanium case and easy to read dial for people who just need a serious timepiece (for serious work and play). Looking at a modern classic, a very unique classic. The get’s remembered and recommended as a collectible. Love that Japanese deconstructionist steampunk look? are custom made by hand and not too expensive. For a bit more commentary, check out . [slideshow] |
Andreessen Horowitz, BBC, Greylock Put $20M In International Video Site ViKi | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | an international video site for world TV series and movies translated in 100+ languages by its community, has raised $20 million in new funding from SK Planet, BBC Worldwide, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others. This brings ViKi’s total funding to $25 million. For background, ViKi is an , and acquires the rights to TV shows and movies. The site then puts it on one of its channels and within the first 24 hours an organized, volunteer community subtitles the content using ViKi’s software. The site has gained considerable traction in the past year. Currently, ViKi is seeing and 36 million total visits in the past month, which is four times the traffic that ViKi has seen from last year. To date, 150 million words have been subtitled in 160 languages by the ViKi community, and the site features 5,000-plus hours of content. And in terms of content, ViKi is working on adding more premium content, including new licensing deals with BBC Worldwide, NBCU and A&E. ViKi also just launched and international TV series on Netflix with subtitles, and is expanding content on Hulu. The company just (with in-stream ads), and will contain TV series, movies, and entertainment news from around the world, with subtitles created by fans. The app currently includes movies from Japan, India’s Bollywood, Egypt, Indonesian and TV series from Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, Korea and the UK (e.g. Hotel Babylon & Mistresses from the BBC). ViKi is also partnering up with Samsung Southeast Asia to develop an Android app for the company’s tablets. The app will be launching later this year in Southeast Asia. The partnership is expected to expand to other regions early next year. What’s interesting about ViKi is that the model allows content owners to open up to new international markets. Clearly content partners like the BBC and top-tier investors are betting that ViKi is the future channel for international distribution and translation. |
Microsoft Talks Portrait Mode For Windows 8 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Most people right now think of as Microsoft’s big tablet effort. But I wonder whether it will ever actually be installed on more tablets than traditional laptops and desktops. After all, it’s not just Windows 7 Tablet Edition — it’s the next version of Windows, period. But there’s an wrinkle on tablet systems that has to be addressed that rarely, if ever, comes up on laptops: orientation. While very few people use their display in portrait mode, it’s extremely common to do so on tablets. Many apps and webpages work better when displayed vertically. So far, so normal for a tablet interface, but it must be just a little demoralizing to be working on something that a majority of users will never once encounter. . The stylized look of the Metro interface means it’s no small task to redo some apps, but they understand the usage scenarios and make things work. I like that things are optimized for thumb work in portrait mode, since it’s more likely you’ll be holding it with both hands in that situation (as opposed to it sitting in a stand or on a table, when it is more likely to be in landscape). But I don’t really agree with this sentiment here:
We’ve received questions and feedback about whether Windows 8 is “landscape first” or “portrait first.” Our point of view is that both portrait and landscape orientations are important, and experiences can be great in either orientation. Rather than picking a posture and orientation for optimization, we designed an experience that makes sense regardless of how the device is held, one that feels tailored for the app and its content. While choice should certainly be allowed, it seems like they’re prohibited from making some strong design decisions by refusing to take sides on this. I’m not saying every app should be locked into one orientation, but at the same time, I think it’s useless to pretend that some won’t work better in one or the other. But then again, there’s no accounting for user preference, and people would likely be frustrated if they tried to turn their favorite app on its side and only got an indication that this wasn’t possible. Even if the experience is “worse,” it’s a user choice that can’t be ignored. That’s the kind of restriction Apple is willing to Make, but not Microsoft (unless they have to) — it’s two schools of design, and both have their advantages. In the post, they also reveal that the minimum resolution that will support all of Windows 8’s UI features (multitasking, charms, etc) will be 1366×768. The way things are going, that many pixels could be fit onto a 5″ screen before long. I’m not sure I’d want that, exactly, but it’s a fun idea. |
Amazon Throws A Minor Curveball With HTML5-Powered Kindle Format 8 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Amazon has integrating many HTML5 tags and CSS attributes. Many expected a concession by Amazon in the form of an EPUB-compatible upgrade, and this comes as a slight surprise — but it’s a natural evolution of the format, really, and of course everyone is already familiar with the toolset. In a way this makes Kindle formatted books nothing more than extremely long webpages, but that’s really a matter of perspective. Flexible layouts and well-known rules for handling text, fonts, images, and so on mean that the file format is adaptable to many devices, zoom levels, resolutions, and so on. The full list of new tags and such can be found ; there’s no video or audio tag, tellingly, but apart from that it seems a fairly normal collection of HTML elements and CSS stuff. It’s probably a good thing that they’re leaving behind the venerable MOBI format, and their choice upon moving away from it was either to join the enemy ranks (EPUB), build a new format from scratch (tedious), or embrace a buzzword that just happens to fill most of the requirements of an ebook file format. Add a few hooks for Kindle-specific functions, change the extension, and you’ve got yourself a versatile new format for rich bookmaking. This naturally occurs after the release of the , which will benefit more than any other from this decision. Children’s books, comics, and textbooks seem to be the most obvious applications. As for the e-ink devices, Amazon says that in the next few months “our latest generation Kindle e-ink devices” will have access to the format as well. I think that leaves out everything up until . But their publishing tool will apparently make a copy (if possible) that will work on the older devices, presumably in the old format and lacking any HTML5-powered bells and whistles. Tablet and PC Kindle clients (like their ) will be able to take full advantage. |
null | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 5 | null |
HP’s Chief Strategy And Technology Officer Shane Robison To Step Down Nov. 1 | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | HP has just that its executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer will be retiring, effective Nov. 1. Robison, an 11-year HP veteran, also served as a member of the company’s Executive Council. In his role, he was responsible for shaping HP’s corporate strategy and technology agenda. He helped lead HP’s research and development and has led many of the company’s largest merger and acquisition activities. HP also announced that it will not be replacing the role of chief strategy and technology officer. He was one of four principal architects of HP’s merger with Compaq. Previously, Robison was senior vice president and chief technology officer of Strategy and Technology at Compaq. Prior to joining Compaq, Robison was president of Internet Technology and Development at AT&T Labs. “Shane has been a powerful innovator for our business groups and other corporate divisions,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “His passion for research and development has ensured that innovation continues at HP.” While he is retiring, Robison’s departure comes amidst turmoil and and transition at the company. HP just and Whitman as CEO with Leo Apotheker out. Whitman apparently to get HP back on track and perhaps this didn’t include Robison. |
The Scourge Of Pentile Returns With The Galaxy Nexus | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | As a man once said: “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” How true that saying is regarding the promises of high-definition mobile screens. Samsung fooled me once with the series, the of which gave me headaches just to look at. And now, after they fix that problem with the Galaxy S II, I hear they’ve for the Galaxy Nexus? Can’t get fooled again, Samsung. Can’t get fooled again. If you’re not familiar with Pentile displays, here’s a quick rundown: in traditional LCDs, each pixel is made up of one red dot, one green dot, and one blue . If you look closely at the screen from some angles, you can usually make them out. A Pentile display, however, lets pixels share dots by using a different dot layout and algorithms for determining what pixel gets which dot and when. The end result is technically a higher resolution, since you can get more pixels out of the same number of dots: No better demonstration of this than the Galaxy Nexus itself: the total number of red, green, and blue dots in its screen is 1,843,200. Coincidentally, that’s the exact same number of sub-pixels as the iPhone 4. But those sub-pixels are making up 1280×720 = 921,600 pixels on the Galaxy Nexus, and 960×640 = 614,400 pixels on the iPhone. Does it seem logical to you that a display can increase the number of pixels created by a number of sub-elements by a third and suffer no ill effect? They couldn’t do it on the Galaxy S, and it was visible to the naked eye. Text and borders had a from the way dots were shared between pixels. The Galaxy Note shows a polychromatic artifact effect on high-contrast things like black-on-white text. Will it be the same with the Galaxy Nexus? I haven’t held one in my hand so I can’t be sure, but I’m guessing that the combination of Pentile sub-pixel layout and a larger pixel pitch to begin will indeed make it visible. Some people don’t notice, and some don’t care. But if you’re picky about the quality of your display, make sure you set eyes on this thing before you buy it. For me personally, it’s a dealbreaker sight unseen. A man’s got to have principles. |
RIM Already Having Legal Woes Over BBX Trademark | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Poor RIM. They just can’t catch a break. Just two days after the official unveiling of their new BBX platform (the ), they’re already having legal papers thrown in their face. As it turns out, the BBX name (while rather fitting, given that it’s a merger of BlackBerryOS and QNX) wasn’t free for the taking. BASIS International, a software development company out of New Mexico, claims the trademark is theirs and that they’re willing to fight for it. BASIS International’s claim to the trademark lays in a product called BBx (short for Business BASIC eXtended), which they’ve been building since 1985 as an interpreter for the Business BASIC programming language. Never heard of it? Don’t worry — you’re not the only one. BASIS International isn’t filing their lawsuit just yet. They say they’ve given RIM until October 31st to respond to a cease and desist, essentially requesting that RIM stops using “BBX” immediately (read: they won’t.) And if RIM doesn’t comply? The company says they’ll “take the next logical legal step”. Meanwhile, RIM tells that they haven’t received the complaint — and even once they do, they see no problem. “We do not believe the marks are confusing, particularly since our respective companies are in different lines of business”. |
Nordeus’ Top Eleven gives its 1,000,000 daily active players an Android app – iOS to follow soon! | Ivan Beres | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Nordeus, makers of the extremely popular web-based football manager Top Eleven, have released their first mobile application: the Android version of their main product. Top Eleven for Android offers the same features and gameplay to Nordeus’s more than 3 million players in a user interface made for mobile gaming. Like its “big brother”, the Android application is free to play. Players can buy addons and both versions of Top Eleven use the same user profiles so players can easily move from the desktop to their mobile device, at least if they use an Android phone. Nordeus’ CEO Branko Milutinovic told Techcrunch that although they’ve launched an Android app, an iOS version of Top Eleven is in the making since their news have been set. Their plan was to first create the easier-to-produce of the two and then after testing it with their users launch the versions for Apple’s devices. has had a lot of success with Top Eleven which in terms of active players: then 200,000 more than its competitor. Since then Top Eleven has grown to over 1,000,000 daily active users, an impressive number in their industry. Top Eleven isn’t the only successful web based game to be ported to mobile devices. Zynga has developed iPad, Android and iPhone versions of a number of their games, such as FarmVille and Words with Friends. With a lot of casual gamers expecting to find the same or similar games on their smartphones like they play on the desktop, both Zynga’s and Nordeus’ efforts are logical. This doesn’t mean the company is putting all their money and time “just” into mobile. Nordeus launched the new, 2.0 version of Top Eleven earlier in the month both on TopEleven.com and on Facebook. The companies has fast become a model for other regional startups because of both its model and its method. Nordeus has never developed software for clients, a method used by a lot of development companies in Eastern Europe to bootstrap their business. They haven’t taken any outside investments either and with a team of 30 people working on a now profitable project, there are no signs they are planning to do so soon. You can for free. |
(Video Demo) Bill Gross Chimes In | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Earlier this week, (and Idealab) CEO Bill Gross launched a new product at the Web 2.0 Summit called . It is an interest stream for following people and things you care about. You can even (only what they share about tech, and not what they share about cats). Gross gave me a demo of the , which you can see above. |
Google Reader Getting Overhauled, Removing Your Friends | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Today Google announced its long-ignored RSS app Google Reader is getting an update. Most notably, it’s getting a fresh new design along the same lines as , like Docs, Maps, Search and Gmail. While I’m not entirely thrilled about this change (I prefer the utilitarian look for the service), I understand Google’s need to maintain user interface consistency across its online products. What really bothers me, however, is Google’s casual decision to remove all of Google Reader’s “social” features, including friending, following and shared link blogs. Look, I get that there’s probably only ten of you out there reading this who care much about changes to Google Reader. For mainstream news consumers, that Google is now streamlining and beautifying this neglected product is probably welcome news. But for those of us who use Google Reader regularly as a utility – as a place to track, follow, archive and search dozens of sources of information from favorite blogs to company feeds and more – any change to Reader has the equivalent impact as an overhaul of Gmail. In other words, proceed carefully or prepare for an earful. And in this particular case, here comes the earful: I’m going to miss the “social” features Google Reader delivers. Wait, don’t laugh! To be clear, I don’t really consider or use Google Reader as “social” product like Facebook, Twitter or Google+ (hence the quotes). I don’t comment much on feeds, or friend and follow dozens of users. But I do enjoy reading the shares from a select group of heavy-duty RSS consumers who are consistently sharing interesting items. When I’m behind on the day’s news, all I have to do is read TechCrunch, TechMeme and this carefully constructed “human curated” list of shares. It is, and will be up until the day it disappears, one of the most regular and enjoyable news consumption behaviors I engage in every day. Although there are many other services out there that promise to bubble up relevant content based on my interests, the best product I’ve used to date was the human curation of my Google Reader friends. Not only did my group consistently share the top tech news I’d want to read, they also share those oddball but interesting stories from outside of tech, including humorous cartoons, popular videos, space and science news, parenting tips and other news completely unrelated to tech, but still compelling. Of course, there were probably only a handful of us really using this feature, so of course, like , it’s getting axed too. But Google, if you think I’m going to “Circle” this group in order to continue reading their shares, you’ve got another thing coming. You can’t force me into using Google+ by stealing pieces of Google Reader. That’s not how that’s going to work. |
Verizon Lights Up 22 New Cities With 4G LTE Coverage | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Get ready, Verizon subscribers. You may have reason to upgrade to a brand new LTE-capable device — like the — now that Verizon has extended its 4G LTE coverage to 22 new cities. The LTE extension into these 22 new cities will bring Verizon’s 4G coverage to a total of 165 cities today, with 13 more areas lighting up on November 17. New cities getting the LTE love today include: Birmingham, AL; Modesto and Stockton, CA; Bloomington, Elkhart, Evansville, South Bend, and Terre Haute, IN; Sioux City, IA; Hagerstown, MD; Tupelo, MS; Albuquerque and Sante Fe, NM; Buffalo, NY; Asheville, NC; Bartlesville, OK; Jackson and Martin, TN; Greater Hampton Roads and Richmond, VA; and Green Bay, WI. Verizon also extended its existing 4G LTE coverage in Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington D.C. and Erie, PA. With today’s roll out and another one scheduled for November 17, Verizon’s 4G LTE network will cover a total of 178 cities in just under a month. By then, Verizon said it would offer at least 13 LTE-capable devices to customers. |
Microsoft Revenue Up 7% To $17.37B, Earnings At $0.68 Per Share | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Microsoft just its first quarter 2012 earnings with revenues of $17.37 billion, an 7% increase from the same period of the prior year. Microsoft’s operating income was at $7.20 billion, its net income was $5.74 billion and its diluted earnings per share were at $0.68, a 10% increase from last year. Microsoft attributed this revenue growth to the demand of several key products,”We had another strong quarter for Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync, and saw growing demand for our public and private cloud services including Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online, and Windows Azure,” said Microsoft COO Kevin Turner. Notably, Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype was also completed during this quarter. The company beat Wall Street’s revenue estimates, which were at $17.25 billion, and hit EPS estimates, $0.68 a share, square on the nose. The Business Division and Windows Live Divisions continued to be the company’s biggest assets, with $5.62 billion and $4.8 billion in revenue and $3.25 billion and $3.66 billion in operating income respectively. Microsoft’s Online Services Division, a.k.a. Bing, continued to operate at a loss despite 19% revenue, at $494 million lost versus $558 million in the same quarter last year. Microsoft’s earnings call will be at 2:30PM today, and you can follow it live here. https://twitter.com/#!/alexia/status/127120947340775424 |
Opinionaided Brings Mobile Q&A App To Android | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Startup is bringing its mobile Q&A app to Android phones with the launch of a new native app. Opinionaided previously offered an iOS app and web platform to allow users to get advice and opinions on the fly. Within the app, users can input a question, determine a category (i.e. relationships, politics) and submit it for other Opinionaided users to answer. You can also publish your questions to Facebook and Twitter. After a question is posted, fellow Opinionaided users can comment on the question, thumps up or thumbs down qursions, and the app will calculate the percentage of users that responded positively or negatively. From there, consumers can reply back to the comments or create a new question for peers to vote on. The startup says there is a range of types of questions users are asking include: “Are these shoes appropriate for an interview?” “What do you think of this photo I took on vacation?” “Should I join the army?” To reward good feedback, the Opinionaided community can give gold stars to their peers, and those with a history of providing great advice become top advisors on that topic. Feedback is broken-down by the percentage of those who responded positively or negatively, and a separate list of all user comments. While the full comments are private to the person seeking advice, everyone sees the current thumbs up and thumbs down percentages after they answer a question. On average, responses start to arrive only six seconds after being shared and users receive between 50 and 100 responses overall. The company is finding that its user base consists of people who are augmenting their traditional social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, with its opinion-based community. And Opinionaided’s userbase spends an average of over three and a half hours using the app each month. Last weekend alone, the app generated 10 million responses to 250,000 questions. |
Toshiba Shows Mobile LCD With 2,560 × 1,600 Resolution And 498PPI Density | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | If you thought the 4.5-Inch LCD screen with 720×1,280 pixels resolution is cool, think again: today took the wraps off a that’s even better. Sized at 6.1 inches, it boasts 2,560×1,600 pixels resolution and 498 pixels-per-inch density. Needless to say, the direct-view-type screen is the first of its kind. It has a contrast ratio of 1,000:1, displays 16.7 million colors and offers a 176° viewing angle (horizontally and vertically). Here’s how a set of Japanese characters looks like with different PPI: Toshiba plans to showcase the LCD next week at the in Yokohama, Japan. In August, the company announced it will its small LCD business unit with those of Sony and Hitachi. |
Gmail Gives An Accidental Peek At Its Upcoming Redesign | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | A video inadvertently posted to Google’s YouTube account has given a sneak peek at some of the changes that will be coming to Gmail in the very near future. It was quickly taken down, but not before a few screenshots were snagged by . The new UI is obviously based on the Gmail ‘preview’ theme that it began back in June, which has more whitespace and options for tweaking how densely you want your conversations listed. The biggest change seen in the video is the conversation/reply view, which looks a lot more like Facebook Messages — each person in the conversation has their photo shown, and it’s easier to read previous messages in the thread. Another key change: Gmail will start surfacing its advanced search features as soon as you click the search box. Before now these haven’t been as easily accessible — you’d have to either click a ‘show search options’ link, or use search operators (“sent:”, “has:attachment”, etc.). Now these options will pop up immediately, and you can also create a new filter from your search query on the fly. There are some more minor tweaks as well. Some buttons are now represented with visual icons reminiscent of those seen in Android Honeycomb/Ice Cream Sandwich. You can now manually adjust the size of the Labels and Chat windows. And there’s a new slick effect: as you resize your browser window, Gmail will dynamically adjust its layout so that everything fits. They’re nice improvements, but, as someone who lives in Gmail all day, there are still a lot of changes I’d like to see. In particular, there are some features that Hotmail (yes, Hotmail) recently that I’d love Gmail to reproduce. For instance, in Hotmail it’s now possible to automatically delete certain messages after a few days (there’s no reason to let all those expired deals clutter your inbox, after all). :
Google took its video down, but here’s a mirror, again via :
[youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF2I8c3fNQs’]
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Nearly Half Of Leica Sold Off To Blackstone Group For Rumored $179 Million | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Comparing and Kodak is an interesting exercise. While they’re not the same by any stretch of the imagination, both rode the wave of photography throughout the 20th century and, come the age of digital imaging, both stumbled. Kodak is and Leica has found a new prosperity in its high-end digitals. But Kodak is still in its crisis period and Leica appears to be well past. So much so that they’re selling nearly half of the company in order to make a big push in emerging markets. What use “emerging markets” have for $5000 cameras, clearly Leica knows better than I. 44% of the company was sold to Blackstone Group LP, which considers it a “medium- to long-term investment. The price was not disclosed, but the cites a source close to the matter who put the purchase at $179 million. If true, that would put their valuation at just north of $400m. That’s a far cry from the $82m Andreas Kaufmann paid for the nearly the entire company back in 2004, but with $250m and yearly sales and $36m in net income, it easily passes the smell test. They’ve shown steady growth over the last few years, but that’s been primarily in Europe and the US, markets already familiar with the brand and, generally speaking, quite rich. The investment by Blackstone gives Leica some capital to work with in expanding their business to Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Their plans were not detailed beyond that. That kind of money is sufficient to fuel research and development of an entirely new camera system. Is this Leica signaling that the M system is going to have a new sibling soon? It’ll be a while before the deal goes through and the money is put to use, but I’d say that’s a fairly good bet. [via and ] |
Crayola Trace & Draw Lets Your Kids Get Dangerously Close To Your iPad | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | In the future, when imagination dies, scientists will point to the Crayola Trace & Draw as a watershed moment. “Kids weren’t drawing, after this thing,” they’ll say. “Art died. They just traced.” The Trace & Draw is a shatterproof case that goes around your iPad two and, coupled with a free app, allows you to slap a sheet of paper over your iPad and let the wee ones trace images and animations. It includes a marker and “50 sheets of pre-sized tracing paper” which suggests that this might be a sort of razors and blades sort of situation, which makes it even more confounding. They cost $39.99 each (the same price as the similar ) and, if nothing else, makes a good, strong case for giving junior the reins. You can pick one up or wait until they end up in Odd Lots in four months. |
Apple To School The World’s Developers On iOS 5 With “Tech Talk World Tour” | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is a pretty great event for developers — but, contrary to the implications of the “Worldwide” name, it’s not quite as great for folks who can’t make their way to San Francisco. Looking to sing the word of iOS 5 to developers who just can’t justify the trip, Apple is once again setting out on what they call the “Tech Talk World Tour”. They held similar events in 2008 and 2009, with an unexplained hiatus in 2010. Also unlike WWDC: the Tech Talks are free. You’ll need to be a registered iOS developer (and they’ll give priority to folks who already have apps in the store), but it’s otherwise on the house. Looking , it’s clear what the focus of the talks will be: iOS 5 and iCloud. If you’ve never been to one of these events and have a serious interest in development, it’s well worth the (non-existent) entry fee. Apple brings out some of their finest engineers, and you get actual face time with the guys who know this stuff better than anyone. You can sign-up or find more info Don’t expect to hear much in the way of secret new details at these events — but hey, if you … you know . |
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley: “The Daily Deal Companies Are Version 1.0” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 20 | In Part II of my TCTV interview with Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, we get down to brass tacks: How will Foursquare make money? (In , we talked about Radar, Siri, and how mobile interfaces are changing). Foursquare is already experimenting by with various daily deal companies, , to show nearby local deals to Foursquare users. But Foursquare is ultimately taking a different approach. “”The daily deal companies are version 1.0 of great things you can build with the Internet that help local merchants drive foot traffic into the door. What we are doing with Foursquare is version 2.” Groupon is great at driving lots of customers into stores, he acknowledges, “but there is always a question of whether they are repeat customers.” Foursquare is focused more on loyalty—identifying loyal customers and rewarding them (with Mayor and Check-in specials). Crowley thinks the bigger opportunity is to give local merchants the data to segment their customers. People who check in a lot are loyal, those who don’t check in any longer are lost (and maybe there are ways to bring them back), and people checking into similar places in the vicinity are good potential prospects. “The best thing about Groupon and Livingsocial is they taught an army of merchants that there are better tools,” says Crowley. “We know we are going to be very good at helping merchants identify their best customers and building the tools that drive new customers into the business.” With Radar and Explore, Foursquare is starting to recommend places to go. I asked Crowley if there would ever be paid recommendations popping up in Foursquare. It is not something he is planning, but he did not rule it out. Of course, Groupon is also trying to come up with ways to and not just first-time visits. I pressed Crowley on what many see as Foursquare’s biggest weakness. There is no way to tell whether people who check in actually buy anything. Foursquare needs a way to close the between an offer and a purchase. “We have thought of different ways to get involved in the payment process,” says Crowley. One way is to strike more deals with credit card companies like its , which offers check-in specials redeemed at purchase by swiping your credit card. Foursquare is working on getting some of that transaction data so that it can help merchants determine which promotions work and which ones don’t. (Watch of this interview as well). |
Europe’s Square iZettle Raises $11 Million For Mobile Payments Technology | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Europe’s Square competitor has raised $11.2 million in Series A funding (€8.2 million) led by with co-investor Creandum and further investment from Charles Dunstone, CEO and Co-founder of The Carphone Warehouse. We in August, but the deal has been confirmed today. iZettle, which is based in Sweden, earlier this year as a card reader that allows users to take credit card payments from chip-enabled credit or debit cards. The free device plugs into the iPhone’s port, and you download companion app from App Store and sign up for an iZettle account. To process a transaction you simply plug in the chip-card reader, enter the amount and a short description of the item you are selling, take a picture and insert the buyer’s credit card. The reader scans the chip in the car, you tap “Pay”, let your customer sign on the device screen to confirm the purchase and the app will send a receipt to his or her email address. iZettle will deposit funds in a merchant account by the next business day. iZettle says that it is more secure than other mobile payments options and is EMV (Europay, MasterCard and VISA) approved, and compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). No sensitive data is ever stored on the mobile device or iZettle reader, and all data traffic is encrypted. The experience is very similar to that of mobile payment disruptor Square, but instead of a swiper, iZettle works with chip-enabled cards, which are popular in Europe. The iZettle chip-card reader and app are free but the company charges per transaction. The price per transaction varies between countries and iZettle’s first market, Sweden, it is approximately €0.16 per transaction plus 2.75% per transaction. Square, which only works in the U.S. for now, recently and charges 2.75% per transaction. The new funds will be used to expand into chip-card markets outside of Sweden as well as support the continued development of the iZettle. Co-founder Jacob de Geer tells me that he plans to expand iZettle to other European countries including the UK, Spain, Italy, France and Germany. |
Estonia's PipeDrive de-cloaks at AngelPad demo day | cloudbrows | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Today Estonian startup presented at the demo day of the often publicity-shy , the San-Francisco-based accelerator founded by ex-Googlers. The only eastern European startup out of the 15 teams in the accelerator’s summer 2011 edition, is developed by sales people for sales people. What other cloud-based CRM systems are missing, Pipedrive attempts to deliver. The main dashboard shows deals in a pipeline from an initial contact, to contract negotiations to done deals. After 40 initial leads, 20 warm, 15 hot, 8 are closed, to quote their example. Timo Rein and Urmas Purde, the founders of Pipedrive, are the sales guys. The previous business they co-founded, VAIN & Partners, the Baltic sales training company, sold its services to 10 000 customers. Despite trying out various CRM tools (the latest one costing 50 000 Euros to the company), they ended up using the post-it notes to visualize and discuss their sales pipeline. This is how Rein and Purde managed their sales process before Pipedrive. Something had to be done, and this is why Pipedrive has been created. This is how a deal pipeline looks like now. Other CRM tools which sprang up over the past few years such as , , and even (which is backed by ) are all tweaking either the good old or , making it cheaper and easier to use CRM systems in the cloud. Pipedrive is challenging a crowded market segment. It gives its customers a visibility of the complete sales process: “This is what I am working on, this is what I have to do and this is where I want to get to”. The company has paying customers since March 2011 and considers SMEs amongst its target client base, 40% of which come from the US. In fact, the layout of the deals pipeline is so intuitive, professionals are using it to track recruitment and fund-raising process besides sales. To be fair to the readers, I have reviewed other cloud-based CRM tools, and I have established that they do not offer the same visualization of the sales process. Here they are, although Rein believes that their main competitors are Excel and post-it notes. Pipedrive cost $12 per month for a solo license, $26 per month for a lite version, $53 for Business version and $121 for Business XL. The sole investor of 37signals is Jeff Bezos. One of the founders David Heinemeier Hansson is an inventor of development framework Ruby-on-Rails. The solution focuses more on recording, managing and sharing contacts. Deal functionality is included, but is not the main value proposition. Price: Free (up to 250 contacts, no file uploads), Basic $24, plus $49, premium $99. PipelineDeals compares itself with a Salesforce as a horse versus a tank. Simple to deploy, it is a typical CRM system, only cloud-based. Contacts, emails, to-do list and reporting functionality is included and can be accessed instantly via a browser. The price is $15 per user per month. A CRM module of this cloud-based office suite comes in three packages: the price is free for up to 3 users, limited functionality, a professional edition at $12 per user per month, and enterprise edition at $25 per user per month. There are add-ons including a mobile version. This customizable tool is all about automating sales process,deals reporting and revenue forecast. Basically, the company wants sales people never to have to leave its environment, by integrating contacts, emails and other tools into its system. Something InvisibleCRM did for to simplify the integration of the personal productivity tools such as MS Office with a time-consuming sales activity reporting. Express version costs $35, Small Business costs $50, and prices for an Enteprise license is available per application only. The company claims to provide its product and services to over 5000 clients worldwide. Contacts, to-do lists, tasks and deals reporting tools are all part of this cloud-based system which claims to be the most successful one on the market. The company aims to be an “Anti-Salesforce” and appears to compete with PipelineDeals on price, by offering $14.95 per user per month for its CRM tool. The functionality, from what it appears to be, includes standard CRM toolbox, such as contact recording and management, tasks, associated with the contacts, to do lists and management reports. |
Vivint Solar Announces $75m Partnership With U.S. Bancorp, Expansion Into Three New Markets | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | “If they’re [the solar panels] not producing energy, you’re not paying for it.” That was Vivint CEO, Todd Peterson on Vivint Solar, the company’s latest attempt at bringing renewable energy to consumers in a disruptive fashion. Through Vivint Solar, customers do not have to pay anything up front for solar power. They simply sign a contract, allow Vivint to strategically place solar panels on their roof and then buy the produced energy at a locked-in rate 20-30% below that of the local utility company. And again, if it happens to be an unusually cloudy summer, you don’t take a loss since you didn’t pay anything up front. Vivint Solar is announcing today a partnership with U.S. Bancorp that will allow the company to expand from its initial test market. A $75 million renewable energy tax equity fronted by U.S. Bancorp will help fund residential solar energy systems in the new markets of Utah, Hawaii and New York. But don’t worry. Vivint is working hard at expanding nationwide. I talked to both Vivint CEO, Todd Peterson and Tanguy Serra, president of Vivint Solar in regards to the expansion. Serra explained that this was the natural path for Vivint. They already provide 80,000 consumers with energy management tools through its home automation and security offering. Peterson noted that Vivint already has a large base of trained installers and experienced customer support staff. Internal retooling and training only cost the company $200k.
Vivint Solar quietly started installing solar systems within a New Jersey test market last summer. The 2011 trial went well and thanks to partnership with Bancorp, they’re slowly expanding to new markets. The process is reportedly surprisingly easy, too. A consumer simply needs to sign a contract that locks in the power rate for 20 years and allows Vivint Solar to install the panels on the consumer’s roof. From there, a Vivint staffer files the appropriate forms with the local municipalities, which takes anywhere from days to weeks (depends mostly on your city). During this waiting period, Vivint will take a solar reading of the roof and pull 20 years of weather data to determine optimal panel placement. The installation itself only takes 3-4 hours thanks to Zep Solar’s versatile modular system that allows for horizontal and vertical panel orientation. Vivint was hessitent to use real numbers in regards to the actual monthly cost. I was told each state will have a different rate and Vivint will work to keep the cost 20 – 30% under that sold by utility companies. Plus, they’ll lock-in the agreed-upon rate for 20 years. That long-term commitment is made a little less scary through a bit of fear mongering in regards to the rising cost of oil. is doing solar energy differently. The model guarantees monthly energy savings and removes the scary initial cost — but through a scary-long 20 year contract. However, you have to buy power from , so why not buy clean energy harvested from your roof? That’s at least what Vivint Solar hopes consumers think. More savvy homeowners might want to price out a similar system and figure out if there’s greater savings to be had by buying a system outright. But as the Vivint’s CEO stated, their system doesn’t cost a thing on a dreary winter day. |
A Quick Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Feature Rundown | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | While hardware junkies like myself may have spent the past few weeks drooling over the , the onstage demo of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich proves that the software powering the device is just as impressive (if not a little moreso). Our hands-on with the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich will be coming shortly, but here’s a quick rundown of what Android 4.0 will be bringing to the table come November. Our is live! Hit the link to see Ice Cream Sandwich’s features in action. |
Ice Cream Sandwich: “Native Resolution” Is 720p | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | While introducing the new Galaxy Nexus today in Hong Kong, Samsung’s senior VP for product innovation, Kevin Packingham, said something that surprised me a little. He said that Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, is “specifically designed” to work with 720p as its native resolution. That seems a bit odd considering there will likely be only a handful of phones with displays capable of that. Furthermore, almost every tablet running Honeycomb is running a 1280×800 display. Not that 80 pixels is a huge difference, but it’s significant for app developers. In a way it’s forward looking, as 16:9 and high-density displays are definitely growing in popularity, but the fact is that for a good long while they’re just plain going to be expensive, part of the high-end superphone crowd. If Android 4.0 is supposed to be the road on which Android 2 and 3 finally meet, setting a standard neither one seems to use is a bad place to start. It may simply be that Google is embracing the fact that the Galaxy Nexus with its big 720p screen is, realistically speaking, going to be the only ICS device out there for a while. Maybe 4.1 will bring the various tools required accommodate lower resolutions and different aspect ratios. A native resolution isn’t a bad choice for a pilot device, though. If ICS doesn’t have to fit onto the great unwashed variety out there just yet, they can nail down UI principles, hunt down bugs, and generally focus on looking good — and then their next job can be entirely composed of adapting that work to new resolutions. It’s also possible that Packingham was just overstating the case. |
(TCTV Exclusive) DropBox CEO Drew Houston Says The $250 Million “Is All Going Into The Company” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Today DropBox decided to officially announce its series B round (which actually closed in Sepetember and we , and with follow up reports). I took a break from the Web 2.0 Summit to drop by the DropBox offices down the street in San Francisco to talk to CEO and founder Drew Houston about what may be the largest series B funding round ever. (Actually, Better Place topped it with a series B in 2010). In the exclusive TCTV video interview above, I ask Houston about the round and what he plans to do with all that money. After all, he just raised more money than many companies do when they go public. How much did the founders and existing shareholders take off the table? “It’s all going into the company,” he tells me. “Nobody sold any stock.” Houston believes he is on pace to triple the number of DropBox’s users this year from 45 million. DropBox is in a very good spot. But now it faces competition from Apple, which just launched iCloud, Google, and others. In the clip below I ask Houston about the threat from Apple and whether he really turned down a from Steve Jobs. Watch below to hear him describe that meeting. |
Google’s Infinite Bookcase: An Abstract Browser For Limitless Libraries | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | I wrote a while back about the eventual necessity for the internet to . The trouble is that the things in the world we consider beautiful in an informational context — magazine and book layouts, typography, etc. — are necessarily limited in the information they have to present. It’s this limitation, the known quantity aspect, that lets designers work effectively. How should you design something, then, that presents effectively limitless information (say, all the world’s books) through a fairly limited medium (say, a web browser)? Google has one idea. Put them on . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GqhJDPi-Ug&feature=player_embedded w=640] As you can see, they’ve got this WebGL-based demo up and running with about 10,000 titles that have been indexed by Google Books. It’s separated by genre, and you can zoom between genres with a thrilling effect. Makes me think of the Tower of Babel: But is this really something people will want to navigate? Probably not. People like analogs in their digital catalogs, and this one seems a little bit too off the wall. Sure, there are books in rows. But it’s also a corkscrew extending to the sky. And people are used to seeing their books arranged spine out — which isn’t necessarily the best thing in the world, but it is a superior information density. And I wonder if it might be better to put people inside instead of outside? Anyway, . Note to Mac Laptop users: be careful how you swipe or you may accidentally navigate off the page or invoke some arcane gesture. |
Galaxy Nexus Officially Announced At Hong Kong Event (Update: With Video) | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | There’s still half an hour to go until the Galaxy Nexus officially takes the stage in Hong Kong, but the has already begun to make the rounds. The Galaxy Nexus is, of course, the first device to run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but the spec sheet has confirmed a few nifty features we were hoping would make the final cut. One long-awaited example is the ability to take screenshots by holding down the power and volume down buttons. The device also adds support for a novel “face unlock” feature that (what else?) allows users to gain access to their handsets just by flashing their pearly whites. The new People app also makes an appearance, complete with Google+ integration. The notification and multitasking systems have also been revamped to allow for quicker info and app management. As far as hardware goes, the Galaxy Nexus is set to impress. It packs a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED display running at 1280×720, 1GB of RAM, and a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor. Sorry folks, no word on the exact make of the processor, but the night still is still young and someone is bound to give out details sooner or later. The Galaxy Nexus indeed sports an NFC chip, as well as either an LTE or HSPA+ radio depending on your particular locale. It’s also being reported that the device will come in both 16 and 32GB variants, which likely won’t do much to appease those in search of microSD card slots. For better or worse, the 5MP camera that was hinted at in an earlier leak has been confirmed, although Samsung mentions that the camera will take photos with virtually no shutter lag. On the flip side, users will find a 1.3MP front-facing camera ready that’s ready for a bit of face time. Samsung has managed to squeeze all of that into a body that’s just 8.94mm thick — not quite territory, but impressive nonetheless. The Galaxy Nexus is due to launch early November in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The Galaxy Nexus’s promo video has just gone live on YouTube. Enjoy! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_ke3rxopc&w=640&h=360] |
Ballmer On Not Buying Yahoo: “Sometimes You’re Lucky” | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Speaking today at Web 2.0, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was boisterous as usual. In a rousing talk with John Batelle, Ballmer talked about how, since last being on stage at Web 2.0 three years ago, Bing has doubled its market share, Microsoft hasn’t completely given up on competing with Google+ and social, the tech giant bought , among other topics of interest for Microsofties and Windows aficionados. In what was both a stroll down memory lane, and a calibration of Microsoft’s roadmap going forward, Batelle raised the question of whether or not Ballmer was glad that . “Times change”, the CEO said. “You ask any CEO who didn’t buy something big before the market crashed [in 2008, they’ll probably say], ‘Hallelujah!'”. But, in a twist of fate, the U.S. economy dipped into one of the biggest recessions in history in 2008, and had Yahoo accepted Microsoft’s terms, perhaps ironically, the deal would have been settled right around the time that Lehman collapsed, he said. “Sometimes you are lucky”, Ballmer admitted, grinning. When asked if Microsoft is punting on social, Ballmer said that Skype and Xbox “seem social” to him and likely represent entry points into the broadly “social” market, and that, going forward, Microsoft is looking to add connectivity into its core products, specifically as its Skype product integration continues. Then, regarding Microsoft’s play in apps in the cloud? Ballmer, channelling Charlie Sheen, chanted: “We’re winning, winning, winning”. When asked who Microsoft is beating? Google. Lastly, all those gathered couldn’t let Ballmer go without asking about mobile. In reference to how Microsoft is competing with Android, the skyrocketing young upstart in the mobile market, Ballmer seemed optimistic about the prospect of Windows tablets, and phones specifically. Windows Phones have a leg up from the average consumer’s perspective, he said, because “you don’t need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows phone”, the CEO quipped. Zing! |
Fantasy Shopper turns window shopping into a social game where users can buy | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | A new venture backed by European Seed accelerator HackFWD has launched today. is a new social shopping game where players discover and share the latest fashion from real-world online retailers. Look out shopping addicts this is seriously addictive. On Fantasy Shopper, users spend Fantasy Money to buy virtual clothing, create outfits and stock out their virtual wardrobe. Launching first in the UK with over 100,000 virtual items from 40 retailers in clothes, accessories and sports goods, the game takes the users from shopping in London to other major world destinations. The game is pretty social as users get to share their purchases and create outfits. The product has been developed for the last 12 months in Exeter, UK, and launches today after being run in closed beta for 3 months. Chris Prescott, Fantasy Shopper CEO says “Our target audience is used to beautiful, feature-rich and well-developed products, so that’s the kind of a product we wanted to launch.” The startup has HackFwd backing but also won two business contests earning £30,000. While the user numbers in private beta were kept limited, some users collect up to 20 “Paydays” every day says Chris. Paydays are Fantasy Shopper’s hourly balance boosts that keep the users’ Fantasy Wallets healthy. An API will be released. CEO Chris Prescott studied computer science at Exeter University but dropped out and developed the idea of Fantasy Shopper alongside his other work. Chris and CTO Daniel Noz met exactly one year ago, after Chris had placed adverts looking for a co-founder to join him in Exeter. Dan moved from Germany two weeks later. At launch, the team is six people and hiring. |
Amazon Lets You Spin Up A Supercomputer Cluster | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Thousands of companies from Dropbox to Netflix rely on to provide storage and computing in the cloud. Amazon’s cloud computing offerings range from storage to on-demand computing cycles. But Amazon wants companies to ask themselves what their engineers could do if they had access to a supercomputer? Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Amazon highlighted a combination of existing services which allow companies to spin up the equivalent of a supercomputer to solve big data problems. Amazon uses these services itself to better handle the 50 million changes per week to its retail catalog of 1.5 billion items. Depending on the job, it could require the combination of Amazon S3 (its cloud storage service), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Elastic MapReduce (Hadoop clusters). Yelp uses the approach to autocorrect spelling in its millions of reviews. , spun up a cluster of 30,000 computing cores which would have cost $18 million for them to build themselves. Instead it only cost $1,300 per hour of data crunching. We are now full circle with the ability to rent time on massive computing resources. Shouldn’t IBM be doing this? : In an earlier version of this post, I misidentified the service as (EMR), which is what I heard while liveblogging. It is actually a combination of existing services which combine to create supercomputing capabilities. No new services were announced today. |
Pandora’s Westergren: The Biggest Tectonic Shift In Music Is From Terrestrial To Personalized Radio | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | This afternoon at The Web 2.0 Summit, Pandora Co-founder sat down with Fortune Editor Adam Lashinsky to talk about what’s going on at everybody’s favorite personalized radio platform. For those who may have missed it, Pandora recently , putting its “P” ticker symbol right smack in the middle of “IPO” — and the NYSE. And its stock has remained pretty high, both literally and figuratively, pricing at over $16 a share on its opening day, and is today trading around $15.20 per share. So far, so good. Furthermore, today the company counts 37 million active users and, as Westergren has said on multiple occasions, is finally hitting scale. Part of the reason that the co-founder believes that the company has been able to reach scale, and continue to grow across mobile and the web, is due to the fact that the entire industry is shifting from broadcast/terrestrial radio to personalized radio. Of course, Westergren is wont to say that this shift is endemic to an entire industry, as Pandora has really been at the forefront of pushing personalized radio across different forms of media. And, based on its mobile adoption in particular, where Pandora reaps 70 percent of its users, it doesn’t look like Westergren is wearing rose-colored glasses. Another interesting statistic the co-founder mentioned today was that Pandora currently has over 900,000 songs in its repertoire, and the majority of those songs were played last month — one of the biggest differences between traditional and new radio, where the diversity of the musical catalog is far smaller. Therein lies Pandora’s value proposition: Allowing listeners to personalize their radio experience, as well as exposing listeners to a wider breadth of artists, songs — and, in turn, giving artists a far longer reach than ever before. To this point, Westergren said, “new” radio is helping the long-tail, by playing more songs. And, it’s important to note that Pandora pays to performers. While this may hamstring the platform a bit financially, it’s great for musicians. Terrestrial (or broadcast) radio only pays publishing fees, which go to composers and record labels, but not to performers. Musicians rejoice. But, what about Spotify, you ask? Revenue from subscribers only made up about 15 percent of Pandora’s revenue in 2011; the majority of its revenue is based on advertising. While Westergren said that the company needs to do a better job of monetizing through advertising in the long run, so far most of its users are cool with listening to the free, ad-supported version rather than subscribing to take advantage of ad-free listening. Spotify, on the other hand, is predominantly subscription-based, but Westergren said that he thinks there’s room for both companies to survive and do what they do best. Ideally, he says, a Pandora power user “would find some songs they like on Pandora, and then go buy them on iTunes or listen to them on demand via Rdio or Spotify and use them in tandem,” he said. “It’s not 100 percent distinct, there’s obviously some overlap, but I think at a high level the place where we operate in the minds of users.” Spotify, with its Facebook integration, has been exploding in the U.S., but for those looking for a one-button, low maintenance way to discover music based on their own distinct tastes, Pandora remains one of the best options out there. We’ll see what the future holds, but I’m willing to bet that both services will be around for at least a few years. |
AngelPad’s Third Demo Day: Fifteen Startups Take Flight | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Six months after , the ex-Googler fueled is ready to have at it again with a third brood of 11 business Internet-focused, technology driven companies. A little over a year into its existence, AngelPad has launched 22 companies, 19 of which have raised money and one of which was acquired. “At AngelPad we deliberately work with a highly selected small number of companies,” says founder Thomas Korte. “Last session, we selected 15 out of 2000 applications. That allows us to give them a lot of attention and intensively mentor them on all aspects of early stage startup: the idea, the product and product-market-fit. Through the process we put a bit of Google DNA in every company and the result is a dramatically shorter cycle from idea to product market fit and even to revenue.” In addition to “Google DNA” pedigreed mentorship and support, being an AngelPad startup means that you have access to an initial $20,000 in funding, and an additional $100,000 from two mystery VC firms who have StartFund-level faith in Korte and crew’s startup taste. You can find a brief description of each of the presenters today, below. In the same space as Sonatype, SourceNinja goes beyond Java as a language agnostic open-source management platform. In addition, SourceNinja also tells you what a software update contains, on top of alerting customers that a new version exists. “We provide all of the information necessary that a developer or manager would need when deciding whether or not to upgrade,” founder Matthew Stump tells me. “[We want] to establish ourselves as company organizations go to for help using open source across the enterprise,” Stump says. SimpleReach offers site tools for online publishers. Their current product The Slide offers up content recommendations for site visitors a la . Founder Edward Kim tells me that what sets his product apart from SailThrough is the breadth of SimpleReach’s network and its performance. In addition, Kim is working on a SimpleReach Intelligence product, a social analytics dashboard that gives publishers and bloggers in-depth insight into story performance across social media (like tracking recurring patterns in stories that received the most “Likes,” for example). Kim is keeping the details it reveals about Intelligence sparse for now, but I interacted with it briefly and it looks like nothing else out there currently. Making it easier for people to borrow money from their friends and family, LendFriend is targeting the younger and pre-credit market as well as people who have below prime credit scores. The company provides all the loan accoutrements for its customers, including legal, e-signature, payments, tax, and regulatory guidance. “LendFriend compartmentalizes the emotional aspect that people have when money is involved with relationships,” founder Geno Moscetti says. Thus far the company has managed between $2-$3 million in loans, with the average loan starting at $15,000. “Typically friends and family are the lender of last resort, but we envision a world where people look first to their friends and family to reach their financial goals, as the lender of first resort.” PipeDrive wants to simplify business software, by creating a simple way for a company to manage its sales pipeline. Founder Timo Rein sees the company’s closest competitors as Excel spreadsheets, analog pen and paper and Post-It Notes, “It’s very hard to scale these across organization,” he says “So, we are building the post-it note and spreadsheet level experience into a software that scales.” Already boasting 330 paying customers in over 24 countries, Rein eventually sees every business using PipeDrive to manage its dealmaking process. Frugalo is a daily deals aggregation platform that uses Facebook and inbox
integration to unearth the most relevant deals for its users, importing deals from both channels as well as notifying you when they expire. Right now the social commerce network is focused on the daily deals space, CEO Mike Cieri tells me, but the company plans on expanding to flash sales sites, member only sites and brand retail offers post-launch. IDoneThis is a motivational email service that asks you, via email, “What’d you get done today?” and expects an email response in list form, every day. IDoneThis CEO Walter Chen holds that his product is in the same space as productivity tools Rypple and Yammer, and that users are loving it. He tells me that 25% of their active users use it every day — one member used it to propose to his fiance, and his co-founder used it to lose 15 pounds. Prizzm is built on the premise that CRM doesn’t work for social media, because Twitter and Facebook mean that customers can say whatever they want when they want about your brand. By rewarding customers with exchangeable loyalty points for interacting with and giving feedback to a brand, Prizzm wants to shift the CRM power balance. “If customers own their data instead of companies, it is much more powerful,” says CEO Charles Oppenheimer. In the same space as Time.ly, Buffer allows users to optimally time their social media (namely Twitter) updates. Built upon the belief that one day social traffic will trump search traffic, Buffer has just hit 50K users with almost 2 million tweets so far. Co-founder Leonhard Widrich says that already the app is offering users results, increasing clicks on tweeted links by 200%, doubling retweets and increasing user followership by 100 in two weeks. Wishery wants to improve customer service with its Gmail add-on, by crawling and including relevant information from a user’s various SaaS apps in customer service related emails — like how long a given user has been a customer, preferences, etc. “The problem isn’t that businesses don’t want to know and care – the problem is that the information they need to show they know and care is stuck in their various software silos,” says CEO Cooper Marcus. Wishery wants to get that data out of silos, and make it useful for both customers and companies. In the same space as , promotions management platform Shoplogic uses customer interaction and purchase data in order to help merchants be smarter about their promotions. “There is a shift in consumer mentality where shoppers expect to see promotions and discounts,” says CTO Dennis Maskevitch, who holds that shift means increased pressure for merchants. He hopes that by using Shoplogic to target those promotions, merchants will be able to alleviate some of that pressure. A “Dropbox for videos” LikeAndy is a mobile app video that lets people distribute their videos across multiple devices. Taking its name inspiration from Andy Warhol’s concept, LikeAndy’s target market is people who want their own fifteen minutes, and express that desire by sharing personal videos. What the company does differently from competitors (eh, hem YouTube) is that it contains a unique heat/interest mapping technology that lets people find the most interesting moments in their videos. Storie goes beyond photosharing apps and attempts to tell a story with photos, using a novel UI to create an experience similar to a photo scrapbook. Stories created in Storie can be shared through various social networks, as well as embedded on a website. “Using Storie should be like browsing a lifestyle magazine or a local newspaper,” says founder Kuan Yong, “Full of engaging human interest stories with the occasional how-to article.” Yong tells me that one of the community’s most popular users is a man in his late 70s who has created a Storie about his experience in the Navy in the 50s. The Storie community determines popularity and visibility of items. Tapviva wants to disrupt traditional restaurant Point of Sale systems by letting users pay via their iPhone and Android smartphones. Competing with , Tapviva is trying to stand out by working with smaller merchants like food trucks and cafes. “Our long-term vision is to change restaurant POS, to bring it out of the dark ages, co-founder Stephen Conn tells me. The app will be launching with merchant Contraband Coffee this week. Kout is link-based selling app in the same space as . By using Kout a seller can reach customers through Twitter and Facebook, their own blogs, and wherever one can use links, directing them to a personalized payment platform. Kout also provides merchants with social analytics, enabling them to gather data on where a potential customer comes in from. “Most platforms don’t combine eCommerce and payments. We do,” says Kout founder Hany Rashwan. One of the biggest problems with app stores is that it is difficult to know what’s in (and for that matter return) a given app. Mobile marketing app Vungle tries to somewhat solves this problem, by letting apps market themselves through its 15 second videos and advertising network. Vungle’s 15 second “trailers for apps” let users explore an apps features before buying, resulting in four times as many installs, according to the Vungle founders. |
Google Ventures Takes A Moneyball Approach To Investing: It’s All About The Data | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Today at Web 2.0, John Batelle sat down with and Graham Spencer of for a quick peek inside Google’s venture arm. For those unfamiliar, Google Ventures’ team of 43 invests up to $200 million a year and in 2011 will make upwards of 100 investments. The value proposition of Google’s venture wing is that, according to Maris, it’s highly focused on engagement with the startups they’re investing in, and, of course, partnerships and Google resources are always close at hand. While Google Ventures doesn’t invest specifically to further Google Inc’s products or development projects, the team consists primarily of former Googlers — not to mention former entrepreneurs, investors, and scientists. But what’s probably most interesting about the venture firm is that it’s really taking a Moneyball approach to investing in startups. What does this mean? , the book (and now film) that looks at the changing role of statistics in major league baseball and how clubhouses utilize their data to determine the value of players. Billy Beane, the book’s protagonist, was able to build an Oakland Athletics team of undervalued (and many would say questionable) players for cheap and take that team all the way to the playoffs. Google Ventures, too, is all about the data. Beyond being able to help teams solve their UX, search, and scaling issues, the team takes hopes to mix both qualitative and quantitative data to put together the best approach to deciding in which startups to invest. According to Maris and Spencer, Google Ventures applies data tools and metrics to their prospective investments to decide which opportunities make the most sense. Naturally, as the team at Google Ventures itself (and their mothership as well) is home a full roster of computer scientists, engineers, machine learning specialists, and more, there’s really no surprise that Google Ventures would be applying a data frame to the problem of what spaces and areas are most ripe for investment. They take investment heuristics and the many qualitative rules of thumb investors use to make their decisions, and apply software they’ve built themselves to build models, test theories, etc. So along with being able to take advantage of Google-based analytics, search query-type knowledge, and so on. The venture partners cited DNAnexus as one of the companies they’ve invested in most recently that both reflects their data-based approach as well as their strategic effort to find startups that are designing solutions to big, global problems. DNAnexus is building a backend system to help researchers understand genomic data sets, making that reseaerch available to everybody, not just for Google — even though Google Inc has partnered with the company to host this huge, totally anonymized, government database. The startup is a good example, the venture partners said, of the type of startup they’re looking to invest in, whereupon they listed a few more examples, including Climate Corp (weather insurance for farmers), and , an antibody discovery platform. For more on Google Ventures’ portfolio, . |
Meeker Says Majority Of Pandora’s And Twitter’s Traffic Is Mobile; Square Transactions Grew 20,000% | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Mary Meeker gave her annual at the Web 2.0 Summit today. The standout slides for me are the ones which track the breakout growth of the mobile web, a trend she was and has continued to . Mobile just keeps on ramping up growth. I’ve pulled out five of her slides which illustrate this trend. For certain large Internet services, mobile already represents a majority of traffic. For Pandora, 65 percent of traffic comes from mobile, while Twitter gets 55 percent from mobile. Facebook, meanwhile, is only at 33 percent mobile (a percentage it expects to increase dramatically). Mobile sales is also becoming a serious driver of e-commerce. eBay’s gross mobile sales is already at $4 billion, PayPal is doing another $3 billion in mobile transactions, Amazon is at an estimated $2 billion, and Square is already at $1 billion in gross mobile sales volume going over its system (an incredible 20,000 percent year-over-year growth rate). Mobile search is up fourfold in the past year, while mobile app and advertising revenues combined is growing at a 153 percent compound annual rate since 2008. In the past four years mobile apps and advertising has gone from a $700 million market to an estimated $12 billion market this year. Of course much of this growth is being driven by two mobile platforms, iPhone and Android. It’s really a two-horse race. With tablets, however, the two horse race is between iPad and Kindle. |
Samsung Outs Verizon-Bound Galaxy Nexus On Their Website | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | If you still weren’t convinced that Google and Samsung will be revealing the Verizon-bound Galaxy Nexus in Hong Kong tonight, check out what an eagle-eyed reader managed to dig up on . Yep, that’s the Galaxy Nexus alright. Interestingly, this is the first peek we’ve gotten at the device’s rear end, though it doesn’t actually reveal much. The Galaxy Nexus, like its forefathers, seems to have ditched all carrier branding in favor of advertising a purely Google/Samsung experience. Normally leaks like this come pouring out of the woodwork the closer we get to an official annoucement, but this one was especially easy to find. All it takes to dig up the Galaxy Nexus on Samsung’s US site is to punch the name into their search box. Don’t just take our word for it: feel free to head over to and try your luck. Of course, there’s a very real chance that someone on Samsung’s web team will yank the offending search result, so we’ve saved a screenshot of the page for posterity. This is surely just the tip of the iceberg though, as details will start flying hard and fast once the event kicks off later tonight. [via ] |
PlayStation Vita Will Debut In US And Europe On February 22 | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Sony’s Playstation Vita has long been slated for a , but Sony has just announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that their new portable will be hitting shelves stateside and in Europe on February 22. While hardcore pocket gamers will have already committed these specs to memory, here’s a quick recap. The Vita packs (among other things) a 5-inch OLED touchscreen, a pair of dual analog sticks, an ARM Cortex A9 processor, a rear touchpad, and into a body that measures in at 182.0 x 18.6 x 83.5mm Pricewise, we’re still looking at $249 for the WiFi-only model, while an extra $50 nabs you the AT&T 3G-enabled variant. Sadly, no mention was made of data pricing, so your guess is as good as ours at this point. It’s quite possible that the Vita could adopt AT&T’s tablet data tiers, with $15 netting users 200MB and $25 yielding 2GB, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Vita gamers were privy to their own special data bundles. I’m sure a handful of gamers were hoping against hope for a holiday launch window (myself included), but hey — at least now we know how much longer we have to save up our pennies. In the meantime, here’s our hands-on video from E3 to help tide you over: |
Micro Four-Thirds Lenses Too High-Quality For You? Try This One! | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | When I go on a trip or just out a-shooting with my camera, I often have a moment of slight panic, in which I try to decide whether I should take my nice big expensive lens with me and risk getting it damaged during the adventure, or take the cheap one for less impressive pictures but also a load off my mind. It’s really a problem when lenses cost more than cameras. So if you’re shooting an or M4/3 camera, this is probably an even worse problem. There just aren’t many budget lenses out there, and the pancake wide-angles you’d want to take with are probably also your favorite prime. Can’t risk it! So why not pick up one of these “Lo-fi” manual lenses from Photojojo? Now, just to cut through the nonsense, let’s acknowledge that bokeh isn’t an “effect” so much as just the result of wide apertures in general. And vignetting and lens flare generally accompany lenses of poor quality. But that’s kind of what lo-fi means, right? (free shipping), and though it won’t get you crystal-clear portraits, it might add a little personality to your shots. The 25mm (50mm equivalent) lens itself isn’t plastic, and it opens up to an impressive F/1.4, but there’s “toy camera quirk” that I assume is a coated or otherwise modified element in the assembly that gives that lo-fi charm a boost. Whatever the quality of the images, an F/1.4 lens for $90 is probably a good thing to have around. Good party lens. But be aware! It is all manual! automatic exposure, autofocus. Just like the old days! |
Euro VC sees an exit stateside | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Good news for European venture house . Oracle is to acquire , the Cambridge, MA-based enterprise search and e-commerce tech company. No word on terms, but DN capital was the only VC invested in the company. Endeca is a long time Bost-based company. Aside form DN Capital, investors have included Bessemer Venture Partners, Venrock Associates, Ampersand Ventures, Intel Capital, and SAP Ventures. The company had raised about $75 million in venture capital. Endeca is big in unstructured data management, web commerce and business intelligence solutions. |
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After A Rare Miss, Apple Predicts Record iPhone, iPad Sales And Hints At A $40 Billion Quarter | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | Yes, Apple with their earnings today. It’s the first time in a long time that has happened. Some are suggesting that hasn’t happened since 2002. That’s big news. But it’s also masking even bigger news: Apple’s expectations for quarter. In a , it can be hard to tell what numbers on a page signify. But those who follow Apple closely must have taken one look at Apple’s guidance for next quarter and had their jaws drop. I know mine did. Apple is projecting to make in revenue next quarter, their holiday quarter. They’re projecting an EPS of $9.30. Both are insane (in a good way). To put this in some perspective, Apple has had a quarter over $30 billion in revenue. The closest they’ve come was , when revenue hit $28.57 billion (this past quarter was their second best ever). A year ago during the holiday quarter, Apple $26.7 billion in revenue. They’re projecting these numbers to be $10 billion higher. But that’s not the craziest part. Where this really gets insane is when you realize that Apple lowballs their projections. For example, this past quarter, they estimated they would bring in $25 billion in revenue, which they easily beat (it was the Street projections that they missed). So if Apple says they’re going to make $37 billion next quarter, it’s entirely possible — hell, maybe even likely — that they still will never have had a $30 billion quarter — because next quarter may be a . Obviously, to get there, they would need to hit an absolute homerun. But again, it’s the holiday quarter for the top consumer electronics company in the world. And it’s the quarter that will see the initial sales of the iPhone 4S, which just launched last weekend to the tune of 4 million units sold in 3 days — the best sales for any phone ever. The iPhone is the key to Apple’s revenue, and it’s the reason why they missed expectations this past quarter. If the iPhone 4S sells well, $40 billion is not out of the question. For a bit more context, while Apple has held the profit title among tech companies for a little while, they’re still behind HP when it comes to revenue. HP revenues of $31.2 billion in their last reported quarter. A few months ago, that Apple would soon zoom past HP in this regard as well. Now it’s looking like they won’t just squeeze past, they’ll demolish them next quarter. HP’s all-time high for revenue in a quarter is around $33 billion. It gets even crazier. Apple is so confident that next quarter is going to be a blow-out quarter that twice on their earnings call today, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer went out of their way to predict that Apple would see record iPhone and iPad sales next quarter. That’s something Apple never does. Their guidance is always very general (and again, low) and they stick to talking about things at a high level. Not today. This is two Apple executives going out on a limb to predict records for their two key products next quarter. I think it’s pretty obvious that they would only do that if they felt like they weren’t going out on a limb. That is to say, Cook and Oppenheimer must be confident that Apple is going to sell well north of 20 million iPhones (the previous record, set last quarter) and 11 million iPads (the record set this quarter). And a lot more. So while Wall Street is panicking right now — is currently down over 27 points (6.5 percent) in after-hours trading after the miss — Apple seems more confident than ever. Sure, a part of it may be that Apple had to throw investors some bone in a period of relative volatility (a rare miss and just weeks after co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs ). But no matter which way you look at it, it’s one hell of a bone. |
Dear Apple, Please Make My iPhone 4S Battery Life Suck Less | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | I think I figured out what the “S” stands for in the iPhone 4S. Now, to be clear, I love my new . I even when there isn’t a human on the other end of the line. Sometimes it talks back. But one thing that literally sucks about my iPhone 4S is its battery life. And I’m not the only one . Today, my iPhone died after about 8 hours—not even enough to get me through a full day without recharging (and this is typical). This was not 8 hours of constant use (unless you count the constant pinging of notifications, which may be the culprit). It was 8 hours total from the time I unplugged it in the morning and took it with me until the screen went black at around 4 PM. According to the , the iPhone 4S is supposed to get 200 hours of standby time, 8 hours of talk time, and “up to 6 hours” of Internet use on 3g. During the day, I made half a dozen calls less than 5 minutes each, used the Internet for an hour on the train (email, Twitter, light Web browsing), and then maybe another 90 minutes throughout the day. So that comes to a total of 2.5 hours of Internet usage and 30 minutes of phone calls. The rest, in my mind, is all standby. Except maybe it isn’t since the phone is constantly bleeping with notifications and emails. And that may very well be the problem. There are many theories out there, but the ones which ring true to me are that notifications and location-based apps are the big battery drains. The iPhone 4S has a really great new notification center where you can see recent notifications from all your apps with an always available pull-down screen. I have about a dozen apps that feed into that notification center, including Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, Skype, Google+, Foursquare Instagram and text messages. I have an equal number with location-based services turned on. Sure, I could turn these off and I probably will. But what’s the point of having a state of the art mobile computer in your pocket if you have to disable its best features? No, what I’d like instead is for Apple to fix this mess. I don’t know how, perhaps through an update or new rules imposed on app developers. Maybe limit the number of times an app can ask for a location update when it is dormant. Or if notifications are the problem, make it easier to manage which notification you get by app. I don’t need to know every time somebody likes one of my Instagram photos or tries to add me as a friend on Facebook or Foursquare. I could cut out more than half of my notifications—and maybe a big chunk of the battery drain—if there were better granular controls to mute the noise. Better yet if there is a technical solution Apple can impose and I don’t have to do anything. Battery life is one of those things you don’t notice until you don’t have it anymore. And I’m noticing it big time. |
Live in Beijing and Thinking about Starting a Tech Company? Read. This. Post. Now. | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | The starts in a little more than 24 hours, and we’ve been working hard over the last few days to make it even for local Beijing developers to attend. In addition to the chance to be the next or win valuable prizes, we have decided to give all Hackathon attendees who complete a hack and present in the 24-hour period free tickets to the Disrupt conference Monday and Tuesday. That’s a $1,000-plus value for some hungry coders with a good idea and the desire to make it happen. You don’t have to have a team to participate. Just show up and we’ll help match you with others. No English? No problem! The entire is open to Chinese and English speakers. We’ve got translators on hand and during the conference, we’ll have real time translation headsets so everyone can follow along. Our TechCrunch and CrunchGear writers will also be roaming the Hackathon halls, looking for hot stories and standout coders to highlight on the blog and on TechCrunchTV. And check out this list of some of our esteemed Hackathon judges. Dowson Tong, SVP of Tencent. Dowson joined Tencent in 2005 and has been responsible for the management of product platform as well as research and development of Internet Business since October 2008. Prior to Tencent, Dowson worked in Oracle for database development and testing; and was involved in ERP system development and testing in Oracle Applications. He also delivered Oracle DBA course in UC Extension. Dowson also worked for Sendmail Software in managing the development teams of operator-scale messaging system and anti-spam filtering system; and later on involved in new product planning and business development. Dowson received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1991 and a Master of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1997. Ming is from New Business Development for Google China. Ming works on various initiatives like Chrome and Commerce. Before Google, Ming was founder of Socialwok, a Facebook for business on Google Apps and worked in product management, business development, sales and marketing. Ming earned a Master’s degree in Biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan. Before his masters, Ming worked as a research engineer for the Data Storage institute of Singapore, a government research agency. Ming did his undergraduate studies in Applied Engineering Physics at Cornell University. And if all of that isn’t enough, we’ve just gotten word that Tencent, the largest Internet company in China, will award the winning company a get-to-know-you breakfast with Jeff Xiong, Co-Chief Technology Officer and SEVP of Tencent. If you want a job with a big tech multinational or have even thought about starting your own company, why wouldn’t you attend? It’s not too late. Here’s what to do. We want to give a special thanks to Andy Mok, founder of Red Pagoda Resources. Along with being the organizer for our Beijing Disrupt Hackathon, he is also a talent-hunter for audaciously visionary internet companies in China. When he’s not trolling Zhongguancun or the Internet for game-changing developers and product managers, he also organizes to help developers meet investors as well as talented and like-minded product managers and UI/UX professionals. |
Bill Gates On “The Miracle Of Availability” And Applying Computer Science To The World | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | Bill Gates just gave a talk at the University of Washington’s School of Computer Science and Engineering. As is typical of his talks, this one was broadly focused on new and helpful implementations of technology. It was followed by an open Q&A session. There was nothing radical or new proposed or revealed, but Gates was smart and compelling as usual, and the highlights of the talk are below. Video of the talk should be available soon from UW. I’ve tried to directly quote Bill as much as possible (bolded for those hungry for sound bytes), but there may be small errors in phrasing. If it’s in quotes, they’re his words, though I may need to correct a few words here or there. Gates began by establishing his computer science credibility, not that it’s necessary at this point, by reminiscing about the early days of computing. He recalled that at UW, on the batch-work computers of the day like the B5500. This served as a segue, actually, to his initial thesis, which was that people like himself aren’t the ones who will bring be making the next generation of breakthroughs happen. He cited the incredible amount of storage and its almost negligible cost, and how as someone who grew up with kilobytes and megabytes, he simply isn’t ideologically suited for allocating terabytes and petabytes. But people who have grown up with it do things like, for example, suggest that every lecture at a university be recorded and stored. Once he got past the prejudice of someone who wants to save every byte, he said he thought The big advance, Gates said, is This is the change that happens when something goes from being a device owned by the elite and wealthy of the world to being something utilizable by the poorest. An example given later was the sophisticated GPS-driven combines used on US farms. Ingenious, but can you build one that an African village can afford? As a further example, he showed off an application using the Kinect which I actually highlighted . Not that it would be useful to a starving child, but there is a huge potential just waiting to be unlocked, as Microsoft Research and innumerable hackers have shown for the Kinect and other devices. Gates praised alternative models for education, showing off a program for teaching algebra that actively monitored how the student was doing, what methods of teaching worked, and adjusted the lessons on the fly. We saw some other ideas along this line with the companies, which I’m sure Gates would appreciate if he is not already aware of them. He also spoke in glowing terms of Khan Academy, which we’ve featured here quite often. But, as he later elaborated during the Q&A session, it’s not meant to be a substitute for learning institutions. He noted that some 20 schools had completely reorientated their curricula around Khan Academy and similar services, with the teacher assigning the lectures and quizzes to be watched on the student’s own time, and then using the classroom not as a lecture hall, but as a discussion platform that added context, clarified points, and offered more one on one time for students who couldn’t grasp the material. As for adding computer science to the curriculum as early as elementary school, he was skeptical: But though he spoke lightly of it, he really considers education one of the highest priorities. When asked how he felt about political discourse and the concentration of wealth, he responded that, to put things in perspective: But that said, Without proper education, how can people make rational choices in day to day life, to say nothing of the issues voters face? When the most controversial bill of a political era (Obama’s health care bill) is over four thousand pages long and totally unreadable by the average voter, how is that effective? He then moved on to the question of poverty and disease. His primary insight came when he was working with researchers to create a stochastic model of It was immensely complicated but the computing power at their disposal made it possible. He thought, if we can model a reactor, with all these forces and materials, why can’t we model disease, including the mosquitos, the people, the environment, the solutions? So they worked at it and eventually came up with an immensely complex model for disease vectors, weather, vaccines, life cycles, seasons, and everything else. They compared it with real statistics and it checked out. He said with confidence: And the modeling approach to problems, now that we have the computing power to simulate the world with some precision, is just as important to apply elsewhere. Whether it’s malaria, polio, crops, nuclear reactors, sanitation, or education, He demonstrated a few applications of the model and explained quite a bit about the disease itself and some of its history. But you can learn about malaria on your own time. On the topic of wealth, something in which he must be considered something of an expert, he downplayed the money thing. One questioner asked for advice on getting as rich as him. He took this slightly tactless question in stride, saying that he never intended to become extremely wealthy, and that it was more important to do something you were interested in. He also said that while he understood the drive to make a few million dollars, a level of wealth that provides after that amount, This raised a laugh from the audience, who are probably all too familiar with this local Seattle burger joint. When asked what might come after the change from PC to laptop to smartphone, he was animated: As in, it’s just a way of getting information from the world into your brain, via your eyes. He suggested that projection directly onto the retina was likely the next big step, or alternatively a flexible screen of adjustable size. Lastly, the host noted that it would be Bill’s birthday tomorrow (the 28th), and invited Bill Gates Sr. up on stage, who held a cupcake with a candle for the younger Bill to blow out. If you’re interested in the continuing adventures of Bill Gates, you can keep up with him at . (10/28: updated a few rough quotes with verbatim quotes) |
Jolicloud pivots up to organise your 'personal cloud' life online | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | It seems like Tariq Krim, founder of the early ‘organise your digital life’ play that was NetVibes has been on a journey – a journey to tackling fundamental problems about our online life, like how to interface and organise it all. Seems like he just can’t let go of that idea. And the Atomico and Mangrove Capital backed Jolicloud has been an ambitious evolution of this, to create an apps-based interface to the cloud, as well as a Netbook OS, which 600,000 users responded to. But today Krim unveiled a major pivot for in the form of a which seems to bring all of that learning into a new place which very much speaks to the proliferation of social networks, photo apps and other services. Because it’s abundantly clear now that half the time you can’t recall if you where tagged in a photo on Facebook, mentioned in a post on Twitter or snapped in Instagram. So Jolicloud have realised that the apps platform they’ve built is now going to work rather well as an aggregator and interface to your Facebook timeline, Twitter feed, photo apps accounts, you name it. But not just that – Google documents and music as well. Some 35,000 people have already pre-registered for a beta they didn’t know anything about, so they have that at the get-go. Jolicloud is now billing itself as the “personal cloud.” Does that mean the first iteration failed? I guess that depends on your perspective, and its clear that the shift of one very big player like Apple towards the cloud, with iCloud, had in part prompted a Jolicloud’s move away from trying to be a similar kind of service. Instead it’s moving upstream to the aggregator space. Speaking at the Dublin Web Summit, Krim said Jolicloud will be a service agnostic, pulling in APIs from all the obvious players (Google, Facebook etc) so users can aggregate and search their online life. This will include Dropbox, Tumblr and Evernote. “We’re not building a feature, we’re building a platform. Google actually quite likes this,” Krim told me. “We’ll be a ‘Mobile First’ company now.” Additionally they’ve built an iPhone and Android app which will be out soon. For now though the large private beta will be going for the next few weeks, possibly even months, depending on how it goes. Jolicloud is also working on “suggested collections” to help you organise photos, personal content etc. In order to parse what is inevitably going to be a huge amount of data, Jolicloud has built its new platform in a Javascript technology called Node.JS. This, they say, will give them the ability to process exponentially more data than even a year ago. You can |
Bill Gates Speaking At University Of Washington – Watch The Stream Here (Update: It’s Over) | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | : The talk is over, but I’ll be posting some highlight quotes and commentary shortly, and the video will be available to watch tonight or tomorrow as well. Later: Bill Gates is set to give a talk today for an event at the University of Washington’s . It starts at 3:30, so in just about fifteen minutes. We’ve got the stream embedded here so you can watch it live. The topic will be advances in computing, including natural user interfaces and pervasive computing that could change the way the bottom 1/3rd of the world’s population lives. For all the fanfare about the 99% here in the states, it’s humbling to remember that to much of the world, we are the 1% with adequate fresh water, free and comprehensive public schooling, working sewage and other basic utilities, and so on. We were contacted by a representative for bgC3, Gates’ technology incubator, so it’s safe to assume that will be involved somehow. Perhaps it’s a recruiting mission. We haven’t heard much from the company since , but of course world-changing research doesn’t occur overnight, or even on the scale of a few years. Enjoy the talk; we’ll write up highlights separately should Bill say anything of particular note. |
Redbox Raises Price On Rentals To $1.20 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | This will not end well. , in position to be the cheap, local, easy alternative to the confusing, troublesome Netflix, has decided to raise its rates to $1.20 per day. I guess they wanted a piece of Netflix’s humble pie. Coinstar, the company that owns the Redbox brand and boxes, explained it this way: “The change is primarily due to the increase in operating expenses, including the recent increase in debit card interchange fees as a result of the Durbin Amendment.” And naturally, that cost should be passed right back onto their loyal customers. I can’t help but editorialize here. It’s just hard to think of a more wrongheaded and shortsighted decision for them to make. Here they have a strong brand built on thrift and a major competitor being laid low by an untimely and confusing rate change. If they plan on being in business for more than a couple years, maintaining the $1 pricing is essential. Why not take another tack? Renegotiate contracts with grocery stores and bodegas where the Redbox machine arguably brings in business. Slim the margins elsewhere so you can afford the hit. Or just charge an extra quarter on debit card transactions, and give the customer an option to select a different payment method. Anything but reneging on the deal that made the brand known in the first place. Netflix , and many more have been dissuaded from ever joining. But it’s not an instantaneous change, and Redbox needed to make a soft landing for them, not act with the same entitlement that Bank of America did in passing on the debit fees to customers. People are leaving that bank in record numbers, and I don’t see how Redbox can expect anything different. |
Codecademy Raises $2.5 Million To Teach You How To Code | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | The term “hot startup” gets bandied about pretty frequently. But there are few companies it applies to more than , a startup which, of all things, teaches you how to program. Today, the company is announcing that it’s raised $2.5 million from an all-star roster to continue that mission. The $2.5 million funding round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from O’Reilly AlphaTech, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Social + Capital Partnership (Chamath Palihapitiya), Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), CrunchFund, Collaborative Fund (Craig Shapiro),Joshua Schacter, Vivi Nevo, Dave Morin, Sam Altman, Ruchi Sanghvi & Aditya Agarwal, and Naval Ravikant. It also includes GroupMe founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci — which is notable because Codecademy cofounder Zach Sims was a GroupMe employee shortly before leaving to help start Codecademy. Since it last August, the site has become what’s (probably) a global hit. It has users in more than 200 countries, only 30% of which are in the United States. The company has declined to share its current user count, but it had 200,000 within their first 72 hours, and I’ve heard whispers that they’re still doing very, very well. I’ve tried the service out myself and love it. It introduces programming in a way that’s surprisingly friendly, and the in-browser code editing bypasses the frustrations of setting up your first IDE. Codecademy originally started off with a batch of lessons created in-house, but it’s just started to roll out user-submitted lessons as well. Their first one? A course on Javascript functions by USV partner Albert Wenger, which will be available shortly. |
Microsoft Patents Manipulation Of 3D Virtual Objects, Throwing Gestures | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | Another batch of Microsoft patent applications have trickled into public view, and these ones may be even cooler than . They describe “flinging gestures,” interaction with 3D virtual objects, and even throw it back a bit to describe a new email view format. Let’s take a look, shall we? Applied for back in April of 2010, this patent application outlines something strikingly similar to some of the technology we saw in . It describes user input on a 2D surface, which is then simulated as direct contact with a virtual 3D object. Said virtual 3D object is meant to move or be manipulated based on the user’s physical input. In the video from this morning, users were able to input gestures without ever touching the device, as shown when the traveling businesswoman draws a heart into thin air, which is then translated onto the screen and relayed back to her kitchen wall. Perhaps this patent is a bridge between what we have now and Microsoft’s envisioned future, but either way I hope this one makes it to reality. The next patent application on our list was filed for much more recently — in July of this year — and is basically meant to make it easier for us to turn on handheld computing devices. You know, since pushing a button is too strenuous. The patent outlines a way to power on a device, whether it be a mobile phone or a tablet (or any computing device you can hold, really), by holding said device in portrait orientation. The patent discusses certain specifications that must be met in order for the function to work, like the degree at which the device must be held, or the amount of time the device must be held that way before it powers on. We’re glad to see it, too, as it would be totally annoying for a tablet to turn on each time it was in portrait orientation. The patent also covers a device that can perform this magical portrait boot action, along with the method by which one would do so. Way to cover your bases, Microsoft. This April 2010 patent application is a bit old-school, or at least it feels that way compared to a day full of both and future predictions. But it may make my least favorite mode of communication — and — just a bit more bearable. The patent describes a way of formatting your email view into different categories, rather than a list of names and subjects. The system would interpret the content of emails, and filter them into certain categories, like from friends, from family, videos and images, documents, invitations, and missed IMs. From there, the user has multiple interface options through which they can view their inbox in varying layouts. The technology described is in no way revolutionary — Google’s been combing your email content to target ads for years, and their Priority Inbox is pretty similar, too — but it may add a little to the email experience, which is something Microsoft seems to . Don’t let the title of this patent application fool you — there will be no phone throwing over at Microsoft, or anywhere else hopefully. Applied for in July, the “Throwing Gestures” patent describes a way of jerking your phone around to perform certain actions, including switching from one image to the next and closing applications. Like the “Changing Power Modes Based On Sensors In A Device” patent, Microsoft has also included a device which would use this technology. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t include any images of the actual flinging motion in its patent application, so that’ll have to be one for our imaginations to figure out. I imagine people walking down the street waving their phones around like they’re throwing frisbies, but I guess that’s no stranger than the masses of people now with their brand new iPhones. Note that these are only applications and have not been granted as yet. [via ] |
Chinese Search Engine Baidu’s Q3 Revenue Up 85 Percent To $655M; Profit Up 80 Percent To $295M | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | Chinese search engine Baidu today, with total revenue in the third quarter of 2011 coming in at $654.7 million, an 85.1% increase from the same period in 2010. Baidu’s net income was up 80% to $295 million. Diluted earnings for the third quarter of 2011 were $0.84; non-GAAP earnings were for the $0.86. Baidu beat Wall Street expectations; analysts Robin Li, chairman and chief executive officer of Baidu said in a release, “Baidu recorded stellar results in the third quarter driven by rapid growth in customer spending and user traffic. In particular, spending by large customers significantly outperformed our expectations as we continued to build strong relationships with high quality companies. China’s search industry is still in its early stages, and as the clear industry leader we see enormous room for continuing growth as users and online marketing customers become increasingly sophisticated.” Operating profit in the third quarter of 2011 was $349.1 million, an 88.5% increase from the corresponding period in 2010. Online marketing revenues for the third quarter of 2011 were $654.4 million, representing an 85.1% increase from the corresponding period in 2010. Baidu had approximately 304,000 active online marketing customers in the third quarter of 2011, representing an 11.8% increase from 2010 and a 2% increase from the previous quarter. Revenue per online marketing customer for the third quarter was approximately $2,148, a 65.1% increase from 2010 and a 19.1% increase from the previous quarter. As of September 30, 2011, Baidu had cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of $1.8 billion. During the quarter, Baidu closed its in Chinese travel site Qunar. Baidu now has of the search market share in China. |
Google+ Resurrects Playback Feature From Wave, Renames It “Ripples” | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | Last August, . Some said Wave was ahead of its time, some said that the platform had enough features to sink the Titanic. However, Google today announced some significant updates to its social network, Google+, among them that — the integration is finally live. And one of these features launched today on Google+ seems a throwback to one now-defunct feature of Google Wave, called “Playback”. Or at least one might claim this as its genesis, with the feature having its roots in-house, as opposed to some sort of reaction to that launched this September. Yes, today, Google launched its new Google+ Ripples, which will let users “re-live” the conversations, comments, and sharing that’s taken place over the history of their use of Google+. . In other words, Ripples is a “visualization tool for public shares and comments”, which users can access by simply selecting the “View Ripples” option in the drop down window to the right of the public post. From there, Google+ pops open a new tab, where users can see the activity in a nifty graphical interface, zoom in on particular events — seeing the innerconnectedness of it all. The diagram shows the post spreading across the network as other users share the post, with arrows “indicating the direction of resharing” and the circles within circles representing the “resharing sequence” with the larger circles indicating the heaviest sharing (and sharers), according to the Ripples description. Users can also see a feed of who shared the post as well as click play on a moving timeline that shows one how quickly the post spread and to what extent it has been shared over the days, months, weeks, and years. The intention here, according to Google’s blog post, is to “rekindle that initial excitement” when one shared their post and to get a better understanding of how the post is flowing across the network and just what kind of reach and collective viewing it was (and is) getting. Google says that Ripples is still experimental and is looking for feedback on how it can be more informative and “more awesome”. But so far, so good. And, just to make one thing clear: Yes, Google did name this feature after me. Thank you, Google. But the interesting thing here is how similar Google Ripples is to Google Wave’s “Playback” feature, which allowed friends to get caught up on what everyone else in a wave has already been talking about. This was essentially like rewinding the wave to see what happened in the past, with the ability to watch it progress through its many changes. Playback allowed users to jump around and see all the edits sequentially as they progressed in time to take some of the confusion out of the feature-brimming communication platform. Another notable update announced today is the so-called “Google+ Creative Kit”, which in part is a bit like a suped-up version of Instagram filters. Creative Kit allows a deeper way to edit one’s photos on G+, enabling users to sharpen their photos, add text, crop, rotate, resize, or overlay that vintage look now so often associated with Instagram and Hipstagram. (Or as one commenter and Google engineer has pointed out, Creative Kit seems to be the native integration of , a photo editing startup .) According to Google, all you need to use Creative Kit is “an idea”: http://youtu.be/RipLoAUUDjc In the spirit of Halloween, Google has added some limited-time, “spooky” features to Creative Kit and is launching a photo competition (through the end of October), in which users can share their frightening photos on Google+ with the hashtag “#gplushalloween”. A panel of celebrity judges will pick their favorite photos and prizes may even be awarded. Though we’re checking on that last bit. Ripples, Creative Kit, and Google Apps integration are certainly notable enhancements to the Google+ platform, especially as the latter has been a much-called-for and needed feature for the millions of Google Apps users. Photo editing features are a bonus, too, considering Google+ users have added more than . While basic photo editing tools have been available, Creative Kit takes Google+’s editing options to the next level. And, in terms of further narrowing the gap between itself and Facebook, Ripples is a natural addition for Google+ as a content sharing medium. Both Ripples and Facebook’s impending Timeline are both unique visual ways of presenting our social data. Timeline will essentially allow users to replace their profiles with chronological scrapbooks, tracking your “most important” photos, content shared, apps, and so on back to the day you were born (for photos), or joined Facebook for everything else. Ripples has a slightly different use case, as it is designed to give users a visual look at the ripple effect of their content sharing, the directionality of that sharing, and the popularity of a given topic. Both are nifty visual features, but whereas Timeline seems to have the potential not only to change your Facebook and social footprint at a deep level, Ripples doesn’t quite get there. It has the potential for a nerdgasm as a cool data visualization medium, which Google rocks in spades. But, really, the question becomes: How much will you actually use Ripples? And, since, in the end, it’s all about money, which has greater value for brands and future monetization? For more on these new Google+ features, . |
HP Reconsiders Spinning-Off PC Division, Personal Systems Group Will Remain Part Of The Company | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | HP caused a minor uproar when it announced just prior to that it was splitting off its PC division. Well, after two months of internal debating, the Personal Systems Group will remain part of the company and Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard can rest in peace. The news comes from a where HP’s new chief MG Whitman indicated that it’s best for customers, partners, shareholders and employees (so everyone) to keep the PSG within HP. She goes on to say that “HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.” The announcement in August came as a shock. As detailed in today’s press release, HP is currently the number one manufacturer of personal computers in the world and saw $40.7 billion in revenues last year. HP has always been a hardware company first and the thought upon review of then-CEO Leo Apotheker was that HP was headed down a route to services and enterprise. But a few short weeks after the announcement which also killed off webOS hardware development, HP’s board ousted Apotheker who was replaced by Meg Whitman. Now that the Personal Systems Group is staying part of HP, the board of directors feels that it can “drive profitable growth” and assist other parts of HP’s business. Members of the PSG should start feeling the love again as HP stated that the PSG is part of HP’s strategy to consumers and enterprise customers alike. I bet they felt a different feeling the last two months. |
HomeAway’s Q3 Revenue Up 37 Percent To $61M, Posts A Loss In Net Income | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | home rental service HomeAway is today, posting a 37 percent increase in revenue to $61.1 millon from $44.6 million in the third quarter of 2010. The company said revenue increase was attributed to a strength in renewal rates and increased revenue per listing from the prior year. Unfortunately, the company posted a loss this quarter of $4.1 million, or ($0.05) per diluted share compared to a net loss of ($0.11) per diluted share in the third quarter of 2010. HomeAway says this was the impact of cumulative preferred stock dividends and discount accretion of $6.8 million, or ($0.09) per share. As of September 30, 2011, the Company no longer has any preferred stock outstanding. Listing revenue increased 29.2% to $52.5 million from $40.6 million in the third quarter of 2010. Paid listings were 626,528, compared to 511,667 at the end of the third quarter of 2010 and 626,661 at the end of the second quarter of 2011. Paid listings increased 22.4% year-over-year and were consistent with the second quarter of 2011, reflecting seasonality. Average revenue per listing was up to $335, compared to $314 during the third quarter of 2010 and $339 during the second quarter of 2011. Renewal rate was 76.4%, compared to 75.4% at the end of the third quarter of 2010 and 76.2% at the end of the second quarter of 2011. The company says web visits were 129.1 million for the quarter, an increase of 23.2% year-over-year. HomeAway definitely had a than Q3 this year. Some of that could be attributed to seasonality—more consumers are renting vacation homes during the summer. Shares of HomeAway closed at $37.32 in today’s trading. |
Gild Hits Half A Million Members, Now Lets Developers ‘Face-Off’ To See Who’s Got The Most Skillz | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | , a and a game-ified jobs platform for developers, from Globespan Partners back in August. Since launching at Disrupt a year ago, Gild has grown quickly, and today announced that it has attracted 500,000 members across 174 countries. Originally intended to be an all-encompassing career platform, Gild pivoted to concentrate on developers and engineers once they saw the high rate of early adoption among these two groups. While Gild lets developers submit resumes like any other job platform, it differentiates itself from the group by allowing companies posting their jobs to establish competitions or programming puzzles. Developers take these quizzes right on the site and are ranked according to their scores. And now, beyond building, sharing, and comparing their skills profiles, developers is officially introducing “Face-Offs”, which let developers go head-to-head to visually compare their skills and achievements. Much in the same way I might, say, compare two outstanding pitchers for my fantasy baseball team. According to Gild, since beta launching Face-Offs two months ago, more than 300,000 Face-Offs have been set up by developers on the site. And, big picture, since launching last September, Gild members have taken over 1 million tests on skills from C++ and Java through 30 other tech skills and languages. Each of these diverse activities, once completed, impacts a user’s skill ranking and determines who wins the dramatic face-off. So, choose wisely your opponents, grasshoppers, because the leaderboards don’t lie. For more on Gild, . |
Locked Out Of Facebook? Your Friends Will Soon Be Able To Help You Get Back In | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | Facebook says it will soon allow you to get help from your friends when you get locked out of your Facebook account. According to on Facebook’s official Security page, you’ll be able to designate three to five friends as “Trusted Friends” who will be sent special codes in the event that you’re locked out of your Facebook account and unable to access your email. It will also be introducing something called “App Passwords” to bring increased security to Facebook-enabled applications. Typically, when you can’t remember your Facebook password, you can have a password reset sent to you via email. Sometimes, such as when you’ve had your Facebook account hacked, your email has also been compromised. In other cases, people who signed up with Facebook so long ago may no longer have access to the email account (or accounts) Facebook has on file. With the new “Trusted Friends” setting, getting back into your locked account can now be facilitated by your friends instead. Says Facebook: Similar to other features that help you prove your identity , you can now select three to five trusted friends who can help you if you ever have issues accessing your account. It’s sort of similar to giving a house key to your friends when you go on vacation–pick the friends you most trust in case you need their help. If you forgot your password and need to login but can’t access your email account, you can rely on your friends to help you get back in. We will send codes to the friends you have selected and they can pass along that information to you. Facebook is also introducing another security feature in the next few weeks called App Passwords. This will allow you to set application-specific passwords that will allow you to login to third-party applications with a unique code. From the description, it sounds like these will be one-time passwords that you will use just the first time you authorize an application using your Facebook credentials. Although it’s nice to see Facebook focused on security efforts, this particular development is probably not going to be much of a hit with mainstream users. Even Facebook itself can’t seem to describe the feature all that clearly: There are tons of applications you can use by logging in with your Facebook credentials. However, in some cases, you may want to have a unique password for that application. This is especially helpful if you have opted into , for which security codes don’t always work when using third-party applications. We are testing a feature that allows you to use app passwords for logging into third-party applications. Simply go to your Account Settings, then the Security tab, and finally to the App Passwords section. You can generate a password that you won’t need to remember, just enter it along with your email when logging into an application. Facebook makes this announcement all the more confusing by posting a screenshot with the word “Apple” to describe the “app” in question. That makes it sound like Facebook is talking about specific passwords, which is not actually the case. It’s a one-time password for a given app, and that app may run on an Apple device, but it won’t work for the Facebook-enabled apps on the same device. |
RIM Offers Up A Device-Driven Look At Tomorrow | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | We’ve already gotten a glimpse of what hopes the future will look like, but how about a different take? was able to dig up a pair of videos created by RIM that offers yet another glimpse at our device-driven tomorrow. RIM’s vision of the future, like Microsoft’s, is one that’s heavily powered by touch — good luck finding a keyboard or physical button anywhere. Meanwhile, BlackBerrys have grown to be considerably more robust, and are able to seamlessly integrate with screens and surfaces that extend their functionality. Working on a long email and need a keyboard? Set your phone down on a table or a countertop and a keyboard pops up next to it. As you’d probably expect from RIM, most of the scenarios they’ve dreamed up deal with business, from a new hire having her device remotely set up to a repairman using an augmented reality display to find a certain house. Even classic RIM focus points like device management make an appearance, albeit with a futuristic twist. If some of that stuff sounds familiar, well, you’d be right: a lot of the things seen in the videos are already possible with current technology. NFC-enabled phones , augmented reality keeps getting , and video conference calls happen everyday. RIM’s thinking here isn’t quite as blue-sky as Microsoft’s; it’s more a refined extension of what we already have as opposed to a wild vision of what we could have. All I know is that the sooner RIM makes this future a reality, the sooner people will stop forecasting gloom and doom for them. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/31211614 w=640&h=360] [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/31211723 w=640&h=360] |
Metaio Adds Gravity To Their Augmented Reality Platform | Jay Donovan | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | German augmented reality firm showcased some updates to their core technologies today at in Basel, Switzerland. The company is documenting this update with out-takes from some highly technical white papers and also, thankfully, with a few video demonstrations (for the algorithm-ly challenged out there – like me). The basic gist of this update to their core augmented reality capability is that the company have been able to create AR technology advancements on 3 fronts: No big deal right? We have seen gravity and occlusion effects in video games for years? And the easily and elegantly demonstrates gravity and occlusion with regard to augmented virtual objects. The reason I find significance in this update from Metaio is that the kind of tracking they have been able to create is being done in real time, in variable lighting and multiple environments. They are able to provide this gravity-sensitive AR image tracking outside of a single, closed or completely controlled space which increases the potential for use in the real world. There is some pretty serious math involved, so check out the white papers when they eventually post at for more detail. If you are like me, just watch the videos and smile at the shiny objects. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVnIcYEunc0&feature=player_embedded] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jfo640kpRo&feature=player_embedded] I was able to see a preview of the occlusion capability in Munich in September, so check out my own companion video to see how they are using the Kinect to map depths and occlude virtual objects. For more info see the official |
Nokia CEO Sees “Broader Opportunity” With Windows 8, Hints At Tablets | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | In a brief interview with , Nokia CEO (and mole for Microsoft, clearly) Stephen Elop hinted strongly at the potential for a Nokia-built tablet. While his statement was, strictly speaking, more of a dodge, it’s clear that this is something they’re at least thinking about. When asked about its role as a consumer electronics brand, Elop explained: The user experience of Windows 8 is essentially a supercharged version of the Nokia Lumia experience that you saw on stage today. And you see the parallels and opportunity for commonality from a user perspective. You say wow, this is more than just smartphones, there’s a broader opportunity here. And clearly we see that broader opportunity as well, without specifically commenting on what that may mean in the future. The topic of the conversation was largely the idea of a strongly-branded, unified user experience, which Elop feels Android doesn’t offer and Windows Phone 7 does (the iPhone didn’t come up, though it would probably fall under the unified category). So when he says Windows 8 is a supercharged Lumia experience, what he is suggesting is that the Windows 8 tablet experience is one catering to its exact use scenario, being less generalist and indeed less customizable than, say, Android. He also mentioned the importance of HTML5, and noted that the series was just part of a larger portfolio of devices and launches they’ll be doing through early 2012. I’m looking forward to it — they seem to be onto something with their new designs and with luck they’ll be able to turn that into market share. As for Windows 8, there’s still plenty of time for that situation to evolve, so let’s not speculate too broadly. |
null | Scott Merrill | 2,011 | 10 | 18 | null |
1000Memories Is About To Fill Facebook With Gen X’s Embarrassing Photos | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 27 | I’m drinking a lot of coffee today because I was up well past my bedtime last night playing around with the test build of the newly launched from 1000memories, now live in . This simple app provides a much-needed function: a way to scan old photographs using your smartphone and post them online. Oh, sure. I know you don’t necessarily need an to scan a photo – you can just take a picture of the print and post it to Facebook. But the ShoeBox app provides a handy set of tools to complement and improve upon that process, including buttons to quickly crop, flatten and rotate photos, plus fields for filling in captions, dates and tags. With the improved camera quality of the iPhone 4S, now offering 8 megapixels and 2448×3264 resolution, a ShoeBox photo scan of a 4×6″ photo produces a DPI of 550, the company claims. The app works on older model iPhones, too, including the iPhone 4, 3GS and 3G and the iPad 2. Of course, photos taken on older iPhones won’t turn out as well. Having not “grown up” on Facebook myself (I’m old), I’m clearly the target demographic for this application, as I, in fact, actually have 10 shoeboxes in my closet as well as 3 plastic bins, all filled with photos. In fact, I even have family photos going back to the 1880’s, thanks to the photo collection I inherited from my grandmother upon her passing. I’ve debated time and again about shipping off the collection to a service for digitization, but never quite got around to it. Now I can at least select a few of my favorites and quickly get them online. I do have a couple of beefs with the app, however. Although it says I can also post my photos to Twitter, after authenticating with Facebook, I couldn’t find the setting for this. As it turns out, it only appears you’ve scanned and tweaked your photo – it’s not in the app’s default Settings screen. Also, the friend “tags” you fill in using the app don’t automatically translate to Facebook friend tags when the photo shows up on your profile. You still have to manually tag your Facebook friends in order to shame them via old photos. I imagine these are features that will be addressed via an update, though. So now that I have an app that allows me to post and share all those embarrassing high school, college and post-collegiate photos from my youth, what I’m discovering is that I have a lot of photos that I don’t know how you kids do it, but for this Gen X’er, I guess I’ll just need to be careful with the cropping. In addition to the new iPhone app, 1000memories recently launched a service for digital memories and photos – a social network Jason dubbed a “Facebook for the Past.” More on that . |
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