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Daily Crunch: Propulsion | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 10 | 15 | Here are some of yesterday’s posts on TechCrunch Gadgets:
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DreamIt-Backed CloudMine Lets App Developers Bypass The Backend Pain, Focus On Their Product | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 15 | I think it’s a fair assumption to say that, for app developers, the enjoyable part of their job is building the actual app, not finding the right web services and hosting provider, setting up databases, and slogging through configuration. I could be wrong to presume this to be true, but , a Philadelphia-based startup launching in open beta today is willing to bet that most developers might agree with me. So, CloudMine has developed a service that will allow developers to reduce the pain by providing a set of RESTful APIs that allow them to quickly create back-end solutions for their apps. Specifically, the startup is offering schema-free data structure storage, user account creation and management, and server-side business logic for computations that are too complex or data-intensive to run on a mobile device. CloudMine is currently part of the current batch of fledgling startups in DreamIt Ventures’ Philadelphia-based accelerator program, which has invested $20K of seed funding in CloudMine’s backend solution. The service has been in closed beta for several months, where its testers have reported that CloudMine has cut the time it takes for developers to configure backend solutions in half. Developers can use the service’s REST-based API directly or download its SDKs for the platform of their choice to give app creators the chance to increase their value proposition by focusing on the product (and getting it in front of users) and not worrying about tinkering with servers, web apps, or scaling. I like that the PaaS service is offering a “B2D” (business-to-developer) solution that enables developers to move their focus away from infrastructure to product testing and iterating. It’s also pretty cool that developers can and immediately get an API key for their first app — and quickly generating keys for other apps with one click once they’re ready to do so. As to who is behind the startup: CloudMine was co-founded by Ilya Braude (formerly of Eastern Research acquired by Sycamore Networks and Drakontas), Marc Weil (who has previously worked at Apple and Oracle), and Brendan McCorkle (also the co-founder of Textaurant. For more, . |
Web “Start-Ups” Hit Cash Crunch. Or Don’t, Depending On Whom You Ask | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | https://twitter.com/#!/gaberivera/status/124295704704327682 https://twitter.com/#!/cdixon/status/124297282274340864 https://twitter.com/#!/sacca/status/124308553656836096 https://twitter.com/#!/parislemon/status/124309953400942592 https://twitter.com/#!/cdixon/status/124309080637575168 https://twitter.com/#!/pkedrosky/status/124315351344349184 https://twitter.com/#!/fdestin/status/124315610158071808 https://twitter.com/#!/pkedrosky/status/124317148062564352 https://twitter.com/#!/davemcclure/status/124319252990799873 https://twitter.com/#!/naval/status/124326777731551232 https://twitter.com/#!/sacca/status/124327981152878593 https://twitter.com/#!/kevinmarks/status/124331853472735232 https://twitter.com/#!/gaberivera/status/124332562989580288 https://twitter.com/#!/davemcclure/status/124329003799683072 https://twitter.com/#!/Joshmedia/status/124354049372991488 https://twitter.com/#!/gaberivera/status/124359298280206336 In an article titled the reports that in contrast to the exuberance of most of this year, “for the past couple of weeks” startups are having a harder time raising early stage and Series A funding. “The start-up financing market is getting weaker by the week, no question,” said in the piece. Techmeme’s (disclosure: Rivera just so happens to be my current significant other) tweeted out the article with a rejoinder, “You people could have blogged about this before got around to it” sparking a fierce Twitter debate between numerous high-profile investors including , , , , Ravikant and even a cameo by our own . Well turns out someone did blog about it, VC , who recently equated venture’s current state to a Basically providing a way more nuanced explanation of the article’s main point, Roberts explained what is happening rationally, “As the time, attention and capital becomes more scarce upstream the number of companies who will attract follow on capital will continue to decrease. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” Basically that what’s happening currently is some form of seed stage Darwinism, weeding out the bad deals while solid companies are still seeing strong valuations. Case in point: “I think people are overreacting to the increased incubator/seed deal volume, and UNDERreacting to unsustainably high Series B/C valuations… There is no big problem with a bunch of sub-$1m deals running out of money — that’s built into our model. There are plenty of innovative & sustainable lean startups getting started, and plenty of seed capital available from multiple sources (angels, incubators, seed funds, big VCs),” told us. “Between personal investments and funds I’m invested in I am probably aware of ~100 startup valuations and have not seen a downround or a bridge in the last 2 years,” Dixon wrote in an email. So did the jump the gun? “The total number of VCs and the total amount of VC capital has gone down,” says VC “Thus, a brick wall. Plus, ENIFA. Everyone Now is a Fucking Angel. Look at Twitter Bios. Everybody is ‘my day job’ + ‘angel investor.'” Some of the debate here may anecdotally be based on the disparity in deals people are seeing, seed, Series A or the holy grail of a a theoretical Instagram or Quora Series B. “And, as more companies form but do not reach Series A, the [drop] in new company formation will eventually help dissipate the pain of hunting for technical talent,” said in a precisely this sort of seed “survival of the fittest.” Which is why this “cash crunch” or whatever is happening might ultimately be a good thing. “It’s the whole frigging POINT to fail on a limited budget instead of wasting a big round,” explained McClure, in his characteristic fashion. You can follow the rest of the pretty entertaining debate through this |
Japanese Telco KDDI Buys Content Delivery Network CDNetworks For $167 Million | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | Quite big news from Asia’s web world today: Japanese telecommunications giant ( ) [JP] it will buy an 85.5% stake in , the Korea-based content delivery network, for US$167 million. KDDI says the plan is to turn the CDNetworks HQ in Seoul into a subsidiary and to expand its global business (CDNetworks also has offices in the US, China, Europe, and KDDI’s home market of Japan). CDNetworks’ core product offering is a that accelerates web content delivery and application performance for customers. The company currently offers over 130 content storage points at servers located in a total of 70 cities in 31 countries. With the acquisition, KDDI wants to be ready for the projected over the next years (KDDI itself has over 30 million mobile subscribers in Japan). CDNetworks was founded in Seoul in 2000, is listed at the Korean Stock Exchange and currently boasts over 1,200 customers worldwide (including LinkedIn, Yelp, or German social network StudiVZ). The company hit US$99 million in revenue last fiscal and claims sales have been growing 20% a year on average since 2007. |
Facebook And eBay Team Up To Breathe New Life Into Social Commerce | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | “We’re at an inflection point”, eBay CEO John Donahoe said from the stage at , eBay’s brand new developer conference that launched today in San Francisco. “We’ll see more change in how consumers shop and pay in the next three years than we’ve seen in the last 15 years”. Donahoe’s prediction for the future came as context for giving a more complete introduction today to , the platform formed by eBay and its nest eggs PayPal, Magento and GSI — designed to create a robust, full-service and “open” eCommerce solution. The eCommerce solution “to rule them all”, one might say. But the real kicker is that, , what X.commerce really symbolizes is the first instance of eBay creating a business that truly caters to developers. In the past, eBay developers have been divided into the eBay marketplace, PayPal, etc., but now developers have all those technologies in one place, allowing them to create “new shopping and eCommerce experiences based on these interconnected suite of tools”. One of the more anticipated announcements to come out of Innovate was a partnership between the world’s largest social network and eBay, which will see the latter integrating Facebook’s Open Graph (the tree of connections Facebookers create by sharing and interacting with friends and content on the social network) into its Magento and GSI global commerce platforms. What does this mean? The partnership will basically give third party developers a bigger voice in the development of social commerce, allowing them to build new social shopping experiences for consumers and retailers, share their ideas, and create personalized apps for buying, selling, and sharing that have Facebook’s social features baked right into them. While building Facebook’s features into eCommerce offerings may allow them to make shopping more personalized and display friends’ thoughts about products right in their eShops, the truth is that social commerce hasn’t exactly taken off over the last year. to set up storefronts on Facebook to sell directly to their customers while they’re networking or surfing a brand’s fan page, but so far sales on the platform haven’t impressed. It seems that consumers aren’t particularly jazzed about doing their shopping on Facebook — part of which may be due to the novelty of Facebook’s eCommerce or it could simply be a reluctance to embrace new commerce functionality on what is really a platform designed to share pictures and stalk former romances. It also may have something to do with the fact that many consumers are worried that their credit card and personal information is being scooped up by Facebook in the transaction process. Either buyers are redirected to a brand’s own online store, or they buy on Facebook and often have to accept an app request to make a purchase. That app request can give away a bunch of information on the user and it’s really something many consumers are still loathe to do. Indeed, it’s a result of this that, as VP and General Manager of X.commerce Matthew Mengerink said today, online shopping remains “a very individualistic and lonely experience”. Which is a shame considering the fact that Facebook’s Director of Platform and Mobile Marketing Katie Mitic told the Innovate crowd that shopping is inherently a social activity and that the world is really just beginning to get a taste of “what’s possible with social commerce”. Of course, to achieve what’s possible with social commerce eBay and Facebook need the developer community to get excited and want to be on board. Yet, some analysts and eCommerce experts were hoping for a deeper and perhaps more full-featured partnership between the two companies. And Mitic’s announcement was met with little to no applause from the 3,000+ developers and techies on hand. This could of course be that they were tired, or that the recent changes to Facebook’s platform that took users beyond the “like” button to allowing them to share what they’ve “read” or want to “taste” just don’t sound that enthralling when applied to social commerce. With eBay’s new Facebook integration, developers will now be able to build social commerce apps that allow users to share what products they “buy”, “want”, “own”, or “recommend”. But is this enough to really change the face of social commerce? Mengerink said that, in the market today, too many shopping apps target the point of sale, but that the real-life process of browsing, discussing what products are appealing or not, and trying different things on, for example, is inherently social, but it doesn’t always involve buying. “What we’re encouraging developers to think about is to try out the more ‘pre-shopping’ social experience”, he said. Meaning that the process of joining friends at an online store, browsing, sharing, and chattering via enhanced social features is a way to encourage brand recognition, organic word-of-mouth familiarity with products — and is integral to making the online shopping experience more resemblant of offline shopping. And to grow online sales. The question is, of course, whether or not this is truly possible just with “want” and “own” buttons, and just how much these new pre-shopping features can boost a brand’s bottom line. The virtual shopping experience is a long ways off from one that mimics its offline counterpart, and I’ve yet to be convinced that just because one of my grade school friends interacted with a product on Facebook, which then popped up in my news stream, that I’m more likely to interact with that product and buy it just because of some loose social connection manifesting while I’m in the process of turning off more Facebook sharing features. Yes, it adds to a brand’s network, and if I’m browsing friends’ profiles and see a product I want to learn about before buying, this is a great conversation starter. What do you think? Is this a win for developers, consumers, eBay, or Facebook (or all of the above)? |
Somfy’s TaHomA Lets You Control The House From Your iPad | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | I’m not a homeowner myself, but something tells me that when I do buy a house, I’m going to want something like the home automation system to ensure that I can be as lazy as possible. Developed by a company called , the TaHomA allows you to remotely control multiple supported products throughout the house, from motorized awnings and blinds to lights and thermostats. Oh, and did I mention you can do it all from your iPad? In fairness, the TaHomA has a pretty robust web interface too, and can run on just about anything that supports Flash. Obviously, since iPads and iPhones can’t handle Flash, they had to make do with a native app that does all the heavy lifting. Aside from the iOS-friendly dashboard, the TaHomA system itself consists of a host of components. The most important bit is the TaHomA controller, a thin glossy black box that runs into your home wireless router, and coordinates a series of small wireless receivers through a ZWave mesh network. From there, those receivers communicate with all the Somfy-supported goodies in your house, like your motorized shutters (you have those, right?). Once all the pieces are in place, you’re ready to fire up the dashboard. Here, homeowners can fiddle with things independently, or create special presets called “scenes.” If you’re like me and just can’t get up in the morning, why not create a scene that cranks up your lights and turns down your thermostat? Users can create as many scenes and control as many rooms as they like, so fiddling is definitely encouraged. Note that installing the TaHomA definitely isn’t going to be a fun DIY project. Somfy actually trains and certifies installers to make sure that new and existing homeowners wind up with a solid installation experience, so don’t go expecting to buy the components and throw them together over the weekend. Creating a product like the TaHomA is a pretty bold for a company like Somfy, who have spent the last 40 years making motors. The end result is surprisingly polished for a first-time effort: the web interface is smartly laid out and easy to understand, and the experience scales down nicely to both iPads and iPhones. The TaHomA is set to debut on November 1, but the pricing entirely depends on how far you want to trick out your house. The ability to control 11 devices within your home will set you back a cool $2500 installation, but it could be a small price to pay to control your house while on the run. |
Pinkdingo Raises $1.4 Million To Make Charity Easier By Killing The Checkout Page | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | , a young startup looking to breathe new life into the charity space, is announcing today that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from a host of angels, including John Paul DeJoria, the Founder of Patrón Spirits and Paul Mitchell Systems as well as Sunil Sani, an New York-based angel and member of the board of trustees at . The startup has also recruited several other advisors who are well-familiar with the fundraising space, among them is Mark Sutton, Founder of , one of the largest P2P social fundraising platforms and Founder of , Brad Hargrreaves. So, what is it about this private beta startup that’s drawn some big seed funding from these fundraising veterans? For starters, Pinkdingo Founder and CEO Scott Arneill brings a refreshing attitude to the fundraising space, saying that it’s important for non-profits to realize that there’s no silver bullet that will magically allow their organizations to convince people to give bucketloads of cash to their cause, or continue to donate until the cows come home. In fact, while many fundraising sites today are taking a social or peer-to-peer approach to giving, Pinkdingo (in spite of a somewhat humorous name) is serious about taking an alternative, and perhaps less social, approach. So, rather than enable charities to get their donors to ask friends (and their social networks) to make donations, Pinkdingo is focused on helping charities the donors they convert. “We believe that scalable and replicable innovation for charities needs to be about retention, rather than creating more ways for charities to ask more people for money”, Arneill said. Pinkdingo wants to make it so that charities don’t have to send reminder emails, and consumers don’t have to groan over the amount of email and snail mail they receive from charitable organizations. Of course, charities are operating in one of the few spaces where players have to reacquire their customers every year and the average attrition rate for first-time donors is between 50 and 80 percent, Arneill said. (Not to mention, solutions like Causes.com, Crowdrise, and Fundly are already working in this space and have some big names behind them.) Even for successful fundraisers, be they charity events and campaigns or what have you, once they’re finished, that’s it. The charity is left with email addresses to try to convert their customers again the following year. So, Pinkdingo has identified the big opportunity in this space to be one that eliminates the donor reacquisition hurdle for charities by giving them engaging recurrence-based apps built for easy, run-in-the-background-type retention. Really, it’s the opposite of what’s typical in this space. Rather than build a cloud-based solution for the non-profit or charity, Pinkdingo wants to focus on the consumer-facing side — to make the giving process less painful for the one unloading their wallet. As the specifics of the solution are still in testing, Pinkdingo isn’t yet showing all of their cards. But, from what I’ve been able to gather, in practice, this means that the startup will be launching some interesting micro-donation technology that will allow charities to get rid of that painful checkout process and better retain their customers. , said Firstgiving Founder Mark Sutton. . More to come as Pinkdingo readies its product for the market. Check . |
Ebyline Raises $5 Million From E.W. Scripps To Help News Organizations Fight Off Content Farms | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | Last September, a group of former L.A. Times veterans launched as a better way for news organizations to manage their freelance talent and syndicate their own content. The goal was to give the Web’s shady content farms a run for their monies by creating an open marketplace for freelance journalists to pitch story ideas, take assignments from editors they work with, and get paid. Publishers, on the other hand, can use Ebyline to bring their content to other newspapers and publications. Variety, for example, uses the platform to syndicate its movie reviews to other websites. ( .) In November, Ebyline raised $1.5 million from E.W. Scripps, and today the newspaper publisher is demonstrating further confidence in the growing startup, announcing that it is leading a $5 million series B round investment to help the platform scale. As a snapshot of the company’s growth as it stands today: In just one year, the startup has secured a total of $6.5 million from E.W. Scripps, powered over 75,000 projects, and partnered with publishing houses like the LA Times, Gatehouse Media, Internet Broadcasting, Grammy.com, and, of course, E.W. Scripps. Beyond building a virtual newsroom platform that enables publishers to manage content syndication and find new freelance talent, Ebyline also automates freelancer administration including assignment and pitch flow, independent contractor agreements, payment processing, and tax management. What’s more, in May of this year, the platform added video and audio capabilities to support multimedia broadcast, and crossed the $1 million revenue mark in August. This revenue is largely derived from the small percentage the startup takes from syndication deals, etc. Seeing that news organizations have reduced their staffs in response to the changing economic and content distribution landscape (cough, digital technology), the pool of talented reporters who work outside of the newsroom has grown exponentially, said Ebyline Co-founder Bill Momary. As the space moves forward, there’s little doubt that news organization (particularly web-based entities) will go virtual and lean increasingly on their outside staff for critical reporting. For the growing number of news organizations that work with freelancers and want to find ways to streamline the time and cost of managing these able-bodied souls (sorry, I had to) or find and hire experienced journalists, Ebyline offers a great resource to do just that. For more, . |
IDCEE hopes to draw investors East, and Eastern startups Westward | cloudbrows | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | There remains competition for the pan-European conference location, and latterly Vienna . But Kiev is now making its play to be the place to bring Central Europe, Russian and Western players together with IDCEE. The advantage over Russia is obvious: no visa required. Scheduled for the 25-26th of October 2011, the conference aims to bring central and eastern European entrepreneurs to the Ukrainian capital. Last year over a thousand participants arrived in Kiev mainly from the Russian-speaking region, hence both Russian and English are the official languages at the event. Even if you have already heard , and speak at the , do not miss a chance to listen to dozens of Russian and eastern European entrepreneurs and investors discussing the opportunities and challenges of the technology entrepreneurship in Russia and eastern Europe. I am personally looking forward to meeting , the CEO of , , the co-founder of , , an Australian entrepreneur from Bulgaria and a founder of Xentio, (stealth mode), , the founder of , , who is cloning Zynga with her new venture , and , the founder of , the maker of the amongst others. Entrepreneurs can still apply to the startup competition. The winner will get a chance to pitch at one of the events. Last year the winner was , the click-to-call technology startup from Russia. Zingaya then proceeded to present at . Another finalist from Ukraine called developed a tool to facilitate data entry on mobile phones and tablets. During the typing process the tool offers most likely letters to press. It has been localised for 26 languages including Korean. The company has already secured a licensing deal with a tablet manufacturer Fly. The deadline to apply for the competition is the 18th of October. We hope to be able to cover the winner of the startup competition. |
Eric Schmidt Finally Appears On Google+ | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | For a company that is supposed to eat its own dog food, Google has been criticized for how few of its senior executives are visible on Google+. You can find and there, and now so too is executive chairman . Of course, Schmidt might have been there all along, just not sharing in public. After all, that is the point of Circles. It’s pretty clear that everyone at Google uses Google+ internally, and sometimes those posts even get shared . But now Schmidt is sharing in public as well. His first post about two hours ago are links to his remembrances of Steve Jobs on Charlie Rose, CNBC, and in BusinessWeek. For some reason, Schmidt’s profile photo is a picture of himself which looks like it is from 20 years ago when he was at Sun. Time to update that photo. Perhaps he could take a cue from Google founder Sergey Brin, who shares amazing on Google+ of whales, tortoises and skydiving pics. Any top Google exec needs to be careful what they share publicly because they do represent the company, even on Google+. But they can also take the natural curiosity people have about their lives and thoughts and use it to showcase hat Google+ is all about. If they don’t use and love their products, why should the rest of us? |
Diaspora Passing The Hat Again | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | It’s been over a year since towards the creation of an alternative, decentralized social network. It was less than three months later that the of their project hit the web, but since then — well, it would be disingenuous to say we haven’t heard anything (they sent out alpha invites just last month, for instance), but they sure haven’t been making a lot of noise over there. And it seems that although the original goal for their Kickstarter project was a mere $10,000, twenty times that amount still falls short of the money needed to develop and launch a competitor to the biggest site on the internet. So they’re asking for more. There’s no shame in that, of course: startups around the world go a-begging to their VCs, investors, and even friends and parents when the coffee runs out. And plenty of software projects are entirely funded by donations. Diaspora, , explains that they need a bit of cash to keep the magic happening: At its core, Diaspora* is a new community, a uniquely free one, based on a positive vision of how we can all experience community online. It’s a community effort too. Which is why so many people are contributing in whatever way they can. And why we hope you’ll take a moment to give $25.-, or whatever you can, to support this vision today. . You’ll get an invite to the alpha if you’re not already in it. It sounds to me like they’re dealing with the reality of launching a product. While they could bang out the guiding principles, basic UI, and so on in a month or two of caffeine-and-righteousness-fueled hyperproductivity, the devil is, as always, in the details. Making it secure, scalable, flexible, and accessible are just as important as the idea behind it in the first place. After all, you only get one big launch — unless you’re Color. Hopefully the community will pull through with a little money to keep them going. I’m anxious to see the project, not because I’m especially displeased with Facebook or Google+, but because this, unlike those services, is truly centered on the user, not on advertising or data farming. That would be like a breath of fresh air these days. |
AMD’s Bulldozer Fails To Meet Expectations | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | The Intel-AMD war has been going on a long time, and I hope it will be going on longer. The last few years have been hard on the underdog, however, with huge growth by Intel in both the low-power and high-performance sectors. The Core 2 Duos excelled, as did the Core i* series, and its most recent consumer series, the Sandy Bridge update to the i*s, is a monster. AMD has consistently lagged behind, though from the other side of the table you might say they’ve been nipping at Intel’s heels quite effectively for years. Bulldozer was supposed to be the platform that finally brought them up to speed, but it’s been delayed for a long time, and now it’s launching to less than stellar reviews. I’ve skimmed through , and the conclusion is that it’s just not competitive. , , and agree. Whether it’s synthetic or real-world testing, AMD’s best FX processors don’t stand up to the middle of Intel’s line, or even to their own processors from last year. Is it a disaster? Not exactly: I’m guessing at some point along the line, someone at AMD said “look, we have to release something sometime. Our customers aren’t going to wait forever.” And despite the fact that they have many improvements waiting in the wings (according to a roadmap AMD shared, presumably as a sort of covert apology), they went to market with the processors they had. Unfortunately, despite the new architecture and insane transistor count (the 8-core 8150 has around 2 billion), performance and efficiency per core just plain isn’t that good. There are a few tests on which Bulldozer takes on Sandy Bridge well, such as those truly optimized for high core counts, but on single-core tasks it gets destroyed. There’s hope: this is just the first iteration of the new architecture, and it’s likely we’ll see both a new line and a serious performance boost when Windows 8 hits. In the meantime, while the Bulldozer processors provide decent performance for a good price, no one seems to have found a good reason to buy one other than that they’re not Intel. If you do decide to buy, get the 8120. It’s the same silicon as the 8150, apparently, but the better-testing samples are getting 8150 branding and a higher stock clock speed. If you don’t mind a doing the overclocking yourself, you can save $50 by going with the 8120 and giving it a little boost. |
TeleSocial Opens API, Allows You To Add Voice Chat To Almost Anything | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | Smack talk, that mainstay of online gaming since the invention of… well… the online game, is a fine art. To know when to call someone’s mother something nasty or to question your opponents sexual prowess is of paramount importance in almost any situation. That’s why wants you to use their API to add voice chat to almost any program you can imagine, from office apps to games. Telesocial is an angel-funded start-up dedicated to voice. They initially worked at adding voice to social networks – including Facebook – and have now opened up their work to programmers. Their system allows one-click calling between app users (you could yell at your opponent in , for example) and the creation of in-app conference rooms for multiple users. You can use nearly any language to create what they call a TalkSpace and they for PHP, Objective-C, and command-line based instantiation. Bill Waytena and Eric Stone founded the site in 2008 and they have always focused on voice in the social setting. “The Telesocial API allows developers to add innovative voice functionalities to their games and applications,” wrote Eric Stone in a release. “Our API translates user IDs into phone numbers, creating a phone-numberless voice service that connects people anytime, anywhere on their favorite device, the mobile phone.” The service supports multiple authentication systems and turns social IDs into “phone numbers” that are uniquely addressable by your apps. The API works with Facebook, Twitter, Android, and iOS. Telesocial notes that the app is good for in-game chats (“Interested in calling the person who just watered your crops in that farming game?”) and call screening (“Want to screen your date with a phone call before going out with him or her – but not give out your number?”) and it supports anonymous mobile-to-mobile calling. It would also be perfect for a sort of illicit, sultry voice-only Chatroulette for lonely writers (just putting that out there, devs, no rush.) The API is available now. |
Apple’s iOS 5 Error 3200: Now Trending Worldwide | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | If you’re trying to upgrade your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to iOS 5 this afternoon, there’s a pretty good chance that it isn’t going to go smoothly: Twitter is currently teeming with complaints that users are suffering from an “internal error” as iTunes attempts to activate each device. The issues are so prevalent, in fact, that ‘Error 3200’ is now a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. Ouch. The issue is related to Apple’s servers, which are unable to keep up with the massive influx of traffic. The fix? A lot of people suggest to just keep trying, though some of them are saying it took dozens of attempts before their request went through. It’s probably a better idea to go read for a while and try later — but I’d probably be clicking madly alongside the rest of you if I had the same issue. Let’s hope that this isn’t foreshadowing things to come: Apple is officially launching its server-based iCloud alongside iOS5, which is obviously reliant on Apple’s servers being able to handle a of traffic (I imagine there’s going to be a major spike as people update their photo streams for the first time). Apple’s last major venture into the cloud, Mobile Me, was a rare for the company, and I’d expect they’ve put a lot of preparation into ensuring that fiasco doesn’t repeat itself. But this isn’t a great start.
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Video: Hands On With iOS 5 | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | Given the folks are having with we thought we’d share a few of the features and associated apps with you all. This update is fairly major – some would call it iOS catching up to some of the best features of Android, especially the interesting new notifications screen – but there was surprisingly little to really show. Most of the features are hidden behind the scenes and the improvements like multitouch gestures have a bit of a tacked-on feel at worst and are inconsequential at best. That said, this is an interesting move for iOS in general and, although I filmed this on the iPad, I think iOS 5 really shines on the smaller iPhone screen, especially with the addition of notification widgets like Weather and the stock ticker. |
New Heyzap Update Puts Your Favorite Android Games Up Front | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | Mobile game discovery platform has come a long way since its , and today the company hopes to shake things up again with a new update to their Android app. For the uninitiated, Heyzap allows players to check-in to their favorite games, and discover new ones by sharing and connecting with other players. Players can also win badges after hitting certain milestones, and can try to become the “Boss” of any given game by checking in enough times. For version 3.0, the team revamped their app’s design to put a new Play tab at the center of the action. Tapping it brings up the full list of games installed on your phone ranked by their usage. If you’re a diehard Fruit Ninja fanatic for example, you’ll find the game right at the top while less worthy titles like Uncle Jim’s Pig Roundup (not a real game, but a guy can hope) settle towards the bottom. Pressing and holding a game’s icon brings you into a separate info page where you can connect with other people playing the game and see who has managed to land the coveted “Boss” spot. If you happen to tap on an unowned game while browsing around, you’re taken to a similar info page complete with download link from the Android Market. The ranked list is a conceptually simple tweak, but it’s one that makes it loads easier for users to manage their game libraries. Instead of scrolling through your entire app drawer looking for that one special game to play, Heyzap figures out what it is and places it front and center. The new design coupled with Heyzap’s ability to connect to the app market for quick downloads makes it clear that Heyzap wants to be your one-stop shop for mobile gaming. Company co-founder Jude Gomila would probably agree with me: he casually mentioned to me that he hopes Heyzap will become the “Instagram of games.” Android users can snag the app (or update if they already have it), but iOS gamers will have to wait a few more weeks until they get to share in the fun. |
Hublot Rebuilds The Famed Antikythera Mechanism | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | Discovered in 1901, the Antikythera Mechanism has long been called one of the earliest computers. For years scientists had no idea what it did, ascribing it with almost mystical functionality. Through the use of advanced imaging techniques, we now know that this lump of crusty, corroded brass was actually an astronomical computer that allowed ancient Greeks to predict the passage of the planets. Watchmaker Hublot has recreated the mechanism using modern techniques and shrunk it down to nearly postage-stamp size. The new watch – a one of a kind – features the full mechanism as historians and scientists understand it along with a standard three-hand tourbillon as well as a date register. Then it gets a little wild: The various known indications of the Antikythera “machine” have been faithfully reproduced on its modern-day counterpart, both on the front and on the back. The primary face of the movement shows: the calendar for the Panhellenic games (which designated those cities hosting the games), the Egyptian calendar (12 months each of 30 days, with the epagomenal, or additional, days), the position of the sun in the constellations of the Zodiac, the phases of the Moon (with a magnificent hand and aperture which shows the position of the Moon in the zodiac throughout the sidereal month), as well as the sidereal year. The back of the watchmaking movement shows the Callippic cycle, the Metonic cycle, the Saros cycle and the Exeligmos cycle.
The watch will be on permanent exhibit at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris after appearing at BaselWorld 2012. The watch uses the mainspring to power these Antikythera registers, adding life and vibrancy to what would have once been a hand-cranked navigational system. It all fits into a tiny package that can be worn on the wrist. Because this is a one-off piece, expect it to cost somewhere in the millions if it is ever sold.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEpf2Lskpsg&feature=channel_video_title] |
New Mobile App Zoomingo Helps You Find Nearby Sales | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | Newly launched is a shopping discovery app that aims to help you find nearby sales using either your Android or iPhone. With a focus on clothes, shoes, jewelry, handbags, beauty and home products, the app appeals to the everyday bargain shopper, not the daily deal seeker or the gadget guru looking to compare prices on HDTVs, for example. Sales data for major retailers is available all across the U.S., including from stores like Nordstrom, Macy’s, JC Penney, Williams Sonoma, Target, Kohl’s, Dillard’s, Wal-Mart and more. In total, has compiled sales data from over 70,000 retail outlets, using a combination of automated methods, manual data-gathering and “Deal Scouts” positioned in the top 10 U.S. cities. Currently, Deal Scouts are paid by the company to help pump up its deals database, but in the future, as the community grows, everyone will have the opportunity to be a scout. At that point, deal finders will be rewarded with badges, points and prizes, like retailer gift cards. The company was founded by language learning service Livemocha’s co-founders, (Zoomingo CEO) and (CTO). When Livemocha started, it initially hired language tutors to kick-start the community for the first few months of operation, before the crowd arrived. Now, they’re doing something similar with Zoomingo’s scouts. (And how we wish other services would do the same, instead of launching deserted, crowd-less wastelands!) Even though my community (lovely Tampa, Florida) isn’t typically considered a top U.S. metro area, I was pleasantly surprised to find a ton of deals in my area for everything from kid’s toys to new handbags to beauty items and much more. In the app, you can follow favorite stores and other Zoomingo users. Also, if you choose to connect with Facebook, you can follow your friends and help Zoomingo recommend better deals to you. (E.g., if your gender is “female” you might be shown perfumes, “males” may be shown men’s clothes). As the community grows, you may find other users with similar interests and you’ll be able to virtually stalk their finds using a Twitter-like “follow” model. You can share your own finds too, by snapping a photo, adding a description and sale price. A future version of the app will offer integration with check-in services from Foursquare and Facebook, instead of the in-app “check in here” option which doesn’t really do much for now. Later on, Nadkarni tells us, retailers could use Zoomingo’s check-in to push out coupons or other offers. Retailers will be able to host in-store scavenger hunts at some later date, too. Nadkarni says he had the idea for the service after he took some time off from Livemocha, and found that his wife was having trouble locating nearby sales on mobile. So many apps were focused on price comparisons and barcode scanning (ShopSavvy, Red Laser), standalone check-ins (Foursquare) or promotions (ShopKick, Groupon), but there wasn’t a simple way to just browse local sales and search for items. Zoomingo is currently self-funded. The app is live now both on and . |
Virgin Atlantic To Recycle Steel Mill Pollution Into Jet Fuel With New Tech | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | Not one to shy away from difficult problems, Virgin has just announced that their aviation arm will be partnering with carbon-handling company to spread . Airplanes are certainly an efficient means of transporting people (more efficient than single-person vehicles, at any rate), but the sheer volume of fuel burned means that any slight improvement could bring about huge savings in costs and emissions. The new process being promoted by Virgin isn’t actually any cleaner to burn, but the way it’s created is far more eco-friendly. Essentially what they’re doing is repurposing waste material from other manufacturing plants, steel mills in this case. These mills produce waste gases and other junk that would normally be emitted into the atmosphere. Virgin and LanzaTech will collect these gases at the source and bring it to their facilities, where it is processed and turned into hydrocarbon jet fuel and miscellaneous alcohols (and some waste, no doubt): [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyW9Me80RcM w=640] They’ll be bringing the necessary retrofitting to steel mills in the UK, New Zealand (where LanzaTech is based), India, and China, and hope to have a “demo flight” in a year or so. They claim the new process reduces lifetime emissions (that is, from production to emission) by 50%. I wonder whether this really can produce anything like the volume necessary to run a commercial fleet. Not that supplementing dirty-sourced fuel with clean-sourced fuel is a bad thing, but will it be more than a drop in the bucket? Steel, at least, isn’t going anywhere any time soon, so even if it’s a trickle, it’ll add up over time while larger-scale solutions are being pondered. |
NYCBigApps 3.0 Competition Looks To Bolster The Startup Scene In The Big Apple | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | Silicon Valley has always been the heart of the startup scene, but some exciting companies are sprouting up here in New York, too. In an effort to nurture that growth, New York city Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the NYC BigApps 3.0 competition, where small companies or your average Joe can submit applications using official city data. And for the winners? $50,000. In its third year, the BigApps 3.0 competition is offering approximately 750 data sets to developers, along with APIs from bit.ly, DonorsChoose.Org, Etsy, Foursquare, Tumblr, Hunch, Meetup, GetGlue , Magma, Min.us, NewsBlur, Readability, Yipit, RecordSetter, among others who may be added to the list in the future. Five app categories have been added into the competition including Best Green App, Best Health App, Best Education App, Best Mobility App, and Best NYC Mashup App. The Mashup App award winner will be the developer who best combines the NYC city data and an API of their choice. That winner will be rewarded with the additional prize of a meeting with a representative of the startup whose API was used. All in all, 13 cash prizes will go out to lucky developers, along with a number of non-monetary prizes including NY Tech Meetup demo slots, two TechStars finalist spots, and membership in the inaugural BigApps Founders Network, which will offer support services to help winners launch or build their startups. Only companies with fewer than 50 employees are eligible to win the big bucks, but companies larger than that can still enter to get the recognition they surely deserve. To enter, you must head over to and get yourself registered before 5pm EST on January 25, 2012. Happy hacking, everyone! |
RIM: Global BlackBerry Outages Due To European Backup Failure | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | RIM held a quick press conference call today to address the which started in Europe but have spread to the rest of the world, including the US. The message was straightforward: a “core switch failure” in their European unit (though they did not give the exact location) that failed to turn over to one of the backup systems. The total failure resulted in a backlog of messages that they are chewing through at this moment. The problems here in the US are a direct result of that backup, and messages to certain European subscribers or that must pass through Europe are being delayed. RIM’s David Yach assured us that no messages or emails were being dropped, only delayed, and traffic was not being throttled. Lastly, they wanted to make clear that this was strictly a technical problem and not the result of a hack or breach. And naturally, their top priority is the reestablishment of service, though they did not give any kind of time estimate or guarantee regarding that. |
Marketing Startup Flowtown Gets Swooped Up By Demandforce | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | Social marketing startup has been acquired by marketing software as a service company , a mere thirteen months after it in seed funding from angels , , , , , , and Flowtown has iterated upon multiple products since it launched in November of 2009. It’s perhaps best known for its service that let companies add useful social information like related Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn accounts to their marketing contact lists. Because of a Facebook TOS change, the company veered away from that product in October 2010 and pivoted into gift marketing, allowing its customers to easily give referral rewards to their customers through Facebook, Twitter, etc. The gift marketing service never publicly launched but was profitable through a few select campaigns. Flowtown also built out a product called which helps users schedule and automatically send tweets at optimal times, based on prior tweeting patterns. That product is now integrated into Demandforce’s small business marketing software. “Anything they do to make their product social is important,” Flowtown co-founder tells me, and brings up an anecdotal analogy from Demandforce’s dentistry vertical, “The 20% of people who don’t go to their regularly scheduled dentist appointment means $80 million in year in lost potential revenue.” Marketing successfully to those people is big business, obviously. Co-founder describes the relationship between the two companies as “complete vision alignment,”We get to integrate our products and move 10x faster than we could if we remained independent and raised our Series A. It’s a major win for our team, products and investors.” |
Why Hulu’s Owners Couldn’t Find A Buyer | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | Hulu, which has been shopping itself around this year, is no longer for sale. Hulu’s owners—Disney, News Corp, Comcast, and Providence Equity Partners—put the online TV site up for bid and got some from , Dish Networks, and Amazon. supposedly took a look. But in the end, Hulu’s owners didn’t get the bids they wanted. Hulu’s owners wanted above $2 billion, but only guaranteed streaming rights for a couple of years. Google reportedly offered around $4 billion, but wanted the streaming rights for much longer. The value of Hulu is in the content deals it has with its owners to stream NBC, Fox, and ABC television series over the Internet. If those rights were to disappear in two years, Hulu’s value would drop significantly. Hence, the lowball offers. Amazon would have been the best fit for Hulu, but there was no way Jeff Bezos was going to overpay for it. So nobody is going to get it. Today, Hulu issued the following : Since Hulu holds a unique and compelling strategic value to each of its owners, we have terminated the sale process and look forward to working together to continue mapping out its path to even greater success. Our focus now rests solely on ensuring that our efforts as owners contribute in a meaningful way to the exciting future that lies ahead for Hulu. Let me parse the corporate-speak for you. We couldn’t get what we wanted so we are taking our Hulu off the table and going back home. “Since Hulu holds a unique and compelling strategic value to each of its owners”? That’s why the sale process was terminated. Didn’t Hulu hold a strategic value to its owners before also? Here’s the thing about Hulu that you need to understand. Its value to the media companies that own it is not in the $2 billion to $4 billion it can fetch at auction today. Its real value is as a source of ongoing and growing licensing fees for their TV shows as more and more people watch online. As TC contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan noted : Hulu raised $100 million at a valuation. Even if Hulu’s value has risen since that deal, the increased value on the TMCs’ [Traditional Media Companies] balance sheets means little. However, if Hulu (in the hands of someone else, be it as an independent post-IPO company, or in the hands of MSFT/YHOO/GOOG) pays the TMCs hundreds of millions of dollars per year in licensing fees, then that kind of annuity on their income statement will be far more valuable. The media companies which own Hulu only wanted to extend their licensing agreements a couple years to any potential buyer because they fully planned on jacking up the price when it came time to renegotiate. And all the bidders knew that. Now that the media companies will continue to own Hulu, they kind of have a fiduciary responsibility not to ream it too much on those streaming fees. Although I am sure they will try anyway. What an exciting future that will be for Hulu. |
No Need To Fear This Face-Tracking Automated Suspicion Generator, Citizen | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | We’ve written about computer vision and facial recognition many times before, and recently one of the issues that has come up has been that all the cameras in the world are generating more visual data than people can watch. I wrote about Kitware’s intention to create , and this “Questionable Observer Detector” seems like it would be a nice complement to it. You’ve heard, no doubt, of security cameras that snap pictures of your face as you pass and compare them to a central database of smugglers, terrorists, and other baddies. The trouble is that unless these people are already known, the system can’t really detect them. So a team of computer scientists at Notre Dame . The camera would analyze footage, recording the time and place of every face in it. Later, while looking at different footage, it would compare the new tracking data to the old, and see if anybody has shown up twice. Someone passing by the same corner five times in a week would be normal, but someone coming and loitering in an airport ticketing area twice a week for a month might be something to look into, regardless of whether that person’s face is in any databases or connected with any crimes. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUHz_i5VAUM w=640] It’s a bit scary, but so is the problem it’s meant to combat: the kind of criminal who only needs one chance to commit a terrible crime — like a suicide bomber. They’ll never be in any databases for obvious reasons, but have a habit of checking out targets a few times before they attack. Sure, it’s also the kind of thing that a police state would love to have in their arsenal. But someone had to invent it sooner or later. [via ] |
Nintendo DS Hits 50 Million Units Sold In US, But At What Price? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | Sales stats for the month of September have been propagated by the NPD Group, and the usual suspects are on there with no major upsets. The 360 is leading sales with 483,000 units sold, followed by the PS3 (estimated at ~370,000 units), with the Wii bringing up the rear with 240,000. Nintendo was happy to point out, however, that the DS has just crossed over the line of 50 million sold in the US, making it the best-selling game console ever in this country by their calculations (the PS2 is a very close second, if so). But with a quarter of a million DS units flying off the shelves every month, what does that mean for the ? You may remember that Nintendo made quite a big deal about essentially introducing the new handheld with a price that was just plain too high. After and offering free games to early adopters as a consolation prize, they’ve seen sales improve… but the month saw 260,000 being sold, not the kind of numbers Nintendo would like to see for their only new console in years (though not as low as the number I had here originally). There was a right after the new pricing was announced, but that seems to have petered out. Did they miss the boat? Don’t forget that the DS is in its of sales. The 3DS is its true replacement (not the XL, or DSi), and the 3DS will be on sale for a long, long time. The gaming race isn’t a sprint, and a stumble at the start doesn’t mean Nintendo is out of the running. After all, the PS3 was a joke when it started out, and while it hasn’t dominated the 360 by any means, it has seen solid, increasing sales over the years. Nintendo is okay with putting a band-aid on this problem because they’re looking five years down the line. Not to mention the DS is finishing off strong, with a big year of serious releases, while the 3DS doesn’t have two killer games to rub together. Give the 3DS some time: the price will drop, new versions will arrive, and must-have games will be announced. And hopefully no children will go blind. |
Onepager Raises Seed Funding For A Quick, Easy (And Free) Website Builder | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | , the startup that allows any user or small business owner to quickly build a website (for free), is announcing today that it has raised $350K in seed financing from a host of New York City-based angel investors, like Daniel Eskapa and Mark Birch to continue development of new features (i.e. embedding feeds and videos) and support its marketing efforts. Onepager was founded by Matt Shampine, the very same entrepreneur behind Simande, a full-service web design agency, We Are NY Tech, a website that profiles entrepreneurs (and was ), as well as WeWork Labs, the co-working space that plays home to a mixture of creatives, developers, and early stage startups. But what is it that Onepager does, you ask? The concept is very simple indeed, Onepager’s design template enables users to build their own website in a jiffy: Users just enter in the text, images, videos and links they want to appear on the site — as one would in a Word doc — and hit publish. As Onepager is a reseller for , the startup takes care of setting its users up with domain names, which can be searched for, purchased, and synced all from the platform. And the platform provides hosting as well. Onepager is completely free to use, or visitors can pay $8 a month for their own customized domain with a full suite of analytics to see who’s clicking, as well as a newsletter generator. Squarespace and Moonfruit are other startups in the space that provide similar functionality, but in allowing its users to embed their social data, add buttons that connect to Facebook and Twitter pages, add images, a logo, forward your domain right from the page — and Onepager works automatically on mobile, as it’s all compatible with HTML standards. (Unlike Moonfruit which uses Flash.) Onepager has been designed to be an uncomplicated solution to quickly building a workable website; users don’t have to know diddly about HTML coding, which means it’s great for local restaurants and small businesses that want to create a web presence but can’t afford to pay web designers a boatload of cash. The site will also soon be offering embedding from embed.ly to allow site owners to supe up their multimedia offerings and news feeds. So, if you want to convince your friends you’re a great web designer without having to read Coding For Dummies, Onepager is the site for you. It’s cheap, easy, and you can build a great website in 10 minutes. and let us know what you think. |
The Official Word: Sprint’s iPhone 4S Will Be Unlocked, But Not For Long | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | Alright, there’s been a lot of conflicting information floating around regarding Sprint’s iPhone 4S and its / status, but a Sprint spokesperson has just offered her official word. The iPhone will indeed be unlocked at first, but a SIM lock will be “pushed to the devices shortly after launch.” Seriously? She goes on to say that after the update goes out, Sprint users looking to do a bit of globetrotting can use an included microSIM to roam internationally, albeit with Sprint’s added roaming costs. The upshot to this situation is that Sprint will unlock your iPhone 4S if you’re a customer in good standing. Presumably this means that your bills are paid promptly and in full for a certain period of time, but the spokesperson offered no further detail. The big question here is why Sprint didn’t just lock the phone down from the beginning and perform the procedure for certain customers Verizon. It’s a system that’s worked just fine for all of Sprint’s other CDMA/GSM phones for years, so it certainly wouldn’t have ruffled any feathers. thinks it’s simply a technical error, and I think that’s the only convincing explanation at this point. The unlocking issue will go unnoticed by a vast majority of iPhone users who are used to signing multiyear contracts and leaving it at that. It’s the avid travellers who’d like to save a little on their monthly bills that lose here, unless someone figures out a way to block the update. |
Video: Google Unveils Their Brand New Ice Cream Sandwich Statue | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | It’s that time again, folks: with the next big release of Android , another massive statue themed around the release’s code name has gone up at the Googleplex. The latest statue to join their ever-growing army: the gigantic, Android-shaped Ice Cream Sandwich. Android lead-man Andy Rubin has just posted a video of the unveiling — check it out below. The description of the video (titled “Calling All Ice Cream Sandwich Lovers”) is nothin’ but a link to the livestream for the rescheduled Ice Cream Sandwich/Nexus Prime debut on October 19th. They’ve done one of these for each of the major releases at this point, from Cupcake, to Donut, all the way through the alphabet to Honeycomb and now Ice Cream Sandwich. They better be careful, or the lawn outside of Building 44 is going to look a terrifyingly crowded bizarro CandyLand before too long. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX4btquQzUE&w=640&h=360] A shot of the Googleplex collection, albeit without today’s addition or the incredibly awesome manifestation of : |
Buying A MacBook Pro? Wait Just a Minute, Updates Are On The Horizon | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | The current MacBook Pro design is probably going to be around until next year, but , according to a few factors that have telegraphed this kind of thing historically. Stock is low on many models, and more importantly, a few new items have appeared in Apple inventory listings. The K90IA, K91A, and K92A SKUs almost certainly represent a minor update to the existing K9*s that are the current MBPs. A total redesign would have a lot more fanfare, so this is probably a spec bump. All the same, hold off on purchasing if you can, since you’ll be getting more for your money shortly. While there’s no information on what the new models will have, it’ll probably be a set of slightly better processors, a new GPU, Bluetooth 4.0, and possibly a new board to tie it all together. Nothing on the outside, and certainly no USB 3.0. Price? No idea, but if they’re adding features it’s unlikely it’ll drop. Price drops often happen as a consolation prize when there are no real updates to a line. |
Can Microsoft Salvage Windows Phone? | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | When Microsoft launched Windows Phone last year, I was of the opinion that it was a platform that would never build steam. The entrenched players – iOS, RIM, and Android – already controlled the market, and the hiatus between the last Windows Mobile phone and the first Windows Phone was too long for even the most dedicated or curious customers to wait. It seems that this was uncharacteristically prescient as both Gartner and both estimate that Microsoft sold 1.4 to 1.7 million Windows Phones this last quarter. As : “In other words, for that entire quarter, they sold about as many total Windows Phones as Apple sold iPhone 4S preorders last weekend.” The WinPho Mango update recently reached our shores and thus far everyone has been quite happy. That’s the odd thing: no one I know, no one I’ve spoken to, is particularly disappointed by Windows Phone nor are they particularly interested in picking one up. Like Palm, the consensus is that the platform is solid, charming, and aesthetically pleasing but that nice phones finish last. admitted that year one sales have been far below expectations, not a particularly rousing endorsement of the platform. Alternatively we can follow the money. Microsoft pledged to Nokia in order to promote Windows Phone and part of this cash will go towards sales incentives. Throwing money at a problem is Microsoft’s traditional MO and I don’t doubt this will be successful. Every phone will be a smartphone in the next few years and the only thing standing in the way of Microsoft’s ascendency is price when compared to similarly outfitted Android and iOS models. Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do. Although I can’t refute their massive lead in the PC space, Google and Apple have a commanding lead in mobile and it will be hard for Microsoft to buy its way to the top. It seems that the old way of doing business – subsidies, bundling, and a healthy dose of scare tactics and FUD – will not help Microsoft in this case. It used to be that you’d never get fired for buying Microsoft. While I can’t speak for the mass of IT departments, it seems like that is increasingly not the case. So whither Windows Phone? I can’t see the platform going away, especially with the improvements we can expect from and the Metro UI and how the PC and the mobile interfaces will eventually merge. My concern, simply, is that it still is too late to come to dominance, which I suppose is fine. Looking at the numbers and general sluggishness on Microsoft’s part, a pessimist might call this platform dead. I don’t agree, but I think it definitely needs a shot of adrenaline to the heart. Nokia has been slow to bring its devices to market, but they’re set to debut at Nokia World in two weeks. If the fruits of that collaboration don’t provide the boost WP7 needs to succeed, it may be that nothing ever will. [Image: / ] |
Bit.ly Wants To Predict The Future With Realtime Social Search | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | Link shortening service Bit.ly the launch of its beta search platform and “reputation monitoring” service for its paying Enterprise customers. Apparently Bit.ly has been crawling every URL its shorten for “virality” (I guess that’s what they were doing all this time) in an attempt to provide a snapshot of content that’s trending and interestingly enough content that’s going to trend through user search. “Instead of pagerank we’re using a different filter — for any given search query, we display the stories that we predict will get the most attention over the next 24 hours. Then we use bitly’s analytics to refine our predictions in realtime. Our search technology is based on the most valuable measure of engagement: the click.” As the first public part of its realtime social search initiative, the company is rolling out a sentiment analysis system that it will be offering to Enterprise users who want to beta test. The company’s blog post that unlike a traditional clipping or trending engine what ever this will be will basically predict the future, as an “early-warning system” alerting you to “swings” in what people are saying about your brand, for example. As someone who misses Google realtime search I’m actually excited for this product, just wish I (or my company) didn’t have to pony up a month for it. |
What Cash Crunch? Khosla Ventures Closes Another $1 Billion Fund | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | There may or may not be a in Silicon Valley, but if you are Vinod Khosla you don’t have to worry about it. His venture firm just closed a new $1 billion fund (Khosla Ventures IV), which we was in the works last May. (He raised $1.05 billion, to be exact). His portfolio is half cleantech and half Internet/mobile, and he plans on keeping it that way. Top tier firms like Khosla Ventures have the luxury of raising huge funds. The limited partners who invest in venture funds are narrowing their investments to the top 20 percent of firms who produce nearly all the profits. “We have generated close to $1 billion in profits,” Khosla tells me, referring to the returns across all of his funds so far. It was only two years ago that he raised for Khosla Ventures III and a smaller seed fund. “Third-tier VCs are not getting funded,” he notes. “The number of active VCs is actually going down.” And that is just fine with him. His advantage at getting deals comes from both his track record (at both Khosla Ventures and, previously, at Kleiner) and the staying power that a $1 billion fund gives him. “When companies come to us,” he says, “they are buying insurance against bad times or getting the first generation of the product wrong. We don’t abandon a company.” He is better than most VCs at identifying high-potential companies early and promises to back them for the long haul, in good times and bad. For the record, the global economic situation does concern him, especially in Europe—enough for him to get his portfolio companies to make contingency plans last summer in case the Greek crisis or something similar makes the global economy take a nosedive. “We have absolutely helped a bunch of our companies increase their reserves,” he says. So far, it’s just been a precaution. Khosla likes to get in early, but only when he sees huge potential. “We will invest in seed companies that can be very large,”he says, “but not in seed companies that can be sold for 3X.” If any of his investments hit it big, as an early investor he is looking at a 10X return or greater. Khosla was the first major VC investor in (where he sits on the board), , , and . All of these are growing rapidly and have valuations in the $700 million to $1 billion+ range. Khosla focuses on specific investment themes across both cleantech and Internet. In cleantech, he invests in companies that increase the efficiency of oil use and oil production (like Kior and Ecomotors), as well as clean coal conversion (Ciris), energy-efficient lighting and cooling, energy storage technologies, materials and even better meat. In Internet and mobile, he invests in a “cool dozen” areas, including “data reduction” (reducing information overload to more relevant signals), big data (he recently invested in TC Disrupt startup Billguard), education, health, the interest graph, emotional computing, social, and next-gen TV. Khosla is an out-of-the-box thinker, which is why he’s been so successful at backing companies. He doesn’t consider himself a venture capitalist so much as a “venture assistant.” At our last Disrupt conference in San Francisco, about his disdain for traditional VCs, his cool dozen and the stealth meat company he is investing in. Watch the interview below. |
October 12, 2011: The Day SMS Began To Die | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | I’m not generally one to predict the death of things. I’ve rarely been known to herald a shiny new Device X as a “Device Y Killer!”, and I’m a firm believer that Facebook is doing a perfectly good job of being “the new Facebook”. Pundits love to make these crazy claims because they’re easily forgotten and rarely does anyone call them out for being wrong after a few years have passed. With that said: October 12th, 2011. Mark it down, and come back and yell at me in a few years if I’m wrong. Today is the day SMS begins to die. It . Or, really, it begins with iMessage. Back in June, MG wrote that Apple had “ ” with the announcement of iMessage. Today, they’re pulling that dagger out… and sitting back and laughing as the wound bleeds out. You! Heading for the comments! Wait a second. (A crazy request, really, given that it’s 5 line breaks deep into this post. I probably should’ve put it right in the headline.) To be clear, It’ll just start the avalanche. Today, many millions of people ( ) are being shown something better. Besides updating to iOS 5, they don’t have to do anything to make it work. They don’t have to manually install an app; hell, they don’t even need to use anything they’re not already using. . There are no PINs to share. iMessage just knows when the person you’re texting can receive iMessages, and handles everything for you. , with its free texting. There is no new app to install and use, or new service to sign up for. This is many, many, many millions of devices, suddenly switching to a new protocol with little interaction from the user. This is millions of iPhones, suddenly sending a fraction of the SMS messages they sent before. The carriers , and rightly so. Yes, iMessage only works from iOS device to iOS device — but that doesn’t matter. This is just the beginning of the end. Next, iMessage support will come to iChat in OS X. Users will be chatting across platforms — again, with no new apps to install, and no new services to sign up for. Next, Google will respond with their own, completely integrated Android-to-Android alternative. They already have such a thing to some extent with Google Talk — it’s just lacking things like photo messaging, read/delivery receipts, and the most important part: the seamless, almost entirely automatic integration. Don’t expect it to stay that way. At a certain point, probably 2-3 years down the road, these proprietary services will be in no way unique. Any surviving platforms will likely have their own SMS alternative, and the concept will reach a point of entropy where they’re no longer directly beneficial to device sales. In fact, that they are not cross-compatible will be seen as a detriment to the concept as a whole — and at that point, the major players will begin working together on a cross-platform (but still carrier independent and agnostic) standard. Users will grow accustomed to these service’s fancier tricks — the aforementioned read/delivery receipts, the typing status indicators, and the whole, you know, part. Users will see texting people via the old SMS system as antiquated; being SMS-only will be like being in a different area code in the mid 90’s. You’ll still get texts — your friends just won’t be happy about it. SMS won’t go away completely, just as e-mail hasn’t entirely killed snail mail — it’ll just be a sad shell of its former self. It’ll hold strong for a few years longer in certain countries outside of the US, until a standard is set and the new protocol is embraced in feature phones. Companies will still harass you via SMS. You’ll still be able to vote for your favorite American Idol via SMS. But SMS, as we’ve known and loathed for far too long, as a ubiquitous and integrated part of our world’s communication, as an unjustifiable cash cow for the carriers, is dying. Good riddance. |
Lovely: A Sleek Tool To Make Your Apartment Search Slightly Less Painful | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | The words “I’m thinking of moving to a new place” are apparently imbued with dark magic. Utter them, and you’re well on your way to countless headaches, tedious searches, and unanswered phone calls. Yes, apartment hunting stinks. But there’s a new tool that may help make your next hunt just a bit easier, and it won’t just help you find an apartment — it’ll try to help you actually get for it. Meet . The startup — whose backers include SV Angel, 500 Startups, Founder Collective, and Ben Ling — is setting out to become the ultimate weapon in apartment hunting. Getting started is simple: head to , and you’ll be prompted to create a username and password (or you can use Facebook Connect). Once you’re in, you’ll see a map of the San Francisco that’s dotted by listings for available apartments (Lovely is starting off in the Bay Area, but will expand to more cities in the new future). This data is drawn from scraping Craigslist and Trulia, but more sources will be added in the future, including landlords posting directly to Lovely. Click on a dot, and you’ll see a nice-looking popover that includes photos, key details, and whatever other relevant information Lovely can find. If there are numerous apartments located in a dense area, then the site will cluster them together in a circle with a number on it — click the circle, and you’ll see the rest of the listings. It’s a lot like using Padmapper, but the interface is cleaner and easier to use. There are also some handy tools for keeping track of which apartments you like, which ones you’ve contacted, and so on. Another very helpful feature: alongside the right side of the screen, you’ll see each listing ordered by how new it is — and the list will refresh in real-time if a new listing is added. As someone who recently went through the apartment search myself, this is an extremely helpful feature — many sites will let you remove listings that are more than a few days old, but this bar makes it easier to snag the best listings as they pop up (in cities like San Francisco and New York, they might be gone in an hour or two). Aside from making it easier to find an apartment, Lovely is also looking to help make sure you’re the one who actually gets it. After all, landlords will often require potential tenants to submit their past rental history, letters of recommendation, and other supplementary material to ensure that they can pay their rent on time. And taking the time to gather that information can make the difference between landing that amazing apartment, or getting one that’s just so-so. To help with this, Lovely will generate a ‘Renter’s Resume’ for you, which includes this key information. It’ll also certify that you’re employed, which can further assuage any concerns. Then, when you contact a broker or landlord through Lovely, it’ll append this resume to your message. But this is all still early days for the startup. In short, they want to fundamentally change the way the rental market works, by providing tools for landlords and renters alike. As the service gains traction, it’ll introduce more in the way of user profiles and reputation systems. The goal, they say, is to bring as much transparency to the process as possible. But they aren’t alone in this mission. Competitors include Padmapper, Naked Apartments, Nestio, and others. But the rental market is huge, and it’s badly in need of some serious disruption.
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What Does The iOS Newsstand Mean For Content Providers? Nomad Editions Gives Us Some Answers | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | The Newsstand may but to publishers it’s a dream come true. They can place their magazines front and center, ensuring eyeballs on their content and display ads without much fuss. I talked to Mark Edmiston, CEO of , about their new Newsstand-compatible titles (including , an magazine that I presume is about cats) and how placement on the newsstand can make or break an app. Nomad Editions found that many of their “app-only” titles were lost in the morass of lifestyle apps and were passed over by readers. By placing them front and center, Edmiston believes the numbers can only improve. He’ll get back to us in a week or so with the verdict, but here’s a quick video interview with him about the move. |
null | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 12 | null |
Larry Page: Mobile Revenues At $2.5 Billion Run-Rate, 190 Million Android Devices | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | During today’s call, CEO Larry Page shared some new stats on how the company is doing in new areas such as social and mobile. Google+ is now past 40 million registered users ( ), and Google’s revenue run rate in mobile is now at $2.5 billion, which is up from a run-rate about a year ago. Page noted that there are 190 million Android devices (up from in July). More importantly, mobile revenue is now at a $2.5 billion run rate, up 150 percent from last year. Most of these revenues presumably comes from mobile search ads. Page would not break out the mobile search versus display ad revenues specifically, but given its dominance of mobile search it is likely that is where the majority of its mobile revenues are coming from. For Google+, Page sees his nascent social network as just at its beginning stages. “We are baking identity and sharing in all of our products. Sharing on the Web will be like sharing in real life across all your stuff,” he says. Already, 3.4 billion photos have been uploaded to Google+. Google+ will also touch every part of Google. “Last quarter we shipped the plus,”he says, “now we are going to ship the Google part.” |
iPhone 4S Teardown: Nothing To See Here, Folks | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | While the first teardowns of the iPhone 4 (excluding Gizmodo’s crude vivisection) were extremely exciting due to the novelty of the design, the 4S doesn’t have much to offer. The stem of the iPhone 5 hopefuls’ slight disappointment, i.e. that the 4S is essentially a spec bump, meant that this teardown would necessarily be less than thrilling. All the same, there are changes and . The biggest change is, of course, the addition of the . Not much more is known about it now than when it first appeared in the iPad 2, but it’s there, that much is certain. The wireless chips have been upgraded to allow for the quadband and HSPA+ functionality, but there’s not much to say about that. The camera has of course been improved, and . The actual camera model doesn’t look impressive from the outside; BSI sensors and better glass don’t photograph well. The vibration motor (right, below) has been switched out for a nicer one that’s less buzzy, apparently. Not having felt either device buzz, I can’t say whether it’s an improvement, but I don’t think Apple would have switched this out if they were happy with its performance. That’s pretty much all. A few minor changes in layout and soldering to accommodate the larger A5 die and such are also to be found, but they’re not substantial. |
Will The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger Create Jobs? (Update) | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | There have been plenty of questions over whether or not the proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T is in the public interest. We’ve heard from competitors, senators, attorneys generals, and even the DOJ, who saying that “AT&T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low-priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market.” Today, it’s the FCC who’s asking the questions, and it seems AT&T has been avoiding them. According to , the FCC sent a letter to AT&T today asking for clarification on the number of jobs AT&T promised the merger would yield. The letter mentions that AT&T has yet to fully respond to the question of how consolidation of two companies into one would create jobs. “Our review of the information currently in our record suggest that AT&T’s responses on this issue remain incomplete. Indeed, AT&T to date has produced almost nothing in response to Question 36,” read the letter from the FCC. One of the greatest critics of the merger, Sprint, recently that aims to deconstruct AT&T’s argument for job creation through the merger. However, AT&T snapped back at that study quickly, calling it “woefully flawed.” In truth, both have quite a bit to gain by casting this deal in a certain light, so we’ll just take their claims with a hefty helping of salt. AT&T has also filed a letter with the FCC, which mentions that “AT&T is aware that the Commission has requested additional information about the job-related effects of the transaction. AT&T intends to respond fully to that request. In the meantime, AT&T submits the instant letter in response to the filings by Public Knowledge and Free Press discussed below.” The following is another excerpt from AT&T’s letter to the FCC: In the process, the merger will spur billions of dollars in additional investment, create thousands of jobs, and significantly narrow the digital divide while advancing the Administration’s rural broadband objectives – all of which will aid the nation’s economic recovery and future economic strength without the expenditure of public funds. On top of that, AT&T has made significant job commitments, including our commitment to make a job offer guarantee available to existing T-Mobile USA non-management employees, our commitment to retain the two companies’ U.S. call center employees, and our commitment to bring 5,000 call center jobs back to the U.S. |
How To Hide iOS 5’s Annoying Newsstand Icon | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | So, you’ve . Look at all the new shiny things! iMessage! Notification Center! Newsstand! Wait, Newsstand? A special folder just for digital magazines and newspapers? Meh! Lets just go ahead and delete th… oh, you can’t. It’s okay, we’ll just put it into another folder and… , you can’t do that either. Well, you — you’re just not to. The Internet Hivemind has found a way. The trick (as first noted by ) is simple (no jailbreak required!), but requires some lightning quick fingers. In what is quite obviously some sort of bug, it appears that there’s about a half second window after the creation of a folder wherein it’s not set to automatically reject Newsstand. As it’s a bug, the trick has a catch or two: Newsstand not only becomes completely non-functional when tucked into another folder, but it’ll actually make the homescreen freak out and quickly reset if you try to open it. Still, it’s better than having an icon you never use on your homescreen until the end of time. Also, you probably shouldn’t expect this trick to work indefinitely. Given the whacky homescreen-crashing side effects, Apple will undoubtedly fix it before too long — but hopefully, they’ll supplant it with something a bit less hacky. |
Tagstand Raises $1.1 Million To Help Take NFC Mainstream | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | The new iPhone may not have it, but the next one probably will — and it’s becoming increasingly commonplace on Android and other smartphone platforms alike. Yes, Near Field Communication (NFC for short), is finally starting to make its way into the hands of consumers. And a YC-backed company called is looking to help developers take advantage of the technology, by giving them (and brands) all the tools and special, NFC-equipped stickers they need. Today the YC-backed company, which we first in August, is announcing that it’s raised a $1.1 million funding round that includes many notable angels. The full list: Yuri Milner, SV Angel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Buchheit, Yael Shazeer, Christina Brodbeck, , Mike Berolzheimer, Bee Partners, Quotidian Ventures, TEEC (Chinese angel network), Vaizra Investments (Israeli fund), Dean Smith, Christopher Morton, and Anand Swaminathan. At this point Tagstand’s catalog includes a variety of NFC-enabled stickers for different use cases (outdoor stickers, stickers that’ll cancel interference so they work on metal surfaces, etc.) and NFC reader/writers. Once in the field, these stickers can be managed from a web-based control panel. Cofounder Kulveer Taggar says that the company, which is already generating five-figure revenues each month, is seeing especially large growth in so-called “smart-posters” in retail and advertising. At this point there are 20,000 different stickers in the field, and that figure is growing around 50% month over month. Perhaps more important, engagement on each of these tags is increasing three-fold each month (in other words, more people are using NFC). Most of this growth has been international, where NFC has a stronger presence — for example, Tagstand worked with Adshel to launch the largest NFC campaign in Australia for a supermarket chain called Coles, which has 50 sites in Melbourne). And Taggar says that the US is beginning to pick up steam in terms of NFC deployment. More broadly, Taggar says that the growing number of NFC-enabled phones (you can see an exhaustive list ) is contributing to a general rise in interest from developers. A third of the company’s NFC orders are coming from businesses, and two-thirds are from engineers and hobbyists interested in experimenting with the technology. |
Google Translate For Android Gets Upgraded “Conversation Mode” | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | Itching to strike up a conversation with a certain foreign someone, but the language barrier is too much to overcome? Never fear, you wannabe polyglot: the latest update to the adds 12 new languages to conversation mode. Conversation mode, if you haven’t seen it, is a nifty feature exclusive to the Android version of Google Translate. It takes a user’s voice input, translates it into a different language, plays the translation out loud, and repeats the process in reverse. It sounds a bit cumbersome, but it works reasonably well and provides a (nearly) real-time way to converse with your foreign friends. Google rolled out a very early version of Conversation Mode back in January, but it only supported translations between English and Spanish. Thanks to today’s update, you can now gab away in French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch Russian, Czech, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Polish. Oh, and lest I forget, the update also packs a few minor tweaks like the ability to zoom in on bits of translated text — perfect for brushing up on your hiragana. As useful as conversation mode can be, all of these new languages are firmly in alpha, so don’t expect flawless performance all the time. The updated app is now live in the Android Market, so all the globetrotting chatterboxes in the audience can get cracking. [via ] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V4QKza7Muo&w=640&h=360] |
Padfone, The Most Unintentionally Funny Product Launch Ever | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | Sure this Padfone thing (yes ) happened in May, but I just saw it and can’t stop laughing and can’t focus on the other thing I was writing so I am posting it here to get it out of my system, -style. ‘ attempt to circumvent by Frankensteining two Apple products, punctuated by the “BREAK THE RULES” and “INNOVATION BEYOND EXPECTATIONS” graphics, has me rolling on the floor laughing my ass off. Way to go Asus, between “Is this a Pad or a Phone in a Pad?” and “Who’s calling me? Whoah,” I am speechless. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2ANnpHnUrc&w=630] Wired Senior Editor mused , “We need a term for cultural products that are (a) not joking but (b) someone involved in their creation clearly is.” Okay, will the stoner at Asus responsible for this please fess up in the comments? In case anyone was confused as to where Padfone fits into the grand scheme of things, the folks over at Digital Inspiration have created |
Once Magazine Brings Compelling Photojournalism To Your iPad | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | Do you remember when photojournalism and photographic stories used to be a more central part of the news reading experience? Granted, those were the days when print publishing reigned supreme and photo-centric news magazines represented some of the highest circulation periodicals in American publishing. There’s no better example of this than Life Magazine, which sold 13.5 million copies per week at its peak. Yet, print edition slowly sputtered out of existence over the years (finally closing the doors of its print operations in 2007 after a number of re-starts), and just as digital technology has forced publishers and media organizations to alter their approach to the distribution and monetization of their content, photojournalism, too, seems in desperate need of a shot in the arm. Photography and photo-sharing have exploded in popularity thanks to the cameras on our smartphones and the countless photo apps and tools that make storing, displaying, and sharing our photos a breeze. While online photo albums and slideshows have become ubiquitous, quality photojournalism and photo stories that actually present a narrative (and even share news) just haven’t made the jump. , a startup that officially launched its first issue on the App Store in August, is looking to breathe new life into photojournalism by offering a series of curated photo stories uniquely edited and designed specifically for the iPad. Working with professional photographers and writers to create complete stories that aren’t just aggregated clumps of photos from the Web (no slideshows here), Once wants to reach all those people that love photographic stories, whether they consider themselves professionals or casual Instagram users. It’s Life Magazine for the tablet age. (For sake of full disclosure, I should say that I have known the founders and editors at Once for several years, and consider them close friends. While I have no personal financial stake in the magazine, I do admit a bias insofar as I hope they achieve fame and glory. Though, admittedly, this can be said for all the startups I cover.) While print publishing and photojournalism may be going the way of the dinosaur, every day, people upload millions of images to their Facebook and Flickr galleries, Path and Instagram, and the growing demand for engaging and sharable photographic content presented in a non-snooze-worthy narrative is still alive and kicking. ( .) Yet, as iPad owners currently resort to viewing photo galleries and stories in Safari and photographers remain fixed to print publications where photo budgets are drying up at light speed, Once is hoping to take advantage of the new availability of sales data and the shifting consumption habits of readers on the Web to offer a new solution. In an industry where contributors struggle to make money from their digital content, and publications likewise fight tooth-and-nail to monetize, Once is hoping to offer a compensation (and revenue) model that can address both of these pain points. For starters, the magazine initially launched , but today the team has released its new paid version, which means that its issues are now available both as in-app purchases or via a discounted monthly subscription. (The cost of which is $2.99 per issue or $1.99 per month with recurring billing, respectively.) To entice photographers, Once will be splitting all revenue from App Store sales right down the middle (after Apple takes its 30 percent cut, of course). As it stands now, the magazine is advertising free, but moving forward, Once will slowly incorporate ads and will also look to begin selling physical prints of popular photos through the App Store. Although Once has only been live for just over a month, the startup’s unique model has already added (the award-winning author, co-writer of the screenplay for Where the Wild Things Are, and founder of McSweeney’s and 826 Valencia) as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer to its advisory board. What’s more, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers like , who contributed work to a private beta, continue to line up to participate in the Once experiment. The reason for this seems largely due to the fact that the magazine has been designed specifically for the iPad. From the beginning, that’s been the focus — unlike the trajectory of the majority of publications, which start with a print product and then grumpily port their offline content to digital media and app stores. The hope is that starting from scratch will allow Once to bypass the baggage inherent in legacy print models and give them a leg up on the competition. As to the content of the magazine, generally speaking, each issue of Once will include three feature stories, each of which will be introduced by a multiple-page-long essay. Each feature will include an average of 20 to 25 photographs, which are complemented by captions, audio clips, and interactive graphics. Thanks to the high resolution of the iPad 2’s display (1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch, for those keeping track) the experience of flipping through these photo-essays on the iPad is more enjoyable than reading a magazine in print. The interface is intuitive, easy-to-use, and provides just enough supplemental bells and whistles without distracting from the star of the show: The mind-blowing photos. Of course, the one problem with being an iPad-focused magazine is that Once doesn’t have the benefit of drawing from a ready-made readership. While the team doesn’t have to worry about the costs (and overhead) traditionally associated with print publishing, user acquisition will no doubt be the startup’s biggest hurdle going forward. To combat this, friend and Once Founder Jackson Solway tells me that the team is considering various ways to partner with existing publications, potentially offering teaser versions of their stories to high-traffic websites in exchange for prominent links back to the Once app. What’s more, with Apple on all iOS 5-enabled devices, this will likely become a terrific source of downloads and eyeballs not only for Once, but for all publishers. As Mark Edmiston, CEO of Nomad Editions, (which has a similar sharing model to Once, albeit with smaller rev-sharing percentages for contributors), , publications that have previously found their app-only titles lost among the barrage of lifestyle apps and passed over by readers, Newsstand allows them to place their content front and center, which he believes will be a boon for publishers going forward. As the Once team is composed of those who’ve previously worked at Wired, Getty Images, McSweeney’s, and Mother Jones, there’s plenty of publishing experience to go around, but with a 50:50 rev-sharing model, and prices set at levels that won’t scare away potential readers, the startup is going to have to sell a lot of issues to stay afloat. To aid in the quest for profitability, the team raised a small seed round back in March and is currently actively pursuing a larger second round of financing. With a beautifully designed app that features some amazing photography from notable photojournalists, the Once experiment is already off to a good start, but the big question is: Can the startup’s rev-share model prove to be more lucrative for photographers and editors than current industry practices — are they tapping into the future of photojournalism? Or is this just another false start? Weigh in and let us know what you think. . |
Foxconn’s Brazil Plant Back On Track | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | Just two weeks ago it was reported that the relationship between Foxconn and Brazil regarding the proposed $12 billion production center there was . Foxconn was making demands the government felt were overreaching, and negotiations were stalled. Government officials and Foxconn representatives , and the plant is ready to pump out iPhones. iPads will have to wait until December, which was the original deadline. It’s likely that the potential for a complete do-over spooked investors, and both parties felt the need to kiss and make up, or at least publicize the parts of the deal that were definitely going through. “We haven’t finished the process, it’s moving ahead but there’s no date,” said Brazil’s Technology Minister, Aloizio Mercadante. Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou assured reporters that the full amount discussed was still forthcoming (brackets Reuters’): “We will be still investing US$12 billion in a (few) years, maybe four years, maybe six years.” So the terms aren’t set for the money Foxconn will be bringing to the country, but the amount at least is more or less guaranteed. How it will be split among the local contractors, sub-agencies, banks, and so on is probably the topic of heated discussion and bargaining right now, but for the purposes of the global community, the deal seems to be more or less done. |
How To Enable 18TB Hard Drives? Just Add Salt | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | The continually increasing size of hard drives means we can all store more pictures, music, games, and so on, but as with the transistor counts in Moore’s Law, those increases don’t come easy. Companies like Toshiba, TDK, and Seagate are forever looking into ways to increase the number of bits they can store inside a drive. It’s already an astounding amount, but they always seem to find a way to improve it further. Today’s advance comes from Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, where Dr Joel Yang has figured out a way to fit several times the number of bits in a given area. The secret? A little salt in the mix. Hard disks have a surface covered in tiny magnetic granules, each only nanometers across. Groups of them clump together to form tiny, semi-regular islands. The hard drive head flies overhead and flips these islands one way or another to create 1s and 0s. Those tiny granules are formed by exposing a certain solution to a nanolithographic process (but of course we all knew that already). Dr Yang found that by adding a bit of salt to solution, they were able to produce superior grains. They’re not actually smaller, but instead of having to clump a bunch together in an island, each individual grain can be manipulated individually into a bit storage unit. This means that the data density of the disk’s surface can be increased immensely. They’ve demonstrated data storage at 1.9 terabits per square inch, which is about four times what the very best hard drives today are capable of. And they’ve made granules small enough that drives based on this new process could reach all the way to 3.3 terabits per inch. That means that your drives could hold as much as 18 terabytes in the near future. Yang actually developed the salty solution when he was at MIT, but it looks like IMRE gets to reap the rewards, at least if they can commercialize it. We probably won’t see drives based on this tech for a couple years, but the improvement is notable regardless. |
Oliver Samwer walks out of an interview with TechCrunch | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | The three Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc and Alexander) founders of the incubator in Berlin, are a phenomenon. They are far and away the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Germany. They have launched and exited at least six major startups since the late 1990s, from ebay clone Alando (€48m to eBay), Jamba (€228m), StudiVZ (€85m), MyVideo (€27m), BigPoint (€100m), and the latest, Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon for an estimated €750m in cash and shares. And yet they remain famously publicity shy. I personally have asked for an interview since at least 2009. So when I was offered the chance to interview Oliver Samwer – considered by many to be the heart of the operation – I jumped at it. Once a year he or one of his brothers journey to the annual business school conference , aimed at budding entrepreneurs. It’s there that Rocket Internet famously recruits its next generation of startup CEOs for their startups – often companies which greatly resemble the business models of US startups, like , which mirrors . The young student organisers of IdeaLab faithfully checked and re-checked that Oliver would do an interview. Today in London to get the flight over to Frankfurt, then to the small but respected business school, where IdeaLab is held. But when it came to it I had 5 minutes 14 seconds with the Rocket Internet guru, much of it walking after him out the building as he repeatedly refused to conduct an actual interview. It started promisingly enough. On his arrival (also via limousine) we walked to a quiet location to sit down, chatting amicably enough. But as soon as we were seated he started by saying he didn’t want to give an interview “right now”. This was despite days or confirmations from his office that he would. He has since categorically denied that he conceded to an interview, although we have the emails to prove his office was fully aware that three media outlets, once being TechCrunch, would be there for interviews. He said there had been a “miscommunication” that an interview had been agreed. He would “maybe” give me an interview in “12 months.” What I did get was largely a criticism of TechCrunch’s previous coverage of Rocket Internet. “Don’t get me wrong, I think [TechCrunch is] the best blog.” But he said that TechCrunch’s position on clones/copycats of US businesses was often “not a fair representation of reality.” What did he mean by this? He implied that Rocket Internet has been unfairly attacked for its cloning ways when it’s in fact “created thousand of jobs” and “companies which are sustainable.” I don’t think Techcrunch would argue that Rocket Internet’s strategy has not been successful, far from it. It’s true to say, however, TechCrunch and its readers tend to prefer innovation to outright clones/copycats. But then it’s tough to get the opposing view of the likes of the Samwers when they won’t put their position… in an interview. Samwer told me that we should be looking at “who is building the best companies from an operational point of view. TechCrunch should have a little bit more of an objective view.” This is all well and good – and the reason I was there. So when I put it to him that I was there to set the record straight and talk to him about his position he said “The problem is, we don’t give interviews. For a lot of reasons. In Europe we don’t want to be mentioned.” He said he didn’t want to be like flashy, or publicity seeking, like “a Richard Branson.” “We are Germans, we have kids,” he said. “We are Germans, we like to be humble,” he later added. At “some point” in the future he would be “happy” to do an interview, but “maybe more a summary of what we are doing.” But, “Now is not the time we want to speak. ” Questions about the Groupon IPO, or Rocket Internet, or his competitors were rebuffed, as I pursued him out the door. It’s a shame. I had a number of questions to put to him and his refusal to do an interview at the agreed time stands in marked contrast to the open publicity Rocket Internet courts by being a sponsor of Idealab, with its logo everywhere, and by also his appearance as a speaker. If you want to be private and “humble” why do this at all? Surely it’s not credible to both totally avoid publicity and seek publicity to recruit people at the same time? Certainly Samer seemed to want to have his day in the sun in front of MBA students, but at the same time banning journalists from his lecture. I would liked to have asked what motivates him now he is wealthy enough not to work. And if Rocket Internet’s execution is so good, why an it not be switched towards innovation and created a Facebook killer? Is there a Talent war in Germany? Is Rocket thinking of an IPO? Who do they consider competition in Europe and why? Wimdu was accused of stealing Airbnb customers – how do they react? Rocket has a reputation for being very hard driving in deals and they behave towards partners and founders – is this reputation deserved or not? If we ever find these things out it probably won’t be via TechCrunch, since I doubt the Samwers now will now agree to another “interview” – though I would hope they do. But then TechCrunch would never agree to an interview where the questions were pre-agreed and the interview was so managed, and intended to be a mere “summary.” Having come a long way for an interview, I had started recording, thinking we were going to do an interview. But after 5 minutes he walked out the door and I followed, as you’ll hear on the recording below. It’s ironic, since it must be said that innovative SoundCloud is about as far away from a Rocket Internet clone company as you can get, and very much part of the new wave of . Oliver Samwer left as he’d arrived, in a limousine. |
Andreessen Horowitz Joins The Start Fund To Seed YC Companies | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | At the beginning of the year, super investors Ron Conway and Yuri Milner to invest in every new Y Combinator startup. They offered each YC startup to graduate from Paul Graham’s rigorous selection process $150,000 in an uncapped convertible note with no discount. Some venture capitalists the precedent this set. But at least one more big one, , is jumping on board and joining the Start Fund. Going forward, Andreessen Horowitz will contribute $50,000 of that $150,000 to each YC startup that chooses to take the deal (and so far, most of them have). “It will start with the next cycle,” Marc Andreessen tells me. With per class and that comes to $3 million in commitments per class for each of the three investment partners in the Start Fund. Is it really a good idea to invest blindly in a group of companies without any vetting? “What you have with YC is a special situation,” explains Andreessen. “it is a very high quality set. Paul just impresses the hell out of us in terms of quality and the results he has had. Our view is he is running such a good selection process that an investment in this group is a good idea.” Andreessen Horowitz is already an investor in some larger YC alums such as Airbnb, Bump, and Likealittle. The competition for deal flow is so intense now that VCs need to get in earlier and earlier to compete effectively with all of the angel money still sloshing around. Andreessen looks at seed investing as a way to explore later investments and get to know companies early on. The earlier a VC puts money into a deal, the more they will make if the company turns out to be a hit. Vinod Khosla takes a in terms of trying to invest as early as possible (but without writing blank checks). With Andreessen Horowitz handing out checks, the notion of a cash crunch seems far-fetched. Except that it is not so simple. The crunch is definitely not at the seed stage, rather it is at the A round. “I don’t think there is a cash crunch,” says Andreessen. “There is no sign of a cash crunch at the seed stage. I think the crush will be at the next stage, seed going to venture.” The number of active VCs doing A and B rounds is actually getting squeezed. Second and third tier limited partners (the institutions which invest in VC funds) are themselves feeling the squeeze from the public markets, and those are the ones who normally invest in second- and third-tier VC funds. So all the money is flowing to fewer top-tier funds who actually are showing returns over the past 5 to 7 years. Increasingly, those top tier funds are the ones which get in at the seed stage and are there to back companies all the way to billion-dollar rounds, doubling down every step of the way. Most startups, of course, won’t ever get past the seed stage. But big boys like Andreessen Horowitz, which overall, (and Milner and Conway) can afford to lose $50,000 a pop for the option to find the next Dropbox or Airbnb. |
Startup madness in Poland: three events in one week and a launch of a new fund | cloudbrows | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | This week startup contests at , and have been keeping entrepreneurs and investors out of the office. For some it may appear unproductive but for , the founder of venture fund and an accelerator called , startup competition is another form of dealflow. Today Kowalczyk and other investors were judging presentations at the Startup Fest, openly exchanging their opinions in tweets and cheering for the best pitches, instead of keeping the deals private to fend off the competitors. The competition to find and fund promising companies is indeed increasing in Poland. Seed money supported by EU funding is easily available, according to entrepreneur , the founder of , funded by Warsaw-based , the non-profit accelerator, and , an portfolio company. Kowalczyk raised 700 000 Euros for his Warsaw-based HardGamma seed and early stage fund after supporting as an angel investor. Codility, the developer of practical coding tests, won both contests: Seedcamp in 2009 and TC Europas in 2010. It is already a profitable business. Now he has just closed ProFound Ventures’ fund of 2.5 million Euros, with the help of the EU money. In Poznan, the fifth largest Polish city, seed funding is available from the . Its investment vehicle Speedup Investments raised 3 million Euros from business angels, and still has money to invest into three more projects. SpeedUp IQbator and , both supported by the EU funding, raised 4 million and 2.4 million Euros respectively. According to , the managing partner of SpeedUp Group, the fundraising efforts are still ongoing for the new fund, aiming to raise total of 10-15 million Euros. This week, a new early stage venture fund called , based in Cracow, has closed its funding round and now has 40 million Zloty (13 million Euros) to invest into early stage tech companies. Innovation Nest is co-founded by . Previously a co-founder of the largest Polish website Onet.pl and an angel investor in Merlin.pl, the Polish clone of Amazon, he is a known guru in Polish tech entrepreneurship. Wilam’s goal is to support Polish entrepreneurs with global ambitions. Yet many startups appear to be rather domestically focused, since the Polish market is attractive enough to build clones of successful Western companies. Also the language can sometimes be a barrier. For example, the pitches at the StartupFest were delivered in Polish, allegedly leaving the guest of the event, Seedcamp’s Carlos Espinal, baffled and confused. requires pitching in English, yet it is rather an exception to the rule. Aside from the choice of language, the Polish startup ecosystem appears to be well developed. The startups can pitch at various events. An invitation-only takes place every month, where a keynote address by a featured guest is followed by pitches and networking. There are also Startup Weekends. Last weekend it took place in Poznan, bringing to life a fantastic idea for a mobile application. , which is barely a week old, aims to help parents motivate their children to do the chores. The next Startup Weekend is in Poland on the 18th of November. E-nnovation is the main Polish conference for tech entrepreneurs with international ambition. This week judges named an Egyptian startup, , the winner and the recipient of 10 000 Euros and two laptops. And for those who need to get a shot of entrepreneurial energy on a regular basis, there are in Warsaw every Wednesday. Then there are specialised tech media blogs such as and that cover the tech community, and even a startup mansion, , a co-working space founded by , a co-founder of . The accelerator GammaRebels is an important element of the startup landscape. It offers 4600 Euros for 10% equity and a three-month mentoring programme. Currently it is preparing teams in the first edition for the demo day, which will take place on the 26th of October. Investors, save the date! Given the during the selection process, the accelerator received many applications from abroad, and now has a Lithuanian startup, (a project management tool which combines the best productivity tools into one flow), and even an Indian company, (an easy-to-use tool to create a personal website for social and professional identity) in its current edition. The latest of the startup events, StartupFest, has just announced the winner. supports impulse purchase decisions by enabling users to take a photo of a product with a mobile phone, and buy the product immediately online. It uses advanced image recognition technology to identify products, and find equivalent in the online stores. The team presented at the Startup Week Vienna earlier this month as one of the top ten startups selected out of 500 that originally applied for the contest. Now let us see if investors will put their money where their tweets are. See for more insight. |
Keen On… The Problem With the Internet: Consumers Want Culture for Nothing (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | This summer, at the prestigious the prize winning Scottish writer and filmmaker made a highly controversial speech about the of the traditional author and the book. Indeed, Morrison’s speech made such a stir in Europe that I invited him onto TechCrunchTV to familiarize our global audience with his controversial views. The unvarnished Morrison didn’t disappoint. Arguing that the Internet is a “model for extreme American capitalism”, he told me that today’s high quality book and author are being killed by three forces: Google, Amazon, and the consumer. While Morrison’s Google and Amazon arguments have been made before by a number of critics (including myself), it is his critique of the online consumer that is likely to be most controversial. But is he right? Could it really be possible that it’s the online consumer – with his or her insatiable appetite for free or very cheap content – that is killing our culture? |
Discover The World Around You With New Mobile App Roamz | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | Just in time to be one of the first app installs on my freshly arrived iPhone 4S, there comes a new location-based mobile app called (iTunes link), which will have its official debut on Monday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. As hinted at by the name, the app wants to help you discover the world around you as you “roam” around town. To do so, digs into social signals from services like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and Instagram in order to find out what people in your area are buzzing about right now. It then presents those results to you in a stream which you can filter by interest. After installing the app, you can optionally choose to connect Roamz Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, so it can provide better, more personalized recommendations. It looks at your own social signals, like your check-ins, your friends’ check-ins, and your shared likes and interests, including those you indicate within the app itself using the included thumbs up and thumbs down buttons provided on the listings. Then, on the main screen, there is a series of toggles that let you filter what sort of information you’ll see, broken down into “interests” like Shopping, Events & Entertainment, Restaurants, Children, Pets and much more. By switching these toggles off or on, you can better filter the results of the activity trending near your location. The result, ideally, is that you don’t have to be constantly checking your social networks to find out what’s going on, what’s popular or where your friends are checking into right now. “There’s so much social data being shared,” explains Roamz CEO and Founder Jonathan Barouch, “but if you’re not following the right people at the right time, you may be missing out.” Barouch admits that the venue categorization is not complete for all areas yet – only major metro regions. That’s why, for example, the results for somewhere like San Francisco or New York appear to be much better filtered than those I’m seeing for my own city (sunny Tampa, Florida). For smaller areas like this, only about 50% of the venues have been categorized. But, , you’ve got to launch sometime. In the future, plans to deliver its recommendations through iOS5’s new push notifications and may even integrate with Siri (e.g. “Siri, does Roamz recommend any museums around here?”) Further down the road, brands may be able to tap into these push notifications to send out highly personalized messages to users, which I like to imagine would go something like this: But then again, maybe I’ve just been hanging out with Siri too much today. Still, serendipitous discovery of the world around you? That’s the app I was waiting for. Roamz is in the very early stages of development, so it can’t fully deliver on that promise just yet. But it’s certainly one to watch. Australian-based Roamz raised $3.5 million in Series A financing in January 2010 from media company Salmat. Barouch himself was previously the founder of Fastflowers.com.au, one of Australia’s largest floral chains. |
The World’s Movie Camera Makers Have All Quietly Stopped Production Of Film Cameras | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | Most people reading this website will not be surprised to hear that the era of film is coming to an end. Even those of you who, like me, spent days in darkrooms perfecting your dodge technique, are likely unruffled at the notion. But in Hollywood film has been clinging tenaciously to life, if only out of a sort of traditionalist inertia. But this last year was marked by a sort of quiet final surrender by the film cadre: Arri, Panavision, and Aaton have all ceased production of film cameras. These companies have been driving the film industry for decades, and for them all to throw in the towel at once suggests that the end truly is approaching. The story of the last few years of film is told extremely well in , which touches on the many people and industries which film moviemaking has both relied on and contributed to. To call its end a tragedy would be a sentimental overstatement, but the world rarely moves on without leaving some things behind, and it’s good to acknowledge that. Practically speaking, there has been pressure for years on these film camera companies to switch entirely to digital, and a few things finally put them past the point of no return. While they have been doing good business in a way, the number of productions using film has been steadily declining, and the need for new film cameras hasn’t been strong in years. They’re phenomenally expensive, for one thing; even major production houses tend to only have a couple on hand or rent from a partner. Panavision and the others have been tweaking and repairing these cameras for a long time, but selling very, very few. The competition from digital has also stepped up, even from within. Can Arri justify the cost put into their film department when everybody is crowing about the Alexa, which is by all accounts amazing? Then you have the upstarts like RED, whose totally new technology and research put the unwary old guard on the run, and Canon, whose 5D mk II has proven a popular option for filmmakers on a budget. Changes in the industry, too, have portended film’s demise. TV production has made a sudden shift to digital, especially after labor disputes that led many actors and producers to join with the union covering digital productions instead of film. The earthquake in Japan flooded the one facility that makes a certain HD tape format, prompting a number of production houses to switch to all-digital. And of course the ongoing replacement of film projectors with digital continued to put pressure on the film ecosystem; in July, the National Association of Theatre Owners announced that fully half of their thousands of theaters were converted to digital, and they’re adding 700 every month. What’s a film-based business model to do? Shut down quietly and with dignity, it seems. Film itself will likely be around for a while longer, though Kodak and Fujifilm are only going to continue production as long as it’s a good business decision. But with Kodak nearing bankruptcy and Fujifilm more and more embracing digital, the future isn’t looking bright for 35mm. But will it disappear forever? It’s impossible to say, but the answer is a bit like that for books: they’ll remain in production for a long, long time, but will be marginalized to the extreme and bought only by collectors and traditionalists. As AbleCine’s Moe Shore estimates: “In 100 years, yes. In ten years, I think we’ll still have film cameras. So somewhere between 10 and 100 years.” Sounds reasonable. Some will say good riddance, and some will never convert, but that the industry is moving on is just a fact. Whatever the specifics of the era’s demise turn out to be, here’s a modest salute to the film camera companies that have enabled so much creativity. They’re finally embracing the next wave with the humility proper to a venerable but truly outdated technology like film, and hopefully the next century will be as productive as the last. |
RIM, Get Ready To Pay Up For That Massive Outage | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | Now that RIM’s global network is , carriers are having to deal with the public relations nightmare that the outage has caused. Given the sheer number of vocal BlackBerry users gumming up Twitter with calls for compensation, we (and all of their customers) are left wondering how RIM is going to handle this. Today’s is a drastically different picture than the one RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie painted in a recent conference call. When asked if RIM would be compensating their carrier partners for the trouble, Balsillie said that it was the last thing anyone was thinking about. According to him, he was heartened to see how carriers the world over offered their support in RIM’s time of crisis. “This has not been about pointing fingers,” said Balsillie. “This has been about serving customers.” While true, this strikes me as a bit of a lame excuse. Of course these carriers were supportive — they wanted the network up and running as soon as possible, so that their users (and their wallets) wouldn’t jump ship. For customers, the carriers are the most visible target for service issues, whether the problem was theirs or not. Now, that service has been restored, we’re starting to see how these carriers are making it up to their customers. All of the , for example, are either issuing service credits or offering free calls and messages to their customers. , a carrier out of the UAE, will be offering BlackBerry users three days of free usage. Apparently, carriers in Spain like Telefonica are to pay their customers for every 24 hours that service was affected. It won’t result in a huge win for individual customers — they’re expected to pick up a few extra Euro each — but Telefonica will certainly be feeling the pinch. It’s not entirely clear to what extent (if at all) RIM will be covering these compensatory costs, but you’d better believe carriers will try and foist the bill onto the folks in Waterloo. Analyst Gus Papageorgiou of Scotia Capital puts RIM’s potential payout at over . What’s still up in the air is if RIM will be directly compensating their customers, as opposed to covering the costs incurred by carriers doing it. The issue was brought up more than a few times during yesterday’s conference all, and all the pair of co-CEOs could say is that it’s a “priority.” Even if they don’t reach out their customers, RIM could face legal pressure from irate customers. RIM’s been on the receiving end of before, and they could face a doozy of one if enough users band together. Whether or not it sticks is another thing entirely. It’s looking at this point like there’s no way RIM is going to get out this mess without opening up the corporate wallet. Unfortunately, it’s the exact last thing RIM needs right now. The company is in dire straits as is, and while it’s unlikely compensatory costs will send them into ruin, it certainly makes RIM’s future look even bleaker. |
Paul Carr’s ‘The New Gambit’ Wants To Be ‘The Economist,’ But Funny (And Tablet-Only!) | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | Here’s the one in which we figure out what startup ; Okay so it is a publication! Okay it’s a focused on publishing only for tablets and e-readers! (Actually doesn’t a tablet count as an e-reader? Wasted thirty minutes having this discussion this morning …) Carr’s post-TechCrunch company, , will shun the Internet in favor of a publishing direct-to-the-tablet model because Carr are two mutually exclusive things. NSFW Corp’s first publication will be , which Carr describes as as written by The Daily Show writers — something like , but for real news. will launch in public beta at the end of next month Carr hopes, and will be available cross-platform — on the Kindle, iPad, Nook, etc. Carr wants to hit a regular publishing schedule by the early part of 2012, with the weekly subscription costing 99 cents a ~50 page issue. “We 100% won’t be on the web,” Carr says, a novel approach which means that his team of ten or so writers won’t have to worry about Internet writing annoyances like caring about SEO or breaking news. “If we accidentally break news that’s great, but breaking news lives on the web, and it’s going to be free. [ ] will be more like ‘Here’s what we think and here’s what we know.’ We want to be breaking jokes. I mean we might just break news every so often just to fuck with people, and hide it at the back. Or maybe we’ll create the first range of news breaking merchandise? I like the idea of a plush toy breaking news … These are all just ideas,” he says. Carr says he chose the name because he wanted something that sounded sufficiently pompous, and was inspired by the Simpson’s episode where Homer reads an issue of the with a “Indonesia’s New Gambit” headline on the cover, asking Marge, “Did you know that Indonesia is in a state of turmoil?” Carr explains,”I’m a strong believer that jokes are even funnier in a grown-up setting … I mean, come on — the Economist and the Simpsons!” When asked about the challenges of launching a new kind of journalistic magazine in a tumultuous time for the industry, especially when considering the Carr said, “I think there is something so satisfying about laughing out loud that it’s worth 99 cents of people’s money. I am not below hiring a team of researchers to follow people around ensuring that they laugh, or giving a money back guarantee.” Funded by and Zappos’ , Carr is currently hiring for positions based out of Las Vegas, “I don’t want a consistently funny man woman or child that isn’t on my payroll. In the same way that Rupert Murdoch owns every single scumbag, I want to own every single funny person. I want the funny Glenn Bleck. Wait Glenn Beck is the funny Glenn Bleck.” At this point in the interview I started laughing really hard, telling Carr that he was, in fact, being really funny. “Imagine how funny this is going to be when you read it on your iPad and there’s 49 pages left to go,” he said. Carr just posted about it Also, here’s that Simpson’s clip he’s referring to, .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GifQm5SW970 |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 13 | null |
ZiiLabs Demonstrates Their Jaguar3 Android Tablet Media Platform On Video | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | We’ve seen a few peeks of Creative’s Zii-powered Android tablets over the last couple months, but being rather spec-oriented, this reference platform didn’t get much attention. This video does a better job of showing off the advantages of having a general-purpose parallel CPU array like StemCell. It’s a special 48-core chip they’ve married to a 1.5GHz Cortex A9, and it’s dedicated to media processing. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HTt5rDtH30g w=640] It may not be that we ever see this guy in action: the Zii series of media players just couldn’t stand up to the iPod touch, and it could be that this augmented Android platform isn’t cost-effective or flashy enough to bring in sales. A hell of a lot of people are going to opt for something like the , since they have no idea what WebM is, and don’t see why they would want to have 1080p playback on a small tablet that can’t even display that resolution. That’s why they have a Blu-ray player attached to a 55″ LCD. Who can blame them? It does look like a nice little tablet, though, and having that big parallel array would probably be attractive to a lot of developers. But I don’t think the market is big enough right now for this to sell more than a few thousand units. [via ] |
Zoopla to merge with FindaProperty creating a UK giant killer | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | The Daily Mail and General Trust which owns The Daily Mail and other media interests is to planning to merge the online property business of its Digital Property Group consisting of FindaProperty.com and Primelocation.com, with venture-backed property startup . Under the proposed merger, A&N Media (the consumer arm of DMGT) will retain a 55% interest in the newly merged entity. Shares in DMGT were up following the proposal. In 2009 Zoopla closed a £3.75 million round of funding from venture capital firms Atlas Venture and Octopus Ventures taking its total raised to £5.5m. The dominant player in the UK online property market is , but this merger creates a powerful competitor. A source close to the negotiations called this “a good deal for both sides”. The FindaProperty sites are bigger in revenue but Zoopla “has the innovation and growth. A big exit looms!” The Rightmove market cap is 1.3Bn. Yes, you read that right. So if the merged entity plays it right, this is almost certain to be one of the UK’s biggest ever startup exits. In a statement Martin Morgan, Chief Executive of DMGT said: “This merger will create a genuine opportunity to challenge the dominant market leader in the online property sector. We believe that the combination of our respective digital property assets will benefit both consumers and clients.” Launched in 2008 Zoopla has become one top most-visited property websites in the UK according to Nielsen. It’s smart features include the ability to ‘claim your own house’ and start extolling its features, and a feature called ‘tempt me’ where potential sellers can be lured into the market for the right price. Alex Chesterman is Zoopla’s founder and CEO, and previously co-founded ScreenSelect.co.uk (now LOVEFiLM.com). Other backers of Zoopla include Nauiokas Park LLP as well as angel investors Sherry Coutu (who founded Interactive Investor), Robin Klein of the Accelerator Group, Simon Murdoch, Andy Phillips and William Reeve. |
Google Axes More Services: Jaiku, Buzz, Code Search & More | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | According to a new post by Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz, on the , Google is delivering the death blow to several more products and services, including its code search engine, Buzz, Jaiku, iGoogle features and the University Research Program for Google Search, the latter which provides API access to Google Search results for a small number of academic institutions. Here are the details on the new shutdowns, per Google: Google also said that it will be closing down the Google Labs site, as . That site will be gone as of today, so get your last visit in now. In addition, Boutiques.com and Like.com will now be replaced by Google Product Search. These latest closures come on the heels of several other service shutdowns from the company whose previous strategy seemed to involve throwing a bunch of a spaghetti on the wall to see what sticked. In June, it . In August, Google , and in September, . Despite all the streamlining and shutdowns, that its “20% Time Project” isn’t going anywhere. |
The Galaxy Nexus Pops Up In Verizon’s Device Management System | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | If legit, a freshly leaked document from the Verizon Device Management System confirms earlier rumors that the next official Google phone will indeed be called the Galaxy Nexus. An Ice Cream Sandwich announcement is already slated for October 19, where Samsung and Google are expected to announce the next Nexus. Originally spotted by , the leaked document shows that the Galaxy Nexus will run on Verizon’s 4G LTE network, but it looks as though the new handset won’t be a global phone. describes a huge 4.65-inch display, a 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4460 processor, a 5-megapixel camera, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, an NFC chip, and of course, Android Ice Cream Sandwich. Based on Verizon’s usual pricing scheme, we can probably expect this LTE device to go for around $299 on-contract. But we won’t know anything for sure until we get official word. |
GE To Build Largest U.S. Solar Factory In Colorado | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | GE has announced plans to spend $600 million on a new solar factory located in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado. The factory, which begins operations in 2012, will be capable of producing enough solar panels per year to generate 400 megawatts of power, or enough energy to power 80,000 homes. When completed, the factory will be bigger than 11 football fields – soon to be the largest factory of its kind in the U.S. The business will also bring 355 jobs to Colorado plus 100 more positions at GE’s research facility in upstate New York. The company is retrofitting and expanding an existing 200,000 sq. foot former L’Oreal Worldwide warehouse, a project which will require a $300 million investment. Over the next two years, GE will double the building’s size. Colorado is already the manufacturing site for GE Energy’s , a joint technology development between GE’s Global Research Center and PrimeStar Solar, a company GE acquired in April. The new factory is located near this smaller, 30 MW facility and a GE solar research center. GE says the location will enable an accelerated start-up schedule with production equipment installation beginning in January 2012. The new factory will produce thin film solar panels made from cadium telluride, which are cheaper than traditional crystalline silicon panels. It’s the same technology as produced by First Solar, the largest solar company in the world by market cap. The panels are lighter, which helps ease installation. They’re also large, which helps to lower the total system cost by reducing the amount of racking and electrical components required. Shipments to utilities and commercial customers will start in early 2013, according to the annoucement. GE’s plan for solar is similar to the one for its , a space the company entered in 2002 – that is, it plans to grow through both technology and scale. GE now has more than 27 gigawatts of wind and solar resources installed around the world. |
Oliver Samwer Walks Out Of An Interview With TechCrunch | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | The three Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc and Alexander) founders of the Rocket Internet incubator in Berlin, are a phenomenon. They are far and away the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Germany. They have launched and exited at least six major startups since the late 1990s, from ebay clone Alando (€48m to eBay), Jamba (€228m), StudiVZ (€85m), MyVideo (€27m), BigPoint (€100m), and the latest, Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon for an estimated €750m in cash and shares. And yet they remain famously publicity shy. I personally have asked for an interview since at least 2009. So when I was offered the chance to interview Oliver Samwer – considered by many to be the heart of the operation – I jumped at it. Once a year he or one of his brothers journey to the annual business school conference , aimed at budding entrepreneurs. It’s there that Rocket Internet famously recruits its next generation of startup CEOs for their startups – often companies which greatly resemble the business models of US startups, like , which mirrors . The young student organisers of IdeaLab faithfully checked and re-checked that Oliver would do an interview. Today I got up at 5am in London to get the flight over to Frankfurt, then drove 100 miles to the small management school, where IdeaLab is held. But when it came to it I had a 5 minutes 14 seconds with the Rocket Internet guru, much of it walking after him out the building as he repeatedly refused to conduct an actual interview. |
How To Pitch Jeff Bezos (And Other “Giant-Brained Aliens”) | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | Is Jeff Bezos really like a “giant-brained alien?” In categorizing the Amazon founder’s unusual genius, Google (and former Amazon) engineer Steve Yegge compares Bezos and those like him to “hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.” He is not trying to be disrespectful. He is just trying to explain how to go about pitching an idea to someone like Bezos. (The short answer: assume he already knows everything about the topic you are going to present, no slides, and “ of your pitch). Yegge does this in a on Google+ to his on Google+ and Amazon. If you haven’t heard of Steve Yegge yet, he’s the guy who accidentally shared a 4,500-plus-word pointed critique on the shortcomings of Google+, his former employer, Amazon, among other things, publicly on the very social network he was criticizing. The post was meant to be shared among his colleagues, but it appears that Google+’s Circles of Sharing can even be confusing to those who work at Google. ( .) The initial post made the rounds, even working all the way up the chain to Google Co-founder Sergey Brin. At Web 2.0 this week, Brin was asked about the memo, to which he somewhat jokingly replied, “I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so”. To Google’s credit, in spite of this being an epic Reply-All-type FAIL and having “potential PR nightmare” written all over it, the company elected not to sack Yegge, and is instead taking his beef into consideration. Turning a frown upside down, or a minus into a plus, if you prefer. Personally, I applaud Google for the way it’s handled this situation. We all make mistakes, and clearly Yegge was, at the very least, trying to be constructive in his criticism. In varying degrees, we’ve all been there. After dealing with a lot of media (and internal) attention, Yegge was back on Google+, and decided to use the platform to , specifically about his former employer, Amazon, and its founder, Jeff Bezos. In his initial manifesto, Yegge referred to Bezos as the “Dread Pirate”. On Friday morning, Yegge (currently an engineer at Google) explained: I still have a lot of friends at Amazon. In fact the place is chock-full of people I admire and respect. And up until now I have prided myself on my professionalism whenever I have talked about Amazon. Bagging on the company, even in an internal memo, was uncharacteristically unprofessional of me. So I’ve been feeling pretty guilty for the past week. So, in his post, the Google engineer attempts to paint a more balanced picture of the billionaire genius behind Amazon, fleshing out his thoughts through relating a specific experience he had pitching the CEO on one of his ideas. The content is very similar to a post , in which he recounted his experience working for Microsoft, and specifically, Bill Gates. Spolsky wrote the post shortly after Gates retired from Microsoft to focus on his charitable work. It gave many outsiders a glimpse into Gates’ management style and introduced many to the billionaire’s “F Counter” — the guy/system by which people were able to judge whether or not their idea/pitch had been successful. In short, the fewer “F words” Gates issued, the better. Yegge’s post, in contrast, is actually very funny. In fact, I thought it was so funny, I read it out loud to a couple of people. And like Spolsky’s post did for Gates, Yegge’s Google+ entry paints a vivid image of Bezos, what he is like to work with, his management style, and how the CEO interacts with employees. The alien analogies stem from Yegge’s effort to describe what it was like to construct a presentation (and then present it) to the Amazon Overlord. Besides being funny, the post will also likely be of use to current or future Amazon employees who have to confront the anxiety-producing prospect of pitching an idea to a guy who, according to Yegge’s rendering, is already an expert in the subject you want to raise, and is probably a lot smarter than you are. Bezos is so goddamned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he’ll be bored and annoyed with you … for years he’s had armies of people taking care of everything for him. He doesn’t have to do anything at all except dress himself in the morning and read presentations all day long. So he’s really, REALLY good at reading presentations. He’s like the Franz Liszt of sight-reading presentations. Yep, he just compared Bezos to Franz Liszt. That just happened. He continues: So you have to start tearing out whole paragraphs, or even pages, to make it interesting for him. He will fill in the gaps himself without missing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace of brain.’ According to Yegge’s experience, even after weeks (maybe even months) of preparation, Bezos will still outsmart the presenter, and just knowing your subject from top-to-bottom isn’t enough; you apparently have to be ready for a potentially withering question or angle that you weren’t expecting. He is going to have at least one deep insight about the subject, right there on the spot, and it’s going to make you look like a complete buffoon … Trust me folks, I saw this happen time and again, for years. Jeff Bezos has all these incredibly intelligent, experienced domain experts surrounding him at huge meetings, and on a daily basis he thinks of shit that they never saw coming. It’s a guaranteed facepalm fest. While this kind of management style and intimidation factor is sure to inspire a culture of paranoia, it seems like that’s just want Bezos wants. He’s known for taking an unusual, quirky, alternative (however you want to say it) approach to building his company, preferring loose-fitting and sometimes poorly communicating teams over a well-oiled machine that creates groupthink — one not so befitting of innovation. And, hey, when you feel like you’re always one step away from losing your job (even if that fear is only in your head), you may just be willing to take more risks. As if banning PowerPoint from the Amazon offices isn’t enough to stop and ponder Bezos’ intelligence, then maybe the new Kindle line has that potential. , he seemed to both literally and figuratively take a page out of Steve Jobs’ book. , Amazon has actually succeeded in building a tablet that both geeks and non-geeks alike want to buy. No small feat. The release wasn’t about what’s inside — Amazon’s custom UI built on some Android frame or another — it was about how well the new browser works to iron out Android kinks, not about how it has EC2, but what that means to users, and what it means to have all the whizbang consumer functionality of Amazon products up front, with a not-too-shabby processor backing it all up. Kindle Fire at first brush looks like it actually “just works”, too. Sure, it’s not the iPad and likely won’t be, but it is $300 cheaper. Android and Windows devices et al have been trying to launch cheaper, viable alternatives to the iPad for how long now, and have they? Not really. With its new-and-improved Kindle, Amazon is making a play at a covetable, marketshare-hungry tablet. Apple is one of the few companies in the world that, in television spots, can simply just show their product and how it works, maybe play some canned music in the background, and you’ll actually feel impelled to buy it. to buy it. Even if you hate technology. Or maybe Apple can get away with the stripped-down TV spots simply because it has the confidence in their products that allow them to do that. Everyone else seems to have to rely on lightning bolts and CGI to spruce up their gadgets, or cars, as the case may be. Bezos seemed to exude that kind of Jobs-ian confidence on stage, and though Bezos is somewhat of an enigmatic figure in the Seattle tech scene, based on Yegge’s portrait of him, it kind of seems like he’s been that way all along. Some scratched their heads as Amazon built up its streaming video, MP3 downloads and cloud computing capabilities. But with Fire and Touch, it’s become clear why. The Kindle is no longer just a reader. While Bezos may remind some of Gates in the way he is able to display ferocious domain expertise (Gates was and is a programmer and understood the moving parts of Microsoft products better than most), he certainly seems to have Steve Jobs’ DNA, too. As Chris Dixon said in talking about the difference between a good CEO and a superhuman CEO, the test of a great leader is not just building a successful company that has a good run for a few years, but building a company that leads innovation in their industry with a string of leading products, devices, etc. It’s way too early to say for Bezos and Amazon, but a $39 billion web platform, streaming services, EC2 and killer cloud services, the Kindle, and now the Kindle Fire, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to posit that (while no one will ever replace Jobs), he may be next in line. Let us know what you think. |
Spoiler Alert: Steve Jobs Enjoyed Many Types Of Tea, Book Says | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | Like many of you I’ve been watching the steady stream of incremental for the past couple days, resulting from the imminent launch of Walter Issacson’s Jobs biography: Jobs came up with the name Apple while on a fruitarian diet, he gave up Christianity at age 13, he loved King Lear, he was disappointed in President Obama, his first job was at Atari, he valued simplicity, utility and beauty, he hated Fox News, he was obsessed with Bob Dylan, he dated Joan Baez, he resisted early surgery for pancreatic cancer, he was inspired by a Cusinart food processer, he was inspired by a trip to a jelly bean factory, he advised Bill Clinton to tell the country about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, he thought John Mayer was “out of control,’ he even consulted a psychic. “It’s like book striptease,” said Twitter user Nuno Maia, when I asked if readers and followers minded all the micro spoilers. “If I read in his biography that he killed a bison, I will quit the internet for a year,’ joked Shawn Farner, making reference to about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that had previously made the tech blog rounds. “People are bored,” Tech pundit Dan Frommer said, explaining the onslaught of incremental Steve Jobs headlines and the pageviews they inevitably bring, “I am on Steve Jobs reading embargo until the book is in my hands.” Issacson’s officially comes out Monday, but many bookstores already have it in stock — which might explain why and to have purchased their copies. Following their lead I too tried to purchase an early copy, asking people coming in and out of SFO to check its bookstores, as I had heard that some people had procured theirs there. The result? No dice, even after founder offered a bookstore counterperson $1000 for the book, arranging the money in hundred-dollar bills out on the counter. (Note: I did NOT ask him to offer cash.) Katz has since tried three times to get a copy at other bookstores, to no avail. Monday it is then. In the meantime, most of those interested in the visionary’s life and times will voraciously lap up every Jobs-related tidbit and leak. It simply comes down to supply versus demand. As , “Bottom line: Steve was a very private guy. When Walter asked him why he was allowing him (a journalist) to write about his private life, he responded: ‘I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.’ Even his children didn’t know much about him. So why do we care? To get even a glimpse of his private life is just plain interesting. We don’t hear much about it at all.” “It keeps him alive for those of us that hope he’ll live forever,” said Thomas Muraca, explaining that even something as mundane as t becomes another point of fan connection with one of history’s most galvanizing and inspiring men. “Many of the recorded interactions with Jesus were uneventful,” mused new media analyst Cody Brown “but when you sew them together you get ‘The Bible.'”
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Bret Taylor: “A Few Years From Now, Most Every Single Person At Facebook Is Going To Be Working On Mobile” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | How important is mobile to Facebook? Already, 350 million of its 800 million monthly active users are on mobile devices, and that number is just going to get bigger. “Fundamentally we view it as a really big shift for our company, as fundamental as the shift from desktop apps to the Internet,” Facebook CTO Bret Taylor tells me in the TCTV interview above (which was shot at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this week). “Companies really need to redefine themselves in this world of devices rather than browsers on people’s laptops.” Taylor goes even further with this stunning prediction: “A few years from now, most every single person at Facebook who works there is going to be working on mobile almost exclusively.” Mobile and social go hand in hand. Facebook wants to create a seamless experience across the desktop and mobile, as well as between mobile devices. Here is where may come in. Project Spartan is the unofficial name given to Facebook’s mobile HTML5 efforts. “I am not sure what Project Spartan was,” demurs Taylor before proceeding to explain how the mobile web it fits into Facebook’s overall mobile strategy. Facebook wants to be available everywhere on any device. If that means native mobile apps, that’s fine. But if someone doesn’t have a Facebook mobile app on their device, there will always be a mobile web version as well. “Where we can play a role in mobile is just helping app discovery and engagement,” says Taylor. That ambition is actually quite large. App discovery is like search for mobile. Whoever controls it, controls what people can do on their phones. Here are links to s I mention at the beginning, and the with Taylor from this interview. In the video below, we talk about the interest graph and how there is an opening for startups to explore it. At the end, I also ask Taylor what he thinks about Google+. |
Must Watch: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Launch Trailer | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | So , because I really don’t care, here’s the Call of Duty: Modern War 3 trailer. You know, the other first person shooter launching this fall, which has been mostly overshadowed by another. The trailer calls MW3 the most anticipated game in history but that’s certainly up for debate. However, Battlefield 3 couldn’t have stolen all of Call of Duty’s fans. It is the best-selling franchise in Xbox 360 history, proving Xbox 360 gamers love highly scripted shooters. Jokes! ( ) Anyway, hopefully you were good this year because between Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, gamers could have an awesome Christmas. |
Fans Line Up At New Seattle Windows Store… For The Concert | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KLwVfi0uaU] This stuff writes itself. At the grand opening of a new Windows Store in Seattle folks were camping out for most of the night only to stream in, breathlessly ready to partake in the one exciting product Microsoft could offer – a free concert by the Black Keys. I’m not here to bash Microsoft’s actual products but gosh darn it of their marketing guys aren’t incompetent. Remember the strange, proto-softcore porn ? Remember the “PC Hunter” ads? Microsoft’s marketing department, barring events where the Black Keys play for free, just can’t get people excited. We saw two or three great just last week, yet they have to sink to live music to draw a crowd? Sure, the company doesn’t need to impress anybody with gimmicky hardware and splashy ads, but can they at least to plan out a store launch that would make folks line up for more than just the blues rock stylings of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney? |
Steve’s Final “One More Thing…” | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | Steve Jobs was the . As such, it should be no surprise that he realized the power of following up a great performance with an encore. But unlike many musicians who treat encores as a given add-on for each show, Jobs seemed to recognize that encores are much more powerful if they’re used judiciously. The Steve Jobs encore was the “One more thing…” He didn’t use it all the time, and because of that, when he did, it would whip the audience into a frenzy. Following his passing, the question now turns to what Jobs was working on in his final days. Surely, the master showman has something to present us with even though he’s no longer around to show it off, right? After he stepped down as CEO in August, I made the case that his final . That his last great product was actually a self-sustaining company that could continue to pump out innovation even after he’s gone. Hopefully that will be the case. But it’s sure starting to look like he may have had a few tangible “One last thing…” products up his sleeve as well. In the weeks following his death, reports have been popping up that he was working on a few new things, perhaps on October 5. One of these projects is said to be the iPhone 5 (or whatever it will be called). This isn’t the iPhone 4S, but rather a completely redesigned version of the phone. If you believe , Jobs was not very involved in the 4S itself because he was focusing his time on the 5. Crothers goes so far as to say this was Jobs’ “last big project”. Considering the iPhone is Apple’s key product now (at least in terms of revenue), certainly one final version revamped by Jobs himself would be a worthy final project. But Jobs clearly loved to transform different industries with his new innovations. The iPhone 5 probably doesn’t fit that bill — he already disrupted that industry. Further, other reports now suggest Jobs had his hands in other things in his final months. Jobs’ upcoming biography is the source for a lot of this new information. Even though the book won’t be out until Monday, several tidbits have leaked out over the past few days. Consider that sentence a verbose SPOILER ALERT!!!!!! Another potential “One more thing…” for Jobs is apparently digital textbooks for the iPad. “Mr. Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson says in the book that Mr. Jobs viewed textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform,” Damon Darlin and Nick Wingfield . Jobs apparently went as far as having meetings with publishers about partnering with Apple to make this happen. And he was thinking about ways of circumventing state certification requirements (a tricky issue in the textbook market). Revolutionizing textbooks may seem a bit ho-hum by Jobs’ standards, but it’s pretty clear that Jobs was passionate about the U.S. education system, and felt this country was falling behind. While digital textbooks may not have the sex appeal of the iPad itself, something of that nature could ultimately prove to be the most disruptive in the long run. And then there’s the big one. For years, there have been rumors of Apple working on a television. Not the current Apple TV, mind you — an actual television set. Once the Apple tablet became a reality with the iPad unveiling in 2010, the Apple television took over as the new mythical invention that everyone loves to contemplate. I’m guilty of this as well. A number of times, the television space is the next major market Apple will go after. Why? Simple. . But have long . Most skeptics point to the fact that the television hardware market is rife with issues like very low margins, long product cycles, tough distribution, and an all-powerful industry (cable) that essentially makes the hardware their bitch. There are many good points being made. Of course, many of these things were , and even the PC industry before that. And most of these things are what make the market so ready for disruption. It would be a challenge, no doubt. But it’s the type of challenge that Apple under Jobs seemed to live for. And conquering such challenges is exactly why Apple has thrived. So it’s not surprising for me to hear that Apple does indeed have plans in the television space. “The new biography on Steve Jobs has a major product reveal: Apple may drop a full-fledged television,” Hayley Tsukayama . She calls this “Jobs’s final plan” — funny how many of these there seem to be, no? Here’s the key part: “He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant,” Isaacson wrote. Isaacson continued: “‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’” “I finally cracked it.” No four words have ever . Apparently, the biography doesn’t dive into any further details about the project. Quite frankly, while the fact that Apple is working in the space isn’t surprising, it is surprising that Jobs would say anything about it. Almost nothing has leaked out of the company with regard to the project. In fact, the only thing I’ve ever heard thrown around is a reference to a project codenamed “Sphere”. That’s it. Considering how big the market is, and the amount of disruption that the television has brought not just to technology but various fields like entertainment and information, an Apple television would certainly seem to be a fitting last “One more thing…” for Jobs. Television is a core technology that touches billions, but it really hasn’t been fundamentally rethought in decades. Sure, the picture has gotten better and the content more expansive, but we’re now forced to interact with it through crappy cable boxes and remotes that I would call — except that it would be a huge insult to Fisher Price. So that’s what I’m hoping for from Jobs’ final “One more thing…” A new iPhone is and will be awesome. Re-imagined textbooks sound great and potentially very important. But I want Apple in my living room disrupting the stale status quo. There’s a reason that Apple refers to the current Apple TV as a “hobby” — it’s just a foot in the door to ensure that it doesn’t close as they work on something much bigger. The real product will see Jobs transform another massive industry — only this time he’ll do it posthumously. One final rabbit out of one final hat from the master showman. |
Up-And-Coming Accelerator First Growth Venture Networks Introduces Sixteen Cool New Startups | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | We here at TechCrunch love startups, and we love the programs, networks, accelerators, and funds that help these startups grow and take over the world. There are a lot of them out there, and for entrepreneurs, it’s all about finding the right fit. , also known as “FGVN” or “First Growth”, may not be as well known as awesome accelerators and incubators like , , , or but the New York City-based startup incubator has a lot to recommend it. Especially for very early-stage startups that haven’t raised any outside funding. For starters, application to the venture network is free and, if the startup is accepted, there’s no enrollment fee. What’s more, the accelerator doesn’t take equity, your company doesn’t have to be located in NYC, nor is it required to have raised funding to be eligible. First Growth is looking for companies that have raised less than $1 million. All applicants need is a business plan, a PowerPoint deck explaining their mission to take over the universe, target market, why they’re disruptive etc. Like other accelerators, First Growth offers its participating startups the opportunity to participate in classes, which focusing teaching founders the important business and product strategies they’ll need to take their ideas from seed to market. These classes and sessions are led by industry experts, VCs, angels, and other entrepreneurs, and are supplemented by networking events, meetings with advisors, and so on. The list of advisors includes VCs and entrepreneurs like Joshua Abram, Partner, Coriolis Ventures, Co-Founder Media6Degrees & AdSafe, CFO of Yext Alok Bhushan, Kleiner Perkins Partner Eric Feng, Accel Partner Sameer Gandhi, North Bridge Ventures Principal Dayna Grayson, Spark Capital Principal Mo Koyfman, Michael Lazerow, Chairman and CEO, Buddy Media, and College Humor Media CEO Paul Greenberg. Today, First Growth is announcing its Fall 2011 lineup and the fourth “vintage” of its startup accelerator program, which will include sixteen young companies looking to go pro. In its inaugural batch of fifteen companies back in 2009, ten of the startups were able to attract funding by the time of their “graduation”, along with one acquisition. In its second vintage, seven of the ten startups had received funding by graduation. It’s encouraging to see this kind of success rate for an accelerator in the now burgeoning New York tech scene. Especially as First Growth is taking a somewhat unique approach in that it’s not trying to make money off of its startups. As First Growth Founder and Executive Committee Chair Ed Zimmerman told us, the accelerator is “ Furthermore, Zimmerman said that roughly 70 percent of the network’s startups have gone on to get funding, and the under-the-radar accelerator has already hatched startups like and that have attracted some high-profile investors and a few big numbers to boot. Not bad at all. So, without further ado, here is an introduction to First Growth’s newest batch of startups: is video-centric website for makeup. Founders and Caroline Marcus Dahllof use video to show women how to increase their style points and what products to use to do so. The goal is the offer a superior alternative to traditional ways of learning about makeup products and how to use them. 105 Looks’ weekly “Trend Guide” covers the latest trends and provides inspiration for trying new looks, along with videos that show how to make them come alive. is a personalized destination site that allows users to shop multiple high-end retailers from a single location, with a single checkout. It also licenses this universal checkout to provide enterprise publishers with a turnkey ecommerce solution and new revenue stream. Frustrated by an experience looking for a specific dress online and with the technical knowledge that a better, more luxurious experience was possible, founder Heather Fitzpatrick resigned from her job to found 72Lux Inc. in 2009. The 72Lux team also includes Jason Cain and Michelle Montgomery. is an easy way to advertise across the social web. The company allows businesses to create ads and deploy them across multiple social ad platforms instantly. Until now, every social network had its own distinct set of data, ad formats and advertising platforms, so advertisers and media buyers had to broker individual deals with each network. Adaptly opens up these walled gardens, providing one simplified social media ad buy to reach the 1.5 billion people on social networks, monitors data in real time, and delivers actionable insight. In April 2011, the company, founded by Nikhil Sethi andGarrett Ullom, raised a total of $2.7 million in seed and Series A funding from First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Kirschenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners, and Lerer Ventures. ( ) is a web-based art rental service for consumers, small businesses and interior designers. The company curates the best pieces from emerging artists at the top MFA programs. It asks potential customers to fill out short quiz to start discovering the art they’ll love. Then, Artsicle’s curators put together a personal gallery for browsing. Clients can try the art for as little as $25/month and earn credits towards purchase. Artsicle co-founder and CEO Alexis Tryon is the site’s connector guru, finding collectors and artists, while co-founder and CTO Scott Carleton is chief geek. is a comprehensive online personal finance tool that helps uses organize and pay their student loans. Binksty launched in private beta in October 2011 and now manages nearly $1 million in student loans. In 2009, Binksty’s founder Brendon McQueen graduated from Columbia University with 12 loans and over $100,000 in debt. He realized how frustrating organizing his student loans was and began to envision a real world tool for people who are fed up with wasting time, energy and money. ( ) is a social travel application that consolidates the past and future plans and destination recommendations of a members social graph into one clean, actionable UX. Irrive was founded by Steven Cohn. is a mobile social network that plays like a game. Users can share ideas and photos in a realtime, spontaneous, game-like environment with people from around the world. Toss a jagimo, and random people catch it and add their own ideas and photos. Once you catch a jagimo, you then have five minutes to retoss. The name Jagimo! is a play on the Japanese word for potato, “Jagaimo”, and thus an allusion to the early “Hot Potato” idea. The company is overseen by President and iOS developer, Erich Wood. is an online platform that leverages technology to bring the traditional stylist-client relationship to the masses, while creating a far-reaching and quality distribution channel for brands. It is launching with a focus on the professional women’s wear market, offering a personalized selection of work wear, pieces and outfits delivered virtually by a Keaton Row stylist. Co-founder and President Cheryl Han was formerly head of the online division for , where she was responsible for Sales, Marketing and Online Business Development. is a secure, cross-device app platform designed exclusively for the financial community. The platform makes it easy for financial providers to deliver apps to users on tablets, smartphones and desktop. The company was co-founded by CEO Mazy Dar and President & COO, Chuck Doerr. is making it super easy and fun for anyone to create an online store and personalize it for their social network by curating from an amazing catalogue of more than 2,000 fashion brands. “STYLEpreneurs” provide friends with customized recommendations and make a 10 percent commission on every sale. The company seeks to make the web shopping experience more personal. Founder and CEO Joel Weingarten realized that by combining the best marketing tool (a recommendation from a family member or friend) with the power of social media, StyleOwner could empower people to become entrepreneurs. is a demand-based marketplace for clothing and accessories. By focusing the shopping experience on the customer, Shopperseeks makes online ordering more efficient for shoppers and retailers. Founder Andrea Gouw is an fashion an ecommerce veteran, having worked for companies including May Company and walmart.com. The site is currently in Beta. is a platform that identifies the best content from tens-of-thousands of the best online contributors and connects them to publishers or brands. The company powers fashion look-books for Teen Vogue, Zagat and Neutrogena. For Conde Nast, publisher of Teen Vogue, the platform produces ten times the editorial-quality content for 1/5th the cost of a staff editor. The platform was developed by founder Matthew Myers. TreSensa is building an HTML5-based game development platform that enables developers to author, publish and monetize casual/social games across the Web, mobile devises and connected televisions. The platform will provide support for games across the entire life cycle ofgame development, driving significant efficiencies and increased monetary opportunities for large, mid-sized, small and independent game studios. TreSensa was founded by CEO Rob Grossberg, President Vincent Obermeier and CTO Rakesh Raju. is a marketplace for local tutoring. The company has tutors across the United States focused on academic subjects ranging from Elementary School Math through Quantum Physics. The company launched in January 2011. Currently there are over 160 tutors signed up in four cities: San Francisco, Washington, New York and Los Angeles. Tutorspree was co-founded by CEO Aaron Harris, Ryan Bedner and Josh Abrams. is a mobile payments platform designed to payments between friends simple and fun. Iqram Magdon-Ismail and Andrew Kortina, met as freshman year roommates at The University of Pennsylvania and built Venmo because it was difficult for them to exchange money with each other, and they wanted to improve this experience for everyone. is a platform to unite consumers around products they want to buy to pull deals from brands, the reverse of the prevailing model of marketer pushed deals. Co-founders Jeff Zaresky, John Garbarino and Bryan Migliorisi are levering combined years of experience helping brands develop social media marketing programs to disrupt the current deals model and is creating new efficiencies for both consumers and marketers. |
The Last Thousand Miles | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | It transpires that the government of Nunavut, a remote territory of Canada between Hudson bay and Baffin bay, recently acquired some new digital cameras for the purpose of creating driver’s licenses. The files created by the cameras, presumably a handful of megabytes unless they’re using Hasselblads, were too big to be effectively emailed for processing due to the extreme limitations of internet connections in the area. Instead, they were loaded onto flash drives and flown hundreds of miles to Iqaluit, where they were processed and returned. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is jokes: haven’t they heard of “save for web”? Did they try the wi-fi at the coffee shop? And in the frozen tundra, shouldn’t they be issuing sledging licenses? But the truth is that this rather absurd little situation is just one of thousands in which huge swaths of the world are being left behind in our rush toward connectivity. While the haves are complaining about losing 4G service when they’re in their apartment, the have-nots are paying hundreds of dollars for speeds we would have laughed at ten years ago. Is it possible to bridge the gap, or are the Nunavuts of the world simply out of luck? Practically speaking, it’s easy to dismiss the issue entirely by making some noises about how living in the sticks is a choice, and the physical isolation is a natural match for informational isolation. You see pictures of a llama farm in the Andes or an Inuktikut native in Nunavut, and you think “do these guys really need broadband?” There’s a grain of truth to this, but really it’s a form of entitled bigotry and a refusal to acknowledge the purpose of civilization, which (briefly stated) is to grow and improve human communities. Cities don’t “deserve” broadband any more than the some ice-encrusted region with more bears than people. Besides, problems are interesting. And solutions have a tendency to breed other solutions. Finding a way to serve remote areas with real and affordable broadband could easily yield serious improvements to the efficiency and reach of our existing and future networks. This isn’t about just buying enough copper to lay down cables to every home in the arctic, it’s about acknowledging limitations in our current systems and thinking about whether those limitations are something we want to work and live under. But there are very few limitations that people will truly accept as permanent. It should probably be acknowledged up front that nobody is going to make any money providing remote areas with internet. Profit is a powerful motive, and it is completely absent here, at least on the face of it. Companies like Comcast and Hughes exist to make money; it just so happens that they make money providing connectivity. National and local governments, however, serve the people, and part of their mandate is the standard of living. The absence of a working internet connection, or at least the absence of one that belongs in this decade, is a serious problem in that category of government responsibility. (which inspired this article) makes this point very clear. India is about to invest some 20 billion dollars into a huge roll-out of broadband services. A huge amount of this will be going to foreign contractors, who will be thrilled to be laying their own style of foundation in a market set to explode. The situation is, unfortunately, somewhat different in places like Nunavut. The population of the entire territory is around 35,000 people. If it were a country, it would be the 15th largest in the world by area. Subtracting the ~6000 people who live in the largest city, Iqaluit, you have on average one person for every 28 square miles. In Bombay, the number of people per square mile is over 50,000. In Canada, there has actually been a lot of discussion on this topic. The northern territories make up only a tiny fraction of the population, and a tension exists between the south and the north as to just how much the big cities should be subsidizing the rural areas. The Canadian telecoms regulatory agency, the CRTC, actually put together a requirement that the existing telecoms should establish a “deferral account” by skimming money from their subscriptions in urban areas (high-profit, low-cost), 95% of which was to be used for remote and rural connectivity (the remaining 5% would go to accessibility for the disabled). But lacking a specific spending plan, the money just piled up. Maybe $670 million was set aside when someone questioned the jurisdiction of the CRTC over things like expanding broadband access. Some people wanted the money to go back to the customers. Some questioned the legitimacy of requiring urban users to subsidize rural areas. It seems a little misguided to me that such a war chest should be squandered on a one-time refund to customers, or spent on areas where the telecoms are already voluntarily investing billions. But there you have it — it’s the kind of questionably justified resentment that some people feel when they see the amount of their paycheck that goes into Medicare or Social Security. It’s not big money, as far as government spending goes, but half a billion dollars sure isn’t small money, either. And as we have seen, it presents a kind of ethical quandary: can we justify spending that much money so a few people in the sticks can check Facebook? It’s more than that, though: without modernization in this area, services that increasingly rely on connectivity as an adjunct to their functions (licensing, law enforcement, hospitals) will suffer and the standard of living will truly be lower. So I think the answer is that at some point, we’re going to have to. And by the time you have to, you always wish you’d done it earlier. So what are the options? For Nunavut and places like it (rural Russia and China, developing regions in Africa and India), options are actually very few when you get down to it. The combination of extreme isolation and environmental conditions makes for a logistical nightmare. If the town is lucky enough to be in range of current data-serving satellites, which understandably mainly orbit in range of the more habitable zone of the planet, you can install a base station. The trouble is that these are expensive to install and upgrade. The stations serving Nunavut now are slow enough that sending photos was impractical, and even slight population growth would instantly render the bandwidth totally inadequate. What if a refinery were to be established, and a few hundred people move into the area? All of a sudden that seven-year-old base station, barely sufficient for a population of 50, becomes absurd. And all of a sudden, that location becomes a risk because critical services can’t be reached during, say, inclement weather, which may be when they are most required. You could establish a series of relays bouncing signals from a central area connected to a backbone. This is common practice elsewhere, good for getting a signal from downtown to the suburbs, but in a places where the hub is separated from the other points by miles of rough territory, it becomes problematic. After all, the towers can only be so far apart, and require regular maintenance. In Nunavut you’d have to have someone going around knocking the ice off the dishes so they don’t collapse. Not a job I’d volunteer for, and not a sustainable or affordable model. Besides that, it would be extremely costly to radiate these tower relays to every far-flung community. The only solution seems to be industrial-sized. In coastal communities like Nunavut, an undersea cable seems to be the tool for the job. But inland areas would need a buried cable. To future-proof it a bit, it should probably be fiber, not copper. I don’t even want to estimate the kinds of costs it would take to put three or four thousand miles of fiber under the ground, with repeaters, protection, maintenance roads, and so on. To be honest, that $670m figure saved by the telecoms starts to look like a down payment. But what other option is there? Connectivity is a necessity these days for prosperity. Without reliable internet, one is limited to places one can reach physically, which in rural areas may not be more than a few hundred or thousand people in a handful of towns. With reliable internet, the possibilities expand almost infinitely. Education and social awareness increases, and people can become involved in industries that require nothing but data to be exchanged — which makes up quite a lot of the economy these days. Some growth might be achieved by putting a little money into fishing or mining, but it’s nothing compared with the opportunity to take part in the world’s “virtual” economy, larger and more real than any local economy. It’s a problem without a definite solution, currently, but so was getting messages across the Atlantic in good time, until someone took the trouble to sink a telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland. This is one of those problems with scale. Who will volunteer to undertake this enormous task? At this level of investment, it’s too great a risk for any one entity to take on alone. Google, for instance, isn’t going to just say “all right, we’ll build that billion-dollar fiber backbone for Africa.” And neither is the African Union, which likely has more important things to manage. And neither is the government of Canada, apparently, until absolutely necessary. Australia, on the other hand, is spending billions per year to establish high-speed internet in its most remote regions. One option might be an international fund being contributed to by ISPs and telecoms; Canada alone raised half a billion in a few years on the subscriptions of perhaps 15 or 20 million people. A similar requirement in the US and other rich, connected countries, guaranteeing a certain level of outlay for the establishment of remote networks, would produce a very substantial sum of earmarked money. The telecoms would fight it, of course, but the deal could be sweetened with low-interest matching loans or what have you. I’m not a politician, if that wasn’t clear from the get-go, and I’m sure this idea of an international fund is astoundingly naive in many ways. But I can’t think of another way to advance the state of global connectivity, such is the size of the problem. Right now there are thousands of communities like Nunavut, underserved and perhaps in danger of being extinguished through neglect. As Nunavut found, the internet is quickly changing from a convenience to a necessity. Not that even necessities are guaranteed by the government or global community — but it means something to class basic connectivity among such other basic public services as medical care, clean water, and police and fire departments. It may be that research is underway that will make laying fiber or cable seem positively primitive, but I doubt there’s anything in Alcatel-Lucent or Cisco’s labs that’s going to obsolete basic broadband infrastructure. And skimming the income of an industry already in rapid expansion internationally seems a timely solution, however unpopular it may be among the carriers. The internet is a promise. A promise that physical distances will be rendered irrelevant. At the moment that promise seems only half fulfilled, as the internet is limited by, of all things, physical distance. The world be connected, though it be at great cost. Such has always been the trend. But those who would pay the greatest cost, as usual, stand to gain the most by it. They wouldn’t agree to it any other way, though a little coercion is sometimes necessary. |
Facebook CTO Bret Taylor On “Trying To Find The Balance Between Self-Expression And Sharing” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | When Facebook CTO Bret Taylor was in high school, he had a backpack covered in patches that helped him express who he was and what things he was interested in. He thinks that your Facebook page is becoming more and more like that backpack. It is a reflection of your identity: where you’ve been, what you are thinking, what music you listen to, and photos of yourself and your friends. In the video interview above, which I conducted this week at the Web 2.0 conference where , he explains the thinking behind some of Facebook’s recent features, including , ,and . Taylor describes Timeline is meant to show your life on one page, with the most important stuff up top, not necessarily the most recent. The Ticker, however is this constant stream of everything your friends are doing, much of it reported automatically by apps such as Spotify or RunKeeper. It all can become a bit noisy if you ask me. “A lot of this is trying to find the balance between self-expression and sharing,” says Taylor. Self-expression is a deliberate act. You choose to put a particular song or photo in your Timeline to tell people who you are. Ticker is a different beast altogether with its automated stream. It is over-sharing in its most unadulterated form. But Taylor doesn’t look at it that way. “Ticker is like the next generation of presence. It is valuable because it is realtime—what are my friends up to right now.” They are listening to “Hot in Here” by Nelly, now get on with your life. |
TechCrunch Gadgets Weekend Giveaway: Name PocketCloud’s Mascot, Win An iPhone 4S | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | See Mr. Fauxcredible over there? He needs a name and Wyse wants to give an iPhone 4S to the reader who comes up with the best one for him. is a remote desktop solution for IT folks and they’re trying to jazz up their marketing. To that end, they asked if I would “crowdsource” their mascot and ask you folks for some help. To enter, simply drop a name below in comments. Enter as many times as you wish and Wyse will pick one winner from all the thousands of comments that I expect we’ll get. Here’s a bit about Pocketcloud to give you some background. I’m going for Floyd, but you may have better ideas. The new version of PocketCloud allows unlimited file sharing, of any file type between your iPhone and iPad and your computer for just $1 a month. So you can link devices, and share music and other files between these devices. PocketCloud also includes support for OS X (Lion) user account authentication, and support for iPad 2 video mirroring.
The winning submission wil get an iPhone 4S for the carrier of their choice, international entrants included. We’ll pick a winner on Monday, October 24 at noon Eastern time. UPDATE – The PocketCloud guys promised to get me a winner by Wednesday. They’re a bit overwhelmed by the entries.
UPDATE – The winner is The winner is: CloudRanger! Somewhat surprisingly it was only entered by one person: Deborah Pira · Aiken, South Carolina
“CloudRanger”… Why? the name says it all!
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Gillmor Gang 10.22.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | While no one was looking, Apple has provided a fresh and easy way of decorating content with social energy, and in the process setting the stage for a renaissance in media influence and strategic thinking. As we produce ever more articulate renderings of our movements through time and space, we build synapses that can hold conversations between events without bothering to ping us for data. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @borthwick, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek |
Keen On… Why The Internet Has Been Bad For Both Musical Artists and Fans (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | The author of several classic histories of pop music including and is as well placed as anyone to understand how the Internet has changed the music industry. But while Reynolds might not go as far as like Jaron Lanier, he is nonetheless far from optimistic about the impact of the Internet on the music industry. As Reynolds told me when he came into our San Francisco TechCrunchTV studio, the Internet is bad for artists because it’s much harder now to make a living recording music. And it’s bad for fans too, Reynolds insists, because all the free music on the Internet has created a problem of what he calls “over abundance.” So is Simon Reynolds correct? Has the Internet really had such detrimental impact on artists and fans alike? And if so, then how can we return to a time when musicians like the Beatles, Stevie Wonder or Talking Heads, rather than Steve Jobs or the iPhone, captured the zeitgeist of our age? |
I Believe In Google Plus | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | Is this a contrarian view? I can’t even tell any more. On one hand, Google Plus now has , it’s the social-networking site in history, and its users have uploaded . On the other, Google is about how many of those users are actually active; say that its traffic has significantly from its peak; Google’s own management didn’t much use it, until ; and many agreed with Google engineer Steve Yegge’s lengthy and viral about how they have screwed up Plus. Not me. I think Google+ is a hit in the making. I hardly use it myself any more — indeed, there, more than a month ago, was “Sadly, it seems G+ has degenerated in my mind into little more than the place I go to complain that Twitter seems to be down” — but I’m no representative sample. Heck, I don’t really use Facebook either, except to mindlessly echo . (We pause here briefly so that bloggers everywhere can recover from their exposure to the mindblowing notion that perhaps one should not treat one’s own anecdotal experiences as universal truths.) When Sean Parker that all your friends are already on Facebook, Vic Gundotra retorted, “Your mom and friends, guess what, they are already on Google.” As MG some time ago, that little black bar on top of their home page and search results is their secret weapon. It gives Google an unparalleled ability to lead horses to their water. But can they make them drink? I think they can. Think long term. Google does. When Google initiatives flop, they’re usually pretty much dead within a month of arrival, a la Buzz or Wave. But when they get any traction, Google is at pushing them uphill, bit by bit, year by year, with a relentless tide of data-driven , all the way to the top of the mountain. When Chrome launched, a lot of people (including me) were bemused: why a new browser? Weren’t Firefox, Opera, and Safari more than good enough? Now it’s to overtake Firefox, and maybe one day even IE. When you consider the commitment Google has made to Plus, you have to figure that G+ today is a mere crude and clumsy approximation of what it will be a year from now. And what it is today is pretty damn good. (Especially now that they’ve ( ) stopped machine-gunning themselves in the foot, by from their and real-name policy.) There are already a bunch of things G+ does better than Facebook. Photo sharing. Group video chat. Allocating people to Circles. Circles with others. …Wait, there’s sort of a theme, isn’t there? Groups. Circles. Handcrafted subsets of your friends, your acquaintances, and the people you follow. Videoconferencing with a group of your co-workers; literary discussions with the members of your book club; debates about the price of a new roof with the other members of your local community center; ongoing scheduling of your World of Warcraft guild; news from the leading lights of the political party of your choice; any of the hundreds of kinds of little or large groups of people that form and dissolve all the time. That’s what Google Plus is good at, and Facebook isn’t. Mark Zuckerberg famously said, “ ” — but everyone lists and subdivides the people they know all the time: in their head, or on paper, or in the and fields of their emails, for innumerable social reasons. They’ll do so online, too, if it’s easier and a more core part of the experience than it is at Facebook. I believe people want to connect to both broad-brush swathes of people — everyone they know, everyone they work with, everyone they went to school with, friends of friends — more carefully defined groups, with finer control over identity and membership. Can Facebook seamlessly do both, and be all things to all people? Maybe, but that’s not the direction they’re going. Ironically, they’re doing things “the Google way,” betting on sweeping algorithmic solutions with their and , while Google seems to be building G+ “the Facebook way,” around personal curation and social selection. The key difference is that, the other day, our identities — and our relationships — are prisms rather than mirrors, multi-faceted rather than black & white. Google Plus acknowledges this in a way Facebook doesn’t, and that’s a big part of why I believe it will ultimately succeed. |
OnLive Feels The Facebook Love, Offers Any Game For $1 | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | OnLive offered a challenge to their community: Get 62,791 likes on and all users would get one game for $1. Well, OnLive’s fans came through, and as of this post’s writing, the Facebook page in question has 67,938 Likes. OnLive made good on its promise. Starting yesterday, all users will their next game for $1. Best yet, there isn’t any silly small print. All games currently available are eligible including Dues Ex: Human Revolution, DiRT 3, Red Faction: Armageddon and the rest of OnLive’s library. Nice. Let me suggest DiRT 3; Dues Ex is boring. With OnLive, games aren’t delivered through traditional media. Instead, gamers buy access to the game, which is then streamed to a relatively small set-top box. Depending on the user’s Internet connection, the games are often delivered with graphics and game play comparable to that of modern gaming systems. Sometimes there’s a bit of lag, though. However, with extremely competitive prices and robust social features OnLive is becoming increasing popular with casual and hardcore gamers alike. This $1 deal will do nothing but earn the company even more fans. The offer is good for a limited time so, OnLive users, fire up your and snag a game for $1 before it expires. Again, the offer is only for games currently available so pre-ordering L.A. Noire and Batman: Arkham City do not qualify. Per , new users simply need to sign into OnLive to access the deal while users who previously purchased a game should get a promo code emailed ( ). What a good way to start the weekend. http://twitter.com/#!/OnLive/status/127484701853233153 |
High-End Car-Sharing Service HiGear Expanding To L.A. | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | San Francisco-based , a peer-to-peer car-sharing service focused on luxury vehicles, is expanding to L.A. starting November 1st. The move is part of the company’s continued expansion plans that will see it arrive in five additional markets, including Portland and San Diego, by year-end. Unlike other car-sharing services, HiGear specializes in “high-end” auto brands only, including Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Tesla. Owners of these high-end cars can rent their vehicles to other drivers for fees that are, on average, 50% off commercial rates. Meanwhile, everyday drivers get a chance to finally drive their dream car without the burden of ownership. HiGear provides comprehensive liability and collision insurance and performs member screening, which includes driving record checks and sometimes even credit checks. It also collects a security deposit in order to “encourage safe and fair use of members’ cars.” In additional to the rental fee ($125-600, depending on the car), drivers pay $20-40 per day in rental insurance. The average rental period is for 3 days, or around $410. In HiGear’s case, the transfer of keys from owner to renter is not an automated procedure involving lockboxes, but actually has the members meeting up in real life in order to coordinate the transaction. Despite this hassle, the company says it now has an “inventory” of 200-plus cars and is adding new vehicles at a rate of 50-plus per month. Earlier this month, HiGear raised $1.3 million in seed funding from BV Capital, Battery Ventures, 500 Startups and angles including Zipcar investor Craig Sherman and Kevin Chou. |
Hands On With Everpix, The Service That Centralizes All Your Photos From Desktop & Web | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | For the past week, I’ve been testing the alpha version of the service, which aims to automatically centralize and organize all your digital photos, both online and off. I’m happy to report that, so far, it works as advertised. In case you missed it, Everpix, a creation of ex-Apple engineers, was . Using a small utility that runs on your computer, Everpix lets you connect to your local photo stores, online services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Instagram, and even to the photos sent to you in Gmail. Given that two of Everpix’s Co-founders, and , each spent several years with Apple it’s no surprise that Everpix is launching first for Mac users. To get started, you install a utility that places an icon in the Mac’s menu bar. Initially, the syncing may slow your computer down a bit as it uploads your entire photo library. For that reason, it might be a good idea to get the upload started before bed so it doesn’t interrupt your work. Clicking the Menu Bar icon will take you to the Everpix website, where you can configure the various services you want to connect to, as well as point it to which folders on your desktop contain photos you want to sync online. For those of you with complicated folder-within-a-folder systems for organizing photos on your computer, you may be a bit disappointed to find that with Everpix you can’t choose to upload only a selection of folders or files. You must either globally enable or disable your entire Pictures folder (or optionally, your Documents and Desktop, too). However, I’d argue that, for most people, this will be a feature, not a bug. In providing fewer choices in terms of what can be synced, it simplifies the setup, reducing the amount of clicks it takes to get started. In my case, though, the folder I use to save photos that appear accompany blog posts is in my Pictures folder, and I had no desire to include these alongside my family photos on Everpix’s website. I will be forced to relocate that folder elsewhere, it seems. By default, all your photos are private and will always remain private unless you specify otherwise, so unless you have some personal photos, I wouldn’t worry too much about having them posted online. Of course, seeing a secure URL (i.e., one beginning https://…) would make me feel a bit more comfortable. From the Everpix website, you can choose to enable additional online photo-sharing services, all of which connect using OAuth or, in Facebook’s case, Facebook Connect. The one big disappointment here was Gmail. Despite the fact that back in March 2010, Everpix straight up asks you for a Gmail username and password, noting that it will store your encrypted password or its servers. When a better method is available, there’s simply no reason to handle things this way. I chose not to connect my Gmail, and will not do so until OAuth is supported. As for the organizational aspects to the service, Everpix does as promises – it groups photos together by “moments.” These moments are periods of time representing life events. For the most part, I found photos grouped by date, but in some cases, it knew to separate the group of photos I took during the day from those taken later at night. One wish I had for the “Moments” feature was a desire to manually combine some of these groupings into one. For example, photos from a conference like TechCrunch Disrupt were spread across multiple days, when I’d rather save it as one moment. Since all the photos are fairly recognizable to the human eye as belonging to the same group (i.e., green background, conference stage), it’s clear there’s no super-intelligent machine algorithm handling the groupings. The other big feature, auto-curation, I liked more. In large photo sets, the service will run through the batch and hide (not delete), bad photos like those that are blurry, out-of-focus, dark, or under or over exposed. You can return these photos to view with one click at the bottom of the page. And to keep the photo unhidden for good, just click the arrow icon on the photo. The best feature of all is Everpix’s simple privacy settings. As noted above, all photos are private by default, but with one click, you can change that. With a toggle switch at the top of the page, an album (or select photos in an album) can be made accessible via a provided URL which you can share with Facebook, Twitter or via email. Overall, despite the service’s simplicity, there are still many features Everpix lacked. For example, photos that appeared in landscape when they should be portrait aren’t rotated for you and there’s no mechanism on the site to do so. The forthcoming mobile interface for Everpix is also a much-needed addition, as it would provide the means to actually have your photos on hand wherever you are, plus provide a much simpler method for automatic uploads from your device. That’s in development, though, so it’s only a matter of time. I’d also like to name some of my moments, tag them or search them by people, places, dates or subjects, but search is not provided at all. It would be great, too, if Everpix could pull in the face tags that iPhoto and Facebook already have and combine them – that would truly be a feat worthy of praise. I imagine that these are the kind of things Everpix is working on next – they would be crazy not to. A comprehensive photo database needs to be searchable and structured, not just organized and pretty, I’d say. The company still doesn’t have details regarding pricing or a public launch, but in the meantime, I’m fairly happy to have this resource on hand. Before now, my photos had been widely spread out across the Web forever, with no easy way to centralize them. For that feature alone, Everpix is a tool worth having, in my opinion. Everpix is accepting . |
Interview With Dick Costolo At Web 2.0 Summit [VIDEO] | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRzs8sz4WaA&w=640] Twitter CEO and former improv comedian gave an almost hour long talk at the opening dinner of this week, peppered with his own unique brand of humor and insight. When moderator began the talk referencing a quote from a recent “Costolo’s job is to turn 140 characters emanating from the fingertips of Snooki, Anthony Weiner and Kim Kardashian into a money-making machine strong enough to withstand a bubble bursting,” Costolo himself chimed in with, “… This task seemingly insurmountable for a man of such limited distinction.” Battelle’s grilling of Costolo regarding Google’s recent announcement on Google+; “It’s early days,” Costolo began, to which Battelle responded, “That’s such a bad answer … ‘It’s early days’… ‘It’s not a zero sum game’ .. Can I answer for you?” “A person can’t throw out a topic sentence any more,” Costolo quipped back, adding to the overall self-awareness of an already pretty self-aware interview (at some point the two throw around possible blog post headlines that could result from the interview — And Battelle mistakenly refers to me as ‘Alexis’). It’s worth watching for at least a half hour or so in, if only to experience a prominent tech CEO with such a finely honed sense of the absurd. |
Daily Crunch: Ticker | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 10 | 22 | Here are some of yesterday’s posts on TechCrunch Gadgets:
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null | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 14 | null |
Linux Foundation Announces Long Term Support Initiative for CE Manufacturers | Scott Merrill | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | The is rocking out in Prague this week and they’ve got some interesting news to share. In addition to adding five new European members and the one year anniversary of the Foundation’s , they’re announcing their “Long Term Support Initiative” to foster a stable kernel release suitable for use in consumer electronic devices. It aims to provide “both an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of consumer electronics products and regular updates of those releases for two years.” The list of companies involved in the LTSI is a list of household CE names: Hitachi, LG Electronics, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Toshiba. From the press release:
This new initiative is crucial because device makers are doing significant backporting, bug testing and driver development on their own, which carries substantial cost in terms of time-to-market, as well as development and engineering effort to maintain those custom kernels. Through collaboration in this initiative, these CE vendors will reduce the duplication of effort currently prevalent in the consumer electronics industry.
This is a terrific example of the power of open source software development. Stop screwing around maintaining your own custom kernel tree and driver set because that stuff doesn’t really provide you much competitive advantage in the market. Instead, collaborate with others on the “plumbing” so that everyone gets the best kernel available, and differentiate your product offering with a better user experience, or features unique to your product.
The goal is to reduce the number of private trees currently in use in the CE industry and encourage more collaboration and sharing of development resources.
The has been extremely aggressive lately in shepherding this kind of collaborative development. The is another good example of this, as is the recently announced . The inexorable march of Linux into more of our every day devices in an interesting thing to watch, and I’m eager to see the Long Term Support Initiative bear fruit. |
Exhibit 4G II Is T-Mobile’s First No-Contract 4G Android Phone, Launches Oct. 27th For $200 | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | I’m no proponent of cheap phones (after a few years of monthly dues, that money you save up front is a drop in the bucket) — but if you insist, T-Mobile’s got a new one for you. They’ve just announced the Exhibit 4G II, a mid-range Android handset that’ll set you back just $30 with contract — or, if you’re looking to steer clear of commitments, a still rather-wallet-friendly $200. While no powerhouse, the specs don’t fall too short for the price. Hell — a year ago, these would’ve been edging toward top tier. The Exhibit 4G II has a 3.7″ display (800×480), with a 1Ghz Snapdragon CPU tucked inside. It’s got a 3 megapixel camera on the back, and a camera of unspecified resolution (presumably VGA) around front. It’s all powered by Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) for now, with no word on whether or not they’ll ever bump it up to the . The Exhibit 4G II will hit the shelves on November 2nd, though Walmart has a few days of exclusivity beginning on October 27th. |
Macworld Expo Metamorphosizes Into Macworld|iWorld | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | It wouldn’t be right to say that the ever-popular Macworld Expo has been , exactly, but ever since Apple stopped being an official attendee, they have perhaps been struggling for . The old de facto Apple conference and expo has become a second-string event, with Apple focusing on retail and much of the ecosystem revolving around software. With this in mind, . First, a change of clothes: “The brand is evolving from Macworld [Expo] to Macworld|iWorld to illustrate that the show is about the whole ecosystem of Apple products,” says the expo’s general manager, Paul Kent. The pipe and double name are, I’m guessing, a temporary compromise designed to introduce the new name without spooking longtime attendees. As Kent says, though, the event will be embracing more of the Apple ecosystem. They’ll be highlighting music, art, and film that has used Apple software and hardware, for instance. That of course includes the many productions that were edited in Final Cut Pro, but they also want to have shows and movies that were entirely shot and/or edited on the iPhone and iPad. That might be a little rough the first time around, to be honest, but the intention is admirable. There will be talks and panels, of course. I think the RapidFire session sounds like fun: five-minute presentations back-to-back, kind of like the Hackathon presentations at our own Disrupt. Great place to show off tricks, effects, techniques, or new games and apps, without taking up too much time. A new focus on apps (desktop and mobile) will bring the expo a bit more in line with the market, as well. And then there will be the usual suspects hocking cases, keyboards, and various white or silver accessories. |
Brightcove’s New Players Aim To Improve HTML5 Video Compatibility | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | Viewing web video content on three different devices is likely to yield three different outcomes. Even if it’s possible to get the whole video to play properly, often there are inconsistencies in how the player reports itself, how the video is requested and cached, and how it is filtered or displayed. It’s bad enough for a user, but for advertising it could be fatal. If you can’t guarantee the content, how can you guarantee the ad? Brightcove is taking this problem head-on with a and an ecosystem that tries to recognize and account for the discrepancies between Webkit renderers, OSes, and so on. They’ve put together a little for you to peruse if you’re interested. Essentially the announcement is that they have created a middle layer for HTML5 video analogous to the one they’ve had for Flash containers and such for years. The Brightcove abstraction layer will act as a middle man between the video container and whatever’s requesting it. This way, Brightcove can smooth out the known inconsistencies between browsers, acting as a sort of interpreter and ensuring that the video loads correctly and the tracking and ads display properly. The customization options from their Flash container now extend to HTML5 as well. Naturally the fragmentation affecting the <video> tag is something that also needs to be figured out among the various browsers and OSes. But if you’re an advertiser and want to future-proof yourself against it right now, you don’t want to wait for Mozilla or Apple to bring their code up to code. |
A Whole Page Full Of Dancing Marissa Mayer Gifs | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | There is no way in hell this will make . |
Just Look At My Beautiful, Working Pocket Cannon | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEvlNDczJ2g] If you’re like me, I’m sure you spend your evenings idly stroking the decommissioned artillery at the local WWII memorial, dreaming of the day you can ride a white-hot shell over the heads of your friends and family and land into a herd of cattle, leaving this world in a blaze of guts and glory. However, since that opportunity will probably never present itself, I’d like to introduce you to the Pocket Artillery, a CNCed lug of metal that, with the help of a BB and a little black powder, can shoot a hole in a soda can. These $29 pocket rockets are currently available for pre-order and should ship before Christmas. They are hand-finished and come in multiple bright colors – your choice, of course. Obviously you’ll probably shoot your eye out with these things so the folks at Pocket Artillery want no truck with your frivolous lawsuits. The legalese is actually longer than the text on their web page. For best results, do not use this in the glass-enclosed conference room at work. |
Atlassian Redesigns Website; Launches A La Carte, SaaS Service For Product Development | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | , the enterprise software company, has really hit its stride over the last few years. Founded in 2002 in Sydney, the company has today built a solid base of 26,000 customers, which include some big names like Facebook, Zynga, Cisco, and Adobe. In July of last year, the startup raised $60 million from Accel to scale and ramp up M&A. Since then, the company has bought Bitbucket and SourceTree to allow developers to host their source code in Bitbucket (or any other hosting platform) and then manage that source using SourceTree. Since the beginning, Atlassian’s goal has been to create software development and collaboration tools that enable enterprise teams to quickly and easily plan, build, and launch products. The startup’s flagship software products, like JIRA and Confluence, let software development teams take advantage of issue and project tracking in an effort to improve speed of development and code quality as well as giving those teams a single place collaborate, share, and discuss files, minutes, specs, mockups, diagrams, etc. According to Atlassian President Jay Simons, the company is currently seeing 40 percent year-over-year growth and $88 million in revenues (up from $56 million last year). Building on this growth, the company is today announcing a series of upgrades and updates that should be a boon to customers worldwide. For starters, the company has moved into new office space at 7th and Harrison in San Francisco, and it is also launching a complete redesign of its website, which goes live this afternoon. But beyond this, the company is today launching a new SaaS offering called “Atlassian OnDemand”, which will allow software development teams to use the company’s products (including JIRA and Confluence) at a lower, discounted rate. Starting at $10 per month for 10 users, the multi-tenant, cloud-based SaaS essentially allows users of its software to take advantage of its development and collaboration products with the benefit of easy configuration. Taking over for Atlassian Hosted (which the company has been running since 2006), OnDemand will enable customers to integrate third-party applications to beef up power, features, and versatility in their project environments. But the real highlight of OnDemand is that it that it’s a la carte, meaning that users can start with as much or as little in the way of services as they need, adding products as they go. Atlassian’s apps are integrated into current holdings, so that, as a user adds new products, tabs appear at the top of their screen. Links can also be shared between apps, as well as shared navigation, and sharing between systems. OnDemand includes JIRA, Confluence, GreenHopper, Team Calendars, Bonfire, FishEye, Crucible, and Bamboo, as well as free maintenance and upgrades of all apps, and third-party compatibility with Google Apps, Zendesk, Salesforce, uTest, and more. So, with mix-and-match OnDemand offerings, customers can pick and choose the number of users they want per application, starting at $10/month and scaling from there. . It’s pretty cool that now, for Atlassian customers, regardless of what he or she purchases, they’ll be able to take advantage of studio-style integration, single sign-on, consolidated user management, linking, common nav, etc. . |
Why Did Amazon Profits Take A Hit? It Is Investing In The Future (Content And Web Services) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | Amazon’s profits are down a stunning 73 percent. The is getting slammed in after-hours trading (down $28 right now). And yet revenues were up 44 percent to $10.9 billion and on the conference call today Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak says, “We expect to have a record quarter in terms of device sales in Q4.” As well it should. Amazon announced a in September, including a tablet, the . Orders for the new Kindles are double what they were the last time Amazon launched a new line, and it is “building millions more” Kindle Fires than it had anticipated, according to CEO Jeff Bezos. So where did all the money go? Amazon is ramping up investments in the backend infrastructure to support all the digital media it expects people will want to consume on their Kindles, especially their Kindle Fires. It is spending a lot of money on both technology and content. Amazon spent $769 million on “technology and content” in the quarter, up 74 percent from a year ago. And it invested nearly $1.6 billion on “fixed assets, including internal use software and website development,” which is double the amount it spent a year ago, according to one of its investor slides. In other words, it is investing for the future, and intends to keep on doing so. “In terms of content, we will be purchasing content for both our U.S. business, for both our paid and unpaid (Prime) business in Q4,” says Szkutak. Amazon will need to pay out a lot more in streaming licensing fees to the Hollywood studios if it wants to catch up to Netflix and Hulu. And with the Kindle Fire, it expects to have a built-in audience of millions of people for streaming movies. It needs to license that content before those consumers can watch it. The Kindle will put other pressures on Amazon’s back-end Web Services as well. It’s custom , for instance, will offload much of the work of delivering web pages quickly to the Kindle Fire to the cloud where it will pre-cache a lot of the elements of each page. Over time that will put more strain on Amazon Web Services to deliver a seamless consumer experience. Amazon is also investing in overall capacity, including beefing up its fulfillment centers so that it can deliver those Kindles without too many hiccups. But for the most part, it is spending in advance of its rollout of new Kindles and the digital media they are designed to envelop. [scribd id=70285794 key=key-23rs31udm825osg3lmnw mode=slideshow] |
Impatient Nexus S Owners Can Play With Ice Cream Sandwich Now | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | Google has already confessed that the Nexus S would get the Ice Cream Sandwich update, but if you’re not the type to wait — and really, who is these days? — you can load up a of Android 4.0 right now. Yep, thanks to some intrepid folks on the forums, you too can enjoy Ice Cream Sandwich on the Nexus S before its official release. Before you dive into the deep end though, be aware that your device has to be rooted to even take part. Like the before it, this Nexus S is running a SDK port so don’t expect a fully fleshed-out experience. It isn’t exactly what you’d call a feature-complete build, but nearly all of the eye candy has made the transition without too many hiccups. Sure, your data connection may be a bit finicky, and you won’t be able to , but it’s a small price to pay to be the envy of all your Android-loving friends for a while. A fair number of users are reporting that the ersatz update is pretty stable, but play it safe all the same if you intend to take the plunge. After all, the last thing you need is to brick your phone right before it gets this update the official way. [via ] |
Twitter Is Testing An Expandable Timeline | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | Twitter is testing out new design changes which makes the main Twitter timeline expandable so that you can see media and related information right in the timeline instead of off to the side or clicking off to another page. We’ve gotten a couple of reports about this change, which only a few people are seeing, (and Twitter confirms it is a “small test”). Patrick Bisch of Pinglio about the changes and even made a screencast (which you can watch below). The changes are subtle, but they manage to simplify an already simple service. You can “open” up a tweet to see how many people retweeted it, the threaded conversation related to that tweet, or related photos and videos. For instance, here is a screenshot of a reply tweet along with the original tweet. (Hat tip also to tipster Paul Dufour) You will notice that the star, retweet, and reply buttons have also been moved to the top right. And you can close the tweet to go back to the main timeline view. Many Twitter clients have long included inline media, and it is encouraging to see Twitter trying to figure out how to make it part of the official experience. Every time I have to click off to another page to see a picture or to figure out the context around a tweet is a waste of time (these clicks add up, especially if you spend as much time on Twitter as I do). You can get a sense of the new experience by watching the video below. [youtube=http://youtu.be/PBt9tuRU14U] |
IBM Names Sales Chief Virginia Rometty As CEO, Samuel Palmisano Will Remain As Chairman | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | IBM’s board of directors has Virginia M. Rometty as the company’s new CEO and president, replacing , who currently is IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Palmisano will remain chairman of the board. Rometty will become CEO effective January 1, 2012. Rometty was previously senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. Rometty joined IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer. She was previously senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, and then was promoted to global sales leader. In her most recent role with Big Blue, She is accountable for revenue, profit, and client satisfaction in the 170 global markets and for the company’s worldwide sales results, which exceeded $99 billion in 2010. She also is responsible for leading IBM’s global strategy, marketing and communications functions. And she previously served as general manager of IBM Global Services, Americas, and of IBM’s Global Insurance and Financial Services Sector. Palmisano says of Rometty in a release, “Ginni’s long-term strategic thinking and client focus are seen in our growth initiatives, from cloud computing and analytics to the commercialization of Watson. She brings to the role of CEO a unique combination of vision, client focus, unrelenting drive, and passion for IBMers and the company’s future. I know the board agrees with me that Ginni is the ideal CEO to lead IBM into its second century.” Palmisano, 60, became IBM chief executive officer in 2002 and chairman of the board in 2003. |
And Makerbot Said: Let There Be 3D-Printed Shells For Pet Hermit Crabs | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | We’re big fans of the home 3D printer here. It’s a truly disruptive technology, though for now the cost is still a bit too high, and the uses aren’t quite practical enough, for it to be a household item just yet. But that hasn’t stopped people from putting it to good use. Project Shellter is one of the most interesting applications of the technology I’ve seen. The project aims to using a , which would otherwise have to be supplied by harvesting spare shells from the ocean. It sounds a bit precious, yes, but it’s indicative of a promising trend of using fabrication tech for novel and helpful purposes. Hermit crabs, you see, don’t actually make their own shells. Carapaces, yes, but the shells they live in are scavenged from sea snails, nautiluses, and other miscellaneous mollusks. And when they outgrow their home, they find another. Apparently there is a bit of a shortage in shells, however, and crabs are fighting over such inadequate homes as aluminum cans, bottle caps, and other bits of trash. Not good. Miles Lightwood (as ) is working out of MakerBot headquarters to see what can be done to address this problem. And before anyone starts complaining that there are bigger problems to solve, consider that small problems are also worth solving if you have the means at hand. You may not be able to solve the homeless problem, but if you can spare a buck, you might solve one guy’s problems for a day. Same here: the proliferation of trash on the sea bed and the disruption of habitats isn’t going to be figured out by a couple guys and a home fab machine. But they might make the lives of a few sea creatures a bit better and it’s essentially research in wildlife prosthetics, which believe it or not is a real and important field. Also worth noting: these shells are not being manufactured to dump in the ocean, but are for domestic use. If, however, a biodegradable material were to be developed akin to normal shell material, they could be added to natural habitats. But to continue. is looking for designs that will accommodate the crabs. Many things need to be considered; for example, hermit crabs need a shell using a right-handed helix because that’s the way their body curves naturally. And a commenter points out that the crabs do ingest bits of the shell now and then, so it will need to be made of something non-toxic and possibly nutritious. Furthermore, the porosity of natural calciferous shells may be difficult to replicate using a fabricator. It’s a slightly strange project, but mainly just because it’s so specific. If a dozen other people started projects as specific, they could be counted as a larger trend, and indeed Project Shellter is part of the trend of expanding the applications of domestic fabrication machines. , and if you have any suggestions or designs, they are looking for submissions and participation. |
Ustream Forges Joint Venture With South Korea’s KT Corp., Raises $10 Million | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | Live video streaming service continues to expand its presence in Asia with the help of major telecom corporations. Today, the company is announcing that it’s teaming KT Corporation, a leading telecommunications provider in South Korea, to launch Ustream Korea. Ustream will be launching its new Korean portal in January 2012, with a new office opening in Seoul that month as well. The joint venture includes a new $10 million funding round for Ustream, which brings the company’s total funding to $98.7 million. The bulk of that funding comes from Japanese telecom provider Softbank, which forged a deep relationship with the company in February 2010 and has invested . Ustream says that since Ustream Asia launched 17 months ago, the portal has seen its video views grow by 307%, with the number of unique visitors growing 266%. Here’s the roster of brands using the Ustream Asia service so far, from the company’s press release: Toyota, Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Nintendo, NHK World, NIKKEI, Coca Cola Japan, MTV Networks Japan, Yahoo! Japan, and more. |
Amazon Misses, Q3 Sales Up 44 Percent To $10.9B; Net Income Down 73 Percent To $63M | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | Amazon today. Net income decreased 73% to $63 million in the third quarter, or $0.14 per diluted share, compared with net income of $231 million, or $0.51 per diluted share, in third quarter 2010. The e-commerce giant missed Wall Street expectations; analysts a profit of $0.25 cents per share on $10.91 billion in revenue. Net sales increased 44% to $10.88 billion in the third quarter, compared with $7.56 billion in third quarter 2010. Operating income was $79 million in the third quarter, compared with $268 million in third quarter 2010. In a statement Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said that September 28th, the first day you could purchase Amazon’s new Kindle Fire and other new offerings, was the biggest order day ever for Kindle, even bigger than previous holiday peak days. “In the three weeks since launch, orders for electronic ink Kindles are double the previous launch. And based on what we’re seeing with Kindle Fire pre-orders, we’re increasing capacity and building millions more than we’d already planned,” he said. North America segment sales, representing the Company’s U.S. and Canadian sites, were $5.93 billion, up 44% from third quarter 2010. International segment sales, representing the Company’s U.K., German, Japanese, French, Chinese, Italian and Spanish sites, were $4.94 billion, up 44% from third quarter 2010. Worldwide Media sales grew 24% to $4.15 billion. Worldwide Electronics and Other General Merchandise sales grew 59% to $6.32 billion. For Q4, net sales are expected to be grow between 27% and 44%, or between $16.45 billion and $18.65 billion. Operating income be between a $200 million loss and $250 million gain, or between 142% decline and 47% decline compared with fourth quarter 2010. The company has $2.8 billion in cash on hand. Of course, all eyes are on Kindle numbers, as Amazon released its new tablet, the $199 , the $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle Touch, and the $149 Kindle Touch 3G in September. We know the Kindle is its best selling product but the company has notoriously been cagey about releasing exact sales numbers. Amazon has also been building out its Prime movie streaming business, announcing deals with and Here are our live notes from the call, which is being hosted by Amazon’s CFO Tom Szkutak (Bezos is not on the call): Szkutak says that Amazon now has 152 million active customer accounts and 2 million sellers. Q: Are you including contributions from Kindle Fire shipments in Q4 revenue guide? A: We feel very good about the demand we’ve seen to date. A: We’re investing in capacity, including in fulfillments centers, in retail growth, in Kindle and digital business, in AWS. We launched four new products at the end of September and we are very excited about those. We think about the economics of Kindle business on totality, especially when it comes to content, advertisement, special offers. Q: In markets where you are #2, do you believe that the business should be number #1 (given emerging markets)? A: We look at it on a category by category basis and where we can add value. Where we’ve entered new categories, geographies, we think about the customer first and sometimes partner with third parties. Q: What are the plans for ramping up content investment with streaming outside the U.S.? What’s the impact of Quidsi? A: In terms of Lovefilm, we have been investing in content since acquisition, and we continue to invest. The business is doing very well and we are excited about this opportunity. In terms of Quidsi, they are doing a great job. Q: How does the behavior of buyers on mobile apps compare with behavior of consumers on the PC/Web? A: We haven’t released a lot of details on mobile, but we are seeing good trends in mobile business. A: We’re not breaking out Kindle customer vs. non-Kindle customer. We’ve learned a lot over past couple of years since launching Kindle. We have some data with advertising and offers on Kindles on how consumers interact after purchasing a Kindle. When they purchase a Kindle, they are buying more content. When we think about lifetime value, we are thinking about the device itself, and the total economics. We expect to hava record quarter in terms of device sales in Q4. A: In terms of content, we will be purchasing content for both our U.S. business, for both our paid and unpaid (Prime) business in Q4. We also have content costs with Lovefilm in Europe. We’re not splitting out the dollar amount for that but it is impacting the guidance in terms of investments in the business. A: It will be very easy on fire to access all of our digital content. We’ll have book content and music content. It will also be easy to access physical product as well. It’s a premium product and at $199 not at a premium price. Q: Can you comment on the new UI on the site and customer response. Are you paying royalties on Kindle Fire? A: In terms of UI, I can’t really comment. We saw very strong growth rate in Q3. We can’t talk about royalties. Q: On the fulfillment centers, you mentioned you’d expand if revenue growth was increased? Also can you comment on any supply issues with the Kindle Fire? A: We’ve given a range of guidance for Q3 and Q4, and we are actually opening up 17, instead of 15. In terms of supply, orders are double previous launch. We are also seeing extremely strong Kindle Fire orders. We are getting ready for a great holiday season for Kindle customers. A: In terms of employment, we’re not giving estimates on them. But the majority of additions would be in customer service. Q: Can you talk about your international strategy? A: Spain and Italy were most recently country launches. We’re happy to be serving those geographies. Listen below for Amazon’s earnings call, scheduled to begin at 5 pm ET. Below are the earnings slides: [scribd id=70285794 key=key-23rs31udm825osg3lmnw mode=slideshow] |
Android Smartphone Round-Up: October Edition | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | Even with , Android Gingerbread devices are still as hot as ever. That said, there are way too many Android handsets on the market to parse through each and every one, but that’s why we’re here. We’ve looked through all the latest Android smartphones to give you our brief thoughts on the pick of the litter. These aren’t full-length reviews, but rather a way for you to easily compare what we think to be the most full-featured Android handsets released this month. Hopefully, your shopping research just got way less intensive. For the glorious and spooky month of October, we’re putting the following handsets on the table: Samsung Galaxy S II (AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint) Motorola Droid RAZR (Verizon, and ), HTC Amaze 4G (T-Mobile), and the Samsung Stratosphere (Verizon). While each of these phones run Android 2.3 Gingerbread, they all have something different they bring to the table, along with varying price tags. Let’s take a closer look, yes? The Samsung Galaxy S II is one of the hottest selling handsets in the world, and with good reason. The specs are pretty heavenly along with the design, but it’s not all rainbows and sunshine with the S II. Since it launched earlier than the rest of our options, it may be a bit more “outdated” (at least here in the world of smartphones) than the rest. If you’re nearing the end of your contract, here are some things to consider about the three carrier variants. Sprint’s big advantage is its unlimited data. Its model basically keeps the same design as the global version, with the exception of four capacitive buttons where there used to be an optical trackpad. T-Mobile, on the other hand, has decided to differentiate on a design level, which is something I usually frown upon. In this case, T-Mo rounded out the back and the corners, which (in my opinion) gives the handset a much less “Galaxy S II” feel. AT&T’s S II separates itself from the herd with a smaller screen, and thus better pixel density.
The RAZR is the newest in our October lineup, and also the thinnest smartphone in the world according to Motorola. The specs are sure to get your endorphins pumping, but you should know that Verizon and Motorola have put quite a hefty price tag on this form of happiness. Overall the Droid RAZR has a lot going for it. The specs speak for themselves, but even beyond that, the RAZR has a way of feeling solid and super light at the same time, which seems to be a difficult balance to strike. The only real catch is the price tag, especially in a world where the “world’s thinnest phone” or “the world’s most durable phone” gets it title swiped by something new in about a month.
The Amaze 4G’s claim to fame is its beastly camera, but as far as looks go this thing will definitely get insecure sitting next to the Droid RAZR or the Galaxy S II. It’s pretty hefty, weighing in at 6 ounces, and has a chunky design that’s only amplified by its white casing. Everyone knows not to wear white if you want to look slim, right? Still, the Amaze 4G has its benefits too, with a snappy processor and support from T-Mobile’s 4G network (with theoretical speeds of 42Mbps). When it comes down to it, the Amaze 4G should really only end up in the pockets of photogs. It can basically fill the role of just about any point-and-shoot, but if you’re looking for a phone that can do it all, the Amaze 4G probably won’t amaze. It’s just too heavy and expensive to justify it as a great all-around phone, especially against the well-rounded feature sets on our other October options. The Stratosphere is the cheapest in our lineup, and also the only smartphone with a physical keyboard that we deemed suitable for our October pick of the litter. Its specs can’t necessarily keep up with the beasts above, but for textaholics, speed demons, and penny-pinchers this could be just what you’re looking for. As with every smartphone, the Samsung Stratosphere is built with a certain type of consumer in mind. If you shoot a lot of video on the fly, multi-task most of the time, or watch a good deal of mobile video, the Stratosphere is probably not for you. On the other hand, if you can’t stand a slow connection and heart physical keyboards, this mid-range Samsung offering is exactly what you need. Well, that’s it for our October Android round-up, but make sure to keep your eyes peeled for next month’s treasures. |
HTC Rezound To Debut At November 3 Event? | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | Move over Motorola and Samsung. It’s HTC’s turn to send out invites to a mysterious press event, and we’re fully expecting to see the HTC Rezound (a.k.a. the ) take the stage come November 3. The Rezound, for those of you who have missed my near-obsessive coverage, is HTC’s next Verizon-bound LTE device. It’s slated to be the first stateside device to pack , but it also confirms its geek cred with a . Here’s hoping that the battery is up to snuff. Though its specs put it firmly in Verizon’s top tier of devices, it’s a chubby little guy and the design may not win many fans. Still, it’s what’s on the inside that counts (or so I keep telling myself), so we’ll hold off on passing judgment until we get to play with it. Nothing is set in stone yet, but there’s almost no way the Rezound won’t take center stage next week. The timing does seem awfully suspect — have pointed to a spate of new releases on the 10th, with the Rezound being one of them. If the leaks hold true, then Verizon fans will have much to be thankful for next month. We’ve seen some of the other prepping for a big November push, but between the iPhone 4S, the Droid RAZR, the Galaxy Nexus, and HTC’s Rezound, it looks like Verizon’s got the holiday lineup to beat. |
New Touchscreen From SMK Designed To Work With Gloved Hands | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 25 | SMK Electronics has put together that’s designed to work not just with those wonderfully conductive fingers of yours, but also with gloved hands and perhaps more. SMK developed a new sensor panel structure that is noise-resistant, allowing for a clearer signal to be detected at high sensitivities. This isn’t the first touchscreen we’ve seen that works with gloves. At this year’s Mobile world Congress, we saw an incredibly showing off their new touchscreens, which can detect a gloved hand or even the head of a pin. They achieved it in a similar way: by reducing noise, though their approach was different. They integrated the touchscreen controller with the display controller running the screen beneath it, allowing them to work together and avoid interference. Synaptics’ screens are aimed at mobile phone use, but SMK’s are specifically designed for dash panel systems in cars. With more and more functions being centralized there, access at any time is important, and many people wear gloves while they drive. Resistive screens avoid this problem but lose out on sensitivity in general. This new screen, which will first appear in 6.5″ versions but can be made larger, might be the best of both worlds. Hopefully they work with real gloves and not just those flimsy parade gloves. People who live in cold regions don’t wear flimsy cotton. |
The Google/Slide Quiet Launches Continue With Prizes — Social Contests For Money | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 7 | 3 | The Slide group within Google has been busy. Disco, the group messaging app, back in March. Then last week, Pool Party, a group mobile photo service . And today the team is back again with , a service that apparently aims to link up people with a problem to those with a solution — for money. Found at Prizes.org (which that Google secured back in April for Slide), Prizes is still in beta testing. But it is available for the public to use right now — though contest creation is still invite-only. You simply sign up with Facebook or Twitter (no Google options) and you’re ready to go. Once you sign up, you’ll be presented with a stream of activities you can do — such as creating a soul mixtape — for money. You can follow any of these contests, or drill down into them for more information. And you can submit entries (solutions) for each contest. Each contest has a time limit for completion. And they can get votes from other users. Users of Prizes can also get messages from other users, and get notifications for the contests they’re following. The money aspect is currently only open to users with a “credit history”, meaning users have participated in contests in the past or created their own. The transactions are handled through PayPal (again, not a Google service — Checkout). The idea is fairly compelling, though as usual, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any mention of Slide or Google anywhere on the site. You have to drill into the to find that Slide, by way of Google, is behind the service. Given the lack of Google integration, it seems that this is yet another example of Google giving the Slide team free reign to do as they wish within the company. I mean, they’re pushing the Facebook Connect integration. Interesting. |
Will Our Grandchildren Be Asking What The Heck Facebook Was Someday? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 7 | 3 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rd-tfJRMLI&w=630] Despite Facebook’s relative lag in its embracing of the music industry, music videos and Facebook seem to be The latest and most mainstream of examples is the treacly sweet “Unfriend You” by Greyson Chance, a Bieber-a-like who was fittingly on YouTube. The most jarring thing about the song? Chance’s normalized and emotional use of the coined term “Unfriend” as a verb. Seriously through, teenage angst is different now; When I was thirteen I would stay at home, glued by my pink and purple plastic phone (I had coveted second line IN MY ROOM) waiting for a boy to call. In the age of the iPhone, kids can just update their whereabouts on Twitter or Facebook, keeping track of relationships through who’s been Followed and Unfollowed, Friended and yes Unfriended. And don’t even get me started on the can of worms that is Facebook Relationship Status. But, just as the iPhone has replaced second landlines (which were a big deal way back when), will something eventually replace Mr.Zuckerberg’s opus as the go to conduit for teen feelings? Popdust puts , “JT is already MySpace back, so—gasp—will our eventual grandchildren be asking us what the heck something called Facebook was one day? That is not a world we want to think about.” And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder … |
Social Studies | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 7 | 3 | Opinions about Google’s new social initiative seem to be slowing down. The overall consensus is that Google has done some good work in avoiding where they have dropped the ball in previous efforts. Also some good work in creating a way to rapidly navigate through a series of people views. And a wonderful video tool that recalls the early days when we all gathered around campfires to shoot the breeze. The early threads are predictably self-referential, just as they have been for each new startup service at this point in the cycle. With Twitter, I lurked for months until the realtime communications bus provided an opening for Friendfeed. Still in that phase with Foursquare, which joins other iOS apps on the push notification bus as what effectively is one service to me. Facebook is mostly an email notification service Tracking the Google rollout has been surprisingly easy with Twitter. I keep thinking there are some hidden wells of information in the Circles comment stream, but for the most part the value remains at the post or share level. Techmeme absorbed the punch by Saturday night of the holiday weekend. Some conclusions based on this early data: I’ve tried to avoid the use of the project’s name until now as an exercise in how to think about its elements. I’ve added people to just one Circle, Friends, in order to prepare for the moment when the signal to noise crosses the threshold where Twitter required new filter structures. With little incentive to post Sparks searches and fragmentation of sharing internal threads, I’m somewhat at the mercy of those who like the idea of explicitly controlling who reads what. Yet I come out of the Plus underbrush with a good feeling about what Google has done for itself and its users. We’re a long way from the passion of the early days, the Fail Whale and the privacy rollbacks of Facebook, even the idea of winners and losers. Google + seems to understand in its DNA that it will thrive based on value, not on destruction of competitors’ perceived weakness. While some short term advantage may be gained from favoring the Google platform, the broader challenge is to expand the value of the entire realtime platform. I’m optimistic this will happen as driven by our adoption of the broader disruption. |
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