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“GameBox For Facebook” Tunnels Facebook Games To The iPad | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | Love them or hate them, one thing holds true of games: they’re crazy addictive. So addictive, in fact, that full-grown adults are having trouble pulling themselves away from the social network, all because of a few virtual strawberries. Luckily, a new app has emerged that will let you play some of your favorite Facebook games outside where the sun shines, instead of in your musty, dark, virtual-fruit-filled room. It’s called GameBox. For now, only two games have made their way into the GameBox app: Digital Chocolate’s Army Attack, and Zynga’s CityVille. More games are on the way though, promises the app’s developer. And don’t worry that things will look different on the iPad — everything about the user interface remains completely the same as it looks on Facebook. So, how does it all work? Voodoo and sorcery. More accurately, it seems like all of the actual flash rendering is happening up in the cloud, with the GameBox app relaying things back and forth — sort of like a considerably less intense . With that being the case, we’d hope that the developer got some sort of permission from Zynga and co. before setting this thing free — with place-shifting technology like this being something of a legal grey area, it seems like a quick way to get a fancy new cease-and-desist letter dropped in your mailbox. The is currently listed for $2.99 in the App Store.
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Tesla’s Q2 Earnings: Steady As She Goes | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | has released their shareholder statement for Q2 2011, and while it doesn’t make for the most exciting reading, it’s at least full of fairly good news. They’ve been on cruise control for quite a while now, if you will, designing and testing their sedan, but there are plenty of pitfalls that could have afflicted the process, techniques and technologies that could have failed to pan out, and cost overruns that could have piled up. But no, things are going as expected and barring any major upsets, they should have the Model S rolling out in mid-2012 as planned. Here are a few Q2 takeaways from the letter: And that’s that. The full letter, with cost and sales breakdowns, (PDF), and more information, including a link to the investors’ conference call and Q&A, can be found at . Basically we’re not going to hear much news until the production Model S starts hitting car mags (we’ll try to get one too), the Model X gets leaked or previewed, and the RAV4 gets priced and dated — all of which will be happening in 2012, most likely. That means a few more quiet quarters. With so many pre-orders for the Model S, they’re sure to have plenty of revenue as soon as they start charging their customers — with a few hundred million dollars locked down for the next few years, they’re feeling confident and I’m guessing their investors are as well. : Elon Musk mentioned in the conference call that they plan to unveil the Model X prototype in mid-December. |
Clearwire Adopts LTE, Not Ditching WiMax Just Yet | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | Wow. Clearwire has just dropped a bit of a bombshell today, so I’ll spare you my usual theatrics: the operators of the nation’s first 4G network, having sensed the momentum that its LTE rival is gaining, has that they will add “LTE Advanced-ready” technology to its previously WiMax-only 4G service. Of course Clearwire is quick to reassert their commitment to their existing WiMax network (and customers), but with Clearwire CTO Dr. John Saw referring to their execution of LTE as the “future of mobile broadband”, one can certainly smell the change in the air. Their LTE rollout is supposed to center around major urban areas in their existing WiMax markets, in an effort to meet high demand for 4G service. Don’t expect their LTE offerings to go live any time soon, though: they’re still waiting on some much-need funding before their implementation plans come to fruition. Hopefully, it happens sooner rather than later — with LTE Advanced potentially offering “peak download mobile speeds of at least 100 Mbps”, it should be able to satiate even the hungriest of data fiends whenever it lights up. It’s definitely a big (and potentially very gainful) leap for Clearwire. They and partner company Sprint stand to pick up quite a bit of market share by offering more competitive 4G performance, all while flying under the banner of “the nation’s first 4G network.” The fact that the same 4G branding will continue for the foreseeable future actually strikes at the heart of a deeper question: does it really matter if LTE is better than WiMax? Most customers, as much as I love them, will see 4G and decline to press the issue any further; the rest of us network nerds will continue to argue about real v. advertised data speeds, while Mr. Joe On-the-go will benefit all the same. |
Web.com Buys Domain Registrar And Hosting Company Network Solutions For $560.8 Million | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | Internet services company Web.com has domain registrar and hosting provider Network Solutions for $405 million in cash plus 18 million shares of Web.com stock, valuing the transaction as $560.8 million Network Solutions, which is currently owned by private equity firm General Atlantic, provides domain registration, e-commerce, search engine optimation, other online promotion services, hosting and email to millions of small businesses. Web.com says there is a large opportunity in selling its SEO, online marketing, Facebook and mobile offerings to Network Solutions’ two million retail customers and hundreds of thousands of wholesale customers. Web.com says that the combined company will generate non-GAAP revenue in the mid-$450 million range for 2011 and pro forma adjusted EBITDA of at least $120 million for 2011 before cost synergies and transaction expenses. Last year, Web.com shelled out for Register.com. |
NYC Photo Hack Day Is Coming: NASDAQ To Feature Winners In Times Square | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | It’s an established fact that tweeting about your breakfast is a serious faux pas, on par with ‘Liking’ your own Facebook status update. However, recent trends indicate that tweeting a of your breakfast is perfectly acceptable, and in some cases, even encouraged. Your friends don’t want to about your oatmeal — but they’d love to see it with their own eyes, preferably after it’s been passed through a ‘Sutro’ filter. Behold, the power of the photograph. These days you can’t navigate a popular app without bumping into a feature that lets you swap or edit photos, and it seems a new photo service is cropping up every week. Which is why , the company that produces a suite of powerful web-based image editors, has decided to help coordinate a that’s dedicated to building photo apps. And they’ve managed to land a sponsorship from NASDAQ to pull it off. Photo Hack Day will be from August 20-21 and is being held at NYC’s (which is also very involved in putting the event on). Tickets are free of charge to participating developers. You can sign up . Aviary’s Alex Taub, who heads the company’s business development and partnership efforts, says that this will be the biggest photo hackathon ever organized. And, assuming things go well, the company intends to launch a global hack day this winter that will simultaneously take place in NYC, SF, Israel, and cities in Europe. Of course, it’s hard not to notice the big sponsor for the event: NASDAQ. This is slightly surprising (it isn’t often you hear about stock exchanges getting involved with startups, unless it’s to help them IPO), but we’re told NASDAQ will have more to share on this front in the near future. NASDAQ is also coordinating a very cool prize for the top three apps built during the hackathon: they’ll be showcased on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square. Here’s a quote NASDAQ had for today’s announcement: “NASDAQ has driven grassroots innovation since it created the world’s first electronic stock exchange 40 years ago,” said NASDAQ OMX Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, Frank De Maria. “NASDAQ is excited to sponsor the 2011 Photo Hack Day at General Assembly and support the start-up community in New York in their pursuit of innovation. We can’t wait to see the results.” : A few days after this was published Aviary asked if I’d like to be a judge. So, see you there! Throughout the course of the event companies will be presenting details about their photo-based APIs to developers, in the hopes that they’ll use them for their projects. Here’s a list of companies participating so far: |
ComScore Picks Up Adxpose For $22 Million | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | Web measurement firm has acquired online ad verification service for $22 million. Originally founded as Mpire in 2005, the Seattle-based startup switched from a widget advertising platform called to an ad campaign measurement tool last year when it recapitalized with a infusion from DFJ and Ignition Partners. The $22 million purchase price is roughly equal to the total amount of venture capital poured into the company since 2005 (although, with the recap, somebody made money). Adxpose focusses on “ad verification” and “ad safety.” Essentially, it tells advertisers if anyone actually saw their ad online (was the ad above the fold or below the fold on any given webpage and how many people actually scrolled down to look at it?), and in what context the ads were shown. For instance, most major brand advertisers don’t want their ads shown next to porn or other content not deemed to be “brand-safe.” ComScore will fold the Adxpose technology into its product, and combine its knowledge of website demographics and traffic to give advertisers better campaign measurement tools. Comscore sees this acquisition as a key piece in its efforts to bridge online advertising measurement with TV and other media. There also are so many third-party ad networks in between the advertiser and the ultimate place where the ads are seen that more accountability is needed. The problem with online display ads that this acquisition attempts to address is that measuring impressions or hits just isn’t good enough. Increasingly, advertisers are demanding that they pay only for the right kinds of impressions and they are auditing campaigns more thoroughly. The entire online ad industry is It’s not about clicks and conversions, . Comscore also just announce its today. Revenues jumped 38 percent to $58 million, but reported a net loss of $8.2 million. |
Google Rips Into Microsoft, Apple, Oracle For “Bogus Patents” And Trying To “Strangle” Android | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | In the past, I’ve been critical of Google who are actively attempting to screw them. Today, they’re no longer dancing. In , Google SVP and Chief Legal Officer takes shot after shot at Google’s competitors. By name, he calls out Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle. What’s this all about? What else? Patents. “I have worked in the tech sector for over two decades. Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on,” is the way Drummond kicks off his post. He goes on to lay out what he believes is a “hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.” He talks about not only the recent Nortel patent auction (which Google lost while a group of rivals ), but also the Novell patent sale (which was also bought by a group including Microsoft and Apple), Microsoft’s that Android OEMs for each device, and the lawsuits against Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. “Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it,” Drummond writes. While Drummond says that their rival’s “anti-competitive strategy” is driving up the price of patents on the market to insane levels, he believes the law will eventually prevail and “this patent bubble will pop”. “In this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it,” he notes, going on to say that the Department of Justice is currently looking into if Apple and Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nortel patents was for anti-competitive means. “We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio. Unless we act, consumers could face rising costs for Android devices — and fewer choices for their next phone,” is how the post ends. Damn. Them’s fighting words. : : |
QuBit launches OpenTag, a free site tagging system designed to disrupt the market | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | The world of ‘tag management’ is not exactly a sexy one, but it’s vital for working out the stats and analytics around web sites. These days sites can be running hundreds of tags tracking advertising and pretty much everything you can think of. The problem is, if you open the hood it’s a mess in there, and nearly all of these tags are proprietary. So what if someone just open-sourced the tag management side of this but concentrated on building the more value-added products? That’s exactly what a new startup, is doing. Launched out of stealth mode today by four ex-Googlers, QuBit is announcing , its first product – the world’s first free open source Tag Management system. With OpenTag, you simply install one tag and then get a dashboard at QuBit to manage all the other tags you have on the site, for free (for sites with less than a million page views), no contract needed. Graham Cooke, CEO of QuBit, calls it the “The tag to end all tags.” This will be of some interest to existing players which charge, such as TagMan, Incitent, Helium and BrightTag. Some companies can charge up to £5,000 a month for tag management. OpenTag’s high performance Container Tag reduces the number of different scripts running sequentially. The deployment of tags is also faster as it uses a global content delivery network to ensure tags are served at the lowest latency and the highest reliability. Crucially, for developers OpenTag also removes the problem of Tag Management out of the core development cycle, freeing up resources. Of course, OpenTag is a sort of trojan horse (though not in a terribly bad way, unless you are a tag management company charging an arm and a leg). By open-sourcing the tag ecosystem, QuBit is now free to roll out other products in the realm of data-driven website optimisation products and solutions to conversion. And they are already working with AOL, Expedia, Not on the High Street, Blackberry and TalkTalk. QuBit is backed by Westminster North Capital with $1.3m in seed funding, and the company founders themselves, making this one of the few EMEA companies to come out of Google in Europe. |
NewMe Accelerator, Aiming To Encourage Black Tech Entrepreneurs, Has Its First Demo Day | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | Yesterday someone asked me whether the reason most of my avatar photos are silly is because otherwise I would have to deal with people constantly bringing up the fact that I don’t “look” like I should work in technology, meaning that I’m a (relatively not nerdy) woman. While I had never consciously thought about it, the answer is yes (“silly” at least is off-putting, while “woman” just means “has no idea about tech”). The concept of minority in Silicon Valley is a bit unique; White, Asians and Indian males are relatively well-represented while Latinos, Blacks and women For some reason our community is exclusive to an extreme. I mean, people used to give Arrington guff for being (!). If Mike and I have it “tough,” the entrepreneurs at , the first startup accelerator targeting black founders specifically, have it a thousand times tougher with regards to looking like they should work in tech — Women represent 23.8% versus African-Americans at 1.5% of our work force respectively. As co-founder Chris Bennett told me, “There aren’t minorities in tech, there just aren’t. One of the problems in the black tech community is that there isn’t yet a community.” Co-founded by (wow, female and a minority — a double whammy) and , NewMe attempts to remedy this, by giving Silicon Valley exposure to African American-led startups. NewMe provides its charges with access to housing, resources and mentorship from top Silicon Valley companies (Google is a sponsor and the startups have been working out of Tagged’s offices). Instead of investment, the incubator aims to provide value by fostering a supportive community. When asked why there was such a dearth of minorities in the tech sector and what we could do to remedy it, Benton referred to investor answer when asked the same question at a tech event, that people invest in what they know — pattern matching whether they’re doing it or not. According to Benton, who is considering opening up the program to Latinos next, the solution to the diversity gap is giving minorities more exposure, ” We can show more diversity in what founders look like in the media, ” she said “So that a kid who reads CNN or the Huffington Post [or TechCrunch] can see that it’s accessible. We need founders that are more successful, raising money and having exits, and it can’t just be one person, it needs to be several people.” Said mentor, and Foursquare head of monetization, “The more we can expose the Valley to what we don’t know the better off everyone is within the stack, from venture capital, to entrepreneurs to consumers, and that’s what the Valley is about, sourcing the best products and ideas and talent.” Here is a list and brief description of each NewMe startup in its first cohort, below. Similar to but with more of a focus on appointment setup functionality, Pencil You In is like a Opentable for salon appointments. Described by the founder as a Greplin meets Dropbox, Kloud.co imports your “online universe” and lets you search through cloud services like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and Dropbox — creating folders of what you were looking for and any other contextual information. Playd, allows you to check in to your favorite games like you’d do for venues on Foursquare, whether they’re PC-based, mobile or on console. Like a more casual based only around shopping, FetchMob lets people crowdsource their shopping trips by asking their surrounding community for help. Mobile app and social network BeCouply aims to solve the problem of how and where to socialize as a couple, by connecting couples and letting them share dates, activities and photo moments with the similarly partnered.
Launching in the fall, Cued hopes to give its users relevant location-based activity recommendations, through using data from your already existing social shares. goKit is basically an About.me for people with multiple personas, attempting to give people an easily set up outlet to express the multiple parts of their online identity. Vouch is like a Hashable for recommendations, an app that allows people to take their offline person recommendations online with Twitter-based #vouches. AisleFinder solves the problem of never knowing what aisle the items on your shopping list are in, using Mechanical Turk to acquire data about in-store item’s location. Similar to Centrally wants to be the one stop web promotion shop for small to medium-sized businesses who want to create websites with the least amount of hassle. |
New Intel Ultrabook Reference Models Could Undercut MacBook Air Significantly | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | When Intel launched its initiative, we were excited: a full-on PC notebook the size of a MacBook Air? Promises of and danced before our eyes, sexy but overpriced. Could this new spec be the one that makes our Air-toting friends jealous? Unfortunately, few ultrabooks have surfaced, and those that have . And just today we hear that Apple is , so people are going to make their notebooks out of fiberglass. Fiberglass! Don’t fret: Intel is on the case, and everything will be all right. Intel understands that ODMs absolutely have to get prices under a thousand bucks if they want to compete. that they’re calling a meeting next week in order to discuss a few new standard bills of material totalling a very reasonable $500-700, and if they’re smart, using components that manufacturers can actually get their hands on. There haven’t been any part-by-part cost breakdowns of the latest MacBook Airs, but the previous generation was estimated to have a BOM of somewhat above $700, and as the updates have been (new processor, Thunderbolt), that’s probably still a good estimate. Intel is aiming at 18mm notebooks and 21mm-thick (for 11-13″ and 14-17″ screens respectively) designs with room to upgrade to their latest processors when the time comes. No optical drive, either, which is arguably more of a jump for Windows users than Mac Users. Both would, depending on options, fall at most at ~700, which with a 25% margin and room for assembly and shipping, puts you nicely at a thousand bucks. And that’s at the high end. When we’ll actually see these designs is a mystery; I’d guess the first ones to make it to Best Buy shelves will be Ivy Bridge models in early 2012. Hopefully we’ll hear more from the companies themselves by then. |
Early 3DS Price Drop At Wal-Mart Could Enable Savings Plus “Ambassador” Perks | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | Nintendo recently had an epiphany, owning up to the slow launch by — . To make up for shafting early adopters, Nintendo has also said that anyone who has bought a 3DS before the price drop hits (on August 12th) will be eligible to receive 20 free virtual console games. But what if I told you that you could get a 3DS for the new price get 20 free games? You’d probably tell me it’s too good to be true. And it might be. But a “trusted source” has told that Wal-Mart will be making the price drop effective a bit early — on the 9th. If you were to buy it there and then log into the 3DS eShop before the 12th — you’ve got the best of both worlds. There’s no way to be sure it’s for real until Wal-Mart makes an announcement or the 9th comes around, but if you’re thinking of picking up the console with the new price, consider dropping by a Wal-Mart or calling in on the 9th to check. We’ll be sure to follow up this coming Tuesday. Hopefully Nintendo doesn’t find out about this. |
Netflix Hits A Million Subscribers In Canada | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | Rejoice! It only took 10 months for Netflix to rack up in Canada. They launched in September of 2010, and in July a lucky Canuck by the name of Amanda, in the province they call Manitoba, became their one-millionth subscriber. She wins a lifetime subscription to Netflix’s streaming service and a lifetime of people asking if they can somehow “get in on that.” That’s really all the news. Something to consider, though: Netflix still has a lot of growth coming its way in Canada. They have 25 million subscribers in the US and Canada combined, which, if my math is right, means there are 24 million in the US. That’s around 8% of the population! Whereas, in Canada, the number being served is less than 3%. With solid broadband penetration and rather long winters, streaming Netflix seems a perfect match for our friends in the north. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll go over their bandwidth caps? |
Fake John Doerr Tips Us About Cool Twitter Photo Search Trick | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | It’s not every day that John Doerr sends us an email into our tip box. In fact, he didn’t send one today either, but someone using his name did. (Yeah, we checked with the real John Doerr, it wasn’t him). The Fake John Doerr wanted to tell us about a cool new search shortcut on Twitter.com. If you type in “sp” anywhere on the page (but not in the search box or the Tweet box) a new “search photos” box will appear that will search only photos. If you do that, you get a nice visual grid of photos people have Tweeted out. Okay, so this shortcut either (it’s been available since at least June), but nobody here at TechCrunch had seen it and I wasn’t able to find it mentioned anywhere other than on Twitter. We spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out if it was new. It’s not new, but it’s been hidden. Try typing in “ ” and see what you get. There is an even cooler shortcut search for videos. Type “sv” and a “search videos”box comes up. Results also appear in a grid and once you play one it goes to a timeline view. After years of only a spare stream of 140 characters and links, the visual display is almost startling. But it’s a glimpse at what Twitter could look like if it didn’t try to hide away all the visuals. Keyboard shortcuts, by the way, have always been a of the New Twitter design. Others you can play around with include “n” for new tweet, “r” for reply, “t” for retweet, and “m” for direct message. |
Texas Instruments Promises All-Day Battery Life With 2013 OMAPs | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | Since battery technology isn’t really enabling us to pack more than a few watt-hours into our portable devices, companies like Intel, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments are working hard at making their chips and processors more efficient. Apple is acknowledged to be the leader here — their vertically-integrated device creation process (and the mysterious ) gives them the control they need to maximize battery and get that critical 10-hour claim. TI is hoping that an upcoming family of its OMAP chips will take some of the pressure off manufacturers and enable current batteries to last from dawn till dusk. , TI’s Brian Carlson mentioned that the 2013 OMAPs will use a 20nm process and should enable “true all day computing.” What does that mean, exactly, when the most popular device is sporting a 10-hour battery? That’s all day in most people’s books, even with plenty of video usage. Carlson didn’t put a number on it, but it’s clear that TI wants to focus on efficiency and not power. Nvidia, on the other hand, is in an arms race with Intel (an ARM race if you will) to push the power of its mobile processors . The question is: what will the tablet and mobile world look like in 2013? Probably not radically different, but an all-day battery might not be much of a draw by then. At any rate the improvement of memory and cache handling and other performance tweaks is always welcome. As Tom’s Hardware , there were indications of TI’s intent to sell off the OMAP brand after the release of OMAP 5 in 2012. A nice bidding war between Nvidia and Intel would bring in a hell of a payday. Discussing plans for a 2013 release, however, seems to moot speculation on that point; maybe TI felt they were better off playing the game than cashing out. |
On Deck Raises $19 Million To Connect Main Street Businesses With Capital | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | , the platform that helps connect small businesses with capital, has raised $19 million of its own in a series C funding round. The startup raised $15 million back in January from and recently added another $4 million from SF Capital Group, a New York–based private investment firm. As part of the new funding, SF Capital Group President Neil Wolfson will be joining On Deck’s board of directors. Wolfson joins David Hartwig, the managing director at SAP, who signed on to the board following his firm’s investment. On Deck has raised a total of $38 million from investors including , , , and . On Deck has been on a good run lately, as its added two senior executives to its sales and business development teams, made an appearance at a forum in Chicago, has doubled its month-to-month growth in customer acquisitions (to 4,000 customers) and loan applications in 2011, and has now connected small businesses with over $125 million in capital (at an average of loan size of $30K). You can read our original coverage of On Deck . Launched in 2006, On Deck uses a blend of data aggregation and electronic payment technology to bring an alternative form of evaluating the health of small businesses in an effort to efficiently bring capital to small and medium sized businesses. While TechCrunch and other technology publications regularly cover startups raising big rounds from venture capital firms and angel investors (ahem, like this one), the truth is that there is an enormous population of small businesses in the U.S. that are unable to raise money from high-powered venture firms. Traditionally, the avenue to capital for the many mom-and-pop shops on Main Street has been to apply for a bank loan. So, not only do businesses lack access to venture capital, but it is also a market that has been underserved by these traditional bank loans. On Deck believes that the fundamental problem Main Street businesses face is not a credit and capital one (as it is so often diagnosed), but instead is an issue of time and technology. What does that mean? SMBs often cannot afford (or lack the expertise) to complete lengthy loan packages, and, on the flip side, banks are unwilling to afford the (admittedly prohibitive) expense of underwriting the sub-$250K financing space — not to mention those under $100K, for which the process is even more tedious. As a result, banks are largely forced to rely on the personal credit score of the business owner in evaluating a loan application, which is often a highly inaccurate reflection of the health of the business. Thus, On Deck tackles this problem by utilizing software that investigates a number of data points, including how many customers the business has, cash flow, sales, and registered complaints — all in an effort to find out whether the business is solid enough to repay a loan. So, instead of going on the personal credit score of the business owner, the company offers what it calls the “On Deck Score”, which is a business credit score developed to provide lenders with an effective measure of a small business’ creditworthiness. The On Deck Score was developed in partnership with Equifax. Because the startup’s platform allows businesses to create merchant profiles, which links to electronic data sources, including online banking, accounting and merchant processing (and aggregates social, tax, and industry data), banks and lenders can more easily access a SMB’s complete financial profile. This saves lenders from the hassle of collecting the data themselves, or relying on personal credit scores to evaluate credit. Considering the fact that there are currently 5 million businesses that have 25 employees or less — a segment the U.S. economy relies on for 40 percent of its jobs — On Deck is providing an exceedingly valuable service in facilitating the underwriting of these businesses, and its new infusion of capital will ensure that the startup continues to bring disruptive technology to an underserved (and sizable) segment of the market. For more, check out On Deck at home . |
DSLR Controller App Lets Your Android Device Call The Shots | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | Using your phone as a remote for your DSLR isn’t exactly the newest idea out there — a ton exist for iOS — but Android historically hasn’t seen that same kind of love. There have been attempts to make it work, some than , but a common theme among them is that you weren’t able to run the device directly into your camera. Rather, your DSLR gets plugged into your computer or a physical adapter, and thanks to a bit of software your phone takes control from there. A bit cumbersome, no? changed that today. A beta version of his DSLR Controller app has just hit the Marketplace, and on top of supporting a direct connection to your camera, it also looks gorgeous. The only extras involved are a USB host cable (a.k.a an On-The-Go cable) and the willingness to fork over $8.51. The app provides a live-view display that runs at around 15 fps, which is a little on the low side, but respectable considering what we’re working with. It also give the use full control over white balance, aperture, exposure compensation, ISO speed, metering, and a bevy of other things you’ll only really appreciate if you’re a photo buff. Now, before you whip out your cameras and your credit cards, compatibility is a bit limited at this early stage. It only works with Android devices that have USB host capability (the dev recommends the Galaxy S II or a Honeycomb tablet) and Canon DSLRs. Again, it’s still in beta, so those of you who have the right arsenal in the first place may experience a few hiccups, but after a bit of polish (and more camera compatibility down the line), we could be looking at the app to beat. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnxvFYza6Y4&w=560&h=349] |
How the King of Kerry plans to disrupt the design industry with Tweak | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | The small coffee shop on the corner, competing with the Starbucks across the street with a lame leaflet. The local chemist that has to place a print ad next to a national chain in the local paper. Globally and every day small businesses destroy their credibility because either they don’t have access to professional designers, or the designs they have are simply bad. The current model of having to hire a designer to create good looking visual material in print just does not really work. It’s expensive for most small businesses and the average person. And it’s slow. At the same time we know that consumers – assaulted daily by great design from companies with huge marketing budgets – now have a have a very high degree of visual literacy. Thus, the concept behind , as founder puts it, is to “democratise design”. Put simply, with an armoury of millions of pieces of design and a CMS three years in the making, Tweak plans to disrupt both the print and design industry, as well as a section of the magazine and newspaper advertising business. And Irishman Kennelly – who exited his previous image library business to the tune of $135m, in hard cash – plans to run the whole operation from County Kerry. Launched in February this year, Tweak took three years of development work between operations in Kerry, Dublin and New York. Tweak’s assault on Vistaprint and the rest of the design world is multi-faceted. – a billion dollar company that ships 60,000 orders a day – is the only real competitor to Tweak. But they don’t do digital. Tweak does, allowing businesses to download the original PDF of a design and take to a local printer. Tweak has branded site of its own, and is closing deals with a large number of print franchises around the world to white label its API solution for print companies that want to do a branded service. So how will Kennelly disrupt the world of design? First of all: Ease of use. Have you tried creating something good looking on Vistaprint? Exactly – it sucks. Creating an amazing looking print brochure on Tweak is a snap. The Flash flex site is incredibly easy to use. Choose a business sector, like beauty, click on, say, Day Spas and get a choice of excellent designs. I’ve seen it in action and there is no horrible shovel-ware design on Tweak. And it’s incredibly affordable compared to traditional print costs. A four page A4 brochure costs about $100 for 50 copies but crucially that includes print and design. All the images are royalty-free so there is no concerns about copyright. Users can have something printed by Tweak and shipped – they have print operations in Europe and North America – or buy the PDF or the InDesign version to get it printed locally. There are 100,000 logos to choose from. So the chances of a small business in, say, San Francisco and one in London bumping in to each other with the same logo is unlikely. With half a million pieces of design,Tweak has systematically gone through 320 business types and created templates for each. All the photos have either been shot by Tweak or licensed from image libraries. They also have teams of copywriters who have created simple to edit copy. This is all the stuff that normal people can’t do – but using Tweak makes their printed material 100 times more professional. Tweak also has two more arrows in its quiver. A direct business and a partner business. The Direct business will be called Tweak Pro and will be for printers, designers and marketers. They will be able to buy credits at a discount and scale. Tweak Brand Manager will let companies put their own documents into the system and control them there, digital or print or both. Furthermore, an API for picture libraries will allow them to sell their own images into Tweak – allowing them to take the average transaction value and up it. This could be a game changer for image libraries. Finally, Tweak also plans to disrupt the world of print advertising. So for instance, you can create a Tweak advert on the fly and size it for an ad in, say, the New York Times. You can’t place the ad… right now, but that is in the plan. Meanwhile the problem for printers and publishers is getting art work on time, or the presses fly empty. It’s very hard with traditional systems. But with Tweak, the ads are “pre-flighted” ready to go, dynamically. All the crops, all the dimensions: done. This could have a real effect on classified ads. Every sale, on the smallest ad, has to pay commission to the salesperson. So it’s a disaster. For newspapers that means there are a myriad number of potential customers they cannot reach as the rates are high as a result. But Tweak’s system can build adverts for every major every newspaper globally. This means ads placed via Tweak would be most profitable adverts in the paper because it would be, as Kennelly calls it “robotic.” Also, people’s advertising assets will be in Tweak, making it “sticky”. Kennelly has a background in photo journalism, launching his first business in 1981, a news picture wire agency for UK and Irish newspapers. He later started the first digital pre-press company in Ireland in 1990, using the Mac. Around 1995 they looked at the stock photography space, and launched the first European company, called Stock Byte in 1996. It was part of a wave. The first royalty free stock photography brands appeared, like Digital Stock in California, which was later bought by Corbis and photo Disk in Seattle, bought by Getty. Eventually, Stock Byte became the largest distributor of royalty free stock photography in the world by 2004. It won venture backing from Act Venture Capital in Ireland, which took a 30% stake. However, a couple of years later Act had lost interest so, unusually for many startups, Kennelly bought out their stake. This left him with 100% of the company. Soon after Stock Byte started licensing their royalty free images to Getty. At a certan point the market became crowded, so they decided to become the leading producer of the best imagery in the world. Shoots started costing costing a million dollars per shoot. They scaled up from 5,000 images a year to 5,000 a month, taking all the road blocks out of the system to scale. They ended up with 130 partners in 70 countries, suddenly becoming an important party of Getty’s business. A fan of Bill Gate’s book “Business At The Speed of Thought”, Kennelly realised that analytics was the real key to the images business and started recording the earnings of each image across 60 fields of data for each one, working out which images “performed” and which didn’t, almost in real time. In 2005 iStock exploded the market by licensing the average image for a dollar when the market standard was $200, creating a sort of ‘Craigslist for crowd-sourced images’. There was no quality, but with such a disruptive business model, Kennelly knew the writing was on the wall. He started to look for buyers. He later sold Stock Byte to Getty for $135 million, right before their own valuation dropped, in 2006, all cash. There was no earn-out period so he walked that day. Ironically enough, Bill Gates tried to buy Stock Bytes, ending up as the under-bidder for the business. With time on his hands and a lot of spare cash, Kennelly looked into entrepreneurship in Ireland. “There was a gap between people’s perception of entrepreneurship and lack of understanding of what it takes. People think it’s about having a good idea when the reality is it takes a lot of work,” he told me. He started setting up non-profit organisations to tackle the issue, hitting the zeitgeist just as entrepreneurship started coming back into vogue. Kennelly founded a non-profit called which is the leading general business accelerator in Ireland, started only last year. Last year’s company is now worth €20 million. A sort of non-profit Ycombinator, it draws on the expertise of many of Irelands leading entrepreneurs as mentors, and brings individuals and startups to Kerry for a 6 month programme. You can imagine that they don’t need much persuading. Kennelly also set up a Junior entrepreneur programme for 10 year old kids and the Young Entrepreneur programme for 15 year olds onwards. Some 2,500 students have now been through the programme. The programmes have been a hit. “Lord knows the Irish are a creative race and punch above their weight internationally. We speak English, we’ve never invaded anyone and we have 12.5% corporation tax!” he jokes. “We have a special relationship with the US and every kid in Ireland travels in Europe.” But Tweak’s plan to disrupt the design world won’t threaten the great designers – just the 95% who are bad or just “OK”. As Kennelly says: “There’s craft in design: great typography, great picture editing, great design. It costs a lot of money. But although our design costs a lot, we spread the costs of that IP over millions of users. So even though it’s cheap, it doesn’t have to be bad.” “We’re the largest library of customisable designs in the world, half a million pieces. A million in 2012. And we can scale it endlessly. A greengrocer anywhere can create something designed specifically for their business, for peanuts, compared to what is available today.” And it’ll all be run from the Ring of Kerry. |
Google Announces Plans To Bake Android-Like Web Intents Into Chrome | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | There’s a lot of innovation going on in the browser wars these days, with huge strides in features and performance from all the top vendors. And there’s a new feature on the horizon that’s going to make web apps even more powerful and flexible: Web Intents, which will allow web apps to communicate with each other. Today, Google has that it’s planning to integrate Web Intents into Chrome. The news comes on the heels of Mozilla’s announcement last month that it is on the project (Google’s post seems to indicate that the two projects used to be distinct, but that they’re now being unified under a single API). So what exactly are Web Intents? The name and the purpose are both similar to the Intents system that’s present in Google’s Android platform. In short, Intents allow two separate applications to communicate with each other, without either of them having to actually what the other one is. Instead, they offer and listen for generic hooks. On Android this means that if you install a new image editing application, the default Gallery app doesn’t have to integrate any special APIs in order to send a photo to that editing app. Likewise in the case of a web app, this means that a new photo hosting site could easily integrate editing functionality from something like Aviary or Picnik, without either of those services needing to implement a special API unique to that photo hosting site. Yes, it’s slightly confusing, but it’s a good thing, and it means web apps will be able to operate more like native applications. Here’s a quote from Google’s blog post: We are hard at work designing an analogous system for the web: Web Intents. This web platform API will provide the same benefits of Android Intents, but better suited for web applications. When designing the system, we have first and foremost been interested in creating a simple, easy-to-use API. With Web Intents, you will be able to connect your web app to a service with as little as two lines of code! Chrome will perform the heavy lifting for you. As with Android, Web Intents documents an initial set of intent actions (edit, view, share, etc.) that likely cover the majority of use cases on the web today; however, as the web grows and sites provide more functionality, new intent actions will be added by services that document these intents, some more popular than others. To foster development and use of intents, we plan to create a site to browse existing intents and add new intents. There’s also an examples page live . |
Microsoft Responds To Google’s Response To Microsoft’s Response | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | If you thought that Microsoft and Google, two massive public companies, would quickly and quietly retire behind the scenes to continue their fight after their over the past couple of days, you’d be wrong. Well, maybe they are fighting behind the scenes too, but the pissing match continues in public as well. Good for us! In the interest of covering both sides of the story (and certainly not because this storyline is full of great fodder, generating massive interest — and pageviews), here’s the latest retort from Microsoft. Once again, Microsoft’s head of communications, Frank Shaw, is firing back at Google’s head legal guy, David Drummond, for his most recent update to from yesterday. And Shaw is doing it again on Twitter. For those who have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, a refresher: Shaw’s most interesting in response reads as follows: Why? BECAUSE they wanted to buy something that they could use to assert against someone else. That’s Shaw asserting that Google held out of a Novell patent partnership bid so they could find other patents to assert against others. Google’s stance on the patent matter has always been that they only want them for defensive purposes, so you know this jab must really piss them off. Hopefully that means another response! Until then, here are Shaw’s Tweets: https://twitter.com/#!/fxshaw/status/99217032838512640 https://twitter.com/#!/fxshaw/status/99217473701818369 https://twitter.com/#!/fxshaw/status/99217585115119616 https://twitter.com/#!/fxshaw/status/99217644988792834 |
Through the looking-glass for String and Augmented Reality | Monty Munford | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | At the Century Club on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue they don’t take kindly to members or their guests using their laptops or mobiles in the rooftop restaurant, but they seem to make an exception for Augmented Reality demonstrations. While in previous visits I have spoken softly into my phone or surreptiously used my laptop under my table, the waiters and management turned a Nelson eye while Reality’s Yush Kaila and Simon Windsor showed off their extraordinary AR products. Rather like a 3D insight into a Lewis Carroll fairytale and using an iPad as a looking-glass, what appeared to be a sheet of A4 paper was transformed when the iPad was lined up with the picture on the paper. Dragons, monsters, aliens and cars jump out in front of the viewer, exciting enough to make even the most vigilant waiter at the Century Club enquire as to what was going on. This AR content can also be accessed by an iPhone and means that not only do A4 sheets come to life, but also the somewhat larger billboards (48-sheets) at airports, stations and other public places. While using a cumbersome iPad or the more agile iPhone to do so can make users look as if they’re practising stilted dance moves, it’s surprising how quickly lack of self-consciousness creeps in. String was after two years of development and joins an increasingly populated AR fray of companies such as Layar, the well-funded Dutch company that is generally regarded as the market-leader in the sector. However, comparing String with Layar is like the old adage of, er, asking how long is a piece of string. Layar is browser-based and provides an open, single platform for third-party content. It relies on location data. Conversely, String’s approach to AR is ‘vision-based’ and launches from print markers. This technology means brands and developers can create their own branded apps and experiences, freeing themselves from a walled garden and without the need for a mobile web connection to view the content within the app. String is currently working with partners such as Boeing, Fujitsu, Audi, Ford of Canada and Paramount, the latter being part of the Transformers 3 campaign, as well as offering developers a £79 licence to create content for themselves. While the movie Minority Report is used too often as an example of how AR may transform our consumer experiences, it’s hard not to think of it when seeing String’s products in action. There have been other times before when AR was expected to hit critical mass, but 2011 may prove to be the year that it finally took us through the looking-glass into Alice’s Wonderland. But don’t take it from an overawed and star-struck Luddite such as me, ask the staff at the Century Club… they know the future when they see it. |
LinkedIn Now Adding Two New Members Every Second | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | In LinkedIn’s as a public company, CEO Jeff Weiner revealed that LinkedIn is adding two new members every second, which is up from In Q2 alone, LinkedIn added 14 million members, after passing the 100 million mark earlier this year. Weiner also said that the network is now north of 120 million members, so LinkedIn has added 5 million members in the past month. While LinkedIn’s IPO is a financial event for the company, some of this growth in membership could be the marketing influence of now being a public company. And LinkedIn’s IPO , as it was the first major social networking company to go public. LinkedIn also revealed that over a third of its users are active once a month. That would mean a little over 40 million users are using the network actively. The company also said that the majority of its members us its free product. And traffic is up. LinkedIn is seeing page views of 7.1 billion, an increase of 80% from the second quarter of 2010. Mobile page views for LinkedIn have increased approximately 400% year-over-year. LinkedIn now has than MySpace and Twitter. Weiner also added that LinkedIn will continuing to invest in mobile and will adding new mobile specific services to the network in the coming year. Additionally, LinkedIn will be updating the features of the homepage and company profiles. In terms of competitors, Weiner commented in the call, “When we talk to our members, we hear the same thing, they want to keep their professional and personal lives separate.” Clearly he’s referring to competition from Facebook. When asked about the cutting of API access to certain developers, Weiner said the startups were not compliant with the developer TOS and said that they were basically spamming users. Another area where LinkedIn could play in is the social enterprise communications arena, and when asked about the possibility of the network entering this space, Weiner gave a roundabout answer. It sounds like a social enterprise product is something LinkedIn is evaluating. Also read: |
Apple Takes Lead In Smartphone Shipments, But Samsung Is On Its Heels | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | According to from IDC, shipped more smartphones than any other manufacturer in Q2, stealing bragging rights from a struggling . With 20.3 million units shipped, Apple managed to nab a 19.1 percent market share, representing year-over-year growth of 141.7 percent. and Nokia followed behind, with and bringing up the rear. It’s worth noting that HTC posted this quarter with 166 percent YOY growth to claim an 11.7 percent market share, up from 8.9 percent . The HTC Sensation and Evo 3D had quite a bit to do with that, along with HTC’s increasing prominence in China. Even though the company ranks fifth, it still seemed to eat a large portion of RIM and Nokia’s share. But HTC wasn’t alone in that — Samsung took a big bite, too. In fact, Samsung’s had an amazing year, seeing year-over-year growth of 380.6 percent. Much of that success can be attributed to the Samsung Galaxy S II, which sold 3 million units in its first 55 days on the market. If they can maintain anything like that growth for a little longer, they’ll leapfrog Apple with ease. Now for the bad news. RIM shipped a little over one million more smartphones this quarter than it did in the same quarter of 2010 — which would be a respectable bump if the smartphone market itself hadn’t seen far greater growth, hitting 106.5 million shipments overall this quarter. So while RIM ship more handsets, they actually lost a ton of market share. Now for the bad news. Nokia, as expected, performed worse this quarter compared to last year both in units sold and market share. After a 30 percent drop in units shipped, Nokia now controls just 15.7 percent of the market. Obviously, the transition from MeeGo to Windows Phone 7 has quite a bit to do with this. While MeeGo dies, customers are opting for brand new phones rather than waiting for a Windows-powered Nokia handset. What’s worse, the wait isn’t ending anytime soon, as the U.S. isn’t anywhere on Nokia’s . Apple and eating Nokia and RIM’s lunch isn’t exactly breaking news, but seeing the actual numbers is always interesting. According to , Android has taken a 40 percent market share as of June. It just so happens that the manufacturers seeing the greatest growth — HTC and Samsung — also happen to predominantly run Android. It only follows that if Android can continue to grow at the rate it is, Samsung and HTC will follow suit. |
LinkedIn Share Buttons Now On More Than 100,000 Sites | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | It is an unwritten law of the social web: One detail that caught my eye in announcement today is that those LinkedIn share buttons are now on 100,000 sites. The proliferation of those buttons (we use them here on TechCrunch) helps populate people’s feeds in LinkedIn and creates another reason to visit the site. I wonder how much the buttons, along with the (LinkedIn’s social news product) last March contributed to the 83 percent jump in unique visitors. All of the publicity around its IPO must have helped also. The more that people go to LinkedIn to check out the latest news, the more they stick around and the more likely they are to do other revenue-generating things like look for a job or sign up for a premium subscription. And the company is turning on a lot of revenue dials. LinkedIn reported a 121 percent growth in revenue to $121 million in the quarter, and a net profit of $4.5 million. We’ve certainly seen the effects of LinkedIn sharing here on TechCrunch to the point where it is now a . Their sharing buttons also seem to register shares much faster than Twitter’s (although I suspect they are counting a lot of retweets since members can populate their LinkedIn accounts with their Twitter feeds, but they seem to be registering those retweets faster than Twitter itself and calling it a LinkedIn share). All I know is that LinkedIn drives lots of traffic. |
LinkedIn Beats The Street In First Quarter As A Public Company; Revenue Up 120 Percent To $121M | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | For the first time as a public company, professional social network LinkedIn is its second quarter results today. LinkedIn’s revenue for the quarter came in at $121 million, which is an increase of 120% compared to $54.9 million for the second quarter of 2010. Net income for the second quarter was $4.5 million, compared to $4.3 million for the second quarter of 2010; Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter was $10.8 million, compared to $6.4 million for the second quarter of 2010. The company blew away analayst estimates the quarter. Analysts a loss of 4 cents per share on revenue of $104.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $26.3 million, or 22% of revenue, compared to $11.5 million for the second quarter of 2010, or 21% of revenue. GAAP earnings per share for the second quarter was $0.04; and Non-GAAP EPS for the second quarter was $0.10. Linkedin CEO Jeff Weiner said in a statement: “In the second quarter, we saw record levels of members, unique visitors, and page views, while revenue growth further accelerated…Going forward, we plan to continue to invest in our team, technology, and products in order to increase the value we deliver to members and realize the full potential of the LinkedIn platform.” In terms of metrics, the site’s members grew to 115.8 million, an increase of 61% from the second quarter of 2010. During the quarter, LinkedIn saw unique visitors of 81.8 million per month, an increase of 83% from the second quarter of 2010. Page views came in at 7.1 billion, an increase of 80% from the second quarter of 2010. Mobile page views for LinkedIn have increased approximately 400% year-over-year. In terms of the breakdown of revenue, Linkedin’s Hiring Solutions totaled $58.6 million, an increase of 170% compared to the second quarter of 2010. Hiring Solutions revenue represented 48% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2011, compared to 49% in the first quarter of 2011 and 40% in the second quarter of 2010. Revenue from Marketing Solutions products totaled $38.6 million, an increase of 111% compared to the second quarter of 2010. Marketing Solutions revenue represented 32% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2011, compared to 30% in the first quarter of 2011 and 33% in the second
quarter of 2010. And the third revenue channel, Premium Subscriptions, came in at $23.9 million, an increase of 60% compared to the second quarter of 2010. Premium Subscriptions represented 20% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2011, compared to 21% in the first quarter of 2011 and 27% in the second quarter of 2010. Revenue from the U.S. totaled $82.7 million, and represented 68% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2011. Revenue from international totaled $38.3 million, and represented 32% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2011. With respect to the company’s outlook, LinkedIn revenue for the third quarter of 2011 is projected to be in the range of approximately $121 million to approximately $125 million. F Revenue for the full year of 2011 is projected to be in the range of approximately $475 million to approximately $485 million. LinkedIn probably had the thus far in terms of hype this year because it was one of the first big social media companies to go public. After at $45 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, LinkedIn per share on May 19, giving the company a $7.8 billion market cap. In the first day of trading, shares popped up to as high as $122.70, soaring past a $10 billion valuation. But these high stock prices didn’t sustain and LinkedIn’s value per share dropped significantly over the next month, dropping as low as $63.71 per share. However, the company’s stock and shares have been trading in the range of $90 to $110 per share over the past month. That puts the company’s valuation upwards of $9 billion. But in July, the company was by one of its underwriters, JP Morgan. And some have that LinkedIn’s shares are priced higher than what the company is really worth. In terms of the actual product, traffic is and LinkedIn now has more unique monthly visitors than MySpace and Twitter. The company debuted a , and also launched a new for companies. Here are our notes from the earnings call: Weiner says that LinkedIn is now north of 120 million members and is adding 2 new members every second, which is up from In Q2, LinkedIn added 14 million members. [slideshare id=8774509&doc=earningsdeck2011q2final-110804145409-phpapp01] |
Google Responds To Microsoft’s “Gotcha”: They’re Diverting Attention With A Trick That Failed | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | This back and forth between Google and Microsoft is getting good. Yesterday, Google calling out Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and others for using “bogus” patents to . Some of the patents Google’s Chief Legal Officer mentioned included the ones Microsoft acquired from Novell (not to be confused with Nortel, which happened later). When Microsoft saw this, two senior officials took to Twitter to . You see, Microsoft had tried to get Google to partner to buy the Novell patents — Google turned them down. And Microsoft had the email to prove it. But there was an obvious reason for this rejection, which Microsoft conveniently left out, Google now says. Drummond has addressed the pantsing incident in an update to his original blog post from yesterday. He kicks the update off with: It’s not surprising that Microsoft would want to divert attention by pushing a false “gotcha!” while failing to address the substance of the issues we raised. But then comes the substance: If you think about it, it’s obvious why we turned down Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft’s objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn’t fall for it. So what Drummond is saying is that Microsoft’s offer to team up with Google to buy the Novell patents was more or less a trick. By teaming up on the Novell patents, Google would have them, but they wouldn’t have been able to have been used to protect Android, because Microsoft would have had them too. Should Google have just gone along with that anyway, since ultimately Microsoft did get them (along with Apple, Oracle, and EMC)? You could argue that. But fortunately for Google, in that deal and made Microsoft sell off the patents they bought and made the others in the group license the rest, Drummond notes. This may go a bit deeper too. It’s conceivable that Microsoft Google would never go for this joint-acquisition plan, but offered it anyway so that when the DoJ did look into the deal, Microsoft would point to the offer sent Google’s way. These companies are very smart and calculating, don’t put something like this past either of them. In his original post, Drummond said that the DoJ was also looking into the more recent Nortel patent acquisition by Microsoft, Apple, RIM, and others. Clearly, Google hopes the same type of thing will happen here, but that’s still being decided. While Apple was cleared by the DoJ to buy the patents ahead of the auction, Microsoft could face a similar ruling as the Novell situation since they already had a licensing agreement on the patents, just as they had on the Novell patents before they tried to buy them. We’ll see. More importantly, this battle is not going to end anytime soon. Novell was part one, then things intensified significantly with the Nortel auction, part 2. But part 3 should be the most intense yet, as both . The Nortel patent purse had over 6,000 patents, but InterDigital has over 8,800. If the winning bid on Nortel was $4.5 billion, InterDigital should be well north of $5 billion. Hang on to your butts. : |
1.6-Terabyte Smart Optimus SSD Reads A Gig Per Second | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | Enterprise hardware company Smart Modular Technologies has that appear to wipe the floor with pretty much everything out there. It comes in capacities from 200GB all the way to a current record capacity of 1.6TB. And not only is it the biggest single SSD available, it also is the fastest, using a Serial Attached SCSI interface to achieve (they claim) 1000MB/s read speeds and 500MB/s writes. The interface is actually specced at 6Gb/s (~750MB/s, theoretically), so there might be a small amount of shenanigans going on here, but those are still monster speeds. Even the best consumer-grade SSDs only do about half that right now. And it fits in a 2.5″ form factor, too. Smart is also touting their “Guardian Technology,” some on-drive tech that helps extend the life of the drive and, presumably, keep the data in order so it can be read off at those incredible speeds. No pricing was given for the Optimus line, though it is described as being “cost-effective.” I’m guessing it’s going to be expensive as hell, but we may see some trickle down of this speed over the next year or so. : There are larger-capacity SSD-based PCI cards, but strictly speaking they aren’t drives the way this one is a drive – i.e. with a serial interface and 2.5″ or 3.5″ enclosure. Could be splitting hairs, but worth mentioning. [via ] |
null | Mg Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 3 | null |
Yet Another Questionable iPhone 5 “Spy Shot” Pops Up | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | We’ve seen a . We’ve seen a . Now, meet: the oddly angled, questionably skewed iPhone 5. This shot comes from , and has been blasting off around the blogs all morning. Guigsh claims that he had hands-on with the device for “only 2 minutes” with “pictures forbidden”, all taking place “in the office of a French operator.” Now, on the upside: this shot fits well enough with of the rumors we’ve been hearing for so long: Slimmer? Yep. Smaller bezel around the display? Sure. But what about the tapered back? Or the more pronounced rounded edges? — slightly so, but that could be side effect of stretching/distorting in Photoshop. Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure that’s whats going on here. Stare at the image for a minute or two, and stuff just starts to seem.. . Then you start to notice it: why is his index finger so long? Why is the ear piece hole gaping like that? Why the heck is he holding it like that? The longer you look at it, the more it looks like a stretched out iPhone 4 being held in such a way to minimize obvious stretching of the fingers. Forum hero set out to recreate the shot with his iPhone 4 and a dash of Photoshop distortion. Here is his “literally 30 second Photoshop job” ( ): Looks like this is myth is busted to me. What do you think? ( Myth double-busted! found that this image was floating around before posted it as his own, and was originally captioned (in French) with “A picture like this could drive some sites crazy…”) |
Tencent Vs. Sina: A Look At Who’s Winning The Battle For China’s Tweets [Infographic] | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | China currently has the most Internet users of any country in the world, with some connecting to the Web. Some even put that number as high as 485 million. Granted, China has a population of just over 1.3 billion, which means only 32 percent of its population is using the Web, a percentage far lower than the U.S. and Japan (at at 77 percent and 78 percent, respectively). Of course, with web activity continuing to grow rapidly in China, the Asian power represents an enormous digital market, even as the so-called has made it difficult (or impossible) to fully transport international digital technologies and businesses into the Chinese ecosystem. Thanks to China’s strict web regulation (and IP blocking, among other things), in the big picture, U.S. businesses have failed to make a significant impact, even in spite of the fact that China’s web users have begun adopting social networking, microblogging, gaming and more, with gusto. Twitter , for example, but that hasn’t stopped Chinese companies from adopting Twitter-like microblogging platforms at home. The use of “weibo” sites (the Chinese translation of “microblogging”) has exploded in China in the last few years, and two companies in particular have come to dominate the market: and . Of course, the matter of which company is winning the “weibo race” in China is open to debate. The reason for this is that Tencent has essentially become, as , what AIM, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter would be were they combined together into one, giant amalgamated enterprise. Tencent’s IM application, (a.k.a. QQ), claims to have 674 million active users, (although it’s very likely that estimate is high by several hundred million). QQ is the service from which Tencent signs up its users and then funnels them into its other products and services, including games, search, and Tencent Weibo, to name a few. According to iChinaStock, microblogging in China really took off with the rise in popularity of Sina Weibo in 2009 and 2010; today, the popular microblogging service has nearly 140 million users. Yet, since Tencent launched Tencent Weibo in 2010, its service, too, has been growing at a breakneck pace, today claiming over . However, iChinaStock estimates that only about 93 million of those users are active on the service, and while this number remains open for debate, it is likely that are registering through QQ, which makes those registered stats run high, while in fact many of those users aren’t even active. As always, the issue of identifying “registered” versus “active” users is delicate, and when it comes to these Chinese microblogging services, much of the data is either unpublished, unreliable, or an estimation. Yet, in regard to which company is winning the race, , a solution provider that offers competitive intelligence as well as e-reputation, data mining and social media monitoring, has whipped up a nifty little infographic that gives us a peek into the Weibo War, and how the leaders stack up against Twitter. (See below) While Digimind has Sina Weibo as the clear leader in China’s microblogging space, Tencent is certainly not to be dismissed, as it is growing exponentially, has an integrated, multi-level platform from which to channel users into its Weibo, and is on marketing to bring new users to its service. That being said, those who I spoke to at Digmind, along with sources in China (as well as iChinaStock) all agree that Sina Weibo likely outranks Tencent in terms of the quantity of active users as well as the quality. With Sina owning 57 percent of the Chinese microblogging market and finding high adoption among Chinese celebrities (not to mention have a relatively stable platform without a lot of downtime), Sina looks like the clear frontrunner. Not to mention that “weibo.com” and “weibo.cn” — two fairly important domain names for a company looking to dominate the weibo market. Plus, they’re just easier to remember. While Sina Weibo compares favorably to Twitter in terms of adoption in China, the fact of the matter is that Twitter has a far broader reach, now being translated into 11 languages, whereas Sina and Tencent remain localized to the Chinese market. (Although Sina Weibo .) Of course, it may be that the market is so huge that neither company will effectively become the “Twitter of China”, though Sina Weibo certainly seems to have the competitive advantage at this point. However, with Tencent’s broader platform and patent ownership reaching into areas including instant messaging, e-commerce, online payment services, search, information security, and gaming, Tencent is diversified to say the least. And, with the massive adoption of QQ, perhaps it is Tencent that has first dibs on a bigger prize: China’s social graph. Let us know what you think. Further reading: For a really excellent comparison of Sina Weibo and Tencent (and Tencent Weibo), check out iChinaStock.com’s analysis , and Bill Bishop of DigiCha’s analysis . Without further ado, the infographic: |
Turn An Email Into Snail Mail For Free | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | I’m currently looking at an email from US Airways customer support, where the only return contact info available in the email is a physical mailing address WTF — And a visit to the US Airways website reveals a similar on snail mail. I mean, who does that? Still? Granted a little bit of on site digging reveals, gasp, phone numbers! I guess somebody’s still into paper modes of communication — as the below “Fax to Email” pitch from , the Canadian version of Shark Tank, proves — because the US Postal Service still, you know, exists. While we wait for the demise of all print, those of us who still need to send Father’s Day greetings to their Dad (and have yet to because they have forgotten how to write an actual letter ) are in luck … You have 10 more days to use , a service that will handwrite your email and physically send it to your recipient including a doodle, a flower petal, a spray of cologne or other old timey accoutrements if you so chose. Note: You only get one shot, and you have to send your text along with mailing details to . “In a culture overrun with instant gratification and on-demand services, this project cultivates appreciation for the lost art of letter writing,” says the sappy blurb on the project’s website. Damn hippies. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r4XN-QRKxU&w=630] |
Mini RFID Device Stores Personal Medical Data, Makes It Instantly Accessible | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | Japan-based chemical and tech company has developed a small healthcare product that should make life for paramedics, emergency doctors (and patients) easier: the portable device (pictured) makes it possible to instantly access all medical data on a specific person with a PC or smartphone, via RFID. Asahi Kasei uses the smart card tech (instead of a self-developed solution), as this system has been widely adopted by all of Japan’s mobile carriers, several major PC makers (i.e. Sony for their Vaio computers), and other electronics companies. In Japan, FeliCa as a brand has actually been around since 1994. In an emergency situation, doctors or paramedics can tap Felica-equipped equipment against the device to view medical data of its owner, for example the blood type, date of birth etc. on the screen in seconds. Asahi Kasei says that the entire medical history of patients can be stored. If doctors need to view very large files, for example X-ray images, the device can make access possible by letting users click on links that lead to that data (but stored on external servers). The device is just sized at 3x3cm. According to Japanese business daily The Nikkei, Asahi Kasei is planning to market it within a year (and priced at $25 a unit). |
StyleSeat Is Yet More Proof There’s A Market For The “Opentable For X” | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 5 |
Earlier today when we about UrbanSpoon trying to get a piece of pie, this quote from Urbanspoon VP Kara Nortman really struck me, “Two years ago, an online reservation system required a massive upfront investment,” she said, now claiming that building a similar platform is as simple as setting up an iPad/iPhone app.” Perhaps this setup ease (and reduced customer acquisition cost) is why we have seen an outcropping of investor interest in “OpenTable for X” services lately, the most notable being investment in ZocDoc. Just yesterday I on a demo for , a platform that pitched itself as a OpenTable for salon appointments, not the first time . Perhaps the OpenTable model has even more potential when made even more niche? After all, there are 30K restaurants in the US that take reservations, versus two million salon professionals. Pencil You In competitor , which at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in May, now has over 75K appointments booked, representing $3.5 million in spend. StyleSeat, which allows hairstylists and salon representatives to set up simple online profiles to showcase their wares, now boasts 14K salon professionals who’ve created accounts, with 50K clients added and 1,700 promotions (deals) created. StyleSeat CEO tells me she’s been approached by a couple of major industry players about partnerships since her Disrupt turn, “Disrupt gave us access to companies that we wouldn’t normally get access to so early in the process- we were approached by several decision makers at some of the largest companies out there. If we took traditional channels it’d take us much longer to reach those people.” McCloskey, plans on monetizing StyleSeat through a freemium model, offering the core StyleSeat product for free and then charging a $25 fee for more advanced CRM and marketing tools. She ambitiously views the company as well-positioned to shake up (sorry, got tired of using the word disrupt) the entire beauty industry, which has annual revenues . McCloskey says that the social sharing features of the site have had the most impact on its growth and calculates that the Facebook recommendations posted through the platform are worth $6.70 each. One in six recommendations shared on Facebook results in an online booking, at an average service cost of $40. She tells me that 98% of clients using StyleSeat say they’d recommend a stylist to friends. StyleSeat currently has $700K in funding from quite the roster of white-hot investors including , , , , , , , and others. |
The Startup You Want To Work At The Most Is Your Own | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | By now it is a common axiom in Silicon Valley small talk that good engineers are, at the moment, murder to come by. While the most prominent talent battles have thus far been between Facebook and Google, I was curious whether there was a specific smaller startup that everyone wanted to work at. So I set up a poll asking, and included the Valley’s most prominent startups, adding new ones as they were suggested by you guys. The poll, which was tweeted out by the TechCrunch account and posted to our Facebook, got over 36K views and over 5K votes over two days. The immediate winners? Your own startup — whatever that may be — and the still stealth . But, allowing for the (even though I’m sure Milk is a great place to work and will be even more so after it actually launches something) and taking into account what the numbers before Rose tweeted out the poll link, it seems like most people, if they have to work for someone else, would want to do the time at and , with clocking in immediately afterwards. So why the crazy appeal of the houses that Jack Dorsey built? Says one Valley bystander, “People want to work with Jack. I think the design and engineering teams are highly respected. Most startups are making junk. Jack was able to use design to make something as dull as payments sexy and interesting.” You can view the rest of the poll . Aside from the crazy Milk numbers, it pretty much jives with what everyone intuitively knows about where everyone else wants to work. |
Study: Some ISPs Still Hijacking Search Results (Lawsuit Follows) | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | Try this: open up a new tab and type “kindle” into the address bar. Chances are it will send you to a Google search results page. That is, unless the ISP is intercepting such rogue queries and doing what they will with them. A pair of computer scientists at UC Berkeley have found that , the result being that, for example, when someone types “kindle” into the address bar, it doesn’t go to your preferred search results, but directly to Amazon’s Kindle page. Harmless, in a way, but in fact deeply invasive when the conditions are examined. These ISPs are using third party contractors who monetize such erroneous or accidental queries. A broad set of search items, things like “kindle,” “apple,” and “bloomingdales” are being listened for, logged, and intercepted, and the user’s intention ignored. As if that isn’t enough, one company suspected of being behind this activity, Paxfire, has filed for a patent on ISP-level tracking of users for advertising purposes. To tell the truth, it’s making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill, but for a good reason. There are shenanigans like this being pulled by ISPs, network operators, content providers, carriers, and all the rest every day. While large-scale stuff like proxying Google and skimming results tends to get noticed, there are tons of grey-area practices being performed, likely referred to obliquely in EULAs and such. Things like packet inspection for “quality of service” purposes, in reality data mining with little oversight. But even if the actual scale of this problem isn’t national, it’s important to keep our eyes open for these things. The researchers, Christian Kreibich and Nicholas Weaver, analyzed traffic from the ISPs and found that 165 terms were being captured and resulting in interference, usually directing users to the relevant site through an affiliate program. It’s possible (though it seems unlikely) that the third parties are doing this independently, ; they allege (from experience) that a service hired to do one thing (provide a standard page for broken URLs, for instance) might get ambitious and decide to make a little money on the side. Google noticed this previously and caused the ISPs to stop tampering with their results, but while it’s easy enough to tell when your queries are being touched, it’s not so easy to tell if they’ve been sniffed. The ISPs may outsource the packet analysis portion of the job to companies like Paxfire as well, routing search queries through them for recording and possible database building. Smelling blood in the water, New York law firms Reese Richman and Milberg have filed a class action lawsuit against Paxfire and RCN, a Virginia-based ISP accused by the study of the shady practices described. As with many internet-centric lawsuits, this one will probably be passed around a few jurisdictions before being really assessed — though as Paxfire is also based in Virginia, that state provides a natural starting point for the litigation. I’m of a similar mind with : amazed that companies think that they can do this stuff and get away with it. The level of scrutiny on services like ISPs is only increasing, and techniques like this have already been ruled illegal and unethical. Did they think no one would notice? Here’s a list of the ISPs the research found : Cavalier – Cincinnati Bell – Cogent – Frontier – Hughes – IBBS – Insight Broadband – Megapath – Paetec – RCN – Wide Open West – XO Communication If you think you might be affected by this practice, try running Berkeley’s web app and see if anything suspicious pops up. |
After Auction, Dropbox Close To Choosing Investors — Round Could Put Valuation At $10 Billion | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | We’ve known for weeks now that has been talking to investors about . The company, which has in a seed and Series A round in 2007, has been seeking something between $200 million and $300 million, we’ve heard. But now we know a bit more. And we’ve heard something from one source that is nothing short of shocking. Dropbox held an auction last week during which investors made their bids to participate in the new round, multiple sources tell us. This week, Dropbox met with the VCs that made bids, and have been collecting term sheets. All they have to do now is decide. Here’s the really crazy thing: one of the offers being considered may push Dropbox’s valuation to post-money, one source tells us. Another source thinks that’s inaccurate, and believes the final valuation will settle closer to the lower end of the $5 billion to $10 billion valuation we reported last month. A $10 billion valuation would be amazing for a number of reasons. But consider this: Pandora and LinkedIn, two companies that recently went public, have market caps of and , respectively. Yes, a startup could be worth more money on paper than those two public darlings. Also consider: Yahoo has a market cap of just . And our parent, AOL, has a market cap of just . (many of which are paying), uploading 200 million files a day. More to come soon. |
Review: The Cask Widge | Scott Merrill | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | Happy ! I just finished celebrating by brewing ten gallons of smoked stout, and I’m looking forward to a draught of blonde ale from my kegerator later today. I’ve been homebrewing for about two years, and it’s a fun, practical hobby. Variety is the name of the game, both in terms of beer styles to produce but also in terms of the methods used to produce beer: extract, partial mash, all grain, single infusion, decoction, boil-in-a-bag, 1 gallon, 5 gallons, 10 gallons — you get the idea. The hobby facilitates the purchase of a tremendous amount of equipment for each of these different methods. The latest addition to my zymurgy hobby is the . Like most homebrewers, I started out bottling the beer I produced. While this makes it easy to share my work with friends and colleagues, I find it to be a tedious, time consuming process. When I bought my first keg, I swore I’d never bottle beer again! Kegging is so much easier, so much faster, than bottling. But it’s not without its problems. I’m not a particularly cautious brewer — I’m in it for the product, not the process — so many of my brews end up with a fair bit of sediment in them. Even after racking to a secondary, many of my beers have had a noticeable amount of sludge at the bottom. This sludge winds up being the entirety of the first glass or two I dispense from a keg. This is because kegs have a dip tube that runs down the length of the keg, pulling beer from the bottom up into your glass. The first pull or two will grab any sludge that’s fallen to the bottom, and after that the beer should be clean and delicious. Some homebrewers avoid this problem by cutting their dip tubes an inch or so shorter than normal so that they sit above the sludge.
The cask widge, on the other hand, floats at the top of your beer, ensuring that your first pull is clean and refreshing! It attaches to a length of flexible tubing, and allows the widge to always rest at the top of the beer in your keg regardless of how much is left. It also includes a fine filter to ensure that any flotsam in your beer doesn’t make it into your glass. The only kink with using a cask widge is that you need to get a for your keg. You replace your normal dip tube with the gas length dip tube, connect the flexible tubing, and finally connect the cask widge. Fill and pressurize your keg as normal, and you’re all set! In order to really test the cask widge, I intentionally brewed a “messy” beer, and ensured that a lot of trub was transferred from the brew kettle into the primary fermentation bucket. I skipped the secondary fermentation process altogether. When I filled the keg, I made sure to get a good bit of the sludge from the bottom of the bucket into the keg. Despite my efforts to cause problems, the cask widge did what it was supposed to do. The beer I dispensed was clean and clear from the first glass to the last! All the rubbish I had intentionally transferred into the keg remained at the bottom, and was not pulled up by the widge. Another use of the cask widge would be to use a corny keg as a secondary fermentation vessel, and use the cask widge to ensure that only the good clean beer gets transferred from that secondary into your serving keg. I haven’t tried this yet, but it’s definitely something I intend to try. If you’re a really good brewer who carefully filters your beer and makes clean, sludge-free beer then you likely don’t need the cask widge. If you’re a brewer like me, the cask widge helps ensure that your beer looks its best at all times! is currently the only US distributor of the cask widge that I’ve found. Feel free to share in the comments if you find another source. I found out about the cask widge via , and I strongly encourage all homebrewers to follow that site (or associated ). Many thanks to Anthony at for getting me the gas length dip tube I needed so quickly. If you’re a homebrewer in central Ohio, you should talk to Anthony. Product Page: |
Did LinkedIn’s IPO Open the Market or Close It for Anyone Under a $5 Billion Valuation? (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | A few weeks ago I was meeting with and that pesky question of whether we’re in a bubble or not came up. In a debate both sides are getting bored with, Thiel made a point I hadn’t heard: That LinkedIn’s IPO wasn’t that opened the markets up for everyone else. In fact, he argued, it was the opposite. LinkedIn showed that you can have a compelling IPO and get an insanely high P/E if you’re a 10-year-old, profitable company, growing revenues at more than 100% a year that can command a $5 billion-plus valuation. , he argued, is what the market wants right now, and those companies are in short supply. More to the point, those kinds of IPOs couldn’t be farther from the historical Silicon Valley playbook. Most of the great tech companies went public at valuations well under $1 billion, and had their biggest innovations after they’d priced. LinkedIn’s IPO isn’t a harbinger of the good ol’ days. Rather, it showed how dramatically different the relationship between Wall Street and the Valley has become since the last good ol’ days. In our final segment with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner I asked him his view on what his company just did for Silicon Valley: Open the markets or close them for all but the big five or so private giants? We also talk about that valuation. He wouldn’t answer whether the company was actually worth $10 billion, but he did share his thoughts on using that — let’s just say — price-to-earnings ratio as a currency for more acquisitions. I began by asking what he learned from his time as a senior executive for Yahoo– decidedly the Valley darling for some time– that prepared him for his new Wall Street duties as CEO of LinkedIn. (For the first segment on LinkedIn’s earnings go ; for the second segment on its user growth and Weiner’s experience in the IPO media firestorm go .) |
‘Game For Kittens’ And HeyZap Team Up For A Good Cause | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | Here’s your chance to let your kitten help other animals, using nothing other than its feline reflexes. You may be familiar with ‘ ‘, an iPhone game developed by Little Hiccup that’s exactly what it sounds like: it’s a game for your kitten (okay, so the title is slightly misleading — cats of all ages can play). And starting this week the game’s developer has teamed with HeyZap to promote the San Francisco . Here’s how the promotion works: the game typically features two levels, one where your cat chases a virtual laser, another where it chases a mouse. And now there’s a third, ‘secret’ level that can be accessed by either pausing the game or beating a level and hitting the ‘HeyZap’ icon. Beat that level, and your cat can tweet a link to boasting of their status as an intelligent ‘checkin cat’ — and the page includes several links to the . I’d like to see the promotion made a little more readily accessible in the app, but it’s a nice gesture. And it’s going to remain in ‘Game for Kittens’ indefinitely. And if your cat isn’t a big gamer, you can also head to and make a donation to the SF SPCA straightaway. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96yTgiaeR1U] |
Chrome Lion Full Screen Support Is Ready To Go In Canary, Both With Tabs And Without | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | Following up on of Google’s Chrome browser for OS X Lion, it looks like development is moving along faster than expected. Specifically, swiping gesture support has already been fully implemented (in the right direction now too), and now a proper full screen mode has hit the Canary build of the browser as well. Shortly after Lion’s launch a few weeks ago, we noted the Chrome was working, but it was a bit wonky. Because Lion changed some gestures by default, page swiping was broken. And Chrome’s own full screen mode wasn’t truly compatible with the functionality that’s built into Lion. No less than Chrome SVP Sundar Pichai said that Google was working on the issues, but noted that “it will take some time”. In the weeks since, the dev and beta builds of Chrome has been pretty unreliable, constantly crashing. This has pushed a number of Chrome for Mac users over to Safari, Apple’s own browser. But if this latest Canary build of Chrome is any indication, Google is pushing hard to get Chrome back up to speed on the Mac. , full screen support is now fully baked into Chrome Canary. And it’s brilliant. There had been some debate as to whether the functionality should work like it previously did — with absolutely no browser chrome (lowercase) showing — or if it should work like Safari, and show tabs when in full screen? Well, Google implemented it both ways. By default, when you enter full screen, you’ll see the tabs, but a new “curtain” button removes the tabs to get you a true full screen experience. (The tabs will still pop down when you hover over the top of the screen.) Gesture-based page-swiping , but Google implemented it backwards, when compared to Safari. , our story flagged the issue for the team, and they quickly fixed it. The latest version of Chrome in the Canary channel is 15. Chrome’s dev builds are still at 14, so the 15 changes should hit soon. Then it will be a few weeks before it rolls out over all of the Chrome channels. But rest assured, a fully Lion-compliant Chrome is on the way. |
Life At AOL – The Expenses War | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | I’ve said this before, but working at AOL is my first experience working at a “big” company. I’ve watched, , as a Dilbert cartoon has come to life around me. Some of the policies and bureaucracy are useful (I’ll think of some examples, just give me a second). Some are (forced drinking events). Some are really annoying. For example, every couple of weeks I get an email titled “AOL Standards of Business Conduct Training” with the demand “As a new employee, you are required to complete one hour of web-based training on the Standards of Business Conduct (SBCs).” The only problem is that I need to have access to the AOL network to complete the training, and they’ve never given me access so that there’s an information barrier between me and the company. But there’s one weird policy that really stands out. AOL is absolutely crazed about questioning employee expenses. Our CEO Heather Harde deals with the brunt of the pain involved in getting expenses approved. But I’ve dealt with my fair share, too. Last night, for example, I was cleaning up my desk. I have an envelope I keep business expenses in. There was a hotel bill for a trip when my AOL issued credit card was turned off for the day. Some taxi expenses and a restaurant bill. I looked at them, thought about the process for turning those expenses in and then having to defend them via a phone call (Heather would probably save me from this, but there goes an hour of her time). So I did the rational thing. I shredded those receipts – around $1,500 – because it wasn’t worth the pain. Part of this process – at least at one point if not now – was referral of expense reports out to a third party firm who would assign you a “case number” and ask you to do things like send actual boarding passes to them to defend flight expenses. Sometimes we can’t get our writers to take business trips because of how difficult it is to be reimbursed for expenses. Then today I was talking to someone at AOL about nothing in particular, and he brought up his own troubles with expense reimbursement. I asked why the company is so crazed about it. Enter Gregory Horton. This guy was head of HR at AOL a decade ago when the company was still part of Time Warner. . He apparently set up a dummy consulting corporation and was billing AOL $100,000 a month for made up work. All in all, the company lost over a million dollars to Horton, or so the story goes. Because of Horton, AOL has for nearly a decade had draconian expense reimbursement policies. This is one of those points of friction in a company that should be stamped out. Find and prosecute the Hortons of the world. But give your loyal employees a break. Don’t make them feel like criminals for trying to get legitimate expenses approved and paid in a timely manner. In the end, this is just a self-imposed competitive disadvantage against nimbler companies. |
Elon Musk, Dustin Moskovitz, And Eric Ries Are Ready To Shake Things Up At Disrupt SF | Elin Blesener | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | As you know, Disrupt is this September and we have some amazing speakers and judges to announce. Tickets for Disrupt SF are We have a few of the key speakers: Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Mike McCue, and Vinod Khosla. Who else is going to be there? Well, today we are announcing a few more key speakers. Not only will we have the four listed above, we are also incredibly excited to have Elon Musk, Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Ries, and Matthew Prince join us. Musk is the co-founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and Space Exploration Technologies. He is now CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and chairman of SolarCity. Moskovitz of course was a co-founder of Facebook, and , a startup tackling the problem of workplace collaboration. Ries helped launch the movement, and has a book coming out by the same name. And Prince wrote his first computer program when he was 7, and is now the co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, which launched at our last Disrupt SF and now a month across the web. You can be sure that Disrupt SF will be a star-studded event filled with brand new startups, guest speakers and judges, amazingly brilliant hackers, after parties, surprises, and much more. As we get closer to the event, we will announce more guest speakers, judges, and many other surprises. Disrupt SF is going to be on September 12th – 14th, starting with our Hackathon on September 10th and 11th. It is taking place at the beautiful , which has 125,000 square feet of disruption space for us. This is one event you will not want to miss. If you’d like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact or for more information.
CEO & CTO, Space Exploration Technologies, Co-Founder & CEO, Tesla Motors Elon Musk is an entrepreneur and a co-founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and Space Exploration Technologies. He is chairman/CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and chairman of SolarCity. Musk was born and grew up in South Africa, the son of a South African engineer and a Canadian-born mother who has worked as a New York City dietitian and modeled for fun. His father inspired his love of technology and Musk bought his first computer at age 10 and taught himself how to program; by the age of 12 he sold his first commercial software, a space game called Blaster.In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and email payments company. One year later, X.com acquired Confinity, originally a company formed to beam money between Palm Pilots, and the combined entity focused on email payments through the PayPal domain, acquired as part of Confinity. In February 2001, X.com changed its legal name to PayPal. In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock. Before its sale, Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, owned 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.
Co-Founder, Asana Dustin Moskovitz is a co-founder of Facebook and, more recently, Asana, a startup tackling the problem of workplace collaboration. At Facebook, he was a leader in the technical staff, where he oversaw the major architecture of the site. He was also responsible for the company’s mobile strategy and development. Starting Facebook with founder Mark Zuckerberg from their dorm room, Dustin has been instrumental in the growth and development of the site since its inception. Dustin attended Harvard University as an Economics major for two years before moving to Palo Alto, California to work full time at Facebook.
Author, Speaker, & Consultant, The Lean Startup Eric Ries is an author, speaker, and consultant for The Lean Startup. Previously, he co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups and venture capital firms. In 2008 he served as a venture advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Co-Founder & CEO, CloudFlare Matthew is the co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, Inc. Matthew wrote his first computer program when he was 7, and hasn’t been able to shake the bug since. After attending the University of Chicago Law School, he worked as an attorney for one day before jumping at the opportunity to be a founding member of a tech startup. He hasn’t looked back. CloudFlare is Matthew’s third entrepreneurial venture. Matthew holds a degree in English and Computer Science from Trinity College. He graduated with highest honors from the Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and was awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship. He earned a JD from the University of Chicago and is a member of the Illinois Bar. He teaches technology law as an adjunct professor at the John Marshall Law School where he serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. He is also the co-founder of Project Honey Pot. |
Multi-Pinhole Technique “Paints” Objects With Photographs From Life | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | Take two minutes out of your day and watch this beautifully-made and interesting little short documentary about Shikai Tseng and his interesting photographic technique. Tseng uses a custom-built multi-pinhole box to expose objects, which have been coated in , to their environments. The result is a beautiful and unique object, essentially a three-dimensional one-time print. It looks like he primarily exposes vases, I’m guessing since they’re nice and round and their surface takes the Liquid Light well. Here’s the video, by Juriaan Booij. A slightly longer version can be found . [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/27108555 w=640&h=360] [via ] |
null | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 4 | null |
BlackBerry Curve 9360 May Have Mobile Hotspot, But What About The Rest? | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | The recently revealed BlackBerry Curve 9360 is proving to be a surprising bit of hardware. Not only did it (thankfully) get rid of the chintzy chrome-ish highlights of its last iteration, reports that it also packs a a more competitive hardware configuration (hello NFC!) and a little feature hidden in the settings that doesn’t seem to have popped up on any other OS 7 device recently: mobile hotspot. While the 9360 (affectionately referred to as the “Apollo”) is a significant upgrade for the budget-conscious BlackBerry owner, this development adds a bit of confusion to the mobile hotspot question. Like I mentioned, recent hands-on outings with the other new BlackBerry models haven’t turned up any sign of mobile hotspot support. Funny, considering the BlackBerry Bold 9900 was widely reported to , only to . Strangely, the new Blackberry Torches also don’t make mention of hotspot support, which is odd since it’s meant to be the more prestigious device. Two possibilities come to mind. It’s entirely possible that the pictured Curve is running an old build that retains the feature, and the photo only just now made it into the wild. The other is that mobile hotspot inclusion will be a carrier-level decision, meaning some customers get it and others don’t. Either one seems plausible, but the bigger question is why RIM is being so coy about this whole thing? For a company with such pronounced focus on trying to stay relevant and meeting the needs of their establish business customer base, it seems totally odd that they wouldn’t mention a great mobility option for road warriors and travelers alike. There’s no reason not to mention it, considering all RIM would have to do is add a bullet point to a spec sheet. A little clarity from RIM going forward could go a long way for the right customers. |
Huge LED Wall For Playing Games On At Hungarian Festival | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | I know this is more or less just a publicity stunt sponsored by Vodafone, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing we had one of these here in Seattle. It’s an installation at the in Budapest, Hungary, and attendees will be able to play an oversized shoot-em-up called Rocket Bullet Storm, by . No joke, I’m a sucker for these kinds of games, and playing in a crazy situation like that with Hungarian rock blaring in the background sounds like a nice break from blogging. Apparently the screens cover over 250 square meters total, wrapping around the columns and so on. It looks as if the game is played inside and displayed on the outside, though. It’s reminiscent of the setups they use in hardcore competitive gaming, but a little more festive. The festival itself runs from the 8th to the 15th, and looks like it has a pretty solid lineup. If you’re in the area, drop by and give us your impressions of this fun-looking installation. |
With Its Eyes On ‘The Creative Graph’, Behance Crosses 1 Million Projects Published Milestone | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | There is a lot of creative talent out there, but for a long time, designers, artists, and creative professionals were underrepresented in the digital world. Not only that, but the Web happens to be a perfect medium for artists to showcase their talents, distribute their portfolios, and hook up with benefactors. So, back in early 2008, Scott Belsky and co-founder Matias Corea, along with engineering leads Dave Stein and Chris Henry, launched , a platform for creative professionals to showcase their talents, designed, in the big picture, to put control back into the hands of creatives and give their ideas the opportunity to see the light of day. After fits and starts, Behance has become one of the go-to resources for creatives to efficiently organize and showcase their work in an effort to give their careers a jump start. The Behance Network, the team’s flagship platform, allows creative types to create multi-media portfolios and distribute those across Behance partner sites and, most significantly, LinkedIn. Last year, Behance launched the “Creative Portfolio Display”, which allows users to bridge creative and social networks and connect their portfolios right to their LinkedIn accounts. While Behance is not revealing exact figures, Behance CEO Scott Belsky did confirm that over 100,000 LinkedIn members are now using the application to showcase their creative portfolios on their LinkedIn profiles and keep them in sync. Behance also launched “The 99%”, its research arm and think tank, which includes an eponymous webzine and conference that offers creatives tips, articles, and the opportunity to network in an effort to move ideas to execution and assist creatives in the endeavor to removing “starving” from “starving artist”. Both the Behance Network and its 99% wing have become a great resource for recruiters, editors, and fans to find inspiring creative work and talent for hire. In fact, today, Behance has revealed a few new, cool stats to TechCrunch, which provide a glimpse into the network’s growth. Today, over 1 million projects have been published by creative professionals on Behance, with over 20,000 new projects launched every week that contain over 100,000 images and videos. As Behance tracks the data behind each of these projects, including what tools were used to create them, who the client was, who collaborated on the project, and how many people viewed and “appreciated” them (Behance’s equivalent of Facebook’s “like”), the network is taking strides to build a “creative graph”. Just like the social graph, the interest graph, and more, Behance is using this data to give creatives a glimpse into trends like which equipment, resources, and software are most popular among certain channels of the creative world. In the future, says Behance Co-founder and CEO Scott Belsky, this could mean that Behance pursues a LinkedIn-type business model, wherein it helps top brands and companies explore its database in very specific ways to search for, track, and hire talent — in an effort to assist companies in the searching and tracking of everything made with their product or for their brand. Beyond powering creative networks and portfolio display on LinkedIn, AIGA, and AdWeek, Behance is behind more than 12 sites that are now receiving over 51 million pageviews per month, from over 7 million visitors, and Apple, Nike, Netflix, and Facebook (among others) are regularly posting jobs and searching for talent in design, illustration, creative direction, etc. What’s more, creative work on Behance received over 16.5 million “appreciations”, and its projects and portfolios received over 11.5 million views on LinkedIn. The creative network also recently launched its , which provides users with a portfolio-website builder to create customizable portfolios without any prior coding or engineering experience, which also happens to be pretty affordable at $11 a month. With ProSite, Behance adds to the suite of features available on its network, and gives creatives a robust resource to get their work discovered and into the hands of the people who write the checks. For more stats and information on Behance, the team has created a nifty infographic, which you can check out . Or check out the video below for additional info on ProSite: [vimeo=http://vimeo.com/23322433 width=”640″ height=”380″] |
Jeff Weiner: Life in the Middle of the BUBBLE! Media Storm (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | We caught up with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner yesterday, just after his as a public company CEO. In an we talked about the surprisingly good quarter LinkedIn had; in this one we talk about the company’s insane roller-coaster of an IPO. I asked Weiner what that week was like for LinkedIn, a company that’s usually the boring social media giant with no scandals, or stories of . He insists the team wasn’t distracted amid the media frenzy….yeah, I have a hard time buying that too. But he points out that the added pride associated with working at a company worth upwards of $9 billion increased the intensity to execute. I wouldn’t be surprised if all that talk of the company being overvalued lit a spark in the company too. Weiner and I also talk about LinkedIn’s this quarter, whether companies should reexamine that late 1990s idea of IPOs as marketing events, and whether that user pop is sustainable.
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One Billion Shakes Later, Urbanspoon Goes After OpenTable | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 5 | One of the all-time most popular restaurant apps on mobile is Urbanspoon ( ). It is still one of the top 10 travel apps on the iPhone. The app’s signature gesture is a shake to find nearby restaurants. Urbanspoon just passed one billion shakes and has been downloaded 20 million times across all mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry). In March 2010, it hit , so it’s doubled in less than a year and half. But what exactly is the value of a shake? Well, the apps run ads as does the . With 100 million pageviews a month across those apps and the web, shakes turn into ad impressions. But the real play here is restaurant reservations. Urbanspoon is going after . Last year, Urbanspoon , an iPad app that allows restaurants to take reservations directly from the Urbanspoon app and site. “Two years ago, an online reservation system required a massive upfront investment,” notes Kara Nortman, the senior VP at IAC in charge of Urbanspoon (and CityGrid Media). Now, all they need is an iPad and a simple app. Currently, only about 800 restaurants are on the Rezbook system, out of 800,000 listed in Urbanspoon. When they show up in Urbanspoon, users can book a table. Nortman says that Urbanspoon is seating 19,000 diners a month at those 800 restaurants, which comes to about 24 diners per month per restaurant. OpenTable, in contrast, seats an average of 450 diners a month per restaurant, but it’s been at this a lot longer. Urbanspoon has only tapped one thousandth of the restaurants in its listings, and is now starting to sign them up in a more serious effort after testing the service. “As more and more consumers think of Urbanspoon as a place to discover and then follow-up with a real-time reservation, we should see this number grow,” says Nortman. She sees her mobile app as her competitive advantage because it is more immediate. For reservations made from the Urbanspoon app, 22 percent are made within the hour and 77 percent within 24 hours. Of course, OpenTable also has a great mobile app for making reservation which covers many more restaurants right now. But Urbanspoon sees an opening and is going after it. |
Lookout Report: Android Malware Has Increased Significantly Over Past 6 Months | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | a company that for a number of smartphones, is releasing the results of its Mobile Threat Report. The report is based on threat and security data from Lookout’s Mobile Threat Network, which includes data collected from more than 700 thousand apps and 10 million devices worldwide. You can access the full report Lookout’s main finding is that mobile malware has increased significantly, with Android users two-and-a-half times as likely to encounter malware today than just six months ago. Lookout estimates that between a half million and one million users were affected by mobile malware in the first half of 2011. During the first half of 2011, the number of unique apps with malware found on markets and download sites grew from 80 to 400 apps. DroidDream, one of the most popular threats, released more than 80 unique apps to take control of a user’s phone. And GGTracker, a newer malware threat that specifically targets U.S. Android users via premium text message services, has upped its infected app count to 15 apps/ And threats aren’t just receiving malware through apps and app markets. Mobile web-based threats have also emerged as a significant part of the threat landscape with three out of ten mobile users likely to click on an unsafe link, including malicious and phishing links, over the course of a year. Unfortunately, Lookout says that malware writers are using new techniques to to infect phones. Now some mobile ads aren’t safe as well. Using tactic called Malvertising, writers use mobile ads to direct users to a malicious website that triggers an automatic download of malware. Basically, now more than ever, smartphone owners need to be cautious about downloading apps from trusted app stores and download sites and clicking on links in the mobile web. Lookout’s own security app can help users combat these issues. Over the second quarter of 2011 Lookout saw an 85% increase in the number of mobile malware detections across its user base. And ecause of this trend, Lookout’s offerings have been growing fast. In December, the company had 4 million users and has now more than doubled that number, with ten million users. Lookout is currently adding 1 million users per month. And the company just raised in funding from Index Ventures, Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures. Even carriers are starting to |
VibeDeck Adds A Free eCommerce Layer To SoundCloud | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | Last month, , which had just raised $2 million in funding for its eCommerce platform for musicians. As we wrote then, though VibeDeck is still in early development (having launched in beta 2 months ago), it’s value proposition is that it’s slick and easy to use. And the startup’s goal is simple, too: To be a low-cost eCommerce resource for small to medium size bands — or musical startups or mSMBs, if you will. VibeDeck does this by giving artists customizable landing pages, where they can add band info, images, and make use of an embeddable player to share their tunes, in which they can drag and drop tracks to reorder etc. The platform also allows musicians to export sales data and connect their account to PayPal in order to receive payments directly from fans. And the best part is, beyond PayPal fees, VibeDeck is free to use. After our prior coverage, quite a few commenters expressed their frustration with current direct-to-fan solutions. More mature services, like , offer direct-to-fan merchandise sales as well, but BandCamp, in particular, is a bit more focused on adding features that will make it equivalent to a web version of a band manager, whereas VibeDeck is solely focused on becoming an eCommerce solution. As commenters pointed out, VibeDeck has a ways to go before it has the same functionality as other music services, but in keeping it simple (and remaining free), it has some great potential. Every day fans and musicians are always looking for services that keep prices low. And today VibeDeck added another piece of the puzzle by deploying a SoundCloud integration that will allow any SoundClouder to sell tracks directly to fans (or give away music for free in exchange for email data, if they’re cool like that). This new feature also enables fans to buy MP3s (along with metadata and artwork) as SoundCloud “sets” directly from a SoundCloud user’s page. It’s a quick, 3-step purchase process, and payments flow directly into the artist’s PayPal account. And, thankfully, VibeDeck doesn’t take a cut of those sales. The set-up process produces a free VibeDeck page as a by-product (an example of which you can see ), and pricing is up to the user’s discretion. However, there is an email-for-media option for those musicians that would rather distribute their music for free in exchange for building an email list. VibeDeck CEO Lior Shamir said that he sees this integration as a quick and easy way to add an eCommerce layer on top of SoundCloud’s audio foundation. This is especially relevant considering the fact that SoundRain (which offered a similar service) is no longer live. Readers can test out the SoundCloud integration . The fact that payments flow right into PayPal, and that bands can connect their VibeDeck accounts to Facebook and embed their VibeDeck-powered music store on any website — plus the bonus that VibeDeck standardized the download type (320kbps MP3) to meet the expectations of Amazon and iTunes consumers — the startup is beginning to look like it has some serious potential. VibeDeck still has some work to do, but offering a solution in which artists keeping 100 percent of profits? That’s music to the ears. |
Facebook Wants Your Unborn Child | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | Sometime in the past week, Facebook flipped the switch on to add your unborn baby to your list of family members via the “Expected: Child” option on Facebook profiles. Apparently too many parents were creating “illegal” fake profiles for their yet unhatched offspring — setting their fake babies’ ages to 13 instead of negative whatever, the minimum Facebook allows. Also, I dare you to come up with a bolder customer acquisition strategy than getting them hooked while they’re still in the womb! Of course this very important news caused an Internet earthquake, and as the aftershocks hit mainstream media CNN split its screen into four! boxes (below) so four women who are experts on the subject of declaring that you’re pregnant could talk about whether Meanwhile America is technically fighting two wars. But maybe expectant moms like care about this stuff, and stuff? I mean how would I know? My uterus is currently as barren as the Hoping to shed some light on the subject, I asked resident TechCrunch pregnancy representative what she thought about the Facebook change, “I couldn’t care less about it. Anyone who is remotely close to me already knows I’m pregnant.” That horse has already left the barn, indeed. |
Zune HD Gets A Handful Of New Apps | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | Yes, you read the headline correctly. The , which was recently and borged into the Windows Phone 7 brand, has received no less than new apps. We heard that the existing Zune games and apps would be , but perhaps during that process they decided to brush off a few that were still sitting in the box. are mostly games, time wasters if I’m honest, and while I don’t think anyone will be going nuts about this particular app drop, it’s always nice when legacy hardware sees a little love. If you’re a Zune HD owner (bless your heart), the new apps should show up and be loadable if you’ll just open up your Zune player. I know I’ll be downloading these — my Zune HD is still going strong, and I plan to make it last for at least a couple more years. |
Wrist Rehabilitation Robot Helps The Paralyzed (Video) | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | The isn’t the only new healthcare from Japan we can show you today. Researchers at the have developed a model that goes in a different direction: their [JP] helps people with spinal cord injuries or those recovering from strokes. The idea is to help patients move their wrists again, a task usually performed by physical therapists. Work on the robot began about six years ago, and the newest version has six joints and a pneumatic cylinder with actuator. Patients can use the robot to “practice” moving their wrist after choosing between various levels of resistance. What’s cool is that a set of sensors can be connected to the muscles in the arm of a patient, simulating force feedback about wrist movements. This video, shot by in Tokyo (in English), provides more insight:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFFSA-d8Mg4&w=560&h=349] |
New Device Detects Radiation In Food Even Inside Cardboard Boxes In 12 Seconds | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | Even almost 5 months after the earthquake and tsunami disaster that hit Japan on March 11, there is still fear over radiation in food in the country. Now Tokyo-based has developed a [JP] that detects radiation in food like fish, meat, fruit and vegetables in just 12 seconds. The company says that similar systems usually take tens of minutes for the same process and that their system doesn’t even require to cut samples of the food to be cut into pieces. Instead, the device can check about 200 cardboard boxes filled with food in 60 minutes – cutting or even unpacking the food isn’t required. The device is sized at W360mm×D865mm×H1350mm and weighs 150kg. According to Japanese business daily The Nikkei, Fuji Electric aims at selling 500 units this fiscal year. The system will go on sale in September for $56,000. |
Mr. Number Dials Up $3.5 Million From Menlo Ventures To Give You More Control Of Your Phone | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | We now live in a world of robust communication tools. Facebook, Twitter, IM, Skype, FaceTime, etc. But the one that still connects nearly everyone, the phone, remains rudimentary. Sure, phone communication has gone completely wireless, but a call is still a call. It requires dialing a number and connecting. goal is to add new layers of usefulness. As a mobile app available for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, Mr. Number allows you to do things like let friends know when it’s a good time to call you. Or you can tell them that you’d prefer a text message at the moment. Or you can say you’re busy and ask for a voice message instead. People waste a lot of time doing these things right now because it’s basically a guessing game as to what the best way is to get ahold of someone at any time. Mr. Number removes the guessing game. The app does a number of other things as well, such as lookup-based caller ID. And they offer the ability to block calls and messages from certain numbers. You can also quickly report spam calls. Mr. Number is all about giving you more control over your phone-based communications. That’s a tall order, and one that requires resources. To that end, the service has just raised $3.5 million from , we’ve learned. The money will be used to scale as well as build new functionality — while keeping the service free (though there are some small fees for reverse-lookups). Menlo’s and will join Mr. Number’s board with the round. This is actually Pishevar’s first big Menlo investment, and his first board seat for the firm. . Mr. Number CEO Jason Devitt notes that nearly 3 million people have signed up for the service so far. The money will undoubtedly also help them combat the big fish playing in this pond: Google with Google Voice. : . |
Twitter Rolls Out An Improved, HTML5 Version Of Twitter.com For iPad | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | Because the stream of realtime palaver that is Twitter needed even more ways to be consumed on devices, the company has just announced that it’s out an HTML5-based Twitter.com for iPad, and that all iPad users should have it accessible within the week. The app is full HTML5 and an improvement over the current one-paned experience of the Twitter mobile site on the tablet. Not surprisingly it is reminiscent of a hybrid of Twitter.com and the mobile apps and was based on Twitter’s HTML5 client for iPhone and Android, Twitter mobile engineer tells me. The HTML5 web app will be rolled out to all users within the week, eh hem, beating Facebook which has yet to launch its own HTML5 initiative . Says Twitter representative Carolyn Penner, “The HTML5 app provides a great option for people who prefer to use the browser over native apps. Its two-column view is consistent with the Twitter experience you’re used to (on Twitter.com), and it takes advantage of touch gestures and other device capabilities.” Screenshot above. |
Japanese Caretaker Robot To Assist In Lifting The Elderly | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | There is much anxiety in Japan related to accommodating their aging population. Their elderly and infirm number in the millions and that figure is growing out of proportion to the rest of the country. Caring for them is naturally on everyone’s minds — including those of . And research organization RIKEN is updating its medical assistance bot in order to help caretakers with the task of lifting a person from a bed to a wheelchair and back. (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance) can actually crouch down and pick up a patient off the floor, a strenuous action that caretakers must do frequently. It has sensors in its arms that work on the capacitive principle, but are made entirely from rubber (except for the conductive part, of course), which allow it to determine a patient’s weight and the correct force to impart in order to lift, roll, and so on. It’s not autonomous, , which is probably a good thing considering that from a while back. I’d expect to see a lot more of these being developed over the next few years — the US has its share of research going on as well, and work with and could produce robo-nurses that take a lot of grunt work off of human hands. [via ] |
Poptuit Looks To Reinvent The Android Dialer By Making It Sleeker And Smarter | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | It’s a cliche by now, but there’s no question that the launch of the iPhone in 2007 changed the future of mobile devices forever. Even the actual portion of the device saw huge improvements: visual voicemail, relatively easy contact management, and quick access to your recent calls. And, err, the dialer has looked just about the same ever since. As has Android’s dialer, which is basically identical to the iPhone’s. They’re drab, they don’t do a good job consolidating different channels of communication, and they aren’t nearly as smart as they could be. Enter , a new startup that’s looking to reinvent your smartphone’s dialer by turning it into a central hub for all of your social content — and it’s much nicer looking to boot. At this point the Android-only application is in private beta, but the first 100 readers to go and enter the code ‘Crunch’ will get access. In a word, Poptuit looks slick. The dialer has gotten a nice facelift, and, more important, it’s actually smarter than the one you’re used to. As you call your friends, coworkers, and family, Poptuit will intelligently display their faces in a grid, so your most-called contacts are easily accessible. And, in a smart twist, Poptuit includes a separate grid for the businesses you call often, even when they aren’t stored in your contacts. CEO Henry M. Vogel explains that many users wind up looking up the same restaurants and services repeatedly using Yelp or Google, but that they don’t save them because they don’t want to clutter their contacts. Poptuit fixes this by remembering them automatically without actually adding them to your address book. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAo_0ubboTk] In addition to serving as a dynamic dialer that learns from your habits, Poptuit is also looking to become a communication platform. Each one of your contacts gets their own automatically generated profile page within the Poptuit app, which will look up their Facebook profile photo and will also display any recent messages you’ve had with them over SMS (Android allows apps to access the SMS database with permission). And, if you’d like to save on those SMS costs, you can encourage your friends to join Poptuit themselves — if both parties are using the service, they can send free messages though Poptuit’s network free of charge, in much the same way they’d send it through IM. I’m not convinced people really another way to send their messages, but the app plays just fine with SMS so you don’t need to use it if you don’t want to. I asked Poptuit about data security, which they say they’re taking very seriously — after all, the app is tapping into your SMS and contact databases. The company says that the only content it stores on its servers are the free messages sent between Poptuit users (and SMS). The service also uploads names and phone numbers from your address book, which it says are secured using asymmetric encryption (I don’t love their setup because while the names you upload are encrypted, the phone numbers aren’t, but most people probably won’t care). At this point the company’s monetization plans are a bit vague, but they see plenty of opportunities. In particular, they think that the list of frequently called businesses could be powerful — the app could potentially place offers from the businesses you like, or from their competitors, and it’s also looking at letting merchants ‘claim’ their own Poptuit pages. At this point though, the app is ad-free. Poptuit was developed by , a company that’s been around for a decade helping large companies manage their phone systems (for example, when you call a call center, their technology can pull up your records and present it on the screen of the customer service representative). The company is also responsible for many of the mobile ads you’ll find on free mobile phone services like Moviephone and AT&T Directory assistance. One thing to note: at this point the app doesn’t support Google Voice (so it can’t important those texts), but the company says it plans to add this in a future release. |
ValueClick Buys Personalized Display Ad Technology Company Dotomi For $295 Million | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | Online advertising company is on a bit of an acquisition spree. After earlier this year, the company is personalized ad technology company . The deal is valued at $295 million, consisting of approximately 55 percent in cash and 45 percent in ValueClick common stock. Dotomi will become a subsidiary of publicly traded ValueClick. Dotomi provides, data-driven, personalized display media for major retailers and travel aggregators. The company works with clients to integrate anonymous data from web visitors into targeting display ads. Dotomi attaches geographic and demographic data to those users, and the company tracks which ads each test user sees and whether a sale ultimately results. Dotomi manages everything from brand strategy and creative development to message delivery and decisioning. The company, which has worked with over 100 retail brands, is based in Chicago and has 160 employees. In 2011, ValueClick expects for Dotomi to bring in $80 million in revenue. ValueClick also from Forbes last year for $42 million. |
On The Verge Of 5 Million Users, Pulse Scores The First ESPN Deal | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | In many ways, tablet-focused readers like , , and , are the next phase of RSS readers. But they’re RSS readers that the masses will actually use because they’re actually user-friendly and oriented around experience and visuals. But because they’re so tailored for user experience, they often need partnerships beyond a simple RSS feed to bring in the necessary information to populate the apps. Today, Pulse has landed a massive fish in that regard: ESPN. The sports category has always been a bit under-represented in the tablet reading space because ESPN content has been largely absent. ESPN is by far the biggest name in sports news, and Pulse notes their deal is the first time the sports network has agreed to syndicate their content to a mobile app that is not one of their own. With the deal, the Pulse Sports category is being revamped to highlight this ESPN content as well as the other sports content from SB Nation, Bleacher Report, Yahoo Sports, and others. The ESPN deal will place major headlines in Pulse as well as tailored news for MLB, NFL, NBA, WNBA, college football, and college basketball. Within Pulse, you’ll also now be able to break down the area by individual sports to get just news about that sport (this includes sports beyond the major ones as well, such as MMA, tennis, boxing, etc). In addition to this deal, co-founder tells us that Pulse should today cross 5 millon users across all the platforms that Pulse is available on (iPad, iPhone, Android). It was only a month and a half ago that , just in time to announce their big $9 million Series A round of funding. You can find Pulse in the App Store . And in the Android Market . |
FCC Analysis Reveals ISP Speed Winners And Losers | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | So let’s say you walk into a Best Buy looking for a new tablet. You walk up to the guy in the blue polo and tell him what you’re looking for. After taking you to the tablet section, he whips out a handkerchief and blindfolds you. “They’re all really good!” he promises. “The one on the left is $499, the one in the middle is $549, and the one on the right is an even $600. Which can I wrap up for you today?” It sounds ridiculous, but that’s essentially how you’ve been shopping around for Internet service providers: blind as a bat, unless you want to trust their ads. But now, for the first time ever, the good old has compiled data from 9,000 average Joe Americans over the course of a month. The goal: to gauge the speeds offered by ISPs in the real world, not just in their advertisements. It’s entirely unnecessary to get into all the math of . Instead, I’m going to hit you with some of the key takeaways so we can all be smarter shoppers. Note that this doesn’t include other statistics, like uptime, customer service, cost, and so on. It really focuses more on the difference between ISP’s vs. advertised speeds — obviously valuable data. First, Cablevision seems to have more subscribers than it can handle. The company scored lowest among all ISPs by a rather large margin. Over a 24-hour period, CableVision’s average download speeds clocked in at less than 80 percent of the speeds advertised. During peak hours, the ISP barely broke the 50 percent mark of its promised speeds. AT&T, MediaCom, Qwest and Frontier also had trouble living up to promised speeds, though none were quite as taxed as CableVision. On a happier note, Fios customers should feel totally proud of themselves. You’ve made a wise choice. Fios’ average real-world speeds were actually higher than advertised speeds, both over a 24-hour period and during peak surfing hours — as it’s a new service, it’s hard to say whether it’ll stay that way, but the numbers are hard to argue with. Other high-ranking ISPs include Comcast and Cox. Here’s the best news of the whole report: a report exists. Before this it was difficult to separate the lies from the truth. Now it’s all mapped out for you, nice and neat. And don’t be afraid to fight for what you pay for. If your ISP consistently delivers speeds slower than what they’ve promised, do a little testing, mark it down, and complain. Never forget: the customer is always right. [scribd id=61477378 key=key-23bw4hhvuknjivcjj6fr mode=list] |
Blissmobox Wants To Help Consumers Discover Organic And Eco-Friendly Products | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | We’ve seen a number of startups emerge that are using a sampling box as a way to help consumers discover products, including , Foodzie, BirchBox and . is the latest company to join the mix with the launch of the Blissmobox, which allows consumers to discover organic and eco-friendly products that safer and better for them, their families and their planet. The Blissmobox is a subscription service that delivers these eco-friendly products to your door once a month. Each box has a theme for the month, and each month Blissmo offers two different boxes. For example, a few months ago, Blissmo’s inaugural box had a “Home & Laundry” theme, included method laundry prdoducts, iQ All-Purpose Cleaner, Twist sponges and more. In June, Blissmo features a Food & Beverage box with CLIF bar, Kaia Foods, quinoa, and a Skin and Beauty box with YesToCarrots, Out of Africa, and others. Upcoming boxes include a bath & shower box, a”morning” box (toothpaste, floss, etc.) and more. Each box also includes an insert with descriptions of each product. Founder Sundeep Ahuja says that products are selected with strong credentials around organic, eco-friendly, sustainable or otherwise “better” than conventional alternatives. Ahuja says people often buy what they buy because it’s what they’ve been buying eventhough they may prefer products without toxins that are safer for them, their families and their planet. Blissmobox exposes to subscribers to new products, encourages them to try these items, and perhaps helps build a new brand loyalty to these products. Currently, Blissmobox subscriptions are $19 per month plus a $3 flat rate shipping rate for the U.S. If a customer buys three months up front they get free shipping. Ahuja says that 20% of subscribers are already opting to buy 3 months up front to save $9 on shipping. |
New Sony Alpha Cameras And Accessories Leaked | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | has received a boatload of information, though none of it complete, about Sony’s newest Alpha cameras and accessories. This comes hot on the heels of , showing off the upcoming NEX-7. I won’t repeat all the details here, but it’s a nice little info tease to hold you off until the rumored August 24 launch date. The NEX-7 we saw looks to be more or less confirmed, though I’m guessing they’ve switched that OFF-NO switch to an OFF-ON one, and it has molted its shiny silver shell. Supposedly this is a competitor with the X100, though without a fixed lens and optical rangefinder it’s obviously a different beast. No info on the EVF. That Zeiss lens, though, is a 24mm f/1.8, but you wouldn’t guess it from its size. Looks more like a wide-angle zoom than a fast prime. The will be getting a sensor update, and there are also a few accessories and updates for the rest of the Alpha line. I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the details on these devices. |
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New Layar Vision recognises real world objects and displays AR objects on top | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | Recently a few startups have started to appear with mobile apps allowing you to point a smartphone at an object and view some kind of augmented reality object or information associated with it. Usually they’ve done this by being activated by some kind of QR code or similar. Others have started to appear with apps where no code is needed. is one such startup that is poised to release an iPhone ap that does just this. But for the user behaviour to take off we need a platform with real existing traction. Thus today , the largest of the mobile augmented reality platforms, is launching Layar Vision. As implied, Layar will now be able to recognise real world objects and show digital content on top of them. It works particularly well with posters, magazines and newspapers. The Layar platform is already used by over 10,000 developers worldwide on 10 million mobile devices. This extension of the platform wil be of particular interest to brands and publishers wanting new ways to engage with customers. Right now it can instantaneously detect up to 50 objects and combine them with location-based layers. As Layar co-founder and General Manager Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, puts it: “Mobile devices can finally ‘see’”. Documentation regarding Layar Vision is readily available on the site. Developers can expect the beta version of Layar’s Publishing Platform together with a beta version of its browser, with Layar Vision features enabled, to be available within the coming weeks. To kickstart the launch of Layar Vision, registration for the Layar Creation Challenge worth $55,000 in total cash prizes, has opened today. The 10 developers with the best concepts for useful and unique layers using Layar Vision will receive anywhere from $2,500 to $15,000. The winners will be picked by an expert panel. The new features introduced with Layar Vision will also be added to an upcoming release of the Layar Player, which will be released in Q4 of this year for both iPhone and Android. The updated Layar Player will allow developers to incorporate Layar Vision features into their own individual mobile applications. |
“Cut The Rope” Sequel Will Be Called “Cut The Rope: Experiments”, Launching August 4th | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | While Angry Birds tends to get all the credit for being the game that has endlessly owned the App Store, it’s not alone up at the top. ZeptoLab’s was the first game to come along and (temporarily) knock the Birds from their #1 spot back in October of 2010 — and in the months since, it’s rarely spent any time in the top ten. With the license still proving to be an effective cash-printing machine (I mean, come on: they’ve got plush dolls and comic books now) the team is moving on to the next logical step: the sequel. We’d been hearing that a second game was in the works, so we reached out to the folks behind the original. They confirmed that the followup is on the way — in fact, it’s scheduled to launch later . If all goes as planned, it should hit the App Store on August 4th. They also sent over an exclusive teaser trailer (see below) — and while it doesn’t show much in terms of gameplay, it does spill the beans on the name: ZeptoLab is still being pretty light with the details, but sums up the follow-up as: Any addicts (what do they call you guys? Cutters? That can’t be right.) out there just dying for this one? ( Just an interesting note — from what we’re hearing, ZeptoLab is self-publishing this one. The original Cut The Rope was built by ZeptoLab and published by Chillingo, but it looks like Chillingo has been cut out of the equation this time around.)
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Sprint Opens Up 4G Network to Wholesale Customers | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | The Verizon/Sprint 4G war has been shifting into high gear lately, and with Verizon’s LTE network capable of faster performance, Sprint has had to play up some of their other accomplishments to try and pick up some momentum. They certainly won’t be letting you forget that they 1) offer the first 4G wireless network from a national carrier, 2) have the most 4G devices, and 3) are apparently “America’s favorite 4G network”. Now they’ve got another claim to add to the list, albeit one you probably won’t be hearing in a commercial anytime soon. As of today, Sprint is the first U.S. carrier to let . In short, this allows third party providers to resell Sprint’s 4G service to their own customers. This announcement falls right in line with some of Sprint’s recent . By opening up their network to third-party resellers, Sprint hopes to gain some much-needed market share by getting their hands into wireless solutions that could stand to benefit from some 4G oomph. Sprint cites partner Mitel as an early example of their collaboration with wholesalers. Mitel, a “leading provider of communications software and solutions for a range of organizations” leaned on Sprint’s network when they offered 4G mobile broadband cards as part of mobility solutions to their clients. In addition to a Sierra Wireless mobile broadband device, Sprint has also announced the availability of the HTC Detail, a Shift 4G-clone as part of their wholesale offerings. Sprint’s definitely got some mojo in the wholesale space — their MVNO kick culminated in the success of Virgin Mobile, which they later acquired — but we’ll have to see if they can duplicate that performance with 4G. |
T-Mobile To Make Carrier Billing An Option For Online Purchases | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | Every phone geek loves to debate how long it’ll be before we’ve trashed our wallets in favor of paying for stuff with our phones in the real world — but what about online? Tailing a similar announcement by Verizon a few months back, T-Mobile has just announced that they’re opening up their carrier billing system to online retailers, allowing T-Mobile customers to charge things purchased on the web (whether it’s purchased on a smartphone, a tablet, or a good ol’ fashion computer) right to their monthly bill. There are a bunch of businesses competing in this space right now — so which one is T-Mobile partnering with? Er… pretty much all of them, actually. Right off the bat, T-Mobile is calling on BillToMobile, PayFone, Boku, OpenMarket, and Zong to power things, and they say that “additional strategic billing service partners” will be added as time goes on. Sounds messy. Worried about lil’ Timmy snatching up all the porn he can find and charging it to his Sidekick? T-Mobile says that age-appropriate content blocking will be made available to parents, while a two-step purchase verification system should make it a bit harder for would-be thieves to buy things in your name. Each purchase will be broken down on your bill at the end of the month, which, if nothing else, should serve as a painful reminder that buying a new tractor for your Farmville farm probably wasn’t the best way to burn a week’s pay. T-Mobile doesn’t name any specific vendors or retailers that’ll be offering up the Charge-To-T-Mobile button at launch, but it looks like they’re going for smaller game: amongst the purchase examples listed are “online purchases of digital games, gaming and social networking credits, music, videos and other digital content”. In other words, it’ll probably be a while before you’re charging that Bugatti Veyron to the wireless bill. T-Mobile Carrier Billing should go live on its first few sites later this month. |
Esther Dyson On Health Care: “Don’t Fight The System, Erode It” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | Technology polymath has always been interested in healthcare and especially how data and personal devices can make us healthier. She is an active investor in a few healthcare startups and sits on the board of personal genomics company . In the video interview above, she explains how startups can help change healthcare for the better: “Don’t fight the system, erode it.” Dyson thinks of healthcare in much broader terms than many people do. There is the current healthcare system with hospitals, doctors, and insurance—that is the intractable part that is hard to change. But then there are all sorts of activities around the periphery that are more in our control, what she calls user-generated healthcare.” Increasingly, technology is making it easier for us to collect personal health and fitness data to help us combat our own vices such as drugs, alcohol, bad food and sitting around. It is user-generated because we create and collect our own health data through personal fitness devices like or aself-measurement services like , and can view our personal health dashboards online. What she sees is an opportunity at the nexus of data, health, and motivation. “Information doesn’t change people’s behavior. You need to be able to somehow motivate.” Sometimes seeing your progress can be a big motivator, but sometimes it takes social pressure. In the clip below, Dyson gets into the promise of personal genomics. She explains to me how 23andMe works. You can get a snapshot of your personal genomic information now for , plus $9 a month. It just a few years ago. These clips are part of a longer interview. Be sure to watch Dyson talk about , why the new are a bad idea, and s . |
Review: Energizer Dual-Zone Inductive Charging Pad | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 20 | Energizer’s Inductive Charging pad gets rid of the wires, looks nice, and just makes getting your charge on easier. Unfortunately, the accessories needed to use the charging pad make your phone fat and ugly. Energizer’s Inductive Charger is a top-notch charging accessory, no doubt. It was a piece of cake to get it unboxed and ready to roll, and it looks mighty nice on my book shelf. As far as design goes, it’s light and pretty thin, and it’s got a nice silver lining to mix it up amidst all the black. Then again, I get this feeling every time I set my phone down on the pad that I’m somehow a part of the future, yet the hardware doesn’t really embrace that. It’s not especially sleek or innovative in design, and I could do without those massive Qi symbols. The case is its own beast, with its own pros and cons. Its major +1 would be the fact that you can toss your phone down on a pad and it’s automatically charging. But that’s really just a pro for the system as a whole. The cases, at least my iPhone case, added quite a bit of beef to the size of my phone. If I’ve learned anything about technology in my short 23-year life, it’s that “thin and light” is where the money’s at, while “bulky and heavy” is a serious no-no. Past that, the case really doesn’t provide any protection for your phone, despite the fact that it seems thick enough to stop a bullet. If you drop your phone while it’s in the case, you not only run the risk of busting your phone, but you could also mess up the case. And then where would you be? All three cases — the iPhone 4, iPhone 3G/3GS and BlackBerry Curve 8900 — cost $34.99. The charging pad features LED lights above both charging areas to let you know that your phone is in fact connecting to the device and receiving a charge. The Dual-Zone charger even has an extra USB port along the backside to give our gadget-packing friends an extra charging option. The Singe-Zone charger, which will launch later this year, does not have the extra USB port. This is also a magnet-free inductive charger, which means that you don’t have to worry about exact placement when you plop down your phone. As long as it’s in the right general vicinity, it’ll charge. Now to talk about Qi: First of all, it’s pronounced “Chee,” and it is the new universal standard for inductive charging. Anything that requires 5 watts of power or less (phones, iPods, cameras) can work with Qi technology and that will be our primary method for inductive charging going forward. That means you won’t need a new charger when you upgrade to a new phone. All you’ll need is the proper accessory (unless of course your cool new phone features Qi technology already, which it very well may). As far as performance is concerned, it took me 3 hours, 23 minutes to get my phone charged using Energizer’s Inductive charging pad. With a wired connection, it usually takes me an hour, maybe a little more if it’s completely dead. Obviously, there’s a big difference there. Time is money and nobody has three hours to wait around for a phone to charge. My fear is that because it takes so long, owners of the Energizer charging pad will resort to charging their phone through the night. This is also a serious no-no. Letting your phone stay plugged in after it’s fully charged only kills your battery, and I’m sure no one needs any extra issues with battery life. In the end, what you win with this device is also what you lose. You get the added convenience of a wire-free charge but the inconvenient three-hour wait to go from dead to a full battery. It really all depends on what you hate more: wires or waiting.
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Gillmor Gang 8.20.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 8 | 20 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Seth Goldstein, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — sat in awe of Apple’s massive hammerlock on the tablet market. What the New York Times called 97% of the purchased category became crystal clear as HP folded its cards and went home to an uncertain future. @seth, founder of the viral music startup turntable.fm, seemed as thrilled with Spotify as he was with his own service. A complementary handoff from discovery to living in the new groove, with a tablet product on the way to supplement third party placeholders. The session had a soft rhythm of exploration and dumbfounded amazement at what HP and RIM and Nokia were thinking when they jumped in with tablets for the remaining 3%. Did they have to try at least once before abandoning the PC, or play off the remaining 3 or 4 years on enterprise contracts, or believe in Windows Phone and Android activations? It would be laughable if real money weren’t involved, but instead these companies will have to turn to the record companies of all people for clues about how to finally make a transition into the Cloud. Or as @scobleizer pronounced it, iCloud. @stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @seth, @scobleizer, @seth |
Revenge Of The Killer Script Kiddies! | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 8 | 20 | They’re out there. Be afraid. They could be anywhere, everywhere, anyone. They are shadowy, deadly, mysterious, guided by intellects . Security consultants and antivirus firms whisper legends of them to their clients to scare them straight. They are the Voldemort of online security, except that everyone is all too eager to say their name: the . Hide your children! You cannot stop them! …well, actually you probably could, and pretty easily too, but apparently most folks can’t be bothered. Vanity Fair just about “Operation Shady RAT”, which featured “ .” Military-industrial standard-bearer Northrop Grumman is “ .” A few months ago Security firm RSA’s SecurID systems were the victim of “ .” The Pentagon is alive to the APT threat, and says it is beginning to focus , because “ ” Why, just this week, San Francisco’s government-owned BART system was hacked by— …waaaaaait a minute. One can never be sure, particularly in this arena, but it that BART’s police database was hacked by … a teenage French girl, who reported: “They had zero security.” the link she allegedly used to hack them. Don’t worry, it’s no longer active. Take a good look at that URL. Remind you of anything? It should, if you’re an XKCD reader: Ah, , that old canard. But wait, it gets even worse: BART's been hacked and it looks like they stored user passwords as plain text. Looks like they missed the class on Security 101 — Michael Meehan (@michaelmeehan) Seriously? Plaintext? Who runs security for these jokers, ? OK, so maybe the BART hack was a script kiddie enabled by morons. But what about “Shady RAT”? So glad you asked. Vanity Fair’s clueless hyperbole makes it sound like no one in the history of the Internet had ever sent an email that linked to a page with a browser exploit before. Earth to their editors: you’re about a decade-and-a-half behind the times. The attacker then to communicate with the compromised machines. Ooo, steganography, scary and hard to pronounce! Sure, that might have been amazingly sophisticated…ten years ago. The RSA hack worked in : emails to employees with an enticing-looking attachment, plus a zero-day Flash vulnerability. And the tech media went crazy about the deadly APT attack on a security company. Are you me? That’s an example of an “advanced persistent threat”? Adobe products are for their insecurity. If that’s an APT, so was News Corporation’s hacking of cell phones. But don’t just take my word for it: “ ,” Symantec security researcher Hon Lau. Or as IT World , re APT attacks in general: “ ” There are genuine, sophisticated, brilliant black-hat hackers out there. Some of them work in groups. Some even work for nation-states and militaries, including, very likely, the people who eighteen months ago. But most hacks are made possible because the victims allowed them; and we shouldn’t forget that security companies have every incentive to make the dangers seem as deadly and sophisticated as possible. Organizations everywhere put up full-spectrum firewalls, draft byzantine and Kafkaesque security policies, send delegates to security conferences to talk very seriously in hushed voices about APTs, and make endless pointless and/or demands in , such as forcing people to use impossible-to-remember passwords while storing those incomprehensible passwords in plaintext on databases vulnerable to URL SQL injection, as their employees open poisoned attachments sent by strangers. That’s like being so worried about whether an enemy nation-state has fired a cruise missile at your house that you forget you left your car parked overnight with the door open and the keys in the ignition. In Oakland. Worrying about APTs directed by, say, China is very sexy—if blatantly sinophobic—these days, but maybe organizations shouldn’t start worrying about the enmity of the Middle Kingdom until they’ve first established their ability to handle bored teenage French girls with a bone to pick. “Public Enemy / Minor Threat”, , Flickr. |
The Daily Show On How Chain Bookstores Can Compete With The Internet | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 20 | [tc_dailyshow id="394761"] Borders’ bankruptcy has further underscored a major shift in the way people consume the written word, namely in pixels as opposed to print. As our chain brick and mortar bookstores inevitably go the way of our chain brick and mortar video stores and record stores, the ever-sharp Jon Stewart and author (and PC-dude) John Hodgman mull over various ways bookstores can stay competitive (video, above). Their verdict: Don’t hold your breath. We have to face facts, Jon. The big-box bookstore has passed into history. And that’s something we should embrace and be proud of. By preserving Borders as a popular historical attraction. Like, uh, colonial Williamsburg? Well yeah, exactly! Bring the kids down to Ye Olde Borders Towne! Let them see what it felt like to paw through a clearance bin of Word-a-Day calendars. Or sneak a peek at pornography printed on actual paper! Right there on the giant rack of weird magazines you’ve never heard of. Including my personal favorite, Bookstore Magazine Rack Aficionado magazine. You know, I think a bookstore preserve might appeal to a — a very small market. : Well, it can’t be smaller than the market of people who buy books. Ba-dum ching. |
Is “Jupiter” the Future of Windows…PC, Phone &Tablet? | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 8 | 20 | Is Silverlight , or is it the future of Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone? This is a question weighing on the minds of legions of Microsoft developers right now – developers who were once promised that Silverlight was the answer to their cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility woes, only to be later informed that JavaScript and HTML5 will be the tools used to build Windows 8 applications. HTML5 is also supported in the IE9 browser, coming soon to Windows Phone “Mango,” due out this fall. Does that mean HTML5, then, is the future of the Microsoft platform? Maybe not. A new, unannounced platform called “Jupiter” may soon have Microsoft developers leveraging their existing skills to write applications for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Which means, of course, apps that run on all platforms – not just PCs, but tablets and phones, too…and even the (via Xbox). That “Jupiter” exists is not new information. There have been a number of leaks about the forthcoming platform in , and some folks have even leaked code to learn more. For those not closely tracking Microsoft’s news, here’s what (we think) we know about Jupiter, based on the information out there: That last item is especially important, since to date, about Window’s 8’s development platform is that it’s “based on HTML5 and JavaScript.” As Peter Bright of pointed out, Microsoft developers were “horrified” by this news. Before you throw Microsoft developers under the bus for failing to jump on the HTML5 bandwagon, you have to understand that they’ve invested a lot of time and money over the course of many years to learn all the technologies Microsoft has pushed, including Win32, COM, MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6, .NET, WinForms, Silverlight and WPF, explained Bright. It sounded like Microsoft was asking them to throw away decades of experience and switch to HTML5. While obviously, has come a long way in recent months, it’s arguably not quite ready to drive the entire Microsoft platform just yet. It’s an option, of course, as it is on iOS, Android and other modern operating systems with modern Web browsers. But it’s not going to be Microsoft developers’ only option, it seems. At the next month, it’s expected that Microsoft will reveal Jupiter to its developer community and the public, at long last. Why does Jupiter matter so much? If it’s not clear from the technical details above, it’s because Jupiter may end up being the “one framework” to rule them all. That means it might be possible to port the thousands of Windows Phone apps already written with Silverlight to Windows 8 simply by reusing existing code and making small tweaks. Or maybe even tweaks. (That part is still unclear). If so, this would be a technical advantage for developers building for Windows Phone 8 (code-named “Apollo” by the way, the son of “Jupiter”) or Windows 8. Imagine if Apple was to announce something similar – an easy way to port iOS applications to the Mac, for example. Right now, there’s no simple method for this. While there are third-party that , Apple developers still have to do quite a lot of work to get a mobile iOS app running on the Mac OS X desktop. That said, we imagine Apple is secretly hard at work on solving this dilemma as we speak. After all, you can clearly with the latest release, Lion: there’s a iOS-like “LaunchPad” with rows of apps, support for apps that work in “full screen” mode, disappearing scroll bars, and more. Meanwhile, at Google, there’s currently a lack of vision about how to merge desktop and mobile. Chairman Eric Schmidt has made vague statements about how, at some point in the future, . But it seems like Google has no clear idea as to how it will go about doing so. That Microsoft is thinking about the merging of desktop and mobile is no small matter. It’s a , as they say, and for now, Apple is the only company that seems to be able to compete here. . . With Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Jupiter, Microsoft, at least, seems to have a vision. But with Apple so far ahead at this point, the timing of that vision’s reveal may be key to Microsoft’s future. The fact that Microsoft has allowed in its developer community for the entirety of the year, just so it could have a splashy announcement at may be looked back on as a strategic mistake that contributed to Microsoft’s eventual downfall. Microsoft wants to be Apple, full of secrets and surprises, but it doesn’t have the culture to support it. With Jupiter, the news should have been officially announced months ago, as a tease, with a full reveal at . But instead, Microsoft set aside developers and their concerns, in order to win the hearts of consumers, technologists and the media with promises of “big announcements” at regarding the future of Windows. Oh, Microsoft. Whatever happened to “developers, developers, developers”? Make them happy and the rest of us will come. |
Editing Community Kibin Helps You Proofread Your Writing Fast And For Free | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | I am primarily writing about this startup because I need it desperately, and because it is the problem I would attempt to solve if I ever decided to flip the switch and become a startup founder instead of the personification of “those that cannot do write” or whatever. Unlike or earlier Web 1.0 professional editing services, is an editing community that allows you to upload a piece of writing and get it edited and proofread for free in a matter of 24 hours. You have no idea how much I want this to succeed. Okay so you say that there’s no such thing as a free anything … Well the way Kibin works is that users can accumulate points for editing other people’s work, and use those points to get their own work edited. If you don’t have the time to edit other people’s work, or just suck at it (eh, hem) you can pay 50 cents for a Kibin credit (founder tells me that credits average out to one cent a word, so that a 1,000 word essay costs around $10 with the option to pay more if you need a faster turnaround) and use those credits to buy editing time. Biziorek says that edits usually get done in under 24 hours. Even though the company is currently focused on students, if Biziorek can get the turnaround time down to under an hour, this will be a godsend for bloggers, who — I don’t have to tell you guys this — usually sacrifice grammar and punctuation for speed. It is to have another pair of human eyes on your work — spellcheck can’t tell the difference between “complimentary” and “complementary,” for example. That kind of attention to detail is worth its weight in gold. I’m sure there at least 20-30 mistakes in this post even but I just don’t have the time to figure out which ones they are. Also, I am typo-blind. Anyways my point is there’s a market for this. The backed Kibin is currently 40K into its 400K seed round and has just over 3,500 users according to Biziorek, growing at 44% week over week (he ditched law school plans to work on it last April). Biziorek’s future plans for Kibin include encouraging its best editors to turn pro and start charging for their services as well building a custom API for services that mass-produced content. “We’re thinking, ‘How can we produce as many happy users as possible?’ Travis tells me. Sweet Lord Jesus please let this succeed. You can watch Kibin’s demo video and the rest of the 500 Startups’ Demo Day . |
Codecademy: A Slick, Fun Way To Teach Yourself How To Program | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | You’ve read the inspirational posts on Hacker News. You’ve purchased the recommended books. You’ve bookmarked the online tutorials. You even plopped down $80 on a set of instructional videos, promising yourself that the investment would only make you more motivated. And for some reason, you don’t know how to program. , a new site that went live earlier this evening, might just be the answer. It’s a web-based, interactive programming tutorial that holds your hand and walks you through the basics of JavaScript. At this point it’s just getting started — the lessons only go as far as ‘While’ loops — but it clearly has loads of potential for one key reason: it actually feels . Codecademy’s initial signup process is very clever: there isn’t one, at least at first. As soon as you land on Codecademy.com you’ll be prompted to complete the first lesson, which involves printing out and finding the length (in letters) of your name. It isn’t until you’ve made it through a few lessons that the site prompts you to create a user account, when it reminds you that if you don’t register, all of your progress will be lost. At which point you’ll probably register. The lessons themselves are pretty straightforward. A sidebar on the left hand side of the screen will instruct you to complete a task, like, say, create a new variable called ‘myName’. You edit code using the web-based terminal, hit return, and your code is executed. The site hits a good balance between telling you exactly what to do, and prompting you to reuse something you learned in a previous lesson, so it doesn’t feel frustratingly difficult or boring. As you progress through the lessons, you’ll rack up points and trophies, which are displayed on your profile. Friends can check out your profile to see how you’re progressing, and it isn’t hard to imagine the site building out additional social features, like leaderboards and competitions. The application still has some bugs, which isn’t all that surprising — the company’s cofounders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski say that they started working on the app only a week and a half ago. In fact, they weren’t ready for the site to get so much attention so quickly (they posted it on Hacker News hoping for some initial feedback, and had 1,000 concurrent users within a few hours). And there are still plenty of questions. The founders aren’t sure if they’re going to let the community create new lessons, and their monetization plans aren’t set in stone (though they do plan to make money). But they’re off to a solid start. I just wish the first lesson included the words ‘Hello World’. |
Activision: Social Game Company Valuations “Out Of Whack” | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | With for upstart tech companies, it’s not just naysayer pundits crying “bubble.” Activision (Activision-Blizzard, to be precise) is skeptical of the numbers being put forth for competitors like Zynga and Rovio, whose billion or multiple billion dollar valuations put them out of reach for easy acquisition. Perhaps they’re hoping to pick them up for a song after the supposed bubble pops. Is Activision playing a long game, or is it just wishful thinking? , Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg poured cold water on the idea of the company making a major investment in social gaming via a high-profile acquisition: Valuations of some of the companies in that space are out of whack, so that’s an issue when it comes to acquisitions…But don’t mistake careful, methodical planning for inaction. Any new place where people are playing games, at scale, is something that we’re interested in. Unfortunately, in the fast-moving social gaming space, too much planning occasionally does amount to inaction. While Activision has plenty of successful titles, none approach, or even attempt to replicate, the super-wide, super-shallow distribution of titles like Angry Birds and Farmville. Meanwhile, million-sellers are made overnight in waves of virality which Activision seems incapable of producing. At the same time, the rapidity of the sector’s growth speaks to the volatility of the market. While Rovio is unlikely to suddenly reveal that it’s folding due to an underdiversified game library, it possible that the next year will bring more sobering results, or a flattening of the field as more examples of quick growth suggest a pattern not unique to these companies — in which case the high valuations might be looked on as optimistic. At this point Activision would have successfully waited it out. Either way, Hirshberg’s comments don’t suggest any great level of illumination on Activision’s part. This kind of bemused skepticism doesn’t inspire confidence in shareholders, either, who are (like Nintendo’s) probably impatient with the failure of the world’s biggest game-maker to grasp this new gaming paradigm. They may be starting to see the light, though: they are planning on social-izing Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises in gaming, with the Elite in-game social network. They’re still late to the party; I guess they hope that’ll turn out to be a good thing. |
YouTube’s Now The Latest Place To Start Your Hangout | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | One of the niftiest features of Google+ is its group videoconferencing app called Hangouts. Not only is the service free, with support for ten simultaneous users — it also attempts to negate the awkwardness that’s often associated with coordinating video calls by making the experience more casual and free-flowing (any of your friends can hop into and out of a Hangout at any point, provided you’ve shared it with them). One of the app’s other neat features is its ability to play a YouTube video for all of your friends at the same time (and, of course, you can immediately talk about the video). This evening, YouTube’s rolled out a new option that makes it easier to jump into one of these video-sharing sessions: you can now initiate a Hangout directly from a YouTube video’s ‘Watch’ page (you’ll find the option under the ‘Share’ menu). The feature works as you’d expect: click it, and a browser window will pop up, prompting you to choose which Google+ Circles you’d like to share the Hangout (and video) with. Comb your hair, click share, and your Hangout will start. This is just the first of what will likely be many more integrations to come for Hangouts — Google has repeatedly said that the app is built as a platform for enjoying shared experiences with friends. In other words, in a while you’ll probably be able to Hangout while playing games, showing off photo galleries, or perhaps even enjoying a live-streamed sporting event with friends. Of course, this assumes that your friends are all on Google+ and are still logging in on a regular basis. Alas, aside from my ‘tech friends’, most of mine aren’t. |
Kickstarter: EEG-Based Telepresence Robot Controller | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | You’re probably familiar with telepresence robot or two. We even had one rolling around the TechCrunch office for a while. They generally have fairly simple navigation interfaces: forward, back, turn left, turn right, and some controls for the camera and speaker. The trouble is that these controls are generally accessed by traditional means: keyboard, mouse, or handheld controller. And a major application of telepresence is allowing people unable to get around on their own to do so virtually. People with extremely limited mobility often aren’t able to reliably use their fingers or limbs, so using head inclination, blowing and sucking, and are necessary. Robert Oschler is a robot and telepresence enthusiast who has been making his own software for years. The latest version of his client adds support for the EEG-monitoring PC peripheral, and he’s hoping to get a little support on . Isn’t that something worth throwing a couple bucks at? He’s been footing the bill for a long time, and I’m guessing the costs started adding up for this version. His software supports a number of robots but not many dedicated telepresence bots, which usually have their own private clients. The bot Oschler adores seems to have rather poor reviews on Amazon, unfortunately, but there’s no reason the software couldn’t be made to support other robots if they were selected by, say, a medical establishment. In the end I think it’s just a worthwhile project, and could end up helping a few people in a very real way. I’d rather this guy was helped along in his quest than, say, some guy makes yet another designer iPad case. Check out the Kickstarter project here. |
HP To Apple: You Win. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe. Around me, there are five people on laptops — four of them are MacBooks. Four other people are using tablets — all four are iPads. Welcome to the Post-PC world. That phrase was one of the first things that today when I heard the that HP was not only their TouchPad and Pre webOS-based products, but also trying to spin-off their PC business. The largest PC business in the world, mind you. And HP’s statements during their earnings call today only further reaffirmed the idea of the Post-PC world. “Consumers are changing the use of their PC,” HP CEO Leo Apotheker said. “The tablet effect is real and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations. The velocity of change in the personal device marketplace continues to increase as the competitive landscape is growing increasingly more complex especially around the personal computing arena,” he continued. He then repeated, “the tablet effect is real”. But wait, then why is he exiting the tablet space after only a matter of weeks? Because when Apotheker says “the tablet effect”, he really means “the iPad effect”. Put another way, “Apple, you win.” And not just in the tablet space. Again, the largest PC-maker in the world is exiting the space. Think about how crazy that is for a second. It sounds like a completely irrational panic move. But maybe it’s not. After all, while HP may be the worldwide leader in PC sales , their actual profit from those sales has already been far surpassed by Apple. Further, while overall PC growth continues to contract, Apple’s Mac sales continue to grow and have outpaced the rest of the PC industry for 21 consecutive quarters. That’s over five consecutive years. That’s certainly another way to interpret “Post-PC world”. The writing is on the wall. HP is perhaps reading it a bit early, but they may well be reading it clearly. Let’s look back at what Steve Jobs last March when unveiling the iPad 2: I’ve said this before, but thought it was worth repeating: It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing. And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. And a lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they’re looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies. And they’re talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs. And our experience and every bone in our body says that that is not the right approach to this. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC. That need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC. And we think we’re on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in the organization to build these kinds of products. And so I think we stand a pretty good chance of being pretty competitive in this market. And I hope that what you’ve seen today gives you a good feel for that. What’s perhaps most noteworthy about HP’s move today is that they, more so than any other company attacking the tablet space, seemed to have a grasp of what Jobs was talking about — undoubtedly thanks to Jon Rubinstein, the longtime Apple general leading webOS. The Post-PC device is about the combination of hardware and software all built and integrated by one company. Google doesn’t get that. RIM can’t execute. But with the Palm/webOS purchase, it seemed that HP had both the vision and resources to possibly compete with Apple. In fact, a year ago, . The subsequent talk about webOS integration across their entire product line as well as the unveiling of the TouchPad and a new Pre seemed to reaffirm this. But something funny happened on the way to the battle with Apple. Amid scandal, then-HP CEO Mark Hurd was . This happened just three months after HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion. At the time of the deal, HP told us very clearly: “ “. Again, while they wouldn’t explicitly admit it at the time, the plan was to compete with Apple. But with Hurd out, , the man who previously ran SAP. He had been with the enterprise company for 20 years. This whole “HP as Apple” plan must have sounded like Latin to him. Since the wheels of this plan were already in motion when he came on board, Apotheker stuck to it. But while he watched for any sign of shakiness, he scooped up some data companies like . It was probably clear to those inside HP what was going on. Last month, Rubinstein switched roles, to be an executive at HP instead of the guy in charge of webOS. When the TouchPad launched, and subsequently floundered out of the gate, Apotheker had what he needed. He and it was set. HP wasn’t going to be the next Apple. They were going to be the next IBM. Not IBM, the PC juggernaut, mind you — IBM the company that cut loose the PC hardware division and focused on data and enterprise. That’s what so jarring about today’s news: HP just did a full stop and then a 180 before our very eyes. Apple and IBM both resurrected themselves in recent years, but each did it in opposite ways. The Apple plan didn’t work for HP, Apotheker decided. He now clearly believes the IBM plan will. During today’s earnings call, Apotheker also cited the threat their “business critical services” were facing from Oracle. That’s interesting since . The two companies hate one another. In choosing the IBM resurrection model over the Apple one, Apotheker has also better aligned his company for a full-on battle with Oracle. So where does all of this ? The TouchPad is dead. The Pre sleeps with the fishes. HP seems to be open to all options including licensing out webOS for others to use. But the simplest solution will probably end up being the one they go with: a sale of webOS to some other entity that can actually use it. HP VP Richard Kerris made this option pretty clear today. HTC? Samsung? Facebook? Google?! One thing to consider: Jon Rubinstein … Something else to consider: when HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion last year, the world was a different place. These days, companies are paying $4.5 billion for a group of . Google is paying $12.5 billion for Motorola, a large portion is which is also for patents. Along with Palm and webOS, HP got Palm’s 1,500+ patents last year, . If those patents are as important in the mobile space , they alone could be worth more than the $1.2 billion Palm sale price now. If HP can flip those for north of that price, the whole acquisition won’t look like nearly as much of a disaster as it does right now. But the big picture item of today remains what HP is no longer doing: making Post-PC devices or even PCs themselves. In less than the span of a year, the biggest PC maker in the world realized not only that they couldn’t Apple, but that they couldn’t even with Apple. And they admitted it. And called the fight. It was a first-round T.K.O. The question is: does this make HP look foolish, cowardly, or smart? The answer today may be different from the one tomorrow. |
Okay HP, Let’s Make Some Lemonade | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | This morning, HP After spending $1.2 to acquire Palm, they announced that they were killing off the development of all smartphones and tablets running Palm’s webOS platform — including the just launched TouchPad. Having survived for just before its death, it’s tragic that TouchPad lived just day longer than the oft-mocked Microsoft Kin. webOS itself, as a platform, isn’t entirely dead. HP says they’ll “continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS”, which is really just a fancy way of saying “Yeah, we’re still not entirely sure what the hell we’re going to do with this thing.” There’s a way out here, HP — and it’s all thanks to Google’s acquisition of Motorola. You see, Google’s surprise $12.5 billion buy-out of Motorola has undoubtedly left Android’s other, non-Motorola partners (Samsung, HTC, LG, etc.) a bit… shaken up. In the blink of an eye, Google went from having what was essentially 0% of the hardware marketshare for their own operating system Out of nowhere, Google went from being the nice guy who builds all the software for free to something resembling a direct competitor. Google insists that Motorola will operate as a separate entity — but at the very least, . But where else are Android’s other partners to turn? Windows Phone 7? Great! Lets keep throwing licensing money at Microsoft. They only by sticking with Windows Mobile 6.5 for far too long, launched Windows Phone 7 way too late in the game whilst simultaneously way too early in its own development, inexplicably tried ( ) to launch the Kin platform at the same time, and have been dickishly throwing a wrench in the Mobile world’s gears by demanding patent licensing money from anyone who finds any success with Android. Here’s your move, HP: Fill the gap that Google has just left open. Share webOS’ source code. Bits of webOS are already available under a GPL license, but it’s time to open the rest as much as possible. Perhaps not with everyone — at least not at first, as suddenly sharing a mountain of once-closed source would be a way to totally bone all of the existing, unlikely-to-be-updated webOS devices currently floating around out there With Android’s popularity and free-except-for-patent-licensing price tag and Windows Phone 7 floating around as an alternative, webOS licenses would be a rather hard sell. That’s why HP needs to just give it away — but only to those willing to improve it. webOS is, in many ways, kind of amazing. It’s ridiculously user-friendly, the notifications/alerts system is top notch, and it’s undeniably one of the most beautiful operating systems ever created… but it has its faults. Among other things, it doesn’t seem to be terribly efficient; even could never seem to make a device on which webOS ran better than a 4-year old with bricks tied to his feet. Furthermore, Palm just could allot the resources to properly build out webOS for third-party development; it lacks much in the pre-provided functionality front (read: APIs), and that which is there could really do with better documentation. And that’s where the trade comes in. Willing to make substantial improvements to webOS? You get a webOS! And you get a webOS! And you get a webOS! Not willing (or don’t have the man-power) to commit to improvements? No sweat — you can still license webOS on the cheap. The definition of “substantial improvements” as well as the definition of “cheap” would have to vary based on company size/revenue, but is better than HP trying to tackle webOS alone. Palm’s best engineers took off when the buyout went down, and HP has proven themselves capable at making software. This part is key. Be the hands-off, no-competition software provider that Google has decided they don’t want to be anymore. Throw webOS into printers, cars, toasters, whatever, but just let the guys who know what they’re doing in mobile do their thing. More cooks in the kitchen can just make things worse — and that’s why there needs to be a foundation of sorts (separate from HP) formed amongst the largest contributors to act as a guiding hand for the product’s future. Major contributors get to discuss and steer the future of the product. And if one wants to do build something into the project that the majority veto? No problem — they’ll just have to build it into their own branch. Think of it sort of like Nokia (et al.)’s Symbian foundation, minus the suck. Will it earn HP back the $1.2 billion they spent on Palm? Nope! But they still have Palm’s patent armory to show for that. Will it score webOS the throne as the #1 or #2 platform in the mobile world? Nope! iOS and Android have that locked down for the next few years , and there’s very little that could change that — but it does make it a viable contender against WP7 for that coveted bronze medal. It also makes the platform a lot more viable to third-party developers, if only because it would boost the number of purchased webOS devices above.. like, twelve. HP ends up with a better webOS, and they avoid looking like they’ve completely wrecked the platform. Partners get a platform — and one with quite a lot of potential — in exchange for allotting manpower they’d have to allot if they were to explore it in the first place, and they get to help steer its future to boot. Developers get a third platform worth developing for. (Oh, and, in some sense, it makes a licensed webOS more defensible against patent attacks, because of all the major players that had an official hand in its development.) It’s not a resounding victory, but it’s probably HP’s best move at this point. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 2 | null |
Salesforce Posts Record Quarterly Revenue Of $546M; Raises Guidance | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | Salesforce just posted its Q2 2012 earnings today, record quarterly revenue of $546 million, which is up 38% Year-Over-Year. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share increased 3% year-over-year to $0.30. Analysts EPS of $0.30 and $529 million for revenue. Subscription and support revenues were $509 million, an increase of 38% on a year-over-year basis. Professional services and other revenues were $37 million, an increase of 44% on a year-over-year basis. Q2 GAAP net loss per share was ($0.03), which includes a one-time charge of $0.04 per diluted share associated with the legal settlement over a California state wage and hour lawsuit. The company’s non-GAAP results exclude the effects of approximately $55 million in stock-based compensation expense, approximately $19 million in amortization of purchased intangibles, and approximately $3 million in net non-cash interest expense related to the company’s convertible senior notes. Salesforce says that it added 6,300 paying customers during the quarter, which brings its total to 104,000 clients using its SaaS products (a quarterly record for the company). Since July 31, 2010, the company added 21,600 net paying customers, an increase of 26% on a year-over-year basis. Cash generated from operations for the fiscal second quarter was $83 million, an increase of 9% on a year-over-year basis. Total cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities finished the quarter at approximately $1.3 billion. The company is raising its guidance for Q3, projecting revenue to be $568 million to approximately $570 million. Revenue for the company’s full fiscal year 2012 is projected to be in the range of approximately $2.22 billion to approximately $2.23 billion. |
Mobiado’s Grand Touch Phones: Android For The Stupidly Rich | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | The Canadian luxury buffs over at have been churning out obscenely expensive (not to mention obscenely designed) phones since 2004, and if you were to look at their line-up, one thing would become immediately clear: none of them are worth the price. , after all. That said, Mobiado is trying something new with their Grand Touch series: bedazzled smartphones! The Grand Touch and the Grand Touch GCB are Gingerbread-powered handsets with 4-inch Super-AMOLED displays. Not too shabby, compared to everything else in their inventory. Both devices have sapphire crystal buttons and sapphire crystal backplates, but while the Grand Touch’s body is made of “precision CNC machined from solid aircraft aluminum,” the Grand Touch GCB is plated in 24k gold. What Mobiado declines to tell their discerning customers, though, is that you can buy the exact same device for (I would imagine) considerably less, without all the gilded trappings. That’s because what Mobiado seems to have done is buy a up a boatload of Samsung Nexus Ss and gave them a makeover. The slightly-curved screen is a bit of a giveaway, but things like port placement and the amount of fixed internal storage (16GB) seal the deal. Still, they’ve got quite the racket going. These sorts of devices were always meant for people who have more money than taste, and who’s to say the uber-rich won’t fall in love? Mobiado has declined to list a price for the Grand Touch series, but there’s a useful rule of thumb when it comes to this sort of thing: if you have to ask how much it is, you probably can’t afford it. |
HubSpot Buys Social Media Management Platform And App Directory Oneforty | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | HubSpot has social business management platform . Oneforty originally two years ago as an app store for Twitter, the startup undoubtedly filled a hole in the media platform. The brainchild of , the startup provided a comprehensive e-commerce marketplace where third-party developers on the Twitter platform can sell their apps. The idea was such a hit in the Twitter ecosystem that rumors swirled that Twitter was potentially But after nearly two years, Oneforty, which has raised a little in funding, found a specific target market for its products—business users. The site for business users to figure out how mange social media, including Twitter and Facebook. The company’s B2B platform on social business includes information on how to invest a budget, what other companies are doing and more. Other content includes a buyers guide for brands looking to adopt social media software and reviews of social media tools. According to the release, the oneforty directory will merge into the HubSpot App Marketplace, the an app store for marketing. For background, HubSpot helps manage customers websites and generate leads. HubSpot, which just raised a massive $32 million from Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Salesforce and others, has been on a bit of an acquisition spree and just bought Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. |
HP Beats The Street, Q3 Revenue Up 2 Percent To $31.2B, Cuts FY11 Outlook | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | After to purchase software company Autonomy, HP than expected third fiscal quarter 2011 initial financial results, posting $31.2 billion, an increase of 2 percent from $30.7 billion one year ago. In the third quarter, preliminary GAAP diluted earnings per share (EPS) was $0.93 and non-GAAP diluted EPS was $1.10. Analysts EPS of $1.09 and $31.19 billion in revenue. For the fourth fiscal quarter of 2011, HP estimates revenue of approximately $32.1 billion to $32.5 billion, GAAP diluted EPS in the range of $0.44 to $0.55, and non-GAAP diluted EPS in the range of $1.12 to $1.16. Full-year FY11 revenue will be approximately $127.2 billion to $127.6 billion, down from its previous estimate of $129 billion to $130 billion. FY11 GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be in the range of $3.59 to $3.70, down from its previous estimate of at least $4.27, and FY11 non-GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be in the range of $4.82 to $4.86, down from its previous estimate of at least $5.00. HP warns that this could be effected by restructuring and shutdown costs associated with webOS devices, and acquisition-related charges. We’ll get more details on the rest of HP’s financials at market close. |
Don’t Miss Out: Last 5 Days To Get TechCrunch Disrupt SF Early Bird Tickets | Elin Blesener | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | Disrupt SF is going to be huge. There are only 5 days left to get the best price on tickets, so be sure to get your early bird tickets now . We have just announced and you can continue to follow along with our announcements of speakers on the Disrupt SF site . Some of the speakers who will be joining us on the Disrupt SF stage include: Elon Musk, Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Mike McCue, Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer and much more. Be sure to also take a peak at our , which highlights some of our incredibly fun after parties as well. We still have many more surprises to announce which we promise will not disappoint. You do not want to miss out, so |
Bring On The Google Hardware Labs | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | In their statement regarding the , Google said that they would “run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.” I understand that to mean that they simply be devouring them, firing redundant personnel, and Borging all Moto functionality into the Google name and brand. On the other hand, they’re not just going to let it ride and skim the profits (and patents). Their business-level plans are still a matter for discussion, but what I’m really excited about is something else entirely: Google’s new playground for hardware. The capacity for the creation of real objects within Motorola is huge. Google produces almost no real objects at all. Motorola designs and produces things meant to be touched and put in pockets. Google designs and produces things that are untouchable, unpocketable. From some perspectives, it’s a terrible match, like Archie and Veronica. But something Google has, which I doubt they have in Motorola, and almost certainly lack in Microsoft and Apple, is upward idea mobility. Google Hardware Labs, anyone? Consider Google’s “free time” policy, in which employees spend a significant portion of their workday tinkering or collaborating on independent projects. There’s been some disagreement about how productive or expensive this program may be, but I definitely think it’s a strength. It may not create a lot of million-user products, but it has created a great number of viable and interesting niche services. I think it’s a perfect match for bored hardware engineers. I wrote a while back about how Microsoft needs to . Google’s not the utopia some people may think it is, but it approaches this ideal more than the competition. I’m always stumbling across microscopic Google projects to improve physics research, or solar cells, or . Things that won’t serve up millions of ad impressions, but act as a sort of ambassador between Google and non-consumer communities like the medical establishment, circuit benders, and various random industries. It speaks to a certain indulgence within the company, and an eye for quality that picks out worthwhile projects for elevation. Microsoft has smart people, but their vast and territorial network of middle managers play “Mother May I” with pet projects, stifling growth. It’s a miracle that something like the Kinect ever floated to the top, though both Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 seem to indicate a more open, focused company. Apple probably has plenty of skunk works engineers, and a whole research division. But compared with Microsoft’s and Google’s, theirs are almost completely hidden from prying eyes. Microsoft Research engineers are collaborating with universities and putting together , while the fruits of Apple’s research are only revealed in patents and final products. Both approaches have their merits — I just wanted to demonstrate two types. Motorola is of the Apple school, but less creative, and Google is of the Microsoft school, but less varied. If Motorola engineers are given a little room to breathe (think: fewer feature-phone PCB designs), they might create some very interesting work. It’s not a guarantee — just like Googlers aren’t guaranteed to create something worthwhile in their 20% time. But Google may combine a clear eye for potential (even — perhaps especially — niche potential) and a willingness to take a risk going public to fast-track some projects and produce some really interesting devices. Google likes hardware. They just never get a chance to confess it. The closest we see is when they cherry-pick designs for their G-series phones, or produce something like the Cr-48, soaking in understatement and Google’s function-first form. And the Open Accessory Toolkit is like . They could have bought a design studio or two, sure. They probably have a few already. But with Motorola acting as Department of Rapid Prototyping, Google has a free hand to try all kinds of things. Not that we should expect Google refrigerators or anything. But imagine things like the being produced instead of buried, just because it was a cool idea. Can’t you picture Google just shelling out for a limited run of these things, to see what people do with them, to create something cool, to be able to say they did it? I picture something along the lines of a Google Hardware Labs, open to some extent (like Chromium) and with major “releases” getting small-run manufacture. It’s probably pie in the sky, but I can dream, can’t I? And is it really so ridiculous to think that Google might occasionally throw a mil or two at a promising hardware project, the way they’ve done with software projects? Use your imagination. Why not: You think that Google doesn’t have guys coming up with this kind of stuff They’ve probably got a backlog a hundred deep of random devices and interesting hardware spaces they want to explore. Google loves to tinker. And they love to put stuff out that isn’t even close to a finished product. It’s not always a positive, but it demonstrates that, unlike Apple and Motorola, they’re willing to release something to the wild just to see how it runs. Now, the recent shutdown of Google Labs (putting “ “) might shake this dream of mine. But my thinking is that Labs occupied a sort of awkward position, internal projects too buggy or specific to be implemented, but not big enough to be features highlighted in a blog post or in-app update. Clearly they’re cutting down on the the levels of granularity projects can occupy — but it doesn’t mean they’re eliminating experimentation, and at any rate a hardware project is big enough to escape that particular crackdown. With the taste they seem to have in hardware design (and, , interface design) and the interest they demonstrate in technological dilettantism, I think the purchase of a proven hardware vector is an unabashed good thing, though it’s far from the only or primary reason Google has done so. Whether their newly acquired engineers and designers are producing stuff of their own volition, or carrying out the designs of Google’s fancy, the result will be new toys. And maybe even something useful. |
Android Phone Owners Use Their Devices For An Hour A Day | John Biggs | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | has found that Android users tend to spend over an hour a day on their phones. Sixty-seven percent of their time is spent “working” with apps while the rest is spent on the mobile web. Forty-three percent of those apps are top 10 Market apps while the top 50 apps are used 61 percent of the time. The rest of the apps – all 250,000 of them – are used the rest of the time. The stats come in advance of Neilsen’s free webinar, to be held on Nielsen will also release the browsing/app habits of iPhone users, a potentially interesting metric to assess the uptake of mobile web apps vs. the native variety. |
It’s Official: HP Kills Off webOS Phones And The TouchPad | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | Brace yourselves, webOS fans. In the hours leading up to their Q3 conference call later today, HP has just confirmed that they will be discontinuing operations surrounding the TouchPad and all webOS phones. This news will come as a rather huge punch to the gut for webOS die-hards (myself included, though you can’t say that ), many of whom have stood by the product for years — first in hopes that Palm would eventually launch a device worthy of the rather fantastic operating system, and later in hopes that HP’s acquisition of Palm would be the spark to the fire that just never seemed to light. On the upside, webOS isn’t dead — at least, not just yet. HP’s wording up above leaves things a bit vague, with at least two potential routes left open: licensing webOS to others, and sticking webOS in other, non-phone/tablet devices (HP has already mentioned plans to put it in printers and .) Until further notice, however, it’s essentially dead in the water. Pour one out for webOS devices tonight, my fellow geeks. If HP needs a way out while still saving face, : HP’s Stephen DeWitt says “We are not walking away from webOS.” They will continue efforts to advance and perhaps license the OS, but its life as we have known it is certainly over. |
My Old Friend, AT&T, Still Bringing The Scumbaggery After All These Years | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | January 19, 2011. It’s a day I’ll always remember. It’s the day I finally got to destroy a Horcrux that had been bringing into my life: AT&T. That’s the day I finally cancelled my AT&T service after years of dropped calls, non-existant service, gross over-charges, and all around frustration. I even did it I knew for sure that Verizon was getting the iPhone. I had had enough. That I got to cancel it , adding insult to injury, was just icing on the cake. Looking back, it was one of the best decisions, technology-wise, I’ve made in the past few years. And today it’s looking even better. You see, after months of AT&T being out of sight, out of mind, they stormed back into my brain last night that they would be removing individual text messaging plans in a few days. In AT&T marketing parlance, this is called “streamlining”. In my parlance, this is called “bullshit”. Specifically, AT&T is removing the cheaper $10 a month option which gives users 1,000 text messages. All that remains is the $20 a month unlimited option. Or you can have no pre-set plan and pay $0.20 for each SMS and $0.30 for each MMS. Sure, that’s “streamlining” in that they’re making three options now two. But what’s important is the motives behind the move. Here’s what’s really going on. Naturally, AT&T will never admit to this, but they’re scared shitless of the full-on assault currently underway in the SMS space. You see, these short messages have long amounted to a revenue stream of billions of dollars for carriers, with profit margins approaching 100 percent for each message. In other words, it has long been a total rip-off. And the carriers have been milking it dry for years. But now startups like GroupMe, which allows users to bypass SMS and use data to send short messages, are gaining popularity. Meanwhile, massive players like Google and Facebook have introduced . And with the launch of iOS 5 this fall, Apple is about to into each and every iPhone out there in the form of iMessage. AT&T’s “streamlining” is a purely defensive maneuver. The truth is that neither GroupMe or Facebook Messenger are going kill SMS overnight. Nor is iMessage. But what these services are going to do is slowly but surely make people realize they don’t need to send nearly as many text messages anymore. I look at my own usage. In the past six months, I’ve sent actual SMS message. Seven. All the rest of my short messages have been through either Beluga, GroupMe, the Google Voice app, or now Facebook Messenger. Each of these messages have been sent or received for free (they’re a just use a tiny amount of data you’re already paying for if your on 3G). This is the future. So with the services now out there making people less reliant on SMS, what was going to happen? People were going to want to downgrade their plans. Who wants to pay $20 a month when you’re using only a handful of messages? Why not pay $10? Well, now you can’t. You can either pay $20 for unlimited, or have no plan and pay AT&T’s ridiculous per-message rate. AT&T knows that most people are not going to chose the latter. Again, we’re not to the point yet where people will be fully comfortable letting go of SMS. Hell, all of the services I mentioned use it as a backup in one way or another. Think of it this way: unlimited SMS is heroin. The $10 a month limited plan is methadone which you could have used to wean yourself off. AT&T has just cut off the methadone supply. They’re daring you to go cold turkey. Most won’t be able to. it’s purely coincidental that this move is happening right now, just weeks before the launch of iOS 5 with iMessage. Sure, AT&T just “streamlined” their SMS plans , but why not do it again? I’m also sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Apple unveiled iMessage . AT&T just felt like customers needed this change right now. Nope, I don’t miss you one bit, AT&T. : Not even 2 minutes after I publish, does my old foil write in to note that this change is only for new customers. In other words, this will only affect millions of new users who sign up for AT&T to get the iPhone 5 (or any new Android phone, etc) shortly. No biggie. In other words part 2: “go ahead, don’t sign up for an SMS plan, we dare you”. |
Just Give ‘Em Away. Buy A Samsung HDTV From Best Buy, Get A Samsung Android Tablet | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | Best Buy and Samsung are going to move a few more Galaxy Tabs next week. Starting on Sunday, if you buy a top-tier Samsung 3D HDTV for $1500 or $2000, you’ll also go home with a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. So, in other words, if you buy an over-hyped HDTV, Best Buy is going to unload a GalTab on you. Sounds great for the buyer, but the one-week promotion speaks volumes about the current state of the Android tablet market. The move is smart, though. Consumers aren’t latching onto Android tablets partly because they don’t know about them. Outside our silly little word, the iPad is the only tablet most consumers have ever heard about. This bundle will at least get the tablet into the hands of a slightly different demographic. Buyers have the choice of either a 46-inch or 55-inch Samsung 3D HDTV. Both feature LED backlighting, 240Hz motion, and, of course, 3D technology. They’re rather pricey options, and a good deal more than competing TV sets from LG or Panasonic — but you get with the Sammies. This signals that Best Buy, and maybe the manufacturers, are starting to realize that non-iPad tablets aren’t an easy sale. This comes after Best Buy redesigned its computer department to better feature and display Android tablets. They now have the same placement as notebooks, but that might not be enough to cycle through inventory quick enough. The retailer reportedly has a massive back-stock of unsold HP TouchPad tablets after only selling 25,000 of their 270,000. The promotion starts this Sunday, August 21 and runs through August 27. |
Foursquare Now Lets You Check In To Official Events, But You Still Can’t Create An Official Event Yourself | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | Foursquare has announced today that people , which is weird because people have actually (unofficially) been checking into events for a long time. I mean just look at NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s check in to something called . Conceptually the “hack” is easy enough for a politician to do — Just creating an event masquerading as a venue. In fact, I am checked into an unofficial event right now. So what gives Foursquare, we’ve been checking into events for a while? Well basically what was announced today is more like Foursquare partner events; Foursquare has hooked up with for sports events, for movie tickets and for concerts to populate its database with official events. These partner events will offer users more check-in functionality like the ability to drill down into individual movies at a movie theatre and even the inclusion of realtime data like sports scores. Foursquare says that it plans on offering hundreds of thousands of “official” events at more than 50,000 venues in the next couple of months. While right now event creation is only limited to those three partners, I’m hearing that in the longer term this will be extended to any venue owner. Foursquare PR representative Erin Gleason tells me, “We’re thinking about venues and users creating events, but we want to make sure we do it right so this functionality isn’t currently available.” In the meantime, you can keep ghetto checking in to events by searching for your event in Nearby Places, and adding it as a place when it inevitably doesn’t show up. |
My Virtual Boyfriend Is Awkward, Funny, And STD-Free | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | Dating sucks. Nine out of ten times, your suitor is a jerk. The other ten percent of the time, they pretend not to be a jerk only to show their true jerk-like colors a few weeks later. This is the world we live in, and there’s really nothing we can do about it. Oh wait… That’s right. There’s an app for that. Straight ladies and gay gentlemen: Wet Productions proudly introduces the My Virtual Boyfriend app. Yep, you can now find love through a simple App Store download, which is equally weird and hilarious. There won’t be any fun sexy time like there would be with a physical boyfriend, but at least you know you’ll be 100 percent STD-free. The app is described as a “game” by the developer, where you work to get the virtual boyfriend to fall in love with you by relating to his personality. There are over 100 guys to choose from, all of which are based on various male stereotypes like the alpha male, the geek, the urban male (not sure what that implies?), the metrosexual, and the nice guy. From there you can customize his hair, clothing, face and even change his name. Then the game begins. Your virtual boyfriend starts things up by saying something awesomely cheesy like “There must be a light switch on my forehead because every time I see you, I’m turned on,” or “They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but obviously they haven’t seen my sword.” Saucy. You are then given a number of different reactions to give him, ranging from smiley-face-thumbs-up to angry-face-thumbs-down to confused and disgusted faces. You also have the option to choose dates and activities, or perform actions like giving him a compliment or holding hands. If you select the interact option, you’ll be able to perform certain gestures through touch like poking him in the belly, caressing his cheek, or my personal favorite, a nice slap across the face. The device’s built-in accelerometer detects when you are holding it at an awkward angle, and makes your new BF stumble all over the place like there’s an earthquake in his little virtual world. But don’t think that just because your boyfriend’s virtual that he’s not an ass. Depending on what criteria you give at the beginning of the game, your virtual boyfriend could be a total tool (check out the screen grab to the right). Luckily, you can swap him out for a better one with a few taps. If only you could do that in the real world. The app is available for $.99 on the and works with the , iPod, and . There is also a free Lite version of My Virtual Boyfriend if you’d like to get a feel for the boy toys before paying up. Check out the video after the break. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LV3fKjGCzk&w=640&h=510] |
SocMetrics Questions Google+’s Mainstream Reach | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 8 | 18 | A few days ago, traffic analysis firm Experian Hitwise of a study of over 10 million online users, and concluded from its findings that Google’s new social network, Google+, was headed into mainstream territory. While not entirely disputing that data, social media monitoring firm , comes to a slightly different conclusion today by examining one particular vertical: . , the group containing the “moms” influencers is a key segment for Google+ to focus on growing, especially considering that one of the social network’s key differentiators is the ability to post privately or semi-privately via its user-created “Circles” (friend lists). But the moms group is “substantially less engaged” on Google+ than others, SocMetrics found. Unlike Hitwise, SocMetrics doesn’t look at visitors to websites – it analyzes social media mentions. This includes mentions on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube as well as Digg, Reddit and Disqus. In this case, the firm tracked conversations (1 million per day) from July 20th to August 10th, and further broke that down by vertical (industry or group). Generally, there were a few thousand conversations per day about Google+ or Facebook. In the chart below, SocMetrics shows that it’s primarily industry types (e.g. tech, marketing, security, developers, etc.) who are talking about Google+. Other more mainstream verticals, like sports, celebrity and fashion, are under-represented on Google+ when using this method for analysis. In fact, out of the top 25 segments talking about Google+, the network has only one which could be considered “mainstream” – the moms. Still, this group is far more active on both Facebook and Twitter than on Google+, which sees 30% to 50% less engagement based on these conversations. There are a couple of ways you can interpret this data – either you believe it clearly shows Google+’s struggle to cross over into mainstream groups, or you may think the fact moms make the list of engaged verticals shows promise for the social networking site. As far as SocMetrics is concerned, the firm feels its data shows fairly similar curves to Hitwise’s earlier findings. There, Hitwise looked at selected segments called “colleges and cafes,” “kids and cabernet,” “status seeking singles,” and “full pockets empty nests.” (Yes, those are apparently segments.) Regardless of those oddly named groupings, Hitwise’s data shows a general flattening trend in terms of growth (see below). SocMetrics says none of this means that Google+ won’t eventually reach the mainstream, but right now it’s not on track to do so. Google needs to move quickly to capitalize on the window of opportunity it has with mainstream groups such as moms, the firm concludes, before their attention wanes even further. Considering , however, it looks like the company is indeed aware of its challenges with Google+ and is rapidly moving to address them. |
Disney Inks Deal with Greenbox, Chinese eCommerce Is Taking Off | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 8 | 27 | A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can’t innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way. These people will hate this post because it’s about a company called that flies in the face of those preconceived notions. Greenbox makes high-end, super-styled kids clothes in and for the Chinese market. It caught the eye of Disney, which reached out to the company to ask if it wanted to manufacture some of their lines. “No thanks,” the company replied. “We’re not interested in just being an OEM.” Wait, isn’t this China we’re talking about? It’s a country of OEMs. The mouse house came back with a sweeter offer that’s being announced at a ceremony in China tonight: It has licensed the rights for the princess collection, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse and Winnie the Pooh to Greenbox. The company will design a high-end online collection to be sold online in China, as part of a broad plan to help build hype for the upcoming themepark in Shanghai. Greenbox was founded more than ten years ago by a designer named Fangfang Wu who started to make clothes for her kids because she was so unhappy with the cheap, boring ones being sold in the country at the time. She obsessed over fabrics, fashion and design and a hobby quickly turned into a business, as she opened a chain of stores, and later closed those stores to sell on Taobao for better margins. She was one of the top grossing sellers on Taobao as her designs struck a chord as with other young, working women in China who wanted to flaunt their increasingly hip and unique tastes. (I mean, look at that outfit above. It’s like a little Chinese Natalie Wood playing Red Riding Hood. How is that not adorable?) In 2010, DCM’s China office sought her out, investing just over $10 million to help scale the business. Today Greenbox is bringing in about $50 million in annual revenues on decent margins. She charges between $30-$40 for items— not absurd, but certainly on the higher end for kids’ clothes. “It’s a classic case for venture capital: High gross margins, but takes money to build it to scale,” says of DCM. Note I didn’t describe Greenbox as the fill-in-the-blank of China. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to come up with an ecommerce model she’s ripping off from the US. Kids clothes hasn’t been a natural vertical for etailers here, save being an offshoot of a site like Amazon. The reason Greenbox has worked so well for China is cultural. Because there are so many only children, there are at least six people wanting to lavish them with cute things: The parents, and two sets of grandparents. This was the same insight Tencent tapped into to monetize its virtual goods early on. So, Greenbox: Not a copy cat, and not the invisible cheap assembly partner for the West either. Welcome to the next stage of Chinese entrepreneurship. Greenbox is part of a crop of booming ecommerce companies in China. For years, the market has been held back due to the typical challenges of shipping, infrastructure and payment platforms. Jack Ma, of Alibaba, has long said ecommerce would be bigger in China than here, and that’s not just because there are more people. In the US, he calls ecommerce “dessert,” but in China there are so many people underserved by brick-and-mortar retail that ecommerce will be the “main course.” DCM and other firms have been aggressive backing many new ecommerce players, and they aren’t as simple as just being the Amazon of China. (Although, to be fair, DCM backed too.) Many of these companies, like Greenbox, show a sophistication in appealing to what the Chinese market wants, not simply what’s worked elsewhere. A surprising vertical Lin seized upon that has never proved lucrative in the US is wine. As incomes soar, many Chinese are developing a taste for Western wine, but have trouble finding interesting vintages and even navigating the language barriers, he says. His bet, , isn’t just an ecommerce play, it’s a content and media play. He was delighted the PR contact on the call brought up another hot DCM ecommerce company: , which makes sexy lingerie. I could hear him squirming as he tried to explain– delicately– why Victoria’s Secret failed miserably in China, while more recently La Miu has succeeded. Victoria’s Secret tried to market to women in their 30s who wanted to be comfortable not sexy. It was a bit too early in China’s consumer revolution and husbands weren’t demanding sexier underwear so ever-practical Chinese women just didn’t see the appeal. Victoria’s Secret made another mistake that Lin tries to explain as tactfully as possible: Asian women have… ….than Western women. But La Miu has taken a totally different tact: Marketing underwear designed for the Asian body type to teens. “Born in the late 1990s they are much more a global consumer, they are open-minded and more rebellious,” Lin says. “It’s been a huge success.” As I’ve written before, China’s ability to be the assembly line to the world wasn’t where its role in the global economy ended; it was where it began. An ability to make products cheaper than anywhere else gave way to an ability to make high end products more nimbly than anywhere else. And increasingly, entrepreneurs like Wu are adding design and brand on top of that to create products the broader world will want. The first generation of Chinese entrepreneurs was about picking the low-hanging fruit in a massive country just opening up to capitalism. Now the real fun is starting. (Shameless plug: Join TechCrunch at in October to learn more.) |
Native Or Web? Bizness Apps Adds HTML5 Platform To Let SMBs Create Their Own Apps — For Both | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 27 | , the startup that gives small businesses the tools to quickly and easily build mobile apps, launched in October 2010 and has been growing like gangbusters, reaching over 1,000 applications, 10 languages, and over 20 countries in less than 9 months. to give SMBS the ability to create and seamlessly add contact forms, online surveys, and invitations to their apps. The startup also has an interesting founding story that provides some useful lessons for your entrepreneurs. . Bizness Apps’s value proposition is simple: The startup wants to make mobile apps affordable, customizable, and simple to make for the small business owner. Thus, the startup offers a DIY iPhone, iPad, and Android app platform that enables SMBs to create, edit, and manage mobile apps without any programming experience required. You start with a template, customize them to suit your business, and then Bizness Apps makes them native apps and distributes them on iTunes and the Android Marketplace. The startup is not without competitors in this space, as iSites, SwebApps and Mobile Roadie are targeting a similar endpoint. But Bizness Apps has a real advantage in the fact that it’s product is easy to use, designed well, yet remains affordable. The price for using either their iOS or Android platform is $39, while those that want to create both Android and iOS apps pay $59. This affordability is very appealing to small businesses looking to take advantage of mobile business without having to fork over thousands of dollars to do so. Native apps are great and all, you might say, but what about this supposed HTML5 revolution? Where my web apps at? Nothwithstanding the fact that there’s been a hot debate over whether app developers should go for HTML5 or native apps ( ), Bizness Apps Founder and CEO Andrew Gazdecki said that he thinks the best approach is to make a bet on mobile as a whole — not one or the other. That’s why the startup is today announcing the launch of an HTML5 version of their DIY mobile app platform for small businesses. With this new web functionality, users of the service are now able to create nearly identical mobile experiences for every mobile platform including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and so on — they can go native or HTML5, or both. . As part of the HTML5 platform launch, Bizness Apps has built a QR code-enabled mobile marketing template to provide SMBs with a simple and affordable way to market their mobile apps to their customers. The template image, as seen above, is automatically created (with the ability to print) with one click from inside the HTML5 platform. The idea here, Gazdecki says, is to help direct a business’ customers to the appropriate app based on what type of mobile device they’re using. For example, if a user has an Android phone, they would scan the Android themed QR code to be directed to the business’ Android app. Availability on native and HTML5 is another important piece to the puzzle in building a platform agnostic app development tool for SMBs, and with its affordability, and new mobile marketing capabilities, Bizness Apps has become an exciting platform and looks well-positioned to weather the native vs. web apps debate. The startup is offering a coupon code for 25 free apps for TC readers, The coupon code is “techcrunch”. For more, check out the video below: [vimeo=http://vimeo.com/27776094 width=”640″ height=”380″] |
Hell Hath No Fury Like A SuperPoke Pets Player Scorned | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 27 | This past Thursday, Google decided they had had enough of their Slide experiment. Even though it had since they spent $200 million+ on the social apps startup, they brought the hammer down, (Prizes.org). The casualty list included Slide projects both new and old. And that sucks for apps like Photovine which . But one Slide app termination above all others has people really up in arms: . How do I know? The comment section on TechCrunch. If you look at about the Google killing Slide from Thursday, you’ll find 230+ comments right now. In the Facebook comments era of TechCrunch, this is a . In our pre-Facebook comments era this would probably equate to over 1,000 comments. And nearly every single one of these comments is in response to the killing of SuperPoke! Pets. Google, you just pissed off the wrong group of casual gamers. And yes, nearly every single one of them seems to be a woman. That’s why I have to give the title of best comment (and credit for the headline of this post) to Annette Samford for the : Hell hath no fury like a SPP player scorned. Shame on you Google. You could have sent that 200 mil to the homeless and left the game alone. It’s not like any new developing was going on anyway. What was it costing you? Lame excuse for ditching a VERY popular and loved game by so many. Samford’s comment also encapsulates many of the other comments. These players are pissed off. I’ll paste a selection of the top comments below, because they do deserve a bigger audience — many of them clearly spent a lot of money on this game over the years. And they’re taking to the TechCrunch comment section because has no comment section. : People get to transfer photos but what about the LOYAL superpoke pets players? Not to mention all the $$$ spent on the game to see it go bye bye? GOOGLE + you say? I say hell to the NO! : I started playing SuperPoke Pets because it was different from other games. It’s more social than any of the other games I’d played, and appealed more to to my creative side that the shoot-em-up or compete with other players type of games. Playing SPP is relaxing and fulfilling, without the time-crunch aspects of games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. (Really, Mafia Wars? We don’t have enough violence already?) I think it’s a huge mistake to eliminate this unique method of social and creative interaction. Please think very hard before pulling the plug, and reconsider what you could do with this game given the appropriate development and support. : I too play Superpoke Pets and if you are taking it are you going to reimburse those of us who have spent money buying items for the game? This is a very sad day if you take our game. We love it. : Class action lawsuit requesting reimbursement for $$$ spent. Even after the slide team knew they were getting shut down, the promoted more sales. That seems a bit shady if not totally unethical. Could it be considered illegal? Any law student players out there want to bring this question to your professors? : I am very sad to see Superpoke! Pets go too! It’s the only game I have spent 2 years playing. I made lots of friends and loved how creative people could be with the game… never known another game that allows so much creativity. : this is the most hateful thing you could have done. millions of us on on this game. most people have disabilities and this is what they have. we have developed friendships. alot of people have spent tons on money on here. are you going to give them that back? but most of all you are taking away something that we have poured our heart and souls in. I have been on this game for over 3 years. I have some truly awesome people that I look forward to speaking to every day. I will drop all my google emails, change my servers and have over 3000 people on my yahoo account that will be more than happy to help me spread the word that google doesn’t care about the people that put faith in them. does google kick dogs and steal candy from babies too? : To say I am upset is an understatement! We all bought into you VIP for free from now on, after you stopped charging for gold. You knew that we would all spend the $$ to get it! I have invested thousands into this game. I think that I should be able to put that masterpiece I bought into my living room! Sell Slide to someone who might actually want to make some money and run it right, instead of running it into the ground! Google, you have let us all down! Make this right! : WTF! Why did you buy Slide just to shut it down? I only play Superpoke Pets and I am not happy :( : I am so bummed..I must say I knew it was coming..SO my promise to YOU GOOGLE..I will NEVER use or buy a Google product EVER..YOU SUCK! : Hey Google! I expect a check in the mail for all of the gold items that I have in the SuperPoke Pets game. You do realize that people paid REAL MONEY for gold items, don’t you? If you do not make this right with all of the SPP players, I will never pay for anything Google ever again. I will also tell all who will listen what has happened here and how you care so little for the consumer! : IF YOU KILL OFF SUPERPOKE PETS, I WILL NOT EVER USE GOOGLE CHROME, GMAIL……NOT A SINGLE THING THAT YOU OWN…….SUPERPOKE PETS IS A GREAT GAME…..ALLOW US TO DOWNLOAD SUPERPOKE PETS TO OUR COMPUTER, SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO PLAY OUR GAME. WE HAVE SPENT ALOT OF MONEY ON THIS GAME, AND IT IS SO UNFAIR TO TAKE IT AWAY FROM US. : Are you Freakin kidding me! This is BullShit! I’ve spent Alot of MONEY on Superpoke Pets I think YOU should THINK of something else to do so I don’t Loose my GOLD ITEMS! : I’ve heard of suicide missions but this tops them all! If Google really does shut down SuperPoke Pets they might as well close their own doors at the same time. As for Max Levchin leaving to pursue other opportunities, I don’t think anyone here would ever support any endeavor he undertakes. I, like millions of other players invested a lot of money into Slide through the SPP game and I view this no differently than if I had invested money in any other company or any other commodity. I foresee a major class action suite in the works if this all goes down. So much joy turning into so much sadness. :-( : spp players……….. who would join together in a lawsuit to get our money back from the items we have purchased? And, for some levity, : Favorite part of this post? The Farmville moms trolling TC. Your move, Google. A number of players are now threatening class-action lawsuits due to the money issue. We’ll see if they follow through on those threats, but this situation could be a bad one for Google — especially when you consider that they just launched . Here’s a dumb question: why doesn’t Google just move SuperPoke! Pets over to the Google+ Games section? Clearly, it has a rabid fan base. In fact, why not just move all the Slide games over there? |
Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media Saw Nearly $50 Million In Revenue In 2010 | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 27 | We’ve known that mobile ad network Millennial Media in 2010 from 2009 and achieved profitability. But we didn’t know how much the mobile ad network brought in, until now. In the recent Millennial revealed that it saw $47.8 million in 2010 revenue, up over 3,000 percent from 2007 revenue of $1.5 million. And while we don’t know what Millennial’s net income is, we know the company is profitable. Millennial is one of the largest remaining independent ad networks after AdMob by Google and Apple There’s no doubt that many technology companies have eyed Millennial as an acquisition target, but the company has managed to remain independent despite the taking place in the mobile ad space. In addition to Millennial’s independent ad network, the company also operates and manages private mobile ad networks for large media companies and conglomerates that have multiple apps and sites, essentially powering a self-service ad network for these companies. And Millennial has a deal with a “prominent internet media company” (but declines to name the company) that has completely outsourced its mobile advertising to Millennial. For basis of comparison, AdMob reportedly had a $100 million revenue run rate when it was acquired in 2009, which could have put its actual revenue at $40 million (AdMob split its revenues 60/40 with publishers). It’s unclear if Millennial’s $47.8 million in 2010 revenue is post-split. Hopefully we’ll see more details of Millennial’s financials when the company files its S-1 for a public offering in the coming months. CEO and founder Paul Palmieri has of taking the company public, and the timing may be right considering this seems to be the year of the tech company IPO. In May, Bloomberg reported that Millennial about an IPO, which could come in the Fall or in early 2012 and would value the company at a whopping $700 million to $1 billion (AdMob was sold to Google for ). Considering how most companies refuse to reveal exact financials when they are private, it’s always interesting to see revenue numbers pre-IPO. |
Connected | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 27 | “They have Internet in Europe?” my friend in the US joked via Facebook Messenger, as I checked into Foursquare from the Athens airport. Yes Virginia, they do have Internet in Europe, or Greece specifically. In my case I had to buy an expensive worldwide data plan for my iPhone before I left the US, and then watch it like a hawk so I don’t go over my allotted 340 MB of data. $99 to stay connected. Upon arrival to my brother’s house in Athens, I was told that I couldn’t call Greek cellphones from our landline, as they were too expensive. My brother’s advice was to buy a dumbphone for 15 € ($21), and then use a 10 € credit to make calls to cells. Another 25 € ($36) to stay connected. One call to my friend’s cell to confirm our travel plans later and that credit was gone. So until I plunk down another 10 € ($14) to stay connected I’m basically stuck with an iPhone in default airplane mode as my only way of communicating to the outside world. And as I desperately downward swipe my Twitter feed and frantically try to reload Instagrams from the beach, only to meet with the taunting Failed message over and over again, the dumb phone sits unused in my purse. It has a game on it I think. Mark Zuckerberg that he knew that Facebook was successful when his friends told him that they had seen it open in European Internet cafes while traveling. While a lot has changed since then, the gnawing impulse to check Facebook or whatever your social media drug of choice while you’re purportedly trying to escape has only grown stronger. For many of us with , ubiquitous Internet has become a utility, like electricity. Thus it seems odd to visit a household without a wi-fi connection, it’s almost like saying um, “We don’t have lights, and you’re just going to have to make due without them.” But, as anyone who has traveled is aware, not everyone lives in the #firstworld. And thus I have spent a good part of my remote Greek island vacation chasing connectivity, using my iPhone as some sort of Internet divining rod, and meeting obstacles at every turn. CONNECTING. CONNECTING. NOT CONNECTED. A Greek WIND USB data stick? Incompatible with OS X Lion (Really). Something called “Free Internet” that pops up as I drink my morning coffee in the town square? Turns out it’s not so free and not so Internet. Finally yesterday night I saw some guy at a café working on his laptop at a bar and rushed over in hopes that I had come across some wi-fi hotspring. “How do you have Internet?” I asked him in Greek. “I brought my own.” Because of this tenuous connection to the outside world I have missed out on all the details of Steve Jobs resigning as CEO of Apple and have no idea about Hurricane Irene. Someone apparently leaked a Greek Wikileak, and I’m too afraid of going over my data plan to load it. Oh and what’s up with Twitter Recent Images? An iPhone in Greece costs 650 € ($ 936), and a Cosmote unlimited data plan another 50 € ($ 72) a month. The average salary in this time of widespread economic crisis is 1000 € ($ 1441) but still enough people own pricey smartphones that Foursquare is over-populated with obscure Greek venues. My Greek friend also has a similar dumbphone to my newly purchased one, for when she goes over her iPhone data allotment. “So,” you say, “Get offline and enjoy your vacation you dork.” Sure, but nowadays if a trip isn’t posted to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, does it make a sound? Thus I have started to be jealous of anyone with more online connectivity rations than I, mobile or otherwise. Yesterday as one of my traveling companions fingered her phone under the table I whispered, “Instagram or Twitter?” “Neither,” she said, satisfied. “Neither?!” I said incredulously. “Yeah, I’m on Foursquare, trying to figure out what the name of this is so I can check in.” Right. I am typing this from a hotel room with no Internet connection, and plan on walking downstairs to something called “Internet Point Prive” in order to post it to TechCrunch. “Internet Point Prive” actually sounds like you should be getting bottle service or champagne with your Internet. It sure costs enough. Connected. |
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