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ZeroCater Raises $1.5 Million For No-Hassle Office Lunches | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 10 | Apparently TechCrunch HQ isn’t the only office that hates having to deal with coordinating lunch. Today , a startup that looks to help make your office’s lunchtime as painless as possible by handling all of the logistics for you (see our ), is announcing that it has raised $1.5 million. This new round is in addition to earlier investments from Y Combinator and (in fact, both SV Angel and Yuri Milner, who make up StartFund, have made additional investments). Here’s the full list of investors, which includes some big names: Keith Rabois
Paul Buchheit
Vaizra International
Yuri Milner & Felix Shpilman
SV Angel
Start Fund
Stewart Alsop
Justin Kan
Emmett Shear
Othman Laraki
Gabor Cselle
Mark Friedgan
Alexander Goldstein
Starling Ventures ZeroCater’s promise is to remove the hassle of ordering lunch for employees on a regular basis. Companies sign up, tell ZeroCater how many mouths they’re feeding and if anyone has special dietary requests, then lets ZeroCater arrange the rest. The startup works out deals with local restaurants to ensure prompt delivery — and because ZeroCater can guarantee large order sizes, high-end restaurants that wouldn’t typically offer delivery often participate. ZeroCater also does its best to rotate between different restaurants so you don’t get sick of eating the same thing over and over. The service is currently available in the San Francisco Bay Area, and cofounder Arram Sabeti says that the startup plans to use the money to expand into other areas. Next up: New York City. |
Hulu To Start Streaming In The Land of the Rising Sun | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 10 | Premium video streaming site has just that it’s about to make its first international expansion: Japan. Hulu is keeping mum on the details, but it sounds like it will only offer a premium subscription service (the US version of Hulu offers both premium and free content). The company now has an office in Tokyo and is working on preparing for launch “later this year” (again, no more details on that front). From the blog post: We are excited about entering Japan right now for a number of reasons. For one thing, Nihon wa subarashii kuni desu (“Japan is a wonderful country”). Japanese audiences are passionate about premium video content, and the country is a major producer of world-class TV and feature films (Japanese content has played an important part of Hulu’s content lineup in the United States for a long time already). In Japan, we also see an unfulfilled market need with respect to premium feature film and TV content, and very favorable environmental factors to a service like ours, including extensive broadband penetration, smart phone and other internet-connected device ubiquity, and strong consumer interest. We have been able to use what we have learned from Hulu and Hulu Plus, in addition to the insights gleaned from our market research, to design a high value product specifically tailored for Japanese customers. Hulu has established itself in the United States as a prime destination for watching the latest television shows (and, increasingly, movies) featuring content like and . It Hulu Plus in June 2010, which is a premium subscription version of the site that costs $7.99 and offers more content across more devices, including the iPad and Xbox 360. It is also hampered by the frustrating restrictions of content owners, who enjoy making their content available for arbitrary time periods and then removing it. Not that it’s ever burned me. |
null | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 17 | null |
CableKeeps Keep Your Jumbled Mass Of Apple Chargers Nice And Neat | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 10 | I think we can all agree that one of the worst parts about buying a new gadget is the fact that it’s just one more thing we’ll have to charge, one more electrical socket we’ll have to free up, and one more charger to keep up with. But a new project aims to help deal with that. From a startup called Nice, I proudly introduce to you . CableKeeps are little molded pockets made of Santoprene rubber that hold your various Apple chargers in a compact, organized manner. So far, Nice has come up with three different models. “Goldie,” for the iPod and iPhone charger, is able to prop up your iPod or iPhone like a little kickstand suspended on the wall. Depending on where your electrical sockets are, this could be a pretty cheap way to watch a movie while your iPhone/iPod charges. Just a thought. Then we have “Nibbles,” which is designed for the slightly larger iPad USB power adapter. Unfortunately, Nibbles doesn’t have the same kickstand functionality as Goldie, but it’ll still bring a little color to your surge protector. Finally, for our European friends with wacky, tri-pronged electrical sockets, Nice is offering the “Gulp.” What’s cool — and made clear in the video — is that all the CableKeeps are made right here in the U.S. Nice seems really genuine about keeping things environmentally friendly, and we’re all for that, but it won’t make a difference if funding doesn’t pick up. The project is at $6,580 as of this moment, but needs to reach $35,000 before September 8. A pledge of $18 or more will get you one special edition CableKeep of your choosing, while $28+ will get you two different CableKeeps, and $40+ scores you all three models. If you’re outside of the States, Nice asks that you add an extra $10 to your pledge for shipping costs. |
New USB Spec Calls For Up To 100W Of Power, Thinks “Thunderbolt” Is A Cute Name | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 10 | I’m sure many of our readers have come across a situation where they’d have liked USB to carry a bit more power to their devices. Your phone or iPod, charging ever-so-slowly, or perhaps an external drive that only works on “powered” USB ports — or must be plugged into a wall socket. A wall socket, in this day and age! I ask you! Fortunately, the SuperSpeed USB group (or whatever shadowy illuminatus it is that truly controls USB) has decreed that (PDF) will include support for a shocking 100 watts of power. That’s enough to keep ten drives running, or an LCD, or even an entire laptop. And believe it or not, it uses the same cables and ports we’ve already got. This really is rather a large jump from the 5 standard watts or 10 extended watts found in normal USB ports. Even the vaunted (and electrical-sounding) only delivers 10W. With 5Gb/s and 100W of power, the USB spec could be entering a second spring here. The ability to power larger and more sophisticated devices, like printers, monitors, and speakers, could make it even more universal than it already is. It’s a real leg up on the Thunderbolt/Light Peak designs, which, while they can handle the data from ten external drives, likely couldn’t power more than two of them. The cables should be able to handle about 1.5 amps of current. It’s not clear how the power load division will be altered, but it seems reasonable to suppose they’ll be increasing the number of concurrent loads. Now, despite the fact that this new spec would use existing cables, there are potential problems. Not all motherboards and power supplies are prepared for this kind of power transfer, and improperly managed, these high wattages could burn out components, tax the PSU, and cause overheating. Charge-carrying USB cables of poor quality already melt and catch fire. But it’s disingenuous of me to suggest this as a drawback when the power is carefully monitored by the USB controller and it should only use wattages and currents tested and known to be safe with given classes of USB devices. I’m more worried that few devices and computers will have the power overhead to support this, since they likely pick PSUs carefully tailored to the power draw requirements of the system. Fears of outdated hardware bursting into flame aside, I think this is quite exciting. It’s a serious increase and could enable a completely different accessory ecosystem. Don’t expect to charge your devices ten times faster just yet, but after the design is finalized in early 2012 (it’ll be previewed at the Intel Developer Forum in September as well), you could reasonably expect some very interesting USB-powered devices. [via ] |
The PenMoto, Reborn | John Biggs | 2,011 | 8 | 10 | We covered the PenMoto in its creator’s eye and, sadly, it was never completed as the designer, Kelvin Geis, cancelled it on Kickstarter. Well, friends, the PenMoto is back and it’s better than ever. The new project involves the same pen mount product – a magnet holds your Wacom or drawing pen in place so you can use the keyboard and then flip it back into your hand when you’re ready to draw – and $25 gets you one pen ($35 for international orders). However, Kevin has improved many of the features and reduced the manufacturing complexity considerably. Previous backers of the project will get the pen for free when it is manufactured. Why did they cancel the previous project? We took a chance by canceling the previous funding’s momentum, but this is what we improved. -Self-Sizing Rings (no need to measure your finger) -Adaptive couplers for nearly any Pen or Stylus -Simplified Pledges -Stylish, Lighter, and more Comfortable -Four alternatives for Manufacturing So there you have it: the pen holder of the future is still alive and kicking and waiting for your pledge. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w1ApV5S_rY] |
“Android for Girls?” HTC Bliss Coming to Verizon | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 8 | 10 | Verizon is preparing to launch an Android phone targeted towards women, the HTC Bliss. The device comes in a “pretty” seafoam-like green, and will include a dangling charm that lights up when you have a missed call or new message. Oh, and here’s the best part – the phone is also rumored to ship with special women-friendly apps, like a calorie counter and an app for shopping. . In case you can’t tell, I’m not a fan of phones targeted towards women. The fact that the phone exists is not new information. Designs for the device were leaked back in May, when cited sources who claimed the phone would be a midrange device, something of a cross between the HTC Desire S and the Desire Z. Today, we have more information on the possible specs, which indeed confirms this phone is no powerhouse. The sources for these claims are anonymous leaks, however, reported via and . So keep that in mind. The Bliss will reportedly ship with a Qualcomm MSM7x30 processor, likely the MSM7630 (due to Verizon’s CDMA network), running at 800 Mhz. This puts it in line with other HTC phones like the Desire Z and the T-Mobile G2. The Bliss’ GPU will be the Adreno 205 and it will run Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). The only standout feature, if you can even call it that, is HTC Sense 3.5, the newest version. HTC Sense is an overlay that attempts to provide a more attractive and user-friendly interface to Android, and is one HTC’s key selling points, or key drawbacks, depending on your personal opinion. I’ve found Sense to be slow, and typically swap it out for an alternative like LauncherPro or the GO Launcher instead. You may disagree. According to the leaked Verizon roadmap, , the Bliss is due to arrive next month. What bothers me about the idea of a “girl’s” Android phone is that somehow my gender has different needs and expectations than their male counterparts do when it comes to smartphones. Colored devices and cell phone charms are not necessarily “womanly” things – they may appeal to a younger demographic, or to those who concern themselves with appearances, perhaps. But that doesn’t mean women. What I take issue with is the gender-biased marketing tactics Verizon has chosen to engage in since day one one, starting with its Droid campaigns, featuring robots and about “racehorses duct-taped to Scud missiles.” So stereotypically male. Why does Android have to be pitched differently to men and women? Last time I checked, women want the same things men do in their devices: power, performance, great hardware, great software, plus of apps. And not just the dieting ones. |
HP Issues TouchPad Liquidation Order – Get Yours Now For $100 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | Wow. The day after HP announces they’re , and they’ve already issued a liquidation order. Best Buy, Future Shop, The Source, London Drugs, and Staples will be selling the 16GB TouchPad for $100, and the 32GB version for $150 starting tomorrow. Well, in Canada at least. No word on when this will spread to the US, UK, EU, and so on — but somehow I doubt many TouchPads will be selling for full price while this fire sale is going on, so the switch will probably happen right away. Also unclear is the 64GB version’s fate. Buy one recently? Get thee to the refundery. Got a few bucks? Try picking one up. That’s a hell of a price for a decent device — even if it won’t be getting any support, people will be hacking the hell out of it soon. One commenter says they already have Honeycomb up and running. Your best bet is to call your local gadget shop and check for stock and pricing, then run like a bat out of hell to get yours before they’re gone. : They’re pretty much sold out, from what I can see. You might try calling Targets, Best Buys, and Wal-Marts that aren’t near the city if you’re dead set on getting your bargain tablet. [via ] |
Google Taking Street View To The Depths Of The Amazon | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | It’s hard to believe that Google’s Street View has . What’s more amazing, perhaps, given the rate at which they have canvassed the world’s streets and alleyways, that there is anywhere left unmapped. But while their teams have successfully traced the surfaces of most large cities and a number of other interesting areas, I suppose it won’t come as a surprise that the remote reaches of the Amazon have not yet been put under the lens. They aim to change that, however, and have detailed their plans to Street-View-ize a large section of the river. It’s being done in collaboration with the , a nonprofit working in the area. To map the entire length of the Amazon, its tributaries, and distributaries, is the work of years, however, so Google won’t be attempting that just yet (though there are plenty of spots to drop the orange guy if you’re curious). For now, they’re focusing their efforts on a 50km stretch of the Rio Negro starting around Manaus, right about at the center of this image: They’ll also be going down the dirt paths to small villages with the , mapping all the while, and will set up the tripod they use to show business interiors to give a panoramic taste of village life. And as a little parting shot of charity, they’ll be leaving behind some equipment, probably some cameras and laptops, for FAS and the locals to use. The whole thing is sort of a publicity play for sustainability, not that there’s anything wrong with that. No word on when the project will be complete — from what I’ve read (travelogues from the 1800s, but still), these kinds of trips generally take longer than expected — but you can see some more pictures of their work . |
Snapsort Raises $500K To Expand Its Product Recommendation Engine | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | , until today known a popular camera recommendation site, has raised $500K from undisclosed investors to expand its algorithmic product recommendation technology to other verticals, starting with cars at and phones at . Snapsort co-founder compares Snapsort’s technology to Factual and Metaweb, but tells me that its data is much cleaner than the former and richer than the later. Snapsort.com, previously in stealth mode, has over 5 million monthly pageviews, with an average site time of 4 minutes and an average conversion rate of 10% for US visitors according to Reid. It took Reid and the three people on his team a year to build. Snapsort, Carsort and Geekaphone scrape data daily from sources including retailers, manufacturers and aggregate reviews. On a Snapsort site user can discover products based on drill down criteria like price, model and make through a user-friendly interface. “We’re more like the friendly knowledgable geek you trust for all your gadget advice, less like the list of products on the Best Buy website that you can’t freaking differentiate,” Reid explains, referring to Snapsort’s human friendly ambitions. The company plans on being in 20 verticals by the end of the year and has its sights set on dominating product recommendation for electronics, entertainment, travel and parenting. “We want to provide advice on everything,” Reid says. |
Cane 2.0: The Tacit Is Hand-Mounted Sonar For The Vision Impaired | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | Every once in a while you see an invention that seems a long time coming. The , a hand-mounted system that pings surroundings and transmits distance information to the user, is one of those. While the reliable white cane and occasional accommodations for the blind and vision impaired ameliorate the difficulty of navigating the world sans sight, technological advances that are both useful and ready for deployment are few and far between. We’ve seen a lot of research into , and there are often hacked-together projects by people personally concerned with issues like vision or mobility — we’ve seen a , the , and Ken Yankelvitz’s . This project is an amazing example of what one guy can do with a soldering iron, some off-the-shelf parts, and an inventive mind. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/27675622 w=640&h=360] The system uses two that can detect the distance of objects between 2cm and 3m away. Mounted facing off to the right and left, they can be swept across a room and will be able to sense most common obstacles and dangerous objects. They send their signal through an , which governs a pair of servos. These servos each press a loop of foam down on the wrist: the closer the object, the harder they press. The whole thing is powered by a 9V battery and straps onto either hand. Designs like this are the reason we have a patent system. And while tech companies are filing thousands of patents for trivial UI items and software methods, the inventor, Steve Hoefer, has opted instead to give away his invention for free under a Creative Commons license. As is increasingly common with interesting hacked inventions like this, he has , detailed instructions, a circuit diagram, and the source code for the Arduino controller. Hoefer says the system has a learning curve of “seconds,” and I can’t see why that shouldn’t be the case. Nothing is naturally intuitive; everything is learned, even vision and our concepts of space and navigation. Hand-based tactile feedback is something many blind people have grown up with, and the addition of this extra information, while at first foreign, will likely be welcomed as highly beneficial. They have also proven themselves very capable of synthesizing this kind of information into a cohesive mental map — sometimes incredibly so. There are some other haptic vision projects, like the system — but this seems more practical to me. The sweeping of the hand mimics the path of the eye, and unlike a head-mounted system, this one can be used to, say, locate a pen on a table. With such a low cost, it could be easily manufactured and made a common aid item, unlike fascinating but costly and impractical (at the moment) ideas like vision substitution. It’s always heartening to see real inventors inventing real things, and for no other reason than a problem needed solving. [via ] |
YC-Backed Can’t Wait Is A Mobile Social Network For Movie Trailers | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | Anyone who’s spent a late night hour or three browsing movie trailers on will understand the utility of the iPhone app. Co-founders and tell me that the app’s closest competitor is trailers.apple.com itself — and that the only way to track the updates on that site is via its RSS feed. Can’t Wait is a slick mobile movie trailer player built on top of YouTube’s API. It’s hardly the first app that includes movie trailers (see the movie apps like Flixster and Fandango, for example), but the app has a strong focus on interacting with other users and also on reminding you when movies you’re interested in are being released. Cinephiles can download the app to view recent movie trailers, which includes options to sort by Just Added, Popular and Release date. After viewing a trailer, users can then choose to share it with specific friends both inside and outside Can’t Wait or with all users of the app by clicking on Gonna Pass or Can’t Wait. Pressing the Can’t Wait button will also opt you in for notifications as to when the movie will hit theatres, when other similar trailers are posted, or when a friend recommends something. The co-founders plan on incorporating even more social features, like the ability to comment on a friend’s post about a trailer in later versions. Of course, because movie trailers are basically the first point of conversion to theatre ticket sales, you can buy movie tickets from within the app — Can’t Wait monetizes by taking an affiliate fee from Fandango. In addition, people who click Can’t Wait and share a trailer with friends (essentially bringing in new users) have the opportunity to win a free movie ticket. The co-founders are mulling over expanding this into some sort of movie-Groupon inspired feature. Florenzano says that eventually he hopes that Can’t Wait will help people organize their nights out with friends and that they’re planning on building out algorithmic technologies that will help people surface what trailers they’d like to see the most. He’d like to see the Can’t Wait model of consuming content to expand to video games, music and consumer electronics. An Android app is also in the works. “People are bored, they’re sitting at the train station, at the bus stop and they’ve got their phone will them and have got time to kill,” says Florenzano. “They don’t have time to watch a whole movie or do something important, but they do have 1 to 2 minutes to watch a trailer. We’re not curing cancer, but we’re helping people have some fun.”
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Apple Sneaks A Big Change Into iOS 5: Phasing Out Developer Access To The UDID | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | Apple is making a to its mobile operating system with iOS 5, which is for developers ahead of a general release later this year. But there is one big change some developers are just starting to take notice of that Apple isn’t talking about that much. In a recent update to the documentation for iOS 5 (which is only available to registered Apple developers, but a copy was forwarded to me), Apple notes that it will be phasing out access to the unique device identifier, or UDID, on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads. This is a big deal, especially for any mobile ad networks, game networks or any app which relies on the UDID to identify users. Many apps and mobile ad networks, for instance, uses the UDID or a hashed version to keep track of who their users are and what actions they have taken. App publishers are now supposed to create their own unique identifiers to keep track of users going forward, which means they may have to throw all of their historical user data out the window and start from scratch. Here is the language from the Apple Developer documentation: uniqueIdentifier
An alphanumeric string unique to each device based on various hardware details. (read-only) (Deprecated in iOS 5.0. Instead, create a unique identifier specific to your app.) The change may be in response to privacy concerns or as a way to pre-empt them. Mobile ad networks, for instance, use the UDID to target ads. It is not clear whether Apple itself will stop relying on the UDID as a unique identifier for iAds, Game Center or other services. “I guarantee Apple will not stop using UDID,” predicts one mobile industry CEO. If Apple does continue to use UDID for itself but denies it to developers that would be an “extremely lopsided change.” It would give Game Center and iAds yet one more advantage over competing third-party services. If you are an iPhone developer, please weigh in with your comments below. How much of a hassle will this change cause, or is it just a minor annoyance? |
Review: Brite-Strike Rugged Flashlights | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | I was sitting outside a cafe the other day when an older man sat down next to me and attempted to assemble a flashlight he’d bought at Walgreens. It was the chintziest piece of garbage I’ve seen in a long time, and I had to help him put together this thing, which after some tinkering finally emitted a feeble glow. He wanted something to keep in his car just in case. I wouldn’t trust that junk device, however cheap it may have been. Flashlights are something you want to buy once and appreciate forever, which is why I wanted to check out EPLI’s line of waterproofs — is it something I can recommend to friends, perhaps over the traditional Maglite, or just another toy? Fortunately I can say that these little guys are definitely worth recommending. I think I’ll always want to keep a traditional four-cell bulb Maglite around, but an emergency or rainstorm, a Britestrike or something similar is a good bet to make. I checked out two sizes: the and a mid-range , meant for police and so on, attachment to pistols and rifles. Both are bright LED lights, both have three lighting modes (high, low, and strobe), and both are waterproof. The differences between the two are bulk, brightness, finish, and of course price. The EPLI is just over five inches long, a bit thicker than a pen, and produces 160 lumens. The tactical is actually a bit shorter, but much wider, and it covered in a crenelated grip pattern that makes it practically impossible to drop, and also makes it into an effective impact weapon. It produces 210 lumens from two cells. They’re made for single-handed operation, which sounds silly at first, but many flashlights require you to hold them and turn a dial or rotate the crown to switch modes or focus. On the Brite Strikes, it’s done by hitting the button on the end once, twice, or three times. The bright mode is bright, the dim mode is dim, and the strobe mode just gave me blue spots in my eyes for a few minutes. It’s very bright when you’re in its focus and it’s ideal for signaling your location, getting the attention of motorists from afar, or flashing in the eyes of that puma or mugger. Both flashlights are extremely well-built. I tried pretty hard to damage them, but they resisted all my attempts at banging, bending, dropping, and throwing. They’re also waterproof, their openings sealed with rubber o-rings. I’m not sure I’d trust the EPLI in a dive, but I wouldn’t have any problem taking these guys out in a rainstorm, dropping them in puddles, or putting them down on wet ground. The tactical one is naturally the more robust, with a thicker o-ring and only one opening. Both have the eerie white light of LEDs, of course, which isn’t something you can avoid. The EPLI has a colder light and narrower focus, as you see above. The classy look of the EPLI makes it a solid addition to the nicest nightstand, desk, or pen cup. It provides a pretty insane amount of illumination for its size, and it’s not going to break or short circuit if you drop it down the stairs or leave it on the ground while you fix a flat in the dark. To be honest I would feel more comfortable if my friends and family kept one of these around in their glove box or purse. It’s capable, rugged, and I wouldn’t want it flashing in my eyes if I were a mugger. You can find it for under $50 right now, which I think is a good price for a serious device like this. The tactical one can be found for the rather higher sum of around $125. That’s a lot more than a Maglite. But this thing would live through a hurricane and a half, and will probably last forever. It also has a nice little range of accessories. Want to make an investment you won’t regret? This thing will probably pay off its price tag a few years from now. I spend so much time with cheap plastic gadgets that it was nice to get my hands on something that I don’t think I could break if I wanted to. Why don’t they build phones like this?
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Facebook Asks People To Post Questions About Interning At Facebook, On Quora | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | Yes yes I know pivoted into some kind of thing back in March but still this is sort of funny, simply because it’s the most of the Q&A space I’ve seen from Facebook yet. Hey, people interested in interning at Facebook, about it, ON . Granted Quora is a more appropriate place to discuss a nerd topic like this and Facebook Questions (once posited as ) no longer has the “ask a question to all” functionality, but still, people could have just left their questions in the comments. In the meantime, when was the last time you made or voted on a Facebook Poll? According to Facebook, the last time one of my friends answered a Facebook Poll it was “ ” on July 13th. For the record he went with Bobby. |
HTC CEO Sticking With Android Despite Google-Motorola Deal | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | That was Peter Chou’s line from right after the Google-Motorola deal was announced, and it would appear he’s sticking to it. Today, the HTC CEO has announced his intention to stick it out with Google and Android in spite of the multi-billion dollar acquisition. According to the , Chou was careful to reiterate his support for the deal, stating that it would benefit the entire ecosystem because Google would have a stronger patent shield thanks to the acquisition. The end result: a stronger Android for manufacturers to work with. Chou has dispelled the recent rumor that HTC was considering building an OS of their own, stating that the company’s goal is to differentiate their products while “leveraging partnerships” with software partners Google and Microsoft. Chou’s strategy certainly seems to be working so far: HTC is the #1 Android handset manufacturer in the country, with Motorola coming in second. Mr. Chou also mentioned that Google was deeply committed to their relationship with HTC, and with good reason: I don’t need to remind you that HTC was Android Partner Number 1, and worked with Mountain View to bring the first Google Phone to life back in 2008. While it’s believed that the Google/Moto deal could make for rough seas between Google and their other Android device manufacturers, Chou and HTC seem to have faith that Google will live up to their famous “don’t be evil” credo. HTC, in a way, seems almost fearless these days: Chou’s vehement support of Google, , and their acquisition of have a sort of maverick, “we can handle anything” air about them. Even if Motorola does happen to receive preferential treatment (and I have a hard time imagining that they wouldn’t), HTC seems poised to take whatever comes next with a smile and a new phone in hand. |
YC-Funded Tagstand Greases The Wheels Of NFC Development | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | One of the more exciting technologies on the horizon is NFC, short for Near Field Communication. You’ve probably heard quite a bit about the technology already: it’ll let you simply by tapping your phone against special sensors, and it’s already been integrated into the Nexus S — with a slew of NFC-equipped Android devices on the way (iPhone support has been long rumored, but it may not be included in the iPhone 5). Granted, NFC has been “on the horizon” for quite a while now, and it still has a long way to go before it achieves any kind of mainstream adoption. But the potential’s there, and plenty of developers are eager to get a head start on the market. There’s just one problem: small developers and brands looking to get their hands on NFC stickers often have to deal with long waits, particularly when they’re ordering them in small batches. Now a new Y Combinator-funded startup called is hoping to become their new best friend, by offering to ship custom NFC stickers within less than 24 hours (plus however long it takes to ship them). And they’re also making the tags ‘smart’, by offering a bit.ly-like short URL service that’ll let you track when each one is used. Each sticker runs around $1, which seems to be around what other sites are charging for small batches (sidenote: Tagstand is already one of the top Google results for “buy NFC stickers”). If you’re interested, Tagstand also has a special deal running for TC readers: head to , enter the discount code “techcrunch4nfc”, and you can order a free NFC sample pack (you’ll still have to pay for shipping). The short-URL feature is pretty straightforward: when you place your order, Tagstand will associate each sticker with a unique URL. Then, once you receive your stickers, you can log into the site’s dashboard and configure where you’d like each of these short URLs to point to (the upshot to this is that you can change the URL even once the stickers are deployed in the field). The site also provides analytics on how often each of these stickers is used. In the longer term, the Tagstand team says they don’t see themselves as an NFC sticker company, at least not exclusively. Instead, they want to be help make NFC as easy as possible for developers to take advantage of — and that includes building software, too. They’re currently working on developing libraries that will help programmers integrate NFC into their own applications more easily. But for now their current focus is on selling the custom stickers, which has a nice side effect: in the process of distributing these stickers, Tagstand is connecting with a lot of developers and brands interested in NFC, which gives them a sense of how people will be using the technology. Which, in turn, will help them shape their future products. |
Twitter Releases Bootstrap, A Set Of Tools To Build Web Apps Using CSS | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | Twitter has just a new toolkit to build web apps using CSS. It includes base CSS styles for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, alerts, and more. You can access on GitHub Twitter says that Bootstrap was launched as a way to provide a consistent framework for the front end of individual applications. The toolkit was originally developed during Twitter’s first Hackweek, and Twitter has been working on the tools to release to developers. The advantages of using Bootstrap is that it is built with Less (read about Less more ), which Twitter says is a more flexible pre-processor that offers much more power and flexibility than regular CSS. With Less, developers can access features like nested declarations, variables, mixins, operations, and color functions. It also makes Bootstrap easy implement (drop it in your code and go, says Twitter), and extremely simple. The company says that Boostrap has become a popular front-end tookit when developing new apps and sites because of its flexibility. From the post: Twitter has been trying to engage developers more meaningfully of late, a new developer portal. In fact, there are currently over one million registered third-party apps, built by more than 750,000 developers around the world. And a new app is registered every 1.5 seconds. |
Fake Steve Jobs Biography Already Available In China | John Biggs | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | If you can’t wait for the , why not pick up a ? “Translated” by someone apparently named “John Cage” (presumably there are 4.33 pages blank near the middle), the book has sold 4,000 copies at $10 a pop. has a quite a bit of poorly translated info on the book, which has been out since April. No one is claiming that this is the real deal but they’re not going to pull it from the shelves, either, claiming it’s close enough. The book’s title translates roughly to “Steve Jobs Gives 11 Advices To Teenager,” which suggest this might be a clever mash-up of a commencement speech and a 19-page Regardless, you probably won’t be reading this biography over here any time soon, but it’s nice to note aren’t the only unreleased Apple-related products being pirated in China. |
Microsoft: Windows Phone Mango Is Done, Manufacturers Just Need To Release It | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | Well, this is something new. Here in the tech world, we hear about after — but very rarely does a company step out and say: “Hey! We’re ahead of schedule!” Today, Microsoft was that company, and the product was Windows Phone 7 Mango. Peter Wissinger, Microsoft’s director of Mobile Business in the Nordic countries, today released an official statement on Mango’s status:
And for those whose Swedish might be a bit rusty, the translation: The only hang-up: Just because Microsoft finished Mango a bit early doesn’t mean that its OEM partners are ready to rock and roll. Currently, Microsoft’s list of hardware partners includes HTC, LG, Samsung, Dell, Acer, Fujitsu, ZTE Corporation and, of course, Nokia. We already know that Fujitsu has something (probably the Toshiba-Fujitsu IS12T) in the works slated for a , and towards the end of June we got a , the so-called “Sea Ray”. There’s really no telling how long it will take manufacturers to get their WP7 Mango-powered devices out, nor when we might expect non-Mango devices to start seeing updates — but from this point on, the ball is out of Microsoft’s court. |
LinuxCon: All About Clouds | Scott Merrill | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | Almost every single keynote at LinuxCon, and certainly every private conversation I had with folks here, involved “cloud” in some way. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst observed in his keynote, there’s no single definition of “cloud”. There’s no doubt that Amazon has really pioneered the default cloud offering, but there’s a lot of work going on to build better, more robust, and more open cloud solutions. Red Hat has , their Platform as a Service offering, and , their Infrastructure as a Service offering. The long-term vision, according to Whitehurst, is that a company’s developers would begin building something on OpenShift, and not worry about any of the underlying infrastructure. When that product is ready to be deployed internally, it would go on the customer’s CloudForms installation inside the company’s firewall. Basically, developers will select the platform and operations can then own and manage that platform. Canonical is pushing , their “service orchestration” solution. Rather than think about applications, Canonical wants to see folks start thinking about services. Rather than deploy a web server application that talks to a database application to present information and receive input from Internet visitors, instead think of a “blog service” that you can deploy through a series of recipes. According to Canonical’s Allison Randal, Canonical feels that Amazon’s AWS sets a good standard, and the Amazon APIs should be adopted by everyone. This will allow users of cloud services to have some modicum of portability: if my cloud provider jacks up their prices, I should be able to transition smoothly to a different cloud provider — or onto my own private cloud — because the underlying mechanisms for interacting with it (the published APIs) should be the same between providers. When Randal told me this, I was initially skeptical. If your cloud provider jacks up their prices, that’s a business problem. It’s not specific to the cloud, or to the technology sector in general. Is there real value in being able to switch from one cloud provider to another, or to bring a public cloud solution in-house? Then I listened to Marten Mickos’ keynote. Mickos, formerly CEO of MySQL AB, is now at pioneering private cloud solutions. His keynote touched on a couple of very interesting things. First, he succinctly cleared up the confusion around public and private clouds and why you might want to use both. Consider the telephone. The public telephone infrastructure has been around for about a hundred years, and yet almost every company still runs their own internal PBX system. This is a pretty solid analogy with respect to clouds. But the most interesting thing that Mickos brought up was the importance of the principles as applied to cloud solutions. With the old paradigm of Linux distributions, the provided by the are fundamentally essential to the long-term success of the platform, because it specifically allows derivative works. Moving to the cloud, though, we’re looking at images, rather than distributions, and the entire notion of a derivative work becomes fuzzy at best. How are the four freedoms of the GPL applied to cloud situations? Suddenly Randal’s comments make a lot more sense. So, too, does , a result of collaboration between RackSpace and NASA to build a common, open cloud framework. Mickos wrapped up his keynote by reiterating that Linux has gone from a disruptive force to an innovation force. His closing remarks dovetailed very nicely with Whitehurst’s opening remarks: Linux is now the choice for new technology deployments, and is the foundation upon which most future technical advances will be built. Both Whitehurst and Mickos observed that the transition we’re seeing now to the cloud is at least as fundamentally radical as the shift from mainframes to client/server. As innovation continues atop Linux in the cloud, Mickos offered some very profound advice: we must strive to ensure that no one closes that which we have opened. |
null | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 10 | null |
Kickstarter Project Empowers Students, Plays The Mario Theme With Plasma | John Biggs | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | This cool allows you to build a working speaker using plasma energy. It’s a little esoteric, but here’s the deal: this is a little kit that contains everything you need to play music using a plasma arc. If that doesn’t seem like your idea of a good time, you might be reading the wrong post. That said, here’s how it works: for $40 you get the bits that make the arc vibrate and for $80 you get all of the bits, including a power supply and flyback transformer. The kit was designed and built by a group of cool kids in Seattle who, along with volunteers, build wild technological artifacts. This looks to be one of their first Kickstarter projects and they requested $2,000 to build a few kits and support their mission. They’re over their minimum, so the project will get funded and you will be able finally play using a tiny plasma arc. Even if you’re not down with shooting electricity through the air, StudentRND seems like a great organization and they’re clearly having fun with science, which is something I can definitely get behind. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSpu63GE8NQ] |
Turntable.fm, Scott Cook, and Instagram Will Mix It Up At Disrupt SF | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | We like to mix things up onstage at , which is only a month away so get your . One session I am really excited will be on lean startups on the day he will release his book, (you can watch a I recently did with Ries on the topic). The Lean Startup movement is picking up steam, and not just among startups, so we decided to bring two founders who take the approach to heart: Intuit’s and Instagram’s . What could a huge company like Intiut and a tiny startup like Instagram have in common? Come to Disrupt to find out. Speaking of pivots (a lean startup strategy), one of the early stage startups right now is , which truly did pivot from its previous incarnation as Stickybits. Co-founders and will come give us an update on the growth and in the social music site where you can grab the DJ stand and plays tracks to a crowd of bopping avatars. Maybe we can even convince investir Chris Sacca to come spin some tunes onstage (he is , you know). Personally, I find it fitting that Turntable will be representing at Disrupt SF since I working late the weekend before Disrupt NYC. Other speakers will include Elon Musk, Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Mike McCue, Dustn Moskovitz and many others. You can see the . Early bird tickets are only available until August 24th, so for the best prices please be sure to . Disrupt SF is going to be held at the massive , and we have partnered with Oyster.com to provide several hotel options surrounding the area. Go ahead and visit the to make reservations. Be sure to use the code “Disrupt SF” for a 10% discount. Disrupt is also known for its amazing after parties. Each ticket gets you into every after party, with all three parties starting at 9pm and going until midnight. One after party hotspot we will be taking over is , with another after party at If you’d like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact or for more information.
Co-founder, Intuit Scott Cook started his career at Procter & Gamble, where he learned about product development, market research, and marketing. He soon began using the insights he was learning there to look for an idea for a company of his own. That idea came to him one day when his wife was complaining about paying the bills. With personal computers just coming out at the time, Scott thought there might be a market for basic software that would help people pay their bills. He launched Intuit in 1983, which today offers software and online products to help individuals and small companies manage their finances. Scott Cook, a founder of Intuit, has been a director of Intuit since March 1983 and is currently Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board. He served as Intuit’s Chairman of the Board from February 1993 through July 1998. From April 1983 to April 1994, he also served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Intuit. Mr. Cook also serves on the boards of directors of eBay Inc., and The Procter & Gamble Company. Mr. Cook holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Southern California and a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard Business School, where he serves on the dean’s advisory board.
Co-founder, Instagram Kevin Systrom is a co-founder of Instagram, a photo sharing application for the iPhone. He also founded Burbn, an HTML5-based location sharing service. Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering—he got his first taste of the startup world when he was an intern at Odeo that later became Twitter. He spent two years at Google—the first of which was working on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products and the latter where he worked on the Corporate Development team. Kevin has always had a passion for social products that enable people to communicate more easily, and combined with his passion for photography, Instagram is a natural fit.
Co-founder, Turntable.fm Billy Chasen is the Co-founder of Turntable.fm. Before Turntable.fm, Billy Chasen was the Founder and CEO stickybits.com. Prior to stickybits, Chasen was on the founding team of betaworks, where he created chartbeat.com, a real-time analytics service and firef.ly, a chat service. Chasen has a B.S. in computer science from the University of Michigan. His art website is located at billychasen.com and his blog is anerroroccurredwhileprocessingthisdirective.com
Co-founder, Turntable.fm Seth creates and invests in really awesome companies. Most recently he and Billy Chasen created turntable.fm, an addictive social music service. In 1995, Seth founded Sitespecific, which pioneered online advertising solutions for companies like Duracell and Travelocity. It was acquired by CKS Group in 1997. In 1999, Seth joined Fred Wilson as Entrepreneur in Residence at Flatiron Partners where he built a practice in “pervasive computing,” investing in companies Kozmo, Modo and Vindigo. In 2002, Seth created Majestic Research, the first Wall Street research firm to mine primary data for hedge funds to forecast the financial performance of public companies. Majestic Research was acquired in 2010 by Investment Technology Group (NYSE: ITG). In 2005, Seth started Root Markets with renowned Salomon Brothers trader Lew Ranieri and the Chicago Board of Trade to create the first financial exchange for online mortgage leads. Seth started SocialMedia.com in 2007 which makes ads more relevant across the Web with a unique social advertising platform. SocialMedia was acquired in 2011 by LivingSocial. In 2007, Seth created the pre-eminent start-up ghetto Pier 38 in SanFrancisco, which houses Dogpatch and dozens of other startups. In 2010, Seth co-founded Stickybits, which connects digital media to real-world objects via barcodes. Seth has served on the board of the Internet Advertising Bureau, where he co-chaired its Social Media committee and helped architect the first set of best practices in social advertising. Seth was the original investor in Web 2.0 pioneer del.icio.us which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and was one of the first investors in Etherpad which was purchased by Google in 2009. |
Apple Releases iOS 5 Beta 6 To Developers | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | It’s that time again! Right on schedule (with “on schedule” meaning “roughly 2 weeks since the last one”), Apple has just released the sixth Beta build of iOS 5 to developers. You know what that means: developers, get to updating (Remember: OTA updates work now!) Non-developers pretending to be developers, carry on (Just don’t be a jerk and ) And everyone else? Be happy to know that iOS 5 is one big ol’ step closer to going gold and hitting your handset. Now, as for whats new in this build… Though most are just crackin’ into beta 6 right this second, we’re not hearing much in terms of stuff here — it’s mostly bug fixes and itty bitty spots of polish at this point. Which, of course, makes sense: Apple’s presumably nearing the end of the Beta phase here, so it’s less about adding new stuff and more about making sure everything that’s in there works as expected. With that said, we’ll update you if we hear about anything new and noteworthy lurking around in this release. |
Apple’s “Inaccurate Evidence” Debacle, Part 2: Smartphone Edition | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 19 | Apple has again submitted what the blogosphere is calling “inaccurate evidence” in its case against Samsung. A photo found on page 77 of Apple’s complaint to the Hague district court in the Netherlands shows the Samsung Galaxy S next to the iPhone 3G. And guess what! Apple screwed with the dimensions once again. But don’t freak out. This may not be as big of a deal as everyone’s making it out to be. Here’s what’s up: The battle has migrated to the Netherlands, the only EU country as-yet untouched by the brawl. Within Apple’s newly filed complaint (which is only available for inspection at the Hague court, but has been seen by ) the company asks for an EU-wide ban on almost all Galaxy devices, including the Galaxy S, Galaxy S II, Galaxy Tab 7 and Galaxy Tab 10.1. Apple also asks that all remaining inventory be pulled from retailer shelves. This time around, it’s not just about appearances, and that makes all the difference. When Apple first submitted that , the lawsuit was entirely concerned with design, so there’s really no obvious reason to mess with the images. That’s not to say that it was some crazy under-handed move by Apple, but it does make it a bit harder to justify a tampered-with aspect ratio. However, the reports that the German judge inspected the devices hands-on and did not base his decision solely on images provided by Apple. In the Dutch case, Apple’s complaint is far more reaching, and cites patent infringement not only regarding the same (iPad), but other functional European patents concerned with , , and Apple’s swipe-to-unlock. In other words, we’ve moved on to software, which makes things 100 percent more complex. In the image (Webwereld’s rendering of the picture is above), the Samsung Galaxy S is scaled to the same proportions as the iPhone 3G. In reality, the Galaxy S is both longer and wider than the iPhone 3G. Specifically, the Samsung Galaxy S measures in at 122.4mm x 64.2mm, whereas the iPhone 3G sports dimensions of 115.5mm x 62.1mm. But in the image provided by Apple, the Galaxy S has been resized by about 6 percent, making it appear identical in size to the iPhone. Unlike the situation with the GalTab, the aspect ratio has not been measurably tampered with. Since we can’t actually get our hands on the court documents, it’s hard to tell the context of the side-by-side comparison, but webwereld.nl reports that Apple did mention the Galaxy S’s “non-identical elements, such as the slightly larger size” (also on page 77). Chances are if Apple is actually stating on the same page that the Galaxy S is bigger, there is probably a good reason for scaling the photo. Granted, the Galaxy S design is under scrutiny due to its similarity to the iPhone 3G, but there are other facets of the device in question, as well. It’s entirely possible that the image of the Galaxy S was resized so that the judge could investigate something unrelated to design. Then again, this is the only side-by-side comparison photo of the Galaxy S with the iPhone 3G, which makes me wonder why a more realistic comparison wasn’t presented, too. To add to the confusion, Samsung’s lawyers claim that Apple manipulate evidence, since this time Samsung actually got to be a part of the court proceedings. “[Apple has been] manipulating visual evidence, making Samsung’s devices appear more similar to Apple’s,” said Bas Berghuis of Simmons and Simmons law firm. Because we’re going off of translations it’s hard to be sure, but it looks like Mr. Berghuis evidence was not substantial enough to convince the judge. Google translates webwereld.nl’s reporting as follows: “But this claim was by Samsung at the meeting was not substantiated by evidence.” I can’t imagine Mr. Berghuis would make a claim that Apple is tampering with evidence without presenting said false evidence to the court. Therefore, Apple’s imagery in the filing is probably resized for good reason. Plus, if Apple was trying to purposefully deceive the court systems with this false evidence, the company probably would have abandoned that plan as soon as the original GalTab photo was discovered. |
HTC Vigor Spotted In The Wild, Possibly Packing Verizon LTE | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | As far as Verizon devices are concerned, the Droid Bionic probably holds the crown for “Most Anticipated Handset,” but newly leaked shots of the HTC Vigor may steal a bit of that spotlight. Rumored to be the newest addition to Verizon’s LTE line up, the Vigor sports a name that’s downright ancient in comparison: it was first spotted in a . The Vigor made waves earlier this month when an ersatz version was spotted on a , but the real deal sports a less angular body that matches up nicely with HTC and Verizon’s design language. Specifically, with its funky textured back plate and red camera trim, the Vigor could easily pass for another entry in Verizon’s Incredible series. The four capacitive buttons on the Vigor’s face mean it won’t be one of the first handsets to run Ice Cream Sandwich, but its rumored specs will dazzle many a phone geek regardless. Under the hood, the Vigor reportedly has a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal flash storage and Beats by Dre audio. A 4.3 inch HD display graces the front, and if it were on, HTC’s Sense UI would be running the show. Note that the Vigor is largely free of branding at this point, leaving the claims of its LTE compatibility and Beats audio processing in question. The device is likely in the test phases now, which could explain the overall lack of flourish, but here’s hoping the rumors hold true. Without the Galaxy S II on board, this may end up being one of Verizon’s heavy-hitters come the holidays. [via ] |
HP TouchPads Slated For Return To Best Buy? | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | It was widely reported that Best Buy was sitting on over 200,000 TouchPads before HP enacted their drastic price cut, but the fire sale has come and gone, and that would normally be that. Instead, a notice in Best Buy’s Employee Toolkit system shows that their contentious relationship with the TouchPad may not be over just yet. The image, sent to by a Best Buy insider, indicates that Best Buy stores will once again begin to receive TouchPad shipments. Due to the swarms of bargain-hunters last time round, employees are being instructed to stick to a ticket system and take down the information of the interested parties that come their way. While it’s possible the notice has been pushed out just in time to make a big splash on the front cover of the Sunday circular, you shouldn’t hold your breath. Different areas tend to have different shipping schedules, but if this holds true, it’s more likely that the units will begin trickling back into stores during the middle of the week. At this point, it’s still unknown whether the notice only applies to some stores or the whole lot of them, but thanks to a bit of corporate foresight, your nearest store may soon have a new recording in their phone system that could clear up the specifics. It’s a bit of a surprise, to be sure: 16GB TouchPads are selling for , a testament to the fact that people have all but given up on more traditional sales outlets. HP’s own site admits that they are only out of inventory, and that coupled with news of a major retailer suddenly receiving stock gives me pause: how many of these things does HP have left? And more importantly for some, how many are shipping with ? The answers, it would seem, may come later this week. |
Facebook Photos Get Another Size Boost | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | The web’s most popular photo sharing site is getting another update. In a blog this evening, Facebook — which is by far the biggest photo site on the web — has announced that it’s launching a new photo viewer that presents images that are 960 pixels wide, as opposed to the 720 pixels they’ve been since March 2010 (they were 620 pixels before that). The viewer itself is also getting an update that replaces the current black lightbox with an opaque white, which it says puts more of the focus on the photo itself. Facebook also says that photos now load twice as fast, though it doesn’t get into how it’s serving the content so much faster. Facebook’s last major Photos update came out in September 2010, when it the black lightbox-based photo viewer and added support for photos as large as 2048 pixels in width (it doesn’t actually display these in the viewer, but you can download them at this size). That update finally made Facebook a viable way to share high-quality photos (before then, you could only download the low-res versions). This has been a big week for Facebook. On Tuesday it announced a of tweaks largely related to its privacy controls and photo tagging —you’ll soon be able to approve photos they show up on your profile, which users have been requesting for years now. It also drastically the way Facebook Places work, placing less emphasis on check-ins. And earlier today confirmed that it’s its Groupon-like daily deals just four months after launching them, though location-based deals are still around. |
Joint Brings Group Chat To Twitter | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | About a month ago, Tom Anderson (or , if you prefer) , offering a few bits of advice for Twitter. While many of us enjoy a good Twittering now and again, Anderson pointed out that there are a few simple features Twitter might consider if it wants to boost the overall quality of its user experience. The main thrust being that the social experience of Twitter might be improved were the company to add a “discussion” or chat function that would, in Tom’s conception, give the viewer an input box by which to leave a comment and easily discuss tweets without flooding followers’ streams with one part of an on-going conversation. Well, Tom might just be interested in a new startup launching today, called . Ok, well it’s not an exact replica of the Myspace founder’s idea, but it’s attacking the same pain point long discussed by Twitter users: In that the platform is badly in need of a better way to facilitate realtime, private, and longer-form conversations. Of course, there’s some disagreement among users over whether or not Twitter should be the one offering this feature, or whether it should stay simple, just as it is. Joint Founder Ethan Gahng says (and I tend to agree) that Twitter will be best served by staying simple in terms of its UI, and instead allowing third party startups and developers to be the ones to add further social and chat features from the outside. (And Twitter’s actions over the last few years seem to largely be in line with this philosophy.) To work towards this goal, Joint essentially turns any Twitter hashtag into an IRC (Internet Relay Channel)-like chat room, which is integrated with a realtime hashtag stream from Twitter. Check it out below. This combo allows users to participate in a number of different social interactions, including a front-and-center realtime group chat feature, which populates with a live hashtag feed in the right sidebar. Users can then pull the hashtags directly into the group chat, or invite the people who wrote the tweets into the group chat, right from the chat room, or simply hang out and enjoy synchronous chat, watching as the tweet stream populates. Compared to Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and other third party apps that let you track hashtags, being able to watch someone tweet from “outside” and bring them in and chat immediately is a subtle boundary and distinction proffered by Joint that really makes a big difference. If you’re trying to engage in a conversation with someone on Twitter that goes beyond a few “@ replies”, you’re either forced to DM or take the conversation elsewhere. Joint allows users to easily join a group chat, as well as discuss notable or popular hashtags. For instance, of late “#irene” has become a much-used hashtag, as Hurricane Irene is poised to hit the East Coast. Joint could become a very useful resource for people looking to easily congregate and discuss ongoing situations like hurricanes, protests, or events, live, from any location. Another cool aspect of Joint’s platform is that it’s meant to function as an off-the-record conversation medium for Twitter users, meaning that if I’m having a conversation with someone and a third person joins the chat room, they won’t be able to see the ongoing conversation. This, Gahng says, is intended to make Joint group chat more reflective of interaction in the real world. As to Joint’s intended use cases, Gahng says that it’s easy to connect to other people on Twitter, but it’s hard to actually get to know them, so using Joint, you can meet someone on Twitter that you want to play Starcraft with — many of your followers may not want to join in on the fun. Which is why open standards warrior proposed the hashtag in the first place, but of course, not many people regularly follow hashtags in their day-to-day Twitter usage. Joint looks to change this by making it easy to search for different hashtags, discuss, and follow them synchronously in realtime. For an example, . Not to mention the fact that, because tweeting with hashtags means that your tweets get archived and live forever on search engines, etc., many people feel uncomfortable about having public conversations (about more private issues, especially) on Twitter. We’ve all had to delete a tweet or two, and often too late. By giving Twitter users that added benefit of social flexibility, Joint hopes to give itself a leg up on other third party Twitter apps. Lastly, beyond simply being able to follow a hashtag group, Joint also informs a user when there’s a new user in their chat room, offers search descriptions, and gives users the ability to browse the main directory, or even start their own hashtag channel. Joint solves a major pain point experienced often by Twitter users, and from my experience in the chat rooms and poking around on the site, the UI is straightforward, and chat is fast and easy to use. The three-person Joint team has been working on this since January, and the startup is bootstrapped at this point, but if the platform can scale and continue to function in realtime without glitches, this seems like something that can definitely have legs. Joint and its team isn’t affiliated with Twitter in any way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the social network comes knocking at their door at some point down the road. For more, . |
Recording Labels Sue YouTube Downloader Website, Fail To Grasp The Insignificance Of Their Actions | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | The recording industry doesn’t have the most respectable history when it comes to lawsuits. Between for trivial acts of piracy, and asking potentially for in more serious cases, they’ve shown that they’re not only completely disconnected from reality, but totally unheeding of the actual effects of their litigation. So it’s not surprising to see them tilting at yet another windmill. Today’s target is , a site that should be familiar to you, at least in principle. It allows you to download and convert YouTube videos to a format more easily watched offline (FLV files can be tricky). You give it the URL, it churns for a bit, and then you can download the video in MP4 or another format. Clearly this re-containering of free content is a grave threat to the recording industry, and must be stopped at all costs. So 25 of the world’s largest labels have gotten together and sued them. TubeFire’s services are temporarily suspended pending examination of the complaint (in its place is a note apologizing and briefly describing the situation). And to be honest, the complaint is probably valid: technically, TubeFire modifying and redistributing copyrighted material, at least so it appears on the face of it. The site is owned by Japanese media company MusicGate, and the suit was filed in Tokyo District Court. How international content protection laws will play out is beyond the purview of this article, but an international consortium of content providers is likely to make its effect felt regardless of jurisdiction. The funny thing is that, as it so often is with these clowns, they’re not only barking up the wrong tree for a number of reasons, but they don’t seem to understand that they’re in a whole forest of wrong trees. TubeFire is an ace away from being a perfectly legal service. To begin with, it’s plainly providing a useful service that’s only potentially a danger to copyright. Re-encoding videos to enhance portability isn’t criminal. YouTube is a fundamentally online service, and this is a natural extension of it, the way image servers and short URLs have acted for Twitter for so long. Users want to watch these videos, which for all intents and purposes are being given away for free, in places other than YouTube, for a number of perfectly legitimate reasons: bandwidth caps, coverage issues, traveling, and yes, sharing. Next, local copies of the videos in question may already be present on the user’s computer. By simply viewing the video, it’s possible they have duplicated the whole thing in RAM or a temp folder. This writing, rewriting, renaming, and so on must count as modifying copyrighted data, mustn’t it? If not, then TubeFire isn’t much different. The video is already being encoded multiple times, transmitted as packet data, decoded and translated to display data. One more encode in there doesn’t materially affect the product. Furthermore, is it really TubeFire doing this? Just as it is not Bittorrent Inc that pirates movies and music, TubeFire should not be held accountable for the actions of users. Terrorists used Google Maps to plan their strikes. Stalkers use Facebook to find victims. TubeFire is a simple in-out operation that corrects a minor problem with videos that users already have access to. And let us not forget that TubeFire is one of perhaps hundreds of tools used for this purpose. They must not have looked very hard for them. . I have one myself, built into my browser! I’ve buried it in the menu so it doesn’t clutter the screen, but look at how easy it is for me to grab one of many copies of a video: : Mike reminds me that we in fact had our own tool for several years. YouTube sent us a and eventually , but no one shook us down for millions in damages. It was a TOS thing, not a copyright thing. Many of these are easily accessible just by changing the URL slightly or other simple methods. Some sites and tools strip the audio out, another extremely easy process — and one replicable, of course, by loading the YouTube video and closing your eyes. These companies want to have their cake and allow no one to eat it at all. They don’t seem to understand that putting content on a service like YouTube comes at a price. They are making the content publicly available, free to all. They are literally giving away the content — and then they get mad when someone takes it! The labels are seeking what appears to be statutory lost-income damages of $300 per video for an estimated 10,000 videos. That adds up to $3 million — the amount the labels would have earned if TubeFire had licensed each video. Now there are two objections here. Why is it a license and not royalties? If anything, TubeFire “rebroadcasted” the content, more like a relay station than anything, and a standard royalty fee of however many pennies or yen seems like it might be more applicable. I’m dubious on that point, however. It’s also unclear whether TubeFire knew they should have been licensing. The service does not require that information; it takes an identifier code, downloads the associated FLV file, and repackages it. Were the labels paying their artists when a file was watched, downloaded, or only when purchased? And how do they define “download”? If the labels are in fact successful at bankrupting and shutting down TubeFire, I must warn them that the effect will be utterly nil. Any user who wants to download a video from YouTube will do so. There will be no reduction in this practice. The site is easily cloned, as the great number of similar sites shows (I can’t even remember which one is the original, if there is one). And like most of their legal actions, this one will bring down a rain of bad PR; if anything, piracy will increase. Here’s where I would put the hydra metaphor if this article weren’t already over a thousand words long. Why, I wonder, did they not think harder about this and try something more effective and interesting? Maybe for music videos, the YouTube version is only half the song, and then there’s a link to the artist’s site, where there’s a more secure player and various buy and share links. Or release 10-second snippets on YouTube leading up the actual release elsewhere. Or just accept that when you let the cat out of the bag, you’re unlikely to get it back in. Piracy is when people steal things. Piracy is not people taking the content you gave them and watching it somewhere else. And TubeFire is nothing but a simple shortcut for actions users would be able to carry out anyway. Unfortunately, this distinction requires a judge capable of comprehending tech issues like this, and those judges are in short supply these days. I know the music and movie associations are famously impervious to reason, but this is beyond stupid. [via ] |
Life Is Crime: If You Try To Shakedown My Virtual TechCrunch Office, I Will Virtually Beat You Down | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | There’s a simple fundamental reason why Grand Theft Auto exploded into a phenomenon. Everyone has criminal tendencies sometimes. And virtually indulging them is a hell of a lot better then actually indulging them and dealing with the moral consequences — or the physical consequences. Like prison. But what if you could make the Grand Theft Auto concept even more immersive by tying it to the real world? That’s what Life Is Crime is all about. The new mobile game by — a startup founded by Mike Ouye, Pete Hawley, and John Harris, former executives at Playdom, EA and SCEE — allows you to put a life of crime onto your phone. It’s a location-based game for Android devices that’s likely to be highly addictive. Think of it as Foursquare meets Grand Theft Auto meet Spymaster ( ) meets Gowalla — well, the old Gowalla, before they recently stated they were . The point is to go around your city and battle others to control properties. The point isn’t to “check-in”, it’s to attack other players with everything you’ve got in order to take over a city. “The social utility guys have taught people how to check-in, but it’s not a real deep gaming experience,” Ouye says. “We’re going after location gaming. It’s about discovery of new places while playing a game,” he continues. Life Is Crime uses real maps that are custom-tailored by the Red Robot Labs team to include virtual representations of key landmarks in a city. Right now, Seattle (where Red Robot Labs is unveiling the game at PAX today) is built out. Soon, San Francisco and other cities across the U.S. will be too. These maps incentivize people to fight over the Golden Gate Bridge, for example. But any location is fair game. The team added the TechCrunch office, for example. The fighting nature of the game is pretty straightforward. You find someone you want to fight and it becomes a battle backed by your weapons and stats. If you have a higher reputation score than your opponent, you’re likely to take them down in a fight. But maybe they have a better weapon than you to even that out a bit. At first, the game will mainly be a single-player experience. But down the line, the Red Robot guys hope people form virtual gangs to battle other gangs for location supremacy. One idea the team has is to have Android vs. iPhone teams when the iPhone version launches later this fall. Maybe Jason and I will play it on OMG/JK. At one point, the Red Robot team got about 200 Googlers playing it at the Googleplex, we’re told. Eventually, as gangs form within the game, there will be different levels individual users can rise to within the gang. Another element of the game is to pick up and drop off virtual goods with other users — both sides are rewarded in the game for this action. There are around 200 items within the game right now, and a lot of customizations for users. More broadly, Life Is Crime is just step one of the location-based gaming platform that Red Robot Labs hopes to build. Their intention is to have three games on the platform this year — two built by them, and one by a third-party. “Location games are wide open right now,” Ouye says. “And we’re going after it, because they’re really sticky,” he continues. “We’re competing for the 30 seconds or 1 minute when you’re in line waiting. Do you want to commit a virtual crime in than span, or do you want to check-in?” You hear that Foursquare? Man up. Time to fight. You can find Life Is Crime in the Android Market . [slideshow] |
Facebook Kills Daily Deals, But Keeps Check-In Deals | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | After announcing they were killing off their nascent Deals product this afternoon, Facebook caused . You see, with the decision to , everyone wondered what it meant for the location-based deals they launched alongside it? Those would remain alive, Facebook said at the time. But does today’s execution change anything? No, says Facebook. Daily Deals are separate from Check-in Deals. The Check-in Deals will work a bit different with the end of Places, but the company will continue to support and enhance that product. Daily Deals are dead — and my email account thanks them for that. Facebook’s statement on the matter: After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks. We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We remain committed to building products to help local businesses connect with people, like Ads, Pages, Sponsored Stories, and Check-in Deals. We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses. In more violent terms that may be easier to understand: they’re killing off their Groupon-killer, but keeping half of their Foursquare-killer while killing off the other half of their Foursquare-killer. Below, a reminder of what the still-alive Check-in Deals will look like on the Facebook iPhone app: |
Keen On… Kyle Dixon: No, Cord-Cutting is an Illusion (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | Much has been made of supposed in the number of cable TV subscribers. But not everyone agrees that mass cord-cutting is reshaping the industry. Indeed, according to Time Warner’s VP of Public Policy, we are seeing the “opposite” of cord-cutting with Time Warner seeing no “significant decrease” for its paid content. I interviewed Dixon earlier this week at the where he spoke on a about the economic implications of online video. What Dixon stressed to me is that, for all the online videos of what he described as “kittens flushing toilets”, consumers still really want high-quality news and entertainment content from networks like HBO. And thus, while the Internet is obviously changing our viewing habits, it is yet to revolutionize the television industry. So is Dixon right – is cord-cutting an illusion? |
Video: “Eyeborg” Replaces Eye With Functioning Wireless Video Camera | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | You might remember Rob Spence, known online as the Eyeborg for his project to create a working bionic eye. , and a while back, but the project has advanced to the point where even a seasoned tech blogger is left speechless with amazement. Spence has worked with a team of engineers to adapt an endoscope into a working in-socket video camera. It’s turned on by waving a magnet near it, at which point it will begin transmitting a wireless video signal to a handheld LCD viewer. Absolutely incredible. Watch the video from below, but be warned that it is slightly graphic. If you can’t handle someone installing and removing an artificial eye, consider this your warning. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTlFgtjLLCE&wmode=transparent w=640] Just astonishing that this is even possible. But really, this is more of a general achievement in miniaturization, not bionics. with wireless transmitters are now commonplace; the enclosure and ergonomics of the device would be the hard part of this build. What’s yet to be accomplished with an artificial eye is hooking it up effectively to the visual cortex, and that is still years away from being practical — at least, for producing any kind of detail. Existing cortical microelectrode arrays just don’t have the density required, and as a result produce something only loosely definable as an image. The timing of this new info is part of a media push for the new game ( ), in which cybernetics and prosthetics figure prominently — which doesn’t diminish the wonder of the thing, in my opinion. They also produced and research in that field that’s worth a watch as well. It’s a very exciting field and the best bit is that they’re creating things that truly improve people’s lives. A prosthetic eye is a long way off, but it’s people with passion and dedication, like Spence and his team, who drive innovation, regardless of how far off the “final” product might be. More information can be found at the . |
Apple Quietly Kills 99¢ TV Show Rentals | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | Bad news for anyone who was looking to rent the latest episode of Top Gear from iTunes, as Apple has quickly and quietly removed their 99¢ television rental option today. The functionality has disappeared from both the interface and the iTunes store proper, signalling a drastic shift in Apple’s pricing policy. Individual episodes of a series can still be bought as usual, and movie rentals still cost the same going rates, so not every iTunes customer will be weeping over the loss. has also found that support documents pertaining to iTunes episode rentals were similarly pulled, although cached versions for those who don’t mind a little digging. In a perfect world, this would be a not-so-subtle signal that Apple’s looking at different ways to handle television rentals. Apple’s big push into cross-device music and app sharing with iCloud could carry over, and rentals could reappear in a new form (and maybe a new price point) but with the ability to be pulled onto any iDevice for the same 48 hour period. Alas, it’s also completely within reason that factors like mounting studio strife forced Apple to axe the rental service. Major studios have scoffed at the low price tag for iTunes episode rentals, with players like NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker stating that such renting episode for 99¢ “devalues” their content. Rentals, to be fair, weren’t terribly well-priced for people who have cable television, but here’s hoping they live on in a new shape. |
Video: This Isn’t The iPhone 5… But I Kind Of Wish It Was | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | When it comes to massive news, the past two weeks have been absolutely . ? ? ?! What better way to cleanse the palette than a quick tromp into a conceptual rabbit hole? 3D animation shop has released a concept video showing what they imagine as the iPhone of the future, and… well.. I’m ready to pre-order. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsBwnv_dAg&w=640&h=390] Now, just how much of this is actually feasible with tech? None of it, really — but a good chunk of it is within the realm of plausibility if we consider said tech’s foreseeable evolution. That design looks far thinner than the 8mm barrier that no one has really managed to crack yet (unless we’re counting those which tuck the thick bits into one lumped region, taper the rest, and then base measurements on the thinnest part of the profile — which is kind of cheating.) With that said, the thickest bits of most modern smartphones tend to be the radios and the camera sensors, and these are getting slimmer and slimmer every few months. Just two weeks ago, for example, OmniVision announced an 8-megapixel camera module that comes in at a build height of just 4.4mm.. Projection keyboards have been done before (IBM patented them in 1992!), but never quite like this. Though they never really seemed to take off, the few projection keyboards that do exist are generally dedicated Bluetooth/USB accessories, as opposed to being integrated into the handset itself. Even as rather clunky, separate components, the projection was one color, red laser-based stuff — nothing like the high-resolution, beautifully scaling board you see here. But these days, we’ve got itty-bitty pico projectors, and folks like Microsoft/PrimeSense dumping millions into IR-based motion tracking. Let those technologies continue to evolve, and we’re probably but a few years from something like the concept keyboard shown here. As for projecting video into thin air, without any sort of screen to reflect the light… that’s something that’ll probably be stuck in concept videos and the Star Wars Universe until further notice. Damn you, physics! It’s probably for the better, really: while interacting with a floating screen seems futuristic and fun, the absence of sort of tactility would be a rather miserable user experience. |
Prediction: Facebook Will Enter the Search Market Next Year | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | Next year, search advertising will be a in the U.S. alone, growing by 14 percent, according to eMarketer. And, if Facebook can capture half the share of that market that Google has today, it could easily add an extra $25 billion or even far more to its value. For most any CEO who could have even a modest chance of succeeding at it, that payoff would be reason enough to take a serious look at entering the search category. And yet, while I’m sure he wouldn’t scoff at the extra revenues, profits, or valuation, I suspect that Mark Zuckerberg finds something else far more motivating than just increasing the financial value of his company. And that’s what will propel him next year to make a completely disruptive entry into the search category. So if it’s not for the financial value, then why am I so certain that Mark Z. will make a play for Google’s home turf? It’s because it’s so irresistibly good for his users. And that’s the most important principle that seems to guide his product development. With that in mind, here are the five specific reasons why Facebook should enter search next year: 1) Consumers make Facebook their home base. Half log in every day; and users come to Facebook 70 percent more times per day than even to Google. They stay twice as long as even users of Yahoo’s vast network of email, content, and more. Facebook has become the . But right now, its “start button” is limited to what other people put in your newsfeed. Part of being home base is being a launching pad to go anywhere you want. So Zuckerberg will need to give users a great connection to the rest of the Web – whatever their intent. 2) Facebook has a search feature today (powered by Bing); and a few people already use it for Web-wide search, even though it isn’t very good. It needs significant upgrading, and Zuckerberg knows it. Having a feature this important be this incomplete creates an unacceptable user experience. It must be fixed. 3) Facebook has an that it can use to deliver better search results than anyone on the planet. Facebook can see everything that Google can see in terms of pages and links, but with a whole extra dimension of human connection that is impenetrable to Google. Facebook knows what your friends like, and what people like you like. And it between real interest and spam. Translating that knowledge into great results will improve online life for his users. 4) More than anything, Zuckerberg and his company’s DNA are all about providing services to connect users to each other and, increasingly, to the world at large. Serendipity and sharing aren’t enough: sometimes people know what they want to find. Facebook must have a search feature to fully enable connection. 5) Search will not only help users; its users will help Facebook. Specifically, it will provide Facebook with even more data about what people want so Facebook can further personalize itself for everyone. Go ahead and cue the creepy privacy music, but remember that so far most users have been happy to make a privacy tradeoff to get valuable personalized service. With Facebook Connect, Open Graph, and Like buttons, Facebook has already shown its vision to fully connect to the rest of the Web. The next step is to help people better access it. Facebook began as a social application, but it’s now in the process of becoming a Social Operating System for the Web at large. Offering world-class search is the next step in its evolution as that “Social OS.” The Web is now around connected people, not documents – and Facebook is the OS that links those people together. Once fully connected, can you imagine how Zuckerberg must think about a Web all wired-in through Facebook’s central hub? He’d know the time spent on every page; the usefulness of every link; the patterns of every user. He’d have a real-time system that provides feedback on every recommendation. You know what’s cooler than a billion connections on the Web? How about a quadrillion! The value of that data will be immense in making recommendations to users, serving advertisers, refining search itself, and enabling next-generation social applications. It will give Facebook a competitive advantage over every other Internet company in building a map of where the gold is buried – in the form of the content each individual user wants – among the trillions of pages on the Web. But more importantly, it will allow Zuckerberg to serve his users. The idea of a socially-powered search is not brand new for Facebook. have both incorporated features that bring your friends’ Facebook content into the search results. And while that is one modest way to improve the search, its impact pales in comparison to the of what Facebook can do to help you by fully exploiting its social data set: It can individualize search results just for you, by using not only data about you and your friends, but by using the full dataset of people you haven’t even met yet. Let’s look at it competitively. Google and Bing have, with limited exceptions, held themselves to the standard that the results should be the same for everyone because they work in an anonymous environment. A friend from Microsoft tells me that Bing has a rule that, with the exception of bucket tests, the top ranked result must be the same for everyone. This rule, he says, was copied from Google – where it fits well with Google’s increasing positioning of itself as the great defender of identity control, compared to Facebook’s ethos where everything is public. But that differentiation hands Facebook an incredible opportunity: in the Facebook environment, it’s not only accepted but expected that everything you do is customized for you alone. Can you imagine the power of combining Amazon-like personalization with Facebook’s deep dataset to offer better results? That’s why beyond just improving a search algorithm, Facebook’s greater opportunity is in redefining the category. The last decade of Web use has been defined by Google’s clean white splash page with a single query field, and the 10 blue links which follow. But just as that approach from Google displaced the prior generation’s directory pages, it’s time for a breakthrough experience. And Facebook is the natural player to provide it. I’m sure the engineers at Facebook are already visualizing what search could be in a fully connected world. Searches could be proactive, prompted by items shared by friends, rather than awaiting a text field completion. Searches can favor brands and publications that you like, or your friends like. But most importantly, searches can be predicted based on people like you, people who are located where you are, or people with similar interests, profiles, and behaviors, without you ever even knowing them. All of these are ways that Facebook can fundamentally redefine search, thanks to its knowledge of each user’s identity, interests, and behaviors. But building a search engine that takes (a difference-making) advantage of the social graph takes lots of time and money, as does building a new operational infrastructure, Web crawler, and advertising engine to support it. And, even more significantly, this is one where Zuckerberg will need to get the privacy implications right from the start. Facebook is currently building its rep with major advertisers on its social network – and that’s a great start, because that will provide a captive customer base to transition into its search engine right at launch. A competitive search engine is one of the most ambitious projects you can imagine – the degree of difficulty is mind-boggling, and the cost is hundreds of millions or more. For Facebook to best Google, it would need to catch up in substantial ways before it could shoot ahead of the leader, even with its valuable dataset. But that’s only an impossible challenge if it has to do it all alone. And Facebook doesn’t have to. It already has an alliance with the #2 player in search, Microsoft. And – in the way of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – it has a common interest in outperforming Google. And Facebook and Microsoft have enough separation between their businesses that they could complement each other rather than compete. Indeed, Facebook’s increasing strength in its advertising engine could be a huge lift to Bing’s – offering hope of raising Bing’s monetization toward Google’s levels. The two truly are more valuable together, and it’s no surprise that smart people have begun to on a Bing-Facebook combination, a step beyond a partnership. Working with Bing for its search entry could save Facebook billions of dollars of initial R&D and speed its entry into the category by years – and by many dozens of engineers. And any agreement they’d sign would likely still give Facebook the option to create its own search engine down the road. Regardless of how Facebook structures its efforts – and with whatever degree of help it gets from Microsoft – it will be able to create a search capability that will be significantly different from anything we’ve ever seen. And it will shake the tectonic plates underneath Google’s Mountain View headquarters, even as it vies to earn users’ adoption with better, more personalized results. Google will not perish in the digital earthquake without a fight, though. Its recent Google+ , for example, shows just how boldly Google intends to enter Facebook’s home territory. That, of course, makes it even more imperative for Facebook to counter-invade by pushing into search. Looking forward, it’s clear that search and social won’t always occupy separate spaces. Indeed, for consumers, over time, they will converge; and the blended (or, just as likely, reimagined) product that emerges will serve as a home base that will serve as a jumping-off point to everything that’s important and relevant on the 21st century Web. It’s fascinating, and it’s all about to unfold. In the meantime, while Zuckerberg quietly forges ahead, and readies Facebook’s game-changing search entry, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, is publicly lost opportunities to catch Facebook. The diverging fortunes of these two digitally defining companies could not be more apparent right now. |
Samsung Galaxy S II U.S. Variants Pose For The Camera | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | We’ve heard quite a bit about the , which isn’t all that surprising seeing that it sold 3 million units in its first 55 on the market. As people from other parts of the globe got to experience the wonder that is the GSII, we here in the States played the waiting game. But it’s so close I can almost taste the Gingerbread. On August 29, Samsung will finally unveil the GSII’s U.S. iterations in the Big Apple for T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T. If you haven’t already heard, on the GSII. In the lead up to the event, this image was leaked to , which shows all three little beasts posing for the camera. They’re all a bit different in design, most notably T-Mobile’s Hercules. If what we’ve is true, T-Mobile’s Galaxy S II will sport a larger 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, as opposed to the original GSII’s 4.3-inch screen. Of course, T-Mobile’s variant may not be called the Hercules. We actually don’t know what any of the carrier names will be, although we sure have : the Attain (AT&T), the Within (Sprint), the Function (Verizon), and even the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch (also Sprint?). What a nasty mouthful, right? Either way, it doesn’t really matter what the phone’s called because it’ll be a hit no matter what. Just take a look at the specs: a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread, TouchWiz 4.0, 8-meagapixel rear camera (1080p video capture), 2-megapixel front-facing shooter, and a 4.3-inch 480×800 Super AMOLED Plus display. Of course, things like screen size may be different from one carrier to the next (read: Hercules), but all in all those should be the specs we’re looking at. There’s also one minor change in the U.S. variants compared to the international version, which would be the loss of that snazzy little home button. Instead, the phones will sport the same four buttons we’ve grown used to on Android. |
Imagine | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | Steve Jobs and I went to the movies this weekend. It was the new Woody Allen one, the one where he remade Manhattan only in Paris. I think Steve likes these get togethers because he knows how right I always turn out to be. Me and the other 250 million people just like me. Steve Jobs is like everybody’s big brother. He isn’t trying to do what’s right for us, he’s just doing the right thing. Sometimes it can come off arrogant, but so does my big brother when he says something in that particular way. The only thing he’s got extra is that couple of years of experience, the next two or three turns around the park that separate the men from the boys. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his period of greatest achievement came as he grappled with mortality. Before then, he was tilting at his own windmills, the missing years when he was exiled from his laboratory, banished to boarding school as his parents took over and ran the ship aground. But when he came back he had the gravitas necessary to not make it about himself but rather what he wanted to get done. Before then, it was about fashioning the future out of the rough clay of an emerging creative culture. Drafting on a miraculous culture that spawned Dylan and the Beatles, Jobs and Wozniak were astronauts testing out unlimited possibilities. Like some combination of Lennon and McCartney and George Martin, Brian Wilson and Hendrix, Dylan and The Band, these guys made a brown album, a white one, failed, went electric, back from the ussr, rosé from the dead, sang with the Dead, disbanded, blew their minds out in a car, God Only Knows. And then, just when we thought it was over, just one more thing became the mantra. A different time, a different more self-controlled era, one of possibility but careful ascension of a logical series of steps. A calculation of checks and balances, building one thing to fund another, learning how to pivot as the entropy of the deliberate provided an opening for elegance. A seeming indifference to the enterprise while all the while producing a generation of consumers who backed into power. Jobs is not a child of the ’60s, but he has inherited the family business. Having used the legacy to build an adult toy based on the music of his youth, he harvested the audience and connected them via the phone, broke the carrier’s hammerlock, and changed the firmware from CD to DVD to iPad and WiFi. Just as Dylan broke the song barrier, Jobs created the new record, razor and blades, a wirelessly streaming living album that wraps, informs, emits, and shares our lives. Sure we’re afraid, afraid to grow up, afraid not to. We watch in awe of what can be done so quickly and so immensely satisfying in the reaction to it, the joy of getting our hands on the next in a series of impossible objects — Pet Sounds, a Day in the Life, even the president of the United States must stand naked. Kind of Blue, Back to Black, impossibly beautiful with a glint of something hard to pin down, dark and deep. We see our own possibilities in Steve Jobs. We are not afraid of losing him but of having to make things happen ourselves. And like the big brother he is, he loves us and we him for not laying the sins of the father on us but giving us the high sign to get on with it. It may be a slow fade ahead but he’s doing even that with a fierce grace. As we enjoy his work, he is rewarded in the best way he could possibly imagine. |
IBM Assembles Record 120-Petabyte Storage Array | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | IBM Research has just set a world record in data storage by capable of holding 120 . It was done at the request of an unnamed research group that needs this unprecedented amount of space for running simulations of some sort. These simulations have been expanding in size as the datasets grow, but also as more backups, snapshots, and redundancies are added. How did they do it? Well, the part was plugging in the 200,000 individual hard drives that make up the array. The racks are extra-dense with units, and need water cooling, but beyond that the hardware is fairly straightforward. The problems come when you start having to actually index this space. Some filesystems have trouble with single files above 4 GB or so, and some can’t handle single drives larger than around 3 TB. This is because they just weren’t designed to be able to track so many files over so large a space. Imagine if your job was to name everyone in the world a different name — it’s easy at first, but after a billion or so you start running out of permutations. It’s the same way with file systems, though modern ones are much more forward-looking in their design, and I doubt you’ll have that problem again — unless you’re IBM Research. 120 petabytes of storage is an insane amount, eight times larger than the 15 PB arrays already out there, and they already had to deal with address space issues. In IBM’s huge array, tracking the location and calling data for its files takes up fully 2 PB of its own space. You’d need a next-generation file index just to index the index! Their homegrown file system is called General Parallel File System, or . It’s designed with huge volumes and massive parallelism in mind: think RAID for thousands of drives. Files are striped across as many drives as they need to be, reducing or eliminating read and write capacity as a bottleneck for performance. And boy does it perform: IBM recently set another record, indexing 10 billion files in 43 minutes. The previous record? 1 billion files — in three hours. So yeah, it scales pretty well. The array, , will be used by the nameless client as part of a simulation of “real-world phenomena.” That implies the natural sciences, but it could be anything from subatomic particles to planetary simulations. These projects are generally taken on as much to advance the field as to provide a service, though. And of course now IBM gets to boast that it built this thing, at least until an even bigger one comes along. |
OnLive Adds Group Voice Chat, Parental Controls And Facebook Achievement Sharing | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | Cloud gaming service has been getting better and better. We had a blast checking out the OnLive booth , and you better believe the service’s usage will have gone up since . But OnLive isn’t resting on its laurels, as new features are rolling out today. The first on our list is Parental Controls, which is kind of a necessity on just about any gaming platform. Where there are games, there is gruesome, violent, and profane content. Definitely not suitable for small kids. Parents can now set certain restrictions on the account to block M-rated games, chatting with strangers, Brag Clips, or spectating. OnLive has also introduced a beta version of Group Voice Chat. Before today, OnLive already had a strong social element with its Game chat (for multiplayer sessions) and Spectator chat (for people watching others play). Group voice chat will let you chat with friends whether they’re playing, watching or picking their nose. Even in beta, the Group chat feature should work fine on all of OnLive’s supported devices. And rounding out our new feature line-up: yet another opportunity for you to brag on . OnLive has today integrated Facebook achievement sharing, which automatically posts any game achievement direct to Facebook. OnLive has already been doing this with Brag Clips, which are little videos of certain stellar moves or big-time wins you’ve done within a game. If it just so happens that your game has Brag Clip Achievement configured, the achievement will get blasted out to Facebook alongside a Brag Clip, so your friends have proof of your ability to dominate. OnLive says these newest features are the product of customer requests, and that they’re far from the last. So if you’re an OnLive junkie and have a great idea to make the platform better, ask and ye might receive. No harm in trying, right? |
Mystery 10-Inch Sleeve At T-Mobile Suggests New Tablet On The Way | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | Well, what do we have here? Looks like T-Mobile has just snagged a new tablet accessory, but we’re not quite sure which tablet the accessory is supposed to go with. This 10-inch leather sleeve isn’t going to fit very well on either of T-Mobile’s current slate offerings: the 7-inch Dell Streak 7 or the 8.9-inch T-Mobile G-Slate. Unfortunately, the sleeve itself doesn’t have any specific tablet in mind. It’s a universal leather sleeve “for most 10-inch tablets,” according to the image leaked by . This could mean one of two things. The first is that T-Mobile decided to sell a 10-inch tablet sleeve for the fun of it. People often get their tablet/phone accessories at their local carrier outlet, whether they bought said device there or not. And there are plenty of 10-inch tablets on the market that are in need of a snug little sleeve. This option is totally plausible, but not what we’re hoping for. The second option is that T-Mobile is working on getting itself a 10-inch tablet. Which 10-inch tablet? Your guess is as good as mine. A few rumors suggest that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 may be headed in pink’s direction, which would be pretty huge since it’s widely regarded as one of the stronger tablet offerings on the market. Right now, T-Mobile’s tablet selection is a bit limited compared to other big carriers like Verizon and AT&T, so we’ll definitely be keeping our fingers crossed that the latter is in fact the reason for this slightly random 10-inch tablet sleeve. |
FEMA’s New Android App Arrives Just In Time For Hurricane Irene | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | FEMA’s had a of their website available for a while now, but all that information does you no good if you can’t get an internet connection. Given the fragility of mobile networks during disasters, going without web access is a very real possibility. Enter FEMA’s , which puts a wealth of emergency preparedness information right in the palm of your hand just in case. The app contains information and advice on what to do for disasters ranging from earthquakes to wildfires, and everything in-between. Also present is the emergency kit checklist, which outlines all the items and provisions one may need to get through some trying times. Very useful, especially because some things they recommend (like a “whistle to signal for help”) aren’t exactly the first things to come up when brainstorming the contents of a survival kit. For those worst case scenarios when the best bet is to head for a nearby shelter, the app lists locations where it should be safe to hunker down. It also provides a quick way for disaster survivors to apply for federal assistance, although it’s my sincerest hope that none of you readers will ever have to. While it’s essentially a pocketable version of the FEMA site, it’s a valuable resource in it’s own right, especially with Hurricane Irene poised to barrel up the East Coast in coming days. Creating an app is a smart move for FEMA, especially considering the state of most mobile networks during an emergency situation. Cellular networks are quickly jammed up by handsets try to make calls, as some of you may have noticed during this past week’s earthquake. FEMA recommends sticking to text messages and emails when trying to contact others, and that the app works fine data connection only helps. One less thing for the network has to cope with will hopefully mean everyone can get in touch with everyone else without too much headache. For more information on Hurricane Irene, head over to the or check out . |
Kickstarter: Kammok, A Hammock For Outdoorsmen and City Folk Alike | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | The perception of geeks used to be that we lived in darkened houses constantly hunched over computers, never seeing the light of day. To be honest, that was me for a bit in my younger years, but these days I’ve come to appreciate the outdoors a bit more. Still, my love for fresh air is only matched by my love of lazing about, and sounds like a perfect fit for my ideal lifestyle. The Kammok is a lightweight portable hammock whose main claim to fame is its LunarWave fabric. It’s a breathable, tear-resistant nylon fabric that allows cool air in during the dog days of summer while keeping heat in when it gets nippier out. The whole shebang stows in a lightweight, water-resistant bag, and only weighs about one pound. While it has some pretty obvious uses for all you outdoorsmen out there, Team Kammok insists that their product is just as capable for city folk and college students as it is in a forest clearing. Users just loop the Kammok’s “python straps” around two of whatever nearby supports will hold your body weight, snap the specially made carabiners into place, and , you’re sitting pretty in just a few minutes. At $85, the Kammok is a bit steep for what it is, but with over 1,400 backers the demand certainly seems to be sufficient. Team Kammok has also pledged that once they’re fully operational, 20% of all future profits will go toward humanitarian aid efforts. The Kickstarter project reached its funding goal in a scant two days, and has already begun the production process, so here’s hoping the final product lives up to the team’s claims.
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Keen On… Krish Prabhu: This Is Not Your Grandfather’s AT&T (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | In a typically forthright keynote address early this week at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum, Clarium Capital’s Peter Thiel that our current technological progress is “decelerating and stalled out.” But not all the luminaries at the Aspen Forum shared Thiel’s pessimism. for example, the recently appointed President and CEO of AT&T Labs, who also the Forum, remains bullish about America’s technological innovation, particularly that driven by what he identified as an increasingly “intelligent” digital network. “This is not your grandfather’s AT&T,” Prabhu – a former partner at Morgenthaler Ventures and CEO of Tellabs – explained to me about AT&T Labs when I sat down with him in Aspen after his keynote. The purpose of the 21st century Labs, he explained, is delivering innovation to start-up entrepreneurs. Thus AT&T’s $80 million investment in their Foundry incubators, an initiative that has already born fruit both in and in and will soon open in Palo Alto. Not loves AT&T, of course. But Prabhu’s new role and AT&T’s serious investment in their Foundry network is promising news for entrepreneurs seeking to prove Peter Thiel wrong and accelerate American technological innovation in the 21st century. |
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Software Is Eating All the Jobs Too | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 8 | 21 | A few months ago I was giving a talk in my hometown of Memphis, TN, and someone asked what the city could do to ignite more entrepreneurship among inner city kids. My immediate was teach coding– even basic app building skills– along with English and Math in every public school. I was surprised that my brother– an engineer who worked for many years in Silicon Valley before relocating to the Midwest– didn’t necessarily agree. “That depends on whether there are still enough coding jobs for them, or they’ve all gone overseas,” he said. It was then that the great American panic of a few years ago came rushing back to me. Somehow I’d forgotten all those business school reports and magazine covers warning the US that it wasn’t just the factory jobs going overseas; the white collar engineering jobs were all leaving Silicon Valley too and going to Eastern Europe, India and other pockets of the emerging world. These reports screamed that kids lulled into computer science degrees by the great late 1990s were graduating into the work world out of luck. Just like the Detroit factory worker, there was just no way for them to compete with the thousands of engineers graduating annually in India and China. It’s amazing just how wrong so many people could be. Just a few years later, one of the only bright spots of employment in the entire country is for coders. In California, the latest numbers show unemployment at a staggering 12%. Yet if you are a coder in Silicon Valley, the world is your oyster. You can apply for Y-Combinator, you can raise money from hundreds of angels and VCs, you can bootstrap a simple Web or mobile app off of your credit cards, you can work at Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, or one of the thousands of other startups desperate for coding talent. Every entrepreneur tells us hiring is the single hardest challenge they face right now. Those wacky offices you see Jason Kincaid parading around on are getting wackier as companies like DropBox and Airbnb want their companies to stand out even more to in-demand recruits. Why do you think everyone wants to their company on Cribs? COME LOOK AT HOW FUN IT IS TO WORK HERE! Recently I asked — the Facebook and Asana co-founder and the world’s youngest billionaire– to come be a judge at San Francisco Disrupt. He joked that he was going to tell the smartest entrepreneurs their startups were doomed so they’d give up and enter the workforce instead. At least I think he was joking. (By the way, he’ll give you a to pimp your desk if you come work for him.) As someone who used to work for one of those magazines, let me apologize if you decided not to learn to write software because of all of those covers. But you probably shouldn’t rely on the media to tell you what to do for a living anymore than you should listen to CNBC for investing advice. Either could have screwed you out of a goldmine in recent years. The idea that all the software jobs would leave the Valley was the second great lie of the early press and excitement around globalization. The first was that America would always stay the “brain” of the global workforce, while everyone else in emerging markets just did our grunt work, leaving us all the innovative, high-paying jobs. I wrote an refuting the implicit naiveté-mixed-with-raciscm of that view, so I won’t argue it again here. At first blush, it’s strange that both of these myths so fervently believed a few years ago both appear to be false, because they seem at odds. Either you believe people in the rest of the world are smart enough to do the higher level work and freak out about white collar jobs leaving the US as the rest of the world’s worker base gets more sophisticated OR you believe the rest of the world will forever just do the grunt work and more sophisticated US jobs are safe. But as it turns out there was a fundamental flaw with that either/or dynamic that Marc Andreessen articulated perfectly in his recent : Software is eating the world. (Ironically, Andreessen became a coder because he read in it was a good way to make money. Lucky for him, he wasn’t born a decade or so later.) What that means is software jobs are not the zero sum game we anticipated back in the early 2000s when many companies were sending them overseas. Instead, they’ve expanded exponentially as more industries have become fundamentally about virtual delivery. And the trend isn’t just about a company like Pandora, Zynga or Amazon pushing music, gaming and books to be software-only products, rather than physical things packaged on shelves. Nor is it just about the new globally exploding market of social media. We’re also seeing the biggest resurgence in companies disrupting the real world since the early days of the Internet, with Airbnb, Uber, Groupon, , and a host of other names taking on long-neglected, fragmented industries in new digital ways. Andreessen and his partners are betting that healthcare and education are next. Accel, too, has been placing some big bets on education. Not only have software jobs expanded dramatically by industry, they’re expanding dramatically within industries too. You can’t overstate the impact of two billion people being online, and estimates that five billion will have smartphones within the next ten years. Even today, more people have basic mobile phones than have toilets, and those phones can provide a staggering array of digital services from to education to . Because digital companies reach so many more people than the days when we were fretting about the demise of software jobs, the handful of companies that dominate a category like social media are building massive organizations. And, unlike the dot com days, most are doing so profitably. Silicon Valley isn’t the only place benefitting. Ask entrepreneurs in China how hard it is to recruit and keep video game developers. Or ask me how hard it has been to over the last few months. It’s no longer an age when a Web company launches in the US, and years later the rest of the world is ready for those products and features. It’s an age when a Web company launches in the US, and a version of it launches in Germany, Russia, India, China, Brazil and a host of other countries within days, creating a smaller amount of jobs than we have in Silicon Valley but certainly more than those countries had ten years ago. More important: Those jobs are working for local companies, not doing low-level engineering for big US multinationals. That’s a much more meaningful way to break the poverty cycle in the long term, as multinational jobs will only employ so many people with limited upside potential. Will all of those software jobs be safe? In both the Valley and overseas, the answer is most definitely not. The bulk are being created by startups, and the nature of startups is to IPO, sell or go out of business. They are supposed to be risky, and everyone going to work for one should remember that. The two latter categories could easily result in a huge wave of layoffs in coming years. That’s a far bigger risk for emerging markets just building their startup ecosystems than it is for the Valley. There will be the regular commenters wringing their hands about a “job bubble”– and while we’re in a financial or psychological bubble right now, we may well be in a job bubble. It’s way too easy to start a company now, and the between winners who get big enough to go public and everyone else is wider than it has ever been in Silicon Valley. (That’s one reason we’re not in a financial bubble.) Still, if you are a recipient of that job bubble would you trade places with any the tens of millions of people out of work in the United States right now? I doubt it. Benefitting from a job bubble is not only a first world problem, it’s an upper-class-educated-lucky-to-be-in-the-right-industry-at-the-right-time kind of first world problem. The entire city of Detroit has the right to punch you in the face if you believe that’s the biggest macroeconomic problem the US faces right now. If you’re worried, save some of that cash you’re raking in for the potential rainy day, and thank God you work in software. In a market like this, better to be the eater than the eaten. |
Skype To Acquire Year-old Group Messaging Service GroupMe | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 8 | 21 | Skype will acquire group messaging service , a service at a hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York in 2010. GroupMe was founded by Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci. The terms of the deal, including price, aren’t being disclosed. Just a couple of months after TechCrunch Disrupt the company a $850,000 round of financing from Betaworks, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and a number of prominent angels. Early this year the company more from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and previous investors. GroupMe allows you to create on the fly private phone groups with others, and then send text messages throughout the group and set up free conference calls. Skype CEO says that he’s been talking to the company for a few months, at about the same time Skype was in negotiations to be . The Microsoft transaction is still pending. They’ll keep GroupMe as a standalone brand, Bates says, and look for integration points over time. he told me via a Skype video call earlier today. He added: GroupMe, which has twenty employees, will remain in New York. |
Another EA Exec Jumps Ship To Zynga; Jeff Karp Joins As Chief Marketing And Revenue Officer | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 21 | Zynga has snagged another EA exec today. The social gaming giant is announcing today that former EA Executive Vice President Jeff Karp is joining as Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer. This is actually a new role for the company, and one that should help Zynga as it expands as a following an IPO this fall. The move was originally a few weeks ago, but Zynga has confirmed this today. In his role, he will oversee all aspects of marketing at the company, and will also be focusing on optimizing and driving revenue within the Zynga’s game studios. Karp will also be in control of international sales. Formerly, Karp was Executive Vice President at EA Play, the home of titles such as The Sims, SimCity, Spore and My Sims. In his role as head of the Label, Karp engineered strategy for the development teams, defined the SKU plan, managed profits and more. Karp previously served as Chief Revenue Officer in EA’s Games Label. Karp actually spent a total ten years at EA. Earlier this year, Zynga EA’s COO John Schappert as COO. As VentureBeat , other former EA executives who have jumped ship to Zynga include Steve Chiang, Mark Skaggs and Colleen McCreary. There’s a serious talent war in the gaming business and Zynga can hand out pre-IPO shares as an incentive for many executives and employees. Zynga currently has 2,543 employees worldwide. |
Luxemi Is A Rent The Runway For Indian Clothes And Jewelry | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 21 | Leveraging the , is launching as an e-commerce site where customers can both borrow or buy Indian apparel and accessories. The site is targeted at a niche audience of South Asian American women who don’t want to spend the money on an expensive Indian outfit, or that don’t live near a shop that sells traditional Indian wear. Instead of just offering apparel and accessories for sale, Luxemi maintains two completely separate collections: one consisting of apparel and accessories for sale and the other a “borrow closet” consisting of apparel and accessories available for rental. When borrowing, shoppers will select their reservation date, rental period (4 or 10 days) and their size. The site’s rental price point starts at $78 for traditional Sarees and Salwars and $28 for jewelry (includes a backup size saree blouse to ensure fit, the Luxe Pack for the clothing including pins, Bindis and a garment bag to keep, and free return shipping). Luxemi, which has been open for only a month, has signed up 4200 memberships, and so far the average order size is over $250. While this is sure to be a hit amongst Indian-American women, it’s questionable whether Luxemi will be able to create a market outside of this ethnic demographic. But the startup says that they have seen a strong interest outside the South Asian community with 40 percent of orders placed by non-Indian customers. And Luxemi isn’t the first retail site to cater to the Indian-American shopping community. is another e-commerce site that caters to the Indian diaspora, but with a flash sales model. The company just raised from Tiger Global, and is growing fast for a niche e-commerce site. |
LinuxCon: Open Source is an Ecosystem, not a Zero Sum Game | Scott Merrill | 2,011 | 8 | 21 | Linux and open source development is not a zero sum game. This was the explicit message from Ubuntu Technical Architect Allison Randal’s keynote speech at LinuxCon, but the sentiment had been articulated in a number of ways all week long from here. The processes by which a company makes great open source software improve the world for everyone. “Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” Randal repeated several times. In addition to the classic (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”), Randal put forward the claim that human beings long to be part of something greater than themselves, and free software development satisfies that in spades. According to Randal, the future of technological innovation is not stealing limited resources away from one another, but creating new resources — and new opportunities to create new resources — in a rich ecosystem. The term “ecosystem” came up several times in my chat with Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus of IBM Academy of Technology and Dan Frye, Vice President of IBM Open Systems Development. Frye made it clear that IBM’s efforts with Linux are to be a “solutions company” as opposed to a product company. IBM doesn’t make their own Linux distribution, but they work hard to contribute to the kernel and other key open projects that bring value to IBM’s customers. It’s all about collaboration, and working together with other open source participants. Sometimes this means collaborating with direct competitors, but IBM “gets it” that this collaboration on open source for everyone, and they’re not in a cut throat competition for a finite number of customer dollars. Certainly they compete strenuously in a variety of markets, and sometimes they compete strenuously against the companies with whom they’re simultaneously collaborating on open source. But it’s not a zero sum game. Wladawsky-Berger continued the “solutions company” explanation by pointing out that a skyscraper is never built by a single company. Legions of small companies with specific expertise work together under the guidance of a project manager to coordinate and execute their specific tasks in the right order. This is ultimately how IBM envisions themselves, as a leader in the open source ecosystem working to enable new workloads for their customers. There are many ways to thrive within the open source ecosystem. Whether its an unwavering dedication to kernel excellence (a la Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman) or a dedication to producing viable, usable tools for everyone to use to avoid reinventing the wheel. The is working on this for the embedded space, just as SUSE, under the fresh leadership of Attachmate, is making available their to help people roll packages for multiple distributions. SUSE is also sharing their to allow ISVs and companies to develop and maintain their own Linux build for use in appliances and “golden master” images. You don’t have to be a SUSE customer to use these tools. But all of this collaboration doesn’t always happen naturally. Companies are still beholden to shareholders and their bottom line, after all. So sometimes it takes a neutral third party to get the interested parties together, provide neutral ground for discussion and shepherd the communications channels. That’s where the comes into play. They provide much of the framework and stewardship of the communication between competitors that result in unparalleled technical advancement across so many industries. “Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” said Allison Randal. Eucalyptus Systems’ Marten Mickos took it one step farther: “Any company with an IT strategy needs an open source strategy.” It’s important to recognize –and embrace! — the larger ecosystem of Linux and open source software, and to find a way to collaborate within it to increase the number of available resources for which to compete. |
Live and Let Die | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 8 | 21 | Apparently we are now in the endgame, the victims of information overload ready for the triumph of socially curated automation flows. You’d think people might be wary of placing big bets on impossible goals (what were they thinking at HP?) but that’s not what keeps happening. In retrospect, it seems stunningly obvious: TouchPad? Why Pad? Why Touch? Why not make it HunchPad as in HP, as in I’ve got a hunch this is not going to work. Again, what were they thinking? Well, we’ve got this suicidal idea that we can destabilize our Microsoft and Intel relationships with a new WebOS, unhinge our developer community with dreams of doing God Knows What to Apple’s giant wave of momentum, and give Google even more room to consolidate Android as the new Microsoft emerging market replacement. OK, let’s vote. With friends like these, Microsoft must be longing for the days of DOJ and EU consent agreements. Back then, Bill Gates was laughed out of the interrogation room for suggesting a Google might come along and eat its lunch. Now HP proves him right by beating the Windows tablet to market by at least a year and giving the real Google room to do a Yahoo! on Motorola to cement the after market, buy a way in to set top boxes, and give Zune developers something to think about in terms of the likelihood that the Netbook will return. No wonder Bill is happier fighting starvation and AIDS where at least he has a chance of making a difference. But wait, there’s more. Google has also claimed the high ground with a classic Microsoft tactic, the one rumored to be coming down the pipe along with the ZunePad, a replacement social network. Google+ arrives just in time to say, sorry, Steve (Sinofsky) don’t waste your time building a competent clone of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, been there, done that. Say what you will about G+’s brain dead circle spam engine, Vic and Bradley have plenty of time to fix things up before ZunePad gets its $99 firesale. Along the way, G+ will need to take a hack at the noise problem aka socially curated automation flows. The inclusion of Plus in Google Search already paid off when I was looking for a link to Marc Andreessen’s Wall Street Journal post on the End of Hardware and found it courtesy of a Loic Le Meur . This represents the only real solution to noise, a social incentive to populate G+ with more than Scoble blog posts. The social algorithm is not driven by content inside G+ but by the pointers in from search and RSS (Twitter). Google needs a universal validating stream to succeed here, one that rolls up the major networks rather than trying to kill any one or several of them. Whether Twitter enables access to its hose or not, its users can take control if they start linking to Plus threads or objects as a way of building social credentials. For Twitter, there’s nothing to be done to stop this short of emasculating its audience’s social imperative, the basic drive for making a difference. Twitter’s new Activity @mention streams are just such a social imperative engine, boosting usage of previously useless citation formats like Favorites and Lists by surfacing the actions we take to try and filter the unfilterable. It’s not the specifics of who and what we are signaling, it’s the envelope of metadata around the signals that not only tags the objects but is something that can be tracked, ranked, and applied as a filter. In other words, it’s the people who are the algorithm but only if they have an imperative to produce. A Paul McCartney song plays over the McDonald’s speaker, suggesting we Listen to What the Man Said. In this time of Netflix and Spotify, the track oddly resonates with its post-Beatles sheen and pre-iCloud sensibility. It’s not the stuff we’ve endlessly been pitched in various holiday blockbuster windows that bubbles up. No, it’s the stuff that confidently sets out to be comfortable in its own skin and be ready when there’s nothing on. After all, it’s just music, right? Nothing to save the world, just something to arrive at the right time and be supportive rather than invasive, productive rather than interruptive. And the fingerprint of these products or services as they now are delivered forms the sweet spot of value in this world we live in, you know, so live and let die. So thank you TouchPad, we hardly knew you and never were going to. As the dinosaurs become oil, we’re regaining a say in the soundtracks of our lives. Call it filtering, call it curation, call it a cab. As George Harrison said in Hard Day’s Night about God Knows What or Who: She’s a drag, a well-known drag… It’s not the subject that we remember, it’s the inflection, the attitude, the rhythm of the thing that counts. And the rhythm of the TouchPad was just plain awesome. What were they thinking? |
Urbandig App Wants To Take You On Expert Local Tours | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 21 | The newest addition to the local discovery app space, iPhone app aims to help you find novel local experiences. In order to do this the team, which consists of former Myspacers , Danielle Lehman and others, has pulled in the domain expertise of local bloggers like LA Weekly assistant music editor Rebecca Haithcoat and Bay Area foodie Darya Pino of in order to create theme-based tours like where to see amazing live music in LA or grab a taste of local SF food. Co-founder Macadaan tells me that this expert curation is how the app intends to compete with the crowdsourced tips and recommendation function of apps like Yelp or Foursquare. “We create original experiences by bundling curated locations and what to do once you’re there,” he says. He also highlights the fact that Urbandig, like the Village Voice’s app, focused on quirky activities like the “Cougar Dens” tour, spotlighting places to find “Cougars” (oh just Google it, and look for the Urban Dictionary definition) on the prowl in SF or “Hangover Heaven,” a run down of where to scoop up the best hangover food in LA. “It’s quality over quantity, in the expert’s uncensored voice,” he says. Users can open the Urbandig app and browse through place collections for SF, NY, LA and Vancouver, sifting for tours through categories like City Gems, Drink, Film, Food and Music, or by curator and proximity. In addition to a brief tour description and curators notes on each place page, you can see each tour stop on a map, and also check into various spots on the tour via Urbandig. Because an app would be nothing these days without some kind of social function, Urbandig allows you to save tours and places as well as share them externally on Facebook with friends. Following friends (by going to Profile and clicking on the settings wheel) will allow you to populate your feed with their activity. Urbandig hopes to eventually support at least 30 locations expanding to Portland, New York, Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago and DC by the end of the year and also plans on coming to the Android in early 2012. The team is bootstrapped and angel funded.
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Weekend Wacky Jumble Picture: What’s Wrong With This TouchPad Ad? | John Biggs | 2,011 | 8 | 21 |
Hey, Kids! Can you find four things wrong with this advertisement in a 6th Ave Electronics flyer? Turn your screen over for answers! sıɥʇ ɹoɟ ɹǝʌo uǝǝɹɔs ɹnoʎ uɹnʇ ʎןןɐǝɹ noʎ pıp ˙4
˙ʇno pןos ʎןqɐqoɹd s,ʇı ˙3
˙ʇı puıɟ uɐɔ noʎ uǝɥʍ ˙2
˙ɯɹoɟʇɐןd pǝןıɐɟ ɐ ‘soqǝʍ sunɹ ʇı ˙pɐdɥɔnoʇ ɐ sıɥʇ ˙1 [ ] |
Facebook, Twitter Drew Record Numbers Of U.S. Visitors In July | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 21 | comScore’s July traffic numbers are out and similar to , Facebook and Twitter both saw record traffic in terms of U.S. unique visitors in the month. In July, Facebook saw a whopping 162 million unique visitors, compared to 160.8 million unique vistors in June, and 157.2 million uniques in May. Twitter also posted record traffic in its ; with 32.8 million unique U.S. visitors in July, up from 30.6 million unique visitors in June, and 27 million unique vistors in May. As we’ve noted in the past, the steady increase in traffic is a big deal for Twitter, which splits traffic between its own mobile clients and the many third-party clients that are used to access the network. And Twitter just from the old web interface to its LinkedIn, which saw a dipped slightly in terms of unique U.S. visitors in July, seeing 32.5 million unique visitors in the month compared to 33.9 million unique visitors in June. MySpace continued to bleed traffic, with 32.8 million unique visitors in July (tied with Twitter), down from 33 million in June. While we once that Facebook and Twitter would duel it out for users and traffic, clearly that’s not the case anymore. Facebook’s U.S. traffic is five-fold to Twitter visitors. Twitter isn’t ‘killing’ Facebook, or vice versa, as Twitter is still growing in terms of traffic. But with the new kid on the block, Google+ , it should be interesting to see if the search giant’s social network will reach Twitter’s traffic. Already there are signs that Google+ , but it’s still early and that could change. |
How Discovery Will Drive Transactions | Semil Shah | 2,011 | 8 | 21 | All year, I’ve heard some variation of this phrase: “ ” I’m still figuring out what this means. I’d like to share my thoughts on it, and I’d like to hear what “discovery” on the web means to you. First, I do not believe that there is a “shift” from search to discovery. “Shift” isn’t the right word, because people will continue to search based on specific intent for years. Second, although discovery won’t replace search outright, discovery can impact it significantly by changing how and/or where we search. Third, there are two types of discovery that matter: (1) discovery that leads to a transaction; and (2) discovery that does not end in a transaction. With this working definition of online “discovery,” perhaps we can now say: “ ” Before social networks solidified, when we bought something online, it was likely the decision process that kicked off that transaction began offline (browsing Amazon and eBay for the fun of it notwithstanding). Discovery largely originated in the real world. Now that more folks are online (and logged into various social networks), the top of the “decision funnel” is starting to originate for many online, not offline. In other words, the origin of a decision to purchase something may be triggered while we’re online, most likely because we are actively interacting with or passively observing someone we know (friend) or someone we’re interested in (follow). As discovery comes online, it certainly won’t replace search, but it could impact it over time. One of the main challenges is our current online behavior. Google is so effective at helping us find relevant information that skeptics caution that even if a user discovers something online to buy, he or she will likely visit Google to find it. Therefore, in order for discovery to have a meaningful impact, social networks that help users discover things by using data to personalize and target information, will also have to create strong incentives for users not to jump over to Google to satisfy their intent and find a way to make a purchase. For instance, if the system knew what item we discovered, could it recognize the item and provide pricing options and store destinations, like a targeted advertisement? What if the user who helped another person discover something gets a piece of the search revenue? In this scenario, a user theoretically wouldn’t have to visit Google because the conversion from discovery to search to transaction would happen in-house. The site that ignites discovery would be rewarded with that search revenue, but in order to make a real impact, discovery would need to happen at scale for many people. That could take a while. If discovery can scale, change behavior, and drive a different type of transaction in the future, could the transactions also be streamlined? Say you’re on Facebook or Twitter. A friend appears in your feed, excited about a new album he’s purchased. This friend influences your own taste in music. Facebook or Twitter identifies the album and presents three options on the right rail for you to purchase the album from iTunes. You want to buy the album, and what if you could just click one button (like “Apply Facebook Credit”) and let Facebook or Twitter drive the transaction and settle payment through services like or while you draw from another site’s inventory? In this scenario, the user discovers and purchases something in one swoop, never really leaving the site and bypassing traditional search. All this won’t happen overnight, though it is undeniably underway. As someone begins to form a thought about a purchase and discovers something to buy, social networks provide extremely strong signals and filters that could influence and accelerate purchasing decisions. Learning about a new product from the right person at the right time within the right context, such as interests (explicit or implicit) or location (mobile), could bring the entire decision-making process online, from discovery to search to payment entirely within one site. The possibilities are so great, which is why sites like , , and , among others, have generated so much interest from users and investors. Ultimately, all of this will come down to what users find more convenient or delightful. While a user may want to hunt Google for the cheapest price for a product, he or she may be willing to pay a bit more if the product is recommended by someone they know and if they have reasonable assurance that they’re getting a fair price from a recommended merchant. Or, a user may prefer to stumble upon something new to purchase or impulse buy without ever going through the entire “normal” online decision process. With so many options for every little item, the noise and offers can be overwhelming, and true discovery can help both sides of the market find better signals. Beyond this, it’s hard to predict just what will happen, or how long it will take to unfold. This is just one point of view. What does online discovery mean to you, and how do you see it evolving on the web? |
null | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 8 | 26 | null |
Meet Phabricator, The Witty Code Review Tool Built Inside Facebook | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 7 | While says his greatest accomplishment is launching many in the startup community hold that it’s – a set of open source developer applications that Priestley and others built while inside Facebook and that he intended to take on as a hobby while he looked for something else to do, after leaving the social network earlier this year. Instead the coding workflow tool took off. Phabricator seems to have gotten some pick up among smaller startups (over 500 engineers use it daily) mostly because of its speed, usefulness and simple Facebook-reminiscent interface designed by Priestley. It doesn’t hurt that its copy, also written by Priestley, is snarky and hilarious. I mean, I’m no coder but even I think Phabricator is kind of cool, mainly because of creative writing like ‘Facebook engineers rave about Phabricator, describing it with glowing terms like “okay” and “mandatory”’ on its intro page, the fact that you can close a task “out of spite” and small details like how the word “submit” has been switched out in favor of “clowncopterize.” Love. Priestley tells me that startups like , , , and are currently using the product as part of their development process, with Facebook bringing more and more of its code on to Phabricator as well. SnapGuide co-founder Steve Krulewitz actually registered the domain name in homage to the service (just click on it, you won’t be sorry). Among its most user beloved features are Maniphest, a bug tracker/task management tracker and Diffusion, a source code browser. The entire suite of applications also includes Differential, a code review tool that allows developers to easily submit reviews to one another via a command line tool called Arc when they check in code using Git or Subversion, Phriction a wiki tool which integrates more and more with Maniphest, and a slew of other products, all designed and described in Phabricator’s unique voice. When asked if there was any other product out there like Phabricator (lame question I know, but it’s my job), Priestley said “It’s kind of tricky, since parts of it are like lots of other stuff. It just brings a wide array of tools together and integrates them tightly – normally, you have to install a lot of different pieces of software to get the same capabilities and the different parts do not necessarily talk to each other easily or well.” Priestley says that future plans for Phabricator’s are “pretty fuzzy” and is focusing on building new features and fixing things. “We’ll see where it goes from there,” he pondering, going on to say that he’s considering some kind of SaaS thing in terms of monetization potential. I don’t know if that’s a joke. |
Planet of the iPad | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 8 | 7 | Spotify at 35 thousand feet continues to amaze. Will it upend Apple at its own game? More likely, iCloud will absorb the innovation in a more efficient combination of streaming and caching. But the inflight video is on the blink and the WiFi is cooking some Amy Winehouse and I am writing run on sentences with not a care in the world. There’s all sorts of amazing data in this Spotify model. For starters, the service took its sweet time getting over here, so much that I wouldn’t have bet and didn’t that it would actually thread the needle. Maybe it was the rope-a-dope with the record business, as a sign of the apocalypse, the reforming of Buffalo Springfield, suggested anything was possible. No matter that the tour may have evaporated, or maybe not. Nowadays Clancy can even sing. A tenuous thread of data ties us to the new streaming era. Last night, after returning from the new Planet of the Apes movie, we looked for the original on Netflix. No luck, but Apple TV was the charm. It took some stop and start to get to the famous final scene, but along the way I enjoyed comparing the new film’s technological mastery to what effectively represents an extended Twilight Zone where most of the budget went for getting Moses to walk naked away from the camera a few times. It wasn’t streaming’s finest day or evening, what with the inability of the WiFi bridge from downstairs to serve the bits fast enough to stay ahead of the storyline. Even as I type, Amy Winehouse pauses now and then to give the rest of the plane a few packets. No matter; they won’t get me going to rehab for my streaming addiction. It’s like the iPad: doesn’t do flash, can’t do this or that, you’re just an Apple fanboy trapped waiting for just one more thing… I’ll take 54 million please. Digital prohibition. This flight’s packed and I’m in a middle seat. The lady to my right has a Nook, to my left iPad 1. They’ve turned off the inflight one more time and are getting debugging code shipped up from the planet to us apes. A blinking cursor at a Linux command prompt. The flight attendants are back to taking cash. The iPad 1 lady asks if we can get free WiFi if the TV computer stays down. I don’t care if TV ever comes back. Houston, I don’t have a problem. I’m not sorry, Dave. I think Spotify caches the songs as they play, because this time around I’m getting no fits and starts on Amy Winehouse. Floating along here I feel more and more relaxed, the tenuous thread of data now a warm lifeline back to the realtime below. In a world of instant social media, of alerts and retweets, the antidote for information overload is the micro-vacation. The chopping horns, the comping clavinet, crazy comfortable, it’s a trip way better than drugs. Meanwhile the catalogue of losers grows. The empty Flash spaces are disappearing from non-view. Adobe has finally shipped an HTML 5 authoring tool. RIM has brand new product, three devices I’ll never use, built for what market? Thanks to Android, Gmail, and Google+, Nokia and WindowsSoft are locked out of the StreamerStakes. Apple is drafting off Android’s success these days, having out waited the carriers. I wouldn’t even think of being a Streamer without Verizon. The neat thing about the Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie is that starting about a third of the way through and definitely for the last third you’re rooting for the apes. In the tipsy turvy world of Streaming, once you get over the first 10 dollars, everything else feels like it’s free. It’s a marketing mirage but then again the Walrus wasn’t Paul. The perception is everything, even when the reception is intermittent. This just in: the patch from the ground has failed and we’re being rerouted to land an hour early. Also there will be a file credit the next time we fly Virgin. 25 bucks up to 100 in first class. Turns out that did pay for the WiFi, a month of Spotify, and even my Apple TV $4 rental of the ’68 Planet of the Apes. A Streamer Micro-Vacation Getaway Package. And just enough time to fast forward to the end of Planet of the iPad. If you look closely, she’s holding an iPad even back then. |
Patents and Unions: When Good Intentions Go Horribly Wrong | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 8 | 7 | Watch me ruin your Sunday afternoon with one word. Ready? Here we go. This week on we talked about the topic most of our readers equate with a long, slow, painful root canal. Or worse. Laura Sydell of NPR was also on the show, and if you haven’t listened to her episode on This American Life called go do it now. We’ll wait. Nathan Myhrvold — who some call the Voldemort of tech– is a bit of a mystery to me. Sydell says she didn’t intend the piece to go so hard after , and as you hear in the podcast, things they thought were innocuous questions were treated like “cross-examinations.” My gut feeling is that Intellectual Ventures didn’t start out to enable trolls. That it was intended, as Myhrvold says, to give inventors who don’t want to start companies a way to monetize their inventions and to be an efficient mediator in a broken system. That’s also the promise of , which recently went public, and is backed by of Charles River Ventures. Armony also invested in Intellectual Ventures, and we gave him the opportunity to defend against “patent troll” allegations . But even if you are willing to give Intellectual Ventures the benefit of the doubt, the NPR piece clearly exposes some pretty upsetting ripple affects that the Intellectual Ventures team doesn’t deny. The beauty of the radio program is you get to hear the reporters’ many attempts to give IV a way to explain itself, and they just dig a bigger hole. When asked, IV couldn’t site a single example of the win-win they promise: An invention they’d bought from a brilliant tinkerer and sold to a company so they could bring it to market for him. The example they do give leads NPR down a rabbit hole that lands them in a hallway in East Texas full of offices of shell companies whose entire reason to exist is buying patents and suing companies actually building things, funneling some of those proceeds back to Intellectual Ventures. This American Life ends by comparing the patent situation to an arms race, citing the recent patent portfolio of the big tech companies. While it’s an apt metaphor, I couldn’t help but think of another one: Unions. I realize I’m inviting well-organized hate mail by writing this. Like patents, I see unions as incredibly well-intentioned and at one time vital to America’s development. But let’s face it: Mismanaged unions are also at the root of a lot of our capitalistic problems today. It’s hard to see what’s happened with the airline industry, the automobile industry, public education and feel that unions are a totally benign force in the corporate world. Like patents– which also seek to protect the little guy– unions were started for all the right reasons. But like patents, they can be twisted into something that hurts innovation, competition and ultimately consumers and the country as a whole. Unions inherently create an “us versus them” dynamic that makes winning against a company’s management the top goal, not serving customers, innovating, or in the case of education, teaching kids. It’s not too surprising that I feel this way, since I’ve spent most of my career covering businesses in Silicon Valley, where the lack of unions is as remarkable as the lack of bailouts. I’ve been reading a lot about Silicon Valley history recently and was struck by just how core the lack of unions has been to the American tech industry’s evolution. It’s enabled the constant creative destruction that keeps Silicon Valley relevant and thriving in a rapidly changing world. Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce famously brought midwestern values to SIlicon Valley, but he reportedly hated unions, regarding them as “a death threat to Intel and to the semiconductor industry generally,” according to Tom Wolfe’s 1983 Esquire of Noyce. Building a huge new manufacturing industry that was set up so that workers to unionize may have been Noyce & Co.’s greatest legacy. It was one of many important lines in the sand they drew between the way business had been done in the US, and the way it should be done in the latter part of the 20th century. Wolfe writes: “Labor-management battles were part of the ancient terrain of the East. If Intel were divided into workers and bosses, with the implication that each side had to squeeze its money out of the hides of the other, the enterprise would be finished. Motivation would no longer be internal; it would be objectified in the deadly form of work rules and grievance procedures. The one time it came down to a vote, the union lost out by the considerable margin of four to one. Intel’s employees agreed with Noyce. Unions were pat of the dead hand of the past…Noyce and Intel were on the road to El Dorado.” This mentality is core to the now common stock option, we-work-hard-and-win-together culture of startups that has spidered through much of the corporate world. We don’t think about that as being “anti-union” now, because we don’t really manufacture anything in Silicon Valley anymore. But back then it was a clear fork in the road that dramatically changed Silicon Valley, making it able to evolve, change, and stay relevant as the world has changed around it, unlike Detroit. It’s unfortunate that no one had the same ability or fortitude to make a similar stand when the well-intentioned but clearly dysfunctional rules around software patents were codified– something the patent office was against and much of the industry wishes had never happened. Of course, there’s a movement now to reform the patent system, but as we’ve seen over the last few weeks our government isn’t exactly functioning at its best now. It’s hard for me to be optimistic anything will change. Still kudos to NPR and Sydell for breaking down the real-world implications of this broken system, and kudos to Chris Sacca for being one of the only investors willing to talk about it on the record. The more the conversation can move outside the geeky confines of Sand Hill Road, the better chance of solving it. Maybe. |
How Visa Plans To Dominate Mobile Payments, Create The Digital Wallet And More | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 7 | It’s no secret that credit card companies are shelling out big bucks and aggressively forming partnerships and deals to start cashing in on the mobile and digital payments innovations currently taking place. American Express, which recently debuted its own , has been on the partnerships front, striking recent deals with both and . Mastercard has bet on NFC with for Google Wallet and bought for $520 million last fall. And Visa has made a number of major moves in the mobile and digital payments space of late; including making an (and taking on an advisory role) in disruptive startup Square, buying for $190 million, and acquiring for $110 million. We sat down with Visa’s Global Head of Mobile Product Bill Gajda and the company’s Head of Global Product Strategy, Innovation and eCommerce Jennifer Schulz to discuss how the financial company is planning to compete in both mobile and digital payments. Gajda explains that there are three prongs to Visa’s mobile payments strategy. One of these is NFC, and focuses on payments using a mobile phone at a physical store. For background, NFC (near field communications) enables people to make transactions, exchange digital content and connect electronic devices with a simple touch. As we’ve seen with , Android phones such as the Nexus S are being built with NFC chips, making your cell phone a mobile wallet. Visa recently a NFC mobile payment network that is a joint venture formed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. ISIS will soon launch in a number of markets, including Utah and Texas. Gajda explains that Visa is licensing mobile payments applications PayWave for integration with the ISIS wallet and the company is actively looking for other ways to integrate with NFC into the company’s mobile payments structure. Of course, some aren’t so bullish on NFC, notably eBay (who owns PayPal) CEO John Donohoe, who in a said merchants refer NFC “not for commerce.” And odd statement considering PayPal just in the NFC pool with support for Android. Gajda tells is, “I think for some people NFC will replace the actual physical credit card but it will be a long time before NFC replaces all payments.” He believes that we are going to start seeing more traction by end of this year but says the capability of “taking credit cards and putting them on mobile phones will represent the long tail” in payments. But he adds, “the pieces are in place for NFC to take off.” The second part of the Visa’s mobile strategy involves the digital wallet and the mobile web. Gajda says that as e-commerce ramps up on mobile phones, there is a need for one-click, simple username and password checkout experience in a transaction being made on a mobile device. That’s an area where PayPal has been working hard to dominate in but Visa sees room for other players. Should we expect a PayPal-like, one-click mobile payments technology coming from Visa soon? Perhaps, the company hasn’t been afraid to enter PayPal’s territory in the past, launching a earlier this year. In May, Visa for the digital wallet. We’ll explain this initiative later in the post, but part of this platform would allow you to access your loyalty points, credit cards and more from your mobile phone at the point of sale. And the third pillar of Visa’s mobile strategy is incorporating value-added services like real-time alerts, contextual services, and offers at point of shopping based on where you are. Visa actually with retailer The Gap earlier this year which alerted customers via SMS of discounts in stores near them. Gajda tells us Visa is working with a number of other retailers and banks on similar deals which will be announced soon. Gajda says there are a number of other factors at play in the mobile payments place that need to be highlighted when talking about mobile payments. International is a huge growth area in mobile payments. He tells is that outside the U.S., there are a large number of people who have mobile phones but don’t have banking relationship or credit card. In fact, he says there are 2 billion people in world that have phone, but don’t have a bank account or credit card. In these markets, Visa’s goal is to bring prepaid accounts, purchasing power and other financial services to basic phones. These could include topping up a mobile phone with airtime, buying transit tickets, peer to peer payments. And this goal was the mean reason behind the purchase of behind the of Fundamo. The company’s platform delivers mobile financial services to unbanked and under-banked consumers around the world, including person-to-person payments, airtime top-up, bill payment and branchless banking services. Connecting with the small business world that don’t yet use credit cards or are new to the system is another area where Visa feels there is strong potential, especially with mobile payments. That’s why the and took an advisory role in the company. Gajda says that the power of Square is that it is enabling small businesses and independent workers such as doctors, designer and other merchants to start using credit cards and grow their businesses. It would make sense for Square and Visa would somehow work to harness the power of their partnership (As of April roughly two-thirds of transactions using Square’s payments service were through Visa credit cards.), but it’s unclear what the two companies will reveal any new co-produced products soon. Gajda tells us that the biggest challenge of mobile payments in the current market the massive amount of fragmentation in the mobile industry. He explains that with all of the various mobile operating systems, specific manufactured phones, applications and more, keeping up with pace of innovation on the development side is a major challenge for Visa. But he says that there is still so much room for innovation around how we pay with mobile phones. “With the rise of smartphone usage, we are already seeing a lot of innovation around commerce,” he explains. “It’s inevitable that this will extend to the payments around the sales in mobile commerce.” Visa’s digital payments guru Schulz outlined her strategy for digital payments at the company, which centralizes around the creation of the digital wallet. Schulz says that because of the fact that e-commerce is being more easy and convenient with customers, especially with m-commerce, the underlying payments infrastructure has to evolve. And Visa’s answer to this is a new digital wallet initiative. Here’s how it works. Users will have an account, and they can add their credit card numbers (and cards from other credit card companies such as American Express and Mastercard). Visa is partnering with a number of financial institutions to offer this product to their customers. Users can also load their loyalty points and rewards cards, as well as organize their shopping lists. Schulz describes it as a “wallet in the cloud.” But she says the key to the success of the wallet is a seamless, one-click payments experience for the consumers. So Visa has partnered with a number of large-scale retailers (which will be announced soon) to integrate what Schulz refers to as a ‘new acceptance mark’ on a merchant payments page. So there will be a button you can click on, which will prompt you to sign-on and then will sync your digital wallet with the purchase in your shopping cart. So for example, imagine you had a camera in your cart, and Visa offered a 20 percent off at camera’s purchased at BestBuy, the wallet would sync and show the discount in your cart. The same works for loyalty points and more. Schulz explains that the idea behind the wallet is that consumers want control over their wallet and want to have payment information and access available to them at all times. She believes that the digital wallet will click to buy incorporated on retailers’ sites is essential to the future of e-commerce in both the U.S. and emerging markets. She compares the digital wallet offering to “two-hand clapping.” ” You can have a digital wallet,” Schulz explains, “but you need a merchant solution of click to buy, and Visa’s going to transform that experience.” And Schulz highlights another , has helping drive a simplified commerce experience, a.k.a. click to buy, within game or within app. Of course adding another checkout experience to online retailers’ sites can be a complicated and time-consuming process. But that’s where Visa’s comes in. CyberSource is said to process about 25 percent of all e-commerce dollars transacted in the United States, and operates e-commerce for hundreds of thousands of retailers. Schulz says this relationship has helped speed up the pace of implementation. Creating the digital wallet, both on the mobile and web platforms, is no easy task. Visa has a name for itself in the credit card industry but the fact is that the brand still has to attach innovation to itself in order for people to take these products seriously. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Google’s Mobile Wallet news created waves, even though NFC technology is in its early stages. Visa competitor American Express is also working hard to innovate both at the large retailer level, as well as among smaller retailers, with While Visa, American Express and others are looking to capitalize on the changes taking place in the payments industry, it is a challenging effort. Local commerce is a big part of this, and everyone is trying to But e-commerce, amongst larger retailers, is also a multi-billion dollar market that Visa hopes to continue to play in with products like a digital wallet. And in-store payments, whether that be through NFC, Square or others, represent another market. I’ve been talking to a number of executives of payments companies and founders of innovative payments startups, and while their objectives are different, they all seem to agree on one thing. It’s early and there is still much more innovation were going to see in the next few years in the online and mobile payments space. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y80tSc1b8UI] |
Amazon’s Answer To Apple’s Terms: A Web-Based Kindle Cloud Reader — Brilliant On PC, Better On iPad | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | Much has been made about Apple’s recent changes to the iOS terms. At first, everyone was sure that many big players , such as Amazon’s popular Kindle app. But then , and simply said that Amazon and others . Amazon complied. But at the same time, they were also working on an alternative. While Amazon hasn’t said anything about it yet, is already live. It’s a web-based version of their Kindle eBook reader app. It allows you to read your books from the cloud or to download your books for offline reading thanks to the magic of HTML 5 (or a Chrome browser extension). It looks and works great. Amazon says that the app officially supports Chrome and Safari. This means it works on PCs, Macs, Linux, and even Chromebooks. This also means that it works on the iPad. In fact, Amazon plays that up on their site. Bullet point three on the Kindle Cloud Reader page reads: Optimized for iPad: shop the integrated Kindle Store for Tablets Again, that’s something you cannot do within the iOS apps due to the new terms. However, while the iPad is supported, the iPhone currently is not. Amazon recommends you check out their free Kindle reader native app in order to read on the iPhone. Something tells me that a browser version for the iPhone is in the works as well. The iPad version is especially good because the store is fully optimized for the device. And you can easily switch back and forth between the store and your own library. It feels like a native app, but it’s not. You can even swipe back and forth to move between pages (though it is a bit slow). One thing to note is that the cloud versions (and obviously the downloaded versions) of the Kindle books are still limited to a set number of devices. So if you have your books downloaded to your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, etc, you may be over the limit and will not be able to read them in the cloud. A few weeks ago, after Apple began enforcing the new iOS terms, one eBook reader, Kobo, came out and said that they would . But again, others like Amazon and Barnes & Noble remained mum, and changed their apps to remove links to their stores. Turns out, Amazon was quietly doing the same thing. And now it’s ready to go. And it’s very good. : And after our story last night, Amazon issued a press release about the service this morning. Find it below: Introducing Kindle Cloud Reader Read over 950,000 Kindle books in your web browser – no download or installation required Based on HTML5, Kindle Cloud Reader optimizes for the platform you’re using and automatically stores your latest book locally for offline reading Instant Books – no waiting for a download, start reading the book immediately, offline or online SEATTLE – August 10, 2011 – (NASDAQ: AMZN) – For over two years, Amazon has been offering a wide selection of free Kindle reading apps that enable customers to “Buy Once, Read Everywhere.” Customers can already read Kindle books on the largest number of the most popular devices and platforms, including Kindles, iPads, iPhones, iPod touches, PCs, Macs, Android phones and tablets, and BlackBerrys. Today, Amazon.com announced Kindle Cloud Reader, its latest Kindle reading application that leverages HTML5 and enables customers to read Kindle books instantly using only their web browser – online or offline – with no downloading or installation required. As with all Kindle apps, Kindle Cloud Reader automatically synchronizes your Kindle library, as well as your last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights for all of your Kindle books, no matter how you choose to read them. Kindle Cloud Reader with its integrated touch optimized Kindle Store is available starting today for Safari on iPad, Safari on desktop and Chrome at www.amazon.com/cloudreader. “We are excited to take this leap forward in our ‘Buy Once, Read Everywhere’ mission and help customers access their library instantly from anywhere,” said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle. “We have written the application from the ground up in HTML5, so that customers can also access their content offline directly from their browser. The flexibility of HTML5 allows us to build one application that automatically adapts to the platform you’re using – from Chrome to iOS. To make it easy and seamless to discover new books, we’ve added an integrated, touch optimized store directly into Cloud Reader, allowing customers one click access to a vast selection of books.” Features of Kindle Cloud Reader include:
– An immersive view of your entire Kindle library, with instant access to all of your books
– Start reading over 950,000 Kindle books instantly within your browser
– An embedded Kindle Store optimized for your web browser makes it seamless to discover new books and start reading them instantly
– New Kindle Store for iPad is built from the ground up for iPad’s touch interface
– Your current book is automatically made available for offline use, and you can choose to save a book for reading offline at any time
– Receive automatic software updates without the need to download new software
– Select any book to start reading, customize the page layout to your desired font size, text color, background color, and more
– View all of the notes, highlights, and bookmarks that you’ve made on other Kindle apps or on Kindle
– Sync your last page read across your Kindle and free Kindle apps so you can always pick up where you left off Kindle Cloud Reader is available for Safari on iPad, Safari on desktop and Chrome starting today. Kindle Cloud Reader on the iPad is optimized for the size and unique touch interface of iPad. Without even leaving the app, customers can start shopping in the Kindle Store and will find a unique and immersive shopping experience built specifically for iPad’s Safari browser. Kindle Cloud Reader will be available on additional web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, the BlackBerry PlayBook browser, and other mobile browsers, in the coming months. Amazon.com customers can start reading their Kindle books immediately using Kindle Cloud Reader at www.amazon.com/cloudreader. |
Founder Jay Adelson Brings His Hard-Earned Entrepreneurship Lessons To Revision 3 | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-WqXUiQp0s&feature=player_profilepage
&w=630] Silicon Valley survivor has worn many hats in his two decades in the technology space: Equinix co-founder, Digg CEO, Simple Geo CEO and Revision 3 Co-Founder among . His latest hat? Talk show host. Yes, Jay will be starring twice a week in , a show on the network he co-founded, where he’ll attempt to answer all sorts of entrepreneurship related questions like “How much money do I raise for my new company?,””What happens once I have a business idea?” and “When do I quit my day job?.” The show is formatted in 4-5 minute episodes and draws on Adelson’s many failures and successes — he bestows pearls of wisdom like “If you’re distracted [at a your current job], just quit, you’re being a douche.” Love. Internet television network Revision 3 produces Adelson’s former colleague Diggnation and Foundation shows as well as geek fare like Techzilla and cult favorites like Epic Meal Time, with a focus on primarily appealing to an 18-34 male demographic. And succeeding. Aside from being profitable, Revision 3 co-founder tells me that the network is averaging north of 80 million monthly views across its 23 shows and is interested in bringing on more content that could do well online with Revision 3’s “Sponsored by” or “Brought to you by” model. “We call ourselves a next generation media company,” says Prager “As business models solidify around our type of content, Revision 3 would be remiss not to start looking at what a media company would look like in 2020.” |
Kno Brings 100,000 Textbooks To Facebook, Adds QuizMe And Journal To iPad | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | “We are not trying to redefine the textbook,” CEO Osman Rashid tells me, “we are trying to redefine how you learn.” Today, Kno is taking a big steps towards making digital textbooks more social by making 100,000 college textbooks available both on its Website and on Facebook. The Textbooks for Facebook app and site will present the books via an HTML5 reader. So students who buy a book via can now read them online or on Facebook. They can post study questions and comments to their news feeds, with an eye towards creating full-fledged study groups down the line. Kno is also adding new study features into its . In the video above, VP of marketing Ousama Haffar demos QuizMe and Journal. QuizMe creates a test out of any labeled diagram in a digital textbook. It blacks out the labels and lets you test yourself with multiple choice answers, which works well with biology or anatomy diagrams. The Journal is a digital notebook in the form of an activity stream. Kno’s iPad app already lets students take notes or highlight passages. Now it collects all of those notes in the Journal, which organizes all the notes for each textbook into an Evernote-like stream of notes. The notes can include highlights, text notes, textbook images, audio notes, and even photos taken with the iPad. “You will use the journal to prepare for an exam, not the book,” predicts Rashid. And while the Journal will be a collection of private notes at launch, Rashid suggests that eventually students will be able to share their Journals with friends. It is not too hard to imagine how the stream of notes in the Journal could become the basis for a study group stream in the Facebook app at some point down the line. The complicated part will be navigating all the different DRM requirements from all the various textbook publishers, but Rashid believes that the industry will come to a consensus around how much of a textbook can be freely shared. (AFter all, it’s free marketing). It was only last April when Kno finally and embraced the iPad instead. The app has been well-received, with an average of four stars in iTunes across 205 ratings and only 3 percent of Kno’s digital textbooks have been returned (the service honors a 15-day return policy for purchased books). Speaking with Rashid, he seems almost liberated. Focussing on software only certainly appears to be accelerating the pace of new feature introductions. |
Facebook Just Out-iMessaged iMessage — And SMS Is More Screwed Than Ever | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | Facebook did a strange thing today: they released a mobile application separate from their main app. They’ve never done this before. But it’s genius. And it’s yet another long-term thorn in the side of SMS. Facebook Messenger is . It essentially merges the in February with their revamped Messages product. Now it makes sense why Facebook wanted to make it clear that the Beluga deal was for both talent technology (Facebook almost always does just talent acquisition deals). Shortly after the deal, Jason Kincaid and I talked about the ramifications of the acquisition for TechCrunch TV (video below). We were both in agreement that while it would be out-of-character for Facebook to do so, they absolutely should release a new stand-alone messaging app. The reason? Speed and simplicity are key in the space. The Messages product inside of the current Facebook apps offered neither. Now, with Messenger, Facebook is ready to roll into this space. Should competitors like GroupMe and Kik be worried? Maybe, but they’re iterating quickly and adding new features to try and stand out. They’ll have to do that a bit faster now as a player with 750 million built-in potential users just entered the space. But the service that should be perhaps more worried about Messenger is the still-unlaunched iMessage. Announced by Apple at WWDC in June, iMessage is a new messaging platform that will be a part of the default SMS application in iOS 5. That gives it a huge leg up, obviously. But it’s also potentially going to be harder to use than Facebook’s new Messenger. The reason is that iMessage, like FaceTime, relies on user email addresses to work (or phone number if they have an iPhone, but if they have an iPhone). Developers with access to the iOS 5 beta that I’ve spoken with complain that they often run into problems trying to send iMessages because they have no idea what email address their friends’ accounts are tied to. This is the same problem that FaceTime has faced. Apple does this because email addresses are also how they define identity for Apple ID. But plenty of people have multiple email addresses, and may use a strange one for their Apple ID. For example, I do. You can add other email addresses where people can find you in the settings of iOS, but most users are never going to do this. The system is not ideal. Much more ideal is using your Facebook connections and actual name look-ups — which Messenger obviously does. Or, if the person you’re trying to reach doesn’t use Facebook, or you’re not connected, you can use a phone number to connect. Yes, you could also do this through iMessage, but whereas Messenger will likely use SMS to bring users into the app, iMessage SMS connections are more likely to continue as SMS communications. While there are some differences between an iMessage and an SMS, they basically look the same, and again, reside in the same app. Facebook Messenger will also clearly handle group messaging better than iMessage. Whereas iMessage seems like system to circumvent SMS — and for good reason, SMS remains one of the biggest rip-offs out there — Messenger feels like something that goes well beyond it. Code found today within Messenger suggests that Facebook will soon add video chat capabilities to the app as well. This makes sense, given Facebook’s recent tie-up with Skype for such functionality. There’s one other big reason why Messenger is likely to out-iMessage iMessage: cross-platform compatibility. iMessage will only work for iOS users. Facebook Messenger works on both iOS and Android devices. And there is one other massive place Messenger messages work: Facebook.com. Using it today, it’s clear that this is the true power of Facebook Messenger. Someone messages me, and I get it sent to my phone and the message pops up in Facebook on the web, if I have it open. If I don’t, the message goes into my Messages area and I can access it later. It’s seamless. This iOS/Android/Web compatibility is a big reason why . With Facebook.com now the web component of this system, things just got kicked up a notch. One thing is more clear than ever before: between iMessages, Beluga, GroupMe, Kik, Google’s new Huddle feature of Google+, and now Facebook Messenger, . Yes, most of those service are compatible with SMS, but only so they can be parasitic off of it. As a standard that works across all mobile devices, SMS isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But with the rise of tablets and the continued use of other computing devices, cross-device messaging is going to come into its own one way or another. And SMS, which is more or less a racket that has been run by the carriers for far too long, is not the way forward. Good riddance. |
Quora Attempts To Cut Through The Noise With ‘Browse’ | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | If you’re going to go through all the trouble of streamlining your Topic pages and creating Topic Groups, you might as well develop an over-arching way to get your users psyched about Topics. a beautifully redesigned browse page that is once again an effort to prevent of user confusion surrounding ways to get to the content they care about. Quora designer Rebekah Cox tells me that this is the first time the Quora browse page has been available to logged out users. In addition to the Quora newsfeed and Topic Groups as a way to discover relevant content, Quora Browse consists of a grid of images corresponding to recently upvoted Topics — relating to Topics you follow. Underneath the image gallery users can see currently popular Quora Questions. To the right of these you can see my favorite Quora feature, Quora Shuffle, which previously was hidden on a link at the bottom of a user’s homepage page. The UI design itself, as Quora power user Semil Shah points out, to Namesake’s function which gives you a visual grid-like display of topics and conversations. While clicking on an image in Namesake’s Discover takes you to that given Topic or Conversation’s page — clicking on an image in Quora Browse drops down select content from its Topic Page seamlessly, without having to leave the page. Coming after the Topics Groups and the , it seems like Quora is iterating on a lot of product tests this summer in its attempt to live out its motto “continually improving.” Which begs the question, improving towards what specifically? |
Bevy Of Apple Patents Granted, From Visual Voicemail To PCI Card Brackets | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | As is befitting a global technology empire, Apple seems to always have a great number of in moderation. The latest batch is an interesting mix, with the standout patents hailing from as far back as 2007 or as recently as 2010. The current ruckus surrounding the patent system isn’t going to die down any time soon, so I’ll try not to editorialize too much here, but some of these do seem a bit more legitimate than others. The biggest win for Apple is probably the visual voicemail interface patent. Opponents of software patents in general, gird yourselves for battle. was submitted on June 28, 2007, the day before the iPhone was made available. It covers “A computer-implemented method for management of voicemail messages” and associated playback controls. While the visual playback and selection of voice messages certainly predates the iPhone, this patent is much more closely allied to the rest of Apple’s multi-touch and initial iPhone patents, the conceptual legitimacy of which as unique inventions may be a matter for discussion, but the legitimacy of which is not worth disputing at this time. The UI is very minutely described in this patent, making it nearly impossible to abuse and mooting any patent-war criticisms directly solely at 7,996,792. Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall are given prime billing for credit on this item. More troubling is the , which is not very specific at all, and amounts to a patent on real-time prioritizing of boot items. During startup, if a user selects iTunes or Photos before other things are finished loading in the background, it then loads the associated libraries and data for that item first on the next boot. Startup and BIOS managers have allowed for this kind of reordering for a long time, and although I don’t know the specifics of how it’s handled, I have to guess that starting an application before Windows has finished loading all its background services (for example) changes the immediate priority in real time, though it doesn’t save that information for later. On a far less contentious note, Apple also was granted two fairly substantial hardware patents. The first is a manufacturing method that could result in a thinner touchscreen-display sandwich, the details of which are quite technical. The second is part of a component mounting system for a desktop PC — a minor item for making the locking and unlocking of PCI and other components easier. It was filed for way back in 2008, though, so it seems about as likely now as then that they have a new desktop enclosure in the works. Still, it’s nice to think about. |
Algorithmically Generated Realistic Sound On Show At SIGGRAPH | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | are hard at work on a project that sounds odd at first, but is in fact a perfectly natural extension of existing 3D and computing technology. They’re making an engine for producing the sounds of colliding objects by simulating the materials of the objects themselves in a virtual space, and then calculating the forces and vibrations that would be produced. Academically it’s a challenging proposition, but it has plenty of practical applications as well. The simulation of noise propagation perhaps would be most easily applied in 3D games, which despite having nearly photorealistic models, textures, and lighting, still rely on a limited cache of pre-recorded sounds to play when, say, a table tips over. By simulating every object on the table and tracking the physical effects of collision with the floor, other objects, and the resulting reverberations, a more realistic and accurate sound can be created on the fly — or at least that’s the theory. Right now the researchers acknowledge two obstacles. First, the physical world needs to be simplified greatly in some cases in order to provide a workable amount of data. A ball hitting the floor is one thing, with only a few factors to calculate, but what about a stack of dishes rattling against each other on a table that has been jostled? The number of contact points must be reduced so thousands or millions of different interactions don’t have to be tracked separately. At the same time, they must have enough to produce a realistic sound. It’s a balancing act governed by the amount and type of objects and the computing power they have at hand. And it seems that not everything can be generated completely from scratch just yet. Their demo at has the stack of dishes mentioned above, but apparently soundtracking flames it isn’t so easy. The low-frequency part they’ve got, but for the rest had to base their models based on recorded fire sounds and then “paint” them onto the low end. That said, most common sounds are predictable in the same way physical interactions are predictable (being that they are themselves sums of physical reactions), and it’s just a matter of getting the tools to do so. Parallel processing hardware (like graphics cards or many-core CPUs) will be necessary to make these calculations on in real time, though: simulating the fire noise takes hours just for a short clip. But the very idea is compelling to anyone who’s heard the same “glass breaking” or “ricochet” noises in games or even movies, where the catalog of sounds is limited. Right now it’s still in the labs, but this is definitely the kind of thing that gets turned into a product and sold. A company like Nvidia or Havok would love to get their hands on this. Unfortunately there’s no video, but if one becomes available after it’s shown at SIGGRAPH, we’ll put it here. Update: it turns out that there are videos, just not of the presentation:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHH8N_lNZzI&w=640&h=390]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZC6ORUbLog&w=640&h=390] |
Developers Frustrated By Android Market Payment Issues | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | We’ve heard our share of app store woes in recent weeks, but here’s one that’s . A number of Android app developers have been claiming on the Android Market support forum that the amount of money they’re being paid doesn’t match up with the number of apps they have actually sold. The problem began on July 26, when a beleaguered dev posted the following: something I noticed the last 2 days: the list of orders in the payout doesn’t match the list of charged orders. And I don’t mean that I miss one or two orders… no I’m getting payed out for less than the half of all orders! From what the developers were able to piece together, the thread that connected their uncounted purchases was that they were all made through the Android Market’s web store. Customers’ credit cards were apparently charged and marked as shipped through Google Checkout, but with no corresponding payout to the developers. Much discussion ensued during the next nine days, until Google finally made their official response: Thanks for posting and for your patience. We’re aware of the issue, and we’re working on fixing it. Once the fix goes out (soon!), orders should be moved to the correct state, which will enable disbursement amounts to be recovered. So if your July activity payouts were underpaid, you will be notified, and your September 1 payout will contain the missing amounts. According to Google, there is no official ETA for a fix, but they have been proactive in contacting the affected developers by email notifying them of the situation. While we have every confidence that Google will eventually make things right, a little transparency could have gone a long way here, especially considering how valuable independent developers are to the success of the platform. The devs affected have been more than patient, but it never hurts to call attention to ground-level problems like this just to keep big companies like Google honest. It’s also possible there are more out there who haven’t heard from Google at all, and are simply baffled by their low receipts (you might want to check yours, just in case). Help should be on the way; be sure to voice your support concerns officially with Google and hopefully things will be resolved soon. |
Shots Leak Of Acer’s New Ultrabook, The Aspire 3951 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | Just a couple days ago, we heard about Intel’s plans to offer a for their class of laptops. Essentially it’s a new blueprint with the aim of putting these new thin-but-powerful laptops (if they ever appear) under a thousand dollars — putting them in direct competition with the 2.38-pound gorilla of the laptop world, Apple’s MacBook Air. As the meeting was supposed to take place next week, I think we can be sure that Acer’s newest ultrabook, apparently , isn’t made with the new mold in mind. The device pictured has a 13.3-inch screen, a Sandy Bridge generation Core processor, and comes with a HDD standard and SSD optional. No doubt that hard drive contributes to the 3-pound weight, though the case is aluminum, not the we heard rumored. HDD included (I presume), it’s nearly as light as the 13″ Air, and it could be lighter without. Interestingly, the most-used ports are located on the back, a design I thought we left behind some years ago. On the sides are headphone and card reader ports; on the back are USB, HDMI, and power. The 3951 is certainly svelte, and the specs seem solid, but will it hit that all-important $1000 price tag? Sohoa estimates the price at 16-20 million VND, or ~$750-950, but the source isn’t clear. It’s possible — but I don’t think these will be made in large quantities, partly due to the shortage of aluminum milling workspace (they couldn’t make a million of these), and partly because of the upcoming Intel revision. Best to just wait and see.
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Twitter Photo Uploading Now Available For 100% Of Users | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | Twitter images, the Twitter photo hosting service we broke the news , has now rolled out to all Twitter users, according to Twitter Public Relations representative Sean Garrett. Users who did not have the feature before will see a camera at the far left of their status update box, beckoning that they upload an image. You can choose an image from your desktop under 3 MB and it will get embedded to your Twitter status like below. If you feel like you’ve made a mistake you can just click on the X to delete and pick another image. Photos uploaded through Twitter will be hosted through Photobucket and appear as a pic.twitter link and image for those who follow you and a “Click to display media” message for those who don’t. Users will not be able to see images from Protected accounts. Users who feel ambitious can add a hashtag to their images and the images will show up in Twitter’s new fleshed out Photo and Video search feature, visible to the right side of your tweet pane when you click through to search for hashtags. You can also use “sv” and “sp” to search for photos and videos directly from the Twitter.com homepage. Twitter tells me it has yet to enable the feature for its mobile apps, and the ability to tweet directly from the iPhone camera will waiting for the launch of iOS 5 in the fall. Twitter plans on launching user Galleries, another feature that has yet to be enabled. As of yet all the individually uploaded pictures are one offs, but Galleries will eventually aggregate all pictures a user has ever uploaded including those from services like Twitpic and Yfrog. While the baked in upload functionality launched to everyone today is seamless and simple to use, the eventual launch of Galleries (where all user photos can be viewed in one place) will herald Twitter’s true foray into the photo-sharing business and the real threat to third parties like YFrog. Until then we wait. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmB15ER3LUQ&feature=player_embedded |
Hit iPad Facebook App MyPad Comes To The iPhone | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | Well, now you may have two Facebook-related apps to download to your iPhone today. The first is , a new standalone app that lets you jump straight into your Facebook Messages. And the second is . MyPad, for those who haven’t used it before, is a third-party Facebook application that includes many of the site’s core features, but is optimized for the iOS interface. The app has been available on the iPad since (when it was called Facepad), and today it’s released a version for the iPhone and iPod Touch. MyPad has had a lot of success on the iPad. Cofounder Cole Ratias says that the application has been installed on over 5 million iPads, and it draws 2 million weekly active users (and 3 million monthly). Since launching Twitter support a month ago, the app now has 1 million users that have connected their Twitter accounts. But will MyPad be able to repeat its success on the smaller form factor? There’s a big difference between the iPad and iPhone, at least as far as Facebook applications are concerned: Facebook still has yet to release an official iPad application. It’s been long rumored and we’ve even seen , but all Facebook apps for the iPad are still being made by third parties. In other words, MyPad hasn’t had to directly compete with Facebook yet. That isn’t the case on the iPhone, where Facebook has been the most popular app of all time (and has been available since 2008). But even despite the competition, Ratias is confident that users will try MyPad too, even if they have the official Facebook app installed. MyPad includes a nifty multi-pane interface that lets you swipe between different portions of the app without losing your spot (it’s a lot like Twitter’s iPad app — see the screenshots to get an idea of what this looks like). And the sidebar makes it easier to jump between different parts of the app without having to go back to a main menu. Ratias also had some promising stats to share around the app’s , which launched in June. MyPad is leveraging its sizable userbase to give exposure to partner games (MyPad gets a cut of the revenue from a game’s subsequent in-app sales). So far, the games section has been driving 100K installs per month — and Ratias expects that number to go up as the app integrates features like Top Apps lists (right now the lists are all static, so users don’t have much reason to keep checking them).
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Apple’s Trade-In Program Just Got So Much Better | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | If you were thinking of dumping that old laptop, hold on a second. has just updated its , and you can now bring in any Apple product, as well as any desktop or laptop, for free recycling or even store credit. Yes, desktop or laptop, including PCs — and it won’t cost you a dime. Thanks to some keen eyes over at , we now know that this is how it’ll go down: You can now trade in your and/or for its “fair market value” (determined in store, by Apple) on an Apple gift card. Apple has done this for a while with desktops and laptops, both PC and Mac, but is now extending the offering to iPhones and iPads. But remember, this only applies if your hunk of old technology is fit to be used in something new. If it has no monetary value at all, it goes in the recycle pile. But no worries — Apple has easy, pain-free plans for that, too. It used to be that when you brought in old computers and displays that were worthless, you could recycle it for free if you were buying a Mac. If you weren’t buying a Mac, you had to pay $30 for a shipping fee. Now, whether or not you’re buying a Mac, any brand of computer or display will be recycled for free. Most brands have some sort of trade-in program for their old products, but just like Apple, they offer credit instead of cash. So if you aren’t an Apple fan and don’t really need credit towards Apple gear, it’s worth the two seconds it’ll take to look up the manufacturer’s trade-in program details and get credit towards a brand you like. Other third-party programs like also make it pretty easy to trade-in your old stuff for cash. But where ever you choose to dump your old stuff, try not to aim for the trash can. The planet could use a break. |
Vizio’s 8-Inch Android Tablet Hits Shelves With $299 Price Tag | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | The Vizio Tablet is finally here after its at CES. wants desperately to control your home theater experience and the company’s new Android tablet is an integral part of that, acting as the central hub of Vizio’s V.I.A. (Video Internet Apps) Plus ecosystem. Acronyms aside, this means that Vizio’s HDTVs and its tablets will share the same interface and apps, keeping things uniform and easy to use. As far as specs are concerned, the Vizio Tablet is an 8-inch WiFi-only slate with 2GB of internal storage built right in, and support for a microSD card. The tablet features Bluetooth connectivity, HDMI out, and has a battery life of up to ten hours, says Vizio. Obviously, the specs on this bad boy aren’t going to change your life, but its price tag may be enough to win you over, at an MSRP of just $299. The Vizio Tablet is currently available at WalMart, Sam’s Club, Costco, and Amazon, along with other similar retailers. |
Keen On… What Twitter Is Doing To Our Brains (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | Not everyone agrees with Nicholas Carr that the Internet is our brains. Take, for example, UCLA Brain Research Institute professor , the author of . While Buonomano accepts that there is a “price to be paid” for the benefits of the Internet, he believes that our brains will eventually adapt to real-time networks like Twitter. Brain Bugs is an interesting book for both entrepreneurs and marketers. Given that the brain acts as a “computational device,” Buonomano says, it actually controls everything about us – from our associations to our appetites to our buying decisions. And it’s the flaws in our brain, those brain bugs, he explains, that offer the best introduction to how we behave and what we desire and buy.
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Sparrow And Shortmail Team Up To Silence Verbose Email | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | As you probably know, . But . And . The two services are attempting to alleviate the pain that is email is two different ways. Sparrow makes email pretty. Shortmail makes email short. Today, the two are teaming up. The latest version of Sparrow (1.3.2) which has just gone live now includes support for Shortmail. It needs to be set up through the Preferences -> Accounts area, but it’s pretty straight-forward. Essentially, it’s just an IMAP connection through the Sparrow client, but it comes with a nice little bonus: a character counter. The entire idea behind Shortmail is that emails are far too long, and should be limited in a Twitter-like fashion. But instead of 140 characters, Shortmail gives users 500 characters to send email messages. If you connect a Shortmail account to Sparrow, it will now honor that character count limit, and show you how many characters each message is as you type. This goes along with 410 Labs’ (Shortmail’s parent company) proposal that a new header should be added to email which displays character count limits (if they exist). Sparrow is the first to get on board with that. Hopefully others will too — *cough* *cough*. I guess it’s a more reasonable solution than my hope that . The new Sparrow comes with a range of other new features, tweaks, and bug fixes. You can find it . And you can find Shortmail . |
DISRUPT Comes to Beijing This Fall. Buy Your Tickets Now! | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | We’ve teased you with this news and again, but today it becomes official: . In late-October we are hosting our first international DISRUPT conference, and the obvious location was Beijing, the hub of China’s surging entrepreneurial ecosystem. And we’re not stopping there. TechCrunch is also hiring local Chinese editors to build an English Language and Chinese Language version of the blog later this fall. (More news on that soon.) It’s the biggest international commitment TechCrunch has ever made, and it has been years in the making. There’s no more exciting– and more challenging– market for us to expand to. As Dow Jones’ reported last week, 145 Chinese startups raised a whopping $3.2 billion in the first half of 2011. Over the same period 54 Chinese companies went public raising nearly $10 billion. Three of the ten largest Web companies on the planet are all located in China, and increasingly our hottest Western companies– like Jawbone, Square, Groupon, Zynga and others– are finding they need China in one way or another to win. This market isn’t emerging anymore; it has emerged. And so far, it’s the only other place outside Silicon Valley that is continually giving rise to multiple $1 billion-plus consumer Internet companies. If TechCrunch is going to continue to tell the story of Web entrepreneurship, we have to be in China. And if you want to understand that story, you need to book your plane ticket now to attend our DISRUPT Beijing conference in October. That’s right, China. We are bringing the international digital elite to you. For the first time Asian companies will be able to launch, demo new products and share the coveted DISRUPT bragging rights with US startups like , , and the most recent winner, . We’ve partnered with Kaifu Lee’s incubator to make this event a reality and have had countless other groups in China guiding us along the way to make sure we bring the country something new and different. The conference will begin the way it does in the US with two-day Hackathon held October 29 and 30. The conference will run October 31-November 1 and will feature fireside chats by top innovators from Silicon Valley and China. The conversations will center around why the Valley and China have clashed in the past, and how new sectors like innovative hardware, ecommerce and online gaming are forging new highly profitable partnerships. And of course, we’ll bring some prominent financiers on stage to get into the big bad bubble debate. The event will be held at the China National Convention Center. Go for tickets. (Chinese language ticketing and application sites will be live in a few days.) Everything TechCrunch does is about entrepreneurs, so as usual the centerpiece of the conference will be the . Anyone from any country can their startup for consideration. The rules remain as they are in the United States. Most notably: You have to be launching to the public for the first time at the event. Get your in now. After two years of evangelizing all the innovation going on outside the United States, I can’t wait for Asian entrepreneurs to prove it this fall. Sick of being called a copy cat culture? . Want to prove another country in Asia can out-do China? . This is your international coming out party, global entrepreneurs. And the party will have a ton of eyeballs. As usual, we’ll be streaming the event on TechCrunchTV and a pack of our top writers will be in China this fall to bring our international readers the ins and outs of this first-ever event. You don’t want to miss this. |
Demand Media Buys RSS Graffiti And IndieClick; Renews Google Ad Deal For Three Years | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | Web content giant Demand Media is a number of and a renewal of its Google ad deal today. First, Demand says that it is its advertising partnership with Google. Under the terms of the three year agreement, Demand will continue to monetize its properties via AdSense for Content and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The company says Demand has extended its agreement to manage and serve ads through the DoubleClick for Publishers platform and the media company’s properties will be included in ‘premium, brand-safe channels within Google Display Network Reserve,’ according to a release. Demand and Google haven’t had the rosiest of relationships in the past. Google issued its “Panda” update to search results earlier this year, which aimed to weed out low-quality content sites from search. It was thought that this could affect Demand content’s rank in search results. And in the company’s earnings call in May, Richard Rosenblatt that changes in Google’s algorithm affected eHow’s traffic, with visits to the platform down in the past quarter. But Demand has promised to clean up its content and is taking measures to improve the quality of the content posted on its family of sites. Demand has also acquired online advertising and media planning company IndieClick, a company that delivers multi-platform advertising campaigns. IndieClick represents over 300 websites as their exclusive advertising sales and technology partners and focuses on the 13-35 y/o demographic. The company provides the complete outsourcing of sales, business processes and ad serving technology for media publications. And lastly, Demand is buying social media company RSS Graffiti, which helps publishers and brand program their Facebook pages with content from websites, blogs, Twitter, YouTube and more. The startup basically simplifies and automates the posting of updates to Facebook pages. Publishers configure the application to check their websites, blogs, Twitter streams and other social platforms. The application then automatically posts the content to the publisher’s Facebook page and to the activity stream of friends and fans at scheduled intervals. The company also for the quarter, beating analyst expectations. Demand’s Non-GAAP revenue increased 34% to $76.6 million, from $57.3 million in Q210. And net income came in at $5.0 million, which is an increase of 43% compared with $3.5 million in Q210. Net Income per share was $0.06, up 50% compared with $0.04 in Q210. |
Use Your PS3 Controller On Your Android Phone Using This App | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | One issue I’ve had with Android , with their dual cores and their gigawhats, is that there just isn’t much of a use for them. Android apps are mostly made for the lowest common denominator, hardware-wise, and aside from a few 3D games and cool (but impractical) HD video playback, you can’t really use those extra cycles for anything without really diving into device customization. We know that these phones have the chops to run Playstation-level games at least — now if only we could use our Playstation Oh, we can now? Yes, lets you use your wireless PS3 controllers with your Android phone or tablet, making your new Galaxy Tab or Xoom an emulation paradise. Well, let’s not overstate the case: PCs will always be top dog in that field, but this does make the tablet platform a bit more exciting for gamers. Unfortunately, you must have root access to make this app work, so it’s not quite the plug-and-play solution I’d like. The controllers need to be paired over USB, after which time you can have up to four controllers going at once. X-Men Arcade, anyone? Analog isn’t supported yet, so keep that in mind if you want to try your hand at Mario 64 or the like. You can download the app in the Android Market, but be sure to check if your device is compatible first by using the app. [via ] |
Next Jump Shoppers Have Burned More Than 1.6 Billion WOWPoints, Each Worth A Penny | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | CEO Charlie Kim wants you to earn and burn his company’s WOWPoints, a loyalty reward currency that can be used to pay for real merchandise. WOWPoints are redeemable for thousands of offers on Next Jump’s at a rate of one penny per point. Since it launched WOWPoints two years ago, more than 1.6 billion have been burned. Currently, people are burning WOWPoints at the rate of 100 million a month, which translates to $1 million worth of discounts every month across thousands of products not only on OO.com, but also on corporate rewards sites which Next Jump operates. Next Jump is making it easer to earn points with a concept called Family Points, which lets families pool their points together to encourage even bigger purchases. That could come in handy for travel discounts. The points can be applied to any offer across the various marketplaces Next Jump operates, including . But the points aren’t really about daily deals, they are more about loyalty. A daily deal is usually an attempt to acquire new customers by offering a huge discount. Points can also be seen as discounts, but at a smaller scale. Instead of a 50 percent discount, WOWPoints typically amount to a 2 to 3 percent discount, sometimes as high as 10 percent. Kim believes there is aplace for daily deals, but that the vast majority of deals should be smaller rewards for loyalty. “Profits come with loyal customers and it is the hardest thing to build,” he notes. The idea behind WOWPoints is a loyalty reward system that works across merchants. As Next Jump adds new ways to earn points, more people are using them. The points drive the purchase loop and the company hopes will make them loyal to OO.com or other Next Jump properties. For more background on Next Jump, read |
Hulu Now Live In Japan With Subscription-Only Service | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | In what marks its first expansion abroad, Hulu is now available . As , the video streaming service will offer both TV shows and movies across various devices for a subscription of about $20 a month (1,480 Yen). Unlike in the U.S., where there are both free and premium versions, in Japan the service will be subscription-only. And it will cost more than twice as much as Hulu Plus does in the U.S (which is only $8 a month). Is Hulu charging so much because it thinks it can get away with a higher subscription fee in Japan or did it have to pay through the nose for international licensing rights and has no other choice? Hulu will stream American shows in both English and Japanese from CBS, NBC, and ABC, as well as movies such as , and . Hulu plans to add Japanese-produced shows and moveis as well. (It is rather surprising they are not launching with any Japanese content partners, but those are supposedly coming). Along with the launch, Hulu is also announcing an exclusive mobile partnership with NTT Docomo, the largest mobile carrier in Japan. The subscription covers viewing on smartphones and tablets, as well as computers, connected TVs, and through videogame consoles. |
Impressive List Of U.S. Investors Drops $180 Million Into Chinese Startup Incubator | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | has a fairly unique perspective on the tech industry, having spent years in high roles at Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Lee spent six years as VP of Apple’s Interactive Media Group, before moving on to be chosen as the guy to forge first Microsoft’s and then Google’s inroads into China. Then, in mid-2009, Lee left Google (where the former professor and computer scientist had been involved with Google.cn and beyond for over four years) amidst the growing criticism in Western media of China’s Internet policy, specifically in regards to the Golden Shield, or the , as it is fondly known. Lee bowed out of Google seemingly at just the right time to turn his focus from the behemoths to the little guys, founding , an early-stage incubator for Chinese startups. Since 2009 the incubator has been solely focused on investing in and coaching young entrepreneurs in the Chinese market, and today the incubator announced that it has raised $180 million to create the so-called “Innovation Works Development Fund” (IWDF). The fund is the first dollar-based fund raised by the company to be focused on Chinese Internet startups. According to , corporations, family funds, and institutions participated in the fund, including investors like WI Harper, Silicon Valley Bank, Sequoia Capital, IDG-Accel, Foundation Capital, Foxconn, SAP, Bertelsmann, Motorola, Autodesk, and pension funds from the U.S. and Canada. Ron Conway and Yuri Milner were also part of the list of investors, as well as executives and former executives from top Internet companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and Yahoo. While American tech companies have largely struggled to expand into the Chinese market, it’s nice to at least see American money working its way into China to support startups and the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. Hopefully, it will encourage Chinese founders to build businesses unique to the region and not Facebook/Twitter ports. The incubator had previously raised $115 million and, to date, Innovation Works has invested in approximately 34 startups, nine of which have successfully obtained sizable Series A financing from third-party VCs, according to Lee. Innovation Works, like its American brethren TechStars and Y Combinator looks to help early-stage startup teams grow quickly with the help of mentoring services and an infusion of cash. Lee manages the fund alongside WI Harper Group. For more, . |
Google May Be On The Verge Of Resurrecting “GDrive” | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | In 2006, Google was internally testing a project codenamed “Platypus”, an online storage service. When it was during an analyst meeting as “GDrive”, it quickly captured the web’s imagination. Google seemed on the verge of transforming their servers into our own personal hard drives in the cloud. were working on this (and still are), but the presumption was that Google would be able to scale this beyond anyone else and do it for free, or very cheap. Google refused to talk about it, but kept coming. Then something weird happened: GDrive never actually launched. It wasn’t until earlier this year that we found out what happened, thanks to Steven Levy’s book . In 2008, GDrive was about to launch under Bradley Horowitz (now a lead on Google+), but Sundar Pichai (now the SVP of Chrome) convinced Google’s top executives not to launch it. The reason? He felt like the concept of a “file” was outdated ( ) in the cloud-based universe that Google was trying to build. After some debate, the powers that be at Google agreed and GDrive was shelved, and the team moved over to the Chrome team. End of story, right? Not so fast. Something curious appeared this evening in the Chromium Code Reviews issue list. As first noted by , there to add the URL to a list in the browser’s code. This URL (which is not yet live) lead to a Hacker News thread wondering: “ ” Diving a bit deeper into the code reviews, what’s most striking is that drive.google.com doesn’t appear to be referenced anywhere besides this one exposed ticket. This suggests that it’s either no big deal, or that Google is keeping this secret. I don’t think it’s the former because the in the one ticket indicates that drive.google.com has been added to the HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) list alongside other key Google apps like docs.google.com and spreadsheets.google.com. Another bit of puts it alongside Android Market and Google Analytics. Google information security engineer, Chris Evans, completed the ticket this evening. And Chrome engineer Adam Langley approved it with the message “LGTM” (Looks Good To Me). I reached out to Pichai (who again, is now a Google senior executive in charge of Chrome), but he declined to comment. A Google spokesperson would only say, “The team is always testing out new features, but we don’t have any details to share at this time.” It sure like something is up. At the very least, Google does appear to be close to doing something with the drive.google.com domain. My best guess — which is pure speculation — is that it will be some sort of new Google app for syncing files over the web across a range of devices. PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, Android phones, iOS, you name it. Think: Dropbox. But wait, doesn’t Google already offer cloud storage functionality as a part of Google Docs? . But since that functionality launched almost two years ago, it seems that very few people use it like they use Dropbox — hence, and . Google is putting a lot of weight behind Chrome OS and Chromebooks. So far, it seems they haven’t exactly in the sales department. But they’re iterating fast, and one area of focus has been the file system (despite Pichai’s hope they wouldn’t need one — remember, they’re going after PC users here). One that is built into the core of the OS and tied to the cloud could be very useful to those hoping to switch from traditional PCs. That’s especially true now that Google is finally making their apps fully available offline as well, as they did with . More to come on this, I’m sure. |
Assistly For Salesforce Launches On AppExchange | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | , the cloud-based customer support platform that’s backed by Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Salesforce, as well as several other angels and VCs, , along with rolling out a new pricing model that includes a full-featured version of its service for free. Today, the summer features keep on rolling out for Assistly, which today announced that it would be adding two-way integration with Salesforce. Assistly for Salesforce is an app that, , will enable sales and support teams to “share a complete view of the customer” — in other words, customer support teams can now see data, like customer contact info and status while working on cases — direct from Salesforce. The app will also integrate with Salesforce Chatter to make it easy to involve one’s entire company in customer support, and allow users to send status updates and set rules to automatically generate Chatter messages as customer support cases age. With Assistly for Salesforce, users can view contact history and more without having to leave Assistly, and likewise, customer support teams can view information from Salesforce — all in an effort to offer a more consistent experience to the customer. Organizations can then use Assistly to show where a customer is in the sales cycle, the status or value of that customer to the company, and the customer’s contact information. In realtime. Assistly has had an ongoing partnership with Salesforce, and this announcement is a logical extention of the strategic investment Salesforce has made in Assistly — and shows yet another partnership forged by Salesforce to continue adding products and services that complement its existing service. Since launching in September of last year and taking on new capital, Assistly has brought on companies like Yelp, Etsy, 37signals, Pandora, Vimeo, and Spotify as paying customers. The startup also counts Mark Cuban and David Liu as advisors. For more, check out the video below: |
Hands-On: At The U.S. Open With The Olympus E-PM1 | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | Olympus is trying to do with their new E-PM1 PEN Mini camera what other manufacturers already have: bring DSLR power to the masses. It’s their smallest Micro Four Thirds camera to date, and it’s definitely got its proverbial sights set on the mass market — and the fact that it comes in six colors certainly doesn’t hurt. Olympus was kind enough to let me play with an E-PM1 and a variety of lenses at the U.S. Open of all places, and here are a few of my quick impressions. The body is a bit on the plasticky side, but it fortunately doesn’t feel like it will fall apart at the seams either. Corners had to be cut to keep the price down, and while the body probably could have been a bit sturdier, it feels robust enough to stand up to the rigors of everyday use. The rest of the package was spot on: it performed pretty nicely in most low light situations I found myself in, and the autofocus was nice and snappy. As something of a novice photographer, I appreciated the simple terms that Olympus has peppered throughout its UI. While being asked to manually change shutter speed on a typical DSLR may elicit a clueless look from an aspiring photographer, Olympus makes it a cakewalk: just change the “Motion Control” setting (complete with self-explanatory icons) to achieve the desired effect. That said, the menu system was a bit confusing at times: after changing the art mode (Olympus’s name for filters) in the menu for example, you couldn’t use the same method to change it. Rather, you press a different button and change art mode from the settings it brings up. The E-PM1’s iAuto mode is a boon to new users — while photos taken using it seem to err just a bit on the warm side, it reduces the amount of know-how needed to take nice shots. Different art modes also add an extra splash of fun to the PEN Mini, and while every camera has them, personal favorites like the tilt-shifting Diorama mode will help position it as the fun camera to use. All things considered, I’m really starting to fall for the little guy. The problem with Olympus’ approach is that it’s terribly difficult to strike the right balance: water it down too much and pros won’t pick it up as a smaller alternative, but make it just a bit too complex and casual users won’t take the plunge. While not perfect, the E-PM1 fortunately seems to stick it mostly in that sweet spot. The Olympus E-PM1 is due for a September release, and will set photographers back $499.99.
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Google Quietly Rolls Out The Chrome Extension To Bring +1 To The Entire Web | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | You may recall that back in May, in Google’s “Dear Sophie” commercial: an unreleased +1 Chrome extension. This was pre-Google+, when the +1 button , so even I forgot about the extension over the past few months. But very quietly, Google actually yesterday. There was no blog post, no featured placement in the Chrome Web Store — pretty much no fanfare beyond Google SVP of Chrome, Sundar Pichai, . But it has the potential to be a bigger deal than it seems on the surface. As the tagline indicates, the Google +1 Button extension allows you to “+1 a web page, anywhere you go on the web”. That’s important. You no longer have to rely on a site to implement the +1 Button, you can invoke the functionality through your browser. Imagine if Facebook made their own browser and offered an extension to “Like” any page on the web through it — same idea (and one that suspect sooner or later). Right now, the +1 Button just shares content you like on the web. But eventually, the plan is to look at this data as a way to affect Google Search itself potentially. That’s huge. The button also is starting to play a role in how Google serves up advertising to you. Again, huge — though these concepts may make people wary of such a button. As Google notes in their description of the app: In addition to the practices described in the Google +1 Button Privacy Policy, by installing this extension, all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1 information. Yes, you read that correctly, “all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google” — and that’s even if you don’t click the button. Nefarious or not, that will worry some people. And while the +1 Buttons for websites just , the extension doesn’t yet offer that — but I assume it will. It does offer +1 counts though already, which is nice. Find the extension . Again, it’s Chrome only for now, we’ll see if they create ones for Firefox, IE, and Safari as well. : For those concerned about privacy, Google pointed me to this page: . |
Show Your Old-School Gaming Love With These Sega Console iPhone Cases | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | I don’t always post about iPhone cases… but when I do, I prefer retro gaming ones. Sure, you could have a cool metallic case, or go all-leather, or make your phone look like R2-D2 — but when you can have a Dreamcast on the back, those other options seem to lose their luster. It’s one of those things you can have that passively sorts through the crowd and only grabs the attention of those who are in the know. I have an Evangelion shirt that does the same . Anyone who sees you rocking a Genesis on your ear will come up and give you a Sonic-style fist bump. You too will feel as cool as the guy in the picture does. You have a choice of , , or the aforementioned . All cost ¥2100, or 27 of your United States dollars. Plus a few ¥ for shipping, of course. Wait, where’s the ? You can’t rewrite history, Sega! [via ] |
Apple Releases iOS 5 Beta 7 To Developers | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | Hey, what do you know! It’s been just shy of two weeks since Apple’s , and just like clockwork, they’re back with another serving. You guys all know the drill at this point: as usual, this Beta release is for developers (and ) only — but on the upside, that Beta version number probably won’t climb too much higher before this thing gets released to everyone. Plus: at this point, the releases seem to be boiling down to bug fixes and tiny tweaks. If you’ve managed to hold out this long, you’re probably not going to miss too much that you wouldn’t have seen in the first 6. Alas, Apple doesnt really release a “change log” pointing to all the fun little gems (other sites may post what they call Apple’s “change log”, but these are just Apple’s developer-oriented API notes/tweaks. These notes are almost identical from Beta to Beta, and have little to do with user-facing changes.) With that said, we’ll keep an eye out for big, notable changes and update this post as we come across them — be sure to let us know down in the comments if you spot any! Like the past two releases, Beta 7 can be downloaded as a slim update over-the-air, or as a full image through the Apple developer portal. |
Microsoft’s Interpretation Of “No Compromise” Is The Definition Of “Compromise” | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | On one hand, you have to give Windows chief Steven Sinofsky some credit, he’s being very open, proactive, and engaged leading up to Microsoft’s unveiling of Windows 8. And that’s great. But on the other hand, you have to wonder if he’s in the process of burying himself in a very big hole. Over the past couple of days, the Internet has let out a collective “gasp” at . So today, Sinofsky has about the design of Windows 8. The theme he wants his post to have is very clear: “no compromise” — he says it four separate times. Unfortunately, the theme that actually comes across is the exact opposite. Writes Sinofsky: We started planning Windows 8 during the summer of 2009 (before Windows 7 shipped). From the start, our approach has been to reimagine Windows, and to be open to revisiting even the most basic elements of the user model, the platform and APIs, and the architectures we support. Our goal was a no compromise design. And: Why not just start over from scratch? Why not just remove all of the desktop features and only ship the Metro experience? Why not “convert” everything to Metro? The arguments for a “clean slate” are well known, both for and against. We chose to take the approach of building a design without compromise. And: Windows 8 brings together all the power and flexibility you have in your PC today with the ability to immerse yourself in a Metro style experience. You don’t have to compromise! And: Our design goal was clear: no compromises. If you want to, you can seamlessly switch between Metro style apps and the improved Windows desktop. I’m really not sure that Sinofsky understands the definition of “compromise”. Several of his own commenters wonder the same thing. As a refresher: Compromise, : a middle state between conflicting opinions or actions reached by mutual concession or modification Um, that’s what Windows 8 sounds like. As Sinofsky describes it, Windows 8 offers both the traditional Windows experience as well as the new Metro-based one because they saw the arguments for doing it both ways. So they… wait for it… compromised! This is important because rarely do such compromises work. Yes, everyone wants to keep their cake and eat it too. But sometimes when you force this indecisiveness in the faces of users, you run the risk of them making a third choice: neither. As Frederic Lardinois : The question, of course, is if Microsoft’s somewhat odd approach to the Windows 8 user interface will really offer the best of both worlds or if it will just offer two completely disconnected experiences. Microsoft argues that “Windows 8 brings together all the power and flexibility you have in your PC today with the ability to immerse yourself in a Metro style experience.” Both Microsoft and Apple, though, have tried this same approach with their media-focused Media Center and Front Row experiences in the past and both didn’t succeed in convincing users to switch between these two interfaces. Apple, of course, also has a two-pronged approach with OS X Lion and iOS. But they’re totally separate operating systems that don’t co-exist on any one device. Sure, OS X Lion is moving more in the direction of iOS, but that’s a transition towards what Apple clearly sees as the future of computing. They’re not sticking iOS on their machines as a sub-operating layer. And the most iOS-like element of OS X Lion, Launchpad, is the one element that seems to draw the most complaints. , I actually quite like Microsoft’s Metro approach. But I like it in the context of smartphones (and possibly tablets). I’m not sure how much I like it as a alternative to Windows itself. But it’s impossible to know that right now without using it, I’ll have to wait and see. I simply think going with a single approach to the future of Windows makes more sense. Microsoft, understandably, is terrified of this. To me, Sinofsky’s entire post reads as an apology of sorts. Microsoft that they need to re-think and revamp Windows, but they can’t fully commit to it because they run the risk of alienating hundreds of millions of existing users. But eventually, Microsoft will have to choose. They can’t be indecisive forever. They’ll have to “compromise”, to use what Sinofsky clearly thinks is the definition of the word |
Today In Also-Ran Tablets: The HTC Jetstream And Sony S And P | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | Today won’t be remembered tomorrow. Nothing of consequence happened today. Steve Ballmer didn’t resign, Dell didn’t get out of the PC business and I didn’t stop procrastinating and actually go to the gym. Nope, like any other boring summer day, several products were announced, start-ups announced funding and another wireless carrier . Today is just another day. But while we’re still here, the last day of August, several tablets from major brands were announced that deserve a bit more conversation. Sony finally revealed for the P and S tablets. HTC, likewise, , which now sports the rather predictable name of Jetstream. You see, these tablets are just like all the other Honeycomb tabs that were hyped for months and eventually hit with a thud instead of a bang. It’s hard to be an Android sympathizer these days, isn’t it? I used to consider myself firmly in that camp — then I bought an iPad 2 a few months back and perspective slapped me in the face. Android tabs are reliant on their manufacturer to make up for Honeycomb’s empty app marketplace. Without help, they’re simply another Internet portal device whose existence is moot when compared against a notebook. This cry for life makes laptops, not the iPad, Honeycomb tabs’ biggest competitors. The Sony tablets outed today attempt to justify their novelty with Sony’s Qriocity media suite. This somewhat obscure offering is available on nearly every connected device Sony makes, including the PS3, Bravia TVs, Sony Ericsson Android phones, the PSP, and all their set-top boxes and connected Blu-ray players. Its install base might even eclipse iTunes when considering the sheer number of devices running the service. But without this media platform, the Sony tablets are, well, just more Android tablets. Sony did build-in robust Playstation support, which could be a killer feature — someday. The Tablet S is the first tablet to be able to play PSP and Playstation games via an emulator. But the tablet comes with only two games (Crash Bandicoot and Pinball Heroes) and per the Sony press conference earlier today, it doesn’t sound like adding titles is a huge priority. Several early reviews and hands-on of the Sony tablets popped up shortly after it was announced. Tim Stevens from Engadget that the Sony Tablet S is “not clearly better” than Galaxy Tab 10.1 citing the odd form factor, scratch-prone glass and flimsy feel. So that’s a pass? Reviews really need to target consumers outside of our sheltered world of silly gadgets. Is it worth your money over another product? No caveats, no “if-then” statements. So far not one table priced around $500 has countered the iPad. The HTC Jetstream fails this proof even harder than the Sony Tablet S. Priced at $699 , the rather bulky tablet only sets itself apart with an LTE radio and stylus support, which their only barely made work. Besides that the tablet is just another nondescript Android 3.1 tab. This one will fail faster than the $499 TouchPad. Another day, another Android tablet to add to the deadpool. But hopefully manufacturers do not view each failure as a wasted opportunity but rather a learning experience. You can bet that Apple pays attention, as the iPad is not the definition of a perfect tablet. With each failed tablet, the path to the perfect slate device gets a tad shorter and we’ll all eventually arrive together. Hopefully this promised land isn’t a gated garden filled with apple trees but rather an open field filled with frolicking androids. But until then, let’s just gather up all the Honeycomb tablets and throw them in the deadpool. No one will notice. |
Mobile TV And Video Platform MobiTV Files For $75 Million IPO | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | Mobile TV and video platform has filed its with the SEC this afternoon. In the public offering, MobiTV plans to raise as much as $75 million. For background, MobiTV was founded in 1999 and was one of the pioneers in bringing to mobile devices. The company boasts partnerships with a number of and content providers such as NBC, ESPN, Disney, CBS, Warner Music and more. And MobiTV has raised approximately from a wide range of , including Menlo Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Adobe Ventures and Hearst Ventures. According to the filing, the company is the national provider of mobile television services for AT&T U-verse Live TV, NFL Mobile on Verizon, Sprint TV and T-Mobile TV, among others. The company’s technology works on 375 different types of mobile devices, across wireless and broadband networks and all major operating systems, including Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry OS and Windows. MobiTV licenses content from major television studios, including ABC, CBS, Disney, ESPN, Fox, MTV Networks and NBC; and in 2010 delivered over 3,000 live events to mobile devices. The company grew its mobile minutes streamed from 264 million minutes in 2007 to 1.4 billion minutes in 2010. For 2010, MobiTV’s total revenue was $66.8 million in 2010. In the six months ended June 30, 2011, the company made $37 million. Revenue for 2008 and 2009 was $55 million and $62 million, respectively. Unfortunately, MobiTV has yet to make a profit. The company has taken a loss for the past three years. In 2008, 2009, and 2010, the company posted losses of $25 million, $14.6 million and $14.7 million, respectively. In the first six months of 2011, MobiTV lost $8 million. And the company warns in the filing that it depends on three customers, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, for most of its revenue and if any of those customers were to limit or terminate their relationship with MobiTV, “it could be difficult or impossible for us to replace that revenue.” Sprint represented 56%, 69% and 54% of the company’s revenue in 2008, 2009 and 2010. AT&T and T-Mobile combined represent 24%, 17% and 24% of the company’s revenue in 2008, 2009 and 2010, respectively, and 42% of its revenue in the six months ended June 30, 2011. To make matters worse, beginning September 2012, MobiTV’s agreement with Sprint converts to a month to month contract. T-Mobile will automatically renew in December 2011 for a one-year term but the agreement is subject to T-Mobile’s right to terminate on 30 days notice. AT&T’s contract expires in January 2013. MobiTV is just the latest in a slew of companies who filed to go public in the past two weeks. , and both threw their hats into the ring last week. |
Environmental Watchdog Report Calls Apple To Task For Violations | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | The ever-volatile issue of the costs surrounding globalized manufacturing looks to be looming again as a harshly critical report on Apple’s Chinese suppliers gains visibility. The report, by environmental NGO the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs ( ), is the sequel to another they released in January entitled “The Other Side of Apple.” With the ominous title it’s clear what their intention is, and while there is a certain slant to the presentation, the facts highlighted are too salient to ignore. I have written about conscious abdication of moral responsibility for our purchases ( ), but the IPE report resurrects the question of corporate responsibility in an era of increasing transparency. Should we, and can we, hold Apple and others like it to account for the transgressions of those with whom it does business? You can download the report in English or Chinese ; I’ve also embedded it at the bottom of the post. First, the obvious must be acknowledged: that this report set out with the intention of exposing, not to say slandering, Apple and its suppliers specifically by publicizing information unlikely to be disclosed by any of the parties involved, such as the health problems of schoolchildren adjacent to certain factories. It also must be said that the violations highlighted are not exclusive to Apple, Foxconn, or China. The report is candid regarding this and gives reasons for why they are singling out Apple. Not that we can’t think of good reasons on our own for an increased level of scrutiny: as perhaps the world’s largest and most influential electronics company, Apple is a natural target for industry watchdogs and reformers. Furthermore, its policy of limited disclosure is ill-adapted to an era in which information wants to be free, even if it must be tracked, trapped, and released into the wild. The report is worth reading for anyone interested in this topic, or anyone curious about the environmental conditions surrounding Chinese factories. I don’t think there are many who imagine a shining paradise with sparkling-clean factories churning out ethical iPhones and recycling the scrap into inspirational sculptures, but it’s nice to get a reality check now and then regardless. If you’re in a hurry, just read the “executive summary,” from which I quote (selectively): Apple has systematically failed to respond to all queries regarding their supply chain
environmental violations. We have found from this investigation that the volume of hazardous waste produced by suspected Apple Inc. suppliers was especially large and some had failed to properly dispose of their hazardous waste. From these two investigations, the coalition has discovered more than 27 suspected suppliers to Apple that have had environmental problems. However, in the ‘2011 Supplier Responsibility Report’ published by Apple Inc., where core violations were discovered from the 36 audits, not a single violation was based on environmental pollution. The public has no way of knowing if Apple is even aware of these problems. The report continues with the documentation of their and others’ investigations into the environmental problems specific to inadequate regulation and disclosure. The cost at large of industry (i.e. pollution, injury, etc.) has been known for centuries, of course, but a rigorous on-site investigation turns up things that one would expect to find in Apple’s audits. Some of the data is anecdotal, but much of it has to do with discrepancies between what is reported, what is really happening, and indeed what is even being looked for. Along for the ride (and providing the photos accompanying the report and this article) was well-known Chinese environmentalist . Familiar tactics are on hand: venting the most hazardous chemicals at night, nominal compliance totally unchecked by regulators, resolutions by local governments that go nowhere, and health problems among workers and locals probably but not certainly linked to the factories. These are things you’ll find in practically every country, but they appear to be running rampant among the big Chinese OEMs. And it is perhaps this fact, the ubiquity of industrial waste and its halo of destruction, that has resulted in lopsided regulation by Apple. Following a rash of suicides and a number of reports on the conditions of laborers in Apple’s supplier factories, Apple has been careful to publicize its (PDF), which details their audits and responses. As you can read for yourself, the “core violations” are almost entirely labor issues. Environmentally, it appears that the companies Apple contracts with are the very pattern of compliance:
(the left column of numbers indicates practical compliance, the right column policy compliance) And this report seems to directly contradict that. However, it should be noted that the rules being complied with are not exactly disclosed, and that high number may have more to do with inadequate Chinese laws and regulation than laxity on Apple’s part. After all, if Shenzhen ordinances permit however many tons of waste cyanide and heavy metal runoff, they are within the law despite the harm that may do to the environment or surrounding population. The same may be said for many factories in the US. Yet it’s not often we hear about Intel factories causing chest pains among nearby kindergarteners. And the news that their chemical waste volume had risen 27% in one year came not from a watchdog agency but . Indeed, the IPE’s report goes to some length to establish that while Apple’s responsibility may not extend to scrubbing toxic alkalis off seabirds, they do not seem to be following the example of some other large tech companies, which have taken steps to improve the visibility of environmental violations and corrective actions. Siemens, for instance, has begun asking their suppliers to publicly disclose solutions being enacted regarding violations. The rest of the industry is no beacon of hope, though, as many of these shady manufacturing operations contract with Motorola, Samsung, Panasonic, and the rest of the usual suspects. The multi-tiered supply chains of practically every electronics manufacturer are extremely difficult to monitor, but the difficulty is directly proportional to the size and extent of that company’s involvement. But Apple’s deliberate policy of non-disclosure, or to be kind, of disclosure, is at worst criminal and evasive, and at best a poor standard to set for the industry. What is it we can do to improve the situation? Shedding equal light on the environmental impact of globalization as on the economical and humanitarian impacts is a start. It’s been done desultorily for decades, but the gruesome realities consequent on the world’s appetite for gadgets and such is hard to face, harder to address, and at any rate lacks the flash and instant appeal of a Foxconn worker jumping to his death following a management dressing-down. It’s easy to comprehend and easy to decry, but the broader tragedy of thousands of lives lost to cancer and anthropogenic desertification doesn’t fit so easily in a blog post, or the short international news section of the local paper. But perhaps the timing of this report is auspicious. While Steve Jobs may or may not be staying on in a , the new face of Apple is Tim Cook and it may be that he can be prevailed upon to make the changes Jobs wouldn’t, or couldn’t. Or as the eye of the public, fatigued with the denigration of humanity that accompanies industrialization, shifts towards the environmental impact of massive companies like Apple, perhaps Apple’s eye will shift as well. Could next year’s Supplier Responsibility Report strengthen and impose rules regarding environmental responsibility? Or Apple and the others fail again to take action on these problems, which are pernicious to solve, easy to pass on to others, and have the agreeable side effect of reducing manufacturing costs? Environmental groups can issue reports like this one, and I am lucky enough to be in a position to help at least expose our readers to this information, however they should choose to interpret it. Apple produces the world’s most popular devices, and are on track to become the world’s most valuable company. It behooves them to lead the industry in more than just interface and industrial design. We may not have the backbone to opt out of their products, or the products of other companies making similar mistakes, but it’s consistent with our inviolable brand loyalty to hold our favored companies responsible for problems as widespread and poorly addressed as this. [scribd id=63681015 key=key-gnivffn9j4zarko7jd9 mode=list] |
null | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 9 | null |
Give Your Lady The Gift Of Glowing Power With The iNecklace | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | It’s iconic. That soft, pulsating light emanating from the button that controls life and death. Press it when it’s glowing and creativity flows. Turn it off and a little bit of your inner child dies. The iNecklace allows the wearer to capture that sense of control and wear it around the neck as a status of power. There’s nothing else like it. (this is where you, the commenter will jump to the comments and link to something identical) The iNecklace is and is available in the states through Gizmine. The pendent is CNC machined from aluminum and features a screw-type back plate. Inside is a pulsating LED powered by a replaceable battery. Just like the power button it’s clearly designed to replicate, the LED seems to breath as it hangs on its 18-inch sterling silver chain, creating a rather unique piece of jewelry and one that will certainly attract the geeks. just started taking pre-orders with shipping expected to start on September 8th. |
Game Closure Quietly Raises Seed Round From SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Greylock, And More | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | when it opened its private beta to the world to test out its new cross-platform HTML5 game engine and SDK. The startup has since gone on to work with multiple and to bring cross-platform, multiplayer HTML5 games to the App Store, Android Marketplace, Facebook, and beyond. According to Co-founder and CEO Michael Carter, the startup has also attracted interest in its technology from game studios involved in the launch and expects activity to ramp up after project details are (expected to be) announced at F8 next month. Game Closure’s new game development environment and SDK makes it easy to create, host, and deploy HTML5-based cross-platform, multiplayer games, starting with iOS, Android, and Facebook. This along with the interest the startup has had from game studios led to its quiet announcement today that it has raised its first round outside of investment. While the founders are being tight-lipped about the actual numbers, the list of investors is certainly impressive. Investors and angels participating in the startup’s seed round include, , , , , , , and . With advisors like Joi Ito, who was on the board of Japanese gaming giant DeNA during it’s primary growth phase, and currently advises Zynga and Twitter, (and runs the MIT Media Lab), Game Closure is starting to add some important pieces that will set it in good stead as it scales. What’s more, the startup is beginning to swim in a hot market. Single player games are beginning to experience distribution pressure from competitive games that launch on multiple platforms, as seen in Zynga’s , a play that has already moved from a previously mobile-only title onto desktop Facebook. This trend is already resulting in game studios work to launch titles which are interoperable with Google, Apple, Facebook, and every other platform. At the least, this is something Facebook fears, as , though for now Facebook still allows publishers to cross promote from the web canvas to 1st-party games on iOS (with ). In light of all this, Game Closure is going after speed of execution as its main target, as Carter said that the company prides itself on its SDK’s ability to turn an idea into a game in under 2 weeks, without having to worry about the so-called “platform wars”. Also of note: Game Closure is an entrepreneuers-in-residence company for the StartX Stanford Accelerator (formerly SSE Labs), and will be presenting at StartX’s upcoming demo day, where the Stanford accelerator’s portfolio of thirteen summer session companies will be unveiled. . |
HTC Sensation Redux To Sport Beats By Dre Audio? | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | Since HTC’s in Beats Electronics, the big question was which of their snazzy new handsets would be the first to benefit from an audio overhaul. Rumor had it that the Vigor may be the first to get a taste of the Dr. Dre treatment, but according to a leaked spec sheet, it may be a refreshed version of HTC’s Sensation that nabs the distinction. Perhaps best known for being one of the first handsets to be privy to HTC’s bootloader unlock process, the HTC Sensation may see new life as a special edition model, reports. The spec sheet outlines a bump in processing power (1.5 GHz, compared to the original 1.2), onboard memory (4 GB, up from 2), and a more robust battery. The device will reportedly debut with a £520 ($846) price point contract, which can largely be explained by the inclusion of Beats tech. If true, the new Sensation will sport audio processing that promises optimized sound quality, and a nifty pair of in-ear headphones with remote control. UK customers hankering for the updated device can expect to nab one for free (!) with the signing of a two year contract. With pricing details already in place, the Special Edition Sensation seems poised for a launch sooner rather than later. While the slide deck all but guarantees a UK launch, the hardware refresh could also soon find its way to China — the device is listed as having support for the TD-SCDMA network, which is the hallmark of China’s wireless industry. |
Impermium Launches Social Spam Index; Finds That Up To 40 Percent Of Online IDs Are Fake | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | of , a young startup aimed at zapping the Internet’s social spam wherever it hides. Not only is the startup bringing the heat to user generated spam like spammy comments, hacked accounts, and fraudulent registrations, but the startup also happens to be founded by , Yahoo’s former “Spam Czar”, as well as former Yahoos and . These guys have significant experience fighting spam, part of the reason they’ve already signed on investors like Accel Partners, AOL Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund and Morado Ventures. But the real fight that Impermium wants to help companies wage is the one against social spam — the spam that is proliferating on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and social networks near you. , malware networks are becoming increasingly dynamic and continue to wreak havoc on search engines, email, and everything in between. Spam, too, is on the rise — and this is no longer your father’s spam. While Impermium is a web security and spam detection startup first and foremost, Risher said that in this new era of social spam, a new standard is needed. What he means is that, in the days of yore, web security companies held their cards close to their chest — when a new bot, form of malware, or spam was detected, white hats kept these discoveries (and their prescriptions) to themselves, hoping to become the star sheriff (and biggest moneymaking outfit) in town. More collaboration among web security companies, social networks, and data collectors is no doubt needed, and while this isn’t a call to make all identified spammers, malware creators, and so on known widely to the public (because they’ll just change tactics), a revision of policy certainly seems in order. So, as part of this effort, Impermium is creating a resource for regularly published data on social web spam and abuse trends. Today, Impermium is announcing the inaugural , which will include quarterly reports based on the data it collects from its customers and daily spam hunting. The first report is based on a 100-day sample of the social web (between June and August) that analyzed 104 million pieces of user generated content (UGC) on social networks, blogs, and social bookmarking sites from a base of 90 million users across 72 countries. (Impermium currently counts , , and among its early customers.) Impermium’s new index has identified some interest — if not disturbing — trends in social spam that show that web businesses that depend on public user profiles are at significant risk in today’s web. What does that mean specifically? Well, for starters there’s this eye-opening statistic: As much as 40 percent of public accounts created on social networks are fraudulent. This means that many sites are overstating how many users they actually have; though fake accounts ranged from 5 to 40 percent across audited sites, with the percentage depending on the site, perceived value to spammers, and the ease of account registration. Impermium also found that so-called “sleeper cells” of social web abuse are growing fast. One if its customers experienced an attack of 30,000 fraudulent new accounts in one hour. Those accounts then posted 475,000 malicious messages to legitimate community members. As this data shows, social media exploitation techniques are evolving fast. Nearly every large consumer brand or significant news event is exploited by spammers on the social web. The deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Amy Winehouse, in particular, became major stories that spammers used to deceive people into clicking on malicious links. Thus, spammers not only target the areas where the most people hang out, but they’re also using emotionally charged content to dupe users into clicking on their spam. Interestingly, Uggs came in as the most exploited brand in social media channels by twice as much as the next in line, Gucci, and five times more than Prada, number three. And in the surprise of the week, porn is no longer the top source of social spam — fashion and electronics were the top two sources of spammy content, outpacing porn by 3 to 1. This may just show some very interesting trend data in web use — it appears that, for once, porn is the underdog. And sadly, it also seems that mom and pop shops have been turned and are getting into the spam game. Impermium’s report shows that small businesses have entered into social spam, reacting to the difficult economy by expanding into more illicit areas. “Most companies will be shocked to see how rampant user registration fraud is on their site”, Risher said. “Bulk accounts for most popular social networks can now be purchased on the black market for pennies. This type of fraud has many significant ramifications, including a company’s ability to accurately value its user base and determine the actual cost of new customer acquisition”. Rather than play into the real-names-only policy on Google+, the CEO continued, sites need a more flexible approach that maintains privacy without exposing them to this rampant proliferation of fake, bulk accounts. For more on the Impermium Index’s inaugural results, check out the infographic below. And for more data, . |
YC’s Patent Pledge Asks Tech Companies To Grant Startups Patent Immunity | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | is about to wield its rapidly-growing influence in the tech community to help startups everywhere. And it’s taking on one of the hottest (and most fear-inspiring) issues around: patents. Today YC cofounder Paul Graham has written a note called in which he proposes that tech companies should commit to a straightforward promise: That’s the entire pledge. There’s no legalese or confusing conditions around it. But it could shake things up for tech companies in a big way. More important: unlike government intervention, which would likely take years, YC’s Patent Pledge could be widely adopted in a much shorter timeframe. YC has set up a site at that lists a roster of the companies that have agreed to the pledge, which already includes fourteen well-known YC alumni like Airbnb, Disqus, Hipmunk, and Weebly. Now, lately you’ve heard a lot about patents with respect to mobile devices — Google is widely believed to have been interested in acquiring Motorola largely because of the latter’s large patent trove, which it can use to defend itself against Apple and Microsoft. But this isn’t an issue that’s particular to mobile, or even big companies. Graham says that one of the biggest concerns new founders often have is whether an incumbent competitor (with a large legal team) will try to kill them off early on by threatening them with patent suits. Graham’s proposal is for tech companies to publicly commit to the pledge above, which would ameliorate some of these concerns, at least for companies just getting off the ground. Graham likens the pledge to Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra, in that it will help attract the best kind of people. From Graham’s post: The patent pledge is in effect a narrower but open source “Don’t be evil.” I encourage every technology company to adopt it. If you want to help fix patents, encourage your employer to. Already most technology companies wouldn’t sink to using patents on startups. You don’t see Google or Facebook suing startups for patent infringement. They don’t need to. So for the better technology companies, the patent pledge requires no change in behavior. They’re just promising to do what they’d do anyway. And when all the companies that won’t use patents on startups have said so, the holdouts will be very conspicuous. Of course, this isn’t going to solve the broader patent issues by any means. It obviously doesn’t help larger companies, like Google in its multiple battles over Android. And it doesn’t protect startups against patent trolls, who couldn’t care less if they’re detested — because they already are. But Graham says that at least as far as startups are concerned, patent trolls are far less worrisome to entrepreneurs than incumbent competitors looking to stifle competition. The trolls, he explains, are just looking to get money — while the competitors are hoping to wield their patents to kill startups off. I’ll be curious to see how far the Patent Pledge spreads. As Graham says in the article, companies like Facebook and Google aren’t out suing startups because they don’t have to, and I expect we’ll see them opt into the pledge quickly. As for those companies that are less startup-friendly, I expect we’ll hear a lot of hemming and hawing — and I hope YC and the community really holds their feet to the fire. Graham closes his post, which is , with the following: Companies that use patents on startups are attacking innovation at
the root. Now there’s something any individual can do about this
problem, without waiting for the government: ask companies where
they stand. |
Gillmor Gang: Live from Dreamforce 1:30pm PT | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 8 | 31 | Update: The Gang is scheduled to start around 1:30pm. From the inside out, salesforce.com is a rapidly growing cloud computing company at the head of the enterprise social wave. From the outside in, the company’s annual Dreamforce conference has landed in downtown San Francisco on the Moscone Center campus. Each year the conference grows in size, with more than 45,000 attendees streaming in this year. I’ve been employed at Salesforce for more than a year and a half, and in that time I’ve seen a steady march toward the goals that attracted me to the company. Many of these advances will be revealed over the course of the conference, freeing me at last to discuss and place them in the context of the Social Enterprise. With the coming release of iOS 5 and the continued advance of Android in the mobile space, the opportunity for using the social stream to improve our personal and business lives has never been more tangible. Most notable in this moment is the collapse of Microsoft as a driving force in the evolution of technology. Whether it’s the reluctance to cannibalize existing Office and Windows revenue streams or the inability to fight off Android’s I’ll Take It From Here of the low end of the smart phone market, Microsoft has no serious club to bring down on anybody who wants to move from the desktop to the Tablet. The problem is, no one cares about Windows. It’s so low in the stack most people don’t realize it’s there, and besides they’re spending most of the minutes of the day and night on Safari or Android or anything mobile. Anything but Windows is also followed closely by Anything but Office, and soon at a theater near you, Anything but Outlook. You may not believe it yet, but email is being routed around. Take my teenaged daughter, who lives in Facebook, or my youngest, who lives in FaceTime. Texting and Twitter. The problem with email is more than the traditional spam firehose. It’s the lack of a social lense across the firehose of interruptions that stream unfettered into your devices. Without a sense of priority, the ability to triage in realtime, you’re at the mercy of the rapid buildout of social technologies that harvest the expanding concentric circles of your most trusted advisors. They are your friends, colleagues, partners, educators, thought leaders, and influencers of the stream. You follow them, @mention them, retweet and accelerate the dynamics of the implicit groups they form around and next to each of us. This undulating stream of metadata informs the value and importance of these social objects in ways email can’t compete with. As social networks improve, we make investments in the multiple ways we can signal value to each other. The model has flipped from the InBox to the OutFollow; we register with more socially-aware constructs that mine our meta signals to construct a series of trust relationships built around a sharing model. With the release of iOS 5 in a few short weeks, this socially-tuned priority stream has a powerful new home in the push notification queue. Instead of leaving one app to check email, we are notified in a non-interruptive drop down alert as things happen. As we let these alerts accumulate you can triage the messages you don’t respond to immediately. But realtime is not about reacting, it’s about absorbing a sense of the flow, the rhythm of the interactions between people, projects, reminders, collaborative ideas in the now. As with Chatter in the enterprise, you develop a subtle institutional memory that lets you stage news, documents, chats, video, even email, in a socially adaptive priority stream. |
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