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Apple’s Terrific And Tumultuous 2011 | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… Those words seem to encapsulate Apple’s 2011 perfectly. The year saw the company both became the most valuable company in the world and lose its founder, savior, visionary, and leader. Earlier, Erick published his . Topping that list is the , a story so big that it . But even without that sad news, 2011 was all about Apple. There was certainly enough news to constitute its own roundup. So here we go. Though January has historically been a huge month for Apple where key products were unveiled at Macworld, 2011 marked the second year of Apple marching to its own beat. January marked the first time the company . The only public company ahead of them in that regard was Exxon. And that wouldn’t last… On January 6, for business, of Apple’s plan to kill off the optical disc. The Mac App Store also offered , which would come later in the year. On January 7, Verizon sent out mysterious invites to an event in New York City. The fact that I was invited . Sure enough, Verizon took the stage with then-Apple COO Tim Cook to . Finally. And of course, January saw the of the … On January 17, Apple announced that Steve Jobs would be , and released Jobs’ letter to the company. As with his past medical leaves, to the lead the company day-to-day, but Jobs would retain his CEO title ( ). Sadly, this time, the situation was not temporary. were the best ever for the company, with $26.7 Billion in revenue, $6 Billion in profit on 7.33 Million iPads and 16.24 Million iPhones sold. At the end of the month, . The month kicked off with controversy after Sony’s eReader app was by Apple. The issue , it’s that they started enforcing them (around in-app purchases) which jumpstarted a . Part of the App Store tweaking was due to the fact that Apple was about to launch starting with News Corp’s , which — incidentally, the same day Google , the first version of their OS built for tablets. The iPad 2 rumors . And started! And so did about an “iPhone nano”. And, of course, . Meanwhile, — they became the most valuable tech company by over $100 billion dollars. When Apple in the middle of the month, . all kinds of ranging from Dropbox to Pandora were in danger of having to their business models to work with Apple. Work on — and . Work on was also believed to be nearing completion. of new MacBook Pros started, potentially with something called “ “. A few days later, . It started out with a bang as Apple held an event with a special guest — . He wasn’t about to let his medical leave let him miss . One of the cooler new elements of the iPad 2: . On March 11, in the U.S. and a handful of other countries. A few weeks later, it in 25 more countries. On March 23, Apple that Bertrand Serlet, the SVP of Mac Software Engineering, was leaving the company. He had worked with Steve Jobs for 22 years. Craig Federighi, the driving force behind OS X Lion, took his place. Word started to get out that iOS 5 would be , instead of a summer release. But the good news was that it sounded like Apple’s new cloud service would be launched at WWDC. Apple the WWDC dates for early June. But it seemed clear this year would be different, with for iOS products instead of the summer. News hit that and would be released in 2012. Of course, that plan changed later in the year. Apple the new Final Cut Pro X at NAB with a very attractive new price (thanks in part to the new Mac App Store distribution): $299. Meanwhile, left for dead, began to resurface. at dinner one night in San Francisco. It became official . Apple were a blow-out again with $24.67 billion in revenue on 18.65 million iPhones, 4.69 million iPads, and 3.76 million Macs sold in Q2. Apple’s quarter was so good that they actually , something which hadn’t happened in a couple decades. There was over information found in iOS (and Android phones). . Apple kicked off the month by with better chips, graphics, and cameras. on , which would turn out to be important later in the year when Siri was unveiled. Apple and Google were forced to about location privacy in front of the Senate. A lot of talk started that Apple was finalizing a deal with the record labels for a cloud music service. The name “ ” started gaining a lot of steam — and for good reason. On May 31, . Weird. Meanwhile, an interesting rumor: there would be Twitter integration in iOS 5. picking up about an upcoming bid for Nortel patents… On June 6, Apple held their . OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud were the main areas of focus. Among the more notable things: , , and the aforementioned . Oh, and . There was nothing about a Nuance however, that would come later. On June 7, Steve Jobs (still on medical leave) went to Cupertino City Hall to pitch Apple’s plan for a massive new headquarters in the city — one that . Amid pressure from multiple sides, Apple from their new (and not yet fully implemented) App Store in-app purchase and subscription rules. . Apple’s stock continued its run. By June 13, Apple was worth more than Microsoft, HP, and Dell — . Nokia and Apple settled a patent dispute — . Meanwhile, Apple’s patent war with Samsung . On June 21, Apple released and Final Cut Pro X into the Mac App Store. Massive started about the latter. of an actual Apple Television started popping up again. And with the WWDC no-show, about the next iPhone(s) started. On July 1, it was revealed that not only had Google lost the Nortel patent bidding, but a familiar foe won them: (along with ). The App Store 15 billion downloads. once again in Q3 with record revenues, profits, iPhone ( ), and iPad sales. As a result, on the stock market. On July 20, Apple updated the , the , and their displays (now with ). Also released: . By late July, (and cash equivalents) on its books than the U.S. government. Apple the ability stream television shows from their cloud. Google about Apple and Microsoft’s patent strategy. On August 9, to become the most valuable (in terms of market cap) public company in the world. For the rest of the year, they would go back and forth. The launch of Steve Jobs’ biography was to November of 2011 (up from 2012). Referencing the success of the iPad, by saying they’re not only giving up on tablets, but looking to get out of the PC game as well (they would later backtrack on this after a CEO change). suggests the next iPhone will be a GSM/CDMA dual-mode one. Meanwhile, starts to circulate that Sprint will be getting the next iPhone as well (though the stuff about an iPhone 5 exclusive turns out to be nonsense). On August 24, is sent around the Apple universe when . While he had been on medical leave since January, this was a clear sign that he didn’t think he would ever feel well enough to return fulltime. Jobs asks the Apple Board to appoint Tim Cook as CEO ( ) and asks to stay on the Board as well ( ). “iPhone 5” rumors hit a fever-pitch but not much actually happens in the month leading up to October… Apple holds to unveil the iPhone 4S. But the star of the show is , the new iOS 5 feature exclusive to the iPhone 4S. Also new to iOS 5 is . With the 4S, the iPhone 4 price to $99 (with a contract). And the iPhone 3GS goes free (with a contract). Apple that 6 million copies of OS X Lion have been sold, outpacing Snow Leopard. They also that iTunes now has over 20 million songs which have been downloaded 16 billion times. Apple also that 300 million iPods have been sold in 10 years. Tim Cook also says that have now been sold. On October 5, just one day after Apple’s iPhone 4S event, Apple announces that earlier that day. , to Jobs begin to appear and this lasts for weeks. After days of mourning, Apple starts iPhone 4S pre-orders, which in just 24 hours. On October 12, . Two days later, the 4S goes on sale and in the first weekend alone, — double the pace of the iPhone 4. Apple’s Q4 numbers were a bit of a surprise for many, because for the first time in several years, on Wall Street’s expectations. of the miss, and Tim Cook did something odd: he went on the record record iPhone and iPad sales in the upcoming quarter (Apple’s holiday quarter). Following Jobs’ passing, the release date of his biography was moved up again, to . Leading up to the day, several excerpts from the book were leaked. The most intriguing one revolved around Jobs’ comment about . On October 24, Apple the MacBook Pro line again (though very subtly). They also the Smart Cover colors. By the end of the month, many iPhone 4S users are experiencing (Apple on a software update to fix them). On November 8, Adobe announced they’ll be on mobile devices. This was long a sore point between Apple and Adobe, . Five years after it was released, Apple the first generation iPod nano. On November 14, iTunes Match officially finally — it had been promised by October. of a 15-inch MacBook Air ( ) . More rumors of a “Retina” iPad 3 also surface. And the talk of a larger-screen iPhone 5 starts up again. Talk starts to pick up again that Tim Cook is open to the idea of Apple issuing a dividend to shareholders as their cash supply approaches $100 billion. The patent nonsense . Depending on which country you select, Apple or one of their rivals may be banned from importing their devices. But not really since there will be endless . Apple announced their “iTunes Rewind” apps of the year awards. for the iPhone, Snapseed for the iPad. Apple 100 million downloads from the Mac App Store in less than a year. In mid-December, it’s that Apple bought flash memory company Anobit, . The iPad 3 unveiling is to be weeks away… Business as usual despite a crazy year. 2012 should be . |
Knight Of The Round Tablet? UK Gov Honour for Ive Heralds New Year Of Tech | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 31 | Honours and medals from Queens and Kings may be an alien concept in Silicon Valley, but they are a delightfully steam-punk tradition, still continued in a Britain which long ago said goodbye to its Empire, yet still has Knights and ‘Commander’ orders to hand out. Thus, Apple’s chief designer, Jonathan Ive, has been knighted in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list, principally for his work in industrial design and championing British talent abroad. Ive was already made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006. Being a Knight means he is now Sir Jonathan Ive – a moniker which should, at the very least, bump him to the front of the average restaurant queue when he’s in London. |
A Web Of Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | It is remarkable to think that we’re in the early days of the app era, when there are already close to 600,000 iOS applications and nearly 400,000 on Android (source: ). The growth of these app ecosystems has been rapid, exponential and shows no signs of slowing down. As well it shouldn’t: the untapped, involves hundreds of millions of users. And yet, app discovery remains a challenge. Whether in an app store, , or via a third-party service. Whoever cracks the nut of app discovery will have the potential to be the next Google: the search engine of the modern age. The search engine for a web of apps. App discovery is a key focus for a number of startups. Off the top of my head: , , , , , , and are approaching the challenge of app discovery in new ways. While that’s a rich topic for examination, it’s not one that can be summed up in a single post. So for today, one aspect of building a web of apps: connectivity. Why do I keep referring to a web of apps? Apps are not like the web – they are not hyperlinked creations that allow you to move seamlessly from one operation to another…or are they? Perhaps not yet. But they could be, if more developers chose to implement this functionality. Using something called “app URL schemes,” apps can communicate with each other. For example, on the iPhone, iOS developers can call up the built-in apps, like the Messaging app, Email app and the Phone app. Apple’s URL schemes are published in developer documentation, but all apps have URL schemes available.(On Android, something similar can be accomplished via “intent filters.”) Apps can launch other apps. Apps can connect to other apps. It’s still somewhat rare to see this in action, but it’s starting to happen. Facebook is probably the most high-profile example of this. In the iOS app, on the left-hand side an “apps” section will link to Facebook apps which also exist as iOS applications. Tap the app in the list and Facebook launches the app on your phone. If you don’t have the iOS version installed, it launches the App Store instead. Clever. Facebook as a portal to the mobile “app web.” But there are lesser known use cases, too. For example, , an open source initiative that . Currently, in order to edit a photo in multiple apps, you have to save the edited photo to the camera roll each time as you move in between applications. But with PhotoAppLink-enabled apps, you simply select another app to use from your current app. Another example (actually, a potential example): the educational startup offers an iOS app that’s a curated version of the iTunes App Store. Designed to , KinderTown directs you to the iPhone’s App Store for downloads when you tap the app in question. Imagine if it could also help you find, filter and launch the apps you already have installed on your phone instead of just those you’ve newly discovered. Meanwhile, at AnscaMobile, a recent tutorial for developers took the concept of app URL schemes a step further. Being able to launch an app using a URL scheme is great, wrote , but what’s is being able to tell your app to in response to being opened via a URL scheme. “Think for a moment just how powerful this can be,” he says. “You could tell your app to do different things, or start in a different state depending on the URL string that was used to launch your app.” Indeed, powerful stuff. And sadly under-utilized. The possibilities for inter-connected apps using app URL schemes are endless, but actually connecting them together is still a challenge. The problem stems from the fact that there isn’t a simple way to discover the custom URLs for the apps you would want to link to. This summer, a company called attempted to address this situation by launching , an initiative which aims to open source the unpublished custom URL schemes for iOS applications. Using a downloadable tool, Zwapp scans your iTunes library to locate the custom schemes for your apps then uploads those to the website. The goal, as you may have guessed by the name, is to collect one million of these app schemes. It’s not quite there – only 15,066 have been submitted to date. Despite the Zwapp’s outreach and call-to-action in the app developer community, what it has implemented is really more of a hack – a way to workaround for the fact that there aren’t better tools available. Whether the usage of URL schemes will ever really take off is unknown. While it’s one thing to launch your own app in creative ways, developers seem to balk at the concept of linking out to other apps. But just like hyperlinks allowed users to begin surfing through what’s now a seemingly infinite number of pages on the web, linking apps could prove to be a way to overcome today’s app discovery challenges, too. |
RED Sues Arri Over Email Hacking, False Advertising In HD Camera Dust-Up | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | Upstart digital cinema company , which has been the bane of many established camera companies for several years now, has filed suit against Arri, a leading camera manufacturer. They allege that Arri employed one Michael Bravin, a former employee of camera kit maker Band Pro, who hacked the email account of his former employee and stole confidential information relating to RED — and astroturfed for Arri on the official forums to boot. They also take exception to some claims Arri made in advertising disparaging RED’s cameras. You can read the specifics below in the court filing, but the gist is that Bravin continually accessed the email of Amnon Band, founder of , and was aware of acquisition talks in 2009 and 2010. He was hired by Arri in 2010 and allegedly provided them details of business and R&D at RED. He also posted on RedUser about how great Arri’s new camera, the Alexa, is. And there’s no question that it’s a great camera — but he posted under a fake name, and there were other circumstances. It’s questionably legal (and questionably illegal), but they are taking him to task for it anyway. RED also says Arri made some claims in advertising regarding how their camera, sensor, and format were superior to others. Again, generally what advertising is for — but there is a little bit of untruth mixed in there, apparently. I like this little zinger: In advertising specifically targeting RED customers, ARRI identifies films that have been shot on the Alexa. Among others, it lists the movie “I Hate You, Dad.” In actuality, this movie was shot on RED. Burn! Who doesn’t like a little camera drama? RED is seeking unspecified damages, but if the allegations turn out to be true, shelling out some cash would be the least of Arri’s worries. Photographers and cinematographers are very brand-loyal in general, but if they don’t feel they can trust that brand, they’ll leave like rats from a sinking ship. No indication of when the trial will be. [scribd id=76815577 key=key-1ya0r64s2avktx3ogqy7 mode=list] |
null | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 9 | null |
Aol Employees Make Zombie Video About Talent Exodus | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04rNzIf6bIs&feature=g-upl&context=G2bf1639AUAAAAAAAAAA&w=630] In case you ;), it’s an especially slooooooooooooooooooooow time for the tech industry. So slow that some Aol employees — the only one I recognize is — made a video about the recent Aol talent exodus, using ZOMBIES as a metaphor for who’ve decided to leave Aol. If I understand the video correctly, the zombie attack was apparently sparked by some design changes made to the Huffington Post (rimshot), which turn recent departures and into zombies, who in turn zombify the rest of Aol’s Palo Alto HQ.”We should have quit when Maser left!” is a reference to Aol VP , who was formerly at Digg. While the video honestly isn’t funny, it is sort of endearing, as the employees come to realize that the only way to fend off the zombie attacks (/talent exodus) is with “quality” Aol products like Editions — which literally kill zombies in the movie.* Using the acronym MAMA (Mail Aim Mobile About.me) to fight of the undead, the Aol* survivors proclaim 2012 as the year the company turns around, “Our friends may have been eaten by Zombies, but we’re still going to have a lot of fun.” Awwwwwwwwww. * Which is weird, because they’re inadvertently comparing Aol products to a , but I digress. *Yes, I know it’s officially AOL (not Aol), but I just write it this way to piss off — who for some reason is really stubborn about us spelling it in all UPPERCASE. |
A New Era For Social Interest Sites: Twitter, Tumblr And Pinterest Go Big In 2011 | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | One of the most interesting trends in is the new growth of social sites that cater to users’ interests, rather than their real-life social graphs. In particular, according to comScore data, microblogging platforms and have had break-out years, and they’ve been joined by new online pinboard site . But all this growth doesn’t seem to be coming at the expense of . That site’s traffic growth has only appeared to slow (but not fall) in places where it is to add. The site that has been taking a beating is . It may be that users who previously used that site to express themselves and follow the celebrities they care about are now doing the same thing across these other sites. Twitter has the most fascinating story here. The short-form messaging service hit the mainstream in early 2009, and received an amazing amount of media hype — but third-party measurement firms like comScore mostly showed flat traffic in the US since then, with monthly visitor numbers ranging between 20 million and 25 million, according to comScore. And even this year started out slow. In April, the company had 24.5 million unique visitors. But, from May through November the company grew to 35.5 million. Twitter’s worldwide numbers have looked just as strong. In the past 12 months, it has grown from 103.0 million uniques to 167.9 million overall. Yes, this growth was likely in part due to its integration with iOS 5, which the company . However, the integration only went live in October, which doesn’t explain all the new usage over the summer. What’s even more interesting is that the company itself has consistently said that third-party services undercount its traffic. In September, for example, it announced that it had based on its Google Analytics stats, up from 250 million at the start of the year. Many of its visitors don’t actually tweet, or aren’t even signed up. At that point it said it had 100 million active users (and it reiterated the same number in December). So, the comScore visitor numbers don’t exactly match up with the internal ones, but the trend is the same: more people are reading tweets than ever before. The five year old company appears to have finally made it past the ups and downs of the hype cycle, and become a solid and growing part of how mainstream people use the web. Tumblr, which will turn five early next year, has also been coming of age. From November of 2010 to last month, it has grown from 6.9 million unique visitors to 15.9 million in the US. Worldwide, its new traffic is just as pronounced, going from 18.6 million to 44 million in the same period. A new interest-oriented site has also gotten into the mix: Pinterest. Although the company has been around since 2008, it only began sending out invites in early 2010. It has taken off this year, going from less than a million in May, according to comScore, to more than 6 million uniques worldwide in November. MySpace may not be losing users directly to these pseudo-rivals, but it’s definitely continuing to hurt. Worldwide, it has fallen from 81.5 million to 61.0 million from November to November. And in the US, the drop is even more pronounced, dropping from 54.4 million to 25.0 million. Based on all these numbers, 2011 is looking like a banner year for the next era of public self-expression and sharing. The ugly, hacked-up MySpace user profiles of past years are less popular than ever, and users are busy sharing through their beautiful Tumblr themes, through Twitter’s simple 140-character messaging service, and through their online Pinterest pinboards. What can we expect in 2012? Can Facebook’s new public sharing features like its Subscribe button tap into all the attention these other sites are getting? Early signs indicate yes. And just where is all this usage going? It may be that 2011 is just the start of a new era, where the average internet user is comfortable sharing everything they think is interesting with the public, and following the people who are most interesting to them, not just friending those they meet in real life. [Top graphic, which I should note is October to October not November to November, is via comScore’s 2011 social network report, which you can download .] |
Verizon Wireless Cancels Plans To Charge $2 “Convenience” Fee | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | Well, that didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after word got out that Verizon Wireless planned to introduce a painfully ironic “convenience” fee of $2 for anyone paying their bill online, the carrier has just officially confirmed that such plans have been cancelled. Why? Because the Internet more or less exploded in their face. We immediately. An army of armchair protestors rallied almost instantly, with a hitting 50,000 signatures in a matter of hours. By this morning, the F.C.C the fee. What’d they expect? The masses went absolutely bonkers went Netflix hiked their fees up a few bucks, and that’s something people actually to pay for. Charging them a convenience fee for paying online? Yeah, they’ll just that. “At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers. Based on their input, we believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time,” said Dan Mead, president and chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless. |
Damn It Google, Where Are My Magic Android Lightbulbs? | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | Back at Google I/O in May, members of Google’s Android team a new initiative that’s going to extend the mobile OS beyond smartphones and tablets — and take us one step closer to Back to the Future II. Dubbed Android@Home, the project aims to bake special hardware and software into a variety of gadgets, which will allow users to control these devices from their Android phones. Think alarm clocks that fade in with your favorite music, lighting systems that blink based on events in the game you’re playing, and more. Eventually the @Home project will include everything from home stereos to dishwashers, but the first planned device was something a bit more modest: the lightbulb. At the event, Google said that it had partnered with to launch Android@Home LED lightbulbs by the end of 2011. I’ve been waiting patiently since then, scowling each time I had to get up out of bed to flick off one of my ‘dumb’ lightbulbs when I should have been able to simply tap a button on my phone. I may have even boasted to my iPhone-toting friends about my impending luminescence superiority. Alas, LightingScience and Google have failed to keep their promise. We are now at the end of 2011, and there are no such lightbulbs in sight. Nor, for that matter, is anything else Android@Home-related. At I/O, Google said we’d be hearing more about the project in the next few months (we didn’t). Given the amount of stage-time Google gave to the project and the huge potential here, I strongly doubt that @Home has gotten the axe. But it’s disappointing all the same. Google seems to have fallen into the nasty habit of showcasing impressive technology at I/O that’s still a long ways off (Google Music first made its debut at I/O , and didn’t launch in beta until a year later). Google declined to comment on the current status of the lightbulbs. [youtube=”http://youtu.be/zD3Q4kJhD5w?t=6m16s”] |
2011: The Year In Tech | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | Okay, last workday of the year. It’s nostalgia time. Let’s take a quick glance in the rearview mirror at the year in Tech, before we speed forward again in 2012. There were defining moments, epic battles, new product introductions, and major corporate screw-ups. Mobile and social drove many of the changes in tech, and we’ve certainly gone through our own major transition here at TechCrunch (but I’ll save that for another post). Below is our list of 11 events in tech that made 2011 memorable.
The defining moment of 2011 which transcended tech was the . It shook the world not because it was unexpected, but because Jobs was at the height of his creative arc and his work was far from finished. He had pulled the tech industry into the with the iPhone and iPad leading the charge, and the rest of the industry following. But Jobs always liked to surprise people with and he set up Apple to keep creating those things far into the future. It is telling that his last public appearance was in front of the Cupertino City Council outlining his plans for a . (Other tech luminaries include Dennis Ritchie, Bob Galvin, and Ken Olsen).
After many previous half-hearted attempts to take on Facebook, Google finally got serious about social in 2011 with the . Larry Page, who this year from Eric Schmidt, put it front and center by weaving it into Google’s other products and pushing it to an estimated . With its and , G+ is forging its own distinct identity. The more that social threatens search as the way people find things in the Web, the more important G+ will become to Google.
Amazon this year with the Kindle Fire, a based on Android that serves as a window into all the digital media Amazon is trying to sell us—books, movies, music, apps. The $200 Kindle Fire is the best-selling Android tablet out there. Amazon sold more than over the holidays (including the E-Ink versions). Amazon just wants to get as many Kindle Fires into people’s hands as possible so that it can deliver digital books, movies, and apps right into our hands.
The one thing startup founders learn very quickly is that failure is okay as long as they learn from it. With the cost to create a product lower than ever before, can afford to try again. This is known as the “pivot,” an over-used term which became a survival strategy for some, even fat startups (see, ). The two most successful pivots which come to mind are (formerly Sticky Bits) and (which went from gay social network to design-oriented e-commerce site).
This was a tough year for Netflix. Its stock went from $300 to $70 as it tried to speed its transition from a DVD rentals business to streaming online video. Along the way, it introduced price hikes to some of its customers and tried to its DVD-by-mail business before and apologizing to customers. (Although, the price hikes remained). Viewers are watching Netflix movies streamed over the Internet, but the company still has a lot of work to do to repair its once-shiny brand image.
After several years of almost no activity, 2011 was a big year for tech IPOs. We had , , , , and Zynga. And don’t forget about Chinese Internet IPOs like and . Most of these didn’t perform that well for public investors , and even some private investors got burned (Zynga priced ). Now all eyes are on Facebook, which is planning to IPO in 2012.
One reason tech IPOs aren’t performing so well is that much of growth in value is now by private investors. Tech companies are pushing off going public further and further into the future, and raising huge rounds of funding from the same types of growth investors—DST, T-Rowe Price, Fidelity—who a dozen years ago would have waited for an IPO. As a result, many private tech companies are raising money at . We saw this trend take off in 2011 with Airbnb, Dropbox, Gilt Groupe, Square, and Spotify. And it’s just to the U.S.
2011 wasn’t just a big year for IPOs, it was also a big year for M&A. While the biggest tech deal of the year, AT&T’s proposed with T-Mobile, was by the government on antitrust grounds, some of the biggest tech deals of the last decade did go through. Google bought Motorola Mobility for , Microsoft called in Skype for , and eBay acquired GSICommerce for . Other notable large deals included HP-Autonomy ($10.2 billion), RightNow-Oracle $1.5 billion), PopCap-Electronic Arts ($1.3 billion), ITA Software-Google ($700 million), Anobit Technologies-Apple ($450 million), Admeld-Google ($400 million), Efficient Frontier-Adobe ($400 million), Radian6-Salesforce ($326 million), Huffington Post-AOL ($315 million), and Kobo-Rakuten ($315 million).
The . Patents are increasingly used to block innovation in courtrooms rather than create innovations in the marketplace, and we saw this problem reach epic proportions in 2011. Patent trolls continued to tech companies large and small. But the patent wars spilled over to the major industry players themselves as everyone pointed their patent arsenals at Android. In July, Google failed to win a bid for more than 6,000 of Nortel’s patents, which went to an for $4.5 billion. by buying patent-rich Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Microsoft started demanding patent licensing fees from Android handset manufacturers, which led to a very with Google which . And Apple did its part by continuing to sue Android manufacturers, including and , for patent infringement. It’s a mess.
All of this fighting is for a very high stakes game—the future of computing, which is mobile. Apple and Android emerged as the two superpowers of the mobile Internet (with 76 percent combined in the U.S.). RIM is in . Windows Phone is still nowhere to be seen (except in TechCrunch writer ). So far, tablets are all iPad, but the Kindle Fire is coming out punching to become a serious contender.
Whether it was the Arab Spring or , social protest movements around the world were fueled by social media like Twitter and Facebook. Protesters self-organized using Twitter, Facebook, mobile phones and any other communications system available to them, which also functioned as a way to broadcast the protests around the world. These realtime technologies make it much , but they don’t make it any easier to finish them. |
AngelPad Looks Back: 37 Companies, 31 Funded, $25 Million Raised | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | , the startup incubator launched by seven ex-Googlers in August 2010, is taking a look back at how far it’s come in the months since and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. So far, AngelPad has helped 37 companies get off the ground, but it wasn’t until this year that things really got going: 29 of those 37 startups emerged from AngelPad’s incubator in 2011 alone. Out of the 37 companies, 31 have received funding, totaling just over $25 million. According to one of AngelPad’s founders, , the average funding amount for its startups is around $750,000. Of course, he admits that averages don’t always give the most accurate picture since a few highs and lows can distort things. , for example, is on the high-end, having raised over $7 million. There were a couple of others with high numbers over a million, too, Korte says. But the vast majority of the startups have raised somewhere in the $500K – $1 million range, and 10 AngelPad companies have raised over $1 million each in 2011. Also, among a handful of acquisition offers, only one took the bait: sold to . However, both companies were so young, it was really more of a teaming up on their parts. Not all companies make it, though. AngelPad has seen three companies fail out of the 37 launched – something that Korte says was not due to lack of funding or traction. “In early stage startups, the number one reason for failure is the founder relationship, he explains, “all three failed because of a founder breakup.” He says the program now looks at the founders applying to see how long they’ve known each other, if they’ve worked together and what sort of issues they’ve overcome in the past. There are few other insights the AngelPad team gained over the past year and half of operation. One is that founders need to have an extremely large vision. “And not an artificially inflated vision, but truly a great vision of what you want to do,” says Korte. “That’s when a lot of investors, and people who want to work for you, and even advisors, get excited about your company.” But a vision alone is not enough. You also have to have the first tangible steps. Korte says he often sees startups with the tangible steps and a smaller vision, or people with a huge vision, and no tangible steps as to how to achieve it. You have to have those things together. He also stressed that growing a company takes time. It seems an obvious point, but in today’s instant gratification age (and corresponding news cycle, ), what’s often not reported is how long it took for a company to achieve its success, funding, or whatever other metric is being touted. “We don’t see how much work or how much time has gone into it – we don’t see how many iterations it took, how many years it took, how long it’s being going on,” says Korte. And it’s a problem that’s affecting everyone. “Investors become impatient, founders become impatient, employees become impatient…but building great companies takes time.” Finally, Korte says that learned that even a small amount of money early on can have a big impact on how founders approach the product. It takes the pressure of raising money off founders’ shoulders, allowing them to focus not on impressing VC’s with what’s being built, but more on building the product itself. Of course, AngelPad knows this impact first-hand: this summer, two VC firms ponied up $50K each, – something that will continue in the new year. As for what’s next for 2012? With any hope, it’s more of the same. The incubator plans to start interviewing companies in January for the session starting in March. , so if you’re a startup thinking of applying, time is almost up. Get busy. |
Shock horror! Berlin VC invests in Italian startup. Is this the start of something? | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | has made a seed investment into , an Italian startup which operates a popular iPhone application that makes it easy to find the best restaurants in Rome, Milan, Florence and other cities in Italy. Fabio Pezzotti, one of Italy’s more successful Internet entrepreneurs and angel investors, also participated in the round. Terms of the investment were not disclosed. The deal is significant since it’s the first investment by Point Nine in a startup in Italy, a market traditional vastly under-served by risk capital. Outside of traditional e-commerce style businesses, there remains very few Italian startups compared to the rest of Europe’s major countries. Cibando was founded by 23 year old entrepreneur Guk Kim who says the startups has so far served over 170 restaurateurs and has grown from 3 employees to over 10. On the iPhone app, users draw a circle on a map to select how far they’re willing to drive and select their preferred restaurant category. Cibando then lists the best restaurants that match the user’s requests, along with reviews, photos and other information. For restaurant owners, Cibando is an opportunity to showcase their business. Pawel Chudzinski, Founder and managing partner of Point Nine Capital, commented: “Guk is an exceptionally talented and driven young entrepreneur. We’re also very happy to make our first investment in Italy, a market which so far has been neglected by most VCs.” Point Nine Capital, the “investment arm” of Team Europe, is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Berlin. Italian VC investors (I mean the ones based in Italy) are, in general, famously useless at identifying high growth businesses in their own country so it will be interesting to watch outside investors looking to pick up good deals in the country. Mobile, in particular, looks like a good bet given the Italian penchant for the platform. |
Keen On… Marian Salzman: What Were The Top Trends in 2011? | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | It’s the last Friday in 2011 and the new year is imminent. So what were the top technological, cultural and economic trends in 2011? What shaped a year that some are is one of the most significant in the last couple of centuries? The queen of trendology is Marian Salzman, a global marketing executive, who publishes an iconic annual about the world. So what were the leading trends in 2011, I asked Marian, when she came into our New York studio. Her answers are both stimulating and controversial. From men being the new women to technology defining the new hope agenda to the emergence of a public mycasting system, Marian’s observations about 2011 are bound to provoke discussion. So is she right? Will 2011 really be remembered as the year that the tablet revolution became the “ultimate transportation device” that finally enabled us to live in the cloud? This is the first in a two part interview with Salzman. Early next week, she reveals her top trends for 2012. |
LG To Debut Second Intel-Powered Smartphone At CES 2012 | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | It looks like LG and Intel have taken that old adage to heart, if a new report is to be believed. The reports that LG will debut an Intel-powered smartphone at CES 2012, but the bigger question is whether or not the device will ever make it to market. LG and Intel’s first mobile partnership yielded an Android smartphone running on Intel’s Moorestown chipset , but the device was ultimately scrapped. The reason for its premature demise? As the story goes, the device died because of it’s “lack of marketability.” LG’s brass certainly thinks their Intel smartphone is viable — according to one of the Times’ executive sources, the device could be released as soon this March. Still, the original LG-Intel phone was pegged with a 2011 release date, so take those claims with a grain of salt for bow. Hopefully LG’s second swing at an Intel-powered phone fares a little better — it’s said to run on Intel’s next-generation Medfield system-on-a-chip, and early tests have yielded some pretty when compared to NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon MSM8260 SoCs. Of course, the real competition is yet to come, as nearly every player in the mobile chipset market is hard at work on their next-generation platforms. Intel has a lot of brand recognition when it comes to PCs, but their lack of presence in the mobile market to date could mean that Medfield could drown in a sea of established ARM-based chipsets. That’s why the partnership with LG is so critical — despite their handset division spending a few quarters in the red, LG is still the in the U.S. Having a major hardware vendor taking a chance on their new platform could establish Intel as a real player in the mobile space, and right now Intel’s mobile efforts could use all the visibility they can get. |
Gillmor Gang Live 12.30.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | The Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live at 9am PT. Recording has concluded. |
Insync (“Dropbox For Google Users”) Gets Major Revamp, Goes Free | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | File synchronization and sharing platform has been around , and today, the eponymous startup has rolled out a totally revamped version of its “Dropbox for Google users”. Insync 2.0, so t speak, is more focused on Google Docs as ever, removed registration and sync limits, streamlined the user experience, and is now free to use. The main target group here are GDocs users who want Dropbox-like functionality when it comes to handling files (the more Google accounts, the more useful Insync should become). In a nutshell, Insync allows you to automatically sync, update, manage, and share files stored on GDocs on your Mac or Windows desktop (in Finder or Explorer). For example, nested or individual sharing of files is possible (Dropbox only supports sharing of folders), as is assigning read/write or read only permissions to others. All file formats, including MP3, exe, dmg, MS Office documents, etc. are supported. Insync doesn’t require a sign-up anymore: just visit , sign in with your existing Google account, download and install the client, link the account with your PC or Mac, and you’ll find all files synced on your computer’s desktop. (According to the company, Insync’s now simpler web app is currently in the process of getting another “facelift”, too.) Insync co-founder and CEO Terence Pua says a key bullet point is price: while his service now (existing users can ask for a refund or credit), Dropbox loses the price comparison with Google’s storage offering by 1:8. For example, US$100 a year gets you 50GB at Dropbox but a whopping 400GB at big G ( ). For its own platform, Insync removed syncing limits entirely. Insnyc, which is based out of Singapore and Manila, just raised a US$800,000 angel round from Joi Ito (via Neoteny Labs), Reid Hoffman, Toivo Annus (co-founder at Skype), and Santosh Jayaram (ex-COO at Twitter). |
Dropbox Automator Is Like IFTTT For Dropbox | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | Thirty-six hours ago, the recently founded software development firm Wappwolf launched , which is sort of like an for Dropbox. IFTTT, for those of you not up to speed on the latest Internet trends (where have you been?!), is that automates tasks to trigger when a particular action has occurred. For example: etc. Like IFTTT, is capable of triggering a similar series of actions, based on what kind of files have been added to your Dropbox folders. In IFTTT, these actions are called “Recipes,” but in , they’re called “automations.” Not only are they trigged by file type (e.g. a photo, a .doc, a PDF, etc.), they’re also triggered based on which Dropbox folder the file has been placed into. For documents, you can choose from actions like convert to PDF, convert PDF to text, summarize, translate, upload to Google Docs, upload to Slideshare and more. Photos can be uploaded to Facebook, Flickr, rotated, annotated with text, a map or a logo, have effects applied, and downscaled. Any file can be emailed, zipped, renamed, FTP’d, encrypted or decrypted, saved to another Dropbox, tweeted, or set as a Facebook status. The only problem I had with the service is that the results were not immediate, as I expected. It took a good ten minutes for photos to show up on Flickr, for example. The speed of other actions may vary based on the processing speed required and the current server load. (The company says its new and improved server engine will be ready next week.) If speed is of a concern, then this service is not ideal…at least not in its present form. But if you’re simply automating stuff that you don’t want to forget to do later on (e.g. put photos on Flickr, upload to Google Docs), then Dropbox Automator could be quite the useful tool. Since its launch barely two days ago, the company has signed up 1,500 users on the platform. Given Dropbox’s popularity and of IFTTT, my guess is they’re about to get a bunch more. You can try out Dropbox Auotmator for yourself from . |
As Millions Of Consumers Unwrapped Kindle Fires Over Christmas, Mobile Ad Impressions Spiked 261 Percent | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | In November, Mobile ad network Millennial Media that Amazon’s new tablet devices Kindle Fire, was seeing ad impressions grow at an average daily rate of 19% since its in the middle of the month. Millennial says it’s not just seeing millions of impressions and the device is on a monthly run rate of hundreds of millions of impressions. But that data was gathered from a few weeks of usage from consumers in November, and as Amazon reported yesterday, December’s holiday season brought record sales for the Kindle Fire, with in December. The Kindle Fire was the most gifted and wished for product on Amazon this season. Today, Millennial is releasing data from its ad network showing impressive growth numbers from the Kindle Fire over the holiday weekend. In November, impressions on the Kindle Fire grew an average rate of 19 percent every day. Over this past weekend, Millennial says that as consumers opened and used their new Kindle Fires, ad impressions increased even more. As millions of consumers unwrapped new Kindle Fires, Millennial saw an average daily growth rate of 113 percent. On December 24, impressions grew 32 percent; and on Christmas day in particular, impressions on the Kindle Fire grew 261 percent. The day after Christmas saw a 46 percent jump in ad impressions. Of course, the Kindle Fire wasn’t the only tablet that saw a spike from the holidays. From December 23 to 26, the iPad had a daily growth rate of 6 percent. The iPad remained the leading tablet overall on Millennial’s platform during this time period, although the massive gain from the Kindle Fire helped to significantly close the gap. The Kindle Fire’s impression growth on the platform has slightly outpaced that of the iPad when the iPad launched in early 2010. Millennial says that though the Kindle Fire has been introduced into a more mature tablet market than the market which greeted the original iPad, Amazon’s entertainment-focused platform and the lower price point have helped drive this early use by consumers. Now that the holiday gifting season if over, it should be interesting to see if consumer usage of the Kindle Fire continues to grow at such a rapid pace. For example, the release of a new version of the iPad could effect Kindle Fire growth in 2012. |
This Cat Might Be Better At Fruit Ninja Than Your Kids | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | iOS devices are generally very accessible for most people. But for felines? Apparently so according to the video recently tweeted by Halfbrick Studios, the developer of Fruit Ninja. It’s clear within seconds of the video starting that the cat has done this before. This cat slashes fruit like a boss. As , the cat displays a surprising amount of accuracy and navigates the arcade mode with ease. But Fruit Ninja is one thing. I wanna see this cat slice and dice its way through Infinity Blade II. [tweet https://twitter.com/Halfbrick/status/152303331254087680 align=’center’] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdEBgZ5Y46U&feature=player_embedded |
Photo Organization Service Everpix Launches Public Beta | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 30 | Photo organization service (and ) has just launched into public beta, bringing with it a number of changes to its backend infrastructure, web interface and its desktop software. The service, for those unaware, automatically organizes and combines all your photos, whether they’re stored on your computer or in the cloud. It then combines them into an online photo gallery where groups of photos are laid out into attractive albums called “Moments.” The service currently supports only Mac computers (iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom), but plans to support Windows in the future. It also gathers photos from your online collections on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa and can even locate photos found in your email. Once connected, uses a feature called “assistive curating” to create “Moments,” which are similar to iPhoto’s “Events,” but are built for you automatically. You can see an Apple-like design aesthetic here, which is not surprising given that two of Everpix’s Co-founders, and , each spent several years with the company. Meanwhile, the third Co-founder, , was previously at . Within these “Moments,” Everpix automatically detects bad photos, like those that are blurry, out of focus or under or overexposed and hides them from view. You can also share photos or albums using a simple one-click setting. Since exiting its alpha, Everpix made a number of changes and improvements. It has increased its performance and handles your imported photos better than before. The company says that it improved color accuracy, timestamp detection, and the preview and thumbnail quality of the photos, among other things. It also automatically reconciles duplicates on import and merges the corresponding metadata. The Mac uploader software has been updated, too, with more options, partial support for Picasa Mac (hooray!) and more. However, the most exciting news is that the Everpix iOS application is almost here. (It’s in the review queue at Apple right now). When launched, this app will automatically mirror your entire Everpix photo collection to your iOS device, while also supporting social sharing and offline access to photos. In the future, support for photo uploads is planned as well. You can . |
European Payment Service Klarna Raises A Whopping $155 Million From DST And General Atlantic | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | European e-commerce payments provider just raised a huge, pre-IPO round of $155 million. The round was led by General Atlantic and Yuri Milner’s DST Global. Sequoia Capital led its last $9 million round in May, 2010. ( : Sequoia did not invest in this round). At that time, Sequoia partner Michael Moritz (he of Google, PayPal, and Yahoo fame) . The new round almost certainly puts Klarna’s valuation within spitting distance of . Klarna is based in Stockholm and was founded in 2005 by three economics students, , and . It already has 600 employees and clears $2.5 billion worth of payments from 6 million consumers across 14,000 merchants. The company operates primarily in Europe, where it takes some of the risk out of e-commerce by extending credit to shoppers and allows them to pay after they receive the goods. Merchants are paid upon order. (In Europe, they call this invoicing). The key to Klarna’s business and profits is to assess and minimize credit risk on the fly. The company , an Israeli fraud prevention firm, last May to help with risk assessment. The new capital could be used for more M&A, hiring, as well as further geographic expansion. |
Fownd Launches A Free Service To Reunite You With Lost Phones, Gadgets, Keys & More | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | Do you lose things? Despite being meticulous about personal hygiene and a snappy dresser, I tend to misplace things. I blame it on bad parenting, of course. But, we all lose our personal items — and as much as it pains us — our gadgets are often the victims. Smartphones, especially iPhones, have been known to surreptitiously slip out of pockets at inappropriate times. Unfortunately, unlike our vehicles, most gadgets do not have panic buttons, or remote key access — although there are some tracking apps that get close. In fact, there are , or track . Apple’s has traditionally been the best way to safeguard against permanently losing an iPhone, running in the background (once set up) until you need to locate it. (And for Samsung/Android users, .) But, of course, we have other personal items that are often lost, whether they be gadgets, like iPods, or car/house keys, etc. Launching this week with its MVP is a startup and its eponymous free iPhone app called , which simply put, helps return your lost items — one and all. Well, maybe not children, but most everything else. Cofounded by Drew Izzo (the former CMO of Ancestry.com and Roost.com, among others), Fownd customizes a homescreen photo of your choice to include a message that enables the finder of a lost item to connect with the owner — essentially, a terrific complementary service to Find My iPhone. What do I mean? Well, along with its free iPhone app, Fownd sells tags that you can add to your keys, cameras, flip phones, and just about every other important item that can go missing. These pages of 10 tags sell for $0.99, and can be ordered directly from the app. As you can see, the tags come in different sizes, with adhesive on one side, so that you can stick them to your personal items — even your smallest ones. One of these tags may take up a lot of space relative to the size of, say, your iPod Nano, but it’s not always about image here, people, think of the utility. Izzo did say that the product is still in its early stages, as Fownd has a team of four working on their product, some of whom have full-time jobs, and tags will likely continue to be improved upon and refined, until that are at maximum elegance. But the point is that, once you download the app and receive your tags, you are free to register them all through the Fownd app on your iPhone. If they happen to get lost, the finder simply texts the code provided on the tag to the number given — all anonymously — and voila! Because Fownd sends these “connection” messages to your email, iPhone and alternate phone numbers that you provide when you register, you are thus able to be reconnected with your beloved devices/keys. You can see an example text that you might receive in the image to the right. The homescreen tag is a good quick safeguard for your iPhone, but in the event that your phone runs out of batteries, (something the iPhone 4S especially has been known to do, although it has gotten better with the new software updates), you can just add a physical tag as a backup. Though, hopefully the finder will be so kind as to charge the phone. Fownd is also working on getting its web client up and running (which it should soon), so you’ll be able to track your iPhone and all other personal nicknacks and doodads from — you guessed it — the Web, and view your phone’s location on GPS via a handy map. It’s a simple product in conceit, but it works, and it’s a great complement to Find My iPhone, so that users can now keep track of their iPhones and even hope to reconnect with lost feature phones, iPods, keys, and more. And what’s better than saving money on replacing keys, or that 8 million dollar Apple product you just bought? For more, check out Fownd here. The team is looking for feedback, as the product is still in early stages, so fire away with your suggestions. Android apps are currently in the works. Commenters have pointed out that there are some similar services out there, like , , and another newcomer . (Thanks, guys!) Competition is important, and each service has its benefits, so we encourage you to check them all out. In terms of differentiation, the latter two do offer rewards for returning lost items — a great incentive for those who might not return something out of the kindness of their hearts. But, Fownd (in its current iteration) beats them all in terms of price. It’s the cheapest. And in terms of the oldest (and perhaps) most well known, Stuffbak, you get two free years of return service, then you have to pay for a subscription. There are a whole mess of catches, and their site reads like some kind of untrustworthy informercial. |
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Gogobot Partners With Flipboard To Turn Your Travel Photos Into A Digital Magazine | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | Since launching early last year, young social travel site has been off to a pretty good start, or at least it has, shall we say, been hitting all the stops. , it was named one of Time’s top sites for 2011, won a Crunchie for best design in 2010, and brought its total funding to just under $20 million with a series B raise from Redpoint Ventures, Battery Ventures and CrunchFund. , and has seen its user base grow 10x in the last six months. But, so what, right? As we’ve , the travel space is rife with newcomers. And TripAdvisor, the leader in the space and the veteran incumbent is on its way towards an IPO, but there are still a few things it doesn’t do as well as some of the younger travel sites. Gogobot CEO Travis Katz specifically cites fraud and the fact that most reviews are left by strangers — not your friends — and it’s this social travel recommendation functionality that Gogobot, I would agree, does fairly well. The trick for these young startups is to leverage the wealth of data now available from social and LBS services to give their own apps and websites a more robust set of features, and Gogobot has followed suit, integrating with Facebook, Foursquare, sharing via Twitter, etc. Part of its success is thanks to a veteran team of former Myspacers (and Ori Zaltzman, one of the guys who built Yahoo Answers), who’ve gone down this road before and know which social buttons to press (and which ones not to touch with a 10 foot pole). The other key is that Gogobot has built a reservoir of travel photos, and its iOS app allows users to select their current location, snap a photo choose from different filters (like the Instagram for travel), and turn those into geo-tagged postcards. With its new mobile app giving users the ability to create geo-tagged postcards on location during their travels, Gogobot’s announcement today that it will be integrating with Flipboard — the iPad’s social magazine of record — makes a lot of sense. The integration will take a realtime stream of travel photos and experiences from around the globe, generated using Gogobot’s iOS app, and transform them into a travel magazine. This will allow both users to flip through global postcards in a Flipboard magazine-like experience to reflect on their travels, or to let users at home browse photos from the comfort of their iPads, discovering new places and getting inspiration for their next trip. Each photo that one takes with Gogobot can now be transformed into a postcard, automatically uploaded to their Gogobot Guide, easily shared to Facebook, Twitter, and now Flipboard in a magazine-style spread. Also of note: this week to create a tech-style magazine for the Le Web Conference in Paris. For more, |
Ticket Search Engine FanSnap Acquired By Shopping Site NexTag, But Employees May Get $0 | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | Comparison shopping site has made its in 15 months, buying event ticket search engine FanSnap. Unfortunately, FanSnap employees and any other common stockholders won’t get anything out of the deal, according to a source close to the transaction. Apparently the purchase price was low, and primarily from . That means even if the investors were paid back, there’d be nothing left for common stockholders. There were high hopes for FanSnap, which lets users search for tickets across big providers like StubHub and eBay, leading us to liken it to a back in 2009. Heck, its backer General Catalyst was also a major investor in Kayak, and FanSnap was founded by StubHub CMO Mike Janes. But it seems that FanSnap didn’t gain enough traction, and eventually its technology that surfaced low priced event tickets became more widely available, leading to the reportedly low sum paid for the company. The ticket search engine should do well under the NexTag umbrella, though, which can drive it traffic. By acquiring FanSnap, NexTag will become a one-stop ecommerce shop for coupons, products, entertainment experiences, and lodging. NexTag CEO Jeffrey G. Katz says “customers will be able to scoop up some of the best tickets possible to their favorite sporting or music events, find a room to stay in, and outfit the whole family in related gear.” FanSnap’s team will relocate to Nextag’s headquarters in San Mateo, CA where they’ll join employees scooped up through NexTag’s other acquisitions. It bought real-time shopping social shopping platform ThingBuzz in October 2011, in April 2011, and before that , and . |
Groupon In Talks To Acquire Clever Sense, The Startup Behind ‘Alfred’ | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | Groupon is in late-stage negotiations to acquire Silicon Valley-based startup , we’re hearing from a source. Clever Sense is the company behind , a popular ‘butler’ app for iPhone that makes restaurant and activity recommendations based on your taste preferences. The company was founded in 2008 and has raised around $1.5 million to date. Clever Sense declined to comment, and we’re waiting to hear back from Groupon. If you haven’t used it before, Alfred might sound a lot like Yelp, and various other recommendation engines. The key difference is that Alfred is focused on keeping the number of taps required to generate a recommendation to a minimum — based on the time of day, the restaurants you’ve eaten at previously, and other factors, the app can generate a recommendation for lunch or coffee in a tap or two (find our past coverage and ). With that in mind, it’s a logical fit for Groupon. The app itself could help Groupon expose new restaurants (presumably ones that are running deals) to users. And the technology behind Clever Sense involves — the company has previously discussed how in addition to collaborative filtering, which creates recommendations by looking at users who are similar to you, the service also uses model-based learning, which means it establishes a unique taste profile for each user. I’m no expert on machine learning, but it seems to work — Alfred has over 1000 reviews on , with a four star average. Here’s a video explaining the app: [youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skBxK9HIE-k’]
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2011 Holiday Gift Guide: Nook Tablet And Kindle Fire Accessories That Are Must-Have | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | These new e-reader-tablet hybrids are shaping up to be the hottest gifts of this year. Amazon’s Kindle Fire is and Barnes & Noble has offered up a worthy opponent in the form of its . But even at their relatively low prices, these e-readers might still be a bit pricey. That’s why we’ve laid out some of the best accessories for the technologically advanced bookworm in your life. By the way, if you’re on the hunt for some sweet accessories of the e-ink, e-reader persuasion, stay tuned. We’ll give those their own moment in the sun. As Matt so , you want your ereader case to do more than just protect your gadgetry. Sure, durability is important. But so is style, especially if the one you love is toting around the hottest ereader on the market. That said, the DODOcase for Kindle Fire is about as awesome as it gets. It’s made using traditional book-binding techniques and sports a bamboo frame and fold-over flap. You can even take it a step further and have this bad boy monogrammed. At a cool , this is certainly the case to consider when holiday shopping for your Fiery friend. But perhaps you’re looking for something a bit more mature. Maybe leather (or something like it)? I’ve got just the thing. Proporta has a slick little (almost) leather pouch for the Kindle Fire that is sure to make your loved one feel like Ron Burgundy, smelling of leather-bound books and rich mahogany… Sorry, got a tad carried away. In any case, the Proporta “Leather Style” Cover is made from “the finest quality alternative to leather” (thus the whole “style” bit in the name), and has a nice protective lining to shield from bumps. Priced at , the Proporta Leather Style Case for Kindle Fire is a option. The thing about the Fire that makes it so great is that it’s nearly a full-functioning tablet. You can watch movies, play apps, and browse the web just like you would on full-fledged tablet. With that in mind, Marware has a pretty sleek Kindle Fire case that can act as a kickstand for you (or your loved one’s) Fire should the two of you decide to cuddle up and watch a holiday flick. Made of genuine leather, the CEO Hybrid case also features a strap along the back which will allow users to hold the Fire with one hand, even with the added bulk of the case. Not far off from the DODOcase, the . As I just mentioned, the Kindle Fire’s access to the Amazon Appstore for Android is one of its biggest selling points. I’m actually convinced that what the world needs now is apps, not love. Still, it’d be a mistake to forget the Kindle history behind the Fire. It’s an ereader just as much as it’s a tablet, and with that said it’s only fair to put at the top of the list. Audible for Android offers up a wider selection of audiobooks, though it will cost around $15 a month (which includes one free book a month) in order for use of the app to be worthwhile. Gamers will enjoy the Fire just as much as bookworms, which means it’s only fair that we include our favorite Fire-compatible game in the gift guide. has been around for a while on a number of different platforms, but the special Fire edition is pretty sick. The extra screen real estate really takes this now-famous tower defense game to a new level. And for $3.00, it’s probably one of the cheapest gifts you can get that will still get a genuine thank you. The 7-inch backlit display on the Fire makes it a great option for video playback, but I had trouble landing on which video streaming app to recommend. Therefore, I’m throwing out and . Both services (not the apps themselves) are paid, and while Netflix doesn’t Wifi the same way Hulu Plus does, that won’t really make a difference on the WiFi-only Kindle Fire. So really, it all comes down to whether your a Hulu Plus person or a Netflix person. The Nook Tablet is a tad more flashy than the Fire, and I usually like to dress up louder designs with more subtle cases. It’s all about balance, people. So when searching for the very best Nook Tablet cases, Speck’s new FitFolio case for the Nook Tablet instantly came to mind. The case combines a precision-molded hard shell case with padded microsuede lining to offer up the ruggedness you need while still feeling comfortable in the hand. In black, the FitFolio case quiets the Nook Tablet’s multi-tonal coloring. However, if that’s the whole reason you got the Nook Tablet you’ll be glad to know that the FitFolio comes in much louder blue and purple flavors. Speck’s . I’d be worried if you had already forgotten that Proporta Leather Style case for the Kindle Fire. Well, after perusing through Nook Tablet cases I have something much more Ron Burgandy for our B&N fans. , our favorite platform for artists, inventors and creators of all types to sell their wares, has a beautiful wooden Nook Tablet case that I simply couldn’t resist. From the : “This beautiful case is made from a wood known as Sapelle which is similar to mahogany.” Mahogany! Yep, this one’s for the anchorman in all of us, especially with that brass buckle. There are also thick felt pads along the inside to keep your Nooky poo safe. You can pick this guy up for . No one has more Nook Tablet case offerings than Barnes & Noble, of course, but the one that seems to catch my eye most is the Tasume. It has two flaps that fold over the front, but can also fold back to offer that same kick-stand functionality we were seeing on Marware’s CEO Hybrid for the Fire. The rather flexible flaps are secured to the back with magnets, making it easy to prop up your Nook Tablet in both portrait and landscape. Hit up Barnes & Noble’s website and you’ll find the . While the Nook Tablet’s app selection doesn’t really compete with that of Amazon’s, I’m finding that just about every one of the Nook apps seem to be high-quality and useful. A few, however, are absolutely essential, the first of which being . We all know it (or at least should), we all love it, and there really isn’t a better note-taking app out there. You can jot down notes, pictures, save audio clips and upload images, all of which can be organized into notebooks. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free? As far as news consumption goes, I’m really digging . The app lets you customize your news based on the feeds you love, and even lets you put together your own stream of curated news, which can then be shared on the various social networks. The interface is super clean and it offers thousands of news sources for the news junkie in all of us. Taptu is also free on the Nook Tablet. Facebook does this cool thing where, even though it’s the most popular social network in the world and one of the most visited sites of all time, they don’t mind waiting a while before launching the Facebook app for a new device. The Nook Tablet is a victim, just like the iPad was. But alas, may just do the trick. The app is a perfectly suitable alternative to an official Facebook app, and even lets you pin chat convos to stay connected while using other apps. Unfortunately, FriendCaster for Facebook is a paid app, but $1.99 is a small price to pay for solid Facebook access on your new tablet. For some extra inspiration on all things gifty, check out the rest of our . |
Mark It Down: June 6, 2012 | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | “Six months from now you’ll say the opposite. Because ultimately applications vendors are driven by volume. And the volume is favored by the open approach that Google is taking.” That was Google Chairman speaking at LeWeb a couple days ago. Specifically, he was addressing a question from the audience wondering why most big application developers are still choosing to develop for the iOS platform first instead of Android. First of all, if you haven’t watched yet, you really should. They cover a range of topics important to both Google and the broader tech space. Plus, it will avoid the small situation that arose yesterday when Schmidt , making him sound much more arrogant about the Android platform than he actually was. While Schmidt was misquoted, the core of this latest debate around iOS and Android remains very much intact. Schmidt predicted that 6 months from now, most app developers will choose to make their app work on Android before iOS. This statement gives us an actual date that to see if he’s right or not: June 6, 2012. Of course, my stance is going to be that there’s no way he’s going to be right about that. Not a chance. In fact, I’m not even sure he would say the same thing again if pressed. Because while the way he answered the question may have reasonable, history has already given us plenty of guidance as to why he’ll be wrong. The audience member who asked the question clearly did so because Android the dominant player in the space. And it has been for quite some time now. Schmidt brushes that fact (a fact which he so often states when it’s advantageous to an argument) aside completely and instead implies that the only reason developers aren’t rushing to Android is because the software hasn’t been good enough until now. Of course, that goes against basically everything Google has been saying for the past couple of years. In that time, it was always been that Android was ahead of iOS when it came to software. Last year at Google I/O, for example, . At one point, they showed Android 2.2 (Froyo) . So when Schmidt says: “It’s taken us a while to get software that really is capable of delivering on the promise that you’ve just articulated.” to the audience member, you have to wonder why then such a software comparison was a focal point of previous Google I/Os? That’s not to say Android Ice Cream Sandwich isn’t good (I happen to be testing it out right now, and it is quite good — more on that in another column soon), it’s just that Google has consistently said the newest version of Android is the one that will blow the doors off the iOS house. It just hasn’t happened yet. And I see no reason why we should believe that the situation will be different this time. Further, Schmidt goes on to imply that another reason why ICS will bring all the developers over to Android is that Google has now gotten better at working with their carrier and OEM partners to ensure the latest software is available to customers. “With the ICS release our core objective as a company is to get all of the hardware vendors onto that platform,” was his actual quote. Yes, that has been a problem — a huge one. But again, I see no reason why it’s going to be solved here. At Google I/O this past summer, about their new “Android Update Initiative”. . Google was going to get all the OEMs and carriers in line and make sure that Android updates came to all in a timely manner. “Over the next few weeks, we’ll figure it all out,” Android chief Android chief Andy Rubin said at the time. That was . Guess how much we’ve heard about the plan since then? *Crickets* Worse, just yesterday, Motorola — the hardware company Google is buying, mind you — to dampen expectations about when their users may seen ICS on their wide variety of phones. They don’t come out and give a date, but putting two-and-two together, it sure sounds like it’s going to be at the earliest. Hell, they aren’t going to even finalize which devices they want to and can update until a month from now. Here’s my favorite bit: 3. Submit the upgrade to the carriers for certification This is the point in the process where the carrier’s lab qualifies and tests the upgrade. Each carrier has different requirements for phases 2 and 3. There may be a two-month preparation cycle to enter a carrier lab cycle of one to three months. I’m starting to wonder if sure Android device besides the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is going to have ICS by June 6, 2012. That doesn’t bode well for Schmdit’s prediction. All that aside, let’s just think about what Schmidt is saying for a second. He’s saying that developers are just months — and maybe even weeks — away from changing their current line of thinking. Are there some developers out there that do Android first right now? Sure. Has that number been growing? I think that’s fair to say (though I have no data to point to either way). But it’s also fair to say that the vast majority of the key mobile software developers are still focusing on iOS first. The audience member cited Flipboard, everyone else can probably rattle off a dozen big names. Again, Android is already the biggest smartphone platform out there. And again, that has been the case for a long time now. So when Schmidt says “ultimately applications vendors are driven by volume”, Android should already be dominating in the race for getting the best apps. But they aren’t. I’ve spoken to many mobile developers over the years about this issue. There are a few refrains, but they’re all largely the same. First, many of them still seem to prefer to use iOS as their own primary device. The likelihood is greater that they’re going to develop for a platform they actually know and use. Second, most developers are still unconvinced that you can make any meaningful amount of money trying to sell an Android app (Schmidt hit on this quickly in his remarks, saying that the Market is now better, but doesn’t really address the issue). Instapaper creator Marco Arment is going to in this regard by offering to split the revenue with any developer who can make a decent Android port of his app and sell it in the Android Market. If he thought it would be a huge money maker, obviously he would do it himself. Third, the Android Market is still no App Store when it comes to both distribution and discovery. Again, Schmidt sort of alluded to this being fixed, but it’s not yet clear if the changes made are actually working. Fourth, if volume was all that mattered, everyone would still be developing for Symbian, . Or they might even still be focusing on Windows, as . Fifth, while eventually Android volume may be a boon to apps largely based around advertising, many app developers don’t want to move in this direction. Most still want to make something and get paid directly for it (imagine that) — see: argument number two. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Android development itself remains a huge pain in the ass. I hear this again, and again, and again — just as much today as I did two years ago. Android has what are widely considered to be vastly inferior development tools when it comes to making apps for Android versus what Apple gives you to make apps for iOS. Many refer to them as a joke. Or a nightmare. Or the bane of their existence. Or all of the above. And you have to use them to ensure that your app will work on the huge number of devices in the Android ecosystem. Very few developers even bother to actually test on the majority of them, and it’s still a pain. It makes IE6-specific development look like a cakewalk. I actually brought this up on stage with SoundTracking creator Steve Jang at LeWeb on Wednesday. They were at the conference to after finding some success going iOS first. When asked what the Android development process was like, he admitted it was long and painful. Pretty much every app developer going from iOS to Android will tell you the same thing — and if they don’t happen to be on stage, they’ll use many more expletives. So you’ll forgive me if I laugh when Eric Schmidt says that by June of 2012, all of this is going to change. Suddenly, the Flipboards, Instapapers, Soundtrackings, Instagrams, etc, are going to launch on Android first. It’s like saying that by the middle of next year, the majority of all TVs are going to be running on the Google TV platform. . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t02iJn5Ypio&w=640&h=360] |
Ness Adds Social Sharing To Its Mobile Restaurant Recommendation App | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | has just launched a new version of its that takes its existing recommendations technology and adds in new sharing services. Yes, there are plenty of restaurant recommendations apps out there, and social tie-ins are increasingly common on mobile devices. But what Ness does is already special, and getting better with the new version. The company has spent years developing machine learning technology that looks at your social data from sites like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, as well as your behavior, and figures out which nearby restaurants you’ll like most. It presents this data in a score from 0% to 100% match in a classy scrolling interface. Instead of going to a site like Yelp and seeing every restaurant with 3.5 to 4.5 stars, as cofounder and chief executive Corey Reese tells me, you get an exact percentage based on its analysis, along with explicit ratings from your friends to highlight what matters. (Note that it has , as we’ve covered, but it’s focused on restaurants for starters). Having launched in late August, it has spent the intervening months refining its system using the 1.5 million ratings generated by the 100,000 users it has accumulated. The result is even finer-grained recommendations. The new social features should help it get out in front of more users. The core additions include a way to post thank-you notes and reviews to Facebook. Just click on the photo of your friend in their review to send the note, or write a review and share it on your wall and news feed. The homescreen also now shows mouthwatering photos of dishes from various cuisines, based on what it thinks you like most (you can swipe to pick different ones). The app has upgraded its provides friend recommendations and notifications integrations with iOS5, too. The getting-started process for new users has also been rearranged from the previous version to highlight sharing. In a series of three steps, you connect with Facebook or Foursquare (Twitter is coming later), and it starts pulling information about you and your friends from those platforms. The second step asks you to provide ten ratings of various nearby locations — as with the previous version, this helps it build on your social data. Then it asks you to invite friends. Overall, Ness’s tech effort has resulted in much better results for users, and the interface makes the experience more enjoyable. But it’s still hitting a crowded market that has established competitors like Yelp and Urbanspoon. The one-off recommendation improvements that it can provide are often subtle, so integrating social features could help it break out. The new version is now live in the iTunes App Store ( ). |
Exploring Some Implications Of Driverless Cars | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | have been a popular and fertile topic for research and discussion for years. From the first high-profile Grand Challenge to the more recent work by Google, there has always been activity, though it’s rarely applicable to everyday life. But a few years from now we’ll really need to start pondering the potential effects of these robocars on cities, infrastructure, and markets. ClockworkMod’s Koushik Dutta has about one potential major change that could come with the automation of vehicles. If a car can drive itself, that drastically increases its potential efficiency, and decreases the number of cars necessary per capita, especially in a city. You better believe the car companies don’t like the sound of that. The comparison Dutta makes is to commercial fleets of planes, which spend a huge proportion of their “lives” in the air – i.e. in use. Private cars, on the other hand, sit idle 95% of the time. Naturally there are examples of the opposite in each case: private jets sitting in hangars and commercial car fleets being used constantly, but that isn’t really relevant to the comparison. With automation of cars, they could be put to use in much more ways and used collectively instead of independently. There are already services that are exploring the potential of this model: and , for instance, which attempt to maximize the utility of vehicles. But systematizing that and adding automatic navigation changes the game. What if you could drive to work and then send your car home to pick up your kids and bring them to school? Or if it wasn’t even your car, but one shared by five houses in your neighborhood, and after it dropped you off, it dropped off your neighbor, then took your spouse to the grocery store — and went to charge itself for half an hour while they shopped? The implication is that if the average car is made even slightly more efficient, that results in a propotional decrease in the number of cars that need to be sold. Sure, there will be inefficiencies like empty cars (though taxis are in a way also empty much of the time) and individual vehicles will wear out faster owing to more constant usage. And, of course, many people will simply prefer to drive. But the amount of work a car can do per joule or hour or whatever could be increased, and if that utility ratio is improved enough, it starts having a serious effect on transportation. And while at first the idea of driving cars around doesn’t seem like a Google thing to do, don’t forget that the most important part of this whole business, and the part that produces the most efficiency, is the logistics. Tracking the cars, locations, needs, routes, and so on — all information Google would love to sift. Google doesn’t care about the way the cars avoid obstacles – that’s an engineering challenge that researchers around the world are cracking. Google wants to power this network of nodes and be the unseen hand that points at vehicle in lot and tells it to go to location by route and pick up person. Google’s forte is flattening deep data, and this would be a great application of it. Not that I would trust Google to drive my car for me, exactly, at least not in Google Commute Beta, but I would certainly trust them to provide all the information my robocar needs to get where it’s going. And they’re jockeying for that position already, probably a decade before automated vehicles even start to be considered for road use. That’s really the part of the equation that Google fits into. Where would Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, and everyone else figure? How will cities, and cars themselves, change? Like I said, it’s a fertile topic, and we’ll probably be talking a lot about these things in years to come. : , as I originally wrote (and still appears in the URL). Entirely my mistake, not entirely sure why I would even think that. He is an Android developer among other things and heads up ClockworkMod. [via ] |
Up Close With A 3D-Printed Card Skimmer | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | I’ve recently fallen into the habit of pulling and tugging at ATM slots before I slide my card through because I fear that someone nefarious has stuck one of these 3D-printed card skimmers over the opening. This skimmer, found in California, was 3D-printed to resemble the real Chase ATM slot almost perfectly. Wildly enough, there’s a pinhole camera connected to a full PCB hidden under the plate and the ports designed to assist the visually impaired seem to be unimpeded, which means nothing would seem amiss even as this thing grabbed your card account number, PIN, and, presumably, the security code on the back of your card in some cases. The fact that this barnacle of electronics is attached, parasitically, to one of the most secure and human-proof devices in existence is an amazing feat. writes: I’ve noticed that since a pair of skimmers were caught in using similar hardware, many of the Chase ATMs here have begun using a different design with blue transparent plastic. I worry that this sort of security by reaction will be a bit shortsighted but clearly Chase has begun the cat and mouse game with these guys. I wonder when those janky ATMs at delis and convenience stores will be hit? |
Facebook One-Ups Twitter With Subscribe Button That Tells Friends When You Click | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | Facebook wasn’t kidding when it yesterday that an embeddable button allowing people to subscribe to someone’s public updates was on the way. Today it , noting that when clicked “The subscribe action is also shared — allowing others to subscribe directly via the News Feed stories, and further increasing viral distribution.” This gives Facebook’s button a distinct advantage over Twitter’s, as the action of following someone through Twitter’s button doesn’t appear in the main tweet stream, only a secondary stream. A “Follow” click will probably only nab you 1 follower, but a “Subscribe” click could create a viral chain that nets you many new Subscribers. Developers can via XFBML or Iframe, and choose whether to display an author’s Subscriber count and the faces of existing subscribers. Above are the 3 available designs. The button is already including The Daily Beast / Newsweek, The Huffington Post, TIME.com, washingtonpost.com, and some of TechCrunch’s author drop-downs. To see it in action, click the arrows beside my name at the top of this article. For sites, the Subscribe buttons will serve as a powerful complement the Facebook’s Like Box plugin, which lets people Like a Facebook Page while on an external website. For individual content producers, it will also make the Subscribe feature a more adequate alternative to creating a Facebook Page which must be managed separately. There’s still a major problem with Subscribe, in that , which I wrote about yesterday and outlined some possible solutions for. With any luck, a fix will be the Subscribe team’s next priority. Facebook is now clearly looking to usurp for Twitter’s role as the place to follow public figures. By publishing news feed stories of an author’s link to the friends of those who click the button, Facebook has found a way to make promoting its button more lucrative than its competitor’s. Authors will appreciate the viral bump, though users might not necessarily want their subscription actions shared even though that info is technically public, Not only will the buttons create more interconnections on Facebook, but their presence around the web will raise awareness of the feature and get more users to . |
Jawbone Cancels All Pending Up Orders, Refunds Unhappy Owners (Even If They Keep It) | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | For a company that generally sticks to fancy-pants Bluetooth headsets and speakers, Jawbone has done a surprisingly good job of making their into a rather trendy item. Alas, there’s another trend going around that’s not nearly as beneficial: complaining that the UP is broken. Looking to fix things before the UP’s reputation goes down for the count, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman has just announced that the company is implementing a full No-Questions-Asked refund policy for anyone with a wonky wristband. They don’t even want it back. In a , Rahman says “We recognize that this product has not yet lived up to everyone’s expectations – including our own – so we’re taking action.” Users looking to take part in the program are offered two options: cash, or Jawbone.com credit. If you take the former, they’ll give you $109.43 (if you’re in the US — it varies a bit based on currency/location); if you go for the credit, they’ll bump it up to $150. Perhaps most (pleasantly) surprising, Jawbone isn’t making anyone actually send their wristbands ; as long as you promise that you haven’t returned your UP already and that you won’t sell it on eBay or otherwise profit from the device, they’ll cough up the dough. The program kicks off tomorrow, with a Furthermore, reveals that Jawbone has cancelled all pending UP orders (it seems to be pulled , as well) and pledges to not begin taking orders again until they “have sorted out the issues with [the] UP bands.” This is perhaps the toughest move the company could make — but given the circumstances, almost certainly the best move as well. It won’t be easy, it won’t be cheap, and Jawbone will undoubtedly pay out a ton of cash to people with fully functional devices — but in the end, the company walks away with their reputation and the opportunity to relaunch the device once the kinks are worked out. |
T-Mobile Offers Square Mobile Payment Readers With Smartphone Upgrades | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | T-Mobile is unveiling a promotion with mobile payments company this week. Basically, T-Mobile is offering its business users an upgrade plan where they can get a 4G Pro smartphone, and an unlimited data, talk and text plan for $69.99 with a two-year contract extension. But along with all of the above, T-Mobile is chipping in a free Square mobile payments credit card reader with a 4G smartphone upgrade. This appears to be the first promotion of Square by a carrier, which should provide nice publicity for the mobile payments startup. Square first got a major promotion earlier this year when Apple the mobile payments readers in its retail locations and e-commerce site. Now, Square is sold at which include Apple, Best Buy, Radio Shack, Target and Wal-Mart. A few weeks ago, Square, which is processing in payments per day, to encourage existing users to give their favorite entrepreneur or small business owner a mobile payments device as a holiday gift. |
Google Currents: First Impressions Of Google’s Flipboard Competitor | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | Google has just its much-rumored Flipboard competitor, Google Currents. The service is available for both iOS and Android — including support for phones and tablets — and you can download it . But only if you’re in the US (sorry international readers). The gist of Currents is simple: it’s a clean, touch-friendly way to consume your favorite blogs and news sites on your phone and/or tablet. And it looks good — much better, in fact, than most of Google’s other applications. After installing the app, you’ll see icons for a handful of pre-selected publications like 500px and The Daily Beast. Currents will immediately begin downloading the most recent articles from these sources, and you’ll also be prompted to add additional publications to your Library (including TechCrunch, should that suit your fancy — we’re an initial launch partner). If you’re using a large enough display (in other words, a tablet), Currents will display large photo banners that help lend a magazine vibe to the app. Aside from these, the app is broken into two main sections of content: Library and Trending. The former is where content from the publications you’ve opted to follow will show up , and the app will proactively download that content so you can read it offline. The Trending tab displays the hottest stories across the web, broken down by category and drawn from a variety of sources. The default section is called simply ‘Top Stories’, and you can add additional topic-specific lists including Technology, Business, and World News. [youtube=’http://youtu.be/5LOcUkm8m9w’] But while Currents has been discussed as a Flipboard competitor — and it is, in the sense that it gives you an attractive way to browse your favorite sites — this initial release has relatively little integration with social networks like Twitter and Facebook, which are Flipboard’s bread and butter. At this point Currents will let you with any social apps you have installed (as you can with most Android apps). But you can’t connect with Twitter or Facebook to view posts shared by your friends within Currents itself. Another way to put it: at this point, it doesn’t feel terribly social. That said, Google says it plans to roll out more social features down the line, so this may come eventually. Of course, the fact that Google omitted them from this release may indicate that it’s more interested in driving people to Google+. Here are some of my other early impressions (I’ll be adding more as I spend more time with Currents): |
Twitter As Discovery Platform: Redesign Adds Personalized Stories, Inline Media, Embeds | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | While Twitter is already a leading platform for information distribution, a few aspects of its redesign today show how it’s strengthening itself in this area. It’s improving inline media viewing and tweet embeds to aid viewing and sharing, and adding a personalized Stories section to help users more easily explore the wide world of tweets. The first, inline media viewing within tweets, is an adjustment from the way you could show media in the previous two-pane view. If a tweet in your home stream contains media, you can click on “View Photo” or “View Media” to reveal it without having to go to another page or pane. So, less clicking through panes, and more engagement as a result. If you share the location of your tweets, they’ll also appear here. Most interestingly, these inline views also appear to include third-party apps like FourSquare. Any app developer should think hard about how to take advantage of this new platform real estate. The second change is embedded tweets. While Twitter has offered a way to embed tweets for a year and a half , the new version is more like YouTube, although more hidden in the interface. To get at it, you first click on a tweet to open it within the stream. Then you click on “Details,” the last link in the meta information in the tweet. This will take you to the landing page for the Tweet, which will then include the embed option. Once you open it, you’ll see a YouTube-style menu that includes HTML, shortcode and the link, as well as a way to adjust the alignment and a view of of what the embed will look like. The resulting tweet contains all of the context, including the Reply, Retweet and Favorite options. [tweet https://twitter.com/miguelrios/status/144879368085311488] The third change is a conceptual shift: the personalized Stories section that’s the default of the new “# Discovery” page. Twitter has up until this point only shown raw streams of tweets, with the most advanced sorting mechanisms being lists. This new page is specifically designed to help users explore the world of Twitter, and it feels like a personalized newspaper. When I asked product managers at the company about how Stories are determined, the answer I got was a vague “your interests.” These interests are presumably who you follow, what you tweet about, what you click on, etc… I’m guessing they’re determined in a similar way to how Twitter figures out who-to-follow recommendations. The examples below, like the Virginia Tech shooting and Ice Cube, appear to be popular news stories that aren’t especially tailored to my interests, so we’ll see how Twitter refines this section in the future. But even if it’s not that interesting right now, this sort of algorithmically determined feature is that Twitter can quickly adjust it from this point forward to match users interests. Stories feels like it could be especially useful for people who are relatively new to Twitter, who don’t fully understand all the parts of the service even if they know it’s a good place for discovering the information that matters to them. Check out the rest of our coverage of the changes today, in the links below: |
Facebook Confirms Corporate Reorganization, Focusing On Mobile, Ads, Product, Engineering, Profile | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | Facebook has confirmed with me that it has undergone a corporate reorganization. “We can confirm that in order to streamline the product development process, we have reorganized our technical teams into product groups that report into Mark. These groups will be lead by Bret Taylor, Chris Cox, Greg Badros, Mike Schroepfer, and Sam Lessin.” Though Facebook didn’t formally name the divisions headed by these , their areas of focus are CTO Taylor – mobile, VP of Product Cox – general product, Badros – ads engineering, VP of Engineering Schroepfer – engineering, and Lessin – Timeline / profile. Rumors of the reorganization were first by AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes last night. The company has grown quickly over the last few years, making it difficult to keep those working on related products in sync. Refocusing around these areas should help Facebook make the product development process faster and less erratic. It will also make it easier for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to communicate his vision down to those building and supporting the different facets of the service. Facebook recently , Erin Egan for policy and Michael Richter for product. Their roles are to oversee Facebook product development to ensure that privacy is protected and that Facebook upholds the promises it made to the FTC. The new vertically integrated structure will facilitate this oversight and help prevent the building or launch of products that could jeopardize user privacy. Facebook had 2000 employees a year ago and is aggressively hiring as it prepares to move into its new “ ” 3600 person capacity headquarters (with room to build more offices). While the company has prided itself on staying lean and remaining relatively flat, the reorganization represents necessary growing pains as the company matures. “Move Fast and Break Things” was a strategy that allowed it to iterate quickly and grow a huge lead in social networking. However, with more public scrutiny and an expected , the stakes are higher now. By creating these 5 lieutenant positions that report to Zuckerberg, Facebook will be able to marry efficiency and purpose with innovation. |
The New Twitter Brand Pages, With Bold Banners And Pinned Videos | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | Twitter unveiled a which will be rolling out slowly. We’ve covered some of the already such as the new timeline and discover features, as well as how Twitter is trying to and accessible. One major change for brands, however, is new brand pages. Not everyone can see what these look like yet, so I’ve pasted some screenshots here from , , , and @ . The two big changes are a new banner just below the profile information that stretches across the page and the ability to pin a tweet at the top of each brand’s stream. This will give brands a more distinctive presence on Twitter, and should roll out more widely in the first quarter of 2012. The pinned tweet is particularly effective for tweets with images or video. With the new design, videos and images can be seen inline within your stream (just click “Open” on the top right for tweets with images or videos). On brand pages, these video or photo tweets can be set to be open, adding another visually engaging element to the page. Twitter is launching the new brand pages with 21 partners. If you have the enhanced version of Twitter enabled, you can see them here: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and . You can also read about the changes on . |
Scottish Startup Sensewhere Promises Accurate Indoor Location-Tracking | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | As location gradually becomes more important to the on-the-go consumer, what with daily deals, check-in coupons, and local promotions, so that consumer’s fine location becomes more important to merchants. GPS and wi-fi can only get you so far, though, and inside a mall or airport it’s much more difficult and inefficient to narrow down a user’s location to anything approaching usability. There are systems for tracking people and devices indoors, but Scottish startup Sensewhere (formerly Satsis) says they’ve leapfrogged existing solutions. Their new “self-correcting” location-sensing network will allow for quick and low-power situation of devices to within 5m by forming a sort of constantly updated mesh of self-aware devices. The company, which split off from research at the University of Edinburgh and got its launch money through awards and loans, received £1.2 million in funding from private equity firms just this last August. They’re making their public launch nowish (there have been a few news items over the last week or so) and have made an app available on iOS and Android. Their technology is similar to existing indoor-tracking systems, but the company says theirs is superior due to its self-updating nature: If you cut through the marketing there, what you basically have is a self-updating network with devices pinging a central server with the networks they see (wi-fi, Bluetooth, RF, etc.) and their position as best they can determine, and that central server continually collates this data and updates the map, using mobile nodes as reference as well as stationary ones. Assuming the system works, it could be a great add-on for megastructures like department stores and airports, with tons of device traffic and square footage. While I’m sure it falls short of the idea right now, one imagines the endpoint: get a promo deal when you walk into a store that expires when you walk out – that sort of thing. Right now it’s available as an app, but it seems unlikely that they’ll see uptake in that form. They’ll have to go white-label and market themselves as a customizable solution for individual locations – that or talk with mapping or deal companies and get themselves integrated at a lower level. No hardware is required for setup at your local mall, but places will still have to tie in and do setup – there’s a lot of low-level work to be done there interfacing with small stores, corporate offices, and so on. Retail is a nightmare but they always up for new marketing opportunities. is pretty spartan at the moment, but you can get more info on the apps into which the service is integrated through them. The system is described in more detail in their and at . |
TC Gadgets Needs Interns In Sin City | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 8 | Heyo! CES is right around the corner and we need some interns to work with us in Las Vegas after the holiday. If you like gadgets, think you can write/edit video, and are free January 10-13 and live in or around or can get to LV, we want to talk to you. Email me, john@beta.techcrunch.com with the subject line “INTERN” describing your interests, skills, and why you’d make a good intern. Eighteen and over only, please, for various, non-creepy, legal reasons. |
Theicebreak For iPhone Wants To Make Your Already Great Relationship More Awesome | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | In the same space as and , social “network” for couples is now available on the iPhone — for those that want to stay hyper-connected to their SOs via mobile. Upon opening theicebreak gives you two options: First is the option to answer an “icebreaker” or a question related to your partner, your relationship or your personality — like, “What are the best words to hear from your partner?” or “What’s your favorite thing to do when the weather gets cold?” You also have the option to “capture today’s moment,” or share a picture of something you saw during the day that “amazed you.” Aiming to improve communication, affection or excitement within a relationship, theicebreak lets users share privately with their partners and/or anonymously with all users. If your partner isn’t on theicebreak, the app will loop them in via email where they can still receive your answers to their questions and your moments, even if they don’t participate themselves. And participation pays off, literally (!): Every time you complete an action on theicebreak you earn $10 in theicebreak coins. When a couple earns $500 in coins, they receive a 20% discount (for up to $20) off their date. All they need to do is mail in the receipts from a date-type outing and the company will send them a check for up to $20. Cute. The app will eventually include Wishlists, a popular site feature that functions like a Pinterest for the relationships, allowing the couple to curate lists of stuff like where they want to go on vacation or what they want for Christmas. theicebreak aims to enhance, not replace the communication couples have already, “Making your already great relationship more awesome,” founder tells me. In addition to the features above, users have a Stats section where they can rate their relationship satisfaction levels daily and a Vitals section which lists couple-relavent information like Birthdays, Clothing preferences and Couples might not want to use this around terminally single friends. Because it would be insanely annoying. |
Overview: 11 Startup Demos From The TechCrunch Tokyo 2011 Conference | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | organized [JP] on Tuesday, a one-day event that attracted a total of 600 people (and will hopefully be organized next year again, possibly as TechCrunch Disrupt Tokyo). The crowd was a mix of people from the local web and mobile industry, Asia, and the US (including TechCrunch’s very own Erick Schonfeld who came to Japan for the first time in ten years). Apart from presentations and panel discussions (which can be watched ), a few hours of the program were reserved for a total of ten Japanese and one Korean startup to to demo their services on-stage. Here is a rundown of all the services that were shown at the event’s so-called “Startup Battle”. [ENG/JP] (winner of the Grand Prix – 1 million Yen/US$13,000 in cash)
Best of show went to , which can probably be best described as Turntable.fm for video. The service uses content from YouTube and lets users choose avatars, watch clips together in a virtual theater, create play lists, and rate videos selected by other “video jockeys” (awesome/lame). Picotube is developed by Tokyo-based startup Vettl (which was established in August) and is available in English and Japanese. Vettl plans to monetize the service with virtual item sales in the future. [ENG/JP] (winner of the special prize)
is a social news reader that ranks content based on the number of corresponding links on Twitter. The service, which is available in English and Japanese, indexes and analyzes over 10 million tweeted URLs per day. Users can personalize their news (for example, by letting Crowsnest serve up links from friends or a self-defined category only), search, integrate news items into RSS readers, etc. Crowsnest looks especially nice on an iPad but is designed to be consumed cross-platform. [JP] (winner of the special prize)
Created by a high-school student, wants to make the contact lists (address books) on smartphones social. The main idea here is to do away with displaying friends and other contacts in list form and visualize connections in the form of a map instead (see below). Users can access their friend’s email, Facebook, and Twitter accounts by clicking on their picture. A beta version for Android handsets is already available on the . [ENG] (winner of the special prize of the jury)
is a social commerce app from Korea that lets shoppers collect loyalty points after scanning a QR code at partner stores (limited to Seoul/Korea, at this point). Users can earn additional points by recommending the store in question to a friend from within the app. When the friend patronizes the merchant later, both him or her and the original Spoqa user receive points. These points can then be used for discounts or free items. Spoqa collected a total of 24,000 users since its launch in Korea in early November (free downloads: , ). Read more about Spoqa (in English) . Here are the six services that didn’t make the cut at the event: [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/27084796 w=400&h=300] Videos from TechCrunch Tokyo 2011 can be viewed , while some pictures from the event can be found . |
Dijit’s Universal Remote Control App Gets Revamped For The iPad | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | The social remote control app Dijit has certainly been getting around lately: it started off on iPhones, made the leap onto not long ago, and now the company has announced that an of the app is in the works. According to Jeremy Toeman, Dijit’s Chief Product Officer, one of the company’s big focuses was to make effective use of all the screen real estate the iPad afforded them. “We’ve tried to think through all the nuance of what a full, 10″ entertainment console sitting on a user’s coffee table should look like,” he said. Those expecting a straight port of the will find that a few of the specifics have changed. Among other things, the redesigned Dijit iOS app has a more pronounced focus on usability: it features larger on-screen buttons and the option to use a full-screen remote, which stand in pretty stark contrast to the smaller controls as seen in the . The iPad version also sports visual cues in what otherwise would have been empty space to guide users through using the app. Otherwise, the iPad version is a cleverly re-imagined version of the original iPhone app — the ease of setup remains, as does the app’s focus on building a social watching experience by linking up to Twitter and Facebook. Since the iPad obviously doesn’t have a built-in IR blaster, users looking to control their home theaters while poking through Wikipedia entry or sharing show recommendations still need to use the to relay commands. I’ve pointed out before that Dijit isn’t exactly alone in this space — Logitech’s works in much the same way — but a $30 difference in price tags may be enough to sway cash-strapped device convergence junkies into giving Dijit a try. Dijit has been making some big plays lately, like getting their app preloaded onto the Xoom 2 Media Edition, and hopefully the iPad version lives up to expectations. iPad owners looking to take the new-and-improved Dijit for a spin will have to wait just a little while longer though — Toeman tells me that the app should be submitted to the app store within the next few weeks.
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Apple Sends Match.com’s App To The Dog House For Untaxed Subscription Payments | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | Those looking for love won’t find it in the App Store. Apple has removed ‘s iOS app because it allowed the lonely to pay for Match subscriptions with a credit card through an external link rather than using the in-app purchases system. That meant Apple wasn’t getting its 30% cut. In June Apple to state that “Apps can read or play approved content that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app, as long as there is no button or external link in the app to purchase the approved content.” Apple and Match.com are now negotiating how the app must change before their relationship can be rekindled and they can have an earth-shattering makeup revenue split. You may remember the controversy back in February when Apple which required apps to offer their website subscriptions through the in-app purchases system at an equal or lower price. Match.com apparently dodged the 30% tax on in-app purchases by displaying a button to pay them directly. This was the exact type of behavior Apple banned with its June policy revision, but I guess it took a while for it to notice Match.com was messing around on the side. Match.com’s app primarily serves as a mobile access point to its subscription-based web service. Those who’ve already downloaded it can continue looking for their soulmate through the app. Still, new users could create an account and start paying within the app, so the removal may be taking a small toll on Match.com’s onboarding rates. That’s a problem since they have high churn rates. See, any successful matchmaking service permanently solves the problem it address — married people don’t need marriage apps. Even a temporary removal from the App Store can also have a lasting impact since it causes an app to fall off the leaderboards, reducing discovery potential. Match.com will have to decide whether to stop allowing users to signup and pay through the app, or agree to pay Apple’s 30% tax. The former seems more lucrative. If you’re setting up your Match.com profile on the go, you’re probably not putting your best foot forward, you won’t meet people, and you’ll stop paying anyways. Even better, Match.com could provide limited functionality in the app and only offer the full experience if they’ve paid online, but not offer any link or button to its web payment system. This way it could still hook up with new users through the app, but be free to collect 100% of their subscription fees. You could call it an open relationship. |
Google Mulling Quick-Shipment Partnerships For Online Shoppers | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | With online retail shopping growing every year, it’s no surprise that practically everyone wants in. Web-based companies are falling over themselves providing recommendation engines, web storefronts, payment systems, and backend management. Google is in most of those fields already, but it’s probable that they feel somewhat frustrated at being unable to siphon users away from major retailers like Amazon. So many searches lead right there, but Google is unable to monetize what are clearly purchase-oriented users. It’s not a new situation, of course: if you want to stuff, you use Google. If you want to stuff, you use Amazon. But Google has increasingly been placing itself in the getting stuff business, and may soon expand into real goods, by way of partnerships with retailers and shipping providers. The Wall Street Journal saying Google has approached them regarding such a partnership. It would expedite the shipment of purchases made through Google’s shopping and search tools and leverage some existing tech used to track availability. Other stores probed by the WSJ as probable collaborators, Gap and OfficeMax, had no comment — nor did Google. It would definitely be a risky move. While millions use Google to shop, very few ever think of Google as a way of doing anything but finding things. Many would be suspicious of a “Buy and ship instantly” button or whatever the suggested use case is. But Google is in a powerful position, since it is likely aware of both searchers’ locations and the locations of the nearest product. How Google will insert itself into a Macy’s purchase without seeming out of place is a serious question, though. It is suggested that there would be a focus on same-day delivery, but that seems like a stretch. Some readers may remember Kozmo.com’s quixotic quest for instant gratification. Not only would it be a logistical nightmare, but it would be monstrously expensive. The best case scenario is Google working with retailers to streamline inventorying and delivery, and perhaps soaking up some of the cost required to do next-day delivery for a lowered price. Considering Google is still putting out feelers to companies like Macy’s, the project is likely still in quite an early phase, so there’s probably no impending announcement, and certainly not before the holidays. |
AT&T’s 4G/LTE Network Already Live In Parts Of NYC | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | Early in November, AT&T exec Larry Solomon mentioned that their 4G/LTE network would be extending its reach to New York City sometime “soon.” Turns out, “soon” means “sometime around December 1st” — as of this evening, reports started coming in that some devices within the Big Apple’s limits were lighting up with 4G/LTE signal. Now, it should be noted that this is still totally unofficial; AT&T has yet to issue a press release announcing that New York’s LTE has gone live, and it’s quite possible that things are just live temporarily for the sake of testing. With that said, our own Jordan Crook was able to get a rock solid LTE signal (on the ) in Southern Manhattan this evening, and was pulling average download speeds between 10 and 12.5 megabits per second. If you’ve got an HTC Vivid, Galaxy S II Skyrocket, or Galaxy Tab 8.9 and are on the Island, whip it out and give it a shot. If you’re able to catch any of those LTE waves, be sure to drop a comment and let us know which part of the city you’re in. |
Real Simple Teams Up With Punchbowl To Offer Digital Greeting Cards | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | Start to finish party planning site and digital greeting card company has announced a technology-licensing agreement with magazine Real Simple to allow the publication’s readers to create and send free digital greeting cards for all occasions. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As we’ve written in the past, Punchbowl’s platform allows users to create and most recently, The startup also provides tools that let you find supplies, organize an after party, set a date, track RSVPs, and much more. Real Simple’s Punchbowl Digital Greeting Cards come with folded designs, matching envelopes, realistic postmarks, and the mailopening experience. The cards can be personalized with accents such as envelope liners, custom postage, and rubber stamps. Today, Punchbowl is also debuting online holiday cards for businesses, where companies can upload their logo for seasonal greetings. |
TechCrunch Moscow, 5th December | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | I’m looking forward to , on 5th December. Conveniently it is just before . Hope to see you there. Here’s the schedule: Schedule, 5 December 2011 9:00
Welcome coffee 10:00
Intro
Mike Butcher , Edward Shenderovich 10:10
What’s Next? Creating the Big Picture.
The tech world undergoes rapid changes that bring unforeseen innovations every few years. In this discussion we’ll explore what’s going to come in the next few years. What will be the next Facebook or Twitter, Microsoft or Oracle?
Morten Lund, Sergei Beloussov 11:00
Presentation
Ostrovok.ru case study
Sergei Faguet, Kirill Makharinsky. 11:15
Interview.
Arkady Volozh 11:45
Coffee Break. 12:00
Who rules mobile industry?
What is the role of operators, device manufacturers and app developers in the mobile world? Does device and connectivity price reduction help the smartphone distribution? Is there a clear leader in the industry?
Igor Schegolev, Dennis Sverdlov, Misha Lyalin 12:45
Digital Politics
How does social media affect politics around the world? What is the role of social media in democratic and dictatorship countries? How is leadership created and maintained in a world of online social connections?
Andrew Keen, Anton Nossik 13:15
E-commerce
E-commerce sales double annually. Will this growth rate be the same in the next few years? What new business models are being explored by the leaders of the field?
Laurent Le Moal, Rob Cassedy, Maelle Gavet, Christian Lanng 14:00
Lunch. 15:00
New Digital Europe
Silicon Valley is still dominating the tech space, but how long will it last? Companies like Skype and Spotify show that worldwide tech leaders can emerge in Europe. How does Europe compete with the US and China?
Morten Lund, Annelies Van Den Belt, Mike Butcher, Lukasz Gadowski 15:30
Venture Investments
Which innovations are worth to invest in? How high is the quality of Russian and European startups? How to choose the right investor for your startup? Which details about the potential investor and contract should startup owners learn before signing the deal? All these questions will be discussed by venture investors and serial entrepreneurs, who have a long experience of negotiations with investors.
Elvira Nabiullina, Leonid Boguslavsky, Alexander Galitsky, Igor Agamirzian 16:15
Interview.
Dmitry Grishin 16:45
Coffee Break. 17:15
Startup Battle.
In a dynamic competition Russian startups will have a very little amount of time to make a pitch and to convince jury to invest in them. Jury consists of experienced venture investors and entrepreneurs, who will judge the battle strictly.
Arkady Moreynis 19:00
Wrap up
Mike Butcher, Edward Shenderovich. 19:15
Party
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LG Nitro HD For AT&T: Hands-On | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | Tonight at LG’s media event in New York City, we were lucky enough to get some quality time with the . The third in AT&T’s line of LTE-capable phones, the Nitro HD was announced earlier this week with a launch date of December 4 for AT&T. Some of its spec highlights include a 4.5-inch 720p display (like the HTC Rezound), a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel rear camera and 4G LTE support from AT&T, of course. Since the Nitro was announced before its dedicated media event (and since it’s basically the Optimus LTE we’re seeing over in Europe), there’s really no reason to hash out all the specific deets. So let’s just get down to business, shall we? All in all, I’d call the LG Nitro HD a fine option, but not necessarily my first pick. It packs specs that can compete on paper, but simply can’t keep up on the hardware front. The Nitro HD will show up on AT&T shelves December 4 for $249 with a two-year contract.
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Vitrue 1st To Let Brands Offer Mobile Access To Their Facebook Page Tab Apps | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | Facebook’s mobile apps and websites don’t support access to Page tab applications, which let brands host signup forms, coupons, sweepstakes, games and more. Considering roughly 40% of Facebook’s users are accessing the site via these mobile interfaces, brands are missing out on serving their content to hundreds of millions of people. But Page management platform announced a workaround today at the conference, inspired by encouragement from Facebook itself. Soon when mobile users try to visit tab apps on the Pages of its clients, Vitrue’s system will recognize the user is on a mobile device and redirect them to an HTML5 mobile site version of that app. This will allow its clients to publish links to their apps in the news feed without worrying that many fans won’t be able to access them. Expect other Page management companies to copy this fix if Facebook doesn’t solve the problem for everyone first. There are plenty of important use cases that brands with mobile Page tab access will be able to support. They could distribute a coupon that fans could pull up on their phone and show at a physical location. They could get mobile users to signup for text message alerts about discounts and news. Brands won’t have to redundantly build these Facebook Page tab apps as mobile sites since starting at the end of the December Vitrue will take care of mobile optimization for them. Any brand with local presences, such a retail or restaurant chains, could benefit from this technology. Adam Archer, founder of which Vitrue acquired in July and now the GM of Vitrue’s games unit, tells me that the company’s clients were clamoring for this type of functionality. He thinks clients of the other big Page management companies are asking for the same, so Vitrue’s competitors will probably follow suit. Archer tells me Vitrue was working with Facebook through the Preferred Developer Consultant program and it suggested they build out mobile access. When I asked if Facebook might make Vitrue’s capability obsolete by building out mobile Page tab access itself, Archer tells me “Maybe it’s somewhere on their roadmap, but it’s not a priority.” I’m skeptical, though. Some thought mobile Page tab access was coming at f8. It’s such a fundamental platform issue it seems unlikely that Facebook would leave the responsibility to third-parties for much longer. Until then, though, Vitrue may be able to attract some new mobile-focused clients. |
2011 Holiday Gift Guide: iPhone Accessories For Every Type | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | Apple has sold over in this past quarter alone, so chances are that someone you’ll have to buy a holiday present for will already have one. Instead of the usual “cheesy card and sweater” combination, why not give them something that takes advantage of their constant electronic companion? Here are a few iPhone-friendly gift ideas to consider, all organized by personality type. Happy hunting!
Take it from a guy who bought and broke an iPhone 4 on the same day: the iPhone 4/4S’s glass panels don’t play nice with concrete. That’s where the Otterbox Defender comes into play: combining a hard polycarbonate body with a silicon skin that wraps around it, the Defender is robust enough to keep up with even the most negligent users. Oh, and did I mention it comes in eight fetching color combinations? , $49.95
There are enough iPhone cases floating around on the internet to make your head spin. Instead of digging through countless options for a case in that one particular shade of puce, why not make one instead? Case-mate offers customers the ability to upload their own images and slap them onto the case of their choice, perfect for the artistically-inclined and the picky to boot. You can even be ironic like me and get an iPhone case emblazoned with HTC phones on it! , prices start at $35 depending on the style of case.
If you’re anything like me — which is to say avid runner/prodigious sweater — then you’ll probably enjoy taking a pair of Sennheiser Adidas PMX 680is on your next excursion. They’re lightweight, have a water and sweat-resistant neckband, and sound rather good to boot. The “i” in this case refers to the iDevice specific model, which features a line-in remote for taking calls and finding just the right song in your “GET TOUGH” playlist. Just don’t plan on doing any bench presses with these things, because the neckband will get in the way mighty quick. , $69.99
The iPhone 4S’s battery has , but who wants to be tethered to a power outlet all day long? Mophie has been making external batteries/cases for years now, but those who would rather dodge the added heft should check out their Juice Pack Boost. It’s a small external battery that packs 2000mAh of juice, which more than enough to keep your iPhone chugging along until you can plug it in proper. , $49.95 If you’re fortunate enough to live where you won’t the next few months blanketed in perpetual cloud cover, check out Eton’s solar-powered battery case. It’s got a little of heft to it for sure, but that’s a small price to pay for a (very marginally) smaller electric bill, right? Alright, so the Mobius won’t be the best choice for every iPhone 4/4S owner, but for those of you who like lounging around in the sun will appreciate the juice this thing provides while you get that much-needed tan. , $80
No one’s too old to pilot a small, mechanized whirligig through the air, and Griffin’s Helo TC helicopter lets you do just that with your iPhone. After snapping your iPhone (any kind will do) into the included Flight Deck control mount, the Helo TC will leap into the air. Just be carefully to log a little bit of practice time first — the last thing to need to do is steer it headlong into a wall. , $49.99
Jawbone’s can pump out some surprising sound and will fit in even the smelliest, most cramped dorm rooms. Jawbone pushes out software updates pretty frequently, and has added nifty features like LiveAudio mode to make tunes sound more immersive. Pair it up with a , and you’ve got a mobile party — all that’s missing are the red Solo cups. , $199.99 |
Solving Email Overload With A Company-Wide Ban | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | The CEO of a large European-based tech firm hates email and wants his 74,000 employees in 42 countries to stop using it. , CEO of , wants his “zero email” policy to be in place within a year-and-a-half. He told the only 10% of emails turn out to be important and that “email is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently.” TechCrunch writers have a long history of trying to solve email overload. for a month earlier this year and when his experiment ended. Michael Arrington has and how it’s an opportunity for an entreprenuer. We which helps you focus on the important emails. I wrote about the concept. We’ve also , which tries to keep email, well, short. And there have been many other posts too. But, none of these attempts are as drastic as Breton’s company-wide plan. He says one of the big problems is people switching to ‘useless’ emails when they were working on more important tasks. Also, he complains “It is not right that some of our fellow employees spend hours in the evening dealing with their emails.” That’s clearly the standard practice in Silicon Valley and the start-up world. Breton’s solution is employees should spend more time talking directly to each other in person or on the phone. And he wants them to use real time messaging tools, saying the chat tools on Facebook would be better than email. This is not the first time Breton has preached against email. Back in February, his firm would be a “zero email company” within three years. A writer at this might just be an elaborate PR effort for Atos’s IT service business, and he might be right. I also wonder what happens to the 10 percent of emails that even Breton admits are important. What business opportunities and improvements might be missed with a zero email policy? Yes, many of us really hate email overload. If email served no useful purpose, we wouldn’t use it. But that’s not the case, and a company-wide ban sounds like the wrong solution. It will be interesting to see if Breton’s ban really gets put into place and how the company then performs. If Atos is serious about this, they might start by updating their own website. Their lists several email addresses. [Image: olly/ ] |
YouTube’s New Homepage Goes Social With Algorithmic Feed, Emphasis On Google+ And Facebook | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | is what the company calls the biggest redesign in its history today, including sweeping changes to its homepage and channel pages. The goal is better personalized video discovery and viewing, with a notable emphasis on social features. Think of the changes as the latest example of Google’s campaign to create a unified social layer for all of its products. The new homepage looks a lot like Facebook, or Google+ for that matter. An activity feed view dominates the middle of the page, while a left-hand navigation bar provides a set of filters for what you see in the feed. The default Subscriptions feed appears to include algorithmically determined video uploads and activities determined by information like what videos you’ve watched and which channels you’ve subscribed to, although YouTube group product manager Noam Lovinsky wouldn’t tell me exactly how it worked. The previous version of the homepage feed, which launched early this year, doesn’t appear to be algorithmically tuned to the same degree. G+ and Facebook also get prime-time spots in the navigation bar, listed right beneath the first feed. Click on either and you’ll be able to view videos shared by friends on those networks. G+ videos are automatically in there since YouTube accounts are linked to users Google identities. Facebook requires an opt-in login. Google is playing up the already social aspects of YouTube to help it bolster Google’s cross-product G+ push. The Facebook integration is a bit more surprising considering that it’s the main social competitor out there. But Lovinksy downplayed that point when I brought it up, noting that only around 10% of YouTube’s views are from embeds, meaning that Facebook is just a part of that percentage. He went on to explain that the prominent locations for G+ and Facebook are to help with onboarding for newer users. Instead of looking through the entire site for interesting channels, or trying to see what YouTube’s general recommendations tell them, they can get started by seeing what their current friends are already sharing. The rest of the left-hand bar includes other options for filtering the feed. You can pin any subscribed channel to the top section as well. Click on any of those subscriptions and you’ll see a reverse-chronological feed of all the activity in that channel. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-ajXnrpkio&w=640&h=360] Further down, the bar includes a YouTube-curated section showing Trending, Popular and Music channels, and another section showing recommended channels. The new homepage has a lot in common with Facebook’s left-hand navigation lists, its algorithmic feed, and its right-hand side recommendations and ads. But that’s a reflection of the design paradigm for all social products, as Lovinksy tells me. Users need a homepage that can help them consume new and interesting content as easily as possible, paired with landing pages that let you add subscriptions. In YouTube’s case, the homepage emphasis on filtering channels is based on users’ desires to watch sets of videos in a single sitting. Like, you know, television, channels. To that end, YouTube is also adding some new templates for channel pages. Here’s what they include, according to the company: These additions, which are more analogous to template options in Tumblr or MySpace rather than Facebook’s one-size-fits-all style, let producers promote their works in the most natural style for what they offer. These templates come with a Feed tab showing any of the following actions from the channel owner: Importantly, any of these social actions can also potentially appear in users homepages, similar to how activity on a Facebook page appears in users news feeds. The Feed tab includes a section for users to post their comments, another section for the owner to feature other channels, and an About form. The homepage and channel changes are the two biggest updates today, but the company is also introducing a site-wide design upgrade to all the elements — typography, iconography, etc (like the new logo at the top of this article). It’s separately adding new versions of its Xbox and Google TV applications, that feature magazine-style tile interfaces showing various channels. Finally, the company is touting the success of its advertising platform, saying that it’s seeing strong demand for its new cost-per-click style of video ads. Going forward, look for YouTube to introduce more social features, Lovinsky said. While he didn’t get into specifics, my impression was there’s going to more fine-tuned discovery options coming, like channels on the homepage that show you content on topics related to videos you like. A “hip hop” video channel for instance. And, of course, look for YouTube to add tighter G+ integrations across the site. |
Dwolla Drops Fees For Transactions Under $10 In Prelude To Larger Announcement | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | Online and mobile payment service Dwolla has announced that . This is of course great news for small businesses and merchants whose average transaction is below that. Anything above still carries the flat $0.25 fee. The company has , and the payments space is certainly ripe for disruption from any number of angles, but it’s still not clear what has enabled this particular move. After all, operational overhead is a real thing, and while nobody doubts the company’s honest interest in changing payment processing, it’s not likely they just did this in the spirit of the season. In all likelihood it has something to do with the announcement they’re planning for two weeks from now, which will mark the company’s first birthday (or rather, the first anniversary of their national launch) and, according to CEO Ben Milne, represent a major and “necessary” platform pivot by the company. Chances are that the mobile payment service has seen obstacles to its growth that are insurmountable in its current form. While a few thousand satisfied customers is nothing to complain about, the market is much, much larger than that and perhaps this “confusing” change might be the alternative to that slow expiration common to inflexible startups. We’ll have that news when it hits. In the meantime Dwolla users should probably gather their wits about them in case the changes are less than suitable for their purposes. |
Phonedeck turns your phone into a cloud app – 500 invites | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | appeared last year at Le Web. At the time it seemed very much like a beta project to manage calls from a computer. But we’ve long had the position that real social graph is in your phone – the people you text and call – and Phonedeck has now come on leaps and bounds. Today it’s releasing 500 invites for TechCrunch readers (use the code “TechCrunch” on the site) and revealing more about its upcoming service. This web/cloud platform lets you manage your mobile phone activity, including your contacts from your computer, sending and receiving SMS, initiating and answering calls. You don’t need to unlock your handset and you can even activate a chime sound when you lose the phone, say in the house. But most importantly you get a tonne of stats and data on the people you call, entire conversation histories and automatic updating of your contacts list via LinkedIn and/or Facebook, in a Plaxo-like fashion. Although it launches next year you can try it out now. It’s only on Android right now but an HTML5 version will work and an iOS and Blackberry app is in the works. After downloading the app, users’ phones are connected to the web platform via a cloud database from where calls and SMS texts can be made and received. It also displays incoming callers, showing their previous calls, SMS history, company and LinkedIn activity to complement their name and picture. Forgot what you called that person about? Entire interaction histories by contact are logged so you can remind yourself. Founder/CEO Dr. Frank Fitzek says Phonedeck makes use of the fact that we can do more with a call when it’s on a PC than on a mobile. Security is built in – all connections made by the platform and associated apps make use of SSL encryption. Personally I’ve often hoped that one day the phone will just be another cloud app and this is very close to the ideal. Phonedeck is headquartered in Berlin, Germany, and was founded in 2010 by CEO Dr. Frank Fitzek, COO Gerrit Schulte, Head of Business Development Jens-Philipp Klein and the chairman Christophe Maire (recent winner of , who is also an investor in the company. from on . |
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Apple: We Don’t Use Carrier IQ… In Most Of Our Products… Anymore. | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | The tech world is up in arms this week about , the mobile data logging software that comes pre-installed (and rather well hidden) on an increasingly huge number of handsets. It’s still entirely unclear as to what’s being logged and, more importantly, what (if anything) is being sent off the handset — but one thing’s for sure: people don’t like it. As the controversy swells, companies are rushing to distance themselves from the matter. The latest ones looking to get on the right side of the air gap? Apple. We stopped supporting CarrierIQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so. So , Apple supported Carrier IQ at some point. But not anymore, as of iOS 5. At least, not with most of their products. Like the rest of the lot, however, they’re assuring everyone that no keystrokes, messages, or identifiable bits were transmitted. From what researchers have found so far (and from what Apple claims above), (which, prior to iOS 5, was buried pretty deep in the settings. Beginning with iOS 5, it’s offered up during the initial device setup.) Which ones still support it, even with iOS 5? Your guess is as good as ours — at least, until the security researchers swarming around this topic finish tearing apart every packet they can wrap their hands around. You can pore over our full coverage of . |
With Facebook At Its Core, Color Will Relaunch As Champion Of The Video Status Update | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | is almost ready for round two. The company — which famously raised $41 million and launched last spring only to watch its bomb (which in turn spurred plenty of Schadenfreude) — has spent the last eight months trying to figure out what went wrong, and where it’s headed next. And now it’s back with a product that has a mission statement as simple as its original vision was complex: it wants to reinvent the status update, in the form of 30 second long, muted video clips. Actually, Color says it isn’t really thinking of these updates as at all, but rather as “visual” status updates that fall somewhere between videos and photos. The last time we heard from Color was , when it announced that it was going all-in on Facebook’s platform (the original version of the product tried to build a new, elastic social graph). The app they previewed in September combined aspects of live video-streaming service Qik with Facebook’s Photos product. And over the last few months Color has been running a private beta program at Texas A&M, where they’ve been monitoring the various use cases students come up with. They’ve tweaked the product significantly as a result of that testing, and they’ll be shipping the new Color to users on both iPhone and Android in the next few weeks. So what does the future of Color look like? The new app, which I received this morning and have played with briefly, is similar to the early build we saw in September. Its basic functionality includes a feed of the photos your friends have recently posted to Facebook, as well as a visual Timeline view that lets you browse the photos you’ve recently uploaded as well. But the big differentiator is the concept of the ‘Visit’, which lets you capture a brief, 30 second movie clip that Color hopes will serve as the next generation of the status update. http://vimeo.com/32972941 The original version of the Visit was actually a live video that could stream indefinitely — not just a 30 second clip. But Color CEO Bill Nguyen says that during the beta period at Texas A&M, students complained that these videos were too high-pressure. So Color restricted them to thirty seconds in length, and they also removed the audio. Nguyen explains that muted videos are much less stressful to record, as you don’t have to worry about what your friends are talking about, or any background noise. When you record a Visit, any of your friends who also have the Color app installed get a push notification (you can tone down these notifications if you’d like). Your Visit also gets posted to Facebook, where friends can watch it without having to install anything. And they can watch the recording in their News Feed or your Timeline any time (in other words, they don’t have to watch it live). In an interesting twist, Color has decided that anyone who posts a video should be able to see who that video — in other words, if one of my Facebook friends watches something I post, I’ll know it (this only happens if they have the Color app authenticated on Facebook — if they’ve never used Color, it won’t show that they watched it). This is different from the way most photo/video sharing apps work, and while I think it could be fun, Color should do a better job explaining how it works so as to avoid potentially awkward surprises. At this point the app still has some quirks around sharing, largely because Facebook hasn’t rolled out components to its Open Graph API. But the company says they’ll be fixed in the coming weeks. And Color says additional features will launch alongside the Open Graph as well. http://vimeo.com/32973510 I’m going to reserve judgement on the video-as-a-status-update idea until I’ve used the app more, but it isn’t a new concept. You may remember , an app with a similar premise that prompted users to share 12 second video status updates via Twitter. The company folded a year ago. But Color has a few tricks up its sleeve that 12seconds didn’t — namely, a new set of Facebook APIs, as well as a heavy emphasis on shooting these short video snippets with mobile devices. I’ll have more thoughts on the app once it officially launches. One other thing to note: Color’s private beta was initially supposed to be run at Harvard. Nguyen says that the company decided to move it to Texas in part because they found many Harvard students are on BlackBerries, and because Texas A&M is “one of the top universities for use of social networking”. I suspect that they may have also faced more skepticism at the birthplace of Facebook than they did at Texas, and that the app didn’t get much initial at Harvard.
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Rumble To Build and Publish Games Using $15M Series A From Google Ventures and Khosla | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 1 | “We’re a developer and a publisher trying to make triple A games that fit the digital lifestyle, are instantly accessible from anywhere, free to try, don’t require a PhD to control, and that you can play for a short session length. It’s an Activision Blizzard meets Zynga model.” That’s how CEO describes his new gaming company , which just closed a $15 million Series A round from Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Rumble will build its own titles for the web, mobile, and social. It will also invest in and publish games from third-party developers through its system which provides analytics, CRM, and distribution across devices and platforms. This allows partnered developers to concentrate solely on building great games. With top industry talent, wise investors, solid funding, and a mission to bring console game quality where it’s not usually, Rumble is looking to disrupt game companies overly focused on manipulative monetization. Rumble was founded earlier this year on a few million dollars in seed funding. Richardson knows what it takes to build a serious gaming company. He was CEO of BioWare/Pandemic when it sold to Electronic Arts for $860 million in 2007, and was an Executive in Residence at Elevation Partners. He has recruited some incredible gaming industry heavyweights, including Mark Spenner, VP and GM of EA2D (now BioWare SF), John Yoo, designer of World of Warcraft and lead designer of CityVille, and Paul Robinson, lead engineer of Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk. Rick Thompson, founder and Chairman of Playdom, is also an investor and will sit on Rumble’s board. Despite funding from Google Ventures, Rumble won’t be favoring Google+. It won’t be betting on Facebook’s HTML5 mobile app platform either, though. “We’re excited about anyone investing in ecosystems that are going to help people find great games and people to play with. However, for the kind of games we’re building, HMTL5 is not yet a valid option, but we believe it will be in coming years” says Richardson. Goole Ventures and Khosla Ventures seem to see eye to eye, considering it was announced this morning that they both just . Richardson believe the current gaming ecosystem is split in two with room for innovation in the middle. Most companies are building either overly simple free-to-play casual games optimized around addiction and monetization, or they’re building pay-up-front high quality console and PC games. He tells me “There are still wonderful console games, but that market has stagnated in its growth because people look at the controller with 22 buttons, see the investment in time is significant, and that they can only play from their living room on a $60 game and a $300 console.” He believes that by applying the deep focus on immersive design of premium games and distributing them as free-to-play games on iOS, Android, Facebook, and other social networks, Rumble will be able to reach serious gamers but through ubiquitous platforms. “We’re not building causal games. The majority of our users are going to be men under the age of 35. We think these people have a taste for rich experiences” Richardson tells me. There’s also apparently little competition in the publishing space for these types of games. By investing in and distributing ambitious mobile and social titles, Rumble could get a piece of the next big indie game blockbuster. The $15 million will go towards finishing its publishing platform, investing in great third-party game developers, and finishing the two games it’s already building. Richardson concludes, “Our games are going to harken back to your favorite console game, but in a place where those kinds of games haven’t been seen much.” |
Facebook Memology 2011: Osama’s Death Is Top Status Update, Rihanna Is Most Listened To | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Facebook tonight released a wealth of data about , both globally and for specific countries. Across the world, Osama Bin Laden’s death was the most popular status update topic, followed by the Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl win and the Casey Anthony trial. When compared with the of the year, differences between Twitter and Facebook become clear. Twitter’s real-time focus led entertainment awards shows, natural disasters, and sports to dominate, while Facebook’s discussion capabilities led world news and celebrity deaths to trend there. The official Facebook Page currently features a that displays popular cultural phenomena from several different countries. In the US and Canada, the acronym “lms” (like my status) became a prevalent way to request a visibility increase for one’s content. This indicates that users at least vaguely understand how the EdgeRank news feed sorting algorithm works. Meanwhile, “tbh” (to be honest) gained popularity as a method of expressing that one was speaking sincerely — context that can be difficult to determine purely from text. The top 6 fastest growing news outlets were: 1. CNN, 2. Fox News, 3. NPR, 4. The Onion, 5. The New York Times, and 6. Al Jezeera, showing the diversity of opinions and interests of Facebook’s user base. Rihanna’s “We Found Love” was the most listened to song. Facebook’s inclusion of song listening data underscores how its new Open Graph listening applications could become a way to accurately track song popularity beyond sales. Here are some more interesting findings scattered across the memology study: |
Microsoft Dangles Carrot In Front Of Developers With Windows Store Economics, But Will It Be Enough? | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Tonight Microsoft revealed that the public release of its Windows 8 Beta will be taking place sometime in late February of 2012. Along with Windows 8 Beta, Microsoft will also be launching its “Windows Store”, which was announced back in September. ( .) In previewing the new app store, Microsoft also revealed some details about what developers can expect in terms of both pricing and revenue share. For starters, as the company has previously said, users will be able to license, purchase, and download Metro-style apps from the Windows Store — meaning that it will be the sole source of Metro apps. (Metro being the name Microsoft uses for the design language it developed for its new, touch friendly Windows Phone 7 interface.) While Microsoft is already operating app stores for Xbox and Windows Phones, this is their big push to create an in-Windows app store to take on iTunes. Microsoft will begin initially with free apps, and has set the pricing of paid apps between $1.49 to $999.99. Developers will be able to offer both free and paid apps, and setting up a dev account will cost $50. In terms of revenue share, the initial split will be 70/30 for developers. However, the Store offers some unique incentives for developers, as the terms state that once an app does $25,000 in sales, Microsoft will reduce its share to 20 percent. There will also be a 70/30 split for in-app transactions, but only for those apps using Microsoft’s billing system. Why does the Windows Store set the low price for apps at $1.49, rather than the typical $0.99? Is it to compensate for offering the additional incentive and revenue share to developers whose apps push past $25K in sales? That’s what it looks like. Of course, it’s all about delivering users. And you can’t buy those, something that Microsoft learened with its , which allowed users to save money when purchasing items found using Bing search before it was discontinued. It seems to me that Microsoft really needed to go further to differentiate itself from Apple, push its split to 25/75, for example. The $25K threshold will have more of an effect on bigger app publishers, not so much for the little guys. It would have been nice to see them bite the bullet and take a risk on 20/80 or 25/75 flat, but no dice. Of course, in the way of enticing developers, Microsoft does have reach. Especially internationally. At the Window Store’s preview event today, Microsoft claimed that there are now 1.25 billion Windows PCs in existence, and that 3 million copies of the Windows 8 developer preview have been downloaded since September. What’s more, the that 433.5 million PCs will ship in 2013, which will represent, of course, the first full year that Windows 8 will be on the market. Obviously, Microsoft hopes that, with the reach of its operating system, its new Windows Store will become a big new revenue generator, something the company could use right about now. Giving users a place to buy and download apps in one place from all Windows desktops and tablets will undoubtedly be a huge step forward for PC users’ experience, allowing them to move past having to go to a fragmented group of sites to purchase and download. Microsoft is also providing developers with a few more carrots to get them jazzed about the new Windows Store, including the ability to offer trial versions of apps, which can then later be purchased and downloaded from within the app — as well as creating expiration dates for certain versions of apps. Publications will also be able to sell subscriptions to their users from inside their apps, something that should be appealing as an alternative to iTunes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37E3jQIs2AA |
SoundTracking’s New Android App Has Spotify And Rdio Integration (So Yes, You Can Listen To Full Songs) | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Launching today at the in Paris is the long-awaited SoundTracking Android app. What makes this app special is that goes above and beyond the — taking full advantage of Android capabilities in order to integrate popular music services Spotify and Rdio (for users of Spotify and Rdio). Which means, yes, you can now listen to full songs on SoundTracking instead just of 30 second iTunes snippets. The SoundTracking app itself is visually stunning, and frictionless; Because of the back button on Android, you no longer have to manually switch between apps if you want to post or listen to a song. SoundTracking founder tells me that Android was his number one user request. At number two? Spotify integration. In order to use the feature, users can hit the plus button in the app’s right hand corner for the “View in Spotify/Rdio” option. SoundTracking Android also senses when you’re listening to music in any music app from Google Music onwards and lets you send that song to SoundTracking, in another key difference from the iPhone app. These integrations are a big step for SoundTracking, which previously only offered the streaming of 30-second song snippets through iTunes, a fact which annoyed some users (myself included). They also expand SoundTracking’s affiliate revenue capabilities beyond iTunes referrals and into affiliate fees for Rdio. “We don’t want to decide what music consumption service they should use. We would like to be able to offer a choice,” Jang says. “If users end up liking something they discover through this collective music timeline, they should be able to have a seamless user experience to play it or add it to a playlist.” Jang says that eventually he’ll consider adding Spotify and Rdio integration to the iPhone version of the app if users show that those features are priorities, “The key to all of this is to make it easy and fun for users to post a highly contextual music moment, but also to take what they’ve discovered and play it/playlist it/own it in their music service of choice.” A product of Schematic Labs, SoundTracking recently announced a one million user milestone and from , and . You can download SoundTracking for free in the Android market by searching “SoundTracking” or clicking . And watch a video of MG Siegler interviewing Jang about his grander vision for the service, below. |
DreamIt Graduates 14 Startups in Philly, Including 5 Minority-Led Companies | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | On Wednesday, startup incubator is graduating fourteen new companies from its Philly 2011 class. It’s the fourth program from DreamIt in Philadelphia, and the fifth graduating class for the accelerator overall. ( this year, too). This year’s group is notable for featuring several minority-led startups thanks to a collaboration with Comcast Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of Comcast Corporation, as part of its (MEAP). MEAP is the first initiative from the $20 million fund created by Comcast as a part of the acquisition of NBC Universal. The fund will also be used to invest in other minority-led startups and initiatives outside of DreamIt in the future. With Comcast’s participation, DreamIt’s budget for this group was increased by $350,000. The five MEAP companies received funding from Comcast while DreamIt funded the other startups. However, all companies received the same direct funding of $5,000 per startup, plus $5,000 extra per founder (up to $25,000 total). Comcast also sponsored some of the standard costs of the accelerator on behalf of the five companies in order to assist with the necessary additional resources (more space, more desks, supplies, venue, etc.) The MEAP companies, though, had special access to Comcast resources, including PR experts, executives and others in various Comcast divisions with appropriate industry knowledge or connections. This year’s class of fourteen includes Ph.D’s and J.D.’s from Yale, Stanford and U.T. as well as dropouts from Duke, Georgetown and the Wharton School at Pennsylvania. Founders include those who have worked at Yahoo, Intel, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Hilary for President. There are even folks hailing from as far away as Taiwan, Lebanon and Uganda. The five selected MEAP startups are ElectNext, Kwelia, MetaLayer, ThaTrunk and Qwite, whose owners are African-American, Asian, Hispanic and Indian. (Full descriptions are below). And now, the graduating class: CloudMine is a platform that provides a set of RESTful APIs for mobile app developers, allowing them to quickly create back-end solutions for their apps. Specifically, the startup is offering schema-free data structure storage, user account creation and management, and server-side business logic for computations that are too complex or data-intensive to run on a mobile device. in October. ClrTouch allows publishers, agencies and ad networks to create, traffic, serve and track “touch-driven” rich media advertising on tablets. By leveraging the ClrTouch advertising technology, publishers and ad networks can drive a higher CPM by offering premium ad formats tailored for tablet web browsers. The ClrTouch ad server and ad builder are currently in development. ElectNext is like an eHarmony for voters as it matches voters with the political candidates who best reflect their values. The site has you rank the issues and answer quizes in order to match your beliefs to specific candidates in the current election. . Flirq is an early-stage startup that wants to shift the perception of online dating from “sketchy and creepy” to “fun and flirty.” To do so, it puts women strictly in control of their privacy while offering them the support of their friends when looking for a date. Guys, however, must win over the girl in order to “unlock” her full profile and to interact freely (ah, the thrill of the chase!). Grassroots Unwired is offering the direct sales industry an integrated SaaS platform that combines a mapping system, mobile application and web portal that run in conjunction with a GPS-enabled mobile device for tracking, reporting and analytics – all in real-time. Clients can use the tools to plan, execute, and analyze their person-to-person campaigns. In the first vertical it went after – political campaigns – the startup generated $300,000 in revenue (to-date) and has retained 100% of its customers. The company is now adding new customers in anticipation of the 2012 election cycle and is in talks with some of the largest direct sales companies and non-profits in the country. Kwelia is a new service for landlords or those managing apartment complexes which compiles a database of rental real estate market data, and uses a proprietary model to crunch the numbers. The result is real-time and user-friendly analysis on critical market assumptions. Renters can also use the service to determine the current market value of an apartment. MetaLayer wants to fight information overload and make sense out of big data by improving how people analyze images and text. Its products take streams of text or images and add structured, relational, temporal, and geospatial metadata. Users can visually summarize information and prioritize relevant content with the service’s . OneAway shows you where your friends and your friends-of-friends like to hang out on “heatmap” of your city. It also displays those who are nearby and allows you to start chatting with them. Qwite is a customer feedback service that works over mobile. It helps businesses deliver content to nearby smartphones, including customer surveys, incentives and other content that enhances the business’ brand. Businesses can use Qwite to increase customer retention rates, reward loyal customers and manage other customer-facing aspects of their business. SnipSnap is the first mobile app that allows anyone to clip a printed coupon onto their smartphone. Users just snap a picture of the offer (whether from a free-standing insert, direct-mail piece, newspaper, etc.) and the app recognizes all the printed text, images, and barcodes. Once scanned, a user can redeem the coupon, as well as receive expiration-date notifications and in-store reminders. Spling is a new service for sharing and discovering links. Users can share any link with anyone, while also creating an online repository where they can store and index their favorites. Spling , backed by a $400K Series A. SupplyHog wants to bring the construction industry online by providing contractors, project owners, and building suppliers a one-stop-shop to manage projects and list, quote, and purchase building materials. ThaTrunk is a mobile app that uses your location to distribute multimedia files with the push of a button. The app creates a “dynamic proximity network” which grows and shrinks with the number of other ThaTrunk mobile app users near you. Creative publishers, like authors, speakers, musicians and more, can use ThaTrunk at expos, conferences and concerts to reach their audience. Files are distributed from the cloud to nearby users who can then view them and share them on Facebook and Twitter. UX Flip is focused on developing a better mobile app experience. The company is building two products: FeedbackTrail, a market-ready tool for developers to communicate in-app with their users, and a platform for direct UI management. Developers will be able to personalize, customize, and perform multivariate testing on their apps without having to re-release them through the app store. |
PSA: 3.1 Update Reportedly Rolling Out To Logitech Revue Google TV Boxes | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | The Logitech forums are alive with music, or rather screenshots, or rather, if I’m honest, . Yes, one user has reported that the 3.1 software has appeared on his Revue box. Users of Sony Google TV products more than a month ago, so Logitech users are probably foaming with righteous anger and expectation. But the screenshot does suggest that the update is being seeded, and if it’s anything like other updates, will roll out over the next week or two. , as we call it, is based on 3.1 and is a significant improvement over the original interface. But as we noted, there’s a lot of functionality still left out. The slickest interface in the world can’t help you if there’s nothing to watch. was tipped off first, but the press release they cite is from last year, so the December 17th date isn’t actually applicable. And although the user on the forums promised more pictures, none have been forthcoming and no other users have reported the update going through. An isolated case? Possibly, but it wouldn’t be the first time an update went out to a few isolated units before going live. There’s not much more to say. But if you’re the proud owner of a Revue, you might boot it up a few times tonight and tomorrow to see if it picks up the update. : Logitech has made the update official in a . |
Archos G9 Tablets To Taste Ice Cream Sandwich Early Next Year (Video) | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that you had perhaps forgotten about the Archos G9 tablets. They haven’t seen much coverage of late, though we did get our hands on one back in October. In our review we found them to be , with various ports and a somewhat untrustworthy build quality, though solid enough for casual use. But the 8- and 10-inch G9 slates may be due for a refresh, which is exactly what they’ll get come the new year. Archos has confirmed that Android 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich will be available on the G9 series in Q1 2012. To prove it, they sent us over a video of ICS running on an OMAP 4-powered G9. I must admit Ice Cream Sandwich definitely paints the slate in a more delicious light, though Archos has reminded us there’s more work to be done. They still have to complete a few more tweaks including hardware acceleration for video support and Archos’ 3G dongle/port support. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd8ZZhjWNIQ&w=640&h=360] |
Verizon Planning Netflix Competitor For 2012 Debut | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Cable TV and internet giant Verizon is planning a streaming media service similar to , . The service is in the planning stages and people close to the matter, but apparently not that close, described it to Reuters variously as limited in scope, focused on movies, and focused on children’s programming. While it can’t be all three, it probably will feature on-demand movies and premium show streams, presumably delivered with that signature Verizon style. Details are in fact few, except that Verizon is talking with content producers at the moment and is possibly going to jump on the Epix library of movies currently licensed to Netflix but soon to be available to others. And it would be offered in places that are not served by their FiOS service. Beyond that, it’s more or less all speculation. The natural question is, of course, what exactly can Verizon offer that could possibly tempt users away from Netflix or other streaming options? I don’t want to condemn a service that hasn’t even been born yet, but Verizon isn’t exactly a popular consumer brand, at least for this kind of thing. Want signal in remote areas? Everyone will tell you “Verizon.” Want to stream a movie? Not many would make that connection. There’s also the consideration that Reed Hastings calls to attention: the fact that both Netflix and their most feared competitor, HBO Go, spend over a billion every year on content. And as he points out, HBO is licensing more and Netflix is producing more. They’re becoming vertically integrated content delivery companies. Verizon is a series of pipes — efficient pipes, to be sure, but they’re in an awkward position from which to start. The last thing most consumers remember from them content-wise is the abysmal VCast. If anything it will probably resemble Comcast’s on-demand Xfinity service, which works fine but isn’t winning any beauty contests (or content contests). It has some content that you can access through it, and you can access that content. Nothing wrong with that. But I doubt anyone would say it has Netflix in its sights. And to be honest, I don’t think Verizon has Netflix in its sights either, as Reuters characterizes the service: they just can’t afford to be left behind and honestly want to test the water. The plan is currently to roll out in 2012, but that is as specific as the sources could get, apparently. By that time, it must be noted, there will likely be some serious changes in the streaming TV world, and Netflix might have even gotten its groove back. More options is always better, but let’s hope Verizon’s effort is more than half baked. |
Facebook Timeline Rollout Starts Today, First In New Zealand | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Facebook that it will begin rollout of Timeline, starting with New Zealand. If successful there it will release the profile redesign elsewhere. The country was likely picked because it speaks English, which eases feedback processing, and isn’t as interconnected with the rest of the user base as some other countries. It’s been 2.5 months since Facebook the Timeline profile redesign at f8 and said the rollout would begin shortly. However, possibly due to product tweaks and a , until today the feature was only available to developers, or . Facebook will have to explain the privacy ramifications of Timeline very carefully. By making the entire history of a user’s Facebook activity more readily accessible, embarrassing or objectionable content could be surfaced if users don’t know to curate their Timelines properly. Facebook posted this statement about the New Zealand rollout to the original blog post announcing Timeline: “We announced Timeline in September and made it available to developers building apps on our platform. Since then, over a million people have signed up for the developer beta to access Timeline. The feedback we’ve received so far has been invaluable. Starting today, we are making Timeline more widely available as we measure speed and other types of performance. We’ll begin by making it available to people in New Zealand and then roll it out more broadly in the near future.” The Timeline profile design allows users and their friends much easier access to their historical content, such as status updates or wall posts they made years ago. This means Facebook’s servers will have to be able to quickly serve up content that was rarely accessed in the past. To make sure the entire user base isn’t impacted by performance issues, it has chosen to roll out the redesign in a relatively small and isolated area first. If Facebook’s infrastructure can support the New Zealand rollout without slowing down the site or causing privacy hysteria, it will then continue the rollout. Facebook may have , as we received reports of an iteration of the Questions product appearing there before other countries. Because the island country is less interconnected with the rest of the world, it can be easier to keep tests there a secret. In other cases, Facebook tests products in the US first where early adopters are plentiful and market penetration, social graph density, and smartphone use is high. This lets the company test products the way they’re meant to be used — with everyone you know using them too. [ : A Facebook spokesperson confirmed with me that New Zealand users will have a 7 day review period, during which their Timeline is only visible to them and their friends will see their profile as before. Users can opt to publish their Timeline and replace their old profile with it during the review period, but the Timeline will automatically publish after 7 days.] With the rollout will come a bonanza for developers of apps that leverage the Open Graph API that can publish content to the Timeline. Developers who’ve been prepping their apps in anticipation of the universal access to Timeline should start putting the finishing touches on so they’re ready when the rollout expands. Most importantly, though, will be how Facebook handles messaging around privacy with Timeline. Combing through years of content can be quite a chore. If Facebook doesn’t explain how crucial this is, users may inadvertently make it easier for parents and bosses to find racy photos and objectionable jokes. Horror stories about lost jobs or offended families could scare users away from using the Open Graph apps that publish to Timeline which Facebook is betting will help it follow Zuckerberg’s Law of doubling the volume of content we share each year. |
After The Regretsy and Diaspora Account Freezes, We’ve Lost Confidence In PayPal | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Hey PayPal, do you realize people no longer trust you? By heartlessly freezing the accounts of legitimate causes, you’ve shaken our confidence. By releasing the funds only in response to public pressure, you’ve shown that your policy enforcement is erratic and our money can disappear on a whim. The account freezes have become such fiascoes that they transcend the facts. Even if you’re boxed in by the law, even if these companies accidentally misused your product, it doesn’t matter. The public’s perception is that there’s a risk in keeping money with PayPal. If something doesn’t change, startups, causes, and merchants will start processing donations and payments elsewhere. Today’s blunder where you froze the account of is going to stick in people’s minds for a long time. It follows you freezing accounts of open source social network , Minecraft creator , and social network for models . I won’t even get into your controversial stance on Wikileaks. Sure, we don’t hear about the countless people you save from spammers, fraudsters, and thieves. But again, this is a public relations issue, and you need to be winning the hearts and minds. You’re essentially a bank, and banks are built on trust. That trust erodes with every errant account freeze. If I was an organization depending you, I’d be worried, and would consider withdrawing all my money. Unfortunately, that very action could lead my account to be frozen. So get smart, and change how you deal with these issues. Here’s how: 1. Appoint a rapid response team to either pre-approve or immediately review any high-profile or contested account freezes. 2. Change your system to prevent people from using the Donation button if they aren’t a non-profit, or accidentally misusing any other feature. 3. Clearly explain to users that rapidly withdrawing large sums of money may trigger an account review, and suggest they regularly withdraw smaller sums instead. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it would probably help you avoid of large volume of erroneous account freezes. If some of these measures are already in place, they’re not working properly. Also, be less of a grinch. You’re a giant company, you could afford to give those Regretsy kids some extra toys or provide some token of good faith to those you’ve screwed. PayPal, you’re the incumbent, and people are slow to switch to an unproven smaller payment service. But considering , startups are gunning for you. That first-mover advantage won’t hold up forever. As more commerce moves online, you’re going to have to uphold the trust of mainstream users that are highly influenced by bad press. And right now, you’re on thin ice. |
Starbucks Mobile App Does Good Business, But When Will They Double Down? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | It may still be a , and mobile payments are a work in progress, but the big movers in the space are happy to be the guinea pigs, knowing it will pay off down the line. Starbucks has been doing the mobile payment thing for a good now, and the app has grown from a simple gift card frontend for the iPhone to a more versatile product, and gone from select locations to . , accelerating to a current rate of around 3 million per month. It has to be pointed out that the payment count growth isn’t quite in line with the geographic and location growth, but that’s expected, since the geographic expansion is a prerequisite for customer participation. That people want to use the system is clear: but will Starbucks continue as a lone-wolf payment brand or align itself with a more universal payment system like Google Wallet? They shouldn’t feel any pressure, of course. As one of the world’s best-known brands and with a service style that lends itself to a standalone app, they’re in a good position to keep things the way they are. A smaller company, say one of the local roasteries here in Seattle, doesn’t have that option, and although their decision to go with, say, Square, won’t have much of an effect on Starbucks, a thousand local businesses doing so might cause them some thought. It should cause Starbucks thought especially, I should say, because their recent brand backpedaling following an overeager expansion saw them desperately trying to rekindle local relationships. But any large company must consider what their customers expect when they walk in the door. If every place on the street takes credit cards and only one takes cash, there’s pressure on them to add that capability. And if a company projects that in five years, customers will be expecting Google wallet, NFC, Isis, or what have you, they’ll want to board that ship early. Right now, with this mobile app, Starbucks is in a holding pattern. It’s doing all right, but the mobile app has accounted for only $110 million in card cash transfers, a microscopic portion of the $2.4 billion in gift card transactions. There’s a lot of room for growth, but it’s not going to happen in this app. Watching how the big retail companies dispose their favor among the competing payment systems will make for great spectating in the next few years. Gap versus H&M, Burger King versus McDonalds, and so on. Like it or not, the success of our favored disruptive technologies will rely very much on the blessing of billion-dollar companies. You may like Square, but if MasterCard and Visa make it easier for their hundreds of millions of customers to use Isis, it’s game over. In the meantime, it’s more natural to see small payment systems installed in small businesses, where they can build up an resistance to bullying and, hopefully, become too large a system to be shut out without concessions by the majors. Starbucks will certainly be one of the big voices in the debate to come; with sovereign sway over so many daily transactions worldwide, they are potentially both crucible and kingmaker. |
Already On Everything Else, Angry Birds Ported To Rovio Exec’s Wife’s Dress | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Going to a fancy State Gala? Married to a Rovio executive? Angry Birds dresses are this season. If you’ve ever met Rovio CMO Peter Vesterbacka, you’ve probably learned two things: 1) Peter is good people, and 2) he really, likes his Angry Birds sweatshirt. It’s rare to see him wearing one. I’m convinced he travels with a suitcase full of them and burns each one after wearing as some sort of sacrifice to the App Store Gods. Vesterbacka was invited to an event at the Finnish Presidential Palace, where, alas, the dress code called for something a bit less sweatshirt-y and a bit more tie-and-tailcoat. Fortunately, Peter’s wife Teija found a way to rep the bird: her entire dress. To anyone unfamiliar with the game, the dress’ pattern probably looked like nothing more than a strange arrangement of shapes. If you’ve spent even a minute or two flingin’ birds, though, the cameo is clear: that’s the Red Bird, glarin’ from somewhere you shouldn’t be starin’. Some folks (including some forumgoers , who were seemingly the first english speakers to notice it) were quick to criticize her choice of attire; I think it’s genius. Peter Vesterbacka (pictured in the top image above, just in front of his wife) is something of a celebrity in Finland and Angry Birds is something they’re mighty proud of (hence the invite to the party) — this just celebrates that. Way to go, Teija. [Update: You can find more photos of the dress, as shot by , ] |
Not Just For Kids Anymore: Major League Gaming Hits 3.6 Million Viewer Hours Per Event | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | I sat down with Sundance DiGiovanni, CEO of Major League Gaming, who had some alarming and interesting statistics to share. First, the championships saw viewerships of over 3.6 million while fans watch 15 million hours of video during the Pro Circuit leading up to the championships. “Our viewership numbers this year have been staggering and MLG now pulls in larger audiences than several traditional television cable networks,” he said. “Our LIVE streams of the Pro Circuit National Championships garnered more 18-24 male viewers than Comedy Central, MTV, TBS, and FX draw in an average quarter hour and nearly as many as Adult Swim.” MLG isn’t just greasy kid’s stuff anymore. It’s a serious business with millions in revenue and a reach of billions around the world. We talk a bit about the future of the league, how gaming is blowing up these days, and if my experience in Minesweeper can translate into a career in gaming. Enjoy. |
Junaio And Kreativagentur Thomas Launch AR Scavenger Hunt – Win An iPad | Jay Donovan | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Another example of creative use of Augmented Reality rears its head in the form of an online scavenger hunt with a chance to win an iPad 2. The team at who created the and German creative shop have partnered to create a scavenger hunt where you can use Junaio to scan special images hidden around the web to unlock AR content and experiences. At the same time, you collect stars for each scan. Collection of these stars can get you in the running for a chance to win a free iPad 2. How do you get in on the goodness? The instructions are detailed , but in general, you download Junaio for Android or iOS, scan an initial barcode to launch the game channel (channels in Junaio are like mini-apps inside the browser), register, then start looking for special images and markers to scan out on the net. Clues to find these scan-able images are found on . You must “like” Junaio to be able to see the clues. The app channel also provides a toggle for two different content views. One view is your typical “viewfinder” mode so you can aim your camera at specialized images or markers and scan them. The other is your “Christmas Room” view, which is a virtual 360 degree view of your Christmas Room, complete with a tree for the presents and stars you collect. You can also superimpose elements from this Christmas Room into pictures you take with your phone’s camera. You can then share these images. This is a timed event meaning that it starts today (Dec. 6) and if you miss the clues today, you cannot access that content in following days to collect those stars. This creates a little bit of demand, I suppose. What does this hunt mean in terms of the market for Augmented Reality experiences? Certainly, scavenger hunts are nothing new. And 2-D barcodes and image scanning , partly because they are misused a lot from a strategic standpoint . I think scanning codes and markers is still a viable concept especially when properly used as a tool to ease the call-to-action for mobile engagement. For example, when you scan a 2D barcode to directly launch an app download screen in the Android Market, you are achieving real utility and time savings by skipping the regular search procedure on your phone. The code effectively ties instruction in one format (print media or PC) to a function in another format (smartphone app download). Similarly, in this example, the act of scanning both traditional 2D glyphs and special photos/markers becomes a tool of this campaign to help you achieve a goal. Therefore the action of scanning images actually adds value to the customer interaction and is not just a gimmick or novelty. But it is a bit more complex than a lot of “give-away” campaigns out there so we’ll have to wait to see if a lot of people catch on and get involved. Metaio’s energies for this kind of creative venture are fairly well documented and expansive. But I had not heard of Kreativagentur Thomas until . From what I have seen, they have a lot of creative energy as well and are quite adept at using Metaio’s advanced AR technologies as well as the tech of other AR providers. I expect we will see more projects like this coming out of this partnership in the future. |
The Top Spiking Tweets Of 2011 | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Which event caused a greater spike in tweets this year, the Japanese earthquake, Steve Jobs’ death, or Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement at the MTV Music Awards? Yup, it was Beyonce. Twitter just released the top for the year as part of its ongoing . Yestreday it revealed the and other topics). The Beyonce announcement spiked at 8,868 tweets per second in August. The Troy Davis execution was the second-highest tweeted event at 7,671 tweets per second. Two soccer-related tweets were next, followed by the resignation of Steve Jobs, which spiked at 7,064 tweets per second. His death a little over a month later created a peak of 6,049 tweets per second. The Japanese earthquake in March came in at 5,330 tweets per second, and was trumped by the puny (but exciting) East Coast earthquake in August, which spiked to 5,449 tweets per second. What about the raid on Osama bin Laden? 5,106 tweets per second. |
Verizon Couldn’t Be More Full Of It | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Yesterday news that Verizon would be blocking Google’s flagship Galaxy Nexus phone from including Google Wallet, the NFC-based system that will let you tap your phone against special sensors to pay for goods and services. The decision was almost certainly spurred by Verizon’s support of a rival NFC-based payment solution called ISIS. We’ve now learned more details. Some reports, including one in the WSJ, state that while the phone won’t launch with Google Wallet, users may be able to download it from Android Market in the future. This isn’t the case, we’ve learned. As things stand now, even once Google Wallet rolls out more broadly, the Verizon Galaxy Nexus won’t be able to download it from Android Market. This could change down the line should the two parties reach another agreement (or Google just decides to tell Verizon to buzz off), but that’s where the dust has settled at this point. And now, despite all this, Verizon is striking back with a statement that it is actually blocking the app from the Galaxy Nexus. Except it is. Here’s their ridiculously vague statement: “Recent reports that Verizon is blocking Google Wallet on our devices are false. Verizon does not block applications. Google Wallet is different from other widely-available m-commerce services. Google Wallet does not simply access the operating system and basic hardware of our phones like thousands of other applications. Instead, in order to work as architected by Google, Google Wallet needs to be integrated into a new, secure and proprietary hardware element in our phones. We are continuing our commercial discussions with Google on this issue.” With this statement, Verizon is apparently saying that Google Wallet isn’t an application, but, rather, a combination of software and special hardware. This is actually mostly true — in order for the wireless payment features of Google Wallet to function, your device needs both a special secure element and an NFC chip. But Verizon is implying that in order to make Wallet work, it needs to somehow tweak the Galaxy Nexus hardware. Which is false. For one, BGR already has the app on the HSPA+ version of the Galaxy Nexus. And a source tells us that the Galaxy Nexus Verizon is planning to ship already has both the requisite NFC chip a secure element embedded as well. It would work just fine. The actual reason Verizon doesn’t like Google Wallet is because it — along with AT&T and T-Mobile — is backing the rival service ISIS. The technical implementation of ISIS is different from Google Wallet’s, in part because the secure element is housed on the SIM rather than the device itself. And I won’t be surprised if Verizon comes back with an argument that this is in fact the only kind of secure element they’re comfortable deploying on their network, which the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t have. But it’ll be hot air. Now, technically Verizon isn’t actually Google Wallet, in the sense that it’s somehow restricting phones from downloading the required app. Instead, in a statement Google said the carrier asked it “not to include this functionality in the product”, and it complied with that request. But this wasn’t a friendly conversation between friends. Google and Verizon have doubtless made various negotiations and concessions, and this is apparently one thing Verizon either won’t budge on, or that Google is willing to give into. After all, while Google’s statement makes things sound fairly benign, Verizon could have asked Google, “Could you please remove this feature — otherwise we won’t release the phone?” Verizon hasn’t responded to a request for further clarification on its statement, and Google doesn’t have any further comment. |
CMU Researchers One-Up Google Image Search And Photosynth With Visual Similarity Engine | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | To these days is really an incredibly service-intensive process. Whereas before, to search something meant you had to through its drawers or folders by hand and inspect things by eye, now it means simply to produce a query and allow the vast computational engines of cloud services to exert themselves in parallel, sifting through petabytes of data and instantly presenting you with your results, ordered and arranged like snacks on a platter. We’re spoiled, to say the least. It’s not enough, however, to have computers blindly compare 1s and 0s; when humans search, they search intelligently. We’ve seen incredible leaps in the ability to do this, and in the area of visual search, we’ve seen some interesting and practical technologies in (respectively) and Google’s function. And now some researchers at CMU have taken another step in the education of our tools. , cleaves even closer to human visual cognition, though there’s still a long way to go on that front. The challenge, when comparing images for similarity, is how to determine the parts of the image that make it unique. For us this is child’s play, literally: we learn the basics of visual distinction when we are toddlers, and have decades of practice. Computer vision, on the other hand, has no such biological library to draw on and must work algorithmically. To this end, the researchers at Carnegie Mellon have determined an interesting way of comparing images. Instead of comparing a given image head to head with other images and trying to determine a degree of similarity, they turned the problem around. They compared the target image with a great number of random images and recorded the ways in which it differed the most from . If another image differs in similar ways, chances are it’s similar to the first image. Ingenious, isn’t it? The results speak for themselves: not only are they, like Google’s search tools, able to find images with similar shapes or, like Photosynth, able to find images of the same object or location with variations in color or angle, but they are able to reliably match very different versions of an image, like sketches, paintings, or images from totally different seasons or what have you. Their video explains it pretty well: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PY__Fo4o67I w=640] Essentially, it’s an image comparison tool that acts more like a human: identifying not the ways in which a scene is like other scenes, but how it is different from everything else in the world. It recognizes the dome of St. Peter’s whether it’s Summer or Winter, ball point pen or photo. Naturally there are limitations. The process is not very efficient and is extremely CPU-intensive; while Google may have reasonably similar images returned to you in half a second, the CMU approach would take much longer due to the way it must sift through countless images and do complicated zone-based comparisons. But the results are much more accurate and reliable, it seems, and calculation time will only decrease. What will happen next? The research will almost certainly continue, and as this is a hot space right now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see these guys snapped up by one of the majors (Google, Microsoft, Flickr) in a bid to outpace the others at visual search. : Google is in fact one of the funders of the project, though in what capacity and at what level is not disclosed. The research team consists of Abhinav Shrivastava, Tomasz Malisiewicz, Abhinav Gupta, and Alexei A. Efros, who is leading the project. and there is some supplementary info and video if you’re interested. |
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Try, Try Again: The XYBOARD Tablets Make All The Same Mistakes | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Listen, I’ve yet to play with the new Xoom 2 models — or, as the new devices are called at Verizon, the . I’m sure both the 8.9 and 10.1 models are fine tablets. They probably power through the hundred or so Honeycomb apps like a championship thoroughbred. But it doesn’t matter. No one is going to buy the new-ish tablets. They will flop harder than the original Xoom. Right now there are essentially two tablets that matter on the market: the $500 iPad and the $200 Kindle Fire. Because of this, there are just two price points. The iPad set the bar at $500 for full-featured tablets while the Fire is doing the same for budget models. Any tablet that attempts to jam itself into this pricing scheme is currently destined to fail. The low-end wants the Amazon pedigree while the high end knows that they want an iPad. The mid-range Android models are strong, I will admit, but they aren’t what compels the average shopper. Take the Motorola Droid XYBoard LTE tablet. Never mind that it’s essentially the same hardware as the original Xoom with the silly addition of an IR blaster. . Heck, forget that it’s lacking the SD card slot found on the original. It’s priced completely out of its market. Only ignorant fanboys will buy it. The 10.1 model costs $529 out the door but requires a two-year agreement with plans starting at $30 a month. That means, two years from now, when the Tegra 2 tablet is countless generations behind current models, the customer would have spent at least $1250. Even worse, because the data package is tied to a contract, the XYBoard owner is liable for a costly early termination fee if they decide to cancel the data package early. As shocking as it might be, this absurd pricing scheme isn’t exclusive to the XYBoard. The HTC Jetstream hit AT&T in September and initially carried two-year contract price of $699 (it was later dropped to $599). The iPad is available from Verizon and AT&T for slightly more than both the HTC and Motorola model, but does not require the same two-year contract. Subscribers can turn the 3G wireless on or off at any time without paying a penalty. I’m a big fan of Android but the past nine months were painful. Nearly every month a hot tablet would leak, which would cause the Android community to itch uncontrollably. But then the official details would be announced and the MSRP would most often kill the buzz. With the notable exception of Asus pricing the Transformer at $399, Android manufacturers ignorantly priced their first generation devices directly against the iPad. They didn’t stand a chance. Slowly but surely the iPad chopped each one down until the Fire hit the scene. Now, as an Android supporter, my de facto champion is a $200 budget tablet that strips away all the beautiful user elements found in Honeycomb in favor of an enhanced Amazon storefront. The XYBoard will likely be quickly replaced with another model. It’s built on an old NVIDA platform, and with Ice Cream Sandwich nearly here, Google and Motorola Mobility likely have a flagship device ready at launch. But that’s the Android game now: Flood the market with tablets built on re-purposed parts. It might be good for the maker and wireless carrier’s bottom lines, but the practice of tying top-tier models down with 2-year contracts will ultimately slow the adoption rate. show that Android tablets have a very limited market appeal and these buyers aren’t likely willing to pay early termination fees just to get a slightly upgraded device. 2012 should by all accounts be a big year for Android tablets. Ice Cream Sandwich is said to unify the development of Android tablets and phones, which will hopefully lead to an influx of tablet apps. Plus, while Android does have a limited consumer interest, it’s doubled since the first part of 2011. However, if Android tablet makers continue following the same pricing schemes as they did in 2011, the platform will start to tread water, creating an easy meal for the great white shark that will be Windows 8. |
MoPub’s Ad Server Now Supports Mobile Games, Signs Up Ngmoco’s Mobage Gaming Network | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | , a mobile advertising startup founded by ex-AdMob and Google employees, is launching support for in-game ads and is also announcing a deal to power advertising in DeNa-owned ngmoco’s Mobage gaming network. MoPub, which is and others, develops a self-serve ad serving platform for mobile applications and websites that allows mobile publishers to serve direct-sold rich media banner and interstitial ads in addition to optimizing their remnant inventory with networks like AdMob, Jumptap, and Millennial Media. It is essentially a DoubleClick for mobile ads. MoPub also recently , which is a virtual trading floor for mobile ads, allowing app publishers to connect with ad buyers in real-time. The startup says it has already experienced 30 percent week-over-week growth in ad dollars on its platform since the launch. Today, MoPub is announced compatibility with game development platform Unity 3D, making the startup one of the first ad servers to support games developed using the popular video game tool. MoPub has also added support for MRAID and ORMMA rich media standards, which allows publishers to include expansion ads and HTML5 animation more efficiently through the MoPub platform. Through the Ngmoco deal, MoPub will be powering all direct sold brand campaigns and Marketplace real-time bidding campaigns, as well as contributing significantly to the facilitation of ad network demand on ngmoco’s new Mobage gaming platform. Game developers Neon Play, Animoca, Miniclip, Fluik, and Com2Us are also using MoPub’s mobile ad serving platform. MoPub CEO Jim Payne says that the startup continues to appeal to a range of publishers, but especially likes that game developers are willing to push the envelope move quickly and aggressively when it comes to advertising, especially on mobile. |
CrunchBase Reveals: Most New US Startups Founded In Silicon Valley, Followed By… New York City | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Lots of US cities they’re the best place to do a startup. So where are entrepreneurs actually starting companies these days? TechCrunch reader took a at CrunchBase to try to answer the question. His most surprising result is that New York has been getting quite a few more startups than other cities outside of Silicon Valley. There is something to all the hype being cooked up by , apparently. Of course, the San Francisco-Silicon Valley region is still the clear leader. Here are the results. I’ll follow with some discussion of the methodology, and explain why you shouldn’t read too much into the numbers. Over the last two years, indicated that 46 companies were founded in Silicon Valley, followed by 24 in New York, and 11 apiece in Boston and Los Angeles. If you include all of 2008, the number rises dramatically, with Silicon Valley increasing its lead. And that trend continues if you remove any limitation on the time of founding. Beyond the unsurprising Silicon Valley numbers, New York still comes in way ahead of all of the other cities. But hold on. Don’t all these numbers look ridiculously low since CrunchBase lists almost 80,000 companies? Yes. Many companies don’t provide their founding information, or headquarter locations, so they won’t show up correctly here. However, this missing data is presumably a trend that’s consistent across all companies everywhere. It’s possible that Silicon Valley companies are more likely to self-identify as Silicon Valley companies, for example, but we don’t have any evidence either way. What about any inherent biases in CrunchBase? TechCrunch is based in Silicon Valley and has historically focused on local companies, so it’s quite likely that Silicon Valley companies overrepresented. (Want to change these results, entrepreneurs? Go on .] More broadly, a startup can mean a lot of different things to different people. Self-identifying as a small business versus a startup obviously skews the results here. TechCrunch is itself a good example: Michael Arrington started it as a side blog, and he didn’t think about it as his main business until it was taking off. A new Mexican restaurant in Omaha might not look like a startup now, but maybe it’ll become a chain one day. Another wrinkle in the methodology is that Baror queried all companies located within 10 miles of a given city to try to capture the relevant suburbs. But he expanded that to 50 miles for San Francisco to capture Silicon Valley. And then, of course, there’s the international question. How do Beijing and London and everyone else stack up? If you feel like running the numbers before I get to it, send over the results and I’ll write them up. You can reach me at my increasingly spammed email account, eldon (at) techcrunch (dot) com. |
UXPin Instantly Converts Photos Of Offline User Experience Prototypes Into Digital Wireframes | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | Bootstrapped Polish startup is about to revolutionize the user experience design process. Typically, building a project requires a steady hand, paper and pencil prototyping, and then a redundant, painstaking manual conversion of offline designs into digital wireframes. It’s slow and hinders startups from rapid iteration. But with today’s launch of UXPin’s new web app and design pads, you can arrange sticky notes of popular design elements, take a photo, and a perfectly aligned, fully editable digital wireframe is created for you. Users can then can share their UXPin project with teammates, simultaneously chat and modify the design on UXPin’s monthly subscription site, and export their product as HTML. UXPin has the potential to ease entry into UX design for novices, significantly streamline the process for experts, and become a powerful player in the wireframing and mockup tool space. UXPin launched the first version of its design pads last year, but they were strictly for offline use with no way to convert them to digital wireframes. Still, they made a splash and the company broke even within a couple of days thanks to customers from Google, Myspace, and Salesforce. Now I’m holding their new, digital conversion-ready pads for web, iPhone, and Android design and they feel great. Solid, hardbound, with tons of sticky elements, strong glue, and instructions for use printed inside. The pads cost $30 each, and a subscription to the online wireframe editor is $7 a month after the 2-week free trial. I’ve never done serious design prototyping and it was quick and intuitive to build the design of an app. Thanks to tiny symbols on the sticky notes, UXPin’s site recognizes the placement of the elements from an iPhone photo I shot of my creation. It then set up a wireframe I could move, resize, color, and augment with additional elements or images. There’s still some kinks in the flow of adding an uploaded wireframe to a new project and editing the elements from one’s offline prototype, but UXPin’s CEO Marcin Treder tells me it’s addressing them. UXPin is the first product that automatically turns paper prototypes into wireframes, and it could seriously disrupt the established UX tool companies like and . Treder is actually a full-time UX man that uses Axure every day and he says it is poorly designed, overly complicated, and doesn’t properly support documentation or collaboration. Treder tells me “I think UXPin has a great chance to get popular among startup founders that need to create ideas very quickly and collaborate with their team.” Though bootstrapped to date, the company isn’t opposed to taking funding, and I think a seed round to propel product development and grow the 5-person team would be a wise investment. UXPin offers a cheap, innovative product that drastically reduces busywork and increases output for designers. Currently, Balsamiq says 30,000 pay for its service, and Axure counts some of the biggest design companies in the world as customers. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of them toss out their pencils and graph paper, ditch their uncollaborative wireframe editors, and switch to UXPin. Watch the company’s to see exactly how it works, and the first 5 people to reply with their email address to my “Contest” comment on this post will get a free team license ( : All 5 have been given away). |
In Today’s Competitive VC Holiday Video Climate, Better Step Up Your Game Scale Venture | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SB9laSv0OfY&w=630] The video above came to me in a message from an entrepreneur, “ does an awesome holiday video — and this is what sends out …” I thought perhaps he/she was being unfair, and then clicked on the link: Snowflakes! Mittens! “Wishing you a sparkling holiday season” in Helvetica! What is this, 1998? Okay I get it, you were just trying to do something nice around the holidays (Bah humbug!) but seriously Scale (can I call you Scale?), it’s 2012. When you’ve got and and who knows who else producing holiday vids worthy of Hollywood, you can’t just throw down some clip art snowflakes and call it a day. At least change the file name to something other than … My point is I’m expecting a lot more from you guys next year — CGI? A ? Sound? I don’t know, get creative. Merry Christmas! (Or whatever else you celebrate, or don’t) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HP4HiZt3DFE&w=630] |
Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has? | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | The past few days, there’s been a lot of talk about web browsers. The that Google will be paying Mozilla close to one billion dollars over the next three years to ensure that their search engine remains the default for Firefox is . The biggest is that Google now makes a Firefox competitor, Chrome. And it got me thinking about Safari. Remember Safari? While Chrome has skyrocketed from 0 percent market share in August 2008 to over 25 percent last month, Apple’s web browser lingers somewhere between 5 and 8 percent, depending on what numbers you look at. While its growth seemed to stall out in late 2008/early 2009, Safari has been growing again since then. But it has been at a very slow, methodical pace compared to the Google browser. Given the fact that both browsers are based on WebKit — a layout engine which was born out of Apple — why hasn’t it been Safari that has taken off, instead of Chrome? The easy answer that most people jump to is Windows. Microsoft’s OS is still by far the dominant one even with record Mac sales quarter after quarter. But while Safari is usually associated with the Mac (since it’s baked into OS X), it has actually been available for Windows quite a bit longer than Chrome has been. Safari for Windows was unveiled in beta in June 2007. It was formally released in March 2008. Chrome wasn’t unveiled until September of that year. Incidentally, it was Windows-only at the time. But it took Google’s browser just a year to surpass Safari in market share. So if it wasn’t Windows, what else led to Chrome’s rise? Another thing people often point to is speed. A number of benchmarks point to Chrome being the fastest browser available in terms of both page rendering and JavaScript performance. But remember too that when Safari for Windows was announced, several of the same tests showed that it was the fastest browser available for both Macs and PCs (remember, Chrome didn’t exist yet). If this was just about speed, shouldn’t Safari have taken off starting in June 2007 similar to the way that Chrome did in September 2008? On the flip side, most users throughout the years have complained that Safari for Windows more or less sucks. It’s been a long while since I’ve used it myself, but I recall it being somewhere between Firefox and Internet Explorer in terms of practical performance (that is, how fast it actually when using it, tests be damned). But Apple has continued to iterate on it and the latest version, 5.1, is still available on both platforms. Others point to Google itself as the reason for Chrome’s rise compared to Safari. It’s true that Google does quite a bit of promotion for their browser, including on Google.com every once in a while. But it’s hard to imagine that being a bigger advantage then either IE or Safari which are both baked into Windows and OS X respectively. To get Chrome, a user still has to download something (unless they’re using Chrome OS — but if that’s the case, they’re already probably going to be using Chrome on their other machines). I would imagine that most IE and Safari users don’t download their browser, they use it because it’s the default that comes pre-installed on their machines. Plus, Safari being bundled by default with iTunes for a time should have helped it gain massive Windows market share. But it would appear that many people downloading it simply weren’t using it. Maybe it’s extensions that give Chrome the advantage? Maybe, but Safari has had them as well since mid-2010. Sure, Chrome’s extensions are better and much more plentiful, but if that is all that was holding Safari back, developers probably would have stepped up their game there. Plus, Firefox had extensions way before either Chrome or Safari and while they undoubtedly helped grow that browser, it’s also shrinking now in the face of Chrome. With the launch of OS X Lion, it seemed as if Safari might be poised for a bit of a renaissance. Because the default controls were inverted, third-party software like Chrome was largely broken to begin with on the new OS. Safari also offered features like better multi-touch support and Reading List (which syncs between iOS and OS X Lion) which rivals didn’t match. But with a few months of data in, it looks like the Safari growth is still the same slow and methodical variety, likely rising simply as more Macs are sold. Given the rise of mobile, it would seem that the massive usage mobile Safari is seeing might help Safari on desktops/laptops too. But again, the numbers don’t really suggest that. Safari is growing, but slowly. Meanwhile Chrome, which isn’t actually a part of Android — not yet, anyway — is skyrocketing without any sort of mobile presence. Personally, I’m a Chrome user myself. I’ve tried a few times to use Safari as my primary browser (most recently with the OS X Lion upgrade), but I always end up switching back. To me, it’s still about practical performance. Things like: with a dozen or more tabs open, Chrome seems to perform in a way that Safari cannot. Plus, I can’t live without the URL/Search Omnibox that Chrome offers. And I’m addicted to “pinned” tabs (browser tabs I always have open and are shoved to the left and shrunken down, out of the way from general tabbed web browsing). It has been nearly 9 years since Safari was first formally introduced on stage by Steve Jobs at Macworld 2003. It has steadily improved and grown market share, but the rise of Chrome in less than half of that time has made Safari look a bit silly. Of course, that could all change rather quickly if devices like the iPad really are of . On mobile devices in general, there’s no question in my mind right now that mobile Safari is ahead of what Google is doing. That’s why it’s odd that the opposite is true on more traditional computers. And it’s not entirely clear why. Some point to Apple neglect — since the App Store has been such a phenomenon, they’re more inclined to throw resources at native work rather than web work, is the basic argument — but again, given the state of mobile Safari versus the other mobile web browsers, that doesn’t seem to be the case. It could simply be that Google’s Chrome team is really good at what they do, and nailed it from the get go. Good things happen to good products. |
Dropbox For Android Gets A Major Revamp, New Features | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | The new year is right around the corner, and many of us are in dire need of some organization. Luckily for all you fandroids out there, DropBox 2.0 has finally made its way onto the Android Market. The app has brand new features and a totally revamped layout. You’ll find a little arrow to the right of each file in the app, which will then lead you to a pop-out menu. From there you can share, delete, and favorite, which is a brand new feature to DropBox. From the main menu, you’ll see three tabs up top including Dropbox, Uploads and the newly added Favorites. Some files are put into Dropbox simply because they are pictures cute, or documents brag-worthy that you need them on all your devices (just in case the opportunity arises to show them off). Once a file is favorited, you can access it even without an internet connection because it’ll be saved straight to the device. That said, I’m willing to bet the Favorites tab will be oft-used. Dropbox 2.0 also includes the ability to rename files straight from the app, along with bulk upload. Speaking of the Uploads tab, users are now able to upload from and export to local storage, which is a welcome addition. Past that, you’ll also find a few bug fixes in the update which is pretty standard for a huge roll-out like this, along with support for ICS. (You G-Nex owners were worried there for a second, huh?) If you’re looking to get more out of your Dropbox then head on over to the and start updating. Merry Christmas! [via ] |
‘Twas The Night Before Christmas (Revisited) | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not an was whirring, not a .
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
With hopes they were stuffed with . The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of danced in their heads.
And ma in her ‘kerchief, and I with my ,
Had settled our texting thumbs for a long winter’s nap. When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my to see what was the matter.
To the I flew like a flash,
I turned up the heat, and to the window I dashed. The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Was no task for my , even when light is low.
Then, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But an ! At it, everyone leered. With a little , so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment: this new iPhone is .
More rapid than eagles, web pages they came,
And the , and , and the Retina Display! “Now ! You listen to what I command!
You are but a in my hand!
The words that I say may give you some trouble,
but don’t go around !” And though it was welcome, the was shy,
It took to finally arrive.
But once it appeared with LTE, ,
With a big-ass touchscreen, and , too. Santa couldn’t compete with the gadgets we owned,
And his new was running on low,
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!” |
Speaking Of Christmas Miracles… This Guy Can Fly (Almost) | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | If you could have one superpower, what would it be? Mind control would be my answer (I hope to be an evil genius when I grow up). But it seems the most popular answer to that question is the ability to fly. Jarnos Smeets, a mechanical engineer from the Netherlands, is working really hard to . How, you ask? Well, he’s building real-life wings (just like the wings on a bird). By first combining the accelerometers of the WiiMote and an HTC Wildfire S, he can now measure the arm-speed of his own movements and thus control the outrunner motors on his DIY wings. Just take a look at this crazy sketch: As far as hacks go, this one may really fly high (cheesiness is forgiven on Christmas Eve, right?). Of course, there’s still no proof that Smeets’ project will yield the results he wants. In fact, he may be venturing into some dangerous territory. Either way, we’ll keep you posted on whether or not he can actually take flight. In the meantime, check out these videos of him tapping into the WiiMote and Wildfire S accelerometers, along with a clip of him controlling the outrunners and further explaining just how these wings came to be. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3fQbGlQlM&w=640&h=360] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXgnxyC9fxk&w=640&h=360] It turns out that both Jarno Smeets and his “human birdwings” were a fabrication of Dutch filmmaker Floris Kaayk. A big ole avian hoax. Our apologies for giving this guy airtime. . |
Gillmor Gang 12.24.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took a WiFi stroll through the forest that is Hollywood’s attempt to lock down our TVs. And by stroll, this one features @stevegillmor at a leisurely somewhat brain-cell challenged pace. You can almost see him think, except that there’s not much thought going on there. No, really. The others are in good condition, unless you count @scobleizer once he starts hitting the whiskey toward the end. As to the battle for control of our TV, it’s really too late, what with SOPA boycotts, reverse engineering of the Apple AirPlay bus, and Microsoft’s slow fade from CES underway. But that doesn’t stop the Cartel from trying. It may turn out that you can someday move network news shows from Slingbox to iPad and back up to Apple TV over WiFi; for now the realtime bus is getting choked. In fact all things streaming are about to collide with bandwidth caps, at least in our house. With 4 Apple TVs and counting, it won’t be long before WiFi consulting becomes a trade school offering. Me, I’m off to Fry’s to follow the chat room advice. Happy Holidays. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Secrets Of The Accidental Entrepreneur | James Altucher | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | I was in a meeting with . You know who he is. He’s the psychic that bends spoons. He’s been doing it since he was a kid. Marvel Comics even did an issue once where Uri Geller was helping out Daredevil. The cover has Daredevil wearing an extremely tight uniform where you could see the outline of his genitalia (putting it delicately for SOPA Nazis). Daredvil was swinging around punching people while Uri Geller (“the Most Shocking Guest Star of All” according to the cover) was melting tanks. So now Uri Geller was sitting right in front of me pitching a business. That’s the way I roll. First there were the demos. Uri (“call me Uri”) gave me a 3×3 piece of paper and a very squeaky magic marker. I made two lines and a bunch of squiggly lines. All sqeaking very loud. Try to imagine how they would sound. “A tree!” he said with his eyes closed. He was right. Then he took a letter opener and we stood by the heater in the office. He rubbed it very hard until it started to bend. Ok, I said, what’s the idea? An entire website on how to generate psychic powers. Including, he said, a big button in the middle of the page that if you kept pushing it, it would increase your potential to have psychic powers. It’s a free country. He’s allowed to pitch me that idea. I don’t know whatever happened to it. Most ideas don’t work. Clearly he didn’t become the next Google. In fact, Google almost didn’t become the next Google. They tried to sell to Yahoo for $1 million and they were rejected. So they were forced into actually making a business out of their pet project. And it took them four years to find a business model that worked. And to this day it’s still the only business model that works. (Feel free to argue with me about this. I won’t respond). Groupon almost didn’t become Groupon. They were originally and they were focused on raising money for charities. I don’t know how they raised the money to do that. The idea was that once enough charitable people would be willing to donate, the charity would get the money. ThePoint, I guess, would get a cut. I once pitched something similar to the CEO of one of the two largest media companies in the world. His instant (and only) response to me was, “Charity sucks! What else do you have?” So Groupon had charity and, of course, the CEO of the media company had been right. Charity does suck and the Point was probably going to go out of business. Instead, they sent out emails for anything, not just charity, and guess what!? It’s now a $14 billion market cap company three years later. Magic! (I applaud the CEO of Groupon for doing yoga) Yelp started as an email recommendation service before they became a more general review site. Twitter started out as a phone-to-podcast service (called Odeo ) that then turned into a way to SMS your friends (called twttr ) that finally became Twitter. All of these companies were accidents. And, like most accidents, I’m sure there was a lot of blood, a car upside down in the woods, ambulances, flares in the ground to keep out traffic, and policemen with blowhorns yelling, “keep it moving, people. Nothing to see here.” And meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, trying to turn Evan Williams’ little podcast thing into the best thing that ever happened to Charlie Sheen. Accidents happen. My two best investments are two accidents. They started as one thing, and after much agony later, ended up as something completely different and better. It takes a special person to survive these accidents. In other words, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows what’s going to work in advance. An abililty to see the future makes Uri Geller famous but does not make a successful entrepreneur. Many of these accidental successes had an “oh shit” moment where it seemed like everything was going to fall apart, they had to come up with a way to transition (I hate the word “pivot” –its very February, 2011) and then they figured out a way to flourish and get over the hump. Uri Geller didn’t have what it takes. I don’t know what happened to his online company. I’m not even going to Google it right now even though I can. It magically disappeared as far as I’m concerned. (Geller and Jackson, and I guess me, were all friends) But the accidental entrepreneurs mentioned above had it. The combination of luck, health, and flexibility that allows one to roll with disappointments, learn from them, move forward, and repeat when necessary. Train your body, mind, and soul before you jump into your startup to be able to handle the following: (the Google logo on Halloween - EVIL) If you can handle all of the above and still retain health and sanity then you are probably ready to start a business. Uri Geller could bend spoons, melt tanks, and be friends with both Daredevil and Michael Jackson. But he probably doesn’t have the magic powers you have. And he never will. See, Oh, and critical to your success: on Twitter. |
A Christmas Miracle! Facebook Chat (Kind Of) Supports Extended Rage Faces | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | First, if you want to get right down to it, here are the codes you type into Facebook chat to get various faces: Huzzah! We are truly living in an age of wonder! Second, why does this work? There are various ways to bring Facebook content into chats. For example, you use Facebook Pages like a little TC by typing [[techcrunch]]. The numbers above are actually the IDs for pages that someone, for some terrible reason, made featuring all of those rage faces ( , for example). There are more to be found thanks to Reddit so I’ll leave further discovery as an exercise for the reader. All I can say is I’m glad there’s an Internet because the long minutes between sips of whiskey on Christmas Eve, spent staring malevolently at the fire, fingering my ratty smoking jacket, drawing from an unlit cheroot that had gone out hours before, and plotting the destruction of my many enemies would be a lot darker without the MeGusta face keeping me going. Happy holidays! [upvote ] |
Watch Out Yammer And Jive, Google Is About To Enter The Social Enterprise Space | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | The social enterprise has been growing as more and more companies look to incorporate Facebook-like communications among workers. Jive (which just ), , and are all betting on the social as an integral part of productivity and business processes in the future. And it looks like Google will be entering the space soon. Google’s Vice President of Enterprise Amit Singh tells us that Google will soon bring a more in-depth Google+ social experience to businesses and institutions using Google Apps. In October, Google that Google Apps users could sign up for Google+, allowing businesses and educational institutions to share posts directly to other users within their workgroups and/or universities. But Google has further ambitions for Google+ in the enterprise, says Singh, and that involves creating a collaborative environment for businesses. Internally at Google, Singh says that the company is already using Google+ as a collaboration platform and it’s going well. “This can become a new social platform for collaboration across Docs, Gmail, video and other apps,” he explains. Singh explains that there’s a shift towards moving from individual productivity based applications to more social applications, and this is only going to accelerate. Part of 2012 will entail bringing the Google+ social experience to businesses. “Google+ is the next big thing for the enterprise,” he says.” “We are going to do the same thing with Google+ that we’ve done with Gmail, and other consumer-facing apps so that Google+ can be adopted in more of enterprise setting.” While Singh says the specifics of how this is going work for businesses with Google Apps is still being developed, he says that in 2012 Google will offer “some good choices for businesses to take advantage of both internal and external communication capabilities.” Google entering the social enterprise market isn’t particularly surprising considering the search giant’s ambitions when it comes to social. In terms of usage, Google Apps is a major product for the company (Apps now has 40 million users, and 5,000 firms are joining per day, ). What should be interesting is how Google’s communications and collaboration platform for Apps will affect the current leaders in the market such as Jive and Yammer. Stay tuned. |
The Decline And Fall Of The Appian Empires | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | A couple weeks ago, MG : . Which took me a bit aback. I’ve developed numerous Android and iOS apps (though not games, so I can’t speak to the differences there) over the last few years, and neither set of developer tools seems to me to be hugely superior: both have their strengths and their really irritating failings. But then I realized–if you’re an iOS developer moving to Android, then yes, Android initially seem a million times worse, just as the converse would. It’s just that the converse has been far less common. The platform you don’t know always seems unbearably clumsy, whereas the platform you do know generally feels easy and comfortable: you’ve already gone through the setup nightmares, figured out its quirks and idiosyncracies, and learned what not to do or try. This, I think, is a big factor in the reign of apps. Ever since the App Store came out, people have been prophesying that apps are a passing fad, soon to be replaced by HTML5. For years now, and , , etc., have offered cross-platform app development, ie the ability to write a single app that works on both iOS and Android. If the transition between the two is such a giant pain, then why wouldn’t everyone do that? Well, there are a whole bunch of reasons. Cross-platform apps are still slower and clumsier. They don’t feel as polished as native apps; also, they generally don’t look like native apps. It’s a pain to get them to work with the many hardware and software services provided by the device’s OS, which native apps do very easily. Generated code is almost always much inferior to written code. To get real estate on the phone’s screen, and presence in the app store/market, you have to package your HTML5 in a native-app wrapper, which can quickly begin to feel like the worst of both worlds. Also, cross-platform development in and of itself means learning Yet Another Set Of Tools And Languages. For some time Apple ruled the only app platform that mattered, so writing apps meant Objective-C, XCode, and iOS libraries. Then Android began to boom. App developers who wanted to expand to it as well had a choice: either learn how to develop native Android apps, or expend a comparable amount of time and energy learning how to write cross-platform apps that would be mediocre on the iOS environment where they already excelled. No wonder the latter never took off. But the story is far from over. More and more developers are becoming fluent in HTML5 (which is ; in particular, it’s easy to write apps which are fully functional even while offline) for web app development, and more and more “apps” are really becoming “mobile portals to web services”. It would be much easier for such services to have a single HTML5 interface, tweaked slightly depending on whether the client is a phone, tablet, or desktop, than to have to support an Android app written in Java, an iOS app written in Objective-C, and an HTML5 desktop web client. This is doubtless one of the motivations for Facebook’s long-mooted “ “. Unless Apple and Google take the drastic step of crippling HTML5 in Android/iOS, it’s really hard to see this happening over the medium term. (For the short term, see Ben Savage’s excellent “ ” post.) If Windows Phone starts to take any significant bite out of the marketplace, and a app platform arises, it will happen even faster; developers will throw up their hands and head to HTML5 en masse. But even if the Android/iOS duopoly continues to reign, the HTML5 is on the wall for native apps. They’ll continue to reign through 2012, and maybe even 2013; but make no mistake, their days are numbered. : |
Siri, What Were Your Top 5 Hacks And Mods Of 2011? | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 12 | 24 | 2011 saw the rise and fall of Siri. What was as something just short of the savior of mankind turned out to be . Apple insists Siri is still a beta product. They say it will get better. But some out there couldn’t wait for Apple. And so, with a little imagineering, people made Siri do all sorts of unconventional tasks in 2011. These hacks led to her opening beer, playing the piano, and even warning owners about what’s on a specific TV station. Yeah, the official feature set of Siri is a bit underwhelming, but hackers and modders managed to roll out an impressive set of avant-garde use cases to keep owners occupied until Apple rolls out the next Siri revision. Read on for the top 5 Siri hacks and mods of 2011. http://vimeo.com/redpepper/beeri Using an Arduino, R/C truck and a metal spike, is more about the triumph of man over machine than actually pouring a proper glass of beer. But who cares! It’s awesome. And as one of the very first Siri hacks, beeri occupies a special place in the history books. “Start my car.” . Developer Brandon Fiquett used an open source Siri Proxy server and coded a PHP script that interacts with the Viper SmartStart system installed in his Acura. Then, with just a quick conversation with Siri, this guy can start and stop his car from afar. Like a boss. Using the same Siri Proxy has the previous hack, this mod interacts with an X10 home automation system. “Siri, turn off everything.” “Your house has been powered down. Good bye.” Eat your electronic heart out, HAL 9000. Never mind the Yamaha marketing nonsense, the video still fun to watch. However, when you dig into the so-called mod, Siri is simply initiating the playback of a specific file. In this case, Siri is telling the iPhone to start playing a Midi file which is streamed using Airplay to the Yamaha piano through an AirPort Express. I think. It could be magic. The Siri Universal Remote leans on SiriProxy and an Arduino IR box. But it’s a lot more than that. As the video shows above, when Siri is asked to change the channel, she announces the program currently playing on the station. Think of it as a Pawn Stars/Jersey Shore early warning system. |
Shaker Is Going To Have A Rockin’ New Year’s Eve | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | TechCrunch Disrupt winner is already getting ready for New Year’s Eve. The Facebook app creates with your friends and meet new people. The startup is partnering with Dick Clark Productions to create a virtual loft where a pre-party will take place right before the “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2012” show begins. The New Year’s Eve loft will be a place where people can virtually hang out between 4PM and 8PM ET on New Year’s Eve before the live show begins. You will be able to dance, mingle, buy virtual drinks and watch exclusive interviews with some of the performers who will be on the ABC television show, including Will.i.am, Taio Cruz, LMFAO, Gym Class Heroes, Fergie, Blink 182, and The Band Perry. (RSVP for the event , or just show up on New Year’s Eve—there are no fire codes for virtual lofts so there is no limit to how many people can be packed inside). Hanging out in virtual spaces to meet new people is still a fairly new concept. Big partnership’s like this one will expose Shaker to a mainstream audience. But the experience will have to be compelling enough for them to come back on their own. Ultimately, that will depend on who shows up for the party. |
Ron Paul Is The Second Most Popular Republican Candidate On Facebook (And He’s Gaining) | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | I know there are lots of people out there who have passionate feelings about Ron Paul. He’s a principled and independent for old-time American values, or a , or someone who let get published in his newsletters decades ago… or whatever else it is that you see about him that makes you react. I’m not here to take sides and tell you how to vote, I’m just writing this article to point out that he’s been gaining the most new Facebook fans every day for most of the past month. He’s now the second-most popular candidate behind Mitt Romney (and Democratic incumbent Barack Obama, of course), according to the . currently has 655,000 fans, half of 1.23 million, and a fraction of 24.3 million, but he’s well ahead of third-place primary candidate . Meanwhile, , who has appeared at many points in recent weeks to be Romney’s main Republican challenger, has had pretty minimal growth. Fan counts are not a perfect proxy for real-world popularity because candidates can do things like buy lots of ads on Facebook, run contests on their Pages to bring in more people, or promote their Like buttons on their campaign web sites. Also worth noting: the fan counts here are far lower than the active voters out there, so this is a subpopulation of politically involved people. Facebook has around two-thirds of the US online population, and anyone in the world can like Facebook Pages. It’s just that most people don’t. But the trends do seem to reflect many of the voter shifts in the primary over the last month. By numerical gains, Paul has had the most new fans every day since December 5th, the election tracker shows. The rise began around when previous top outsider candidate Herman Cain announced he would drop out. It leveled off for a bit during a short Rick Perry resurgence, right around the 8th of the month, when Perry released his widely hated “Strong” video against gays in the military. So maybe Perry gained some Facebook fans even though he created the most disliked video on YouTube? But as Perry’s blip tapered down towards zero, both Gingrich and Paul grew. It’s true that Romney has surged over the past week or two as Cain, Perry and Gingrich have faded down. But Paul has gained even more every day, with monthly growth highs among all candidates at nearly 7,000 new fans per day at some points last week. Maybe it’s because of how people are . What does it all mean? Until a few months ago, online success for Paul might have been chalked up to the relatively small but very earnest group of online supporters, who have helped him win online polls for years. But now he’s also , like in the . His Facebook fan growth is looking more and more like a proxy for his overall trajectory. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 6 | null |
Facebook Subscriber # > Twitter Follower # ? | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | Where do you publish first if you have more than Twitter followers? That’s a question more and more journalists are going to be asking themselves. This is just 3.5 months after the launch of Facebook’s late entry into asymmetrical following (I follow you, you don’t have to follow me back). Many individual content producers including TechCrunch / CrunchFund’s , The New York Times’ , and myself have have seen our subscriber counts surpass our follower tallies. How? Because Facebook’s larger user count makes it easier to amass subscribers. This is why I think Facebook has a real chance to beat, or at least severely reduce the value of Twitter. For the mainstream internet user, the barrier to following someone on Twitter is high because, well, they have to sign up for Twitter. Most people already have Facebook, so subscribing to someone doesn’t require additional work. They’re just rolled into your existing news feed. You don’t have to make any conscious entry into interest graph networking. Over time, the sheer popularity of Facebook could lead many to have a larger public audience there. If publishers prioritize by audience size, the shift could jeopardize Twitter’s prowess as the source for breaking news. Some caveats. Facebook may have taken the lead so quickly for some journalists because they appear more often on its dynamic suggested subscribe list. However, people are gaining lots of subscribers through links on the comments they leave through Facebook’s Comments Box widget for websites. Yes, the big influencers are on Twitter, and reaching them is important. And yes, Twitter is more reliable for breaking news because the unpredictable nature of the news feed and EdgeRank mean updates aren’t always delivered immediately. But for publishers, reaching the long tail is important too, especially from a money-making perspective. All Facebook has to do is expose subscribe links to its huge user base. Eventually publishers will gain enough subscribers that they consistently post publicly there. Then, people on the fence about whether to join or invest time in Twitter may not bother. Facebook will be good enough. There’s still a in that you can’t post separately to subscribers vs friends. And there’ll always be unique use cases for the rapid consumption, 140-character format. Not enough to win over the mainstream, though. Turns out it’s not easy for a little bird to fight an 800 million user gorilla. |
New startups pitch in Berlin at HackFwd Build event [TCTV] | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | , the pan-European accelerator created by Lars Hinrichs, the founder of LinkedIn competitor XING, recently held its open session, where startups are invited to enter the programme. It’s a sign that HackFwd, one of the few accelerators in Europe to stress the need for technical co-founders, is opening up to new teams. I went to the event in Berlin and interviewed all the startups pitching on the day, as you’ll see in the below video. We’ve covered how HackFwd works before in with Hinrichs but it’s clear now that their HackFwd “Build” events, held four times a year, are becoming mini conferences, with several key European players attending and a few international ‘stars’ of the tech scene, including most recently of . Previously held at other locations, they will now be held always in Berlin, as was the previous Build event in October, which we . |
Flurry: Largest Addressable Markets For Mobile Developers In 2012 Include India, China, Japan & U.S. | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | Mobile analytics firm Flurry is closing out the year with into the forthcoming shift in mobile installed bases expected in 2012. Using data from the firm’s dataset of over 140,000 apps running worldwide, it was able to calculate smartphone penetration in established markets like U.S. and Europe. Then, using additional data from the IMF in combination with Flurry’s own data, the firm was able to then determine which countries represented the top market opportunities for mobile app developers. Not surprisingly, China and India made the list. But so did the U.S. To start, Flurry looked at a snapshot of apps running across its user base over the past 30 days in order to rank the current addressable market. The U.S. led the way, with an installed base of 109 million out of 264 million (41%). Flurry notes that 264 million is about half of what Apple and Google say they’ve activated – something that can be accounted for by old device replacement. China (#2) and South Korea (#4) appeared in the top five, ranking above Japan (#5), France (#6) and Germany (#7). The U.K. is #2. Next, Flurry wanted to determine which markets hold the most future promise. It used the adult population counts from the IMF, then adjusted the numbers based on the size of the middle class in each country using . Flurry then estimated the size of the upper class for each country, as those folks could also afford a smartphone. This way, China, India and Brazil would not be over-represented in the estimations just because they have large populations. And yet, they did make a showing. China has 122 million users who could afford an iPhone or Android. The U.S. has 91 million, India 75 million, Japan 65 million and Brazil 34 million. In the final bit of analysis, Flurry wanted to determine the world’s largest addressable markets, regardless of penetration. For starters, it looked at current market maturity (the measure of how penetrated smartphone devices are among a country’s addressable audience.) The U.S., with the largest light blue circle in the graph below, has the largest total addressable audience (TAM) at 200 million. Sweden is the most mature country with 3.2 million of 5 million (66%) addressable consumers already using iOS and Android devices. France, 10 in maturity, has 9.6 million of 34 million (28%) consumers using iOS and Android devices. In looking at the future addressable markets, Flurry found that even though India’s total population is not far behind China’s, its total addressable market is. Meanwhile Japan, the world’s fourth largest market, has a lot of upside given light penetration of iOS and Android devices against its large, addressable market, says Flurry. Using this method, the top 10 addressable markets are the U.S., China, Japan, India, Germany, Brazil, Italy, France, the U.K. and Russia. More analysis can be found on Flurry’s . |
Spare some idle CPU cycles for charity this season | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | Well, it’s that time of year again when families come together to stare moodily at each other over lunch and, in theory at least, we’re supposed to be thinking about others less fortunate than ourselves. To that end, stay you hand before you switch off the office PC and head off for some seasonal shopping. For those CPUs could be put to good work for charity, no less. is a non-profit volunteer computing grid. Based on Berkeley University’s BOINC software for grid computing – as used by dozens of famous ‘citizen science’ projects such as SETI@home. Charity Engine’s version of BOINC simply donates what it makes from research projects on its grid and donates the cash to charity, while incentivising users with randomly generated cash prizes. Profit from the commissions from science and industry is shared 50-50 between the charities and prize winners. You can use the invite code for the beta: CRUNCH. Charity Engine says its software typically adds less than 10 cents per day to a PC’s energy costs and can generate $10-$20 for charity – and the prize draws – for each $1 of electricity consumed. Some of the projects to use the Charity Engine grid so far include Africa@home which uses volunteer distributed computing to provide supercomputing resources to African universities and institutions. The first such project is MalariaControl.net, a project to determine optimal strategies for controlling the spread of malaria. So why not download the software and put that idle PC to work. The software has been used without incident by 6 million people, and the research applications cannot access personal data in any way. So let’s join hands. We are the world! |
Gillmor Gang Live 12.23.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | The Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live at 1pm PT. Recording has concluded. |
GoDaddy CEO: “There Has To Be Consensus About The Leadership Of The Internet Community” | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | In a brief interview with TechCrunch, GoDaddy’s new CEO, Warren Adelman, did a little damage control relating to the company’s of its position on . GoDaddy had previously issued a strong statement of support for the controversial bill, . The last day has seen a growing grassroots rejection of the company and its position in the form of a boycott ( has much related info). But today brought a statement from the company apparently doing a complete about-face. Adelman noted that he had “been CEO of this company for all of one week,” and that the complaints and feedback had grown just over the last 24 hours, and it is during this time that he became involved. He said that the feedback made him realize they should “take a step back and look at the current legislation.” Of course, the outcry against SOPA and its twin in the Senate goes back much further. I suggested it was easy to say they should take a step back, but that they had in fact already demonstrated strong support on the record for nearly every provision in the bill. Adelman declined to address this, saying he “can’t comment on the history of it up to this point.” When I asked whether the company still thinks the objections raised to SOPA are “unfounded,” he said that “there are others that need to voice their advocacy positions,” presumably alluding to the fact that testimony by experts and internet luminaries has been scarce. Adelman couldn’t commit to changing its position on the record in Congress when asked about that, but said “I’ll take that back to our legislative guys, but I agree that’s an important step.” But when pressed, he said “We’re going to step back and let others take leadership roles.” He felt that the public statement removing their support would be sufficient for now, though further steps would be considered. Lastly, on the subject of the company’s rather vague promise that “Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it,” I said it seemed unlikely that the internet community would ever support a bill of this type, and certainly not SOPA in any shape or form – so the statement is difficult to interpret. Adelman said “There has to be concensus about the leadership of the internet community. It’s a large community and a global one.” The The statements made by GoDaddy and its new CEO are far from strong, but they may solidify with time. “Not supporting” is not the same as opposing, and on an issue like this the internet, by their own admission the source of their reversal, will demand opposition. They can’t avoid the fact that they were a strong, on-the-record supporter of the bill, however, and that may be something of an albatross for them for some time. While this quick reversal in the face of a widespread outcry may possibly be nothing but a business decision, it is still a business decision that could be a useful one in the opposition of SOPA and similar legislation. |
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