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Earlybird closes Hamburg office to double-down on Berlin | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | If there’s been a theme for the year it’s that Berlin has emerged as a full-blown startup hub to rival London in terms of sheers number of companies. I know for a fact that all the major VCs, from Accel to Index to Balderton and others are in and out of the city on a regular basis. There’s also a rumour Wellington will open an office there. It makes sense therefore that , which currently manages €430 million in assets and already had a base in Berlin, is to close its Hamburg office and move the staff to the capital. “We already have six companies in Berlin and expect this number to increase sharply over the next years,” says Christian Nagel, managing partner and co-founder. Earlybird’s investments in Berlin include , , , , and . The 12-strong team in Berlin will include Ciarán O’Leary, now promoted to Partner, Matias Collan, Managing Director and Heiko, now head of finance. Earlybird will continue to operate its office in Munich as there is a strong B2B and cleantech ecosystem there. |
The Congressional Grill: House Co-Sponsor Defends SOPA (TCTV) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | The Internet is about the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and for good reason. It could potentially block and censor sites for alleged copyright infringement without full due process. Companies that support the bill are facing boycotts (GoDaddy just for this reason). But people on the two sides of the debate still don’t see eye to eye, which is why we invited one of the SOPA’s co-sponsors, Congressman (D-NY), to address the issues. We captured the conversation in the video above. Owens defends SOPA (what did you expect?). But he is also open to amendments to prevent some of the abuses opponents fear. The thrust of the bill is aimed at shutting off access to pirated content on overseas sites. Owens compares the effort to stopping illegal physical goods from crossing the border. But the way SOPA proposes to block these sites could have all sorts of unintended consequences, such as it being applied to legitimate sites by overzealous prosecutors and judges. SOPA cripples the safe harbor provisions under the current DMCA law by making third-party sites, search engines, and ISPs liable for copyright infringement by other sites they point to. Under the current DMCA rules, if a video, photo, or other piece of content is infringing, the content owner can request to take it down. Under SOPA, the entire site gets blocked, even if it contains millions of other legitimate videos and photos. SOPA raises so many red flags around the lack of due process, censorship, and simply messing with the basic way the Internet works by blocking traffic at DNS servers. Owens and I get into all of these issues. He didn’t back down from supporting the main thrust of SOPA (which is directed at online piracy rampant in other countries like China), but he also admits the bill may not be perfect as currently written. At least that’s a start. Unfortunately, he is not on the Judiciary Committee marking up the bill. His response to the Internet industry which opposes the bill, however, is to suggest changes that would protect the Internet while still fighting piracy. If you have any ideas, add them in comments. You can read more of our and watch my previous interview with Union Square’s Brad Burnham on . |
UC Berkeley Picks Google Over Microsoft In Battle Over Campus Cloud Services | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | When you’ve got a campus with 70,000 students and staff on it, all requiring some form of integrated cloud service, be it for email, scheduling, documents, or what have you, the decision-making process over which service to use is not a trivial one. Fortunately, UC Berkeley considered it not only necessary, but a duty to the public to not just consider the options carefully but to explain those considerations. They’ve put up (Apps and Office 365) as they relate to University business. Anyone or any institution thinking of doing a similar deployment may find it interesting reading. For the rest of us, perhaps an executive summary will do: Google essentially won out on flexibility and ease of use for both those implementing the system and their users. Migration from Cal’s local services to Google’s would take far less time, cost less money, and be far less complicated than if they had gone with Microsoft, whose installation process involves putting in local servers and replacing key services. But it was far from a knockout; in fact, Google receives a drubbing in calendar features and integration, and in the specifics of the contracts. Microsoft’s robust calendar, built on years and years of enterprise work, is far superior to Google Calendar, which is made to be a simple, accessible, social tool. And Microsoft appears to have a contract that is more sensitive to, say, HIPAA requirements and other things important to a research university. Microsoft also ekes ahead on security, which isn’t surprising. It seems that Berkeley felt that the most important thing was to have a good-enough system (with room for improvement) that’s familiar to its users. A quarter of Berkeley students are already on Gmail, which indicates the ubiquity of the service, and Microsoft was less yielding on a few features that would have to be migrated to their own solutions. Universities are patchworks of overlapping semi-compatible systems, but Cal appears to feel that Google’s system integrates and improves more than it fails (or necessitates changes in). University digital infrastructure is a strange beast, and judging by the fact that both of these high-profile services have serious shortcomings, it may be that there’s room for someone to step in with a better solution. Students often have their own emails that they’d like to keep for as long as possible, and an @berkeley.edu one just isn’t important to them. They also are extremely likely to have smartphones, and those ownership numbers are only growing. We’ve seen some work on digitizing the content in our universities, but we’re still waiting on the breakthrough that definitively brings the university experience into the 21st century. Berkeley’s existing agreements with Microsoft are unaffected (bulk software licenses and lots of specialty software). The announcement sent to students can be found . [ ] |
Last-Minute Gift Guide 2011: iOS Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | Looking for a quick last-minute gift? Not feeling up to fighting the holiday traffic, crowds and checkout lines? Just too busy to shop? Then you may want to consider giving the gift of an iOS app. You can gift any paid app from iTunes on your computer or from the app’s description page on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Just scroll down past the screenshot and look for the “gift this app” button. All you’ll need is the recipient’s email address to complete the transaction. This app list includes both new releases and old favorites. It’s entirely subjective! Note that some of this year’s best apps are free, so they aren’t on here. (Waving to Instagram, Path, Spotify, Flipboard, Pinterest, HBO GO, etc.) Also, everyone already has Angry Birds (the original). It’s not on here, either. 1. ($4.99) Everyone should have this app from Apple, the fun moviemaking app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Designed for multi-touch, iMovie puts everything you need to tell your story at your fingertips. Make a movie in minutes by adding video, photos, music and sound effects. Then give it the Hollywood treatment by adding a theme, titles and transitions. 2. ($0.99 sale) Whether you’re a seasoned photographer or someone who’s barely touched a camera, Camera+ will make you love taking photos. Offers exposure, lighting controls, stabilizer, high quality zoom, scene modes, digital flash, cropping tools, effects, borders, sharing features and more. 3. ($4.99) iPad App of the Year Snapseed makes any photograph extraordinary with a fun, high-quality photo experience right at your fingertips. Anyone can enhance, transform, and share their photos with ease. 4. ($1.99) Simply point the camera to the sky, tap on what you see and discover neat things about these sky objects. SkyView is unique as it blends the camera view with incredible 3D graphics of the sky objects to provide an Augmented Reality (AR) view of your sky. 5. ($1.99) This super clever app is a weather application that shows you the current temperature of any location right on your iPhone/iPad homescreen using iOS’s push notifications (the red badges). Beyond the real-time temperature display, it also gives you detailed weather information from unlimited cities worldwide. 6. , , ($9.99 each) From Apple’s iWork Suite, its own versions of Excel, Word and Powerpoint designed for iOS. All three work with iCloud, so your files stay up to date across all your iOS devices automatically. Alternate choices: ; for text only, 7. ($0.99) Garmin StreetPilot onDemand offers rich navigation features for walking or driving, a simple and intuitive user interface. Using your data connection, StreetPilot onDemand always has access to the most up-to-date maps for the U.S. and Canada so you can navigate with confidence whether you’re on foot or in the car. (Premium features require monthly subscription of $2.99). Alternate choice: 8. (ad free version) ($3.99) TripIt “automagically” takes all your trip details and creates one truly helpful itinerary that’s there when and where you need it – on your iPhone or iPad, synced with your calendar, and online at tripit.com. When you receive a confirmation email from anywhere you book, simply forward it to plans@tripit.com. TripIt instantly recognizes reservations from 3,000+ booking sites including cruises, restaurants, concerts and more. 9. ($2.99) Building on 25 years of development led by Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram|Alpha has rapidly become the world’s definitive source for instant expert knowledge and computation. Across thousands of domains, Wolfram|Alpha uses its vast collection of algorithms and data to compute answers and generate reports for you. 10. ($1.99) A better podcast manager for iOS, Instacast lets you manage all your podcasts (audio and video) in one place and get new episodes instantly. Supports AirPlay, download over Wi-Fi, Edge and 3G, show notes, 2x playback, pull-to-refresh, favoriting, and more. 1. ($4.99) Tiger Woods: My Swing helps golfers of all levels improve their golf swing through video analysis and instruction from golf great Tiger Woods. Compare swings against every club in Tiger’s bag and against friends. 2. ($4.99) The breakthrough workout program that revolutionized home fitness now has an app that lets you Bring It! on your iPhone, so you can get even more amazing results—and work out with P90X anywhere. Keep track of your sets, reps, and weights, view your progress, log your nutrition, and share your results. 3. ($1.99) iMuscle is a sophisticated workout aid that can be taken anywhere. Use it to identify a body part or individual muscle by zooming into a 3-Dimensional human body with the musculature exposed. Then access all the exercises associated with the development / rehabilitation of that muscle. 4. ($4.99) Featured by Apple as a Fitness Essential, Tempo Magic Pro lets you change the BPM of your music. Perfect for DJs, Music Instructors and Dance Instructors or anyone who needs to set the pace for their workout. ($4.99) GarageBand turns your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch into a collection of Touch Instruments and a full-featured recording studio. Use Multi-Touch gestures to play pianos, organs, guitars, drums, and basses. They sound and play like their counterparts, but let you do things you could never do on a real instrument. 2. ($9.99 iPhone – on sale for $0.99 / $20.99 ) Djay transforms your iOS device into a full-fledged portable DJ system and seamlessly integrates with your iPod library, giving you direct access to all your favorite tracks and playlists. A hyper-realistic touchscreen interface and ultra-low latency converge to offer you a true professional mixing experience, right in the palm of your hand. You can perform live, record mixes on-the-go, or enable Automix mode. 3. ($1.99) Procreate is a professional painting & sketching app, made exclusively for iPad. Engineered using the Silica painting engine, painting & sketching on an iPad has never been so responsive and precise. 4. ($1.99) Animation Desk for iPhone is a mobile application that allows users to create hand-drawn animations on iPhone or iPod Touch. The drawing interface provided by the app resembles the real working environment of a professional animator who completes each frame of an animation on a specially-designed desk, the animation desk. 5. ($6.99) SoundHound is an instant music search and discovery app for music recognition, including via singing and humming, lyrics, and on iPad, YouTube videos. 6. ($4.99) The ever-popular painting application featuring an advanced color picker, several realistic brushes, layers, extreme zooming, and a simple yet deep interface. 1 ($6.99) The continuing journey of young Siris unfolds as you delve deeper into the world of the Deathless tyrants and their legion of Titans. Includes Unreal Engine 3 graphics, new styles of combat, an immersive 3D works and more. 2. ($2.99) Grand Theft Auto III brings to life the dark and seedy underworld of Liberty City. With a massive and diverse open world, a wild cast of characters from every walk of life and the freedom to explore at will, Grand Theft Auto III puts the dark, intriguing and ruthless world of crime at your fingertips. 3. ($0.99) Featuring hardcore gameplay and a rich audio experience, immerse yourself in events that unleash the Necromorph horde again – and set the stage for the horrifying action of Dead Space 2. Hailed by fans and critics, this stunning vision of the Dead Space franchise is truly a landmark “must-play.” 4. ($0.99) Similar to Starcraft II, this real-time strategy title from Gameloft brings you to a Sci-Fi world on the planet Sinistral, where rare Xenodium crystals are coveted by a human mining conglomerate called the Consortium. The Myriad, an indigenous race of aliens, is addicted to Xenodium and will do everything they can to prevent the Consortium from plundering their resources. To add to the chaos, a sentient robot race called the Wardens is trying to turn the war in their favor. 5. ($0.99) Another Gameloft title, Asphalt 6 lets you build a dream collection from 42 cars and bikes, race your friends across the city streets of L.A., Tokyo, the Bahamas and more. 11 leagues and 55 events are included. 6. ($2.99) Shadowgun puts you into the role of John Slade, the galaxy’s most infamous bounty hunter. Your mission: hunt down Dr. Edgar Simon, maniacal genius and leader of his own mutant army. Infiltrate Dr. Simon’s mountain fortress and fight his personal guard of cyborgs, battle droids, and genetically-enhanced humanoids. 1. ($4.99) A popular PC and Mac puzzle game has been transitioned to iOS devices, letting you drag and drop living, squirming, talking, globs of goo to build structures, bridges, cannonballs, zeppelins, and giant tongues. 2. ($0.99) Intrigued by the candy-eating monster Om Nom’s insatiable appetite for sweets, the Professor puts him through a series of experiments in this all-new game, a follow-up to one of the most original in the App Store. 3. ($0.99) Angry Birds’ holiday app includes 25 new levels in the Christmas edition featuring gingerbread cookies, bells, twinkling lights, and candy canes. The newest Angry Bird will also make an appearance. And on the last day you’ll meet the big pig himself. 4. ($0.99) Players assume the role of a bird with tiny wings. You use hills as jumps to fly up, then gravity pulls you back down again. The goal is to see how far the bird can fly until the sun sets. 5. ($0.99) A popular Warner Bros. Nintendo DS puzzle game involves a character called Maxwell who solves puzzles by drawing or typing in tools like blocks or bridges. Includes 40 levels, 10 that are exclusive to iOS. 6. ($0.99) Fruit Ninja is a juicy action game enjoyed by millions of players around the world, with squishy, splatty and satisfying fruit carnage! Become the ultimate bringer of sweet, tasty destruction with every slash. 7. ($0.99) Zynga’s version of Scrabble now has over 20 million people addicted to the word building, triple score seeking, chat bubble sending goodness of Words With Friends. 1. ($2.99) Bugs and Buttons is a uniquely styled collection of games and activities that are entertaining and educational. The app goes beyond simply great graphics and beautiful music by engaging children through intriguing game play that progressively adapts to their skill level. 2. ($1.99 -sale), ($7.99) (Books from Nosy Crow) Fun, animated versions of children’s classics with great graphics, sounds and interactivity. 3. ($1.99) Inside a little bouncing barn, friendly farm animals are waiting to pop out and surprise your little one. Work with your child to learn the names of animals and hear the sounds they make. Younger children will love opening the barn doors to find a new animal animation, as they learn about cause and effect and become familiar with animal names and sounds. 4. ($0.99) Monkey Preschool Lunchbox is a collection of six exciting educational games for your preschooler including games for memory, counting, letters, shapes and more. (ages 2 to 5). 5. ($0.99) The bedtime book “Nighty Night!” for iPad helps children get to know animals interactively while preparing to go to bed. Dog, Pig, Sheep, Duck, Cow, Fish and Chickens moo and bubble, hop and lay eggs, until a kid turns the light out and the animals go to sleep. 1. ($2.99) Tweetbot is a full-featured iPhone (and iPod Touch) Twitter client with a lot of personality. Whether it’s the meticulously-crafted interface, sounds & animation, or features like multiple timelines & smart gestures, there’s a lot to love about Tweetbot. 2. ($2.99) Momento is a unique diary/journal writing application which provides a quick and easy way to privately record moments throughout your day. Connect with popular web services, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Foursquare, Gowalla, YouTube, Vimeo, Digg and Last.fm, to collect and display your online activity as part of your diary. 3. ($24.99) The Associated Press Stylebook is an essential tool for writers, editors, students and public relations professionals. It provides fundamental guidelines on spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage and journalistic style, with special sections on reporting business and sports. 4. ($4.99) A beautiful Google Reader client which lets you sync feeds, star, notate and save items to Instapaper, ReadItLater, Readability, Delicious, Pinboard, Zootool, or share with Facebook and Twitter. |
GoDaddy No Longer Supports SOPA | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | Surprise! GoDaddy has just recanted their support of SOPA, issuing a press release and blasting out a of tweets on the matter. This comes just hours after they were seemingly their position, shrugging off the boycotts as something that had yet to cause “any impact to [their] business”. For those who somehow missed it: after GoDaddy publicly stated their support for SOPA yesterday morning, a colossal chunk of the Internet (read: the chunk that understands how the Internet works) began to rally. There were no torches or pitchforks here; the only weapons here were wallets, all being carried off in another direction. The mob got loud, quick: Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh that he’d be taking his 1,000+ domains (I Can Has Cheezburger, FAIL Blog, Know Your Meme, etc.) elsewhere if GoDaddy continued to support the act. Meanwhile, thousands of Redditors to transfer their domains, with December 29th set as the mass-move day. While it’s nice that they changed their stance (publicly, at least), you’ve got to ask yourself: do you want to continue throwing money at a company blind enough to support SOPA in the first place?
Looks to Internet Community & Fellow Tech Leaders to Develop Legislation We All Support SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) — Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress. “Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation — but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.” Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech. “As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy,” said Adelman. In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support. “Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future,” Jones said.
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Forget BBX: RIM Faces Legal Woes Over BBM Trademark | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | I swear, it never ends — not long after a U.S. court passed down a judgment that saw RIM change the name of their new operating system, the company has once again gotten themselves into . This time, the name in question is “BBM,” RIM’s preferred shorthand for their popular BlackBerry Messenger service. The lawsuit comes courtesy of , a not-for-profit broadcast and audience measurement organization that’s been in business considerably longer than RIM has. Originally known as the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement, the group was originally founded in 1944 and took on the BBM moniker in 2001 — well before RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger service came to be. RIM has gotten quite a bit of mileage out of BBM, and went on an a while back in order to drum up some public interest for it. While using the BBM mark is here in the States, the company filed for and was denied a trademark for BBM in their native Canada. “We want our name back,” said BBM Canada CEO Jim MacLeod. “I find it kind of amazing that this wouldn’t have been thought about before they decided to use the name. The same thing goes for BBX.” MacLeod seems strangely apologetic about the whole thing — he has made efforts to accomodate the much larger company, even going so far as offering to rebrand the group entirely in order to avoid making a scene. Those overtures were met with silence from RIM, which has led to the sticky situation these companies are embroiled in. RIM hasn’t yet responded to these allegations, but when they do, I imagine that they’ll say there’s no conflict since both companies operate in different fields. Then again, since they tried that line during the BBX case to no avail, RIM’s legal team may need to work out a different approach. If this sort of thing keeps up, the company runs the risk of looking, well, incompetent. And really, the last thing RIM needs now is for their top brass to look foolish, lest their stock price take (another) dive. |
A Very Merry Giveaway: Galaxy Nexus #TechCrunch | Elin Blesener | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | You spoke and we listened. The holidays are upon us and yesterday we asked all of you what you would want as a gift out of six different options. Those options were: iPad 2, Canon S100, Kindle Fire, Galaxy Nexus, Boxee Box, and last but not least, a Kinect for Xbox 360. , all of you wanted an iPad 2. Then we asked , and you all chose a Galaxy Nexus for your most wanted gift. So, with it being and all, we are giving away.. a to one lucky reader! If you want a chance at winning it, all you have to do is follow the steps below. 1) 2) – Retweet this post (including the #TechCrunch hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below telling us what your favorite holiday memory is The contest starts and goes through New Years. It will end January 1st at 7:30pm PT. Make sure you only tweet the message once, or you will be disqualified. We’ll choose the winner at random and contact them when the giveaway is over. Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive deliverable packages. Good luck everyone and happy holidays! |
LogMeIn Remote Control iOS App Goes Freemium | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | Users of are in for a pleasant surprise this holiday season. The once paid — and quite expensive — app is now migrating to a freemium model. That said, users who paid for Ignition won’t have to cough up the dough for a LogMeIn Pro subscription, but they will get the added premium features including HD remote control (and HD streaming) from their computers to their iOS devices. For LogMeIn noobs: The app is free to download and includes access to an unlimited number of PCs/Macs, remote view and control of the PC/Mac, and the ability to run computer-based applications like Salesforce, Microsoft Office, Quickbooks etc. Users will also be able to view files through either a WiFi or 3G connection. If that isn’t quite enough control, an annual in-app purchase of $39.99 gives you HD remote control (allowing for HD streaming of video and audio content to the iPad/iPhone), cloud storage integration, and file management. In other words, you can view, copy, transfer, and save files between your iOS devices and your PC or Mac. The app is available now in the , and LogMeIn promises an Android version of the app in 2012. |
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. |
£1,275 BlackBerry Porsche P’9981 Will Launch In U.K. By Year’s End | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | Pop quiz, phone fans: what device will you soon be able to buy in the U.K. that costs nearly twice as much as a Galaxy Nexus and looks three (maybe four!) times stranger? Well, if you’ve read the headline, you already know the answer: it’s the . reports that high-end retailer Harrod’s will be carrying the love-it-or-hate-it device in store by the end of the year. What really gets me is the price tag for it: the Porsche will sell for £1,275 (that’s just a hair under $2,000). Wow. Let’s take a step back and consider that for a moment. For the same price you could spend on a BlackBerry Porsche, you could buy both an iPhone 4S and a Galaxy Nexus with enough left over to swing round Tesco and buy a few boxes of . Tell me, UK readers, which would you rather do? The Porsche P’9981, if you recall, is a limited edition BlackBerry designed in conjunction with the style mavens at Porsche Design. While the P’9981’s looks are… striking, the internals (1GHz processor, a 5-megapixel camera with 720p HD video, and an NFC chip) don’t do much to differentiate it from its less-gaudy brethren. I’d be surprised if Harrod’s managed to sell more than three of these things, but alas, I am but a poor writer and have no appreciation for the finer things in life. |
How Best Buy Stole Christmas | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | “I wouldn’t touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.” There’s a bit of inherent risk when shopping online. You’re handing over your credit card to a retailer that promises to ship you something in return. Most of the time transactions are completed without issue and orders are fulfilled as promised. Sometimes things go awry, though. And sometimes Best Buy ruins Christmas. Best Buy started reaching out to customers earlier this week — you know, mere days before Christmas — that the retailer was unable to fulfill orders placed as far back as November. Big Blue was sorry but they were canceling the affected orders. Happy holidays! Signed, your merry friends at Best Buy! Consumers traded the safety of buying an object from a brick and mortar store for the convenience and often lower prices found online. As Best Buy proves here, buying items online is still a bit risky even in 2011. Consumers just do not know for a 100% fact that they will get their product. Sure, receipts are issued and shipping estimates are given, but there are just too many variables involved for complete trust. Shipping companies can also break the chain, too. You just never know if the FedEx man is going to chuck your LCD monitor over a gate. Generally though, the bigger the retailer, the more safe the transaction feels. Amazon, Walmart, Newegg and, to a lesser extent now, Best Buy should be considered trusted retailers. These massive companies should be able to fulfill online orders with minimum exceptions. But issues do arise. Customers are sometimes left without their order, feeling used and abused. Don’t worry about Best Buy, though. The retailer isn’t hurting its bottom line by canceling orders en mass. an analyst stating “It’s a hiccup for the company” and “It probably won’t make a big difference for Best Buy’s holiday sales.” Oh good. Because Best Buy’s earnings were the first things I thought of when this story broke. Screw the customers. They don’t matter anyway. Apparently if those with canceled orders whine enough, for the inconvenience. Of course those that suck it up and move on get nothing. There’s no way of knowing how many of these canceled orders were to be holiday presents. Reportedly many of the canceled items were sold on Black Friday. But even without Christmas looming, Best Buy held these orders hostage for nearly a month. They violated the trust of their customers. The retailer essentially cast a wide net, collecting just as many orders as they could, likely knowing it would be unable to fulfill them all. It’s greedy, unacceptable and just plain wrong. Merry Christmas. Oh, and just in case you need help, the CEO of Best Buy posted a tip to his Facebook page. |
Fotopedia Shifts From iPad Books To Photozine With “Wild Friends” App | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | Digital media is just more compelling when it is updated on a regular basis. That is what keeps people coming back. It’s as true for blogs as it is for apps. has built a nice little franchise putting out digital photo books re-imagined for the iPad. After 9 apps and 6.2 million downloads, with 1.4 million active users and 100 million pageviews a month, it is taking a more magazine-liek apporach with its latest iPad app, . Instead of a relatively static set of highly-curated pictures around a single topic, you get a highly-curated set of pictures that changes every day. And each photo now has a narrative caption written by the photographer. Fotopedia started experimenting with this more magazine-like approach in September with its and integration into Flipboard. You can see what the looks like on the web also. By focusing on one topic area per photozine (animals, Japan, national parks), Fotopedia hopes to attract advertisers with . Delivering fresh content every day should give users a reason to visit more than 2.4 times per month (wich is the average). Fotopedia will eventually convert all of its existing apps into the magazine format as well, and soon will add Facebook Graph integration, which will allow readers who opt in to show every page they are browsing in their Facebook Tickers. |
Want A Piece Of Founders Fund’s Latest $625M Fund? Start By Trying To Change The World | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | Some call , others visionaries, however any way you slice them the — consisting of Partners , , , , , , , and others — is definitely an unconventional lot. There is a well-worn saying that the only difference between a crazy person and an eccentric is money. Well, perhaps as a clue as the where the VC industry as a whole is going, Founders Fund (a IV fund larger than all its other funds combined) in order to invest what it holds to be world-changing ideas. Maybe when you examine that philosophy closely, it’s not that unconventional. Partner Bruce Gibney tells me that Founders Fund basically adheres to the old VC model of “You can make a tremendous amount of money on companies that can solve difficult and important problems, and create durable value.” Gibney holds that only issue is the definition of what constitutes these companies changes over time. Gibney tells me that the fund intends to create enormous value independent of market conditions, not just dropping cash into a company because Google needs a product or there’s an S-1 bubble. People are too focused on readily graphable metrics according to Gibney, “The acme of this was a year ago, when you polled people who invested in Groupon, many of them had strong opinions what would happened a year from now, but no opinion about where the company would be in 10 years,” he says. “People have become so focused on near-term metrics, that they don’t consider the long-term prospects for the business.” Refusing to think ten years ahead because you’re too worried about having a short-term success — essentially optimizing your resume for three years from now — can be disastrous to a VC portfolio. Gibney thinks VCs are more diligent when there’s skin in the game — “When .2% of fund is out-of-pocket, a VC invests with much less seriousness than when its 10% percent.” For the record, Founders Fund’s newest fund is 20% out-of-pocket. “If you walked up and down Sand Hill Road with a basket of securities, and the business plans not logos, of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Genetich, synthetized insulin, and a basket of derivative follow on consumer Internet stocks, and you asked people on Sandhill Road which basket you’d like to choose … the depressing answer is that they’d take from the second basket.” Sure the value proposition of big-idea Founders Funded companies like , takes intellectual effort to understand. The problem no longer is “Can we get distribution?” But rather, “Does it work?” When asked what kinds of companies the new $625M fund is likely to finance, Gibney asserted that Founders Fund wasn’t necessarily against consumer Internet companies despite its “The consumer internet of our time consumer internet, but it will look like nothing that came before,” he said. “It is ludicrous to think that one of the most powerful technologies that we’ve ever created is tapped out after 15 years. It might be fashionable to say so, but it’s not true.” Healthcare and AI were also on Gibney’s wishlist, as were “industries that have been practiced for generations as art, yet now we have enough information to practice them as a science.” “The complexity of the problems we face as a species may exceed our ability to solve them,” Gibney said, urging entreprenuers and VCs to shoot for the difficult problems. “We know a lot of problems, and a lot of people who can solve them. It’s a great time to be in VC but that’s not how people are behaving,” he says. “Groupon is the acme or nadir of this phenomenon,” Gibney emphasized, bringing up the fact that out of $15 billion of venture capital expenditure last year, one billion went into Groupon, “[This suggests] Groupon either is the best idea ever, –which may be true — or people don’t really know where to put that money.” |
SigFig Shows Its iOS-Owning Investors Big on AAPL, Its Android-Owning Ones Not So Big On GOOG | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | A study by investment analysis startup suggests that iPhone-owning investors are 20% more likely than the average investor to also own Apple stock, while investors with Androids are 25% less likely to own Google than average. This is just one startup’s limited data, so don’t get all excited and assume that this is the case worldwide. But still, it makes for an entertaining look at just how loyal those Apple fans are. SigFig gets the data from its site, which tracks $20 billion in investments. More than $5 billion of the total goes their mobile phones — not much by public market standards, but still something to look at. The company then correlates users’ investment portfolios to their mobile phone operating systems to see who is using and buying what. From the company by SigFig data team member Andrei Kopelevich: Wikinvest, launched in June of 2010, tracks stock performance data from more than 65 brokerages within a single dashboard, analogous to consumer finance site Mint, and also contains news, graphs and other features. It’s continuing to live on, but SigFig is busy working on a new as yet unlaunched product. SigFig (Significant Figures) is a registered investment advisor with the SEC, and is planning to launch a new toll that will include enhancements to the exiting product but will also “analyze your holdings and transactions to recommendations so you can improve your portfolio,” spokesperson Samantha Murillo tells me. “For example, if you’re investing in an underperforming fund, or if you’re getting ripped off through fees, we’ll let you know.” |
Did You Review Your Whole Facebook Timeline Before Publishing It? | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | Really? The whole thing? You probably didn’t, but you should because there are things you posted long ago that you might not want people to see. I sincerely worry that all over the world, this is happening right now: “Oh look, a new Facebook profile design. Grrr, I dislike change, but it looks cool. There’s a 7 day preview period? But all my friends are showing off their pretty covers. I’ll just publish my Timeline now, and go back and delete embarrassing posts later.” But they won’t. This is a big problem for individuals and Facebook. For the majority of users, things will be fine, and they’ll love . Facebook did a great job designing it. Maybe too great, such that people publish it too fast. Over the last 6 years, the definition of a Facebook friend has expanded to include people outside one’s peers. Timeline doesn’t change your privacy settings, but it does make it easier for others to find things you posted before you ever friended them. I’ve heard Facebook is planning more ways to educate users about the importance of curating your Timeline. There are already a few alerts in the tour, intro, and blog post, but they’re not very strongly worded. That needs to change, and Facebook may need to provide tools to make reviewing the masses of content easier. Once users have already opted in to publishing their Timeline, it will be harder to get them to go back and review. And with today’s , the time bombs start ticking. Two weeks, a month, a year later, they get a call from their boss about a sexist or racist joke they posted in 2009. They get a call from their mom asking if they have a drinking problem. They get a call from their little brother about whether getting high is fun like they said in that post 3 years ago. Some say you shouldn’t post anything to Facebook you wouldn’t want public. They’re right, but not everyone is so diligent. Beyond the examples above, everyone gets worked up sometimes and writes things that might not seem so appropriate once they’ve cooled down. Facebook needs to get serious about pushing users to vist their Activity Log and review their Timelines. Raising awareness without scaring users will be tough, but Facebook must figure it out. Otherwise, horror stories of lost jobs and family drama are on the way. Burned users will blame Facebook, and the mainstream media will jump all over it. Despite the image above, this isn’t fear mongering or snarky criticism, I’m really trying to help. Facebook, you’ve worked too hard on Timeline to let it become a talking point against you. Tell the users loud and clear how important Timeline review is. Users, tell your friends. |
Rocket Misfires — Samwers lose key people ahead of huge fund raising to clone globally | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | The three Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc and Alexander) founders of the incubator in Berlin, are the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Germany and possibly Europe. After launching and exiting multiple businesses, many of them clones/copycats of US startups, they are multi-millionaires. Indeed, their Groupon clone CityDeal sold to to Groupon for an estimated €750m in cash and shares. But much of that success looks threatened by the departure of at least 20 of its key staff in the last two weeks – including CTO- level people – and possibly as much as 40, according to multiple sources spoken to by TechCrunch Europe. While Rocket Internet has around 200 people on staff, losing key heads could be a severe blow to the renowned incubator. The timing could not be worse for the Samwers, who are understood to be in the middle of raising at least a billion dollar financing round designed to clone every successful US startup, to launch them outside the US much faster and become a larger global player than many of the Silicon Valley businesses they plan to copy. Amongst those 40 staff, Rocket Internet has now confirmed to us that one of its key founders, , CEO at gimigames.com and the former Managing Director at Rocket Internet GmbH, has left to pursue his own interests. Another former Rocket MD, Uwe Horstmann, already left already in summer. Weiss’s departure, along with nine other envelopers, indicates huge strains at the incubator. As one source told us: “All those leaving are fed up with the Samwers and are going to do something on their own.” Rocket Internet made its name as an incubator where young MBA founders would be given a healthy salary but just a small amount of shares in a clone startup backed by Rocket. Their most recent clone is one of Pinterest, called Pinspire.de, which typically looks exactly like the original. The business model has worked to attract young aspiring entrepreneurs who were concerned about the risks of a startup – many of them attracted by the Samwer’s focus on “execution innovation” rather than “conceptual innovation”, a model followed more by Silicon Valley. But it would appear many of Rocket’s staff have seen the management do extremely well out of the exits of Rockets clones while they’ve been left with a mere salary. As another VC source told us: “Many are leaving and the ones that are still there have ‘mentally’ left Rocket.” He told us that with Groupon shares vesting at the end of many more at Rocket will “break loose.” A key component of Rocket is a long time member of the Samwer’s ‘praetorian guard’: . Samwer observers will be looking to see if he stays on. Another source with intimate knowledge of Rocket’s internals told us “the situation is very tense” and that those leaving included tech leads and CTOs. They said Rocket had recently gone more for “managers than for entrepreneurs with Rocket being more like a factory than a venture builder” with managers offered “equity kickers” rather than bonuses. How the terms of those operate is up to the Samwers, who’s are legendary for their aggressive business style. Indeed, Oliver Samwer recently with TechCrunch. “The people in charge are more hired managers than the people who started Rocket. They won’t contradict Oliver, it will lose its drive, and it just won’t attract new people if it’s run like a factory,” one well-placed sourced told us. We reached out to Oliver Samwer for comment who replied on email: “Rocket is growing very fast and its team has also been growing very fast. Rocket develops entrepreneurs and sometimes people decide to go their own entrepreneurial route at some point of time. We think this is what Rocket stands for: an entrepreneurial culture. We continue to have a great relationship with Christian and his colleagues and wish them great luck with their new venture.” When asked about the departure of other staff and their fund raising exercise, he replied: “As you know we never comment since we focus on building great internet companies instead. Christian and 9 programmers will do their own new venture.. we will continue to collaborate in the future.” Weiss emailed us with the following statement: “I cannot tell you more about my plans right now, but I can tell you that I am looking back at four and a half fantastic years since I founded Rocket for Oli, Alex and Marc in Summer 2007. I can only thank the whole Rocket team and especially Oli, Alex, Marc and my Co-MDs for this great opportunity and support. I am absolutely convinced that we will continue to collaborate in the future.” But the departure of key players like Weiss comes at a time when the Samwer brothers are looking to scale their cloning model internationally. For that they will need vast amounts of money, but the prize is huge. Imagine if you could repeat the best of the Valley’s startups in the markets those companies had yet to localise for or reach. Many successful Silicon Valley companies rarely look outside the US until it’s too late. That is a trillion dollar prize, which the Samwers, acknowledged masters at executing clone businesses, would gladly take. Indeed, we understand a key lieutenant of Yuri Milner’s DST fund was recently walked around the Rocket Internet building, meeting various staff, which would suggest the Samwers could be in talks with DST about their fund raising, though Oliver Samwer declined to comment. As one source told us: “Oli’s great thing is his family offices investors were very supportive, but in order to go global he needs large institutional invest investors.” In addition, we understand a brand new incubator is being created in Berlin which will compete head on with Rocket for talent. We understand it has significant backing though no further details are available at this time. However it will be based on creating innovation-driven startups “not just plain copying” a source said. |
The New ZangZing Will Never Keep Your Photos Hostage | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | I don’t know about you, but when I hear about another photo sharing app or website, my eyes roll back into my head, and I reflexively go into “screen saver mode”. There are just way too many options. How about Shutterfly, Kodak, Flickr, Instagram, Path, Twitter (TwitPic, Yfrog), Facebook, Google+, App Trover, GLMPS, Tracks, LiveShare, OpenPhoto — just to name a few. I don’t even like photos that much. So, when I heard about , especially considering its name, I had the same reaction. However, back in April, Mike (granted, that was in comparison to Color), and Alexia . So I pressed on. It also helps that ZangZing Co-founder and CEO has some serious startup cred under his belt, having founded and been CEO of four startups, one of which was acquired by Apple, another merged with Kana and went public, and then Vontu, which was acquired by Symantec for $350 million in 2007. , Ansanelli assures me. After all, photos are a huge category — Facebook sees over 250 million photos uploaded per day, and the CEO thinks there’s room for new services that redesign photo-sharing for a more traditional kind of user. And that’s ZangZing’s focus: The average photo user, not the uber adopter, people who care about ease of uploading, aggregating all their photos in one place, and privacy. Have a ton of photos on the soon-to-be-discontinued MobileMe? Ansanelli wants you to bring them to ZangZing all at once. And this last bit is what seems most interesting to me, not so much that ZangZing is now apparently importing one photo per second (after turning on one-click import), or that 70 photos is the average album size, it’s that 50 percent of the startup’s albums are currently private. Google+ launched to give users social circles within social circles, a “refined” mechanism for sharing content among specific groups of people. In fact, Google . It’s a big, challenging goal that may never be solved completely — but ZangZing is yet another example that consumers want to share photos, just not with everyone, and founders want to try to bring them that experience. So, today, about eight months since the startup went into private beta, ZangZing is launching version 2.0 of its platform with some cool new features: Namely, one-click import from the majority of photo sites and social networks, including Facebook, Flickr, MobileMe, Instagram, Dropbox, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, etc. Just click “link”, and your photos arrive. In this sense, ZangZing is really making a play at making it simple for users to add photos from anywhere, from a PC or Mac, Picasa Desktop, or iPhoto — giving users who feel their photos are “being held hostage” a chance to work within a more compatible platform. What’s more, you can email photos directly into a ZangZing album from any smartphone or any computer, or view photos in full-screen slideshows. And they won’t make you pay if you want to get your photos back. And, while Flickr has a bit of group sharing, it doesn’t work so well with one-time events, as Mike pointed out. With ZangZing, if you want to create a group album from an event, you simply upload a picture of the event through email invite your friends, and presto. On top of this, like many file-sharing sites, ZangZing wants to add soem granularity to its privacy controls by allowing users to decide who can add, view, and download full-resolution photos. Like any good social photo repository, it allows commenting to enable chat and social interaction around particular photos, and offers both people and activity views to surface albums based on who created them or when they were created, respectively — great for photo discovery. Furthermore, every ZangZing photo album has its own privacy setting, so that public photos are available to everyone, hidden albums let only those who know the web address view the albums, as well as invite-only albums that require sign-in. There are also a number of email settings to allow or disallow invitations, social following, confirmations, ZangZing news, etc. And, best of all? There’s no advertising. Another important piece of the puzzle if ZangZing is to convince users already inundated with photo-sharing websites that its model has a long-term value proposition. Because it won’t be offering advertising, ZangZing offers a bit of eCommerce, as it contains a number of product options, like prints (and mounted prints), photo panels, framed photos, etc., with which users can select images from favorite albums, customize dimensions, and check out directly. If someone buys your image, you get paid. It will be interesting to see if ZangZing goes to a freemium model to support its revenue model, but one thing’s for sure, the site is easy to navigate, is designed well, and I think it offers enough differentiation that it can become a valuable alternative to some of the legacy photo sharing options. Plus, an API is on its way. But I’m just one man, check it out and let us know what you think. |
Bye Bye Netbooks: Dell Kills The Mini 10 As It Shifts Focus To “Thin And Powerful” | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | Once upon a time netbooks ruled the land. But with the rise of tablets and miniaturization of traditional x86 CPUs, the mini notebooks are quietly dying. The latest victim is the Dell Mini. discovered by way of that the products are no longer listed on Dell.com. They’re dead, my friends, and it seems ultrabooks and similar products are to blame. Dell is reportedly shifting focus away from the inexpensive notebooks. A company spokesperson confirmed with that the product line is indeed finished and Dell doesn’t have plans to release products on future Intel platforms. Instead, Dell will focus on “thin and powerful” notebooks, a not so subtle nod towards ultrabooks even though that description can fit a few of the company’s current notebook lines. Both Intel and AMD are focusing heavily on CPU platforms that allow for ultrathin notebooks. Some will be as thin as the MacBook Air, the ultrabooks, but still others will be relatively thin while not fitting within the traditional definition of an ultrabook. But with Dell’s inexpensive Mini line gone, it leaves a curious space open at the low-end of Dell’s product line. Other company’s previously stated that it was cutting a drastic amount of product lines in an effort to tighten up profit margins and the like. Either Dell is looking to do the same, or, and this is completely reasonable, the company is a prepping a product such as a tablet able to live comfortably in the Mini’s previous $300 – $400 price point. CES is less than a month away. Dell might have thrown away the Mini to clear room in the fridge for a more tasty treat. |
Fly Or Die: The Leapfrog LeapPad | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | Erick and I are both parents so we know from tablets. The $99 LeapPad from Leapfrog is cool, to be sure, and fun if junior’s aunt or uncle is picking it up, but we both found it lacking, especially when compared to other devices. Obviously if you don’t want the wee ones slobbering all over your iPad, this is a huge winner. Otherwise, the lack of apps, especially for geeks like us, was disheartening. Kids love toys and this is a toy. It’s very powerful and even has a rear camera, but in my high-tech household it is often the tablet of last resort, relegated to the toy box while the iPad takes center stage. However, as a fun, portable, and rugged device for kids too young for iPod Touches, it’s a winner. |
If Freemium Is In, Then Why Do Paid Apps Still Reign Supreme? | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | Earlier today, we posted on some that shows that free-to-play online games, often overlooked in the hype around social and casual games, are growing just as fast and as furiously around the globe as their counterparts. Obviously, much of this has to do with the industry’s transition from paid to freemium models — the examples of which are numerous not only in online gaming, but for web and mobile apps on the whole — and even startups and SMBs making their way in the consumer Web. While many of us probably take the rise of freemium for granted by now, some new stats and a nifty infographic from show that we are still very much in a transitional phase. As app developers work out the best ways to monetize their free products via in-app purchases, mobile advertising, rewards, deals, offers, incentivized downloads, and so on, free apps still comprise less than half of all mobile apps — across top mobile platforms. Of course, as you can see in Quixey’s infographic below, apps that cost $50 and above only comprise about 0.3 percent of mobile apps, whereas apps priced between $1 and $50 make up about 32.6 percent of the app population. Considering 45 percent of apps are free today, that leaves the remaining some 22 percent of apps pricing between free and $0.99. So, upwards of 54 percent of mobile apps will cost you some real, hard currency to download. And, in conjunction with this, it’s interesting to see that 60 percent of the “most buzzed about apps” have the words “free” or “lite” in the title, which seems to point to the fact that app stores are becoming increasingly crowded and overpopulated, so the best way to reach eyeballs and attract downloads is to assure consumers that the app being presented is cheap — if not free. If that’s not enough to tip you off to the overwhelming increase of app developers jumping into the game (along with the hike in the total number of apps), the infographic shows that the top 50 app developers only produce about 5 percent of the content in app stores. Of course, potentially part of the reason that they’re top developers is that they produce less content — or what content they do produce is of a high quality. This is where the . Of the hundreds of thousands of developers out there, few are having their voices heard, and it seems that overproducing and churning out apps (hence the over one million active apps now available on top mobile platforms) isn’t helping their cause, either. The infographic poses some interesting questions for app developers — and app consumers. ( .) Check it out below and let us know what you think. |
null | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 23 | null |
From RIM’s Conference Call: CEO Pay Cuts & Dual-Core LTE BlackBerrys | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | Well now, this call turned out to be much more interesting than I expected. First, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie has just announced that he and partner Mike Lazaridis will be cutting their annual salaries down to $1. According to Forbes, currently receive $1,175,664 per year. While they don’t appear to receive annual bonuses, they both receive restricted stock awards, although the terms under which those stocks can vest are unknown. The news will likely be welcomed by distraught stockholders, but don’t expect Mike and Jim to suffer too much. Mr. Lazaridis also took the opportunity to speak about the future of BlackBerry smartphones. In order to keep up with other manufacturers, Lazaridis said that RIM has chosen to run with a dual-core LTE-capable chipset for first BlackBerry 10 devices. Finally BlackBerry fans will have a device that’s at least mildly competitive, but they’ll have to wait even longer than expected for it. The downside to the situation is that the particular chipset RIM hopes to use won’t be available until the middle of 2012. Astute readers may remember that were expected to ship around June of next year, but Lazaridis concedes that the launch window will instead come toward “the latter part of 2012.” Ouch. |
Quickly Tag Photos With Locations, Assist Ad Targeting With Facebook’s New Timeline Map | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | There’s one big new feature in today’s . Facebook has enhanced the Timeline Map with a wizard that lets you rapidly tag your existing photos with locations. You can also now type in a location and share rich stories about whether you’ve been, took a trip, or lived there. The Map feature could seriously advance Facebook’s “location as a layer” plan. By convincing users to append valuable geographic data to its massive collection of photos with this easy flow, Facebook could improve local ad targeting. To access Map, visit your Timeline, which you can . Below the Update Info and Activity Log buttons and next to to your Friends, Photos, and other Timeline View tiles is a drop-down arrow with a number. Expand this menu and click “Map”. To navigate to Map directly, you can add ” /map ” to the end of your profile’s URL in this format “http://www.facebook.com/[Your User Name or Profile ID]/map”. To alert people to the feature, Facebook is currently showing news feed stories about friends who’ve updated their maps, and . When Timeline became available for developers, Map only showed the Places you’d been tagged at, and didn’t let you directly add new data. Now, you can click “Where have you been?” to share travel memories, or “Add Photos” to bring up a “Where was this?” entry field over a thumbnail strip of photos you’re tagged in. The wizard slides you forward and asks you tag the next photo once you’d added location to the last one. You could probably add location to all your tagged photos quickly as each only takes a few seconds. The feature focuses on getting you to add location to photos you’re tagged in because Facebook wants a better idea of where you and your friends spend your time. If you list San Francisco as your current city, but say many of the your photos in are from Mountain View, Facebook could know to show you ads for Mountain View restaurants. As multiple people are often tagged in each photo, Facebook gains that same data about your friends. For the same reason, the “Where have you been?” feature asks who you were with. [ : Facebook engineer Jon McCord who worked on Map says data collection and improved ad targeting was not a motive of the feature’s design. However, I still see these as important emergent impacts.] Many third-party apps such as have had success helping people share their past locations and generate maps to show off to friends. Those could become less necessary now. Timeline Map could even challenge ‘s single player function of letting users keep track of their travels. Facebook’s most ingenious designs create something easy to use, fun to browse, and coax valuable data from its users. Timeline Map does all three, and honestly, it’s kinda fun to use. Now you have to decide whether to keep your location to yourself, or aid Facebook in serving you more relevant ads while filling out your map with memories. |
Save the date: TechCrunch Baltics event, Feb 9th in Riga | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 15 |
We’ll we’ve run a lot of TechCrunch meetups all over Europe since 2007, getting to most of the major European cities. But there’s one place we haven’t got a chance to hit and that’s the tiger economies of the Baltic states: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The latter is of course where, famously, Skype was largely developed. So we’re putting that right with an event in January, . It will be on February 9th, 2012, in the lovely city of Riga, Latvia. We’ll be holding a min-conference and pitch contest to show off the the best that the Baltic startup and technology community has to offer. Stars of the show will include , Chief Marketing Officer and “Mighty Eagle” of Angry Birds fame, and , Founder at HackFwd and founder of Xing.com. Tickets will be available soon and follow for information. We will also be accepting pitch applications from startups soon, but please sign up on that site to apply and be notified. If you’re a VC who’d like to attend, also let us know, thanks. |
Zynga IPO Prices At $10, The Upper End Of Its Range, But Under The Last Private Round | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | Zynga priced its IPO at $10 a share, according to and CNBC (bankers love to leak). The IPO, which is set for tomorrow, will be in the upper end of the the company indicated previously in SEC filings. Zynga will sell at least 100 million shares, raising $1 billion at a $7 billion valuation. The valuation is about half of where early reports were speculating it would be, but Zynga the price in the face of the tepid performance of other tech IPOs lately and general economic concerns weighing down the stock market. Even with the lower price, Zynga is poised to open trading with a bigger market cap bigger than LinkedIn, which currently is at $6.4 billion. Zynga’s investment baankers can tap into an extra 15 million shares if there is additional demand for them at the IPO price. Investors including Kleiner Perkins, IVP, Union Square Ventures, Foundry, DST, Avalon, Google, SilverLake, and Tiger Global could be getting a payday tomorrow if they sell a portion of their shares as part of the offering. Investors such as Kleiner Perkins who participated in Zynga’s last private in February, 2011 will actually stil be underwater. According to a table in the S-1 filing, Kleiner bought 1.8 million shares at $14 in what was technically the Series C. But Keiner will do just fine. It bought the vast majority of its shares—another 24.7 million— back in July 2008 at $0.42 a share. |
RIM’s Rough Ride Reflected In Q3 Earnings | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | RIM has just released , and the figures are about as rough as we expected: the Waterloo-based company pulled in $5.2 billion during the past quarter — a considerable bump over their Q2 performance, but still a 6% drop year-over-year. Nearly 80% of the company’s revenue came from hardware sales, with RIM shipping 14.1 million BlackBerry handsets during the quarter. As expected, performance of the company’s beleaguered PlayBook wasn’t up to snuff yet again. The company only shipped around 150,000 of their ailing PlayBook tablets this quarter, down from nearly 200,000 shipped in Q2. To be honest, it’s a bit of surprise that they sold that many, although the company has been getting aggressive with PlayBook and . Ever the optimists, RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis kept up a hopeful tone while they commented on the company’s financials. “Despite the challenges faced in the third quarter, the BlackBerry subscriber base grew to almost 75 million customers around the world,” they said in a recent release. “RIM continues to have strong technology, unique service capabilities and a large installed base of customers, and we are more determined than ever to capitalize on our strengths to overcome the recent surrounding product launches and the resulting financial performance.” While I have to give them props for essentially acknowledging that the PlayBook was/is a flop, it’s not the only problem that RIM has had to face in recent months. There was of course the that struck users across the globe, not to mention the they encountered when trying to brand their new OS. RIM expects this next quarter to be even grimmer: they forecast revenues of between $4.6 and $4.9 billion, and they expect to ship between 11 and 12 million BlackBerrys. The company’s earnings conference call is about to kick off, and we’ll be sure you keep you updated with any new details. RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis will only draw a yearly salary of $1, effective immediately. |
Galaxy Nexus Gets Launch-Day OTA Update To Squash A Few Bugs | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | The Galaxy Nexus has been , and it’s already getting its first refresh. But reports are bound to come in over the next week or so, but it looks as though Google had a few things that still needed fixing upon release. In Android 4.0.2 build ICL53F, you’ll see improvements to your 3G/4G connection, your Wifi connection (including automatic reconnection to already-saved networks) and mobile hotspot enhancements. The lock screen will also get some “visual improvements,” along with some special effect enhancements for the front-facing shooter. If you already own a Galaxy Nexus, you may have seen this error message: “data was disconnected due to roaming”. That was a mistake, and will no longer appear once the update is complete. And if you were having trouble opening up certain mail attachments, that issue is done for, as well. You may have also noticed that the G-Nex supports DivX. This latest update will remove support for DivX, though that support will come back in a future update. Verizon also mentions improved volume during Google Navigation’s turn-by-turn directions. If the update hasn’t already been pushed straight to your device, it’s worth hitting up the Settings tab and checking for updates manually. Here’s the on everything included in the update, and happy Galaxy Nexus day, everyone! [via ] |
The Top Gadget-Related Search Query Of 2011: “iPod” (But “iPhone” Isn’t In The Top 10…) | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | It’s Google Zeitgeist day — the annual event where Google rounds up the year’s top search queries and trends to present a data-centric recap of the last twelve months (minus, ahem, any adult searches). Most of the Zeitgeist data went live — see our for the top trends overall. Spoiler: Rebecca Black took the top spot. And now Google has given us some additional datapoints that haven’t been published yet, which focus on electronics — namely, the top gadgets, the top consumer electronics, and the fastest rising consumer electronics. I’m not sure exactly how Google defines a gadget versus a consumer electronics product (I asked and was told gadgets are a subset of CE), though I’m guessing it has something to do with the device being portable. Note that these lists apply to the United States, only. Apple has a commanding lead on the Top Gadgets list, holding four of the top ten spots, including the iPod at #1. But there’s one striking omission: the iPhone doesn’t appear among the Top Gadgets at all. Amazon’s Kindle (and Kindle Fire), the Otterbox, Nook, Zune, and even the defunct Palm all bested it. I actually had a hard time believing this, but a spokesperson confirms that I am reading the list correctly — the iPhone simply isn’t on it. That said, the iPhone does appear twice in the fastest-rising list (as the iPhone 4S and the elusive iPhone 5). Also worth noting: Amazon has a very strong showing here. The company has famously (and frustratingly) never disclosed firm Kindle sales, but based on the number of searches it’s got plenty of traction among mainstream users. As does the Kindle Fire — and that name wasn’t even until late September.
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Salesforce Buys Social Performance Platform Rypple; Will Launch ‘Human Capital Management’ Unit Successforce | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | Salesforce.com has just the acquisition of social performance platform Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close early next year, were not disclosed. Rypple, which has raised $13 million in funding, is a web-based social performance management platform that helps managers and employees improve performance. Essentially, Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with a more social and collaborative approach. The software has been compared to a “Zynga for the enterprise,” and allows managers to track projects, guide their team and give kudos to deserving staff for others to see within its online application. The software employs various game mechanics, like badges, which can be custom-built to reflect a company’s own values. And employees can rack up “skills earned,” in a method reminiscent of building up a character in a virtual world or MMORPG, for example. Rypple also a new mobile application that allows managers to give real-time feedback to staff, provide coaching, track goals and publicly recognize colleagues. Founded in 2008, Rypple counts Facebook, Gilt Groupe, and Spotify as users. Salesforce says the acquisition represents the CRM giants entry into the ‘human capital management’ market for the social enterprise. Salesforce.com plans to re-launch Rypple as “Successforce” and create a new human capital management business unit. The new HCM business unit, including Successforce, will be led by John Wookey, salesforce.com’s executive vice president of advanced applications and a former SAP and Oracle alum. Salesforce will also add Rypple to its existing products as well. For example, people will be able to thank colleagues, win badges and provide recognition from within Salesforce Chatter. While human capital management is not necessarily a natural product extension of a CRM business, it’s not a surprising move for Salesforce, which has been aggressively pursuing a social enterprise strategy of late. Human capital management is a huge market for many of the large companies that Salesforce already counts as customers, so from a product and revenue standpoint, “Successforce” could be a hit. |
DumpTruck Is A File Storage System With Roots In Usenet | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | If you’re familiar with , you’ll be well aware that the newsreading platform is, well, not longer about newsreading. In fact, most Usenet providers are, by necessity, experienced data storage providers. That being said, has just announced DumpTruck, a WebDAV file-sharing resource that, in the wrong hands, could end up a SOPA target. The service lets you store data in the cloud. It’s free for holders of “Diamond” Giganews Usenet accounts and costs $99 for a full terabyte of monthly storage. DumpTruck promises anonymous, worry-free storage with, interestingly, no data reduplication. This means DumpTruck won’t compare your files with other files and save only one copy. Your folder is your folder, no matter how full. The service also offers full 256-bit encryption and single provider storage, a must if you’re, well, serious about security? This is an interesting move for Golden Frog, for obvious reasons. Although Usenet is still a popular news service, the real value is what not a lot of people talk about: the file sharing system built into the protocol. Usenet providers could, in the future, face a fairly big backlash and they need to be ready, which leads them to the prospect of secure, inexpensive storage based on servers they already own. The service is live now and you get 5GB free with any Giganews account. |
Sony Tablet S Review: Slick, But Somewhat Slow | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | The Sony Tablet S is actually a pretty hot 9.4-inch slate, and doesn’t look like every other Android tablet out there (thank goodness). On the performance side, however, I found myself frustrated on more than one occasion. The design is everything I’ve been wanting from Android tabs, but unfortunately I just couldn’t ignore the underwhelming responsiveness of the slate. In terms of design, the Sony Tablet S actually has a lot going for it. It looks like it used to be a long slab that’s now been folded in half, making one side thicker and more rounded, with the other coming to a much thinner point. In landscape mode, this is exactly what a tablet should be. The slight angle makes for easier typing and viewing, and with the help of that textured finish on the back (more on that later) it’s comfortable in the hand, too. In portrait, however, the tab gets more hit or miss. If you’re holding it with one hand on the thicker side, it’s actually a much more solid grip than you’d get with an iPad or Galaxy Tab 10.1. If you’ve gripped the thin side, on the other hand, it’s actually really difficult to hang on to not only because its thinner, but because that textured finish doesn’t extend all the way down to the thin side. The tablet comes with the usual ports, some with a solid little plastic covering. I usually hate any sort of covering over ports (save for specifically rugged devices), but since the design of the slate leaves the button in a shallow crevice along the side, I don’t see this covering breaking off unless you leave it unlatched all the time. Underneath the covering you’ll find an microUSB port, as well as an SD card slot (up to 32GB). The microUSB isn’t for charging, however, as the Tablet S has its own dedicated charger that sits along the bottom. In every case that’s a great spot for it, as it never once interrupted me while using the tab plugged in. Unfortunately, just about every surface of this device snatches up your fingerprints like it’s the only thing that matters in this world. The screen is instantly smudgy, and even the textured back panel takes on prints. Since that back panel is also reflective, rather than being a soft touch-type material, once it takes prints it looks much cheaper than it did out of the box. Honeycomb runs well on the Tablet S for the most part. Switching between home screens, opening and closing applications, and multitasking were all a breeze. But once I ventured into the browser, things got really messy. For some reason, the Sony Tablet S loses its Wifi connection too frequently. More than a handful of times per day, I’d say, which is more than I’m comfortable with. Especially when every other device in the house (and trust me, there are plenty) is doing just fine maintaining a connection. I also had trouble the browser. Pinch-to-zoom was wonky, and all scrolling was delayed, at best. I also found a few other weird bugs. The pre-loaded Sony Reader app, for instance, sent me into an unending loop of a “download now” web page, to the Android Market, back to the “download now” page. Sony’s Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited apps work well if you can get them to open (and have a subscription, of course), but only if you can get them to open. I once had to restart the tablet to get them to launch. Other apps, like Sony’s Remote Control (which lets you control almost any device in your house via infrared), work really well. Basically, it’s hit or miss on the software front. The Tablet S really shines during game-play. Everything’s snappy, and I experienced no bugs in any of the Playstation titles I dug into. And as I said earlier, multitasking doesn’t seem to bother the S much. I was able to have up to ten different apps working at once without seeing a noticeable slow-down in performance. The same story’s true of battery life, too. The Sony Tablet S gives a solid eight hours of use, even with the brightness turned all the way up. The Sony Tablet S has a lot going for it in terms of design. I love the folded-over look, and think its much more comfortable during use and in the hand. The 10-inch form factor has always been a tad big for me, but anyone who appreciates the size of an iPad will feel right at home with the Tablet S, as it’s just slightly smaller. It’ll inevitably come down to patience, which is what you’ll need a bit of to deal with surfing the web on this thing. The constant loss of a connection, the janky scrolling and zooming functions, and the overall bugginess of certain Sony apps is frustrating to say the least, and could use a good old software update.
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Quora Now “Charges” You To Show Questions To Topic Followers | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | You know what I’m into? ‘s . Because listen, and could have chosen to devote their youth to anything on earth and they have chosen to build a database of . Valid. Also, last night I was searching the Internet for info for a story on why SF cab drivers are so averse to using credit cards, and wondered if there was a Quora thread about it … Lo and behold . Rad. Imagine being able to do this with any inquiry on earth, people? I debated sending the entire team a note of thanks, but instead am writing it here. (Hey guys, whats up?) So now, in addition to getting to “pay” people to answer questions, every time you ask a question on Quora, the site to spend 50 credits to “add topics.” The carrot is that you get to show your question to all topic followers. The stick? Well, without being or something it might be hard to get people to look at your questions, unless you cough up some credits. Eh, hem. Also, the topics are now aligned on the right rail. This is obviously one way Quora can get users to think twice about asking questions that don’t add value (for example) while keeping the quality of the site up. Also, I guess they’re really serious about this credits thing and are trying to find new ways to implement the structure. Fine. For those of you who plan on being Quora cheapskates; Users can still see non-paid for questions if they’re still following people who ask the question or follow the question. On a somewhat hopeful note, if a question now becomes followed enough, it automatically gets added to a topic. Amen. |
Backed By Angels, Antengo Takes On Craigslist With Realtime Mobile Classifieds | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | You may not have heard of it, but San Diego has its very own tech incubator, called , a product of the non-profit industry association, which provides startups with access to capital, talent and business development. One of the companies we wrote about recently, , has just been accepted into the incubator. And, today, another one of EvoNexus’ startups is officially announcing itself to the world with a platform relaunch, new iOS apps, and a bit of funding to boot. Joining and a host of others, is launching a redesigned mobile marketplace for posting and discovering realtime, local classifieds. ( .) While this may not initially set your hair on fire, classified listings a la Craigslist are resources we turn to virtually every day, to find tickets to local events, sell an unused gadget, or find freelance work. So, simply put, Antengo wants to make it really easy for you to do just that on your mobile device, allowing you and your local communities to post, browse, and answer listings in realtime. How does it work? It’s pretty simple. Once you’ve downloaded the free app, new users will hit the splash page, where they can browse listings immediately without logging in, using simple keyword searches. Antengo then populates the splash page with realtime results. For users who want to post a listing, Antengo requires you to sign up (Facebook and Twitter authentication are available), at which point you can browse through categories, find the appropriate one, take a picture of your item, enter cost, your address (or use “send my location” functionality), and post — listings take only a few short minutes to create and are immediately posted to the marketplace. Both buyers and sellers can apply filters, search by categories, and message each other directly or make calls in-app, the former of which results in simple push notifications. Listings are searchable based on the time published, proximity to you (location), descriptions, or by photo — because, let’s be honest, you never buy something from a local listing without browsing through a few photos first. Antengo is going after a pared-down design that makes buying, selling, and browsing classified listings simple and easy-to-use while you’re on the go. The design is focused around providing users with specific and immediate needs — selling last-minute concert tickets, a place to live, or someone to carpool with — an easy way to connect with local users looking for the same items or services. According to , classifieds are one of the fastest growing mobile categories, second only to social media. So, it’s clear that there is plenty of demand for a well-designed secondary market for mobile shopping. Obviously, Craigslist has a well-reviewed app for iOS as well, and with a well-established name, it’s an uphill battle for startups looking to compete toe-to-toe with the larger players, eBay included. However, while Craigslist has a few not-so-shabby third-party apps, its apps still mostly rely on web data, and they haven’t yet killed the mobile user experience. So, where Antengo hopes to offer differentiation with the bigs is through offering a platform model that can incorporate mobile classifieds into other offerings, including events. Antengo has been working with events producers to power ad hoc “live event marketplaces”, which provide attendees with a channel to find vendors selling food and merchandise at specific GPS locations, as well as public restrooms, parking, and special offers from the producers (like ticket give-aways, for example). Antengo can also create realtime mobile marketplace functionality at events in the P2P sense as well, providing attendees with the ability to broadcast requests and offers to others in the crowd, creating a level of interactivity and serving as a utility to help event-goers save money through carpooling, etc. Tech events are another likely candidate for this kind of mobile marketplace, as Antengo Co-founder and CEO Marcus Wandell tells us that they have a commitment from Seattle’s largest tech conference as well as conferences in San Diego. This is where Antengo eventually hopes to make its money — by capturing mobile payments at large events or grocery stores, where users might be able to pay using the app once it’s linked to their mobile bank accounts. For now, Antengo isn’t currently monetizing its marketplace, but they will eventually enable users to make purchases in-app. Beyond Craigslist, Antengo also has to deal with at least nominal competition from apps like , an awesome service that lets users hire people to do just about anything, whether it be to bring them a cup of coffee, or track down some quality Giants tickets, or find a private dancer for hire. Zaarly is a bit like the mobile Task Rabbit. Antengo has a bit of a different use case, and now it also has $415K in funding from institutional and angel investors, including a “a GM at MSNBC Interactive, a former M&A exec at Microsoft & Vodafone, and the CTO of ViaSat”, to name a few. With a location-aware, GPS and realtime messaging with push-enabled app, Antengo is hoping to take on Craigslist and others in the mobile classifieds space. The app still has a ways to go, but the design looks great, and I have to say that posting an add is frictionless, nearly instantaneous, and thus pretty easy to do. At the very least, that right there puts Antengo off to a good start. What do you think? http://vimeo.com/32094871 |
The Louvre Scores 5,000 Nintendo 3DSs To Spice Up Their Audio Tours | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | What’s a museum to do when they want to offer a richer art experience for guests but no one wants to use an audioguide? Why, give Nintendo a ring of course. Nintendo will be providing this March as part of the museum’s push to appeal to a more modern audience. The Louvre is clearly gunning for appeal with the touchscreen generation, as they have also noted that an iOS app is in the works. In the meantime, guests who rent a 3DS will be able to load up special itineraries and listen to guided audio-tours in seven languages. On top of that, Nintendo has also produced original content for the Louvre, though it’s still unclear what they have in mind. While we’ll certainly see some educational software trickle on to the devices, I’m still holding out hope for an elaborate RPG that takes players gallivanting up and down the Richilieu Wing. Sadly, the Louvre retains editorial control over what goes on their 3DSs, so we can probably kiss that epic boss battle atop the Pyramid goodbye. With the upgrade, the Louvre’s security may have yet another thing to deal with. The museum’s previously audioguides were clunky, single-service devices emblazoned with KoreanAir logos — not exactly the kind of thing most people would be tempted to walk off with. A shiny new 3DS is an entirely different story, and I’m curious to see how many of these things the Louvre’s staff is going to be able to hold on to. And for those of you wondering, this isn’t the first time that Nintendo and the Louvre have crossed paths: that distinction belongs to an old (and lousy) episode of |
Gowalla Went For $3M In Facebook Shares, And Many Investors Were Cool With That | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | What the headline says, basically, according to two sources. That and multiple sources are telling me that a majority of investors were cool with the deal being entirely in Facebook shares, because those are likely to be more profitable moving forward — as Facebook approaches IPO. Other sources are saying that the sentiment isn’t a reflection of the majority of Gowalla investors ( wrote an ) and that the deal was done with full board backing. The team, many of which will not be moving on to Facebook, did not get a significantly better deal than investors I’m hearing. During an interview at joint Gowalla investors and went on the record saying that they were happy about the Gowalla deal, especially Parker, who already owns a lot of Facebook shares, obviously. “We’re both happy,” said Pishevar. “It’s a great outcome for Josh, as he was in a difficult and very competitive space against Foursquare.” While he wouldn’t comment on any deal specifics, Gowalla founder told me in an email, “I am truly excited about moving forward. We’re going to build some awesome things in the days ahead.” And we will likely be covering them. Woot. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxNhc64b_po&t=16m0s&feature=player_embedded&w=630] |
The Real Reason Twitter Employees Are Leaving—So They Can Sell Their Stock | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | People are —executives, engineers—this happens at large companies with more than 700 employees. , as does every other tech blog. Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider put forth a based on a single interview with a former employee that range from the engineers not being rockstar enough to jealousy over a party in Las Vegas to which only some employees were invited. But there is a much simpler explanation. Twitter is very restrictive about when employees can sell shares. It just completed an $800 million financing round in September, selling up to 20 percent of their shares. While that did serve as a release valve, the offering is over. If you are a longtime Twitter employee sitting on a bunch of fully-vested shares that you want to unload, your best bet might be to quit and try to sell them on private secondary markets. Twitter has less control over what former employees can do with their shares, although it frowns on shares trading on the secondary markets (instead, in the past, Twitter has directed these sales to run by Silicon Valley investors like Chris Sacca and Ron Conway). Of course, everyone’s situation is different. Employees who believe that Twitter’s best days are still ahead of it might prefer sticking around and holding onto their shares. Another contributing factor to the departures is that there’s been a changing of the guard, with founder earlier this year to take over product development and other functions, such as marketing. Meanwhile the other founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, left to . The aftermath of that transition may still be playing out. Overall, though, while some of the exits may be high-profile, Twitter is not suffering from a mass exodus. After all, it is still hiring and increasing headcount. |
WellnessFX Grabs $4 Million From Javelin, Floodgate To Give You A Personal Health Team | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | Back in September, WellnessFX launched a platform that is designed to help people take charge of their health. And today, the startup is adding to its own financial health, announcing that it has raised $4 million in series B funding. The round was led by a new investor, , with participation from the startup’s existing investors, and . Alex Gurevich a Principal at Javelin Venture Partners will join the startup as a board observer, while Javelin Managing Director Jed Katz will join the board directly. The investors join a board which already includes of Floodgate and Voyager Capital Managing Director Curtis Feeney. ( author is also a strategic advisor.) WellnessFX as health-focused startups that have recently raised funding from some big name investors, showing that investor interest in robust digital healthcare solutions continues. For those unfamiliar, WellnessFX is designing a platform that offers users a preventative, diagnostic tool to manage their health, rather than a solution that only treats health problems as they arise. Just as GAIN gives its users access to professional personal trainers, Wellness FX’s platform offers consumers access to a community of expert practitioners to help them create (and navigate) personalized care and diagnoses. Once WellnessFX has helped you bring in your health data, it allows users to share this aggregated health data with a network of expert health practitioners. That digital experience can then be augmented by online consultations that can be set up at the convenience of users — both in the evening and on weekends — through which users will receive a set of personalized recommendations and simple, actionable insights intended to help you stay health and reach your health goals. Basically, WellnessFX is trying to give you access to your own personal health team that will help see to your longevity and avoid waiting rooms and expensive treatments. To reach this goal, the startup wants its users to have access not only to diagnostics, but to nutritional research, genetic data, integrated therapies, as well as charts and graphs that allow them to track lab results, genetic proclivities, etc. — data that will help paint a more accurate, comprehensive picture of your current health. Currently, the platform is only available to Californians, but with its new funding in the bank, WellnessFX will be “aggressively expanding” into a number of other states in early January, including Oregon and Washington. WellnessFX ain’t cheap, though, starting at $650 a year for one “baseline assessment” (to help set your personalized goals), which includes 50 diagnostics and one consultation. The price scales from there. Of course, WellnessFX is hoping that this is a trivial price to put on preventing those larger, more expensive health problems down the road. For more, . |
PsychicsLive.com Sees Video Chat As The Future Of The $2 Billion Psychic Market | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | Whether you believe in psychic consultation or not, the industry pulls in $2 billion a year and is primed for disruption. Pay-per-minute phone calling still dominates the market despite being around for decades. Launching today, is a new psychic consultation video chat site designed to give people a face-to-face connection with spiritual advisors. By taking a cut of the $2 to $6 a minute users pay to learn the future or just receive on-demand therapy, PsychicsLive.com could quickly turn profitable. Miss Cleo’s slogan “Call me now!” may soon give way to a generation of psychics asking you to Skype them. Psychic video chat has several advantages over voice calling for both users and PsychicsLive.com. Instead of blindly being matched with “psychics”, users can select who they think matches them. Questions are asked and answered live, but then users can replay their sessions later. The video aspect could also inspire feelings of confidence and intimacy for users, as they know their consultant is actually engaged with them and not doing something else. For PsychicsLive.com, the video model scales easily. It doesn’t have to pay for expensive phone systems, carrier charges, or call centers. Consultants simply sign up, use their own computers and webcams, and accept clients whenever they’re available. PsychicsLive.com vets the consultants, and operations manager Brad Estes tell me “We’ve kicked people off that didn’t meet our standards.” Industries typically thought of illegitimate can sometimes lag behind modern technology. Those willing to assess them objectively from a business stand point can find great opportunity behind a sketchy public perception or a model that seems crazy. Remember, most people wouldn’t have predicted virtual goods could become a . |
Fast Society Deadpools Its Messaging App, Preps Cameo For Launch | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | it will shut down its group messaging app and instead devote resources to its new app that will launch next month. Group messaging seemed like such a big opportunity a few years ago. But that was before Apple launched , , and Facebook . Suddenly, there wasn’t much to add by being a mobile group texting app without OS or other platform integration. Fast Society will apply its existing team and investors towards offering unique value by helping people share moments rather than just messages. After 9am EST on Wednesday, December 14th, all Fast Company apps will cease to function and messages won’t be delivered. Users should save any photos or other content as it will all be deleted then as well. Don’t take this as a sign of defeat, though. Fast Society’s co-founder Matthew Rosenberg tells me “It seemed dumb to just quit. We’re not quitters, we’re New Yorkers. We’re used to hustling every single day. It’s unfortunate to have launched something into a crowded space, but the benefit is we saw a lot of people doing it one way and we’re passionate about doing it a different way.” One area where I see potential in mobile sharing is unifying all the different types of content people usually publish separately. I’d love an app that lets me accumulate multiple photos, videos, status updates, location, friend tags and more behind a single shared link, creating a sort of collage of a moment. This seems to match with Rosenberg and Fast Society’s mission with Cameo. “We’re trying to capture experience and be part of fun events. Group messaging became the lowest common denominator.” |
Kiersten Hollars Moves From Aol Comm VP To Andreessen Partner | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | PR guru is moving from AOL VP to Partner at , we’ve confirmed with Andreessen. From her former boss ; “Kiersten is a rock star… ran all of PR and marketing for the entire mobile, apps & commerce team. [She was] a loved manager of the team and cultural ambassador of what the AOL culture *should* be!!” Come January, Hollars will be reporting to Andreessen Head of Marketing Margit Wennmachers, who has been recruiting her for an entire year to join her now four person team. Her formal title will be “PR Partner” at A16z. Hollars has gone from Outcast to Yahoo to Digg to AOL, executive Brad Garlinghouse in his career post-Yahoo. Garlinghouse notably exited AOL recently and is working on something new and undisclosed. For the first time in awhile, Hollars obviously will not be joining him. “She has great experience and is just a gem of a person,” Wennmachers explained on why she brought Hollars on to the 30 person Andreessen team, telling me that her primary duties will include scaling the marketing and PR efforts for all 80 companies in the A16Z portfolio. “She’s going to be plenty busy,” Wennmachers said.
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WordPress 3.3 Released To The Masses; Includes iPad Optimization, Tumblr Importer And More | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | After 14 million downloads of , WordPress 3.3 is being today. Codenamed “Sonny” in honor of the jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, WordPress 3.3 is available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard. WordPress, which had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, has a number of new features and bells and whistles, including UI improvements. The new version includes a revamped welcome screen and improved contextual help UI. The media uploader has also been streamlined with a drag-and-drop image uploader. A new menu feature allows users to hover over menus for navigation. There is a new toolbar, and improved co-editing notifications and support. And WordPress 3.3 now comes with a Tumblr importer and is optimized for the iPad. For developers, WordPress has also released a new editor API, new jQuery version, better ways to hook into the help screens, improvements on the Codex and more. |
Enterprise Software Company Jive Prices IPO At $12 Per Share, Valued At Over $600M | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | Social enterprise giant Jive has just priced its IPO, which is set to debut on the public markets tomorrow morning. Jive priced at this evening, above the expected range. The company originally set the range between At $12 per share, Jive is valued at over $600 million. Jive, which will list on the Nasdaq under the symbol ‘JIVE,’ filed its . Jive had previously raised $57 million in funding, but in October existing investors Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins $40 million more in the company. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company sold 13.4 million shares, up from the 11.7 million shares originally planned. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive’s software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more. For the year ended December 31, 2010 and for the nine months ended September 30, 2011, Jive’s total revenues were $46.3 million and $54.8 million, respectively. The company saw net losses of $27.6 million and $38.1 million for the years ended December 31, 2010, and for the nine months ended September 30, 2011, respectively. Next up on the IPO train is Zynga, which is expected to begin trading at the end of this week. |
Review: Fujifilm X10 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | A stylish and fun alternative to the likes of the Canon G12 and Nikon P7000. It’s not the quickest on the draw, and the build quality is obviously a step down from its elder brother, the , but image quality is good and operation is straightforward. It’s got a great lens and after a little familiarization could be quite versatile. While it compares decently with the competition, it’s far from a knockout, and if you’re looking for a compact enthusiast camera you would do well to look closely at the other options before pulling the trigger. The X10 is, in a way, the X100 minus everything that made that camera good. The X100 had an excellent 20mm f/2 lens, a nice big APS-C sensor, a great metal body, and of course the unique hybrid viewfinder. The X10 has none of those things, sharing mainly the look and feel of the X series. However, it also adds a very respectable zoom lens, fixes some control problems, and really improves the menu system, which was pretty bad. It’s actually a more practical camera for most people. You turn on the camera by twisting the lens counter-clockwise to its 28mm position. When the camera is off, the lens is retracted all the way into its case, but whenever the camera is on, the lens protrudes. This is bad news for people who like to keep their camera on standby and ready to shoot: having the lens sticking out all the time makes for a less portable package. The zoom is a 28-112mm by 35mm standards. It’s extremely quick and satisfying to use, much better than electronically-controlled zooms. At the wide end it’s F/2, and that goes down to F/2.8 at the long end, which really is quite a decent amount of light to be gathering at that level of telephoto. Attached to the zoom is the viewfinder, which zooms along with it. It gives the illusion of operating a zoom lens on an SLR body, which will probably be a comfort to people who are used to that (like myself). The lens barrel actually protrudes into the viewfinder window at wide angles, which ends up more quaint than problematic. There are unfortunately no displays inside the viewfinder, so if you want to adjust your aperture or what have you, you’ll have to look at the LCD. There is also no proximity sensor that turns off the LCD when you’re using the viewfinder, which is kind of an odd omission. On the topic of the viewfinder, it is a little narrower than the actual image, which is of course better than being wider. In the following two shots, I framed the viewfinder with its corners at the edges of the windows (in the first shot) and its sides at the side of the chest (second shot). I’ve outlined roughly what the viewfinder covered: So it’s not exact, but it’s a fair approximation and you shouldn’t feel any anxiety using it as long as you feel confident in the autofocus. The body of the camera is similar to the X100, but looks and feels quite a bit cheaper. I thought the black-on-black color would look stealthy and cool, but because everything on the camera is black, it just makes it look plain. Not that this is a serious objection to owning the camera, but it is a little disappointing that it’s not as beautifully designed as the X100. Don’t get me wrong: it’s certainly more interesting-looking than the competition, if you ask me. I wish they’d spent more time on the finish, though. On the back the layout is similar to the X100, but the X1’s jog wheel/d-pad just feels better. Maybe I’m imagining things, but it just seems more stable and responsive. There is now a dedicated white balance button, which some will enjoy. On top there are two dials: mode and exposure bias. More direct manual controls like shutter and aperture would be nice, but really it doesn’t make sense unless you can have them all, so mode and bias are just fine. In manual mode you have instant access to pretty much everything you need, even if it’s not on a dedicated dial. Power shooters should be able to set up custom shots in just a few seconds once they’ve gotten the hang of things. The menus for things like white balance and ISO are only one level deep, so there’s not a lot of navigation to do unless you’re fiddling with settings. Handling likely depends on your hands and what you’re used to – like any camera. The X10 is definitely a two-hander, though it has gained a thumbgrip that makes one-handing while zooming easier. I have medium to large hands and my thumb tended to rest on the rear dial instead of the thumbgrip if I didn’t steady it with my other hand. Focusing is kind of a pain. I mean, if you’re not in a hurry, there’s no problem: I found the autofocus to be accurate and obedient. You can switch between center-point and matrix autofocus and manual using a little switch. But I wouldn’t say it was quick, though I’ve seen some report it as such. It be quick, certainly, but it’s not reliably so, and like many others, it tends to over or under-shoot the mark and then reverse and try again. It’s not a flaw unique to the X10, but I still wouldn’t feel confident shooting any kind of action with this camera. On the other hand, the macro mode is very nice: The manual focus-by-wire is one of my least favorite parts of the camera. Lacking a focus ring on the lens itself, you must use the jog dial on the back. This can be either quick or exact, but not both. If you spin it fast, you can get to either end of the focus pretty easily, but getting the focus exactly right is a bit fiddly, I found. The camera, thoughtfully, automatically zooms into the center of the frame so you can check your focus exactly. There is a very cute pop-up flash with its own designated pop-up button, which I love. The button, not the flash. The flash is pretty standard point-and-shoot stuff and you’ll want to use the hot shoe if you’re doing any real flash photography. The LCD and info display are all right, but I feel like they could have streamlined the different modes a bit. Some of the X10’s competitors also have a higher-resolution display, something that really should have been included on an enthusiast camera like this one. The digital level is handy for people like me who must have everything perfectly perpendicular: For serious comparisons of similar cameras, I recommend going to a dedicated photography site like DPReview, where they have a controlled test setup. For my part, I just kept it around and used it as I normally would, getting some pictures in and out of doors in a few lighting situations. Click on these to get the full-size images, which you can inspect for noise and such. Be sure to open in a new tab to avoid triggering the windowed viewer.
Yes, I know the tree is sideways. I didn’t want to reorientate it and have to reprocess the JPEG. And note that the house picture and the dog on the porch were taken from the same vantage point with the widest and longest zoom respectively. The lens is nice and fast, so you won’t need to push the ISO too much. I found that at 800 it was perfectly fine and 1600 was acceptable. Beyond that I started seeing some very noticeable luma patterns, though I didn’t see much in the way of colored noise. As for lens quality: only some detailed analysis will find the limits and best practices, but I found it just fine for normal shooting, with no vignetting at wide angles and no more than the usual chromatic aberration and fringing. Movie quality is… fine, I suppose. It’s 1080p30 and looks good, but you can’t adjust exposure or focus manually while it’s recording. DSLRs at this price offer a better video experience, manual focus, and more options for formats and framerates. While people interested in getting into serious photography would do better to pick up a DSLR and a nice starter prime lens, the X10 is a charming and fairly powerful camera that anyone, photographer or not, will have fun using. A larger sensor for low-light sensitivity would have been welcome, and manual focus is still not as good as the rest of the camera, but overall it’s both practical and lovable. It’s a camera with personality. Compared with high-end point and shoots it is more complicated and more suited for specialized photography, and compared with its larger brethren, the G12 and P7000 among others, it falls behind in some features (LCD, the sensors are in fact slightly smaller) but excels in others (the lens and zooming viewfinder). As always, hold all your options in your hand before putting down the money. But if you’re looking to spend more than $500 but less than $800 on a camera, the X10 should definitely be one you check out. |
How Zynga Won The Facebook Platform In 2009 | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | Zynga is about to go public at a valuation that , so the press is busy looking back at how the social gaming leader came to be this successful. There’s lots of discussion around its , its with Facebook, its , its currently — or basically everything, if you read this by my former colleague Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat. But here’s a closer look at how the company came to dominate social gaming on Facebook in 2009, based on conversations I’ve had with Zynga employees and rival developers over the years. It’s a case study in how startups can win markets by hitting them at the right time and place. On January 1 of 2009, a year and a half after its founding, Zynga had grown its user base to a respectable 23.9 million monthly active users. That was good for the Facebook platform at the time, but nothing mind-blowing compared to other social gaming developers. But by the same time next year, it had grown by ten times that number to 240 million, according to , and was larger than all of its social gaming competitors combined. How? Yes, it had built up an experienced team, and an infrastructure system designed to scale quickly with growth. But it had also figured out the types of games that users wanted — especially casual simulations. And it knew how to bet big on those. One key way was Facebook’s own changes. In early 2009, Twitter has hitting its first big hype cycle, and Facebook was concerned. So it decided to move from an algorithmic news feed of stories to a of information that focused on status updates — a bid to grab the attention around the micro-blogging form factor. Zynga reacted by designing its communication channels for real-time. The result was users seeing all sorts of stories around games (“spam,” as many of us called it). When Zynga launched its formative simulation hit, FarmVille, that June, it had already refined how to reach users in this new environment. That wasn’t all the company was doing. It had also discovered that it could get a return on its investments in Facebook ads when many other developers were still aiming for purely organic growth. During the first part of the year, it began increasing its spending for games — and kicked that tactic up a notch when FarmVille launched. These ads weren’t so much used to seed users, but to help accelerate growth once a game was already growing. On top of all of the other things it had going for it, plus the aggressive optimization for the new platform, and the heavy ad spending, it was able to roll out a line of other simulation hits over the rest of the year (Café World, PetVille, FishVille). And with each new hit, Zynga was also able to cross-promote users from existing games. By the late fall of that year, ads were becoming more expensive as other developers (and other advertisers) began buying them more. And Facebook re-overhauled its platform, going back to an algorithmic news feed and cutting back on other viral features like notifications. Each Zynga launch that fall was smaller than the previous one. AppData began tracking daily active users that June, which provides us with a more detailed view of just . The company started with around 10 million DAU before FarmVille, and then plateaued at nearly 70 million at the end of the year (see graph above). Since 2009, Zynga has come out with other hits, like FrontierVille, CityVille and newer ones like CastleVille. But it’s never seen the same scale of growth or the same number of consecutive successful launches. Today, AppData shows the company with nearly 50 million DAU and 220 million MAU. Prospective investors shouldn’t get all depressed, though. What Zynga has done is refine everything it has had to offer better products and make more money. It hired more and more veteran game designers to build higher-quality games, which has helped it maintain older titles for years and launch better new ones. And it has gotten . The company has steadily grown revenue over the years, in spite of factors like increasing ad costs and the addition of Facebook’s 30% cut from Credits, it has in S-1 filing amendments. Along with its still-dominant position on Facebook, its increasingly successful moves into mobile gaming, and its massive spending power — and all of the other factors that have made it successful to date — Zynga has an interesting future. It still has the . It’s also gaining of new users on mobile, and it has big ideas for where things might go. In , it says it expects social network users to double from one to two billion, with web social gaming growing to a market size of 900 million. So maybe it’ll have another 2009. |
Gillmor Gang 12.12.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Laura Fitton, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — questioned the sanity of several industry players in a lively @scobleizer-shortened appearance. Robert had just enough time to reiterate his distaste for the new Twitter UI and Eric Schmidt’s predictions of Android and Google TV success. But it was George Colony’s LeWeb prognostications on the state of the Web, Social, and Enterprise that got the juices flowing at the dawn of the new week. Laura, or @pistachio as she favors, sees most of Colony’s pitch as Theatre of the Obvious, while @jtaschek and @kevinmarks sneered at the idea that the Web was going anywhere any time soon. @stevegillmor thought what he usually thinks, and enjoyed it. |
“I Work For The Internet” — Show Congress How You Really Feel About SOPA | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | Congress is moving ahead with trying to pass SOPA — the so-called “Stop Online Piracy Act” that includes that would stifle free expression as we know it. Here’s a simple action you can take to tell everyone how you feel about that. A site called “ ” lets you upload a photo and first name, and what you do for a living. It showcases photos of other people who have done the same. It’s simple, and heartwarming, and a nice reminder for politicians about whose side they should really be on. The site, apparently launched earlier today, was created by , a advocacy group that was behind the hit “ ” site. You might not change any votes by sharing your photo, but you’ll get some comfort out of participating if you’ve been feeling that the bill has been incorrectly portrayed as “media companies versus tech companies,” like I have. Browsing the site will also give you a visceral sense of who all those other random internet users are out there. SOPA goes up for a House committee vote later this week, and this site won’t tell them how you feel directly. So be sure to contact your local representatives if you haven’t already (and sign ). You can also check out our previous coverage of the bill . And for further reading, be sure to check out a couple great articles from TechDirt about the to the bill, and its . |
One More Day To Nominate Startups For The Crunchies! | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | The are just around the corner (January 31, to be exact). for Silicon Valley’s co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch end tomorrow at midnight PT. So this is your last chance to tell us who is worthy of a Crunchie for , Best Mobile App, Best Design, Best Technology Achievement, or any of the other categories. There are 20 categories in all. More than 280,000 nominations are already in, but the more votes the better. And if you think a startup or product really deserves recognition, you can campaign on its behalf by sharing your nominations on Twitter or Facebook. Vote more than once.. Nominate your own startup (everyone else does). We’ll tally all the votes, put it through our patented anti-gaming filters, and announce the finalists in early January when you can vote again for the final winners. (Yup, it’s a two-stage process, folks. Stay with me). now. I am particularly interested to see who gets nominated for best Angel investor this year. It seems like all the usual suspects are now full-fledged VCs (just don’t cal them that to their face). Who do you think is the best angel of 2011? Okay, then who is the best VC? And are those two the same person? Tuesday, January 31, 2012
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA 7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire. Tickets will be released in batches starting early December. Davies Symphony Hall can seat over 2,000 attendees, double the size of previous Crunchies Awards. open: Friday, November 18th
Nominations close: Tuesday, December 13th at 11:59pm PST
Finalists announced: early January Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen, if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities during the ceremony or after-party, please contact Jeanne Logozzo at jeanne [at] techcrunch [dot] com. For press credentials, please fill out this and confirmations will be sent separately via email. |
Kickstarter: Meet Eyeboard, A Low-Cost Open Source Eye Tracker | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | I’m a little ashamed to admit that I spent the tail end of my high school career goofing off and trying desperately to appear cooler than I actually was. Fortunately for our future, people like Luis Cruz exist: this recent high school graduate designed , a low-cost, open source eye tracking solution meant to make communication easier for disabled users. While many prominent eye-tracking solutions use cameras to monitor the movement of a user’s eyes, the additional hardware means that they can be cost-prohibitive for the people who could use them the most. Cruz’s Eyeboard takes a different approach: users wear a pair of glasses with a set of electrodes mounted inside, and an external board (powered by an ATMega328 microcontroller) measures changes in the resting potential of the retina that correspond to their movement. It isn’t the most precise way to go, but the simplicity of Cruz’s design means that the Eyeboard is far less expensive than more accurate alternatives. The board runs into a PC, where the Eyeboard software (which is available in both Windows and Linux flavors) then interprets those voltage readings as movement inputs. The end result? An inexpensive way for users type out messages on-screen with just their eyes. And like I mentioned, Cruz’s project is entirely open source so people with specific use cases can feel free to tinker with his code as needed. Eyeboard prototypes have been making the rounds for a few months now — his work was highlighted — but now comes the tricky part of actually producing Eyeboard kits en masse. For that, Cruz has turned to Kickstarter for support: while his early prototypes cost around $200 to $300 to build, interested investors can lock in a first-run Eyeboard kit for $95. It’s a niche product for sure, but with any luck, these things will start seeing use in underfunded schools and developing countries before long. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zObidmxnj5Y&w=640&h=360] |
Archimedes Labs Launches As An Incubator For Mobile Startups | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | , a new incubator and investment vehicle focused on mobile, is today. The incubator is co-founded by , a serial entrepreneur and a co-founder of TechCrunch. Teare previously co-founded RealNames Corporation, and The EasyNet Group. Teare explains that the thesis for the incubator is based on the premise that the future architecture of software and application is moving to an app and cloud-centric world where mobile is central and the web becomes less and less important. Archimedes Labs will be focused on investing, incubating and accelerating startups that are trying to exploit the shift in gravity from web to mobile, he says. The fund, which has under $1 million in management, will incubate one or two ideas, invest in startups at the seed level, and accelerate the development of startups as well. One of these ideas is Teare adds that the Betaworks-like incubator evolved from , an investment vehicle created by TechCrunch founder and Teare in 2005. The managing entity in charge of Archimedes has a number of partners including Teare, (a former senior executive at Stratacom, Cisco SVP; and CEO at Applied Micro); Jay Borenstein (former CEO at Integrated Appliance and mentor at StartX, the Stanford Incubator); (a founder at Lending Club); ; Matt Kaufman and Bess Ho. In 2011, Archimedes has incubated just.me, entered into an acceleration agreement as a co-founder at stealthy startup Blurtt and invested in Quixey, Incident Technologies and Broomstick Productions. And Teare says we can expect more in 2012. |
NSFW: When Good Search Engine Placement Goes Bad | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | It’s been nearly two decades since the launch of the Internet’s , and search engine placement is still king. Own the relevant terms for your industry, and you’ll pretty much drown in traffic. Great search engine placement isn’t a good thing, though… especially when your user created content comes into play. Today’s example: Amazon’s user-created lists. TC Reader Sean B. was surfin’ the Tubes in search of the same thing most of us go looking for around this time of year: gift ideas. He needed something for his dad. Easy enough, right? A search for turns up well over 100 million results — the category is so crowded that even a dozen pages back, the results are still relevant. Nearly every retailer has a gift section tailored specifically for Pops, so the odds that anything nefarious will boil their way to the top are incredibly low. The twist: Sean’s dad is blind. Changing the search to — as one would likely do in Sean’s situation — cuts the number of results drastically. The count dips from 100+ million to less than 2 million. Gone are the results from Brookstone and ThinkGeek, with the results going irrelevant after just a page or two. But wait, what’s this? The result is ? Perfect! Alas, Amazon doesn’t do the greatest job clarifying that not the ones making these recommendations… and, well, the recommendations aren’t exactly the greatest, either. It starts out well enough.. Large Print Adress Book. Great! Very thoughtful. A rolling handcart, for keeping important things nearby? Nice! I wouldn’t have thought of that! But then things get a strange… A book called “2002 Days & Nights Of Sex”? … Erm. Sure, why not. Many legally blind people can still read with glasses or other assistive devices, and, well, come on: 2002 Days Nights Of Sex? In one book? Kind of a tangential pick, but what a bargain! Another book. “The Penis Guide: An Owner’s Manual For Use, Maintenance, and Repair”… uhh. Wait. What? A talking alarm clock? Alright! We’re back on track! Lets just skim the list a bit.. … … … I’m going to ahead and skip some of the items on the list, but to go all spoiler-alert for a second: the list reaches its absurdity climax somewhere around #15 (the Euro Scooter) and #27 (the powered handsaw.) That’s not to say that visually impaired folks want a powered hand saw — but really, that’s probably a purchasing decision they should make on their own. Needless to say, this list is someone’s not-so-subtle flexing of their troll muscle — and yet, there it sits, leading the results on what is presumably a moderately common search. And therein lies the moral of the story: awesome search engine placement + user-created content = especially risky business. While you and I understand that lists like this are user created, we live in a world where a huge chunk of the population still Googles for “Facebook login” and blasts their password into the first text box they see — to that bit of the populace, this is saying your visually impaired Meemaw would love an archery kit, a book on speed reading, or a box of cactuses. If anyone has any recommendations on thoughtful gifts for blind friends/family members, feel free to drop them in the comments below for anyone who might wander in here from Google. |
News Aggregator Thoora Shuts Down After Taking 2 Years To Launch | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | Just 3 months after its public launch following 2 years of private beta, content discovery engine that it will shut down. Thoora’s website, Android tablet app, WordPress plugin, and all user data will be blinked out of existence on December 15th. Its failure to get a working smartphone app out the door allowed services like and sites like to swoop in and solve the information overload problem more beautifully and efficiently. The shuttering should serve as a lesson to entrepreneurs: you can’t spend forever perfecting your product. Thoora allowed users to view the top content about selected topics aggregated from across the web. Users could also explore topics set up by the community such as “US Economy”, “Cybersecurity”, or “Wine”. The design was dry and unintuitive, though, and the content surfaced was often too old or not relevant enough. Thoora is only giving users 4 days to manually bookmarks their on-site favorites, and there are no tools to assist in exporting or converting user data. When about why it took two years to publicly launch in September, it said the delay was caused by an “an explosion of social media and content since 2009 and Thoora was working on integrating this into the application.” Sure, aggregating Instagram, Tumblr, and other channels was important, but that should have been happening once the product was out the door. There’ll always be one more “essential” feature to add, but first and good beats last and great. Orphaned Thoora users won’t have to look far for a replacement, though. , , , and many others are all tackling cross-vertical news aggregation. |
BBC launches BBC iPlayer app for iPhone/Touch and 3G mobile streaming | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 12 | The BBC has just released a BBC iPlayer app for Apple iPhone and iPod touch ( ), and introduced 3G streaming across all mobile networks. The mobile app is a big improvement on the mobile web app, which we’ve had to content with, offering better features. With ‘Live Channel Hopping’, users can switch between live channels as like on their TV, and live radio. Later in the week, 3G streaming will also become available on a range of BBC iPlayer mobile web devices. Key features of the new BBC iPlayer app: – Live TV and radio with easy channel switching – 3G streaming across all mobile networks – Background listening – Improved playback with greater resilience to network congestion – Improved user experience with a simple and intuitive design Previously there were apps for Apple iPad (1.5 million installs) and Android devices (1.2 million istalls) since launch in February 2011. |
null | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 15 | null |
College Tips By Google: You’ll Fail Without These 16 Google Products | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Without Google, no one ever graduated college. At least that’s the message of “ “. It’s a new site where Google shamelessly suggests its products as the answer to all the problems facing today’s students. Follow these tips, and you’ll become a healthy, productive cog in Google’s advertising machine. Yes, you could follow the official tips and collaborate on a resume through Docs or practice a presentation on Hangouts. But let’s face it. The people who built these products probably didn’t have a typical college experience. Here’s a list of the 16 products Google suggests and how I think they’re actually used by college students: |
Facebook, Google, Apple And Rackspace Rated Best Places To Work in 2012 | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | a jobs and career community where employees can anonymously rate companies and CEOs, has just released its fourth annual Employees’ Choice Awards, listing the top 50 “Best Places to Work,” based on surveys collected from U.S. employees in 2011. The top five Best Places to Work, according to employees, are: Bain & Company, McKinsey & Company, Facebook, MITRE, and Google. Looking at just the tech sector, the 2012 best places to work in technology are Facebook, MITRE Google, Apple and Rackspace. Facebook actually slipped from the top spot last year to number 3 on the 2012 list and Google had moved up to the fifth slot from number 30 on last year’s list. Other tech companies that made the list include Salesforce (13); SAP (22); Intel (32); and Groupon (40). Rackspace, Samsung Austin Semiconductor, NVIDIA, and Hewlett-Packard climbed also saw big jumps up higher on the list. National Instruments CEO James Truchard and NetApp’s Tom Georgens received 100% approval ratings this year, followed by Apple’s Tim Cook (96%) and Synopsys’ Aart de Geus (96%). Rounding out the top 5 is Intel’s Paul Otellini with a 93% approval rating for the year. eBay’s John Donahoe saw the biggest boost in approval ratings this year, climbed to 65% approval from 30% last year. Sapient CEO Alan Herrick climbed to 85% from 58%. Analog Devices’ CEO Jerry Fishman climbed to 80% from 55%, and Intuit’s Brad Smith climbed to 84% from 60%. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg slipped to a 89% approval rating from 96% approval last year. Xerox CEO Ursula Burns fell to 28% approval, down from 65% approval last year while Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers fell to 57% approval from 85% a year ago. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ approval declined to 61% from 79% last year and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s approval fell to 55% this year from 71% a year ago. In 2010, Leo Apotheker held 62% approval (and by the time he left office in Sept. 2011 his cumulative rating was down to 57%), yet Meg Whitman now stands at 76% approval. Yahoo’s Carol Bartz held a 56% approval in 2010 (and 54% cumulative approval when she left office) yet current Yahoo CEO Timothy Moore has just a 31% approval in his interim role. Larry Page has a 92% approval, but that falls short to Eric Schmidt’s 96% at the end of last year. Apple’s Tim Cook has an impressive 96% approval, just one point below Steve Jobs’ 97% approval when he officially turned over the reins earlier this year. You can check out the full list of companies and CEO approval ratings below. |
TaskRabbit Gets $17.8M For “Aggressive” Expansion, Wants To Grow Internationally And Beyond | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Ebay for real world labor has seen lightning fast growth in the past couple of months, and has taken advantage of that growth by raising another $17.8 million in Series B funding. Participating in the round are existing investors , , , , and , in addition to new partners , , and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s new investment firm. This new round will bring the company’s total funding to $24.5 million. In tandem with the new investment, Lightspeed’s will be joining TaskRabbit CEO , CPO and co-founder and Shasta’s Sean Flynn on the TaskRabbit board. Busque tells me that she chose Lightspeed Ventures specifically because of the firm’s experience with local market place startups like Grubhub and LivingSocial. Interestingly enough, Michael Eisner found out about TaskRabbit through a segment on ABC World News Tonight, the producer of which had found out about TaskRabbit through an article profiling the company in . Busque came up with the idea for TaskRabbit in 2008 in Boston. It was too cold to go out, and she and her husband Kevin needed to buy a big heavy bag of dog food for her dog Kobe. She wondered if there was any service that let people easily outsource errands and tasks. There wasn’t, so she quit her job four months later to start a company. TaskRabbit, which lets people post tasks that can be subsequently bid on, operates in five cities — Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and LA with over 2,000 task “Runners.” The company is getting ready to expand to Seattle, Portland, Austin and Atlanta. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/user/leweb#p/search/0/k9JmPqJCNmY&feature=player_embedded&w=630] And Busque tells me that she’s also gunning for international expansion, fresh off a trip to Paris’ where fellow collaborative consumption startup launched in Europe. “We’ve got thousands of people on the waiting lists for cities that haven’t launched yet,” she tells me. TaskRabbit is now seeing 9,000 tasks a month and has tripled its net revenue since its Series A funding in May. The company monetizes by taking a fee of between 13% – 30% from each task completed. Busque will be using the influx of cash to build out an Android app and further refine TaskRabbit’s iOS app in order to make the TaskRabbit experience even more mobile. The TaskRabbit team is currently 35-person strong team and is looking to hire between 25-30 people in product, engineering and design. “We can really blow up this thing in a way more aggressive fashion,” Busque tells me. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/33308059 w=640] |
Lookout’s 2012 Mobile Security Threat Predictions: SMS Fraud, Botnets And Malvertising | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | a company that for a number of smartphone platforms, is releasing its 2012 Mobile Malware Predictions, based on data collected from its Mobile Threat Network, a cloud-based network which constantly analyzes global threat data to identify and quickly block new threats with over-the-air app updates. The network includes more than one million apps and 15 million user devices worldwide. For background, Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected applications for Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and help users from losing their phones and identifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a tracking application, data backup and a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer. Lookout says that mobile threats are on the rise (which we’ve as well), especially for Android device owners. The company estimates that mobile threats successfully stole more than one million dollars from Android users in 2011. And in 2012, Lookout says that the criminal business of malware will be more profitable than ever before as the possibility of monetizing mobile devices grows and the cost of infecting devices lessens. Kevin Mahaffey, co-founder and chief technology officer at Lookout, warns, “In 2012, we expect to see the mobile malware business turn profitable. What took 15 years on the PC platform has only taken the mobile ecosystem two years.” The report shows that the annual likelihood of an Android user encountering malware today has increased to 4 percent up from a 1 percent likelihood measured at the beginning of 2011. In fact, Android users worldwide have a 36 percent chance of clicking on an unsafe link in 2011 (up 6 percent from July 2011). In the United States, the likelihood of encountering an unsafe link is higher than the global average at 40 percent. As for 2012, Lookout has identified a number of security threats that mobile users will encounter more frequently in the new year. First, mobile pickpocketing (SMS/call fraud) will be on the rise as malware writers continue to steal money directly from consumers by accessing their mobile devices’ ability to charge phone bills via SMS billing and phone calls. For example, earlier this year Lookout identified GGTracker, the first mobile malware that steals money from users in the U.S and earlier this week Lookout identified another Android Trojan, RuFraud, targeting Eastern European users. While botnet networks have yet to be used at scale, this issues will be a serious threat in 2012. Lookout anticipates malware writers could secretly integrate thousands of mobile devices into extensive botnet-like networks like DroidDream and Geimini to distribute spam, steal private info, and install other malware. Because many users fail to update device software and the difficulty of patching vulnerabilities on mobile phones, malware writers will also continue to exploit iOS and Android OS at a pace greater than vulnerabilities can be resolved. In terms of mobile malware, Lookout says that malware writers will develop tools that enable the automatic repackaging of malicious applications. Lookout has seen instances where several infected apps were packaged by the same developer within a matter of seconds. Both iOS and Android users will be susceptible to browser attacks as malware writers attempt to profit via Web-based mobile phishing distribution like email, text messages and fraudulent websites. Lookout also says that malvertising (genuine-looking advertisements that link back to fraudulent sites) will continue to increase in 2012, especially as mobile advertising grows. Lookout, which just raised in new funding, is preparing for an action-packed 2012. The company will continue to and launched in Germany this week. And the company will be looking to continue to develop its mobile security technology, focusing on optimizing the time it takes to detect a threat and protect users. |
How Pixiv Built Japan’s 12th Largest Site With Manga-Girl Drawings (Redesign Sneak Peek And Invites) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Unless you live in Japan, chances are you've never heard of . Even if you do live in Japan, unless you are young and really into drawing manga characters, chances are you’ve still never heard of Pixiv. But its 3.6 million visitors a month generate an astounding 2.9 billion pageviews. According to comScore, Pixiv is the 12th largest site in Japan measured by pageviews, slightly bigger than Facebook in Japan. And that’s just on the Web. Pixiv generates another 900 million pageviews a month on mobile phones. All of this for a site that is stil a pretty barebones image board that up until a year ago required a login to see anything. Pixiv is about to get a major redesign. When I visited Pixiv on my trip to Japan a couple weeks ago, CEO Takanari Katagiri and his team showed me their plans (see video above and screenshots below). A beta of the new site will be ready around Christmas, but 222 TechCrunch readers can now to reserve their spots (use the code “techcrunch”). If you like , 4Chan founder Moot’s new , Pixiv might appeal to you. Moot himself seems to draw inspiration from Pixiv. In the startup’s shrine-like foyer where visitors can draw a portrait of themselves on one of the tiles, Moot had left some evidence that he too had been there. Drawing is a big hobby in Japan, and Pixiv is a place for people to share their digital drawings. The site has 22 million pictures, with 20,000 to 30,000 new pictures uploaded every day. Nearly all of the pageviews are internally generated by the intensely obsessive community on Pixiv. But the current site is text-heavy. The new design looks a lot like a Facebook feed for illustrations. You can subscribe to other users or friends to see their pictures in your feed, rate them or comment on them, and repost the drawings to your own feed. Pixiv is moving briskly on its own momentum, riding the subculture of Japanese comics-style illustrations. The company has 50 employees, up from 30 a year ago. It doubled revenues to about $8 million (600M Yen) in its last fiscal year ended in June. Next year, Katagiri expects to do $13 million in revenues, mostly from advertising on the site. [slideshow] |
16-Year-Old Programmer Raises Seed Round From Billionaire Li Ka Shing To ‘Summarize The Web’ | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Launching today on the App Store is a new application called that, in short, attempts to summarize the Web. The app was formerly known as Trimit ( ), before Founder (and 16-year-old programmer) Nick D’Aloisio raised a seed round from billionaire Hong Kong investor and his investment vehicle, . Horizons encouraged D’Aloisio to change his startup’s name to “Summly Limited”, which he has done, all in tune to what we are hearing is a sum of money that’s over $250K, which the startup will use to ramp up hiring, for development, and creating patents. At the very least, it’s a lot of money for a 16-year-old. Do you remember what you were doing at 16? Likelihood is it wasn’t raising seed funding from the world’s billionaires. (I was just learning to tie my shoes.) So what is this Summly app that everyone’s so excited about? Well, in July, I wrote that the value proposition for Trimit was that its web and iOS apps allowed you “to condense content into 1,000, 500, or 140-character summaries. Essentially, Trimit was a text auto summarizer designed to fit all those things you’re reading on a mobile device into concise synopses and share those over SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter in .txt form — all with a few clicks”. Today, the guy that Om calls has used his new money to enlist the service of veteran programmers to built out the initial architecture around his genetic programming and AI-based tool that he says, “mimics evolution”. It does this because, as the 16-year-old says, the Web is overloaded with content (I like to think I’ve in some small way contributed to that), so Summly offers the world a simpler browsing and search experience by summarizing content into bite-sized chunks to make it easier to consume. And it seems to be working. Researchers at MIT, D’Aloisio tells us, have tested Summly’s patent-pending technology and have found that it outperforms the “highest academically published results” by a factor of 30 percent. Why? According to the founder, Summly’s algorithm is able to instantly analyze text and automatically distill it into digestible chunks, doing so as you browse and surf the Web, providing succinct summaries of search results, articles, and Web pages. D’Aloisio was a little more hesitant this time around to discuss the secret sauce that makes his new app tick, but for a glimpse, to get a sense of what’s behind the app — and how it works in practice. For more, . |
Think Openspace Launching A Brick And Mortar App Store Is A Silly Idea? Think Again. | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Yes, when you think of an “app store”, you probably picture iTunes, the Android Marketplace, or even the Chrome Web App Store or GetJar. That’s because apps live in our browsers and on our mobile devices, right? Sort of. , the Co-founder and CEO of looks down the road and sees the app-ification of everything — a time when apps will become more like CDs, real, tangible goods — something more than a transitory download. Maybe that sounds a little crazy — just as it probably sounds crazy that Openspace launched an actual brick and mortar “app store” this week in downtown Boulder, Colorado. Which might lead you to think, “but how many brick and mortar CD outlets are left? Isn’t this a little backwards? Apps live on our phones, only sometimes in our hearts, but not in the real world, right?” Reich is fully aware that launching a brick and mortar app store sounds like a silly idea, and he and his team have a sense of humor about it, leading some to ask if it’s a publicity stunt. Of course, it’s not at all: Reich and team are considering opening similar real-world app stores in San Francisco and New York. But why? The reason for launching a brick and mortar app store is best seen in context with what Openspace — the startup itself — is all about. with the mission to let developers and users bypass app store and operating system fragmentation (and limitations in distribution and monetization channels) by offering an app store that enables you to discover and purchase an application once and use it anywhere, anytime, on any device –- smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, Mac or PC. was a complementary developer co-op, designed to govern its app store. As the Openspace founders (Reich included) are app developers themselves, the motivation behind the cooperative was, as I wrote at the time: The reclamation of app monetization and distribution strategies by — and for — developers. By signing up for the co-op, developers can help set the agenda and write the rules that govern the sale of their apps on the Openspace store. Thus, Openspace’s newly launched web app store is attempting to solve the problems inherent in today’s popular app stores, specifically, the fact that there’s a lot of noise — the App Store has categories, but as many know, it’s hard to drill down to subgroups within these categories, and it’s become (with over a million apps published) increasingly difficult for developers to get their apps seen and discovered. Services like Chomp have launched cool algorithmic search engines to help users discover apps amidst the fracas, and Openspace is combining algorithmic search with good old-fashioned curation and crowdsourcing, via a slightly different approach: Collections. To add more granularity to the process of app discovery, search, and enjoyment, Openspace organizes apps by collections, which means that you can browse by “Interests” (sports, food, and so on), or you can go beyond that and create more refined (and specific) collections, like “Gluten Free Living”, for example. Openspace offers a “Community” section, too, where anyone can create a collection for other people to browse. Of course, Reich tells me that creating collections is naturally a process that much of the app-consuming public may be resistant to doing, because it takes time. That’s why Openspace has added a “follow” button, which allows users to follow certain categories that they like, and when new apps are published to the category (Openspace crawls app stores every day), they get an email. Users also receive emails on sales, deals, and so on. It’s with this community feel in mind that Openspace decided to portion off 300 square feet of their Boulder offices to create its real life, brick and mortar app store, complete with “App Guru” staffers (a la Mac Geniuses) that can make recommendations of the best apps in certain categories and help people find the best fitness app, for example. Reich tells me that their Boulder store has already seen quite a bit of foot traffic this week. When I expressed a bit of surprise, the Openspace Co-founder reminded me that the average American is now carrying around a mobile supercomputer that, while appropriately “user friendly”, still causes a lot of anxiety. It’s a bit like FoMo — here you have this powerful tool with tons of different capabilities, but a lot of people are anxiety-ridden when it comes to getting the most out of their device. And apps are the main culprit. The co-founder said that they’ve been seeing moms, dads, and even grandmas, who are coming into the store saying that they’re looking for the best calendar apps — iCal is no longer cutting it — so can you help me find the best one? The average smartphone and app user (especially in the older demographic) relishes the opportunity to have these kind of educational conversations one-on-one, rather than in a one-way dynamic like you might find on Google or reading a blog post. That being said, a lot of users and visitors to the Boulder store have been questioning Openspace, are they being paid to recommend certain apps? Reich assures me that this is far from the truth; App Gurus and Openspace at large will be recommending apps that the community finds most relevant, that they themselves use. That’s why they think categories can be so great for developers, as an Openspace iPad user can view 12 app collections at once, with 50 apps in each collection. There’s a much greater chance for visibility there than there is on a traditional app store. While the startup hasn’t secured it’s revenue models yet (though it has raised $1 million to date from The Foundry Group, David Cohen of TechStars, among other angels), Reich says that they’ve already been getting a lot of interest from app developers. Why? Because to get the most of some apps, the ideal scenario would allow developers to work directly with their users to coach them on how to get the most out of their apps. This obviously isn’t necessary for casual games, but for apps with deeper, more complex functionality, it’s nearly impossible to get this kind of face-to-face access to individual users. The more you dive into Openspace’s approach, the more you come to realize that they are onto — if nothing else — an idea worthy of testing. Real, live app stores may prove to have little use in today’s culture, but Reich is a smart guy, and my sense is that they just may be onto something here. I’ll leave it at that, but Openspace is definitely worth checking out. And, if you happen to be in Boulder, drop by and then pop in here to tell us about your experience. |
Chat Service Meebo Launches New Version Of Site Designed Around Competitive Sharing (!) | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | You probably know Meebo as a service that lets you easily chat with friends across different IM services, but the company is now rolling out a new version of it’s site that’s designed around sharing. Think competitive sharing, like who can get the most traffic from their articles. It’s a big switch from the former Meebo Messenger IM site (which you can still find ). I’ve been playing around with it, and here are some initial impressions. It’s like a cross between Twitter and Klout. The new user flow guides you to add a bookmarklet to your browser, and instructs you to use it to share any link you find on the web. The terminology is “check in,” as if sharing a link is like checking in to a physical location, I guess. There are options to share it with Facebook and Twitter friends or to other Meebo users. After that, you can look at the new site to see how many people are clicking through based on your share. You can also see how many people are following and how many people you’re following. There’s also a history of everything you’ve shared. And if you follow friends on the service, you’ll be able to see their scores and compare yourselves to them. The Meebo Bar is also getting the check in button, chief executive Seth Sternberg tells me today. The bar, a feature that web site owners add to the bottom of their sites to let users chat and share their content, will be a key way for this service to spread. It already has 100 million unique users in the US, according to comScore. You can see an example of it live now at philly.com. The bar is also now inside of the new Meebo site, too, so you can chat about your scores with friends. The big plan here is for Meebo to become more of a central social repository for all the things you’re sharing across the web. You’d still use Facebook and/or Twitter as normal, but this site will help you track how much people actually look at what you’re sharing. It’s sort of like how web sites use Google Analytics, but for individual users in social services. The big new web site isn’t the only news out today. Sternberg has a the change, in which he discloses that the company is making revenue in the “mid 8 figure zone.” Sternberg emphasizes to me that this release is the “.5 version” of the new Meebo site, and that we should expect a bunch more releases next year. So let the backlash among existing users begin as this big experiment in competitive sharing evolves. |
Google Makes Street View Images Of Post-Tsunami Japan Available On Custom Site | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | In July, Google announced that it would be sending its Street View cars through the areas of Japan stricken by the March earthquake and tsunami. Today the work of stitching and annotating is finished and like any other Street View location on a special website they’ve called “Build the Memory,” though it is also labeled as Memories for the Future. A little clicking around brought me to several affecting sights, for instance a tranquil playfield converted to an enormous debris dump near Sendai. The location they feature in the also really allows you to see the devastation at close range. However, I also came across quite a lot of old imagery in the “after” tab; perhaps a curated tour of some of the areas with new photography could be added. Google also used the occasion to roll out a minor feature, a timestamp on the corner of every image letting you know what month and year it was taken. No date or time, unfortunately. This information should be available throughout Street View now. These Maps team special projects are always interesting and are probably good practice for Google to flex its logistical muscles. This kind of information is extremely valuable and while Google is happy to give much of it away, it’s also a demonstration of what they’re capable of that no one else is. The rapid deployment of rich, targeted information is Google’s specialty, and when only they can provide it, it is to Google that companies and governments will come when such a task becomes necessary. |
New Tweets Per Second Record — 25,088 TPS — Set By Screening Of Japanese Movie “Castle in the Sky” | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Move (sigh, I can’t believe I’m writing this), a new tweets per second record has been set. According to a statement by Twitter, the Japanese television screening of hooked up 25,088 Tweets per second, more than twice the previous TPS record, on December 9th. https://twitter.com/#!/twittercomms/status/146751974904311808 Prior to the “Castle in the Sky” tweeting the record had been set this August when Beyonce’s big MTV #VMA pregnancy announcement gave Twitter its own proud bump, 8,868 Tweets per second. Before that the TPS record was held a U.S. women’s soccer team’s game at 7,196 Tweets per second. Other notable Twitter events? Steve Jobs’ death at 6,049 Bin Laden’s death at 5,106 TPS, Super Bowl 2011 at 4,064 TPS, New Years Eve 2010 in Japan at 6,939 TPS, the day of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in March at 5,530 TPS and the Royal Wedding in England in April at 3,966 TPS. The Japanese events showing up multiple times here come as no surprise, as Japanese is Twitter’s second most popular language. is a cult film (obviously) that has been voted one of the 100 . And now it has a new record under its belt. https://twitter.com/#!/twj/status/146751303584980992 |
Evidence Supports Facebook’s Plan To Monetize Mobile With Sponsored Story News Feed Ads | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | For the first time, Facebook may start showing ads in its mobile apps and HTML5 site, sources close to the company’s ads team tell me. The ads would come in the form of mobile news feed Sponsored Stories — social ads that show a friend’s interaction with a brand rather than traditional display ads which don’t fit on mobile screens. published earlier today about receiving similar information from undisclosed sources. When I asked Facebook’s ad representative Brandon McCormick a week ago about the potential for mobile news feed Sponsored Stories, he coyly told me “I think that could be interesting.” More evidence for the plot: Facebook has begun showing Sponsored Stories in its website’s Ticker, possibly to test for backlash. Also, Facebook recently declassified one ad type from being a Sponsored Story to make sure they all require a user action. The strategy could open a major new revenue stream for Facebook in the ramp up to a potential . Two weeks ago I began hearing that through mobile, Facebook might mix ads into the primary news feed — something it has never done before. When I grilled McCormick on whether Facebook would follow this path to mobile monetization, he told me “it’s about getting the mobile experience to be really good, then we’ll think about ways to monetize it. We want a solution that’s going to work for people, we don’t want it to be interruptive, but we want it to be effective for advertisers.” That sounds like Sponsored Stories, considering a study conducted in May showed the and 20% lower CPC. This shows they’re attractive to both viewers and advertisers. Only permitting Sponsored Stories on mobile would prevent advertisers from injecting irrelevant content that could significantly pollute the news feed. Sponsored Stories are different because they show content that could appear in the news feed organically such as a friend Liking a brand’s Page, checking into a Place, or using an app. Brand advertisers pay to guarantee visibility of these stories, but first must trigger them by courting authentic user interaction. Because Sponsored Stories actually include the activity of friends, they’re much less likely to piss off Facebook’s historically whiny user base. Last month, Sponsored Stories began appearing in the secondary Ticker feed on the right side of the Facebook web interface and there has been little sign of user protest. As and Android apps from its HTML5 site, it would only have to start showing Sponsored Stories on its mobile website’s news feed to have them reach hundreds of millions of users a day. Before September, advertisers could pay for “Page Post” Sponsored Stories to have their Page updates gain more visibility amongst their existing fans. However, since these ads didn’t require friends to have taken action, . This subtle change could pave the way for mobile news feed Sponsored Stories that always include a friend’s actions, and therefore force brands to focus on driving engagement, not just spending money. It’s unclear whether advertisers would be able to choose to have their Sponsored Stories shown specifically mobile, or whether Facebook would allocate them across web and mobile. Either way, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories could become a huge revenue driver for Facebook as . To date, Facebook has kept mobile ad-free to fuel widespread adoption, especially in the developing world where there’s still high potential for user growth. But it also may have been waiting until unobtrusive Sponsored Stories were ready for mobile deployment. In the years since its mobile apps and site launched and grew to account for half of the site’s daily active users, Facebook has been stockpiling monetization potential.The company may have planned to announce this new revenue stream just before its IPO to drive up investor interest. The cat’s out of the bag now, though, and secondary market share prices might rise accordingly. |
Battle Of The Browsers: iOS 5’s Browser Is Still (Slightly) Better Than Android’s | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Alright, fanboys: get your flamethrowers ready. HTML5 framework development house has just put a wide array of performance tools to use to answer one of life’s geekiest questions: Who’s got the better browser, Android 4 or iOS 5? I’d save the answer until the end, but I suppose the headline gives its away: while Android 4’s browser is a “major step forward” for the platform, iOS 5’s offering still wins out in the end — but just by a hair! Sencha tested both browsers on four primary metrics: rendering accuracy, rendering performance, HTML5/CSS3 feature support, and Javascript performance. With regards to rendering, both browsers fared about the same: they both nailed perfect scores on , and, while both had minor rendering artifacts, they were trivial enough that the scores went unaffected. Sencha then went on to test each browser’s SunSpider performance. SunSpider is a series of tests built to push Javascript to its limit, testing a device’s performance on heavy-duty tasks that are currently (or likely to soon be) commonplace. See a graph of the results below (note that they used an iPad 2 rather than an iPhone 4S for this test as the CPU is closer to that found in the Galaxy Nexus, and that a Kindle Fire and Playbook were thrown in for curiosity’s sake): (Also note: smaller bars = shorter time = better performance) Outside of that one strange (but mostly irrelevant) Kindle Fire outlier under string performance, performance across all devices is… about the same. While each device has its own respective highlights and weakpoints, the performance differences we’re looking at here are measured in . Finally, Sencha dove into head-to-head into specific HTML5 capabilities, which ended up being the only test with a clear-cut winner. While both devices offered up a rather impressive HTML5 armory, iOS 5 had a leg up on Android in a handful of noteworthy places: Of those, the most important markers are and — which, to oversimplify things, respectively allow for two-way communication between web sites/devices (for realtime functionality) and for multiple scripts to run simultaneously locally on the device. In even simpler terms, they’re big parts of letting web apps work more like native apps. Sencha also dives a bit deeper into some metrics specific to their animation tools, which In the end, the differences are subtle enough that most folks (read: non-developers) would never even notice them. At this point, it’s absolutely a matter of personal preference and itty-bitty nuances. I’d take iOS’ browser over Android’s, for example, almost entirely because the former lets me jump to the top of the page with a tap of the status bar, rather than a zillion swipes. When everything is equally lightning fast and tailored to a tee, it’s all about the little things. |
Startup Trials: Quipol Looks To Disrupt Online Polling In A Crowded Market | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | It’s a tender situation, being a startup, isn’t it? Here you have what you think is a great product, maybe it’s even a little disruptive, but you’re not naive enough to think that you’re the only one who’s ever thought of this idea/product. At any moment, some giant or more well-funded startup could make your idea/widget/feature/tool/product their priority and with a little marketing spend, you’d be toast. Bootstrapping, you rely on your users’ feedback to tell you what works and what doesn’t, iterate, and hope that your user base grows organically until you have a sustainable business. That’s the hope, right? The same goes for Max Yoder, a 23-year-old designer from Indiana — except that in Yoder’s case, he launched his startup out of his bedroom in Indianapolis. Yoder recently graduated from college, at which point he went to work at Compendium to learn about startups, media software, and to help pay off his student loans. To help his cause, he was selected as an last year, and has, over the last seven months, been building his startup. Recently, Yoder took off to work on full-time. Quipol (pronounced “kwi-poll”) is a web app and embeddable widget in beta, designed using HTML5, CSS3, Ruby on Rails, and , to let content producers create simple, one-question polls that can be embedded in blog posts and web pages to encourage feedback from their audiences and help them reach more readers. It’s part polling system, part commenting tool, but the fact of the matter is that there’s plenty of competition — and this has been done before. There are awesome sites like (full disclosure: Founder Ben Schaechter used to be a developer at TechCrunch and is a friend), which let users create realtime polls with plenty of Twitter integration. There’s , , (scooped up by Survey Monkey), and CMSes like WordPress have their own polling functionality, thanks to startups like . And that’s where Quipol’s real competition comes in: The already-in-place polling widgets owned or offered by content management platforms. But Yoder thinks that Quipol can be a good complement to some of these, as well as to commenting platforms like Disqus and Livefyre. So, Yoder is hoping that both through the simplicity of Quipol’s design (it looks great) and its “universality”, the service can offer some differentiation from others already occupying the space. At this point, the Quipol embed code works with WordPress.org, Tumblr, Squarespace, and Blogger, and everything but the social commenting works well in Posterous and Facebook. What does that mean? Users can vote and comment as they normally would on Facebook and Posterous, but if they choose to share their comment to their social network, the social post will link back to the poll on Quipol.com — not its embedded source. Unfortunately, in this case, Posterous and Facebook don’t play nicely with Quipol’s javascript, but Yoder says he’s currently plugging away at some workarounds. Interestingly, Quipol currently is without customization options, it only comes in 400 by 600 form, another thing Yoder is currently wrestling with — this is where that user feedback comes in. But, Quipol still does what it does well enough that it’s a great tool. The commenting uses Twitter and Facebook authentication to keep out the spam, and the linking in Facebook and Twitter offer a simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” voting mechanism, with the ability to comment if your opinion doesn’t fall into one of those two buckets. Votes and comments can then be monitored by Quipol creators from the site’s admin layer. Readers, however, can’t see the results of the Quipol unless they vote, and the admin layer provides the essential analytics, until users provide enough data on what they want to see, which will enable Yoder to scale the analytics offerings. He also soon plans to add YouTube/Vimeo video embedding in the media portion of Quipols in the near future, , for example. It’s a really simple tool, and Yoder has designed a great product — the question is whether or not there’s a real business here, or whether it’s best suited as a feature for a larger entity. Quipols work best when they are embedded into contextually relevant blog posts to help bloggers engage with and grow their audiences (the growth part happens via Quipol’s social commenting functionality, Yoder says). And what better way to test it out than in a blog post? |
Microsoft Kinectimals Appears On The iPhone, As Cute As Can Be | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Microsoft has ported Kinectimals, the Xbox 360 game that involves the care and feeding of dangerous animals in the wild, to the iPhone, suggesting that (at least in the short term) even Microsoft sees the value of releasing on iOS. The $2.99 game recreates the Xbox version fairly faithfully but without the Kinect motion controls. Interestingly, the app also allows you to “unlock” new cubs on the Xbox, proving that paid DLC can hide in multiple guises. The game supports the iPad and iPhone and follows the launch of the that came out in conjunction with the update. |
Investors Were Kicked Off The Twitter Board “For The Good Of The Company” | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | In digging around trying to investigate rumors that VC lost his at Twitter two weeks ago, I came across the information that almost all investors including Doerr were told to stop coming to board meetings in late August/September, when that and had left. The thing that’s hard to understand here is that Doerr never actually had an official observer seat to begin with, so there was nothing to “lose” per se. After Doerr, Wilson and Sabet stopped attending meetings, the remaining seats were stripped of their VC affiliations and became “independent directors,” said a source with knowledge of what transpired. What I’m assuming this means is that non-staff board members like , who by a joint KPCB and Twitter decision, is no longer the venture firm’s eyes and ears. I have no idea how this concept applies to VC s position, as Benchmark is still very clearly invested in Twitter. Post-Sabet, Wilson and Doer, the remaining Twitter board members are Chairman Jack Dorsey, Dick Costolo, Evan Williams and “independent” board members Peter Fenton, Mike McCue, David Rosenblatt and Peter Currie. According to multiple sources, the board streamlining happened because “everyone agreed it was for the good of the company,” — A statement which granted has many interpretations, including some . The speculation that the board will be adding another member and more specifically a woman soon is just speculation we’re hearing. Twitter confirmed the new board arrangement with us via the following statement, “Twitter’s board of directors currently has seven members. In addition to Dick, Ev and Jack, who serves as chairman, the board includes four independent directors: Peter Fenton from Benchmark Capital, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, former DoubleClick executive David Rosenblatt and Peter Currie of Currie Capital.” And then there were seven. |
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Other OS Class Action Case Against Sony Dismissed | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | The “Other OS” controversy is one of those things that, while in a way trivial, is really a proxy battle over a much larger problem. Briefly stated, Sony upset some users by removing the ability to install another OS on their , an option that allowed the powerful console to be used as a PC, media center, or pretty much anything. The removal of this option and effective outlawing of the practice caused a geeky backlash that had less to do with the inability to run a Linux box on your TV than the fact that Sony was dictating what you could do with your device after the fact. These things get resolved in all sorts of ways, but this one ended up in that said Sony was in breach of its agreement with users. Unfortunately for the class members, on the grounds that the behavior may have been questionable but could not be shown to be illegal. Here’s U.S. District Judge Seeborg on the matter: As a matter of providing customer satisfaction and building loyalty, it may have been questionable. As a legal matter, however, plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable. It’s a fair judgment, in my opinion: while I think it’s a form of bullying that Sony removed the option, it’s also part of their right to secure their console environment. I wrote in my that while users are justified in employing whatever means necessary to circumvent unreasonable protections, manufacturers are free to do the same to avoid those circumventions, and part of that is withholding updates and other negative reinforcements. The fact is, as the judge points out, the updates are quite optional, though you will miss out on certain abilities and perhaps online play, but Sony is within its rights to take those away if you are working outside the agreement. Hacking your device is a right, but what companies like Sony provide is a privilege. By exerting your rights, you sometimes lose privileges — it’s just part of the deal. But legality doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or consumer-friendly practice. Sony needs to be more open and permissive or it risks the ire of more and more users. Random restrictions on the way you can use and share your games and hardware will only cause more people to chafe and seek relief in hacks, as they should. I’d like to say this ruling won’t embolden Sony to further restrictions, but considering they are now among other things, it will probably only get worse. For those undaunted by the prospect of potential excommunication from the church of Sony, you can keep up with Other OS news or at other fan sites. |
Destroy Your Friends With FaceInvaders | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Do you hate your Facebook friends? Do you want to blow them all up in fiery blasts of laser light? Sure, we all do. FaceInvaders allows you to shoot down your social graph. The game is a simple Space Invaders clone with a twist – each alien is a face randomly selected from your Facebook account. You shoot down friends hither and yon, allowing you to passive-aggressively destroy the people who you pretend to love. Once you’ve beaten all of the waves, you fight off the boss friend (also chosen at random). Interaction with the Facebook API allows you to post high scores on your wall. , the game costs $1.99 and is available now. While it’s nothing new, it’s definitely clever and it might be a nice way to see how your friends have update their profile pictures. It also allows you to destroy them in secret, finding sweet release in the blaze of energy emitted as they explode into space. In some ways, it’s better than a relationship status update. |
Luluvise goes live, but will this girl-only site attract more legal ire than eyeballs? | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 13 |
is a social and communications platform aimed at young women and their best friends where they can hand pick their best pals and network privately. Online pyjama party? I’ve no idea, I’m a guy. However, the idea here is to re-create the patterns of close female friendship online, and they’ve raised a $1 million in equity financing from Passion Capital, PROfounders Capital, and angels to do so. We wrote about their but now the service goes fully online today and they have some data to share so far. Plus, a sneak preview of a feature which may well land them in legal hot water. They’ve had 69 different countries represented on the platform, the majority being split across the UK, USA and Canada. The average user has between 4-8 friends in her Inner Circle. Once a user has at least 3 friends in her Inner Circle, her usage patterns (number of scoops posted, time chatting on the site) all increase by about 70%, according to the startup. This chimes with research. According to some industry figures women generate more than 70% of the messaging activity on Facebook, spend more than 35% more time on social networks than men, and drive 80% of all consumer spending. Of the 4 types of “scoops” or areas that can be created in Luluvise, Wikidate Scoops and Text Scoops were the most popular. The specific female-centric features most loved were the urgency buttons. Users can add an “OMG!” or an “SOS” to their scoops (yes, really) and almost every scoop created in the beta had one of these tags on it, accoroding to founder Alexandra Chong. And apparently a lot of guys want in. “We had a lot of guys submitting their emails to get access to the beta, and we must have sent out over 500 emails telling them Luluvise is for ladies only,” said Chong. She added they have had “so many requests for the iphone app that we have decided to launch it before the end of the year.” Could this be an Instagram from women? “We think that.. photo and polls will catch up once a girl can take a sneaky snap while she is out and about.” Meanwhile, guys are going to find Luluvise whether they can get in to it or not. There are already fake/false review appearing ( and here’s a ) which a guy can’t edit or respond to because, er, he’s a . These rate men on various things including whether they are “good in bed.” This is going to prove an interesting move for the startup given that although it’s technically a US company it’s physically based out of the UK, which happens to have Technically speaking, a man in a committed relationship may err, and then find himself “reviewed” on the site. Thus a “review” on a site frequented by women rating men on things like performance in bed could well be construed by a judge in a court of law that it has “lowered him in the minds of right thinking members of society” (as libel law would have it) since the man both claimed to be committed but had also been “reviewed” for his sexual performance by other women. All very well if he really is a philanderer (truth is a defence in law), but not so cool if a woman decides to “review” a guy she had not slept with but simply wanted to libel. Luluvise responded: We have good legal counsel and guidelines in place, we also have a takedown policy.” The startup was founded in 2010 by Alexandra Chong, a former Global Head of Marketing & PR for Upstream and Director at the Corporate Executive Board. The team is 10-20 people, based in London, but the company is incorporated in the US. |
Paul Allen And Burt Rutan Launch Stratolaunch Systems, Plan To Build World’s Largest Aircraft | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | Having conquered the terrestrial realm, today’s big money is looking to the skies for new regions to subjugate. And what was a lark ten years ago now appears to be a common hobby among a certain ambitious type of mogul not given to the habit of collecting megayachts. Their millions have produced results, however, and while the shuttles have been retiring, the private space ships have been making flight after flight. Paul Allen and Burt Rutan worked together on the original SpaceShipOne, part of a challenge to build a reliable extra-atmospheric aircraft. The design has been refined and (to an extent) commercialized by Virgin Galactic, but Allen and Rutan want to make an entirely new aircraft. And they’re not modest about their ambition: , aims to create the largest aircraft ever flown. How’s that for a mission statement? The idea is to minimize the cost of launching materials and eventually people into space. The problem with the space shuttles, and nearly every other form of space-directed travel, is that they rely on rocket boosters to launch them straight up from the ground. When you think about it, it’s a bit primitive, isn’t it? The solution is to get the payload into the air first, give it some speed, and then boost it with the rockets to escape velocity. The SpaceShip series of spacecraft does this, riding underneath a WhiteKnight and then detaching, boosting, and escaping. Stratolaunch hopes to improve the WhiteKnight method, allowing for larger items and potentially spacecraft to be launched into orbit. Powered by six 747 engines, with a wingspan of 380 feet, and requiring a runway more than two miles long, this would in fact be the largest aircraft ever to take flight – yes, wider than the Spruce Goose, though slightly lighter than the An-225. The rocket booster/orbital payload (built by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies) is mounted centrally, and the pilots, fuel and passengers would be put in two pontoon-like cargo areas, each the size of a jumbo jet’s. It would take off in the traditional way, fly until it reached a suitable speed and position, then boost the orbital payload into orbit. ( : The entire aircraft does not go into orbit, only to high altitude, where it navigates to the position from which it can launch the payload; this paragraph and the previous have been altered to reflect this) News of the new partnership and company has been bubbling under the surface for a while, but this is the first public announcement regarding the joint venture. Money was not mentioned, possibly because the sums involved are simply to high and too complex to break down — but to produce a spacecraft from scratch isn’t exactly a minor endeavor. They are likely looking at hundreds of millions in R&D, facilities, and manufacturing. But considering the first few hundred tickets on Virgin Galactic sold out at a price of $200,000 each, it’s probably considered a smart early-stage investment in a growing industry. They plan to start test flights in 2016. |
Accel Leads $14M Round In Cloud-Based, Visual Presentation Software Prezi | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | Cloud-based presentation software has raised $14 million in Series B financing led by Accel Partners with Sunstone Capital participating in the round. Accel’s will be joining Prezi’s board of directors. Prezi, which was founded in Budapest, Hungary in 2009 by Adam Somlai-Fischer, Peter Halacsy, and Peter Arvai, essentially brings stunning visualizations into presentations and storytelling. The tool allows you to bypass classic the slide-by-slide presentations created by PowerPoint and create non-linear, story-telling visuals that are animated. Part of what makes the web application so unique is the ability to visualize your ideas with movement in slides. You can pan left, move right, zoom-in on a detail, or zoom-out to show the big picture, and all of these movements are sleek and unobtrusive. Users can choose from templates or create their own storytelling boards. And you can insert images, videos, YouTube videos, PDFs, and more files to make your presentation more compelling. The startup an iPad app, which allows users to use the touch-screen device to present Prezi presentations. The app is now one of iTunes’ top 10 free productivity apps. So it’s not surprising that the mostly bootstrapped startup has accumulated a customer base of over 7 million registered users and a loyal following (my colleague Robin Wauters ). Prezi, which is cash-flow positive, has many organizations using its product, from the World Economic Forum to Stanford University and at companies such as Facebook, IBM and Google. TED Conferences actually backed the company with an undisclosed amount of funding and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey While Prezi is known primarily for its online presentation software, Prezi also offers Prezi Desktop for offline editing, and Prezi Meeting for real-time collaboration. Prezi CEO Peter Arvai explains that there is a big change taking place in the online productivity market. “People are freely choosing between services like Dropbox, Evernote, and other web-based products when it comes to productivity, and this trend is extending to online presentations.” He explains that traditional slide show options (i.e. Microsoft PowerPoint) are older technologies and there is plenty of room for disruption in the space. “We are trying to reinterpret how you can organize ideas and communicate them effectively and I think we can change the way people think about sharing ideas.” Braccia agrees; explaining to TechCrunch that it’s time for presentations to change and innovate. He says that he first learned of Prezi when he saw multiple startups in investor presentations to Accel use Prezi as a presentation tool. He met with Arvai and has been working to build a relationship with the company for the past year. For Accel, Prezi was attractive because it fit into one of the fund’s investment theses, which is the trend of the consumerization of software. “The growth of web services is fundamentally altering the traditionally bundled environments of packaged software. Today’s users want best-of-breed software that makes an impact in the lives of professionals and educators around the world. Prezi is redefining the presentation and communication landscape with its leading suite of online productivity software,” he says. In the future, Braccia sees international expansion and collaboration features as growth opportunities for the company. The new funding will be used to hire talent, expanding Prezi across multiple platforms, and widening its global reach. |
Smule’s Newest Musical Brainchild: Magic Guitar for iOS | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | Just when I was beginning to think that would be the only brand new product we saw come out of mobile musical masterminds Smule in 2011, they’ve just squeaked one out in the final round. Not that only launching one product in a year would be a bad thing, mind you — especially since they’ve been busying themselves raising and . Following up on the success of Magic Piano and , Smule’s bumping their duet up to a trio with . If you’ve played either of the aforementioned predecessors, you’ll be in familiar territory here. You hold the iPhone like the neck of a guitar (at least, as much like the neck of a guitar as you could ever possibly hold an iPhone), and the notes (in the form of little balls of light) stream down toward your fingers. Tap the balls of light as they near the timing line, and the note will play. The closer you tap to the note’s on screen position, the better it sounds. It’s similar to Rock Band in some ways, albeit with a heavier focus on flexibility and creativity over predetermined precision. Mixing things up a bit, Magic Guitar also allows players to “bend” notes by dragging your fingers up the notes as you play, and to tweak the vibrato a bit by shaking the device. Once you’re done, your performance can be shared (for better or worse) on Twitter, Facebook, or with the world at large on Smule’s signature Sonic Network. As with the more recent releases of Magic Piano (which Smule transitioned to a freemium model earlier this year), Magic Guitar is a free product with unlockable tunes. New songs are unlocked by way of “Shred” points, which can be earned through in-game achievements, partner offers (Who wants a credit card? You get a credit card! And you get a credit card!) — or if you’ve got a bit of change, purchased outright. While it’s not my favorite app in Smule’s armory, it’s cute, it’s fun, and it’s free. and give it a spin. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPsF7MjYVig&w=640&h=360]
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A Look At The Organizations That Grabbed $115 Million In Grants From Google In 2011 | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | As you may have heard, Google is getting into the holiday giving spirit these days, as it that it has dished out an additional $40 million in philanthropic grants, targeted at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), girls’ education, and even fighting slavery. (You can read more in Google.org SVP Shona Brown’s .) These grants brought the total that Google has funneled into nonprofit and academic institutions over the course of the year to $115 million — and that’s on top of the $1 billion the company invests in programs like , , which offer free support and services to non-profits and educational institutions. As part of the $115 million in philanthropic grants awarded over this year, Google has funded 16 programs in STEM and “girls’ education” (nine of which are in the U.S.) for a total of $14.7 million. These programs include the , the , , the , Boston-based , and U.K.-based . The rest include: In support of girls’ education, Google also dished out funding to the , which “provides merit scholarships to promising young women”, as well as across the continent, and the , which brings literacy to the young women of rural Afghanistan. Others include: Google also awarded 14 grants to recognize “the entrepreneurial spirit” behind companies using the Web, open source programming, and other tech platforms to improve access to information — something Google has obviously long been passionate about. These include companies like , which offers loans to students with great credit history in the developing world, in an attempt to help governments become more transparent, connected, and efficient by connecting web developers to leaders in civic services. also received $2 million in funding to help connect mobile and wired teens with causes they care about, as well as , a company that helps African health care works connect with local mobile providers to create free networks and communications channels. The other 10 organizations include: The last portion, $11.5 million, was apportioned to organizations that will help free people from modern-day slavery, which . There are some amazing companies in this list of grant recipients, and Google has clearly spent more than a little time researching some of the more inspiring and big-picture-minded non-profits and technology companies operating out there today. Sure, this is just the season when Google spends some time promoting its charitable grants, but if you have a few minutes, it’s worth checking these organizations out. There’s a lot of value here. For more, check out the video below: http://youtu.be/BsNPmJ8QL58
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At Least The Stock Market Is Liking Google Lately | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | We’ve been with the things Google has been saying lately, but it’s worth looking at how people with money on the table are feeling about the company. Which is, compared to most other tech rivals, including Apple in the post-Steve Jobs era. Google stock is up 16.16% in the past three months. The only other company that’s had a net positive over the same period is, er, Yahoo. What’s making Google go up? Maybe it’s Larry Page’s aggressive new strategy to cut weaker products and focus on big new areas like mobile and social. Maybe it’s because the company has been beating earnings since he came in? Maybe it’s specifically Android’s growth (however fast that may be). Maybe it’s the not-failed user numbers coming in for Google+? Maybe it’s just the overall steady growth of its core advertising business? Or maybe traders have figured out some other information that’s not publicly available. Obviously this is a small snapshot. If you zoom out to year to date, for example, Apple is the big winner. It’s up 17.87% versus Google’s 4.05%. And really, the big question here is why Apple’s stock is trading s0 low. That’s the question everyone keeps . The stock price suggests that investors think there’ll be negative cash flow growth, which as the other day, is basically impossible given the growth of all of its businesses. Disclosure: As a daily user of Apple hardware and Google software (but not the other way around) I have no particular loyalty or disloyalty to either company, or any other company for that matter. |
Kickstarter: Cam Crate, A Simple, Rugged, Waterproof Camera Case | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | The last few times I’ve brought my camera out into the wilderness, I’ve had a few fears regarding its safety. Sure, a foam case will prevent the lens from getting scratched and so on, but what it is mauled by a bear, or we are attacked by werewolves? Most hard cases, like those from Pelican, are reliable but bulky, designed for air travel with multiple lenses, but not hiking or climbing and quick access. This Kickstarter project, the , hopes to make a simple hardened case for your full-size SLR and its attached lens. The outside is hard molded plastic, the inside is soft foam, and there’s a nice big water seal and latch to keep the dew out. It should withstand getting hit by rocks, dropped on the trail, and possibly the werewolf thing too. It even floats, so it can get away from vampires (they can’t cross running water). Right now it will fit a 5D or D7000 or similar-sized camera, but not one with a battery grip or integrated base grip like a 1D. It’s deep enough that a reasonably sized tele or big prime should fit, though I’d check the measurements before going in for it. It’s got plenty of time left on its Kickstarter counter. It’ll sell for $80 if it’s successful, but the $50 donation level will get you one if you’re willing to buy on faith. |
Gumroad Lets You Sell Anything You Make | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | The guy who helped bring you , a dead simple file-sharing service, are now testing something called , a way to ask folks to pay for downloads. The site is very basic – you enter a URL, a price, and share the link. Users are asked for a (don’t buy that, it’s ) to buy the item and sellers pay 5% plus 30 cents for each sale. The system is aimed at ad hoc sales and the seller protections are nearly non-existent. The download link isn’t obfuscated. Instead it’s hidden until Gumroad shows it to you after your purchase. There is nothing stopping folks from, say, sharing the download link later with friends and family. However, like Louis CK’s experiment, this site assumes humans are good, kind, and honest – a fatal assumption in many cases. There are plenty of ways to deliver content. This is simply the next step in the equation – monetizing said content to everyone’s benefit. I could see Dropbox, for example, adding a “Pay Me For This” link and making a lot of money in the process, but I suspect they don’t want to sully the overall file sharing experience with financial transactions. Gumroad makes sense. There are plenty of things I’d love to sell if I had the option – early access to podcasts, naked photos of myself, etc. – if I only had the means to do it quickly and easily. By making sales as simple as clicking one button, Gumroad opens up a vista of opportunity in the world of simple micropayments. |
Have yourself a merry little christmas card. Song included. | vaughn597 | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | Aren’t Christmas eCards lame? It’s not just me, right? The annual holiday greeting efforts from those in my family who think they have figured out the digital world by renouncing handwritten letters are not just cheesy, they usually get lost in my spam folder, too. Turns out has a nice little alternative to that. The image tagging startup introduced its Interactive Holiday Cards Maker today. It’s a free service you can use to create personal christmas cards. Besides uploading a festive picture and scribbling ‘Merry Christmas’ on it, you’re free to record a greeting or song and embed it in the card, through a record feature by that ThingLink has added for the festive purpose.
If the kids aren’t too keen on singing Jingle Bells into their parents’ laptop, you can also embed a youtube video. Or any content from around the web, by adding the relevant link. Show some creativity! This really can become a nice, personal and interactive greeting to friends and family, either for individuals or your entire contact list if you prefer to share the greeting card on Facebook or Twitter. At the very least, they’re fun to make. Here are some not-so-personal examples for you to check out: |
First Android Dedicated GPS Unit Actually Looks Pretty Decent | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | Considering Android is getting on in age, it’s surprising it hasn’t been featured on more “miscellaneous” devices. Phones and tablets, sure, but we haven’t seen many, say, DVD players or PMPs using the OS. And certainly not GPS devices, whose proprietary libraries and interfaces were developed at great cost, leading the companies that made them working desperately to squeeze every last penny out of them. But perhaps we’re about to see that change. GPS maker Holux and sporting map app company SatSki have put out the , a handset-like unit that has multiple sports-related mapping tools, lots of live maps (Google of course, OVI, OpenStreetMap, and more), and a location and distance-focused interface. Average speed, altitude changes, all that stuff. It also has Facebook and Twitter baked right in, so you can tell all your friends your coordinates. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have access to other Google services like GMail or the market, though there is a sub-market called the All Sports App Market that probably will have a few random useful apps. Sure, it’s not a breakthrough device, but it’s rugged, hackable, and full of location-y goodness. I doubt this is the last one of these devices we’ll be seeing. Garmin and the rest can only fight for so long before they too are assimilated. No availability or pricing is available right now — nor specs or anything really, let’s hope this thing exists. [via ] |
Zazzle Launches AR Technology To Let You See How Art Looks On Your Wall Before You Buy | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | It’s been a while since we’ve written about DIY online shop, . But the company has grown to be one of the largest customization companies out there, with 20 million unique visitors a month. And today the company is pressing forward with developing its own innovative new ways to help users more accurately customize and visualize their products. For eShopping, one of the next big technology trends will see augmented reality and artificial intelligence allowing customers to try on clothes without actually being in-store, test products, and so on before buying them. As to its own play into this world, Zazzle is today announcing AR technology that will show online shoppers exactly what art, prints, canvass wraps, photos, etc. will look like on their office or home walls. Online art buyers — both high end and not — are generally lacking in ways to accurately visualize art on their walls, which is something that we’d all like to do, especially before committing a sizable chunk of our income to a specific piece. Using its so-called “Zazzle Realview” technology, shoppers can easily snap a picture and upload it to the site, then interact with 3D-rendered photos to see (in realtime) how the prints will appear on their very own walls. Users can upload personal graphics or photos, or choose from thousands online — and as they make changes to size and frame type, for example, those changes are instantly reflected in Realview’s visualizations. What’s cool about this is that Realview works for all art, personal or stock art on Zazzle, regardless of price, allowing you to check it out via AR. Of course, Zazzle is not alone here. Art.com, Panasonic, and even Lego have comparable AR services, but Zazzle thinks that by offering features like automatic calibration of user placement, simulated lighting over products, interactive view of a 3D model with a webcam, as well as high-res views of customizable products within a user environment, they’ve got a leg up on the competition. It’s pretty cool: The company’s patent-pending computational photography tech combines computer graphics, object recognition, image processing and digital photography to produce interactive assets. While most other AR in this space are processing video data at around 1 to 1.5 megapixels, Realview ups that to between 5 and 6 megapixels, which Zazzle hopes will put it in the “glossy” web magazine space. It seems like a niche space, but Zazzle is currently processing billions of dollars in customize products each year, and sees millions of art buyers and visitors each month — which brings some neat technology to a fairly wide audience and to a space that traditionally suffers from legacy models. For more, . |
Come On, Microsoft: Siri Is Making You Look Terrible | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | Last week, Microsoft overhauled the . The update brought dozens of new features, but there was one I was particularly excited about: when paired with a Kinect, the new interface was said to pack voice recognition support pretty much everywhere. As I noted in my well over a year ago, the Kinect’s voice system was the one bit I found particularly disappointing. After finally seeing do something right with voice with Siri, the idea that the 360 might be getting a wonderful voice interface had me beyond excited. Alas, it still sucks. Now, lets get one thing clear: I really, like the Xbox 360. It’s one of very, very few devices I consider a personal favorite. If I had to up and sell everything I owned, the 360 would be one of the last things to go. I’ve owned one since launch day, and have ran three of them into the ground since. Suggesting I have a bias against the 360 (as commenters are wont to do whenever we criticize ) would be like saying . But this new voice crap… yikes. If Siri’s greatest strength is that it (generally) allows users to speak naturally, the 360’s newfound greatest weakness is the exact opposite: it requires people to speak like robots. Very dumb, slow-speaking robots who have no idea what they want until presented with a finely groomed list of options. Take my battle last night, for example. I wanted to watch the TV show , which is available on Hulu. How might I do this? “Xbox, play Grimm on Hulu,” right? Without searching on Bing (we’ll get into that later), the process was: Turn on Xbox. Wait 15 seconds for the Kinect to start up. “Xbox, Quickplay” (only because I’d loaded Hulu recently. Otherwise it’d be a few more commands.), “Xbox, Hulu Plus.”, “TV.”, “Title A-Z.”, “View All”, “G.” (It hears “J”), “Go Back”, “G.”, “Next Page”, “Next Page”, “Next Page”, and finally: “Grimm”, “Resume Show”. 13 commands to do one action. Why not just search in Hulu with my voice and be done with it? Because you can’t. You can the search interface… which promptly tells you to grab your controller, because voice isn’t supported here. Because that process totally makes sense. So, why not just search via Bing on the homescreen, as you now can? I tried. Oh, how I tried. “Xbox, Bing Grimm”. Results: Anne Graham. “Xbox, Bing Grimm”. Results: Andy Grammar. “Xbox, Bing G-R-I-M-M”. Results: C’est ne ma’am. Now, that’s just an example of the interface’s failings; it’s not to say that Siri would handle this specific goal any better. While it turns up some third-party results (Yelp, for example) Siri can’t actually search for content within third-party apps at all. With Siri, however, I’m constantly being surprised with what I can do. With the 360, I’m constantly surprised by what I . Siri can set my alarms, send my texts, find nearby businesses — and heck, it’ll tell me a joke. The 360 can’t even do the things it outright says it can. To put it another way: in the 10 days since the new UI rolled out, I haven’t been pleasantly surprised by a voice interaction once. I have, however, given up on voice and reached for the controller more times than I can count. Think of the Kinect’s advantages: it has access (in most cases) to a constant Internet connection with relatively massive bandwidth. It has constant power, rather than working around battery drainage. It’s running on an exponentially more powerful device, with (stand-alone!) listening hardware that essentially never has to move. The 360 never has to figure out what I’m saying in a crowded bar, while driving, or at a ball game; it just sits in my living room, with an absurd amount of power behind it. The 360’s new voice interface should be twice as smart, twice as fast, and twice as surprisingly wonderful as Siri. Instead, it just makes me want to break my TV. |
Samsung Adds An Appolicious-Powered Social Mobile App Directory To Galaxy Tab Devices | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | After landing a , social mobile app directory has announced another partnership—with Samsung. Currently, a Samsung-branded social mobile app directory is preloaded on Samsung Galaxy Tab Android Tablets. The mobile app directory, which is located on the home screen of the tablet as ‘Samsung App’, designed to make it easier for consumers to locate and find recommended Android apps. Users can access apps by genre, Facebook friends and also see Appolicious’ curated recommendations. For Appolicious, this deal is part of the startup’s “Intel inside” strategy of providing APIs to power app discovery for partners. Partners can use Appolicious’ search, recommendation APIs and all the curation to help users figure out which apps are best for them, founder Alan Warms explains. Many technology players see the value of providing their own branded App Discovery to consumers, and he says there are more partners to come in the near future. |
“If I Were A Poor Black Kid” Inadvertently Touches On Sad Education And Tech Truths | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | You may have read the recent Forbes editorial by Gene Marks, entitled (hilariously, the slug reveals it was originally “If I Was”), which entered instant infamy as a textbook example of a failure to comprehend privilege, or at least failure to communicate that comprehension. The internet has taken him to task for his “let them eat cake” attitude, recommending these kids utilize schoolwork-tracking websites and services like Khan Academy when many of them are busy avoiding being crushed by poverty and an inattentive school system. There’s no need for us to add our voice to the chorus (this isn’t PrivilegeCrunch, though it may occasionally appear that way), but it’s a good time to take his rather tone-deaf recommendations and make something positive of them. Marks is right that technology and the web have a lot to offer impoverished kids and districts, but his application of them is upside-down and backwards. I was very pleased to be able to highlight , many of which made their debut at Disrupt. What struck me about many of them (struck me as practical, that is) was that they were aimed at the teacher and administration level, not at the students, who may or may not have access. Because access is not guaranteed for students, not by a long shot. The way to go about applying technology to underprivileged kids isn’t changing what you require from students. Students must learn, true, but they must also be taught. It would have been more to the point for Marks to write “If I Were A Poor Black Kid,” though again, the race thing is a whole other issue and won’t be addressed by web services, so let’s leave it at “If I Were Teaching Underprivileged Kids.” The failure rate at inner-city schools and in poor areas isn’t a failing of the students, and advice should not be aimed at them. The greatest advancements of the last 30 years have been in technology and communication, and that needs to be applied from the top down. If I Were Teaching Underprivileged Kids, then, I would go straight to my principal and supervisor and open their eyes to some of the powerful tools available for improving the ways kids can be exposed to information, tracked, and their educations personalized. I would attempt to use a service like Remind101 to keep parents informed by SMS of kids’ work and school events, and to receive feedback and concerns without the hassle of conferences or phone calls. I would suggest to them the benefits of standardizing data collection district-wide in a tool like Eduvant, and investigate grants or funds that may make the transition easier. I would point out that money could be saved. I would attempt to maximize the effectiveness of the few computers we had by modern means that students need not worry about, like screen sharing. I would contact offices and other schools to see if there were spare computers, no matter how old as long as they could play a YouTube video and run a word processor. I would petition to replace software like Word and Photoshop with free options like and , and use the money saved (perhaps no more than a few hundred dollars) to pick up a few inferior netbooks, laptops, or tablets, anything that turns on. I would reserve a week (or more) for the online investigation of and application for scholarships. I would set aside class time to examine the costs and benefits of college, vocational school, GEDs, community college, online courses, and other options. I would attempt to ensure my students had at least a basic understanding of web services, social media, online privacy, how they can be tracked, and other modern job concerns. Naturally, all that is something of a naive fantasy. I went to an inner city public school myself, and saw the teachers’ portion of hardship myself, and I have friends teaching now who would laugh at these suggestions. If I Were Teaching Underprivileged Kids, I’d have enough on my hands just trying to keep my oversized class in line, get homework graded without taking it home (yeah, right), meet expectations for standardized testing, and motivate my kids to come to school in the first place. I wouldn’t have time to be reconfiguring budget tablets and installing open source software on dozens of school laptops. But we’re in tech, and we have to be realistic about what we have to offer. It will take time for the dream of tech to come to poor school districts full of overworked teachers and pitifully insufficient resources. But making it available is the necessary first step. Unfortunately, we can’t take the next one ourselves, and until then this fantasy world of Khan-powered, cloud-tracked classrooms will remain just that: a fantasy world. But one thing we absolutely must not do is expect the work to be done by the people whom, by focusing on the bleeding edge, we’ve profoundly underserved for years. The tech gap is as real and consequential as the income, gender, race, and every other gap, and failure to acknowledge that is doing real harm. |
Duedil secures a second round of Angel investment | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | , which is building out free database around company financials in the UK and Ireland, has today announced a second round investment from Jonty Hurwitz, the founding CTO of . Terms were undisclosed. The startup previously raised seed financing from Passion Capital and prominent angel investor Federico Pirzio-Biroli. Duedil is unusual since until now most company information has been paid-for in those territories. Duedil offers a pretty large array of company data for free, and has plans to expand since launching in April 2011. It aggregates over 30 billion data points to bring indispensable information on every company and director in the UK and Ireland. Hurwitz is a co-founder of Wonga, arguably one of Europe’s most successful and profitable startups, turning over £74 million in 2009, and recently sponsoring the Tube during New Year’s Eve. Duedil won the startup competition this year. |
CarWoo Raises $6 Million To Spare You The Car Dealership Blues | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | Buying a car doesn’t have to be such a nightmare, after all. That’s the promise of , a startup that looks to take the stressful negotiation tactics and pushy salespeople out of the equation, allowing consumers to buy their car online with a relatively small amount of hassle. Today the company is announcing that it’s closed a new $6 million funding round led by Interwest Partners, Comcast Ventures, Blumberg Capital, and Raymond Tonsing. The company has now raised over $12 million in total, after a $6 million round last year (it was also part of the Y Combinator class of summer 2009). In conjunction with the news, the company is announcing that it’s landed a new COO: Rudi Thun, who was previously the GM of AOL Autos, the fourth biggest online car site (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL). This is a significant hire for the team, as the core team of founders didn’t actually have any experience with cars when they first started the company. They say that’s served them well up until now, but it was time to bring someone onboard with extensive experience in the space. CarWoo streamlines the car buying process by flipping the traditional model on its head. First, users head to the site, where they input the make, model, and trim of the vehicle they’re looking for. Dealers who have signed up with CarWoo can then compete against one another for that customer — naming their price (which the customer can counterbid on), and answering questions as well. So what about test drives? CarWoo CEO Tommy McClung says that a lot of people go to a local dealership to try a vehicle out, then head online when it’s time to actually buy the car. McClung says that the company has managed to quadruple the number of dealers using the service in the last year alone — they’re now at around 11,000 dealers nationwide. And while the company doesn’t disclose how many vehicles it’s sold, he says that the site attracts a large enough userbase to make the site worthwhile for those 11,000 dealers. Another interesting trend: while price is obviously a factor as users decide which dealer they want to work with, McClung says that most of the time users wind up choosing a dealer who didn’t offer the absolute lowest price. This, he explains, is because there are other factors involved: customers prefer dealers who are more responsive, professional, and so on. CarWoo makes money in a couple of ways. Consumers wishing to search for three or more car models at once pay $100 (there’s a new, free plan that just launched that lets them search for one car at a time). On the other side of the equation, dealers can list their vehicles and complete transactions for free. The site recently launched a premium ‘Dealer Plus’ option that lets them pay to receive advanced analytics — which are designed to help them compete on those aforementioned factors that can help decide who lands the customer. |
It’s Official: Verizon Galaxy Nexus To Launch On December 15 For $299 | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | Well it’s about time — after months of breathless waiting, Verizon has finally confirmed that the LTE-capable Galaxy Nexus will indeed launch on December 15 (i.e. tomorrow). The word comes courtesy of , who received a release from Big Red themselves celebrating the device’s long-awaited release. As expected the device sticks to Verizon’s new standard pricing model for top-tier 4G smartphones, and people looking to nab at Nexus at the $299 price point will have to sign up for (or extend) a two-year contract. If the thought of slogging to a Verizon store or third-party retailer tomorrow fills you with dread, you’ll also have a shot a snagging one when the online sales begin at 1AM EST. Interestingly, Verizon has yet to put an end to their , so potential Galaxy Nexus buyers should also be able to lock in a 4GB monthly data plan instead of the 2GB plan for $29 — not a bad bonus when you’re buying one of the most-anticipated smartphones of the year. There isn’t much else to say at this point: we’ve reported tirelessly about the , and we’ve taken in-depth looks at over the past few months, so really all that’s left is to breathe a sigh of relief as we wait for sales channels to open. Oh, and here’s the full release, in case you were planning to celebrate the occasion by poring over every word: First Smartphone to Combine Android™ 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and the Power of America’s Fastest, Most Reliable 4G Network BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – Verizon Wireless, Samsung Telecommunications America (Samsung Mobile) and Google™ announced Galaxy™ Nexus™ is available starting today in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores and online at www.verizonwireless.com for $299.99 with a new two-year customer agreement. Customers can browse the Web, stream music and more at blazing speeds using the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network. Galaxy Nexus customers can enjoy access to the 4G LTE network in 190 markets covering over 200 million people across the United States, and fly through the Web with fast download speeds of 5 to 12 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of 2 to 5 Mbps within the 4G LTE Mobile Broadband coverage area. Galaxy Nexus runs Android™ 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, which brings an entirely new look and feel to Android. Galaxy Nexus offers customers a redesigned user experience with improved multi-tasking, notifications, Near Field Communications (NFC) sharing with Android Beam™ and a full Web-browsing experience. The lock screen, home screen, phone app and everything in between have been rethought and redesigned to make Android simple, beautiful and useful. Galaxy Nexus also features an ultra-thin 9.47mm design with a 4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED™ Contour Display to watch movies, view pictures and play games that come to life in 720p (1280×720) resolution. Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) features: · Redesigned user interface – software navigation buttons, a first for Android smartphones, and a dedicated recent apps button to make multi-tasking easy · Face Unlock – use state-of-the-art facial recognition to unlock Galaxy Nexus · Android Beam™ – quickly share Web pages, apps, contacts and YouTube™ videos with friends by simply tapping two compatible phones together · Redesigned Camera – introduces panorama mode, 1080p video capture, zero-shutter lag for instant photo capturing, and effects such as silly faces and background replacement · People Application – browse friends, family and coworkers, see their photos in high-resolution and check their latest status updates from Google+ and other social networks · Cloud Services – keep email, contacts, photos, music, browser bookmarks and other data synced to the cloud, available across multiple devices so customers never lose important data · Google Music – upload up to 20,000 songs to the cloud, discover and buy new music from Android Market™, and stream it instantly on Galaxy Nexus and from the Web for free · Google+ – Create a Google+ account right from the phone and check status updates, manage circles, quickly share updates and photos, video chat with up to ten friends with Mobile Hangouts, and chat with groups of friends with Google+ Messenger · Support for Google Mobile™ Services – Gmail™, Google Maps™ with 3D maps and free turn-by-turn navigation, Google Earth™, Movie Studio, YouTube, syncing with Google Calendar™, a redesigned Google+ app and access to more than 300,000 apps, millions of eBooks, thousands of movies to rent, and millions of songs available to download from Android Market Additional features: · Dual-core 1.2 GHz application processor and HTML5 Web browser – optimized dual-core processing with Android 4.0 combined with lightning fast 4G LTE connectivity for fast downloading of graphics, applications processing and Web browsing · Mobile Hotspot capability – share 4G LTE or 3G connection with up to 10 Wi-Fi-enabled devices · 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with zero-shutter lag for instant photo capturing, autofocus and LED flash with full 1080p recording · Front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video chat · Textured soft-touch back cover – enhances the ergonomic feel and makes the phone slip-resistant · Bluetooth® 3.0 technology – support for headset, hands-free, stereo, phonebook access, human interface device (HID) and object push for vCard and vCalendar · 1 GB RAM and 32 GB on-board memory (actual formatted capacity will be less) Pricing and data packages: · Galaxy Nexus is available now in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores and online at www.verizonwireless.com for $299.99 with a new two-year customer agreement. · Customers that purchase a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung will need to subscribe to a Verizon Wireless Nationwide Talk plan beginning at $39.99 monthly access and a smartphone data package starting at $30 monthly access for 2 GB of data. Customers can visit www.verizonwireless.com/galaxynexus for more information on the Galaxy Nexus. For additional information on Verizon Wireless products and services, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.
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[Update] Website Visitor Opt In Rate To Facebook Integrations May Be Closer To 40%, Much Higher Than 2.8% | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | Many websites include Facebook integrations in hopes of offering quick sharing or personalization that can increase referral traffic, conversions, and page views. 56% of users who view a Facebook authentication step will accept it, according to a new study by . That means users aren’t actually as scared of the Facebook authorization flow’s privacy implications as some might assume. The real hurdle is getting users to click the Facebook integration buttons in the first place. As long as websites don’t disrupt their design with these buttons or hinge their entire experience on opt-in user data, there’s little harm and a lot of good that can come from Facebook integrations. They can help direct users to relevant products or content that match their interests or that have been viewed by friends. To conduct the study, social web integration developer and 1.2 million views of the Facebook authentication flow across 42 different social applications of its clients. The majority of sites see between 50% and 66% of visitors opting in to personalization if they click through to see the prompt shown below. Additional findings include that asking for fewer data types increased the opt in rate, and that users sourced via search engine optimization and marketing opted in less often. Last month, Sociable Labs shared data with us indicating that . This means that social plugins such as the Like button that don’t require user permissions to function are a safe bet for websites. But few people want to click a random “Facebook Login” button with no idea of what they’re getting. If sites want the benefits of learning a user’s biographical information, location, interests, and other data, they must expend real estate to say why users should opt in. A little note that “By logging in we’ll be able to suggest relevant products and deals from our huge catalog” goes a long way. |
null | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 13 | null |
Overwolf Partners With TeamSpeak To Give Online Games A Social Boost (And In-Game Voice Chat) | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 14 | A slice of good news for gamers: Today, , a company which makes voice communications systems to let gamers chat while playing games, has partnered with to begin offering gamers some serious suped-up social and voice communications functionality during gameplay. TeamSpeak users can install a simple widget to get in-game notifications, chat, the ability to change voice settings, and manage channels without leaving the comfort of their favorite MMO games. For those unfamiliar with Overwolf, the Israeli startup that makes software to overlay social media in games, the company’s mission is, put simply, to “Zynga-fy online games” (in a good way), providing a software client that seamlessly adds a social layer to games, providing us with a convenient way to share achievements, access Facebook, Twitter, Skype, MSN, web browsers, and gameplay recording while playing multiplayer online games. Obviously, neither company is without competition in the gaming world, especially Overwolf, as the ‘socialization of everything’ has certainly come to games in full force, but for game publishers, Overwolf provides an easy way to integrate social media within games to boost virality and reduce user acquisition costs without touching a line of code. Overwolf has partnered with companies like Frogster Online Gaming, Games-Masters, gPotato and Aeria Games, which have launched their own branded versions of the service as a way to connect their online games with various social platforms. It’s a great way for gamers to interact with other members, post screenshots or videos, search databases for new tricks, cheats, and explanations while playing games, and Overwolf is hoping that by providing a channel into already-existing social networks they can bypass having to create their own gaming social network from scratch. TeamSpeak, too, has been looking for easier ways to boost their in-game support, so with their new partnership with Overwolf, both are able to offer a deep set of communications tools that players already had on the desktop during the online, in-game experience. Overwolf CEO Uri Marchand said that gamers and Overwolf users have been champing at the bit to get TeamSpeak support, as TeamSpeak has become very popular among online gamers, which use the service to strategize and speak to other team members while playing, including realtime voice chat, file sharing, and so on. While many game development companies have been trying to enhance user experience by offering more social tools, Twitter and Facebook integration, YouTube support and so on ( ), this partnership between TeamSpeak and Overwolf could be of great value to smaller development operations that don’t have the time or resources to build social and communications functionality from scratch. For more, check out and , or the video below for more on how the partnership works in-game: |
Over 40 Internet Companies Come Out Publicly Against SOPA (Including Us) | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 22 | Since the hit the Internet yesterday, the lines have been drawn; People are to pull thousands of domains from domain registrar Godaddy after it appeared on the list as a supporter. Other people are calling those people Whether you’re for or against it SOPA has become somewhat of a pain point amongst techies, with the overwhelming majority, including myself and almost every other writer on the TechCrunch team, leaning heavily towards “against.” SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) essentially allows ISPs to block entire domains because a piece of hosted content infringes copyright. As the bill approaches deliberation in House of Representatives next month, a steady stream of Internet companies have taken anti-SOPA stands. After all, sacrificing innovation to save a dying business model is a close as it gets to anathema in these parts. Here’s a list of all the publicly anti-SOPA tech/Internet companies I could find. Please add other ones you know of in the comments. |
Facebook Opens Mobile News Feed As Viral Channel For Games | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 22 | Once upon a time, Facebook game companies like Zynga fattened up their user counts thanks to viral distribution to non-gamers through the news feed. Facebook later curtailed this channel, forcing developers to concentrate on paid marketing and true word of mouth to grow. A new boom period could be coming, this time for mobile developers, as Facebook that it is testing game stories in the mobile news feed. This could attract devs to its recently launched HTML5 mobile gaming platform with bait of reaching . Facebook learned a lot about balancing developer success with user experience during that first boom period, often called the wild west days. Game spam such as users asking all their friends to install and give them virtual good overran the news feed, making it a bore to non-gamers. Facebook will surely be monitoring the volume of mobile news feed game stories to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Rather than pepper the feed with individual stories, Facebook is using aggregated stories that read like “Rose Yao and 9 other people recently played games”. Below users see a few friends names and links to the games they played, and can tap to expand to see the whole list. Tapping a game will launch its HTML5 version, or that native app if already installed. The aggregated stories give users control, so those that want to discover something to play can, while those uninterested can breeze by. Earned viral channels also democratize the Facebook platform, as they provide exposure to small developers without big marketing budgets. Facebook platform to make sure Apple and Google weren’t the only ones making money off mobile games. Developer adoption of the channel has been a bit sluggish so far, though. The opening of this viral channel could convince developers to experiment with Facebook mobile. Facebook also made a few other announcements to the benefit of web Facebook game developers. Users will now see 6 bookmarks instead of 4 while playing games, which should boost retention and re-engagement. Home page bookmark notifications will now clear when clicked, making the arrival of new alerts more noticeable. The separate Games & Apps dashboards have been combined so users don’t have to check two places, and game categories have been refined so Facebook can more accurately feature high quality developers. Finally, the company launched a Games Tutorial to ease the path to developing games for its platform. |
Codecademy Builds ‘Labs,’ A Web-Based Code Editor | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 22 | Smoking hot startup , a service which teaches you how to program online has launched its feature today, as a sign of things to come. Codecademy founder tells me that Codecademy, and specifically new hire , built the feature because it wanted people to be able to play with what they’ve learned on Codecademy without having to download a desktop-based code editor or integrated development environment (IDE). He says that most other online code-learning environments (like ) don’t yet offer a way for students freeform write and run the code they teach in-browser. In addition to Javascript, which Codecademy already offers courses in, the interactive coding console allows you to program in both Python and Ruby as a way to practice languages and implement curriculum you may have learned elsewhere. Sims tells me that the startup plans on offering Python and Ruby lessons in addition to Javascript eventually. In addition to editing, Codecademy Labs allows you to run, and download executable files so your programs can run elsewhere. “It eliminates the biggest hurdle. When they’re learning code, people want a super easy way to go do something with it,” Sims says “Labs makes it really easy to continue along the path of learning stuff without any of the complications that go along with programming.” Codecademy recently received $2.5 million from an impressive array of investors including , , , , , , , , and others. |
In confidential email Samwer describes online furniture strategy as a 'Blitzkrieg' | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 22 | , the Berlin-based incubator best known for German-language clones of US startups like Zappos and Groupon, , especially in the online furniture space according to information passed to TechCrunch Europe. In a confidential email sent by Oliver Samwer which we have confirmed is genuine, the head (with his brothers Marc and Alexander) of European Founders Fund and the driving force behind Rocket, says their strategy is to become “number one” in the ecommerce sector for furniture over the next year. But the language he uses – including the world “blitzkrieg” – indicates an aggressive and potentially insensitive management style which appears to be a ‘modus operandi’ of Rocket Internet culture. Samwer has since apologised for using the term. In the email, written in halting English, Oliver Samwer tells his team at Rocket that “there are only 3 areas in ecommerce to build billion dollar business: amazon, zappos and furniture.” “Never forget there are only 2 big areas in ecommerce: amazon and zappos. this is the last chance in your life! the chance for another billion dollar ecommerce company will never come again. This is over, after amazon there came only zappos, so we cannot lose this, because your grand children will ask why you why you did not become it,” he writes. He then goes on to explain how they will achieve this: by being “German detail oriented”, being fast, being “aggressive” and “data driven”. He also adds that managers he employed who did not do this lost him “a lot of money” in Russia and “the founders lost 50% of their equity” and had “no salary for 6 months.” However the language used is quite surprising, to say the least. He tells his team: “You must assume everything [sic.] in your plan so that there are no surprises. i do not accept surprises. i want this planned confirmed [sic.] by all three of you: you must sign it with your blood.” He adds: “i will only do a plan that you 100% believe in and that is signed with blood.” Most controversially, especially for a high profile German businessman, he uses language more reminiscent of World War Two: “There are only 3 areas in ecommerce to build billion dollar business: amazon, zappos and furniture. the only thing is that the time for the blitzkrieg must be chosen wisely, so each country tells me with blood when it is time. i am ready – anytime!” “Blitzkrieg” was of course a term used by the German military to describe their tactic of fast moving “lightning war”. The well-placed source who passed us the email told us: “Samwer is known for using military terms as well as obscene language a lot, so that kind of ‘motivation’ is definitely “Olli Samwer style”. I don’t know a single other business person using such language.” Everyone knows that in the realm of high-growth Internet companies people can sometimes get overly excited and perhaps over-step the mark. However the language used is less than tactful, to put it mildly. Contacted by TechCrunch about the email Oliver Samwer confirmed it was genuine and responded on email with this statement: “This was an email I sent to members of a project team back in October. In the midst of my enthusiasm and the idea of a fast roll-out I used the totally non-appropriate term Blitzkrieg. I am deeply sorry for this. I apologize to anyone who might have been offended by this word and the general tone of the email. It was really not my intention to hurt anyone’ s feelings. I am sending the same email of apology to the original recipients of this email. I know it was wrong and I will surely never articulate myself that way.” We reprint the email in full below. From: Oliver Samwer
Subject: when is it time for blitzkrieg
To: [redacted]
Cc: [redacted]
Date: October, 2011 [Name], [Name] and the other founders globally in furniture, i need to know from you, when it is time to do the same in furniture, that means when it is time to take 100% of the market, full scale investment attack etc – as see below. there are only 3 areas in ecommerce to build billion dollar business: amazon, zappos and furniture. the only thing is that the time for the blitzkrieg must be chosen wisely, so each country tells me with blood when it is time. i am ready – anytime! Team in India, Turkey, Australia, South Africa, South East Asia, I want you to change strategy and become the fastes, most aggressive and most succcessful company we ever built. You both face the same situation of coming late into market but sitting in the most interesting markets of the world and therefore I want you both to follow the same strategy. And do not tell me that you are following the strategy already, today from india to turkey, you have implemented 20% of this. Now it is time to either decide we will die to win or to give up. So here is the important stuff for our strategy Must: 1. We must be number one latest in the last month of next season. Full month, not a discount sales month. Why ? Because only number one can raise unbelievable money at unbelievable valuations. I cannot raise money for number 2 etc and I have seen it how easy it is for me in Brazil and how difficult in Russia, because our team fucked up. So to be clear, I will provide you with the money for the most aggressive plan of history. You must provide a plan and assume the following: 1. You achieve number 1. And you must achieve number in the categories that your competitors are active. So if your comeptitors are only in shoes, you must be number one in shoes. And then have clothes etc on top. But it will not that by not being number one in shoes you make up by selling in clothes. Leader in EVERY country that you have. 2. You must be in 2 seasons from now have at least 50% marketshare of the total online market in all your categories. A scenario where you have 35%, next 25%, next 20% will not give you the valuation that we need. we need an amazon valuation: seen as the 80% leader in the market. 3. You must assume that your competitors will raise huge amounts of money and will have revenues of 3x compared to this season. 4. i want all competitors with forecasts in your plan, so that it is clear what our position is. 5. i only care for net revenues, after returns and number of orders to prove that you are number one and have the required market share. no other currency. pls provide a business plan for 2012, not longer, not less. 6. in the last season month you need to be 100% bigger than biggest competitor in net revnues and order (both metrics) 7. assume that your competition will do crazy things: tv, groupons, selling below cogs, … you must assume eveything in your plan so that there are no surprises. i do not accept surprises. i want this planned confirmed by all three of you: you must sign it with your blood. What you need and do not have (this is not criticism, this is oberservation): 1. You have not enough top buyers: you need to be number one in shoes, apparel, sports, jewelerey, whatever category makes sense. we can only get to 80% marketshare if we beat our competitors by aggressiveneess in each category, it must be a blitz-krieg-invasion. i think you should have 25 top buyers, top in each category, start looking now. you must OWN each category. australia mistake, not enough focus on shoes, instead apparel and so they are losing out in shoes. the strategy is: own every country and if you have to sacrifice, focus on shoes as priority. best is if you can master all. 2. you need more top people. more mckinseys, goldman. find young talent, aggressive talent, smart detailed. 3. you need to ask much more brazil, russia and germany for their lessons, mistakes, improvements. russia did not do reports like germany and so they screwed up. 4. spend your money wisely. grow buying now, but it makes no sense to have 200 logistics people for 10 orders a day. so grow early, but wiseley. 5. control marketing, the key is in measurement. there is tons of lessons in russia mistakes and brazil there. 6. 2 of you should come some time for 2 days over one weekday and one weekend day to germany to get complete download. 7. find a top cto wizzard, build up a 30 people it team of top talent. amazon is it company, zalando 30% of value in it. it is always bottleneck. Summary: i give you all the money to win, i give all the trust, but you come back with unmatched success. If i see that you are wasting my money, that you are not german detail oriented, that you are not fast, that you are not aggressive, that you are not data driven, that you are not doing logistics well, upload inventory fast, buying wrong inventory, then i get angry and do like in russia, where no people leading the company now and i lost a ton of money and the founders lost 50% of their equity and no salary for 6 months. we are in the same boat, everyone has to do his mission. We are coming late, so we need to be the most aggressive, so aggressive that every competitor is surprised because he cannot imagine that we are SOO aggressive. to give you an example in brazil in groupon my competitor did 3m a month and had 80 sales people. i assumed in 4 months he would go to 300 salespeople and 6m so i told the team to have 500 salespeople in 4 months and 10m monthly revenues. we won. yes, there was some collateral damaage (it could have been done cheaper wiht more time), but i won and this it was matters so i could raise money and optimise all the missing parts. Provide a plan over this weekend that includes all your recommendations, thinking because i can give you the money, the knowhow, the strategy, but i will only do a plan that you 100% believe in and that is signed with blood. this is not olis plan, this must be your plan, our plan. Never forget there are only 2 big areas in ecommerce: amazon and zappos. this is the last chance in your life! the chance for another billion dollar ecommerce company will never come again. This is over, after amazon there came only zappos, so we cannot lose this, because your grand children will ask why you why you did not become it. Surprise me with your aggressiveness, but smart and thought through aggressiveness – learn from the russian and japanese mistakes and the german and brazilian successes ! This is our last chance in ecommerce to build an Amazon company. After us, you can build an online games company, but no more in ecommerce. this is the LAST frontier in your life for ecommerce and I want you to rule this frontier. not 20%, not 30%, but 80% marketshare which is still possible in your countries. I am the most aggressive guy on internet on the planet. I will die to win and i expect the same from you! =
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Y Combinator Startup Priceonomics Tells You How Much To Pay For Any Used Product | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 22 | You want the best price on things you buy second hand, but finding out how much you should pay is a hassle. Removing this friction from a lucrative part of the purchase funnel is the goal of . The first startup out of the winter 2012 Y Combinator batch, Priceonomics has crawled the web to compile its next-generation price guide. It launches today featuring 10 million prices on 50,000 products, and plans to expand across verticals soon. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you want to buy a TV on craigslist, a bike on eBay, or something from the . Visit the site and search for the product. Priceonomics returns an estimate for how much you should pay for it along with a range of prices it’s crawled. It then displays listings of people selling it. Filter by keyword, proximity, and price to narrow the results. There’s also value to sellers, as they can check how they should be pricing their own products. Most listings I clicked had already been sold, but the site is designed for you to discover what you should pay, not necessarily where to buy. If you can wait a little while, enter your email address and Priceonomics notifies you when the product is posted at a great price. There’s also for specific product types. You could click Computers->Apple->MacBook to discover you should pay about $1000 for this used laptop, or at least somewhere between $682 and $1,318. Currently the site features 71 product types across categories like transportation, cameras, computers, phones, and TVs, but more are on the way. Used product price guides aren’t new, especially for cars, but Priceonomics does it right. I love how quick and clean the site is. It’s so refreshing compared to slogging through Google product search results. My only gripe is that I have to click a listing to find out if it’s already been sold. With time I’m sure the founding team of CEO Michael Flaxman, CTO Omar Bohsali, and Rohin Dhar will sort this out and highlight active listings. Flaxman tells me developed the idea for Priceonomics because “I’m a serial craigslist shopper…[but] I’ve always found it really hard to figure out what things are worth.” I asked Flaxman why Priceonomics is different from existing price guides. He explained, “First, in almost all our verticals we’re the first price guide to exist. Want to know what a five-year old bicycle is worth? Good luck finding that! Second, our guides are generated by the collective knowledge of literally millions of people. All the data is transparently available for everyone to see. This gives us a credibility that doesn’t exist for the big car pricing sites. This means that all of our guides are constantly updated automatically as we continue to index the web, so there’s no risk of our prices becoming stale.” Because it fits into the purchase funnel at the stage where people are clearly trying to buy something, the Priceonomics has big monetization potential. Featured product guides for brands, sponsored search results, traditional display, lead generation, and affiliate links would all work. While the rest of the Winter YC class will launch soon, Priceonomics made a smart push to get out the door today. It may have missed the pre-holiday shopping blitz, but there’ll be plenty of people looking to spend cash gifts or find out whether they should return a new product and buy used instead. : I’ve heard back from the Priceonomics team and added several quotes to this article. |
Cheezburger’s Ben Huh: If GoDaddy Supports SOPA, We’re Taking Our 1000+ Domains Elsewhere | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 22 | And the anti-SOPA rallying of the tech world’s best continues. Just minutes after Ycombinator’s Paul Graham disclosed that SOPA-friendly companies , Cheezburger (as in I Can Has Cheeseburger, FAIL Blog, Know Your Meme, etc.) CEO Ben Huh has announced that they will be moving their array of over 1,000 domains away from GoDaddy unless the registrar recants their support of the act. Will Huh’s threat be enough to make GoDaddy back down? Probably not: GoDaddy is a company with plenty of controversies under its belt, so they’re more than used to taking a bit of heat. With that said, it raise awareness to the fact that taking your domains (and thus your money) elsewhere is a totally legitimate form of protest — in fact, Huh’s tweet just reminded me that I have (make that had) 2 domains sitting in GoDaddy’s yard. Thanks, Ben! You can find our , and find out more about why it’s such a terrible, terrible idea , , and . |
ComScore: Google+ Grows Worldwide Users From 65 Million In October To 67 Million In November | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 22 | There are lots of third-party guesstimates floating around about Google+ traffic. Are users losing interest like search trends ? Has the service grown to 150 million active users like this research firm ? I’ve gotten new numbers from , which is arguably the best third-party measurement firm for web traffic in the world. It shows that Google+ grew from 65 million unique visitors in October to nearly 67 million in November. This is purely based on traffic to the plus.google.com subdomain, comScore’s Andrew Lipsman tells me today. So it doesn’t include the many Google+ feature injections that the search company has administered to its other properties over the last months. Some people have suggested that Google+ is as barren as a desert — this is at least an oasis. Here’s how the service stacked up against competitors last month. The depressing significance for those people out there wishing for Google+ to either die off or kill their rivals is that neither appears to be happening. Just some slow and steady growth, which is overall good for Google considering the vast resources and focus that it’s bringing to bear on the effort. Ultimately, Google+ doesn’t have to dominate now, it just needs to keep growing and getting better over the coming years in order to be a real alternative to Facebook and everyone else. And now, the usual data caveat: Obviously comScore, like any other third-party, doesn’t have the same access to data as Google itself, so don’t assume these numbers are 100% right. But still they’re worth paying attention to, since Google doesn’t share much about how it’s doing. The last time the company released anything, it said it had users during its earnings call in October. That’s not directly comparable to this, but could indicate that there’s been more significant growth over the fall. Also, for more on worldwide social networking trends, check out our coverage of from yesterday. [Oasis image via ] |
In A Reversal, Intuit Will Make Quicken 2007 For Mac Work With Lion | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 12 | 22 | has just released some good news for “Quicken for Mac” users. The accounting software company says they will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac “Lion-compatible” by early spring 2012. Yes, irony alert. Back in July, facing those users, because Apple Lion OS was dropping support for Rosetta. Without Rosetta, Quicken 2007 wouldn’t run on the Mac with Lion. And I wrote each of the three options Intuit proposed (Quicken Essentials for Mac, Mint.com, Quicken for Windows) had their own flaws. , Intuit’s General Manager of its Personal Finance Group which includes Quicken and Mint.com, wrote a note to existing customers saying “I am committed to creating products to help you reach your financial goals. I recognize, however, that we have not always delivered on this promise to Quicken Mac customers.” Forth adds “I understand the frustration this may have caused you and have put a team in place to address the issue.” The details have not been worked out yet, but Intuit says they have a team in place to solve the problem and they ask for their customers patience. Back in July, reported one solution might be Intuit bakes some Rosetta libraries into Quicken. It’s unclear if that’s the solution now being worked on. After calling them out for this problem earlier, it’s only fair to give them credit for doing this now. Forth says “working toward a … solution is just a first step in winning back your confidence.” I agree. Ok, I realize it is about to become 2012 and we are talking about a 2007 product, but it’s still a widely used product. |
OnLive Now Playing Friendly With The Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 22 | Does anyone out there actually own Sony Ericsson’s handset-formerly-known-as-Playstation-phone, the Xperia Play? I’ve never seen one in the wild. Not once. If any Play owners out there reading: A) raise your hand, and B) know that your device learned a cool new trick today. That fancy slide-out gamepad built into your device? It’s now compatible with OnLive’s crazy . For the unfamiliar, OnLive allows you to use your smartphone to play a rather wide selection of games (around 200, currently) that would otherwise only be playable on big ol’ beefy computers. The games are actually being rendered/played on OnLive’s servers, then streamed back-and-forth to your handset with surprisingly little (but still perceptible) delay. With today’s update, Xperia PLAY owners can use their device’s built-in gamepad to play any of OnLive’s titles. For everyone who didn’t buy Sony Ericsson’s wonky (but kind of neat ((but mostly wonky))) gaming portable, there’s always the . |
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