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Google’s Niantic Labs Will Soon Launch An eBook Spin-Off Of Its Ingress AR Game
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
This is a bit of an odd story: according to – and as first reported by to – Google’s Niantic Labs, the somewhat mysterious division of Google that is home to , the and , will soon start co-publishing a series of eBooks based on Ingress, its popular augmented reality game. A Google spokesperson confirmed to us that this report is indeed correct. The series, which, according to PublishersLunch, will be called ALIGNMENT and written and co-published with the help of ; the first installment (ALIGNMENT: Ingress) will be published in April. The books are designed as prequels to Greanias’ Raising Atlantis series. It looks like Greanias has long been in the Ingress story, and the overall theme of the game seems to fit in well with his earlier books. For Google, though, this – just like Ingress and most everything else that has come out of Niantic Labs – is a bit of a departure. The company isn’t exactly known for launching games. And to then turn the game into a series of books is obviously new territory for Google, though Niantic Labs does seem to operate from the rest of the company.
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Lawdingo, The Startup That Lets You Talk To Lawyers Instantly, Joins Y Combinator
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
, a startup that connects users with lawyers for online consultations (sometimes instantly), is announcing that it’s part of the current class of startups at . I last . You can browse lawyers on the site based on their expertise and location, and if you find one you like, you can schedule an appointment or in some cases hit the “talk now” button. The goal is to make finding a lawyer more convenient and more affordable. (On the affordability side, many of the lawyers on the site offer free consultations, and since you’re choosing from a broad geographic selection, you can probably find lower rates.) Founder and CEO Nikhil Nirmel told me that he hadn’t expected to get into YC. That might sound like false modesty, except that as a solo, non-technical founder, his situation really is a bit unusual for the incubator – so they must have seen something they really liked. (He’s working with a team in Eastern Europe, but Nirmel is still the only full-time Lawdingo employee in the United States.) There are now more than 450 lawyers on the site. As he put it, “We’ve scaled faster than any law firm.” And the business model is evolving. Originally, Lawdingo charged a subscription fee, but Nirmel said that with the varying marketing budgets between different law firms, as well as the fact that different leads for potential clients had different values, that flat fee didn’t make sense for everyone. Instead, he’s moved towards an auction model, where lawyers bid to have their profiles shown to particular users. Over time, as the amount of lawyers on the site grows, they’ll need to bid higher if they want their profiles to show up on the most popular legal topics.
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Mailbox Cost Dropbox Around $100 Million
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
Disrupt alumnus in a series of super-savvy, super-early stage acquisitions today, picking up email management app in an acquisition that we’re calling “DropMail.” We had been hearing that Mailbox was raising money, piquing the interest of Andreessen Horowitz among others, which is why today’s that the company sold to the harmoniously named Dropbox didn’t come as a surprise. Sometimes an acquisition is the easiest way to raise resources for growth — especially when you’re tackling as expensive a problem as email. And have a six-figure wait list. And we’re hearing that this particular acquisition was not cheap — The post-pivot startup cost the storage company “well over” $50 million, according to multiple sources. And we’ve heard that that the price was around $100 million in cash and stock. Yahoo had also made inroads with the email platform, founded by IDEO veteran , which makes sense considering the brand decline of Yahoo Mail as well as the latter company’s dismal mobile traction. But Dropbox’s allure and sympatico vision made more sense for the fledgling startup, whose impressive numbers gave co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi the courage to take a swing at email. In any case, we can probably expect to see Dropbox handling email attachments real soon.
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Formspring, The Pioneering ‘Ask Me Anything’ Anonymous Q&A Platform, Is Shutting Down
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
, a startup that helped pioneer the “ask me anything” format of anonymous Q&A online, is shutting down. The San Francisco company announced the news in a this afternoon. The closure of the Q&A platform will occur March 31st, and users will be able to export their data until April 15th, Formspring’s founder and CEO wrote in the closure announcement. Formspring may have been the first mover in its space when it launched back in 2009, but its brand was certainly hurt when parts of its service were replicated by . The company, which raised a in venture capital, worked to keep its independent edge: For instance, last year Formspring rebranded itself with the that downplayed the anonymous Q&A aspects which had been copied by others. But it seems that it just wasn’t quite enough to keep things growing as Formspring and its investors may have hoped. Rumors had swirled in recent months that Formspring had made internal cuts of key staffers, and also saw the departure of its . Today’s news shows that it was unfortunately all leading to this closure, and not to an acqui-hire situation. Here is the announcing the shut down in full:
“Formspring launched in November 2009 as a unique way for people to have engaging conversations about anything. Eventually reaching over 30 million registered users and 4 billion posts, Formspring grew beyond my wildest dreams to become an important part of how people interact online. I’m grateful to each of you that helped make the site better by asking questions and posting responses. None of this would have been possible without you. Through the community you created, we’ve met new people, strengthened relationships, opened our minds to different points of view, and made each other smile. Unfortunately, and with great sadness, I must announce that Formspring is shutting down. While we’ve had great success in reaching a broad audience, it’s been challenging to sustain the resources needed to keep the lights on. Sunday, March 31st will be the last day you’ll be able to ask questions or post content on Formspring. You’ll be able to export your responses from now through Monday, April 15th, after which the site and apps will go offline, and any content will be permanently deleted. You can export the responses you’ve posted by following these steps: Log into your account and visit http://www.formspring.me/account/export
Click the export button
When your export is ready you’ll receive an email
Visit http://www.formspring.me/account/export again to download a zip file with your data
Thanks again for all the smiles. Sincerely,
Ade Olonoh, Founder and CEO.”
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Facebook Fills Vacant CTO Role By Promoting Its VP Of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
Mark Zuckerberg has just made an internal announcement to Facebook naming its veteran VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer as CTO, we’ve just learned from an industry source. Facebook has since confirmed to TechCrunch that Schroepfer will take the postion previously , who left last year. Schroepfer has been at Facebook for nearly five years and led most of its latest mobile efforts. Prior to Facebook, , or “Schrep” as he’s referred to internally, held the VP of Engineering role at Mozilla for three years. Sources tell us that the promotion is to “represent Schrep’s long service to the company.” A company spokesperson told TechCrunch “Mike Schroepfer’s new designation as Facebook’s CTO reflects the unique and important role he plays across the company.” With Facebook’s focus clearly centering on , including the desktop, this move makes complete sense. Facebook has experienced a significant loss of top talent as many VPs and directors have left over the last 8 months since the IPO. Of course there are lots of high ranking roles at a company of 4600, but in the last year departures include Taylor, Director of Product , Director of Product Management and Open Graph leader , Seattle office head , and more. The promotion could make sure Schrep sticks around and could inspire hope for advancement in newer Facebook employees. Over the years of working with Schrep, I’ve [Josh] found him to maintain a calm confidence about Facebook’s plan, and command great respect from his peers. He’s no young hot shot, but is more so one that could help Facebook stay the course and remain a reliably popular place to work.
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Wayin’s Scott McNealy On Making The Leap From Sun Microsystems Back Into Startups [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
We had the opportunity to sit down with McNealy this week at in Austin, Texas for a segment with TechCrunch TV, and we talked a bit about how he made the transition from corporate giant to startup and the lessons he’s learned along the way — both the serious ones, and the more humorous ones. Of course, Scott McNealy is also known as one of the tech industry’s more outspoken characters, so there was lots more to talk about as well, from bridging the worlds of social and enterprise, to the future of education, the importance of open source, the role of tech founders in philanthropy, and more. Watch it all in the video embedded above.
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Airbnb Open Sources Its Chronos Scheduler, A More Flexible Cron Replacement With A Web-Based GUI
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
just announced that it has open-sourced , the company’s replacement for the standard time-based schedule that is probably familiar to everybody who has ever used a Unix-based system. Chronos runs on top of Apache’s cluster manager and allows developers to execute shell scripts at set intervals and, unlike Cron, you can also trigger jobs by the completion of other jobs. Chronos, the team writes, was born of Airbnb’s need to automate more of its data-processing pipeline. Until last December, Airbnb was apparently using a single hourly Cron job that would start its complex processing pipeline. The problem with this, the company’s engineers write, was that they “use a managed Hadoop product from Amazon, called Elastic Map/Reduce. High variance in network latency, virtualization and not having predictable I/O performance is an ongoing challenge in a cloud environment.” This increased the chance of something going wrong, so the team decided it needed a system that would allow for retries and would give its analysts the ability to see which jobs had failed. To make keeping track of Chronos even easier, the team also developed a web-based user interface that makes it easier to manage and run jobs than the usual text file Cron users have to rely on (Chronos also features an , so you can always build your own GUI, too). Airbnb’s delves a little bit deeper into the details of how Chronos works and if you’ve got 45 minutes to burn and would love to hear more about Chronos, here is the tech talk the team did at Airbnb’s headquarters earlier this year: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLqURrtS8IA?feature=player_detailpage]
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Ask A VC: Menlo Ventures’ Shawn Carolan On Sourcing Siri, How He Wants To Solve Email Overload And More
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
Menlo Ventures Managing Director stopped by the studio for our Ask A VC series. Carolan, who focuses on consumer tech investments for Menlo Ventures, chatted about how he sourced the firm’s investment in Siri, which was and is the underlying technology behind the company’s “intelligent personal assistant.” Carolan also addressed the firm’s of Shervin Pishevar, and the addition of newest partner, Venky Ganesan. And we revealed that Carolan is spending most of his time these days working on a new stealth startup, called . Check out the video for more.
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Dear Microsoft, Samsung Isn’t Very Happy With You
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
There’s been a lot of talk lately about Samsung’s growing rift with Google. But what about Samsung and Microsoft? Samsung has indeed been moving away from Google’s native apps with their own complement of directly competing services. And their insistence to continue developing Tizen as an mobile OS over which they have full control looms over Google’s future as a valuable partner to Samsung. You can check out our thoughts about this . But Samsung’s executives have been voicing their discontent with Microsoft’s products for quite some time. “Smartphones and tablets based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system aren’t selling very well,” admitted Samsung Co-CEO J.K. Shin in his latest interview with the WSJ yesterday. “In Europe, we’re also seeing lackluster demand for Windows-based products.” It’s also worth noting that J.K. Shin gave his assurances that Samsung and Google were still very much on friendly terms. Samsung Executive Vice President Song Soo Jun, manager of the company’s memory marketing division, was a little more blunt. “I think the Windows 8 system is no better than the previous Windows Vista platform.” That’s a low blow considering Windows Vista’s reputation as a bloated and buggy OS that shipped too soon. Even more so when you consider that Windows 8 was supposed to be Microsoft’s great divergence away from the Windows of Yore. Samsung has reason to be unhappy with Microsoft – Windows 8 and Windows Phone devices as a whole just aren’t selling well. Since its debut last October, Windows 8 only amounts to 2.3 percent of the global desktop OS market share. Microsoft has only managed to ship 1.5 million units of its Surface tablet, falling far below industry estimates of 3 million. Weak sales for Windows RT tablets in Germany is forcing Samsung to ditch their entire Windows RT lineup there. But from some perspectives, Samsung’s attitude towards Windows Phone is one wrought purely from negligence. “There is no evidence that Samsung has any interest in seeing the Windows Phone platform succeed,” writes Detwiler Fenton analyst Jeff Johnston. All of this says plenty about where Samsung and Microsoft respectively are today. Samsung’s successes in the mobile market have seemingly turned the company overnight into a fearsome juggernaut with plenty of spending power. When it comes to mobile, Microsoft is still struggling to keep itself afloat. That’s why it isn’t surprising at all that Samsung feels confident enough about its own position that it’s firing shots over Microsoft’s heads. A Samsung executive badmouthing Windows would have been unfathomable a decade ago. But times and circumstances have changed. Samsung has an answer to mobile that is producing profit. Microsoft doesn’t. And until Microsoft figures out a way to make itself relevant in the mobile space, Samsung won’t be paying any attention to them.
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There Is No Such Thing As A Great Launch Event
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
If you woke up this morning wondering why Samsung is being berated on social media less than 24 hours after announcing its , might I point you and , where you can read of the magical night at Radio City Music Hall when Samsung paid Broadway actors to play out scenes using the new phone for two hours. In a word, it was surreal. But that seems to be the norm these days with CE launches. I can’t think of a single product launch that has left me thinking: “what a great product.” Instead I’m left thinking about how long and torturous the presentation was. Tolerating the presentation long enough to begin loving the product has become a growing obstacle for the tech press, and it’s something marketers are trying desperately to solve. HTC and BlackBerry annoy us because they bring exec after exec on-stage for hours to demo a phone whose features we could understand in about 20 minutes, sometimes to do their bidding. We’re annoyed with for going way off the hinges trying to make mobile processors look like the priority of every teenager’s life. Sony, I can’t even talk about, after they made us sit through two full hours of game demos without ever letting us see the next PlayStation. Who’s idea was that? Seriously? With Samsung’s presentation last night, the company managed to roll all of the worst gimmicks in product announcements into one, long, wacky show. Even the Galaxy S 4, Samsung’s beast and the latest generation of the top-selling Galaxy S line, couldn’t make it through the announcement phase without looking like a tween being dropped off at school by over-protective, off-their-rocker parents. Has there ever been a good product launch? Has a company ever found a way to make the device loveable, important, and must-have without letting their marketing spunk dirty up the whole show? And if so, what does it look like, this flawless CE debut? I can only think of one product launch that left myself, and the tech press, with a good taste in their mouth. It will enrage the flame-throwing phandroids, but the truth often does, so oh well. Apple’s , and maybe the iPad, was the first and possibly only time that a product has overshadowed the event. This is not a hat-tip to Apple’s marketing, who still managed to throw in a little gimmick in the form of a stage concert with John Mayer. (To be fair, a concert with a famous musician is almost always better than seeing Big Bird or watching a dance number from unknown Broadway actresses, which is why Apple closes most events with a concert. Even if you don’t like the band, it’s hard to hate a company for giving you a free concert.) But the concert, remember, has nothing to do with the success of the iPhone launch or the failure of Samsung and other CE OEMs who can’t seem to launch a product without a little song and dance. The reason the iPhone launch kicked everyone in the ass was because it was the iPhone. It was mysterious. At the height of the iPod’s popularity, we knew something big was coming, and had no idea what it might be. Steve Jobs was a great presenter, and he really wound up the crowd talking about clunky keyboards getting in the way, and the combination of three major products into one. But if the iPhone, hypothetically, wasn’t a godsend of a device that could give us legible internet direct from our pockets, the launch would have been much like any other preposterous presentation we’ve seen in the past five years. The iPhone announcement was 10 percent heightened expectation, 10 percent Steve Jobs’ enthusiasm, and 80 percent device. Last night, Samsung’s announcement was 80 percent song and dance, and 20 percent device. To be clear, Samsung ain’t no dummy. Last night’s show was a clusterfuck on purpose. Radio City Music Hall was packed, not only with tech media (who are usually the only ones allowed to these things) but full of regular consumers who obtained tickets to the show. Furthermore, the Galaxy S 4 leaked like a broken faucet before the launch, and Samsung is fine with that. These leaks are highly controlled, as is the entry of regular people to the launch event, and it only heightens the hype of the product. It all comes back to hype. And expectations. The iPhone announcement was great because it managed our expectations perfectly. There was very little glitz and glam, but there the promise of a product that would solve a lot of problems. The Galaxy S 4, while an incredible phone, really only solves first world problems. Not important problems. The specs are great, and Samsung impressively managed to fit better components into a smaller package. However, it’s hard to brag about that when every competing OEM is making their phones smaller, lighter, thinner. Samsung could, and did, talk about the Air View feature, which lets you preview more information by hovering over an email subject line or photo gallery. Unfortunately, only about six seconds of the hour-long presentation was devoted to this one, useful feature. The rest of the event was sprinkled with skits about Group Play (letting you play one song from multiple connected devices) and Dual Cam (which lets you use both cameras at the same time). They’re “cool” but do any of these features solve problems the way that the original iPhone solved problems? Do they bring new information into your mobile world? Tell you how to get from point A to point B when you’re lost? Do they bring the internet to your hand in a profoundly simple way for the first time? No. The Galaxy S 4 is great, but the Galaxy S 4 isn’t a savior to our every woe. Most of the upgrades in the Galaxy S 4 are either standard spec bumps (like the quad-core processor and beautiful screen) or intense software features. Where specs are concerned, Samsung actually has a great selling point. Galaxy S III owners will likely yearn for that even better display, the tighter build, and that upgraded camera. Those who struggle with lag or freezes will wish on stars for that quad-core (or eight-core) processor. But I can’t imagine many people who will yearn for Air Gesture, or Smart Scroll, or Smart Pause, or Group Play, and I can probably continue on if any of these software features had made a real impression on my brain. Yet, all I can remember is that little boy doing a tap dance routine and that one actress toward the end who was playing a lush. Galaxy S III owners who longing for these software features can breathe easy, however, as they’ll . Samsung had to throw in some flash and pop to manage our expectations. The Galaxy S 4 is an amazing phone but it isn’t the salvation to your every problem, and Samsung knows this. In fact, they know it so well that they had to use actors and an expensive set to show how the GS4 might actually solve your pain points. Just telling us in a press release and via YouTube wouldn’t have been enough. The point isn’t whether or not the S 4 is a good phone, but whether or not a great product announcement even exists anymore? The 2012 iPhone 5 announcement was a snooze fest, and so was the iPad mini announcement. In fact, Apple’s lost momentum with each announcement since the original iPhone. And that’s not about companies, that’s about devices. Though the show is a viral success today, no one will remember the weird announcement or broadway show when the company announces availability. They’ll simply have this impression, as if direct from a dream, that this phone is a big deal. And that all comes back to Samsung’s big show. I urge CE companies to start thinking about how their particular product will change the way someone lives. If the product does, in fact, have life-changing capabilities, then the pony show becomes unnecessary.
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Dropbox Bought Mailbox Because It Wants To Be More Than A Cloud Storage Company
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
earlier today caused a Friday boom with its . The move has two layers of significance for the company, and it points to what more we will likely see in its future: In addition to Mailbox, an app designed for iOS devices, Dropbox has made a few other acquisitions that point specifically to cloud services that work on mobile devices. They include and on the consumer side. And it also bought , a startup that specialised in tablet-optimized advertising. Dropbox clearly sees mobile as an essential route ahead for the company. Last month, Dropbox’s CEO Drew Houston was a , where he gave out an open invitation to any and all handset makers and mobile carriers to get in touch to see where Dropbox could fit into their worlds. “If we’re not already working together, we’d love to work with you,” he said with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face. He also said in Barcelona that mobile was the single-biggest platform for sign-ups for Dropbox in 2012, with the company now topping 100 million subscribers uploading 1 billion files per day on 500 million connected devices. That was due in no small part to the company’s relationship with Samsung, which integrates Dropbox into its smartphones and gives those buying the Galaxy S III 50 GB of free storage (an offer that may well get extended to the new S 4 devices). This is the other motif behind all of Dropbox’s acquisitions. Storage is the thing that people pay for now, but down the line there are two reasons why Dropbox would want to have more. It may be that eventually Dropbox will want to make money from other revenue streams to diversify its business. Alongside that, it may want to have more services to keep consumers on Dropbox’s platform rather than going elsewhere — just like Google, Apple, Microsoft and others do. In both of these cases, the acquisition of Mailbox, along with Snapjoy and Audiogalaxy, make sense. Add to this Dropbox’ first acquisition, of Cove, nearly a year ago to the day. That was a “stealth collaboration startup”, as Alexia wrote at the time, probably made more for talent than for actual product. But in any case, and , the two engineers behind Cove, will have brought strong product experience, gained from previous years at Facebook, also into the mix. The move beyond cloud storage is an important route for Dropbox, and it should come as no surprise that it’s one also being eyed up by its similar-sounding, sort-of compatriot, sort-of rival, Box. CEO Aaron Levie the company also sees mobile platforms as fundamental to its future growth, and it is in the process of testing out “Google Docs”-style services that could see it also expanding beyond storage and enabling other company’s cloud-based services, and offering more of its own.
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FuzeBox Hires Google’s Amritansh Raghav And Skype’s Eran Shtiegman To Lead Product And Engineering
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
Video conferencing company is announcing two big hires today — Amritansh Raghav (left), former engineering director for Google Compute Engine, and Eran Shtiegman (right), a former director of product management at Skype (where he worked on social products and ads). Raghav is the company’s new chief security officer and senior vice president of engineering, while Shtiegman will be the vice president of product and user experience. CEO Jeff Cavins said that when FuzeBox management asked, “Who would be our ideal candidates and help us scale products and operations at a global level?” it was looking for people who had successfully launched enterprise products, had experience with “massive scale,” and had also dealt with “massive user adoption.” Together, Raghav and Shtiegman “really hit all three criteria” — both of them have that include working on the Lync videoconferencing service at Microsoft. (FuzeBox also says that Raghav was a key driver Google Docs and Compute Engine, and that both men were crucial to Microsoft’s strategy.) The fact that Raghav and Shtiegman have worked together before isn’t a coincidence — Shtiegman said that Raghav “basically recruited me.” Raghav described FuzeBox as a company that’s well-positioned to “rethink communication and collaboration” in the face of a growing number of Internet-connected devices. (For example last year.) “We are lucky to be coming into a place where product is already on fire,” Raghav added. So his job will be “thinking about — with this change in the kind of screens, whether it’s glasses, it’s tablets, it’s smartphones — what is the ideal experience going to look like for the user?” FuzeBox says its customers include Kellogg’s, GM, Evernote and Spotify.
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Princeton Review Founder’s Startup Noodle Acquires Lore To Build An Education Marketplace Around Search
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
Last summer, we , a startup co-founded and led by John Katzman, perhaps better known as a co-founder of The Princeton Review and 2U (formerly 2tor). The startup is on a mission to bring a Netflix-style recommendation engine to the fragmented and noisy world of education. Not unlike Google, Noodle Education wants to organize the world’s learning platforms and aggregate the huge amount of educational info out their on the Web into a learning-centric, personalized search and recommendation engine. The startup has been quiet since, but today we’ve learned that the company has made its first acquisition, scooping up Founders Fund-backed learning management startup, . Formerly known as CourseKit, Lore has been developing a new take on the familiar “course management system” with a gradebook, calendar and document uploader for class assignments, while providing students with “a social network-style newsfeed for classroom conversations,” . Initially focused on building forums around courses with tools designed specifically for teachers, last fall, Lore launched its student-facing platform to let students create academic profiles, follow classmates and professiors and join study groups, clubs, and so on. The network had its first semester live last spring, and since then has signed up more than 600 schools and added thousands of courses across a range of disciplines. While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, we do know that that this is primarily a technology acquisition. Katzman tells us that Noodle Education will be acquiring the platform and all of Lore’s assets, but that the startup’s seven employees are each evaluating whether or not to join Noodle on an individual basis. Lore founder Joseph Cohen, who developed CourseKit (which later became Lore) with Dan Getelman, and Jim Grandpre while undergraduates at The University of Pennsylvania, will not be joining Noodle. That’s not to say he’s not happy about his startup’s exit — which he and his two co-founders left school to pursue full-time — in fact, he tells us that he couldn’t “imagine a better home for Lore.” The company shares “shares [Lore’s] ambition to build a better future for education,” he continued, “and what’s more, John Katzman is one of the best, most experienced education entrepreneurs that I know, so I’m excited to see how he grows the platform and help him do it where I can.” Cohen hasn’t decided what he’s going to do next, whether that’s go back to school, or get back into the startup game, but Lore’s life will continue nonetheless, Katzman tells us. But, what’s going to happen to Lore, you ask? Well, the reason that Noodle Education has been quiet for the last six months is, in part, due to the fact that it’s tackling a huge problem — one that’s really too big and has to be segmented to be approached effectively. Education information, data is broad and diverse. When one looks at it in the big picture, this means information on schools, learning platforms, tutors, learning content, textbooks, testing, assessments, teachers, performance and on and on. To create an educational search engine that works for anyone — regardless of whether you’re a parent looking for the best tutor for your third grader or you’re a high school junior trying to figure out what college to choose — is a big challenge. Especially if you want to build something that’s just as valuable for consumers as it is for businesses and offers personalized recommendations. Katzman says that he started working at Noodle Education full-time in December because, although growth has been compounding 40 percent month-over-month, the problem has proved trickier than he had imagined. The other contributing factor is that Katzman and Noodle want to not only building a tool that will help learners and educations connect and find both each other and content more effectively, but to address perhaps the biggest problem in education: The cost. The company’s underlying mission, the founder tells us, is to raise the overall quality of education while driving down the cost of tuition. In order to do that, the 25-person company has aspirations to build an educational marketplace around its flagship search tool and Katzman says they will be looking to both build and acquire great technology that helps them do that, while impacting the overall cost of and access to quality education. Going forward, Noodle Education will look to develop complementary companies around its search and recommendation engine, beginning with “Noodle Launch,” a “sister” company that Katzman hopes to launch at some point in April or shortly thereafter. Noodle Launch will be focused on the cost issue, he says, and the question of “how do we make it less expensive to build out the asynchronous part of blended learning?” The acquisition of Lore was the first step in this regard, he says, and my guess is that this won’t be Noodle Education’s last. “Lore has built a beautiful interface,” Katzman tells us, and by offering a social news feed experience that has become standards on networks like Facebook, Lore’s integration into Noodle will allow the company to offer students an experience they’re familiar with — while making the core Noodle experience more social. Going forward, Noodle will look to build a marketplace of services around search, not unlike what Google has done around its own search engine. With how opaque, fragmented and dysfunctional the educational marketplace is at this point, that is an ambitious goal, and there’s no “silver bullet,” Katzman admits. But, if Noodle can begin to unite the disparate silos within education through some kind of unifying search and services marketplace, it could stand to have a significant impact on the learning experience and the current educational infrastructure. That said, it’s an enormous hill to climb. We’ve also learned that the company is currently in the process of raising a significant round of funding to help it build its educational marketplace, so stay tuned for more news coming out of the Noodle ecosystem. For more, find and .
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Tudou Founder Gary Wang To Launch ‘Pixar Of China,’ Looks To San Francisco And LA For Talent
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
Gary Wang, the founder of China’s largest online video site , now plans to launch a Beijing-based animated film studio that on April 1. Wang says he has already secured “tens of millions of dollars” in funding from an undisclosed international group of investors–and he’s looking to staff his studio with experts from the U.S. so his movies can compete with Hollywood imports. Wang said he has already gone on a two-week scouting trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles for senior animators, directors, and storyboard artists. The studio will produce films mostly for the local market, but as , only a few movies from abroad are permitted access to Chinese cinemas each year. China’s movie industry, which was worth $2.74 billion, is still relatively small, but growing rapidly, so Wang has a good chance of creating blockbusters. After founding Tudou in 2005, Wang served as CEO, steering the company to a merger with rival Youku in a $1 billion stock deal that was dubbed . Last year, Wang announced his retirement from Tudou and said he’d be (and now we see what Wang was dreaming about). Wang believes it’s the right time to open a film studio in China because of an improving environment for film distribution, promotion and copyright in that country, as well as an uptick in movie theater screens and rising income levels in urban areas. Wang cautions, however, that it will take investors several years before they see a return because of the film production cycle. U.S. studios he’ll be competing with include DreamWorks, which is currently building a studio near Shanghai under the name Oriental DreamWorks, a joint venture with China Media Capital, Shanghai Media Group, and Shanghai Alliance Investment. DreamWorks enjoyed success in China when its Kung Fu Panda franchise became a massive hit, and hope its winning streak will continue when “Kung Fu Panda 3” is completed by Oriental DreamWorks in 2016.
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Western Digital Contributes To SSD Maker Skyera’s $51M Series B
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
Enterprise solid-state storage system maker Skyera that it received funding from Western Digital as part of its $51 million Series B round of financing. The two companies say the investment is an extension of a strategic relationship that includes joint technology development. The money will be used to scale Skyera’s business across marketing, sales, and engineering, said chief executive officer Radoslav Danilak in a statement. Western Digital previously funded Skyera as its initial outside investor, and its other backers include Dell Ventures, which . “One of our primary goals in developing strategic relationships with technology innovators in the broader storage ecosystem is to enable customers to develop highly optimized storage solutions that meet their changing data management needs,” Western Digital president and CEO Steve Milligan said in the press release. Gartner that corporations will spend $4.5 billion on solid-state drives, which offer quick and energy-efficient performance, in 2015, up from just under $1 billion in 2010, so it makes sense for larger tech companies to get in on the action. But Skyera does have from companies like EMC, Fusion-io, STEC, Violin Memory, and OCZ.
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Google Scoops Up Neural Networks Startup DNNresearch To Boost Its Voice And Image Search Tech
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
Well, Google’s M&A strategy is nothing if not diverse in focus. In November, . Last month, Google , buying eCommerce startup Channel Intelligence. Today, Google dug into the Computer Science department at The University of Toronto to acquire , a young startup founded by professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his grad students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. Incorporated last year, the startup’s website is conspicuously devoid of any identifying information — just a blank black screen. While the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Google was eager to acquire the startup’s research on neural networks — as well as the talent behind it — to help it go beyond traditional search algorithms in its ability to identify pieces of content, images, voice, text and so on. , the University of Toronto said that the team’s research “has profound implications for areas such as speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding.” Furthermore, Professor Hinton is the founding director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College in London, holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and is the director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research-funded program on “Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception.” Also a fellow of , has become renowned for his work on neural nets and his research into “unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input.” In its statement, the University of Toronto said that both Krizhevsky and Sutskever will be moving to Google, while Hinton will “divide his time between his university research and his work at Google,” both in Google’s Toronto offices and at Google headquarters in Mountain View. For Google, this means getting access, in particular, to the team’s research into the improvement of object recognition, as the company looks to improve the quality of its image search and facial recognition capabilities. , which owns a number of patents on facial recognition, following its acquisition of two similar startups in PittPatt in 2011 and Neven Vision all the way back in 2006. In addition, Google has been looking to improve its voice recognition, natural language processing and machine learning, integrating that with its knowledge graph to help develop a brave new search engine. Google already has deep image search capabilities on the web, but, going forward, as smartphones proliferate, it will look to improve that experience on mobile. published by the three founders of DNNresearch, the team found that “despite the attractive qualities of CNNs [convolutional neural networks], and despite the relative efficiency of their local architecture, they have still been prohibitively expensive to apply in large scale to high-resolution images … [However, the results of its research] show that a large, deep convolutional neural network is capable of achieving recordbreaking results on a highly challenging dataset using purely supervised learning.” Get that? The acquisition of DNNresearch also follows a $600K gift that Google awarded to Hinton and his research team to support their work in neural nets. Following its do-good thesis, the company pledged to “support ambitious research in computer science and engineering” through its “ ,” which offer unrestricted, two-to-three-year grants and give recipients access to Google “tools, technologies and expertise.” So, it looks like Google discovered DNNresearch through its award program and, seeing the implications that the team’s work could have on the fields of speech recognition, language processing and image recognition — all central to its core products — decided that a grant wasn’t enough. “Geoffrey Hinton’s research is a magnificent example of disruptive innovation with roots in basic research,” University of Toronto President David Naylor said in a statement. “The discoveries of brilliant researchers, guided freely by their expertise, curiosity, and intuition, lead eventually to practical applications no one could have imagined, much less requisitioned.” More in the University of Toronto’s statement . that offers his take on joining Google officially, in which he says he is betting on “Google’s team to be the epicenter of future breakthroughs.” Full post below: Last summer, I spent several months working with Google’s Knowledge team in Mountain View, working with Jeff Dean and an incredible group of scientists and engineers who have a real shot at making spectacular progress in machine learning. Together with two of my recent graduate students, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky (who won the 2012 ImageNet competition), I am betting on Google’s team to be the epicenter of future breakthroughs. That means we’ll soon be joining Google to work with some of the smartest engineering minds to tackle some of the biggest challenges in computer science. I’ll remain part-time at the University of Toronto, where I still have a lot of excellent graduate students, but at Google I will get to see what we can do with very large-scale computation. Also, for those interested in some context as to the significance of Hinton within the scientific (and technical) communities, . Basically, he’s Chuck Norris.
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Microsoft Is Currently Experiencing Hotmail, Outlook And SkyDrive Service Disruptions
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
As we reported last month, Microsoft decided to . That migration process might not be going so well, as users have flooded sites like Twitter with to the tune of three hours. Its migration approach was to be a slow one, with the move being optional at first. Regardless of the reason, three hours is a long time to not be able to check your email. Upon visiting the , the message looks grim, but doesn’t call it a full outage, with Outlook and SkyDrive being affected as well: The Hotmail and Outlook issues are described as an issue with displaying all of your emails, while SkyDrive is having file-editing problems. These are important features for these products, obviously. The status site also shows that a Calendar issue was recently resolved, with the only details provided being that the issue had to do with “maintenance.” Perhaps this was the migration that we were all waiting for. Oops. [tweet https://twitter.com/bwhetstone/status/311643961351602176] [tweet https://twitter.com/n_gothic/status/311640232934129665] Depending on who you ask, it sounds like the entire suite of Microsoft-cloud products aren’t acting as they should. Popular site as a “likely service disruption.” We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update our story upon hearing back. Here’s the statement that we’ve received from a Microsoft spokesperson, that says the problem is affecting a “small number of customers,”: Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting a small number of customers’ access to Hotmail and Outlook.com, and we are working to restore full access to the service as quickly as possible. For the latest information, we encourage people to visit the Hotmail and Outlook.com status page ( ). [Photo credit: ]
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Leap Motion’s Michael Buckwald Lays Out His Vision For Gesture-Based Computer Interaction
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
While I was at South by Southwest Interactive, I had a chance to meet with the team and try out their upcoming gesture-based controller. We’ve been writing about the company for a while now, but this was a chance to see the technology in-person, and to use it with existing apps. Thankfully, my own feeble attempts to play Cut The Rope using the Leap Motion Controller weren’t recorded on camera, but we did film a short demo by Vice President of Product Marketing Michael Zagorsek. He showed off a 3D visualizer that helps developers understand the controller’s capabilities, then played Fruit Ninja using a chopstick, and finally used the controller to sculpt a digital clay. After the demo, I sat down with CEO Michael Buckwald to talk some more about his plans for the product. The company still intends to start shipping units to preorder customers on May 13 and selling them in stores on May 19. I was impressed by what I saw, but I also asked Buckwald whether, in order to master the new controller, some users might have to un-learn certain behaviors acquired from keyboards, mice, and trackpads. “Interaction with a computer should be as similar to interaction with the real-world as possible,” he said. Other input devices may have “confused or unlearned” people’s instincts, but he argued, “Usually it takes people only a few seconds to recalibrate, and ultimately that deep, hardwired, instinctual ability to reach out and just grab an object in 3D space — because the world is 3D — that wins out.” Eventually, Buckwald said he wants to see Leap Motion technology embedded into a wide range of devices, including head-mounted displays like Google Glass. In fact, he suggested that gesture-based controls could be the key to making those devices take take off, because typing into a keyboard breaks the immersive experience. Not that he’s endorsing Google specifically. “There are many other companies, both startups and entrenched players, that are working in that space,” he said. “I think that it is going to be inevitable. It’s just a question of when.” Earlier this week, the team behind the Fleksy gesture keyboard .
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To Boost Music Subs, Deezer Turns On Affiliate Deals, Gaming APIs, And (Ahead Of Spotify) 3rd Party Apps On Mobile
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
Music streaming may not be , but that’s not stopping music streaming hopefuls from trying. The latest development comes from , which is announcing a series of new services based around its APIs to drive more users to its service. They include an affiliate marketing program; more social and gaming integration; and the ability to port apps made for the Deezer App Studio into Deezer’s mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. This last point gives Deezer a leg up on Spotify, which has yet to incorporate third-party apps into its mobile platform — although we that Spotify seems to have laid the groundwork for this already. Deezer says it currently has 26 million customers, with some 3 million of them paying as of . As a point of comparison, Spotify now has . But with Spotify’s service reaching 26 countries and Deezer’s, via its web app, 180 (its lists 215 live countries), it’s clear that Deezer has a long way to go to keep up with Spotify’s rate of penetration. Today’s upgrades are part of Deezer’s bigger push to make itself more attractive by differentiating on services, with the belief that competing on a basic music streaming service or landgrab not enough in today’s market. This is a theme that CEO Axel Dauchez has been pushing for some time now, going back to the company’s , through to a , and again today: “Music streaming isn’t about giving people access to soulless databases of songs,” he said in a statement. “We want to build an immersive and entertaining experience that gets people hooked on Deezer. Our affiliate scheme and API improvements will help developers seamlessly bring music into their greatest apps. We can’t wait to see what they’ll build.” The affiliate program, Deezer says, is accessible through its Open API (first launched in ), and it’s essentially an incentive to developers not only to use Deezer’s API for any music needs in their apps, but also to make a point of promoting it. Deezer says that each time a user subscribes to Deezer via these apps, the developer gets a payment equivalent to a month-long Deezer subscription, priced at the local equivalent of £9.99. (As with Spotify and Rdio, the other usage tier is priced at £4.99.) Meanwhile, the updates to the API are also adding in more functionality. They include more social integration including an appearance on the social bar in Deezer’s main app. And Deezer is trying out a new twist on where the music may get used by adding features “to enable and encourage the development of gaming experiences.” To give an idea of how this would work, Deezer has also developed a Songpop-style gaming app, Askking Music, “an app which combines gaming with music discovery. People using Askking Music can challenge their Deezer contacts and Facebook friends to identify tracks from shared favourites and playlists.” Deezer is also adding more apps to its third party App Studio (the equivalent of Spotify’s App Center), a dating app called Moosify and music discovery app Seevl, taking the total to 35 added in the last six months. While Deezer has yet to go live in the U.S. — currently Spotify’s biggest market, and perhaps the biggest and most mature market for streamed music overall — it is passing its competitor in another piece of functionality by making its apps available on mobile, specifically making all apps in the App Studio available via Deezer’s apps for all iOS and Android devices. Mobile is one of the key drivers of usage for Spotify — specifically for paid subscribers — so Deezer is hoping that by making its mobile service more attractive, it will see the same effect.
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Alleged Promo Video Heralds Google Now’s Eventual Debut On iOS Devices
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
It’s not an uncommon sight to see pundits and fanboys pit iOS’s Siri against Google’s mobile combination of Voice Search and Google Now, but persistent reports maintain that Google has been working to bring its contextually aware Google Now service to iOS devices. Thanks to a obtained by , though, those reports may have just become a lot more solid. The promo video — which was reportedly live on YouTube before being unceremoniously yanked — gave iOS users a quick recap of the Now service before touting integration with the iOS Google Search application. It’s worth noting, by the way, that Google’s iOS search app got a that brought a highly visual taste of the company’s Knowledge Graph to Apple’s devices. According to the video, users will be able to get their Now on by signing into their Google accounts from within the app and simply swiping up — just like Android. As always, it’s best to look at these sorts of leaks while firmly clutching a grain of salt, but the video certainly looks like the real deal. Among other things, it seems to share a voice actress and some of the same animations as seen in the original Google Now promo video — not necessarily a waterproof case, but enough to give the video some extra credence. And of course it’s not as though Google is immune to the occasional video leak. While many of us eagerly argued about its dubious origins, a leaked promotional video of wound up being an (much to the tech community’s surprise). It comes as little surprise that Google is aiming to expand Google Now’s reach when it comes to mobile devices (though startups like may wind up feeling the pinch due to a similar vision for mobile search), but the Mountain View company’s ambitions don’t end there. Earlier today, developer and Android enthusiast discovered evidence that Google plans to bring Google Now to desktops by way of its — we can just add that to the pile of that Now could soon be an even bigger part of the Google experience across multiple platforms.
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Everything We Know About The Galaxy S IV
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
In 48 hours, the Galaxy S IV will stop being a set of unconfirmed photos and videos from Chinese forums and be a real, official phone. A new generation. And while some mystery still remains over processor particulars, special eye-tracking software, and perhaps a hint of NFC-style , we have a pretty good outline of what we’re going to see on Thursday. Where the last Galaxy S smartphone made a splash with software, like Pop-up Play and S-Beam (while perhaps slacking on design), the Galaxy S IV will seemingly deliver solid hardware and software all in one package. Based on the most recent round of photos, videos, and Samsung-planted teasers, the Galaxy S IV seems to have the least amount of bezel we’ve ever seen out of a Samsung device. The GSIII curved all the way around letting the bezel expand around the mid-points, whereas the GSIV appears to be shaped a bit more like a Note or the GSII, with rounded corners, a curved top and bottom, and straighter edges along the side. Straight is the operative word, since these leaks clearly depict some sort of arced contour around the edges. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfzom-RdrwI&w=640&h=360] It appears that Samsung has stuck with a brushed plastic for the front and rear casing of the device. EVP of mobile Y.H. Lee told that Samsung will continue to build phones made of plastic, knowing full well it can more efficiently manufacture a higher volume of phones to a higher volume of customers than using more premium materials. However, Samsung does seem to have added a metal strip along the sides of the GS4, which seems more legitimate than the metally-looking strip on the Galaxy S III. It’s slightly iPhone 4-ish on a concept level. We haven’t confirmed what type of material this metal-looking strip is, but (who’s been integral in delivering early information on this and past Galaxy handsets) it will be aluminum. Introducing metal prominently to the Galaxy line could give the Korean handset maker yet another boost in their quest to defeat the iPhone. Though there have been that iPhone loyalists are growing tired and bored, many cling to the Apple for its solidly built smartphones with luxury feel. A little weight, and a nice sturdy feel might be a small game-changer for the Galaxy line, which has often been described as excellent though slightly heavy on the plastic. And according to SamMobile, the next generation Galaxy S will be than the Galaxy S III. The Galaxy S IV is believed to be slightly larger than its predecessor, though based on the sliver-like bezels along the side the device wouldn’t have to pick up too much real estate to fit the larger 5-inch display. We actually don’t have many confirmations on actual software features, but (if we believe it to be legitimate), you can see TouchWiz on top of Android 4.2.1. The audio tones for pressing buttons in and out of applications sound similar to the water-drip bloops on the Galaxy S III, though not quite identical. The video also shows the presence of NFC and S-Beam, which makes perfect sense considering it’s a huge part of Samsung’s brand offering as a whole. One feature that’s been , though never shown in video or confirmed, is eye-tracking or software that will automatically scroll down a page based on how your eyes are moving across the page. The of this, though hasn’t clarified just how Samsung will technologically implement this in the phone. However, it’s worth remembering that Samsung already has technology in the Galaxy S III (Smart Stay) that tells the screen to resist going dim while you’re looking at it. The , and history seemingly suggests, that Samsung’s next Galaxy phone will make a big push in software, but we have very little understanding of what that entails. Samsung may introduce even more Cloud sharing/syncing services, even greater B2B/IT support, and more NFC software features. Speaking of, Samsung recently , which could be a foreshadowing of things to come in mobile payments via NFC. We’ll have to wait and see. It’s also possible that Samsung will revamp their camera app. Big strides have been made in the camera/software department out of competitors like Nokia, HTC, and Apple. Samsung needs to step up their game, too. pointed to a 4.99-inch 1080p 440ppi Super AMOLED display, an Exynos 5 Octa eight-core processor, a 13-megapixel camera, a 2-megapixel front camera, 2GB of RAM, and three different storage flavors including 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. After running the rumor mill gamut, only a few of these specs have remained the same and true through the entire hype period: The processor remains a central question. Previously, rumors pointed to Samsung’s own Exynos 5 Octa processor, clocked at 1.8GHz with four main cores and four secondary cores. However, reports that the 5 Octa was overheating, and won’t be ready for production, so the Galaxy S IV will instead use the Snapdragon 600 clocked at 1.9GHz. None of this is confirmed, but processing power affects lags and battery life, making it a central focus of most consumers’ needs, whether they know it or not. There has also been question over whether or not Samsung will use its Super AMOLED displays or go with an SoLux display, perhaps like the HTC One’s LCD3-based display. The HTC One and Galaxy S IV will face off in retail, with the One’s similar specs like a 4.7-inch 1080p display, a Snapdragon 600 processor, and 2GB of RAM. My gut tells me Samsung will stick with its Super AMOLED technology, but the CPU question is still a toss-up. With the Galaxy S III, the phone had an Exynos processor when sold in Korea and Europe, but was swapped out for a Snapdragon in the States. Perhaps that’s where this rumor came from? In any case, the Galaxy S IV will surely be a beast of unknown magnitude. After all, it is . The Galaxy S IV will be announced at an event held in NYC on Thursday, March 14, beginning at 6pm. We’ll be covering the whole thing from start to finish.
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Highlight Brings Location-Based Ice Pops To SXSW
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
This is the for location-based/social/mobile/photo app , but the company has come a long way since March 2012. Last year to market the app there were just a couple of guys — the founders — telling people about the service. This year Highlight is doing a little bit more: renting an ice cream truck and cruising around town handing out ice pops. The whole exercise is a way to introduce people to the new , which just launched a few weeks ago. The latest version of the app adds a whole lot of new ways for users to interact with each other, by checking in to events and collecting photos that are uploaded during them. The Highlight team has been taking pics of the people it’s handing ice pops out to and then uploading them to the service, showing how easy it is to get them after they’ve been posted. Since Highlight’s photos are all tagged based on location, people who already have the app will be able to instantly see the pictures that have been taken of them. I did a quick interview with Highlight CEO Paul Davison to learn more about the company’s plans at SXSW and new updates that they’ve made with Highlight version 1.5. Check out the video above.
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Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz And Will Arnett On Taking Their Show To Netflix
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
One of the big events coming up for comedy fans this spring will be the , which will after a long hiatus. While in Austin for SXSW Interactive, Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz and star Will Arnett took a few minutes out of their busy, busy, extremely important lives to answer a few questions about the show. So what’s it like being a big star on TV and then putting your face on the Internet instead? Arnett said it was “very exciting” to be using the Internet to deliver the show to its fans. In part that’s because that’s where the fans are, according to Hurwitz. At least, when compared to premium cable or other distribution networks. “For this show, which has always taken some risks with the form, it just seemed great to take a risk with the delivery system, too. Which has only been used, as I understand it, for pornography,” Hurwitz explained. Later he clarified that there wasn’t much difference in distribution between Arrested Development on broadcast TV and how it’ll be shown on Netflix. “I don’t think of it as being on the Internet… Any more than I think of being on TV as being on electricity,” Hurwitz said. “It’s still going to be an experience where people are going to watch a show, and they’re probably going to be watching it on a TV. The fact that it’ll be distributed by the Internet versus cable hasn’t changed the way we made the show.” Of course, being on the Internet means a different way of thinking about viewership and ratings. Netflix doesn’t plan on releasing any sort of official ratings numbers for Arrested Development, or any of its other shows, for that matter — in part because it doesn’t rely on a big one-time showing for advertisers. That said, the Arrestsed Development guys expect huge viewership from the show’s fans. How big? “Probably a billion views a day,” Arnett guesstimated. Hurwitz thought that estimate was low, expecting more like 7 or 8 billion views. What’s that in Nielsen ratings? “Probably about a 4” in the demo they’re looking at, Hurwitz quipped. Check out my interview above, which was somehow chopped down from a crazy, 20-minute improv session that I couldn’t keep up with most of the time. (Kudos to TechCrunch TV video producer Ashley Pagán for making it work.) Maybe we’ll have outtakes later.
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Acer Ups The C7 Chromebook’s RAM, Battery Life And, Sadly, Price
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
The a bit more powerful. With the RAM doubled to 4GB, the latest flavor of Acer’s inexpensive but still tasty Chromebook should be able to handle a few more simultaneous tasks. Plus, the new model ships with a 6 cell battery able to last 6 hours rather than the 4 cell found in the original. Too bad Acer couldn’t manage these upgrades without inflating the price from a cute $199 to a slightly intimidating $279. Acer previously noted that the C7 was a huge hit with the education crowd, for 5-10% of all of its US shipments. The C7 is now more expensive than the Samsung Chromebook. For $249 the Samsung Chromebook is less expensive, thinner, and sports a longer battery life. However, the Acer still tops the Samsung in some areas. The Samsung Chromebook only contains a 16GB hard drive where the Acer rocks a 320GB HDD. Plus, with an Intel Celeron 847, now backed with 4GB of RAM, the system is a touch more powerful than the Sammy’s ARM SoC — an important fact for those looking to put Linux on the little notebook. The new C710-2055 is priced at $279 and initially headed only to Acer’s commercial market. At that price it’s sadly out of the impulse buy range, but still a good deal for a platform quickly gaining traction. The original C7 was with the education crowd; a repeat performance is likely in the cards.
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 | null |
Dustin Moskovitz And Cari Tuna Launch Site For Their Philanthropic Foundation, Good Ventures
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
We’ve heard a little bit about Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s new foundation, , specifically a company that its investment arm . Today we’ve learned a lot more, specifically about its non-profit endeavours, as the site for Good Ventures has been launched, and it discusses exactly what the foundation will be doing and which companies and causes it’s currently involved in. Its “portfolio” reads like a list of every difficult problem felt in third-world countries, and it’s expansive already. Just some of the issues that Good Ventures has issued grants for are curing and treating malaria, marriage equality, and small enterprise support. The grants seem to average $50,000 and are going directly to the causes that need it the most. was co-founded by Moskovitz and former Wall Street Journal reporter Cari Tuna. The about us page on the site describes their mission clearly and concisely: Good Ventures is a philanthropic foundation whose mission is to help humanity thrive. Here’s an excerpt from their intro letter on their reason for creating the foundation: We’ve seen human well-being increase dramatically in recent decades. Quality of life is rising and violence is declining. At the same time, humanity is becoming better networked, technologically, economically and socially. We’re optimistic that these trends will continue — even accelerate — in the decades to come. Our giving, leveraged well, can quicken the pace of humanity’s progress and mitigate the risks that threaten to derail it. Our giving can increase the human capital on which society has to draw. Our giving can prevent unnecessary suffering by ensuring that the fruits of our collective labor benefit those who are most marginalized today. While there doesn’t look like there’s a systematic approach to its grants, it does seem like the organization gives Moskovitz and Tuna the platform to drive change by placing money directly with causes. For example, Good Ventures set out to co-fund Population Services International with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation last August. The cause supports an effort to contain and eliminate drug resistance to antimalarial medications, and Good Ventures donated $1M. The site also has a about the causes it’s involved in, as well as why you should be giving to charities too, with most posts penned by Tuna. Here’s an excerpt from a recent one about giving: People give to charity for a wide variety reasons. Some give to improve the lives of their friends, family or neighbors. Some give to advance a cause or support an organization that’s close to their heart. Some give to express their faith or spirituality. Some give because it feels good. The primary goal of our giving is to improve the lives of as many people as possible as much as possible. We believe that all lives are valuable, including future lives. These guiding principles have big implications for the foundation’s approach to grantmaking. We’ve reached out to Moskovitz and Tuna and will hopefully be telling a bit more of their story in a future “Weekly Good” article. Until then, head over to to see exactly what they’re up to.
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Dropbox Revamps Its Desktop Clients With A New Menu And A Bigger Focus On Sharing
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
The cloud storage buffs at have spent quite a bit of time optimizing the service for mobile devices (and , naturally), but the Dropbox desktop client looks and works much the same way it did a few years ago. Well, that’s not the case anymore — the company has just on a 2.0 update for its desktop clients that adds some much-needed graphical flair and streamlines the sharing process. There’s a lot to dig into here, but it’s worth noting that the redesigned menu just looks great — it’s a refreshing change of space from the spartan menu of yore. Much as I like it though, it’s not quite a slam dunk since some of the more useful features (think a ticker for how much available space you have) have been hidden away and require another click to get to. Dropbox has been putting greater emphasis on sharing files and folders these past few months, and the team has worked to make sharing more prominent in the revamped menu. Mousing over recently edited files displayed in the menu reveals the option to share them with others with a single click, and users can view and dismiss notifications generated when their friends and loved ones share files and folders with them. Those sorts of notifications don’t just live on your desktop though — Dropbox has also said that users of the iOS and Android apps will get notifications as well, though I imagine some users may not appreciate the prospect of having even more mobile notifications to wrestle with. The updated clients are now live and can be , but there is one potentially big caveat: Linux users can download and install the update but suggests they aren’t privy to the new menu design just yet.
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The Oatmeal Thinks It’s Time To Put LolCats To Sleep [TCTV]
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
Matthew Inman is sick of memes about bacon and kitties. Better known as web comic artist , Inman gave TechCrunch the lowdown on what’s funny, what’s not, and how he finds inspiration. In this video interview he shoots off his thoughts on 4Chan and The Harlem Shake. When asked about LolCats, he bluntly replied, “Tired of that”. After the interview, Inman insisted he has no beef with Ben Huh and his company . The Oatmeal just doesn’t want to see humor turned into a formula of “cat photo + impact font”. Here he describes where he goes for a laugh, plus offers an update on the Nikola Tesla museum he helped fund. For those of you asking “Why is this on TechCrunch? I thought you were about tech and startups”, The Oatmeal is the future of visual communication online. Much like how Instagram has accelerated the shift from words to photos for conveying our thoughts, The Oatmeal demonstrates how the web’s short attention span values the efficiency of cartoons. Expect to see more businesses and startups ditching long-winded mission statements and blog posts for more communication through images. But back to Inman. One bit of warning? If you ever meet the guy, don’t scream about bacon or your feline friend Chairman Meow. “I wrote an entire book about cats. Then I went on a book tour and every single person would come up to me and say ‘oh let me tell you about your cat’.” Eye rolls ensued. If you want to get in good with , you have to reference Admiral Ackbar.
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Google Launches “Help For Hacked Sites” To Teach Site Owners How To Recover Their Hacked Sites
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
No site is fully immune to getting hacked, but there are some obvious things every site owner can do to make it a bit harder for hackers to break into a web server and add rogue links or take over a site completely. Today, Google its new “ ” series to how to avoid getting hacked in the first place – and how to recover their sites if it happens. The first part of the series is geared toward relatively non-technical users, while the later part is aimed at users who can read code and are comfortable with using terminal commands. Overall, the series features about 80 minutes of video and a dozen or so articles that cover everything from basic things like figuring out that a site was actually hacked to to recover a site, all the way to using vulnerability scanners, understanding SQL injections, reading log files and using the shell to log into your site to determine the . The series also explains how users can ensure that Google removes the “ ” and “ ” links on Google Search after they have cleaned their sites. “While we attempt to outline the necessary steps in recovery,” Google’s Developer Programs tech lead admits in today’s announcement, “each task remains fairly difficult for site owners unless they have advanced knowledge of system administrator commands and experience with source code.” Because of this, Google also points site owners to its for additional help. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubklMNgC6x8?feature=player_embedded]
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Cobook 2.0 Arrives, Bringing An Auto-Updating, Universal Address Book To iPhone
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
, a Mac contact management app that , is today launching version 2.0 of its service which introduces a new feature called “Livecards.” This feature does what everyone wants address books to do these days – their contacts with the most current information. It’s bizarre that in this day and age, we’re still struggling with a feature that should be so simple. An automatically updating address book is something that our email providers should have implemented for us ages ago. , but via Google+, which is not for everyone. And as innovation in the address book space has stagnated among the big players, that’s left room for startups to come in and try to fix the problem. For example, launched a similar app to Cobook, also with a heavy focus on the auto-updating functionality. However, the problem with many of today’s solutions is that they work best when everyone uses the same platform. In that regard, Cobook is not much different. For what it’s worth, at least the solution Cobook has implemented to fix the problem is relatively simple. After updating Cobook on iPhone (or upon first install for new users), it will prompt you to “Connect Livecards” when you launch the app. You’ll tap a button, fill out the info you want included on your own Livecard (name, company, email and phone), select the friends you want to share with, and then send them a message which they can either confirm or ignore. Of course, this sharing process also serves as a nice viral way for Cobook to gain some traction through users’ friend networks, too. Currently, this messaging and friend-finding functionality only works via Facebook, but Cobook’s founder and CEO Kaspars Dancis says that email registration will arrive shortly. He also confirms that the startup does not upload your address book data to its centralized servers. “The only thing that needs to be synced through our servers is your Livecard,” he explains. The sharing is explicit, he adds, and you control your own Livecard containing the information you want to publicize. That’s a bit different from Addappt, which shared my “Me” card, without first letting me select the fields which I wanted to keep private. Instead, I had to make a duplicate, simplified contact card for myself, and set that one as “Me.” Cobook’s system is more straightforward. The Livecard feature is also optional, so if you would prefer to only use the app for address book management and not for sharing, you can. (Also, you’re crazy). If you haven’t used Cobook yet, and you’re a Mac and/0r iPhone user, it’s worth taking a look at this one. Although the startup has competitors in the social address book space – and , for example – Cobook’s app is pretty powerful in that it not only works with your iCloud contacts as a replacement address book, it also syncs your iCloud and Google Contacts, and pulls in data from social networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, as well. Most importantly, its sync process is conflict-free, unlike the much more painful experience using Apple’s native Mac address book. If you’re a current Cobook user who had previously done a lot of customizations and categorizations of your contact list, including favoriting people, manually updating their info, merging their social profiles, tagging them, etc., those changes are saved upon updating to version 2.0, but it might take a couple of minutes for everything to sync, depending on the size of your address book. . , still a bootstrapped company out of Lativa, has half a million users today. Dancis says that an Android version is now the company’s next priority.
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Google Now’s “Topics” Feature Looked Handy – Too Bad Google Shut It Down
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
Google recently killed a newly discovered feature called Google Now Topics, which apparently wasn’t quite ready for primetime. The feature appeared to be a useful, if perhaps a little creepy, means of revisiting your past web searches performed using Google Search through a visual, Google Now-like interface. “Topics” was discovered over the weekend by the folks at the unofficial Google-watching blog, . When it worked, you could visit the URL “https://www.google.com/now/topics” from your Android device in order to see a card-style user interface that displayed your past searches, broken down into various categories. Beneath a title and lead image, the text prompted you to “continue your research” and “explore now.” Being a regular user of Google’s , I liked the idea that there was going to be an appealing, mobile-friendly format to delve into my past Googling. But it was a little shocking to see all of my search history laid out on one page like that, I have to admit. All at once, I had a visual image of just how much Google knew about me. But as I’ve long since traded my privacy for free services (Google’s and otherwise), I quickly found I could stomach the reveal.* Unfortunately, just as quickly as Google Now Topcis appeared, it was gone. Soon after the blog post went up, the page began to 404. Requests for more information and a better explanation from Google have also gone unanswered. We have to assume that Google was just kicking the tires of a yet-to-launch addition to the increasingly useful Google Now passive search functionality, which ships on phones running the latest version of Android. Although today, Google Now is more focused on delivering you up-to-the-minute info, like flight delays, weather, traffic reports, restaurant reservations, birthdays, and more, it’s easy to imagine it morphing into a more fully fledged, “lean-back” search service that offers Topics as an alternative to typing on mobile phones’ small screens. Or maybe even more, . Yes, I’m really sorry that I didn’t take a screenshot of Google Now Topics myself (the one time I don’t!), but others did. All I can say is that I can confirm that this did work at one point, and hopefully it will again soon.
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New York City’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot On Bringing Innovation Into Government [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 |
So it was great to have the opportunity to talk to Haot about her job and her latest projects while she was in Austin, Texas this past week for . She told us she’s focused on encouraging tech adoption and development not only within NYC’s government and public services, but also in the city in general, with initiatives such as aimed at supporting NYC’s tech industry and startup ecosystem. Watch the video embedded above to hear Haot talk about how cities large and small should focus more on digital technology, what Made In NY means, making the leap from the startup world into the public sector, and more.
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Winners & Losers: Supercell’s Clash of Clans Tripled Its U.S. Marketshare, Report Shows
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
, the title , has doubled its marketshare among U.S. iPhone users over the last six months, according to Onavo, an app tracking company that can actually see active usage. The data is part of a monthly report Onavo does in marketshare — which is defined as the percentage of U.S. iPhone users who open an app at least once in a 30-day period. The last time Supercell was last fall when it — when Clash of Clans’ marketshare was one-third of what it is now. But from sources in the industry, we hear that figure is much higher now, in the $1 to $1.3 million range per day. Generally, the . With the iOS base of devices growing, we could see a $2 million per day for a single developer by summer. The big question for a lot of observers in the industry is if and when Supercell will raise a massive funding round off the back of its success. Meanwhile, the bootstrapped husband-and-wife team at Imangi looks like they are making a successful sequel transition with Temple Run 2 picking up market share where the original game left off. Sequels can be pretty risky for studios if they’re not executed properly because they cannibalize players from the original. And if the sequel isn’t good at retaining users, then the entire franchise can suffer. EA Popcap’s Plants Vs. Zombies also made a big comeback this month after the company made the paid title free. Many developers behind the older, popular titles on iOS from several years ago are making their original games free. . Perhaps it’s a bid to rekindle interest in these games, or perhaps it’s a recognition of the huge shift in the industry toward free-to-play games. More midcore games are also climbing in active usage. Phoenix Age, the quiet studio behind Castle Age HD, saw its title triple its marketshare over the past month. The developer, which often has titles in the top-grossing charts, hasn’t publicly announced any funding to date and is based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Meanwhile, Ruzzle, which grabbed a super-high 7.5 percent of U.S. iPhone users in January plateaued. The game from the Stockholm-based developer MAG Interactive kept its marketshare even after growing enormously in January. Lastly, Flow Free from Seattle-based indie gaming studio Big Duck Games, lost about 2 percentage points in marketshare. Onavo is a Sequoia-backed company that . Because their apps have several million users in the U.S., they can take that data in anonymous, aggregated form and estimate overall usage of third-party apps.
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Twitter Launches Its First Official App For Windows 8 And RT
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
Twitter just its . It’s been a long time coming, but the new app does seem to do the platform justice, with a number of Windows 8-centric features, including support for the Windows 8 Share and Search charms, snap view (so you can park the app on the side of the screen), live tiles and notifications. The Discover tab uses Windows 8’s horizontal layout to highlight individual tweets and photos. Photos were clearly something the designers focused on with this release. Tapping a photo brings up a full-screen view that puts the image front and center. You can also view a photo gallery from your favorite users right in the app. Thanks to the Share charm, you can now also share links to these photos, as well as links from other apps and Internet Explorer 10 to Twitter. Just like every other Windows 8 app, the Twitter app also uses the Windows 8 Search charm. As Microsoft notes, the app uses “the same design principles as seen on and other Twitter mobile apps featuring the Home, Connect, Discover and Me tabs. And the also uses the same design principles.” Indeed, when you snap the app to the side of the screen, it looks virtually indistinguishable from a mobile Twitter app. While there were already a few Twitter apps available for Windows 8, it’s no secret that Twitter isn’t a fan of third-party client apps. Having a native Twitter app available for both Windows 8 and Windows RT is surely something the folks at Microsoft , though power users will likely prefer to continue to use in the browser, which actually works very well in Metro mode. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLmN-40P_X4?feature=player_embedded]
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Yet More Leaked Samsung Galaxy S IV Pics Appear Hours Before Launch
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
The Samsung Galaxy S IV will be in just a few hours, but another crop of leaked photos featuring the device has , a few days after a another batch of pics The handset in the photo has a high-gloss, textured plastic casing (though it already shows hairline cracks in the leaked pics) and the same metallic-looking bands around the edges as the one in the earlier set of photos, as well as a 1080p, 4.99-inch display. According to , the specs listed on it168 claim its Exynos 5410 is a 1.8GHz 8-core CPU unit, with PowerVR SGX 544MP3 GPU. The i9502 weighs 138g and is 7.7mm thick, with 2GB of RAM and 16GB ROM storage with a microSD expansion slot and has a 2600mAh battery. The specs also include the Smart Stay eye tracking that is already expected, as well as a new feature that allows users to hover their fingers over the screen to create a Galaxy Note II S-Pen like effect. Source: , via
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Xi3’s David Politis Says Piston Will Combine The Best Features Of PCs And Consoles
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
recently for Piston, the company’s gaming-optimized personal computer. I actually had a chance to speak to the company’s chief marketing officer David Politis over the weekend at South by Southwest Interactive, where he described the device as a combination of the best aspects of PCs and gaming consoles: Consoles are great because they’re small, they’ve got a great environment, but they are closed and you can’t update them. Computers, on the other hand, they’re typically great because there’s a lot of software for ’em, you can run basic computing things, you can surf the web and all of that, but they’re typically really big and they typically suck power. And they’re ugly. Piston, Politis said, represents a “middle ground” with the size and elegance of a console, plus the modularity and updatability of a PC. He also hinted that Xi3 is trying to land some exclusive games from developers. Politis was vague about the exact shipping date, except to say that the Piston will ship sometime around the holiday season. Suggested retail price is $999.99, but .
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The Google Reader Shutdown Is Yet Another Nail In Feedburner’s Coffin
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
How long until Google shuts down ? The company just that it is . That’s a sad day for all of us who still regularly use it, but its demise was probably inevitable. Reader had been lingering in a stasis for months (maybe even years) now, especially since Google in favor of focusing on Google+ and barely dedicated any staff to maintaining it. The last RSS-focused product Google closed was , its ad product for site owners who wanted to monetize their RSS feeds. With Reader and AdSense for Feeds gone, the last RSS product standing at Google is – and all signs point to that getting the ax sooner or later, too. Just like Google Reader, it’s been a very long time since Feedburner got any updates and everything points at a total neglect of the product at Google: Its stats are sporadically unavailable, it never even got the visual refresh that virtually every other Google product got, the (now called AdSense for Feeds – after the already closed product…) has been updated three times since April 2010. The FeedBurner Status Blog hasn’t been updated since last September. I always assumed Google would keep Feedburner on life support for as long as it could, but the fact that they are shutting down Reader shows that they are willing to make these unpopular moves and close products that form the basis of a larger ecosystem (I’m sure the teams at Reeder, Feedly and other Google Reader-based services are scrambling right now). I can’t imagine that Feedburner will live through many more of these spring cleanings given that it is Google’s last RSS-focused product that’s still standing. If you are actively using Feedburner, I think it’s time to start taking full possession of your feeds again (which isn’t easy). RSS may still be the plumbing that makes a lot of applications tick, but don’t look for Google to provide a platform for RSS much longer.
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Google Reader’s Death Is Proof That RSS Always Suffered From Lack Of Consumer Appeal
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
The idea of RSS was one that never quite gripped with normal Internet users. Sure, for us geeks who absolutely love consuming as much information as possible, RSS is a wonderland. When Google launched Reader in 2005, I can remember surfing to all of my favorite sites and looking for that little RSS logo, clicking on it and subscribing to the feed. So easy, so awesome to “us,” and so not easy or awesome to anyone else on the planet. I’ve heard many smart people try to explain RSS to normal folks, such as “turning content into television stations, allowing you to subscribe only to what you want to consume.” That one didn’t work. Neither did any other explanation, because RSS as a technology is too nerdy, too behind-the-scenes and lacked general consumer appeal. Nobody ever took RSS under its wing and “mentored” it. In essence, Twitter is a big RSS reader, allowing you to “follow” the people sharing content that you’d like to consume. That simple concept of following gripped, but subscribing to feeds simply did not, at least how Google Reader and other popular readers let you do it. What has taken off are apps like Flipboard, which have a beautiful interface that allow you to do the same thing that Google Reader let you do, except that it’s sexy. Shoot, even Google tried to copy Flipboard by launching a product call “Currents.” Ever use it? Me neither. Why is and RSS not so interesting? Because people don’t want to read news like this, and it never evolved: Google Reader was just a glorified email inbox. Sure, you could skim news quickly from your favorite blogs, but it lacked any other wow factor for people that actually matter. Additionally, it was nearly impossible to monetize, as the same argument about ads in RSS feeds would get the same three geeks angry each time. . [tweet https://twitter.com/parislemon/status/311992206716203008] There is a pretty sizable pocket of people like us who are upset at Reader’s demise, but since none of us could ever explain what RSS was – why someone should use Google Reader and how to advance a boringly old technology – it’s dying. Nobody cares that Google Reader is dying, because nobody cared enough to keep it alive. The funny thing about technology is that apps and sites pick up traction after early adopters get to it first. It’s these geeks that brought apps like Instagram to the masses, calling it fantastic and amazing. Nobody ever did that for RSS or Google Reader, so this is what happens. The sad day for Google Reader came a long time ago, such as the fact that I haven’t logged into it for three years. The only reason why I logged in today was to grab these screenshots. Thanks to Twitter, Flipboard and Facebook, I have more content than I can shake a stick at. I don’t want to read every single thing that WIRED writes, I want to read the things that people I know think are awesome. Google Reader never did that for me, so it must go. [Photo credit: ]
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Ahead Of PayPal And Square, Intuit Rolls Out Mobile Payments In Europe, Starting First In The UK
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
The mobile payment market in Europe continues to get more crowded, with the latest wave of entrants coming from across the pond to join a number of homegrown startups targeting the millions of businesses in the region that still do not accept credit card payments. Today, Intuit opened up its mobile device-based card payment service, , for general availability in the UK — just a few weeks after PayPal announced that it would be bringing its own mobile payment service, , to the UK . , Intuit’s biggest U.S. rival, has yet to announce any plans for Europe. Despite the fact that there are a number of mobile payment providers hitting the market, there is also still a very big lack of adoption. A survey of small, fewer-than-10-employee businesses in the UK by Intuit found that only 19 percent of respondents took card payments. Intuit Pay, which was first announced back in , is launching in the UK first, but this is just the beginning. Terry Hicks, VP of products for Intuit’s global business division, told TechCrunch in an interview that the intention is to use the UK as the first market ahead of a wider European and worldwide rollout. Hicks points to QuickBooks as an example of how Intuit takes products international: when it rolled out globally, it debuted first in the UK and then shot over to Singapore. Intuit Pay is rolling out initially with an , although other platforms like Android are on their way soon. Like many of the other mobile payment companies in Europe — they include , , , , and more — Intuit has come up with a payment solution that meets the requirements of card processors, specifically Visa Europe, which has certain services when they haven’t met their security standards. This has meant, at least in part, doing away with the snappy little dongles that plug into mobile handsets and have become the unofficial trademark of these kinds of services — so much so that when it decided that its marketing, featuring one of these dongles, looked too much like its own. So, Intuit (like the others) has created a card reader with a keypad for users to enter PINs that correspond with the chips embedded in the cards to authenticate users. This subsequently links to an app on your iOS device to process the payment, send receipts and more. Transactions are charged at a 2.75 percent flat rate. While companies like iZettle and Payleven are charging around $65 for their card readers, Intuit is hoping to sweeten the deal as the newest entrant by offering these devices for free for a limited time, along with a free app and free access to Inuit’s online payments service. Intuit, whose wider business is geared towards business software for small and medium businesses, says that Intuit Pay can also integrate with QuickBooks, Intuit’s accounting software. Indeed, the fact that Intuit has a strong suite of other business products to sell alongside and integrate into Intuit Pay may be one reason why it would be willing for forego upfront margin. It is also part of the reason why the company is so bullish about entering new markets not as the first entrant. “We think of Intuit Pay as part of an operating system, one that includes QuickBooks but other products, too,” Hicks told TechCrunch. “Intuit Pay embraces the fact that it provides a one-stop shop. Once you sign up, you get all the invoice, payment, offline, mobile invoicing included.” Intuit’s U.S. business is also setting a decent precedent for confidence. In Q2 of this year, Intuit’s payments solutions business grew 18 percent, with card transactions within that growing 10 percent, largely because of GoPayment (Intuit Pay’s equivalent in the U.S.). The company says that over the last two years, its payments business grew by 15 percent to $417 million in 2012, up from $313 million. The company says that overall transaction amounts that pass through that payments business were $37.8 billion in 2012, $30 billion of that with cards.
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Google Closes The Book On Google Reader On July 1, Seven Other Products Also Get The Chop
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
Google just plans to shut down eight of its services as part of what it’s calling an ongoing spring cleaning effort. Some of them are pretty arcane, but among TechCrunch writers, anyway, we’re pretty bummed to see that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1. “We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites,” SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle writes in the blog post. “While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.” As a result, we can probably expect . RSS as a technology for publishers to distribute content probably isn’t going away anytime soon, but if nothing else, the comments about loyal-but-declining usage suggest that anyone hoping for RSS to become a significant consumer technology can stop hoping. And for folks who like to track lots of news sources, this really sucks. (Seriously, you should see the wailing and moaning in the TechCrunch chat room.) Google’s declining interest in RSS was already pretty obvious given last fall’s . At the time, TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois wrote: RSS, as a mainstream consumer technology, is mostly dead today (though it still provides a lot of the backend plumbing for many web and mobile apps). Google itself is barely investing in Google Reader anymore and, as far as we know, pulled virtually all of the Reader team into other projects a long time ago. Other products being shut down (with various nuances in terms of what will still be available to whom) include: Latest Coverage
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GoogleReaderpocalypse. For Real This Time.
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
Don’t be evil? If that’s the unofficial Google motto, then the company has failed to deliver today. Among the products Google (read: kill off), beloved feed-reading service Google Reader is now on the chopping block. “*$%#” wrote at least one TechCrunch staffer upon hearing the news. “What will feed my Reeder app,?” asks another. “Super sad,” says a third. “I AM SO MAD ABOUT THIS I WILL KILL,” screams a fourth. These reactions will be echoed among a legion of Google Reader fans, and loudly, as the news spreads. And yes, many of them are bloggers and journalists – edge cases in our news consumption behaviors, I’ll admit, but important ones. Google Reader never made it as a mainstream product, which is why Google is giving the ax. But allowing it to sit out there, neglected and abandoned yet still functional, was at least a comfort to this niche crowd, where Google Reader still serves as one of the company’s most-used apps of all time, right up there with Gmail. We got a taste of what life without Reader was like in February, . Feeds went haywire, showing old things as new and not respecting the “mark as read” functionality. Google eventually stepped in to fix the problem, and in the meantime, we had a chance to explore the alternative products out there. None of them were up to Google Reader quality, whether because they’re still an early stage startup, or because they’re with outdated interfaces. I guess that’s good news for those early stage startups though. , here’s looking at you. Better go buy some more servers. (And hey, look guys, !) Also , launch already. It’s been time. , get busy. , . . Google has been gradually destroying Google Reader for over a year now. In fall 2011, it . Hundreds of angry commenters posted their grievances at the time – including what seemed to be , which had used Reader as an under-the-radar service – a way to get uncensored, unfiltered news outside of government control. There were even movements like the “ ” , from Google Reader’s original creators, no less! Now for Google to ignore. But that doesn’t matter to Google, which is now systematically shutting down products which don’t fulfill its core missions: search, social, ads. On these fronts, Google Reader just doesn’t deliver. After all, who uses it but bloggers anyway, right? , explaining in detail not only everything that went wrong with the service over time, but how it eventually came to be steamrolled by Google+. Bloggers – oh and , too – who are now collectively pouring one out for you, Google Reader. You were loved. RIP.
: – Google Reader is going away: There’s still — Yahoo!(@Yahoo) [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25VgNZDQ08?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360]
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Twitter Appoints Adam Messinger As Chief Technology Officer, A Role Left Vacant Since 2011
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
Twitter is preparing itself to be a company taken seriously. More importantly, it wants to be one that is a darling in the public marketplace. Today, that the company has appointed Adam Messinger as CTO, a position that has since . This would make Messinger Twitter’s second CTO. Messinger spent over a year at Twitter as the VP of application engineering before making the jump. Companies like Google and Facebook don’t have an active CTO role, with some feeling that this position is that of a “front person,” but it’s clearly a role that Twitter felt like it needed to fill, especially if it’s indeed on the road to IPO. AllThingsD points out that this move will also unify its Engineering division, with some shifts coming as to whom reports to whom. We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will update our story if we hear back.
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Google Pulls Ad-Blocking Apps From Play Store For Violating Developer Distribution Agreement
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
More than a few developers have worked to make web browsing and app use in Android as clean and ad-free as possible, but it seems their efforts haven’t made them any fans at Google. That displeasure was made clear today when a number of developers who have created and maintain ad-blocker apps found their wares from the Google Play Store. It’s hard to say exactly how many apps have seen the business end of the banhammer so far, but at least four prominent programs — AdBlock Plus, AdBlocker, AdAway and AdFree — can no longer be downloaded from the search giant’s content market. Google began sending out removal notifications a few hours ago, and developer was among the first to publicly. So far, they all seem to invoke the same argument — these developers are violating part of the company’s . Here’s the snippet of the agreement in question: 4.4 Prohibited Actions. You agree that you will not engage in any activity with the Market, including the development or distribution of Products, that interferes with, disrupts, damages, or accesses in an unauthorized manner the devices, servers, networks, or other properties or services of any third party including, but not limited to, Android users, Google or any mobile network operator. You may not use customer information obtained from the Market to sell or distribute Products outside of the Market. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that current users of AdBlock Plus, AdBlocker, AdAway and AdFree will have to stop using their beloved apps — it’s just that these developers can’t list them for download in the Google Play Store anymore. Granted, the Google Play Store is easily the most accessible way for prospective users to access these applications, but some devs have alternate methods of getting their apps out there. The folks at , for instance, host a downloadable .apk of its Android app on its website, while the developer of AdAway has made the app available in the . I don’t doubt that the developers behind these ad-blocking apps only did so in an effort to improve the browsing experience for their users, but the (pretty broad) legalese they agreed to when listing their apps seems pretty cut and dried in this case. While the goal may have been an altruistic one, blocking ads that other developers (and Google, of course) rely on for revenue sure looks like a case of interference even if it’s not entirely intentional. Still, this whole exchange has left a bitter taste in some developers’ mouths. Till Faida, co-founder of AdBlock Plus, told me he didn’t feel the app was in violation of the terms at all: “Users should have a right to control what kind of content they want to allow on their devices just like you can deactivate JavaScript or Flash in your browser if you choose to do so,” Faida argued. “Google’s alleged differences to Apple in terms of freedom and choice don’t hold up when it comes to revenues,” he added. Google has declined to comment on the matter. AdBlock Plus has now put out to kick ad blockers out of the Play Store.
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Days Of Wonder Turns To Crowdfunding To Produce Small World 2 For Tablets
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
Any geek worth his fedora and duster will know the name Days of Wonder immediately. The company makes some of the best boardgames around ( needs to win an Emmy) and Small World is probably the best fantasy game I’ve played in a long time. Now you can take part in an effort to bring to a tablet near you. Small World itself is already a popular and the new version aims to add a bit more complexity to the title by allowing up to five players to play simultaneously and the addition of new maps and creature types. It will also be available for Android. A pledge of $15 gets you a digital download of the game plus some special content not available to non-backers. Why are they going the route? The company has been looking for ways to supply the game to Android and Steam users. However, because they’re focusing most of their development energy on Ticket to Ride, another popular title, it’s hard for them to pivot. “For a small company like us, especially one doing all its development in-house, creating versions for these platforms is a non-trivial project,” they said. Given how many people would love to smack down some Tritons, Skeletons, and Goblins in an evening, it is a pastime popular with our own kin here at home.
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Pebble Teardown Reveals A 120MHz Chip, Lots Of Glue
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
The smart watch is one of the most ephemeral pieces of hardware I’ve seen in a while. The watch is amazingly light and yet contains enough computing power to run a solid notifications system and, once development ramps up, any number of interesting apps. How do we know? tore that thing to pieces just now and found a 120MHz ARM chip, 3-axis accelerometer, and a Bluetooth 2.1 and low-energy 4.0 chip. Not surprisingly there are few surprises inside the case. Because it is waterproof to 50 meters, the designers essentially filled the case with glue which keeps things nice and tidy and wraps the circuitry in a gooey casing. They obviously had to destroy the thing to get inside – the front screen cracked as they pried it up – but they found an ARM Cortex-M3 MCU inside along with 32MB of storage. This is enough to run apps on the device and handle firmware updates. Quoth iFixIt: How easy is this thing to fix? Not easy at all. “If you break one of [the] buttons, it can be replaced individually from the others; however, you still need to get inside the watch in the first place, a feat we have not yet mastered,” they write. Must really suck trying to replace the 3.7 volts and 130 mAh battery. In short, it seems, this Pebble is disposable.
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MakieLab’s iPad App For 3D-Printing Your Own Dolls Has 70K Designed In First Week
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
Growing up, I pretty much had the standard dolls and toys everyone did — Trolls, Barbies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures. But with the advent of 3D printing, kids today have access to something truly special: their very own custom-made toys. A U.K.-based startup called is making a bet that the rise of smartphones and tablets coupled with the decline of traditional retailers is making the iPad the right place to sell the toys of the future. And custom 3D printing will let kids have products that no one else does — toys they design themselves. The startup launched a app last week that lets you design your own unique doll with special hair, facial features and custom clothing. You can then have it 3D printed and sent to you at a price that starts around 59 pounds ($88), excluding shipping. The app has seen about 70,000 dolls designed so far in the first week. (These are dolls , not ordered. MakieLab isn’t sharing stats on orders yet.) “People love the fact that these toys are on demand,” said co-founder Alice Taylor. “Because the child or adult has made the toy themselves, they’ve got a precious relationship with it. The doll has a heirloom aspect to it.” MakieLab has been running a web-based version of the store for about a year, but this is the first time they’ve transitioned to mobile platforms. Ultimately, they hope their business will offer a mix of real-world and virtual goods. You can design dolls to buy in real-life or eventually there will be options to dress them up with virtual accessories. Like the rest of the gaming world, Taylor says there is a “power curve” dynamic with a small minority of customers being very aggressive with purchases. One had even bought everything in the store twice, she said. The startup, has been working hard to bring down the costs of manufacturing the dolls. At the beginning, it was about 99 pounds ($148). Now the most basic doll (sans hair) will be about 59 pounds, and then probably 20 pounds more if you want a simple outfit and a hairstyle. “This is a journey we’re on,” Taylor said. “The material costs are quite high with the type of plastic we have.” MakieLab has printers in the U.K. and Amsterdam and ship globally. Right now, about 10 percent of sales are coming from the U.S., and the majority of people who order a physical doll also buy accessories. “Eventually, we’ll expand it to be like a distributed manufacturing network, rather than having a centralized factory model,” she said. Finding printers has been a “trial-by-fire” effort, she said. “But we’re getting a ton of support. The suppliers and manufacturers want to see this happen.” The company isn’t profitable yet and margins on each doll are about 20 percent, compared to the 50 percent level you’d see with standard toys and dolls. But Taylor thinks that a Moore’s Law-type effect is starting to kick in for 3D printing. Costs are coming down fast enough, that the MakieLab model will work over the long-run, she says. The company also has other products in the works that will be more targeted toward boys or other demographics. That could help them reach the scale they need to raise margins. “What you see now is 20 percent of our vision,” she said. “We want so much to happen faster, and it will happen over time.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkj54PG2cQw]
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PayPal Here Takes On Square Register With New iPad Payments App
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
After its in-store mobile payments technology PayPal Here in the U.K. two weeks ago, the payments giant is announcing another set of news around the product: an iPad app. Not only is this the first iPad app for PayPal Here, but it’s actually the company’s first native app for the tablet ever. Last year, PayPal launched Here, a triangular dongle that plugs into an iPhone or Android device to read the magnetic strip on the back of a card — similar to the square-shaped dongle produced by rival Square. PayPal says that an iPad app was a hugely requested feature from its “hundreds of thousands” of merchant users. In fact, many users were simply magnifying the iPhone app to fit the iPad. Today, the iPad app will compete with the likes of Square’s iPad register app, Square Register. The app’s design is different from its iPhone cousin and has been optimized for the larger touch screen of the device. It allows for multiple employee logins within one account, which is a key feature for any larger merchants or chains. Once you log in, you are taken to the register, which allows you to enter the total into the keyboard and take a payment in a variety of ways, including swiping the credit card using PayPal Here, entering the number manually, scanning the card using Card.io’s acquired technology, accepting a check, or using cash. Once the transaction is approved, you can email, text or print a receipt. Merchants can also see which customers have check-in via the PayPal app. There are a number of other interesting technologies built-in, as well. The app has integrated eBay’s RedLaser technology to allow users to scan barcodes to purchase items (which in Square Register yet). Users can also use the scanning feature to add inventory to the app to allow for an easier checkout process. Merchants can also manually add items to the menu so cashiers can simply pick an item from a list to add to a bill amount. In terms of backend technology, the iPad app shows merchants sales history, a daily summary of sales, gross sales to date, taxes, tips, discounts. You can also wirelessly connect the app to a cash drawer and printer. While the app could replace a register, PayPal says that it also is integrating into existing POS solutions from NCR, Vend, Kounta, Erply, Leapset and Shopkeep. For now, the register only works in the U.S. with the PayPal Here dongle, but eventually the app will be integrated with the company’s international offerings, as well. In late February, PayPal Here debuted its new hardware to accommodate the chip-based cards in the U.K. and other parts of the world, competing with some of the local payments companies like iZettle. But PayPal says the response to the U.K. reader has been positive, and already the company has had 11,000 merchants express interest in using the technology. As mentioned above, the company says PayPal Here in the U.S. is being used by hundreds of thousands of merchants, and is growing at a fair pace in terms of usage (which is still ). That being said, Square and Square Register has had a leg up on this market in the U.S. because it has been out for longer, and in that time has updated its iPad app But the market is huge, especially among small- to mid-sized chains and a little competition should be interesting and help push companies to innovate faster.
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Facebook’s About Page Redesign Is A Graph Search Data Grab
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
Years ago Facebook made a wildly successful data grab by putting About details at the top of the profile. Now with its ‘s “Suggested” sections, Facebook could fill out Graph Search by making it easy to select and show off where you’ve been, what you Like, and what you’ve watched, read, and listened to. And Facebook does more with that data than you might expect. The year was 2010 and Facebook was in the dark. Hundreds of millions of people had profiles but didn’t fill out their About section with their hometown, current city, relationship status, current employer, education history, or spoken languages. These characteristics help define people’s identities. The data could also be used to personalize content feeds and target ads, if Facebook could just get us to volunteer it. So in December 2010 to start displaying this info front and center. If you didn’t fill it out, you were greeted with incomplete prompts every time you visited your profile. And if the info was out of date, friends would probably remind you that you lived in a different city than you said. Over just a few days, huge swaths of Facebook’s users keyed in this crucial information. It’s secretly one of Facebook’s most successful moves ever. It simultaneously helped people express themselves and see better content, while turning Facebook into one of the world’s most accurate ad targeters. Today, Facebook is going after another critical data set — what you’ve done. The biggest problem with , its new internal search feature, may be that Facebook’s information on what we care about is stale and shallow. Many people haven’t accurately mapped their real-world interests to Facebook Likes. Those who have probably haven’t kept that map current by pruning things they’ve fallen out of love with and adding their recent finds. If you Graph Search for “Music my friends Like,” you may be getting a better impression of their tastes from a few years ago. Last year Facebook’s Open Graph platform added a new dimension to interest sharing. It let you actually consume media on third-party apps that would share that data back to Facebook. Data about what you listened to on Spotify, watched on Netflix, and read on Goodreads started flowing in. But Facebook was missing both what you had already consumed before Open Graph launched, and what you wanted to experience in the future. Facebook’s and its new “Suggested” sections let you enter this info with one click. When you scroll down your About page, in each of the Music, Movies, TV Shows, and Books sections there’s a set of suggestions that let you instantly say you have listened to/watched/read something or want to. The suggestions are personalized based on what else you’ve Liked and consumed, plus your identity and social graph: Facebook’s also adapted two of its other powerful data-grabbing tools into the About page. Formerly buried in the Timeline app tiles, the on the About page lets users rapidly geo-tag old photos and updates. The Likes section of the About Page offers suggestions of things to subscribe to, like a version of the . Then Facebook can use this info to for friends. It can say what music you’re into, what books a friend should pick up, or where the best nearby sushi restaurant is. About page suggestions lend depth and recency to fix the Graph Search’s shallow, stale data. Oh, and then there are ads. One of Facebook’s least understood ad-targeting methods is called . It lets businesses choose to reach you because of what you’ve done, not just what you Like. You may have Liked Lady Gaga years ago, but if you listen to her on Spotify, Facebook knows you really care about her. Then thanks to Action Spec Targeting, Facebook could help advertisers show you ads about Lady Gaga concert tickets or merchandise. While this process is still a bit clumsy for advertisers, some adtech partners like Ampush tell me they’re getting great results from Action Spec Targeting. The About page redesign will give them even more data to pinpoint potential customers with. This aids Graph Search, but also Facebook’s new that competes with Yelp and Foursquare. Finally, Facebook has a big new revenue opportunity with About page suggestions. Facebook could let businesses pay to insert “Sponsored Suggestions” into the recommendations of what people should say they’ve consumed, want to experience, or Like. Some will say this paid, inorganic data pollutes Graph Search’s results, but seriously, you don’t think Facebook is keeping track of which Likes are earned and which are bought? It knows to mute the impact of paid Likes and activity. Facebook is filled with news feeds and ads. Decry its tactics all you want, but you’re either seeing relevant content and ads or stuff that’s more intrusive. Either way, you’re seeing them, so they might as well be personalized accurately. This is one Trojan horse worth opening the gate for, even if we know Facebook’s intention.
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Andy Rubin Says He’s “An Entrepreneur At Heart” In Message To Android Partners About Changing Role
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
Google’s Larry Page today announced in a blog post that former Android chief Andy Rubin would be stepping down from that position and moving on to something else within the company to be . Now, The Wall Street Journal has from Rubin describing his pride in Android and his reasons for taking a new role. The email is quoted in full below: Dear friends, In November of 2007 we announced the Open Handset Alliance with 34 founding members. Today, I’m grateful to the over 85 OHA members who have helped us build Android and drive innovation at such an incredible pace. The Android ecosystem has seen tremendous growth since the launch of the very first Android device in October 2008. The volume and variety of Android devices exceeds even my most optimistic expectations — over 750 million compatible devices and counting! At its core, Android has always been about openness — the idea that a thousand brains are better than one. Just as the ecosystem has grown, so has our team at Google. I am incredibly proud of the phenomenal group of people that spend their days (and nights) building the Android platform and services. Just look at last year…a lean yet incredibly ambitious team released Jellybean with Google Now, launched Google Play in many languages and countries and collaborated with several partners to build three new Nexus devices to help drive innovation in the ecosystem. Today, the success of Android combined with the strength of our management team, gives me the confidence to step away from Android and hand over the reins. Going forward, Sundar Pichai will lead Android, in addition to his existing work with Chrome and Apps. Hiroshi Lockheimer — who many of you already know well — plus the rest of the Android leadership team will work closely with all of our partners to advance Android and prepare the platform for new products and services yet to be imagined. As for me, I am an entrepreneur at heart and now is the right time for me to start a new chapter within Google. I am amazed by what we have accomplished from those early days (not so long ago!), and remain passionate about the power of a simple idea and a shared goal — an open source platform freely available to everyone — to transform computing for people everywhere. Thank you for your support, – andy Rubin’s missive ticks all the right boxes: Reaffirm confidence in the department he built with some flattering stats; talk about how the team remains strong despite the change in leadership; praise the incoming general; close with a strong statement about the continuing value of the mission. What Rubin’s note doesn’t say is where exactly he’ll be headed next. He does note that he’s “an entrepreneur at heart,” and that his next role may be in Google’s X Lab, which is where the company houses its more ambitious projects. It is true that he’d probably be free to pursue things there in a much more ‘entrepreneurial’ manner than heading up one of Google’s most established divisions.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 12 | null |
Kleiner Perkins’ Bing Gordon On How Entrepreneurs Can Keep Creativity Alive [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
And according to Gordon, that’s not as unusual in this world as people might think. In a chat this week at in Austin, Texas, he said that tech entrepreneurship is actually a naturally very creative endeavor in itself — and offered some insight for how entrepreneurs can overcome bouts of the proverbial “writer’s block” that artists and creatives often face. I met with Bing on the morning of our last day at the notoriously SXSW, and it was a bit of an early start for both of us — but he is to talk with, and this time was no exception. Watch the video embedded above to hear about his outlook on keeping creativity alive, what television could look like in the near future as gamification takes hold, where gaming startups go from here in general, why despite recent stock market setbacks he’s actually long on , and much more.
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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With MkII Ventures’ Ron Palmeri
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 |
After a brief hiatus for SXSW, Ask A VC is back this week with . As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guest either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Over the past few years there’s been a , or “studios,” in the technology and VC world. Palmeri was one of the first participants in this movement while he was a managing director at Minor Ventures. He was responsible for hits like GrandCentral (now Google Voice), OpenDNS and Scout Labs (acquired by Lithium). Last year, Palmeri his new firm, MkII Ventures, which has developed , a cloud service that takes unused images from surveillance videos and turns them into actionable information for store owners. Prism Skylabs is also backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and CrunchFund. We’ll be talking about why parallel entrepreneurship works, what Palmeri is incubating next and more. Please send us your or put them in the comments below!
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Samsung Now Has 3 CEOs With The Addition Of J.K. Shin And Boo-keun Yoon
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Samsung Electronics today that it has appointed Boo-keun Yoon and J.K. Shin as co-CEOs following its annual shareholders meeting. That means the Korean tech giant now has three CEOs: Oh-Hyun Kwon will continue on as CEO and chairman of Samsung’s board of directors. Yoon will stay in his current role of overseeing Samsung’s consumer electronics division, which includes TV and appliance products, while Shin will remain in charge of the company’s IT and mobile communications division. Samsung’s mobile business became the world’s number one smartphone seller in 2011 under Shin’s leadership. Fresh from unveiling the Galaxy S4 in New York City, Shin afterwards , in which he said that he’s not satisfied with Samsung’s smartphone market share in the U.S. and that the company is seeing “lackluster demand” for Window-based products in Europe. In its statement, Samsung said that “the new leadership structure will serve to clarify and enhance independent management of the two set divisions, as well as the independent management of the set and component businesses.” While having three chief operating officers might seem a little unwieldy, it makes sense for a company that is . It’s also worthwhile to note that five years ago, Samsung Electronics after Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee was involved in a bribery scandal, with Samsung Life Insurance chairman Lee Soo-bin saying at the time that “without a captain or rudder, Samsung now faces a complex crisis, with each unit meeting cut-throat competition independently.” Making the heads of Samsung’s different departments work closely together might be a move to prevent potential fractures in the leadership. (Lee Kun-hee, whose father Lee Byung-chull founded Samsung in 1938, remains in his current position as the boss of everyone.)
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IronPearl Is Systematizing The Secrets That Have Helped Startups Like Wanelo, Lyft And Goodreads Grow
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
If you build it, they will come, right? Not exactly. Growth is actually a lot more complicated than that. Getting users to discover your product, and then stick to it, is more of a rigorous science that uses lots of multivariate testing and traffic funnels. A pair of longtime investors and entrepreneurs, and , are getting together again to build tools that will help startups optimize how they attract and keep users. After leading and selling a web 1.0 company Tickle, Chudnovsky has advised companies like Goodreads, Path, Wanelo, Poshmark, Lyft and Highlight on how to grow. Before , Chudnovsky was doing it back in the early 2000s with some of the first e-mail and address book importers. Now after all of these one-off consulting projects for startups around the Valley, he’s out to do something more systematic. At his new startup , Chudnovsky is quietly building a set of optimization tools that will track a user through a site or app and test which combinations work best to keep them coming back after a week or a month (although the goal can be whatever you want it to be). Think about it like an Optimizely for longer-term retention and growth. The product he’s building can run dozens of tests simultaneously to check which user flow keeps people engaged with a site best. He showed me a dashboard filled with percentages showing which combinations of copy and art produced the highest number of people returning to a site. “Growth is generally misunderstood,” he said. “It’s like interest in the bank. If you get 2 percent every week and it’s compounded, that’s where the power comes from. If you run 10 tests during a single week, and one of them gives you a 10 percent boost, you can get to a 10 percent overall improvement the following week.” He expects to launch IronPearl in a few months after some beta testing with GoodReads and other startups. Chudnovsky has a long, long history in the Valley. An immigrant who arrived in the Bay Area in 1994, he was a vice president of engineering at Tickle, which was later acquired by job-hunting site Monster.com for its wealth of career-oriented quizzes. It was a personality test site that grew to 100 million users and $40 million in annual revenue. He later dabbled in social gaming, and sold Wonderhill to Kabam. Then he got into advising and investing in startups, helping social reading site GoodReads grow to more than 14 million members. His philosophies on growth have changed as well. Indeed, quizzes and personality tests can go viral very easily, but they may not be kind of product that keeps a user engaged over the very long-term. Quick quizzes were one of the first types of apps to blow up on the Facebook platform, when it launched back in 2007. But they gave way to casual, social games, and then now more sophisticated, midcore titles. Now it’s more about not just getting users in the door, but getting the ones that find a product useful and keep coming back. He has certain rules of thumb: “Seventy-percent of new users should come in as a result of invitations or word of mouth from people who are not first-time users.” But he disdains the term “growth hacker.” “No one has any idea what it actually means,” he said. “Last year, it was all about data scientists and this year it’s the growth hacker.” Maybe that’s because he was one of the originals.
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Nearly 35% Of Android Apps In China Secretly Steal User Data, Another Sign Of Google’s Lack Of Control
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Earlier this week, the Data Center of China Internet (DCCI) (h/t ) that showed nearly 35 percent of the Android apps it surveyed were secretly stealing user data unrelated to the app’s functionality. The DCCI, a research institute, looked at 1,400 apps downloaded from different app markets and found that 66.9 percent were tracking users’ private data, with 34.5 percent collecting information that had no connection to the app’s usage. The DCCI’s findings are yet more signs of how fragmented and chaotic China’s Android market is–and how little control Google has over it, despite the Chinese government’s concerns about its supposed dominance. Just last week, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that said Google has too much control over China’s smartphone industry via Android and has discriminated against domestic companies, in part by making it difficult for Chinese firms to develop their own operating systems. But as TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas , even though Android dominates the OS landscape in China, “not all Chinese Android-powered devices are equal since a large proportion of homegrown mobile makers heavily customise Android and do not carry any of the standard Google services such as its Play store.” Many observers believe that “Chinadroids,” or no-name devices that have been equipped with modified versions of Android, will take over China’s mobile market in the near future. As , sales of these forked devices may be lucrative, but ChinaDroids are also a valuable gateway to content, starting with in-app purchases and then becoming the “terminal of choice” for e-commerce. Google’s absence has created “fierce and chaotic competition to control content delivery channels in China.” The DCCI’s recent report shows that all data in user’s phones is up for grabs, from calling records to contacts. According to its report, more than half of the apps studied tracked user locations, with 13.2 percent doing so even though user location had nothing to do with the app’s functionality. Even the most innocuous-seeming apps–study and beauty apps, for instance–are among the worst offenders when it comes to location-tracking. Google Play . This is in part because of Google’s complicated relationship with the Chinese government, but it could also be because the company’s is concerned that Android’s openness lends itself to abuse by malware developers and spammers. But as analyst , “Android is fragmenting beyond Google’s control, and Google’s Android strategy is rapidly coming undone in China with no immediate prospects for correction.” Google Play has become , with most app developers giving the Android app .apk file directly to consumers instead of linking to the Play Store. , with varying degrees of trustiworthiness, have popped up. The DCCI’s report is another sign that, despite the Chinese government assertions that the Internet giant has too much control, the Android ecosystem in that country is no longer under Google’s steerage.
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Samsung Unveils A Bluetooth Wireless Gaming Controller For The Galaxy S 4
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Samsung is releasing a bombardment of accessories along with their Galaxy S 4, one of which is a fully functional, boda-fide wireless gaming controller. The oval shaped controller is a great deal smaller and lighter than the Xbox and Playstation controllers you’re used to gripping. It has a plastic build, and it’s so light it feels almost hollow. It feels cheap, to be quite frank — I’m used to the heft of regular controllers, and it was a little oft putting to use at first. You’ll find the regular assortment of joysticks and buttons here: two analog sticks, inset d-pad controls, two triggers on the right and left – everything you’d expect. The controller connects to the Galaxy S 4 via a Bluetooth connection, and sadly, it isn’t backwards compatible with the S 3 or any other Samsung phones. It’s powered by two AAA batteries and there are strangely two separate battery compartments for each battery. The coolest part of the controller, if anything, is that there’s a receptacle on the top of the phone that can be pulled out as a dock for the S 4. Now for the bad news: the controller is only compatible with games that are purchased from Samsung’s curated app portal. For many of us Android users that have already purchased and downloaded a plethora of games from the Google Play Store, that’s a severe disappointment. It also appears as though the S 4 can only link up with one controller at a time, so multiplayer gaming is a no-go for now. Samsung wouldn’t tell us any details about the pricing, but we expect the controller to be released sometime in May.
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Samsung Taps Mobeam To Bring Beamable Barcodes To The Galaxy S 4, Could Wallet Integration Be Next?
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Samsung talked up the Galaxy S 4’s features with a bit of Broadway flair here at Radio City Music Hall, but there still are some neat additions to the device that didn’t get a moment in the spotlight. The Korean electronics giant, for instance, tapped a San Francisco company called to bring its novel approach to displaying barcodes to the Galaxy S 4. Rather than sticking to the tried and not-so-true approach of trying to display a barcode on a phone’s screen, Mobeam coaxes the device’s infrared proximity sensor to pulse a pattern at a barcode scanner. Essentially, it’s trying to trick the scanner into thinking that the light flashing at it is a “reflection” of a valid barcode — it sounds a little out there, but it definitely seems to work. The problem may sound trivial to some, but that’s certainly not the case for companies and advertisers that want a more direct way to interact with consumers. We’ve seen more than a few startups attempt to tackle this issue — there’s Disrupt Battlefield alumnus SnipSnap for one, while devices like the ambitious iCache Geode tried to solve the issue with a secondary display — but Mobeam’s solution strikes me as one of the smarter ways to do it. After all, why deal with paper coupons and gift cards that come in the mail (that often expire and get thrown out anyway) when a company like, say, Coca-Cola can cut out the middleman and send you retail-friendly deals directly. You get a price break, retailers don’t need to revamp their point of sales systems, and Coca Cola makes a sale. According to Mobeam CEO Chris Sellers, the company has been working out the particulars of this partnership with Samsung for around 18 months. It’s the first time that the Mobeam has locked up a partnership with handset manufacturer, but they’re no stranger to attention from major companies — in late 2011 Procter and Gamble teamed with Mobeam in a bid to better distribute digital coupons. With any luck, the Galaxy S 4 won’t be the last device to benefit from Mobeam’s tech, as Sellers told TechCrunch that Mobeam has been in talks with a number of major handset OEMs. At this stage, there don’t seem to be any applications on the Galaxy S 4 that take advantage of Mobeam’s tech. It’s there for curious developers and companies to muck around with, but one has to wonder if Samsung has something specific planned. Back at Mobile World Congress, Samsung officially pulled back the curtain on , a Passbook clone of sorts that lets users digitally store “coupons, membership cards, tickets, and boarding passes” — all things that a device like that S 4 could pass it self off as thanks to Mobeam. Sellers wouldn’t confirm that Samsung planned to tap into Mobeam’s API for Wallet, but if Samsung is really looking for a way to beat Apple and Passbook, this may well be it.
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Samsung Launches The Galaxy S 4 With A Baffling, Overproduced Broadway-Style Show
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
I’m watching of in New York, and I cannot stop laughing. In theory, illustrating different features of your new phone using real-world scenarios isn’t a terrible idea. And if you must hold your event at Radio City Music Hall, why not get theatrical? But what’s impressive here is how the skits are both terribly written and unconvincing (like, maybe intentionally so because ), and yet Samsung is really committing to them — actors get played on and off with cheesy music, and there have been several dance numbers. A sample joke: “Our family videos look like a movie about a single mother” — followed by an awkward product explanation. Right now, I’m watching host (and Broadway actor!) wearing an apron while actresses pretend to throw a fun bachelorette party. Naturally, they’re adding a few gratuitous mentions of the new phone as they dance. Earlier, we got to see Chase pretend to negotiate with his agent, with jokes about percentage points. And yes, there was a cute kid who was fawned over by other cast members, , and shouted, “I WANT FISH EYE!” The real highlight for me, however, was a segment illustrating the S 4’s translation capabilities. A young actor was transported to Shanghai, where he tried to get an elderly Chinese gentlemen to give him directions. The problem, as loudly explained by Chase: “The old guy doesn’t speak English!” Afterward, in case you didn’t understand the skit, Chase helped out: “Then the old guy answered in Chinese and the S 4 typed it out in English!” That was the moment when my snickers turned into loud, disbelieving laughter, and no amount of sophisticated translation technology or fish eye lenses could make me stop. So, this is weird, right? — Marinperez (@Marinperez) If you want to relive the magic, the skits start about 57 minutes into the video below. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDXILsX7_QI&w=560&h=315]
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Samsung Debuts S View Cover For Galaxy S 4 With Integrated Display Window
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Samsung didn’t just unveil a new flagship smartphone today, it also introduced a cover accessory for that device with unique features. The S View cover has an integrated pass-through window for the main display, which can provide at-a-glance access to basic info such as call display, SMS, current battery status and time. It’s actually reminiscent of an old feature phone throwback, such as the small displays that were built into flip phones once upon a time. The idea is to keep the phone’s screen protected while also giving access to vital information, and it’s a rather nice execution. Maybe not as nice as the YotaPhone, which offers an e-ink display on the back that takes much less power than the main screen when activated, which has a battery-saving feature, too.
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Samsung Launches New Version Of S Health, Complete With S Band Step Tracking Wristband
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Samsung’s S Band and updated S Health apps are new features added to the Galaxy S 4. The updated S Health app improves upon the S Health design that debuted in the Galaxy S III. It takes advantage of a new built-in pedometer for tracking steps, as well as ambient temperature and humidity, and the app also tracks food nutrition information from a database. The S Band is a brand new accessory that has its own pedometer to keep you tracking your steps even when you don’t have the phone on you. Everything also plays nice with third-party accessories and devices, meaning it’ll connect to heart-rate monitors and more to give you a much more comprehensive picture of your overall health. Developing…
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Samsung Galaxy S 4 Beats The Best With 5-inch, 1080p Display, 1.9GHz Processor, Gesture Controls And A Q2 2013 Release
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
As if it could be any other way, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 is Samsung’s, and perhaps even Android’s, best phone yet. In fact, it very well may be the best smartphone on the market, period. We’ve been through months of speculation, hype, rumors, and leaks, but the truth is out, and the Galaxy S 4 still has much more up its sleeve than the leaks suggested. More than any other Galaxy before it, the Galaxy S 4 is proof that the company can build a central brand the way Apple has with the iPhone. Both the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S series have been selling in the millions, and the Galaxy S 4 looks like it will hold up that trend. Even with loads of new software, like an enhanced camera application, hover-style gesture features, and a slew of baked-in apps and services from Samsung, the Galaxy S 4 still brings the heat in the hardware/spec department. Here are the specifics:
The Galaxy S 4 clearly has a small ring of competition in the spec department. The only phones that are on this level are the Xperia Z (1080p 5-inch display, 13mp camera, quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU) and the HTC One (4.7-inch 1080p display, 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600 quad-core CPU, and an “Ultrapixel” camera) and LG’s Optimus G Pro (1080p 5.5-inch display, quad-core Snapdragon 600, 13-megapixel camera). Of course, they each have their own pros and cons, but the Galaxy S 4 seems to be the most compact, lightest, and fastest among them. Samsung hasn’t been clear about the exact brand of the processor for the U.S. version, but it did say that it was a quad-core Snapdragon CPU clocked at 1.9GHz, which we believe may be the Snapdragon 600. However, “processors vary by region,” says Samsung, and the Asian and European version will sport the long-awaited Samsung Exynos 5 Octa eight-core processor.
The Galaxy S 4 design manages to both fit in with the Galaxy S family and stand on its own as a unique breed. For one, Samsung packed a bigger display (5-inches diagonal) into a package that’s actually smaller than before. The GS4 is the same width, slightly shorter, and .7mm thinner than its predecessor. As such, the bezels on the Galaxy S 4 are slightly thinner on all four sides, which means it’s all screen, all the time. And what a screen it is. The Galaxy S 4 display is 5 inches of unadulterated Super AMOLED 1080p brilliance. Surrounding it, the Galaxy S 4 takes a hybrid shape, something between the straight lines of the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II with the curved tops, bottoms, and corners of the Galaxy S III. The elongated home button is unmistakably GSIII-style. The Galaxy S 4 also sticks with familiar materials, and unfortunately that still means a whole lot of plastic. Both the front panel and back panel (which is removable) are made of brushed plastic, but with a textured pattern of tiny circles laid over it. It gives the phone an industrial, textured look, but in reality all you feel is smooth plastic. Around the edge, you’ll notice a new embellishment to the S series: a metallic bar that runs along the edge of the device. Though it looks a lot like metal, it’s actually polycarbonate and meant to protect the sensitive corners of the device. It would be nice to see some more premium materials in this generation of the Galaxy S, but the plastic and polycarbonate construction let Samsung fit many components into a very compact, light package, according to Director of Product Planning Drew Blackard.
The Galaxy S 4 uses a new 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, bumped up from the 8-megapixel shooter on the Galaxy S III. It’s still centrally placed on the upper back half of the device, complete with LED flash, autofocus, and 1080p video recording. On the front, the Galaxy S 4 sports a 2-megapixel camera. The higher megapixel sensor is nice, and will surely make a slight difference, but where the Galaxy S 4 camera really evolves from past generations is in the software. For one thing, the camera app now uses the same UI as the Galaxy Camera, with a brushed silver finish to the buttons and much simpler navigation. Clicking the mode button along the bottom will bring up a simple scroll wheel full of various modes. When one is highlighted, the menu gives the name as well as a description. More sophisticated users can also see these mode options in a grid view for quick changes. Along with some of the same modes we’ve seen on both the Galaxy Camera and newer Galaxy smartphones like Beauty Shot, Samsung has added way more modes into the mix. One is called Eraser, and it lets you remove unwanted people from a shot. Samsung says it comes in handy for shots that have been photo-bombed, or tourist shots at busy places. The camera senses any motion that goes through the frame and lets you choose to remove it, as if that person had never walked through your shot of the Eiffel Tower. The Galaxy S 4 also has a dual-shot mode, which is just a button press away from the main camera interface. This lets you use both the front-facing camera and the rear-facing camera at the same time, for both recording and still captures. There are various filters, such as Oval Blur, Postage Stamp, Cubism, and Split, which give you different options for the theme of your dual-shot creation. You can resize the pop-up picture, and move it around the screen using simple drag and drop tools. It’s pretty amazing. Some other modes include Drama Shot, which lets you take a succession of photos of some action (like someone skiing down a mountain) and turn them into a composite of the entire sequence, and Sound and Shot, which lets you record up to 9 seconds of audio to pair along with a picture. Samsung even jumped on the GIF train with the likes of Cinemagraph and Vine to create a gif-making mode, called Cinema Shot. It lets you take a short recording, and then determine which parts of the shot stay still and which parts remain animated. In fact, it’s almost exactly like Cinemagraph. But Samsung took one step past capture and even built an app called Story Album which lets you create photo albums of special events or trips through templates, and use TripAdvisor to add extra location data to your story. You can even print your album through a partnership with Blurb’s print distribution network. There’s a lot going on here, so try to keep up. We had recently heard that the GS4’s “wow” factor would be all in the software, and that’s exactly right. Most of TouchWiz is the same, though it seems to get lighter and lighter as the phones get faster. The one very noticeable edition was a set of extra toggle buttons available in the pull-down notifications menu. Other than those particulars, let’s start with the gesture-based head-tracking stuff. The most useful new feature of the Galaxy S 4 is Air View. It lets you hover over something on the screen to get an extended pop-up view of what’s inside. For example, if you hover over an email in your inbox, Air View will bring up the first few sentences of that email’s contents. If you hover over an album within the photo gallery, you’ll see nine thumbnails of the contents of that gallery. In fact, if you hover over an image while inside the folder, that particular thumbnail will expand to give you a better view of the particular picture. It’s all very reminiscent of what can be done with recent entries in the Galaxy Note line, except without requiring users to keep track of an S-Pen. Air View is embedded in the email client, photo gallery, calendar, and a Galaxy S 4-edition of Flipboard, which lets you view and select headlines by hovering over a single tile. Samsung also added an Air Gesture feature, which lets you control the phone without having to hold it — I could see this being used while driving. You can swipe left and right to switch between web pages, songs, photos in the gallery, etc. and swipe up and down to scroll. You can even accept calls by waving at the phone. Rumors suggested that Samsung had developed some sort of magic-scroll eye-tracking technology, when in reality the Galaxy S 4 can actually only track your head, very much like the Galaxy S III’s Smart stay feature. The front-facing camera can detect that your head is facing the phone directly, which stops the display from dimming. In the Galaxy S 4, that technology evolves to automatically pause videos when you turn away from the phone with Smart Pause. As far as scrolling is concerned, if you’re on a page that requires reading or scrolling, the Galaxy S 4 will let you tip the phone forward or backward to scroll (as long as the ff-camera senses that you’re paying attention). Samsung said that using tilt-gestures as well as “head-tracking” technology to streamline browsing a page was “the most intuitive and natural to the end-consumer.” As far as NFC is concerned, the GS4 includes S Beam and TecTile integration, but Samsung also lets you pair with up to eight other NFC-devices to run a feature called GroupPlay, which lets you play the same song across eight different devices… to create a party on the go. Samsung also included an IR blaster on the Galaxy S 4 so that you can use it as a remote for just about any modern television. Called WatchON, it also includes rich information proved by an electronic programming guide. Along with an updated camera and Story Album, the Galaxy S 4 brings a handful of brand new applications to the Galaxy S family. The first, and possibly most important, is S Translator. S Translator is available in nine languages at launch, including Chinese, English U.S., English British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese. It is a standalone app that automatically translates information that is typed or copy/pasted into it. S Translator is also embedded in ChatOn, Messaging, and email. The Galaxy S 4 also has an optical reader which turns analog information into digital, by reading business cards and turning them into address book contacts. S Translator is also embedded into the optical reader, which scans QR codes as well. ChatOn, Samsung’s own-branded VoIP application, has been updated to include three-way video calls, screen share, and annotations. You can even use the new dual-camera mode to enjoy ChatOn calls. Samsung has been making a big push in the health department with the new Galaxy S 4, and has thus preloaded the S Health app on the device. The app originally made its debut last July and seemed to focus mainly on linking up with existing health gadgets like fancy scales and blood glucose monitors. This time around, using the Galaxy S 4’s built-in pedometer, S Health tracks your activity throughout the day and knows when you’re running, walking or climbing stairs. The S Health app also lets you input your consumption activities to track caloric intake and get suggestions. Speaking of S Health, Samsung is selling a few health-related accessories to tackle the ever-growing quantified self products like the Jawbone Up, Nike Fuelband, and FitBit. That said, Samsung has introduced the wrist-worn S Band that tracks activity, temperature and humidity. Samsung is even going so far as to sell a heart-rate monitor which you can strap on for your daily workouts, and a body scale. All of the accessories come with Bluetooth so they can pair back to your device and be recorded by the S Health app. And since Samsung loves making special cases for its big-name phones, the Galaxy S 4 had to go big even with its case. It’s called the S View cover, and it has a little screen on the front that reads information from the phone. That way, even though the phone is locked, you can still see the time, SMS notifications, battery status, and choose to accept or ignore incoming calls. Samsung didn’t specify which technology they used for the cover’s display, or whether or not it needs a charge or takes battery from the S 4, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear they took a page out of the YotaPhone playbook and are using low-power e-ink here. Samsung didn’t clarify exact pricing, but said it would go for the same price as a “Samsung premium smartphone”. The Galaxy S III launched in the US at $199 with a 2 year contact. In terms of availability, they didn’t give a specific release date but did say it would be on store shelves in 2013Q2, at AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Cricket and U.S. Cellular. Samsung is riding high on the success of the Galaxy S III and from what I’ve seen, the Galaxy S 4 is a worthy successor with innovative features packed into a familiar housing. It’s a bit of a shame that Samsung announced the phone without giving a price or release date, but at this point, with Samsung the global sales and innovation leader in smartphones, it can do pretty much whatever it wants.
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Hulu To Appoint Andy Forssell As Acting CEO Following Jason Kilar Departure
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
will take over the position of CEO at online video company later this month, following the of the company’s current chief executive which will occur . The succession plan was announced today in an internal memo from Kilar to Hulu staffers that was subsequently made public on . Forssell has worked at Hulu since 2007, and currently serves as the company’s Senior Vice President of Content. According to his , Forssell earned a BS with honors in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, a BS in Russian studies from the United States Military Academy, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. His career began with the United States Army. The memo indicates that Forssell will serve as Hulu’s “acting” CEO, and has not yet finalized who will fill in the role permanently. TechCrunch is hearing that the person who ultimately gets that position could very well be an outsider, depending on the ongoing News Corp. discussions. We’ll update this with more detail, but for now here is the memo from Kilar announcing Forssell’s appointment in full:
Team – As you all know, I will be departing Hulu at the end of this quarter. I wanted to share the news that Andy Forssell will be stepping up to lead Hulu as acting CEO after I depart later this month. You know Andy well; he’s been a critical senior executive and has been here from the start of this great adventure. Andy exemplifies the Hulu culture and has been central to Hulu’s journey, helping to grow this company from 2 content partners and no revenue to over 450 content partners and approximately $700 million revenue in 2012. In his role, Andy has built strong relationships with many of our Board members. Andy has the Board’s strong support in leading the team during this important time. Disney and News Corporation are currently finalizing their forward-looking plans with Hulu, and the senior team has been working closely with them in that process. Once the plans are finalized, a permanent decision will be made regarding the CEO position. As I mentioned to you all at the beginning of this year, Hulu’s focus remains on delivering a fantastic 2013 for customers and shareholders. Hulu is well on its way, with new records being set in Q1 across both revenue and subscriber additions. The unwavering focus on delighting Hulu’s customers is clearly showing up in the outputs of the business. Jason’
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Join Us Live Right Now For Our Samsung Galaxy S 4 Reveal Event Live Blog
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Samsung is launching its Galaxy S 4 device (better known as the worst kept secret of all time) in New York today at a special event. The event is , but we’re also there covering the action, and will bring you updates live right here as the show progresses.
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Watch The Galaxy S 4 Live Video Stream Right Here!
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDXILsX7_QI The Galaxy S 4 is upon us and this is the official Samsung webcast. Of course you can follow along with our liveblog, or, if it floats your boat, watch the live video stream embedded here. The Samsung Galaxy S 4 is hardly a secret at this point. Most everything has leaked earlier today. But still, this is Samsung’s latest flagship, the phone designed as the company’s answer to the iPhone 5, HTC One, and all the rest. Tune in; Samsung likely has a good show planned
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Hashtags On Facebook Would Open Up Exploration And Discovery Way More Than Graph Search
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
The hashtag (#), which is a hallmark of Twitter’s userbase wanting to categorize content, is rumored to become a part of Facebook’s . , but not much is known about how far along the social network is with it. While the hashtag isn’t a concept owned entirely by Twitter, the company has helped to make them popular with mainstream users. The most important usage of the hashtag hasn’t been for branding though, its been to bring uncategorized information together into a discoverable and scannable way. [tweet https://twitter.com/chrismessina/status/223115412] Our sources tell us that it’s too early to know if the feature will end up making it into Facebook’s user experience or whether it will hit the chopping block. But with the company’s focus on slicing up information into feeds with its , the incorporation of linked hashtags makes sense. Currently, Graph Search doesn’t crawl all of our posts, so it would seem like the hashtag feature would have to wait until that gets rolled out. However, Facebook has seen the power of the hashtag firsthand; it’s a wildly popular behavior on Instagram. With a completely different demographic hashtagging their photos, Facebook is able to see how much extra engagement and traction is stirred up for photos based on bored users tapping the highlighted words. As I’ve been using Graph Search, I find that typing into an open box isn’t something that comes naturally on a social network. I would much prefer queues like links or hashtags to drive my exploration. This is a phenomenon that is prevalent on sites like Wikipedia. You can get lost for hours clicking around from one article to the next based on the terms that are linked. In that way, links are the glue that make a massive social network feel smaller, which is what Twitter has experienced since properly incorporating hashtags. If Facebook were to adopt linked hashtags, of course even more commercials during your favorite TV shows would be plastered with #things to “engage” you in conversation. But mostly, the hashtag is there to engage you in wasting tons of time with tappable and clickable discovery. Oh, and Twitter would benefit from this adoption greatly, so don’t start singing the blues for them.
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LeVar Burton On How Interstellar Human Travel Could Become A Reality [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
As a member of the of the , Burton is a champion of the idea that we can make human interstellar travel capabilities a reality within the next century. We had the chance to catch up with Burton this week at in Austin, Texas and talk to him about 100 Year Starship, which he discussed . It was also great to be brought up to speed on his other initiatives, such as the . In the video embedded above, you can hear Burton tell us how tech concepts that were purely fictional back in the TNG days are now realities, why it’s important for technology and art to be brought together, what he really thinks of (and how it compares to what wore), and more.
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Google Translate Now Lets You Build A Personalized Phrasebook
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
just a cool new feature that allows you to easily create a personalized phrasebook with the phrases and sentences you want to memorize and/or find yourself translating repeatedly. As the Google Translate team notes in today’s announcement, the idea here is to allow you to jumpstart the process of committing the translation to memory by “allowing you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them.” Revisiting these phrases regularly, Google argues, will help you turn these translations “into lasting knowledge” (just like those rote drills from your Latin classes back in the day). The new phrasebook is now enabled by default, and you can access it through the little book icon in the top right corner of the Google Translate screen. To save a phrase, simply press the new star icon underneath the translations. The phrasebook itself is pretty straightforward, with one language on the left and the translation on the right. You can filter phrases by language pairs and – just like across the rest of Google Translate – there is a text-to-speech feature that allows you to listen to each phrase.
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Meet JumpSeat, The Airbnb For Private Jets
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
So the market for private jet startups sure is heating up!* So far, we’ve written about and , both of which are seeking to become a kind of “Uber for private flights.” So it probably comes as no surprise that there’s someone out there with a kind of Airbnb, peer-to-peer offering to make private flights cheaper for everyone. A new startup called has emerged to help make it easier for the private jet set to make unused seats on flights they’ve chartered available to others, and to help them save some money in the process. The idea behind JumpSeat is simple: There are a lot of people who want to fly private, but don’t necessarily want to do so on a half-empty jet. (I’m sure there are just as many people who relish the idea of only flying with their posh loved ones, but JumpSeat is not for them!) Rather than pay for the whole jet themselves, they can instead lower the cost of flying by making seats available to other jet-setting ballers looking to save a little money on their private jet experience. So you basically get all the same advantages of flying private — like faster take off and landing and no security lines — but you might have to share a jet with some randoms. That’s a tradeoff JumpSeat believes a lot of private fliers will be willing to make. The company breaks down customers into “flyers” and “buyers,” according to JumpSeat founder Justin Sullivan. Flyers are JumpSeat users who have already booked a private jet and want to make unused seats on their flights available to others. And buyers are users who show up for what are essentially discounted tickets on private flights booked by other people. All in all, the idea is to lower the amount of unused seats on private jets, making the whole thing cheaper for everyone. Today, there are a number of people who book private jets for $25,000 or more, just to travel with three to five people. But most private jets hold eight to 15 passengers, so there are usually seats to go around. Just as importantly, charter and private jet operators frequently end up flying empty jets between destinations where their clients have booked travel. Individual seat prices vary significantly based on the popularity of the route and number of seats available on the flight, but tend to be thousands of dollars per seat, rather than tens of thousands for the whole jet. To start, JumpSeat’s inventory will primarily be made up of those latter types of flights, where charter operators will make unused seats available at a lower price just to recoup the cost of otherwise flying an empty plane. But as more flyers sign up, Sullivan expects a whole lot more of the company’s inventory being part of travel between high-density corridors — for instance, Florida or New York to Aspen during ski season, or typical business flights between New York and Chicago or L.A. JumpSeat is an extension of Sullivan’s existing legacy charter jet business, . Over the past several years, he’s operated that business the same way that most private jet services have — by connecting his Private FLITE clients with charter operators. And he’s grown that business to more than $6 million in revenue per year. With that in mind, the team decided to add some technology and build a web app that could grow the overall charter business by making it cheaper to fly and reduce the number of unused seats. The JumpSeat peer-to-peer model could grow the pie of private jet fliers, thus boosting the number of seats it sells overall and the amount of money it makes. JumpSeat charges a 10 percent commission on initial flights booked through the platform, and then another 5 percent on seats that are unused seats that are booked in a peer-to-peer fashion. Currently available only on the web, the JumpSeat team is working on a mobile app, which it expects to launch on iPhone in the next few months. And Android will come soon after that. The idea is to make booking seats on a private jet easier than ever, by lowering the cost and making available inventory more transparent. While the six-person, Boston-based team still operates the legacy Private FLITE business, it’s strongly suggesting to its existing clients that they become JumpSeat users and participate in that marketplace. JumpSeat was bootstrapped by the Private FLIGHT guys, but the company is currently looking for outside investment to help grow its business. ==
* And somehow, I’ve become the private jet writer for TechCrunch.
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Facebook Hires The Team At Design Firm Hot Studio To Build Tools For Brands
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
, a design firm based in San Francisco and New York City, just that its team will be joining Facebook. Facebook has , writing: We began working with Hot Studio on a few projects several months ago. Immediately, we recognized the synergy between our teams and their remarkable talents. Hot Studio has a sixteen-year history working with some of the world’s biggest and best brands. They have an intricate understanding of what businesses need and a flair for building tools and resources to help meet those needs. And this is what we’re bringing them here to do – build amazing tools that help the brands and businesses that use Facebook.
Noteworthy-but-unsurprising is the emphasis on “brands and businesses” — i.e., the advertisers who pay Facebook’s bills. That’s a group that Facebook has been trying to convince to embrace non-traditional ad units, and that Hot Studio should have plenty of experience dealing with. Apparently the transition period will take a few months, while Hot Studio fulfills all of its remaining commitments. According to , Hot Studio customers include Cisco, Warner Music Group, Charles Schwab, Zinio, Ancestry, SFMOMA, and the California Academy of Sciences. And . An employee at Hot Studio has saying he’s been told that this is Facebook’s largest talent acquisition ever. says that the company had 67 employees in 2012 and saw revenue of $14.5 million 2011. We’ve emailed Facebook for details and will update if we hear back. ( Facebook says it can’t comment on the talent acquisition tweet.)
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Reuters Editor Indicted For Conspiring With Hacker Group, Anonymous
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Thomson Reuter’s Deputy Editor of Social Media, Matthew Keys, for allegedly conspiring with hacktivist group, “Anonymous.” to the Department of Justice, “Keys provided members of the hacker group Anonymous with log-in credentials for a computer server belonging to KTXL FOX 40’s corporate parent, the Tribune Company.” The indictment includes allegations of aiding hackers in defacing the Los Angeles Times websites. “That was such a buzz having my edit on the LA Times,” wrote a co-conspirator to Keys in a conversation intercepted by the Justice Department [ ]. “If convicted, Keys faces up to 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000 for each count,” concludes the Justice Department memo. As of this writing, Keys’ an hour ago and still includes his credentials as a Reuters employee in the bio. More as this story develops.
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Agawi Partners With NVIDIA To Deliver Ready-To-Stream Gaming Architecture To ISPs And Telcos
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Game streaming might be a common feature of ISP packages for bundled Internet, if has anything to say about it. The cloud gaming startup has outlasted rival OnLive, which still exists in , and to power its , and now it wants to give ISPs and carrier networks a chance to regain their place as providers of content. Internet providers have been demoted to dumb tubes with the advent of services like Netflix, iTunes, Spotify and others, which is not where they want to be. Serving up piping hot content to customers is the way to own a more complete relationship, one that’s likely to result in longer-term commitment and deeper revenue pockets. If you control both the channel and what’s on it, you’re winning both ways, after all. Agawi, which has spent the past few years building its cloud gaming infrastructure, is now pursuing its plans of making that tech, code named VG36, commercially available to ISPs, with a ready-to-roll white label solution they can pass on to their customers. Agawi is partnering with NVIDIA to make this happen, after the two worked together on building their “True Cloud” gaming architecture in February. The combination of Agawi’s existing tech with servers based on Nvidia’s Grid processors is designed to help stream multiple games at the same time from a single server, thereby bypassing or at least minimizing the upfront equipment costs that proved extremely troublesome to OnLive. I spoke to Agawi executive chairman Peter Relan about the launch of the new platform, which will be opening up to general availability in July. It’s being announced now because of the long lead times a lot of Agawi’s target customers have when implementing services like this one, Relan said. The point is to make potential partners aware that Agawi is ready do deploy this tech as soon as the second half of this year, with data center partners lined up around the globe. “Everybody has been waiting for MNVOs, MSOs, the telecom guys, the cable guys, to bring new services to market,” he said. “They offer voice, they offer Internet, they offer television, so what’s the next big content area? Gaming. Almost all the major telecom operators and cable operators want to do trials this year with introducing gaming services, and the easiest way to bring them to market is through cloud gaming, because the alternative is to put the equivalent of an iPad inside their set-top box.” Once Agawi begins deployments in earnest, any service provider that participates should be able to offer games direct to existing subscribers through the hardware they already have it – be it computers, mobile devices or even connected TVs. Relan says it can also help with licensing of specific content, and will offer three tiers (casual, mid-core and AAA) to appeal to all types of gamers. Targeting the folks who manage the pipes is a good strategy for Agawi, not only because providers are looking around for content opportunities, but because cloud gaming has the potential to be very bandwidth-intensive for consumers. If carriers are providing the service, however, they can presumably also offer some way of making sure that bandwidth used to stream games doesn’t count across their monthly totals, the way . Whatever the arrangement between providers and clients ends up being, Agawi still has to sell its offering to telcos and ISPs first.
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Facebook May Launch Hashtags To Open Graph Searches Of Related Posts, But There Are Privacy Questions
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 |
Facebook already has tagging for people, Pages, and location, and could soon allow users to tag their posts with hashtags so they could be more easily indexed and surfaced by Graph Search. A source told TechCrunch that Facebook was working on the project, and soon after reported similar news. However, this feature may be a ways from fruition. It will likely require Facebook to add posts to . Right now Facebook’s internal search engine only returns people, places, Pages, apps, media, and interests. Facebook did say that search for posts would launch eventually though, and hashtags could make the feature even more useful. Without them, finding posts about a popular topic could require people to deduce the exact terms used to describe it. By implementing hashtags, anyone who wanted their posts surfaced better by Graph Search could add a hashtag to their post, and Facebook could help searchers find the tag related to what they’re looking for. When clicked from a post in news feed, the hashtag would presumably open a page of Graph Search results of mentions of the hashtag, similar to Twitter. Hashtags would also allows brands and events to better coordinate buzz on Facebook. They could ask people to include the hashtag when referring to a brand’s event or marketing campaign. Facebook could then display in the news feed any hashtags mentioned by multiple people in your network. Advertisers might be happy to pay to appear in search results for hashtags related to their businesses as many do on Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that sponsored search results would be Along with hashtags, a trending topics list could potentially come along with post search for Graph Search. There’s a big issue with hashtags on Facebook, though. Unlike Twitter where most posts are public, on Facebook most have some level of privacy. Clicking a hashtag would therefore only be able to show you public posts and those set to be visible to you that mention the tag. One option would be showing the content of private posts but not their authors, though this would likely be met with backlash. Figuring out how to operate hashtags and trending topics will be a sociological challenge for the world’s most popular social network. Done right, they could reveal the zeitgeist of opinion on Facebook. Done wrong they could make people wary of adding that little pound sign to posts. But until Facebook launches Graph Search for posts, hashtags have no power on Facebook.
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 13 | null |
Want To See Pictures Of Twitter’s Office Visitors? Meet @Twisitor
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
There are Twitter accounts for almost everything these days. Some people I know have accounts set up for , then there are , , drones and so on. The company itself has a fun account called , which was a project built during one of Twitter’s quarterly hackweeks. There’s a camera in the lobby of Twitter’s new San Francisco office and it will snap a photo of anyone who stands in front of it. Once it does that, guess what’s next? You guessed it, a tweet goes out from the Twisitor account. It’s a great representation of the culture at Twitter, where its employees eat its own dogfood, or in this case…birdfood. Its first tweet was from January 11th, so it’s still relatively new. I’ve been to quite a few tech startup offices and each has its own bit of style and flair. When you go to Facebook, there’s always a video of someone on the team talking about the company, at Google there’s usually some comfy couches to sit on with free WiFi to use but Twitter takes the cake with Twisitor. Here are a few sample tweets from those who have visited the flock: [tweet https://twitter.com/twisitor/status/289798274066567168] [tweet https://twitter.com/twisitor/status/314824292305100800] There’s even an account that follows Twisitor, called , which points out all of the people that were unnamed in the background of photos. It’s interesting to see internal culture showcased publicly on the service that these employees work really hard on building. [tweet https://twitter.com/TwisitorCameo/status/314824855855968256] The hacked project was built by , an International Engineer at Twitter, along with , , and a few other folks. The neat part about hackweek, I’m told, is that teams are comprised of employees all over the company. I’ve been hot on Twisitor’s tracks for some time, but this tweet from her filled in some color as to where the camera is in the lobby, nestled inside of a birdhouse, where people stand to get their picture taken: [tweet https://twitter.com/kudeki/status/315257021593178113] If you’d like to see tweets from other parts of Twitter’s office, you can follow and . [tweet https://twitter.com/twisitor/status/314469984942292992]
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The TechCrunch ‘Lean In’ Roundtable, Part 4: Are We Our Own Worst Enemies?
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
Welcome back for the last segment of our roundtable discussion of COO new book In , posted Tuesday, we discussed the controversy surrounding as well as the element of fear and how it plays into women’s career paths. In , posted Wednesday, we discussed the emotion of guilt and the myth that women can “do it all.” And in part three posted yesterday, we Sandberg’s advice on finding real mentors and partners who will support your professional and personal ambitions. We concluded the series with the discussion embedded above, about how women can be our own worst enemies when supporting each other in the workplace. Sandberg writes in the last chapter of the book, “It is the painful truth that one of the obstacles to more women gaining power has sometimes been women already in power.” Our roundtable consists of a small group of Generation Y female leaders that represent the Silicon Valley tech industry’s rising new guard: , the former IBM engineer who is now the founder and CEO of , the startup that has for outsourcing errands, tasks, and deliveries; , the senior director of communications for cloud-based enterprise storage technology firm ; , the and alum who last year into the venture capital world as a partner at ; and , the Stanford MBA and former engineer who is now the of educational Q&A platform . In this last segment, we also asked our panelists for their impressions on the book, and the larger movement it is meant to spark — across the board, everyone found to be easy to read and informative. Busque is actually buying the book for each of her employees (both women and men) at TaskRabbit, and a couple of our other panelists are thinking about following suit. Tune in above for more! And make sure to check back on Sunday, when we’ll post the full video from the roundtable, along with a written transcript.
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T-Shirt Crowdfunding Site TeePublic Funds 22 Designs In Its First Week
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
Apparently, starting one popular T-shirt website wasn’t enough for Josh Abramson. Last week Abramson, who previously co-founded the jokey T-shirt retailer , launched , which is basically a Kickstarter for T-shirts. Users can pledge to buy designs that they like, and if a shirt gets at least 30 people to fund it, then TeePublic will print it and continue to sell the shirt indefinitely. Shirts cost $20, of which $5 goes to the designer. Older sites have taken steps in this direction. Most notably, there’s , where people submit their designs and people vote on them. Ultimately, however, the designs that get printed are chosen by the staff. As a result, Abramson argued that there are plenty of designs that attract significant interest, but never get turned into shirts. (Y Combinator-backed .) For example, he pointed to , which the artist said received “a huge response from the members of the Threadless community” but “they never opted to print it for whatever reason.” Abramson sold his company, Connected Ventures (whose properties included CollegeHumor, Vimeo, and BustedTees), to IAC, but he bought BustedTees back in 2011. He said that he considered making TeePublic part of the existing site, but he worried “there would be pressure on everybody to come up with funny T-shirts” (some shirts on the site are funny, but many are not). Nonetheless, he will be using BustedTees to cross-promote the new site. In the first week since lauch, Abramson said TeePublic saw 50,000 visits, and there are now more than 2,000 registered users. Those users performed 1,000 funding/purchasing actions. On the design side, more than 480 designs were uploaded and 22 have been funded so far. And since it’s important for designers to publicize their shirts, Abramson also pointed out that 60 percent of the designers are sharing on Twitter and Facebook once they upload their work.
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Ask A VC: Comcast Ventures’ Michael Yang On What’s Next In Digital Healthcare And More
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
In this week’s Ask A VC, Comcast Ventures’ Managing Director sat in the hot seat to talk about his passion for digital healthcare, and much more. During the show, Yang actually demoed wearable health tracking device BodyMedia. Comcast led a investment in the health care startup last year. We also chatted about how things are going over at Yahoo. Yang was previously a Vice President/General Manager at Yahoo in the Media Group as well as the Local Markets & Commerce Division, where he managed Yahoo Autos, Yahoo Real Estate and Yahoo Health; co-led Yahoo Shopping; and was part of the team that formed Yahoo’s strategic alliance with the Newspaper Consortium. Check out the video above for more!
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Backed By Kickstarter And Full Of Tech Cameos, ‘The Startup Kids’ Movie Debuts On iTunes
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
But two young Icelandic entrepreneurs found a silver lining in the situation. With an absence of traditional job prospects, the two young women decided shortly after the 2008 economy crash to start — and it turned out to be a big success. After that, they were motivated to spread the word about entrepreneurship to more people by making a documentary film about startup life. The Startup Kids filmmakers on set, Vala Halldorsdottir and Sesselja Vilhjalmsdottir Much like they first jumped into entrepreneurship without a ton of experience, Halldorsdottir and Vilhjalmsdottir tell us they jumped into the filmmaking process with nothing more than a rented camera and a one-way ticket to the US. The plan was simple, but audacious: To somehow track down a number of successful tech startup founders and talk to them about entrepreneurship. Thanks in part to a and the participation of very well-known founders from the likes of Vimeo, Soundcloud, Kiip, InDinero, Dropbox, and Foodspotting, it all worked out — and film became a reality. Up until today, the film has been seen at a smattering of screenings. As of today, though, it’s available to a much wider audience, with the film’s . It’s a fun story and the final product is an interesting watch. You can see the trailer embedded above, and download the full film (for now, it’s available only in English-speaking countries, but the DVD is available for shipment worldwide on The Startup Kids . The official summary goes like this: “A film about young entrepreneurs in digital age made by two of these entrepreneurs themselves, The Startup Kids is a documentary about the growing number of young web dynamos such as the in the U.S. and Europe. Made by two Icelandic entrepreneurs who founded their first company shortly after the economic collapse of Iceland, this doc is an insider’s look into what it takes to make it even when everyone is telling you it is impossible. We also had the opportunity to talk with the filmmakers via Skype about The Startup Kids, and you can watch that in the video embedded below to hear more about the inspiration behind the film, how it went from idea to reality, how the Icelandic startup scene is faring these days, and much more.
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Google Reader Who? Feedly Became Top News App On iPhone, iPad & Android This Week; New App Now Awaiting Approval
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
Where are the users headed following news of Google Reader’s shutdown? To , it seems. We it had passed half a million new users, but more importantly, Feedly is now winning on mobile, too. According to new U.S. App Store and Google Play data, Feedly is leaving competitors like NewsBlur and Reeder far behind. Even though Google Reader will remain for a few months more, Feedly became the No. 1 news app across all three top mobile platforms (iPhone, iPad and Android) this week. It even climbed into the “Top Overall” section within all three stores. This data is current as of mid-week. Today, Reuters moved up on iOS to bump Feedly to No. 2 on iPad, and No. 4 on iPhone. On it’s still No. 1. Also, the data is U.S.-only, so it doesn’t present a complete view of the situation. But it’s notable as to where the Reader-replacement race stands now in one of Google Reader’s top regions. Ten days prior to the Reader announcement, the average daily downloads for the Apple App Store for Feedly were around 1,200 to 1,300, according to app analytics firm . Since the news broke, Feedly downloads have increased more than tenfold to over 16,000 per day, on average. Competitor NewsBlur, which also has a mobile client, is currently generating 1,000 to 2,000 downloads per day since the news broke – Feedly’s pre-Reader shutdown levels, basically. It’s worth noting that Feedly has been at the game longer, and has been preparing in advance for the end of Reader. It has a transition plan in place already. NewsBlur, admirably, is a one-man shop. It’s inspiring to watch Samuel Clay . And it’s open source, so it has that going for it. But a mission-critical app can’t go into maintenance mode after Reader is gone, so people may be nervous about NewsBlur right now. By the numbers, it’s Feedly’s half million users vs. NewsBlur’s 60,000+, currently. Things, of course, could quickly change – and the horse race is not limited to these two. People are also responding to the branding of “ ” (though it’s not really like the old one). It also struggles under the load, and the mobile interface needs work. , but we know nothing of the final product. with plans for the return of NetNewsWire, which happens to be TechCrunch writer Frederic Lardinois’s preferred client. has a plan for D-Day, but limits itself to the Apple world. There’s also , so no need to bore you by listing all of them here. But only some are true replacements. Everybody with a remotely related news-reading service is trying to get a piece of the action these days. Zite, for example, . That was seriously messed up. Zite is a A news magazine is a Reader replacement. Feedly might not ever transition into a full Reader replacement, either. Founder Edwin Khodabakchian says he’s “trying to find the right balance” between what Feedly has built and serving the news of its new audience, which is demanding a minimalistic view of their feeds, like Reader offered. To some extent, . (And for those still not happy with the Feedly UI, there are always and .) “Our goal is not to copy per se, but understand the behaviors and workflows and try to support them as best as we can,” Khodabakchian says. He also tells us that Feedly has been working for the past five months on a very big mobile update, which is being approved by Apple right now. The app should be out soon – maybe a week at best. “The private beta feedback we collected on that update is by far the best we have had over the last 18 months,” he says. And he promises that Google Reader refugees will appreciate the new title view that the app offers. Fingers crossed.
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Thanks To Poor Holiday Sales, B&N Will Give Away A Free Nook Simple Touch With Every Purchase Of A Nook HD+
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
There’s been nothing but bad news coming from Barnes & Noble lately, and it seems as though the company has decided to resort to the desperate measure of giving away Nooks for free. Reuters is reporting that customers who purchase the $269 Nook HD+ will receive a $79 Simple Touch free of charge as a limited offer. It’s a great deal if you’ve been looking for both a tablet and an ebook reader, but I can’t help but feel a little sad that this is what it’s come down to. Nooks have always been solidly designed products, it’s just that they were never able to catch on with consumers after being doubly sucker punched by the iPad and the Kindle. In January, Barnes & Noble revealed its plans to close nearly , which was followed by news last month that .
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One Notion Under Jobs: Newly Unearthed Videos Show 1984 Steve Wozniak Speaking On Pranks, Probation, And Apple’s Early Days
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
Damn it, Internet. I had things I needed to do this afternoon. So much for that. A VHS recording of a 1984 Apple enthusiast meetup was recently rediscovered, and it had at least one very special gem tucked inside: footage of a 34-year old Steve Wozniak giving a speech on just about everything you’d want to see 34-year old Steve Wozniak talking about. Pranks. The decision to quit everything and start Apple. Changing the friggin’ world. (Oh, plus a very special rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance, “One Notion Under Jobs”) To give you a better sense of timeline: this is about eight years after Apple was first formed, seven years after the Apple II, and it’s the same year Apple launched the Macintosh. Woz would leave his full-time position at Apple about three years later. A thousand high fives to public broadcasting journalist for digging these up and getting them online. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V81xvNvR77k&w=420&h=315] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPssItXt4R4&w=420&h=315] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k-TwxqVy2Y&w=420&h=315] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3cpgwcQCYc&w=420&h=315] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EAMwVkMvbg&w=420&h=315] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTcrSPOsH48&w=420&h=315] : [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH4sNyXSQA4&w=420&h=315]
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Gillmor Gang Live 03.22.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
– Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor.
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TC Makers: A Walk Through Adafruit Industries With Limor Fried
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
Since we started Makers I’ve made it a priority to try to visit , the amazing Manhattan-based electronics shop run by Limor Fried. Fried started her company out of her dorm room at MIT, building cool electronics kits for her friends. She slowly expanded into other hobbyist realms including Arduino add-ons, how-to books, and cases. Now her store is bustling with 1,302 items for sale with about 600 orders per day. Their revenue is also impressive: $15 million per year without VC backing of any kind. In short, Fried AKA Ladyada is killing it. We had the unique opportunity to tour her brand new Manhattan warehouse/design center/factory in Soho where she and her team create amazing gizmos and gadgets. They are also working on student outreach via in order to convince kids that STEM is actually cool. This visit we saw Adafruit’s mini-fabrication line, their amazing, home-grown CRM system, and, most important, , the company’s robotic mascot.
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Ride-Sharing Startup SideCar Opens For Business In Washington, D.C.
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
Residents of our nation’s capital will now get to see what ride-sharing is all about, as San Francisco-based startup announced today that it is making its service available Washington, D.C. The launch there marks the ninth market that SideCar has launched in, as the company is aggressively expanding across the country. But it also raises questions about how city officials will react to newer transportation services. As in its other markets, SideCar is launching with a bit of a staggered rollout in D.C. — the service will initially be available on weekends only, before making rides available more generally during the week. The new city follows a launch in last week, as SideCar is rolling out around the country. It’s also got drivers in . But the launch in D.C. could prove contentious with local officials, based on their reaction to another transportation service launching there. Previously, Uber had a run-in with the D.C. city council. The city first tried to make the on demand car service prohibitively expensive with a so-called “ ” that would have set a minimum rate it could charge. That amendment , allowing Uber to continue operating in the nation’s capital. After months of negotiations, Uber later got the blessing of the D.C. city council for its on-demand mobile apps, with the that legitimized its services there. But while the D.C. e-hail rules will allow Uber to offer its e-hail services in the city’s capital, it’s less clear that they will work for ride-sharing services like SideCar. That’s because the D.C. rules allow for users to hail rides with mobile apps and allows providers to charge based on distance travelled, but . As a result, SideCar’s community drivers wouldn’t qualify under the same rules. No doubt SideCar is prepared for a fight. After a run-in with local officials in Austin, the company there for prohibiting its ride-share service from launching around SXSW. It’s also run up against problems in Philadelphia, where . Nevertheless, SideCar continues to operate in those markets, and it’s pretty well capitalized to continue fighting legal battles. It raised from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others, and has in order to face these challenges.
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Heyzap Introduces Ads To Its Mobile Gaming Network
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
, a Y Combinator-incubated social platform for mobile games, is releasing a software development kit today allowing developers and publishers to introduce Heyzap ads to their games. Basically, it’s turning Heyzap’s social network into an ad network too. Developers can use it to make more money, or to promote their games in other Heyzap games. You can see a sample ad to the left, highlighting one of Heyzap’s big advantages as an ad platform: The company knows what games users have played (since they’re sharing that information with friends on Heyzap), and it can make a reasonable guess as to other games you might be interested in. Even though the ads program is only officially launching today, the company says that it has already run ads from Zynga, TinyCo, Storm 8, Gree, Kabam, and Com2Us as part of a “secret alpha.” Heyzap ads are already running in 350 games (out of the more than 4,000 in Heyzap’s network). “There are three components to the life cycle of a game that developers are concerned with: user acquisition, retention, and monetization — we now have solutions for all parts of the cycle,” said co-founder Jude Gomila in the press release announcing the ads release. The SDK should only take 10 minutes to install, the company says, and then developers should get paid at the end of every month. The ads will be monetized on a per-install basis. . Heyzap has also been expanding its social features, for example by .
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 14 | null |
Albumatic Photo Sharing App Is Raising $4.5 Million, Says SEC Filing
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
, the latest venture photo-sharing from Devon Gundry and Vine investor Adam Ludwin, is raising a $4.5 million round in funding, according to a . Adam Ludwin, co-founder and principal at , , and RRE managing partner Stuart Ellman are all named in the filing. The app . According to the , a total of ten unnamed investors have already invested in the offering, in exchange for equity. Of the $4.5 million total offering amount, $4,045,002 has been sold. Not much else has been disclosed. Albumatic has gotten quite a bit of attention since its launch, with MG Siegler to it. Perhaps it’s gaining popularity due to the fact that you can share pictures with friends in the moment based on a certain event, but location doesn’t have to be a barrier to that sharing. Nearby friends can participate by adding to the Event album, while users from afar can watch in real-time, maybe feeling a little closer to their friends. Albumatic isn’t about sharing photos with your friends later on, nor is it about randomly connecting with people nearby. Instead, it allows you to create and capture events with friends in the moment. Ludwin described his approach as, “fun and done.” We’ve reached out to Ludwin, but he wasn’t able to respond by time of publication. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVfXuuLrnOI&w=640&h=360]
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Apple Adds In-App Purchase Notice To Free Apps With Paid Upgrades, Could Curb Accidental Spending
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
Apple has to the way it shows that free apps that have in-app purchases, the Guardian noted today. The new notice appears under the price bar and the app icon in app listings on iTunes on the desktop, though it doesn’t yet appear in the mobile App Store or on the web-based iTunes application pages. The change comes after a number of high-profile complaints re: accidental spending on the App Store. $2,500 in in-app purchases in 15 minutes: that’s how much a single five-year old boy managed to spend via in-app purchases in a recent incident in the U.K. Sarah argued in a post following that incident that to prevent this kind of thing from happening. The new label is hardly that, but it is a tool that should increase awareness about exactly what parents are getting when they download what looks like an otherwise free, kid-focused application for iPhone or iPad. The fact is that a huge chunk of App Store revenue is now being driven by in-app purchases; you have to scroll past a lot of apps to find one that charges for the actual app itself in the Top Grossing section of the App Store, and out of the top 100, less than 20 percent are paid apps. Freemium is big business on the App Store, with in-app purchases accounting for around according to IHS. A lot of these titles are particularly oriented towards a younger demographic, too, which makes them susceptible to the kind of incident described above. For developers, increased restrictions and additional friction between customers and in-app purchases is obviously not a desirable outcome, and that means Apple likewise probably isn’t crazy about the idea. Adding a more obvious notice about the presence of in-app purchases in titles is a good middle ground between enforcing some kind of restrictions that potentially inhibit revenue-generating capabilities, and raising awareness about when there’s potential for accidental spending. It’s a small thing, but a helpful one, and hopefully the feature will make its way out to mobile and web app listings, too. Apple got in touch to let us know that the notices also went live in the iPad and iPhone App Stores over the weekend, too.
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Betaworks Kicks Off Its ‘Openbeta’ Initiative To Turn Early Product Testers Into Design Partners
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
There’s something very thrilling about getting to play with something before everyone else does (that’s at least partially why I fell in love with tech journalism), but opportunities for that sort of early access can be hard to come by unless you’ve got an in. The folks at New York-based accelerator/app foundry are looking to change that, though. It announced a new initiative called that will let average users play with their work-in-progress products. The idea is simple. In exchange for early access, Openbeta users provide their benefactors with feedback about their experiences. The old adage about “design by committee” comes to mind here, but betaworks’ Nick Chirls assured me that the last thing they want is user-requested feature bloat infecting their projects. “We’re looking to really solve the needs of the users,” he said. “But this is not meant to say that every single feature request is going into the product.” Instead, betaworks plans to lean on some eager testers to act as “design partners” that will help shape the product in its early stages. betaworks is no stranger to exposing nascent products to early scrutiny — Chirls pointed out that previous Openbeta sessions have connected products like Chartbeat with the New York Times (an investor in betaworks), which led to changes that ultimately wound up in the finished product. Of course, if we’re talking about betaworks and public feedback, Digg is the most recent, most prominent example. As you’ll recall, betaworks acquired the ailing social news site , gave it some major plastic surgery over the course of six weeks, and pushed the redesigned beast back online. From there, user feedback prompted the team to tweak and modify the new-old site even further. All that noodling around seems to have worked: as of January, Digg’s userbase had doubled since it had been taken over by betaworks, so the general fondness for accepting and building off of users’ responses is understandable. Just like the products that are due to be publicly evaluated, this expansion of the Openbeta initiative is still in its early stages. There’s no firm word yet on the mechanics of the program. Users can throw their hats into the ring by signing up here, but nitty-gritty details like tester group sizes are still up in the air. For now, the Openbeta model is only meant for products and projects that betaworks is working on directly (and Chirls assured me that there were plenty in the pipeline) but that may not be the case forever. The betaworks team has apparently also thought about extending Openbeta to its portfolio companies, as well.
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HBO’s Richard Plepler Weighs In On Game Of Thrones Piracy, Says ‘Maybe’ On Broadband-Only HBO
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
When TechCrunch attended the San Francisco premiere of Season 3, we didn’t . I also had a few minutes to talk to HBO CEO Richard Plepler, when I asked him about the show’s status as . “Well, look, it’s the good news and the bad news, right?” Plepler said. “The good news is that a lot of people want to see it. Over 12.5 million people are watching it legally. And most of that pirating is occurring overseas. We’re going to do what we can to bring that down, and we’re going to do what we can, obviously, to bring that down in the United States as well.” When I asked Plepler about HBO’s next steps from a tech and distribution perspective, he said that the model is giving customers “a whole lot of programming across a lot of different genres” that they can watch on any screen they want: “As long as we give that for a fair price, we like our model very much.” Following up, I asked Plepler to predict where what HBO’s distribution will look like in five or ten years, and he replied: The most important thing for us is creating content that is addictive. … And if we continue to create great content, then the means of distribution, while very important — people are going to find it. So what we want to do with HBO Go is give people as much optionality as we possibly can. … Where do I think we’ll be in five years? I think there may be even more optionality, but with our partners. With our partners in the cable business, satellite business, and the telco business. Maybe even a broadband-only HBO delivery system. Who knows? We’ll see where that goes down the road. That’s very far from a commitment to broadband-only HBO, but it isn’t an outright rejection of the idea either. Apparently , prompting AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka to .
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72% Of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don’t Think Their Students Deserve Credit
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
This is not a good sign for online education: 72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) , even if they did well in the class. More importantly, these are the professors who voluntarily took time to teach online courses, which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably much (much) higher. The survey reveals the Grand Canyon-size gap between the higher-education establishment and the coalition of tech companies and lawmakers that are for online courses. Since the largest university system in the world, the California State University system, announced , schools from all over the country have raced to replace physical college instruction . In only a month’s time, the University of Wisconsin started offering a fully legitimate college degree without any class time required and scores of schools announced that they will be emulating CSU lower-division pilots in the near future. But, this is mostly administration-driven. Professors, by and large, . When the California state legislator proposed mandating that online courses be accepted, the faculty senate sent a : “There is no possibility that UC faculty will shirk its responsibility to our students by ceding authority over courses to any outside agency” This latest survey from The Chronicle Of Education reveals how little confidence professors have in their own courses. “The deck was somewhat stacked with true believers,” writes Steve Kolowich of The Chronicle about the survey, which polled the 184 known professors who have taught a MOOC. It’s early days for online education, and the old guard isn’t going down without a fight. [ ]
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Canonical Is Building A Standardized, Open-Source OS Specific To China
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 22 |
Canonical announced that it will be building an Ubuntu-based open-source OS for China, in partnership with the Chinese government and members of the Chinese developer community. The joint-venture, which will produce a version of the Linux-based Ubuntu called “Ubuntu Kylin” for an April 2013 release date, is said to “go beyond localization,” and include specific features and applications geared towards the Chinese market. The development of Ubuntu Kylin will be a collaborative effort between the China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP), the National University of Defense Technology, and Canonical engineers, will focus on a desktop release first. But future extension to other platforms is also planned, and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth indicated in the announcement that we could see a China-specific version of Ubuntu Touch down the road, too, for smartphones and tablets. The that this is “widely seen” as China trying to get its IT sector off of Western platforms and software, and onto alternatives sourced from within China itself. Of course, Canonical is based in the UK, but the new OS includes specific support baked in for China-based services and software, including music services, Baidu Maps, online shopping destination Taobao, Chinese bank payment processing and WPS, China’s most popular office suite software. In an interview, Canonical CEO Jane Silber explained that the move is about helping China take advantage of more open software options, and institutionalizing that behavior. “It’s clear in what CSIT has said about the collaboration is that they’re interested in options, and choice and open source,” she said. “The same competitive pressures and openness that drives some people to open source in other markets are applicable in China as well. There’s certainly a desire to not be forced into walled gardens that look pretty but end up being handcuffs.” A push to move China’s tech infrastructure off of Windows and onto Ubuntu, backed by the Chinese government, could have a major impact on Linux’s role in the future of computing. It’s fair to say that if China does indeed manage to migrate a significant percentage of its population onto Ubuntu Kylin, the global influence of Linux and Ubuntu will increase dramatically. China continues to gain influence as a market to target for software developers, and a sharp spike in share for Ubuntu pay big dividends in terms of encouraging companies to make Linux-supported version of their software. Ubuntu already has strong traction in developing markets where it comes pre-installed on a lot of hardware, and this deal could help Ubuntu Touch replicate that kind of success, something Shuttleworth has previously . It’ll have an uphill battle against Android, however, which has managed to . Silber added that while there’s currently nothing concrete in the works right now, but says she expects both mobile and cloud platform versions to be “part of this project in due course.”
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Pressure Increases On Michael Dell As Carl Icahn Mulls Tie-Up With Blackstone In Bid For PC Company
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
Carl Icahn has he is open to a partnership with Blackstone Group in a move that could make it easier for the rival investors to overtake Michael Dell’s $24.4 billion buyout bid for the company he founded, reports Reuters. This means Michael Dell could also potentially lose control of the PC maker he founded when he was 19. This development comes a day after it was revealed for Dell that valued the company at more than Michael Dell’s original offer, which was made in partnership with the Silver Lake Group. Negotiations could potentially go on for a month. Icahn, who owns a $1 billion stake in Dell, said on Monday that he has started discussions with Blackstone. The billionaire investor has offered $15 per share for 58 percent of Dell, while Blackstone said it can pay more than $14.25 per share. Michael Dell and the Silver Lake Group had offered $13.65 per share. Michael Dell will meet up with Blackstone to discuss its bid, reported Reuters. The private equity group has already unsuccessfully tried to convince Oracle Corp president Mark Hurd to run Dell if it buys the company. Several major investors Michael Dell and Silver Lake’s offer, claiming it undervalues the company. Southeastern Asset Management, Dell’s largest shareholder with 8.5 percent of shares outstanding and a vocal opponent of Michael Dell and Silver Lake’s offer, has said it is pleased with the terms of the new proposals offered by Icahn and Blackstone. Earlier this month Southeastern Asset asked Dell’s board of directors to disclose a full list of shareholders in a move to shore up its resistance to Michael Dell’s bid. Another point of contention had been taking the company private. Both Icahn and Blackstone Group have said that their proposals would allow investors to retain publicly traded shares of Dell.
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Bug Kills Facebook Comments And Like Counts Across The Web, But Fix Will Restore Them Soon
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
Facebook has confirmed to TechCrunch that a new bug has temporarily reset Like counts and comment threads on sites sporting its Like buttons and Comments plugin. Luckily, all the counts and comments should be restored soon as Facebook is finalizing a fix. Everything should go back to normal, though the problem may frighten some regarding how much the Internet relies on a centralized service. At around 1pm PST today (March 25th), reports came in that some websites, in many cases those without the www URL prefix, had seen counts on their embedded Like buttons nuked. Also, some of these sites that use the Facebook Comments plugin saw comments threads on old pages and posts appear blank as if no comments were ever published. Bug reports were filed on Stack Overflow, some personal blogs, including , reported the issues, and we received several tips about the situation. As you can see above, a popular TechCrunch article about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wedding showed zero Likes or comments despite being heavily shared and commented on. After asking Facebook this afternoon whether the user-generated content and social sharing popularity scores were actually deleted or just failing to render properly, we’ve just received this statement: “Earlier today, a display bug made it appear as if the Like counts and comments on some sites had been reset. We are in the process of addressing the issue now, and sites should be displaying the correct number of Likes and comments soon. No Likes or comments were lost. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.” The issue follows in February that temporarily made websites using Facebook Connect appear broken and inaccessible to people logged in to the social network. Though it was quickly fixed, it was a reminder of just how much the web depends on Facebook these days. Then again, Facebook provides a free, generally reliable commenting and sharing service, and no software is perfect.
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Fingerprints Instead Of Credit Cards? YC-Backed PayTango Aims To Make Payments Work Through Biometrics
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
As a mechanism for payment, the credit card remains just as hardy as ever. It has so far defied the threat of mobile phones, and less plausibly, QR codes, among many other forms of payment. One YC-backed startup is betting that fingerprints and other forms of biometric identification may be the payment method of the future though. Called , they’re partnering with local universities to offer a quick and easy way for students to use their fingerprints to pay instead of credit cards. The four-person team is basically almost fresh out of Carnegie Mellon University. The co-founders, Brian Groudan, Kelly Lau-Kee, Umang Patel and Christian Reyes, graduating later this summer and have experience in human-computer interaction and information systems. They built an initial prototype with a fingerprint scanner and credit card reader with off-the-shelf parts for between $1,500 and $1,700. They’re bringing the costs down after iterating on it for 10 weeks and they have a working version of it at three locations on the Carnegie Mellon campus. “The very earliest product was just basic,” said CEO . “But it was a great product to get out there and users responded to it very early on.” The on-boarding process for users is really easy. They touch the fingerpad with their index and middle fingers and if they’re not in the system already, automatically detects that. It will ask them to swipe a card to associate with their fingerprints and then enter in their cell phone number. That sign-up process made it fast enough for 100 students to sign-up within four hours on campus. The reader plugs right into a merchant’s existing point-of-sale terminal and software. “We developed a way to integrate with the major systems and users don’t have to worry about these complex software integrations,” Patel said. Of course, like all point-of-sale offerings, faces a huge chicken-and-egg problem. How do you handle outbound sales to small and medium merchants? How do you make sure sales employees are trained well enough to use the hardware and software? It’s a fairly difficult model to scale. That’s why Patel said the company is focused on very dense networks of merchants and consumers — like the kind of you might see on a college campus where students repeatedly go to a few places for lunch. Gyms are another target market since the same small group of consumers have to quickly swipe in and out. As for a business model, it’s too early to pinpoint that. But Patel said the company would consider charging a monthly subscription fee. He says if the pilot goes well, they’d push for a campus-wide roll out at Carnegie Mellon.
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Yelp Announces A New ‘Revenue Estimator’ For Small Businesses
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
is announcing a new feature intended to highlight and quantify the value that the listing and review site provides for small businesses. A company spokesperson told me the feature is important for two reasons. First, it helps business owners understand the impact that Yelp is already having on their revenue. Second, it gives them a baseline from which to judge the success of their advertising campaigns — it’s one thing to see an increase in page views or reservations after a campaign, and another to put a dollar value on the new business generated by those ads. To make its estimate, Yelp separates customer leads from page views — those leads can include things like bookmarking a Yelp business listing, mapping directions to the business, placing a phone call from the Yelp app, purchasing a Yelp deal, making an OpenTable reservation, and more. (That’s information Yelp already provided in monthly reports.) Then, , it estimates the average spend per customer in a given business category. (Businesses can also enter their own estimate for the value of a lead.) Finally, it takes the total leads and multiples it by the average value of each lead, giving businesses a sense of the total revenue generated by Yelp. Explained this way, it seems pretty simple, but a Yelp spokesperson said it’s pulling from a lot of data to determine what a lead is, and it would be hard to pull off without all the user data that the company has collected. (They added that the company had 100 million unique visitors in January.) This feature will be available for free to all Yelp businesses, though it’s available initially for those in the United States and Canada. The spokesperson added that this is just the first of a number of simple tools that Yelp plans to offer small businesses for calculating return on investment on ad spending. In , Yelp there are now 39,800 active local business accounts, a year-over-year increase of 68 percent.
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Crowd Surfing The Zombie Apocalypse, Or Why Spotify’s TV Ad Is So Creepy We Made A Parody
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
I love you, Spotify, but you’re freaking me out. Today you showed off your first television commercial. It’s supposed to introduce the mainstream world to the wonder of listening to almost any song ever on demand. Yet with a useful product to sell and all the emotional resonance of music to lean on, the ad comes off vague, haunting, and devoid of soul. So much so I couldn’t help but parody it. The commercial is called “For Music.” Your first sign that your ad agency Droga5 sh*t the bed was that there is essentially none. No music in the minute-long spot. Nothing to excite or remind us how thrilling music discovery can be. Just a long, dreary drone. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-wbGBc4BuY] The visual language isn’t much better. An anonymized man crowdsurfing in the dark over an endless sea of throbbing humanity. It’s enough to trigger claustrophobic nightmares. Also, if you’ve ever had someone dropped on your head while you’re trying to watch your favorite band’s encore, you too will think of crowdsurfers as selfish distractions more than some symbol of liberty. Then there’s the hollow voice-over. “Why can a song change the world? Because music is a force, for good, for change, for whatever. It’s bigger than us. It lives inside us.” Seriously, Spotify? Your mission to democratize access to music deserves better than this trite nonsense. And anyone seeing this ad as their first taste of Spotify deserves better, too. Congratulations, you didn’t trot out a geeky feature list. But perhaps communicating that you can search for any song and listen to it in full for free would have piqued people’s interest a little better. You’re not Facebook, and you don’t get to have a weird, artsy commercial. Many people have no idea what Spotify is. And I’d bet that after watching your ad tonight during The Voice or whenever else, they still won’t, other than that you have something to do with music. Or maybe zombies. That’s all I could think about while watching “For Music.” Droga5 has produced memorable , and even made insurance seem inspiring, so this is atypically terrible. The two additional commercials it made for you, and are only little stronger. Still too subtle and lacking emotion, but at least they don’t conjure visions of the apocalypse. Which is why I made this parody. Think of it as the internal monologue of what someone unfamiliar with Spotify might assume “For Music” was about. Again, this criticism comes from a place of love. Maybe next time an Internet company makes their television debut, they’ll keep it simple. Just tug our heartstrings and show us what you solve.
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With $6.25M In Tow, Bina Technologies Wants To Bring Big Data Insight To Genomic Sequencing
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
Once unfathomably expensive, thanks to scientific and technological advances, the cost of genome sequencing for your average Joe is dropping fast on its way to a big, historical benchmark: The $1,000 genome. We’re not quite there, but we’re getting close. This is exciting for a host of reasons, but particularly because it has the chance to usher in an era of personalized medicine, in which it will be far easier to discover if we have a genetic predisposition to cancer, Diabetes, and so on. Companies are moving towards full-genome sequencing, while some 2,000 sequencing companies are already there. Yet, there’s a problem. These companies churn out piles of sequenced genomic data, but that data is still too complex for downstream research and clinicians to use. The number is projected to reach 8,000 sequencers by 2015, which means that the amount of valuable genomic data “hitting the lab floor” (so to speak) will only continue to grow. This is where comes in. Founded in 2011 by a group of Ph.Ds, big data junkies and bioinformaticians from Stanford and University of California Berkeley, Bina picks up and analyzes this genomic data that has been, until now, almost unusable. Through Bina, research universities, pharmaceutical companies and clinicians can get access to data that focuses on the rare variants in our genetics — in other words, those that cause our predispositions to cancer, newborn disorders, down syndrom, sickle cell, and so on. Through the ability to better parse and make use of this data, the idea is that these downstream players can then facilitate significant improvements in patient care, treatment and, really, basic understanding of how the body works via insights at the molecular level. Bina has previously raised a round of seed funding from a handful of Silicon Valley angels, including Bobby Yazdani (an investor in Dropbox, Google, Klout, Kissmetrics, Salesforce and others) and Farzad Naimi, and today the company announced that it is adding $6.25 million to its coffers in a Series B round led by Sierra Ventures. As part of the round, Tim Guleri from Sierra will be joining the startup’s board of directors. With its new funding Bina plans to triple its headcount, half on the business side and half on the engineering side. Since the company’s official launch in February, they’ve started to see some traction, and the founders hope that the new funding will allow them to really begin turning those years of R&D into applications for the real world. To get a sense of Bina’s applications, here are a few examples. As a part of its new financing, Bina announced a new partner in Liz Worthey at the Medical Center of Wisconsin, who focuses on newborn whole genome sequencing in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). In the next few years, Worthey and team hope to begin sequencing every baby born in the medical center, analyzing that data using Bina. The Stanford Genetics Department, led by Dr. Michael Snyder, was originally piloting Bina’s platform, but has since become a formal customer, doing large-scale genetic analysis and research. Snyder used the Bina platform to analyze several hundred whole human genomes in less than 5 hours — something that has traditionally taken several days (or weeks) to do. In each instance, both Snyder and Worthey said that they began using this technology because it offers scalability alongside on-premise security, which is interesting given that most of the other players in this space are pure in their cloud-focus. Bina opts for the hybrid approach. It seems that, for the clinical market, that security is a priority (as it should be), and cloud solutions aren’t yet seen as being able to provide that level of security. Whether that’s true or not for all sectors remains to be seen (AWS would certainly beg to differ), it seems to be the prevailing mentality in healthcare. The $15 billion genomic research industry is on the verge of some enormous changes and as sequencing solutions begin to pump out more and more genetic information, it would seem that ther will be increasing demand for scalable genomic analysis. But not just any old Big Data port will do, it has to be vertical-specific. Technologies like this take years to develop, but in the long-run they could have a big impact on our own health — and medicine as a whole.
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You’re Doing It Wrong, BlackBerry
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins that the company would launch a midtier device yet this year and an “exciting” new flagship device could launch around the holidays. “It [the new flagship] takes BlackBerry 10 to another level in terms of the user experience,” he said. Great! There’s a new BB10 device launching by the end of the year. How’s the Z10 doing, Mr. Heins? The Z10, the current standard-bearer in BlackBerry’s army, launched in Europe and Canada in early February. it was the most successful BlackBerry launch ever. But then, just over a month later, Rogers, along with Bell and Virgin, , making it just $99 — the same price as the iPhone 5. The phone just hit AT&T in the States. It launches on Verizon and T-Mobile this week. It’s $199 from all three providers. But wait. Don’t buy the Z10. Didn’t you hear the CEO? There’s an exciting new one a few months away! I want to believe in you, BlackBerry. One year ago Friday, I wrote “ .” People said I was crazy. for claim chowder. But here you are, a year later, the Z10 actually made it to market and it’s a quality device. There are 100,000 apps in BB10’s App World with more additions each week. But you’re killing me, Smalls. Talk about your current devices, Heins. Keep the focus on the Z10 and not-yet-launched Q10. They’re actually quality handsets and BlackBerry should be very proud. Upon reading CNET’s article, our Canada-based reporter, Darrell Etherington, said today that his Canadian rage and sadness are all mixed together in a confusing yet delicious soup (I think that means he’s disappointed). The first rule they teach you in Consumer Electronics 101 is “Don’t talk about a future product until your current device is available.” The Z10 isn’t fully available until tomorrow! The QWERTY-packing Q10 won’t hit U.S. carriers for a couple of months! And you’re already talking about future flagship devices? Settle down and concentrate on the present. At this point, consumers understand that their cell phones will be outdated within a few months. This is especially true in the Android world where HTC, Samsung and Motorola constantly trump one another. But the accepted churn is slower, more methodical when there’s one only manufacturer involved. Like with Apple. There is one iPhone a year. When you buy an iPhone on Day One, it’s pretty well accepted that you’ll have the best iPhone for a year. That’s a superficial but valuable feeling and an advantage of the Z10 until this CNET interview. Now, BlackBerry is asking its remaining fans to not only take a chance on an unproven platform but do so knowing that their device, which they likely purchased with a 2- or 3-year contract, will likely be outdated by the end of the year. And while we’re on the subject of doing things wrong, , the one about full screen takeovers, better not be accurate. You’re not going to renew any friendships by annoying people with full-screen adverts. You’re going to piss people off. The BlackBerry of 2013 is very different from the Research in Motion of 2012. There’s life in the system. BlackBerry feels like a scrappy, young fighter instead of a former champion now overweight and out-of-shape. Research in Motion is dead and the young, and seemingly inexperienced BlackBerry has taken its place. I still believe the company can recover and find some level of success. But only if they throw all their weight behind the Z10 and stay quiet about future devices.
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Internet Borked? The Amazing Jellybean Resets It All In The Right Order With One Button Press (Or Over Bluetooth)
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 3 | 25 |
A few years ago, I received a panicked phone call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in months. His Internet connection was on the fritz, and he had a project due the next morning. He’d called his ISP, and they were no help. As his only friend that, as he said, “knew computers and stuff”*, I was bound by International Homie Law to fix his crap. “You’ve reset your modem, right?” “Yeah, man — Comcast had me do that.” “You reset your router, too, right?” “Yeah. It’s still broken!” “I’ll be over in a while.” I arrive at his house a bit later, and have him point me toward his networking gear. It’s stuffed behind the TV in his living room, as it’s the only place in his apartment with a functioning coax cable coming out of the wall. I ask him to reset his modem again. He reaches over and unplugs his modem. So far, so good. I ask him to reset his router again. He reaches over and unplugs his roommate’s AppleTV. Whoops. Every geek has a story (or 10) like this one. The Amazing Jellybean, an , wants to make them a little less common. The Amazing Jellybean is, at its core, a power switch. But it’s a power switch with smarts. You see, the modem/router reset dance is a bit more complicated than it probably should be. Unplug both. Wait 60 seconds. Plug in modem. Wait 60 seconds. Plug in router. Wait 60 seconds. That’s 180+ seconds! Nicholas Cage could have stolen your car like by then. The Amazing Jellybean (a name which I am starting to feel ridiculous typing) handles all that with a single button push. Push the button, walk away. It’ll kill both the modem and the router, then bring them back online in the right order and with enough time in between for a proper boot sequence. That alone makes it a pretty killer product to get for, say, your mom. Or your uncle. Or that one friend who has how he keeps getting spyware from all of the legit sites he browses on his curiously sticky Dell. Cough. But you, don’t need this, right? You’re a titan of technology! You don’t nee no stinkin’ box rebooting your modem for you! Oh, did I mention it has Bluetooth connectivity so you can reset your broken connection without getting out of your chair to battle dust bunnies? Yeah, that’s what sold me on it, too. Is it a more of a band-aid than a permanent solution to a bigger problem? Sure — but it’s a problem that has been lurkin’ around consumer grade networking gear for now. It’s probably not gonna disappear anytime soon. As for why it’s shaped like a Jellybean? I have absolutely no idea. Find here. [* Pro tip: When a conversation starts with “Hey, you know computers and stuff, right?”, the correct answer is a straight-faced “What’s a computer?”]
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