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Facebook Now Lets You Rate Movies, TV, And Books To Turn Graph Search Into A GoodReads For Everything
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 14 |
For the first time, Facebook users can now give star ratings to movies, TV shows, and books. That data could help Facebook show more relevant content and results in news feed and Graph Search. The feature comes alongside Facebook’s announcement that it’s finished rolling out that show what apps you use. Sections let people express themselves and gives developers a new way to grow. Facebook first started testing the as part of a redesigned Timeline with all user posts in the right column. Now all users have the cleaner looking Timeline with posts and Sections divided rather than mixed up. Down the left column, each content type and app gets its own Section, which you can configure in your profile’s About tab. The Music Section displays what musicians you Like, the Spotify Section shows off what songs you’ve been listening to, and the OpenTable Section features restaurants you’ve favorited or recently ate at. Right now Facebook is trying to get more of your opinions codified in its graph, and Sections with ratings are a big step in the right direction. , Sections and now ratings could be a data goldmine for Facebook’s Graph Search, as they encourage people to forge connections with apps and media they care about. Graph Search relies on those connections to generate and sort search results for queries like “Movies my friends Like”. Facebook would know to show your friends’ five-star rated movies above lower rated flicks they’ve Liked. For developers of content consumption apps like Spotify, Hulu, GoodReads and more, Sections will offer another way to grow beyond posts to the news feed. Considering people add 200 million items to Sections each day and it only just reached all users, the growth opportunity could be signficant. Facebook now has an Insights dashboard specifically for showing developers how much traffic they’re getting from sections. Facebook says “more than 17 billion songs have been added to people’s music sections through Likes and listening activity from apps.” Now Rdio and Spotify can track how those sections are netting them new users. If Sections catch on and people properly curate them, scrolling through a friend’s sections could be a great way to discover new art and apps. Meanwhile Facebook gets to chow down on the data you volunteer. Give Game Of Thrones a five-star review? Facebook will know to show you more of its Page’s updates in your news feed than a show you Like but only give three or four stars to. Add RunKeeper to your visible app sections and Facebook will probably show you more runs posted by friends. The fact is that the apps we use and the media we consume are becoming an important way we express ourselves. Facebook wants Timeline to tell you life story, and that story would be incomplete without this data.
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Nokia’s Smart Devices Chief On Instagram, Android, Phablets & The Continued Lack Of A 41MP PureView Lumia
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 5 | 14 |
Nokia has added another device to its burgeoning Lumia portfolio of smartphones today, with the introduction of the : a sleek, PureView-branded handset that will be its first flagship on T-Mobile U.S. At today’s London launch, Nokia executive VP of smart devices, Jo Harlow, sat down with TechCrunch to field a few questions. Obviously our goal is to brings great apps to the Windows Phone platform. We have a huge amount of respect for Instagram and we continue to work in that direction and in particular with Microsoft, and with apps like Hipstamatic and the ability to share your pictures on Instagram. But the importance of Hipstamatic isn’t Instagram really — it is the great capabilities that Hipstamatic brings and the community that Oggl represents because they’re a community of people who love photography. And so I think in inspiring that world of consumers then that brings attration from others as well. We worked very closely with Hipstamatic and shared our portfolio with them, we’ve shared our imaging APIs with them, and that’s where we’d like to work with the developers who can bring even more greate experience to our imaging story. The first thing we’ve done is make our imaging APIs accessible to developers — whether they’re developing imaging specific apps or in other ways could use the camera in their app — that they could get all the way to the performance of the camera itself. If you look at what’s happened with photography with mobile devices and just how we use pictures you see that what is today is unlikely to be just what is in the future. It’s constantly evolving — now hundreds of millions of pictures are uploaded every day just to social networks. Yes there are imaging specific apps, and there will be more imaging specific apps and communities in the future, but all communities have a deep relationship with pictures because that’s part of the social fabric of our lives these days. And I dont think that changes, that only gets bigger and bigger. I can’t comment about our portfolio coming in the future, but what I will say about the PureView technology that we developed that uses a 41MP sensor is that it delivers a consumer experience in terms of zooming after you’ve taken the photo. That is a phenomenal experience. That’s something that we think is very interesting to continue to pursue. I’m not ruling it out. The dominance of Android is led by Samsung. I think you can see the difficulty that others have in standing out from Samsung even when they have really good devices. I think first of all it comes down to partnership and the partnership that we’ve had with Microsoft in terms of bringing new experiences to the platform as well as our own differentiating experiences. We did not believe we could have that level of partnership with Android — and that’s a key difference. To a certain degree yes. But I think I would characterise the competition in Android as more of a spec race than anything else and so there is one partner who is the development partner for any new release of Android and everyone else come some time later, so it’s open but that doesn’t make you first and that doesn’t make you necessarily the most competitive. I think the word is ‘experiences’ because as we are investing in great experiences on our smartphone range it’s logical to think that those experiences we would look to take into other types of form factors and make them compatible with each other. Obviously what we would want in any portfolio is that there’s some consistency in the experience that consumers have of a Nokia product.
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Loop Makes It Easy To Conduct Real-Time Surveys Via iPad
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 14 |
co-founder and CEO Rajit Marwah argued that “surveys and reviews are everywhere” — but they’re often ignored or delayed. With his new startup, on the other hand, Marwah said he’s giving businesses a way to create and conduct those surveys easily and quickly. When a business downloads , they can use one of the app’s survey templates (the templates are based on business type, such as restaurant or hotel) or create a survey from scratch, then share it via email, Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else you can post a link. The most interesting use case, however, is the ability to open a survey from an iPad. So instead of hoping a customer will fill out a survey in a day or two, businesses can just hand them an iPad, and they can give their answers in just a few seconds. That means you get a much higher feedback rate, and that feedback is immediate, unlike “receipts surveys, 1-800 numbers, and clumsy email surveys,” Marwah said. “After visiting a business, most customers move on and don’t bother to give feedback after the fact,” he added. “Feedback in the moment is something consumers actually respond to.” Marwah also said that the Loop app was just built by two people — himself and his co-founder/CTO Mike Liu. He painted that as a plus, because it shows that Loop is a lean company. (It has raised seed funding from , an incubator whose chief product officer Keith Teare also co-founded TechCrunch.) He added that Loop is taking a mobile-first approach — it’s not just that the surveys are conducted on iPad, but businesses can also create and share surveys, as well as view results, directly from the mobile app. I don’t conduct many surveys myself, but at Marwah’s urging, I tried out the app. With the templates, it took only a few taps to launch a new survey from my iPhone, which I could then open on an iPad. Once I turned on Guided View, I could lock the iPad onto the survey screen; you can imagine giving it to a customer to fill out without any distractions. And after I completed the survey, the results were immediately live in the iPhone app. Loop was previously available as a limited beta test — during that period, Marwah said it saw response rates that were up to 30 times higher than traditional surveys. Today it’s launching globally, and it’s available in 34 languages and 155 countries.
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Open Garden Gets Google Glass To Connect To Its Mesh Network, Asks Google To Make It Available To All
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 14 |
, the San Francisco-based startup that allows Android, Windows and Mac users to create mesh networks between their devices to share Internet connections, today announced that it has managed to get Google Glass to connect to its network. This matters because Glass users typically need a tethering plan to connect to the Internet (which is pretty much essential to using Glass). Those plans typically cost around $20 extra, depending on the data plan and carrier. With Open Garden, users can just use the service to connect to their phones without paying extra. Open Garden, as the company’s co-founder and CEO Micha Benoliel told me, also makes it far easier for Glass users to connect to the Internet. Right now, you have to set up Wi-Fi access through Google’s configuration page and scan a QR code with Glass for Wi-Fi access. You also, of course, have to pair Glass with your smartphone via Bluetooth if you want to use it away from your home. With Open Garden running on Glass, Benoliel argues, all of this would be seamless because the device would just automatically connect to the Internet. “We believe the Android OS is going to reach out to more and more new types of wearable devices,” says Open Garden’s CEO and co-founder Micha Benoliel. “Google Glass is one of them. It shows how Open Garden can enhance the user experience and become the by default solution to keep your devices always connected to the Internet.” The company’s CTO and co-founder Stanislav Shalunov makes a similar argument: “We put Open Garden on Glass and formed a mesh network with it and we want every Glass user to be able to just use the Internet without having to install, pair, or configure anything, but for that we need Google to help us make this a reality.” Given the realities of the market, however, it remains to be seen if Google will ever allow this. Open Garden says its software has been installed by more than 2.5 million users since its launch at last year. The company has also partnered with a number of app developers, including , and others, to expand its reach.
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Rushmore.fm Wants To Fix The Music Industry, Ex-Virgin Group Online Boss Named As CEO
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,013 | 5 | 14 |
, a new London-based startup founded by , is de-cloaking somewhat today with what sounds like the rather lofty but noble mission to fix the music industry. Described as a “music ecosystem”, the (currently) invite-only site initially consists of a Wikipedia-like music resource where you’re encouraged to contribute and follow content, although the site’s broader aim is to connect music fans “directly and effortlessly with the artists and labels they love”, and in doing so make it easier to make a living from music. In fact, it’s what Rushmore sees as a disconnect between fans and artists that it’s trying to solve. Bring these two groups closer together and the company thinks there’s money to be made, which in turn can be reinvested in music. Of course, if it’s successful, that’s also how the startup plans to generate revenue via related services. “We need to get these folks connected with the fans that love them, and subsequently enable some sweet, sweet commerce,” reads the site’s . With that in mind, along with its public (partial) unveiling, Rushmore is announcing the appointment of Alex Hunter, the former Global Head of Online for Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, as its CEO. While it may seem odd to hire an “outside” CEO so early, it’s a reflection of the incubation model that New York-based Betaworks, Rushmore’s backer, is employing. It’s teamed up with neighbouring design collective Fictive Kin who are charged with researching and coming up with a startup’s concept, before handing it over to take forward and scale — a methodology we’ve to the Hollywood studio model. Once Rushmore.fm was green-lighted in late 2012, Hunter was approached. After agreeing to come onboard, it was decided the company should operate out of London, which has a decent track record for music-oriented startups. Last.fm, for example, exited to CBS, while more recently the likes of Songkick are making decent . (As an aside, for those familiar with the London tech scene, Alex Hunter is the brother of Andrew Hunter, co-founder and CEO of jobs search engine .) As Rushmore stands today, the site uses a “follow” model to provide a way for music fans to stay up to date with news, live events, and new releases from their favourite artists. The clincher is that, collectively, they’re also the ones doing most of the work in the sense that content is at least partially based on user contributions (pages have a Wiki-esque “edit” button, though I’m told that contributors will always be invite-only), while Rushmore is rewarding fans who add content via virtual and unspecified real world rewards. There’s a sprinkling of gamification, too. Each week fans compete for the top spots on “The 300”, described as a “highly competitive chart of Rushmore’s top users”. To that end, Rushmore says that its private beta users have made 200,000 music news, live event, and discography contributions already, which isn’t bad going, though we won’t declare the music industry fixed just yet.
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Urban Storage Startup Boxbee Is Opening For Business In The San Francisco Bay Area
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 14 |
Have a lot of stuff? Don’t have a lot of space to store that stuff? Don’t know how you’d get yourself organized enough to keep track of it, even if you did have the space? No worries. Urban storage startup has the solution to all your too-much-stuff-having problems. The idea behind Boxbee is simple: You put stuff in a box. Then Boxbee comes and takes the box and puts it in secure storage for $6 per month per box. If you want your stuff back, Boxbee will deliver it to you for $15 plus $2 per box. Boxes are 24 inches long by 20 inches tall by 12 inches wide, so they’re not HUGE. But they should provide ample space for users to keep their winter clothes stored away for a few months. In addition to the storage service itself, Boxbee has a web interface and mobile app for keeping track of all the stuff you’ve stored. That is, you can take photos and categorize items that you’ve got in one box or another. That way, when you need items in a particular box, you can make sure that you get the right one. On the storage side, Boxbee manages a network of commercial warehouses and keeps tabs on what goes where with the help of barcodes. Pretty soon, it’ll be moving to RFID tags, which should improve the process even more. Since it operates in a 15-mile radius of San Francisco, the company can make deliveries from its warehouses within hours of a request being made. Boxbee hopes that by making storage more convenient and a little less expensive than renting out a whole unit, it will be able to tap into a new market of customers who should probably be storing their crap somewhere other than their tiny apartments, but don’t want to deal with the cost and hassle of doing so. The company launched at um, LAUNCH, where it . It has been operating in private beta since then, spending the last few months as part of the in San Francisco (which has its demo day next week!). The startup is in the process of raising a seed round, which it will use to make a few more hires and expand into new markets.
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Samsung Galaxy S4 Shipments Hit 10 Million One Month After Release
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has hit 10 million channel sales one month after its release. The company its latest milestone today j since its international launch on April 26. According to Samsung, this is the fastest ever sell rate for any of its smartphones. The latest entry in the Galaxy series–meant as Samsung’s iPhone challenger–has sold much more quickly than its predecessors. The Galaxy S4’s milestone beats the record set by the , which reached 10 million channel sales 50 days after its launch in 2012. The took five months and the seven months to reach the same number. (Channel sales are to wireless operators and not direct to consumers. In other words, the numbers are for units shipped.) The Galaxy S4 had to that disrupted its U.S. rollout and were attributed by the company to unexpectedly high demand for the phone. Though the Galaxy S4 is indeed selling swiftly, reinforcing , Jordan Crook noted after it hit 6 million units shipped that the iPhone is still technically a faster selling phone than any of Samsung’s Galaxy models. When the iPhone 5 launched, Apple t . Furthermore, iPhone 5 pre-orders were two times the number of pre-orders seen for the iPhone 4S. Despite Apple’s , consumers still love their iPhones, and is not over quite yet, especially as the Cupertino company prepares to launch new products this fall.
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OtterBox Acquires Rival Protective Case Maker LifeProof After Settling Patent Lawsuit
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
, which makes the top-selling protective case for smartphones, has of for an undisclosed amount. News of the acquisition comes one day after a lawsuit filed by OtterBox against LifeProof for patent infringement was . OtterBox told the North Carolina Business Report that the acquisition was not related to the lawsuit or any settlement. Headquartered in San Diego, LifeProof also makes protective cases and accessories for smartphones and tablets. Over the next 30 days, OttberBox will beginning incorporating the LifeProof brand into OtterBox’s product lineup. More information about product availability and alignment will be available after that period. OtterBox currently has about 650 employees worldwide, while LifeProof, which was founded in 2009, employs about 250 people, who the companies say will remain in their San Diego location “for the foreseeable future.” “Our strategy is to utilize our combined brand momentum, and world-class talent to create a great customer experience that generates OtterBox brand ambassadors for life,” Thomas said in the acquisition announcement. In addition to its extremely durable smartphone cases, which are designed to withstand drops, water immersion and debris, OtterBox also makes protective coverings for other mobile devices such as tablets, as well as screen protectors and accessories. LifeProof’s cases are designed for people with very active lifestyles (or who are especially accident prone around mountains, concrete and bodies of water). Both companies’ cases by TechCrunch during CES in January.
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 13 | null |
Why Does Hollywood Hate The Future?
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MG Siegler
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
A few weeks ago, Chris Dixon something thought-provoking: What were the last Hollywood movies you saw about technology & the future that were optimistic? They seem to be systematically dystopian. I happened to be sitting in a movie theater waiting for to start, so I tried to come up with a good counter-example. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. Then the pre-movie trailers starting playing. The new Will Smith (and son) flick, : dystopia. The new Guillermo del Toro flick, : dystopia. Even the new Superman flick, , could be classified as a technological dystopia (more below). Sure, there are some films — mainly smaller indies — that in some ways are starting to buck the trend. But overall, Dixon (and Peter Thiel, who Dixon ) are right: Hollywood seems to hate technology. Why? My initial thought is simply that dystopia sells. It’s the same reason why the mainstream media covering technology tends to harp on the downsides of new tech, sometimes to the point of fear mongering. They are ! They want to ! They want to ! Most people are predisposed to fear what they do not understand. Hollywood’s futuristic films are simply playing to this fear in the same way that horror films are packed with moments meant to startle you. This is nothing new. In 1927, Fritz Lang’s — the very first feature-length science fiction film — told of a 2026 where the lower class workers power the technology for the upper class. In 1951, saw aliens bring a giant robot to Earth that would destroy the planet if humans couldn’t get their act together. The 1960 version of (based on the H.G. Wells book) had technology (nuclear weapons) destroying civilization. . . . . . The list goes on. The difference is that we now live in a society where advanced technology permeates all of our lives. Nearly everyone now walks around with computers in their pockets that are far more powerful than the computers that filled up rooms just a few decades ago. Nearly the entirety of human knowledge is now just a few clicks or swipes away at any given moment. The vast majority of our recent technological breakthroughs, I think everyone would agree, have been overwhelmingly good for society. And yet, Hollywood still seems that this is going to change. That at some point, our meddling with technology will create HAL 9000 or Skynet, and technology will turn on us. The example I ended up at Dixon as an answer to his thesis was . As recently in looking back at the 25th anniversary of : Gene Roddenberry’s guiding vision of the Star Trek franchise was, famously, that it would offer an optimistic vision of humanity’s future. And that largely held true through television series: The Soviet Union collapsed a couple of years into the filming of The Next Generation, and the show’s optimistic future became startlingly coterminous with the optimistic present of the George H.W. Bush administration. Where else but space could you find a thousand points of light? The grand adventure of the NCC-1701-D was no longer to spread civilization, or even defend it; it was just to keep the machinery oiled. Remember 1991, America? But the recent films are a bit different. While I always liked how plot of revolved around making sure a man takes the first flight at warp speed in space to usher in an era of peace on Earth, the actions are kicked into motion by the threat of the Borg — perhaps the ultimate in dystopian technology — taking over the Earth. The latest franchise seems to take a mainly glitz and glam approach to technology — bright white decks on giant starships accentuated with lens flares galore! But there also exists plenty of tech that is also horribly destructive. , for example. I saw the latest film, , last week. While , many Trekkie diehards did not. Certainly there are plenty of elements that are more than the idea of using technology for exploration. I mean — minor spoiler alert — we have some sort of ultra weapons developed in secret and powered by some vague futuristic technology. And the man with the most technological know-how gets booted off the ship at one point for not wanting to mess around with these things. is another interesting example. It’s to be about technology used for good — but only to combat technology used for evil. So it’s basically neutral. Then there’s the forthcoming . You might think this has little to do with technology (or at least what we commonly think of as technology), but as in a profile of the film’s director: The film also emphasizes the world of Krypton before its annihilation — a bleak, utilitarian planet with sophisticated if downright creepy technology — and the treachery of the Kryptonian villain Zod (Michael Shannon), who finds Kal-El on earth. The result is an unapologetic science-fiction spin on Superman, and while that may shatter audiences’ expectations for pure, unalloyed realism in “Man of Steel,” Mr. Snyder said this approach was built into the DNA of the character. Why is Superman on Earth? Because technology has led to the destruction of his home planet. I can’t wait to see what the author views as “downright creepy”. is one of my favorite recent sci-fi films. While the future envisioned there doesn’t seem so bad (and the filmmakers went out of their way to make the futuristic world as ), the underlying premise is still pretty dystopian. Also: eye-scanning tech to show you ads. Spider-like robots that scan everything. This sure sounds like The New York Times’ idea of hell. Another Spielberg film, , paints a peaceful, yet melancholy future where technology tries to but can’t quite replace elements of humanity. It’s far from Utopia. Especially when you consider that ultimately — again, spoiler alert — all our technology can’t save the human race from extinction at the hands of another ice age. Even though our technology, the robots, live on! Speaking of robots, one of the best sci-fi films I’ve seen recently is . It’s a decidedly smaller type of science fiction that focuses on an elderly man’s relationship with his caregiving robot. The film is actually quite sweet, but again, . In , we again find a fairly peaceful and advanced futuristic society. But the core technology of the film, DNA sequencing — something rapidly becoming a reality in our actual world — has led to a world with a whole new level of prejudices. , , , now I’m just looking over films I own that fit the mold. All are either dystopian or a net-negative for technology. The most positive one I can find is , which still has plenty of negative technological elements (and this is a film based on a book written by perhaps the quintessential science/technology optimist, ). Where is the set in 2150? Are a few scenes from really the best we got? Again, I think the answer is that we already live in a technological utopia of sorts. No, the world isn’t perfect, but the recent advances in technology have given us so much. And people go to the movies to escape reality. It’s just too bad that science fiction films have essentially become horror movies.
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Kim Dotcom Claims He Invented Two-Factor Authentication, Has A Patent To Prove It
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
Oh, Kim Dotcom. You just never stop surprising us. Just hours after Twitter finally rolled out its long-awaited feature to protect accounts, the Megaupload founder is claiming to have invented the entire mechanism… and he’s got a patent to prove it. “But they won’t even verify my Twitter account?!”, he says. The patent in question can be . Filed for in 1998 and published two years later, it lists a Kim Schmitz — Dotcom’s name before he changed it in 2005 — as the sole assignee. For the unfamiliar, two-factor authentication is a mechanism intended to make it more difficult for hackers to access accounts that aren’t their own. When a user attempts to log in to a service from an unrecognized computer, the service sends a one-time password to an alternative device (like, say, a cell phone) known to belong to that user. At least theoretically, hacking a user’s account would thus require access to that device in addition to their password. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and countless other monstrous sites all use two-factor authentication to protect user accounts, and Kim Dotcom’s tweets suggest that he hasn’t seen a cent from any of ’em for the alleged “massive IP infringement.” Google, Facebook, Twitter, Citibank, etc. offer Two-Step-Authentication. Massive IP infringement by U.S. companies. My innovation. My patent — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) So, will he sue? It seems he has at least considered it: I never sued them. I believe in sharing knowledge & ideas for the good of society. But I might sue them now cause of what the U.S. did to me — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) But he quickly switched to a different approach; instead of getting into a legal battle with a bunch of giants, Dotcom would prefer that Google, et al. continue to use “[his] patent for free,” in exchange for financial assistance in : Google, Facebook, Twitter, I ask you for help. We are all in the same DMCA boat. Use my patent for free. But please help funding my defense. — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) All of our assets are still frozen without trial. Defending our case will cost USD 50M+. I want to fight to the end because we are innocent. — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) Given the rather broken state of software patents, it’s not impossible to imagine that there’s at least one other person or company out there that can claim to have invented it, with patent in hand. held by Dynapass Inc., for example, was approved in 2006 for “Use of personal communication devices for user authentication.” We’re searching for other instances of similar patents. As strange as it may seem for those who only know him as the founder of a file uploading site , it would actually make quite a bit of sense for Dotcom to have security-related patents. His first brush with notoriety came in 1994, when he was arrested in Germany at the tender age of 20 for hacking calling cards. Those who spend their lives looking for security holes are often the same who come up with the solutions.
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LinkedIn Has Definitely Acqui-Hired Maybe, Omar Hamoui’s Polling Startup, Minus Hamoui Himself
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
Fresh from , has made another acquisition to dive deeper into the . TechCrunch has found out, and confirmed, that the social network has aqui-hired , the social polling startup founded by Omar Hamoui — the man who set up, ran and then mobile ad company AdMob to Google for $750 million. All staff from Maybe, except for Hamoui himself, are now at LinkedIn and working in its mobile division. That includes four engineers and one designer, LinkedIn has told us. Meanwhile, has now shut down. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Maybe first emerged , a startup that was incubated and spun out of Hamoui’s startup generator Churn Labs. Maybe was one of the contenders in the area of polling startups — an area that has seen some other M&A activity, specifically with the acquisition of . Others include , and . It’s not clear why Maybe closed up shop so fast. Maybe because the polling space is so crowded? Maybe because Hamoui is working on something else? Maybe because LinkedIn made Maybe an offer it couldn’t refuse? LinkedIn is not commenting further, and we have not yet heard back from Hamoui himself. Maybe we will update when we do. : Hamoui has now responded to confirm the acqui-hire as well, and explain a little more of what went on: “After a number of different product directions we didn’t feel that what we were building was having the impact we wanted,” he says. Putting aside competitive pressures in the polling space and startups in general looking for just the right product for the market, there is a connection between LinkedIn and Admob: Kevin Scott, SVP of Engineering at the social network, was previously VP of Engineering at AdMob. TechCrunch understands that after Hamoui and his two co-founders, Haider Sabri and Wayne Pan, met with him, they all decided it would be a natural next step for the mobile-focused team that they had built up. “Although we had plenty of cash of in the bank, we were really impressed with the team and vision at LinkedIn,” says Hamoui. “Having the excellent mobile focused team we had built join them was clearly a way to have the kind of impact we were hoping for.” Hamoui says the his own next steps “aren’t locked down yet.” We’ll definitely keep you posted with what we find out.
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GiftCards.com Agrees To Buy Giftly To Grow A Mobile Platform
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
, a Pittsburgh-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch. Giftly’s acquisition follows a number of other ones. although it may not produce meaningful revenue for some time for the social network, according to its earnings results earlier this year. Another . Giftly built a platform that avoided the hassle of individually dealing with merchants and point-of-sale systems. They last fall that made it easier to send presents to friends and family. The company’s platform didn’t put any limitations on what kinds of presents you could send because the company had a web of relationships with banks and credit card processors. When a recipient would go to redeem their gift, they would pay out of their own pocket, but Giftly would reimburse them that amount through their credit card. GiftCards.com said Giftly will be rolled into their operations, but will maintain offices in San Francisco. “We will continue to build out Giftly,” said Giftly’s CEO Timothy Bentley. “Our backend infrastructure will be used for their next generation products. We’ll continue to expand
the ways our technology and services are available to developers, through our API, and merchants, through our merchant services.” The company is also looking to raise a first venture round, even though it’s been around for more than 10 years. That round will go toward completing the acquisition of Giftly. GiftCards.com has been around since 1999; they sell personalized, pre-designed and discount gift cards.
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Encoding.com’s Vid.ly Integrates With FreeWheel To Provide Monetization Of Universal, Cross-Platform Video URLs
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
Cloud encoding vendor Encoding.com launched a couple of years ago to provide video creators with a way to and then have that content accessible on any device. Now it’s providing a way to monetize those videos, thanks to an integration with ad delivery platorm FreeWheel. The idea behind Vid.ly is that Encoding.com does all the hard work of encoding it into as many video formats and renditions as necessary, then serving up the appropriate copy of the video depending on which device was accessing it. In addition to transcoding, it also provided all of the storage, video player technology, device detection, streaming, and analytics needed by video creators. Customers could simply connect with the Vid.ly API and have a single universal URL created for them. All of that’s great, especially for brands and agencies and marketers who wish to make their videos playable for all audiences on every PC, mobile phone, or tablet. But what Vid.ly didn’t provide (until now) was a way to monetize all of those videos. Hence, the partnership and integration with FreeWheel. By integrating with FreeWheel’s ad-serving platform, Vid.ly will be able to provide all the same convenience and reach to publishers, but it will also enable them to monetize those videos across all those devices. By connecting with Encoding.com’s user interface or API, when a video is requested, Vid.ly will pass along user info to the FreeWheel ad server and pass along targeted ads along with the video. Pre-rolls, mid-rolls and post-rolls, as well as banner overlays, will all be supported. Encoding.com has raised $4.5 million since being founded in 2008. While Vid.ly is a growing piece of its business, the company is still primarily focused on providing cloud encoding services to a growing number of publishers moving their content online.
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Twitter Ups Web Security With Two-Factor Authentication Via SMS, But Shared Accounts May Still Be In Danger
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
After scores of accounts were potentially a few months ago, Twitter today through SMS to protect people from hacks and phishing scams on the web. Unfortunately, it may not help shared accounts like big brands and news agencies where multiple people need to be able to log in and out but only one phone number can get the login verification codes. Following the where hundreds of thousands of accounts had to have their credentials reset, the tech world demanded Twitter offer two-factor authentication. Wired’s Mat Honan last month that Twitter was internally testing the feature. But since then, several prominent accounts including the through phishing tricks that the security feature could have prevented. With two-factor authentication now in place, we’ll hopefully see fewer compromised individual accounts. However the brands and news outlets whose accounts are the most valuable to hackers may not benefit from the feature. They can only set one phone number as the recipient of the two-factor authentication codes, but may have several staff members who need to access the account. If they enabled it, whoever carried the phone registered with Twitter would have to relay the code to all the other staffers to get it to whoever needed it. That hassle might prevent shared accounts from turning on login verifications, and so the hackings may continue. Hopefully the fact that Twitter labeled its security blog post “Getting Started With Login Verification” means more advancements are on the way that might protect shared accounts. Twitter’s product security team member Jim O’Leary writes “much of the server-side engineering work required to ship this feature has cleared the way for us to deliver more account security enhancements in the future. Stay tuned.” The feature is rolling out now. If you don’t see it in your , you should soon. To enable two-factor authentication, check the box next to Account Security that explains “Require a verification code when I sign in.” You’ll need to enter your phone number if you haven’t already saved it with Twitter. Once you receive a confirmation SMS on your phone you can complete activation of the security feature. From then on when you enter your name and password to log in on Twitter.com, you’ll get a text message with a verification code you need to enter to prove you’re the account owner. The idea is that if someone steals your name and password, they probably don’t have your phone, too, and they need both to login as you. Twitter’s “login verification” doesn’t work with its mobile apps, though, so you’ll need to use to stay safe when logging in on your small screen. You can here or below to learn how to use Twitter’s two-factor authentication. You can also check out its documentation. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsdvJI0AK5M]
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Twitter Introduces Charts By Genre And Popularity For Its #Music Service
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
We’ve confirmed with Twitter that it has rolled out a new part of its for the web, charts that we were accustomed to from the company . The charts are broken up into a few areas: the familiar genre breakdown, as well as some categories like “Superstars” and “Unearthed” that appear to be built based on current Twitter trends and trajectory of artist mentions. This is leveraging all of the data that Twitter is collecting from tweets that include links to tracks from popular and emerging artists. As you click on each category, the tiles on the page swap out quickly, letting you surf around to find new artists and songs. The categorization was a necessity to be able to find hidden gems, as the original breakdown of Popular and Emerging changed so rapidly: These are the types of charts that will get artists themselves more engaged on Twitter, as well as catch the attention of record labels who want to know what people are saying about the musicians that they’ve signed. Everyone in a band wants to know how well they stack up against others. In fact, some artists didn’t see the service coming at all, and were . The service, which is still finding its footing, is still in the mode of getting musicians to participate by getting on Twitter and engaging with their fans. That engagement gives them a better shot of shooting up the charts and being found. With the addition of charts, which music listeners are also familiar with, people will be able to go deeper in finding songs that fit the genre that they like the most. Rather than waiting for Twitter to pair you with matches that it’s taking a guess on, the power is now in your hands. If you’re an Rdio or Spotify user, then the entire #Music experience is seamless, but if you’re only buying music from iTunes, you’re not getting to hear full tracks within the app. It’s going to take a while for #Music to grip, as are a lot of Twitter’s “discovery tools.” As the company onboards more people who aren’t interested in tweeting, just browsing, they will benefit from sites like #Music being broken out. For those who actively tweeting, it’s kind of neat to imagine that your support through tweets could shoot a band or artist up the “charts.” These charts aren’t available for the Twitter #Music iOS app but are available to everyone today.
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Adobe Acqui-hires Thumb Labs To Make Mobile Apps For Behance And Its New Creative Cloud
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
Another step for in its bid to become the go-to place in the cloud for those working in design and other creative industries: it is acquiring , a bootstrapped, New York-based mobile app design agency. Jared Verdi, one of the co-founders of Thumb Labs along with Rich Kern, tells TechCrunch that financial terms of the Thumb Labs acquisition are not being disclosed. The news follows on from Adobe’s acquisition of another New York-based design startup, , a platform for designers and others in the creative industries to share their work, which Adobe reportedly for around $150 million. Earlier this month, Adobe put the Behance acquisition into context when it announced a , with social/community features powered by Behance. Verdi tells TechCrunch that Thumb Labs will see out existing contracts it has with other clients, but as of May 31, it will focus its efforts exclusively on making mobile apps for Behance. That’s a position it knows well. Thumb Labs, which officially launched as a business in 2011, created the first mobile app for Behance, and as it points out in a announcing the deal on its site, “We have been working closely with their talented team ever since.” That’s included a of the Behance app, and its app. There are under 10 people working for Thumb Labs right now, Verdi says, and all of them are joining Adobe, based out of New York. Thumb Labs’ other clients have included a roster of startups, such as TechStars alum (a platform to trade goods with friends); (an app to make baby books); and (a debt management app). The main part of Thumb Labs’ work will now be focused both on maintaining Behance’s existing apps, as well as developing new ones. This will include “definitely some tablet work”, including an iPad app, as well as apps for more platforms beyond Apple’s, and in general making Behance’s main site design responsive so that it’s more mobile-web friendly. Over time, there will be more focus on other Creative Cloud initiatives, which makes sense considering how linked the rise in cloud services has been with the boom in smartphone and tablet use. “We’ll also be working with other teams at Adobe for integration into the Creative Cloud. Mobile is a big part of that,” Verdi said. In a way, getting acquired by Adobe is a natural fit for a design house like Thumb Labs, and Verdi says that it’s coming at a key time of change for its new owner. “In the creative profession everyone uses Adobe products, and the new focus on Creative Cloud is the biggest change we’ve seen in a while,” he said. “They’ve announced a number of exciting things, and hopefully we will be a part of them, too.”
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We Want YOU To Be The New TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Editor
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
The competition at our Disrupt events is like a mini startup school. The dozens of chosen startups that go through the Battlefield training process end up with solid presentation skills, hard-earned pitching prowess and newfound courage. And also, lots of public visibility, which is great for getting users, hiring top employees and luring clients and investors. The Battlefield has gone so well that our current staff has been getting overwhelmed by the record number of applications. We need help, so we’re creating a new position called the Battlefield Editor. We’re looking for a bright, talented person to help manage the entire process, from bringing in applicants to picking the 30 finalists and getting them ready for the Disrupt stages in San Francisco, New York and, this year’s addition, Berlin. In this position, you’ll also get to give out a huge trophy and a big cardboard check for $50,000 to one lucky startup, as they debut to the media and the investor world. Battlefield winners and finalists have included huge success stories like and among others. Are you already in the Startup Whisperer role at a popular accelerator and think you can take your show on the road? Read TC every day, just finished your MBA and want a more meaningful job than McKinsey? Can you find the Next Big Thing? Send your resume and a letter explaining your interest . TechCrunch is looking for someone to oversee the Startup Battlefield process in all its phases — including applicant recruitment, applicant review and final selection (working under the direction of TC’s co-editors), finalist training and rehearsals, and finally stage management at Disrupt. The role’s title is Battlefield Editor. In addition to those responsibilities, the role will focus on expanding our network of angels, incubators, VCs and accelerators to recruit a stronger pool of Battlefield applicants, strengthening our rehearsal program, and developing the Battlefield franchise, both online and offline, for applicants and alums. The role requires a strong writer who can post on TechCrunch about Battlefield matters, as well as manage many threads of communication with the many parties who make up the Battlefield. The core of the job is a strong ability to work with relatively green, unlaunched startups and prepare them to present brilliantly on the TC Disrupt stage before a group of highly distinguished judges. That preparation process takes enormous focus and commitment. Beyond that core requirement, the role will also work to help expand the Battlefield franchise in a variety of ways, including improved ties with Battlefield alums. Candidates should have deep experience in the Silicon Valley startup world and direct experience working with startups and investors to help shape new ideas and prepare them to pitch investors. They should possess very strong personal and written communication skills, outstanding organizational skills, a high capacity for detail work, and a very patient and winning attitude.
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Google X Acquires Makani Power And Its Airborne Wind Turbines
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired , a green energy startup that is currently . The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone’s , and judging from Stone’s story, the team will join Google X. Google invested in the Alameda, Calif.-based company in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. As far as we can see, this also marks the first time Google has acquired a company specifically for its Google X skunkworks. Stone reports that Google CEO Larry Page approved the acquisition, but as Google X’s director Astro Teller notes, Page said that X “could have the budget and the people to go do this, but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.” The company was founded by Saul Griffith and Don Montague, a former World Cup windsurfer. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. Google has confirmed this acquisition and provided us with the following statement from Astro Teller, Google X’s “Captain of Moonshots”: Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem. Makani Power’s technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy. They’ve turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software. We’re looking forward to bringing them into Google[x]. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbPXXpaW5ws?feature=player_embedded] Makani it hopes that this acquisition will provide it with “the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.” The acquisition comes just a week after the company completed the of its Wing 7 prototype. Here is how TechCrunch columnist Matylda Czarnecka described the project back in 2012: The , which resemble mini airplanes, are launched when wind speeds reach 3.5 meters per second. Rotors on each blade help propel it into orbit, and double as turbines once airborne. The blades are tethered to the ground with a cord that delivers power to throw them into the sky and receives energy generated by the turbines to be sent to the grid-connected ground station. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYN0yrntB2M?feature=player_embedded]
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Join CrunchGov’s Town Hall With @CoryBooker On Immigration For #iNewark Right Now
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
are bringing attention to the need for immigration reform in a 36-hour social media marathon, . It’s an issue we know our readers care about, so we’re thrilled to give you the opportunity to join , full-time mayor of Newark, , and one of The , Cory Booker, in a rousing town hall. Mayor Booker and I will be answering and responding to a few reader questions in our comments (officially begins Noon PT). As I’ve written about before, the United States definitely , which can only be filled by attracting the best and brightest from around the world. Despite near unanimous support for more high-skilled immigrants, the United States Congress without a comprehensive package that included all foreign-born workers. A set of proposed drafts that will eventually become a single comprehensive bill is currently winding its way through both chambers of the Congress; sticky issues on agriculture workers, border security, gay rights, and an high-skilled visa system threaten to derail any progress at all. As Senator Jerry Moran ( : A) told me, , especially social media. The March For Immigration isn’t about advocating a particular position, but about letting Congress know that the electoral consequences of failing to pass a bill will be greater than passing an imperfect one. To participate in the discussion, comment below and/or tweet Booker (use hashtag #iNewark). Here are a few very important questions that citizens should be asking We look forward to your insightful ideas.
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Deeplink.me Lets Mobile Users Navigate Through A “Web” Of Apps
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
Have you ever wished that you could navigate through the apps on the phone as easy as clicking links on the web? Such a thing may now become a real possibility thanks to a new service from , called . In a nutshell, it’s a bit.ly for mobile app deep linking – meaning not necessarily just linking to the app itself, but to a specific page, section or – in the case of a mobile game – a specific level, within an application. The link (deeplink.me/ ), meanwhile, works from anywhere, whether web, mobile web, or any other native mobile application. It can automatically detect where an end user is coming from and whether or not they have the necessary mobile app installed on their device. If the link is clicked on the web, it would simply point the user to the developer or publisher’s web version of that same content. If on mobile with no app installed, it could be configured to point to the app store or mobile website instead. And if the app is present, it could take you right to the relevant screen. All of this is configurable, of course. The idea came about as an offshoot of what Celllogic is currently building with , a content discovery network for mobile applications. Nextap is a much bigger product built on top of this deeplink technology, and, even pre-launch, it has paying customers. These include several large news publishers and a few big-name app and game developers. During the development process for Nextap, the team decided to spin off the Deeplink tool, which will allow end users to move horizontally through apps. As Cellogic CEO Itamar Weisbrod explains, Nextap’s customers wanted to use the technology as something of a “bit.ly for deep linking” so they could tweet out links, share them on Facebook, email and elsewhere. “One of their biggest issues is that they’ve invested so much in these native apps, but they’re still silos,” says Weisbrod. “So we said, well, we have the analytics, we have this platform, we could just give you this one URL and you can generate the links for your apps, and you could then link to specific parts in your apps.” The implementation requires minimal configuration on the app developer’s side since the function the link is calling is already present. Developers only have to add a few lines of code, Weisbrod says. And on Android, the company offers a sample “Intent” filter, as well, to help developers get started. (Intentions let Android apps kick off a specific action. They’re a part of the Android operating system, which handles deep linking fairly well, in comparison with iOS). As you may know, the technology which enables app deep linking itself is not new. In terms of simply opening up apps for you, Facebook has long since pointed its mobile users to apps on their phone from its own mobile application. It has now turned its ability to connect users to apps into , as well. And with the debut of new Twitter “Card” types, it, too, , including products, photos, videos, articles, and more. These are only the more recent efforts, however. A lesser-known example called , is an older open source initiative using similar app-linking technology. Plus, an even earlier example came from a company called , which tried to solve the problem by launcing , a database that tried to open source the unpublished custom URL schemes for iOS applications. Facebook and Twitter’s moves are still somewhat limited, however, and none of those earlier efforts really took off. Weisbrod says the reason why those initial efforts failed is because there was no impetus for developers to use them. “This is an actual service,” he says of Deeplink.me. “There’s value on top of just being database.” With , developers will have access to analytics, which details things like clicks per platform, the click-through rates, where users are coming from and more. This analytics feature will be improved in time, and the service will support plugging into other app analytics platforms in the future, too, like Flurry or HasOffers, for example. Pricing for Deeplink.me has also yet to be set, but it will be a freemium service after the beta period completes. A handful of Nextap’s customers are already using the platform, after joining a private test a few months ago. Now the beta is opening up a bit further: have been reserved for TechCrunch readers who sign up . This service could help solve some of the problems facing the ecosystem today – namely app engagement and usage rapidly declines after install, as apps are tucked away off of users’ homescreens in forgotten folders. Developers in turn, have to use increasingly spammy push notifications to encourage re-opens. Frustrated, users simply delete the apps bothering them. Having specific, deeplinked app content appearing when users click links they actually to follow could instead be a more natural way to draw users back in to apps. Though the details of how all this works is technical, if the company can spur adoption – still an unknown – the end result could be something which would allow a more natural way to move through apps on our phones and tablets, as well as from the mobile web to apps. Using apps could even begin to feel more like the web itself – that is, less isolated, more connected.
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HTC Can’t Stanch The Flow Of Departing Senior Talent As Internal Turmoil Prevails
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
A brain drain at a big tech company is never a good thing, and when a lot of that departing talent consists of high-level execs moving on in rapid succession it’s bound to look like curtains to outside observers. That appears to be the case at HTC, which is losing a lot of senior execs according to multiple reports today from , and , and a source has pointed us to yet another recent high profile departure. We’ve learned at TechCrunch that HTC Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Greg Fisher departed the company just a few short months ago to Amazon. Fisher is among a growing list of known execs leaving HTC, including people on both the product and marketing sides of the equation. What we’re hearing suggests that the company is facing a lot of internal turmoil and politics, which is frustrating employees across the board. The Verge reported earlier today that HTC’s Chief Product Office Kouji Kodera has departed as of last week, which is a considerable staff shift given that Kodera probably spearheaded HTC’s recent line of critically well-received devices, including the HTC One X and this year’s HTC One. The company has also seen the departure of Global Communications VP Jason Gordon, Global Retail Marketing Manager Rebecca Rowland, digital marketing chief John Starkweather and Eric Lin, manager of product strategy with the past three months. And when it rains it pours, as HTC Asia CEO Lennard Hoornik confirmed to have left today, and Elizabeth Griffin, the Head of Global Digital Service for the Taiwan-based smartphone maker also reportedly hopping into the lifeboat in favor of a position at Nintendo (out of the frying pan and into the fire?). This sizeable outpouring of talent comes at a crucial juncture for HTC, as it has just launched the HTC One, a flagship that . Chou so far seems to be secure in his position at the company, but if this trend of executive departures, he could soon wind up on his own at the top. Chou is apparently not the man people would like to have in charge, however, as The Verge reports that he and his tendency to make snap decisions are what’s behind this outbound tide of senior staff. The after a slow start, but HTC’s other sizeable bet, the First which comes pre-loaded with Facebook Home, looks to be on life support at best, if not . If HTC is bleeding from the head, it’s possible it’s bleeding from the body, too. We’ve seen , and we’ve also heard that it’s not just senior people who are looking towards greener pastures. It’s unlikely that we’ve seen the end of these leavings, either, so in the meantime we’ll be watching to see who’s next into the lifeboats.
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 14 | null |
Made For The World. Built And Designed In China.
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’ It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience. But that’s a stereotype that isn’t exactly true anymore. A small group of companies — both small, bootstrapped app startups and multi-billion dollar giants like Tencent — are showing that they can design apps or higher-end hardware with international appeal. Tencent, one of the country’s gargantuan Internet powers with a market cap of $72 billion dollars, often likes to point out the international reach of its messaging app Weixin or WeChat. That app has blossomed to more than 190 million monthly active users over the past year and “I’m very glad to see the internationalization of Tencent,” said the company’s CEO Pony Ma this month at the GMIC conference in Beijing. He later added, “The manufacturing sector in China went globalized and the service industry can be internationalized as well…. It’s difficult, but if we can make it, it would be a revolution.” Interestingly enough, WeChat’s growth abroad is being fueled by the Chinese diaspora — immigrants are taking WeChat with them to stay in touch with their families back home, according to app-tracking services like Onavo. They base this hypothesis on the correlation of WeChat active usage with that of other Chinese-language apps. Younger Chinese startups are also building internationally as well. I met a with 50 million registered users and 10 million monthly actives, with half of them outside of China. “A lot of people are surprised when they find out we’re a Chinese company,” said Louisa Cao, who heads marketing for the company. It helps that exchanging business cards is much more ritualized and formal in China and Japan than it is in the West, so that gives startups in Asia a competitive edge on understanding what consumers want in a product in this area. Similarly, messaging apps out of Asia like Line, Kakao and WeChat are leading the way, with Western startups like Path arguably borrowing some of their strategies like stickers. Blux, another company out of Xian, the second-tier Chinese city that’s home to the famous army of Terra Cotta warriors, has built a higher-end photo app called Blux Camera that’s been featured by Apple more than 100 times on the iTunes homepage for global audiences. As the cost advantages that China has over Western markets narrows, the co-founder Jo Yin told me that it now can make economic sense to run global market-facing startups outside of the traditional hubs of Beijing and Shanghai (as they’ve become too expensive). One of the reasons that all of these startups can built products for foreign audiences is because they’ve been trained either at Western universities or through working for multi-nationals. Some are run by “sea turtles” or Chinese who have returned home after years of working or studying abroad. Intsig’s CEO Michael Zhen spent years at Motorola where he picked up ideas on how to manage teams and think globally. It’s also helped that the Chinese government has gone far in protecting and nurturing domestic technology companies and startups, a trend and move off Western software platforms. Now that companies like Tencent have reached a certain prowess in domestic markets, they can look outwards. To be fair, achieving global reach is something only a small fraction of local Chinese startups can do. It requires an international fluency; founders have to understand what kind of design and marketing attracts foreigners. Chinese web services can seem noisy and busy; they can be filled with more links and text as Mandarin characters are complicated to create on QWERTY keyboards. There are even a few U.S. growth-stage companies that haven’t been dissuaded by Google’s very public about-face on the Chinese market and are hiring design and developer talent locally. and they very intentionally took on local hires to develop product. “It’s easy to sell your products everywhere. But when we say we want to be a global company, it’s because we want to make our products everywhere,” said Evernote CEO Phil Libin, when he launched Evernote for Business locally in China. He went on to say that China’s copycat reputation is unfair. “Chinese companies don’t have a good reputation for innovation in the West. The reputation that Chinese companies have is that they don’t really innovate. They just copy and I don’t think this reputation is right. It’s not a problem that Chinese companies copy. It’s that everyone copies. Chinese companies don’t just copy. They copy and improve. Copy and improve is what everyone does everywhere. That’s what Apple does. That’s what Microsoft does. That’s what Facebook does. Very few companies start with a first-of-a-kind idea.” Indeed, probably the most interesting company to watch as it expands globally is Xiaomi, which did just that. They took Android and improved upon it. They’re probably the best example of how China is moving up the value-chain from low-cost manufacturing into high-end design. Just three years afters being founded, the company is . Some have made the metaphor that Xiaomi is the “Apple of Android” in that it’s an integrated hardware and software maker that has built its own special skin of Android and sells high-end hardware at or around the cost of materials. They compete head-to-head against Samsung in mainland China, and according to third-party mobile app analytic services like Umeng, they’re in second place. Although Xiaomi will only publicly talk about its plans to sell handsets in Hong Kong and Taiwan, a source close to the company says it’s been on the lookout for a general manager that could bring their Android skin, the MIUI, to North American audiences. They’ve been able to develop a rabid fan base locally in China because they allow people to participate in the designing of the phone by requesting features. Internally, they have small teams of engineers, product managers and designers that work alongside each other on a very fast cycle. They release a new version of the MIUI every week. But they don’t know if the model will translate abroad yet. Chinese consumers are very comfortable with paying for the full-cost of the phones upfront and buying devices online instead of through brick-and-mortar stores. “We don’t know how developed regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong will accept products like Xiaomi,” said co-founder Lin Bin in an interview. “Greater China is just one step beyond mainland China.”
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Photo App Piictu To Join Betaworks Company Kandu, Will Shut Down On May 31st
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
Another photo sharing app bites the dust? Or is something with promise getting another chance? Either way you look at it, betaworks is adding more technology and team members to its arsenal, as photo sharing app that the team will “join forces” with a betaworks company that has yet to launch. , yet never really took off. The app allowed you to share photos with captions, but Piictu wanted to focus on letting photos start conversations, rather than sit in a stream waiting for likes. The app’s approach was to get you to share photos in context of what you were doing. Here’s what the Piictu team shared today, including instructions on how to get your photos out of the service. You’ll have until June 7th to do so: Piictu is joining Kandu (a Betaworks company)! We’re excited to announce that Piictu is joining forces with Kandu – “a Betaworks company” that shares our vision and ideals of how technology is a catalyst for a better and richer world. Together we will continue to build and bring users great products and experiences for a brighter future. Obviously, this news doesn’t come without hardship. Unfortunately, the Piictu app will no longer be available. The important thing: You will not lose any of your photos and we trust you will reconnect with all your piictu-friends on other networks like tumblr, kik, twitter and instagram – some of our fave. Over the past two years we’ve had the opportunity of supporting and sharing unique moments of our lives in pictures. Piictu was built on the idea that “the change in use of photography” is opening new opportunities to communicate and interact as humans. We’ve seen this stand true and flourish not only on piictu, but on other networks as well. On Friday May 31st, the piictu app will no longer be available. You’ll be able to download your photos until Friday June 7th by following the instructions here From the entire team we want to thank you for the great energy, trust and support you have brought to the community and we look forward to bringing you more fun, exciting and heartfelt products in the future. No terms were made available, but we’ve reached out to betaworks for comment. However, this does feel like a stay of execution for an app that never took off. Again, it’s not known what Kandu is exactly, but we assume that it will have something to do with photography. Another betaworks product, to provide a home for all of those awesome animated GIFs that we like to share. During TechCrunch Disrupt, betaworks CEO John Borthwick discussed his vision for the company, What Borthwick and team are doing is bringing together the most useful parts of services, be it Digg or an eventual Google Reader replacement, and creating a suite with them. How it will all look once it fits together is unknown, but betaworks is on a bit of a roll after .
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Amazon Wants To Build A Bio-Dome Three Blocks From An Actual, Normal Park
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 |
Amazon has reportedly submitted plans for a new futuristic headquarters in Seattle that combines a skyscraper and a tri-sphere, bio-dome-like structure. According to the plans, the structure will be able to hold various forms of plant life and become a place where employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.” Because, God forbid, employees walk to the . Here’s an excerpt from the (also, hat tip to for the find): While the form of the building will be visually reminiscent of a greenhouse or conservatory, plant material will be selected for its ability to co-exist in a microclimate that also suits people. To encourage growth and maintain the health of the plants, the building’s interior will include high bay spaces on five floors totaling approximately 65,000 SF and capable of accommodating mature trees. The exterior enclosure will be highly transparent and be composed primarily of multiple layers of glass supported by a metal framework. In addition to a variety of workplace environments, the facility will incorporate dining, meeting and lounge spaces, as well as a variety of botanical zonesmodeled on montane ecologies found around the globe. The building will be anchored at either end by publically accessible retail spaces entered from 6th and 7th Avenues. Generally, it all sounds very cool and very futuristic and very trendy (read: Apple did the whole thing ages ago). However, it’s interesting to see how the biggest companies in tech are tackling the issue of working in an office or with a more loose structure. Remember, everyone made a pretty big deal out of Marissa Mayer’s recent that requires all Yahoo employees to work in an office. And just recently she announced that Yahoo would be in the Times building in New York’s Times Square, which is capable of housing up to 700 employees. As it stands now, all of the big four tech companies — Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon — favor keeping employees in the office. Google has one of the best campuses you could dream of, both in Mountain View and in New York, feeding employees free lunch from world-renowned chefs. Apple is one of Steve Jobs’ final projects, a new spaceship office. Facebook has the same : chess boards, and video games, and basketball courts, and free lunch. So of course, the in the race, Amazon is devising its own tricks to keep employees at the office as long as possible. It’s a win-win: Employees do more and better work due to a pleasing and comfortable work environment, and employers get more, and better work, out of their employees. Also, there’s a perfectly good park just three blocks from the new campus. Here’s the full set of plans: by
[Biodome rendering via ]
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Yanked From The Cloud: Why Connectify Unplugged Its Switchboard Campaign
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Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 5 | 25 |
, a Philadelphia-based software company obsessed with making the Internet faster and using Kickstarter to do so, this week pulled the plug on Switchboard, its most recent connectivity campaign. Alex Gizis, Connectify’s CEO, said his backers wanted it that way. Connectify is no stranger to Kickstarter. When the company launched its Dispatch software that aggregates multiple broadband connections to boost speed, it raised over $100,000 and delivered its rewards on time. But Dispatch, which worked at the socket level, had some limitations. It performed well accelerating web browsing and torrenting, but didn’t do much for streaming video and could spell trouble for a VPN connection. The company thought the solution was to move the connection aggregation to the cloud. “You log in, and and now your Internet is faster,” says Gizis, who notes that the software, like Skype, simply navigates firewalls without having to fiddle with settings like port forwarding. And so it returned to Kickstarter, proposing to build a global server network called Switchboard that would accelerate Internet access from just about anywhere. Users would be rewarded with a year of access to the service. The Switchboard campaign got off to a solid, if not breathtaking, start. Ten days into its $100,000 campaign, 244 backers had contributed nearly a quarter of its funding goal. It’s not uncommon for companies at that point to turn up the volume, launch more attractive reward tiers, and make a strong social media push. Connectify, though, yanked the campaign. Many Kickstarter campaign owners say that the feedback they receive during a campaign is one of the most valuable parts of running it. Usually, these are ideas for enhancements or thoughts on which design or feature roads a company can take. In Connectify’s case, though, the feedback was that running the cloud itself was actually the wrong path. Gizis says he got tons of messages with a common overriding theme: Potential customers liked the technology but wanted to run the servers themselves; they wanted to put their own Linux servers in the cloud. It was the sweet sound of failure. Connectify’s core competence in software would allow it to sell Switchboard directly to corporations without the risky proposition of investing in a pricey global server network. The shift of Switchboard from hosted service to enterprise infrastructure could spell bad news for your average Jane seeking to eke out a meager few extra megabits per second on the mean streets, but it will still be available to consumers as a personal server for $90 that runs on personal PCs and Macs that you can access from the road. Furthermore, in addition to the many companies that wanted to own the Switchboard servers themselves, Connectify heard from hosting companies that said that they could run the service more cost-effectively than the company could; Gizis expects that at least one of them will make the service available directly to individuals the way many hosting companies offer hosted Exchange servers. When asked if Connectify could have received this kind of feedback without Kickstarter, Gizis said he couldn’t think of an alternative. He notes that the company conducted research among its current customers before it launched the aborted Kickstarter campaign. In the end, he notes, the real test comes when you ask people for their credit cards.
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CrunchWeek: Yahoo’s $1.1B Tumblr Purchase, Lyft’s Big Raise, And Microsoft’s Xbox One
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 25 |
It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show where a few of us writers chat up the most interesting stories from the past seven days. , , and I chatted about Yahoo’s of Tumblr (and that the company is eyeing a purchase of Hulu); Lyft’s from Andreessen Horowitz and the big reveal of Microsoft’s . Tune in above for more!
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Misfit Wearables Drops Android Support For Its Shine Activity Tracker Ahead Of Summer Launch
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 25 |
Heads up, Android fans. If you took the plunge and backed the rather sleek from , you may want to get your money back. According to a recent update posted to , the Founders Fund-backed company has decided to drop Android support from the final version in a bid to better focus on polishing the experience for iOS users. Seriously, that’s the only reason they gave, which is likely little consolation to the backers who were originally told that the Shine would support certain devices running Android 4.1 and up when the thing officially launched. But let’s back up a moment first — in case you haven’t been following the Misfit Wearables odyssey, the Redwood City/Vietnam startup aimed to inject some style into the world of personal activity tracking with the that could seamlessly sync your motion information to a slew of supported smartphones. It’s not entirely unlike what you would do with a Jawbone Up or a Fitbit, except that the hardware involved was designed to be as unobtrusive as possible — a welcome quality for a device you’re meant to wear all day long. There’s no firm count on how many Android users wound up backing the project, but I’d wager there’s a decent chunk of them considering that the project raised more than eight times the $100,000 funding goal the team was originally shooting for. For what it’s worth, the decision seems to have been made fairly recently — a response on the Misfit Wearables Facebook page confirmed to one fan that the team intended to have Android support ready for the masses when the Shine officially launches in July. That said, the team has been working on the Shine Android app for at least a few months now, and they provided a first glimpse at the app in the form a of a render (see above) before ultimately putting it on the back burner. I’ve reached out to Misfit to see if they would clarify the issues they’ve been having on the Android front, and I’ll update if/when they respond. Sad to say it’s hardly the first time a purveyor of fitness gadgets has decided to drop support for Google’s mobile operating system. Despite claiming that an Android version of its FuelBand syncing app was in the works for the better part of summer 2012, Nike unceremoniously pulled the plug on the project earlier this year noting that it would instead focus on building out the Fuel experience for iOS and the web.
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Will The Xbox One Rule The Living Room? Price Will Determine The Size Of Its Kingdom
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 25 |
The , but its price has yet to be revealed by Microsoft. Price and ship date are always the biggest concerns when new gadgets or hardware hits the market, but in the case of the Xbox One, it’s likely to help determine whether the “home entertainment system,” as Microsoft is characterizing it, becomes the category-busting, revolutionary, multipurpose living room command center it’s being billed as, or ends up just another console with niche appeal that makes it a target of lust for core gamers, but few outside that circle. The Xbox One continues what Microsoft started with the Xbox 360, building in plenty of non-gaming services, apps and tools that could appeal to a broad range of audiences, including sports fans and people who just generally enjoy media content of all stripes. The Kinect interaction potential looks to be able to provide pretty extensive feedback for athletes and people training, and its new voice-recognition tricks offer a chance at a completely revamped way of interacting with the television. Microsoft also looks to be courting partners for a la carte TV content delivery, which is a huge potential alternative market to traditional cable and satellite providers. New features of the Xbox One are clearly designed to cast a wider net and rope in people who might not care all that much about games. But price will determine whether Microsoft actually lands those customers or whether the Xbox One remains a gaming machine first, which just happens to provide gamers with a number of other benefits besides. Rumors have pegged the new Xbox One pricing at anywhere from less than the initial cost of the Xbox 360 and PS3 (each ), to (likely a high guess to prevent sticker shock later on) as it has been listed on Amazon Germany, to anything in between. A gap of just a couple hundred dollars could make all the difference here: Users who aren’t so interested in the gaming aspects have plenty of options now for over-the-top services from providers, including Apple, Google and Roku, all of which offer similar access to custom content, if not the unique interaction methods and Snap multi-information streams of the Xbox One. And most of those are available for around $100 or less, which will have a significant impact on buyer choice. It’s possible that what Microsoft wants is to , similar to what Google initially attempted with Google TV, as our columnist Tadhg Kelly suggested in his column earlier today. But I think Microsoft is doing much more feeling out with the Xbox One, with a variety of services and a focus that could easily shift depending on where consumers take it. But getting them there in the first place involves either pricing the console right or demonstrating irrefutably that the value added by the console and its services make up for a steep premium over other alternatives. I’m not convinced Microsoft has the guts to price the Xbox One where it needs to be to truly start breaking down device category walls, but we’ll see if they surprise us when they talk price, which could happen as early as E3 next month.
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What Games Are: Xbox One Is Microsoft’s Spruce Goose
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Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013 | 5 | 25 |
During the 1940s Howard Hughes spent millions developing and building a plane with the largest wingspan in history and a huge carrying capacity. The was meant to solve a problem of moving troops and material for the second world war effort, but by the time it was tested, the war was already over and the plane’s engine technology was being superseded by jets. Even with more money at his disposal than Solomon, Hughes could not convince the world that his propellered giant had a place. I think it might be a similar story for the Microsoft Xbox One. Even at a physical level the Xbox One idea just doesn’t work for me. For one thing, it looks huge and ugly, like an old Toshiba VCR. Its is farcically large for what amounts to a fancy webcam, and the console also needs to be connected to your cable box in order to serve up all of its . That’s a lot of technology to find room for under your TV set at a time when everything else seems to be getting smaller. Unlike the miniature Apple TV or OUYA, Xbox One demands pride-of-place and lots of room, and when I put those two ideas together it just doesn’t work. It fails my wife’s test of asking that our living room not be overrun with technology. It fails the small-apartment test, the small bedroom test and the crowded family home test. The fact that the Kinect needs to be attached before it can even be switched on merely reinforces that fact. And even after all that, what is Xbox One’s core function? . TV you can control with gestures. TV you can command with your voice. TV that can be sidebarred. TV that can trend, find, recommend and socialize. Transmedia TV. Gamelike additions to TV. Halo the TV show. It’s a fancy remote controller, an adjunct to your existing services whose job is to make it slightly easier to search for Game of Thrones. It’s also a way to have Skype chats with friends while watching Star Trek, listening to both friend and film speak over each other in real time. What else? A music player perhaps, but doubtful one that will work with your iTunes library. A social networking device if you can get voice recognition to actually work. A Netflix box perhaps, but what isn’t these days? A games machine, but not for all of the varied types of innovative games that now populate your smartphone. Only the big and the bold will do for Xbox One. When you say it like that this new console does seem rather odd, doesn’t it? What started when the Xbox 360 went from a much-beloved home of indie games in 2008 to a monotone Metro-powered top-10s machine in 2011, Xbox One continues. It’s what Chris Anderson might call aiming for the short head. Microsoft only wants to talk big, top 10, top 25. It seems to believe that that’s the only conversation that anyone cares about. As part of the event, Microsoft had Electronic Arts showing us a demonstration of a new game engine delivering water dripping off NFL players’ helmets and UA fighters getting slow-mo kicked in the face. It had Activision showing Call of Duty clips and dog animations that gave the Internet plenty of GIF ammunition. It had next generation Forza. These are all big-game plays, and between showing them off and talking about key partnerships, the implication is that Xbox One intends to use a strategy similar to the old Nintendo Entertainment System. That is to say: tentpole releases only, nothing but strikes. No great depth of diversity, but instead a system targeted solely at mass audiences. Madden-as-a-service, hooked up to your real NFL tv shows and fantasy games. A way for big connected plays to capture all of their value and place Microsoft at the heart of gaming. Subsequent revelations seem to confirm this. The lack of a viable way for independent game makers to publish on the system is a big one, especially in an age where every other device does. The lack of backwards compatibility (in the Xbox universe “ “) is another, although less so. And the third is the very confused message regarding buying and installing games, especially used games. It screams of a concern only with big new things. All three say “we only want the big stuff, that’s all that matters”. This platform holder does not believe in the long tail and intends to spend zero time worrying about it. It only wants the biggest media experiences, the key apps, the banner games. It has concluded that the rest of the market either doesn’t exist or isn’t worth chasing. The market wants big TV, big shows, big games, big sports, big plays. Or does it? There is often value in making a very clear choice as to who your customer is. Apple does it all the time, preferring not to enter a bunch of cheap markets and instead hold onto the value of the premium computer user both through hardware and software. Microsoft’s big bet seems to be the same sort of idea, that there is a high value gaming and TV audience out there wants a big vertical solution, wants all of this awesome tech and premium games, features up to the eyeballs and so on. The central idea of Xbox One’s all-in-one promise is basically a console for those who can afford it. The problem for me is that that’s exactly the same argument that Sony tried to make with the PlayStation 3, one of power and promise and Blu-Ray movies, and it fell flat on its ass. It relies on the idea that there is such a thing as a premium-priced gamer out there, and historically this has always proved to be untrue. The console industry’s most successful business model tends to work more like razors-and-blades (cheapish machine, expensive games that can be traded) because that’s what the teenagers, students and 20-somethings can afford. With Xbox One being set up the way it is, it seems only targeted at people who can afford premium all the time. And, just like PS3, there are simpler and cheaper options on the horizon. Back then it was Wii. Now it’s OUYA and Steamboxes. TV may suck, but it doesn’t suck so badly that most people want to spend $4 to $500 to fix a menu problem. It’s also not used in the same mode as when the “owning the living room” idea was born. Nicholas Lovell characterized Xbox One as an example of a . Meanwhile, Leigh Alexander called it “ ” and go back to an era when we all consumed entertainment at the altar of television. What both are picking up on is the rise in personal technology like the laptop, smartphone and tablet and the decline of the living room as a battleground. Rather than the battle being about owning rooms, it’s about personal screens and personal connections. Alexander writes how she didn’t watch the Xbox Reveal event on a television, but on a computer while talking on a phone and using a netbook. Lovell writes about how personal technology largely circumvents the need for worrying about television at all. They make the case that today’s problem is not about cramming tentpole features into big boxes to bring everyone back to television, but rather how to acknowledge that television has become the second screen. More lightweight Apple TV that shows your HBO Go iPad stream, less 2001-style entertainment monolith. More consoles that are nimble and unobtrusive, and provide app-style game experiences with app-style liberal game making conditions. Less heavy handed overbearing grand plans that leave everyone behind. The failure to adapt to this new reality makes Xbox One looks like the console for last year’s man. Live TV is a mode of watching that many people don’t do any more because they have long-tail services like Netflix and Hulu. Rather than watch scheduled programming like a sucker, they sit in and watch the entirety of Arrested Development as a batch. Rather than stare all eyes-a-goggle at the big screen, they have other devices open and switch back and forth. The living room of people all sitting around their Kinect dancing for joy and swiping over to read Internet Explorer is not a real place, and never will be. Maybe there was a time when owning living rooms made sense, but not any more. It’s almost incomprehensible to watch how singularly Microsoft seems not to acknowledge how times have changed. “Not getting it” doesn’t even begin to describe the cognitive dissonance that watches the world diverge in thousands of app-shaped directions and concludes that it only wants to be able to watch NFL while tweeting, playing Madden and racing. Victor Hugo once said that “one cannot resist an idea whose time has come,” but the corollary of that is that one cannot perpetuate an idea whose time has gone. Microsoft can continue to dream like Howard Hughes of a grand world in which we all hook up our consoles and Kinects to our cable boxes and then sit around Father Television to watch The Price is Right. But it’s doing so at the expense of a market that it helped to create, while searching for a customer which arguably no longer exists. Alas, it seems more like Xbox Done.
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Gillmor Gang: Parlor Games & Metaphones
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 5 | 25 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — neatly sidestepped the Yahoo Tumblr acquisition and segued into the wonderful world of messaging. As Facebook Home settles into a cot at the homeless shelter, Google is revving up for an all-out assault on the service suite. Google Glass is just the tip of the iceberg; below the waterline, the search giant is sucking image, location, traffic, and advertising data in realtime. It may seem like the Gang is tilting over into Google love, but scratch the surface (no pun intended) and you’ll find just as much Apple love lurking beneath. The consensus is not so much a two-horse race as a widening duopoly that makes it very hard for Yahoo or Microsoft or Amazon or any new player to break the hold these two giants maintain. Of course, that’s what they said about Microsoft, which in reality was the duopoly of Windows and Office. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Reminder: Google Buzz Is Still Dead, Your Data Will Be Moved To Drive, And They Thank You For Using It
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 25 |
, the social service that Google launched way back in 2010 and then killed in 2011, reminded former users that their data still lives in and will be moved over to your Google Drive accounts in July. That’s lovely. The email describes exactly what will happen with your data, which won’t count against your Drive storage limits, thankfully. If you don’t delete the data and let Google move your stuff to Drive, it says that the public Buzz posts you shared in the past “may appear in search results and on your Google Profile.” OK, then. Here’s the entire email in case you’ve filtered out Buzz communication to go directly to Spam or Trash: In October 2011 we announced Google Buzz was shutting down. On or after July 17th, 2013, Google will take the last step in the shutdown and will save a copy of your Buzz posts to your Google Drive, a service for storing files online. Google will store two (2) types of files to your Google Drive, and the newly-created files will not count against your storage limits. If you’d like to wipe Buzz from your online world completelly, go here and delete the data now: 1. The first type of file will be private, only accessible to you, containing a snapshot of the Google Buzz public and private posts you authored.
2. The second type of file will contain a copy of only your Google Buzz public posts. By default it will be viewable by anyone with the link, and may appear in search results and on your (if you’ve linked to your Buzz posts). Note, any existing links to your Google Buzz content will redirect users to this file.
3. Any comments you made on other users’ posts will only be saved to those users’ files and not to yours. Once the change described in this email is final, only that user will be able to change the sharing settings of those files. This means that if you have commented on another author’s private post, that author could choose to make that post and its comments public. If you would like to avoid that possibility, all your Buzz content now.
4. The new Google Drive files will only contain comments from users that previously enabled Google Buzz, and the files will not contain comments that were deleted prior to moving the data to your Google Drive. Once the files are created, they will be treated the same as any other Drive file. They are yours to do with as you please. This includes downloading them, updating who can access them, or deleting them. Before these files are created, you can . If you do not want any of your Buzz posts or comments saved to Google Drive files, you can immediately your Google Buzz account and data. Thank you for using Google Buzz. Since Google mentions in the email that you can delete your data not once, but twice, that’s the course of action that I’ll be taking. , and Google went on to focus all of its efforts on Google+. There were a slew of reasons why Buzz didn’t work, . The close integration with Gmail made the entire experience a mess, blurring the lines between what should be personal and what should be public. This is clearly the last step for Google to completely rid itself of the product, and all of the privacy concerns and issues that cropped up around the product. Oh, and just in case you missed that delete link, Thank , Google.
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The New “Handmade” (Part Two)
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 25 |
Although 3D printing technology has existed for some time, it’s only now beginning to cross over into mainstream awareness, thanks to increasingly affordable access to the printers themselves, as well as attention-grabbing headlines about and . While less eye-catching, perhaps, the innovation is also powering a new class of creatives, who are using 3D printers to produce art instead. Their “handmade” goods, including jewelry, home decor, gifts and more, appear on sites like the marketplace for crafters, , and the 3D printing resource center and online shop, . These modern-day artists don’t always fit the traditional mold – or stereotype, rather – of what an artist should be. They don’t necessarily have a studio or workshop, nor do they always have an art background or related experience. Sometimes, they’re drawn in because of the technology and science involved, only then discovering their more artistic side. And sometimes, they’re just everyday people working day jobs in unrelated fields who have discovered 3D printing as a new way to express themselves creatively, communicating their visions and ideas to a wider audience than they had ever thought possible. These are their stories. When Dutch designer Maaike van der Horn wanted to learn how to use 3D modeling software, she turned to YouTube. The site, she says, is filled with several tutorials that walk you through the basics, and sometimes she would watch these over and over while trying to find her way. “If you have an idea in your head, and you spend a little bit of time – well, a lot of time, actually – you can actually get pretty far,” she says with a chuckle. Van der Horn currently works as a market researcher for a European airline, but over the past couple of years she had been trying to learn something entirely different: she wanted to be a goldsmith. Hoping to make a career change, van der Horn has been training part-time at in order to learn the trade. “But I got frustrated because I had all these ideas in my head about things I wanted to make, but I realized that with the traditional goldsmithing techniques and practices, I wouldn’t be able to make those, or would only be able to make those after 20 years of experience, maybe,” she says. Even if she became an expert in goldsmithing, the soldering and welding techniques wouldn’t have allowed her to make some of the jewelry that’s she’s able to make today using 3D printing, and whatever she had ended up producing because of those limitations wouldn’t have been her original vision — only some watered-down version instead. “You wouldn’t be able to make such complex and very geometric objects,” she explains. “You wouldn’t be able to be so precise.” 3D printing offered a better alternative. Van der Horn first heard about the technology after spotting an article in her local newspaper, which talked about the website – a site offering printing services as well as tools and help to guide those who are new to using the technology, and which in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The website soon became a valuable source of information for van der Horn. She then began teaching herself how to use free software like and – a feat that’s even more impressive considering that she never had formal training, nor does she have any sort of technical background that would lend her to being able to quickly pick up and adapt to new software programs. In college, in fact, she had studied Psychology, and even at her day job, she only uses basic Office software. But YouTube tutorials and 3D modelers’ forums have gotten her a long way. Once, when she really got stuck, she hired a fellow modeler to help, paying him $50 to solve a particular problem. Van der Horn heaps praise on Shapeways, saying that the site made it so easy for her to learn and the prices for materials and printing costs were affordable. Although her initial efforts were a bit rocky – her first printed object was a 2D item – she’s now able to produce interesting, unique and complex shapes. Although she’s always been crafty – van der Horn has filled her house with homemade furniture – her real love has always been jewelry. So that’s what she’s making today , where she tends to prefer working with metals. Stainless steel powder, printed, then fixated by being placed in a gold bath or bronze bath becomes modern, wearable jewelry like rings, earrings, necklaces and bracelets. “It really stays close to the essence of what I’m trying to do. But I love gold and silver, and right now it’s not possible to directly print in silver or gold at Shapeways,” van der Horn explains. So sometimes, she prints the jewelry in plastic, then has it cast locally. “It’s a mix of traditional techniques (the casting), plus modern techniques (the printing of plastic models). It’s interesting to explore how those two worlds can mix together,” she adds. Today, most of her jewelry designing is done from the kitchen table or couch, from a beat up old laptop she wants to replace soon. In comparison, her goldsmith training takes place in a joint workshop where several artists pay to share the tools and equipment and split the cost of any repairs. ~~~~ Like many of the early 3D artists, van der Horn’s jewelry reflects its technical underpinnings with geometric shapes and sharp lines. In time, as people become more familiar with the techniques, that might change. Meanwhile, though van der Horn has always been drawn to geometric shapes herself, she’s still trying to make sure her customers see that her jewelry is coming from her – an artist – not a machine. “Many people place a lot of value on something that’s handmade and has a direct connection to the artist. The challenge is to show that I put a little bit of myself into my designs,” van der Horn explains. “You can do that by making things that are not so geometrical, or making every branch just off of where it should be. And maybe you can convey a sense that something comes from the heart of the artist,” she says. Now her shop is around a year old, and she sells her items and in local markets in Amsterdam. These days, she ships around 30 or 40 items per month, though that differs depending on the fairs and markets she attends. Given the recent interest (some may even claim hype) around 3D printing, we asked van der Horn whether or not she thought the technology could produce items of long-lasting value, the way that her goldsmithing skills may do. “It’s more than hype,” van der Horn asserts. “I do like to think we’re at the beginning of development and we’re only just exploring what anyone – people like you or me – can do with those techniques. For me, it feels like the new industrial revolution. Before, we were all more or less dependent on factories or multinationals who had production capabilities.” “Now,” she adds, “production methods are opening up to anyone.”
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CrunchWeek: Facebook’s Q4 Mobile Madness, BlackBerry’s Star-Studded Makeover, And All Things Crunchies
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
This week, and I were very happy to be joined by our New York-based colleague to discuss Facebook’s in its latest quarterly earnings , RIM and BlackBerry’s toward a real (complete with a ), and all the fun we had at the . Check it all out in the video embedded above.
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Is The FBI Dumb, Evil, Or Just Incompetent?
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 5 | 25 |
Your government is worried. The world is “going dark.” Once upon a time, telephones were the only way to talk to someone far away, and the authorities could wiretap any phone they wanted. Nowadays, though, suspects might be communicating via Facebook, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Skype, Viber. , inevitably: “Today, if you’re a tech company that’s created a new and popular way to communicate, it’s only a matter of time before the FBI shows up with a court order to read or hear some conversation.” But some of those providers have no interest in spying on their users. The FBI is not amused. “A government task force is preparing legislation that would pressure companies such as Facebook and Google to enable law enforcement officials to intercept online communications as they occur,” , by fining them increasing sums until they build government-accessible back doors into their systems. Which invites the titular question of this post. The FBI may be looking back with dewy-eyed nostalgia on the phone wiretaps of yore, but I think we can all agree that those would have been ridiculously ineffective if anyone with anything to hide had been able to easily acquire and attach tiny devices that made wiretapping impossible. That’s exactly the case today: anyone even remotely with technology can securely encrypt their digital communications themselves, via eg . So the FBI would only be able to wiretap suspects who are either too dumb to use encryption — in which case they ought to be easy enough to catch wiretaps — or who think they have nothing to hide. Meanwhile, they’d be setting a terrible precedent for other, more draconian governments. “We’ll look a lot more like China than America after this” … but the Obama administration, which not coincidentally appears to above , still seems poised to support this initiative. But wait, it gets worse. In order to claim this empty chalice, the powers that be will require a surveillance system that could be abused by the very kind of people it’s supposed to be used against. Could, and almost certainly would: if you build a tool that be used malevolently, then inevitably it one day be. Consider how Google was hacked in 2010 by adversaries who – at the government’s insistence – to access the private email of Chinese dissidents, and: Google had a database with “years” worth of FISA surveillance orders it received.The Chinese hacked it. — Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) Put another way: Basically, FBI is proposing massive fines for companies that design their systems to be secure. Insanely bad idea. — Julian Sanchez (@normative) Is the FBI actually too stupid to realize that this is a terrible, horrible, very bad, no good idea? Or — get your tinfoil hats on — is the pretext of hunting criminals and terrorists merely a smokescreen for requiring what in effect will be a gargantuan cross-platform surveillance system that will let them spy on anyone’s conversation at any time for their own ulterior motives? Probably not. ( , he said paranoiacally, .) But that exactly what’s happening in other countries. Witness by legendary security guru Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of RedPhone among other tools, who was approached by the Saudi Arabian government to help monitor and block tools like Twitter, Viber, Line and WhatsApp. When he declined, they suggested: If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities. That’s right, folks: if you’re not helping the government of Saudi Arabia secretly spy on all of its residents, then you’re on the side of the terrorists! Good to know. I vastly prefer Moxie’s take: While this email is obviously absurd, it’s the same general logic that we will be confronted with over and over again: choose your team. Which would you prefer? Bombs or exploits. Terrorism or security. Us or them. As transparent as this logic might be, sometimes it doesn’t take much when confirming to oneself that the profitable choice is also the right choice. If I absolutely have to frame my choices as an either-or, I’ll choose power vs. people. Similarly, a indicates that the FinFisher surveillance software is now being used in 36 countries, including those well-known pillars of enlightened human rights Bahrain, Ethiopia, and Turkmenistan, and the Syrian government has an entire electronic army targeting dissidents (who, unfortunately, continue to use Skype even though and Microsoft tap into Skype chats.) So we’re left with the last option: the FBI is simply technically incompetent. Unable to come to terms with the new world of technology, and take advantage of the many ways in which new technology can aid their investigations in new ways turning America into a , they’re instead still thinking inside the box of 20th-century wiretapping, and insisting that tech companies implement a counterproductive, expensive, and ultimately pointless toolkit…purely to satisfy their own blinkered lack of imagination. It’s sad, depressing, and dangerous. Let’s hope clearer heads and more farsighted visions prevail before this pathetically bad and dumb idea is actually implemented — but alas, I see no reason to believe that we can expect anything but more of the same high-level cluelessness for the foreseeable future.
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Qihoo’s iOS Apps Reportedly Removed For Violating Apple’s Rules
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
According to multiple sources cited in a report (link via Google Translate, h/t ), Apple removed all of Qihoo’s apps from its App store last week for violating its terms of service. Qihoo last week that it did not know the reason for the removals, which took place on January 26. In fact, the QQ Tech article claims that the apps were taken down manually, and there’s no timeline for their return–a situation so serious that Qihoo’s chief financial officer has reportedly flown over to the U.S. in an attempt to win back Apple’s favor. While it’s important to note that Tencent, which publishes QQ Tech, is one of Qihoo’s competitors, the latter company has developed a reputation for using questionable business practices. Last week, China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) to Qihoo for unfair competition, citing anti-virus software used in its Internet browsers. Tech In Asia has the rundown of the Qihoo engaged in unfair competition. Furthermore, this is the second time Qihoo has had its mobile apps taken down by Apple. The first time was almost exactly one year ago. Qihoo then that the removals were a mix-up caused by its apps receiving unusually high numbers of positive/negative feedback by unknown sources, which triggered an automatic removal by the App Store. While its apps quickly reappeared in the store last year, this time it’s more serious. Sources in Tencent’s report claim that Qihoo encouraged users to jailbreak iPhones, a boon because Qihoo often makes its apps available as single file downloads. (Its Android apps are unaffected). Not only that, but Qihoo also used banned APIs and repeatedly try to manipulate App Store rankings. In a , Qihoo said users who have already installed its apps aren’t affected and it is communicating with Apple to resolve the situation as quickly as possible. Qihoo has been emailed for comment.
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Line Doubled Users Every Day In Hong Kong Last Week
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
Japanese messaging app Line has just reported that new users in Hong Kong have been doubling each day for the past week since January 29. The app, which is the dominant messenger of choice in Japan, launched its on December 12, and looks like it’s riding a huge wave of momentum in Asia, ranking first on the free app category in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand, to name a few. Line provides free calls and chatting, and the company noted in its latest announcement that the hike in numbers in Hong Kong seems to have been prompted by some service provider decisions to impose annual fees on SMS messages. Typically, users on the same provider can text each other for free, but telcos charge for inter-network messages to try to get subscribers to pull in friends and family onto the same networks. Line is made by the Japanese arm of Korean firm, NHN, which operates its country’s dominant search engine, . Line also recently passed its on Jan 18, just a year-and-a-half after launch. The app counts about as subscribers. The main hook for Line, it seems, are the emoji unique to it. Users typically buy those from the company, and as early as July last year, reached about 300 million yen, or $3.75 million each month in sales. With the current growth rate for Line, that number is bound to be far higher now. More and more Asian messaging apps appear to be focusing on voice functions in addition to messaging. Unlike popular U.S. client, WhatsApp, which doesn’t support voice calls, other major Asian players like WeChat and Kakao Talk do. WeChat has about 300 million users and Kakao Talk has 72 million users.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 22 | null |
The Weekly Good: Random Acts Of Kindness With #GiveMondays
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
What if you found a blue envelope outside and it had a few dollars in it that you could use on whatever you like, say a coffee on Monday? This is a possibility with a new initiative that took off in London and is starting to spread itself throughout the world. is a community of anonymous givers who thought that it would be nice to start off everyone’s week with a random act of kindness. The act of giving makes you feel better, and it doesn’t matter what you give or how much you give, either. I don’t even know who started the website. Here’s the story behind GiveMondays: One fine morning we had an epiphany – giving feels good and Mondays are blue. Blessed with this wonderful insight we decided to set up GiveMondays and encourage people to give their week the best possible start by good deeds every Monday. So who are we? GiveMondays is an anonymous community of givers. And we’d like you to join us. To get started, all you have to do is get a blue envelope and leave it in a random spot with some instructions on how to pay it forward. Really small campaigns like this excite me, because it’s proof that the Internet isn’t just a place to post pictures of your cats. You can learn about and participate in some really amazing stuff. Seeing the tweets from people who are preparing and finding the envelopes is kind of neat to watch: [tweet https://twitter.com/jjmullz/status/298217790807097344] If you took the time to stuff a blue envelope and add the instructions below, you could inspire just one other person to do the same. That person could inspire someone else, and so on. This is true virality for good. You could leave an envelope by the bus stop or on a co-worker’s desk and just watch how happy someone is when they open it up. The best part is that you don’t even put your name on it. You just get to feel good for giving. If you’re giving kindness or receiving kindness in a blue envelope, and sign in to share your location. The site then displays on a map all of the places where envelopes were given and found. Jump into the comments and let us know if you plan on participating tomorrow.
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Superbowl Ad Confirms BlackBerry 10 Can’t Turn Trucks Into Rubber Duckies
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
BlackBerry 10’s first Superbowl commercial squeaked in right before a delayed the game for 34 minutes. Instead of focusing on what the new OS can do, however, the 30-second spot showed what it do: trigger spontaneous combustion, make users disappear in a puff of colorful smoke and then magically reappear out of manholes, or turn out-of-control tanker trucks into a giant, harmless pile of rubber ducks. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPbhzmIq9uU&w=560&h=315] In a press statement, BlackBerry chief marketing officer Frank Boulben said: “In our debut appearance at the Super Bowl we knew that it wasn’t feasible to communicate the rich experience of BlackBerry 10. We decided to use the light hearted spirit of Super Bowl ads to showcase what BlackBerry 10 can’t do. We wanted to let people know that BlackBerry is back and that BlackBerry 10 is worth checking out.” The ad was created by agency . Perhaps they would have been better off using Twitter to bid on “power outage” as a search term, which one advertiser after the outage began.
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Speech Tech Company Vestec Says Hello To $1.5M From MModal Founder
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
Speech technology company Vestec that it has landed $1.5 million in funding from V. Raman Kumar, the founder and former CEO of MModal, a provider of clinical transcription services and clinical documentation workflow solutions. Kumar has also joined Vestec’s board of directors as vice chairman and will oversee the development of products and services for the global market with a focus on healthcare. “I am delighted to join the Board of Vestec. Healthcare has a growing need for natural language understanding technologies, and Vestec, with its strong IP and advanced AI platform offers many competitive advantages which we will productize and bring to market,” said Kumar. Vestec was founded by a group of artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Waterloo under the chairmanship of Fakhri Karray, a University Research Chair Professor in the field of intelligent systems, as well as co-director of the Center for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. MModal was recently sold to One Equity Partners, JP Morgan’s private equity arm for $1.1 billion. Kumar is currently the chairman and managing director of Aeries Group and chief mentor at Zeus Capital. Last October, Vestec secured $6.4 million in institutional funding from Sansar Private Equity Partners, which it is using to expand its product portfolio for speech-recognition products and speech-enabled services.
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Apple Debuts New AppStore.com Vanity URLs For Developers During Super Bowl
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
Look! Apple just released a new product during the Super Bowl. Actually, it’s a new product for App Store developers – short “AppStore.com” vanity URLs. The domain made a grand public appearance at the end of the ad for the new Star Trek movie, which pointed viewers to Appstore.com/StarTrekApp instead of, perhaps, Facebook.com/StarTrekMovie or the movie’s homepage, which is the kind of link that usually gets this prime spot in TV advertising. , noting that the domain “AppStore.com” was a personal to Steve Jobs from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff back in 2008. Developers will now receive their shortened URL names when they submit their apps to either the iTunes App Store or the Mac App Store, according to on the matter, which was updated on January 31 with info about the new URLs: You can also create easy-to-read links to your app using App Store Short Links, which use the AppStore.com base URL plus a specific form of your app or company name. This provides a simple way for users to find your apps on the App Store directly from your website or marketing campaigns. These short links are ideal for use in offline communications materials like print ads, TV spots, app trailers, radio ads and billboards. Domain names can also point to either the company itself (e.g. http://appstore.com/gameloft) or the app (e.g. http://appstore.com/wheresmyperry), Apple says. These new vanity URLs could quickly turn into a land grab in the crowded App Store, which now has some 800,000 mobile applications available in the iOS App Store alone. That competition is something that Apple has prepared for, though. The company says that in the case of name conflicts or other errors, URLs with multiple results like appstore.com/airhockey, will direct users to a search page. Developers are encouraged to come up with unique names for their apps instead to prevent this problem from occurring. That’s likely why the Star Trek trailer pointed to “StarTrekApp” and not just “StarTrek.” (Well, that and also because of all the taking place within the app.) Currently, the domain name www.appstore.com redirects users to Apple.com (after a !), but the URL without the “www” opens up the iTunes App Store or the Mac App Store, depending on the app in question. Previously, short links were available using the itunes.com URL. AppStore.com will now replace itunes.com in this case. After checking with a couple of App Store developers and sources inside Apple, it sounds like the new vanity URLs will be able to be configured to whatever the developer wants them to read, but will rather be provided by Apple on a developer’s behalf. This conflicts CNET’s and our original reports on the matter. It’s confusing because of the way the developer documentation reads at present (see excerpt above, for example). This article has been updated to reflect that info. As always, we’ve reached out to Apple for additional confirmation, and will update if we hear back.
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StormFly Wants To Childproof Your Computer With Its Ubuntu-Booting USB Bracelet
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
When I was but a wee lad, I hosed my share of family computers simply because I wanted to help out — once I tried to free up space on a 6GB hard drive by deleting anything larger than 1MB. You can imagine how well that played out. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the founders of went through something similar, because they’ve just recently launched a for a device that should ensure it never happens again. At its core, the $59 StormFly is little more than a 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive with a bootable version of Ubuntu that someone (ideally a kid) can wear on their wrist. After a little bit of setup (mostly changing the boot sequence in a PC’s BIOS), those little ones whip the USB bracelet off their wrists, plug it into a PC or a Mac, and do whatever it is that kids do on computers these days without having to worry. Thankfully, since the StormFly’s user never has access to the OS that’s actually installed on the host computer, there’s no way for them to royally screw things up by mucking with other people’s settings or downloading things they really shouldn’t be. Not a bad proposition, especially when parents are exposing children to technology earlier and earlier these days (for better or worse). Granted, this is the sort of thing most of you readers could probably cobble together , but not everyone can be bothered to put together a custom computing environment for their kids. StormFly is about more than just a bit of hardware that you wear though — young ones are prone to lose things, which is why StormFly also features an encrypted online backup component… for an additional monthly fee. In the event that its user misplaces their USB bracelet, StormFly can ship out a replacement unit that has all of a user’s data back where it was within about 24 hours. There are, however, some issues to be found here. Perhaps most concerning its the project’s tagline — the team claims multiple times that the StormFly is “like a PC on your wrist,” which seems a bit misleading. To their credit, the project’s description puts a finer point on what the thing actually is (a USB 3.0 flash drive with Ubuntu loaded onto it), but it’s a questionable move that’s already caused some heated debate in the project’s comments section. Still, it’s a neat enough project, and it’s slowly been picking up steam — StormFly has currently hit $14,000 in pledges after only a few days, so it’s certainly got a shot at becoming a real product.
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Maybe Those Chromebooks Weren’t Such A Crazy Idea After All
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
When Google launched its Linux-based in early 2010 and its Chromebook , most pundits didn’t quite agree with our own MG Siegler’s premise that Google had dropped a “ .” A few years later, it sure doesn’t look like Microsoft has much to fear from . But despite its slow start, it looks as if the Chrome OS momentum is slowly picking up. Google has traditionally been very quiet about Chromebook sales and mostly focused on very large enterprise and educational installs. That’s clearly also the target market for the Chrome OS ecosystem right now, but when Acer says that its $199 C7 Chromebook now accounts for , it’s clear that some of those devices must have gone to regular users, too. Acer is obviously playing the value game with its $199 Wi-Fi-only device. Samsung, too, offers a and a more fully featured $449 version. Both of these companies partnered with Google from the early days of the Chromebook program. Now, however, Lenovo is also getting in the game with its $429 , which will go on sale later this month. It’s unlikely that Lenovo would enter this market if it didn’t see some momentum for Chromebooks, too. At the low end, price obviously makes these Chromebooks attractive laptop alternatives, especially given that even these affordable devices don’t actually feel all that cheap compared to the usual Windows laptops that tend to start at around $400. Since Google switched to a more last year, the whole experience of using Chrome OS must also feel a lot more comfortable for a lot of users who were previously turned off by the Chrome-only look. Still, with over 2,000 schools now using Chromebooks, the real market for these devices sure seems to be in the education space. Over the last year or so, I’ve heard from a number of educators that they prefer to use Chromebooks with their students than an iPad (their students probably think the exact opposite…). Not only are they obviously cheaper and come with service contracts and management consoles for administrators, but having a full keyboard and larger screen clearly make them attractive devices in the view of many teachers and school administrators. The fact that the devices auto-update regularly and are pretty much safe from viruses also makes for an attractive selling point when compared to traditional laptops. For Google, of course, this also means many of these kids will grow up in the Google ecosystem of Gmail and Google Drive, which surely isn’t going to hurt it once these students go on to college or get jobs. When Google launched Chrome OS, it was probably a bit ahead of its time. At the launch event, Google it wanted “to rethink the personal computing experience for the web,” but Wi-Fi and 3G/4G connections weren’t all that ubiquitous back then and still aren’t today, so Google started to add more offline features and file-management capabilities to Chrome OS, as well as larger hard drives to its Chromebooks. Web apps weren’t all that powerful back in 2010 yet, either, but now, thanks to the power of HTML5, there isn’t really all that much you still need a traditional desktop for. Google is clearly in this for the long haul. It won’t challenge the market shares of Windows and OS X on the laptop anytime soon, but it sure has developed into an interesting platform over the last two years. And maybe Google’s idea to couple its browser with Linux and a pared-down laptop wasn’t so crazy after all.
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Ravens Fans Are 14% More Likely To Fumble Their Smartphones During The Super Bowl Than 49ers Fans
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and the anticipation is palpable. I can’t speak for Baltimore, but on my recent trip to San Francisco, I realized I had never seen such a large congregation of people all wearing a single team’s merchandise. But all the excitement of the big game, combined with quite a bit of alcohol, actually makes for a relatively dangerous situation for your phone. In fact, a new report from (a company that offers extended warranties for smartphones) claims that 27 percent of Ravens fans have dropped and damaged their phones in the past 12 months, while 23 percent of 49ers fans have had an accident. According to the study, Ravens fans are actually more at risk of damaging their smartphones or tablets during the big game; SquareTrade says they are 14 percent clumsier than their Super Bowl counterparts in San Francisco. Of all the spectator-sports-related accidents coming through SquareTrade’s protection-plan system, 18 percent of phone drops are what the firm calls “liquid drops,” meaning the phone ends up in the toilet, a puddle of spilled beverage, etc. Shockingly, 13 percent of all drops are phones plopped into beer. Just goes to show that drunkenness and gadget operation do not go hand-in-hand. Followed shortly behind that, 12 percent of all spectator-sport accidents happen during a fit of rage or passion, where a device is straight up thrown across the room. In other words, put your phone on a table somewhere away from all the chaos. That’s the best way to ensure that a touchdown, spilled beer, or fit of rage doesn’t leave your smartphone hurting after a big hit.
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Tagwhat Aims To Become The Go-To App For Local Deals With Social Media Aggregation And A New Design
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
is a mobile startup trying to present users with content that’s relevant to their location — descriptions of nearby points of interest, , and now, with the latest app update, with local deals and events. The deals are pulled from Facebook and other social networks, and then recommended to users based on the time and location. Co-founder and CEO Dave Elchoness argued that this approach is significant because it means a user can see relevant deals without having to follow a bunch of different businesses on Facebook and Twitter. At the same time, the businesses get access to potential new customers (rather than just promoting themselves to existing fans), and they don’t have to change their behavior at all — which also means that Tagwhat doesn’t have to go out and recruit a bunch of businesses. The idea of deal aggregation isn’t new, but Elchoness pointed out that Tagwhat has developed its own technology to not just pull the content from social networks, but also to understand the content well enough that it can recommend “the right content at the right place at the right time.” For example, when I opened the app this morning, I saw a bunch of Super Bowl happy hour promotions from nearby bars. “Sometimes too many choices is acutally more confusing,” Elchoness said. “If there are a hundred places around me that are restaurants, it’s really hard to make a decision. If we call out the places that have an actionable opportunity, that reduces the number of choices, but it’s still extremely satisfying.” This addition is just part of a larger redesign to the Tagwhat experience, which allows users to browse all of the app’s content in a real-time feed. By default, Deals & Events are just one of a number of “channels” adding content to the feed, but you can also focus specifically on deals if you want. Elchoness said the company is looking at a number of different ways to monetize the feed, such as syndicating it with different content partners. Elchoness also acknowledged that he doesn’t have any official deals with the social networks, but he said that he’s directing traffic back to businesses’ Facebook pages (for example), “so I can’t imagine why they would object to our making their product just so much more engaging in the context of a location.”
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After Seducing 1M Little Monsters For Lady Gaga, Backplane Expands To Spawn More Fan Clubs
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
Geeking out about your favorite things can be embarrassing or annoying on the big social networks. But Lady Gaga’s tech team proved with her Little Monsters site that fans want an online home. Now it’s branching out to create communities for 10 more bands and brands, starting with Conde Nast and Guns’N’Roses. Backplane’s ready to take you down to Paradise City. The dedicated fan club social network idea helped make Lady Gaga one of the most popular entertainers in the world. Named after what Gaga calls her loyalists, lets people share their love for the shocking she-devil of pop and get exclusive messages and media from the Lady herself. Little Monsters pulled in nearly 1 million registered users and 2.3 million monthly unique visitors. Gaga crowdsourced merchandise designs from them that became her best sellers, and concert pre-sales on the site let her pack arenas around the globe. Backplane believes there’s real money to be made harnessing the passion people have for their interests. So do investors, considering from A-List VCs, including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund, Google Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, Menlo Ventures, and SV Angel. Today, steps out from her shadow. It’s staffed up, hiring designers, engineers, and Yahoo Sports and Entertainment’s former head of business development Jan D’Alessandro. By the end up the year, it plans to have 10 Little Monsters-style sites running. The first are , for Guns’N’Roses lovers, and Fingerprints for Conde Nast’s media site users. When I talked to Backplane’s CEO Matt Michelsen, he gave me the usual dry mission statements about “creating a solution to help people organize around communities, affinities, movement.” What was interesting was when he railed against Facebook, citing the low percentage of fans that Facebook Pages hit with each of their posts, and saying “their reach is not what they want it to be”. That’s a really serious issue for anyone with a Facebook Page or Twitter account, which is practically everyone. On those networks, brands, artists, and even religious groups don’t own the connections to their fans. They’re at the mercy of the platform, who at any time could say “Hey, you spent years signing up fans or buying subscribers with ads, but now you have to pay to reach them.” Those networks are at least theoretically free to set up on, and are where people spend their time. Backplane will have to demonstrate unique value to convince potential clients not to bet on Facebook or Twitter, and that their existing teams can’t build standalone communities. Another issue with Backplane’s plan is that these sites won’t work for every musician or company. I laughed out loud at an event where washed-up 2000’s rapper Jermaine Dupri told a crowd of entrepreneurs that people would flock to his private social network because “I’m me!” Yeah, but nobody gives a damn about you anymore, JD. When you’ve got 50 million Facebook followers like Lady Gaga or 30 million across Facebook and Twitter like Guns’N’Roses, though, it could work. That is, if the artist is willing to put in the work. Little Monsters thrived because Gaga sat down and actually used it herself. With serious commitment and tech from studios like Backplane, celebrities, media properties, and more can set up profitable little echo chambers exalting their greatness. And in the process, give fans a place where they don’t feel like weirdos for worshipping what they love.
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Craigslist Finally Gets More (P)Interesting, Adds Photo Grid View For Visual Browsing
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
Craigslist has taken another baby step forward to improve the usability of its retro-tastic web interface — adding a photo grid view to certain types of listings that allows site users to visually browse categories so they can quickly scan listings for items of interest. The new grid view feature (seen below) lets users toggle the view to see a grid of photos, rather than a list of text links. The grid view update was spotted by TC reader after Craigslist engineer Jeremy Zawodny about the addition late last month. Craigslist’s new feature is still a far cry from the hyper slick design of sites like but that’s only in keeping with the CL’s utilitarian mission — grid view is evidently about making the process of searching easier, not turning listings into eyecandy: Craigslist has famously stood firm against the vagaries of online design trends, taking a puritanical view of the ‘Pinterestification’ of the web to remain a minimalist island in a brash and noisy sea of perpetually iterating web services. Minimalist island — or wasteland of hyperlinks (as memorably put it), depending on your perspective. Site changes are driven by its community of users, according to Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark. Responding a question posed on Quora asking , Newmark said: “We’re a community driven site, and innovate in response to that.” Presumably, then, the CL community has been clamouring for searching on Craigslist to be a bit more (P)interesting. Grid view is not the only recent usability-focused tweak to Craigslist’s feature set. Earlier this year it — allowing users to view potential purchases on a map, upping its game in these location-obsessed times. Grid view is another small but telling step for the site, suggesting the spartan online classifieds service is feature-creeping its way forward, usability-adding inch by inch (its map view feature still isn’t being offered outside the U.S. and Canada, as far as I can tell). But when considering why CL is adding grid view, another c-word is important: not community — but competition. CL has been trying to shrink opportunities for third party services to piggyback on its its data and shift eyeballs elsewhere. For example, in June last year, , a third party service that mashed up Craigslist apartment data with Google Maps — subsequently adding its map view feature to make third party offerings less necessary. involved in CL data scraping, including , also found themselves on the receiving end of lawyers’ letters last year. By adding its own grid view feature, Craigslist is pulling a good portion of the rug out from under third party visual search services — services which it has been unhappy about for years. Since 2008, “at least three dozen” CL data scraping services — such as MapsKreig, Craiglook and CraigsFish — have been served with cease-and-desist letters by CL, according to the , “most for building websites that presented Craigslist listings in ways they considered to be more dynamic, visually appealing and helpful”. So the Craigslist competitive modus operandi appears to be ‘litigate first, innovate late’. Currently grid view only appears to be live in the U.S. and Canadian sections of the site — and is only available for certain categories including ‘housing’ and ‘for sale’. The ‘missed connections’ category under ‘personals’ also includes the feature. Users searching these sections are now offered four buttons to toggle the view between list view (for plain text listings); pic view (for text plus a thumbnail); grid view (for the new photo-heavy view); and map view (to view listing locations plotted on a map). It’s unclear when or whether Craigslist plans to roll out grid view (or map view) to other geographies. We’ve reached out to the company to ask about its plans and will update this story with any response. The grid view rollout appears to mirror the map view rollout — as if CL views grid view as complementary to map view and sees them forming a new, richer feature-set for site users.
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Iterations: The Spectre Of Inorganic Distribution
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
TechCrunch Distribution is a hell of a drug. In a product-obsessed town, it’s distribution that often proves , and when a person or platform can tap into it, they oftentimes move quickly to lock-in those advantages. However, not all distribution is created equal. In today’s technology landscape, while thousands of startups pursue the dream of massive distribution, a few platforms and companies hold tremendous advantages in their own special, elite tier: Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, to cite the big ones. These platforms confer great benefits to their owners and the ecosystem, and all is rosy until they decide to distribute and play favorites with their own goods at the expense of others. In the startup world, those moves can be frowned upon. The most recent example of this is a narrow but vocal strain of backlash in the Valley against mini-movies blowing up in their Twitter feeds. Vine is a quick short-form video mobile app pre-launch by Twitter and, given their new owner’s platform strength, was quickly to a large audience worldwide (if they had an iPhone). I personally enjoy Vine and, recently, a small set of my non-tech friends who have seen and tried the app enjoy the product and find it slightly more fun than a picture, in most cases. The chorus of backlash in the Valley, I believe, has less to do with the product, and more to do with the fact that Vine did not naturally grow (like Instagram), but rather benefited from “inorganic distribution.” There are other examples of “inorganic distribution” under slightly different conditions. As Snapchat late in 2012, Facebook their own similar app, Poke, seeking to use their massive distribution and concentration of eyeballs to douse water on the Snapchat flame. As any iOS developer knows, getting noticed by users in the iOS App Store is getting more and more difficult, and it’s not easier when Apple restricts which of its own native apps remain as defaults, especially when considering interoperability between apps. Google is slowly incorporating more editorial data (and sometimes, Google owns this data) as it returns searches for authors or restaurants, for instance (see: Zagat). And, Amazon recently made its dive into after years of selling books, backing Tim Ferris’ new cookbook, much to the chagrin of big publishers. In a textbook or business school case study, a platform’s incentive to inorganically distribute their goods makes perfect sense. It is a seemingly rational move. Right or wrong, in the world of startups, many believe that distribution should be earned without the PEDs of platform advantages. Up until it was acquired, Instagram was the poster child for organic distribution, an independent startup leveraging all the major platforms for its benefit and rising to the top by itself. Then, once it became a private entity owned by Facebook, different strains of power-user backlash have emerged, perhaps the result of the fact that now, as a property, Instagram has unfettered access to the drug that is Facebook’s distribution channels and can therefor play by different rules. While there are no hard and fast rules for platforms to follow, the most recent backlash around Vine has less to do with the product itself, and more to do with the fact it was given an outsized advantage under Twitter’s wings while many other startups trying to crack the mobile video nut on their own. “Inorganic distribution” may seem unfair, but it’s also a reality, and everyone building new products and hoping for distribution on other platforms should probably about what the big platform owners could do. They could acquire an app in your category to distribute. They could copy and rebuild an app in your category to distribute. Or, they could the data access for apps in your category, making the thought of distribution moot. While it may seem unfair, all is fair game when startups rely on platforms for growth. As a result, and as always, product-builders seeking distribution should plan accordingly.
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In Europe Etsy Sees Opportunity, Says Caroline Drucker [TCTV]
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
Last year , the marketplace for hand crafted goods, was with 22 million members in nearly 200 countries and had passed the $895 million mark for sales in 2012 (compared to $525 million for all of 2011). By the end of the year, over 100 million items had been sold in Etsy’s history. And as she explains in this video shot at the recent DLD conference in Munich, now Europe is a big opportunity according to Caroline Drucker, Etsy’s country manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Although it faces local competitors like , it appars there remains plenty of room for growth. Indeed, for international expansion Etsy has raised $40 million in funding last May from Accel Partners, Index Ventures, and Union Square Ventures. It also the team behind Mixel, the iOS app for creating photo collages. Since its launch in June 2005, Etsy, which focuses on allowing makers to sell handmade and vintage items, as well as art and craft supplies. The items include art, photography, clothing, jewelry, edibles, quilts, and toys. Etsy is modeled after open craft fairs that give sellers personal storefronts where they can list their goods. The company charges users a flat listing fee (of 20 cents per items), and takes a commission of 3.5% off all items sold.
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Backed Or Whacked: Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Laziness
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Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 2 | 3 |
Last week’s Backed or Whacked covered light-related products that could be controlled by a smartphone. Beyond making their way in the dark, though, modern humans have many other basic needs — maintaining well-being, feeling secure, and enforcing as much control over their domain as possible while exerting as little effort as necessary. The ability to achieve them with the aid of a smartphone, though, has arrived relatively recently, and the ability to crowdfund them via Indiegogo as per all of this week’s projects, even more recently. Amiigo, which is Spanish for “friend in good shape who spells poorly,” is a chevron-shaped shoe clip that monitors movement, enabling you to know precisely how many calories you’ve expended repeatedly lifting the Boston Creme donut until it has been reduced to sugary crumbs. Amiigo enters the increasingly crowded contest for survival of the fittest begun by early entrants such as Nike+ and Fitbit. However, the trendy joint between the hand and forearm is where all the wriststers hang out these days. These include the , , and other forthcoming entrants such as CES debutante and the HAPIwatch from . To enter that club, the Amiigo shoe clip neatly docks into a wrist strap. What the Salt Lake City-based team is counting on to set Amiigo apart from these rivals is more intelligence regarding the specific type of activity you’re doing. The idea of diving deeper into the nature of your exertion has been previously espoused by the developers of the $199 , which employs fancy sensors to monitor the body’s reaction to exercise beyond motion detection. Amiigo, which has more than tripled its $90,000 funding goal with about 25 days left in its campaign, dispenses with the extra hardware and is due to ship to Indiegogo backers in June for about $99. ADT has run a legitimate business securing people’s homes and businesses. Recently, however, bigger bosses like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have told their capos that they want into the protection racket, see? Extracting a monthly fee for peace of mind, though, has heretofore taken place mostly within the customer base of those in multi-room dwellings. There have been a few alternative approaches, though, like the apartment-friendly but nonetheless professionally monitored system. For those who are comfortable handling alarms — false and otherwise — themselves, though, Raymond Meng’s team proposes iSmartAlarm, which includes a base station/siren reminiscent of the old Power Mac G4 Cube. iSmartAlarm, set to ship in April and starting with a basic package of only $79 with no monthly fees, has big plans for expansion. The company eventually seeks to include features such as sprinkler controls and GPS pet trackers. For now, though, it is starting off with the basics — window/door-open sensors, motion sensors and, most importantly, that inert sign that scares away the bad guys. Should brazen intruders disregard the latter, the system can initiate taking successive photos of the perp and will send alerts to the smartphone owned by you or the vigilante of your choosing. iSmartAlarm’s campaign has been plodding along with over $30,000 raised of its $50,000 target with about 20 days to go. Now that the crowdfunding world has provided the gear to convince you of your health and safety, it’s time to take it easy. Perhaps you want to turn on that FM radio on the porch a few feet away, but the thought of leaning forward displeases you. Debuting at CES along with the ultra-thin, time-telling bangle that a future Backed or Whacked will discuss in more depth, the Tethercell may be your only hope. Designed by aerospace engineers, the cylindrical device stuffs a Bluetooth radio into a AA battery shell, leaving enough room in the cavity to insert a AAA battery. You give up some device stamina, but gain the ability to remotely enable and disable all kinds of products either manually or according to a schedule. Tethercell can also alert you when the AA batteries in a device are running low. Adding Bluetooth to products never intended to be controlled by a smartphone creates a wonderful twist on backward compatibility. While a shrinking number of devices that you might want to activate remotely take standard cells these days, the campaign’s Indiegogo page depicts small lamps, radios and baby monitors as examples. As Tethercell also works with some videogame controllers and many toys, the non-confrontational parent wishing for their kids to turn that damn thing off and pick up a book already can still pick one up for only $35 (although pairs are also proving popular). Recently charged above 47 percent of its $59,000 goal capacity, the Tethercell campaign has about 20 days’ worth of juice left.
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Food Discovery App Burpple Now Available On Android
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
Burpple, the social discovery app that seeks to connect food lovers from around the world, just released their in public beta. Their iOS app was in December 2011. The app now boosts users from 140 countries and 4,000 cities who have shared 300,000 “food moments,” including photos of dishes consumed and check-ins at different establishments. In addition to functioning as a social discovery platform, Burpple also serves as a personal food diary and automatically fills in the time, place and food for meals frequently eaten by each user. While the Android app is in public beta, Burpple’s developers say they will release and update with more features frequently. This video demonstrates how Burpple’s new Android app works. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybNlL2Ybtqs] Based in Singapore, Burpple received $500,000 in seed funding from Neoteny Labs and QuestVC in December.
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On-Demand Taxi Startup Hailo Raises $30M From USV And Others, Including Strategic Funding From KDDI To Launch In Tokyo
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
On-demand taxi service Hailo is looking east. After successful launches in cities throughout Europe and North America, the startup is intent on bringing its e-hail application to Tokyo. To do so, the company has created a Japanese subsidiary, and it’s raised some strategic funding from Japanese telco KDDI, in addition to Union Square Ventures, Richard Branson, and others. The funding plans were . Hailo is one of a growing number of e-hail applications that connect passengers with rides, relying on GPS location to find the nearest driver and in-app mobile payments to facilitate transactions. The startup first launched its service in London in 2011, and has since been slowly adding new markets that it operates in. In December it announced that it had , and had served more than a million passengers since launch. Its service is now available in London, Dublin, , Chicago, and , with plans to expand to more cities soon. Those include New York, Barcelona, Madrid… and now Tokyo. For that Tokyo launch, the company has planted a stake in the ground by creating a local subsidiary. It’s also raised a bit of strategic money from KDDI, one of the big telecom players in Japan. The strategic part of the deal is important, as the Western startup seeks to gain adoption in its first Asia-Pacific market. In addition to providing cash, KDDI can help get distribution in the gigantic Tokyo taxi market. The company has more than 36 million mobile subscribers, and can help get the Hailo app pre-installed on at least some of those handsets. On the business side of things, the wireless provider can also provision handsets to taxi drivers, and it would benefit from doing so. In that way, the investment creates a bit of a symbiotic relationship between Hailo and the mobile carrier. Tokyo is a nearly untapped market when it comes to e-hail apps. According to KDDI senior manager of business development Yasuo Kawabata, the Japanese cab market is the largest in the world, at about 2 trillion yen (or about $22 billion). So far there’s only a few apps for hailing a cab, including one owned by Nihon Kotsu, the largest local taxi service. But that app really only provides a way to call dispatch — it doesn’t have any of the same GPS location or mobile payment features that are common in Western e-hail applications. While Hailo wants to be big in Japan, it’s also trying to gain a foothold in other important markets — like New York City, where the Taxi and Limousine Commission will soon start running an e-hail trial with a variety of app providers. Key to that trial is integration with the taxi meter system for determining fare and payment. There’s also increasing competition in various cities around the world for apps looking to offer on-demand rides via mobile apps. In addition to Hailo, taxi-hailing apps like Flywheel (formerly Cabulous) and Taxi Magic are looking to expand into large metro markets in the U.S., including New York. Uber, which pioneered GPS-based location and in-app payments with its black car service, is also going after the low-cost market with taxis and hybrids. And there’s a new generation of ride-sharing e-hail apps like SideCar and Lyft that are expanding from their San Francisco bases to enter new markets.
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Huawei & Microsoft Team Up To Launch Exclusive Windows Smartphone in Africa
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
Chinese telecoms giant Huawei a Windows smartphone tailored for and exclusively available in Africa. The device, a customized version of the , was created in partnership with Microsoft as part of its new initiative. Prices have not yet been announced, but Gustavo Fuchs, director of the Microsoft Windows Phone division in the Middle East & Africa, told the BBC that “our aim is to be the most affordable Windows phone in Africa.” He estimates that there will be “tens of millions of smart devices available across the continent in the next couple of years.” Fuchs said 4Afrika’s objective is to increase smartphone penetration in the continent, in part by developing apps appealing enough to local consumers to make them consider switching from their feature phones. According to Fuchs, the current penetration rate is “very close to 10%” and less in some regions. “Affordability is important but without the right local content we believe a lot of users will not see the benefit in the change from a basic feature phone to a smartphone,” says Fuchs. The phone’s initial rollout will be in Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Angola, Morocco and South Africa, with phones being marketed according to the retail climate in each country. For example, in South Africa it will be operator-led, while phones will only be sold at retail in the Ivory Coast. Markets like Nigeria and Angola have a mixed environment, Fuchs said. The 4Afrika initiative also includes plans to develop affordable wireless broadband in Kenya’s Rift Valley and help developers in South Africa and Egypt create Windows apps. Africa is one of Huawei’s fastest growing markets outside of China. Last November, the company said revenue in southern and eastern Africa may climb as much as 30 percent in the next three years. According to , Huawei saw revenues of $3.42 billion from Africa in 2011, a 15% increase year-over-year. It has more than 5,800 employees across 18 offices in the continent, as well as a R&D center in South Africa and seven training centers. Huawei’s , the first under-$100 smartphone, has been particularly popular in Kenya, gaining a of 45 percent. The has a 4-inch touch screen and 5 megapixel camera, and can be on stand-by for up to 420 hours between charges.
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Maynard Webb On ‘Rebooting’ Your Career By Relying On Yourself, Not Your Employer [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
And Webb just added another role to his resume — author — to help other people better forge their own successful work lives. Along with Carlye Adler, Webb has written a book released last week called , in which he talks about the tools needed to build a successful career in the modern age, and how it’s different now than it’s ever been before. The new age of entrepreneurship we’re living in now, he says, is distinct from the “age of paternalism” that preceded it — whereas people used to be able to rely on their employers to “take care” of them and nurture their career paths through the years, today, companies just don’t last long enough to count on in the same way. We’re entering into a time when everyone should have a streak of entrepreneurship within them, even if they have no ambitions of actually starting a company themselves. It was a real pleasure to have Webb drop by TechCrunch TV last week to discuss his new book and the ideas behind it. You should watch our whole sit-down in the video embedded above, but I wanted to pull out one bit that I liked here in the text. Much of focuses on how many of us employees need to change how we view our jobs in today’s new age, but he also has an interesting opinion on how employers should also tweak their mindsets: “You can create an environment where people have a say. In the old days, we used to think of our people as our property. And we’d say things like, ‘Oh, that guy poached our person.’ And that is not necessarily the most enlightened view. …The best way to have your people be happy and satisfied is to earn the right to have them come back to work for you the next day, knowing that there are tons of other places. And what are you going to create an environment where they’re challenged, and inspired, and learning.” Watch the video embedded above to hear Webb discuss how came to be, what people in the work world can learn from sports, what his personal goal list looks like for rebooting his own career, and much more.
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Baidu’s Q4 Report Shows Growth Is Still Slow Despite Higher Profits
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
Baidu’s presented a mixed bag for the company known as the “Google of China.” Though its profit jumped by 36 percent in the quarter because of an increase in advertising spending, its 41.6 percent year-on-year revenue growth was the slowest since 2009, . Most of Baidu’s revenue comes from search-engine advertising. Though the Beijing-headquartered company’s online marketing revenues climbed 40.8 percent in the fourth-quarter, that represented a slowdown from its growth of 49.6 percent in the third quarter. In fact, revenue growth has fallen significantly over the past four quarters: it was 59.7 percent in the second quarter, 75 percent in the first quarter and 82.3 percent in the fourth quarter last year. Baidu had forecasted a slower fourth quarter as China’s economy lags. Other factors include users switching from PC to mobile, and more competitors in the search space. The slowdown in online marketing revenues has worried investors, as Baidu shares have fallen since 7 percent since the end of September. While the company’s online marketing customer base grew 4.1 percent to 406,000, advertisers spent less: revenue per customer slipped 3.1 percent last year. Baidu continues, however, to hold the majority (80 percent) of the search market in China, according to research firm Analysys. Baidu’s fourth-quarter revenues were slight ahead of forecasts. The company made revenue of $1.02 billion, compared to analysts’ estimates of $1.01 billion for the quarter. Baidu’s net income of $448.7 million increased about 36 percent year-on-year. The company said it earned $1.28 per American Depository Share, in line with Wall Street expectations. In the first quarter, Baidu says it expects total revenues of $945.4 million to $975.9 million. Analysts are looking for revenues of $967.09 million. One key factor is whether or not Baidu will be able to leverage its mobile products, which are a key part of its growth strategy. Though it before Baidu can close the monetization gap with mobile, Baidu is currently using 25 percent of its R&D budget to develop mobile and cloud computing in an effort to build an ecosystem that will allow its PC users to “seamlessly migrate” to mobile.
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Jawbone Acquires Mobile Health Startup Massive Health In Big Talent Acquisition
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
Hosain Rahman’s Jawbone may have first made a name for itself because of its line of high-performance Bluetooth headsets, but these days it has taken on a healthier image thanks to its more recent forays into activity tracking with the UP wristband. As it turns out, Jawbone is far from done tinkering with the UP experience. According to a new report from , Jawbone has acquired San Francisco startup Massive Health and Portland-based design firm Visere to help out. Sources with knowledge of the deal have told TechCrunch that the transaction for Massive Health was a talent acquisition, but also that stock and money changed hands totaling in the millions. Massive Health was founded in 2010 by Sutha Kamal and former Mozilla creative lead Aza Raskin with the goal of using data and smart, intuitive design to reinvent how people grapple with, well, their health. The startup locked up from Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and others back in February 2011, and is perhaps best known for its nutrition-conscious Eatery app. The app managed to pick up some considerable early traction — users logged more than 7 million food ratings in Eatery’s first five months on the market, but CEO Kamal wound up leaving Massive Health . Speaking of Eatery, it’s essentially stuck in limbo. According to a post on , Jawbone will continue to maintain the app for the time being, but it already seems as though active development has stopped — the app’s update was pushed out nearly one year ago. Visere isn’t as prominent a party as Massive Health, but it’s no less important and the company isn’t exactly a stranger to the Jawbone team. The Oregonian design firm had a hand in crafting the Jawbone UP’s companion iOS app, and it seems that talks of an acquisition have been in the works since at least July (or so from former Visere technology director Adam Wulf indicates). Curiously, former Visere UX lead Dayn Wilberding also notes on his personal site that Jawbone , and made the transition to his new employer in April 2012. Bringing a team that already had a hand in shaping the Jawbone UP app’s design language is certainly a logical move, but it may not be as new as it seems at first glance. According to GigaOM founder Om Malik, the two transactions have yielded a total of about 25 people that will be (or in some cases, have already been) folded into Jawbone’s software and design teams, though I imagine it’ll be some time before the fruits of this newly unified team become known to the rest of us.
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Two Makers Come Together To Make A Robotic Hand For A Boy In South Africa
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kB53-D_N8Uc] Two makers on opposite ends of the globe, Ivan Owen in Bellingham, Washington and Richard Van As in South Africa, teamed up to build a custom . The best part? They built it for Liam, a five-year-old South African boy who was born without fingers on his right hand, by collaborating online between continents. The pair met when Van As discovered Owen’s hand-made prosthetic prop hand he built for a convention. Van As lost four fingers in an accident and asked Owen for advice and help to build his own prosthesis. The pair began working remotely, with Van As sending casts of his hand to Owen who built models at home. Soon, Van As began working on a Robohand for Liam and the pair met to collaborate on a full prosthetic hand for the boy. Folks at heard about the project and donated two Replicator 2 3D printers to the pair who were then able to create parts by sending CAD files back and forth. In a few days, Liam had a prototype hand and the pair continued to refine and improve the model. Last month Liam received his improved hand and has been using it to pick up small objects – something he was unable to do previously. Just 3 days after receiving his finished Robohand… Liam is off and learning to use it like a champion! A little guy who couldn’t grasp anything with his right hand can now even pick up an object as small and difficult as a coin!! Imagine how many other little folks are out there who could benefit from this technology! The pair of designers are now to help other people who have lost fingers and cannot pay the $1,000 and up necessary to have “real” prostheses made. It’s a stirring testimony to the power of 3D printing and the energy of two men on a mission to make a little boy’s world a little brighter.
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AOL In Talks To Buy Gdgt, The Consumer Electronics Review Site Started By Former Engadget Founders
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
I’m hearing that (pronounced ‘gadget’), the consumer electronics review site founded by co-founder and former editor-in-chief , is in late-stage acquisition talks with . Sources tell me that a deal appears to be nearing closure in a matter of days. I’ve reached out both to gdgt and to executives at AOL for confirmation or comment, but have not yet received a response. The latter is kind of awkward because they are technically my co-workers and/or superiors (disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch,) but it is par for the course when it comes to M&A rumors. Also, it feels a bit strange to report on deals that are being worked on within my own (really big) company, but this is the word I’m hearing — and in the end, , news is news. Gdgt’s parent company has raised some from investors including Spark Capital, True Ventures, betaworks, AOL Ventures, Lerer Ventures, and others. The company has a staff of . This is not the first time the company has been in sale talks — the company has reportedly received interest from , and over the years. That of course means that this deal may not pan out, but I’m told that the current talks are indeed very serious. The thing here is that AOL buying gdgt would bring some of the most influential people from the past decade or so of gadget blogging back under its roof. Block and Rojas to begin working on , and their departures ended up being just the start of what became known as that many saw as damaging to the site (and a sign that AOL couldn’t keep its tech writers around, something that’s turned out to be a of sorts.) But now, AOL seems to be trying to that reputation. Engadget Editor in Chief Tim Stevens was foolish enough to swing by the TechCrunch office, so we asked him for a comment. He said, “We respect GDGT, we’ve been using their databox for the past year and a half, but I couldn’t comment on a possible acquisition.”
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Business-Focused Ad Startup Bizo Reports $22M In Revenue For 2012
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
, a startup that helps advertisers reach a business audience, says that it brought in $22 million in revenue in 2012, and that its annualized run rate at the end of the year was $30 million. The company , and it has raised a total of $20 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, Venrock, Crosslink Capital, and others. The platform offers ad targeting and analytics, and it includes both display and direct-response advertising. In addition to sharing its revenue numbers, Bizo says it’s now working with more than 600 brands, including two-thirds of the top 50 business-to-business brands. (Back when the company in April, Bizo told me that it was working with more than 400 brands, and that its revenue run rate at the end of 2011 was $18 million.) Advertisers include General Electric, Nissan, Virgin America, Box, Wells Fargo, and eBay. The team has grown by nearly 70 percent to more than 80 employees. And the company says it’s now running ads on 4,200 B2B websites. “We plan to keep our foot on the gas in 2013,” CEO Russell Glass said in a press release. “We have aggressive hiring plans and major product innovations coming down the pike, as we weave Bizo’s audience data even more tightly into the B2B marketing stack.”
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Tomorrow’s 10th Annual “Safer Internet Day” Now Involves Over 100 Countries, And Google Is Ready
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
Tomorrow is the 10th annual “Safer Internet Day” celebration in more than 100 countries on six continents. The idea is that you’re supposed to take a step back and think about how you can do a better job of keeping your private information more secure and keep yourself and your loved ones safe while surfing the web. Google is participating again, and has updated its “ ” site to fit in with its , along with some updated information on how you can leverage Google products for safety. This year’s theme for is “Connect with respect.” Its purpose is to teach people about their online rights and responsibilities and Google has been a leader in the initiative. Its Director of Privacy of Product and Engineering, Alma Whitten, had this to say: Protecting our users is one of our top priorities at Google. Whether it’s creating easy-to-use tools to help you manage your information online or fighting the bad guys behind the scenes, we’re constantly investing to make Google the best service you can rely on, with security and privacy features that are on 24-7 and working for you. The Good to Know site, launched last year, is a campaign from the Mountain View giant to educate people, thus making them a little more comfortable with using the Internet for all of those little daily chores that are made easier thanks to technology. The site has been updated this year with a new design, as well as tips on how to protect yourself and your family from identity theft and fraud. The interesting thing about online scams is that we all wonder who falls for them, but they wouldn’t exist unless people did fall for them. Yes, there is a section of the world that doesn’t fully understand that there are nefarious people trying to get information, and money, from them at all costs. Tomorrow’s day hopes to help folks out. With mobile devices becoming so prevalent, especially for doing things like banking and buying things, information like this needs to be updated and people need to learn along the way. Google’s example of keeping people safe includes how it handles what you do through its site, as Whitten explains: We encrypt the Gmail and Google Search traffic between your computer and Google—this protects your Google activity from being snooped on by others. We also make this protection, known as session-wide SSL encryption, the default when you’re signed into Google Drive. Because outdated software makes your computer more vulnerable to security problems, we built the Chrome browser to auto-update to the latest version every time you start it. It gives you up-to-date security protection without making you do any extra work. The key is that we don’t have to do any extra work to be more secure, and that’s what the world needs. Most people don’t understand what server side encryption means, and it’s quite scary to think about in fact. Through its Chrome Browser, the company is identifying new phishing sites daily, to make sure that we don’t fall prey to those who want to steal our information. Here’s a challenge, since you’re probably a well-educated Internet user: Reach out to someone who might not be, and ask them if they need any help or ideas on how to be safer. You’d be surprised how good it feels to educate and empower someone who isn’t as knowledgeable as you are. You can also download kits for kids on the site. [Photo credit: ]
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Facebook Graph Search Didn’t Break Your Privacy Settings, It Only Feels Like That
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
! This kind of email has been rolling into TechCrunch’s tip line since the of the new, and still-in-beta, search service from Facebook. The reveals are somewhat tantalizing – ! (Yes, we’ve been having fun with this here). But despite what it looks like, Facebook hasn’t actually violated your privacy. It only feels like that. If you recently discovered that people you’re not even Facebook friends with have seen some embarrassing photos from your past, then yes, you can probably thank Facebook Graph Search for that. In terms of gaining access to users’ photos, Graph Search allows any Facebook user to type in your name, and click the helpfully suggested link “Photos of…” which appears underneath the search bar. Next thing you know, that Facebook user – possibly a complete stranger to you – can see a bunch of photos of you! And some of those may not be photos you were willing to share. This has led to some immediate backlash. For example, Stephen Balaban of Lambda Labs under the headline “Facebook Graph Search Breaks Your Privacy Settings.” And it’s kinda sorta true. Except it isn’t. What Balaban is referring to in his post is the fact that even privacy-conscious users like his brother – who carefully maintained his privacy settings over the years to make sure that non-friends visiting his profile can’t see a thing – are now exposed by the new feature. A single Graph Search on Balaban’s brother’s name returned dozens of photos, he wrote. His brother was outraged. The problem in a nutshell is that Graph Search isn’t just about privacy settings, it’s about how respectful your Facebook friends have been of your privacy, too. For example, when vanity Graph Searching myself (this is a thing now, right?), I found that a college friend had posted old, slightly embarrassing photos “publicly,” tagging me and other friends along the way. In the past, this wouldn’t have been as big of a deal, because the photo would fall off your Timeline eventually. The photo was still public, but it was less-in-your-face about it, as compared with Graph Search. But perhaps the more confusing issue has to do with photos that aren’t mistakenly (or ignorantly) posted publicly by friends, but rather those that are revealed when two non-friends share a mutual friend or friends. In those cases, photos show up with the “friends only” icon instead of the globe icon representing a public share. If you click on this friend’s icon, you can see why the photo is visible to you. For example, it might say , or shared with , or or some other variation by which you now get to see the photo. That’s why, for example, I only see one photo on the profile page for my TechCrunch colleague Colleen Taylor, but I see nearly two dozen when I Graph Search her. Colleen and I were not Facebook friends at the time of the experiment (and yes, we’re going to fix that!), but we had lots of friends in common. I could see those friends’ photos, and they had tagged her in them. So now I got to see those photos, too. The thing is, I could have seen those photos – they were shared by a Facebook friend of mine with his friends. And I’m his Facebook friend. However, it would have taken a lot more effort to dig them up in the past; Graph Search makes it simple. This is Facebook’s general M.O., of course. The company takes the data that users are publicly, or semi-privately, sharing, and pushes it further out into the open. Facebook says it’s “making the world more open and connected,” according to its own vision statement, and Graph Search is just another example of that. And this doesn’t extend just to photos – , people are unwittingly sharing all kinds of information publicly on Facebook, some of which may end up being far more embarrassing or damaging than an old photo of you looking goofy/with a bad haircut/getting drunk/whatever. So what can you do about the photos you didn’t know were being shared? For starters, untag yourself in them. That’s a quick fix for those that your friends have inappropriately shared. If you want to go the extra mile, report the photo. To do so, in the same place you probably went to remove the tag – the “Options” setting underneath the photo – click “report/remove tag,” then choose the second option (“I want this photo removed from Facebook”) and the reason why. That will kick off the process of getting a more permanent takedown. . Or if your friend is cool with . But it’s very confusing, which is exactly the point. Facebook’s privacy settings are complicated, and even when Facebook tries to fix this by giving users more control over their data, things somehow end up even more complicated. Can anyone keep up? Does anyone still bother to try? In years past, the outcry over the kind of exposure Graph Search introduces would have been deafening. This time, it went from official announcement to — while still in beta. Apparently, we’re getting used to being over-exposed by Facebook’s changes, and we have no fight left in us. For the handful of those who proclaim “ over Graph Search another billion or so shake their heads with a laugh, or – even more likely – they just don’t care.
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Samsung Launches Strategy And Innovation Center, Will Invest $1.1 Billion On Innovation Through Two Funds
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
Samsung is already becoming one of the big heavy hitters in tech, but it’s looking to make more investments to ensure its place as the so-called “ ” alongside Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The company announced today that it is committing to investments in new technology, with the launch of its new Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center (SSIC), as well as a $100 million commitment to a new Samsung Catalyst Fund, to fund development of components and subsystems. That’s all alongside the $1 billion that Samsung is investing through its and its existing R&D centers around the world. The new Innovation Center will be headquartered at Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, and will be led by Samsung Electronics president and chief strategy officer Young Sohn. Today at a press conference, Sohn laid out the company’s strategy for investing in innovation over the next several years. By 2020, Sohn said, Samsung expects there to be 120 billion connected devices around the world. And the company wants to connect all of those devices, hopefully capturing an ever-larger portion of the electronics market in the process. Samsung hopes to double its revenue between now and 2020 and grow to a $400 billion company by that time. With the growing number of devices, Samsung sees the need for new technologies around cloud infrastructure, mobile privacy, Internet of Things, and other related topics. While much of Samsung’s R&D and innovation previously happened in Korea, the company sees a huge opportunity to find and take advantage of other innovators around the world. Sohn highlighted Samsung’s ability to control its own supply chain and create its own component infrastructure. But it knows that it won’t be able to go it alone in the future. With that in mind, Samsung is committing a huge amount of money to discover solutions around this fast-moving world of connected devices. That begins with the creation of the SSIC, which, while based in Silicon Valley, will also tap into other R&D centers around the world. “Being in Silicon Valley is critical because this is the epicenter of disruptive innovation,” Sohn said. Samsung will also continue making moves in M&A, Sohn said, pointing to examples of acquisitions that the company has made in Cambridge and Santa Clara. It’s also focused on further investment through venture capital, both through its new Catalyst Fund and its existing $1 billion Samsung Ventures America Fund. Sohn pointed to an increased hunger for investment in technologies that typical VCs have ignored. He pointed out that most investment has been very app-centric or focused on later-stage investment. Samsung, by comparison, sees more innovation that can be invested in through more hardware-based or infrastructure systems. As a result, the new Catalyst Fund will kick off to focus on components and subsystems, and to support it, Samsung is holding a competition. The SamsungCreate Challenge, which the company will launch later this year, will be run through the SSIC and will be focused on promoting innovation through Samsung’s Device Solution Architecture platform. Samsung will award $10 million in seed investments to winners of the contest and will provide incubation and support through its new Silicon Valley location and through partnerships with various R&D technologists. In addition, the company will continue to invest through its $1 billion Samsung Ventures America Fund. That fund did 20 deals for $160 million in 2012, and over the years has seen more than 60 exits, with 47 IPOs and 16 acquisitions. As a strategic investor, Samsung has been focused on many technologies that other investors have ignored. Sohn pointed out that very few VC firms are making investments in hardware or chips, places where Samsung can provide real value, and where Samsung hopes that other technologists can help provide new solutions. While Samsung has already been operating in Silicon Valley for some time, Sohn wouldn’t comment on the number of people who will be working through the SSIC at start. According to Sohn, the company will have an open budget, and will invest appropriately depending on the size of the opportunity in front of it. But, he also said that he’s not a big believer in hiring hundreds of employees, instead preferring to have a manageable size of people in the right places.
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The Orp Smart Horn AKA The Smorn Is Cooler Than It Sounds
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
JK all the way. Actually, the is a bike horn built by Tory Orzeck of Portland, a former GE Plastics and Nike designer who, after a run in with a few nasty cars, decided to build a “hearable” horn in a small, rechargeable package. The Smorn can blast trucks as they pass or, using the Wail Tail trigger, you can move the decibels and pitch up and down. The horn blows out a 76 dB tap or you can hit a 96 dB blast to wake sleepy drivers out of their texting stupor. The project has six days to go and is near its $90,000 goal so you’re almost guaranteed product when it funds. $45 gets you a Smorn in white, blue, orange, or “snot green.” $55 gets you a Glorp – a glow-in-the-dark model. The Smorn also has four front LEDs can strobe, and you recharge it via USB. It is also waterproof and you can set a special Pulse mode that will beep regularly as you ride down the street, keeping people aware of your presence. Tory wanted to solve the problem of bikers getting hit by drivers who were oblivious to the cyclists around them. He writes: We live here in Portland, Oregon, considered one of the most bike friendly places in the world. There are bike paths, bike lanes and designated bike friendly roads throughout the city. But no matter what, our rides mean sharing the road with cars. Having said that, bicycle versus vehicle accidents have steadily increased in Portland as more people take to the road on their bikes. Our project was prompted by both this phenomena as well as a few particularly well documented accidents in Portland involving cyclists and commercial trucks. The problem was that the cyclist was neither seen nor heard. While I know that Frodo and Bilbo will never have to fight the evil Smorn in their travels towards Mordor, it is nice to know that Strider would be able to find them if they pulled the Wail Tail in a time of need.
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Football Is A Very Rough Sport — The MC10 CheckLight Wants To Help Keep High-Impact Hits In Check
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
A company called is looking to help stop those neurological injuries before they start. The company, which focuses on products, has developed a device along with Reebok called the , a very lightweight skull cap that fits under a helmet and gauges the severity of an impact. When an athlete has a hit that may necessitate a time out or outside evaluation, the cap emits a yellow light. A red light indicates that the hit was even higher impact and more potentially brain damaging. The idea is that brain injuries are not as apparent from the outside as, say, a broken bone. So the CheckLight aims to give an outward indication of when something damaging may have occurred, so that help can come quickly. No one knows the need for a product like this better than MC10’s director of sports and business development . A Harvard alum and retired NFL player who was a during the team’s appearance in the , Kacyvenski has taken his fair share of hard hits, and suffered a number of concussions (in fact, he about the league’s handling of brain injuries). But according to Kacyvenski, the real promise of the CheckLight is how it can impact sports at the non-professional levels for kids and teenagers. Kacyvenski stopped by TechCrunch TV to give us a hands-on look at the CheckLight and talk about how it could change the nature of sports such as football, hockey, lacrosse, and others. You can see that in the video embedded above.
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Swartz’s Girlfriend Shares Intimate Details Of His Last Days, Explains ‘Why Aaron Died’
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
, the girlfriend of , explained why she thinks he committed suicide. After revealing intimate details of his seemingly chipper, curious lifestyle, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman argues that “I believe Aaron’s death was caused by exhaustion, by fear, and by uncertainty. I believe that Aaron’s death was caused by a persecution and a prosecution that had already wound on for 2 years.” Stinebrickner-Kauffman, who found Swartz hanging by his own belt on January 11, devotes the lion’s share of her post to dispelling the myth of Swartz’s depression. “Over the last 20 months of his life, Aaron spent more time with me than with anyone else in the world. For much of the last 8 months of his life, we lived together, commuted together, and worked in the same office,” she writes. “I was never worried he was depressed until the last 24 hours of his life.” “The Aaron I knew was sociable and excited to spend time with his favorite people, right up to the very end. He had plans and ambitions — huge ones. On January 9, two days before he died, he spent hours deep in conversation with our Australian friend Sam about the new organization Aaron was in the early stages of building. Sam asked him whether he had support, and Aaron replied that everyone who was competent enough to support him was, in fact, supporting him — classic Aaron pessimistic arrogance, but also a reminder that he knew his friends were standing with him. Sam gave Aaron a quick overview of Australian politics; Aaron expressed astonishment at how easy it would be to “take over Australia”, but concluded that a country of only 20 million probably wouldn’t be worth it. Self-esteem, needless to say, was definitely not Aaron’s problem.” Placing the blame on mental health, she argues, diverts attention from the true cause of his suicide: . Swartz was the target of a controversial legal case for releasing millions of pay-walled academic papers from the popular JSTOR database. In response, Hacktivist organization, Anonymous, replaced part of MIT’s website with a statement condemning the prosecution and Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren has proposed a bill to limit the prosecutorial power of similar crimes, dubbed “ .” The AtlanticWire boldly , that he may have in fact been depressed, even if he wasn’t outwardly showing signs, leading Stinebrickner-Kauffman to tweet: [tweet https://twitter.com/TarenSK/status/298488980876439553] Controversy aside, the post is heartbreaking and well written. Let us hope his death was not in vain.
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City-Focused News App Spun Partners With A+E, AskMen, The Awl, And Others
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
, a mobile app pulling together news stories relevant to your city, is announcing several content deals with well-known publishers, including A+E Networks, AskMen, Gothamist, Untapped Cities, The Awl Network, CultureMap, and “dozens” more. These deals are another way to make sure the app has plenty of locally relevant content and also suggests that content will cover a pretty broad spectrum, not just local news (the A+E deal, for example, includes History and Biography). In an email, CEO Andy Hunter told me that Spun doesn’t have to partner with a site to run its content — it just needs full stories to appear in the RSS feed, or on mobile-optimized web pages that Spun can display in the app. “We are forming partnerships every day, and hope to establish many more in the next few months,” he said. “We’ve gotten feedback from the smaller blogs that we’ve partnered with that they’ve gained new readers and seen good referral numbers from content shared from Spun. Ideally, in the future, any blog creating local content will be our partner.” Hunter added that there’s no revenue component to these partnerships, though he did say some involved an “in-kind” exchange, where a publisher promotes the Spun app in exchange for getting featured more prominently within the app itself. In the press release announcing the deals, Dan Suratt, A+E’s executive vice president of digital media and business development, described Spun as a “great opportunity” for the network to “inform and entertain audiences about the history of cities they live in and visit.” as the “next evolution” of Broadcastr, an app allowing users to pin audio content to real-world locations. In addition to its content aggregation, Spun features a cool design (you navigate different sections by spinning a 3D cube) and sound effects, and it automatically ties most of its content to a specific location. Content from all of the partners is live “in most cities” as of today, Hunter said. You can .
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Biased Review
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
It’s a sad, sad day when companies start reviewing their own products. Today is a sad, sad day. Nokia has just posted their review of the Lumia 620 budget Windows phone to the . And guess what! Author Adam Fraser had only good things to say about the little mid-range Lumia. He just so happens to be a “Writer and Reporter at Nokia Conversations Blog”, who “has owned more Nokia handsets than he can count” and receives his paycheck from Nokia, but just ignore that bit. I’m sure he’s totally objective about the whole thing. Here are some of my favorite, unbiased bits: From the front, you’ll see a double layer of colours, but from any other angle, all you can see is a vibrant, luscious lime colour. Comparing the weight with my Nokia Lumia 800, the Lumia 620 feels lighter, but not in a cheap way. It feels solid and heavy enough to fit snugly into the palm of my hand while the smooth back and rounded edges give the whole phone a comfortable feel. Read: This phone may feel cheap and light, considering that it’s made of cheap, light materials like polycarbonate thermoplastic. But don’t mind that. Look! Pretty colors! The 3.8″ TFT WVGA ClearBlack display produces some vivid colours, equally on par with the Nokia Lumia 920 and the Lumia 820. Read: The smallish display looks really pretty with all these live tiles! Once I’d made some more adjustments to my Start screen – resizing Live Tiles, adding email tiles, and moving tiles around – it was time to delve into the Windows Phone Store to download some great games and apps. I made sure I covered the basic, and essential, as far as I’m concerned, apps/games; Cinemagraph, Creative Studio, 4th & Mayor, Weather Flow, Draw Something and Angry Birds. Read: The Windows Phone Store has a ton of apps, almost one quarter of the App Store’s app selection. Download them, even if you don’t recognize their names, because our partner Microsoft spent a ton of money getting developers to build for Windows Phone 8. You’d be mistaken in thinking that because a device has 512MB of RAM, it would run slowly and you’d experience a certain amount of lag. However, this isn’t the case. The dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon CPU does a fantastic job at keeping everything running as smooth as any other – more expensive – smartphone. Read: Who needs 2GB of RAM or a quad-core processor when there are hardly any apps to require that level of performance? We’ve about how the review process has changed in tech media. Newspapers and magazines used to receive review units months or weeks in advance of some arbitrary embargo date, at which point they could post 3,000 words about the latest feature phone from Samsung. Then, with the introduction of the internet, reviews became a race of sorts, with each media outlet having maybe a week’s lead time with a device. Sometimes, less than that. This is a flawed process, to say the least, but those journalists who do review a product usually take the responsibility very seriously. For example, TechCrunch reviews include intensive battery testing, stress testing, graphics and processor testing, and our reviewers usually ditch our primary device altogether for the review period. It’s hardly enough time to notice certain bugs, or other device flaws that show up with a lot of wear and tear. It’s not perfect, but it’s honest. This is why we don’t always get every review unit. Back in the CrunchGear days, Range Rover stopped talking to us because of the comments (subsequently lost when we transitioned to Facebook comments) in this . Sending out units for review is a risk that companies run. They may get a glowing review and sell more devices because of it. In that case, it’s the most effective form of free marketing ever concocted. On the other hand, they may get a negative review which might hinder sales. Luckily, Nokia has solved that problem altogether. Instead of running the risk, they just published their own review. It includes an unverified defense of the less-than-impressive Lumia 620 specs, as well as a nice little promotion for some of Windows Phone 8 apps. The review is a beautiful mix of marketing speak and review terms, woven so intricately together that the reader may entirely forget the URL of the blog. Which is why I’ll remind you: http://conversations.nokia.com/2013/02/04/compact-vibrant-and-lots-of-fun-our-nokia-lumia-620-review/
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TechCrunch NY Is Holding Office Hours To Find The Big Apple’s Best Startups
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 |
Wanted: An entrepreneur or team of rivals who want to stand on stage to present their project to thousands of investors and members of the media. Sounds like you? You’re in luck. TechCrunch is holding Office Hours this week to scope out some potential Disrupt Battlefield and Startup Alley participants. These things usually sell out wicked fast so read on to figure out what to do. Office Hours is one of the best opportunities we can offer to a startup to get featured in our massive Disrupt NYC conference. More than a few of our past Disrupt alumni were discovered during Office Hours. It’s pretty straightforward: you come, we meet for 10 minutes, learn about your product, and give any feedback we may have. Do you have to be at office hours to grab a spot at Disrupt? Absolutely not, but putting a face to the name definitely helps. We’ll hold the meetings in our Aol Ventures office at 670 Broadway on Thursday, February 7, at 1pm. But before you rush over and sign up, there are a few requirements: You can sign up for a session with , , or right here.
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FoodPanda, Rocket Internet’s Answer To GrubHub And Delivery Hero, Now Delivering Food In 23 Countries And Raising Money
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
, a Rocket Internet-backed online platform for aggregating and delivering food from take-out restaurants, is today announcing that it has expanded to 12 more emerging markets, taking the total number of countries that it covers to 23. The company is also in the process of raising money to help fuel the growth, essential to compete against the likes of in the U.S., or or based in Europe, all of which have also raised hefty funding rounds to expand their labor-intensive operations. Rocket has a track record of raising large rounds for its incubated companies, with recent deals including , an Asian Amazon clone, $13 million for , and potentially up to . As for who might be investing this time around, Rocket tends to turn to a number of repeat investors, including JP Morgan, Holtzbrinck, and Tengelmann. Like other Samwer/Rocket ventures, FoodPanda is getting a lot of mileage out of bringing successful e-commerce business ideas — in this case, offering a logistics, online ordering and analytics backbones to take-out food businesses — in markets that its would-be rivals have yet to tackle. FoodPanda’s new markets include Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Hungary, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Russia, Senegal and Ukraine, where it operates under a variety of brands — foodpanda, foodalia, foodnation, hellofood, hungrypanda and pidiendo — and has forged “thousands” of partnerships with takeout restaurants. FoodPanda says that it is continuing to add more, with the focus remaining Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Given that FoodPanda focuses almost exclusively on less affluent markets, and that Just-Eat raised its most recent round, $64 million, last year at one of the lower points of the European recession, it’s seems that this is at least one online business model that works despite larger economic forces at play. But like other Rocket ventures, Rocket seems to take a hedged approach to the business — launching a number of businesses in a variety of areas, to see which works best. There is also the opportunity to leverage systems created for one business in another — for example, Payleven’s mobile payment solution can become the basis for collecting money from customers that take orders via FoodPanda. “We have built strong relationships with thousands of partners, including the best restaurants in every country. That is how we provide the greatest culinary variety online. We see an impressive demand for food ordering online user-friendly, fast and most convenient,” said Ralf Wenzel, FoodPanda’s co-founder and newly appointed global MD appointed to further concentrate its expansion strategy and fundraising goals. Wenzel used to be the COO of Moneybookers and before that was an SVP at mobile content company Jamba/Jamster, once a part of News Corp. when it had high ambitions in new media.
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News Of A National ‘Super Wi-Fi’ Network Was A Media Fabrication
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
America got bamboozled yesterday, courtesy of an unintentional media fabrication: the government . A somewhat confusing feature in about a few loosely connected government initiatives about greater access to faster Wi-Fi got twisted into a story about a plan to create a so-called “Super Wi-Fi” network. What ensued looked like a game of telephone between hair-trigger media outlets. In fairness, I was halfway though regurgitating the myth before my contact at the FCC told me that there was no such plan. Ironically, the story is now more interesting as a case study in how the need to break news has overshadowed fact-checking. The (not a) super Wi-Fi network was a Frankenstein of two separate initiatives: for better Wi-Fi hardware and the potential auction of unused television station spectrum (600 MHz) to the nation’s wireless carriers. Taken together, it’s possible, but highly unlikely, that this would result in a blanket, super-fast Wi-Fi network across most of the country. Spinning a little spice into the story, the seemed to imply that this could result in an unmanaged public Wi-Fi network and combined it with a juicy story of how telecom companies have launched a fierce counter offensive. As Ars Technica pointed out, the story was “a grain of truth, exaggerated and repeated.” Headlines quickly snowballed out of control: “FCC Proposes Free Wi-Fi For Everyone In The US,” ( ); “FCC wants free Wi-Fi for all” ( ); and “Telecom Corporations Are Trying To Stop The Government From Offering Free ‘Super Wi-Fi'” ( ). Sacrificing traffic numbers, I waited to hear back from an FCC spokesperson who promptly explained the confusion and issued an official statement: The FCC’s incentive auction proposal, launched in September of last year, would unleash substantial spectrum for licensed uses like 4G LTE. It would also free up unlicensed spectrum for uses including, but not limited to, next generation Wi-Fi. As the demand for mobile broadband continues to grow rapidly, we need to free up significant amounts of spectrum for commercial use, and both licensed and unlicensed spectrum must be part of the solution. In other words, there’s likely no national public Wi-Fi network and any plan moving into the future is likely to be a combination of both more advanced technology and private telecommunications companies. Both the and Mashable wrote posts to clarify the mistake (Mashable apologized for the confusion). Jeffrey Eisenach of the American Enterprise Institute was less diplomatic, the story, “almost entirely fiction.” I also reached out to , which critics of the piece didn’t seem to do. I never received a full explanation, other than the writer didn’t think the criticism of her piece was accurate, at least as of early yesterday. I suspect we’ll be hearing something soon, given the hubbub. Even though I was thankfully cautious, it could have easily ensnared me, too. In the scheme of things, critics (and those who waited) ended up losing out on a lot traffic. I probably lost out on even more traffic by not making the out to be the villain. The less sexy truth is that it’s due to an online media environment that unintentionally demands speed over accuracy. Media drama aside, you’re not getting access to free super-fast Wi-Fi soon. So, pirating is still going to take just as long.
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4G Will Make Up Just 10 Percent Of Global Connections in 2017
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
It looks like just 10 percent of mobile data traffic will be based on 4G networks in 2017, according to Cisco Systems’ . It’s significant growth from the extent of today’s 4G deployments, which make up just 1 percent of global connections. But with devices like the iPhone 5 becoming common in larger economies, we may feel the technology rift between early adopter countries and laggards even more in four years’ time. Cisco’s measurement of 4G includes too, in addition to cellular 4G, so LTE will support less than 10 percent of global network connections. WiMax was pipped as a mobile 4G standard before cellular 4G was ready for the market sometime back around the mid-2000s, but in spite of its first-mover advantage, more carriers have chosen to deploy cellular 4G like LTE. One reason is that upgrades to 4G can piggyback on existing 3G infrastructure. (Think of WiMax more like super-charged Wi-Fi, so it’ll take entirely new equipment.) Another prediction that Cisco makes for 2017 is that the Asia-Pacific will generate 47 percent of all mobile data traffic in the year, consuming a whopping 5.3 exabytes a month. North America is next at 2.1 exabytes/month, followed by Western Europe at 1.4 exabytes/month. The Middle East and Africa will consume 0.9 exabytes/month, Central and Eastern Europe at 0.8 exabytes/month and Latin America at 0.7 exabytes/month. Speaking in Japan, Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing at Cisco, said that the country will consume a huge 16 percent of global traffic on its own. Global mobile traffic will also grow at 66 percent every year between now and 2017, and will hit 134 exabytes of data. That’s about 3 trillion video clips, and represents about 46x of all mobile traffic from 2010. 2017 will bring on 3 billion more mobile devices—but just an addition 1 billion people onto the network. A proportion of these devices will be Internet-enabled appliances and M2M (machine-to-machine) communication-ready systems like smart car dashboards, Webster said.
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As An Asian American, Have I Ever Experienced Racism In The Tech Industry, Even If It’s Usually Subtle And Non-Malicious?
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
, : .
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MediaTek Anticipates Slow Q1, But Still Confident About Its Fattening Chunk of China’s Smartphone Market
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
reported lower-than-expected revenue in its fourth quarter, but the Taiwanese handset chip maker says its still poised to stand strong against rivals like Qualcomm. The company, which was founded in 1997 and entered the mobile phone business in 2004, has grown rapidly on the back of its reference designs, which are purchased and re-branded by manufacturers. MediaTek’s of clients include Coolpad, Huawei, Lenovo, Samsung and ZTE. MediaTek at its investor conference this week that compared with the third quarter of 2012, fourth-quarter net profit decreased around 9 percent to $4.88 billion NTD (about $165.39 million USD), while revenue in the fourth quarter finished at $26.73 billion NTD. The company had anticipated a decrease of about two to five percent. MediaTek’s consolidated revenue for 2012 was $99.26 billion NTD, while year-on-year consolidated revenue grew 14.33 percent. The net profit for all four quarters of 2012 was $15.68 billion NTD. MediaTek blamed inventory issues, as well as pricing competition from manufacturers in China and Latin America, for the slowdown in revenue growth. In response, the company will decrease its product inventory and reduce the price of some chipsets by 10 percent, a move it anticipates will decrease its overall growth in the first quarter of 2013 to the range of $21.9 billion NTD to $24 billion NTD, down from $26.73 billion NTD in the fourth quarter. MediaTek says that it plans to return to positive growth in the second quarter of 2013. Despite its current growing pains, MediaTek’s chip shipments continue to enjoy strong momentum, especially in the smartphone segment. This year, it plans to ship 200 million chips, mostly to smartphone makers in China. MediaTek says it of selling 110 million smartphone chips in 2012, an impressive jump from the 10 million chips it sold in 2011. Though , MediaTek continues to cater to the latter segment, a market that it dominated by focusing on emerging markets like Indonesia, India, Brazil and Russia. Overall in 2012, Media Tek sold chipsets for about 500 million phones, eclipsing Samsung, HTC and Apple in total volume, . In 2013, MediaTek its marketshare in China to be an impressive 30 percent to 40 percent in TD-SCDMA chipsets, 50 percent to 60 percent in WCDMA/HSPA and 70 percent to 80 percent for EDGE chips. The company says it anticipates TD-SCDMA chipsets to make up 20 percent to 25 percent of its projected sales volume in 2013. This is important for MediaTek because TD-SCDMA is China’s 3G standard. At last month’s Qualcomm QRD summit, China Mobile’s deputy manager of products Wang Hengjiang that in 2012, there were over 60 million TD-SCDMA devices sold, which means that, as of the end of November, there were over 220 million 3G users in China. China Mobile’s goal is to sell twice as many TD-SCDMA devices this year, with smartphones taking up over 80 percent of that segment. Furthermore, MediaTek’s first quad-core processor, the MT6589, just launched, and the company also released a dedicated processor for tablets, which is expected to launch in the third quarter. Feeling the heat of competition, Qualcomm has responded with it to help such as North America. The San Diego-based company is also focusing on creating products that will take advantage of the upcoming arrival of 4G LTE in China. Its dual-core CPU MSM8930 Snapdragon S4 Plus will also start shipping in devices over the next few months.
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Google Cleared By Australia’s High Court In Landmark AdWords Case
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
Google in Australia on Wednesday when the country’s High Court ruled that the Internet behemoth did not violate fair trade law by allowing companies to purchase AdWords containing their competitor’s names. Five judges of Australia’s High Court ruled unanimously in favor of Google, overturning a previous ruling from the Federal Court, which had ordered the company to set up a compliance program to make sure paid ads on its search engine are not misleading. The Federal Court had found in 2012 that four advertisements were misleading and breached Australia’s Trade Practices Act 1974. Google appealed the decision, bringing the case to the High Court. The Mountain View-based company had maintained that it acts as a publisher and is not responsible for content by AdWords purchasers. The High Court’s decisions concludes a six-year-long battle between Google and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the country’s fair trade regulator. The ACCC brought the case against Google in 2007, alleging that the Internet giant had sold misleading advertisements allowing companies to purchase competitors’ keywords between 2005 and 2008. The case was triggered by search results in 2006 and 2007, where a search for Honda Australia would show a paid advertisement for a Honda competitor CarSales. The ACCC claimed that such ads linked CarSales to Honda Motor Co. and were therefore deceptive. In its ruling, the High Court said Google was not responsible for the messages in sponsored links sold through its AdWords advertising platform because it had not created them. “Ordinary and reasonable users of the Google search engine would have understood that the representations conveyed by the sponsored links were those of the advertisers, and would not have concluded that Google adopted or endorsed the representations,” the High Court in a news release. While significant, this case is certainly not the first time Google has been embroiled in litigation over selling AdWords ads triggered by third-party trademarks. Companies that have sued Google include American Airlines, GEICO, and the Rosetta Stone, but Google usually comes out on top in these cases, as Forbes .
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Fly Or Die: Microsoft Surface Pro
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
The gap between a full-fledged PC and a touchscreen tablet has finally found a bridge in the Microsoft Surface Pro. The Windows 8 device will be available for purchase on February 9, but we got a sneak peek with the Surface Pro and took it for a test spin in the Fly Or Die studios. So what’s the verdict? Well, both John and I agree that this is some of the best work we’ve ever seen out of Microsoft. The company sent some mixed messages with the Surface RT, which was more of a web-browsing, email tablet with a cute keyboard than a full-fledged computer. But the Surface Pro steps up where the RT fell short, letting users load up any programs they want. It’s the difference between a working, usable computer and a pet project by Microsoft engineers. As it stands, we’re both very excited about the prospect of a real and powerful Win8 machine to finally stand alongside similarly powerful OS X devices. We’re both still a bit hesitant towards Windows 8. The Surface Pro rides the line between old, Classic Windows and the new “Metro” UI. The developer base needs time to figure out the Metro side of Windows 8, and having the desktop model as a backup helps ease the transition. Will it be the most popular consumer gadget on the market this year? No. But does it prove that Microsoft can be a powerhouse in the hardware realm? Absolutely. Two flies.
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The Microsoft Surface Pro Proves That The PC Is Back
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
I come bearing glad tidings. After decades of OEM malaise, a constant parroting of the speeds and feeds mantra, and an aesthetic that was formulated in the back room of a dingy Staples office supply store, the PC is really back. In short, the Surface Pro is so good that it could drive Windows 8 adoption with enough force to make people reconsider Microsoft’s odd new OS. Microsoft bet the farm on a new paradigm and it needs a champion. Surface Pro is the right hardware for the job. I haven’t been a Surface apologist and, although I’ve seen Windows 8 as more of a success than a failure, no hardware has truly made me see the value of the platform until this model Surface. But enough effusive praise, let’s look at the hardware. Back in November I noted that launched the Surface RT long before the platform was stable or even interesting. The RT, as you’ll remember, runs a quad-core Cortex-A9 ARM chip clocked at 1.3 GHz. It’s not awful, but it’s not great, either. This model attempts to right those wrongs by turning the Surface from a “tablet” device into a what essentially amounts to a Windows laptop. This is an important distinction. The Surface isn’t supposed to be a tablet you drop on the coffee table and use when you want to look up something on IMDB. It’s a powerful computer with enough speed and graphics chops to give any other manufacturer’s laptop a run for its money. Previous Windows tablets have been hampered by a strange and messy amalgam of interfaces, pen input, and a focus on the slate form factor. This device, on the other hand, is a real hybrid – a laptop that is also a tablet that is also a media consumption device. You will use it just like you use a laptop whereas, by definition, the hobbled RT version of the Surface is meant to be used as a tablet.
In examining the Surface Pro we must remember that, physically, the Pro is essentially the same device as the . It is very slightly thicker at exactly a half inch versus .37 inches for the RT. It is also a half a pound heavier than the 1.5 pound RT.
The system runs an Intel dual-core 1.7GHz Core i5 chip and comes with 64 or 128 GB of storage (although, as mentioned all over the web, the 64 GB has only 23 GB available and the 128 GB model has only 83 GB available. The rest is taken up by system files.) It has a microSD slot on the right side, one USB 3.0 port, a mini DisplayPort, and a headphone jack. It uses a magnetic charging system that snaps, with some degree of difficulty, into a little slot on the side. It has 4GB of memory and a 1920×180 pixel 203ppi screen with 16:9 aspect ratio. The device also uses a Wacom digitizer and is compatible with Wacom pens. This is a boon for artists and designers as it means you have varying levels of pressure available when drawing on screen. You can also use the pen to control the on-screen interface, although I far prefer a mouse or, barring that, a finger on the touchscreen. Everything that people loved/hated about the RT is here: the loudly clicking magnets that hold in the power adapter and keyboard, the kickstand that hides itself away when not in use, and the glossy screen with touch-sensitive bezel. The kickstand alone is worth a few hours of Mac-lover ridicule or Windows-lover bemusement. Kickstands are for mid- to high-tier Android phones, not tablets, they’ll say as they attach cases that fold into kickstands to their iPads and Galaxy Tabs. I personally found the kickstand to be very useful when the Surface is in laptop mode although the lack of angle control is limiting. In short, the kickstand is a cool idea and integral to the Surface experience even if it does increase the overall footprint by two inches. In terms of usability I had no trouble learning the vagaries of Windows 8 on this device or actually enjoying the experience. That’s right: I liked Windows 8 on this for the simple reason that the balance between Classic and Touch UIs (which is what I’ll call Metro here) was easy to understand. This balance doesn’t help Microsoft convince us to use Touch more – you still tend to land in classic mode more often than not – but it does make Windows 8 far more usable. Plenty of ink has been spilled by those complaining about Windows 8 and the Touch UI. While I would be loath to hand this device to a novice Windows user, once you get a hang of the new interface it’s quite simple. Much of the Start menu functionality ends up in the “tiles” Touch interface while the search button makes it easy to find and run apps. As more apps use the interface I think the Classic mode will be phased out. Until then, you’re sort of stuck in UI limbo. That said, how does this device fare as a computing/content creation platform? I’ve been using the Pro as my primary laptop for the past week and even traveled with it. As a Mac snob this is a fairly unique turn of events. Usually I would test a laptop for a few days and revert back to my MacBook. As a laptop it is excellent. I was able to do nearly everything I needed to do including the editing of large documents, photo management, blogging, some minor gaming, and plenty of email and web browsing. I did run into some trouble while trying to play Civilization V. The game froze for a while and then launched in “touch” mode, thereafter sitting underneath the task bar where various features were hidden from my mouse. Amnesia didn’t run at all out of Steam. However, Microsoft did show proof that games like Far Cry played on the Surface. It’s hard to fault the company for third-party titles when nearly every other app ran just fine on the platform. Even Minecraft, that paragon of high-performance gaming, ran beautifully. Many of the issues are associated with running a keyboard and mouse-based title with a touchscreen device and should be remedied over time. Everything else worked perfectly. It installed Vim and Putty and all of my favorite Windows programs without having to worry if they were compiled for RT. I also installed a set of applications into the Touch interface where I ran Skype, IM+, and some news readers. Even the much-reviled Mail app worked well in Touch mode. I didn’t notice that the Surface was formally a tablet. It worked just like a PC and, thought I got most of my work done in Classic mode, it was a pleasure to swipe along the sides to bring up windows, the UI “charms” for search and settings, and the various little tricks that Windows 8 employs to make the move from touchscreen to keyboard as seamless as possible. This assumes, of course, that you’re using either the $129 Type Cover or $119 Touch Cover or, barring that, an external keyboard. I found both covers to work well with the Surface (except for some connection problems I’ll talk about later) and I would say that these covers are absolutely essential to the Surface Pro experience. You can, to be sure, just watch a movie on the Surface’s big screen or slip around to view documents with a finger, but you absolutely need a keyboard to get any meaningful work done. The onscreen keyboard, like so many onscreen keyboards before it, is simply not enough. It’s hard, then, to say exactly what this device is. The kickstand, for example, offers a design cue that can’t be ignored. When looking at the Surface Pro you it wants to stand upright yet, unlike a laptop, you cannot simply lift up the screen and use the whole thing on your lap. You can, however, hold it above your body while lying down, like any other tablet. However, this position is not conducive to content creation.
You can also lay the Pro down flat and draw on it, thereby turning this into a very nice art tablet. However, you’ll get the most done at a solid table with a keyboard and mouse at hand. That is the Surface’s secret: it’s a laptop that turns into a tablet, not a tablet that turns into a laptop. In terms of media features, much of that has been addressed in reviews of the RT and Windows 8. I was pleased to note that the screen resolution was excellent – 1920×1080 is nothing to sneeze at – and Microsoft’s “ClearType” display is very nearly on par with Retina screens, at least at first blush. There are definite pixels visible on this screen but on the whole the display is bright, eminently readable, and offers excellent contrast. Reading on this screen, for example, is a pleasure and casual games like Angry Birds work just as they would on a similarly outfitted tablet. The Pro has two 720p cameras, a front-facing one for web chat and a rear-facing for taking in the world. Neither are particularly amazing but they are useful for web chats, etc.
Media playback is excellent and barring some codec problems with some of the video I played on it, the Surface Pro handled video amiably. I was able to see about five hours of video playback in Battery Saver mode which was just enough for a trip to San Francisco from New York. I set the Surface up against the back of the seat in front of me, hid away the keyboard and mouse, and used it just as I would normally use my iPad. To be clear this solution is not absolutely ideal. Once you take off the keyboard and mouse, the Surface Pro becomes less interesting. Most major games are difficult or impossible to play without alternate input systems and apps like Windows are marginally useful. This is far from a deal-breaker, obviously, because the two use cases are so disparate and having the option of turning the Surface into a tablet or an ultralight laptop is the main benefit of the form factor. Is this the ideal tablet? No. However, as an amalgam of workhorse and media consumption device it is one of the best I’ve seen. Even convertible laptops are far bulkier and fare worse. The Lenovo Yoga, for example, was a solid touchscreen laptop with some tablet features but its bulk was a bit too much to handle on the road. This device, on the other hand, is Windows condensed. It offers an excellent form factor and the fact that solid performance is a click away is compelling. The Pro costs $899 for the 64GB model and $999 for the 128GB model, a pricing scheme that tells you a lot about how much solid state memory is worth these days. It’s clear that these price points will aim the users to the roomier model. This price includes a Surface pen. Microsoft is also selling a $70 “wedge” mouse that is little more than a wedge of plastic and two buttons. I’ve been using it extensively and it’s been quite a lifesaver while mousing around in classic Windows.
At $1,000, you’re paying about as much as you’d pay for a MacBook Air or a more powerful Windows laptop. Is this premium worth the investment? I’d say that it ultimately depends on how you intend to use this system. If it’s a laptop replacement as in something you carry on trips or to meetings, then yes. This is a stable and solid machine and will turn heads when you open it up. As a tablet, on the other hand, I’d say that you’re probably better off looking elsewhere. Given that most Windows tablets are hovering around anyway, it’s probably not the best time to pick up a Win8 model (unless it’s the Surface.) Manufacturers will begin the race to the bottom soon enough and the $600 Win8 tablet isn’t too far off. The $899/$999 prices are a signal: Microsoft wants you to buy the 128GB model. Much ado has been made of the fact that you really only get 82GB but I don’t recall folks complaining when their laptops came full of Windows system files and bloatware. This device comes, out of the box, ready to rock. Apps aren’t that expensive or particularly big and barring the handling of huge files, you’re not going to run out of storage immediately. Will you run out eventually? Absolutely, but presumably you can stick some of your files on a microSD card and carry that around as well. It’s a trade-off, obviously.
Given all of the previous commentary, what do I think of the Surface Pro? I think it’s a great laptop and it is the standard-bearer for the Windows 8 charge. It is a flagship product that will show other manufacturers just what they’ve been doing wrong all these years by dumping Windows on weak hardware and calling it the latest and greatest. This the latest and greatest and it was built on Microsoft’s terms with Microsoft money. Will it sell well? I doubt it. The price is too high for the lookie-loos and the pain of the Surface RT will make die-hards a bit apprehensive about spending more money on the platform. However, you can apparently trade in your RT model for a Pro and that is definitely the way to go if you’re considering the upgrade. Is this for the average user? Absolutely. It’s fast, solid, and small. It’s a great portable experience and it can be used, without much fuss, as a media device. It is the best of a lot of worlds and handily replaces the laptop/tablet combination most people carry these days. Could it be better? Absolutely. I’d love some cellular support, for one, and would gladly pay for it. Windows 8 is still heavily dependent on Classic mode and the Windows app store, while generous, is not overwhelming. But backwards compatibility makes this an excellent stepping stone into the Win8 era. Once you use this device you slowly begin to realize why Microsoft was so ham-handed for the past few years. In short, they were afraid to alienate the core and they were anxious to build their customer base. By building this, they’ve shown the world how Win8 can win. Now for some of the bad news. There’s not much I can complain about but the stuff that I did notice is definitely annoying. The type cover and inputs are flawed. The touchpad on the type cover is woefully small and the connection between the keyboard and the device is often wonky, disconnecting at odd intervals. The touchscreen interface, while excellent in Touch mode, is difficult to manage in Classic mode. This problem is intermittent and didn’t get in the way of solid hours of usage over the past few weeks. I won’t pretend that these aren’t real problems (for example: “I’m writing this without hitting some keys again, resulting in huend up words.”) That muddled word is “mashed.” It seems that this problem is related to the stability of the surface on which the device and keyboard are sitting. On an airline tray, for example, the problem is horrible. On a solid kitchen table the whole thing works perfectly. To solve this I’ve taken to keeping the device on a desk and using the wedge mouse as a pointer. I’ll raise my hand occasionally to use Touch mode, but I’m mostly using the Classic experience because most of the apps I use are trapped in that Forbidden Zone of “old” Windows. The hardware can run hot – there’s a real Intel chip in there – and it stays hot for some odd reason even after being shut down. This behavior reduced a full battery from 100% to about 80% overnight, which wasn’t pleasant. Leaving it “open,” namely with kickstand up and keyboard attached without pressing the power button, made the device run down in about four hours of non-use. Obviously this is a question of settings but you expect this thing to work like a tablet, not a laptop. Battery life in Balanced mode is about 3 hours and about 5 hours in Power Saver mode. This is enough to watch a few movies on a flight but not quite the five hours I’d like to see out of a device of this size. Power Saver mode can improve that battery life by about an hour. For $1,000, Microsoft could have put a longer power cord on this thing. The cable is about four feet long and the actual power cable – the side that goes into the wall – is shy of two feet. But that’s the trade-off: RT gives you tablet features by cutting your options and Pro gives you PC features by chewing up the battery. The first company to meld the two, in my mind, wins this battle. Given the value of the Surface Pro to Microsoft’s brand, it’s easy to see why the company opened their Surface kiosks this holiday. I read the reports of cheery salespeople flogging Surface RT with plastic smiles and an obsession verging on evangelical with a grin of . Now I understand what happened: they were selling the wrong Surface. Those ham-handed sales pitches should have been saved for this model Surface. The RT, as exciting as it seemed at the time, is clearly the runt of the Surface litter. While the OS X/iOS vision Apple put forth worked for their mobile devices, Win8 without an Intel chip, at this point, offers a truncated expression of this platform’s power. The joke going around the pro-Surface RT crowd a few months back was that nobody wanted to run a 1998 copy of Peachtree Accounting on their sassy new Surface. I would argue that they are dead wrong. Without the benefit of a solid base of apps – or at least the perception of a large collection of useful apps and potentially a larger collection of garbage apps – a device that runs only Win8 and is not backwards compatible will alienate a Microsoft’s large base. To those who snicker at Win8 in general I will say this: this is the direction in which Microsoft is going, and to deride it is tantamount to hindering progress. To use a musical analogy, those who wish that Jamiroquai would return to the glory of Virtual Insanity will be gravely disappointed and the only way forward for a fan of Jay Kay or Em Ess is to accept that change is inevitable. I’m not a constant or dedicated Windows user, yet I am very excited about the Pro. It is Microsoft at its best – a pure expression of some computing solution that is more akin, say, to the Xbox 360 than the Dell Adamo. This is not a laptop that looks weird being sold at a premium. Instead it is a hybrid device that works surprisingly well as both a laptop and a tablet. There are obviously trade-offs, but the simplicity of form, the excellent design, and the promising OS make the Surface Pro a real treat – and threat to other manufacturers.
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Twitter Confirms Purchase Of Bluefin Labs To Boost TV Analytics And Advertising Services
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
On the heels of around around this past weekend’s Super Bowl football championship, Twitter today that it has purchased , a social TV analytics service. The deal had been reported first yesterday by . Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but BI notes that it’s Twitter’s biggest acquisition to date. The acquisition fits in well with how Twitter is developing as a business on two different levels. On one hand, BlueFin’s analytics can be used to enhance advertising services: Twitter is using its streams of user-generated Tweets to embed sponsored and promoted tweets from brands and other businesses, and at the same time Twitter has proven to be a powerful vehicle for conversations about media, and specifically what’s live on the telly. Putting those two together, Twitter can potentially occupy a strategic position as a key place for second-screen advertising if it can better mine the TV-related data it already has passing through its streams. This also builds on Twitter’s to build up and use TV viewing data. On the other hand, Twitter is on the lookout for ways to continue to enhance its platform and make it more engaging for users. While today people are mainly using Twitter as a way to comment on what is happening on the main screen, Twitter is also increasingly embedding media experiences directly in the Twitter river. Twitter’s new acquisition could help come up with solutions to better bridge those two. Bluefin, Twitter notes, can help create innovative “consumer experiences in the exciting intersection of Twitter and TV.” For Bluefin, it almost seems inevitable that the company would have eventually joined — or else been killed by — Twitter, such was their dependency on the social network for data to make the analytical wheels turn. “While our products have always included data from multiple social media services, the reality is that Twitter is the platform where the overwhelming majority – about 95% – of public real-time engagement with TV happens,” Bluefin’s founders Michael Fleischman, Deb Roy and Jean-Philippe Maheu write in their about the acquisition. “So we couldn’t be more excited to join Twitter.” The company, which was first borne out of research work from MIT Media Lab, will remain in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and from where it will “grow over time.”
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Apple Calls For New Siri UI Engineer, Suggests Digital Assistant Could Soon Grace The Desktop
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
With all the time, , and Apple has offered up on the altar of Siri, it’s only a logical next step to see the virtual personal assistant migrate over to Mac OS X. The question is not if, but when? And we may be getting closer, as Apple has looking for a Siri UI Engineer with a few hints at OS X integration. This isn’t the first we’re hearing of a potential Siri rollout on the desktop level. In November, reported that Siri and Apple maps would be present in the next version of OS X. The job listing calls for an engineer “responsible for implementing the content that appears within the conversational view.” They call it a “broad-ranging task,” considering all the various applications Siri must interact with to be useful, and all while conserving the limited resources of mobile devices. “We take every application that Siri interacts with, distill it down to fundamentals, and implement that application’s UI in a theme fitting with Siri. Consider it an entire miniature OS within the OS, and you get a good idea of the scope!” the listing reads. Yet, nowhere in the job posting is there mention of iOS specifically. There is, however, mention of Mac OS X. Under key requirements, Apple asks for knowledge of all of Apple’s development APIs (both iOS and Mac OS X), as well as “familiarity with Unix, especially Mac OS X.” Obviously, the listing is still very ambiguous, but it signals that Apple is beefing up Siri for something new. And as astutely notes, Dictation has already found its way onto the desktop (just like it did on the iPad before Siri showed up in tablet-form). It all adds up, but we’ll have to wait on Apple’s word before we know for sure.
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Stack Exchange Co-Founder Jeff Atwood Launches Forums Startup Discourse, With Funding From First Round, Greylock, And SV Angel
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
, co-founder of Q&A network , that he’s launching a new startup called , which offers an open source platform for running discussion forums. The full name of the company is actually Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., and its goal is indeed to improve the quality of online discussion. However, Atwood writes that he’s following a very different strategy from Stack Exchange, which aims for “the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers”: Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just . After spending four solid years thinking of discussion as the established corrupt empire, and Stack Exchange as the scrappy rebel alliance, I began to wonder – what would it feel like to change sides? What if I became a champion of random, arbitrary discussion, of the very kind that I’d spent four years designing against and constantly lecturing users on the evil of? I already built an X-Wing; could I build a better Tie Fighter? In other words, while Stack Exchange tries to help users find the best answer to a given question, Discourse tries to support a broader discussion without falling victim to the trolling and spam that afflict many other forums and comment threads. Apparently, Atwood and his team have been working on this for the past year. The system is designed for “hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers,” and of course it includes moderation tools. Other features highlighted on include just-in-time loading, notifications whenever someone mentions you, the ability to remember where you were reading in a thread, automatically expanding links, and more. Citing the popular open source blogging platform used by sites like TechCrunch, Atwood said that it’s “not a stretch” to say that he wants to create “WordPress for forums.” He also announced that he has raised funding from , , and . (Atwood told me that he’s not disclosing the funding size.) Discourse offers its software for free, with plans to charge for hosting and other enterprise services later on.
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Microsoft Surface: From Idea To Pro
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
When it comes to designing new hardware, most companies are pretty quiet about the design process. Microsoft, with its , is taking a far more open approach than many other companies. Just a few days ahead of the launch of the Intel-powered Surface Pro, I got a chance to sit down with Ralf Groene, Microsoft’s Director of Industrial Design, earlier this week to talk about the history and the design process that eventually led to the Surface project as we know it today. The German-born Groene brought a full case of Surface and prototypes to the meeting. Sadly, Microsoft didn’t allow photography at this meeting, but the company provided us with a number of images that you can see throughout this post. Even though Groene himself may not be a household name (yet), he worked on a number of products that you are probably familiar with. His first project out of college, while working at Palo Alto Design Group, was the , one of the earliest e-readers. After that he worked for well-known design companies like Hartmut Essslinger’s and then , where he became the design lead of the company’s Palo Alto studio. These experiences allowed him to work with lots of interesting clients as a consultant, but he didn’t get to work on the designs from the idea stage to product launch and was clearly itching to develop products from start to finish himself. Seven years ago, Microsoft hired Groene to start working on its mice and keyboards. He started out with the , Arc Touch and Arc keyboard, as well as the LifeCam camera. After a few years of doing that, Groene told me, Panos Panay called him into his office to talk about what would eventually become the Surface. “That was the birth of Surface,” Groene recalled. “We started out as a very small team with just a handful of people – really like a startup – and we were given a task: design computers for Microsoft.” At the time, of course, Microsoft didn’t build its own computers, “but it was an exhilarating thought” for him to work on this project. Who really came up with the idea of Microsoft doing its own computers isn’t actually clear, but it was obviously borne out of the company’s strategic outlook. Groene said that Steven Sinosfky, , was their access point and gave them the task to begin working on the project. One thing Microsoft never used to figure out the design, though, was a focus group. It didn’t take this core team of about 15 people all that long to come up with the early ideas for the Surface. One of the first decisions the team made was to do everything but the final assembly in-house, including engineering, software design, product design and manufacturing. Groene argues that a big company like Microsoft could have hired any consultant it wanted to, but “the actual value that you will create comes from the people who are actually committed to the business. We had zero consultants on this project.” During the “startup phase,” the core team came up with most of the basic ideas for what the Surface should look like and what the brand should be about. Groene noted that some of the main ideas like the kickstand and click-on keyboard were developed very early on in the project. “It really contained all the elements that Surface and Surface Pro are now growing into.” Indeed, Groene showed me one of the earliest design prototypes that contained all the essential Surface elements and it already featured a keyboard as a cover and the kickstand. One interesting idea that was scratched very early on was to put a small screen on the back of the tablet to display status updates and other information. The team also looked at an 11.6 inch screen, but that just felt too big for a tablet, Groene said. Within 10 weeks or so, the team came up with the core ideas for Surface that essentially still remain the same today. Every design, says Groene, needs to have a core message and a product needs to be built around this core idea. Design, in his view, is not about making things pretty. One thing the Surface team also realized early on was that the Surface should reflect the core values of what Microsoft stands for as a brand. “Microsoft is a big brand that carries a particular set of attributes. If you want to get things done, you use Word, Excel and you would find that Windows is actually something that is very useful,” Groene noted. Even as the PC is dissolving in front of our eyes and morphing into something else, those values still stand true, says Groene. That insight, he argues, was the main breakthrough that made the team decide on what has now become the Surface and Steven Sinofsky immediately bought into the idea, too. This meant that the core mission of the Surface was, in Groene’s words “to bring Windows 8 to life.” Part of the inspiration for the final design was the fact that the Metro design in Windows 8 doesn’t feature a chrome. Just like Windows 8 gets out of the way and puts apps front and center, Groene believes that good design gets out of the way, too. He wants to build good tools and doesn’t care about fancy styling. Windows 8, he argued, is an “authentically digital” design. The old desktop, the one that’s essentially based on the Xerox desktop that Apple copied and Microsoft later adopted, too, was based in the analog world. “We lived in that era for so long,” Groene said, “so when you come up with something new, it rocks people’s world a bit.” Because Excel and Word are part of the Microsoft brand, the decision to add a keyboard in some form was pretty obvious, and having a functional cover just made sense to the team right from the outset. Groene noted, however, that one shouldn’t think of this Microsoft legacy as a “burden.” Instead, his team’s mission is to amplify these values and those of Windows 8 in general. As for the interaction with the Windows 8 team itself while developing the Surface, Microsoft carefully argues that its team got the same access to early software builds as its other hardware partners. Given that the Surface project strained the relationship between Microsoft and some of its hardware partners a bit, that’s an argument I would expect Microsoft to make. What’s clear, though, is that the Windows 8 team played a role in what the Surface looked like, if only because Sinofsky was the team’s access point to the rest of the Microsoft hierarchy. The Surface’s Touch Cover, of course, has long been a focal point of Microsoft’s marketing campaign for the Surface RT. In Groene’s view, the Touch Cover is obviously better than typing on glass, but he also believes it “pushes how you make keyboards forward.” The early prototypes, of course, were very primitive and nothing more than drawings on a piece of plastic. In our discussion, Groene likened the final design to the digital camera in that it turns something that was always analog into the digital world and makes it better. The team, of course, also tested lots of different magnets to ensure the cover would be able to hold the device and users would still be able to detach it without too much effort. Still, because Microsoft’s brand is about giving people choices (“We don’t dictate what people should like”), the company also decided to go ahead and make the Type Cover, as well. While Microsoft has talked a lot about the Touch Cover, Groene also highlighted the design process behind the magnesium chassis that surrounds the Surface. For the Surface RT, the team’s resident material scientists developed a novel way to use hot, that’s quickly pushed into a mold to create the device’s body and to ensure that it is light and sturdy at the same time. When it comes to attention to detail, the body of the Surface is really where the design team got a workout. As Groene told me, he and Panay regularly went to Asia not just to work with the manufacturers, but also, with lots of gages and scales in tow, to measure every piece of the product to make sure it was up to spec. Groene estimates he flew to Asia at least 10 times last year. The team’s attention to detail went deeper than that, though. Groene, for example, noticed that the edge that surrounds the Surface was just a bit too sharp, so the team brought in new CNC machines to dampen this effect by adding a 3mm chamfer. While this came at some expense, the team had enough support from the top of the Microsoft hierarchy to do these kinds of things regularly. Similarly, the angle on the Surface Pro’s sides was supposed to remain the same as on the RT, but because it is thicker, that angle didn’t work without making the corners way too small. To solve this problem, Microsoft brought in expensive 5-axis milling machines to give the corners a different angle from the rest of the sides. With the Surface Pro, Microsoft is about to expand its Surface family later this week by bringing the full power of Windows 8 to its own line of tablets. Because it uses an Intel chip, it is a bit thicker than the RT to allow for more vents and significantly larger batteries. While the Surface RT is made out of three pieces of the magnesium alloy, however (the frame, back and kickstand), the team improved its manufacturing methods just in time for the Pro model and can now build the frame and back as a single piece. Early on, Groene noted, Microsoft decided that the Surface team was too small to tackle both the RT and Pro at the same time. He wasn’t quite sure why the RT became the first model they focused on. In his view, though, users should think of the two devices as siblings, not twins. The Pro is a laptop with tablet capabilities and the RT is a tablet that has laptop capabilities. The Pro is obviously more powerful than the RT, but in return, its battery doesn’t last as long and is heavier. Doing both, said Groene, sadly isn’t an option today. “You have to decide what you want: a truck or a speedster.” Both are useful in their own way, but if you try to combine both, you probably end up with an . Looking ahead, Groene obviously couldn’t say much about the future of the Surface line beyond the Pro, but he did stress repeatedly that the RT and Pro are not endpoints – “we didn’t just stop having ideas.” Microsoft is obviously working on growing the Surface family. In what direction isn’t all that clear right now, but Groene said that he and his team “have a lot of passion around those ideas” and that we should expect a continuation of what we are currently seeing. The core design team that worked on Surface is still very much intact and still very small. Chances are, Groene has a few more suitcases full of Surface 2 prototypes lying around somewhere in Microsoft’s Studio B and if the old adage that it always takes Microsoft three attempts to get a product right still holds, it’s definitely worth keeping a close eye on what this group will come up with next.
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 4 | null |
Zynga Q4 Highlights: 72M Users On Mobile, Lots of Midcore, Real-Money Is On Track
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
Now that , here are the highlights from the earnings call. Zynga shares are up about 13 percent since yesterday’s close on the results. – . Zynga now has 72 million monthly active users on mobile platforms, which is about one-quarter of the company’s total. CEO Mark Pincus said on the call that more game teams in the company are focused on mobile launches than on Facebook. They added that Zynga likely has the fifth-largest daily audience on mobile platforms behind companies like Google, and almost certainly the largest in mobile gaming. Players spent 10.7 billion minutes inside Zynga’s mobile games in December. That said, Zynga is still feeling the effect of Draw Something’s decline with daily active users declining to 20 million from 22 million in the previous quarter. – Zynga made its bread-and-butter on the stereotypical 35-year-old female gamer and positioned itself as the new daytime soap opera, so to speak. But following an industry-wide trend, the company is shifting its focus to midcore-style games like Kabam and Kixeye, which have a smaller number of players who typically spend more. “Our pipeline is heavily weighted to midcore,” Pincus said on the call. Zynga recently and to get talent to build these kind of games. Speaking of which, Kabam – Barely months after Zynga launched one of its most highly anticipated sequels, the company is shutting down Cityville 2. That follows the closures of the Boston and Japan offices and the shutdown of more than 10 other games in the fourth quarter. Pincus said, “We are re-aligning around our best growth priorities,” he said. This also means the company is becoming more careful about doing pre-launch testing. Early testing of Farmville 2 in the Philippines under the name Big Harvest helped the company iron out kinks and poor pacing in gameplay that would have turned away prospective users. Zynga’s had three significant sequels: Mafia Wars 2, CityVille 2 and FarmVille 2. But only FarmVille 2 has been really successful; the other two effectively cannibalized the player base of the original without producing better earnings to make up for the decline of the originals. CityVille was Zynga’s third most lucrative game in the third quarter, making $34.3 million in revenue for the company, . But CityVille 2 fell out of the top-three best-performing games for the company and lost users dramatically not more than two months after launch. – Zynga recently signed a deal with bwin.party to offer real-money gaming in the U.K., and games in this category will start coming out in the first half of next year. Real-money bets in games like Zynga Poker could be a new growth opportunity for the company, as Poker already made up 20 percent of the company’s online game revenue in this most recent quarter.
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More Change At AOL: Photosharing App Hipster.com Is Shutting Down February 16
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
Another change afoot at AOL today: Hipster.com, a hyperlocal photosharing app AOL acquired in , is shutting down as of February 16. Registered users are being sent emails (a copy, sent to us by a reader, is embedded below) telling them that they will need to save any postcards — Hipster’s term for posted images — by that date, or they will be deleted, along with all other user data. The site itself has yet to post any notifications, although its confirms the news, too. : We now also have a confirmation from AOL that it is “sunsetting” Hipster but that some of the staff will remain to work on other projects at AOL. “While the Hipster application didn’t prove core to AOL’s strategic roadmap, we continue to work with key talent from Hipster in support of AOL’s other products,” a spokesperson said. According to the email — which doesn’t mention AOL at all — the shutdown was due to a number of reasons — the state of the “photosharing landscape” (read: domination by sites like Instagram), financial considerations and the growth of the site were among those named in the letter from the three founders Doug Ludlow, Steffen Hoffman and Ethan Czahor. “The decision to shut down Hipster was not an easy one,” they note. They note that the site had picked up some 500,000 users since launching in 2011. When AOL bought the site last year it was for a reported price in the lower seven figures. Putting aside some of the bigger issues of competition from larger photosharing sites, there have also been changes at AOL. First and foremost, the group that Hipster sat in at AOL, AOL Mobile, has effectively shut down, with several key people leaving the company, and others being redeployed to different, individual operations such as websites (like TechCrunch, which AOL owns). “The culture that Sol, David, and the team have created over at the AOL Mobile Team in Palo Alto is pretty amazing – it’s a group of people we can’t wait to starting building cool stuff with,” former CEO Doug Ludlow said at the time of the acquisition in March 2012. “We’re also thrilled that Hipster is not only going to stay open as a product, but we’ll now be able to improve it / build even faster.” Clearly with AOL Mobile out of the picture that put Hipster into a more precarious position. (Ludlow is now “ ” at AOL Ventures and has also started the for children’s books) The other change is that this week AOL, in the lead-up to its quarterly earnings, is trimming down, sharpening things up, and possibly doubling down in other areas. Today also brought news that personal profile site About.me was after two years under AOL’s wing. Earlier in the day, AOL also , and there are reports that it is in talks to , a tech site co-founded by a co-founder and a former editor in chief of Engadget, owned by AOL.
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Zynga To Shut Down Three More Games (Including CityVille 2), Promises Slower Launch Cycle In 2013
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
During this afternoon’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Zynga announced three more game shutdowns — CityVille 2, Party Friends, and The Friend Game. The most notable closure was probably CityVille 2, since it was the sequel to what was once Zynga’s biggest hit. However, . COO David Ko blamed some of CityVille 2’s failure on a lack of lead time to properly test the game. Zynga had earlier announced a cost-savings plan that . This year, the company will be releasing fewer games and spacing their releases further apart, Ko said. He also said that many of those new games have significant franchise potential. Not all of the news was bad. Zynga’s earnings , and during the call as well as the successful launch of its sequel.
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Zillow Debuts Digs, A Pinterest-Like Photo Sharing And Inspiration Platform For Home Decor And Remodeling
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
Pinterest is a mecca for users to share home decor pictures they love, or to post their own remodeling efforts within their apartment or home. has also become a go-to destination to share and find remodeling ideas and inspiration. So it makes sense for, Zillow, the online sales and rental marketplace for homes and apartments, to try to tap into this movement. The the online real estate giant is debuting , an iPad app and companion web app, that allows users to share and find photos of remodeling projects and home decor. Users can browse tens of thousands of photos and see Zillow’s proprietary Digs Estimates for the estimated cost, based on where they live, of the actual bathrooms, kitchens and spaces they are viewing. Similar to the way that Pinterest operates, users can create, save and share Boards of ideas and décor they like, browse Boards created by others, comment on photos and follow people with similar interests and tastes. What differs from Pinterest (and this is Zillow’s secret sauce), is that not only will Zillow provide estimates of how much something costs, but it will also show you architects, contractors and designers that worked on the renovation or space. If not local to a viewers area, Zillow will recommend local home improvement professionals for help. Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff says that the estimates tool is powered by a proprietary algorithm that analyzes extensive housing data and research. This includes data from local contractors such as size, materials, finish level, and regional labor and material rates. Another opportunity that Digs provides is for the actual professionals. The company says that contractors, designers and architects can create their own branded boards to showcase their talents and expertise. Considering the massive amount of sharing that takes place on Pinterest around home decor and remodeling, it makes sense for Zillow to provide this engagement for its users. There’s a natural tie-in for users who have purchased or found a home or apartment using Zillow to then see how they can then decorate their new digs.
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500 Startups Mexico City Comes North Of The Border With A Mountain View Demo Day
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
Today, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups showed off some of its Latin America flavor. Just a day before its 500 Startups Accelerator Demo Day, the venture firm previewed some of the companies it has incubated in Mexico. Today in Mountain View, Calif., 500 Startups Mexico City held its first demo day since the venture fund merged with Mexican.VC last year. 500 Startups venture partner Cesar Salazar gave a history of the group, from its early days as Mexican.VC. “We realized there was huge potential in the region,” Salazar said. But Mexico entrepreneurs were held back by a lack of capital and a lack of mentorship. So they created their own local incubator. After talks with McClure, the two groups decided to combine their efforts, and 500 Startups Mexico City was born. The presentation consists of about a dozen startups, most of which came from 500 Startups’ Latin America portfolio. Here are our the companies that presented: – This startup helps events organizers sell tickets and find an audience for their concerts, conferences, and other events. In addition to sales online, Boletia also allows organizers to sell through local convenience stores, which is a popular way of purchasing tickets. The startup takes a 6.5 percent fee per ticket. Seven weeks after launch, it’s had more than $100,000 sales in tickets with just one salesperson. – Capptalog provides a way for small and medium-sized businesses to quickly create catalogs to showcase and sell their wares through mobile devices. It provides a SaaS platform on the web for creating and managing product descriptions, upload multimedia, such as photos and videos, and create sales pages for those products. It says there are 5 million SMBs in the Mexican market, and is looking to attempt to capture 72 percent of those. – This company seeks to help train the 20 million professionals in Mexico that are underemployed or unemployed. In the Latin America market, the company sees 152 million web users, of which 14 percent are participating in online education. That will grows annually at a rate of 15 percent to 32 million people in 2015. – This startup is going after the fashion and beauty market in Spanish-speaking companies. There are already 100,000s of customers coming to website every month, and it’s profitable. But it’s looking to expand in a market where there’s no Pinterest or Glam Media to compete against. – “Obesity is a bitch.” That’s the problem that Harris seeks to solve, by connecting users and nutritionists and allowing both to track a user’s diet. The company offers a SaaS-based platform with a subscription model for its dashboard. It has a large list of foods and nutritional info that users can check out to choose what to eat, and nutritionists can use to keep track of their diets. – Nuperty helps connect buyers, sellers, and mortgage lenders in real estate. The company provides a platform for searching real estate listings, and also provides buyer profiles to financial institutions for those who wish to qualify for loans. The company has generated $100,000 in leads so far and is growing quickly in Mexico, and is looking to expand to other Latin American countries. – This startup has a mobile app for managing all the contacts that you have across multiple networks and address books. It also provides a unified messaging system, which combines conversations you’ve had with contacts by SMS, email, DM, and Facebook message, all in one place. – If you’ve been reading me, you probably know . But look, there’s a problem in Mexico. According to Rubberit co-founder May Alba, the average person there has sex 126 times a year, but only uses a condom four of those times.There are 180 million condoms sold in mexico, but the country probably needs 1 billion per year. With a subscription package, the company gets rid of the problem of not having a condom around, as well as the problem with having to go to the store to buy them, which carries some social stigma. In addition to changing the way people get and keep condoms, RubberIt is also working with NGOs on a one-for-one program to provide condoms in underprivileged areas for each condom sold. This startup seeks to be the Seamless or GrubHub for Mexico, by enabling its customers to quickly set up and allow restaurants and chains to take mobile orders. The company has been around since early 2012, but has grown pretty aggressively since last May when it had 3,900 users. It’s now at more than 33,000 users and is seeing 36 percent growth per month over the last eight months. With SeMeAntoja, restaurants can sell through Facebook, as well as their own web pages and iPhone apps. It now has 1,200 restaurants signed up, and has done $300,000 in orders so far. – Shopinterest enables small businesses to get their e-commerce stores set up, and shares them through Pinterest. Why Pinterests? Because that’s where the customers are, duh. Rather than needing 8-10 steps to get to a shopping cart and complete a purchase, Shopinterest simplifies the process for sellers and buyers, basically creating Fab.com for any seller. The startup already has 500 stores signed up, and more than 20,000 items listed. It charges listing and transaction fees, as well as premium paid features for businesses. – Wideo makes it easy for anyone to create animations without Flash or Powerpoint, through a suite of its own tools. It claims to be 20 times faster than other tools, and distribute them for viewing in any web browser. – This startup provides a taxi e-hail service for riders in Mexico. It allows users to quickly find a taxi without having to carry a bunch of cards around, or hailing a creepy taxi on the street. Since it doesn’t require a driver to have the app installed on their phone — or even a smartphone for that matter — it’s differentiated from other mobile, on-demand ride hailing companies that we’ve seen. The Mexico City cab market is the largest in the world, with three times as many cabs as New York City, amounting to a $2 billion market. For riders, the convenience they get only costs $1 per ride to use the app. That’s made it the #1 travel app in Mexico, with 50,000 users who have used it in tens of cities around the country.
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BiteScore Tells You How Many (Or Few) Rat Droppings There Are In Your Salad
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
As an inveterate chow hound I like to know if the restaurant I’m about to visit has a) a working bathroom b) PBR c) any health violations. While the first two are deal-breakers – it’s not a dinner without the smooth taste of the Ribb – I’m often very lax when it comes to health violations. Not many others are. BiteScore is a tiny app that tells you the health rating of a restaurant you visit on the web. After , you can visit Zagat or another review site and see the score right there. Want to know if your favorite Greek place has mice? Bang. Right there. Want to know if that sushi place sometimes serves “imitation” eel? Boom. BiteScore. BiteScore also builds a fairly staid results page that exposes the change in health violations over time. For example, scores an “A” rating while other, lesser restaurants limp along with a “B”. Founded by Lior Gavra and Ryan Hoffman (who are clearly more concerned with cat dander in their soup than I am), the site is self-funded and seeing about 100 users a day. Because it is a Chrome add-on there’s not much branding, but if you use sites like Seamless and OpenTable, knowing whether an Ethiopian place serves actual fingernails with its finger food is a godsend. It adds a small bug to these pages that adds just a bit more information to already information-rich pages. “BiteScore started because we both ordered a lot of food on Seamless and were always looking for the restaurant’s health rating. It was not convenient to search every restaurant on the NYC Health Department website when browsing multiple restaurants before placing an order,” said Lior. “It allows users to have a better experience and the ability to make better dining decisions.” The pair isn’t looking for a big exit or lots of revenue. Essentially, they’ve added a key element to restaurant listings and they’re offering it for free – a noble effort, to be sure. After all, as anyone who has discovered that the green lump in their butter sauce was not, in fact, a caper, forewarned is often forearmed.
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Zynga’s Pincus Says FarmVille Has Passed $1B In Total Player Purchases
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 |
The launch of FarmVille 2 was one of the big highlights of Zynga’s past year, but CEO Mark Pincus said its predecessor FarmVille crossed major milestone too, having reached $1 billion in total player bookings. Seeing an old game reach cross the $1 billion mark may not tell us much about Zynga’s future or current finances, but it still seems appropriate (or symbolic, or something) that FarmVille crossed that line as the focus shifts to its sequel. Speaking of that sequel, a month ago that the game had 40 million monthly active users and 8 million daily active users. Today it also said that bookings from the game had exceeded Zynga’s predictions by 100 percent. And Pincus said FarmVille 2 will be coming to mobile this year. Those numbers were shared during Zynga’s fourth quarter earnings call, as part of a larger discussion how the company is doing in the “investment and express” category. At the same time, Pincus said Zynga’s “pipeline is heavily weighted toward mid-core” games that are aimed at a less casual audience. Overall, , with revenue flat compared to last year.
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Every Other Tech Angle You Need For Super Bowl XLVII
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
Millions of people across the U.S. are preparing their jerseys, face paint and horrific nachos. Yes, football fans rejoice, the big game finally kicks off tomorrow in New Orleans — that is, Super Bowl XLVII, between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Franciso 49ers. The Super Bowl is always one of the biggest media events each year, and our inboxes have been flooded with “OMG this is going to be the most social Super Bowl EVAR” emails for weeks now. It’s going to be a close, hard-fought game between two teams that most people will probably know nothing about until kickoff. But because the Super Bowl has become such a spectacle, there are tons of things to pay attention to on the web and on social media while stuffing your face with fried food and trying to watch the game while asking your friends what happened on the last play. But don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to ask your friends what happened on the last play — because one could take a short nap between plays in a football game. while the average duration of a football broadcast is 185 minutes, the actual time the ball is in motion (read: the time teams are actually running plays) is 11 or 12 minutes. That’s 6 percent of the broadcast, give or take. Just another reason you should be watching hockey. My personal gripes aside, let’s move into the playbooks of a few silver linings (see what I did there?): , the Super Bowl will be legally streamed on the Interwebs for the second time tomorrow, thanks courtesy of a new host: NFL.com and . The Super Bowl streaming on the Web is a great thing in principle; however, last year’s webcast only picked up about 2 million viewers compared to television’s 100 million (so clearly networks don’t care about the web cannibalizing viewers yet), and some questions remain. . Let’s be honest, there are really only a few other technical/digital-related things that people care about (or should care about) in relation to the Super Bowl: The ads and betting. You should be consuming chicken wings (or celery sticks if you’re in San Francisco), drinking beer or margaritas, making ridiculous statements about sports things you know nothing about and actually talking to friends/loved ones. Okay, there’s some validity to the whole second/third/fourth-screen experience as it relates to consuming digital media (especially sports content), but seriously, people, put down your phone and/or tablet and talk to someone. Preferably a human, but I’d even prefer your dog to your stupid phone. So let’s jump in. If you want to get previews of the Super Bowl ads before the game, probably the best place to go is , where you can get sneak peeks on upcoming commercials that will air during the game, pick winners, interact on the web and Xbox 360, etc. And Hulu will be archiving and showing the game’s full roster of ads after they appear. On this front, Twitter also hopes to come to the rescue , which will let fans vote for their favorite commercials (during the game and for 48 hours thereafter), catch the ones they missed, and sneer at the ones you hated. This has become one of the most-enjoyed pastimes for journalists, pundits and fans who don’t care as much about the game. Naturally, most people just talk about the content and are really discussing the work of the creative teams that design the content for the ads. But, naturally, brands believe that everyone is really talking about them, and in the short-form world of Twitter and social media, they are — to a certain extent. That’s why, unsurprisingly, brands are spending millions on social media sites, paying an armload to become a promoted trend on Twitter for a day — especially considering that the buzz around the Super Bowl now extends for weeks, as brands launch pre-game day campaigns, contests and the like to suck us in. And, admittedly, brands now have good reason to believe that there’s more ROI from social media advertising than coughing up during the game. According to CBS, those prices are rising, and who would be surprised if that continues for the foreseeable future? What’s more, brands were able to score twice the amount of Facebook likes when posting about the Super Bowl last year, . Brands utilizing Facebook to yak about the Super Bowl saw 99.7 percent higher engagement on Super Bowl Sunday and 60 percent higher engagement during the preceding six weeks. On Twitter, there were , helping to make the Super Bowl one of the biggest events of the year on the social network. During the final three minutes of last year’s game, there were 10K tweets per second, which set a “TPS” . Naturally, discussing all the opportunities for people using the service during the big game. As to what brands are up to this year? Bud Light is launching two new apps offering fans new ways to “connect with the brand across social platforms,” partnering with Blippar to create an interactive Super Bowl experience by downloading a free app to “blipp” any Bud Light NFL logo on bottles, cans or in print. [ ] And it will also have an app on its to track the number of times fans tag Facebook posts and tweets, if anyone really cares about that. Samsung has launched a pre-game web campaign featuring Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen and Bob Odenkirk to try to drum up . Livefyre is offering a , which lets people chime in and chat with other fans in realtime, as do a million others. BlackBerry 10 will be featured in Super Bowl XLVII for the first time ever as part of a broad marketing campaign for the re-invented RIM, I mean BlackBerry. on which Harbaugh brother is more marketable, which is obviously something you need to know the answer to immediately. http://youtu.be/pzfAdmAtYIY All of this spending on Super Bowl-related advertising does seem a little bit ridiculous, especially considering how much brands are spending on TV spots. Adobe, for one, is taking a more “contentious” stance in favor of the digital approach (what else?). The ad is, of course, meant to spoof the huge spending on Super Bowl TV ads. On the other front, CivicScience details why Coke’s new digital ad campaign for the Super Bowl is actually working. Which is a good thing, too, as the company is spending big bucks promoting the campaign, (which is called by the way.) As a side note for the geeks, , Lady Ada (a.k.a. Limor Fried or Adafruit), has posted Becky Stern’s video of how to emblazon your team’s logo in electro-luminescent panel on the side of the nearest football helmet. [ ] Oh, and there’s , to use as a game-time companion, in which they can segment data for player and team insight, get predictive analysis and trash talk. But the other notable tech-related Super Bowl news, which is a little bit different this year, comes from gambling. As , an enormous secondary gambling market has (perhaps unsurprisingly) grown around the Super Bowl. The Raw Story reports: By the half-time show of the 2013 Super Bowl game between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers, Americans will have gambled an estimated $10 billion on various aspects of the sports spectacle – from picking the winner to whether Alicia Keys will flub the words of the national anthem. Naturally, with shrinking budgets and struggling economies, states want a piece of the action. But the Obama Administration isn’t having any of it, and wants to block the states from trying to collect their share of the gambling spend. Nonetheless, there’s no doubt that the burgeoning world of online (and social) gambling has contributed to the overall growth. The Super Bowl has always been one of the most-wagered-on events of the year, but $10 billion? Holy jackpot, Batman, that’s huge! To this point, some gamblers may be frustrated by my revealing their ace-in-the-hole, but it seems that stats guru/shaman Nate Silver posted his prediction . Predicting the outcome of the Super Bowl is a leeeettle bit different than predicting the presidential elections, but Silver nailed those predictions with such accuracy (and aplomb/grace in the face of the haters), that it’s hard not to a) and b) want to put down your month’s paycheck on Silver’s prediction — or at least 1 million of your nearest Bitcoins. And 49ers fans rejoice, because Silver has picked your team to win. That’s right. Suck on that, Ravens fans. Of course, if Silver is wrong, there could be a lot of angry, broke bettors at his door tomorrow night. So hopefully he’s already hired a few bodyguards. [ ] Oh, and not that they’ll probably hold a candle to Silver, but for a breakdown on demographics and all that other Super Bowl segmentation and what not.
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What Games Are: Should Sony Move Beyond PlayStation?
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Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
So then. February 20th. New York City. . This, it seems, is what the content of a viral video aired this week by Sony promises. Slowly we saw the signature four shapes of the PS controller slide into view while spark trails coursed over their frames. The intended message (presumably) was cometh the hour, cometh the PlayStation 4. Sony has struggled in the PS3 years. The company has sold 77m machines at last count, but over a very long period (Apple has sold over 500m iOS devices in a shorter timeframe). It suffered with last year’s PlayStation Network hack. It has attempted (and largely failed) to get into the Wii/Kinect space with the Move controller, and also updated the PSP line with a new handheld – the already-a-dud PS Vita. Layoffs, losses and difficulty have been its watchword. Yet the company also marshalled considerable effort behind key franchises like the Uncharted series and Journey. In many ways Sony has been trying to rebuild innovation credibility after a period of perceived arrogance at the height of the PS2 era. The Move, for example, is a great gestural controller and is useful beyond the screen, such as in the indie game . There have also been initiatives to deliver more App-Store-like distribution for games and to support unusual titles like Book of Spells. Despite all of that, the PlayStation still has a perception problem. What I’m wondering is whether the PlayStation brand is one that Sony can ever fully rehabilitate, or whether the company would be better off in the long run by ditching it. Video game journalists have always interpreted the industry in the grand narratives of generations, console wars, legacies and heritage. To them the industry has a touch of the saga, and its cycles become vaguely mythic. Fans support their favourite platforms with the fervour of religions. There are stories of rises and falls, of felled heroes and platforms that should have been. Journalists and fans generally consider, for example, that this is the . (And yes, it does all sound a little bit Tolkienesque on occasion.) As a part of that view, the sense that no power on Earth can sustain an idea whose time has gone is pervasive. While some systems have managed to successfully sequel a predecessor (the SNES, Xbox 360, the PS2), once a platform brand is judged over then it’s over. And often that means that the company behind that platform goes to Hades. Sega never really got over the Genesis years. Nor Commodore with the Amiga. The only platform holder that regularly manages to buck that trend is Nintendo. Primarily it’s because Nintendo often focuses a new brand on a new control innovation. The Nintendo DS is defined by it’s dual screens, and the Nintendo 64 similarly by its analog stick controller. So, in the epochal view, Nintendo thrives because it moves with the ages where Sega did not. The question for Sony is whether dumping PlayStation would let them be like Nintendo and reinvent, or go the way of Sega into hardware oblivion. Privately, the PS4 is seen by many in the industry as something of a last-chance saloon. While Sony was once the king under the mountain of the console industry, various dragons have stolen its throne. Chief among them is Microsoft, and the press narrative has it that the signature moment of implosion for Sony was the so-called “ ” conference at E3 2006. That’s the moment when Sony went from first to last in their eyes. Since then PlayStation has struggled to seem relevant because of its legacy. PlayStation carries a weight of other games with it, from Wipeout and Tekken to Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy series. As each iteration of the platform appears, each game is brought along for the ride and so the catalog looks immediately stale. It’s difficult to get journalists excited by yet another iteration of a game that they have already played to death, on a platform that they view as undying rather than living. Those factors automatically sour any announcement that Sony could make. The biggest challenge facing Kaz Hirai (CEO of Sony) is how to take a broken-down brand with all of its trappings and make it new again. He only has to look at how Microsoft is mishandling Windows 8 to see that sometimes holding onto the past too much is a recipe for innovating half way. Rejuvenation can be done, but to do it implies making a definitive break and being willing to consign the past to the past. Steve Jobs revived a brand when re-founding Mac OS as OS X. Part of the advantage of working in a media landscape that thinks epochally is that that instinct can be played up to, and a marketing storyteller like Jobs knew this. He realised early that half the battle is about capturing and distorting reality into a myth, which turned journalists from inquisitors to evangelists. Sony used to be good at this, too, but lost their aura. There is always the chance to get it back by leaping forward, though. If Sony rocks up on stage in three weeks’ time and announces a PS4 (or “PlayStation Next,” “PlayStation X” etc.) with much the same stylings as PS3, it will be greeted with a sense of fatigue. All interested eyes will turn to see what Microsoft is doing with Xbox, and then probably back to the much more interesting story of Ouya, Steamboxes, Gamestick and the emerging . On the other hand, if Hirai appears and announces something new? If he shows off a new way to control games, a new platform brand and tells a new story? That could be the real turning point for which Sony has searched. A digital-only console would be an interesting start, as would a console whose every unit can be turned into a development kit. An app store that everyone can submit games to would send the signal that all bets are off. To be the company that finally brings the console out of the 20th century mould and changes what we think when we think “console” into something other than “expensive dumb game box with pretension of being a media centre”? Who knows. Or maybe he’ll just do what we expect and announce a PS4. Here’s hoping not.
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Facebook Ramps Up News Discovery Battle Against Apps Like Flipboard With “Articles Related To”
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
Rather than trust your friends and favorite Pages to post interesting stuff, Facebook is taking news discovery into its own hands with “Articles Related To…”. This special feed story shows you popular links that lead to content mentioning Pages you Like. It could be the next step in Facebook’s master plan to take on apps like Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite, keep you on site and make publishers pay. Say you Like rapper Lil Wayne. You might see a feed story titled “Articles Related To Lil Wayne” followed by a preview blurb and link to an post about him on music site that’s getting shared a lot on Facebook but that none of your friends posted. At the very least, the story type could become Facebook’s personalized version of Twitter’s Trending Topics. About a year ago Facebook was frequently showing a “Trending Articles” block in the news feed. However, those links could be about anything and were mostly sensational stories auto-shared by your friends via Open Graph news reader apps. Articles Related To instead relies on the wisdom of the Facebook crowd, and notes the total number of times the article’s been posted. It could also lay the groundwork for a “Sponsored Articles Related To” ad unit. But the real reason this new way to find links is so fascinating is because it could foreshadow a dedicated news-only feed on Facebook. Devoid of random status updates and pics of your friends’ children, it could use the habits of Facebook’s 1 billion users and everything it knows about you to deliver a super-relevant personalized newspaper. That could be a real challenger to news-discovery services from all the way to Twitter. Facebook already has dedicated and . A news-only feed also appeared to be part of the visual news feed mobile app that we know Facebook is building. The one problem is that while Facebook wants to help you discover content, it doesn’t like pushing traffic off-site. That’s what links do…normally. But lately some apps like RockMelt have built special fast-loading, pop-up that recreate off-site content within their apps so people never leave. By striking revenue share deals with news publishers, Facebook could show ads on reader views of their content and earn a fee for delivering eyeballs while keeping you firmly planted in its walled garden.
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Peter Thiel On His ‘Super-Futuristic’ Focus And The Chess Strategy Founders Should Know [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
I think Thiel is one of the most fascinating and forward-thinking people in technology today — and the business world overall — so I was really pleased to get the chance to talk with him backstage for a few minutes just after he collected his award. We touched on a few topics in our short chat, including his “super-futuristic” funding focus and his iconoclastic toward changing the education system through his program, so you should watch the whole four-and-a-half minute video. But I wanted to pull out one especially interesting thing he said when I asked what an entrepreneur should avoid doing when introducing a project to Thiel. He said: “This is sort of a minor nit, but it’s one that I think is always a good one to be aware of. They shouldn’t say that there are a whole bunch of different things they could do with their product, all of which would be good. Normally you want just one thing that’s going to be fantastic. And so when you say, ‘We could do A, or B or C or D or E, and we could make money doing A or B or C or D or E,’ that’s often that you don’t really have a plan, which isn’t going to work. It’s always better to have a plan. It’s one of the things I learned in chess: A bad plan is better than no plan.”
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Pair, The Mobile App For Two, Buys UK’s Cupple And Rebrands As Couple
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
, the Y Combinator-backed mobile app studio behind the couples app Pair, is doubling down (literally) on its business ambitions: The company today is announcing that it has bought , a UK-based rival mobile app for two people only, and, to mark the change, has rebranded itself as . Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is one of the app only. The two co-founders behind it, Tim Allison and Mark Hill, as well as their Newcastle-based app studio, , will remain independent, but not totally separate from Oleg Kostour and his team: “Tenthbit is looking forward to interacting with the Cupple team and learning from their experiences,” the two note in a statement. Cupple was “super bootstrapped,” Allison told TechCrunch in an interview today. Meanwhile, Tenthbit raised a seed round of from an illustrious list of investors, including Yuri Milner, Dave Morin, SV Angel and CrunchFund. The two have been in discussions since last year. Cupple will, for now, remain as a standalone app, but users will have the ability to migrate their data to Couple from Cupple if they choose. Cupple first launched in November 2011, a few months ahead of Pair, and had slowly built up a user base that was, at last reveal, 70 percent in the U.S. It was helped along by Apple featuring it in the App Store around Valentine’s Day, as well as against Pair. For its part, the YC company also launched around that time with , and then of course its . Cupple did not disclose current usage figures, downloads or geographical reach. Pair (Couple) meanwhile notes 1.25 million messages sent every day, 160m messages between couples to date and 800,000 downloads. Remember that there are other apps that are made for social networks of just two: from ; ; Korea’s (also ). Some consolidation among them may be inevitable longer-term, and this indicates that Tenthbit, and Couple, are laying out their claim to be the leader of the space. At the same time, the merger of Pair and Cupple comes at a time when social networking apps focused on privacy have had a little extra scrutiny, after Path — ironically, another mobile app designed to let people share among limited, private groups of friends — was by the Federal Trade Commission over a glitch (quickly fixed), which resulted in user address books being uploaded in their entirety to Path’s servers. It’s scenarios like these that will lead some away from using social networks altogether, but will also compel others to look for ever-more private and direct ways to communicate with the ones they want to speak to most when they are not physically together. “Together, we’ve created a new space in the technology market for private sharing. 2012 was the year private sharing became a new category in the market and we know 2013 will see even more growth and innovation,” said Oleg Kostour, CEO of Tenthbit, in a statement. “People want privacy more than ever. The market is moving towards users having more control of the products they use and the data they wish to share.” “We both had a vision,” said Allison of the two apps developing equally but independently. “We wanted private sharing to be an important part of the tech space.” The Cupple acquisition is also a great news story for UK startups; for those who stick to ideas they think are good (even when those around them are more doubtful); and for solid design. Allison noted that he and his co-founder had tried to raise VC funds before launching the app, but no one would bite, with many skeptical of the concept of social networks for two. “I‘m very proud of what we ended up achieving on a bootstrapped budget,” he said. “We were one of the first private sharing apps to launch, and we thought a lot about the UI and design of the product. I think you can see how that has played out in the wider space with the rise of more apps doing what we do.” Yet for all the appeal of Cupple’s UI and UX, and the basic concept itself, there could be another reason that influenced the acquisition: Cupple’s name and brand assets. Tenthbit last year found itself , with the hosting company accusing Tenthbit of infringing on its trademark — made slightly more complicated by the fact that Y Combinator used some of Pair Networks’ services, but also equally frustrating considering how different the business of consumer apps is from web hosting. “The matter has been resolved, and beyond that we have no comment,” Kostour told me today. Tenthbit promises more news coming soon — perhaps apps for more non-iOS or Android devices could be one product of the union. But for now, we hereby pronounce you a Couple.
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The Art Of Science
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
Like many great startup ideas, the formation of L.A.-based incubator, investment firm, and accelerator had its origins at a dinner. In 2007, Peter Pham and Mike Jones found themselves working in L.A., having recently sold companies to and , respectively. The duo, who were friends, started to organize dinners, called Beta South, to bring together startup founders and tech leaders in the area. Pham says that attendance at these dinners was in the single-digits but soon expanded to include many more. At that point, Jones and Pham started thinking about ways to foster entrepreneurship and bring more VC dollars to L.A. Flash forward four years, and Jones had just sold News Corp.’s Myspace, where he was CEO, to Specific Media. As he was thinking about what to do next, he came back to what he and Pham discussed. He was certain that the best way to foster more entrepreneurship in L.A. would be to combine the best elements of Idealab, Y Combinator, Betaworks and a VC firm into a startup-creation machine. From the start, Jones had a very different view on how to structure Science, and it’s this unique model that he hopes will set it apart from the hoards of incubators that are emerging in the current market. While many of the companies that Science is incubating are interesting, what’s far more intriguing is the process through which Science forms, develops and then supports these companies. Jones reconnected with BillShrink founder Pham who had just, infamously, left the photo sharing app in 2011 at the The Lobby conference, a yearly gathering hosted by August Capital partner David Hornik. Pham was brought on to control investments and the money side of things. After spending years at News Corp. and AOL, Jones had observed the structure of media companies, realizing that the right management structure could provide strategic services to launch and support businesses. For example, large media companies have some assets that they own 100 percent of, some assets they own part of, and some assets they produce in-house to support other content. This model, says Jones, has not been applied to venture capital yet. “Why weigh a startup down with things like developing customer-acquisition tools, handling financing and legal operations,” he explains. “We have an operational and strategic way we build companies, and there is a set structure behind this.” And Science’s name refers to the science of building startups. Using revenue and metrics data from companies incubated, Science is trying to create a pattern recognition of sorts of what works in various verticals. Jones and Pham admit that the first thing they do each day is log-in to a proprietary dashboard that collects all of this data on portfolio companies. The first vertical Science has been heavily investing in is the e-commerce and marketplace market, and exploring how technology can solve real-world problems. , a marketplace to find pet sitters, helps harness ordinary people who like to take care of dogs and helps connect them to people who need dog sitters. is on the popularity of juicing and gluten-free foods to make a profit. is a subscription service and e-commerce platform for razors. Science conducts three types of deals procedurally. The first takes an idea or early-stage startup and helps the cofounder craft and scale the business. The second takes an entrepreneur in residence and actually creates a homegrown startup. The third takes a business that has been around for a while and helps it scale. So what’s the method to this Science? There are a few elements to the organization’s strategy, and it goes beyond just daily hands-on help with founders. The first is that the company has a core platform of talent and services that provide a layer of support to startups, including a legal team, a commerce specialist, a design team, a performance marketing specialist, and a hiring manager. The performance marketing exec, for example, handles all Facebook ad buying for portfolio startups. Each individual company has a CTO, but Science has a shared code repository and additional development staff to provide engineering support. Second, Science has built a number of B2B companies that can provide its other consumer-facing startups with marketing technologies. , which in November and powers personalization for styling and clothing companies, is supporting another Science company, , which offers a personalized styling service for men. was developed to provide Pinterest analytics. TripleThread uses HelloInsights on a daily basis to power its personalization engine and track Pinterest traffic. Additionally, Science has an internal system that monitors pretty much every metric you can think of online, including social media, sentiment across all social media channels, and how they rank with competitors in the space. “No startup would have the time or money to build such an in-depth data platform,” says Jones. Third, and interconnected with the second point, Science is using and parsing through mass amounts of data every day to figure out what is making revenue, where traffic is coming from, and more. But Jones says they don’t look at page views as much. “We fundamentally build businesses that have revenue. Our core daily metric is what was revenue yesterday,” says Jones. TripleThread CEO Allan Jones, who joined Science last year, says that the program’s focus is to help build businesses that have meaningful revenue. And where they are doing this, he adds, is in industries that are stale and boring and often overlooked. “It’s one part art, one part scientific formula,” he says. But sometimes Science gets it wrong. “This is a dynamic environment, and we are looking at data every day and thinking about ideas on what we can improve with each company and what we can work on next,” says Pham. If the data shows an idea is not working, then it’s time to close up shop and move onto the next idea. This has happened several times over the course of a year, and, Jones admits, “we’ve had stumbles and made some bad bets. Pham took 101 flights back and forth from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 2011. Basically, Pham was up in the Valley every week last year talking to investors and pitching them on Science startups. Science in 2011 from Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Rustic Canyon, White Star Capital, The Social+Capital Partnership, Jean-Marie Messier, Philippe Camus, Jonathan Miller and Dennis Phelps. But what separates Science’s investment strategy from other non-SF based incubators and accelerators is what it does for its startups when it comes to financing. Originally, Jones and Pham had plans to launch six companies in 2012. The team ended up developing 15 businesses in 2012, and either shut down or never launched four of these startups. Of the nine companies that have publicly launched and raised funding, Science has helped coordinate 13 rounds of financing and raised $35 million for seed and Series A rounds. As he began the round in the winter of 2011, he realized this was going to be an uphill battle. Science didn’t yet have the credibility of a Y Combinator. There’s also the question of investing in an L.A. startup. In some cases, Pham says he had to talk to almost 100 people (including both angels and VCs) for one deal. A lot of VCs didn’t understand why Pham would need to be sitting in the room with a startup when pitching and for ongoing negotiations with a startup. A year later, for one deal, Pham will take around 60 meetings with VCs. That will be narrowed down to 30 who are sort of interested, and 20 who will actually sit down to hear the pitch from the entrepreneur. From that, usually three to four VCs invest. Pham rides a fine balance between investor, mentor and friend to the startups he is pitching for and the investors he is pitching. He says of his role, “The stars have to align in a lot of ways. You have to find the investor that in that small window of time is currently looking to invest, is interested in the space and gets excited for whatever reason about the company. It’s tough. I have to continually figure out which of the 200 investors I know to talk to about a specific company.” Recently an investor came down from Silicon Valley to meet with Pham and one of his previous investments at Science (Pham says a year ago, most Silicon Valley investors weren’t coming down to L.A.). This also was the day that one of Science’s other startups started to hockey stick in terms of data, users and engagement. The visiting VC happened to hear this while at Science’s office and he wanted the pitch. Even though the deck hadn’t even put together yet for investor pitches, the entrepreneur pitched the idea on the fly. The VC decided on the spot to invest in the startup. As for what Science invests in and how much, it’s dynamic. There’s no range or set formula, which is the way some incubators operate. Science makes a few types of investments. First, Jones and Pham will actually incubate and fund an idea and bring in an entrepreneur-in-residence to develop the idea into a startup. This was the case with a video-driven e-commerce platform. Science also will take an existing startup that hasn’t had much traction, and help seed and rejuvenate the product with the “Science” touch ( ). Lastly, Science makes traditional investments into startups. An example of this is a recent investment in BlackJet, the Uber for private travel. “At the end of the day, there is no template for deals,” explains Jones. “We’re not an accelerator and sometimes we put in a lot of money or we don’t.” Science says that with incubations the stake is in the double digits, which is high compared to Y Combinator, where the stake is around 7 percent on average. While Pham and Jones wouldn’t disclose what the exact percentage of ownership the organization takes in startups, we’ve heard it can be as high as two-thirds. That’s a boatload of equity for an entrepreneur to give away early. Despite some of the challenges Pham outlined above, Science has been able to complete a number of impressive seed raises and Series A raises for startups. DogVacay from Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Baroda, and Quest. Dollar Shave Club has from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Venrock, Forerunner Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and White Star Capital. DogVacay founder Aaron Hirschhorn said that the value of having Science help develop his idea was twofold. First, Science helped him make DogVacay into an actual, usable product and interface. Second, the credibility and connections Science brought with fundraising were extremely valuable, both at the seed and Series A levels. Beyond just getting investors to bite, there’s also the question of the quality of startups coming out of Science. With the frothiness of the incubator market, investors are wary of many of the startups that are coming out of accelerators. But Pham maintains that because of the data- and revenue-focused nature of Science, investors actually consider this a benefit. Science vets these ideas on a daily basis through its metrics-focused approach. And as the Series A crunch becomes a reality, investors are looking for real revenue and metrics. Science, says both Pham and Jones, can provide that early on with almost all of its companies. “Good metrics and good businesses will always attract money,” they say. Being based in L.A. also has its advantages for investors. “Valuations are actually reasonable and investors are attracted to that. They are a lot less than they would be in the Valley,” Pham adds. Nate Redmond, general partner at L.A. and San Francisco VC firm Rustic Canyon, and who has invested in Science and a few of the company’s portfolio startups, explains that he sees Science as a “technology operating company.” He agrees with Jones that the idea of applying the media company model to the VC world is compelling. Another differentiator from most incubators is that the core Science team is incredibly talented, he explains. “There is real value for entrepreneurs in with working with Mike and the team around how to market and build a business.” He adds that Science has out-executed and are ahead of initial projections from 2011 on all key metrics. While Pham and Jones wouldn’t comment on whether they are fundraising for more money for Science, their silence on the matter speaks volumes. We’ve heard independently that they are planning to do a Series B round soon. New funding would make sense considering the expansion Jones and Pham have in mind for 2013. Currently, Science has around 16 in-house employees, after starting with six staffers in 2011. Science wants to hire additional employees in operations, customer acquisition and product. We’ll also see the company bringing on more leadership at these levels. Science is also considering a Start Fund-like financial entity that would allow a few investors to put money in everything Science incubates at a very early stage. There are some investors, says Pham, that tend to put money into most of Science’s companies as it is, but this will become more formalized. And the organization will move into new segments. The common thread is that all of these startups solve real-world problems, and we’ll see Science expand this philosophy into the enterprise and other areas. Additionally, we’ll see Science start to do more Bay Area investments and New York deals, says Pham. “Science companies now employ 200 people and we want to have 1,000 by the end of this year,” he says. Scaling to this capacity is a challenge, however, and Jones highlights it as one of the biggest challenges for both Science and its portfolio companies. How Science will perform long-term will depend on whether Jones’ “science” actually ends up being a tried-and-true way to found revenue-generating startups. The application of the structure of media companies in venture capital and tech startup incubation is not a tried and true method yet. Economist Benjamin Graham once described the market as a “voting machine” in the short-term and a “weighing machine” in the long-term. In the near future, Science will be judged in the same way that they judge their own startup founders — by the numbers. Jones and Pham believe all of their startups have the potential to be heavyweights with $100 million in revenue or more, but it’s too early to adjudicate their progress. Walk into its Santa Monica headquarters and you’ll be face-to-face with passionate entrepreneurs hungry to become Science’s first major exit. Many of them entered Science without any knowledge of how to build a startup and without an organized ecosystem to enter. Regardless of the long-term results, Jones and Pham have earned the right to think back to the 2007 dinner when they decided to bolster technology entrepreneurship in L.A. and make a little toast.
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Gillmor Gang: Give Me Your Pants
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — is recorded live in the style of a jazz date, where the group improvises around the themes of the day or week. As we prepare to start, I usually try and get voice levels while at the same time trying to “save it for the show.” This time we went ten minutes or so before realizing we’d neglected to record. The result is an abrupt start to a good conversation, post-Crunchies. It turns out Mike Arrington is very tall and the Oliver guy from the Daily Show very funny. @stevegillmor, @kevinmarks,@jtaschek, @scobleizer, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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MySpace Squandered the Only Thing It Had Left
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Brenden Mulligan
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
MySpace. Or is it Myspace. Or is it My______. I’m not sure. Truth is, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that MySpace has made increasingly bad decisions for too many years to every hope that they’ll become relevant again. Their latest bad decision shows how detached they are from the little value they still offer the entertainment industry. When MySpace launched its , there was a critical aspect missing from every artist page. An asset that bands, record labels, and interns spent countless hours building: their fan base. MySpace decided that they would erase the audience that the bands had built and ask them to start over. To put it simply, THEY DELETED THE F*CKING FANS. It was upon realizing this that my brain exploded. But before we get to that, relax in your favorite armchair as I tell the tale of what MySpace meant to the music industry. A site called MySpace launched in 2003 and immediately got the attention of the music industry because it was the easiest way for a musician to set up a web presence with songs, blog posts, tour dates, etc. I was working at a record label at the time, and MySpace was truly revolutionary. It was a gift to all of us who spent way too much time worrying about artist web presences. It also came with the amazing concept of “friends.” OMG CARTWHEELS. We could quantify a fan base, and even better, by encouraging fans to share (and using spammy friend-adder tools), we could actually grow a fan base. Suddenly “friend count” was one of the most important metrics in the industry. When trying to get a band hired to play a concert, the number of MySpace friends became a big big selling point. Over time (mostly because the MySpace code was such a nightmare and unsecure) people learned how to hack their MySpace pages to look however they wanted. This was another huge win for musicians, because a branded web presence is a really important thing. We wanted the pages to represent the artist, not MySpace. And while this was amazing for musicians, it also greatly benefitted MySpace, because the industry started telling fans about the social network instead of the artist’s website. We even re-directed the artist’s domain name to their MySpace page (which actually was a missed opportunity for MySpace, but that’s an entirely different post). MySpace was then acquired in 2005 by News Corp for $580 million, but honestly, the industry didn’t care. MySpace still worked just like we wanted. The bigger problem that emerged around that time was Facebook started taking off, and there were fewer consumers coming to MySpace. But that’s okay, because MySpace’s Google ranking was still phenomenal. Most times when searching a band name, their MySpace profile was the first link. So regardless of Facebook’s popularity, the MySpace presence was still very very important. So for years, we kept updating it religiously. It was around 2007 when it became clear that MySpace had a looming problem. Because their code allowed musicians to be totally flexible with their pages, MySpace couldn’t really innovate. If they re-designed their site, it would break all the customizations that its core, and only remaining valuable, users had invested time and money into. Facebook was winning because of its clean streamlined design and more engaged users. MySpace couldn’t really do anything to beat them as a social network. But what MySpace could try was to own the entertainment vertical. But at the same time, they had to be very very careful about keeping that vertical happy, because at any moment the entertainment industry could say “screw it, we’re moving to Facebook.” And the MySpace conundrum emerged. They could innovate and piss off their core users, or do nothing and continue to crumble. Not an enviable position. MySpace sat stagnant for a long time. Bands remarkably kept updating it, but for the most part, there wasn’t a clear future for it. And eventually NewsCorp . When Specific Media bought the site, their plan sounded good on paper. Completely focus the site around the one thing people actually use it for, entertainment content. They had hundreds of millions of users and an enormous amount of traffic, and they could leverage those very valuable assets to revamp the site to be the premiere entertainment destination on the web. Plus, they recruited turned Justin Timberlake to help breathe fresh new life into the archaic brand. In fact, the brand was the site’s biggest liability. Although MySpace was an internationally recognized brand and very associated with music and entertainment, it was also seen as a poorly designed site that was past its prime. While the brand could be considered an asset, I always felt like it was more of a liability, and I thought that getting users to get excited about MySpace again was near impossible. If I had been running Specific Media, at this moment I would have acquired a less well-known but more respected brand, such as , , or, yes, . Then I would have found a way to leverage the assets of MySpace (traffic and users) under the new brand’s identity. I think this would have given Specific Media a better chance at a return on investment than reviving a brand with the negative connotations of MySpace. But, they decided to forge on with MySpace and embark on a drastic redesign that they claimed would bring MySpace back. In 2012, MySpace that gave a glimpse into what they would be releasing. The New MySpace depicted in the video was beautifully designed and a really interesting concept. I personally thought the user interaction looked too confusing, but at least it showed that MySpace had brought together a team that could build a compelling and visually well-designed product. It actually got me excited to give it a try. When MySpace finally started letting people in to experience the new site, we all realized the same thing. While it’s neat, it’s not easy to use and doesn’t feel like it’s worth rebuilding a social graph again. As I played with the new site, I noticed I wasn’t connected to any bands or friends. I realized that my old account was under a different email address, so I signed out and tried to sign in with my old address. That didn’t work, but then I saw the option to use my old MySpace account. I used my old email and password and then it became clear that while I was using my old credentials, it wasn’t really porting over my account. It was just letting me use the old login info. When it asked me to connect with my friends, it emphasized Facebook and Twitter over MySpace. This makes sense because those social graphs are probably more updated. Then I saw the column on the right that prompted me to connect to certain artists. That was confusing to me. I’d been connected to them on MySpace before. Shouldn’t I still be connected to them? And then it hit me. MySpace had shit the bed. Again. Immediately, I started looking around the site in complete disbelief. Getting musicians to care at all about MySpace again is a hard enough challenge. Getting them to care enough to try to rebuild a fan base on the platform is out of the question. And that’s what they’re expecting. Every musician starts out in the new MySpace with zero fans. They need to start from scratch. To tell their audience “Go back to MySpace and connect with us!” An example: Britney Spears has about . She has . Hell, even ever-present well-dressed JT has about and . I know that the data from the old system isn’t optimal. I know that most of us have moved on and there’s very little chance we’d actually engage with MySpace again. But the fact that MySpace didn’t automatically port our accounts and the friend graph over from its old system is lost on me. I don’t get it. IT’S ONE OF THE LAST ASSETS THEY HAD. Musicians take advantage of every audience they have. They still used MySpace because regardless of activity, they still have a set of fans on there. Now, musicians have a choice: Ignore MySpace and keep building their fan bases on platforms people actually use, or try to drive their fans from Facebook and Twitter back to an ancient social network that’s confusing. Musicians and entertainment professionals were the only real users MySpace had left. And the only reason they came was because they already had built an audience in MySpace’s heyday. Now, they have no reason to return. wrote “in the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without.” For MySpace, regardless of the external attacks from Facebook, the “internal revolution” was its own misunderstanding of what its users found valuable, squandering the one thing the site had left to offer to musicians and entertainers: the audience they worked so hard to build.
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Google’s Schmidt: ‘Twitter Can No More Produce Analysis Than A Monkey Can Type Out A Work of Shakespeare’
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 2 | 2 |
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s upcoming book, , isn’t pulling any punches. From the “irrelevance” of anonymity to some juicy thoughts on Twitter, the some thought-provoking quotes from the book slated to be released in April. Without more context, we don’t know if this means he means it’s impossible to compose something thoughtful in under 140 characters, or if he’s making a dig at the product itself. Either way, in fairness, Twitter founder Biz Stone had a sense of humor about the occasional silliness of his creation in a Stoli Vodka ad (below): [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XjDBd93ezc] : “ This one is likely to send digital civil rights groups into a fit of blogging rage. Anonymity is often thought of as an essential component of privacy. However, Google and Facebook, especially, fear anonymity contributes to the mindless and uninformed dialog that often overwhelms comment sections and search results. Given that Google is the digital deity of search, it may be able to declare anonymity “irrelevant” through algorithmic fiat. : Earlier this week, it was reported that Schmidt’s book that China is the world’s “most sophisticated and prolific hacker,” which implies that we’re already in a sort of war with China. : As a blogger, I’d be insulted, but Schmidt tells that , so I’ll just assume he’s talking about outlets of far smaller readership (and, if Mr. Schmidt is reading this article, first, thanks for being a reader. Second, please make Gmail faster, the latency is driving me crazy). Given Google’s influence, the upcoming book isn’t just a philosophical exercise, but a peek into the future of the Internet. For his willingness to put Google’s extensive resources to the cause of democracy, we named Schmidt one of our most Innovative People in Democracy. See the full list . [ : Alex Howard]
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 2 | 5 | null |
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