…. Whether or not Facebook’s in-house analytics product, Insights, is working. Due to product changes in recent weeks, the tool has been particularly slow to update with the latest metrics, as the site’s creator, PageLever, has discovered. The startup uses Facebook’s API to provide an advanced custom interface for page owners who are trying to track impressions and a variety of other key numbers. Because of the problem, it has been getting all sorts of questions from clients lately asking a slightly different question: “Why isn’t PageLever working?”
Yes, WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotworking.com doesn’t actually try to answer what its name would seem to indicate. Only Facebook engineers working on the tool know exactly why Insights is not functioning at any given time, after all, and they are probably busy working to fix it instead of dealing with questions.
As cofounder Jeff Widman tells me, the real goal is to direct his clients — and anyone else in the industry — to a single site for a quick answer, instead of having to deal with one-off support tickets like they have been. Normally, as he and the site both note, delays take around 48 hours. (And clearly, the inspiration for it comes from the web standard, DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com.)
Longer term, Facebook could provide its own version of WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotWorking.com if it can’t get updates happening more regularly. The social network took a similar step in recent years in response to platform stability issue, introducing a general “Platform Live Status” note at the top of its developer blog. But obviously, since the company is months away from an IPO and working hard to lure in as many marketers as possible, it needs to get this situation taken care of ASAP. Otherwise, the analytics tool and the developer ecosystem around it are going to dampen the buzz.
Last week, a Mountain Lion roared “Mac is the next big gaming platform.” Apple is bringing Game Center to Mac, it will support cross-platform iPhone vs. Mac play, and the Mac App Store will likely become more prominent. It’s time for mobile developers to decide if they’ll bring their games to Mac OS, and how they’ll port their controls and levels. Otherwise they risk having to claw their way up much more competitive charts.
Tomorrow, after 100 million downloads across platforms, ZeptoLab will release its hit Cut The Rope for Mac OS. After hooking me up with a pre-release download, the Moscow-based founders gave me the low down on the biggest challenges of porting to Mac OS, and why they think it’s critical that mobile developers don’t get left behind on the small screen.
Why Port?
“We see opportunity with the Mac App Store because it’s not as occupied as the mobile App Store. There are several quite nice games, but the competition is not as huge” said ZeptoLab’s twin brother founders Semyon and Efim Voinov. Angry Birds and Plants Vs. Zombies are already available, but other staples like Fruit Ninja, Words With Friends, and Where’s My Water are absent. Without these apps occupying the charts, there are places for other developers to swoop in and get discovered.
As expensive console and PC games like Call Of Duty and Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic appear in the store as well, paid apps ported from mobile may be able to get away with charging higher prices. On a phone $5 may seem steep, but the bigger screen size and history of $50 disc-based games may make $5 appear cheap on the Mac App Store.
“We started quite a while ago doing this in-house. It took a bit longer than we expected, but from a technical standpoint the process of porting to Mac was pretty straightforward. The tools are pretty good. The majority of work was on the design and art side.”
From Touch To Trackpad
In Cut The Rope, users cut ropes attached to pieces of candy, working with gravity, momentum, and other forces to guide the sweets into the mouth of a hungry baby dinosaur named Om Nom.”It was challenging porting to Mac OS, because Cut The Rope was intended for touch controls” the Voinovs admit. “It’s tricky to move from one point of the screen to another very quickly. It’s pretty natural with fingers, but different with the mouse.” When the game was ported to HTML5, some laptop users reported difficulty holding down the mouse click button while using another finger for precise movements.
To keep the original feel intact but give players an optimized control scheme for the track pad and mouse, the Voinovs added the option to hover near a rope to highlight it and click to cut it, rather than swiping. If it helps, users can leave it on, or disable it if they find it too different from the mobile version. During testing, the team noticed that levels where you had to make several quick cuts could leave users cursing the controls. To compensate, they made the physics of the Mac version work just a little slower.
Developers should determine which controls might be harder with a mouse and consider adding similar options, keyboard shortcuts, or on-screen buttons that make use of the extra real estate. If those aren’t enough, similar tweaks can be made to a game’s physics to reduce player frustration.
High Resolution Landscape Level Design
Meanwhile, many of Cut The Ropes levels were designed for a portrait orientation screen, while most Mac monitors stay fixed in the landscape position. The Voinovs took a methodical approach, playing each level of their mobile game and noting which were too tall and would need lay out adjustments. “We realized it was more half of the levels”, making level redesign a significant time-suck. Other devs should factor this into their decisions to port and release schedules.
Bigger screens also require higher resolution artwork. Rather than seeing this as busy work, ZeptoLab took the chance to differentiate the Mac OS experience. “We made sure it would look great, really crisp and sharp. It makes it special and give people who already played on mobile a reason [to buy the Mac OS version]. You can see all the little details of the graphics in the game.” Now as the team makes new level packs, they’re using the Mac OS resolution standards that are much easier to scale down than scale up.
Diversifying Revenue Streams
“This is our first experience releasing a Mac OS game. We believe it will develop into a bigger thing overtime” Semyon told me. ZeptoLab will be closely watching the success of the game, but is simultaneously seeking other revenue sources. Last week it released Cut The Rope for the Barnes & Noble Nook reader. Apple TV and Siri are two other big platforms that developers should have on their radars. At the New York Toy Fair, ZeptoLab announced licensing deals with Mattel, Hasbro, JAKKS Pacific, and Li&Fung to create Om Nom plush dolls, a board game, and clothing line based on Cut The Rope. “We’re trying to keep the balance. Merchandise is important, but there’s no merchandise without a good product” the brothers say. Merch has been huge for Rovio‘s Angry Birds, and now Zynga has struck licensing deals, legitimizing offline revenue streams.
Finally, while Cut The Rope is in 4th on the all-time App Store paid app chart, ZeptoLab is eager to invent new intellectual property, ”We have this creative urge to do cool new things.”
Developers shouldn’t limit themselves to porting existing games. The Mac OS gaming platform comes with unique characteristics like the trackpad to be designed for, rather than around. “Cut the ropes to your imagination” a some hack writer might say. I’ll just leave you with, “Go make people happy, that’s your art.”
CCP Games, the makers of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game EVE Online , say the company brought in $66 million in revenue last year.
The game, a science fictional adventure set in a star cluster dominated by five major civilizations, first launched in 2003, and its subscriber base (currently about 400,000) has grown every year since launch. Revenue has been growing too, at a compound annual growth rate of 53 percent, bringing in total revenue of $300 million over the game’s lifetime. As for profits, CCP would only say that it has “very healthy margins” — a claim backed up by the fact that it has grown to more than 450 employees despite only raising $3 million in seed funding.
This might seem like an illustration that traditional online gaming, overshadowed in the media by casual social games like those from Zynga, can still work as a business model. At the same time, CCP’s new CMO David Reid says the company has been excited to embrace new models, in addition to the traditional subscriptions offered by EVE.
CCP has already been experimenting with free-to-play in EVE, by allowing rich subscribers to essentially pay for others to play, in exchange for virtual currency — something that has been used by 40,000 people, the company says. Its next game, DUST 451, is scheduled for release this summer, and will go further in this direction, charging players for in-game credits rather than subscriptions or playing time (though there is an initial “cover charge”).
That’s not the only ambitious thing about DUST. With its first-person shooter gameplay, this is CCP’s attempt to reach the audience that made franchises like Call of Duty a hit, while also connecting to the EVE universe. Through mechanisms like orbital bombardment, the space-based players in EVE can actually affect the planet-based combat in DUST, and vice versa.
As a result of its plans for DUST, as well as Asian expansion for EVE, CCP says 2012 will be its bigger year yet. In fact, the Icelandic company’s CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson says an IPO is a possibility, though predictably, he wouldn’t commit to anything.
“We want to be ready for an IPO from a policy standpoint,” Petursson says. “We’re quite a substantial company, so we’re thinking, ‘Okay, what is the next step?’”
If you run a big website, you have a range of good options for staying protected from malicious hacks: hardware from enterprise-oriented companies like Cisco or McAfee, your own in-house support, or hosted professional blog services like WordPress VIP (which is what TechCrunch uses). If you’re a smaller site out on the open web, you have weaker options — at least if you want to get auto-updated responses to a wide range of security problems.
Israeli startup 6Scan is out to change that, launching a WordPress plugin today that automatically scans and updates to protect against the latest issues coming up across the web. By “automatically,” I mean that the company’s security team monitors the web and does its own research to find problems, then pushes an update to all of its users. These go out about every hour, according to co-founder and chief executive Nitzan Miron, as they’re discovered and added to the company’s system.
Key problems it fixes include SQL injections, cross-site scripting, directory transversals, remote file inclusion and the other top security risks. The scanning software is offered for free, but it will fix remove risks and provide other features, like zero-day research and additional email and SMS support for $10 a month. Although the Israeli company has only been around since April of last year, Miron and his co-founder Yaron Tal worked in web security in their country’s military over the previous years — they’re not new to the space.
Other website guards that serve small to medium-sized sites include Dasient (now part of Twitter), Armorize, StopTheHacker (also recently funded) and CodeGuard. They each provide a range of competing services for cheaply and quickly identifying threats, and they all offer various methods for containing or removing problems. Miron says that the ability to fix existing vulnerabilities instead of requiring users to take additional actions helps separate 6Scan’s offering from web-based competitors. (Note: I haven’t tested every web site security system around, but so far I haven’t seen others that do this, exactly. Tell me if otherwise in the comments).
More generally, another type of competitor here are companies that offer hosted, supported sites for smaller businesses, that accomplish the marketing goals at stand-alone websites. This can include anything from Facebook pages to Tumblr accounts to hosted site creators like Weebly or Webs.com. On that front, Miron says that they’re also talking to hosting companies to get their software auto-installed, and they’ve been getting some interest — so, they’re not only going straight for consumer-style smaller businesses running their own sites.
While WordPress is the first live version, Miron says support for other content management systems are coming soon, with Joomla and Drupal in the next few days. In its private beta, 6Scan has already added up a few thousand customers, he adds, many of whom are already paying.
The company has so far raised an undisclosed round from YL Ventures, following on seed funding from Israeli incubator Venturegeeks last year. Miron is coming through town now, and planning to present at the SF New Tech cloud meetup at Might tomorrow.
When Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and several others in the organization were arrested in raids a month ago, it was noted by prosecutors that Dotcom’s rather wild lifestyle and propensity for spontaneous international travel, combined with his vast wealth, constituted a serious flight risk. He was denied bail at the time, at least until Feb. 22, when the US was to turn in its extradition paperwork.
And today in New Zealand, or rather tomorrow (it’s the 22nd in NZ), Dotcom was released under a number of conditions: he will have no Internet access, will not travel 80km from his home except in emergencies, and no helicopters would be permitted to fly to his property.
[image: Elliot Kember]
The reason for his being granted bail appears to be that investigators found he did not in fact have the resources to flee New Zealand. They say he is “highly disorganized” in money matters, and his main resources had been seized. It seems hard to believe that a person running a site the size of Megaupload, living in a $30 million house and with contacts all over the world, wouldn’t have any kind of backup plan in case of exactly this event (he is not entirely without foresight: there was a shotgun in the room where he was arrested). But the burden of proof is on the police to show that he does have those resources, and they could not do so. Dotcom was released to a swarm of reporters, who asked him all manner of questions; he responded only that he was happy to be returning to his wife and kids, that he planned to fight his extradition, and that the way the cops treated him “felt a little bit like an audition to American Idol.”
On the legal front, the U.S. now has until March 2 to get its extradition paperwork in, but the extradition hearing for the four arrested will not be until August. Last week U.S. prosecutors added wire fraud to the heap of charges, and noted that not only were Megaupload’s user counts inflated, but less than one out of ten of those users had actually uploaded a file. Dotcom’s lawyers, on the other hand, insist this is at best a civil case and that the U.S. was overplaying its hand. The charges, they say, don’t merit extradition.
The fate of the site, meanwhile, is still hanging in the balance. It’s a simple matter of fact that whatever illegal activities in which the site may have been engaged, there were also perfectly legal files on there, access to which was abruptly cut. One hopes that a solution will be presented that allows, perhaps, one day’s access of users to their own files, but the U.S. Government doesn’t appear to be very concerned with this particular kind of collateral damage.
There’s a lot of noise in our social media channels. I’m busy clogging up your Twitter feed with my deep thoughts, your friends are sharing their one-millionth baby picture on Facebook, and Scoble is filming startups in your living room on Google+. There is unfathomable amount of data being produced every second, as social networks, apps, chat, etc. now facilitate realtime communication and sharing — making email feel like the Pony Express. This makes it nearly impossible for people (and their businesses) to stay on top of — among other things — the realtime communication happening between their customers.
What’s more, sharing has really gotten out of hand. The ease of realtime communication and sharing now has outpaced our ability to filter the noise into non-teeth rattling signals. There are hundreds examples of realtime data interpretation applied to outputs of noise, and social media dashboards are the answer to the social sharing part of the problem. We just covered Nimble, a company that’s essentially taking on Salesforce with an enterprise equivalent of social CRM for the little guys, i.e. startups and SMBs. Bottlenose today released their own v2.0 of their intelligent social media dashboard, and it’s an interesting and more visual alternative to Nimble. MG covered Bottlenose last year when the company was still in stealth mode and was just focusing on funneling Twitter streams. Co-founded by Noah Spivak, who’s already become know for his data plays, like Twine and Live Matrix, and Dominiek ter Heide, Bottlenose now filters Twitter, Facebook, and RSS, creating a unified stream that puts those networks in one place.
The goal, though, is not only aggregation, it’s about understanding what each message is about at a granular level so that it can build a robust profile about you and your interests so that it can help you discover relevant information you might have missed, new friends, articles, and so on. Just like Nimble.
The cool thing about Bottlenose is that it gives you the opportunity to set sophisticated alerts and uses action-based rules to help you get on top of the noise, regardless of whether or not you’re actively engaged in the app or not. It can even take actions for you, like a helpful brows-er-based social media butler.
So there’s a lot going on under the hood, but the experience is light and fast — it doesn’t feel like your browser is carrying sandbags, thanks to Bottlenose containing a breezy concoction of HTML5 and Javascript. The social butler I mentioned before (or “Assistants”) now live in the left column of the app, learning about your interests as you go, offering personalized suggestions for filters that you may actually care about. This is all part of Bottlenose’s core technology, called Sonar (hence the dolphin references), which has been significantly improved in version 2.0, now representing a really interesting, visual browsing experience. When you’re in the app, Sonar takes up the right portion of the screen, presenting personalized, relevant tags in a graphic layout. They’re layered in concentric circles, with those closest to the nucleus being the most important, but you can see the visual tree layout of your conversations, clicking into each one to learn more.
Beyond the new column view with “Assistants,” Bottlenose 2.0 also now allows you to consume pictures, video, and read articles in-line within your streams (all embedded in the UI), and there’s more author and message context so that you can view author data inline, threaded conversations, bios, and so on.
Users can also now write lengthier messages, and Bottlenose will carry messages that exceed the character limit into a “metadata payload” that others can expand. Oh, and there’s plenty of Twitter info to keep you occupied, influence, interests (all semantically inferred) — instant dossiers on the people you care about. Hooray!
Bottlenose already has 10K+ users in beta, with 100K more on the wait list, and the team says that users have been spending an average of 11 minutes in the app per visit.
The startup will be opening up third-party developer access (APIs) very soon to enable plugins, new functionality, integrations, and all that good stuff. Once that happens, Bottlenose could really take off.
The app is still in somewhat limited beta, but for those looking to get access (I recommend checking it out), head over to the homepage, sign up, create an account, and if you’re prompted, use “Getsonar” for the access code. Oh, and if you have a Klout score over 30, you’ll get in automatically. Let us know what you think.
Twitter has just launched a new app refresh for its mobile apps in Android and iOS, as well as expanded its offerings to the Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble NOOK and NOOK color.
Returning to the iOS and Android apps is the ability to swipe individual tweets to reveal tweet actions like ‘Reply,”Retweet,”Favorite’ and ‘Profile’ — a feature which was initially available in Tweetie, the app that eventually became Twitter for mobile, and then removed inexplicably. Another blast from the past is the ability to copy and paste text of tweets and user profiles, which I for one really missed.
One clear sign we live in a post-Pathgate world? The iPhone app now gives you brusque, “We will securely upload your contacts to help you find friends and suggest users to follow on Twitter” notification you when you try to find friends, buried deep under the ‘#Discover’ tab (which I’ll elaborate on in a moment).
In addition to the major changes above, Twitter has also added the ability change your font size and to tweet, copy and mail a link with in a tweet or read a link later if you enable that setting.
While the design of Direct Messages has been further streamlined and now users can mark all as read, the feature itself is still disappointingly buried under the vague ‘Me’ tab. Sadly enough for those who find Twitter to be a superior short messaging platform, you still have to take two steps to get there, whereas old school Direct Messaging was given prime real estate with rest of the core functions.
You know what replaced easily accessible DMs (Grrr)? This terrible thing called #Discover, which I guess lets me view all the trending topics I don’t care about like the #Brit Awards#MardiGras or #SometimesWhenImBored.
Twitter, hear me out bro: I’ve never gone to #Discover with the intent of actually discovering something. In contrast, I visit my DMs about 20 times a day. How about you move the tab just for me? Pretty please.
Oh hell, I’m just going to download Tweetbot.
With stories of Terminator-esque Google glasses making headlines these days, you’d think a basic task like screen sharing would be something that’d be pretty well solved by now. But while there are many different ways to share your desktop (or some portion thereof) with your friends or coworkers, more often than not the process isn’t something you’d call easy.
It’s bad enough that many people (including me) often find themselves steering their peers around computers the old-fashioned way: voice instructions over the phone (“Okay, now look in the Dock, do you see the Settings button? The one with metal gears, right. Click that…”) ScreenLeap, a new startup out of the latest Y Combinator batch, wants to make this process a lot less painful, so that next time you’re confronted with an issue that could be better dealt with via screen-share, you actually take advantage of it. And to do that, they’re offering a product that’s about straightforward as it gets: click a link, and you’re looking at your friend’s screen.
Of course, ScreenLeap is far from the first company that’s looking to take on WebEx and the other well-established screen-sharing platforms — competitors include GoInstant, which debuted at TC Disrupt SF back in September, JoinMe, and even Google+, which offers screensharing as part of its Hangouts feature. So what sets ScreenLeap apart? Cofounder Tuyen Truong says that it’s the only service that uses JavaScript and HTML in its viewer, which means that just about any browser — including those on smartphones — can view a broadcast without having to install any additional software.
Conversely, competitors like JoinMe (which is part of LogMeIn) use a Flash-based viewer, which won’t work on many smartphones (including, famously, any iOS devices), so they require standalone mobile apps. And while GoInstant doesn’t use Flash (in fact, it doesn’t require any downloads), it’ll only let you share a browser screen, and not content from other apps.
From the viewer’s perspective, ScreenLeap works great. You click the link (or enter a short PIN on ScreenLeap’s homepage) and you’re looking at the sharer’s screen within a few seconds. Unfortunately the experience isn’t quite as straightforward for the person who wants to share their screen — they’ll need to download and run ScreenLeap’s Java applet, a process that’s quick and relatively painless, but is a significant hurdle nonetheless (some people are wary of running such applets, especially if it’s from a site they’ve only recently heard about).
The site itself is the epitome of a minimal viable product. It looks pretty generic (to the point that I might initially assume its homepage were an ad of some sort), and from a functionality perspective it’s missing some obvious features, like the ability to create screen-shares that are restricted to certain users.
But the design issue is easily remedied, and the company says user accounts (and permissions) will be coming in the next few weeks. Another obvious omission is audio: at this point ScreenLeap is for visual sharing only. But Truong says that the service has found that many people are already having a phone conversation when they launch the service anyway.
At this point ScreenLeap is free, but down the line the company plans to utilize a freemium business model, with certain features being available for a price. Truong says that ScreenLeap is hoping to appeal both to businesses — who have traditionally been the main users of screensharing software — and consumers, who he believes are an untapped market. He likens the current situation with screensharing to the quick rise of the camera phone, as the ubiquity and ease-of-use of smartphones have led to people snapping photos far more often than they would otherwise.
He’s less certain about what they’ll be screensharing, but expects that users will demonstrate use-cases in the coming months. Personally, I seriously doubt that screensharing will see anything near the boom mobile photos have, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a much more modest uptick as it becomes easier to do.
Finally, one interesting anecdote. ScreenLeap’s four founders are Tuyen Truong, Lawrence Gentilello, Steven Liu, and Allison Huynh, and two of them — Truong and Gentilello — were founders some thirteen years ago of a site at Stanford called Steamtunnels. A site that featured an online version of Stanford’s (print) Facebook, and had aims that were very similar to what Facebook.com eventually became. Alas, Stanford’s faculty wasn’t receptive to the idea. From the Stanford Daily:
As the site's "About Us" page stated in 1999, "Let's face it, the Facebook is an integral part of Stanford's social structure: you poured over it freshman year getting to know your class, and now it remains a desktop reference more cherished and abused than your Webster's Dictionary…we put the Facebook online."
However, only a week after the release of the beta version of the site, the trio said the University pushed for Steamtunnels to shut down, citing potential Honor Code violations and removing Gentilello and Truong from academic advising positions
Facebook’s Timeline is a cool idea, but as a representation of my life, it doesn’t have much to say about my experiences before 2004. Now, in its own small way, viral content site BuzzFeed is trying to change that.
Specifically, it’s adding buttons in a few posts to take advantage of the Timeline’s ability to backdate content. The first post with this feature asks, “What Was Your First Computer?” For example, you could say that your first computer was an Apple II, and that you got it in 1978, and that would be added to the relevant section of your Timeline. Another post asks, “What Toys Did You Play With As A Kid?“
“Facebook didn’t exist in the 1980s and 90s so we never had the chance to post about our love of Pepsi Blue, the Tandy 1000, and Boyz II Men,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti tells me via email. “We wanted to help BuzzFeed readers complete their Timelines with all the meaningful experiences from their formative years.”
Of course, this also allows BuzzFeed to publish nostalgia-baiting posts that drive traffic through social sharing — after all, that kind of socially-driven traffic is both BuzzFeed’s bread and butter, as well as one of the main reasons for any startups to build Timeline apps.
I think there could be some fun ways for other sites to use the backdating feature, but I haven’t seen any yet. Peretti says his team had to work closely with Facebook to make this happen, and that BuzzfFeed might eventually extend this feature beyond its main site.
Things are beginning to look even dimmer for LightSquared. Just one day after satellite network operator Inmarsat announced that LightSquared had defaulted on a $56 million payment, new reports indicate that the company plans to slash its workforce by 45% in an effort to cut costs and keep fighting.
“This and other cost savings measures will allow LightSquared to continue to navigate the regulatory process as it works with the appropriate government agencies to find solutions to the GPS interference issue,” reads a statement issued to Reuters.
Let’s not forget that LightSquared isn’t that a big a company to start off with — the company only employs around 330 people. With their workforce poised to be cut nearly in half and regulatory woes bogging them down, I can’t imagine the morale in their particular corner of Virginia to be too high. The move also casts their non-payment to Inmarsat in a different light — while LightSquared claimed that they have “raised several matters that require resolution” before they make the payment, it now just looks like they couldn’t scrape the money together.
LightSquared declined to offer any further detail on the situation, and could not be reached for comment at time of writing.
Though things are looking grim for LightSquared right now, it's unfair to say that the book has closed completely on LightSquared's ambitious plans. From the sound of their release, LightSquared seems ready to streamline their operations and keep their head down for the time being. Anyone whose followed the LightSquared situation though knows that keeping their head down is highly uncharacteristic for them. For nearly every drawback LightSquared has faced (and there have been a lot of them so far), the company was quick to respond with a sharp-tongued press release.
This time though, there doesn’t seem to be much more that LightSquared can do. They can’t proceed any further without the FCC’s go-ahead, and they’ll never get that unless they can prove that the interference risk their network poses to GPS is negligible. LightSquared has publicly taken issue with the testing process — they’ve gone as far as to accuse two government committees of wrongdoing — but only further testing can clear their name.
Even then, the ball isn’t in their court. Despite having given LightSquared a conditional approval [PDF] to build out their network in early 2011, the regulatory body changed their minds in a jiffy when NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling sent them a letter [PDF] last week stating that an interference-free network rollout wasn’t doable.
LightSquared clearly intends to continue fighting, but their spate of layoffs seems to signal that the company is hunkering down into survival mode. Unless the political or regulatory climates change soon, how long LightSquared can continue to keep at it is anyone’s guess.
Moral ambiguity, thy name is advertising. How are we to parse this advertising campaign in London in which an intelligent bus stop billboard only displays its content to women? You read correctly: the billboard has a camera that scans passersby and if one stops to look, it determines their sex and shows them a 40-second video if they are female. Males only get a link to the advertiser’s website.
Now, does it change things if the advertiser is Plan UK, a non-profit organization trying to raise money towards the education of girls in third-world countries? And they don’t show men because they wanted to give them “a glimpse of what it’s like to have basic choices taken away”? Whether you find this commendable or reprehensible, you have to admit that the technology and implications are more than a little interesting.
TechCrunch isn’t really the venue for the discussion of gender politics, so we’ll abstract this one level and look at the campaign from another angle. First, the installation cost £30,000 for a two-week placement, so it’s not like these are going to start appearing on every street corner. And the system claims a 90% accuracy rate, a figure that is perhaps optimistic. The 10% of people mistaken for the opposite sex will be somewhat unhappy.
Incidentally, here’s the video that 90% of females and 10% of males will see:
But think about the possibilities if you aren’t using some sensitive information as your content arbiter. What if you load up a hundred videos of people in different outfits, and then match that to whatever the person viewing the ad is wearing? “Nice red blazer. But we like this one better. Only $25 at H&M.” Or perhaps an advertisement aimed at people with children or holding babies.
In this case, the ad’s form of tailoring the experience is to exclude people. Useful for making a statement, but not so much for driving sales or donations.
One thing is sure: this particular campaign is going to raise hell, and the companies behind it are going to be answering calls and emails for months. Plan UK’s CEO, Marie Staunton, says:
Millions of girls across the globe are being denied the right and choice to have an education. This ad is a deliberate attempt to raise public debate on this issue. Although we're not giving men and boys the choice to see the full ad on this occasion – so we get a glimpse of what it's like to have basic choices taken away – boys and men play a vital role in helping girls to be all they can be.
It may also raise public debate on the nature of advertising. That’s probably a good thing, considering ads have been more or less the same since they first gained traction in the 19th century. Sometimes a controversy like this is a powerful way of moving things forward. You can learn more about the campaign here and donate if you like — or give the organization some feedback.
[via PSFK]
This complete project kit made by Adafruit allows you to print out things from the Internet. Want to print all your Tweets onto receipt paper? You got it. Want to print out your Facebook wall? Why the heck not! The kit uses an Arduino board and thermal printer and offers the opportunity for weekend hackers to pop together a cool little printer thinger and learn Arduino and Twitter programming.
The plans are completely open and you can either buy the full kit for $89 or just get the parts for yourself. The kit doesn’t include the Arduino board or Ethernet kit, so that adds another $60 or so to the price or just get a Arduino Uno Ethernet with built-in Ethernet.
The kit is available now. I’m going to build one to print out Texts From Bennett. Product Page
Are you enough of a photo geek to build your own camera? Maybe. But are you enough of one to build it out of LEGO and some spare bits you had lying around the house? Probably not. But Carl-Frederic Salicath over in Norway is. And he did. He calls it the Legoflex B1.
The body of the camera is entirely LEGO: normal bricks for the outside, and some Technic pieces built to hold the 120mm roll film the camera uses. It even has a rewind lock so the film doesn’t unravel or turn the wrong direction. The lenses are from a pair of binoculars (optically the same) and the aperture is a single Technic piece that has a hole in the middle.
Twin-lens cameras like the famous Rolleiflex have two identical lenses one about the other, with one bouncing off a mirror so you can compose, and another exposing the film. The design is made to minimize moving parts; the focus is adjusted by moving the lens back and forth, and in this case the exposure is achieved by sliding a one-brick-wide plate with a slot in it across the path of the light. Obviously getting a correct exposure is something of a challenge. But it works, as his sample shots show.
When you think about it, cameras can be fairly simple. Pinhole photography and things like solargraphs are as simple as it gets and work by basic principles of optics. It’s when you start adding things like autofocus, adjustable aperture, and restricting the depth of the camera that things get complicated — and expensive. Head over to this blog entry for detailed info on how the camera was built.
[via PetaPixel]
Yahoo’s management of Flickr has been something of a mystery. The photo-hosting service, once far and away the frontrunner and choice of pros and casual shooters alike, has seen few improvements in recent years — an eternity in the fast-moving online photography space. Many (including myself) cling to the service out of a kind of inertia, but it’s hard not to be jealous of the whiz-bang layouts and features of newer sites and services like 500px and Instagram. Even communities like Google+ and Pinterest are making Flickr users second-guess themselves.
It looks as though Flickr is finally getting the makeover it has deserved for years, though: launching on the 28th is a whole new layout and upload style, with an emphasis on community and consumption.
The news comes straight from Flickr’s head product manager, Markus Spiering, who told BetaBeat all about it in an interview. He explained that communication wasn’t as good as it could have been over the last few years, but insisted that Yahoo has its heart in the right place. But few would disagree that that the site has remained mostly the same in a changing industry, and Yahoo has let new sites eat Flickr’s lunch for quite a while now.
At any rate, some serious changes are forthcoming: the photo browsing page is far more browsable, with a dynamic layout that minimizes white space and looks suspiciously friendly to touch interfaces.
A new upload page is in the works as well, something that’s long overdue. I’ll miss the small pleasure of the way the checkmarks pop into the progress bars, but the new drag-and-drop interface, with richer interaction with the photos uploaded (more like the organization page) and a more robust workflow.
It’s a serious UI change, but if it’s the only thing coming in 2012, it still might not be enough to satisfy the wolves at the door. Their presence in tablets and mobile needs to be boosted, and the site needs to decide who it’s competing with or else it will, by default, be competing with every comer. Spiering seems optimistic, but of course, that’s part of his job.
Suite anticipation, said The Daily. The News Corp iPad mag broke the news this morning that Microsoft was about to submit its productivity suite to Apple for review. They even had a photo of the app running on an iPad to back up their claim — which they triple watermarked for some reason. The outlet specluated that the app could launch in the “coming weeks.” But then Microsoft responded, telling ZDNet that “The Daily’s story is not a picture of a real Microsoft software product.”
I reached out to The Daily’s Apps & Tech Editor Peter Ha for confirmation. Having personally worked with him for a couple of years here at TechCrunch, I knew he was not one to run a story of this magnitude without plenty of fact checking. Sure enough, they did their homework and Ha stands by the story and pic.
We’ve been chasing this story down for weeks. We did not fabricate the image and Microsoft isn’t denying the existence of Office for iPad. All this fuss over a photo is nonsense. The story is real.
We also got confirmation from local sources in Seattle, who assure us that the software is real and being developed in-house. However, as the build in the picture is far from final, Microsoft can deny (in its overly specific way) that it’s not a real product.
“Wait, you want us to be your lab rats?” “Pioneers”
If you need more proof that Microsoft and Google hate each other, just watch the video above. It’s a direct message from Microsoft to businesses everywhere. And it raises some very valid points.
Change is hard for everyone. Switching from Office to Google Docs isn’t an easy switch. Many features are still missing from Google’s productivity suite. It’s not a direct replacement. Typing in the cloud is fantastic but so is a reliable auto-spell check and fool-proof offline editing. Microsoft Office might be disappearing from some shops but others rely it as much as the office’s coffeepot.
Google will no doubt fire back with its own quirky advert. You can always count on Microsoft and Google’s marketing department for a good show.
Sugar Inc., a media company that caters exclusively to women, is acquiring San Francisco-based Circle of Moms, a social network and online communityfor moms and moms-to-be. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Originally launched on Facebook in 2008, Circle Of Moms has a community of around 6 million moms connected around news and advice on parenting/mom topics. The platform also offers Child Pages, which are centralized online spaces within the network where moms can share child's special moments, photos and memories with close friends and family online.
Circle of Moms was funded by Mike Maples, Naval Ravikant, SoftTech VC and a number of angel investors. Sugar, which just raised $15 million in new funding last year, will operate Circle of Moms as an independent subsidiary.
For background, Sugar's flagship site is PopSugar, and it also home to social shopping site ShopStyle, a free blogging platform for users called OnSugar, and a variety of topical blogs including FitSugar (fitness), PetSugar, and BuzzSugar (gossip). Sugar also operates the more mom-focused Lilsugar. The media platform draws 28 million visitors per month between its sites. Sugar previously bought virtual fashion assistant MyPerfectSale last October in 2010.
Sugar Inc., a media company that caters exclusively to women, is acquiring San Francisco-based Circle of Moms, a social network and online communityfor moms and moms-to-be. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Originally launched on Facebook in 2008, Circle Of Moms has a community of around 6 million moms connected around news and advice on parenting/mom topics. The platform also offers Child Pages, which are centralized online spaces within the network where moms can share child's special moments, photos and memories with close friends and family online.
Circle of Moms was funded by Mike Maples, Naval Ravikant, SoftTech VC and a number of angel investors. Sugar, which just raised $15 million in new funding last year, will operate Circle of Moms as an independent subsidiary.
For background, Sugar's flagship site is PopSugar, and it also home to social shopping site ShopStyle, a free blogging platform for users called OnSugar, and a variety of topical blogs including FitSugar (fitness), PetSugar, and BuzzSugar (gossip). Sugar also operates the more mom-focused Lilsugar. The media platform draws 28 million visitors per month between its sites. Sugar previously bought virtual fashion assistant MyPerfectSale last October in 2010.
Another cloud startup is making enhancements to improve the performance and functionality of its services. This one is squarely for enterprises and comes from Huddle, which today is announcing Huddle Sync, a service that promises “intelligent” synchronization of enterprise work files to serve users what they need, when they need it.
Huddle is banking on the idea that services like Dropbox will have limited appeal to enterprise users who have to access masses of data; and that IT managers and CIOs will want to exert control on how users access files, and that users will find managing everything themselves a headache. And that companies like Microsoft or IBM will not beat it to the punch in offering this functionality directly.
“Everyone does cloud synchronization today,” Andy McLoughlin, co-founder and EVP of Strategy. “That’s fine with 50 gigabytes of personal content, but when you have 50 terabytes, there is no way to know what is relevant. Dropbox is a terrific tool for small teams, but it’s not suitable for the enterprise.”
That is an issue that will only grow in the years ahead. In figures provided by Huddle, IDC in 2011 estimated that the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zetabytes this year, with enterprises accounting for 80 per cent of information “in the digital universe” at some point in its digital life.
The service — available today on for Windows desktop and as an iPhone app, with further platforms like Mac coming soon — works like this: enterprise users have access to sections of files and other that their IT managers enable for them to use. Then over time, Huddle says that its algorithms learn what a user is accessing, and starts to offer relavant files to them, which they can use online or offline. IT folks get full audit reports of what gets accessed and when.
London and SF-based Huddle says that from today 100 of its customers will be going live on the platform, with it becoming available to its full user base soon. That base, currently, numbers 100,000 business, including 70 percent of UK’s central government and 70 companies in the Fortune 500, such as HTC, Kia Motors and Procter & Gamble, says McLoughlin.
While we have heard many stories of remotely-controlled cloud services going down and causing problems for both enterprises and consumers, Huddle is fairly bullish on its ability to remain robust as it serves its current customers and continues to grow. McLoughlin says the company, so far, has not had to pay back on a single service-level agreement in its years of operation.
Hopefully McLoughlin hasn’t spoken too soon. Meanwhile, the company’s CEO and other co-founder, Alastair Mitchell, says that Huddle expects for its business to triple in size in the next two years — with options to potentially sell services like Sync on to third parties to offer on to other businesses or even consumers: after all, recommendation and personalization services are a hot area today.
The company, he notes, is already profitable and has not raised any more money since raising nearly $15 million several years ago, but he said it expects to announce another funding round soon “to help it grow even faster.”
12 months ago at SFMusicTech, I talked to StageIt founder and CEO Evan Lowenstein about what he called “the new intimacy economy”. And last week at SFMusicTech, I met again with Lowenstein, a former popular musician himself, to talk about StageIt’s progress and how he is helping reinvent the music industry by enabling a new kind of intimacy between artist and audience.
Backed by angel investments from Jimmy Buffet and Shawn Parker, StageIt offers musicians a live video platform to connect with their fans. It’s what Lowenstein calls a “video Twitter” – although he is determined to fight the “phantom metrics” that, he says, assume that Twitter followers or Facebook friends automatically translate into a paying audience of fans. Instead, he argues, artists need to use digital venues like StageIt to rebuild their intimacy with their audience. StageIt’s secret sauce, Lowenstein insists, is “standing out of the way of artists and fans” and so far it seems to be doing a good job – with 4,000 bands already signed up to the platform and 800 actually doing business on it.
Like Nataly and Jack at Pomplamoose, Evan Lowenstein’s innovation is rebuilding the music industry in the Internet economy. In a year’s time, he expects not only to have moved his video platform into other verticals, but also to be profitable. I hope he is successful. We need more entrepreneurs like Lowenstein simultaneously committed to both realizing revenue and helping reestablish the trust between artist and audience in our digital age.
Following its recent raise of $2 million in seed funding, the still invite-only mobile payments startup Zipmark is today announcing the launch of its developer program and API. The New York-based company, founded in 2010 by Citigroup alum Jay Bhattacharya and CTO Jake Howerton, leverages the existing check processing network to allow users to avoid credit card fees while also eliminating the risk of bounced checks.
The way Zipmark works is this:
Users connect their “real” checking account to the service, which they can then use to pay bills and invoices or send money to friends. Because the Zipmark works over the existing check processing infrastructure, Zipmark doesn’t need to hold onto the funds in the cloud for an extended period of time while the transactions are verified. Instead, the money clears a user’s account on the next business day. Merchants will also be able to offer Zipmark as a payment option by placing a QR code on their invoices, which customers can then scan and pay.
Because it uses the check processing network, Zipmark’s fees are low – just 1% of each transaction – and are capped at $5.00, regardless of the transaction amount. The system also uses secure, Check21 compliant digital checks, the goal being to “modernize the checkbook,” the company says.
With the new Zipmark Biller API, businesses and app developers will have access to a new payment system for both online and mobile transactions. At launch, several companies are also announcing their support for the system, including NY co-working space Sunshine Suites, bill payment solution provider Singular Payments, property management software company UnitConnect, and mobile invoicing provider InvoiceASAP.
In addition, Zipmark says it will also launch a consumer-facing iPhone app in time for SXSW, which will let users pay for items, fees and subscriptions directly from QR codes.
While the service competes with other mobile payment systems, like Dwolla or PayPal for example, Zipmark isn’t about building a new payment network, or even connecting you to credit card networks through a mobile interface. Instead, it’s about leveraging the existing check processing network in a new way – through your mobile phone.
Zipmark raised $2 million in December in a round led by Village Ventures and Contour Venture Partners, and supported by NYC Seed, High Peaks Venture Capital and the New York City Investment Fund.
Developers will be able to sign up starting tomorrow on the Zipmark homepage.
There’s a feature war brewing in the synchronous listening space. Turntable.FM-competitor LetsListen today added video chat to its music locker web app so you can listen to a song at the same time as a friend, but also chat with them via text, audio, or video.
It’s a more intimate shared experience than just watching avatars dance around, but will video chat convince you to spend all day staring at your music player? Here’s how I see LetsListen, Turntable.FM, and Facebook tackling synchronous listening from different angles.
LetsListen - A primary experience where you actively video chat with friends as you play songs for each other, as well as a music locker where you can store, manage, and access MP3s.
Facebook’s “Listen With” – a passive experience seamlessly integrated into Facebook’s Chat feature and music partner apps like Spotify, with notifications and its unified message product making it easy to leave on in the background and just check in when friends are talking.
Turntable.FM – Somewhere in between, where public rooms fill with head-nodding avatars to grab your attention but you don’t see your friends’ faces. If you’re not looking you might miss chat messages.
When I spoke at Social Media Week with Turntable.FM founder Seth Goldstein about the future of music. I asked whether he thought of his product as a primary or passive experience. RadioSurvivor transcribed how Goldstein lamented,
"I wish it was more background. I think there are a lot of passive services that aim to be more engaging. We have the opposite problem. It's really engaging for a small community. You go in and you get addicted, and spend four days of your life not doing much of anything else. And then you say, 'I just can't do this any more. I've got to get back to my life.'”
I worry LetsListen could have the same problem. Video chat is fun to play with occasionally, but the service needs to work great without me looking at it to become something I use all day, everyday. Turntable.FM’s first-mover advantage means it could overshadow LetsListen by adding its own video chat.
If LetsListen is going to win this war, it needs to marry the passive and primary experiences. Most critically, it should add browser tab notifications to show when you’ve received chat messages or a friend starts video chatting with you. The existing audible notifications annoyingly interrupt the music. Then I can passively groove with LetsListen, but pop back in when friends are throwing me Ozzy Osbourne devil-horns over video chat.
Though it may not always seem like it, big wireless carriers are still stuck on the concept of push-to-talk communication. It's easy to see why — instantaneous communication between multiple people can be a huge benefit in certain lines of work, and and catering to those groups often leads to some hefty service contracts. To that end, AT&T has announced that they have launched a new charter program geared toward getting push-to-talk smartphones in front of business customers.
Now the idea of implementing push-to-talk on smartphones isn't exactly new — there are a whole host of apps available for the major mobile platforms that allow users to send voice notes, messages and media over their data connections. The immensely popular Voxer app comes to mind — it boasts a pretty robust feature set, not to mention about 200,000 average daily downloads. So what’s different about AT&T’s approach?
Their ace in the hole here seems to be their use of partner Kodiak Networks' InstaPoC technology. While the name may conjure images of a real stinker, InstaPoC reportedly allows for sub-second voice connections between compatible devices, as well as better voice quality than a standard phone call.
InstaPoC was created in compliance with the imaginatively-named PoC (Push to Talk over Cellular) 2.0 standard, which lays out in excruciating detail the criteria necessary for a reliable, business-grade push-to-talk system. Throw in the ability for developers to fold PTT support into other applications via an API, and all of a sudden we’re looking at a potential ecosystem centered around instant communication.
AT&T promises that entrants into their charter program will be able to test the PTT service on "powerful, state of the art smartphones," though they don't offer any specifics. Considering the types of phones that tend to get saddled with PTT functionality, it wouldn't be a surprise to see users testing the service given something like the forthcoming Rugby Smart to mess around with.
Mountain Lion, Apple’s latest version of OS X, is currently in beta. However, it is in a stable enough form that some journalists were given sneak peeks over the past few days. I’ve been working with the OS for most of the last week and weekend and, as a public service announcement, I’d like to state that while Mountain Lion is a compelling upgrade to OS X it’s not currently ready for prime time.
To be fair, the worst version of OS X I ever used was an early build of Lion. This build essentially rendered my machine useless and made me cry uncontrollably when my Time Machine backups failed. Never, as they say, again.
However, being a glutton for punishment, I gave Mountain Lion a spin.
Mountain Lion installed without a hitch on a 2010 vintage MacBook Air although it refused to install on a 2006 Mac Pro – a disappointment that still burns a little. I know this old workhorse is six years old and more than capable. I’m sure there will be a fix down the line but right now there is no way to get it to install.
The OS has “grey screened” once and my install was marred by a system failure that required, literally, about 24 hours to fix. I didn’t have to sit there the whole time to fix it, but apparently one install froze, the machine locked up, and the secondary install process required a massive download. This took most of a day and night.
The most interesting improvement is the Notifications system. Not unlike Growl, Notifications sit unobtrusively in the corner for a moment and then disappear. There is a new icon in the upper right corner, next to the search glass, that allows you to see recent notifications. Grown still works fine as do most of my apps. I only noticed that QuicKeys, a text macro app, failed for the first few hours of use and then magically started up when I reset the machine.
Messages is arguably abysmal, with two odd UIs clashing with each other wildly. When you look at messages, you mostly see the huge message window. However, there is also a smaller buddy window that is a clone of iChat yet also folks in video chat and Facetime in a melange of odd queues. I’ve also had trouble syncing my conversations across devices. I would love to be able to receive, for example, iMessages that appear on my phone on the desktop and reply from either device. As it stands, the service is focused around an iMessage email address. I’d love it to work with phone numbers as well.
Mail is improved slightly as well, with a new “star” system for important messages and a VIP system for important senders. For example, you can set Mom or the significant other to a VIP and then only receive a notification when a VIP emails. MacWorld has a wildly complete look at Mail, but there’s not much different that anyone would notice except that the new Mail does not support RSS feeds.
Twitter integration worked quite well as did page sharing in Safari.
As for behind the scenes I noticed that Mountain Lion was as stable as Lion and, barring the rare catastrophic shutdown, I’m working as quickly and as efficiently on ML as I was on Lion. I never experienced Gatekeeper’s security system during my time with the OS.
Would I recommend that non-devs upgrade right now, just to “kick the tires?” No. It’s not worth the potential headache and the agony of waiting 24 hours to see if your MBA was totally hosed thanks to an install error was enough to make me want to revert to Lion. However, Apple sent this out as a pre-release for a reason. It works quite well and the new features are actually mostly apps rather then baked-in improvements. So don’t pull the trigger yet. It’s fun experiment but it’s also fun to have a computer that works.
When I went to meet with Samsung to pick up the Galaxy Note, I was told something that I kept in mind throughout my last week or so with the phone. “People freak out and say it’s too big until they play with it — then they love it.” I was also told that the S-Pen is way more than just a stylus, and I generally felt excited to be playing with something different from your average Android phone. So what do I think now of the giant 5.3-inch S-Pen-packing Galaxy Note?
To put it plainly, I think they were wrong. Features:
5.3-inch 1280×800 HD Super AMOLED display
AT&T 4G LTE
Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread
1.5GHz dual-core processor
8MP rear camera (1080p video capture)
2MP front camera (720p video capture)
S-Pen
MSRP: $299.99 on-contract
Pros:
The display is downright gorgeous
Thin and light
Solid battery life
Cons:
A bit laggy all around
Doesn’t take prints well
Way, way too big
Long Version
Hardware/Design:
Clearly the first thing we need to chat about here is size, and to be honest I think it may exclude quite a few people. It’s just too damn big. Now, many of you will cry foul because I’m a girl but here’s what I say to that: first, I have rather large hands for a girl, and secondly my male counterparts have confirmed that the Note is, in fact, too big to be comfortable.
Truth is, you just can’t perform one-handed actions with comfort and security. I felt like I was always slipping, almost dropping it, or simply working too hard to do what I needed to do. If you’re using the S-Pen that problem goes away a little bit, as you hold firmly with one hand and doodle with the other. But many of us only have one hand free to do what we need to on our phones, and that’s where the Note fails.
In terms of materials and build quality, I find this superphone quite handsome. It looks a lot like a Galaxy S II, and has this stitch-style texture on the battery door. It’s nice and light at at 6.28 ounces, and measures just .38 inches thick. The microUSB is square at the bottom of the phone with the S-Pen slot just to its right, while the volume rocker is on the upper left edge, and the lock button on the upper right.
I honestly don’t have much to complain about here except for the size. Everything feels solid, premium, and looks good too. I just can’t enjoy it because I don’t have XXL hands. S-Pen:
I figured many of you would scroll to this section anyways, so I thought I’d save you some trouble and put it closer to the beginning. The S-Pen is great, but it’s not enough to justify the phone on its own. It’s fun, sure. You have a paintbrush, marker, pencil and highlighter; complete control over color and thickness, and can add text. You can drop in photos, crop, take screen grabs, and share everything. Plus, the S-Pen is pressure-sensitive, so it can even pick up light and dark strokes. It’s also got a little button that helps you perform shortcut commands like taking a screen grab (hold button, hold tap screen) or opening the S-Memo app (hold button, double tap).
I had a fine time tooling around and doodling all over pictures of my bosses, but even after a week I couldn’t really integrate the S-Pen into my daily life in any useful way. Mind you, Siri sets at least five reminders for me a day and sends at least two or three texts. It takes two hands to use it, which takes it out of the equation a large amount of the time, and it always seems like it takes longer to get it out and start using it than it does to just take care of it with touch.
Now, I’m not the most artistic person and I will say that my more creative friends have spent more dedicated time drawing than I have, and the products have been pretty impressive. However, the Wacom-style S-Pen can’t replace a real Wacom pen and/or tablet, or so says my graphic artist/animator friend.
So that really leaves it in a sort of middle ground: you can’t do real work with it, and you can’t make it useful in any other, daily-life kind of way. So basically it’s just for fun. Software:
The Galaxy Note runs Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread under Samsung’s custom TouchWiz UI. The UI is tweaked a bit to make the most of the extra screen real estate, offering five virtual home buttons along the bottom and a 5×5 grid of apps/icons.
I’ve noticed with Samsung devices that both Android and TouchWiz slow things up. Samsung’s $50 Focus Flash runs like a champ on Windows Phone compared to this, and it has to come down to software. The good news is that TouchWiz actually adds some usability rather than just a heavy, custom look.
Resizeable widgets actually allow for a little differentiation which is nice, but TouchWiz has a lot more subtle features that make it a bit more intuitive than other overlays. For example, when you scroll down the letters along the right side of your address book, you can swipe a bit to the left to move on to the next letter in the name. So if you have two dozen J names in your contacts, you can narrow it down to ‘Jo’ or ‘Ja’ or whatever.
Another plus is that Samsung’s HD Super AMOLED display is basically off wherever it’s black. The UI just so happens to be mostly black in all the menus and most apps can be configured to display light text over a black background, so that tends to help on the battery front.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of pre-loaded apps like Amazon Kindle, Qik Lite, Crayon phsyics and How To Draw (clearly for the S-Pen), and a host of AT&T apps. When I went into the Android Market to try out some games and such, a Gameloft title (NFL Pro 2012) was “not compatible with my device.” Bummer. Precision apps, on the other hand, like Where’s My Water and Fruit Ninja are much easier with the S-Pen. After a few tries I was getting some of my highest scores ever on Fruit Ninja. Good times. Camera: The Note’s 8-megapixel camera takes great pictures, no doubt. And if you have two hands to take the picture with then you’re in great shape, but otherwise good luck. I seriously had the most difficult time trying to hold the Note in one hand to take a picture of something in the other hand… it was a joke.
And it doesn’t seem like there’s a physical shutter button anywhere either, which means you have to find a way to get that thumb free and tap the little soft shutter. The good news is that the pictures are great, with really nice color reproduction and light sensitivity. The shutter is really fast and snaps the picture upon release.
The video quality is also really great, though it does take some time to switch between low light settings and outdoor light. But I found that the Note does this gracefully, a slow transition but at least it doesn’t seem really obvious during playback — a steady shift.
If you have the hands (the size of catchers’ mits) to handle it, the Note camera will treat you really well.
Comparison shot between the Galaxy Note (left) and the iPhone 4S (right): Display:
You’ve got to hand it to Samsung. They know displays. This 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED is just about as good as it gets, except for the fact that I wish there was more of it. I wish it was a tablet, and the whole stylus thing could be seen as a great accessory (maybe for kids) and that no one would ever, ever have to hold one of these things up to their face ever again.
Watching movies was awesome, and everything from pictures to the clock widget looks crisp, bright and beautiful. But again, all this real estate makes for more than a few issues during any regular usage scenario. I’m going to type text messages way more often than I’m going to grab a bag of popcorn and watch Inception on this thing, and if I can’t send a simple “Hey, sorry… I just got this text now…” to one of my dearest friends then what’s the point? Performance: There’s not really much to complain about here when talking about performance. The Note is pretty snappy, even with TouchWiz along for the ride, and things should get ever better once ICS makes its way onto the device. The biggest beef I had with the Note was during web browsing. Every time I scrolled or zoomed in on some text, the Note took an extra half a second to do what I’d asked. This is pretty common on Android, but worth noting.
Benchmark testing went well for the Note, too. The superphone scored a 2703 on Quadrant, which tests everything with a focus on graphics. Browsermark, on the other hand, gave the Note a 48,610. As far as AT&T’s network goes, I was surprised with just how great call quality was.
In the data department I was seeing an average speed of 24Mbps down and .8Mbps up. Battery:
If there’s one thing that really exceeded my expectations about the Note, it would be battery life. That massive HD Super AMOLED display and 4G LTE radio would lead you to believe that this thing wouldn’t make it past breakfast, but that wasn’t the case.
In real-world usage scenarios, the Note hung with me all day long. That’s not to say I could take it partying into the wee hours of the morning with me, but it’ll get you past dinner time. But I don’t know how you use your phone, so let me share with you some numbers.
When we did the official battery test, we found that the Note lasts a little under six hours. We test this by really pushing the phone, running a continuous image search within the browser. At any time, I can come in and play a game or check something else out for testing, and then continue running the program. But at no point, whatsoever, is the phone resting.
To give you a little context, the Droid 4 only hung in there for three hours and forty-five minutes while the Droid RAZR Maxx (Motorola’s battery beast) stayed with me for a staggering eight hours and fifteen minutes.
Here’s the deal.
I applaud Samsung for thinking outside of the box on this one, but the issue with this type of exo-box-thinking is that I think it’s headed in the wrong direction. I understand that people are increasingly enjoying larger screens, as mobile video and gaming take over, but there has to be a line. Unfortunately, I think the Galaxy Note crosses it.
No matter how beautiful the display is or how fun (/useless) the S-Pen is, this thing is just too damn big to enjoy. I can’t tell you how frustrated I was doing even the simplest things like taking a picture, gaming, or even writing a text or search inquiry. And don’t even get me started on the kinds of looks I got holding this thing up to my face.
Perhaps if you have giant hands and can’t get enough doodle in your life, the Note might be right for you. But for anyone else, I’d recommend either waiting for the Galaxy S III (which is sure to be freaking awesome), or holding out for this rumored Galaxy Note 10.1 we’ve been hearing about. The Note makes much more sense as a cool tablet than it does a giant phone.
Check out all of our Galaxy Note review posts here.
Small business inventory management startup Stitch Labs is announcing a $1 million seed investment this morning led by True Ventures. In the same space as Bizelo and Ordoro, Stitch Labs allows design-focused small businesses to organize their CRM, product orders and inventory with custom tailored features like Etsy and Shopify integration.
Stitch founder Brandon Levey started the company when he, as the owner of a small design and manufacturing firm, couldn’t find a satisfactory SasS solution to manage his own business. He wanted a product that went beyond accounting software, and could pull its weight as an inventory management across multiple sales channels.
Levey thus centered the Stitch Labs experience around design and usability, “We are dedicated to working with our customers to make sure that Stitch is powerful and intuitive, ” he told me, “We know we always need to improve our usability but it makes us so proud when a new customer signs up and within an hour two, without any assistance, building hundreds of products, links their Etsy and Shopify stores, adds contacts, orders, and expenses, bills customers, and generates sales reports. Pretty awesome.”
Speaking of “awesome,” Levey will use the new funding to expand the Stitch Labs team, “We need to hire some awesome developers (so if they are reading this please apply at stitchlabs.com/jobs).” Plans for further shopping cart and marketplace integrations as well as some (yes!) awesome new partnerships are in the works, according to Levey.
Software and SaaS security company Cenzic is today launching a new security product for mobile application developers which will allow for the testing of mobile apps on any platform – iOS, Android, J2ME, and more. The product will be the first that can test products without requiring developers to submit the source code, as all the testing is done through the cloud, while the app is up-and-running.
The service will then be able to tell what sorts of security vulnerabilities an app has, what sensitive data it could leak, what other sorts of security threats it may be vulnerable to, and what to do about it.
The security risk inherent in using mobile applications was recently in the spotlight, when it was discovered that many of users’ favorite apps were uploading their address books to developers’ servers. But that kind of risk, while important, is not the sort of thing that Cenzic’s solution is interested in addressing.
Explains John Weinschenk, CEO of Cenzic, “there’s been a lot hype and a lot of focus on the device itself, but the device itself is not the risk. If I hack into your mobile device, I get your information. That’s not that interesting. But as a hacker, if I hack into the server itself, I can get millions of accounts, and millions of pieces of information,” he explains.
The problem Cenzic wants to help fix has to do with the fact that many companies’ backend systems were designed to be accessed by web applications, but are now being accessed by mobile apps. With the new solution, the company looks at a mobile app’s backend and use of web services, and analyzes those for vulnerabilities. This is especially important for enterprise app makers, who need to ensure that their apps’ are protected against all the latest threats to protect sensitive customer data.
But how prevalent are these sorts of vulnerabilities? Weinschenk says that prior to today’s launch, the company tested over 30 applications for four (unnamed) beta customers, which included companies that have over a billion dollars in sales operating in the financial services space, in e-commerce and in manufacturing. During the testing period, Cenzic found that 60% of the vulnerabilities were input validation issues, while 40% were authentication issues. “What this means,” explains Weinschenk, “is that programmers writing mobile applications don’t really understand how to manage the authentication of that device communicating up to the server.”
In Cenzic’s solution, the platform will provide info on how to fix the vulnerability and how to make code changes, but, as it doesn’t have access to the source code itself, will not make the changes, only point to the affected part of the code. In addition, the library of vulnerabilities is updated every week, similar to anti-virus systems, so developers can continually test for new threats to their mobile apps’ backends.
The new mobile solution will also be wrapped into Cenzic’s other products, in the form of software, managed services and cloud offerings. Pricing starts at $7,000 per app per year.
The company today secures more than 500,000 online applications for Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, universities, security companies, SMB’s and others. More information about the mobile product is now available on the Cenzic homepage here.
Music magazines are getting hit with a double whammy in the age of digital media. Like all print publications, their audience is going online—but so is the music. Why read about a new album when you can just listen to it on Spotify? Spin magazine is responding by shifting its focus online in a big way with a major redesign that literally puts the music first with a music player right at the top.
In the video above, digital general manager Jeff Rogers gives us an exclusive preview of the new site, which launches tomorrow. It is part of a sweeping redesign of both the print magazine and website. The print magazine is larger, back to the original size of Spin, with a mix of heavy stock and glossy paper. It will only come out bi-monthly instead of monthly and become more of a high-end collector's item for music aficionados.
The homepage is divided into sections. As you scroll down, the background color and layout changes,. The top is news, interviews, and profiles, with a black background. Then below that are the music reviews: essentials, classic, and "worst music." There will also be a whole new set of blogs to keep the stories fresh.
The new Spin site is filled with thousands reviews—both long form and 140-character Twitter reviews. The print magazine will no longer carry reviews. They have all been moved online. "Getting your reviews in a magazine is like getting your stock quotes in a newspaper," says Rogers.
The new site takes some of its design cues from Spin Play, the magazine’s iPad app that came out last year. Every article has full tracks that you can listen to while you are reading, and even as you browse around the site, the music keeps playing in the player which takes up the top nav bar. Clicking on the player while you are listening to a song gives you more songs and articles about the artist, and the ability to buy the song through iTunes or Amazon.
There will also be a Spin 30—which are 30 songs the Spin staff thinks you have to listen to now, and other Spin Lists. Hit play at the top and you get the current playlist. Spin is offering full tracks, but only a few hundred at any given time. It is not trying to compete with streaming music services like Spotify, rather it is doing what magazines do best: offering an edited selection of articles and related music. (In the future, it plans to export its playlists to other music services like Spotify). The majority of songs are promotional tracks which will exist on the site for a limited time, but Spin will license tracks as well.
Spin is finally treating its website like a product instead of just another music news site. It will be a place to go to not just to learn about music, but to experience it.
Canonical’s Ubuntu TV, unveiled earlier this year, was the first in a series of announcements about “Ubuntu on devices”. The next device in Canonical’s multi-screen strategy for world domination is being unveiled next week at Mobile World Congress 2012, and it’s an Android-powered smartphone. It’s not entirely what you might think, though.
This is not an Ubuntu app running atop Android. Nor is it an all-Ubuntu device running an Android emulator. Rather, Ubuntu for Android it the full Ubuntu desktop running side-by-side with Android on a shared kernel that provides context appropriate access to all your content. When out and about, the phone operates as any other Android-powered phone; but when you slip the device into a dock connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse you get the familiar Ubuntu desktop experience.
I admit that I think this is pretty novel. It’s not an Asus Transformer trying to play both sides of the smartphone / laptop experience with a single OS. Instead, it’s something completely new that’s trying to leverage the right interface and experience for the right context. It’s a phone in most senses, but only activates the Ubuntu desktop when connected to peripherals that benefit from them.
What’s this good for? I asked Jane Silber, Canonical’s CEO, that question. The most immediate use case is enterprise users: people who carry a smartphone and a laptop. Ubuntu for Android would allow many mobile professionals to reduce to a single device. Average users would benefit from this convergence, too. According to Silber this allows “the right experience on the right form factor.”
What are the benefits of this Android/Ubuntu hybrid? Data consolidation, for one. You don’t need to duplicate your address book, or even synchronize it: whether you’re looking for a number to call from the Android phone app, or looking for an email from the Ubuntu email app, both programs are interrogating the same single address book. The same holds true for documents, media, and any other content stored on the device.
Another neat trick: if you connect your Ubuntu for Android device to a television via HDMI you don’t get the Ubuntu desktop: you get the Ubuntu TV interface. You can browse media on your phone or access online content as you would with any Ubuntu TV appliance.
Ultimately, says Silber, this hybrid approach reduces the mental “context shifts” required by using multiple independent devices. When your Ubuntu for Android device is docked and you’re composing emails, you can still send and receive texts and phone calls — and, indeed, access and launch all the Android apps on your phone — meaning that you don’t need to move away from your laptop to pick up and use your phone. You simply mouse over to the incoming call indicator and select the action you desire: take the call, hang up, whatever. Efficiency, for the win!
When I asked Silber how long it would be until they kick Android to the curb and release an all-Ubuntu phone, she simply said “We’re not going to be announcing that at MWC 2012.”
As with the Ubuntu TV, Canonical won’t be unveiling a completed product ready for purchase next week. They’re showcasing the technology they’ve developed and are looking for hardware partners.
Kleiner Perkins-backed comparison shopping platform FindTheBest has been focused on solving a specific problem for the past year: how to help people compare different products and services so that they can quickly figure out which is the best one. And today, the platform is adding data-driven personalization as part of the solution with the launch of a new data-driven feature called AssistMe.
Co-founded by DoubleClick founder and former CEO Kevin O’Connor, FindTheBest performs in-depth comparison searches that crawl large amounts of data. For example, the engine can compare colleges and break down comparisons by acceptance rates, SAT scores, tuition, and more. As we’re written in the past, the quality of the data they've gathered from government and other trusted sources, the transparency into how the data is sourced, and the tools available to slice, dice and manipulate it make FindTheBest a compelling destination.
Until now, FindTheBest has been drawing data from other services and sources to best serve its customers. AssitMe aims to draw data from the user, attempting to personalize the shopping experience. The tool focuses on capturing explicit data by asking the user which aspects of a product are most important. The user gets to weigh approximately five aspects of the product or service—from unimportant to very important. FindTheBest's AssistMe algorithm then calculates the options and then returns a set of personalized results. Basically the feature attempts to create more of a dialogue between the consumer and the site.
For example, when comparing dog breeds, AssistMe will ask questions such as “How important is the temperament of the dog?” or “Is the Size of the dog an important factor?” or “Is minimal shedding or grooming important to you?”. The questions are fairly simple and users can answer in a range of five choices from ‘unimportant’ to ‘very important.’
In the user’s search results, FindTheBest will suggest which options are best suited based on the AssistMe data. Today, AssistMe is rolling out for 20 comparisons, but will eventually be extended to all the comparison subjects FindTheBest offers.
FindTheBest now has 6 million unique visitors per month, says O’Connor, which is up from 4 million unique visitors per month in December. The company has also raised $6 million from Kleiner Perkins, and will be looking to raise another round later this year.
In the latest monthly report from app analytics firm Distimo, the company delved into the revenue generating possibilites for apps sold through both Google’s Android Market and the Amazon Appstore. Looking at the top 110 apps available in both marketplaces, Distimo found some surprising data: 42 of those top apps made more money on Amazon’s store than in the more widely available Android Market.
That the Android Market has its challenges when it comes to paid applications, is widely known. In fact, just the other day a friend was telling me how when she went to buy her first new smartphone, the Verizon rep was pushing Android devices because they “have more free apps” than the iPhone. Great story, right developers? Now the Android Market’s inability to make you money is a sellingpoint for Android phones. Excellent news.
So maybe it’s not so surprising that Amazon’s Appstore is beginning to prove itself as a better revenue generating platform for some mobile application developers than the official Android Market. After all, Amazon’s store is a “curated” collection of apps. The apps are tested, reviewed and made sure to be malware-free and stable before being listed on Amazon’s store. (Hmm. Does that process sound familiar?)
Still, the Amazon Appstore is only a small piece of the overall revenue pie for now, delivering just 28% of the top 110 apps’ revenue. But then again, Amazon’s Appstore is barely a year old, and is rapidly gaining strength. For example, the total number of downloads generated by the top 100 apps in the Amazon Appstore increased 14-fold in December 2011, compared with just 2 months earlier, Distimo found.
Today, Amazon hosts 28,826 mobile applications, compared with about fourteen times more apps on the Google Android Market. (It’s now pushing 400K+). Half of all Amazon’s apps are also available on the Google Android Market. But the Amazon market is catching up in terms of size. In December and January, the number of new apps in the Android Market was only 5x the number new apps in the Amazon Appstore.
The Amazon Appstore is also more likely to favor paid applications than the Android Market, as 65% of all its apps are paid apps, a figure that has remained stable for the past 7 months. Meanwhile, Google’s Android Market sees 32% of all apps as paid apps, and that figure has dropped from 38% during the same time frame.
In addition, the average price for the top 100 paid applications is 40% lower on the Amazon Appstore ($2.89) than on the Android Market ($3.47) for the top 100 paid apps. That’s because Amazon, not developers, controls the apps’ prices. That means some of the discounted top apps could be bringing down the average, of course.
This pricing strategy appears, at least in some cases, appears to be working in developers’ favor. User think they can find cheap apps on Android’s store, and aren’t disappointed. But while there, they download other apps, too.
Download volumes on Amazon’s store during November (when the Kindle Fire launched) quadrupled from the previous month. In December, downloads increased even further to more than 14 times October’s volume, then stabilized once again in January. During this time, 42 of the top 110 revenue-generating apps made more money on Amazon’s store than on the Android Market. It’s not a majority, obviously, and information about what types of apps, or what these apps may have shared in common, are details that are unfortunately lacking in Distimo’s analysis.
But that’s the real gem in Distimo’s data: for some developers, Amazon’s Appstore is working. It’s too soon to call the success a fluke or a new trend, especially with the Kindle Fire’s new(ish) arrival on the scene. But if Amazon is helping some developers make more money, it’s probably not due to a single, easily pinpointed reason. It’s more likely to be a combination of all factors: app curation, discounts, catalog size, promotions, user interface, brand recognition, price setting, and more.
Thank heavens: finally a Tokyoflash that you can read immediately without depending on a manual or detailed instructions. The Stencil is a fan design that uses for LCD blocks to display the current time and date in a very “bubble letter” sort of way.
Designer Heather Sable wrote:
I found that I had a knack for creating read-at-a-glance designs with cryptic looking, yet easy to read digits. I designed the digits for this concept by starting with rectangular shapes, and cutting out unnecessary pieces using line segments and dots. By arranging them into four quadrants with some connecting lines, the display appears to be just a bunch of stencilled in lines and dots, while if you read the background, you can see the digits clearly.
The watch looks surprisingly big and comes in multiple colors and styles, including a hot mirrored LCD design that adds a little bling to what would be considered standard digital watch. The watch is available now for $99. Product Page
Thank heavens: finally a Tokyoflash that you can read immediately without depending on a manual or detailed instructions. The Stencil is a fan design that uses for LCD blocks to display the current time and date in a very “bubble letter” sort of way.
Designer Heather Sable wrote:
I found that I had a knack for creating read-at-a-glance designs with cryptic looking, yet easy to read digits. I designed the digits for this concept by starting with rectangular shapes, and cutting out unnecessary pieces using line segments and dots. By arranging them into four quadrants with some connecting lines, the display appears to be just a bunch of stencilled in lines and dots, while if you read the background, you can see the digits clearly.
The watch looks surprisingly big and comes in multiple colors and styles, including a hot mirrored LCD design that adds a little bling to what would be considered standard digital watch. The watch is available now for $99. Product Page
Some rather inflammatory news has been making its way around the web today: a user posting on the Pirateweb message board has accused Google of removing copyrighted MP3 music files from a Gmail account — possibly using the scanning services that Google employs to block illegal content on YouTube, possibly using something else.
Shocking if true, so we went to Google to get a response. And the short answer is: no. Or not, at least, just like that.
Perhaps it’s the confluence of other things — Google’s upcoming privacy policy changes, and murmurs that Google could remove illegal content that people store in their Google Music digital lockers — that make this story sound plausible.
But a spokesperson from Google has come back to us with a denial that it is doing anything of this kind.
However — and this might be a worry for some who store all kinds of things in Gmail — he also left open the possibility that Google could do something like this “in extreme cases,” for example, in response to court orders.
“We do not go into or interfere with user’s Gmail accounts, except in extreme cases, such as in response to court orders. Emails, data and files contained in Gmail are users’ private information.”
Before you read too much into that, he also pointed out that the scanning service used with YouTube is only used there:
“Our Content ID service, which enables us to scan uploaded YouTube videos for copyrighted material, is only ever used on YouTube. It does not work on our other products, including Gmail.”
The original note raising the issue was published last week. The user, one Honey Escreveu, said that a folder she kept in her Gmail account, which contained MP3 files for copyrighted music, suddenly got deleted. It’s not clear whether those were legally-owned files or not. The only two MP3s that remained in her Gmail, apparently, were for “unsigned indy artists” who are not on YouTube.
So, the jury is still out on whether Honey got the wrong end of the stick, is a hoax, or really has seen the phantom disappearance of her files. If the latter, we are still none the wiser about where the music has gone.
You may not know this, but Turkey has a fever. And the only prescription is more games. That’s right. Sifting through some of Pando Networks’ recent numbers on international gaming, we found that Turkey owns an increasing share of the global downloads of free-to-play games. Over the last year, the number of gamers in Turkey downloading free games climbed to over 5 million, a 534 percent increase since 2010 — and more than 14 percent of the country’s total population.
Not only that, but Turkey has a growing appetite for social games, which is precisely the reason Peak Games has parked its headquarters in Istanbul. In case you’re not familiar, Peak Games is a social gaming company that produces titles specifically for emerging markets — specifically in Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, and South America.
In conversation with the gaming company’s Chief of Strategy, Rina Onur, she made it abundantly clear that the company is aware of the huge lead Zynga has built in social games in the U.S. (its titles have over 55 million daily active users, compared with Microsoft in second at 22 million), and that there is stiff competition among Zynga, EA, wooga, and others for the Western markets. But Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa (MENA) have increasingly connected populations, their young people are coming online in droves, and they love to play games.
So, while Zynga, EA, and wooga focus their efforts in Europe and North America, largely lacking a presence in MENA, Peak Games has been busy acquiring studios or creating their own games like Okey, Umaykut Online, Akvaryum, Erlikhan Günlük Falınız, which Onur says now have over 7 million daily active users. (Although AppData puts that closer to 4 million.) These games are all built around popular Turkish and Arabic card/board games that are native to the region, so the titles are tailored towards their specific local markets, in their native tongue.
Peak Games’ MENA focus has caught the attention of top tier VCs in Europe, as the company closed a $11.5 million series B funding round in September from Earlybird Venture Capital and Hummingbird Ventures, among others, bringing the startup’s total investment to just under $20 million. At the time, Turkey was the fourth largest Facebook market, with some 30 million+ using the social network, and those numbers continue to grow across the Middle East and North Africa.
With this high rate of adoption, the startup has been eager to acquire studios with strong development talent and established titles and help bring those to the Facebook platform, make them more social, and expose them to its multi-million-strong existing user base. Last summer, it acquired two hardcore strategy game studios, Umaykut and Erlikhan, (both of which are Turkish) in an effort to continue bringing these emerging markets to social gaming. And today, Peak Games is announcing the acquisition of Saudi Arabian social games giant, Kammelna Games, as it looks to further expand its reach into underserved markets with localized, culturally-specific games. The startup already has a popular Arabic-language title with Happy Farm (at some 2.2 million daily active users), which it will now complement with Kammelna’s “Baloot,” a popular Saudi trick card game.
Onur tells us that Kammelna founder Essam Alzamel will now run Peak Games’ new studio in Damman, Saudi Arabia, keeping the company’s 15-odd employees in their home country, and successfully adding another location to Peak Games’ already existing offices in Istanbul, Ankara, Amman, Barcelona and Berlin.
The Chief of Strategy says that more than two-thirds of Internet users in Saudi Arabia play games online, and the country has one of the highest average revenue per user (ARPU) rates in social gaming. Capitalizing on what they see as a massive regional opportunity (that is only going to get bigger), Peak will now set about launching Baloot across platforms, including Facebook and mobile, as well as using Kammelna to develop (and launch) more Arabic card, board, and table-top games.
Peak Games now claims to have over 20 million active players worldwide, with 150 employees (40 of whom are in MENA), and you can be sure that this is not even close to the end of the startup’s near-term M&A strategy, as we hear that Peak is in the process of acquiring yet another studio. It’s not clear which studio yet (and the company would not divulge the price of its Kammelna acquisition), but you can be sure that the acquisition will be another stepping stone in its mission for MENA dominance. More to come as we learn more.
Check out Peak Games at home here.
Like the original Galaxy S before it, Samsung’s Galaxy S II sure knows how to get around. After having touched down on Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T (twice even), the Korean giant’s one-time flagship handset is now being embraced by the folks at U.S. Cellular.
Customers who have pledged their allegiance to the nation’s sixth-largest wireless carrier are probably celebrating the news, considering the last big Android handset to grace their shelves was the Motorola Electrify, a non-WiMax version of the Photon 4G.
As far as specs go, U.S. Cellular’s GSII variant plays it straight — it sports the same 1.2GHz Exynos C210 processor that most of the U.S. models do, as well as the bog-standard 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, 8-megapixel camera, and 16GB of onboard storage. Oh, and expect it to feature the now-classic Gingerbread/TouchWiz combo we’ve come to know and tolerate.
Sure, the Galaxy S II may seem passe these days (especially with MWC right around the corner), but good hardware is still good hardware. Sadly, U.S. Cellular’s version of the Galaxy S II is 3G-only, so anyone looking to pick it up won’t be able to jump on their LTE network when it lights up later this year. It’s not as though the hardware doesn’t exist — AT&T’s Skyrocket features an LTE radio — but for now it seems like U.S. Cellular customers will have to make do with a revamped Galaxy S if they want their mobile LTE fix.
U.S. Cellular’s is keeping mum on the Galaxy S II’s release, but that should give customers a little time to either weigh their options or scrimp together $230.
Australian-based travel marketplace Jayride.com has lined up $400,000 AUD in seed funding for its ride-sharing service, which also aggregates transportation data. The angel funding was led by Andrey Shirben, one of the first investors in Kenshoo, a digital marketing software company. In addition to helping in the financing, Shirben will also bring his digital marketing expertise to assist the company, as well as connect Jayride with other players in the global travel sector.
Compared with other current ride-sharing and carpooling startups, Jayride’s unique angle is to provide a single interface for finding all your transportation options, including commercial transport, and combining that data with the available ride-sharing options. This way, travelers will never be in a situation where they research a route and end up without options. Instead, when there are no ride-shares found on your planned route, Jayride will show you bus schedules, shuttles, relocation cars and other transportation options.
Shirben tells us that the angel round was supposed to be for $350,000 AUD, but after he put his money in, it became overbooked by 30-40%. Within a year, Jayride plans to raise another round led by a U.S. VC firm, as it prepares to expand its geographical transport data coverage.
“Jayride is the only land-transport marketplace attacking ride-sharing this way,” says Shirben of the startup’s transport data aggregation play. “There are many ride-sharing startups around the world, but almost every one fails this simple UX test: if you search from point A to point B outside a main thoroughfare, you find no search results. This is the main limitation of ride-sharing today.”
Shirben says that after meeting the Jayride founding team, and following up over the course of a few months, the decision to invest was an easy one. “Great team, disruptive idea, lots of business potential in a huge market,” he remarks.
Founded in 2008 by Rod Bishop and Ross Lin as a carpooling site, Jayride made the move to aggregate all travel data last fall. The service currently supports Australia, New Zealand, and is coming soon to the U.K. and Ireland.
Entrepreneurs and small businesses are integral to the engine of job creation. According to the White House, companies less than five years old created 44 million jobs over the last three decades in the U.S. and what’s more, accounted for all net new jobs created over that time. In a struggling economy, the incubators and accelerators that help grow startups and SMBs, giving them access to the network and capital they need to grow, are essential to job creation and building a healthy economy.
Accelerators have been popping up around the U.S. (and the world) in the past year, and the big incubation houses (like TechStars, Y Combinator, 500 Startups, etc.) continue to grow. Yet, these generators can (and should) have the most influence not in big cities/markets like New York, San Francisco, and Boston, but in places where unemployment is high and economies are stagnating.
Cities like Detroit are depressed, but they are doing everything they can to encourage innovation and fuel business development. Another is St. Louis. St. Louis has a rich big-company history, and has at various times been home to the headquarters of a slew of Fortune 500 companies. Anheuser-Busch still makes its home there. Yet, while headquarters may live there, the production likely happens elsewhere.
The city wants to fight stalling unemployment by building an innovation-focused ecosystem, which is why Arch Grants was born and launched last month. Arch Grants is a non-profit organization led and supported by a band of lawyers, investors, real estate managers, entrepreneurs, civic leaders, and more, that wants to create a more robust startup culture and infrastructure in St. Louis. The company wants to turn the city into a place where entrepreneurs want to go to grow their businesses.
Arch is starting with a business plan competition that selects the most promising startups, giving them $50K in grants to turn their ideas into reality. Typically, accelerators offering venture capital take equity stakes in the startups they choose, but Arch Grants offers non-dilutive capital — they are, as one would expect, grants and therefore don’t require founders to cough up any equity in exchange for the capital.
After receiving the initial $50K grant, startups then go on to compete for a second round of up to $100K in funding, along with access to angel investors. Arch Grants President Jerry Schlichter, a trial lawyer, says that the program will be selecting at least 12 companies per year, and plans to run the program for at least three years.
Generally speaking, it’s tough for non-profit organizations that dish out growth capital to for-profit companies to receive approval from the government, but the IRS makes exceptions in areas of high unemployment, and Schlichter says that they were surprised by how quickly Arch Grants was able to be approved.
To that point, Arch Grants isn’t a business accelerator, but they want to, for all intents and purposes, operate like one — or at least create the same opportunities for their startups. The organization has tapped more five local universities, business mentoring organizations, mentors, experts, investors, and a host of other support organizations to offer resources and assistance to its founders.
Its affiliates can also hook up startups with affordable apartments and office space, business networking and mentoring, free legal and accounting services, and collaboration with local universities, etc.
While Arch Grants has a model that may be slightly unusual for startups and entrepreneurs used to the Y Combinator approach, Schlichter and others believe that the real hook for entrepreneurs can be that they would be part of something broader than their own goals, helping to put a city back to work. “These startups are going to get a deep level of support here, because this is something that is really important to the entire city,” he says, “because it has greater implications and importance than it does for Silicon Valley.”
To assist it in its endeavors, Arch Grants today announced that it has secured a $150K donation from Peabody Energy (the largest private-sector coal company in the world). This donation brings the organization’s total funding to $2.5 million, which has been contributed by a mix of individual and corporate donors.
Another feather in the cap for Arch Grants? It’s also officially announcing today that Square Co-founder Jim McKelvey (who along with co-founder Jack Dorsey is a St. Louis native) will head the organization’s advisory board. This means that, among other things, McKelvey will help lead strategy for the business plan competition and selection of grant recipients as well as advising the selected startups and founders.
Again, while tech companies will be the program’s focus, all entrepreneurs are encouraged to apply. Arch Grants is currently accepting applications through its proposed deadline of March 9th. Those interested in applying can do so here.
And young entrepreneurs looking for another cool pitch competition and resource/hub for entrepreneurs, should check out Intel Innovators. More here.
Social game-maker OMGPOP says it has another mobile hit — its app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 1 million times in 10 days.
Draw Something is based on OMGPOP’s online game Draw My Thing. Described by CEO Dan Porter as a turn-based version of Pictionary, players are assigned things to draw, which can be simple (like a smile) or complicated (like a zombie), then their friends are supposed to guess what it is.
Players have already created more than 20 million drawings, Porter says. The game’s average load is now 50 drawings per second, and where the company took nine days to reach its first 10 million drawings, it’s now seeing 10 million new drawings every 24 hours. The main driver of that growth? Porter says it’s Twitter and Instagram, where users post their drawings and look for other people to play.
And he says the game is already seeing five figures in revenue per day. OMGPOP runs ads in the free version of the game, and Porter says the biggest source of revenue is actually users upgrading from free to the ad-free, paid version. The game also makes money through virtual goods, like bombs, which help with guesses and also give players better words to draw.
The game is available on both on iOSand Android, but iOS supposedly accounts for 85 percent of installs and 90 percent of revenue.
There have been some mistakes too. Porter says OMGPOP had to remove its original cap of 100 turns per game, when it realized that games were going for longer than that. It’s also a challenge to store the rapidly growing number of drawings, he says.
The success of Draw Something also confirms a broader shift in OMGPOP’s strategy. We covered the company’s first mobile game Puppy World in August 2011, and now Porter says he’s fully committed to mobile.
“When we started in 2008, we focused on socializing traditional arcade style games on the web,” he says. “As Facebook grew as a game platform we moved to Facebook and we did OK. Now though that we have reoriented to creating truly social game experiences on mobile – iOS and Android – we have locked down our strategy, socializing mobile games, and we are having monster success with it. We want to be the #1 competitor to Zynga with Friends and eventually pass them.”
Zynga’s Global Director of Brand Advertising Manny Anekal who led the company to a 233% increase in ad revenue this year is leaving to become COO of Kiip, which lets brands reward gamers with real world prizes. Anekal is a monetization rockstar who pioneered social game brand integrations, helping companies like McDonald’s offer FarmVille players in-game powerups.
But now he’s moving to Kiip’s greener pastures seeking a bigger impact with a startup that’s aiding developers and redefining brand advertising for the next big opportunity: mobile
Kiip’s 20-year old co-founder and CEO Brian Wong calls Anekal “a triple massive win” for his company, pun perhaps intended. See, during Anekal’s 10 years of experience in the space he was the brand integration manager of Massive, one of the first in-game ad networks. Next he became the Global Director of Ad Ops for Electronic Arts before joining Zynga.
Anekal popularized the concept of a reciprocal value exchange between advertisers and gamers, where brands give players something of in-game value in return for their attention, rather than just being obtrusive and annoying. For example, Anekal closed a deal with Farmer’s Insurance to protect FarmVille players from crop wither if they displayed the brand’s blimp on their property.
However, since the 3000-employee Zynga mostly relies on in-game purchases and not ad revenue, Wong says Anekal wasn’t making as big of a dent as he wanted to. Now he’s the 21st employee of a hot new startup with $4.3 million in funding and a disruptive model for making mobile game developers money without traditional display ads. When a Kiip-powered game player levels up or gets a high score, they’re rewarded with Popchips snack samples mailed to their door, Amazon gift cards, or entry into tournaments where they can win home theater systems. Brands get exposure, developers earn money, and gamers are rewarded rather than bombarded with ads.
With copycats targeting Kiip’s model there’s no time to waste, so Anekal will start immediately. His brand relationships and expertise could get top-tier advertisers offering rewards in Kiip, which is already working with Disney and 1-800-Flowers to racked up millions of interactions from gamers.
As for compensation, Wong hinted that Anekal was tempted with substantial Kiip equity, saying “We’re doing what’s responsible to to keep talent like him on board.” Watch as Kiip’s young co-founder Brian Wong maps out the road to disruption in this interview with TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis.
Braintree, an online payments provider, is debuting a set of new tools for mobile app developers that allow merchants to accept payments within a mobile app, rather than through a web browser. For background, Braintree powers and automates online payments for merchants and companies online. The company provides a merchant account, payment gateway, recurring billing, credit card storage, support for mobile and international payments, and PCI Compliance solutions.
The new offering from Braintree helps developers avoid PCI compliance issues by encrypting sensitive credit card data when it is entered by the user on their mobile device. The encrypted data is passed from the merchant's server to Braintree for processing, and only Braintree can decrypt the information using a private key, preventing the merchant from being exposed to sensitive credit card data. The libraries support both mobile phones as well as tablet devices running Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7 operating systems.
Braintree maintains that the customer entering the credit card information on the app is the last person to see it. Other mobile app payments solutions typically use a web browser masked as an app, says the company.
Braintree's client list includes LivingSocial, 37signals, OpenTable, Fab.com, GitHub, Airbnb, Heroku, Engine Yard, Animoto, Shopify and HotelTonight. Braintree is processing more than $4 billion in annual credit card volume and is adding more than 100 new merchants a month. The company also raised $34 million in funding last year from Accel.
Netflix streaming just got a bit more classy. The Weinstein Company is releasing “a diverse slate” of its titles exclusively to Netflix streaming. These titles will hit the service within a year of their theatrical release and will include foreign language films, documentaries and other hits from TWC. This is the first deal between TWC and Netflix.
Netflix subs should expect several critically acclaimed titles. 2012 Academy Award Nominee The Artist will hit Netflix prior to pay TV on traditional premium cable. Other titles like French-language World War II drama Sarah’s Key and The Intouchables, Bully, and Coriolanus will hit Netflix streaming in the future as well.
“We couldn’t be happier to be working again with Harvey and Bob, who have an unmatched track record of creating critically acclaimed and commercially successful movies,” said Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos stated in today’s announcement.
This was a big win for Netflix. It was the first deal between the media company and Netflix and adds a fair selection of high-profile releases even if there is a long wait until they’re available. But Netflix needs more similar deals. Netflix streaming is facing tough competition from Amazon and others. Content is king.
Terms of the deal wasn’t released.
While initial reports pointed at a launch on February 22, Barnes & Noble has just taken to the wires to officially announce the release of the new 8GB Nook Tablet. As expected the new Nook variant has a price tag to match its reduced memory capacity, and with both now selling for $199 the battle between the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire seems ready to heat up once more.
BN is clearly trying to capture some of the marketshare that the less-expensive Kindle Fire has laid claim to in recent months, but the change doesn’t come without its casualties. In addition to the dip in memory — not much of a problem thanks to the Nook Tablet’s microSD card slot — the new Nook Tablet only sports half the RAM of the original version.
Meanwhile, the Nook Color’s price has been slashed to $169, offering frugal customers looking for an above-average (and easily hackable) eReader/tablet hybrid a solid way to go. Developing…
We heard all the way back in November that Microsoft would launch an Office app for the iPad, and it would seem that the big day draws even closer. According to an unverified image captured by The Daily, a version of Microsoft Office for iPad was caught running on one of Apple’s tablets.
Now, we still don’t have an official launch date but the report claims that Redmond is about ready to submit this thing for approval from Apple. The image seems to reveal what we’ve been expecting — a metro-style UI that should fit in swimmingly with all the other metro UIs MS is sending out into the world, like Windows Phone, its other iPad apps like MSN and Bing, Xbox 360 and the forthcoming Windows 8 OS.
As you can see, there are tiles for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, along with a button to create a new document. You’ll also notice, if you look close enough, that there are search and Messenger icons, which will presumably send you to Bing and Windows Live Messenger respectively.
There’s no word on an Android version of the Suite, but the Daily reports that MS’s OneNote iOS app will get a revamp to reflect Microsoft’s decidedly metro direction.
Attachments.me, the startup that promises to take the pain out of searching through email attachments, is gradually ramping up the services it’s offering to users: from today, it is launching an option to automatically file your attachments to specific folders in the cloud; and it has also expanded support to include Box, which now joins Dropbox in its list of supported cloud storage partners.
The news caps off some significant developments we’ve seen at attachments.me since announcing a seed round of $500,000 seed round from Foundry Group last year: others have included Dropbox support and Gmail extensions for Chrome and Firefox.
The addition of an automatic filtering feature underscores the growth of time-saving services that we’re seeing around cloud storage — in other words, it’s not just yet another set of dumb folders for filing things away. In this case, attachmennts.me will let users set up rules to decide how attachments get stored, and then when the attachments come in, they’ll automatically go to specified folders.
The service sounds promising, if somewhat limited in this first iteration: for starters, attachments can be filtered by sender and file type — but not subject or other keywords. Also, a user can only set up the rules in attachments.me’s Chrome extension.
However, it’s worth nothing that in a blog post announcing the new service, co-founder Jesse Miller says that this is just 1.0 of this service: “We have a ton more options we are going to add to automatic filing,” he writes. One of these, apparently, will be letting users set up automating rules via the tools’ iPhone app as well.
Meanwhile, the new support for Box is a logical next step for attachments.me as it looks to grow its customer base, which currently accounts for some 40 million Gmail attachments.
Specifically, it could see attachments.me make bigger inroads into the enterprise segment: Box.net last year signed a strategic deal with HP to offer its cloud services on selected HP desktops, and, on the back of an $81 million Series D round of funding in October 2011, Box could have other, more aggressive expansion plans on the cards, too.
Barnes and Noble reported earnings this morning, with total sales increasing 5% compared to the prior year, from $2.3 billion to $2.4 billion, falling short of analyst expectations. Net income was $52 million, which is flat with the previous year’s earnings. Third quarter earnings per share was $0.71; missing analyst expectations of $1.01 per share.
The company said retail sales in general increased 2% from $1.46 billion to $1.49 billion. BN.com sales increased 32% over the prior year, from $319 million to $420 million. Comparable sales increased 42%, on top of a 64% increase a year ago. This increase was driven by continued growth of NOOK device and digital content sales, offset by a decline in online physical product sales.
The NOOK business across all of the company's segments, including sales of digital content, device hardware and related accessories, increased 38% during the third quarter to $542 million. NOOK unit sales, including NOOK Simple Touch, NOOK Color and the new NOOK Tablet, increased 64% during the third quarter as compared to the same period last year. Digital content sales increased 85% on a comparable basis.
B&N previously stated that Nook Tablet "exceeded expectations" over the holidays, with device sales up 70 percent. As a whole, today’s earnings were not stellar considering that this is supposed to be the company’s high season for sales because of the holidays.
Barnes & Noble College sales declined 3% from $540 million to $525 million, due to the shift from selling new and used textbooks to lower priced textbook rentals.
As reported yesterday, Barnes & Noble also stated that it would release a new 8GB version of the Nook Tablet, which is priced at $199.
The iPad 3 is still weeks away from being announced, but Chinese tech blog M.I.C.gadget managed to snag a back shell for the iPad 3 from “one of our most reliable sources.” As you can see from the pics after the jump the case is slightly thicker than the svelte iPad 2 back panel. The next-gen tablet still has the tapered styling of its predecessor. It just looks like a slightly overweight iPad 2.
The iPad 3 is said to be thicker than the iPad 2. That should be considered as a fact now. Everything from LTE to the high-resolution screen to the predictably larger battery is cited as the cause for the thicker case. But outside of fanboy flame wars, an extra couple of millimeters doesn’t really matter. M.I.C.gadget even found several iPad 2 cases still worked with the thicker casing. The addition of the aforementioned specs should more than justify the additional thickness — and that’s coming from a guy that doesn’t want the damn thing.
There is of course a chance that this isn’t the back case of the iPad 3. It’s entirely plausible M.I.C.gadgets is trolling the Internet. But I doubt it. I’ve found the site to be reliable in the past and the timing is about right. If the site had post this, say, even a month ago, I would have a lot more doubts. But the iPad 3 is said to be launching in the coming weeks. Components are already being made. Case makers already have the specs. Expect more leaks to hit the interwebs prior to the official launch.
M.I.C.gadget also notes that the iPad 3′s back panel has room for a larger camera lens. This is in line with previous rumors that place a higher-resolution camera within the next iPad. But of course these are all rumors. Nothing is 100% confirmed yet. Apple is said to be announcing the next iPad the first week of March, but that’s still a rumor too at this point.
Pricelock is all about making the buying and selling of energy more efficient. It was true when the company launched the Marketplace, a customized online energy auction platform for utilities companies, power plants and other government and/or commercial entities to buy and sell natural gas, motor fuels and coal. But today, Pricelock is taking things one step further with the launch of a mobile app.
The Pricelock Mobile app extends the auction into the pocket of the buyer or seller, which is meant to improve the speed and efficiency of how energy is purchased. The app notifies suppliers of upcoming auctions and lets them watch how their bids are doing in real-time.
Unfortunately, it seems as though the app only offers view-only access, rather than the ability to place a new bid. But theoretically, the app would make it easier for a supervisor or monitor to keep up with what’s happening at the auction (where there’s supposedly a proxy) without getting behind in day-to-day work.
The Pricelock Mobile app is available now for free in the Apple App Store, Android Market, and BlackBerry App World.
MHL had a huge 2011. The mobile high-definition connectivity standard went from a relativity unknown port to making its way onto more than 50 million devices. More than 90 licensees are on board with MHL and the connectivity option is nearly standard on tablets, smartphones, HDTVs, and is now making inroads on the digital media streamer market with the tiny Roku LT.
"Since the release of our specification in 2010, MHL Consortium membership has grown five-fold, with OEMs designing and releasing new products at a steady pace," said Tim Wong, president of MHL, LLC stated in today’s announcement. "In 2012, it's my expectation that consumers will see even more exciting and innovative products that we hope will enrich their lives."
The MHL Consortium was founded by Nokia, Samsung, Silicon Image, Sony and Toshiba in 2010 after several years of testing and public demos. MHL brings together the high definition standards of HDMI with similar power management tools found in USB. Devices like the Roku LT are directly powered by the connection. MHL-enabled HDTVs and displays can even charge a connected cell phone, ensuring that the media stream isn’t cut off during playback.
MHL should see even larger numbers in 2012. The port is nearly standard on mobile devices and adoption seems to be increasing on HDTVs. Pretty soon it should be as ubiquitous as USB — hopefully.
By most accounts there aren’t very many people out there in the world using PlayBooks, but for those that are, or are considering the purchase of one, comes some good news: RIM has finally updated the OS to include two services that have been long discussed and much anticipated: integrated email support and Android app availability.
The OS could serve to give the device a boost in the market, after many people slammed RIM for shipping the tablet too early when it debuted last year without these and other features.
PlayBook OS 2.0 will be available as a free download for existing users and will automatically update on new devices. Some details:
The new email client — at long last integrated with the tablet and no longer requiring the user to own a BlackBerry to use email on the tablet — was perhaps the most obvious feature that RIM needed to fix in this update.
But what RIM has done is effectively bring the PlayBook up to speed with what other device makers have already been doing on other platforms like Android. Now users can access both personal and work email via the device, and the unified inbox can also be used for incoming messages from social networks Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Not clear if others, like Google+, can be added as well at the moment. Similarly, social features are also being integrated with RIM’s calendar and contact apps.
The other big area that has become crucial for tablet and smartphone makers is apps and content in general. The PlayBook has not been a standout in this area up to now, but RIM again is hoping to make up for that by not only beefing up its own catalog of apps but also giving access to a select number of Android apps:
During RIM’s developer conference earlier this month, the company said it had 60,000 apps on App World. Today, RIM tells us that it is adding “thousands” of PlayBook apps, with the addition of “a range” (again, no specific numbers) of Android apps also to be used on the tablet.
It is also finally adding its video store — first discussed last year — which will feature some 10,000 films and TV shows to rent to buy. RIM says will only be available initially in the U.S., with further countries to be added later.
One nice hardware development: those who do own BlackBerry smartphones will be able to link them up to the PlayBook to use their keyboards to input text on the tablet.
And in a nod to enterprise users — still very much part of RIM’s heartland, despite its many moves to bring consumers into the fold — there are also more productivity features added to the new OS, to print documents and manage files on corporate networks. With a number of third-party players getting involved in this space on other platforms, it will be interesting to see if these features drive more enterprise takeup of PlayBooks.
What’s interesting is that many had thought that RIM would wait until Mobile World Congress next week to announce the PlayBook update. Will that mean that there is other news up its sleeve for next week?
