Facebook today filed an amended S-1 to IPO that describes new risks based on its launch of ads for mobile, Zynga’s standalone gaming platform, and a patent dispute with Yahoo. It also explained how its concentrated voting structure would impact investors, and listed additional underwriters.
Here are the major revisions to the S-1 compared to the original Facebook filed at the beginning of February. Quotes can be interpreted as strict additions:
Risks
Mobile
Facebook announced it will now start monetizing mobile using Sponsored Stories ads. It now states its ability to monetize mobile in “unproven” rather than noting it does not advertise on mobile.
Terms Of Service Violations
Violation of its terms of service, such as creating duplicate accounts, is now listed as a risk that could harm its reputation and business. The Facebook brand could be negatively effected “by the actions of users that are deemed to be hostile or inappropriate to other users, or by users acting under false or inauthentic identities.” Investments to stem these problems may be unsuccessful.
For example, another prolonged hacking attack like the one in November that spread pornography or gore in the news feed could reduce visits.
Zynga
Zynga recently launched an off-Facebook gaming platform. If relations with Zynga worsens, it tries to migrate its users to its hosted gaming platform, or it stops investing in its Facebook games, Facebook’s business could be harmed.
Facebook confirmed it makes a 30% tax on user purchases in Zynga’s games, despite agreements regarding traffic guarantees.
Patents
Yahoo recently accused Facebook of violating 13 of its patents. Yahoo hasn’t commenced legal action against Facebook but could in the future. Additionally, “we face increasing competition and gain an increasingly high profile, including in connection with our initial public offering, we expect the number of patent and other intellectual property claims against us to grow.”
Inaccurate User Count Measurement
Inherent challenges in measuring its user base could hurt Facebook’s reputation and business. If advertisers or developers believe its user counts are inaccurate they may be less willing to allocate budgets and resources to Facebook.
For example “There may be individuals who have multiple Facebook accounts in violation of our terms of service, despite our efforts to detect and suppress such behavior. We estimate that false or duplicate accounts may have represented approximately 5-6% of our MAUs as of December 31, 2011.” This estimate is based on a sample that may not be representative and so it could be inaccurate.
Mobile metrics may be inflated due to devices hat automatically ping Facebook’s server without a user taking action. “We estimate that less than 5% of our estimated worldwide DAUs as of December 31, 2011 and 2010 resulted from this type of automatic mobile activity, and that this type of activity had a substantially smaller effect on our estimate of worldwide MAUs and mobile MAUs.”
Voting Structure
Facebook now lists itself as a “controlled company” whose board of directors does not have an independent nominating function.
It notes that through voting agreements with major stockholders, Mark Zuckerberg has a large percentage of voting power. “ As a result:
“Mr. Zuckerberg has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support. This concentrated control could also discourage a potential investor from acquiring our Class A common stock due to the limited voting power of such stock relative to the Class B common stock and might harm the market price of our Class A common stock.”
The dual class structure of Facebook’s common stock and the voting agreements among certain stockholders concentrate voting control with Zuckerberg and other directors, which could limit or preclude stochkholders from influencing corporate matters.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg work for Facebook at-will with no specific time commitments.
Finances
Last month, Facebook terminated its prior credit facility, raising its facility from $2.5 billion to $5 billion, and moving from a 0.15% commitment fee to a 0.10% commitment fee per annum on its daily undrawn balance.
Facebook entered into a bridge credit facility allowing it to borrow up to $3 billion “to fund tax withholding and remittance obligations related to the settlement of RSUs in connection with our initial public offering.”
When the post-IPO lock-up period ends, substantial sales of stock could cause the stock price to decline.
Major additional underwriters now include Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, RBC Capital Markets, and Wells Fargo Securities.
Further added underwriters include Blaylock Robert Van LLC, BMO Capital Markets Corp., C.L. King & Associates, Inc., Cabrera Capital Markets, LLC, CastleOak Securities, L.P., Cowen and Company, LLC., Lazard Capital Markets LLC, Lebenthal & Co., LLC, Loop Capital Markets LLC, M.R. Beal & Company, Macquarie Capital (USA) Inc., Muriel Siebert & Co., Inc., Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Pacific Crest Securities LLC, Piper Jaffray & Co., Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Samuel A. Ramirez & Company, Inc., Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated, The Williams Capital Group, L.P., William Blair & Company, L.L.C.
User Growth Stats
Brazil and Germany are now estimated to have penetration rates of 30-40%, not 20-30% as previously listed.
The US user base grew to 161 million by the end of 2011, up 16% from the end of 2010.
“DAUs as a percentage of MAUs increased from 54% in December 2010 to 57% in December 2011, which we believe was driven entirely by increased mobile usage of Facebook. We believe that increases in DAUs and in DAUs as a percentage of MAUs generally positively affect our revenue”
“Worldwide mobile MAUs increased by 76% from 245 million as of December 31, 2010 to 432 million as of December 31, 2011″ not 425 million MAUs as previously listed.
“We estimate that approximately 58 million mobile MAUs accessed Facebook solely through mobile apps or our mobile website during the month ended December 31, 2011, and the remaining 374 million mobile MAUs accessed Facebook from both personal computers and mobile devices during that month.” That’s a very small percentage of users who are only accessing via mobile where Facebook’s monetization potential is unproven — a bright point in the revised S-1
Sales Growth
“As of December 31, 2011, over half of our revenue was generated by users in the United States and Canada. However, we are experiencing rapid revenue growth in markets such as Brazil and India due to growth in the number of users and their engagement and an increase in our sales efforts in those markets.”
Facebook believes new advertising initiatives, including mobile ads, will increase the return on investment for advertisers and thereby increase advertising demand and spend.
Marketers now have access to real-time Insights on their performance. This could increase spend on Sponsored Stories ads because advertisers will immediately know if a Page post is getting a positive enough reception to make it worth paying to turn into a Sponsored Story.
It’s sort of funny that the only major thing those in the rumor business got wrong was the name of the new iPad. It’s not the previously presumed “iPad 3″, nor is it the “iPad HD”. It’s just the iPad. And that’s what it will be from now on.
This was surprising because our expectations were set for a new name. But it really shouldn’t be all that surprising. My iMac is not the “iMac 11″. My MacBook Air is not the “MacBook Air 4″. The iPod line changes, but the name remains the same. This will undoubtedly happen to the iPhone line as well. Just as the spec is dying (more than partially ushered to the grave by Apple), the ascending number naming race is dying too. It’s about simplicity.
Apple can pull this off because they have so few products and they’re in complete control of all of them. Their software isn’t licensed to other OEMs. The iPad doesn’t have to be called the “iPad 3X HD S” just to beat the “iPad 3X Turbo” made by a competitor. There are no real competitors. Not yet, anyway. The naked “iPad” name alone is enough to win.
Enough about the name. The real key to today’s event was a theme Apple is going to hit on again and again for the foreseeable future: the “Post-PC Revolution”. These were some of the first words out of Tim Cook’s mouth when he took the stage today. Yes, it’s a theme that began with Steve Jobs, but after Apple’s insane last quarter (the first under Cook as permanent CEO), it has never been more clear that Apple has evolved far beyond a mere PC company. They still make them. But they’re a sliver of the business.
Apple has sold 315 million “Post-PC” devices (read: iOS devices) in total. In just the past year, Apple sold 172 million of them. And last quarter alone, they sold 62 million, as they made up 76 percent of Apple’s revenues. This Post-PC segment is now the heart of the company. And the movement is accelerating. “Apple has its feet firmly planted in the Post-PC future,” Cook said.
Right now, the iPhone is king of the Post-PC world. But Cook and others at Apple have had no reluctance in predicting that the iPad business could be even larger one day. Something Cook said on stage today reiterates that stance. “We think the iPad is the poster child of the Post-PC world.” The iPad. Not the iPhone.
Cook then put up his stunning graph. The iPad sold 15.4 million units last quarter. That was more than any PC manufacturer sold of their entire PC line worldwide. HP sold 15.1 million PCs. Lenovo sold 13 million PCs. Dell sold 11.9 million PCs. Acer sold 9.8 million PCs. A year from now, don’t be surprised if this gap is significantly wider.
“Apples to oranges! Apples to oranges!” I hear you. But you’re wrong. Apples to Apple. Stats like this do matter because they show where we’re headed. It’s not necessarily that the iPad is beating the PC, it’s that iPad beat the PC in under two years of existence. This drives PC people batty, but the numbers don’t lie. PC sales have peaked. In many cases, they’re going the wrong way. The iPad is just getting started.
What’s more likely — 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a PC? Or 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a tablet? Just two years ago, this question would have been an absolute joke. Now it’s a joke to think it will take a full five years.
There’s strong push-back to this idea because people generally don’t like change. It’s hard to understand. We take comfort in the familiar. It’s hard to think about and write about the future because it’s always unknown. The risk of being wrong is great. But here the writing is very clearly on the wall.
“We set out not just to create a new product, but a new category,” Cook said of the iPad. And they did. But a few years from now, it could very well be the case that the PC gets lumped into this very category as a small portion of the market.
Apple doesn’t want the iPad to be put into the PC category because it’s limited and decaying. The PC people don’t want the iPad to be put into their category because it makes them look even worse. But again, 5 years from now, which will be your main personal computing device? That’s all that matters.
As for the new iPad itself, it looks amazing. I got to play with one for about 20 minutes in the hands-on area after today’s event. Devin did as well and wrote up his initial thoughts already (be sure to check out his text comparison picture).
Yes, it largely looks the same as the iPad 2. Yes, it’s ever-so-slightly, but noticeably (to those who use their iPad a lot, like me) thicker. I couldn’t tell a difference in weight (though it does weigh slightly more). What really matters, of course, is the screen. It’s glorious.
It’s one of those things where it may be a little hard to tell at first because the images on the screen are the same. But when you look closer, you get it. And you’ll never be able to use a non-Retina iPad again. The new iPad display makes everything look like a printed photograph. By comparison, the old iPad display makes everything look as if I’ve taken my glasses off. Blurry.
The new iPad seems fast, but the iPad 2 seemed fast. I imagine it will be hard to tell the speed difference between the two until apps that really test the RAM and graphics chip appear. The new Infinity Blade game that was demoed during the keynote is probably one of those apps, unfortunately, it wasn’t available on the demo units.
The new camera is much, much, much, much, much better. Funny how that works when you go from 0.7 megapixels to 5 megapixels.
The highlight for me personally was iPhoto on the new iPad. I never use iPhoto on my Mac to edit photos, I simply use it to organize them. I will absolutely use iPhoto for the iPad to edit photos. It makes it fun. It’s the way non-professional photo editing should absolutely be done. It’s all touch and slide-based. For someone like me who has gotten more into photography because of brilliant iOS apps like Instagram and Camera+, this is the next step.
The other aspect of the new iPad that I’m really looking forward to is the 4G LTE capabilities. Unfortunately, the iPads in the demo area were on WiFi, so I didn’t get a chance to test it out. But I feel like this functionality isn’t getting its full due. These new iPads will be able to go anywhere in the U.S. (and Canada) and connect to the web at speeds faster than many broadband connections. This is a part of the “Post-PC Revolution” as well. Not only are you not tethered to a desk anymore, you’re not tethered to anything. You don’t need to be near a WiFi hotspot. The new iPad is a WiFi hotspot (I hope the carriers don’t screw us over there, we’ll see — I’m a little concerned that Apple isn’t saying anything about this right now).
As predicted, some folks were disappointed by the iPad announcement today. They’ll undoubtedly remain disappointed as they wait in line to buy the new iPad next week.
For whatever reason, we’re wired to only think something is truly new if it looks completely different. But that line of thinking is foolish. Apple didn’t change the form factor of the device because it works. They have the sales figures to prove it. You don’t call back your homerun and say you wanted a double instead.
No other tablet is close to the iPad right now. That was true yesterday, it’s even more true today. If and when that changes, that’s when Apple will undoubtedly switch things up from a design perspective. There’s no use in competing against yourself. Lure the competition to come to you as you’re about to sprint the other way. Next year.
As for the rest of this year, “you’re going to see a lot more of this type of innovation,” Cook said. “We’re just getting started.” Which sounds like a great promise to the customers and a giant threat to the competition.
Editor’s note:Ben Lang is community manager at Wibiya and Conduit, which is hosting Conduit Corner at SXSW. Follow him on Twitter @benln.
Let's face it, many of the big players in the tech scene are headed to SXSW this year. The question is, how do you connect with them? You want to leave SXSW feeling like you’ve accomplished something aside from just getting drunk. Finding the right A-listers beforehand and connecting with them at the event is a sure way to make the most of your time there.
Don't have your eyes set on someone specific? Here are some tips and resources to get you started on scoping out the most influential tech stars making a grand appearance at SXSW. Twitter Hashtag + Klout
Try searching #SXSW on Twitter to see who’s coming. If you want to find the most influential people tweeting about SXSW, try using HootSuite to help you filter people based on klout. There are also other tools like Hashtagify.me and Topsy, which can help you analyze hashtags.
After a quick search, I discovered that Perez Hilton, Tim O'Reilly, and, of course, Robert Scoble are all headed to SXSW. Those are definitely some "A-listers" I'd want to get in touch with before the event to make sure I meet them. Speaker Schedule
Hundreds of influential people will be speaking at SXSW. The only problem is, they’ll probably be bombarded after their presentations. Take advantage of this list and try to connect with the people who interest you beforehand. Schedule meetings with them so that you’re guaranteed time to connect.
A friend of mine recently spent a few hours scrolling through the names of speakers, made a list of top-priority people and reached out to them, saying he was going to attend their event. That gives him a much better chance of creating a meaningful relationship with these people. Meeteor
Meeteor, a networking service that does the background work for you, set up a networking platform specifically for SXSW. You can browse through it and see if you spot any A-listers you’re keen on meeting – and meet them before you even get to the event.
Through this service, I've already connected to plenty of interesting people, which has enabled me to network with them before the event itself. Plancast
The Plancast team may have recently announced their intention to move on to other projects, but people are still using it – especially for SXSW. Try searching SXSW on Plancast to discover just how many parties are happening that week. It's a great idea to scroll through those attending the events and find people who interest you. With over 2,900 people signed up on the main Plancast page for SXSW, you’re sure to find some A-listers to mingle with.
An acquaintance of mine told me that he perused through hundreds of people on Plancast to find interesting SXSW attendees. Eventbrite Eventbrite is another great place to scroll through lists of people attending SXSW parties. They made a page just to show all of the parties taking place at SXSW. Keep your eyes out for A-listers to connect with at these festivities.
I took a look at some parties, such as The State of Now, Tech Cocktail's #StartupLife and Boxee Kegger and found fascinating new prospects for networking. SX Social SX Social is a platform that allows attendees of specific events to search for and message each other. Start messaging people before the conference to maximize your results. SXSW Parties
This Twitter account run by Michael Gold contains tweets about influential people partying at SXSW. Following this account will greatly boost your chances of discovering people at the event.
I've been following @sxswp for a few days and have already learned about some hot parties and inspirational people who will be coming to Austin.
Once you’ve found the right people, get in touch with them and start engaging them in a conversation. Here are some of the top tools to help you make that first move: Rapportive Rapportive is a Gmail plugin that serves as an excellent tool to reach out to people. This powerful tool displays a person’s information such as their Twitter page, Facebook profile, CrunchBase info, approximate location and more.
You’ll only see this info once you’ve entered the person’s email into the “to” field, but what you can do is simply play a guessing game. For example, if you’re trying to reach a certain writer at The New York Times, try typing in his or her first name @nytimes.com. If the person’s picture, Twitter and Facebook info appears in the Raaportive box, you know you’ve hit the jackpot. If your guess wasn't right the first time, don't give up! Keep trying until you get it right by adding their last name, adding a period, or trying any other variation you can think of.
It’s not as if you’re sending this email to them through a contact form that may never be seen. It’ll reach them directly and they’ll probably think that you have a close mutual friend who has their email.
If you receive a response, engage the person, start a conversation, prove that you're worth their time. I've used this strategy before plenty of conferences to set up meetings. It always pays off. Now's your chance to do so before SXSW takes place. Twitter
Try checking out your target’s Twitter account to see if they’re active. If they are, start tweeting them about connecting at SXSW. Make sure to give them a good reason to do so. It has to be mutually beneficial for both sides. LinkedIn LinkedIn is a great resource to look up people's profiles and see if you have any mutual connections. If you do, just ask your acquaintance to give you that person's contact details. Try and build a relationship with that person before SXSW — that way you'll benefit more.
Any other tips?
[image via flickr/betsyweber]
Facebook has confirmed with me that its new location APIs let any third-party app import and display the checkins as well as location-tagged posts published to Facebook by other apps. This turns Facebook into a location backbone that can power serendipitous meetups and other geo-functionality no matter which apps you and your friends use.
Bliss — soon you won’t have to use every location app simultaneously, you’ll just pick your favorite.
Previously, location and friend tagged posts syndicated to Facebook from third-party apps got “dumbed down due to limitations of our API”, new Facebook product manager Josh Williams tells me. But APIs launched today will allow these posts to be tagged with Places or exact GPS coordinates instead of appearing as “static links” says Williams, the former founder of Gowalla, which Facebook recently acquired.
When Facebook first launched its own location service, Places, only a few apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp had access to private APIs for publishing checkins to the news feed. A few months later it opened the read, write, and search APIs to all developers. However, when it moved away from checkins and toward location as a layer that could be applied to any post, the APIs didn’t upgrade to let apps tag posts and photos with locations, or read non-checkins that were tagged with location.
That meant when you took a photo with Path or Foursquare, tagged it with a location, and cross-published it to Facebook, the specific location wasn’t included. This prevented Facebook from pinning the photo to your Timeline map, making it appear prominently on the news feeds of friends in close proximity so they could meet up with you, or allowing other apps to use the data.
With the new APIs, Williams tells me “We wanted to figure out how to clean up [third-party app posts] so they won’t be treated as second-class citizens and can shine in their own glory.” Apps now approach parity with Facebook’s own publisher, “this announcement is a pretty big step in the right direction of bridging that gap. Still, there will be further improvements in the future.”
In addition to making users more likely to use cross-publishing apps like Path and Foursquare, the APIs open opportunities for passive location apps that don’t necessarily use checkins like Highlight, Banjo, and Glassmap. They won’t have to tag users to an established business or landmark, but can use GeoPoint specification to tag a user to an exact latitude and longitude. For example, these apps could prompt you to post your coordinates to Facebook, or do so automatically if you spent more than one hour in a location.
But here’s the coolest part that the other publications and I missed: The improved read API lets developers pull the coordinates of your friends based on their posts from Facebook or any other location app. [Update: While explicit "checkins" could in some cases be read before, now any post with location attached can be pulled] As long they’re cross-published to Facebook and you’re authorized to see them there, you could view Foursquare posts on Highlight, or Banjo posts on Glassmap. Status updates, photos, or any other non “checkin” post tagged with location can now be read.
That means soon you might be able to simply use the location app that suits you best, but see friends from across apps there and appear in theirs too. Even brand new apps with few users could populate themselves with checkins from Facebook and other established apps. This will push apps to differentiate and truly add value instead of just fighting to get the most users.
Facebook is about to become a hub for location data, enabling innovation while populating its own content feeds and ad targeting.
Facebook has confirmed with me that its new location APIs let any third-party app import and display the checkins and location-tagged posts published to Facebook by other apps. This turns Facebook into a location backbone that can power serendipitous meetups and other geo-functionality no matter which apps you and your friends use.
Bliss — soon you won’t have to use every location app simultaneously, you’ll just pick your favorite.
Previously, location and friend tagged posts syndicated to Facebook from third-party apps got “dumbed down due to limitations of our API”, new Facebook product manager Josh Williams tells me. But APIs launched today will allow these posts to be tagged with Places or exact GPS coordinates instead of appearing as “static links” says Williams, the former founder of Gowalla which Facebook recently acquired.
When Facebook first launched its own location service Places, only a few apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp had access to private APIs for publishing checkins to the news feed. A few months later it opened the read, write, and search APIs to all developers. However, when it moved away from checkins and towards location as a layer that could be applied to any post, the APIs didn’t upgrade to let apps tag posts and photos with locations.
That meant that when you took a photo with Path or Foursquare, tagged it with a location, and cross-published it to Facebook, the specific location wasn’t included. This prevented Facebook from pinning the photo to your Timeline map, making it appear prominently on the news feeds of friends in close proximity so they could meet up with you, or allowing other apps to use the data.
With the new APIs, Williams tells me “We wanted to figure out how to clean up [third-party app posts] so they won’t be treated as 2nd-class citizens and can shine in their own glory.” Apps now approach parity with Facebook’s own publisher, “this announcement is a pretty big step in the right direction of bridging that gap. Still, there will be further improvement improvements in the future.”
In addition to making users more likely to use cross-publishing apps like Path and Foursquare, the APIs open opportunities for passive location apps that don’t necessarily use checkins like Highlight, Banjo, and Glassmap. They won’t have to tag users to an established business or landmark, but can use GeoPoint specification to tag a user to an exact latitude and longitude. For example, these apps could prompt you to post your coordinates to Facebook, or do so automatically if you spent more than 1 hour in a location.
But here’s coolest part that the other publications and I missed. The improved read API lets developers pull the coordinates of your friends based on their posts from Facebook or any other location app. As long they’re cross-published to Facebook and you’re authorized to see them there, you could view Foursquare checkins on Highlight, or Banjo checkins on Glassmap.
That means soon you might be able to simply use the location app that suits you best, but see friends from across apps there and appear in theirs too. Even brand new apps with few users could populate themselves with checkins from Facebook and other established apps. This will push apps to differentiate and truly add value instead of just fighting to get the most users.
Facebook is about to become a hub for location data, enabling innovation while populating its own content feeds and ad targeting.
Are you having fun yet? We’re in the process of winding down from another Apple Event Day, which means recovering from a day full of iFanpeoples eagerly clicking on every iPad-related article on the Web, a day in which blogs lap up the ad revenue, and trolls eagerly proclaim their indifference to whatever this iHubbub is all about, sneering at the army of iClones marching in lock-step to the nearest Apple Store. Let it this wash over you, as its clearly a unique display that only the tech industry — and, really Apple — is capable of inspiring.
During the new, new iPad/iPad 3/iPad 2S announcement today, Apple CEO Tim Cook told those gathered that Apple is “redefining the category that [it] created with the original iPad.” Personally, I’ve become a bit wary of Apple’s near-constant claims that it is re-defining itself, or language that implies anything along the lines of “we’ve done it, again,” or “look at this miracle of gadget wizardry and fear our command of your wallets.”
In a tweet earlier today, Box Founder and CEO Aaron Levie tweeted an initial reaction to Apple’s iPad announcement that likely resonated with many: “It would appear that iPad innovation is experiencing the law of diminishing returns.” This strikes at the heart of the matter: Innovation.
Because, when it comes to returns from sales, Apple devices (the iPad, specifically) are far from seeing anything that resembles diminishing returns. Apple sold 315 million iOS devices in 2011, 62 million in Q4 2011, and the CEO revealed that the company “sold more iPads in the fourth quarter of last year, than any PC maker sold of their PCs.” Yep, 15.4 million iPads were sold in Q4 2011, and iOS devices accounted for 76 percent of Apple’s revenue in the fourth quarter.
However, with some saying that the iPad 3 is just a large version of the iPhone 4S, it’s worth asking whether or not the public will view this new device as an example of incremental innovation, or whether this is indeed a huge update befitting of media slobbering and hype.
Apple has had every superlative known to man attached to it in the last three months, and when you pass Exxon Mobile in market cap, there’s at least some justification for that. But, as the New York Times’ James Stewart points out, the company could be soon subjected to the law of large numbers, which basically means that it will be unlikely to sustain this kind of growth forever. Of course, that could mean that Apple continues its meteoric growth until 2015, when things start to level out.
With the current adoption of the iPad, and many analysts expecting the company to sell 60 million iPads in 2012, it’s unlikely that growth slows in the near future. The market in Asia, and really the international market as a whole, is relatively new territory for Apple. Smartphone adoption in Asia especially is blowing the roof off, and if Apple can capitalize (like it’s already started to), the company’s already ridiculous numbers are only going to become more jaw-dropping.
But the fact of the matter is, with each of these successive “Oh my God we’ve done it again” announcements, the public becomes increasingly inured to the actual magnitude of their hardware and software updates. So, we see the line between actual innovation vs. incremental updates become increasingly muddied. Yes, Apple is trying to play a part in reinventing education (via text books), though I personally would say they’re not really that close on that one, it’s doing its best to disrupt TV, and no doubt we will be seeing more.
Yes, the company essentially created a new form factor with the iPad, but, again, it seems we’re getting to a point where Apple is going to have to introduce the flying car, a Watson in human form that can do my taxes, or an edible tablet before we’ll feel emotionally moved enough to pay attention. Of course, there’s a gulf between the tech media and the rest of America, and things aren’t quite as jaded on Main Street. As long as Apple continues to design its products (make updates) in such a way that really matters to its customers, then there won’t be a problem. Apple executives seem convinced that the new, new iPad — at least in terms of hardware — is a serious next-gen update compared with the iPad 2. And they do have a point when you consider the A5X chip, hi-res (retina) screen, and fancy new 5MP shooter capable of recording video in 1080p. Now, considering the fact that photo-snapping with an iPad has been a fairly fuzzy experience, this is a great update — for the iPad. Yet, it still just sounds an awful lot like the camera on your iPhone 4S.
But, with its new chip, which is supposed to four times more powerful than Nvidia's Tegra 3 chip, plus LTE or 4G speeds, voice dictation, a iPhone 4S camera, and a supposed 10 hours of battery life (hopefully unlike the iPhone 4S’ conception of “longer battery life”) — there’s plenty going for this iPad.
After all, the iPad’s 2,048 x 1,536-pixel, retina screen is now of a higher-resolution than you’re likely to find on any phone, tablet, or TV, so, when we talk about innovation, it’s hard not to get a little excited about the effect this new gadget can have not only on video, but more so on gaming. As we wrote Monday, iOS is already killing Android in terms of its ability to handle HTML5 game performance, with the iPad 2 reigning supreme.
And now, re-imagining games in extra HD is going to be amazing for games that, unlike Angry Birds, push the envelope in terms of animation and design. Of course, designing for that higher resolution can be expensive, and it remains to be seen whether the iPad’s new processor will be able to handle the higher resolution in graphics.
There could be a huge boost as game developers figure out how to best incorporate cool new visual elements. What’s more, the iPad 3′s density and display likely will give it the best picture in your house, so you’re going to want to play your games on it like you would a regular console. Startups like Joypad, Flypad, and Brass Monkey are turning your smartphones into game controllers. I have a feeling the public is going to want more of these when/if they turn to using their iPad 2Ses as their main source of movie-watching and game-playing.
All in all, it seems like there are a lot of subtle (and not-so-subtle) updates and upgrades going on with the new iPad (also pretty cool that the company has optimized all its stock apps for the new screen like it did for the iPhone 4S), but I leave it up to you: Are we seeing diminishing returns in terms of iPad innovation, or did this blow your socks off?
Remember that big redesign YouTube launched in December? Granted, you’ve probably seen it several times today already, but in case not, YouTube redesigned its homepage so that its overall look would reflect the design changes that have been rolled out across Google products. More specifically, the update brought tighter integration with Google+, more personalized video discovery and viewing, and a whole mess of updates to channels.
The redesign focused on filtering channels in a way that would enable users to watch sets of related videos in one sitting, starting with a random video that they happen to love, and going on to discover and follow content from that particular curator, and video jockeys like them. The idea was to be able to easily aggregate all those followed channels on a personalized homepage that constantly updates with videos that you’ll actually want to watch. Based on the results YouTube shared today, it thinks the redesign is having the desired effect, as daily unique visits to channels have increased by 60 percent and daily net subscriptions are up 50 percent since December.
With channel engagement and subscribing on the up and up, YouTube says that its ready to take the next step in the redesign process it began in December. This means that all channels, across the site, are going to be updated to the new layout, or one of four templates customized to their creators.
As you may remember, those four templates include:
The Blogger template: A featured video, a reverse chronological list of videos from 1 playlist of your choosing, playlists, and other Channels.
The Creator template: A featured video, featured playlists, and other Channels.
The Network template: A featured video and featured Channels
The Everything template: A featured video, featured playlists, and featured Channels
YouTube is also adding some new features that it believes will help users stay more engaged with channels, including the “Channel Feed,” which will display all videos uploaded to a particular channel, as well as “playlists and Liked videos across YouTube.”
The goal, the company says, is to “make it clear what you’ll get if you subscribe,” because, once you do subscribe, the feed will be published to your homepage so that you can stay on top of all the new content coming out of your favorite channels.
Updating…
At 4pm PT, we’ll be going live on TechCrunch TV to talk about all the news that came our of Apple’s event in San Francisco today: The new iPad; upgrades to iCloud, Apple TV, and iOS 5; and of course the tech world’s reactions to it all. Joining me will be my TechCrunch colleague Devin Coldewey, who was at the event in San Francisco today and had some hands-on time with the new device — he’ll be able to give us all the details on how the new iPad looks, feels, smells, tastes, and so on. It’s going to be awesome.
But most importantly, we want to hear reactions from all of you dear readers. Let us know what you think about all things Apple and iPad by Tweeting with the hashtag #ipadcrunch — we’ll be watching our Twitter streams throughout the hour-long show from 4pm to 5pm PT.
At 4pm PT, we’ll be going live on TechCrunch TV to talk about all the news that came out of Apple’s event in San Francisco today: The new iPad; upgrades to iCloud, Apple TV, and iOS 5; and of course the tech world’s reactions to it all. Joining me will be my TechCrunch colleague Devin Coldewey, who was at the event in San Francisco today and had some hands-on time with the new device — he’ll be able to give us all the details on how the new iPad looks, feels, smells, tastes, and so on. It’s going to be awesome.
But most importantly, we want to hear reactions from all of you dear readers. Let us know what you think about all things Apple and iPad by Tweeting with the hashtag #ipadcrunch — we’ll be watching our Twitter streams throughout the hour-long show from 4pm to 5pm PT.
ChartBeat is going to be launching a new version of its real-time analytics service in a few weeks, and I got a sneak peek earlier today. The big theme: looking beyond pageviews.
You can see a screenshot of the main ChartBeat dashboard above. Specifically, it’s the ChartBeat page for venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s blog, because apparently he doesn’t mind sharing. Elements of the interface might change (ChartBeat’s Lauryn Bennett and Alex Carusillo kept telling me, “Don’t fall in love with anything.”) but if they do, the basic functionality will remain the same.
So what’s new? As in the existing version, the number of current visitors to your site is displayed prominently, but there’s a new number that’s just as visible — the total amount of time that visitors have spent engaged on your site today, and the average time for each visitor. Carusillo says the engagement clock only counts real activity of some sort, whether it’s scrolling down the page or typing a comment. It doesn’t count people who just have the page open on a random browser tab.
The dashboard still includes a list of articles, but they aren’t the articles with the most views. Instead, they’re all unusual in some way — for example, the top story is getting an unusual amount of traffic for search. A story is probably still valuable to you if it’s being shared constantly on Facebook or leading to an unusual high level of engagement, but you might not see that if you’re just looking at list of the most-viewed content. (If you want the old list of most-viewed articles, it’s still there, but on a separate page, and even then it also shows the average engagement time for each piece.)
“You get these kind of big, linkbait-y articles, and people spend a couple of seconds on the page, because that’s not ‘good content,’” Carusillo says. “We frankly don’t like that.
We’re really trying to focus on engagement and on usage rather than just a big number that tallies up over time.”
On a broader level, ChartBeat has also added graphs that show how much of your traffic is coming directly, from links, from search, from social, and internally — and how all of those numbers stack up against similar sites. Users can also drill in on social traffic and mobile traffic.
All of these changes sound particularly useful for the non-news sites and businesses in ChartBeat’s customer base, who may care as much about how people are interacting with their brands as the do about total pageviews. Bennett and Carusillo say that some of these features will be making their way over to the company’s news-specific product NewsBeat, but in a different form, since most news sites are still largely pageview driven. Maybe these new features will help, in their own small way, to change that, but still — we’re not going to see an end to linkbait headlines anytime soon.
Chartbeat is going to be launching a new version of its real-time analytics service in a few weeks, and I got a sneak peek earlier today. The big theme: looking beyond pageviews.
You can see a screenshot of the main Chartbeat dashboard above. Specifically, it’s the Chartbeat page for venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s blog, because apparently he doesn’t mind sharing. Elements of the interface might change (Chartbeat’s Lauryn Bennett and Alex Carusillo kept telling me, “Don’t fall in love with anything.”) but if they do, the basic functionality will remain the same.
So what’s new? As in the existing version, the number of current visitors to your site is displayed prominently, but there’s a new number that’s just as visible — the total amount of time that visitors have spent engaged on your site today, and the average time for each visitor. Carusillo says the engagement clock only counts real activity of some sort, whether it’s scrolling down the page or typing a comment. It doesn’t count people who just have the page open on a random browser tab.
The dashboard still includes a list of articles, but they aren’t the articles with the most views. Instead, they’re all unusual in some way — for example, the top story is getting an unusual amount of traffic for search. A story is probably still valuable to you if it’s being shared constantly on Facebook or leading to an unusual high level of engagement, but you might not see that if you’re just looking at list of the most-viewed content. (If you want the old list of most-viewed articles, it’s still there, but on a separate page, and even then it also shows the average engagement time for each piece.)
“You get these kind of big, linkbait-y articles, and people spend a couple of seconds on the page, because that’s not ‘good content,’” Carusillo says. “We frankly don’t like that.
We’re really trying to focus on engagement and on usage rather than just a big number that tallies up over time.”
On a broader level, Chartbeat has added graphs that show how much of your traffic is coming directly, from links, from search, from social, and internally — and how all of those numbers stack up against similar sites. Users can also drill in on social traffic and mobile traffic.
All of these changes sound particularly useful for the non-news sites and businesses in Chartbeat’s customer base, who probably care as much about how people are interacting with their brands as the do about total pageviews.
Bennett and Carusillo say that some of these features will be making their way over to the company’s news-specific product Newsbeat, but in a different form, since most news sites are still largely pageview driven. Maybe these new features will help, in their own small way, to direct news organizations away from a pageview-centric mindset, but still — we’re not going to see an end to linkbait headlines anytime soon.
Is Google Voice (previously GrandCentral) co-founder Craig Walker getting back into the VoIP game? According to a recent tweet he sent out, it looks like Walker and his team at incubator Firespotter Labs is cooking up something in the VoIP space. As Walker writes, “Starting to play around with a bunch of VoIP ideas…time to take this incubator thing into hyperdrive:).”
For background, Walker co-founded GrandCentral, a phone management service that first launched in 2006 and was acquired by Google for $50+ million in 2007. Grand Central was relaunched as Google Voice.
Starting to play around with a bunch of VoIP ideas...time to take this incubator thing into hyperdrive:)
—
Craig Walker (@cwalker123) March 07, 2012
Walker left the Google Voice team in late 2010 to join Google Ventures as an EIR, and then founded Firespotter Labs. Walker has previously said that Firespotter Labs will build the initial products using its own permanent in-house team and if a product has legs, spin off the company to get outside funding.
To date, Firespotter has launched a few projects publicly—food photo-sharing app Nosh, spoof app Jotly, and waitlisting application for restaurants NoshList.
Walker clearly has plenty of experience in VoIP, with the creation of Grand Central as well the launch and development of Google Voice. Google Voice's Gmail integration is done over VoIP, and as my former colleague Jason Kincaid reported, Google actually had a functional Google Voice VoIP app for Android that was developed but never released.
So is Walker developing Grand Central 2.0? Perhaps. There’s still room for improvement with Google Voice (perhaps adding additional VoIp support?), and VoIP technologies could also be complimentary to Firespotter’s NoshList application as well. We’ve contacted Walker for further details. Stay tuned.
Is Google Voice (previously GrandCentral) cofounder Craig Walker getting back into the VoIP game? According to a recent Tweet he sent out, it looks like Walker and his team at incubator Firespotter Labs is cooking up something in the VoIP space. As Walker writes, “Starting to play around with a bunch of VoIP ideas…time to take this incubator thing into hyperdrive:).”
For background, Walker co-founded GrandCentral, a phone management service that first launched in 2006 and was acquired by Google for $50+ million in 2007. Grand Central was relaunched as Google Voice.
Starting to play around with a bunch of VoIP ideas...time to take this incubator thing into hyperdrive:)
—
Craig Walker (@cwalker123) March 07, 2012
Walker left the Google Voice team in late 2010 to join Google Ventures as an EIR, and then founded Firespotter Labs. Walker has previously said that Firespotter Labs will build the initial products using its own permanent in house team and if a product has legs, spin off the company to get outside funding.
To date, Firespotter has launched a few projects publicly—food photo-sharing app Nosh, spoof app Jotly, and waitlisting application for restaurants NoshList.
Walker clearly has plenty of experience in VoIP, with the creation of Grand Central as well the launch and development of Google Voice. Google Voice's Gmail integration is done over VoIP, and as my former colleague Jason Kincaid reported, Google actually had a functional Google Voice VoIP app for Android that was developed but never released.
So is Walker developing Grand Central 2.0? Perhaps. There’s still room for improvement with Google Voice (perhaps adding additional VoIp support?), and VoIP technologies could also be complimentary to Firespotter’s NoshList application as well. We’ve contacted Walker for further details. Stay tuned.
Heyzap, a startup that allows users to check in as they play their favorite mobile games, is now releasing its data through an API.
The API focuses on two types of information — games and players. Through the API, a developer can see which games are trending based on usage, or they can bring up a list of who has checked in to each title. Heyzap says developers could also look up information about individual players, such as their profile and check-in history. And since co-founder Jude Gomila describes this as “a read API to start with,” you can probably assume that the startup will be adding more features over time.
Gomila says non-game developers have been making requests for access to Heyzap’s data, so he sees the API as a way for the company to reach an entirely new set of partners, including gaming platforms, social platforms, and gaming news websites. As with anyone launching API, Gomila is hoping to be surprised by how the API is used, though he notes that many of “the early compelling projects” have had a strong visual elements. He offers the tantalizing (but also theoretically exhausting) suggestion that it might be possible to use the API as the basis for a “location-based chess game.”
As a demonstration of how the API might be used, Heyzap has created two cool maps that show game usage in real-time — one for the whole world, and one specifically for San Francisco (where the Game Developers Conference is currently being held). So as players check in to games, you can see icons appear (or rather fall) on a map, showing where they’re playing.
You can read more about the API here. (And yes, this does seem to be the week for cool projects from Heyzap.)
Update: I promise it’s up. It’s just having a lot of trouble right now. Update 2: So It looks like the Apple Store is working for some and not for others. But I have proof that it is in fact running, which you’ll find in numerous pictures at the bottom of the story. Update 3: Alright guys. Refresh is the name of the game right now. Downforeveryoneorjustme.com says it’s down for everyone, even when I have it up and running in the neighboring Firefox tab. So just stick with it. Have hope — it’s iPad day.
So I’ve been pressing refresh on the Apple Store every second for the past hour. It’s really fun, by the way. I’ve seen it cough up the “We’ll be back soon” page, a 404 error page, and even a really cute “Oops!” page. Who knew Apple could be down in such varied formats?
So I’m refreshing, and I’m refreshing, and I’m refreshing yet again… And then suddenly, as though I was seeing it for the very first time, with brand new eyes, it appeared.
Yes, the Apple Store is back up and running, and I’d give it all of five minutes before the entire site crashes from the traffic. So if you’re planning on pre-ordering the new new iPad, click here right now.
The new iPad (what a stupid name, by the way) keeps the same pricing scheme as its predecessor, with Wifi-only models starting at $499. Wifi + 3G/4G models start at $629.
Update: I promise it’s up. It’s just having a lot of trouble right now.
So I’ve been pressing refresh on the Apple Store every second for the past hour. It’s really fun, by the way. I’ve seen it cough up the “We’ll be back soon” page, a 404 error page, and even a really cute “Oops!” page. Who knew Apple could be down in such varied formats?
So I’m refreshing, and I’m refreshing, and I’m refreshing yet again… And then suddenly, as though I was seeing it for the very first time, with brand new eyes, it appeared.
Yes, the Apple Store is back up and running, and I’d give it all of five minutes before the entire site crashes from the traffic. So if you’re planning on pre-ordering the new new iPad, click here right now.
The new iPad (what a stupid name, by the way) keeps the same pricing scheme as its predecessor, with Wifi-only models starting at $499. Wifi + 3G/4G models start at $629.
Today, Apple unleashed the “new new iPad,” or iPad 3, or 2S, or whatever you want to call it. It’ll cost you $499, has a new retina display, with an A5X processor complete with quad-core graphics. The iPad 2 is also getting a price drop, to $399, and Apple announced a slew of new updates to existing products, including movie support for iCloud, iPhoto is coming to iOS, along with an update for iOS 5. Yes, iOS 5.1 will be available for download starting today for iPhone, iPod and iPads, according to Apple, with some new updates to Siri.
Siri brought a big change to the experience of the iPhone when it appeared on the 4S, and since then, people have been finding all sorts of back-door ways to bring the saucy personal assistant to other Apple devices. Today, Siri is officially showing up on the iPad. Well, sort of. It won’t be the full-featured personal assistant iPhone users have become familiar with, but it does include voice dictation support. This support will include American English, British and Australian English, French, German and Japanese.
While most of those languages have already been available for iOS, Japanese is a new arrival. But, perhaps the coolest part of this pared-down Siri for iPad is that the dictation feature will be available in third-party apps. That means that users will be able to holler their tweets and Facebook status updates into their iPads and iPhones, making for an interesting experience for those in close proximity.
iOS 5.1 is also supposed to hold the promise of enhanced battery life, but iPhone 4S users have been holding their breath on that one for awhile now, so that remains to be seen.
But, as always, iPhone Hacks warns that, for those operating with jailbroken versions of iOS, it’s a good idea to avoid those firmware updates, because you’ll likely lose your jailbreak. Just FYI.
We’ll update when we learn more.
Today, Apple unleashed the “new new iPad,” or iPad 3, or 2S, or whatever you want to call it. It’ll cost you $499, has a new retina display, with an A5X processor complete with quad-core graphics. The iPad 2 is also getting a price drop, to $399, and Apple announced a slew of new updates to existing products, including movie support for iCloud, iPhoto is coming to iOS, along with an update for iOS 5. Yes, iOS 5.1 will be available for download starting today for iPhone, iPod and iPads, according to Apple, with some new updates to Siri.
Siri brought a big change to the experience of the iPhone when it appeared on the 4S, and since then, people have been finding all sorts of back-door ways to bring the saucy personal assistant to other Apple devices. Today, Siri is officially showing up on the iPad. Well, sort of. It won’t be the full-featured personal assistant iPhone users have become familiar with, but it does include voice dictation support. This support will include American English, British and Australian English, French, German and Japanese.
While most of those languages have already been available for iOS, Japanese is a new arrival. But, perhaps the coolest part of this pared-down Siri for iPad is that the dictation feature will be available in third-party apps. That means that users will be able to holler their tweets and Facebook status updates into their iPads and iPhones, making for an interesting experience for those in close proximity.
iOS 5.1 is also supposed to hold the promise of enhanced battery life, but iPhone 4S users have been holding their breath on that one for awhile now, so that remains to be seen.
But, as always, iPhone Hacks warns that, for those operating with jailbroken versions of iOS, it’s a good idea to avoid those firmware updates, because you’ll likely lose your jailbreak. Just FYI.
We’ll update when we learn more.
Sometimes I wish I wrote for The Onion and not TechCrunch so I could write funny shit like this all day instead of repeatedly getting attacked publicly for expressing myself or not being smart enough to be a SERIOUS TECH JOURNALIST WITH SERIOUS THOUGHTS ABOUT SERIOUS THINGS. Or whatever.
In other news, iPad.
I’ve just gotten out of a quick hands-on session with the new iPad (and yes, it’s just called the iPad), and come away with exactly the feeling I expected to have: that I need to buy one.
The first thing you should know, and also the reason there aren’t many pictures, is that as far as weight and shape, it’s almost exactly the same as the iPad 2. They wouldn’t allow comparison shots — probably because the new iPad is a little thicker — but the dimensional differences are minor and the overall feel is near-identical.
Let me tell you why I’m going to buy the new iPad. Or rather, let me show you.
Open it in a new tab to see the pixels up close.
The top picture is the new Retina screen, the bottom picture is the original screen. This close up (about a quarter of an inch), you can see the pixels. But from a normal distance, the text is so clear and the overall visual effect is so smooth, I can’t help myself.
I would love to read books and magazines on the iPad. I’d love to work from it, do my photo editing on it. But reading text and viewing images just wasn’t ever good enough. Now it is. The sharpness is as good as you expect, the device otherwise is more or less the same. Were you hoping for a redesign? That will happen eventually. Don’t be greedy.
As for the new apps, which they demoed for me, they look great. iPhoto feels like a lot of fun to use, though professionals will of course prefer the more robust controls in something like Aperture or Lightroom. For everyone else (and perhaps me), these basic controls over exposure, color, and so on (non-destructive and fairly robust; the brushes are nice) will be more than enough.
Beyond that, what’s to tell? Objective benchmarks will appear when we have our own unit; performance of the updated apps will have to be evaluated by users of the old versions; the new apps and games will have to be actually tried (the new Epic game wasn’t available for testing and Infinity Blade wasn’t upscaling very well); 4G speeds and coverage will be progressively evaluated; dictation is worthless in a crowded hands-on room; the cameras can’t be tested properly in a dim room with little connectivity; the main fact I ascertained is that having my hands on the new iPad was a lot like having my hands on the old iPad.
But having my eyes on it? That’s another story.
I’ve just gotten out of a quick hands-on session with the new iPad (and yes, it’s just called the iPad), and have come away with exactly the feeling I expected to have: that I need to buy one.
The first thing you should know, and also the reason there aren’t many pictures, is that as far as weight and shape, it’s almost exactly the same as the iPad 2. They wouldn’t allow comparison shots — probably because the new iPad is a little thicker — but the dimensional differences are minor and the overall feel is near-identical.
Let me tell you why I’m going to buy the new iPad. Or rather, let me show you.
Open it in a new tab to see the pixels up close.
The top picture is the new Retina screen, the bottom picture is the original screen. This close up (about a quarter of an inch), you can see the pixels. But from a normal distance, the text is so clear and the overall visual effect is so smooth, I can’t help myself.
I would love to read books and magazines on the iPad. I’d love to work from it, do my photo editing on it. But reading text and viewing images just wasn’t ever good enough. Now it is. The sharpness is as good as you expect, the device otherwise is more or less the same. Were you hoping for a redesign? That will happen eventually. Don’t be greedy.
As for the new apps, which they demoed for me, they look great. iPhoto feels like a lot of fun to use, though professionals will of course prefer the more robust controls in something like Aperture or Lightroom. For everyone else (and perhaps me), these basic controls over exposure, color, and so on (non-destructive and fairly robust; the brushes are nice) will be more than enough.
Beyond that, what’s to tell? Objective benchmarks will appear when we have our own unit; performance of the updated apps will have to be evaluated by users of the old versions; the new apps and games will have to be actually tried (the new Epic game wasn’t available for testing and Infinity Blade wasn’t upscaling very well); 4G speeds and coverage will be progressively evaluated; dictation is worthless in a crowded hands-on room; the cameras can’t be tested properly in a dim room with little connectivity; the main fact I ascertained is that having my hands on the new iPad was a lot like having my hands on the old iPad.
But having my eyes on it? That’s another story.
Wondering what to call the newly announced iPad hardware, demonstrated at this morning’s Apple event in San Francisco? Well, it’s not going to be the “iPad 3,” the “iPad HD,” or even the “iPad 2S.”
Nope, the new iPad will just be called “iPad.” That’s not confusing at all.
To make matters worse, it seems that Apple will continue to sell the older model iPad, the iPad 2. Except now the iPad 2 will see a $100 price drop (hooray!), bringing it down to $399 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi only model. The 3G version will be $529.
Meanwhile, the new iPad starts at $499 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi and $629 for the 3G version.
But the name change – seriously? This means we’ll now be referring to the two currently available devices as the iPad 2 and just “iPad?” And what about the first generation device, which many people (myself included) still own? The iPad 1? iPad the original? iPad Classic? (Ha.)
Or maybe we should just call the new iPad “the new iPad,” like Apple wants us to. After all, isn’t that how you refer to the thing in casual conversation? Sure. That will go over well:
Hey, do you have the new iPad? The iPad 3? No, it’s just called the iPad. So you have the first one? No, it’s new.
For what it’s worth, TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis says she heard this news prior to today from a source very familiar with the matter, and would have written about this herself, if she wasn’t supposed to be on break. (Something about feeling all stabby. I don’t know.)
“When every other tech blog was annoyingly bullshitting about it being called the iPad 3 or the iPad HD,” Alexia tells me, “my source was all ‘it just says iPad on the back.’ Turns out, they weren’t being enigmatic.”
In other news, iPad, iPad, iPad, iPad.
Wondering what to call the newly announced iPad hardware, demonstrated at this morning at the Apple event in San Francisco? Well, it’s not going to be the “iPad 3,” the “iPad HD,” or even the “iPad 2S.”
Nope, the new iPad will just be called “iPad.” That’s not confusing at all.
To make matters worse, it seems that Apple will continue to sell the older model iPad, the iPad 2. Except now the iPad 2 will see a $100 price drop (hooray!), bringing it down to $399 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi only model. The 3G version will be $529.
Meanwhile, the new iPad starts at $499 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi and $629 for the 3G version.
But the name change – seriously? This means we’ll now be referring to the two currently available devices as the iPad 2 and just “iPad?” And what about the first generation device, which many people (myself included) still own? The iPad 1? iPad the original? iPad Classic? (Ha.)
Or maybe we should just call the new iPad “the new iPad,” like Apple wants us to. After all, isn’t that how you refer to the thing in casual conversation? Sure. That will go over well:
Hey, do you have the new iPad? The iPad 3? No, it’s just called the iPad. So you have the first one? No, it’s new.
For what it’s worth, TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis says she heard this news prior to today from a source very familiar with the matter, and would have written about this herself, if she wasn’t supposed to be on break. (Something about feeling all stabby. I don’t know.)
“When every other tech blog was annoyingly bullshitting about it being called the iPad 3 or the iPad HD,” Alexia tells me, “my source was all ‘it just says iPad on the back.’ Turns out, they weren’t being enigmatic.”
In other news, iPad, iPad, iPad, iPad.
StartupBus, a multi-city Wi-Fi-enabled roadtrip to the South by Southwest Interactive conference with the goal of developing and launching startups by the time the travelers arrive in Austin, fired up the engines on its biggest year ever this week.
Yesterday, busloads of hacker-entrepreneurs departed from 11 regions — San Francisco/Silicon Valley (where the StartupBus began in 2010), Boston, Cincinnati, Florida, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Louisiana, Mexico, New York, Stanford University, and Washington D.C. — to brainstorm and code their way down to SxSWi. The whole thing culminates on Saturday March 10th, when all the startups (or to be more precise, the functional prototype web services) hatched on the various trips will show off their demos in Austin to a panel of potential investors.
TechCrunch TV’s John Murillo is along for the ride all the way from San Francisco to Austin, and he put together an awesome video wrap-up of Day One that’s embedded above. Reasons you should absolutely watch include:
The “buspreneurs” pitching ideas to each other and then sorting out who they want as teammates, high school gym class style
A leg-stretching expedition at the Santa Monica Pier, where buspreneurs talked to potential customers (aka, regular people) about their fledgling apps
And naturally, a cameo by early-stage startup hound Robert Scoble, who boarded the bus for the SF-LA leg
In all, it looks like StartupBus 2012 is off to a solid start. We’ll be following the trip’s daily progress here on TechCrunch TV over the next couple of days; to get more real-time updates on what the buspreneurs are up to and where each bus is on the map, you can check out StartupBus’ own blog here.
Get ready for another wave of social location-based mobile apps. Facebook has just opened new APIs that allow apps on its platform to tag posts with friends and Places, read the location of your old posts, and search for specific posts by coordinates and distance parameters. Additionally, Open Graph apps can now play back video and display big photos in news feed and Timeline.
By allowing apps to tag Places, Facebook can use the location data to show their posts to nearby friends. That means posts from Foodspotting, Gogobot, Path and other apps will be able to inspire serendipitous meetups just like Facebook check-ins.
For example, Facebook explains that “an app used to share your favorite meals can now make it possible to add where you ate and who you were with.”
Facebook will be able to collect lots more location-as-a-layer data thanks to the new APIs. This helps it determine where users spend their time, and therefore what local content will be especially relevant to them.
The option to add GeoPoint data will let apps create more interesting aggregated stories on their users’ Timelines. For instance, an app could reference the GeoPoint of your stated place of residence against all your checkins at restaurants around town through its app to give you an average distance you travel to eat.
We’ll have more analysis on the opportunities offered by these new APIs soon.
There was a debate over the last few months regarding the iPad 2. Some said the iPad 3, now known as the new iPad, would replace the iPad 2. Others, including myself, speculated that the similar form factor and slightly upgraded specs (plus it’s still selling like gangbusters) all told a different story. Well, as it turns out, Apple is in fact keeping the iPad 2 on the market for the time being.
Starting today, the iPad 2 will be available in only 16GB form. The WiFi version will cost $399 and the WiFi/3G version is $529. That’s a $100 drop from its previous MSRP. Android tabs should officially be on notice now.
This puts the best selling tablet in a new price point range. At $399 it’s within striking distance of Android tablets like the Asus Transformer and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. This is huge.
This strategy will likely increase Apple’s dominance in the tablet space. It now is officially selling two models. It doesn’t matter to the average consumer if one of them is a year old; it’s still better than nearly every other Android tab.
Since the iPad 2 and the new iPad share many components and manufacturing processes, it’s all prancing unicorns for Apple. 2012 is going to be the year of the iPad (and new iPad).
A weekend hack called Friendsheet went from 60k uniques a month to 150K in 24 hours when Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg Liked it yesterday. Friendsheet employs Facebook Connect to turn the photos from your news feed into a Pinterest-style browsing experience. Thankfully it’s hosted on Amazon S3, Friendsheet’s creator Zach Allia tells me. Otherwise the Zuck Effect caused by his Facebook subscribers clicking through the news feed story generated by the Like could have crippled Friendsheet.
Turns out it’s not just Pinterest’s product, but the wide-screen, medium-sized photo panel layout it uses that resonates people.
Facebook’s one update-wide news feed works well for digesting text. However, our eyes don’t need as long to view photos, and constant scrolling down a photo feed can be exhausting. Pinterest’s seven update-wide layout makes scanning large quantities of visual content easier. That’s why the Friendsheet browsing experience is refreshing and satisfying.
To make Facebook’s news feed more relevant, the EdgeRank sorting algorithm also hides photos from most of your friends. Friendsheet doesn’t have access to data on who your closest friends are, but doesn’t require it since it can make browsing all the photos from your network so fast. You will end of seeing photos from some acquaintances you forgot you ever friended, though.
First launched in January, Friendsheet lets you Like, comment, or re-share, click photos to expand them in a light box, or upload your own to be posted to Facebook. You can also see all of your own photos or those tagged of a friend in dedicated pinboards.
To be clear, the Facebook Connect-enabled site and HTML5 web app is not a competitor to Facebook or Pinterest. It merely repurposes and adds to Facebook’s content, and it doesn’t offer the web curation of Pinterest’s ability to display linked and not just uploaded photos. Still, if it gained more traction it could steal time-on-site from Facebook, and make Allia an acquihire target.
This isn’t Allia’s first viral hit. In 2008 he built the Free Gifts app, sold it to SGN, and bought it back. Next he plans to port his photo browsing product to the iPad as a native app and improve the HTML5 version. His motive is simple, “I wanted to bring the Pinterest feeling to Facebook photos and make it more of an experience than a task.”
At Apple’s iPad 3, cough, iPad, announcement today in San Francisco, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed, among other things, that it sold more iPads in Q4 2011 than any individual PC manufacturer sold of their PC devices. That’s pretty impressive.
There were quite a few other developments, such as the fact that iPhoto will be moving from the desktop to the iPad (finally), and Apple has also translated GarageBand and iMovie onto their tablet.
And beyond the cool updates to the iPad hardware itself (retina display, A5X processor), it also looks like an updated version of iWork is on the way to iOS. Not only that, but we’re hearing that Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are all being updated, which will be announced at some point today. Apparently they will all still cost $9.99 each, and are free updates for people who’ve already downloaded them.
It looks like iOS take on the iLife suite will also be getting an update, as Chris mentioned, and GarageBand will be getting some updates, including smart strings, note editor, and “jam session.”
We’ll be updating as we learn more.
Apple has managed to translate their popular GarageBand and iMovie apps into impressive iPad experiences, and now it’s iPhoto’s turn to get the iOS treatment.
Mobile photo buffs should get quite a bit of functionality out of the new app, if only because it’s capable of multi-photo comparisons with images as large as 19 megapixels. All of a user’s images are organized into “shelves,” which allows for quick and easy browsing though their photo libraries.
Tapping a photo brings up the editing interface, and as expected, iPhoto for iOS is is chock full of multitouch gestures for editing. Grabbing and moving corners will crop images for example, touching images with the brush interface allows users to add a bit of flair to their photos. Once all your photo tweaks are in place, those photos can also be quickly beamed from device to device, or published directly to iCloud. Developing…
Apple has managed to translate their popular GarageBand and iMovie apps into impressive iPad experiences, and now it’s iPhoto’s turn to get the iOS treatment.
Mobile photo buffs should get quite a bit of functionality out of the new app, if only because it’s capable of multi-photo comparisons with images as large as 19 megapixels. All of a user’s images are organized into “shelves,” which allows for quick and easy browsing though their photo libraries.
As expected, iPhoto for iOS is is chock full of multitouch gestures for editing — think grabbing and moving corners to crop images, touching images to spruce them up with brushes, etc. Developing…
The new iPad (dubbed, simply enough, iPad) packs a slew of new hardware — the A5X system-on-a-chip, a 5-megapixel iSight camera, and perhaps most importantly for wireless connectivity fiends, an LTE radio. Yep, the new iPad will be Apple’s first LTE-capable device, and it’s very likely that it won’t be the last.
So far, Apple has revealed that LTE-friendly variants for Verizon and AT&T will be available, as well as for Canadian carriers Telus, Bell, and Rogers. Worldwide 3G support is understandably also part of the mix, so those of you who take the plunge without the right coverage will still be able to get those wireless data connections going.
Expect battery life to take a hit while surfing on that 4G connection, though the reported 9 hours of use is certainly no slouch especially when the iPad itself is still hovering around 10 hours sans wireless data. We’ll see how this actually pans out though — the iPhone 4S was notoriously finicky when it came to battery, and that was a 3G-only device. Still, that minor detail probably won’t keep most people from buying these things, so here’s how the pricing breaks down for the 4G models.
Apple is sticking to their standard pricing model here, with the 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB 4G iPads going for $629, $729, and $829 respectively. Pre-orders open today, so you should probably start wailing on the Apple Store website if you want to get in on the ground floor. Developing…
At today’s iPad 3 unveiling, Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled a staggering data point, revealing that Apple sold more iPads in 2011 sold than any individual PC manufacturer sold of all of their products.
According to a slide, posted below, Apple sold 15.4 million iPads in Q4, whereas HP sold 15.1 million PCs in the same timeframe. Lenova sold 13.1 million units in Q4.
He also said that there have been 200,000 apps made for the iPad to date, adding that “the momentum has been incredible.”
At today’s iPad 3 announcement, Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled a staggering data point, revealing that Apple sold more iPads in Q4 2011 than any individual PC manufacturer sold of their PC devices in the same quarter.
According to a slide (posted below), Apple sold 15.4 million iPads in Q4, whereas HP sold 15.1 million PCs in the same timeframe. Lenovo sold 13.1 million units in Q4. Basically Apple sold more iPads in Q4 of last year, than any PC manufacturer sold of their products worldwide.
He also said that there have been 200,000 apps made for the iPad to date, adding that “the momentum has been incredible,” and that the iPad is “The poster child of the post-PC world.”
Today, in downtown San Francisco, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook unveiled the iPad 3. “We are redefining the category that Apple created with the original iPad,” he said. The device looks very similar to the iPad 2 but the new model is equipped with internal hardware including a high-resolution screen with a 264 ppi, and as Apple’s Phil Schiller notes, is good enough to call a reina screen.
But Apple doesn’t talk about just hardware. It’s all about the experience and a screen nearly twice as sharp is something Apple hopes will push the iPad into a new markets.
Inside the new iPad is a A5X processor complete with quad-core graphics. Apple states that the A5 SoC is “twice as fast” as the Tegra 3 and the A5X offers “four times the performance.”
Holding up the iPad to take a picture is never the most pleasurable experience, which is likely why Apple kept the camera experience on the lower-end in the previous generation models. But with all the killer camera apps available on iOS and our general enthusiasm toward imagery, Apple knows it’s time to slap something better onto the iPad HD. That said, the same 8-megapixel shooter fitted onto the iPhone 4S will be present and accounted for on this next-gen iPad.
The camera has the larger f/2.4 aperture to let in more light, and all the same software goodness that came with the iPhone 4S camera app — like swipe to preview, photo editing, and facial recognition — is along for the ride too.
Today, in downtown San Francisco, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook unveiled the iPad 3. “We are redefining the category that Apple created with the original iPad,” he said. The device looks very similar to the iPad 2 but the new model is equipped with internal hardware including a high-resolution screen with a 264 ppi, and as Apple’s Phil Schiller notes, is good enough to call a retina screen.
But Apple doesn’t talk about just hardware. It’s all about the experience and a screen nearly twice as sharp is something Apple hopes will push the iPad into a new markets and use cases.
Inside the new iPad is a A5X processor complete with quad-core graphics. Apple states that the A5 SoC is “twice as fast” as the Tegra 3 and the A5X offers “four times the performance.”
Software
Apple has optimized all the stock apps for the new screen like the company did for the iPhone 4. Several developers were given access to the new screen specs and have updated their apps to take advantage of the new pixels.
Camera
Holding up the iPad to take a picture is never the most pleasurable experience, which is likely why Apple kept the camera experience on the lower-end in the previous generation models. But with all the killer camera apps available on iOS and our general enthusiasm toward imagery, Apple knows it’s time to slap something better onto the iPad. That said, the same 8-megapixel shooter fitted onto the iPhone 4S will be present and accounted for on this next-gen iPad.
The camera has the larger f/2.4 aperture to let in more light, and all the same software goodness that came with the iPhone 4S camera app — like swipe to preview, photo editing, and facial recognition — is along for the ride too.
The camera can also record video in 1080p.
The new iPad also comes equipped with a voice dictation tool that supports US English, British, Australian, French, German, and Japanese. This positions the iPad for increased productivity tools — it’s a straight shot at other mobile workstation solutions.
LTE
Apple has also equipped the new iPad with high speed networking. This model sports 21 Mbps HSPA+, 42Mbps DC-HSDPA and 73Mbps LTE. This is blazing fast data connectivity.
The new iPad can rock its LTE goods on Teslus, Rogers, Bell, Verizon, and ATT (Verizon & ATT in the states). It retains its 3G radio from before and is 3G world-ready.
Battery
The new model is 9.4mm thin and weighs in at 1.4lbs. That’s slightly heavier than the iPad 2 but the additional weight allows for larger batteries that give the new iPad, complete with its new screen and LTE radio, the same 10 hour battery life found in the iPad 2 (9 hours on LTE.)
Price and availability
Price points remain from previous models: the 16GB is $499, 32B $599 and 64GB $699. Likewise, the LTE versions are $629, $729 and $829.
The new iPad ships on March 16th. Pre-orders are available today.
At this morning’s Apple’s event in San Francisco, the company announced an update to its iCloud service, which will now support – at last – movies! The movies you purchase on iTunes will be stored in the cloud and made available for re-download to any of your iOS devices – the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
This is an extension to the iCloud features Apple currently offers, which until now had supported the re-downloads of purchased music and apps, available both in the iTunes desktop software and on the devices themselves.
And the news comes just in time to correlate with today’s other announcements, it seems: a new Apple TV.
The movies and TV shows sold in iTunes will now support 1080p, CEO Tim Cook announced on stage. Perfect for Apple’s TV’s new UI which is also in full 1080p. More on that in a minute, of course.
While we wait for the new iPad to officially take the stage in San Francisco, Apple CEO Tim Cook has just taken the opportunity to rattle off some impressive numbers for the company’s iOS devices. The company has sold a total of 315 million iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches, with a full 62 million of those iOS-powered devices being sold in Q4 2011 alone.
These three product lines alone accounted for 76% of Apple’s Q4 revenue, and a quite a bit of Apple’s big Q4 performance can be pegged on the iPad’s popularity. According to Cook, 15.4 million iPads were sold during that quarter, which eclipses the sales performance of nearly every other major PC manufacturer. Developing…
Meet the new Apple TV. It’s a lot like the Apple TVs of old in that it does not feature a traditional iOS interface centering around apps: it’s still all about content consumption.
The big update comes in the form of higher resolution videos. The updated UI sports a 1080p interface and movies can now be purchased from iTunes in that resolution as well.
iCloud is also a big part of the new Apple TV and works in a similar manner as other Apple devices. Photos can be accessed in a Photo Stream and iTunes playlists are available from the cloud as well. The new 1080p interface should make for gorgeous photo viewing.
The new Apple TV is available for ordering today and ships next week. It’s still only $99.
image via Engadget.
Yesterday word began to emerge that Apple had created a new section in the app store: Catalogs, where it has slowly started to funnel apps that would have previously been in other categories like Lifestyle. The news was first brought to light by the developers of Catalog Spree, a catalog aggregating app that saw itself get moved in the process.
There are a number of benefits to the new category that are pretty basic, discovery possibly being the most obvious of all. But it also signals a way for Apple to provide a whole lot more in mobile commerce services — something that people have long been anticipating but have seen little in the way of activity from the company.
Joaquin Ruiz, the founder of Catalog Spree, says he is not privy to any details of what Apple will announce today, but he does know where Apple would be best placed to do something more than just group his app with other apps like it: providing a centralized billing service for all the apps.
Offering payment services for physical goods sold through apps could work along the lines of Apple’s current in-app payment offering, which is currently used for digital goods like games credits, subscriptions and extra content. It would signal a much easier way of paying for things on a device — and Ruiz thinks would point to a lot more purchasing as a result.
“Our application is effectively a mall with every store like an individual shop with its own checkout,” he explained. And that, effectively, is multiplied many times over when you consider dozens of other catalog apps.
However, he points out, Apple has several hundred million credit card numbers — more than most banks do. “If they were to implement a centralized checkout system, that would be massive. You could visit that ‘mall’ and have a single ID to pay for everything.”
Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner, agrees: “Whether offering payments for goods through catalogs becomes an extra revenue stream for Apple remains to be seen, but what is more obvious is that it would deliver a lot of value to those owners of catalog apps.”
But as Ruiz also notes, this is an area that is probably being explored by others, too — companies like eBay and Amazon, which already provide centralized billing for many smaller storefronts, would be likely candidates for such services.
And this model would be a significant shift for Apple. For one thing, it couldn’t run something like this as it does in-app payments, where it takes a 30 percent cut of all transactions and in February said it had paid out more than $4 billion to developers to date. The margins on physical goods can be as low as ten percent, says Ruiz, so that kind of commission on transactions would never work. More likely would be the kind that credit card companies already take: between one and two percent. What about NFC? With the Apple announcements coming up soon, it’s anyone’s guess what will actually be revealed, although guesses have been strongly favoring the announcement of a new iPad model, rather than something related to a new iPhone. (Among all the rumors we’ve seen today, but if a texture-friendly interface really did make its way to the device, that, too, would be a big boost for catalog apps as well, even if it didn’t emerge today.)
That would point to NFC continuing to remain on the backburner in terms of new technologies — although Milanesi at Gartner (as do many others) believe this is an obvious future step. “I'm sure is NFC is on their radar,” she said, but added that they are still trying to figure out the way of exploiting that, and that the more obvious first device for that would be a handset, not a tablet.
When I was at the MWC conference last week in Barcelona, mobile payments was a topic that came up again and again, and it was remarkable how many times Apple would be mentioned in the same breath as something like NFC, an area where it has never announced anything.
The thinking seems to go like this: once Apple moves on NFC, that would signal a sea change in how others would be able to use it — not unlike Apple’s move into smartphones in general.
“One of the key differences is that Apple takes the time to educate consumers, and so when they have the technology in place, the consumer can take advantage of it,” said Milanesi.
Part of that is because of Apple’s ability, for better or for worse, to essentially swipe away everything else and simplify how things work. “There are so many conflicts of interest in payments, with PayPal, Google, carriers, banks, all of them wanting a cut,” said Milanesi. “So the hope from some is that with Apple’s power, it will just come in and make it happen.”
As we said above, even without anything commercial getting announced today, discovery is a good enough reason on its own to create a separate category tab for Catalogs.
With more than half a million apps in the App Store, we hear almost daily about discovery problems, and catalogs were getting lost in Lifestyle. One example: Pimp Your Screen, currently the top paid app, has very little to do with shopping for a new blouse. Sorting that out may have been reason enough to reorganize, but if Apple’s other goal is to keep developers happy about making money, more commercial efforts can’t be too far off, either.
We’re coming to you live from San Francisco’s Yuerba Buena Center from the Apple iPad HD (?) event. We’ll be liveblogging with MG and Devin and you can listen to our live commentary with Jordan and John.
We’re using ScribbleLive this time so things should go much more smoothly so keep your eye on this page for the duration of the event and then tune in at 4pm Pacific/7pm Eastern.
To be clear, there is no live stream of Apple’s upcoming iPad event so we’re giving you the next best thing. If you don’t want to keep your eye on our liveblog from the show floor, you can watch or listen to our news updates live from our NY studios where Jordan and I will attempt to bring all the news that’s fit to obsess over to you, dear viewer.
You can Tweet questions and comments with the hashtag #ipadcrunch and we’ll address them live.
Again, this is not a live stream from the show floor but an opportunity to listen to what’s going on without having to read what will be going on below. Think of it as a live event on tape. So slap on your headphones, fire up an Excel worksheet, and keep your eyes and ears on our charming and knowledgable faces.
In addition, we will have a follow-up live event at 4pm Pacific with Devin and Colleen in our San Francisco office.
Hot, new Washington D.C. tech accelerator known as The Fort is debuting its inaugural class of startups today. The organization grew out the efforts from early stage VC firm Fortify Ventures LLC, also known as Fortify.vc (that’s its URL, too), which had previously invested in nearly dozen D.C.-area tech companies.
Over the past 9 months, The Fort’s co-founders, Jonathon Perrelli and Carla Valdes, have been busy trying to spark innovation in the nation’s capital. They set up the fund, invested in group of startups, created the accelerator, hosted a pitch competition called “Distilled Intelligence” which handed out $25K to winners, and selected a dozen more startups for The Fort’s first program.
“D.C. is not a place where people are always working together,” says Perrelli of the group’s efforts, “but now there is this uprising. People are trying to build something here.”
He notes that the area, despite being the center of government where important policy decisions are made, has been slow to join in the burgeoning tech scene. But things have been changing. With The Fort, the hope is to provide a path to get D.C. area startups off the ground.
The program, which gives founders anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 in seed capital, was lured to the area from nearby Arlington thanks to a $100,000 grant from D.C. Mayor Vicent Gray. Now set up in offices on K Street two blocks from The White House, the organization its opening its doors to 12 new companies who will spend 6 months in its program.
As with most accelerators, The Fort will also provide coaching, mentorship, as well as a number of discounted and free services, including software deals, hosting, legal and accounting assistance, and even some regional and local perks like discounts on bike and car-sharing programs in the area.
Perrelli tells us too, that the program has been built to meet the unique needs of the D.C. area. The region has a lot of government contracts, obviously, but also sees travel and tourism and cybersecurity as key verticals to attack.
“We’re seconds away from the most powerful people in the country,” he says. “We’re having an impact in those areas,” says Perrelli, “and so are our companies.”
Speaking of the companies, here’s the first class: CoFounders Lab CoFoundersLab is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs launch new businesses by helping them overcome the first challenge in launching a startup – finding the perfect co-founder. It’s eHarmony for entrepreneurs. The service is similar to FounderDating, but serves different geographic markets. Feastie Feastie wants to make it easier and more affordable for people to cook healthy, tasty, home-cooked meals. The site offers a recipe engine that uses natural language processing to extract ingredient information from recipe webpages,and it provides nutritional information, shopping lists, and coupons matching. Forensic Innovations Forensic Innovations, Inc., which already sells a File Investigator Engine for document recovery, backup, management, security and more, aims to satisfy the need to efficiently dig through data and produce the nuggets of information hidden in today's computers. The company is focused on building new technologies to compliment its already popular File Investigator and File Expander products. Hinge Hinge wants to help you expand your social graph on Facebook. It finds and matches you with the friends of friends you'll love. All you do is answer questions about your current Facebook friends: What are they like? Which ones are your type? Hinge then learns your tastes and suggests up to five compatible friends of friends per day. Klaggle Klaggle is Klout for reviews and opinion based content. With its ReviewRite product, Klaggle allows consumers to write, share and discover trustworthy reviews on anything with their friends. It also lets businesses leverage the power of reviews more effectively through its patent pending analytical and search technology that scores and indexes the quality, credibility and resonance of any type of written content. Lemur IMS Lemur IMS is an Inventory Management System for big box retailers that connects local customers to local slow moving inventory. This system gives the customer a personal offer on an item they are seeking, and also collects market, retail, customer and community data to optimize the results per location. Using various methods of real-time communication, Lemur creates a sense of urgency and a call to action that leads to more sales. MonthsOf.Me MonthsOf.Me is home to visual stories about life's moments where members easily organize their digital life, share their stories and collaborate on content. Members create visual stories using media like pictures, text, and videos in order to share moments around specific topics such as births, ballgames, weddings, concerts, and events. NextGame NextGame wants to connect people for the purposes of playing and participating in sports and activities. The platform includes the iPhone app, Android App, and website to bring people, locations, retailers, and event organizers together in a way that it hopes will make it the premier pickup sports app. Saylo Saylo is a mobile app that lets you create and join location-relevant conversations, allowing you to communicate, one-to-many with the people around you. Like a hyper-local Twitter, Saylo allows for spontaneous interaction and engagement, especially with new people around you who you don't even know. Social Tables Social Tables is a web-based event planning platform for large, seated events. The service offers a suite of planning tools, built for anyone from the DIY bride to the sophisticated corporate planner, in order to make the planning experience less stressful and more efficient. Uppidy Uppidy lets everyone save, search and share their text/sms messages. It works on all the major smart phone platforms. The company has thousands of users worldwide and millions of messages in dozens of languages. Uppidy lets everyone keep the conversations they created regardless of carrier, provider, cell phone or cloud service. Venga Venga ("Let's go" in Italian") is a marketing platform for restaurants and bars. It lets chefs and managers focus on the food by simplifying their digital marketing efforts through consolidation of their social, mobile, and web presence. It also lets restaurants connect with new and loyal guests in real time. The service has over 140 restaurants, many of which will never do a daily deal, and the backing of Top Chefs and industry execs.
Joseph Kony is one of world’s worst war criminals. By using the Internet to make him famous, he can be brought to justice. The Invisible Children project’s goal is to reach 20 culture makers including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and 12 policy makers including John Kerry and Mitt Romney with the message that Kony must be stopped.
It’s working. Currently 4 of the global Twitter trending topics are about the mission to prevent Kony from abducting more children and turning them into soldiers and sex slaves. The mission starts with watching this video:
If the video is too long to watch now, view this trailer and come back later.
Essentially, Ugandan military forces need advisors and technology to track Kony in the jungle. Obama
has devoted resources, but they’ll be withdrawn if there’s not mass public support. As the project’s founder Jason Russell explains in the video “the problem is 99% of the planet doesn’t know who he is. If they knew, Kony would have been stopped long ago.”
Strife in Uganda is a more nuanced issue than the video explains. Uganda is in fact strategically important to the US, and there are others than Kony responsible, but the quality of life for a whole region can be improved by removing Kony.
The Invisible Children project is a technology story because it’s using modern connectivity to make the world’s leaders listen to the world’s people. While once the mainstream media had to get involved, now the combined power of millions through the Internet can have an even bigger impact. This is another coming of age moment for YouTube, for Twitter, and for society. It’s time to use our clicks to take a stand. Visit Invisible Children to learn more and join the movement. (Excuse the site if it loads slowly, the whole planet it getting involved)
Aspiring wireless carrier LightSquared has seen better days — they've had their FCC approval for a network rollout revoked, slashed their work force by 45%, and lost their CEO in just over a month's time. 2012 isn’t shaping up to be a banner year for the beleaguered company, but according to a report from Bloomberg, LightSquared is on the verge of losing Sprint’s support as critical network partner too.
The news of Sprint looking to bail out of the deal shouldn’t come as much of a shock to LightSquared, as Sprint essentially issued them a six-week extension/ultimatum at the end of January. If LightSquared could win approval from the FCC then the deal would continue as planned, but with only a few days left on the clock and no regulatory victories to show for it, the deal is expected to go sour as early as next week.
Sprint and LightSquared kicked off their official partnership in July 2011, with Sprint offering up 11 years worth of access to their spectrum in exchange for $9 billion in cash, $4.5 billion in service credits, and first crack at LightSquared’s satellite-oriented wireless network. At the time, it seemed like a standard win-win: LightSquared gets to offer Sprint’s 3G service in addition to their own 4G offerings, and Sprint gets in on the ground floor of a new LTE network as their relationship with Clearwire began to fizzle out.
Of course, the deal hinged on LightSquared being able to nab regulatory approval for their network tech in the first place. Things looked peachy for a while as the FCC gave them the a conditional go-ahead, but further testing showed that LightSquared’s use of the L-Band radio spectrum caused significant interference with GPS receivers that rely on an adjacent radio band. The FCC revoked their approval since LightSquared couldn’t meet the required conditions, and, well, here we are.
According to a recent securities filing, Sprint will have to shell out $74 million to LightSquared if they indeed axe the deal. While I’m sure the cash infusion would be a welcome one, it would also mean that LightSquared has one less partner at their side as they try to make their network dreams a reality.
Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Google Play, a rebranded Android Market which consolidates all of Google’s media offerings, including apps, music, movies and e-books, into one portal. But it appears that Google’s ambitions to create its own iTunes-like experience won’t stop there. In the Help Center for the new Google Play, empty pages titled “Audio Books” as well as “Magazines and journals” have appeared, hinting at Google’s plans into its future content offerings.
The Audio Books page was first spotted by unofficial Google news site Google Operating System, which also discovered two genres for audiobooks listed on the site (“audio books” and “audiobooks”). However, because of the duplicated spellings, this last bit is not as telling as the placeholder page in the Google Help Center. It could be that the genres are automatically generated, the blog speculates.
It wouldn’t be surprising for Google to move into audiobooks, though, an obvious complement to their current offerings, as well as into magazines, newspapers, catalogs, educational content, TV shows, and everything else that Apple is doing now within its iTunes universe. If anything, the rebranding effort with the Android Market (as much as we may hate it), seems to speak to a desire for it to be seen as a more robust, richer offering than “just” an app store.
To that end, Google even registered several domains that suggest its ambitions. These unused domains include googleplaymagazines.com, googleplaynewspapers.com, googleplaynewsstand.com, googleplaytv.com, and many other variations on those themes.
Google is also developing a consumer-facing experience for organizing purchased e-books at the home of its former online ebookstore, an Amazon-like shopping portal found at books.google.com/books. To be clear, that’s a separate storefront from its books search engine books.google.com (which also now points to Google Play). The stalled effort at creating a home for users’ purchased ebooks now has a second chance, complete with a library of books on Google Play, including a few pre-loaded classics like Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice. Audio books would fit in well here, if Google moved in that direction.
Also of note, there are magazines available in this ebooks portal too, but not in the Google Play. It’s clearly only a matter of time before the two sites (Play and Books) are even further merged making those magazines easy to find and purchase using the revamped Android Market…err…Google Play service. After all, if you have ‘em, promote ‘em.
Not surprisingly, there’s a placeholder help page for that, too, dubbed “magazines and journals.” Newspapers and TV placeholder help pages don’t yet exist, however.
Moolah Media may be focused on performance-based mobile ads, but it isn’t ignoring the display advertising side of things — today it’s announcing a display network of its own.
CEO Shawn Scheuer says a display network has always been on the company’s roadmap. By opening up more inventory, this is another way to serve Moolah’s existing advertisers. Before this, he says the company wasn’t able to meet the existing demand before.
Moolah has said that it’s bringing in advertisers whose needs aren’t being addressed by most other mobile networks. Instead of paying publishers by the impression or the click, Moolah charges based on the metrics that matter to direct-response marketers, such as form submissions and phone calls.
In January, the company said it helped 50 advertisers launch their first mobile campaign. Scheuer’s hope is that these advertisers will now skip the big ad networks entirely and come to Moolah with their display needs.
For its display network, Moolah’s is making a big deal about its transparency. The company says its real-time bidding platform allows advertisers to specify which sites its ads can and can’t be shown on. There are “some small networks” that provide similar transparency, Scheuer says, but they’re focused on brand advertisers.
“CPC networks like AdMob, JumpTap, InMobi, etc., are completely blind and do not reveal where ads are shown,” he says.
Another milestone for old-school print magazines moving into a digital future: Cosmopolitan says that it now has 100,000 people paying to read the digital edition of its monthly fashion/beauty/lifestyle magazine. That puts publisher, Hearst, one step closer to a target set by president David Carey last November to rack up one million paying subscribers across all of its non-print editions this year.
The 100,000 readers, Hearst says, come from its presence on a number of newsstands, including Apple, Zinio, Barnes & Noble and Amazon Kindle, where prices go from $1.99 for a one-month subscription to $19.99 for a full year of the magazine.
It’s not clear which of these newsstands is selling the most at the moment (we’ve asked). Zinio was the first of these launched by Hearst back in 2005, but the boom in digital reading, and specifically paying for the privilege, has really only taken off in the last couple of years with the rise of e-reading devices and tablets like the iPad and Kindle, and so these may be the storefronts doing the most business for Hearst at the moment.
Hearst says that now it has 500,000 paying readers across the whole of its digital magazine footprint. That means the publisher has added 100,000 subscribers since the end of November. That footprint also includes titles like Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper's Bazaar and O.
It looks like Cosmo — being the first to get the 100,000-subscriber-announcement treatment — may be the biggest of these at the moment. But they are all growing at a clip right now, it seems: in November Carey also noted that this subscriber base is currently growing at a rate of 10-15 percent.
But while Hearst’s big magazine brands may be carrying the day right now, the publisher is also banking on readers for digital-only spinoffs — products that in the heyday of printed magazines may have been physical editions in their own right, but today are made or broken by the amount of capital investment they would require to get off the ground. These “brand extensions” have included CFG: Cosmo for Guys on the iPad, but also one-off apps that riff on themes from the main magazine, such as Cosmopolitan’s Sex Position of the Day; more apparently are to come.
That’s on top of the digital audience that Cosmo is attracting to its free online properties: Cosmopolitan.com, for example, currently has 7 million unique visitors per month, Hearst says.
Another milestone for old-school print magazines moving into a digital future: Cosmopolitan says that it now has 100,000 people paying to read the digital edition of its monthly fashion/beauty/lifestyle magazine. That puts publisher, Hearst, one step closer to a target set by president David Carey last November to rack up one million paying subscribers across all of its non-print editions this year.
The 100,000 readers, Hearst says, come from its presence on a number of newsstands, including Apple, Zinio, Barnes & Noble and Amazon Kindle, where prices go from $1.99 for a one-month subscription to $19.99 for a full year of the magazine.
It’s not clear which of these newsstands is selling the most at the moment (we’ve asked). Zinio was the first of these launched by Hearst back in 2005, but the boom in digital reading, and specifically paying for the privilege, has really only taken off in the last couple of years with the rise of e-reading devices and tablets like the iPad and Kindle, and so these may be the storefronts doing the most business for Hearst at the moment.
Hearst says that now it has 500,000 paying readers across the whole of its digital magazine footprint. That means the publisher has added 100,000 subscribers since the end of November. That footprint also includes titles like Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper's Bazaar and O.
It looks like Cosmo — being the first to get the 100,000-subscriber-announcement treatment — may be the biggest of these at the moment. But they are all growing at a clip right now, it seems: in November Carey also noted that this subscriber base is currently growing at a rate of 10-15 percent.
But while Hearst’s big magazine brands may be carrying the day right now, the publisher is also banking on readers for digital-only spinoffs — products that in the heyday of printed magazines may have been physical editions in their own right, but today are made or broken by the amount of capital investment they would require to get off the ground. These “brand extensions” have included CFG: Cosmo for Guys on the iPad, but also one-off apps that riff on themes from the main magazine, such as Cosmopolitan’s Sex Position of the Day; more apparently are to come.
That’s on top of the digital audience that Cosmo is attracting to its free online properties: Cosmopolitan.com, for example, currently has 7 million unique visitors per month, Hearst says.
