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that drew
drew olanoff is a geek. he beat cancer...by blaming it. also brained up "Social Good", Gmail4Troops, BlogAbroad, and other stuffs.
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Tweets
- OK Glass. Xbox On. Siri.May 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- One Xbox, ahhh ahhh ahhhhhhhMay 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @tapbot_paul wait. apple doesn't make the xbox? well, shit.
- RT @tapbot_paul: Excited about this Xbox Reveal, maybe this time they’ll get to some of the more obscure details like pricing and availabil…May 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- prediction: new Xbox transforms. with sound effects.May 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @redcrossokc: @KDTrey5 steps forward and gives $1mil matching gift to the ARC for disaster relief, text "REDCROSS" to 90999 for a $10 do…May 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- "Mr. Cook....iPhone 5S or 6? I'd like to remind you that you're under oath."May 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Live Blog: Live From The Reveal Of Microsoft's Next-Generation Xbox http://t.co/ivOyuSVCUP by @grgMay 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @newsycombinator: Cancer and Startups http://t.co/Ciwvj96JVzMay 21, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @cap: Google Glass will fail. Passive interfaces won’t. (blog post): http://t.co/3Pzh1gDO7f
- Stop. Showertime.
- Grip n sip. http://t.co/IWuyrKMvgE
- @HeyVeronica when you go through a tornado you can wear whatever you want
- RT @brimil: Free shipping through Sunday, worldwide, on my prints, stretched canvas, iPhone cases, stationary, pillows & more! http://t.co/…
- As tough as you think you have it and as difficult as life can be, there are people who need you to quit the whining and help them.
- RT @unmarketing: My brother's friend after the tornado standing in front of his former house. http://t.co/IQFelHvz6D
- Text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a donation.
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- AOL TechCrunch HQ410 Townsend St
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Posts
New Tumblr is nice on android.
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Info
- Summary
My name is Drew Olanoff, and I have over 10 years of marketing, PR, customer service and support, relationship building and management, product management, and technical support experience in multiple verticals. Online, including mobile.
I coined the phrase "Social Good" for online charitable movements, and invented the online "donation by action" charity model. I founded #BlameDrewsCancer
I pride myself on being a connector. Connecting people, stories, information. I have worked under some amazingly talented and gifted PR pros while working for startups as a "Director of Community", "Community Manager" and "Technology Evangelist". I have the knack of working stories both mainstream as well as online. Bridging that gap is my passion.
I am a leader AND a team player, and strive for nothing short of success. My life motto is "failure is not an option".
Specialties: podcasting, videoblogging ,blogging, community management, social networking, technology evangelist, tech, technology, marketing, pr, outreach, customer service, social media, product development, UI, UX, mobile, user acquisition, technology trendsExperience- Sept 2012 - PresentCommunity Director / TechCrunch
- May 2009 - PresentFounder / BlameDrewsCancer.com
During my personal fight with Hodgkins Lymphoma, I created a website that leveraged tweets to raise money for charity. During my treatment, I was able to:
- Participated in official LIVESTRONG events as a Global Envoy
- Appeared on both national and local news (CNN, Fox Philadelphia) to talk about our mission
- Held a 24 hour livestreamed marathon to raise money for LIVESTRONG
- Worked with Drew Carey to raise money by auctioning off the Twitter handle @drew
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Interests:travel, music, creativity, technology, gadgets, games, management, training, mentoring, leading, new media
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Tweets
- Moneyball got robbed. So gonna kick that artsy fartsy dog's ass.
- Happy anniversary @thatdrew and @Melbellie. I promise I won't tell anyone who my favorite is. If it makes you feel any better, it's close.
- Running for president.
- I'm thankful for whipped cream from @starbucks. Oh and for @Melbellie @thatdrew too. And @adrianbellie I guess.
- @Alyssa_Milano right back atcha! <3
- I'm dog tired. Long flight. But I got some bacon!
- Why does @Melbellie and @thatdrew get to pick pumpkins? I like pumpkins. Jerks.
- Sorry @thatdrew. I'm so damn cute, I make everyone want to talk to you. If it helps any, they're dumb.
- I get to fly and see @Melbellie tomorrow. Not a happy visit though :(
- Both of my parents work from home. This sucks. Can't even lick my junk in privacy anymore. I need a break. #rufflife
- Fan of @bifnaked's music even though I don't understand the words. Well, I don't understand ANY persons words really.
- I want to move to Ohio.
- Where the frig am I. What is this Ohio????
- you should feel how soft I am right now.
- sometimesmytweetsdonthavespacescuzigotnothumbs.
- oh and don't forget to do number one AND number two, even if the ground is wet. #hurricaneirene #wooftip
- to all of my furry friends out there on the right coast, please stay safe and take care of your people #hurricaneirene #woof
- come home @adrianbellie :(
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Posts
- May 21, 13
The new Xbox controller was introduced alongside a brand new console today at an event in a tent outside Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington. It looks very similar but has a redesigned directional pad, one of the big complaints with the earlier versions.
The history of the Xbox controller
The original Xbox launched with a controller that could most politely be described as gargantuan. though I had little problems with it, it was quickly bashed for being too tall and too thick for many smaller hands. What it did do, however, is set a template for the stick layout that still hasn’t changed to this day. D-pad on the left, sticks upper left and lower right, with start, select and Xbox gem in the center. The D-pad, unfortunately, was a sloppy mess which triggered randomly on whatever axis it felt like at the moment.
Shortly after the release of the original console, Microsoft responded to criticism with a slimmer, sleeker model of controller with an ‘S’ tacked on. Not much else changed, and the d-pad remained a train wreck.
The 360 controller brought about a few changes while maintaining the same overall stick and button placement. The addition of shoulder bumpers added a ‘PlayStation’ feel to the scheme, and allowed for more complex game interactions. Many big titles adopted the new buttons right away.
More to follow.
- May 21, 13
More than three months after About.me ‘bought itself back’ from AOL, spinning itself out as an independent company once again, the San Francisco-based startup is now ramping things up a notch by introducing personalized domain names for its online identity platform.
The service constitutes part of its new freemium business model, which sees About.me move away from a completely free offering to a 3-tiered subscription level.
Existing users can continue to use the free About.me incarnation as normal, but there’s now an option to upgrade for $4 a month, which lets them use their own domain name. In real terms, this means you can use, say ‘mydomain.com’, and have your About.me profile appear directly on it.
For those who don’t already own their own domain, About.me is also partnering with NameCheap.com to guide users through the buying and setting-up process. It’s worth adding here that if you use your own domain name, you will of course need to find your own host – this is where NameCheap.com comes in to play.
Upgrading to $4/month also lets you remove the About.me branding from the top of your page, if you choose to remain on the hosted About.me/username domain. Furthermore, you can now gain access to Google Analytics which will let you glean specific data relating to traffic that arrives on your site, which will be open to both hosted and personalized domain-using customers.
An additional $9/month subscription level will be introduced in the next few months, which essentially buys you prominence across the About.me network, including in the Directory and through search. This will be powered by Wefollow’s technology, which About.me acquired earlier this month – Wefollow was founded as a Twitter directory back in 2009, by JeffHodsdon and Kevin Rose while they were still at Digg.
The story so far
About.me was co-founded by Ryan Freitas [see customized About.me domain here], Tony Conrad and Tim Young in October 2009, before launching to the public in December the following year. It was swiftly acquired by AOL for what was thought to be tens of millions of dollars.
Then, almost exactly two years later, About.me announced it was becoming a startup again. While full details of the buyout weren’t revealed, Freitas and Conrad said that it was financially backed by the management team and a group of investors “who have backed companies such as WordPress and Google.” AOL retained an 8% stake in About.me.
About.me has launched a slew of new features in recent times, including a WordPress widget to display a user’s profile in their blog’s sidebar, while last month YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud embeds were enabled.
Personal branding
Customized domains have been a long-time coming, and today’s news positions it alongside the likes of Tumblr or WordPress, which offer both fully-hosted, branded blogging services, as well as customized domains.
“At About.me, we’re constantly seeking feedback from our users and customized domain names has been the most requested feature for quite some time,” explains co-founder Conrad.
About.me, of course, is different to the aforementioned blogging platforms, but this latest move hints at the direction it’s heading. As things stand, About.me still serves as a fairly straight-forward online profile portal, but it wouldn’t be at all surprising if we started seeing a far richer offering, with dedicated ‘sections’ for portfolios, videos and so on, though Conrad remained tight-lipped on what, if anything, we can expect to see moving forward. “We’re taking a close look at our product pipeline in order to deliver on the desktop and mobile features that matter most to our users,” he says.
From a free-to-premium conversion perspective, what will About.me classify as ‘successful’? “We have internal targets that are in line with what typically happens in other web services, anything between 2%-5% is reasonable as a starting point,” explains Conrad. “The initial focus on domain-mapping and branding-reduction is just one of many offerings we’ll begin to roll out.”
So, 2013 could be the year About.me evolves beyond recognition. What started life as a simple, hosted one-page profile back in 2010 is now sprouting arms and legs, and it will be interesting to see how the service looks a year from now.
The premium upgrade service will be open to all users shortly.
Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock
- May 21, 13
Last.fm has teamed up with MUZU.TV today to bring over 90,000 music videos to the Web version of its Pandora-style Internet radio service.
The partnership will add relevant videos to each artist’s profile page, giving users a wider variety of content to ‘scrobble’ – the term coined by Last.fm to describe the act of recording a track as part of your ongoing listening habits.
The videos will be available to European users today, although the company says support for additional countries will “come very soon.”
Each artist page currently shows a short list of the top tracks scrobbled by users through the Last.fm service. Music videos supplied by MUZU.TV will be integrated into this chart – rather than being listed separately – and will also be available on the webpage assigned to each individual track.
On the flip side, support for automatic Last.fm scrobbling will be added to the MUZU.TV website so that videos will always be recorded as part of users’ listening habits, regardless of where they are on the Web.
Last.fm is one of the only services that provides a comprehensive and seamless way of recording everything that you listen to. This data was originally used to recommend new tracks and artists to listen to, using both the Last.fm website and its dedicated mobile apps.
The service has since been integrated into other music services, particularly on-demand streaming alternatives such as Rdio and Spotify. Last.fm has never offered users this sort of control – instead relying on automated playlists similar to Pandora – and has lost some attention as a result.
Last December, the service practically abandoned this service in almost all countries except the US, UK and Germany. Web-based radio listening remains free in these countries, but it’s now a paid-for option elsewhere, as it already is in its mobile apps.
Last.fm doubled its efforts, however, by launching a brand new iOS app called Last.fm Scrobbler, as well as a striking new Xbox 360 app just last month.
The addition of MUZU.TV music videos is significant, but Last.fm needs a serious overhaul if it’s to stay relevant in the ever-expanding and evolving range of Web-based music streaming services.
- May 21, 13
MessageMe, the US-based chat app looking to rival Line, WhatsApp, Viber and co, has confirmed that it has closed a $10 million round of seed funding and, furthermore, that it has passed 5 million registered users, just 75 days after launch. That follows an impressive start which saw it hit 1 million users within its first week.
The mobile messaging newcomer sprung a surprise last week when we dug up a filing that showed it had closed the new investment just months after it announced a $1.9 million round, which was assembled in late 2012.
The startup has revealed that the new round was led by existing investor Greylock Partners and included participation from a number of other existing backers.
The service adopts a multimedia-rich approach to communications to its iOS and Android apps.
Chats can be one-on-one or in groups and, beyond basic text-based messages, users can share images, drawings, videos, voice recordings, music and their location.
In addition, there are two blank spaces that are reserved for stickers and money; two features that the company will switch on when it turns its focus to making money, CEO (and one of four co-founders) Arjun Sethi told TNW recently.
Speaking prior to the latest round of funding, Sethi said that the primary focus is on growing the service’s user base for now. Indeed, with fresh cash in the coffers, there is less pressure on making money and the company has the resources to grow its team, develop the product and increase its user base.
“We’ve got some ground breaking additions in the pipeline, aiming to change the way we look at communication happening in our world. We’re excited to help lead a team that pushes the envelope on what’s possible, while focusing on a first-class product,” said the founders in a blog post.
Passing 5 million registered users in a short space of time is impressive, but it still leaves MessageMe a long way behind WhatsApp (200 million monthly active users), WeChat (195 million monthly active users), Viber (200 million registered users), Line (150 million registered users), Kakao Talk (90 million active users), Kik (50 million registered users) and, well, others…you get the picture.
But, the service is certainly growing at a fast clip, and the founders shared a range of other statistics to illustrate that.
As of today, MessageMe sees 8 images uploaded per second on average, that’s up from two 65 days ago after it first launched, while the number of notifications sent per second on average has tripled from 500 to 1,500 over that same period.
A recent Informa report found that the number of messages sent by chat apps overtook the volume of SMS worldwide for the first time last year. And, while Message is very much standing in the shadow of giants on that front, one particular thing that is notable about its plans: the founders’ background in gaming.
Sethi and fellow co-founder Justin Rosenthal were part of game maker Lolapps, which merged with game publisher 6wave in 2011. Sethi was centrally involved with a number of top Facebook games, so has experience in scaling social games and making money from content.
That’s crucial because a number of messaging services are moving towards becoming content and games platforms, with promising signs of success.
Line made $58 million during Q1 2013, up from $30 the previous quarter, and Kakao Talk’s games ecosystem is grossing $40 million each month. Equally tellingly is that two billion dollar mobile games firms, GREE and DeNA, are moving into the space with their own messaging apps, Tellit and Comm, respectively.
Yet, in the US — MessageMe’s primary market thus far — no company has stepped up to dominate the mobile messaging with content.
WhatsApp service remains focused on providing communications services, but there are also that are moving. Canada-based Kik is gradually developing its content play — with its HTML5-based Cards platform — while Line and WeChat are translate their overseas success into growth in the US.
That gives MessageMe a decent shot at being among the early movers in the space. Or, at least, the odds are far better than its potential to topple WhatsApp.
Kakao Talk is proof alone of that potential. The Korean service has fewer users than its global competitors, but yet it has built an ecosystem of games firms that is bringing in money an impressive, and growing, rate each month.
In the immediate term, MessageMe will focus on continuing to gain traction among new users and grow engagement on the service. As we said when it landed its $1.9 million round in March: the company has done well so far, let’s see what it can do next.
Headline image via Thinkstock
- May 21, 13
Internet connection while travelling overseas is a huge boon – you can find your way with Google Maps, suss out must-eats nearby you, and check the weather so you don’t get drenched in rain while hiking up a mountain.
Taiwan’s government has just made it easier for tourists by extending free Wi-Fi services for travelers island-wide. This follows after the government in 2011 launched free public Wi-Fi in Taipei.
In a press release on Tuesday, the Taiwan Tourism Bureau said the government has set up about 4,400 “iTaiwan” Wi-Fi hotspots at major tourist spots, transportation hubs, cultural establishments and government offices all over the island. On top of that, iTaiwan has established roaming agreements with four local governments for tourists to access other Wi-Fi hotspots including TPE-Free in Taipei City, New Taipei in the city of that name, iTaichung in the city of Taichung, and Tainan-WiFi in the city of Tainan.
All tourists need is a passport, and they can apply for an iTaiwan account at a Taiwan Tourism Bureau service counter or any visitor counter across the island, according to the press release. The entire service will be free of charge.
Foreign tourist arrivals hit a record-breaking 7.3 million in Taiwan last year, and that could increase to 7.7 million this year, with China and Southeast Asian countries the main sources of growth, the tourism bureau has said.
Headline image via Thinkstock
- May 21, 13
It’s less than 24 hours until we find out what Microsoft’s next video game console is, but that doesn’t mean the Xbox 360 has been relegated to the scrap-heap. On-demand music streaming service Deezer announced its first app for the system today, giving users a new way to discover and listen to music.
The interface will feel familiar to anyone that has used the current iteration of the Xbox Music or Last.fm app. The main interface uses a large menu bar along the top of the screen, denoting the usual key sections such as Search, My Music and Radio.
A mini-player sits at the very bottom, displaying the artist and track name, running time and cover art, alongside four colored buttons that convey the functionality of the traditional Xbox 360 controller.
The center of the screen uses a large grid to show the various options and selections available to the listener. Deezer has done this as part of a conscious effort to support Kinect, the peripheral from Microsoft that enables motion controls and voice-commands, because it makes it easier to selecting various options with the hand. It’s a novel way of navigating the various menus and is clearly geared towards social settings, such as a house party or family gathering.
The large targets are therefore welcome, and are bolstered by the usual array of colorful album artwork. As with Last.fm, Deezer is pushing its curated radio stations in a big way. Users can simply select a particular music genre, and the app will quickly create an endless playlist of suitable artists and tracks.
Expanding the audio player shows a list of tracks down the right-hand side of the screen, contrasted with the cover art and playback controls on the left. It’s not particularly innovative, or visual compared to Last.fm’s latest update, but the interface looks clean and intuitive.
The Xbox 360 app also supports up to three Deezer accounts. Only one Xbox 360 account needs to be signed in from the dashboard, but the Connection tab along the top of the screen offers a quick means of switching between users. The functionality should give listeners easier access to personal playlists and preferences, without having to exit the app or tinker with the Xbox 360’s settings.
Deezer is available to European Xbox 360 owners right now, although listeners will need a Premium+ subscription, priced at £9.99 per month, to gain access to unlimited streaming. It’s the same strategy deployed by Microsoft with its Xbox Music service, whereby users are encouraged to pay for wider device access and functionality.
For Deezer, launching an app on the Xbox 360 should improve its brand awareness and also show that it’s serious about catering for a wide range of hardware. It follows a Windows 8 app launched last month which again competes with Microsoft’s own Xbox Music service, as well as the likes of Nokia Music+.
Deezer has 26 million users and 3 million subscribers. Today’s launch follows a ‘recharged’ Android app released in beta earlier this year, as well as a new music streaming service released by Google at its I/O developer conference last week – Google Play Music All Access.
- May 21, 13
Samsung Wallet, an Android alternative to Apple’s Passbook, was quietly unveiled at Mobile World Congress in February and Samsung has, once again, without a media fanfare, launched the service for consumers with an initial rollout in Korea.
An announcement in Korean (via Engadget) states that the service is available for a range of Galaxy device owners — initially those with the Galaxy S4, Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy Note 10.1, Galaxy S II HD LTE — who can store their credit card details on their device in order to make transactions with online merchants. Payment is verified using a PIN and a one time password.
The company says that some 30,000 domestic retailers are supporting the service on launch. There are plans to add support for a number of Passbook-like services, including tickets, membership cards, coupons and other services that were showcase earlier this year.
There’s no word on a timeline of other services — we already know NFC payments will be supported in time — nor do we have an update on when it will launch outside of Korea. For now, it looks like this will be a test deployment ahead of a wider expansion.
Like Apple’s Passbook, Samsung Wallet is able to deliver time and location based push notifications, notifying you when you are near a store or location that you can use a Wallet card. Always connected, membership cards and boarding passes can be updated in real-time.
Samsung Wallet includes an open API which allows other services to feed into it for payments. So, once the global launch kicks off, we can expect integration from the existing base of partners which includes including Walgreens, MLB, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com and Lufthansa.
Here’s a reminder of what was announced back in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress:
Headline image via Jung Yeon Je / Getty Images
- May 20, 13
Earlier this year, Tencent-owned WeChat, a mobile messaging app with more than 300 million users, came under fire for censoring ‘sensitive’ topics that its users were discussing. Now, Line, a rival app developed in Japan which has 150 million users, is the next in line to pal up to the Chinese government and restrict the use of certain phrases on its dedicated China service: Lianwo.
A section of code within the app — spotted by Twitter user @hirakujira – shows that Line has a mechanism that will detect selected phrases. As the image below shows, there is a warning for ‘bad words’ which prompts the following Orwellian message (translated into English): ’Your message contains sensitive words, please adjust and send again.’
In addition to the code, @hirakujira gained access to Lianwo servers and obtained a list of 150 ‘bad words’ (in this pastebin note) that the company will monitor for.
Words on the list include references to the Tiananmen Square massacre (a phrase that previously got Foursquare blocked in China), recently ousted Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and his family wealth (which was subject to a NY Times exposé), ‘criminality in the communist party’, ‘Jasmine Revolution‘ and other terms which are routinely deleted when posted to Chinese Web services like Sina Weibo.
The censorship feature is not currently activated, but, it has been suggested, that Line could monitor the conversations of its users worldwide, that’s despite it only blocking language used in China.
TNW carried out a range of tests and was able to receive a number of phrases from the block list without a problem — in both Chinese and the English equivalent.
Though it is not switched on yet, @hirakujira proved that the feature exists by hacking his/her iPhone to get packets from Line, which then generated the following censorship notification:
Censorship requirements of China
The discovery of the censorship feature and list of terms is a clear sign that Line is focusing on growth in China. Western Internet services like Facebook and Twitter are blocked in the country, while domestic Web companies are subject to censorship and punishment when they fail to manage their users.
Last year, Sina Weibo was made an example of when its commenting system shut down for three days after it was adjudged to have been slow in responding to coup speculation that emerged on its Twitter-like service.
What’s particularly concerning for those in China, is that Line asks users to verify their telephone number in order to install the app. The fact that Lianwo then monitors their user chat logs for sensitive words, will raise alarm given the potential repercussions should that data fall into government hands.
Line has around 45 million registered users in Japan, but it has passed 150 million registrations worldwide thanks to particularly fast growth in Southeast Asia, Spain and Latin America. The ambitious company is also targeting China and the US, and is thought to be devoting significant resources to both markets.
Focus on Chinese market
Despite WeChat’s dominance in China — all but 40 million of the service’s 300 million-plus users are on its home turf — Line launched there in December 2012. While it is the underdog in the battle, its lack of censorship was one advantage that it had over WeChat from a Chinese user’s perspective. At least until this discovery was made.
It isn’t clear if the creation of this feature is a response to a request from the Chinese government, or whether Line made the change on its own. The dilemma between following legal regulation from authorities or choosing to operate from outside of China is one that many companies juggle when committing to having a business in the country.
Line could opt not to censor Chinese words, but then it runs the risk of being blocked by the government.
Twitter, Facebook and Google are among those that have refused to kowtow to censorship, but many others have relented in exchange for the chance to gain a foothold in the country’s vast and fast-growing Internet space.
Potential to impact global growth
Tencent apologized for its WeChat censorship, which affected users worldwide, but referred to the issue only as “a technical glitch” that meant “a small number of WeChat international users were not able to send certain messages”.
Despite that, the issue was enough for many to suggest that it would impact WeChat’s global growth potential. Quartz went so far as to say that WeChat had “messed up its best chance of beating Facebook”.
While Line’s censorship is limited to China, it remains to be seen how this issue will affect its ambitious goal of becoming a truly global service and widening its income base worldwide. The company recorded $58 million in revenue during Q1 2013, but a whopping 80 percent came from Japan highlighting that it is still to turn a global user base into global revenue streams.
We reached out to Line for comment more than seven hours before publishing this news. Though a representative confirmed receipt of our request, we are yet to receive a response from the company.
Headline image via Thinkstock, additional images via @hirakujira
Thanks to our anonymous tipster and Richard Lee for helping with Chinese-English translations.
- May 20, 13
Today Leap Motion, a company building a motion-capture device that allows people to interact with computers sans touching them, released a video of its device in action with Windows 8.
It’s impressive, but remains a demo; if actual use mirrors this, however, it will present a real challenge to touch. Touch-based computing is the current market trend, with Microsoft, Apple, and Google building platforms and devices that lean on it.
Touch is but one way to interact with devices. Work in voice is underway with each company. Leap Motion is working in a space that only Microsoft has a viable alternative, with Kinect for Windows.
Happily, Leap Motion is all but out the door. The company announced a delay to July 22nd for the shipping of its product. Enjoy:
Top Image Credit: Dell Inc.
- May 20, 13
After taking over much of the weekend’s news cycle with its acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo has more to share: the firm has announced that Flickr has been completely redesigned, featuring high-resolution images and a massive 1 terabyte of free storage for all users. In addition, Yahoo shared that it is releasing a new Android app, mirroring the company’s latest iPhone app.
Speaking at Yahoo’s press event, CEO Marissa Mayer stated that “we want to make Flickr awesome again.” Three ideas, apparently, went into this change: the utilization of full-resolution imagery, availability across devices, and the ability to store every photo a user could possibly take.
Here’s the new profile design for Flickr users on the Web:
Here’s the individual photo view, which fills out the entire screen.
Here’s the new search page design:
During the talk, Yahoo also announced that its NY-based team will soon move into a four-story office space near Times Square. That in mind, Mayer has clarified that Tumblr will not be moving into Yahoo’s offices. A number of important figures in the NY tech scene attended the event today, including NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg and NYC CTO Rachel Haot.
AllThingsD first broke the news of sale talks between Yahoo and Tumblr, as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. For more on the acquisition, head here.
- Tracking 50M people, Newsle nabs $1.65M in funding to help keep you informed of your social contactsMay 20, 13
Newsle, a news discovery service, announced that it has raised a $1.65 million Series A round of funding. The investment was led by Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast Traveler and Reddit. With this new funding, Newsle says that it will focus on building out its team and grow its product offerings.
If you’re not familiar, Newsle functions as a news feed to tell users when their friends have been mentioned anywhere on the Internet. It’s a Web application that functions like Google Alerts, but specifically for users’ Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, and public figures. The company says that it uses “advanced persona identification, natural language processing, and proprietary disambiguation algorithms” to display relevant search results.
Monitoring what’s happening with more than 50 million people, Newsle claims to have a tool that will help professionals build better relationships with their social contacts. It processes data from 100,000 sources and over 1 million articles each day. Users can leverage either Newsle’s website or email alerts to keep track of mentions relating to their friends or colleagues.
Jonah Varon, Newsle’s co-founder, said in a statement that “The Internet has transformed news, and effective businesspeople need tools to cope with this transformation. We help people find essential items they might otherwise miss in the flood of online news. This round of investment allows us to grow our team and further establish Newsle as the go-to resource for relevant news discovery.”
The investment by Advance Publications and its subsidiary American City Business Journal is a vote of confidence for the service, which isn’t a pioneer in the news discovery space. Prior to its creation, Angstro tried to break through and become successful, but instead it pivoted into Knx.to and was acquired by Google. Newsle is hoping to avoid Angstro’s experience — support from an organization built around news and information is an important accomplishment for this young startup.
Other investors in the company’s Series A round include Maveron, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Transmedia Capital, and Launny Steffens. Rockwell Schnabel, a previous investor in Newsle’s seed round, also participated.
Newsle has raised a total of $2.25 million in funding.
Photo credit: Thinkstock
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- May 21, 13
“It’s absurd for Congress to vilify businesses like Apple for wanting to minimize their tax code just like every other American rightly does,” tweeted uber-Libertarian Senator Rand Paul, lashing out at his Senate colleagues for ‘dragging’ Apple CEO Tim Cook in to defend his company’s tax policies.
On the eve of Cook’s much-hyped testimony, a Senate investigation released a scathing report, accusing Apple of cooking the books and engaging in shady tax-dodging practices, to avoid repatriating $102 billion in offshore cash to avoid a 35 percent U.S. tax rate.
“Instead of doing the right thing we drag businessmen and women in here to berate them for trying to maximize their profits for shareholders,” Rand continued in another tweet.
“The ability to pay taxes of less than 2 percent on all of Apple’s offshore income gives the company a powerful financial incentive to engage in convoluted tax planning to avoid paying U.S. taxes,” notes the report from Senators Carl Levin and John McCain of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (for a more detailed explanation for how Apple dodges billions in taxes, see our previous post)
Paul was rightly furious for the tone of the accusations, which blamed Apple for skirting its obligation to the U.S. government. “This is a vendetta against American companies for trying to maximize profit,” he said. ”I want to see one company come before here and tell us that they’re goal is different from Apple’s, that their goal is to maximize their tax burden.”
Noting that thousands (if not millions) of U.S. citizens hold Apple stock directly or through pensions, Paul argued, “When we want to punish Mr. Apple. who are we punishing, we’re punishing ourselves.” Indeed, Apple would be hosing the everyday shareholders if it didn’t maximize its profit through some very convoluted offshore tax strategies.
However, Paul’s transparent theatrics fell short on his solutions, which included a passing mention to a “repatriation holiday.” Back in 2004, the U.S. government gave a juicy tax repatriation holiday to incentivize bringing foreign holdings back to the homeland. Yet, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, that money didn’t go into research and development. Indeed, many of the companies cut jobs, instead funneling their new domestic coffers into providing dividends to its shareholders.
Now, Paul and others could argue that lower taxes, overall, would stimulate investment in innovation, but he shouldn’t be so glib to the very real implications to a tax repatriation holiday.
The actual testimony has been far more diplomatic than the report, which lavished Apple with kudos. “I. Love. Apple…I harassed my husband until he converted to a MacBook,” gushed Senator Claire McCaskill.
Former presidential candidate and Senator John McCain, for his part, joked, “What I really wanted to ask was why the hell I have to keep updating the apps on my phone.”
Cook, himself, briefly lobbied for two solutions: a simpler, reduced U.S. tax code and a “single digit” repatriation tax. While such a tax solution is up for debate, the most compelling statement was made by Senator Rob Portman to Tim Cook, “you don’t need more tax lawyers, you need more innovators.”
- May 21, 13
The Xbox One was just unveiled at Microsoft’s Redmond campus and, true to multiple reports that circulated before the official reveal, the new console will indeed come with a Kinect.
And what a Kinect it is! The rumors of a vastly improved Kinect sensor array were right on the money — this next-generation model is capable of tracking motions as minute as wrist rotations, and Microsoft’s Marc Whitten said the new Kinect would even be able to read users’ heartbeats when they’re exercising or when players shift their weight. The new Kinect’s main camera is capable of recording 1080P RGB video at 30 frames per second (for a bit of perspective, the original model could only capture VGA video). Perhaps most importantly, the Xbox One will be capable of chewing on all the data the newfangled Kinect (no one has dropped an official name for the thing yet) captures at a rate of about 2GB of per second, which is probably partially why the onstage demos looked so brisk.
We got a brief glimpse of the new Kinect in action when Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi called out commands and used minute hand gestures to manipulate content on the Xbox One — commands like “Xbox on” and “go to video” allow for near-instantaneous switching between running applications, and the Kinect is apparently also able to differentiate between users based on their voices.
In short, it’s a massive, massive upgrade compared to the venerable original model, which often exhibited issues with basic limb and motion tracking. Granted, demos we saw today were carefully staged, but the Kinect reacted to Mehdi’s commands and inputs without a hint of technical hesitation — if the new Kinect works in the living room as well as it did onstage, Microsoft may really have something here. And frankly, that’s saying something considering Microsoft managed to move 10 million of the original camera/sensor arrays between November 2010 and March 2011.
- May 21, 13
While we don’t have all of the details on the new Xbox Live features announced at today’s Xbox One launch, it’s clear that Microsoft is going all-in when it comes to social and multiplayer gaming. First, they are upping the number of dedicated servers for online play from 15,000 to 300,000 and nearly all of your content and game data will be store in the cloud.
The service will also allow you to take in-game video and photos and share them over social media services. This is similar to Sony’s PS4 solution and is definitely a method allow users to create valuable and viral homemade content while still maintaining control of distribution. As games become more social and more cinematic, this will be an important differentiator and is essentially free advertising for game makers.
Finally, the new service adds asynchronous matchmaking, which means you can be searching for potential teammates (or enemies) while watching TV or playing another game. This increases the stickiness of multiplayer titles by nudging you back into the game when a worth opponent appears. Microsoft has also added “bigger matches with more players” and, most important, “living and persistent worlds.” This sounds to me like a direct attack on MMORPGs like World Of Warcraft and could make the Xbox a formidable force in the popular professional gaming subculture, a niche no console maker has yet cracked.
We should see further information about the Xbox One at E3 this summer.
- May 21, 13
Now leading the pack in gaming consoles, Microsoft’s future growth lies outside the gaming sphere. We’ll surely see tons of games at E3 in a few weeks, but at the big reveal of the Xbox One, the company chose to focus on non-gaming features, such as media streaming and Skype conversations.
But what makes streaming and entertainment a true upgrade on the Xbox One, which already has access to almost all streaming platforms? Instant Switching. It allows you to switch between inputs, games, menus, internet explorer, and almost anything else almost instantly. And what’s more, it lets you layer the power of Microsoft partnerships and information across live TV.
The Xbox responds to the voice; saying “Xbox On” turns on the console to the homescreen. The UI is familiar, and lets you see what you were doing last, along with trending content from friends, and other panels like games, tv, etc. But then you say “Xbox watch TV”, and live TV pops on. “Xbox show Guide”, and the guide pops up letting you see what’s available on Live TV. “Xbox watch ESPN”, and bloop, ESPN is on. Instant Switching at its best.
And here’s where it gets interesting:
“Xbox show Fantasy,” and instantly, along the right side of the screen showing a Knicks vs Celtics game you’ll see a run-down on your fantasy league, letting you access further information and even make alterations in real-time, right alongside the game itself.
The company also announced a new partnership with NFL which will offer exclusive content and access to Fantasy leagues in Snapmode in real-time.
This is thanks to a feature called Snapmode, which will offer new interactive experiences for Live TV. This includes social, applications, and more.
Because Xbox is now tapping into your live TV, it offers a more targeted and complete entertainment UI, with favorites showing all of your favorite content in a single destination.
And it’s all powered by your voice, should you like. What’s that? Is that the voice of Microsoft telling the hundreds of thousands of Xbox 360 owners out there, who proudly revel in their ownership of what’s considered the most popular gaming console out there, that they should maybe think about upgrading?
Of course, Microsoft wouldn’t upgrade software without hardware (which you can read more about here), and that includes the addition of a Blu-ray player.
Alongside announcing the Xbox One, Microsoft also announced a partnership with 343 Industries and Steven Spielberg to develop a live action TV show about Halo. They didn’t go into much detail, but how much you want to bet there’s some awesome Snapmode features and Xbox SmartGlass features?
- May 21, 13
Microsoft’s Don Mattrick pulled back the curtain on the Xbox One at a live event at the company’s Redmond campus, and it wasn’t long at all before the talk turned to software. One application in particular has been the subject of speculation for months, and SVP Yusuf Mehdi confirmed that Skype (which, if you recall, Microsoft acquired for $8.5 billion nearly two years ago) is part of the Xbox One experience.
As you might imagine, the Xbox One Skype application allows users to participate in group video chats with their fellow users using the Kinect camera — so there are opportunities for a natural type of ongoing conversation, one that won’t require you to chat for 30 minutes and then disconnect. This could be an “always on” situation.
You can answer a call by saying “Xbox, answer call” and then the video screen slides in from the right. Since the Xbox One aims to be your all-in-one “Home Entertainment System,” Skype is going to play a huge role in the overall experience. The demonstration showed a group Skype conversation happening while watching a video, with video quieting down a bit once the call is connected.
Microsoft has always talked about being the hub of the living room, and it seems like the newly announced Xbox One is the device that brings its vision to reality. The game-changer with this Skype integration is that you can watch a television show or play a game while carrying on a conversation. This has been attempted, mostly as a “second screen experience,” but to make this a seamless reality is a huge step forward for Microsoft. Until now, you were constrained to the functionality of a particular game supporting voice chat, but this gives you a more personal experience no matter what you’re doing on your Xbox.
- May 21, 13
Microsoft has revealed its new Xbox, the successor to the Xbox 360. It’s a next-generation console, with plenty of power under the hood, but it’s also clearly about consolidating your digital entertainment and operate as much more of a lifestyle device.
“Where all of your entertainment comes alive in one place,” is how Microsoft’s Don Mattrick put it on stage during his introduction. The entire event was prefaced with a description of the various types of non-game media that’s becoming popular with online streaming set-top boxes and mobile devices. “To continue to lead, we must provide compelling answers to new questions,” Mattrick said.
“Design and build an all-in-one system to light up a new generation of games, TV and entertainment,” in a way that’s “simple, instant and complete” is how he characterized the mission for the new device.
Voice Control
Kinect is part of the package, and it’s a voice controlled experience from power on throughout the entire process. Your voice cues the Xbox to your user profile and sets up all your custom options. Then, you can dictate activities to Xbox One, sort of like how many imagined Apple would do their own Apple TV with Siri.
Changing between activities is as easy as telling the Xbox One exactly what you want it to be doing. It’s remarkably quick, quicker even than the process of changing channels on my at-home cable box hardware. But voice control isn’t the only trick, there’s also gesture recognition tech for controlling the system with your hands.
Snap Mode
There’s a “Snap Mode” feature, too, which looks like the Microsoft Windows 8 experience, in that it allows you to run two activities simultaneously. So you can watch a movie and then also browse the Internet at the same time, for example, to look up elements of that film. You can even use Skype, newly introduced to Xbox with the Xbox One, and have that running in Snap Mode too.
The Snap Mode feature does something that has until now mostly been reserved for computers and for mobile and tablet devices: provides a second-screen experience that runs right alongside things like live TV. Adding basically a HUD layer to live TV might be the Xbox One’s biggest appeal for content providers who are looking for additional ways to engage audiences losing interest in traditional ads.
Tech Details
The Xbox One has 8GB of RAM, along with a Blu-ray drive, as well as a native 64-bit architecture, a 500GB onboard hard drive, HDMI in and out (including passthrough capabilities for use with your existing home theatre setup), 802.11n Wi-Fi as well as an 8-core CPU and USB 3.0 connectivity. That’s mostly in line with what we’ve heard from previous rumors, but it’s still quite impressive.
The big advantage of the Xbox One is its architecture, however, according to Microsoft’s Marc Whitten. He said essentially it’s like they’ve combined three operating systems in one to deliver the seamless transition between games, applications, and live entertainment. The Xbox architecture combines with Windows, via a third OS that handles fast switching between multi-tasking apps.
Kinect And Controller
The Kinect has been updated to capture 1080p video, as well as detect many more points on the body for more accurate recognition. It’s also better at recognizing voice input and gestures, and it can even read your heartbeat while you’re excercising.
Overall it seems like Microsoft has put a lot of effort into developing the new Kinect, in order to smooth out any rough edges that the launch device had in terms of working as naturally as possible.
The new controller looks like the one you know an dlove but has an integrated battery compartment (more like the PS Dual-Shock), as well as Wi-Fi Direct and a high precision D-Pad. The new trigger design is supposed to be much more powerful as well.
DVR, Cloud Game Saves And Library
New cloud-based features require that the Xbox One’s Live service has 15,000 servers backing it up, and offers a number of features like back up of your media content, games and game saves to the cloud for easy portability. There’s also a DVR function to record game play, and also share save states.
This is likely why the Xbox was said to require a constant Internet connection; it sounds like a lot of the functionality is based in the cloud. Microsoft has said that it doesn’t require the console to be “always on,” specifying that it will be designed to allow you to continue to watch Blu-rays, live TV and even play games should your connection drop.
The One To Watch
When Sony unveiled their PlayStation 4, one of my complaints was that it focused too much on games and not enough on becoming more than just a console. Microsoft has taken the exact opposite approach, fielding a device that seems like it would be equally at home in either a hardcore gamer’s, or a non-player’s living room. That should help them deal with a changing gaming industry.
The Xbox One is launching globally “later this year,” but Microsoft didn’t get any more specific or provide an idea of price.
- May 21, 13
Microsoft is about to unveil the next Xbox home gaming console, and they’re broadcasting the entire event live for all to watch. There will be thrills! Spills! Chills! And maybe some actual hardware, unlike at Sony’s PlayStation 4 reveal. Check it out above, or if you’re in an environment where you can’t listen in, or just prefer glorious words written by Greg Kumparak over these newfangled moving pictures, check out our live blog.
- May 21, 13
Virtual private networking is a great way to accomplish a number of things, including making sure that your secrets stay your own, protecting against malware attacks, and getting around the geoblocking of audio and video content from networks, labels and basically anyone who wants to restrict your sweet, sweet access. It’s understandable, then, that as computing increasingly goes mobile, VPN would get more popular on mobile, too.
Hotspot Shield, a free VPN from leading provider AnchorFree, has just announced that it has crossed 10 million total downloads on Android and iOS, with a growth rate of around 1.5 million new downloads per month. Hotspot Shield is a top productivity app on iOS, and on Android, it has already grown faster than its iOS counterpart in the Android ecosystem since its launch last year, and now around two-thirds of new users come from Android.
The growth has come on strong very recently, with the app seeing its active user base double between now and the beginning of 2013. The company says it has managed to prevent 28.6 billion malware threats since its debut, and has also saved over 102 million MB of data via its compression algorithms. For paranoid and thrifty travellers, it’s a way to both add an extra layer of security at open public Wi-Fi hotspots like those you’ll often find in airports, and conserve data on tight roaming plans, too.
What’s extra funny about the growth is that there’s a huge elephant in the room and AnchoFree is barely talking about it. In a release announcing the news, they offered this choice tidbit:
Hotspot Shield is also used by travelers to access US content while abroad.
Just that line, on its own, amid a sea of text emphasizing the data savings and security benefits of VPN. Which is probably because it’s unlikely content providers like thinking too much about the other, extremely useful benefit of VPNs: namely allowing you to sidestep geographic restrictions.
If you want Spotify and you live in a country where it isn’t available yet, for instance, you could use a VPN to make it appear as though you’re based in the U.S., no matter where you actually are. Using it if you’re a U.S. citizen travelling abroad rides the fair side of the line, but that’s not how most are employing that particular tech. Beyond U.S. borders, there’s a strong and pervasive appetite for U.S. film and video content, the likes of which you can find on Hulu, for example, but not once you exit U.S. territories.
AnchorFree isn’t playing up that angle, but I’ll bet it’s responsible for driving a fair amount of those 10 million downloads. So as long as some content is restricted in terms of where you can watch, it’s likely growth isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.
- May 21, 13
It’s Xbox day! Almost exactly 8 years after the announcement of the Xbox 360, Microsoft is back with another one.
We’re live on the ground at Microsoft’s Xbox campus in Redmond, where the company is about to show its next-generation console for the very first time. We’ll be bringing you the news as it breaks with our up-to-the-second liveblog. Join us, won’t you?
The event is scheduled to start at 10 am Pacific (1 pm Eastern), but be sure to tune in a bit early — lets say… 9:30 am? Connectivity allowing, we’ll be bringing you photos and commentary fresh from the scene..
- May 21, 13
Clueful, the mobile privacy app Apple booted from its App Store for being too revealing — or possibly because of its own behavior – is staging a comeback. This time around, Clueful’s maker Bitdefender is targeting Android users instead, with plans to reveal what the apps on your phone are doing, and how your privacy may be compromised in the process.
Bitdefender, a company that makes a variety of anti-virus, anti-theft, and other security applications for web and mobile, first launched Clueful a year ago as a $4 iOS app that detailed how the apps on users’ phones handle – or mishandle, as the case may be – personal data. The app launched in the wake of a number of high-profile security events, like address book-gate and locationgate, for example. (And you know they’re bad when there’s a “gate” attached, right?)
For “unknown reasons,” Apple removed Clueful from its App Store shortly after its debut. The company spins this as “we revealed too much!” of course, but the more informed answer points to the fact that, to work, the app itself had to pull a list of apps from a user’s device, send them to Clueful’s servers and then cross-reference those with the apps it had in its database. Apple might not have cared for this process, especially considering the end result may have discouraged app downloads. Clueful later returned in a watered down web version.
Apple mobile device users, of course, don’t have much to fear in terms of malware because of how Apple tests and approves apps ahead of making them publicly accessible in its iTunes App Store. However, Clueful still plays on the sometimes misguided fears some have, who believe that software makers are always purposely and maliciously trying to track your location, acquire your personal or financial data, spam you or your friends with unwanted messages or emails, and more.
Often, apps accused of doing some or all of these things are more the result of a rush to launch or shoddy coding, more so than malicious intent. And sometimes, they’re just early stage startups, making mistakes. Then there’s the fact that some apps are designed to work with this “sensitive” data in ways that help you – an app that wants to help you find nearby events or set geo-fenced reminders, for instance, needs to know where you are.
Yes, there are malicious, virus-laden apps as well as those over-reaching in terms of what they need to function, but many operate in a gray area. So to the uninformed, being told that some app is “tracking you” can perhaps cause concern when little to none is warranted.
To Bitdefender’s credit then, at least the Android version of the application now ranks applications as low, medium or high risk, based on their “danger levels.” And you can also filter to just see those with “intrusive ads” that “send unencrypted data,” or “are viruses,” for example, which could be useful if you’re not prone to being careful with your installs or are worried you have a problem app on your hands.
On Android, Clueful is available for free, with an option to upgrade for added security, including a real-time web scanner, on-install and on-demand app scanner, and more. This is provided by the company’s anti-virus app, which costs $9.95 per year. That undercuts competitor Lookout’s Premium option, but it also lacks Lookout’s more comprehensive feature set which also includes remote wipe, lock, signal flare, locating lost phones, backup and restore, cross-platform support, and more. (Some of these options are available through Bitdefender’s other freemium apps, but not all.)
Clueful may find better footing on Android, though, where users do have to be more cautious because apps are not vetted ahead of launch. Plus, a good chunk of Android’s user base are those upgrading from feature phones to a low-cost smartphone, and are still technically unsophisticated when it comes to sorting the good apps from the bad.
The new version of Clueful is available here in Google Play.
- May 21, 13
We are updating this blog during the live congressional testimony of Apple CEO Tim Cook. More details will be added soon.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook came out firing during his Congressional grilling, declaring, “we pay all of the taxes we owe, every single dollar.” A blistering Senate investigation accused Apple of shady tax dodging, helping it avoid $13.8 billion in taxes.
In his opening testimony, Cook affirmed Apple’s position that “we don’t rely on tax gimmicks” to avoid paying any taxes (for a review of how Apple stashes cash oversees, see our previous post).
Cook had supporters on the panel, especially Senators Claire McCaskill and Rand Paul, a known libertarian who favors dramatically lowering the corporate tax rate.
Paul wigged out on his fellow senators, accusing them of vilifying a great American company for fulfilling their responsibility to maximize shareholder value.
Instead of doing the right thing we drag businessmen and women in here to berate them for trying to maximize their profits for shareholders.
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Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) May 21, 2013It's absurd for Congress to vilify businesses like Apple for wanting to minimize their tax code just like every other American rightly does.
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Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) May 21, 2013McCaskill admonished Paul for his accusations against his Senate colleagues, but made sure to note that “I. Love. Apple…I harassed my husband until he converted to a MacBook.”
Cook, for his part, lobbied for a simpler U.S. tax code, which he said should be “revenue neutral, eliminate all corporate tax expenditures, a reasonable tax rate on moving foreign cash back to the U.S. We make this recommendation with eyes open, knowing it would probably raise our own tax payouts.”
Cook admitted his tax recommendation, “fully recognizing that this would result in an increase in Apple’s U.S. taxes.”
- May 21, 13
Last year, Twitter announced something it called the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), which would keep patents in the hands of the designers and engineers that came up with the technology behind them. What this agreement serves as is a promise to only act on a patent for “defensive purposes.” Anything outside of that scope would need to be signed off on the creator of the patent itself.
Here’s how Twitter defines “defensive purposes”: “Defensive purposes means that you can defend yourself should another party try to initiate patent litigation against you or your customers or users. Under the IPA, it also means that you can use these patents against anyone who has sued others offensively in the past (up to ten years).”
The first patent to get the IPA treatment is Loren Brichter’s pull to refresh user interface interaction, which was built into Tweetie, the Twitter app that was acquired by the company and adopted as the official client.
Basically, Twitter is saying it’s not going to go after companies that are using pull to refresh, or other parts of Brichter’s patent, within their app. If someone were to claim to have created the functionality first, only then would Twitter defend itself.
Twitter has also announced that two other companies, Biz Stone’s Jelly and the Lift task tracking app, will also be adopting the Innovator’s Patent Agreement. With so many ideas running around, there should be no reason why the first person to successfully file a patent should hold the power to make everyone’s lives miserable. At the end of the day, all companies benefitted from Brichter’s work, and it’s been nice to see Twitter not going after anyone else for replicating parts of it.
When the IPA was announced last year, Twitter VP of Engineering Adam Messinger had this to say:
This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.
Using patents as a shield will hopefully slow down the rampant patent trolling that has plagued the technology space for the past ten years. Twitter, Jelly and Lift promise not to be trolls, and that’s a good thing.
You can read the full IPA draft here to see if it’s something your company would want to adopt.
[Photo credit: Flickr]
- May 21, 13
The Meta 1 is a pair of augmented reality goggles that performs some very unique and useful tricks. While they are still in beta stage, the glasses are coupled with a Kinect-like camera to sense objects in real space and allow users to interact with virtual worlds with the swipe of their hand.
The company founder, Meron Gribetz, says that the company is on track to create a mass produced solution shortly, but until then they have brought on Steve Mann, a real cyborg and wearable computing researcher, to act as a chief scientist. You’ll recall that Mann was assaulted in a Parisian McDonald’s for wearing a Google-Glass-like headset.
“We brought Mann on board because of his expertise in two key areas: miniaturization and mediated reality. Mann has been developing a Google Glass-like device for years but recognized now was not the right time for something of that scale, because of the limitations of such a device. Rather than a phone accessory, Mann is keen to work with us to develop a fully fledged new interface for computers,” said Gribetz.
“His scientific leadership in mediated reality will be a huge advantage for us when delivering an immersive augmented experience. Occlusion (hiding or modifying real world objects) is a key part of full augmented reality and Mann’s experience in mediated reality will allow us to bring the best solution to market in this area.”
Gribetz is a Y Combinator alum and the project, which is still on Kickstarter, is nearly funded with 26 days to go. Users can receive a Dev Kit for $550. Epson will help build Meta’s next-generation VR glasses which will look considerably less DIY than the beta developer version.
“The entrance into consumer wearables needs to be a high powered immersive device capable of fully replacing the computer and more. Heads up notification systems have their use cases, but they won’t be game changers. Mann’s commitment to a fully wearable future is why he chose to join us,” said Gribetz. Considering Mann has been wearing his computing power for most of this decade, it seems like a good fit.
- May 21, 13
Postmaster, an Austin-based startup that aims to simplify shipping and parcel tracking through an easy to use REST API, launched earlier this year and today, the company announced that it has raised a seed investment round of $600,000 led by Capital Factory, Cloud Power and Zelkova Ventures, as well as a consortium of angel investors. The Postmaster team plans to use this additional funding – it launched as a member of the last TechStars Cloud class – to expand its development team and build additional carrier integrations.
With Postmaster, e-commerce developers and merchants can easily add shipping features to their existing solutions. The service, for example, allows users to quickly compare rates across FedEx, UPS, Lone Star Overnight Canada Post and the USPS. This allows shippers to figure out what’s the fastest and most cost-effective way to ship a given parcel because the aggregate data Postmaster collects allows it to predict point-to-point shipping times for any given carrier. That’s data that companies like Amazon have for their shipping operations, but that’s not typically available to small businesses. Postmaster also, of course, allows its users to create shipping labels through its API and offers tracking, reporting and auditing tools.
The company also today announced that it has partnered with Lone Star Overnight (LSO), a shipping company that focuses on overnight deliveries to Texas, Oklahoma, western Louisiana and southern New Mexico (and which has partnerships to serve all of California and Mexico, too). Using Postmaster, LSO’s customers now get access to all of its services through a white-labeled portal.
This marks Postmaster’s first integration with a shipping carrier. “Our partnership with Lone Star Overnight is a win-win for everyone involved ,” said Jesse Lovelace, CEO and Co-Founder of Postmaster in a prepared statement today. “Postmaster will gain access to a wealth of shipping data instantly for even greater route optimization – not only for LSO customers, but for all Postmaster merchants. Additionally, this is the first simple and truly cross-carrier portal on the market for the public, solving some inherent issues that result from how siloed the carriers have traditionally been from one another.”
Shipping is obviously a pretty hot area right now, but the focus has mostly been on same-day shipping, with Google, for example, buying BufferBox and launching its Shopping Express service, eBay testing same-day delivery in Chicago and Dallas and startups like Deliv trying to bring same-day delivery services to even more businesses and customers. ShipHawk, a TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Startup Alley audience choice winner, is also looking to make a dent in the shipping market, but unlike Postmaster, which focuses more on developers, Shiphawk targets consumers and small businesses directly.
- May 21, 13
About.me, the online identity platform that spun out from Aol* at the beginning of the year before acquiring the one-time Digg spinout Wefollow, is now lifting the curtains on its plans to generate revenue, with today’s debut of About.me Premium. Via this new, paid tier to the service, the company is adding some of the more advanced features users have requested, including domain mapping, Google Analytics integration, the ability to remove the About.me branding, and more, for a $4 per month fee. And that’s just to start.
This is the first time About.me has charged users for any aspect of its service, co-founder Ryan Freitas tells us. With today’s release, the site will begin to offer features aimed at professional users, like the ability to display their About.me page on their own custom domain name – the most in-demand user request to date, he says. The site will walk users through the process of adjusting their DNS settings to map the new domain to their page.
To accompany this change, Premium users can also remove the branding on their page, which includes the “about.me” logo and the top navigation bar entirely. However, branding won’t entirely disappear. A small button at the bottom will still say “me,” pointing those who are interested to more details about the About.me service.
Users will also be able to check site statistics using Google Analytics, and jump to the front of support queues with priority email support. The company isn’t yet committing to a guaranteed turn-around time, however, because they’re currently unsure what user support volume will be. But Freitas says the company has always taken support seriously, and is now staffing up on the customer service side of the business.
The company also announced its future plans with Premium, which speaks to how it will integrate the technology acquired by the purchase of Wefollow, which today still serves as a discovery tool that helps Twitter users find others to follow by interest.
“There will be a secondary tier that allows for people who want to be discovered,” explains Freitas. “We’re going to be able to create a paid tier using the algorithms from Wefollow to promote [users] into a variety of different mechanisms that we’ll be unveiling over the next few months,” he says.
This will include a search directory, similar to the one Wefollow offers today, as well as tools that will allow premium users to pay for better search placements. “That will probably be one of the first things we roll out – improved search and promoted search,” Freitas adds.
About.me is working on improvements to its mobile application, which launched around a year ago. The app today serves more as a mobile-optimized way to use About.me’s service, by allowing users to create personal pages, discover and network with others, and similar to another startup called Highlight, it also helps you find nearby people. That latter feature – serendipitous discovery – hasn’t proven to be as successful a use case as originally thought, however. On mobile, the app needs to find a way to have a regular draw – something that would addict users to have them checking it or using it often.
What that might be is a little bit up the air, but when we asked Freitas if the company would ever want to inch into the “social contacts” space to compete with apps like Brewster or Cobook, for instance, he didn’t rule it out.
“I think there’s a defined space for mobile apps that try to handle contacts,” he says. “I think that if we were to do something, we would take a little bit of new tack on it…We know we have a little time to experiment, but we know we need to update the app.”
Premium tiers for the social service aren’t the only potential sources of revenue for About.me. Though the company today offers a variety of page customization tools, it’s in desperate need of complete themes where everything from font choice to background images is chosen for those users (ahem) lacking design chops.
Freitas agrees that’s an avenue they want to explore, noting that the WordPress theme marketplace model is “fantastic,” and that there is a “cohort of users who needs our help, and would love to be able to purchase those things.”
But that’s further down the road.
The new subscription-based Premium tier, however, is live today. You can sign up from the About.me homepage here.
Disclosures!: About.me’s previous owner, Aol, is TechCrunch’s parent company. CrunchFund, a fund backed by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, also invests in the startup.
- May 21, 13
Smartwatches are all the rage, and judging by the turnout and level of enthusiasm at the recent year one meetup for Pebble Kickstarter backers in San Francisco, there’s at least a passionate niche audience for the things. So it isn’t surprising to see them continue to pop up on Kickstarter. A new one called Agent has a few unique tricks, however, which its creators believe set it above the competition.
What the Agent has that others don’t is a combination of power management features and wireless charging. It has not one but two processors, for instance, one with higher performance capabilities and one extremely low-power variant to handle simple background tasks. There’s a new Sharp Memory Display that combines the advantages of both a traditional LCD and e-ink black and white, which is very power conscious, as well as wireless Qi induction charging with an included pad. Since it’s based on the widely-accepted Qi standard, however, it should work with charging pads from a variety of manufacturers.
The Agent is a refreshing change from other Kickstarter smartwatches in that it actually offers something new in terms of technical aspirations. The watch should get up to 7 days of battery life with its smart functions activated, or up to 30 days of standby in ‘watchface-only” mode. Even if that misses the mark by a bit, it should still beat the stated and actual battery life of existing devices like the Pebble. The gadget also features a 120HMz ARM Cortex-M4 processor, a 1.28-inch display, Bluetooth 4.0 (aka “Low Energy”), onboard motion and light sensors and an OS that allows developers to write apps for it using C# and Microsoft Visual Studio. It uses a Microsoft .NET runtime environment that Agent’s creators say will maximize memory and power efficiency, unlike with other smartwatches. The team says you’ll be able to start writing and emulating apps on the desktop as soon as the funding campaign is complete, which would be faster than the staged rollout of the Pebble SDK.
The creators of the Agent are Secret Labs, a team of engineers that has been building open-source products under the brand name Netduino since 2010, as well as smart home technologies, and House of Horology, a custom timepiece manufacturer that brings some real watch cred to the game. Early bird pledges get a pre-order for $129, where the final price is expected to come in at around $249 when the product ships late this year.
- May 21, 13
Airbrite, a Y Combinator-backed e-commerce startup, is debuting its first product today called Celery (its name a play on the world “sell”). Celery is designed to be a “pre-commerce” store builder – or, in other words, it allows anyone to start selling ahead of having a product to ship. That means sellers can start taking credit cards now, then charge when their product is ready to launch. And in case you couldn’t figure it out by that description, Airbrite is hoping the product will be a hit with those raising funds using crowdfunding.
In fact, says Airbrite co-founder Chris Tsai, the company has already seen some traction with crowdfunders during its private beta, which rolled out to hundreds of users this March. But, he clarifies, Celery isn’t just designed for those merchants – it’s for anyone in any business who needs to enable pre-commerce on any platform.
Some of its early customers include Kickstarter crowdfunder the3doodler.com, e-commerce site dagnedover.com, connected hardware maker breathometer.com, and onesmall.biz.
Tsai says the product itself was inspired by the shift the team saw happening in commerce – that sellers want to establish more personal connections with buyers, and vice versa. But to do so, they need tools that give them more flexibility. ”E-commerce is kind of like blogging was five years ago. It was really challenging to get a good CMS up without a serious backend developer, then came things like Tumblr and Blogger which made it really easy for anybody to get a blog up and running,” Tsai explains.
“It’s really hard today to get an e-commerce storefront that flexible and available anywhere,” he continues. “We want to make it easy to embed an e-commerce touchpoint wherever you are – whether it’s your website, your mobile app, on Facebook, or even on Google Glass.”
In addition to Tsai, who previously led mobile commerce initiatives for Groupon overseas, Celery’s founding team includes Brian Nguyen, whose background is in social commerce, and Peter Shih, a key developer on LinkedIn’s iPhone development team, who also worked at Foursquare. Their diversity of experience with social, commerce, and multiple platforms helps to inform their decisions as to how to proceed with Celery.
During their time in Y Combinator, the company was building its API and e-commerce platform, though originally with more emphasis on their support for mobile.
Celery is actually built on top of Stripe, which makes it similar to newly launched MoonClerk, another e-commerce startup whose focus is on one-time and recurring payments. But it also competes in the broader e-commerce space with giants like PayPal and Google, as well as startups aiming to simplify the experience including Ribbon, Chirpify, Soldsie, Sellfy, Gumroad, and more.
Stripe enables Celery’s flexible payment processing, but Celery’s platform also allows for pre-order management, pre-order customer service, tracking via analytics, plus support for coupons, emails to customers, and more – the whole checkout layer on top of payments.
The company charges a 2 percent commission on transactions, in addition to Stripe’s 2.9 percent + $0.30 payment processing fees.
In the future, Airbrite will introduce support for volume and bulk pricing for larger sellers, for pre-orders via Celery, and for general e-commerce, the company offers an open API.
Based in San Francisco, Celery’s team of five has seed funding from YC and SV Angel, but declined to disclose additional investments, only stating that it’s in a “healthy” place right now, and is not looking to raise.
Interested users can sign up for Celery here.
- May 21, 13
In the debate surrounding native versus web apps, the mobile web has been getting a bad rap lately. Not least since Zuckerberg famously threw HTML5 under a bus. But for publishers, a mobile website is more often essential, even if they have a shiny so-called “native” app too.
Brow.si, a new product from MySiteApp, is launching in open beta today as an add-on for mobile websites that promises to bring a number of features to rival the engagement of native apps. These include social sharing, a read it later button, subscriptions, and push notifications (sort of). Developers can also create additional extensions for the Brow.si platform to add further desktop web/app-like functionality and monetization options.
Once the Brow.si code has been integrated into a mobile website, the site gets the Brow.si toolbar added to it. Clicking on the toolbar reveals a row of buttons incorporating the new features, which include sharing the page to multiple social networks, a read it later option that ties into Pocket and Readability, and the ability to adjust font size. Further mini-apps are on their way, too. These will come from third-party developers that Brow.si hopes to attract, thus creating a marketplace as part of the platform.
Having all of these features — and more — nicely implemented via a simple to install add-on takes care of much of the heavy lifting for publishers. As simple as it sounds, trying to crowbar in even something as mandatory as social sharing buttons onto a mobile website can be a kludge.
Lastly, Brow.si is talking up its support for push notifications, a first for the mobile web, it claims. A more accurate description, however, might be to call it a bridge between a mobile website with the Brow.si add-on and the Brow.si Reader app, a native iOS app that site visitors are prompted to install. It’s via this native app that the push notifications arrive, even if they originate from a Brow.si-powered mobile website. Cleverly, the Brow.si Reader app is also a fully-fledged browser, meaning that it effectively puts the Brow.si toolbar across any site if viewed within it, which the company will be hoping that users habitually do.
Meanwhile, Brow.si has been selected as a WordPress VIP feature partner, meaning that WordPress VIP customers will be able to install the Brow.si plugin with a single click to add its functionality to their mobile website. It’s also available for a range of other CMS software, including Drupal, Joomla and Blogger.
- May 21, 13
TeamSnap, a company that provides tools for managing sports teams, has today announced that it is acquiring Weplay, a social networking site for athletes, parents and coaches to help facilitate coordination for events, games, practices, etc.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Trinity Ventures-backed startup, Teamsnap, is an online tool aimed at making practice scheduling, conditioning sessions, team rosters, payment plans, etc for all amateur sports. It tracks everything from parents’ payments for big tournaments all the way to who’s bringing the sliced oranges.
So far, the company has raised a total of $4.3 million, including its latest round in February for $2.75 million.
According to the release, Weplay had raised even more, a total of $15 million since its launch in 2008. The service acts as a social network with similar functionality to Teamsnap, wherein parents, coaches, and kids can coordinate practices, games, etc. for sports teams.
Teamsnap claims that it will take over Weplay’s “customer base and technology” in the acquisition, though it’s unclear if the Weplay team will migrate over to Teamsnap or if this is the end of their Weplay chapter. It’s also unclear if Weplay will be rolled into Teamsnap or stand alone as its own product.
We’ve reached out for clarification, but haven’t heard back yet.
The release states that Weplay has over 2.25 million customers which will migrate over to the Teamsnap platform. The acquisition should bring Teamsnap’s total userbase to 5 million users in 195 countries.
The deal makes sense considering just how similar the two platforms are. There are a growing number of services like this out there, and not one has risen to the top as a dominating force. Perhaps some consolidation will help Teamsnap reach that peak.
- May 21, 13
Change.org got its start in 2007 as a social network for non-profits and for project-based giving. For years, growth was slow for the fledgling social action platform, but, over the last year, that changed dramatically. Change.org has grown from six million users in early 2012 to more than 35 million users today, and, as a result, has become one of the largest and fastest growing companies of its kind.
In fact, this growth has led Change.org to take on its first round of outside financing in its six-year history. The company announced this morning that it has taken on a sizable $15 million investment led by the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.
The firm, which has also backed platforms like Meetup and micro-lending giant Kiva.org, will be taking a minority (and non-controlling) stake in Change.org, even without the promise of a traditional liquidity event — as the company has expressly stated that it will not sell or IPO.
Other investors in the round, which brings the startup’s total capital to around $20 million thanks to previous angel investments, includes Uprising, a new “mission-aligned” San Francisco-based fund, among others.
Part of what makes Change.org unique (and appealing to investors) is that, unlike many others mission driven companies of its ilk, the startup is decidedly for-profit and is certified as a B corporation. It’s a similar approach to the one taken by sites like Rally.org, though it runs counter to an exciting new wave of non-profit startups, like the much-buzzed about Watsi, for example, wich is Y Combinator’s first not-for-profit incubation.
Change.org Founder and CEO Ben Rattray tells us that both becoming a for-profit company, while simultaneously proclaiming that his company will never go public or seek an acquisition, aren’t decisions that were made lightly. Not, at least in the latter case, to simply to attract attention. Rattray and company are on a mission to prove to startups, investors (and the world) that it’s possible to build a socially-minded, mission-driven business without being a non-profit. A business that can have a real impact, but also make money and afford to hire the same level of talent that the Facebooks and Googles of the world attract regularly.
That’s been a stigma that non-profit and mission-driven organizations have had to wrestle with for some time. While a whole new generation of people have grown up on the social activism of Twitter, Facebook and Reddit and want to make a difference while making money, the perception that it’s impossible to do both remains.
“If we’re going to build real tools that help people create change, we need to generate revenue,” the founder says. “Many of my friends told me I was crazy to seek venture capital, but if we want to be fast, to build an innovation-focused business and create the kind of scale you find in the for-profit world, we need this capital to help us get there.”
Now that it’s reached 35 million users, Change.org wants to encourage more social enterprise investors and help evangelize for the development of a third, alternative means of creating liquidity. Whether it’s stock buybacks or some form of dividends, mission-driven businesses need a method that allows them to remain independent without seeking a one-time liquidity event.
Granted, the founder continues, these kind of social enterprise businesses are working over the long-term, 15 to 20 year windows, which is beyond the scope of most venture capitalists. “I have no doubt this is going to change, that eventually more investors are going to start backing socially-conscious businesses,” Rattray says, “but that support probably won’t come from existing funds; instead, it may come from sources like large foundations.”
Either way, by focusing on being fast, on hitting scale and generating revenue (the company hit $15 million in revenue in 2012), the founder says that the company has made an effort to offer comparable compensation to the big tech companies, even if it can’t offer the same perks on the equity side. Instead, it uses a different hook: Join us, and you can actually help make a difference in the world.
This hook, whether it appeals to your or not, has seen the company grow to over 170 employees in more than 18 countries over the last year. But, even if Change.org eventually runs aground, Rattray tells us, the key is to show other startups and investors that there’s opportunity to create big, sustainable businesses within this space, which offer social and financial returns.
When asked what pushed Change.org to the tipping point early last year, which has led to those 35 million users (nearly half of which are international), the founder credits simplicity. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, he said, the company focused exclusively on petitions; in other words, making it easy for users to create and sign digital petitions.
While this may sound too simple, or like it just encourages “lazy clicktivism” instead of true activism (as Liz points out), Rattray says that the key has been embedding its petition tech within social communities.
Twitter and Facebook have emerged in the last five years as remarkably effective advocacy and community organization tools, but they’re not built to harness real, sustained social movements, the founder says. By embedding petitions within social communities and by allowing people to find out what kind of movements or campaigns are happening now, are happening locally and by highlighting the most effective campaigns, Change.org can go beyond just being a simple “online petition site.”
Skeptics may roll their eyes at that statement, but SurveyMonkey, now a billion-dollar company, would probably say the same about surveys. And, for Change.org, when 35 million people have used the site, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
