Tuesday, March 27, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

Mobile App Directory Appolicious Debuts Advertising Platform

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PDT

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Social mobile app directory Appolicious is getting into the advertising game today, launching a bidded keyword engine for its app directory, and those the startup powers for Best Buy or Samsung.

As you may know, Appolicious offers mobile and web app directories where users can search for apps that are organized into more than 1,200 categories, such as "Preschool Early Reading" and "Travel Destinations." Search also features auto complete and uses Appolicious’ algorithmic app search based on social, user-generated and editorial signals. The company has made a business out of licensing its app directory to retailers and manufacturers, including Best Buy and Samsung.

Similar to Google AdWord, now advertisers can bid on keywords to serve ads next to search results for apps on Appolicious. So a keyword such as Music which would match an ad against a search for music on Appolicious or on a partner site or app directory. The ad would also match if a user clicks on the music category, says the company.

As founder Alan Warms explains, the company’s approach is to target consumers when they are looking for specific apps. And the company’s distribution partnerships help expand reach for advertisers beyond the search portal.

More Patent Legal Woes: T-Mobile Sued By OTI Over Use Of NFC in Nokia, HTC Smartphones

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 08:45 AM PDT

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Here we go again: today brings another mobile patent infringement suit — this time against T-Mobile USA, and over a technology that has had very little use to date, but a lot of potential.

On Track Innovations says that the carrier is selling “at least” two handset models — the HTC Amaze 4G and the Nokia Astound — that it claims violate a patent owned by OTI. NFC is the technology that is the centerpiece for a number of contactless mobile payments services and data sharing other applications.

The case was filed today in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, OTI says.

OTI says that it holds some 100 patents — both approved and pending applications — covering a pretty wide range of areas, from NFC and other contactless payments technologies, to secure ID, and  “petroleum and parking solutions.”

OTI says that T-Mobile has been damaging OTI’s business “by selling and/or offering to sell data transaction devices having contact and contactless modes of operation enabling Near Field Communications capabilities, including at least the following such devices: HTC Amaze 4G, Nokia Astound.” That could leave the door open for other devices to be named. There are no damages specified in the suit.

OTI has been enforcing its patents already and says it has signed a licensing deal “multibillion dollar” corporation, covering a different patent for contactless smart SIM cards. It doesn’t specify the name of the company.

"We believe in the strength and value of our intellectual property and have the resources to protect it," Oded Bashan, chief executive of Rosh Pina, Israel-based OTI, said in a statement.

OTI says that its technology is supported by MasterCard and Visa. Among the products it sells itself are NFC devices and readers, including a product, the COPNI (Contactless Payment and NFC Insert), that can be attached to a phone to make it NFC-capable, even if it does not have an NFC chip built into the device itself.

Although some companies like Google, Nokia and RIM have committed to implementing NFC, there are others that have not and some have seen these “bolt-on” solutions as one way forward to speed up usage and adoption.

Up to now, many of the patent suits have been between device and component makers — although there seem to be an increasing number of digital media suits covering services (for example, the infringement case Yahoo has brought against Facebook) that widens the net of plaintiffs and defendants.

We are contacting T-Mobile for a comment and will update this story as we learn more.

Filing is here:

Apsalar Lets You Customize Your Mobile App For Users Based On Their Behavior

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 08:31 AM PDT

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Apsalar, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics startup, is giving developers more precision in how they target their users.

The company is launching something called “Advanced User Segments” today. In plain English, that means that developers can change the way their app works or send targeted promotions to consumers based on how valuable or engaged they are in the app.

An app maker can target users based on how much they spend, their location, their lifetime value, their engagement level, whether they use iOS or Android, or custom events like whether they got past Level 5 or opened a shopping chart.

So for example, a developer could send notifications or show ads for their new game to a user who has spent more than $5 and stopped coming back to the original game. Or they could target a user who was thinking of buying a virtual item with a discount on the good. This is the kind of precision that can separate top-grossing games from mediocre ones.

“You really need these kinds of tools to go beyond analytics,” said Michael Oiknine, Apsalar’s chief executive. Despite Apple’s recent crackdown on UDIDs or special unique identifiers that are tied to iOS devices, Apsalar’s targeted promotions will still work because the company is rolling its own ID scheme.

Apsalar’s competitors include Flurry, Kontagent and Localytics. Flurry has a much larger footprint, but Apsalar says that it was first in offering more advanced analytics like cohort segmentation. (That’s the ability to see whether users who joined an app at different times stayed longer or spent more. App publishers use it to see whether a small tweak might have improved their ability to retain users.)

Another company that isn’t analytics focused called Playhaven also lets game developers target users with different ads depending on how much they spend in a game. Apsalar has raised $5.8 million in funding from Thomvest Ventures, Battery Ventures, DN Capital, 500 Startups, Morado Venture Partners and Seraph Group and has its analytics in more than 10,000 apps since launching 13 months ago.

Claiming Legality, EveryLodge Launches A Flash Sales Aggregator For Hotel Deals

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 08:06 AM PDT

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EveryLodge is a new startup that aims to at least partially fill the void left by the closure of sample sale aggregator MyNines last year. Like MyNines, EveryLodge also aggregates the ongoing flash sales from across the web for shoppers’ convenience. However, where the former focused on the fashion vertical, EveryLodge is instead focusing on aggregating the flash sales for hotel stays.

To do so, the company has an interesting strategy to collect data which is often tucked away behind paywalls or the usernames and passwords required to access it. And it’s not letting the legalese surrounding many flash sale sites’ Terms of Service stand in the way.

Explains founder Andrew Nicol, a former corporate lawyer in New York, the startup knows it can’t generally use bots or spiders to gather data from the sale websites like Jetsetter, Vacationist, Voyage Privé, and others, due to legal reasons. It also knows that in many cases, the sites’ Terms of Service prohibit its users from collecting or recording the data contained within, which is why EveryLodge says that, in those cases, it decided not even to join the site in question in order to track the details of the sales.

So where does the data come from, then? Well here’s a hint:

“The flash sale websites don't prohibit you from telling someone else about a sale they're featuring. This is fortunate for us, but fortunate for them, too: without word of mouth publicity, they would probably go out of business,” says Nicol.

Oh, so, scraping social media?

Yes, he says.

“Of course, by far the most efficient way to get the data is to scrape the actual sales sites, which we do if we can, but which mostly we can’t. Our next best way of being alerted to sales is by links to the sites we cover being posted on social networks,” explains Nicol. “There are also a couple of other websites that we monitor for news about sales. And then there are user submissions. We put this data together and get a snapshot of the sales across the various sites. Human verification is sometimes necessary as the final step.”

Nicol notes that EveryLodge would ultimately like to reach an agreement to source its data directly from the sites it pulls from, but it has launched without those agreements in place. As a lawyer, he seems to be pretty confident that the data collection being performed is not either illegal or in violation of the companies’ Terms of Service.

EveryLodge is currently tracking 14 sites: Bungolow, Expedia ASAP, Groupon Getaways, Jetsetter, LivingSocial, Luxury Link, SniqueAway, Spire, Tablet Hotels, Travesse, TripAlertz, Vacationist, Voyage Privé and Yuupon. It’s focused primarily on flash sales for now, and specifically those for hotels, resorts and other fixed-location venues. (Meaning, no cruises, tours, etc.). While many sites, including the above, provide details on discounted hotel rooms, EveryLodge is only interested in featuring those which are time-sensitive deep discounts.

On the company’s homepage, these sales are plotted on a map, and can be filtered by status (ongoing or upcoming), price, check in and check out dates, and source. When a user is ready to book, they’re directed to the source of the sale itself.  It’s unclear how the services being sourced will react to this launch – will they look upon EveryLodge as a helpful provider of referral traffic, or will they be upset that it’s managed to tap into some of their exclusive, private deals?

EveryLodge was funded as a part of the Chilean Government’s Start-Up Chile Program, which offers entrepreneurs $40,000 is seed capital, but this project is actually an offshoot of a related project, also covering sales, which the company plans to launch later this fall.

Change Is Good: HTC Axes HTCSense.com Cloud Service, But Its Successor Could Be Huge

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 07:59 AM PDT

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Good night, sweet prince. Whether you knew about it or not (my money being on the latter), HTC’s HTCSense.com has provided users with online backup and device location services since October 2010. In an effort to “improve” their customers’ experience though, HTC has recently announced that they will officially shutter the HTCSense.com backup service so they can focus on revamping their cloud offerings.

Worry not, you HTC loyalists, you’ll be able to download all of your digital effluvia (contacts, messages, and the like) in a handy .zip file before April 30. But this whole thing raises a hefty question — what is HTC planning to do next?

Quite a bit, if the company’s string of parnterships are any indication. HTC realizes it’s time to go big, and key deals with cloud-loving companies like Dropbox (file storage), Dashwire (mobile data backup) and Intertrust/SyncTV (streaming video service) all point to the possibility of a much more robust HTCSense cloud service coming down the pipeline.

Representatives for the Taiwanese company were as tight-lipped as ever, and I’m not privy enough to internal chatter to make any bold claims, but the company certainly seems intent on gathering up an impressive roster of teammates. It’s not unthinkable that HTC would seek to tie all of them together under the HTC Sense brand, which itself got a boost when the UI bearing the same name got its own revamp at this year’s MWC.

I suspect that, in light of all of HTC’s other big partnerships, we’ll also be seeing a considerable bump in their new cloud service’s reach and visibility. Honestly, before this news started making the rounds, how many of you had heard of the HTCSense backup service, let alone used it? It launched in late 2010 with support for only two devices, and while HTC made minor improvements in the intervening years, it never really seemed like the success that HTC was hoping for. The company has already rolled out commercials playing up additions like Beats Audio, so if something as substantial as a multifaceted HTC Sense cloud service appears, you’ll probably be hearing a lot about it.

As Digital Trends points out though, HTC could have some issues when playing up their new services. To offer a cloud backup service, abruptly, and expect users to jump in the pool once again is indeed a bit of a leap. The big difference is that HTC’s new pool has the potential to be far more compelling than the original one-off backup service. Once they’ve got that in place, they’ll have a potentially tremendous selling point for all of their hardware releases — access to a formidable HTC Cloud. Sure, the abruptness of the transition may have ruffled a few feathers, but it could all be worth it if HTC delivers what I’m hoping they will.

LG Spectrum Review: This Is One Ugly Sumbitch

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 07:33 AM PDT

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Short Version

The LG Spectrum has spent a long while with me. In fact, LG’s asking for it back, saying that my review period has come to an end. I didn’t get around to the full review until now because (to be perfectly honest with you) I didn’t really want to sit down and talk about the LG Spectrum for X amount of hours.

True, there’s nothing necessarily “wrong” with the phone. It’s got solid specs, performs alright (I guess), and has a downright gorgeous display. But at the same time, there’s a long list of issues that I have with the phone, and most center around design.

Features:

  • 4.5-inch 720×1280 True HD IPS display
  • Verizon 4G LTE
  • Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread
  • 1.5GHz dual-core processor
  • 8MP rear camera (1080p video capture)
  • 1.3MP front-facing camera
  • LG UI
  • MSRP: $199.99 on-contract

Pros:

  • This is a stunning display, without a doubt
  • Camera gets the job done
  • 4G LTE speeds are fast

Cons:

  • Poor battery life
  • Creaks and cracks when stressed
  • Ugly: Too light and plastic-y to feel premium
  • LG UI is equally ugly

Long Version

Hardware/Design:

Ah, where to begin?

The LG Spectrum isn’t the prettiest phone I’ve ever laid eyes on. In fact, it doesn’t even really compete. In a world of sexy iPhones, captivating Galaxy Notes, and compelling Nokia Windows Phones, the LG Spectrum likely won’t even get your attention. It sports some of the same design language as the Nitro HD, but for some mysterious reason LG chose to put a nasty plastic panel across the backside. It has a little textured print on it, but feels slick and cheap like plastic. The 4.5-inch display is surrounded by a black bezel and gunmetal silver tapered edges.

Every part of it soaks up your fingerprints like that’s what it was built to do. This, of course, only lends to that cheap feel I mentioned before.

Then there’s build quality. The Spectrum creaks and bends when stressed in a way that makes me highly uncomfortable. People have dealt with cheap-feeling phones for a long time now, and if you’re upgrading from something two years old that may not bother you so much. But if you’re moving from an iPhone or any of Samsung’s or HTC’s newer devices, you may be disappointed at just how creaky this little guy is.

MicroUSB access is square on the top of the phone, along with a 3.5mm headphone jack and the lock button. The volume rocker can be found on the left hand side, and three capacitive home buttons are down at the bottom. I’m not a fan of this plastic cover LG likes to put on the MicroUSB port — it’ll surely break off at some point — and it doesn’t help that the port is right where your hand would be if you chose to play around with the Spectrum in landscape while plugged in.

Nothing Special:

We usually reserve a place in our reviews for that extra something special a phone has. The Note had its S-Pen, the Droid 4 had its amazing QWERTY keyboard, the GalNex had ICS and NFC, and the list goes on and on. Almost every phone has some extra umph, whether it’s by way of a really cool feature, interesting design, extra hardware or a first-of-its-kind spec.

The Spectrum has nothing like that, and thus I’m left filling up a review section with nothingness.

Software:

Let’s just start out with LG UI. I’m going to be upfront when I say that all of the manufacturer overlays are awful. I’d say that Samsung’s TouchWiz (or whatever they’re calling it these days) and HTC’s Sense are the most visually appealing and useful, while Motorola’s is meh. LG’s sucks.

Everything’s bubbly, round, and it looks like a children’s version of a user interface. Of course, these are just aesthetic preferences, so if you like the look and feel of LG UI then boo on me. The only problem is that it has no real use. The trick with a custom UI is adding value. Users will get over the fact that you’re snatching away their pure Android if you give them something cool like HTC’s weather widget or Samsung’s special contacts scroll feature. It’s the little things that count.

With LG UI, the only “little thing” I can find is that apps are automatically categorized by type. Unfortunately, I would rather arrange apps on my own and keep the little headers out of it. LG also included a little media carousel in the UI, which would be much more pleasing if it wasn’t the laggiest thing on the phone.

Pre-loaded apps include Netflix (which should be nice on that gorgeous display), ESPN ScoreCenter, Amazon Kindle, BlockBuster, NFL Mobile, and a handful of Verizon apps like VZW Navigator, V CAST, and Verizon Video.

Camera:

I’m actually quite impressed with the Spectrum’s 8-megapixel camera. It seemed to reproduce color slightly better than my iPhone 4S, which was a pretty big shock after dealing with this phone for a couple weeks. The shutter’s not nearly as fast, and I’m not a fan of the camera app UI, but I still give the Spectrum camera a fly.

It does have more trouble in low-light than my iPhone 4S, but perhaps not in the way you’d expect. Sometimes you take pictures in a dark environment to recreate that eery, dark look. In fact, that’s the only reason you should take pictures in a dark environment. The Spectrum tends to brighten pictures automatically, even with the flash off, and it makes anything taken in a cloudy bar or dark room look awkward.

Video capture was fine, but nothing to call home over. Switching between low and well-lit areas takes some time, and playback was a bit grainy for what I was expecting. But on the whole I think the LG Spectrum camera is just fine.

Comparison shot between the LG Spectrum (left) and the iPhone 4S (right):

Display:

Go ahead. Breathe a sigh of relief — you’ll get all love and no hate while we chat out the display.

The Spectrum’s 4.5-inch 720p display is everything and more. I tend to lean toward Samsung’s displays, especially of the Super AMOLED Plus persuasion, but LG’s TrueHD screen is seriously beautiful. Blacks are sharp and deep, text is crisp, colors feel real… I mean honestly, it doesn’t get much better.

There is one thing that’s sticking out to me, but it’s not necessarily make or break. The display sports a 16:9 aspect ratio, and while many phones share this trait, the Spectrum display seems awfully long and skinny. This wasn’t so apparent when watching videos in portrait (and you’ll have to excuse the fact that I’m coming off of a Galaxy Note review, which obviously makes a difference), but I just thought it worth noting.

The display is coated with Corning Gorilla Glass so there shouldn’t be any huge scratching issues, but as I mentioned before, you’ll be hard-pressed to keep your finger prints off this thing.

Performance:

Generally speaking, this phone didn’t live up to my expectations in the performance department at all. Laggy? All the things!

Let’s just start with the most basic actions, scrolling between home screens and opening apps. More than once (in fact, more than a handful of times), I clicked the apps icon… waited… and clicked it again. Of course, this led to the app tray opening and closing in a flash. It was so slow, that I had closed it before I opened it.

This is the kind of stuff that happens over and over with the Spectrum. Pinch-to-zoom… wait… double-tap to zoom… zoom in and out in a flash. It’s hella annoying.

But it gets worse.

There’s some strange flaw in the Spectrum that has to do with Car Mode. Basically, the Spectrum decides when you’re in a car, whether you’re actually in a car or not. When it makes this decision, as displayed by a tiny steering wheel icon up top, the phone reverts back to the home screen and flashes black. Repeatedly. To make matters worse, you can’t really access the car mode app within Android as far as I can tell.

Super fun.

Oh, and I’m not the only one to notice.

The problem persisted so much that I couldn’t complete my testing. Usually, I like to run each of my three tests three times each, just to be fair, but this Car Mode bug made that impossible. So unfortunately, I’m going to have to hit you with the results from the first of each test. In Browsermark, we saw a score of 57573, which is nice compared to the Note’s score of 48,610. The Spectrum unfortunately did not test better than the Note on Quadrant (a full-fledged benchmark program), scoring 2448 compared to the Note’s 2703.

In the data department I was seeing an average speed of 4.5Mbps down and 1.6Mbps up on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. That’s not so hot knowing how fast Verizon 4G can be.

Battery:

And as we migrate into the battery department, the disappointments only persist. I was shocked to find that the Galaxy Note, with its massive HD Super AMOLED screen and 4G LTE radio could hang with me all day. After reviewing the Note and the Droid RAZR Maxx, I had hoped that phone makers were starting to figure out how to make 4G a viable option with solid battery life. I was wrong, at least about LG.

The Spectrum doesn’t last all day with me. In fact, it barely makes it to dinner time. I’ve been fiddling with settings for the past few days and I noticed I can get just a little bit of extra life with certain services, like location services, shut down, but I’m still not pleased. And on top of that, I don’t know where the hell I am.

When we did the official battery test, we found that the Spectrum only lasts a little over three hours. Of course, this is a restless workout for the Spectrum. We run it through a program that constantly loads Google Image search pages, but at any time I can pop out of the browser and play a game, make a call, etc.

Still, I’d like to have seen more out of the Spectrum. The Droid 4 only hung in there for three hours and forty-five minutes while the Droid RAZR Maxx (Motorola’s battery beast) stayed with me for a staggering eight hours and fifteen minutes.

Head-To-Head With The Galaxy Nexus And Nitro HD:

Check out our thoughts on this match-up here.

Hands-On Video: Initial Impressions

Conclusion

The problem with the LG Spectrum is that it’s a sheep dressed in wool. I hoped against hope that the performance of the phone paired with an amazing display and 4G connectivity would rid me of my desire to hurl something so freaking ugly against a wall. But it did not. There was a bug that lasted through the entirety of my two weeks with the phone, it soaks up prints, lags like a fat man in a marathon, and is just plain ugly.

The phone looks cheap, and performs like it’s cheap, and no one deserves to live through two years of frustration like this.

I give it a die.

Die. Die. Die. Die. Die.

Die.

Check out all of our LG Spectrum review posts here.

Russian Money Into French Clouds: App Analytics Platform Capptain Gets $1.5M From Runa Capital

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 07:29 AM PDT

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As the world of apps continues to get ever-more crowded, another app analytics startup has picked up investment to help app developers figure out what is working, and what is not. Paris, France-based Capptain has raised $1.5 million from Russian VC fund Runa Capital.

The investment, says Runa, will be used to help Capptain, a cloud-based platform, expand its geographical footprint in Europe, Russia and the U.S. Past funding in the startup was not disclosed but TechCrunch understands that it was a seed round led by angels and totaling around $500,000.

In some respects, given how many app analytic platforms there are now — there is Flurry, Kontagent, Localytics, Bango and so many others — one wonders if there will be some consolidation ahead.

Like others, Capptain provides real-time monitoring services to chart how apps are downloaded and used. Also like others, it adds a level of marketing services into the mix as well, with the ability to push promotional campaigns for the apps through the platform, and to pull information in from users — for example from surveys.

What is perhaps most notable about Capptain is the range of platforms it covers, from iOS, Android, Html5, Web OS, Blackberry/RIM and WP7 down through to Samsung’s Smart TV service, and the subsequent range of devices, from mobile handsets and tablets through to Internet-enabled TVs. The company also says that it is better at visualizing its results and offering them in reports that are can be customized.

And even with a number of analytics companies out there, there is a large market to serve: not only are apps growing in number, but they are in value, too: the world-wide mobile apps market is forecast to be worth some $25 billion by 2015 by researchers at MarketsandMarkets. ABI Research is even more bullish: it predicts revenues of $46 billion by 2016.

Capptain is developed by UBIKOD, which has been around since 2008 and focuses on software-as-a-service for enterprises. As part of the investment, Dmitry Chikhachev, the managing partner of Runa Capital, will become a board member of the parent company.

Although based in Russia, Runa Capital has invested in several companies outside the country focused on cloud services. They include enterprise-focused companies ThinkGrid, BigTime Software and StopTheHacker. In February 2012, Runa launched an accelerator in partnership with virtualization provider Parallels aimed at cloud startups.

Lenovo Launches An Android App Store For The Enterprise

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 07:10 AM PDT

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Computer manufacturer Lenovo has launched its own Android app store today, called simply, the “Lenovo Enterprise App Shop.” As the name implies, the service is targeting the company’s businesses customers by offering custom management, deployment and publication of mobile applications. Apps can also be purchased through volume pricing.

Lenovo says the app store will work on their Android-based tablets running Android 3.1 or higher, but it will also work with those tablets from other PC makers, too.

One key feature of the new app store something known as the “Lenovo App Shop Manager.” Essentially, this is a tool that allows a company’s I.T. admins to build their own customized app stores which they can then fill with apps that are approved for use by the company’s end users. I.T. can also remotely disable apps when required, identify unapproved apps, alert users, or uninstall apps entirely, if need be.

Lenovo says it modeled its own app store after the self-serve consumer app shops already available, while also making it available as a SaaS (software-as-a-service) cloud hosted solution. In other words, businesses don’t need to provide their own infrastructure and support for the app store – Lenovo provides it for them.

Apps which are approved for the Lenovo app store, besides having a business focus, are also vetted in advance – meaning Lenovo tests them for malware, offensive content and runs them on Lenovo’s tablets to ensure they function properly. In addition to the apps found in the App Shop catalog, end users will also have access to those app found in the MobiHand Universal Android catalog, where volume licensing is available, too.

The move is clearly one designed to target the increasing popularity of the Apple iPad in the enterprise – in a January study from enterprise mobility provider Good Technology, the iPad 2 was the third most popular device category in terms of enterprise activations, followed closely by the original iPad. Android tablet activations combined, meanwhile, accounting for only 6% of all tablet activations, the study found. With the third revision of the iPad (the new iPad), those numbers will again skew in Apple’s favor.

Lenovo’s new app store was announced this morning, but the service has seemingly yet to go live. The company points to this URL lenovo.com/enterpriseapp as the new home for the enterprise app store, but it’s currently displaying a broken link. Stay tuned.

Now Is The Time For All Good 16-Year-Olds To Make Scientific Calculators In Minecraft

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 06:41 AM PDT

A young man who calls himself MaxSGB built a calculator in Minecraft. But this is not just any mechanical calculator: it’s entirely “mechanical” and, if it were real, would be 5 million cubic meters in size.

The calculator supports “6 digit addition and subtraction, 3 digit multiplication, division and trigonometric/scientific functions.” He reduced the number of multiplication and division digits because it took too long to perform the calculations using pixelated blocks.

The video, above, is pretty freaking long, but it’s important to note that not all kids out there are listening to the rockity rap and smoking tea. Some are making calculators in imaginary worlds.

via TomsHardware



Sony Shakes Things Up Under New CEO, Reorganizes For The Post-PC Era

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 06:21 AM PDT

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Sony enters a new era April 1st. On that day Kazuo Hirai will replace Sir Howard Stringer as Sony’s president and CEO. The challenges ahead are massive; Sony is facing a financial and organizational calamity. Sony is simply too big and has fallen too far and Hirai is tasked to bring Sony back to glory.

Sony just announced a new corporate organization that shows drastic change is underway. Under this strategy, dubbed One Sony, separate Sony divisions will share management, hopefully streamlining decisions and creating a more unified end-user experience that better utilizes Sony’s content offering. Sony under Stringer was an unwieldy multi-headed beast. Hirai is clearly trying to tighten the reins. It just might work and it has to work.

Prior to Stringer, Sony was led by Nobuyuki Idei who started feeding the hungry Sony machine. Under his watch Sony established Sony BMG Music Entertainment and purchased Hollywood’s Metro-Goldwyn Mayer studio in 2005. He entered into the joint mobile-phone venture with Ericsson. He was also the Sony exec that green-lighted the loveable, but still a bit strange, Aibo robotic dog.

Stringer was left with a bit of mess when he took over in the summer of 2005. At that time Sony was far from being just a consumer electronic company and majorly involved in nearly ever aspect of media creation and distribution. Now, in 2012, Sony’s once-mainstay TV division is drowning in red ink, the company just dissolved its partnership with Ericsson, and there is little, if any, compelling reason for a consumer to use one of Sony’s many media distribution platforms over Netflix, iTunes or Amazon.

Sony is simply not built for the current consumer electronics game. We’re entering into the age of digital appliances, a post-PC era if you will, and 15 years ago Sony would have been the top player. But now, in 2012, Apple and Samsung are the big kids on the playground; Sony is hiding under the slide doing his homework.

The PlayStation happens to be the one bright spot in Sony’s recent history. Sony’s incoming CEO, Kazuo, led that division for the last 5 years. There is hope, Sony fans.

Under the One Sony structure, Sony sees digital imaging, gaming and mobile devices to be the three cornerstones of its electronic business. Hirai himself will be in charge of Sony’s troubled HDTV division. The company will still pursue the medical technology field but what was separate medical-related divisions within Sony will be consolidated into one unit. Perhaps most promising though, Sony is appointing Kunimasas Suzuki, currently Executive Deputy President of Consumer Products. & Services Group, to be the officer in charge of unifying Sony products and creating a better user experience across the company’s entire product and network service line — something the company desperately needs. He is also in charge of Sony’s mobile business, showing that Hirai understands that going forward user experiences start in the mobile sector.

Sony of old is long gone. Sony will never be the same nimble company again. However, with the proper structure and leadership Sony might once again regain its swagger. Sony was once the shining example of user experience and hardware design done right. Sony needs to find its soul. If any company can properly battle Apple in the arena of consumer electronics, it’s Sony. After all, it’s Sony that Apple and Steve Jobs were aiming to dethrone 15 years ago.

After Alpha Attracts 1M Users, BlueStacks Goes Beta To Bring 450K Android Apps To Your PC

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 06:05 AM PDT

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Ever since a pre-launch BlueStacks raised $7.6 million in Series A financing, the startup has been attracting attention. Why? Because it’s developed software designed to let Android users run their apps on all Windows PCs, tablets, and laptops — without any modifications. Not to mention the startup then raised another $6.4 million a few months later from AMD and Citrix Systems, with contribution from existing investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Ventures, and more.

The Series B followed closely on the heels of the alpha launch of its App Player for Windows — a free software download that gives users one-click access to Android apps on any Windows PC, along with the ability to view these apps in full-screen. Accompanying the App Player was Cloud Connect, a cloud-based service that allows PCs to become an extension of any Android-based mobile device — and vice versa. And today, BlueStacks is pushing forward with its next major release, the beta version of its App Player, which is chasing the ambitious goal of bringing the some 450,000 Android apps to those billion-odd PC users out there.

The beta software release is of note because it now allows desktop PCs to run graphics-intensive Android apps, accelerating them to a degree that prior iterations of the software just weren’t capable of. This new functionality is made possible by the company’s new patent-pending technology, called Layercake, which allows Android apps to run on x86-based PCs, including apps that are written for the ARM processor, like Angry Birds Space or Fruit Ninja, for example.

BlueStacks’ beta release uses your PC’s graphics card to make apps running graphics-intensive engines like Unity run without glitches, using hardware acceleration not dissimilar to that which takes place in the browser. The new release also brings the accelerometer tilting and pinch-to-zoom features of the smartphone experience to the desktop, by way of the mouse and keyboard arrows.

The startup found quite a bit of traction during its three-month-long alpha phase, attracting over 1 million users in more than 100 countries, with more than 4.5 million apps opened. With its beta, the startup wants to build on its early success, while making the experience more frictionless. This means that users can now download apps from within BlueStacks even if they don’t have an Android phone, a dock launcher that reflects the Windows interface, in addition to Cloud Connect enabling users to send and receive SMS messages on their PCs.

BlueStacks VP of Marketing and Business Development says that the company has partnered with the developers behind apps like Fruit Ninja, SliceIt!, Barnes & Noble's Nook, Townsmen, Evernote, Defender and StumbleUpon to pre-load their apps in the beta. These developers have been attracted to BlueStacks’ software, because it opens up Android app discovery to a huge potential market — the billion-plus users of PCs. Not only that, but developers don’t have to port or modify their apps to run them on those PCs, and that’s money in the bank.

For more, check out the BlueStacks beta release here.

Viralheat Adds Social Media Publishing With Version 2.0,

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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Viralheat is launching version 2.0 of its social media tools today, an upgrade that takes the product beyond the standard monitoring and listening.

One of the biggest changes in version 2.0 is a new feature that Viralheat is calling engagement, and which basically means you can post comments to Facebook and Twitter directly from the service. Posting to social networks may not sound like a big deal, but CEO Raj Kaddam says it makes life a lot easier for customers.

Instead of using one tool (such as, well, Viralheat) for monitoring social media mentions and sentiment, then jumping to a different application (such as CoTweet) to actually publish content, Viralheat allows you to do both in one place. Wherever you are in the service, there’s a button at the top right that lets you post to social networks. When you’re reading through Facebook and Twitter comments, you can hover over them to get more details about the commenter, then click to respond directly.

Viralheat 2.0 also refreshes the product’s user interface to one what Kaddam says is “more of an inbox-type layout.” One of the big goals, he says, was to make it easy to access all of Viralheat’s reports with fewer clicks. And the upgrade also incorporates Facebook Insights, giving companies more information about the conversations on the Facebook Pages, and more data from Twitter.

The company’s investors include Mayfield Fund. You can see a demo of the new version below.

Pontiflex Launches Self-Serve Version Of Its “Mobile Signup” Ads

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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Pontiflex, a company focused on what it calls “mobile signup” ads, is reaching out to smaller advertisers today with the launch of AdLeads, its self-serve platform.

Co-founder and CEO Zephrin Lasker says this has always been one of his goals for the company, ever since it launched five years ago — to allow any business, regardless of size, to pay for marketing leads collected via Pontiflex ads (advertisers only pay when someone actually enters their contact information into a sign-up form). With the growing importance of mobile, Lasker says this is “the next big step” beyond Google AdWords for many small businesses.

“We’re on our phones all the time,” he says. “They might as well be taped to our foreheads. Anybody from a small business owner to a media planner can tell that everybody’s attention has shifted.”

Lasker also walked me through the process of creating and managing a campaign in Pontiflex. The whole process of creating an ad, creating the form, and targeting an ads based on geography and topic only took a few minute, then you can track the performance of the ads in real-time. Behind the scenes, he says Pontiflex has developed its own set of audience for targeting the audience that will be the most responsive to an ad. The minimum campaign size is $100, and you can currently place self-serve ads in nine countries.

More than 300 businesses participated in the AdLeads beta test. Pontiflex is planning an ad campaign to promote the new platform, with some “secret” promotional efforts in the works, but Lasker says he’s hoping the biggest growth will come from word-of-mouth.

Sojern Raises $7.5 Million For Its Push Into Travel Tech And Targeted Travel Ads

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 05:35 AM PDT

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The travel industry is one vertical that seems to be seeing a lot of disruption at the moment — ranging from social media startups changing how we plan and book our journeys, to those who are re-examining how companies in the business are going to make money in the future. One of the startups working in the latter space, Sojern, today announced that it has raised a round of $7.5 million.

This round, Sojern’s third, was led by new investor Industry Ventures, with existing investors Focus Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Trident Capital all also participating.

Sojern started four years ago with a business focused around advertising on boarding cards. But it has more recently expanded to also offer a product it calls the Sojern Media Platform — essentially, an audience re-targeting service aimed specifically at the travel sector, relying on some 50 million pieces of anonymized travel data amassed by Sojern, as well as algorithms and other technology. The idea is to serve more targeted ads to travelers either as they are planning their trip, or while they are on it, with Sojern’s network touching “hundreds” of publishers, CEO Mark Rabe says.

(And, as a noteworthy side note, it’s telling that Sojern hired Rabe of all people, to lead the company last year: the guy has a lot of online advertising expertise. He is one of the (many) executives that have departed Yahoo in recent times; his most recent job at the Internet company was leading its business in the UK and Ireland.)

While Sojern does not break out revenues, Rabe notes that it is seeing the most growth from its newer line of business, the media platform was only introduced late last year.

Rabe says that the company has actually booked more revenue in the first three months of this year than it did for all of 2011. That points to the media platform potentially overtaking the boarding pass business in terms of importance for the company in the longer run.

Like many who work in the travel space, Rabe believes that the market is ripe for change. “Travel is really going through a revolution, one mostly focused on distribution,” he explains. “The focus is on marketing to people and taking advantage of the data available to them, and really changing how they go to market.”

One fact that spells opportunity for a startup like Sojern is that there are actually a lot of companies, such as airlines, that are not in the best state of financial health at the moment. That means they are on the lookout for new revenue opportunities, whether that is in the form of upselling their customers on their own services, or potentially linking up with others in co-marketing deals.

At the moment, there are several airlines and other companies that are strategic partners of Sojern’s with some holding equity stakes of undisclosed amounts. They include Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Carlson Wagonlit, Delta Air Lines, Hawaiian Airlines, Kayak, Travelport, United Airlines and US Airways. (Their relationship stems back to the founding of the company, and part of what airlines, for example, receive is a cut on the advertising revenues that appear on their boarding passes.)

Rabe says that the funding announced today is mainly being used to grow the company’s business in the U.S., which alone accounts for 50 percent of all air travel worldwide. Sojern, he says, has been mainly active “at the top of the purchase waterfall” — that is, around buying air travel — but in the data world, Sojern can potentially follow and monetize users as they continue along with the rest of their journey planning, whether it is to book hotels, rent cars or reserve seats in restaurants.

A further step down the line will be international expansion, although Rabe says that this could prove more challenging, given how fragmented the market is with smaller and more regional airlines almost more common than major global players.

Millennial Media Sets Price Range For IPO At $11 To $13 Per Share, Valued At $974M

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 05:31 AM PDT

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Mobile ad network Millennial Media has increased the price range per share for its upcoming IPO to $11 to $13 per share. The company previously had set the range at $9 to $11 per share.

The network, which filed its original S-1 in early January, aims to raise as much as $152.5 million in the offering, which is up from $75 million originally stated in earlier filings. The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “MM.” At the high-end of the range set today, Millennial could be valued at nearly $1 billion ($973.5 million to be exact).

Millennial, which is one of the largest remaining independent mobile ad networks, currently serves ads to 200 million unique users worldwide, including approximately 100 million unique users in the United States alone. More than 30,000 apps are enabled by developers to receive ads delivered by Millennial.

From 2009 to 2010, Millennial’s revenue increased 195% from $16.2 million to $47.8 million, and the company took a net loss of $7.6 million, and $7.1 million, in those years, respectively. From 2010 to 2011, revenue increased 117% from $47.8 million to $103.7 million. In 2011, the company saw a net loss of just $287,000.

We’ll see how Millennial performs on the public markets soon. While some companies, such as Yelp, have seen a huge jump in value in first-day trading, others have not.

Freemium Game Dev Addmired Rebrands As Machine Zone, Lands $8M From Menlo Ventures

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 05:01 AM PDT

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Oh, how times have changed for Addmired team. The Y Combinator startup first debuted in 2008 with an Hot or Not-esque social network plugin, but eventually found their footing after pivoting to become a developer of freemium multiplayer mobile games like iMob and its recently released sequel.

Now they’re looking to do a bit of rebranding by renaming themselves Machine Zone, and to celebrate, they’ve also announced that they have raised a cool $8 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. Their board of directors is being bolstered to boot — Menlo Ventures managing director Shervin Pishevar will be joining the board, as will Anthos Capital managing director Bryan Kelly.

Pishevar’s new role with the team is quite the boon for Machine Zone, and for co-founder and CEO Gabe Leydon in particular. Pishevar’s own roots as founder of Social Gaming Network occasionally saw the two companies come into competition, as seen back when the first slew of mafia games started to take hold of iOS. Somewhere along the line, the two developed a mutual respect, and Leydon began to see Pishevar as “best VC in the valley when it comes to understanding what we do.”

What they do, specifically, is develop games that are big on uniting users and in-app purchases but are generally low on graphical intensity. Machine Zone’s oeuvre consists of games like iMob 2, Global War, and Original Gangstaz, and while none of them pack whiz-bang graphics, they all rank among the iOS App Store’s top 50 highest grossing apps (iMob 2 currently leads the pack at number 24). That by itself is pretty impressive, but they also stand as a testament to Machine Zone’s knack for creating games with some serious staying power. Original Gangstaz (which I’m really enjoying typing, by the way) was first released over two years ago, and Global War is something like 15 months old.

Leydon attributes this staying power to their specific approach to designing games, which, oddly enough, emphasizes crafting a engaging social environment ahead of actual game design.

“Video games are terrible at retention,” Leydon said. “We don’t look at them for inspiration. Look at the top apps in the App Store, and the ones that last are social communication apps. What we’re doing is creating a more social experience and then wrapping a game around it.”

Being the sort of gamer that prefers to play alone, I don’t know that I buy that philosophy, but the formula certainly seems to be doing the Machine Zone team well. With a fresh infusion of capital to play with, my conversation with Leydon naturally turned toward what’s next on their horizon.

As far as new game concepts go, Leydon smartly kept quiet when it came to specifics, but noted that the team is currently “kicking a lot of ideas around.” I can’t blame them for taking their time here — they’ve launched a total of 13 games since 2009, but they’re not just looking to slap together a new property and push it into the market for some short-term gains. In order to make these nebulous new projects a success, Machine Zone is also looking to use some of that new-found funding to bolster their ranks with savvy developers.

CloudLock Raises $8.7M To Help Secure Enterprise Data In The Public Cloud

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 05:00 AM PDT

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CloudLock, the software company that aims to secure enterprise cloud data, has raised $8.7 million in Series B funding from Ascent Venture Partners and Cedar Fund. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million.

CloudLock says that many companies lose sight and control of exactly what data is being shared in public clouds. CloudLock’s software helps enterprises secure data in these public cloud platforms. The company’s suite of security applications give businesses additional security, control and visibility into public cloud offerings. For example, a number of Google Apps customers use CloudLock to secure their data in Google.

The startup says it added hundreds of large customers with over one million users under license to its subscription service. And CloudLock is on track to double sales in 2012. The new funding will be used for hiring engineering talents, product development and international sales efforts.

Social Gaming Startup Mob Science Raises $1M To Make A Bet On Zynga’s New Platform

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 05:00 AM PDT

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While Zynga may have won the early social gaming wars, investments in Facebook gaming haven’t totally dried up.

In fact, some startups are hoping that Zynga will end up being more of a friend than foe. That’s exactly what Mob Science is doing in taking $1 million in seed funding to build games tied to Zynga’s new platform and push into supporting third-party games.

Mob Science, which is based just north of San Diego, has made games like inFamous Anarchy, Coffee Bar, Snowball Fight and Willy’s Sweet Shop. They’re relatively small and none have more than 20,000 monthly active users, according to Facebook app tracking service AppData.

But Mob Science is using the cash to focus on a mid-core RPG and hire game designers, product managers and engineers. The Zynga partnership should effectively allow Mob Science to outsource marketing so that the startup can focus on making actual games. On top of having access to Zynga’s 240 million monthly active users, Mob Science gets access to back-end technology, analytics and other viral channels from the gaming giant.

After years of creating its own games, Zynga is trying to break into supporting other studios’ games so that it isn’t as vulnerable to the hits-driven nature of the business. The company launched a destination site for casual games that incorporates Facebook Credits a few weeks ago and it hopes to include third-party titles.

With the round, Joyent co-founder David Young joins Mob Science's board. The other angels include GameSpy Industries founder Mark Surfas, Joyent chief technology officer Jason Hoffman, Joyent’s executive vice president of corporate development Brian Brown and Steve Tuck, who is the general manager of Joyent Cloud at Joyent.

Open PaaS DotCloud Adds Support For WebSockets, Vertical Scaling And More

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 04:59 AM PDT

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Second generation platform as a service DotCloud has added support for WebSockets, MongoDB 2.0 and vertical scaling in an effort to provide full stack development resources for users.

For background, DotCloud’s platform lets developers build and deploy their applications rapidly by allowing them to customize components and supporting multiple languages and tools. The PaaS supports developers using any combination of language and database without the need for additional hardware or software.

As co-founder Soloman Hykes tell us, this update is about continuing to support application development from front to back, the support for new technologies speaks to the impact of HTML5 and the rise of the FullStack Developer. He maintains that DotCloud is the only PaaS to provide native support for multiple databases and languages, WebSockets, and both vertical and horizontal scaling in a single platform.

All DotCloud applications can now leverage Websockets for real-time, bi-directional communication between the browser and the backend, and use an updated database MongoDB 2.0. In particular, Hykes says that the addition of WebSockets, which is part of the HTML5 standard, will allow for web apps to feel like native apps.

Developers can also choose between increasing concurrency in applications (horizontal), or larger memory allocation (vertical), or both. As Hykes explains, vertical scaling works best with databases and NodeJS.

DotCloud has raised $10 million from Benchmark Capital, Trinity Ventures, SV Angel and others.

Google Pushes Play Front And Center: Is Selling Content Now King?

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 04:49 AM PDT

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Google is marching steadily towards Larry Page’s reported goal of a “single, unified, ‘beautiful’ product, across everything.” It started last year, as redesigns came to all of Google’s big products, Search, Maps, Translate, Reader, Gmail, YouTube, etc, etc. A black navbar appeared, which Google later announced it was removing, only to then reverse course and keep it. And then, earlier this month, it announced Google Play.

The Android Market itself has undergone a number of changes over the last year, catching the redesign bug, along with adding a whole slew of content (eBooks, music, videos, etc.) on top of apps. Google has been busy building a digital media hub, and the “Android Market” moniker represented an older iteration, a mobile-focused platform, so Google Play took its place, and has since made Google’s cross-platform intentions loud and clear.

Google wants to promote its top-billing products across screens and instances, increase visibility, and hopefully attract more users to premium content. Google has also been moving into direct-to-consumer content sales over the past year, and Google Play offers that unified storefront experience that provides a very direct alternative to the iTunes store. Again, it’s Google’s more “open,” cross-platform, approach (you don’t have to own an Android device to rent movies or purchase music, it’s all cloud-backed and browser accessible) — versus Apple’s Walled Garden.

How seriously is Google taking its new storefront and content initiatives? Well, last night Google Play begin emerging in the ubiquitous black navbar that appears atop Search and other Google products, and it’s front and center. Play is positioned prominently between Maps and YouTube, as products like Reader and options like “Video” have been moved to the “More” drop down menu.

The navbar has been tweaked several times since the launch of Google+, and today we have yet another lineup, although this could very likely end up being Google’s starting rotation. And, since Google crossed the 1 billion monthly unique visitors mark last year, putting Google Play access front and center makes perfect sense.

Of course, the opinions on Google’s navbar differ. Some think it’s taking up space, others view it as a ubiquitous advertisement for Google products. Before, that argument wouldn’t have held much weight, as Google Shopping and others mostly just pushed users offsite to make purchases. That’s not the case anymore with Google Play.

Then again, it’s also just a minor change to an already-existing navbar. It’s not a huge intrusion. And there’s a lot left to do with accessibility to Play content outside of the U.S., along with a few bugs here and there.

It will be interesting to see if the black navbar ever starts showing little red notification numbers for Gmail, YouTube, News, etc., or if Google ever opens it up to users to decide which of its products make it into the navbar. The last one is unlikely, but it’s nice to dream. Either way, welcome to the new Google.

For more, see The Verge’s post on Google Play installing a Russian email app on Samsung devices. And Devin’s epic critique of Google+ (and Google’s new philosophy) here.
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