The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- This $49 Quadcopter Flips, Dips, And Floats
- SortBox Replaces Email As A New Way To Review Job Applicants
- As The Trial Rages On, Court Filing Sheds New Light On Apple And Samsung Device Sales
- iPhones Now Top 5% Of Total E-Commerce Website Traffic
- HTC Reaffirms Android 4.0 Updates Are Coming This Month
- iPhone 5 Battery Images Leak: Only Slighter Larger Than iPhone 4S Battery, Despite Expected LTE
- This Apple Commercial Was Too Self-Congratulatory To Run
- MeeGenius Raises $2.4 Million To Bring Children’s Books To The iPad, Android Tablets, And Other Devices
- Python For Microsoft Excel Company IronSpread Comes Out of Beta, Changes Name To DataNitro
- Craigslist Tries To Improve Its Image(s): Inline Photos Appearing Alongside Listings
- Principal Mozilla Engineer Mike Hanson Departs, Joins Greylock As EIR
- GoalHawk Helps You Get Fit And Learn To Code, With A Little Help From Your Friends
- The Kicking Of RIM’s Tires Continues, As IBM Reportedly Considers Its Enterprise Unit
- Y Combinator-Backed Noodle Labs Launches Everyday.me, An “Evernote For Your Life”
- One Horrifying Account Of Working At Zynga
- Japan’s DeNA Appears Unfazed By Gaming Mechanics Ban As Profit Is Up 20%
- EVE Online Maker CCP Games Raises $20M
- Open? Yeah, Sure. Sorry Oracle, You’re Still Full Of It
- Online Education Degrees Now Dwarf Traditional Universities
- Startup Accelerator TechStars Showcases 11 New Startups At Boulder Demo Day
| This $49 Quadcopter Flips, Dips, And Floats Posted: 10 Aug 2012 08:45 AM PDT  Why spend a few hundred on a Parrot AR.Drone when you can pop over to Brando and pick up a $49 quadcopter that fits in the palm of your hand and does flips. The Quadcopter uses “New Design Technology” to be “The Most Stable (like the real?) Floating in the AIR.” I’ll let Brando’s breathless authors take it from here: The Special Design of the One Press Button, which can make the UFO to Somersault in the Air. This RC UFO is powered by a Small piece Battery that is fueled with the USB External Dual Charging Box; therefore, UFO can Fly Never Stop with this Unlimited Power Supply! Plus you get all that eversion!
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| SortBox Replaces Email As A New Way To Review Job Applicants Posted: 10 Aug 2012 08:42 AM PDT  With a down economy, and an overwhelming number of job applicants to any open position (well, maybe not in tech startups, but everywhere else), there’s a real need for tools that help businesses better sort through their over-crowded inboxes to find the best candidates from among thousands of emails with attached files, photos, resumes and cover letters. A new company called SortBox wants to help address that problem by getting rid of the email inbox altogether. Instead, it’s offering a simple, customized inbox designed just for the purpose of moving through job applications quickly. The SortBox inbox was created to be very easy to use, however it joins a crowded market of companies innovating the talent acquisition/hiring space : there’s The Resumator, HireRabbit, Firefish Software, Jobvite, Ovation, and Sendouts, to name just a few, and Oracle acquired top competitor Taleo at the beginning of the year. But a lot of the companies that are designing tools related to hiring are offering something robust, with a lot of features and configuration options. Obviously, that serves a need in this market, but SortBox wants to provide an alternative for businesses that don’t need that level of complexity. Its target market is not the enterprise, but rather the mom-and-pops, the small businesses, recruiters, and yes, even startups who are just looking to keep their actual inbox clutter-free. Explains SortBox founder Justin Sherratt, “we purposefully removed many features, both on the scope and even commented out code because we wanted to come to market with an MVP product that was super easy to use,” he says. “In time we are going to add products and functionality.” To get started with the system, you just click “create a Sortbox” from the SortBox homepage to create a web presence for that particular job. You then fill out the title, description, and other any other details about the position. Once posted online, when anyone visits the page, they apply by clicking the big blue “Apply” button at the bottom and upload their images, bios and their resume into the SortBox job listing. The system then organizes the content so that it’s all neatly laid out on one page for the business owner or hiring manager to view. And you can really fly through the job applications, thanks to SortBox’s color-coded “Yes,” “No,” and “Maybe” buttons at the top of each application. The system also supports multiple SortBoxes so you can advertise for more than one position at a time, and keep everything related to hiring in one central resource. Currently there’s no auto-posting feature included, but companies can post the custom link SortBox generates to places like Craigslist, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter on their own. In the future, support for auto-posting will be added. SortBox was founded in April 2011 during Sherratt’s participation in the Founder Institute program in NYC. His background includes time spent at startups (RxCentric.com, 300 Monks, NinjaFinder), at recruiting agencies, and in film (producing, directing, and cinematography). Having been involved with the hiring process directly in many of these efforts – and even building tools like NinjaFinder to fix the problem of finding creative talent – he knew first-hand how difficult the current hiring process is today. This experience inspired him to build a tool that could simplify the process for any industry. Prior to today’s public debut, the company has been running a private beta test with under 50 customers, which included startups like Wello.co and Kindara.com, and restaurants like Mixt Greens and Split Bread. Pricing for SortBox has not been worked out, but it will be a freemium-based service. You can try it for free from here now.
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| As The Trial Rages On, Court Filing Sheds New Light On Apple And Samsung Device Sales Posted: 10 Aug 2012 07:21 AM PDT  There’s been no shortage of tantalizing details coming out of Apple and Samsung’s big legal spat in San Jose, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down. Case in point: Samsung’s legal team filed a document (first spotted by AllThingsD) the other day that shed some new light on the two companies’ smartphone and tablet sales over the years. The data was put together by the Invotex Group (who also whipped up this handy PDF chart outlining what Apple thinks it deserves in damages), and it appears they’ve left no stone unturned. Take a look at this little guy, for instance. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on there — 24 of Samsung’s smartphone models are under fire in this case, and there’s sales data here for each of them. In case you don’t quite feel like poring over the entire thing, here it is in a nutshell: Samsung sold a total of 21.2 million of those accused smartphone models between June 2010 and June 2012 which works out to $7.5 billion in sales revenue over the two years. Surprisingly, the top selling Samsung smartphone is the prepaid Galaxy Prevail, with 2.25 million sold during the timeframe in question. Boost Mobile must be mighty pleased. Apple’s numbers on the other hand are a fair bit more imposing — the Cupertino company has sold over 85 million iPhones since the device made its debut back in 2007 (netting Apple a cool $50.7 billion in revenue), but that’s hardly a fair comparison to Samsung’s figure because of the timeframe involved. Apple’s financial calendar doesn’t match up terribly well here, but from Q3 (July) 2010 to Q2 (April) 2012, Apple sold over 60 million iPhones. This still isn’t the most accurate number — the provided sales numbers don’t account for every single one of Samsung’s smartphones — but it’s still a considerable difference between the two. Samsung’s Android devices may be taking over the rest of the world, but it’s still got a hell of a fight in front of it here in the states. Things get even more interesting when we turn to look at tablet performance. Apple has sold a total of 34 million iOS tablets since 2010, raking in $19 billion in revenue as a result. Meanwhile Samsung’s Galaxy Tab sales haven’t been quite as amazing — the Korean electronics giant shipped a total of 1.4 million Galaxy Tabs, Galaxy Tab 10.1s, and Galaxy Tab 10.1 LTEs between October of 2010 and March of this year. Again, it’s worth noting that the portrait this data paints is missing some crucial pieces, like the handful of tablets that Samsung has released since March. There’s a small silver lining to be found here though — as Zach Epstein over at BGR points out, Samsung’s average revenue per tablet during that period was just shy of $450, compared to roughly $353 in revenue for each accused smartphone it sold.
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| iPhones Now Top 5% Of Total E-Commerce Website Traffic Posted: 10 Aug 2012 07:03 AM PDT  It’s interesting to watch the impact that the mobile device explosion has on various industry verticals, and especially so in e-commerce – a market that has yet to take full advantage of the platform by offering mobile-friendly websites and apps. But that’s not stopping people from shopping on mobile by any means. According to new data from e-commerce technology company Monetate, top e-commerce websites receive 3.31% of their total visits from Android smartphones, which is up from 1.76% last year. iPhones, on the other hand, account for 5.41% of those sites’ total traffic, up from 2.45% a year earlier. But even though the iPhone base delivers more visitors, it’s Android users who convert better. 1.26% of Android users convert as compared with 1.00% of those on iPhone. Here’s another figure to throw into the mix: on tablets, Android users again are converting at higher percentage points, with 3.58% converting compared with iPad’s 3.19%. However, the iPad is driving the most tablet traffic to these sites. 88.31% of tablet visits to these e-commerce sites are from iPad, while Kindle Fire and other Android tablets now account for 10% of the market share. Seeing the chart below, you can tell that Android has made some headway into eating into iPad’s dominance here. We asked execs at Monetate why they thought Android users were converting better (percentage wise), and they noted that the difference between the platforms was nominal, but interesting. They’re not sure why it’s the case, however. Could it be that iOS users have other means to shop, such as through native apps? Monetate CMO Kurt Heinemann hedges a guess. “Android devices come in many different configurations whereas the iPhone only comes in one size, he says. “A large portion of Android devices that have been released over the last year have had larger screens and provide a better web surfing experience than a smaller iPhone. With a larger screen and the ability to display more website real estate the user has a more comfortable and less frustrating experience which results in higher conversion.” In case you’re wondering what websites we’re talking about here, Monetate can’t talk in specific out of respect for its customers’ privacy, but it aggregates data from its top 150+ e-commerce customers and samples from over 100 million shopping experiences to reach these figures. Its customer lineup includes QVC, Urban Outfitters, Dick's Sporting Goods, Best Buy and Brooks Brothers, to give you an idea of what types of sites may be included in this study. While Apple and Google battle for market share in terms of traffic, the company’s report found that mobile is one of the fastest-growing customer segments today, and it’s now suggesting to its customers that they experiment with offering alternative ways to allow visitors to checkout without having to pull out a credit card. For example, try PayPal, Monetate tells its customers. It’s also stressing to its e-commerce customers that they need to invest in both web analytics and usability testing to make their sites work better for mobile shoppers because, by doing so, they have a real opportunity to increase their average order value significantly.
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| HTC Reaffirms Android 4.0 Updates Are Coming This Month Posted: 10 Aug 2012 06:45 AM PDT  HTC smartphone owners, take note. Your Ice Cream Sandwich update is coming this month says HTC on its Facebook page. The company previously released a laundry list detailing the ICS roll-out schedule but failed to meet many of its own target dates. But HTC is now stating all the devices on that list will get Android 4.0 by the end of this month. If HTC follows through with this plan, Android 4.0 should hit devices like the Droid Incredible 2, Thunderbolt, Rhyme and Desire S. This is especially good news for the latter two, which HTC previously stated would have ICS by the end of July. Relative to iOS updates, major Android revisions are slow to hit devices. This is for various reasons, too. OEMs and carriers often put the updates through rigorous testing, and furthermore, they have to support a huge number of devices. A Google report released earlier this month notes that 16% of Android devices are now running Android 4.0, up from 10.9% in July. But Gingerbread, released in 2010, is still the dominate Android version and currently powers 60% of the devices on the market.
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| iPhone 5 Battery Images Leak: Only Slighter Larger Than iPhone 4S Battery, Despite Expected LTE Posted: 10 Aug 2012 06:29 AM PDT  In the blogosphere’s continuing quest to assemble a virtual iPhone 5 before Apple unveils a real one in September, 9to5Mac has published images of what appears to be the next iPhone’s battery. Juicy stuff! As expected, the battery is a bit larger than the last iPhone, but not by much. It jumps from 1430mAh in the iPhone 4S (up from 1420mAh in the iPhone 4) to a 1440 mAh battery. With the expected inclusion of LTE, plus Apple’s turn-by-turn mapping (which is a huge battery drain, at least in iOS 6 beta), we must simply hope that Apple’s dual-core SoC will use this relatively limited power source efficiently. According to the label on the battery pack, it was created in June of this year, which is right in line with Apple’s iPhone 5 timing. So what else can we expect in Apple’s next-gen iPhone? For one, a larger 4-inch display at a resolution of 1,136 x 640, along with a new two-tone back panel. You’ll also see a much smaller connector dock along the bottom, as Apple is allegedly replacing the worn out 30-pin dock Apple’s used for so long in its iThings with a 19-pin mini dock. Of course, iOS 6 will ship with the device.
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| This Apple Commercial Was Too Self-Congratulatory To Run Posted: 10 Aug 2012 06:12 AM PDT  It’s not quite fair that this commercial featuring Apple greats Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, George Crow, Bill Atkinson, and Mike Murray never aired, but it’s easy to see why. In it you meet some of the creators of the Mac who go on to offer some insight on the design process and end with the tagline “Incredibly Great.” Arguably, this sort of self-promotion is a little gauche, but it’s definitely nice to see these boys in their prime, talking about something they loved. For context, Smith designed the Mac motherboard while Hertzfeld created many of Mac OS’ UI components. In short, these are the Young Turks of the proto-PC/Mac era. Sadly, the commercial only aired at Apple sales events where this team of Apple Avengers got to tell their tale. BONUS: Check out Hertzfeld’s design for Frox, a home computer that looks more like a mutated Wii than anything available back in 1990.
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| Posted: 10 Aug 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Kid’s learning startup MeeGenius launched in 2010, with the idea of helping children learn by introducing highly curated apps full of licensed and original e-books. The app is available on the iPhone, iPad, and a wide range of Android devices, and has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. Now it’s closed a $2.4 million round of funding to help it expand and add even more kids content. The MeeGenius app is free to download and provides a single place for kid lit, where parents can buy titles and children can read them, all in one place. It has more than 700 titles available for purchase, and there’s no confusing flipping between a store for purchasing and downloading books and one for reading them. It’s also very much a curated experience, providing high-quality content from a variety of sources. MeeGenius works directly with publishers, as well as authors, to bring their titles on board. The startup is also producing its own titles, working with writers, editors, and illustrators to create unique new stories. To date, MeeGenius has sold millions of titles to MeeGenius was founded in April 2010 by Wandy Hoh, a mom of three and a former VP at Pomona Capital. And MeeGenius’s investors are equally passionate about serving kids. The $2.4 million round included investment from Sonja Perkins through Broadway Angels and Sunrise Capital Partners, among others. In addition, Perkins and Sunrise Capital principal Hemang Mehta are on MeeGenius’s board. The app was one of the first to debut on the iPad, and has since expanded to a number of other platforms. It’s got an iPhone and Android app, as well as one for Google TV and the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome app was made to target the education market, and as such, comes with a free 20-book library for educators that have purchased Chromebooks. The startup is based in New York City, and has fewer than ten employees today. Still, it employs a number of freelance writers, editors and consultants, which it will use to add new titles and expand to new markets.
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| Python For Microsoft Excel Company IronSpread Comes Out of Beta, Changes Name To DataNitro Posted: 10 Aug 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Y Combinator Winter 2012 graduate Data Nitro (formerly known as IronSpread) has a simple proposition: it enables you to to use the popular programming language Python in Microsoft Excel. The plugin is free for individual non-commercial and enterprises will pay for the privilege. So far it’s only available for the Excel 2007 and 2010 for Windows. The company has no plans to support OSX. Although power users have long been able to use Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to script Excel, and Microsoft is expected to support JavaScript in Office, Python is a strong addition to the Excel jock’s toolkit. Python is a top — if not the top — language with programmers by a number of metrics. It’s clean, straightforward syntax has made it a popular choice for beginners and introductory programming courses, but its popular in product in many places, including Google and NASA. There’s a lot to like about the language, and the effort spent learning Python for Excel scripting could translate well to other applications. The good news: You can still use all your old VBA scripts, Data Nitro won’t stop them from working. Plus you can use existing Python libraries. The bad news: anyone you send the spreadsheet to will need to install the plugin in order to run the Python script. Other tools for working with Python code in Excel include Pyvot and Pyxll (hat tip to the Hacker News community for the links).
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| Craigslist Tries To Improve Its Image(s): Inline Photos Appearing Alongside Listings Posted: 10 Aug 2012 05:09 AM PDT  Craigslist has been making a lot of moves to ensure that third party developers get off its lawn, but the listings giant is also, it seems, trying to make that lawn a little more attractive for residents. At some point not too long ago it seems, the site quietly introduced a feature that lets users view images inline, on the same page as category listings, and when you hover your cursor on the thumbnail image, it enlarges. In the past, users would have to click through to specific entries to see those pictures; this feature makes that no longer the case, at least in some categories. It’s a small move, both figuratively and literally. But it’s a sign that Craigslist itself is incorporating some of the features that third parties have been developing for sites that utilized listings “scraped” from Craigslist. The improvements come at the same time that Craigslist has been making a lot of moves to restrict how its content gets used elsewhere. Most notably, it has sent cease and desist letters to those sites that scrape its data to use in third-party listings services; and some of those have progressed into actual lawsuits. Craigslist also cut off the ability for Google and other search engines to index its listings in its cache, by excluding high-level categories in its robots.txt file. And last week it began to display an exclusivity clause for all new postings, although now that exclusivity clause has been removed again. The inline images come in the form of a small bit of text that appears on the left side just below a category search. Click on “show images” and they appear alongside the listings heading: “Hide images” will get them to disappear again: Putting your mouse over the image will make it appear larger: As with everything else on the site, the inline image option is very understated. And it only seems to appear in sections of the “for sale” category, not in any of the others. It was brought to our attention today by an anonymous tipster. PCAdvisor, which picked up on the new feature in the middle of July, also seemed to be in the dark about how long the it was there:
For what it’s worth, it looks like this may have been a feature that Craigslist has been experimenting with for a while, with the show image option appearing the upper right corner earlier this year. The site’s strategy to refresh itself and bring people back to using it as a primary source of information has been a longer-term effort. It was looking to hire a usability expert to make a “faster, friendlier and easier” Craigslist back in April. It’s still not quite clear what the real motivation is behind Craigslist’s recent moves to restrict access to its content.* Commercial reasons may be at the heart of Craigslist’s decision to cut off the scrapers. Third-party sites like Padmapper (currently being sued by Craigslist), which were celebrated for making the text-heavy Craigslist considerably easier to use, have been pretty unequivocal about the fact that they sent all traffic back to Craigslist. But at least one of the third party developer who got a C&D letter did admit to TechCrunch that there was good money to be made in AdSense ads running alongside his re-listing service (in its lifetime, his site, which was a side project, made $24,000; since the C&D letter from Craigslist, it has been shut down). So who knows: maybe Craigslist is getting ready to introduce more ads itself. But there may be some higher ethical arguments here, too. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out yesterday, “We understand that Craigslist faces real challenges in trying to preserve its character and does not want third parties to simply reuse its content in ways that are out of line with its user community's expectations and could be harmful to its users.” The EFF counts Craig Newmark as a member of its advisory board, and Craigslist contributes to the EFF. Making images more prominent may be a sign that there is a bigger strategy at play here for CL to try to keep more users directly on its site by improving is usability, but Craigslist could take that a lot further. As the anonymous tipster who contacted TC noted: ”It still looks like shit, but I guess it makes the site more functional.” For starters, the company has yet to launch its own native mobile apps. As with the CL scraping websites, there seem to be plenty of CL mobile apps (here’s the iOS search results for example). Some of these are sold, and some are free; but none appear to be officially linked to the site, although there are versions of the site optimised for tablets and mobiles. Of course, there are a many among those who contribute to Craigslist’s 30 billion monthly pageviews who like the simple, no-frills approach that Craigslist takes. But for those who are looking for more bells and whistles, the startup world is certainly heeding the call. Services like Zaarly and Yardsale are going after specific vertical categories like hired help and individuals selling their own used items, and there are even very occasional examples of services never intended as Craigslist competitors showing signs of being used for that purpose anyway. The question is whether users who want more will have the patience to stick around to see what Craigslist does next, or move on to the next service. “I’d rather see Craigslist get knocked down than to bumble along with ‘improvements’, but at least it’s a sign that they’ll try,” noted reader Andrew Chen to me. *With every article I have written, I’ve tried to contact Craigslist for comment and have never had a response.
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| Principal Mozilla Engineer Mike Hanson Departs, Joins Greylock As EIR Posted: 09 Aug 2012 09:34 PM PDT  Greylock Partners announced tonight that it has added a new member to its team, with Mike Hanson joining the firm this week as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Hanson joins Greylock from Mozilla, where he has been a principal engineer at Mozilla Labs for the last three years, playing a central role in conceiving the company’s distributed identity verification system, also known as BrowserID, and developing APIs and apps for Firefox’s apps platform — among other things. Prior to Mozilla, Hanson was a principal engineer at Cisco, working on app delivery, particularly device virtualization, clustering, as well as data center strategy. Hanson also co-founded and was the chief architect at Reactivity and spent several years at the Apple Research Lab working on Sherlock, perhaps better known as the precursor to Spotlight. He also counts 16 patents to his name. Greylock’s former Entrepreneurs-in-Residence include Josh Silverman, the President of Consumer Services at American Express and former CEO of Skype, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Google VP of Engineering Venkat Panchapakesan, among others. Michael Callahan, the former CTO of PolyServe, is also currently an EIR at Greylock. John Lilly, a partner at Greylock and the former CEO of Mozilla who worked with Hanson at Mozilla among other places, penned the firm’s announcement today — which you can read here. Copied below:
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| GoalHawk Helps You Get Fit And Learn To Code, With A Little Help From Your Friends Posted: 09 Aug 2012 08:19 PM PDT  If you’re having trouble achieving your goals, what you need might be a little social pressure. That’s the idea behind GoalHawk, a new startup in the current Teens in Tech incubator. Right now, GoalHawk is focused on fitness and programming. Granted, there are already plenty of social tools in these areas — that’s particularly true with fitness, but even on the programming side, Codecademy has social features. However, GoalHawk isn’t focused on any particular subject or industry, and is instead trying to build a broader platform for tracking your goals. The social dynamic is also more active — instead of just passively sharing their achievements, users actually get nagged by their friends if they don’t meet their goals. Right now, when you visit the GoalHawk site, you select either fitness, programming, or custom goals. If you’re not building your own custom plan, you choose a set of goals that comes from a partner site (the initial partners include MusclePharm, BodyBuilding.com, and Codecademy). Then you identify three to five Facebook friends who might support you in following the plan, and you send them a message asking them to help out. One everything’s set up, GoalHawk will start giving you goals and deadlines, and you’re supposed to update the site every time you achieve a goal. If you miss a deadline, GoalHawk tells your friends that you slipped, and they’re invited to send you an encouraging message. It’s not just about nagging — your friends can also make pledges, for example promising to take you to a movie or buy you dinner if you reach a certain milestone. And ideally, those supporters would turn into GoalHawk users too, so that you’ve got a network of friends who are all trying to achieve their own goals, and lending support to each other as they do. The company was founded by Sumukh Sridhara and Mark Daniel, who are both about to start college. (Sridhara at UC Berkeley and Daniel at Babson College.) Both of them say they plan to continue working on GoalHawk while at school, and if it really takes off and demands their attention, they’re willing to devote themselves full-time to the company.
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| The Kicking Of RIM’s Tires Continues, As IBM Reportedly Considers Its Enterprise Unit Posted: 09 Aug 2012 08:00 PM PDT  The fear and loathing of RIM has been well-documented by this point. At the end of June, the company released its Q1 2013 earnings, which were more than a little disappointing, with RIM reporting its first operating loss in eight years, that it would be cutting 5K+ employees and that the release of its new BlackBerry was again being delayed — this time until the beginning of 2013. The acquisition rumors had already been swirling around the BlackBerry maker, and since then, they’ve intensified, with some big names kicking the company’s tires. This morning, Chris wrote about Samsung’s confirmation that (again) it was neither considering a buy-out nor a licensing agreement, even though it’s been reported numerous times that it, in fact, it’s been considering both. And, today, Bloomberg has reported that IBM has “made an informal approach” to acquire RIM’s enterprise services unit, which is really at the core of BlackBerry’s business. While RIM has certainly been hurting, the company still has hopes that BlackBerry 10 can reinvigorate consumer interest in its products. That’s obviously part of the reason why RIM’s board has reportedly turned down IBM’s interest in its enterprise unit — after all, as new CEO Thorsten Heins has said (via The Verge), “enterprise is where BlackBerry lives best.” Big Blue obviously knows a thing or two about enterprise, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see it continue to seek an acquisition in the event BlackBerry 10 isn’t the panacea RIM hopes it could be. What’s more, Heins has said in the past that RIM might consider licensing BlackBerry 10 to handset manufacturers, which naturally he believes to be a scenario preferable to one in which RIM is broken up into pieces and sold to the highest bidders. In keeping with that preference, RIM’s board has allegedly nixed the idea of selling its divisions, to both Samsung and now IBM. There are a lot of people (customers and beyond) both quietly and loudly pulling for RIM, hoping that it nails BB 10. However, as the long wait for its arrival continues, the pressure on the company to produce big innovations in the market and release some sort of WonderBerry may be too great. It’s increasingly likely that RIM will have to, at the very least, undergo a major restructuring, and if BB 10 should fail, the enterprise unit will likely curry the highest price as it’s really the most valuable component of RIM’s business. So this probably isn’t the last time we’ll hear reports of big names jockeying for first dibs. Excerpt image from MyBankTracker
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| Y Combinator-Backed Noodle Labs Launches Everyday.me, An “Evernote For Your Life” Posted: 09 Aug 2012 06:53 PM PDT  Noodle Labs, the mobile development startup that’s part of Y Combinator’s summer batch, launches today with its newest product: An iPhone and web app called Everyday.me. Co-founders Yu-Kuan Lin (a former Googler who worked on Maps, specifically for China), Weiting Liu (already a YC alum) and Yu-Te Lin (a former engineering lead at Wyse) describe their new app as “Evernote for your life.” In other words, Everyday.me is a mobile and web-based notebook, with bells and whistles, which allows you to record your life and save those updates indefinitely. It’s a bit like Facebook Timeline were it plugged into all of your social networks and were it tailored to be a personal journal in one timeline. To that point, an even bigger differentiator and likely a point of appeal for many, is that Everyday.me is a private, personal journal. Users can plug in their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter profiles so that each feed is funneled into the app (with Foursquare, Tumblr next up for integration as well as life-logging apps like Nike+ and Fitbit) and can then tag using Twitter-style hashtags to organize and group posts so they’re easier to digest. If you’re looking to tame your Twitter feed, it’s not a bad way to organize them, especially if you’re looking for that kind of functionality within the framework of a note-taking and journalizer. Everyday.me adds to its own feed, then, with some basic emoticons and integrates with your iPhone’s camera, so you can upload pics directly. The founders also said that perhaps the most important aspect of Everyday.me is that it’s available everywhere, on the Web, on your phone (although a few mobile platforms would argue it’s not everywhere, at least not natively), offline and via email. The latter is a nifty little feature, taking a page out of Posterous’ book, meaning that users can update Everyday.me directly from their inbox by sending their emails to post@everyday.me. The co-founders have developed a Quarterly Report, which will will offer a deluxe print edition of your timeline (complete with infographics), inspired by the Feltron Report. And, for the nostalgic among us, the app has a “Blast From The Past” feature, which sends you (via email) a social media update on where you were on that day in the past. Everyday.me is obviously competing with a whole mess of different micro-blogging, journalizing, note-taking and life-logging apps and services, so it has plenty of work ahead. The team will have to nail the user experience to set itself apart from the pack and to help do that, I’d really like to see it be translated to tablets. The team says they’re working on an iPad version, but has no timeline for launch as of yet.
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| One Horrifying Account Of Working At Zynga Posted: 09 Aug 2012 06:05 PM PDT  Divorce, alcoholism, and near worthless stock are the rewards for 12 hour days prepping for a game launch at Zynga, according to one anonymous Quora user who worked there after their company was bought by the gaming giant. The answer was called “butthurt” by one responder. “Sorry you’re not a millionaire after a year of work on a failed product” said another. Indeed it seems a bit overemotional and worth taking with a grain of salt. Long hours and rewards that might not materialize are part of working at startups. Still, the answer has received tons upvotes, including some from former Zynga employees, and sources from inside the company say they’ve seen these hardships first hand. So here’s the grim Quora tale of killing yourself to get to an IPO, just to see your $10 shares dive to $3. [Begin Quora answer from anonymous Zynga employee] I worked for Zynga for a year when my startup was acquired. Within a few months, we were putting in brisk 10 hour days as we started our new project. Six months in a launch date was handed down from above and we shifted to 11 hour days six days a week. People willing to play the politics game were given ‘rockstar’ status, quarterly bonuses and promotions. Project direction and goals shifted daily, innovation of any kind was difficult – we were constantly forced to hew our game closer to the Farmville/Cityville playbook. Six weeks before shipping the studio was flown out to San Francisco to launch our game – 12 hour days seven days a week, free of the distraction of friends, wives and girlfriends. I watched alcoholism and substance abuse skyrocket, relationships crumble (including my own), people slept on office couches, two developers got divorced, one nervous breakdown. They attempted to smooth this over with more stock, free food and t-shirts. Free food doesn’t do you much good when you’ve lost fifteen pounds from not eating. Our game shipped and performed rather dismally, so the bonuses, raises, promotions and rest we were promised didn’t materialize. With a now completely exhausted team, we were expected to work even harder to improve key metrics. Management would divert blame when these unrealistic metrics could not be hit. Our studio manager, possibly the only person who knew how the company was actually performing on a macro level, quit unexpectedly a few weeks after the IPO. But it was all going to be ok, just hang in there, we’d all be rich in a matter of months. We were told point blank in one studio-wide meeting that we would IPO “around $20 a share”, and could expect $100 a share within a year if we “launched one or two more successful titles”. A quick analysis of the company fundamentals placed it closer to $10. It now sits at $2.90. How does it feel? To spend years being worked into the ground, putting your life on hold and being egged along so top brass can cash out millions at $12 a share while the rank and file employees are in a ‘lockout period’? I’ll second ‘devastating’. [End of answer] – The last line refers to a previous Quora answer that describes the stock drop as devastating. There’s definitely conflicting opinions, though. One response from a 4-year Zynga employee said the company is “far from perfect” but that this story could be a “gross exaggeration”, and concluded that, “‘Devastated’ is a bit too dramatic…disappointed seems more fitting.” Now Bloomberg reports that Zynga will hand out more stock to employees to compensate them for the flubbed IPO. Regardless of severity, Zynga’s culture problems may spawn from its inception as a mercenary company. It wasn’t designed to not be evil or make the world more connected like Google or Facebook. It’s a metrics-driven money machine. Yes, it aims to entertain, but also to get players addicted. If you don’t end up with a pot of gold, there’s not as much of a mission to be proud of, and that can lead to spiteful employees. The hard startup lifestyle only works if you love your job. Check out the original question on Quora and downvote if you think this is bullshit, upvote what you think is right, and give your own account if you actually worked at Zynga. Postscript: I agree with Drew Olanoff. This person joined Zynga with the wrong attitude. No amount of money is worth being miserable. Quit, and go do great things.
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| Japan’s DeNA Appears Unfazed By Gaming Mechanics Ban As Profit Is Up 20% Posted: 09 Aug 2012 05:50 PM PDT  At least for the time being, Japan’s multibillion dollar gaming giant DeNA appears to be unaffected by the government’s recent inquiry into ‘gacha’ gaming mechanics. Profits were up 20 percent year-over-year to 10 billion yen ($127.3 million), and rose 6 percent quarter-over-quarter. Overall revenue was up 37 percent to $605.9 million. Japanese gaming companies have faced some headwinds in the early part of this year as the country’s consumer affairs agency cracked down on a gambling or ‘wishing well’-like gaming mechanic called kompu gacha that randomly awards players prizes (kind of like a slot machine). The biggest mobile gaming companies in the country like DeNA and GREE have stepped back from using them, which has put downward pressure on their share prices. DeNA removed these mechanics from its games in May (or two months into the quarter). The company said that increased spending on virtual currency offset the loss of these mechanics, although we’ll only see the real effects perhaps in the next quarter. “There was some concern in the investor community that it would have a pretty dramatic impact on sales and the good news for us is that it didn’t really have the type of impact that was feared,” said Neil Young, a director at DeNA and the CEO of Ngmoco, the mobile-gaming network the company acquired in 2010 for up to $403 million. In another promising bit of news, DeNA said that it saw $10 million in Moba-coin consumption in July from the Western-facing side of its mobile gaming platform Mobage. In an effort to keep growing beyond their relatively saturated home markets of Japan, both DeNA and GREE have made an aggressive push toward luring in Western audiences with splashy acquisitions of U.S.-gaming startups like Ngmoco, OpenFeint and Funzio. Young said Mobage now has 45 million registered users, although he didn’t share daily or monthly actives. Zynga has at least 33 million daily active users on mobile. Fueling that growth in Western revenues was a trading card title called Rage of Bahamut, which sat on Google Play’s top-grossing charts for 17 weeks. Some other mid or hard-core titles like Blood Brothers are also attracted average revenue per daily active users of about $1. DeNA’s shares were unchanged on the news at 1,810 yen, giving the company a market capitalization of $3.29 billion. Like Zynga and every other contemporary, freemium gaming counterpart DeNA has, everyone’s valuations are down significantly from the beginning of the year. DeNA shares are down only 21.6 percent from the beginning of the year, however. DeNA said for the next quarter it expects to see revenue up by 40 percent year-over-year to $1.24 billion and profit up by a similar ratio to $272.4 million. “The challenge for us is to prove to the investor community that our market cap has been limited by speculation on the Japanese market,” Young said. He added, “To be successful, gaming companies need to be 1) global 2) prove they can monetize and 3) be on mobile. DeNA is well-positioned in that regard.”
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| EVE Online Maker CCP Games Raises $20M Posted: 09 Aug 2012 05:26 PM PDT  CCP Games, the Iceland-headquartered company behind the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game EVE Online, says it has raised $20 million in new funding. The funding comes in the form of convertible bonds raised from Icelandic institutional investors, according to Chief Financial Officer Joe Gallo. Founded in 1997, CCP previously raised $20 million in equity financing. Back in February, CCP executives told me that EVE Online saw $66 million in revenue last year. Chief Marketing Officer David Reid says the company is now gearing up for the launch of its next title, the first-person shooter DUST 514, which is currently in beta testing and is supposedly on-track for a 2012 release on the Playstation 3. With DUST, CCP is experimenting with a new model for console-based first-person shooters — the game will be free to play, with players instead paying for in-game goods. Perhaps even more impressive than the business model is the fact that the planet-based action of DUST will be integrated with the space setting of EVE Online, so that player activity in one game can affect the world of the other. The two games were kept separate for the initial player testing, but Reid says CCP is currently in the process of merging the two worlds, allowing players in both games to chat with each other and EVE players to cause some havoc in DUST through orbital strikes. In part, the funding will be used to promote the DUST launch. Reid acknowledges that it’s going to be a crowded fall for video games, with a number of big releases like Halo 4 on the schedule. CCP doesn’t intend to “go head-to-head with EA and Activision,” but since the success of an online game doesn’t depend on driving a massive amount of first day sales, Reid says the company can take a more patient, long-term approach to its marketing campaign. The launch is also coming after the disappointing performance of the highly anticipated MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic. Reid points to The Old Republic as a sign that “players by-and-large are consuming the content of triple-A games faster than anybody is able to develop them.” He contrasts that design- and story-heavy approach with CCP’s philosophy in EVE and DUST, where the universe is more of a “sandbox” and “the players become the content in the end.” In addition to launching DUST, Reid says the funding will allow CCP to prepare for an IPO. The company doesn’t have any immediate plans to go public, but he says the money “allows us is to do some of the things you need to do for IPO preparedness,” such as building greater redundancy into its computer systems, so that it’s ready to go public when and if the time is right.
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| Open? Yeah, Sure. Sorry Oracle, You’re Still Full Of It Posted: 09 Aug 2012 05:17 PM PDT  Bob Evans has a colorful past. He works at Oracle these days as what I would call a king’s blogger except that he isn’t doing very well even with the apparent influence of the king himself. Bob used to write for SAP where he penned his own gems about Oracle. The watchmen at Oracle thought Bob did such a good job that they decided to hire him. Now Bob turns on his blog flame against Oracle’s critics. Bob decided to attack me yesterday in a post he wrote. It’s an odd one about how “TechCrunch is Clueless About The Cloud.” It’s their attempt to rebuke my post last week about how Oracle will be the big loser when IT gets virtualized. I have been critiquing Oracle for some time about its cloudwashing, the way the company has acted in the open source community and Larry Ellison’s general bombastic antics. The consistent critique from the industry overall has had its effects. Oracle is a company that is trying to distract the market from some considerable flaws in its long-term strategy. The cloud is important for Oracle but only because the company has to make it sound like they actually have something there. They are not seen as a significant player. Yes, it has Fusion, what it calls cloud-based apps. But it is all tied to on-premise and thus the almighty Oracle database. But there is no real platform as a service environment. There is Java Service, which has not been released yet. The Oracle cloud is not elastic, nor mulit-tenant. My thought is that Larry Ellison got so pissed off that he ordered Bob to write the post decrying my so called baseless claims. Larry is deeply involved in acquisitions so the post struck a nerve. There are shareholders out there who may have questions like mine. Bob’s post has all of Larry’s markings. The attacks, the double talk and the rule of opposites that I always apply to Larry. Whatever Larry says, think the opposite. If he says cloud, it is not. If he says open he means closed. And so on. Bob rants about my baseless remarks, my sloppy work and my audacity for writing such outrageous claims. Whew. What a reflection of Oracle’s insecurities about how it really is threatened by the new movement to distributed infrastructures and open, loosely coupled cloud environments. Let’s look at the facts: I have talked to several people since Bob wrote his Larryesque post. The consensus is overwhelming that Xsigo is a closed, proprietary technology that Oracle will use to optimize its own stack. Eric Johnson, CEO of Adara Networks stated to me that it is apparent from Xsigo’s own publicly available information that Xsigo’s NIC does not have any open APIs. Xsigo works off a proprietary driver. You have a switch and a server with the Xsigo device in between. The device is not fully open to be programmed. It is a proprietary device with proprietary I/O that Xsigo is seeking to patent. With this closed environment, Oracle can easily plug it in to its own converged infrastructure. The point of software defined networking (SDN) is that you have software that can program the hardware, Johnson said, That’s what you can do with OpenFlow, the effort to open software defined networking. Companies that use OpenFlow include IBM, HP and Google. “There is nothing apparent that allows the core functionality to be programmed externally,” Johnson said. Xsigo does not fit with open or the principles of SDN. Bob has a nice quote from Oracle Product Manager Raju Penumatcha. Of course, Raju says there is no truth to my story. It’s funny because he also says that Oracle would tune other company’s products to work well with its own stack. Of course! But read what he says carefully. Oracle is optimizing Xsigo for its own stack. It is not optimizing for other platforms from Google or IBM for that matter. Open would be anathema to Oracle. Oracle has proprietary infrastructure, databases and apps. Opening it would mean right sizing its stack to other apps. That would cave in its business model that relies on a closed, proprietary model. It’s also why the cloud is really not what Oracle is selling. The cloud is about being modular and interoperable. OpenStack lets any hypervisor run on any set of machines. That does not fit with the Oracle way of doing business. George Reese, CEO of EnStratus said Oracle is still openly hostile to running anything besides Oracle virtual machines in its environment. For years the company has battled with VMware to keep its virtualization technology off the Oracle stack. George aid Oracle does not have a story for the way the market is going. “Oracle’s cash cow is its database engine,” he said. “Everything else is irrelevant.” Bob says Oracle runs on Amazon Web Services. He writes:
That’s true but it would be stretching it to say that Oracle running on AWS has any value. George says what you can run in AWS is essentially crippled. It is not what customers want. They want the Oracle stack in the cloud but that’s not available. Oracle put the “cloud” name on its products. But that’s just cloudwashing. Now if Oracle came out in support of OpenStack that would be another matter. Oracle makes its money selling enterprise licenses. In the future, enterprise shops will use a variety of different database environments such as Riak, Cassandra and Mongo DB. Bob also brings up IBM. Here’s the difference between the two companies. IBM has a legacy product portfolio but its behavior is entirely different. IBM is associated with the Linux movement. Oracle has been a terrible steward of Java and MySQL. Reese makes that point and it is what you hear often in the open source community. I contacted an Oracle spokesperson for comment but have not yet heard back. I could go on and on. But I’d like to end with saying that I am honored the king’s blogger took the time to attack me. For me, it shows I am doing something right.
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| Online Education Degrees Now Dwarf Traditional Universities Posted: 09 Aug 2012 04:10 PM PDT  Education degrees earned at online universities now dwarf those of traditional universities. USA Today analyzed recent Department of Education data and found that online education behemoth, the University of Phoenix, awarded more than twice as many education degrees as its closest traditional competitor, Arizona State University (5,976 vs. 2,075). “We shouldn’t be surprised because the whole industry is moving in that direction,” said dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, Robert Pianta. “The thing I would be interested in knowing is the degree to which they are simply pushing these things out in order to generate dollars or whether there’s some real innovation in there.” While ASU still awards the most bachelor degrees, the other top 4 online universities, 3 of which are for-profit, hand out far more advanced degrees, which are increasingly important for hiring and promotion. This, of course, says nothing about the quality of online degrees. Senator Tom Harkin’s office released a blistering report, noting that though only 10% of enrolled students are with online schools, they account for roughly 50% of student loan defaults. Unfortunately, there’s no good way to compare the quality of offline to online degrees. Schools and unions are still in a heated debate over how to measure the quality of existing teachers, largely because we still don’t know how to measure learning. "Children are educated and learn over a period of time, but we have this notion that children are to make a year's growth for every year they're in school," said Paul Heckman, UC Davis’ Associate Dean of Education, "This is … a problem, because children do not develop in nine-month chunks except during gestation." Still, the convenience factor for online education is a major appeal. Meredith Curley, dean of the University of Phoenix College of Education, said that the average age of the student is 33, and many come back after starting families. Do you think it makes a difference whether a teacher was trained online or at a traditional college? [Image Credit: Flickr User CollegeDegrees360]
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| Startup Accelerator TechStars Showcases 11 New Startups At Boulder Demo Day Posted: 09 Aug 2012 04:01 PM PDT  Today, seed fund and accelerator TechStars hosted its “Demo Day” in Boulder, where it showcased its 11 newest startups. With an average funding of $1.28 million raised per TechStars-backed company so far, it was an important day for these new companies as the room was full of investors at the Boulder Theater. TechStars was founded in 2006 in Boulder but now holds programs in Boston, New York City and Seattle as well. Last April, it debuted a new accelerator called TechStars Cloud that focuses exclusively on backing cloud computing and infrastructure startups. Right now, TechStars invests $18,000 in seed funding and provides an optional $100,000 convertible debt note for every startup. Only 17 out of 126 startups have failed since 2006. 13 were acquired. Click to view slideshow.Here’s a look at the 11 finalists. Ubooly is a stuffed animal for kids ages 5-10 that wakes up when parents put their iPhone inside the plush, orange little character. It’s an educational toy powered by a smart phone that brings kids on adventures, teaches them foreign languages and more. Ubooly is voice activated so kids can talk to their Ubooly and make decisions. Updates to Ubooly are made via wifi so it’s always learning. Ubooly is launching on Thursday but its kiddo beta testers are already in love with him. DealAngel is a site that shows what the true price of a hotel room, anywhere in the world should be on any day of the year. It takes into account when there are conferences, time of year, proximity to landmarks, etc. It is not influenced by any hotel chain (like Orbitz or Travelocity or other hotel deal sites) but rather takes into account historical rates and data to show travelers if a hotel is a good deal or a rip-off. Verbalizeit offers travelers (and businesses) access to a human translator anywhere in the world. It’s available in five languages – Spanish, French, Mandarin, Hindi, and Portuguese (the language options are expanding as they grow). It costs $5 for 5 minutes for a traveler to call, tell the translator what they need in a taxi, a pharmacy, a restaurant, anywhere. There are price packages for businesses as well. They have already partnered with Skype and TripLingo. PivotDesk is launching in Denver/Boulder to help increase entrepreneurial density by giving businesses a way to rent out their extra office space. It’s co-working on steroids. Entrepreneurs and founders can avoid long term office leases for a small amount of space. ROXIMITY is a location based alert and deals platform. It allows merchants to send targeted messages to consumers as they pass their cars. Integrated into a vehicle’s sync system, consumers can tell ROXIMITY using hands free, voice command, that they are hungry for lunch and it will locate lunch deals nearby. 27Perry is helping clothing and furniture consignment stores to go online in a highly curated way. There is an estimated trillion dollars worth of consignment inventory and they are entering into the untapped world of consignment goods. 27Perry works with independent thrift stores across the country to feature the best items on sale. 27Perry is not in market yet and they are raising at seed round of $350K. RollSale is the Lending Tree for used cars. It offers a marketplace for people selling their used car to market it and sell it to car dealers. It takes the wheeling and dealing out of selling a used car. There are approximately 250 million used cars in the united states which a market of $325 billion (transactions make up $3.6B slice of the pie). SalesLoft is an enterprise application that works in Salesforce and other CRM tools to help sales professionals to engage with their clients and prospects in a deeper, more meaningful way. This tool is targeting the $400B sales industry. Good sales people do their due diligence before reaching out to a sales lead so SalesLoft helps them do that quicker. By pulling in social data (like LinkedIn updates and tweets) and bio information right into a CRM, SalesLoft enables each touch-point for sales folks to be relevant, fresh and meaningful. MobiPlug is putting the internet into your things! Mobiplug makes home automation a reality by providing a single box (a gateway) to control all wifi enabled devices like the thermostat, door locks, lights, TVs, garage doors, home security devices/alarms. MobiPlug lets homeowners manage their devices right from their smartphone with a single application that talks to various protocols and off the shelf devices. There’s no contract unlike Xfinity, ADT and other competitors and it’s much more affordable and integrated. Digital Ocean is the world’s simplest cloud hosting service with unlimited bandwidth. Aimed at individuals and startup companies, Digital Ocean lets anyone deploy a virtual server in less than a minute. In 2011, cloud hosting market was at $3.7B and Digital Ocean is set to focus on a $1B part of that market that represents small businesses and developers that use cloud hosting for new projects, hosting personal sites, etc. Digital Ocean already has 500 active customers and 10,000 virtual servers (5000 were added in the past 30 days). Birdbox is a smart box for anyone’s photos and videos. Great for families, parents and couples, BirdBox organizes photos and videos in one place making them searchable anywhere. With a estimated billion new photos taken everyday and 48 hours of video updated to YouTube every minute, Birdbox is a way to sort and manage this media posted on various networks. In addition to time, location and date a photo or video was shot, Birdbox maintains the social context of the photo and video including comments, retweets, tags and more.
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