Crazy For Tech - Gadgets,Cell Phones,Cameras » data

Halliburton Dumps RIM, Chooses iPhones For 4,500 Employees

Achilles — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:26:22 +0000

To say that RIM has had a tough time these past few months is an understatement, and today’s news probably won’t help raise the morale around Waterloo. According to AppleInsider , oilfield services giant Halliburton will soon be migrating their BlackBerry-toting workforce to run exclusively on a new fleet of iPhones. I can also imagine the conversation now. “Sorry RIM, it’s not you, it’s us… alright, fine, it really is you.” The news was sent out via an internal newsletter, which mentions that the reason for the switch was because the company “determined that the iOS platform offered the best capabilities, controls and security for application development.” It goes on to offer a basic timeline for the process — all 4,500 of Halliburton’s employee-operating BlackBerrys will be swapped for iPhones over the course of the next two years. So what does this development mean for RIM? Not much at all, if Halliburton was the only company to jump ship. It’s clear that they’re not the only ones in search of some greener pastures — Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer pointed out during the company’s Q1 2012 earnings call that nearly all of the top Fortune 500 companies “now approve and support iPhones on their networks,” including Credit Suisse , Kimberly Clark, St. Jude Medical, and Nike. Of course, that hardly means that all or even most of them will transition their workforce from one platform to the other. Still, it clearly shows that these companies are considering different, more compelling mobile options to help conduct their business. And with the first BlackBerry 10 device not slated to ship until much later this year , RIM may not have too many chances left to show off what they’re really capable of. In the meantime, RIM continues to illustrate how serious they are about the enterprise market with the launch of initiatives like BlackBerry Cloud Services , which allows businesses using Microsoft Office 365 more fine-grained control over devices and their data. It’s clear that RIM isn’t going to give up their hard-won enterprise segment without a fight, but if their recently leaked roadmap is any indication, they’re running awfully low on bullets right now.

See the original post:
Halliburton Dumps RIM, Chooses iPhones For 4,500 Employees

Groupon Buys eCommerce Data Targeting Startup (And Angelpad Alumnus) Adku

kram412 — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:27:29 +0000

I love the smell of acquisitions in the morning! We’ve just heard that Groupon has acquired Adku , a stealth startup that uses big data in order to personalize the online shopping experience for people visiting eCommerce sites like eBay, Amazon and Zappos. The company built their personalized targeting technology in three months, and have basically been in stealth since they launched at the Angelpad Demo day a year and a half ago. Adku is backed by Greylock Partners , Battery Ventures and True Ventures in addition to being an Angelpad startup. Although CEO Ajit Varma and several members of the six person team are former Googlers, from what I’m hearing this wasn’t a talent acquisition or acqhire but a team + technology play – with a price beyond $10 million. Varma would not disclose what the team will be working on when they get to Groupon. While it’s not clear what the technology will be applied to, the acquisition makes sense on a lot of levels, especially because a personalized experience is where most of eCommerce is headed. Greylock VC David Thacker now runs product for Groupon, so that couldn’t have hurt either. Wrote Varma in a blog post, “We started talking to Groupon to bring our technology to more customers and quickly realized that we wanted to be a deeper part of a company that people love and is empowering merchants and customers in a way that’s never been done before.” Stay tuned! OK @ adku (three former Google engineers) is a company that Techcrunch will slobber over. Dynamic content. Interesting company.— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) November 11, 2010

Original post:
Groupon Buys eCommerce Data Targeting Startup (And Angelpad Alumnus) Adku

Investors Drive $ZNGA Up 26% In Two Days Following Facebook IPO Filing

Achilles — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:54:13 +0000

Those of us who have been following the social gaming industry already know that Zynga makes up a big portion of Facebook’s revenues. But lots of public investors only seem to have gotten the memo on Wednesday evening, when Facebook’s S-1 filing revealed that the developer accounts for 12% of its total revenues , or $445 million. In the two days since, Zynga’s stock has gone up more than 26%, to close at $13.39 this evening. This is far more than most analysts had previously projected. The ones who began covering Zynga after its December IPO had pegged its stock well under ten bucks. When analysts at banks who underwrote Zynga entered the fray a couple weeks ago, they were unsurprisingly more bullish . Following the end of the quiet period, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Barclays Capital, along with analysts from banks not involved in the IPO, all put their target price above Zynga’s public opening amount of $10. This drove the Street’s average target price up to $11.08, as you can see from the StreetInsider table below. Existing industry research, namely the Inside Virtual Goods report from my previous company, Inside Network , had indicated as of last fall that virtual goods revenue from Facebook applications reached $500 million last year . Facebook’s prospectus more than confirmed this on Wednesday, revealing that a strong fourth quarter had actually put the number a little higher, at $557 million. There are other data points you can use to try to figure out Zynga’s position with that number. AppData traffic shows that it has a dominant traffic position on Facebook’s platform. It gets 90% of its revenue from Facebook, but first Facebook collects 30% of its virtual goods transaction sales, per terms that have been in effect since midway through last year. And, Zynga has since at least 2009 used Facebook ads as a main way to bring in new and returning users. The problem is how to add this up. The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler explains the confusion in how to calculate the results: Different assumptions lead to different estimates for Zynga’s fourth-quarter “bookings,” which is the preferred method for measuring Zynga’s top line. Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter’s quick-and-dirty analysis says Facebook’s disclosure implies $268 million for Zynga’s bookings for the fourth quarter, short of the $302 million analysts are expecting. Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian digs deeper, making more assumptions, and comes out with a number of $315 million. Both analyses included many caveats. Heavy trading volumes indicate high volatility among investors. Zynga will do its first ever earnings call on February 14th. Get ready for some new estimates.

More here:
Investors Drive $ZNGA Up 26% In Two Days Following Facebook IPO Filing

The Peek Bites The Dust

ACMAir — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:33:27 +0000

You may remember the Peek , a device that showed up back in 2008 (so long ago, now!) offering nothing but email. That’s right, nothing but email in an age when smartphones were already becoming popular, and the iPhone was changing the way people thought about interacting with their data. In a way, it was genius: limiting the service and the device made it easy to explain and simple to use. It does email, period. An interesting tack, and one that kept them rolling for a few years, but alas, Peek is finally going to take the big sleep. Despite revising the hardware and switching up the pricing, the Peek couldn’t maintain relevance in the face of smartphones and tablets. There was always the question of whether it was a legitimate market at all, but I object to that objection. I think it’s a brilliant proposition, and one many people found useful. But you just can’t fight progress, and while phones and tablets got more capable, they also got easier to use. Ironically, it might have been trying to compete that made the Peek at last irrelevant. The people who liked it didn’t think of it as a less-capable smartphone, but as a single-purpose device, like a fork or a measuring tape. That value proposition, focus, is something we’re seeing in practice in single-purpose sites like Imgur and so on. But the philosophy of the mobile phone as Swiss army knife has taken over in the hardware field, so devices like the Peek got left behind. The Verge talked to the CEO , and he said that there are a few thousand devices lying around in warehouses, and he’d like to put them into the hands of interested hackers. The Peek 9 was a perfectly workable piece of hardware, though not particularly powerful, but perhaps it could be made into something interesting or useful by a little creative coding. Head over there for more info. Update : It should be noted that this isn’t the end for Peek the company , only Peek the service and line of devices. Peek Inc actually just closed a big funding round to fuel its work bringing smartphone-type software to low-cost mobile devices. We’ll report more on that as the story develops.

TCTV: In the Studio, Greylock’s John Lilly Examines the Opportunities in Personal Health Data

kram412 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:00:51 +0000

Editor’s note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil “In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV continues today with a guest who was once a Senior Scientist at Apple and CEO of Mozilla Corporation before eventually making the trek up Sand Hill Road, where today he’s a partner at a leading venture capital firm. John Lilly , an investor with Greylock Partners , has kept himself busy. Having invested already in properties like Tumblr, Dropbox, and a series of others through his firm’s early-stage “Discovery Fund,” one of the new areas Lilly is investigating today is world of personal health data and systems. The sheer number of new companies and devices on the market offering consumer-level health solutions is simply staggering. We have an explosion in “computing devices” (phones and sensors), new hardware (like Fitbit ), new software services (like Cake Health ), and social systems and platforms that attempt to weave these all together to form some type of personalized representation of our current state of health and where we’d aspire to be. (Note: There are simply way to many companies in the health space to mention them all here. You can find more comprehensive lists on Quora and by poking around the website of Rock Health , an incubator designed to help launch health-focused startups. ) In this short discussion, Lilly brings some of his latest blog entries on personal health data and social health systems to life. Because he has a background in hardware, sensors, software, and now consumer products, Lilly has a unique perspective on where the real opportunities may lie relative to all the approaches currently on the market. In this talk, he’s able to paint a picture of how hardware, software, and social systems could marry to form a truly personalized health experience for the consumer, especially set against the backdrop of aggregate population data. For those entrepreneurs working away on the health devices, the health software approaches, and the ways in which we’ll share our data in social systems, this talk with Lilly is a great chance to learn from someone who has been thinking deeply about the opportunity a few years down the road, with an eye focused on the convergence of the hardware, software, and social.

More:
TCTV: In the Studio, Greylock’s John Lilly Examines the Opportunities in Personal Health Data

Visualizing Facebook’s Media Storage: How Big Is 100 Petabytes?

Administrator — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:02:31 +0000

Just a little tidbit from everyone’s favorite reading material this week, the Facebook IPO filing : the company noted that it now stores over 100 petabytes of media (photos and videos) uploaded by its 845 million users. In case “100 petabytes” didn’t blow you over, the filing further explains that’s equal to “100 quadrillion bytes.” OK, now you’re just showing off, Facebook. The number was thrown out there in the section where Facebook details its data management and personalization technologies. It’s the technical part of the S-1 which focused on the company’s in-house technology like Haystack , which allows Facebook to efficiently serve and store data, Apache Hive , a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop, and HipHop , a tool that transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++ code. But 100 petabytes is such a larger number, that’s it’s hard to really wrap your mind around it. However, with a little brainstorming, and the clever infographic created by TechCrunch’s Bryce Durbin , we came up with a way to visualize the size of Facebook’s media store. Using common 320 GB hard drives stacked on top of each other, Facebook’s collection of users’ photos and videos would taller than the world’s largest buildings, many times over. Mind, blown.

Read more from the original source:
Visualizing Facebook’s Media Storage: How Big Is 100 Petabytes?

Coming Off Big Holiday Season, Sincerely Ink’s Mobile Postcards Now Ready For Valentine’s Day

Administrator — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:56:27 +0000

Sincerely , the maker of mobile apps that let you send your photos as print postcards, is pushing out a new version of its Sincerely Ink app today. The main change is that the theme now features Valentine’s Day cards, as well as other themes like Birthdays or New Year’s. Not huge news in and of itself, but get ready for many more updates like this — the Christmas season went so well for the company that it’s doubling down on holiday editions Its largest mobile app, Postagram (a regular top app in the iTunes photo app category) saw 39% of its users also install and send a card using the Sincerely Ink app, founder Matt Brezina tells me. Postagram also lets you mail high-quality print versions of phone photos, and it could theoretically also be used during the holidays. So, the cross-promotion number means that lots of users are serious about themed cards for special occasions, and that Sincerely’s theme changes are hitting home with them. The Ink app includes 20 Valentine’s Day-themed cards, although there are also new Thank You and Birthday cards available now. Brezina says they’re adding more designs all the time without the app itself needing to be updated. Customization options include photo filters and a section for including a personalized message. Cards cost $1.99 for a glossy 5×7 inch photo print, including postage in the US, Canada and the UK. Photos ship within 3 to 7 days. In other parts of the world, the price goes up by a dollar, and mailing can take up to a few weeks. The app is available for iOS and Android devices. The first 100 TechCrunch readers can follow this link , enter “vdaytc” and send a free card.

Tucows Officially Launches Ting, A More Thoughtful Wireless Carrier

kram412 — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:14:57 +0000

Tucows is probably best known for their slew of web services and their extensive reseller network, but CEO Elliot Noss sees room to grow in another space: mobile. After spending months conducting a private beta for a few hundred users, Tucows has officially opened up their Ting wireless service to all comers. The goal? To offer wireless customers “a whole different type of carrier relationship.” “Big name carriers have services meant to maximize their profitability, not their service to customers,” Noss told me. That customer-centric vision extends from Ting’s selection of voice plans (there are six, with minute buckets ranging from 0 to 3,000) to customer service (there are no tiers, and all reps can provide “geek-powered” support) to their handling of overages. Like I mentioned earlier, Ting has six tiers of voice plans . If you’re signed up for the 500 minute plan and go over on your allotment, you’re automatically bumped up to the next plan. While thoughtful, it can at times be worse than the standard overage model imposed by other carriers, especially if you only tiptoe over your limit. Even so, Ting attempts to make up for this by having it work in the opposite direction too — you’ll automatically be bumped into a lower plan and credited accordingly if you use fewer minutes than the month before. Just for kicks, I threw my own Verizon bill into the Ting savings calculator to see how much I could potentially save should I decide to make the switch. For my two-person 700 minute Verizon family plan with 2GB of data and 1,000 messages per person, Ting estimates that I could save nearly $436 each year. Maybe not the most impressive savings I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly enough give me pause. There are more savings to be had if you or your loved ones aren’t huge data hogs (like me), as their data packages are easily the priciest parts of the Ting formula. At this stage in the game, hardware choices are a bit limited. Ting service uses Sprint’s mobile network to provide the actual connectivity, so most of the handsets in Ting’s lineup should seem familiar to Sprint customers and phone enthusiasts. The newest device in the lineup is Motorola’s angular Photon 4G, while mid-range Android devices, flip phones, and mobile broadband devices fill out the rest of their roster. In typical MVNO fashion Ting doesn’t bind users to long-term contracts, but that leaves those users paying the full retail price for their hardware. While it’s still usually a better deal that getting a subsidy on a phone and paying higher bills each month for two years, people could get (understandably) gun-shy when it comes to taking the plunge on an unknown entity like Ting. Even so, Ting may be able to drive adoption thanks to some help from its parent company. MVNOs historically haven’t had much sticking power, but Ting could potentially lean on Tucows prodigious list of reseller partners. According to Noss, Tucows resellers will also be able to offer Ting wireless service to their own customers, while Tucows handles payment processing and billing. If reseller reception of Ting is positive — and Noss tells me that so far, it is — then Ting’s lack of a physical retail presence could be offset by leveraging existing Tucows affiliates. Noss’s plan for Ting is to start off small, with their first promotional efforts slated to begin in the middle of this month. Frankly, I wish them all the best — while Ting isn’t a perfect service, their twist on wireless service has some facets that I think every carrier could benefit from absconding with. In the meantime though, Noss is content to keep his expectations pretty grounded. “If in one year, we were known as the carrier that sophisticated users were using, that’s fine by me.”

Here is the original:
Tucows Officially Launches Ting, A More Thoughtful Wireless Carrier

Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile

kram412 — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:58:16 +0000

As part of its initial filing to go public, Facebook has just revealed some new user numbers that illustrate just how big it is. It had 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users as of December, for year over year growth of 39% and 48% respectively. Mobile is also now half the user base, with 425 million monthly actives. Some other stats, which are a bit more vague: 100 billion friend connections as of the end of last year, and 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the last three months of the year. All in all, this basically stacks up with what the company has previously shared. It said in September that it had some 800 million MAUs. One other point on the numbers is that Facebook is providing a fairly extensive caveat around what it’s counting: The numbers of monthly active users (MAUs) and daily active users (DAUs) presented in this prospectus are based on internal company data and we use these numbers in managing our business. We believe that our MAU and DAU numbers are reasonable estimates, and we take measures to improve their accuracy, such as eliminating known fictitious or duplicate accounts. There are inherent challenges in measuring usage across large online and mobile populations around the world. For example, there may be individuals who have multiple Facebook accounts in violation of our terms of service, despite our efforts to detect and suppress such behavior. As another example, applications on certain mobile devices may automatically contact our servers for regular updates with no user action involved, and this activity may cause our system to count the user associated with such a device as an active user of Facebook. We estimate that less than 5% of our estimate of worldwide DAUs as of December 31, 2011 could have resulted from this type of automatic mobile activity and that this type of activity had an even smaller effect on our estimate of worldwide MAUs. The impact of this automatic activity on our metrics may vary by geography, as mobile usage varies in different regions of the world. In addition, our data regarding the geographic location of our users is based on a number of factors, such as IP address, which may not always accurately reflect user location. We regularly review and may adjust our processes for calculating these metrics to improve their accuracy. In addition, our MAU and DAU estimates will differ from estimates published by third parties due to differences in methodology. For example, some third parties do not count mobile users.

Go here to read the rest:
Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile

Glooko Raises $3.5M To Connect Glucose Meters To iPhones For Tracking Diabetes

Administrator — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:00:35 +0000

Glooko , the developer of a unique hardware device and mobile app solution for people with diabetes, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership, with participation from existing investors, including Bill Campbell, Vint Cerf, Judy Estrin and Andy Hertzfeld, Venky Harinarayan, Russell Hirsch and Xtreme Labs. Chamath Palihapitiya , Founder and Managing Partner of The Social+Capital Partnership will be joining Glooko’s board. Launched last year, Glooko is a digital logbook for people with diabetes who have to check their blood sugar every day. There are dozens of glucose logbooks in iTunes, but almost all of them require manual entry. What makes Glooko different is that the company designed a $40 cable ( sold separately ) that works with seven of the top glucose meters. You just plug it into both devices and it downloads your daily readings. The app itself is free. The digital log book allows users to review daily blood sugar levels, annotate them and share the results with their physician. It lets you mark whether the reading was done before or after a meal, add notes, and email or fax a 14-day summary to your doctor. The company charges for the cable. Glooko today released a new version of the Glooko Logbook app that supports the Bayer’s Breeze 2 meter, including a real-time food database, a 30-day logbook, and provides availability in Canada. There are currently 25 million people living with diabetes in the U.S. today, and Yogen Dalal, Glooko co-founder and chairman, said that people with blood sugar meters couldn’t do anything but read results on the meter itself, making logging results a visualizing this data cumbersome. While there have been a number of digital readers that have emerged on the market over the past year which plug into smartphones, the beauty of Glooko is that it works with the top seven devices on the market. So users don’t need to purchase and learn how to use a whole new measurement device. “Proactive and ongoing self-management of one’s health can now be a reality using mobile devices and well-designed software,” said Palihapitiya. “Glooko has made important progress in helping individuals better manage one of the most pervasive diseases of our generation.” There is also future potential in actually analyzing the data collected from users. Parsing and plotting these data points on a graph requires FDA clearance, explains Dalal. Dalal says Glooko currently has 1,000 plus users, and the response has been overwhlemingly positive. He adds that Android integration is on the horizon. The new funding will be used to expand to other platforms and for user acquisition.

See more here:
Glooko Raises $3.5M To Connect Glucose Meters To iPhones For Tracking Diabetes