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Google Redesigns Its iPhone Search App To Be Faster And Prettier

admin — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:25:10 +0000

Google today launched version 2.0 of its search app for iPhone . Google completely overhauled the design of the app , which now looks and feels more like the app’s iPad version the company launched last November. The new version feels significantly faster than the last one and the new design works especially well for image searches. In line with last year’s iPad update, the new app now features the ability to easily swipe back and forth between your search results and the pages you clicked on. It’s also become significantly easier to switch between Google’s various search features like images, places, shopping and videos. Whenever you swipe up to the top of the search results page now, a new menu opens up at the bottom of the screen that lets you switch between the different search features. The app, of course, also still support voice search and gives users access to all of Google’s other services like Google Goggles, Gmail and Google+. One interesting feature is its ability to detect which other Google apps you have installed on your phone and then allows you to switch to them instead of using the company’s HTML5 apps. Overall, the app is a nice improvement over the previous version. It builds upon a trend we’ve seen lately from Google toward better mobile apps, including the recent Google+ for iPhone redesign. For the most part, though, most users will likely continue to do most of their searches from their favorite mobile browser.

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Google Redesigns Its iPhone Search App To Be Faster And Prettier

YuMe Adds Another $10 Million From WestSummit Capital

A D M I N — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:12:07 +0000

Online video advertising startup YuMe has picked up another $10 million in financing from China-based investment firm WestSummit Capital , closing out a $22 million strategic round that was first announced last November. The round was led by Samsung Ventures and also included Translink Capital. YuMe founder Jayant Kadambi confirmed the raise, and told me by email that the funding will be used primarily to expand into more connected devices. YuMe provides a platform for delivering ads against online videos, but has recently been adding support for connected TVs. “[W]e are using to expand our Connected TV business across OEMs and publishers globally. We are continuing to expand our business out of our Chennai development labs, as we see tremendous media business growth opportunities across all of Asia,” Kadambi wrote. That’s the primary reason for Samsung’s interest in YuMe, as well as a previous strategic investment from Intel . Other YuMe investors include Menlo Ventures, Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, BV Capital, and DAG Ventures. Altogether, YuMe has raised nearly $75 million since being founded in 2007.

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YuMe Adds Another $10 Million From WestSummit Capital

Sidecar Reimagines The Humble Phone Call

vertical8 — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:00:00 +0000

The quick rise of smartphones over the last few years definitely changed the way we use our mobile phones, but one aspect that never changed much – and maybe even took a step backwards – is the humble phone call. Sidecar , which is launching out of beta today, wants to change this and re-invent what a call should look like in the 21st century. As Sidecar co-founder and CEO Rob Williams told me last week, a lot of innovation has happened on data, but voice calls have basically remained unchanged. They are siloed and remain separate from the rest of the smartphone experience. With Sidecar, Williams and his team want to introduce new ways to “think outside of the phone icon.” To do so, the company has built iOS and Android VoIP applications that integrate voice calls with the ability to share location, pictures and short messages. Sidecar integrates with your contacts on your phone and lets you make free VoIP calls over WiFi to other Sidecar users anywhere in the world and to any number in the U.S. and Canada. As Williams told me, it was important to the company to create an application that would work, no matter whether your contacts use it as well. The app’s features include live video streaming and photo sharing. Another nifty little feature is the ability to share contacts as well. The location-sharing feature, too, is worth looking at, as it doesn’t just let you compare your location with that of your contact, but also lets you decide on a place to meet up with just a few clicks. Sidecar uses the phone’s proximity sensor to automatically toggle the phone’s speakerphone mode on and off to enable you to access these extra features. After you hang up, all your shared photos and locations can be found in the app’s contacts list. The Sidecar team, which is largely made up out of a number of former Real Networks veterans, previously worked together on a video chat service called SocialEyes . Sidecar is backed by Ignition Ventures, The Webb Investment Network, Rob Glaser and other prominent individual investors. In the long run, the company hops to work directly with carriers. Phone calls, after all, are still at the core of what the carriers do, Williams told me, and the company’s mission is directly aligned with the carriers’ missions as well.

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Sidecar Reimagines The Humble Phone Call

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

kram412 — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:46:41 +0000

Editor’s note: Some savvy Facebook engineers rigged the NASDAQ button to automatically post “Mark Zuckerberg has listed a company on NASDAQ – FB” to the CEO’s Timeline as he rung the bell to open the NASDAQ’s day of trading. David Garcia, a senior software engineer at Facebook, explains how they turned the NASDAQ on to Open Graph. It was a normal Monday. Nothing out of the ordinary other than that Facebook was set to go public at the end of the week. Camera crews were beginning to appear and NASDAQ was coming to campus so we could ring the opening bell together. Other than that, it was like any other Monday. During lunch, some us started talking about how cool it would be if the second Mark rang the bell a story would post to his timeline to let his friends and subscribers know. I was so excited about this idea that when I got back to my desk, I posted on Facebook: “We should totally hack the button so it pushes an open graph action, “Mark Rang the NASDAQ bell”. The first person to comment? Zuck: “It would be epic if you pulled that off.” I got to work that night. The solution: connect the NASDAQ button to a mobile phone logged into Facebook to generate an open graph action. While this seemed simple, it would prove to be a little more complex in practice. Step one was to hack the headphones of my mobile phone. Just like you use headphones to play or pause music, I wanted to get them to publish an action on Facebook. I grabbed a soldering iron and soon enough we had a way to trigger the phone to publish an open graph action. Step two was to see how the actual NASDAQ button worked. By the time NASDAQ arrived on Wednesday, a few other engineers caught wind of the project and offered their help. So five of us headed over to the conference room to check out the button. NASDAQ was game and allowed us to dismantle the button, with only one rule: don’t break it. As we unscrewed the cover and poked around inside, we discovered that it looked quite different from what we were expecting. While the system wasn’t too complicated (a touch pad, a light, and grey box containing some relays connecting to the power supply), our hack was going to prove a bit of a challenge. We plied open the gray box to test the various circuits and figure out exactly how they worked. After some delicate tests with a voltmeter, we came up with a solution. A couple of us then headed off to Radio Shack to pick up a couple relays, capacitors, and resistors. A couple of hours later, we had built our hack. The finished product wasn’t exactly the prettiest thing, but hacks aren’t supposed to be. They’re just supposed to work. We ran back to the conference room with the button to make sure it did. We hooked up our hack to run at exactly the same time as Mark pushed the button to turn on the light and ring the bell. Then we attached a wire that hooks to the hack and into the headset jack of a cell phone. When the button was pressed, it sent a signal through the hack, and the phone got the signal that triggered the custom action through our Open Graph API, posting a story onto Mark’s Timeline. It worked. “Mark listed a company on NASDAQ – FB – with Chris Cox (VP of Product) and 4 others [Sheryl Sandberg (COO), David Ebersman (CFO), Cipora Herman (Treasurer), and Dave Kling (Deputy General Counsel)” In less than 3 days, an idea became reality, something that would be seen by people all around the world. So, like I said, it was just a normal day here at Facebook.

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How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

Quora Raises $50M At $400M From Peter Thiel, D’Angelo Puts In $20M Of His Own Money

Achilles — Tue, 15 May 2012 02:18:25 +0000

Q&A site Quora has raised $50 million at a $400 million pre-money valuation according to a report by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to me by the founders themselves. We had reported that Quora was raising in this range back in April and it looks like Facebook board member Peter Thiel has beat out many other investors including a much-rumored KPCB to lead the round. Also investing is Matrix’s Josh Hannah and Northbridge’s Jonathan Heiliger . According to our own sources, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo put $20 million of his own money into the Series B financing. Thiel is leading personally and not through Founders Fund, breaking up the remaining $30 million between Matrix and Northbridge. “Thiel added a lot of value to Facebook,” D’Angelo said about the Thiel investment, “And he’s been very helpful to us in the past. He understands these kinds of companies.” The participation of Wikihow co-founder Hannah is also interesting to note, as he is painfully familiar with the Q&A space, through his WikiHow and eHow investments. “Quora is a phenomenal resource to capture and share all the information where there are multiple points of view,” Hannah told me over the phone, “The Yahoo Answers and Answers.coms of the world have all fallen down to the lowest common denominator because of pandering to search traffic. Quora’s long-term vision to take the high road and create a platform for high quality discourse completely differentiates it from competitors.” D’Angelo tells me that he’s going use the money to scale and grow the company even further, “It lets us focus on the long-term. And helps us build a really good team.” According to AppData , 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log into Quora through Facebook Connect — Bear in mind that this is a small fraction of its total number of users, which Cheever and D’Angelo famously never reveal. “[The site] grows every week,” D’Angelo said, “I don’t really think of mainstream as a binary thing. I think that as it grows bigger, more and more people will use it to tell their stories.”

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Quora Raises $50M At $400M From Peter Thiel, D’Angelo Puts In $20M Of His Own Money

Nokia Weighs In On Investors’ Class-Action Lawsuit: It Has “No Merit”

Achilles — Fri, 04 May 2012 19:32:58 +0000

Nokia may be busy suing the likes of RIM, HTC, and Viewsonic over the infringement of a long list of wireless patents , but the Finnish company should watch their backs — now they’re the target of a class-action lawsuit from a shareholder because their plan to embrace to Windows Phone hasn’t yielded the right results. But are they concerned about it? Not if their official statement on the situation is any indication — Nokia has just reached out to say that they are “reviewing the allegations contained in the complaint and believes that they are without merit. Nokia will defend itself against the complaint.” If you hadn’t yet heard the details, plaintiff Robert Chmielinski filed the suit yesterday [ PDF ] in U.S. District Court in New York, in which he alleges that Nokia knowingly misrepresented how well the transition to Windows Phone was playing out to their investors. More specifically, it says that “defendants told investors that Nokia’s conversion to a Windows platform would halt its deteriorating position in the smartphone market. It did not.” The complaint goes on to point out that despite all of the positive spin Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and CFO Timo Ihamuotila put on the company’s various Lumia launches, those claims fell apart when the company announced on April 11 that their Q1 2012 financials would be much weaker than expected. That announcement was followed by pronounced dip in Nokia’s stock price, which affected “thousands” of Nokia’s shareholders. Oh, but there’s more: “[Nokia] also disclosed a glitch in its newest Windows offering – the Lumia 900. Nokia had to immediately offer customers an automatic $100, making the phone essentially free.” For what it’s worth, Nokia also handled those Lumia 900 connectivity issues much better than I’d expected. They owned up to the problem, laid out a plan to fix it, delivered that fix ahead of schedule, and sweetened the deal for anyone who could have possibly been affected. Whether or not Nokia knew about the glitch prior to launch is a question that we may never get a clear answer on (though I’m inclined to say no, considering how much was at stake for that launch), but as far as that complaint goes that’s the least of Nokia’s issues. Were Elop and Ihamuotila just being corporate cheerleaders, or were they engaged in a plan to willfully deceive and defraud their shareholders? Though Nokia definitely feels the execs fall into the former, I’ll be keeping my eyes on this for the long haul. Only time will tell how much steam the suit will pick up though — investors interested in taking up the role of the lead plaintiff have until July 2 to file the appropriate motion.

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Nokia Weighs In On Investors’ Class-Action Lawsuit: It Has “No Merit”

KinderTown’s Educational App Store For Parents Doubles Users, Adds Apps For Bigger Kids

A D M I N — Fri, 04 May 2012 19:22:24 +0000

KinderTown , the startup behind the educational iOS app store for parents (and honestly, a personal fav) is expanding its focus today. According to feedback from its users, the number one complaint was that KinderTown wasn’t available for older children. Now that changes, as the service will bump up its supported age range from 3-6 to include children ages 7 and 8 as well. To kick off the launch, 125 new apps aimed at older children have been added to service, and more will be added every week. They company is also starting to see some growth, too, doubling the total number of users in April. In fact, KinderTown reports that it added more users in April than it did in the five previous months combined. Returning users also increased by 300% during this time, KinderTown CEO (and DreamIt Ventures co-founder) Steve Welch says. While the startup doesn’t offer raw download numbers or active user counts, it does attribute the bump in usage to its newly launched social sharing integration. A recent update allowed parents to share a list of their favorite apps for kids within the KinderTown app and then post that list via a link to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. When other parents click the link, they’re directed to the user’s “My Apps” page where they can then download the recommendations. For those not following the ‘kid app” space, a refresher. Launched back in November , KinderTown is one of the first companies to build an app store within an app that’s sold in the app store. (Ha!) That is, the company filters through the 600,000+ iOS apps (iPhone/iPad) to surface just the educational apps that are designed for children. It then further curates the selection by vetting the apps for quality of content. The staff includes former educators, who review the apps prior to having parents test them. Only when both groups agree the app is worthy, does it get accepted into the KinderTown store. The result is an easy-to-use alternative to searching through iTunes for age-appropriate (not brain-rotting!), apps and games for the kids. The company says that users pay an average of $2.65 for an app when they buy through KinderTown, which redirects them to iTunes. To date, the company has driven 100,000 downloads in the iTunes App Store. As someone who cared not one bit for kids until I had one, KinderTown has been a lifesaver in helping me fill up the kid’s iPad with better content. I had no idea what was out there, what was good, or what other parents would recommend. I was always googling for app reviews and ideas, and jotting down the occasional personal suggestion from parents I bumped into while out and about. Apparently, this is par for the course for new parents. As Welch explains, “one of the first things parents do when they buy a new iPad is ask their friends what apps to download. With KinderTown, parents can now just send a link,” he says. Welch also notes that the company is starting to see teachers using the app as a resource to inform their students’ parents about what apps to download at home. The updated app is expected to roll out to iTunes today. You can get the current version here in the meantime. Thanks to KinderTown, one day – I swear – I’ll have enough new apps that the kid won’t notice when I delete Talking Tom and Talking Ben. One day!

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KinderTown’s Educational App Store For Parents Doubles Users, Adds Apps For Bigger Kids

Samsung: The Death Of The Spec Gives Way To The Birth Of The Human Touch

blogger — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:12:46 +0000

If we have reached the Death of the Spec, then what Samsung wanted to introduce us to today was nothing short of the birth of the human touch. In the presentation launching the Galaxy S III, the first full half hour was very light on specs, with mention of only one — the size of the screen (4.8″-huge). Instead, what we got was long on references to intuitive design, with lots of non-tech buzzwords: “nature,” “organic,” and so on. The Galaxy S III is “really designed for humans” the company said today, again and again. The “simple, organic design” will come in ”pebble blue” and “marble white” and it has worked natural elements into every aspect of the user interface. Included in that will be new alert sounds that sound like water drops and other sounds from nature. “The Galaxy S III looks deep into your eyes and only turns off when you do,” noted Jean Daniel Ayme to the audience. That is to say, the screen will note when your eyes are on it and will stay “awake” for as long as you look at it. “It knows precisely what we are doing and our intentions.” It will also recognize your face and that of others — automatically tagging contacts in your pictures and inviting you to share them with them. And Samsung also talked about its new, improved answer to Siri: the S Voice, “a voice recognition service that does more than just respond to voice commands.” That will include features like automatically taking users to other services on the phone, like the camera, and understanding different languages. In addition to English, there will be Italian, German, French and “even English spoken in a French accent,” said Ayme.

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Samsung: The Death Of The Spec Gives Way To The Birth Of The Human Touch

Clarity Launches Mobile Mentorship Service To Connect Startup Founders With Good Advice

Budowniczy425 — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:02:16 +0000

I often hear people say they moved to San Francisco and Silicon Valley to be in the thick of things — to open themselves up to running into a new mentor at the local coffee shop, or pitch a top venture capitalist during a chance elevator encounter. Advice websites and how-to books are great, Q&A sites such as Quora are helpful, but there’s still nothing like one-on-one conversation from someone who has been there before when you’re trying to build a new company. A new company called Clarity wants to help provide that service to startup founders no matter where they are. Launching to the public today, Clarity provides a marketplace that hooks up phone calls between entrepreneurs and mentors such as successful businesspeople and venture capitalists. The advice givers can either talk for free or set a price for their time, and Clarity lets them either keep that money or donate it to a charity of their choice. If the money is not given to charity, Clarity takes a 15 percent commission. How It Works Martell has assembled a star-studded collection of 1000 advisors who are on board for Clarity’s launch, including noted investor and 500 Startups founder Dave McClure , Greylock Partners principal and Twitter and Facebook alum Josh Elman , Startup Weekend CEO Marc Nager , Color and Science labs co-founder Peter Pham , Rypple co-founder Daniel Debow , and lean startup guru Eric Ries . The key thing about Clarity is that it arranges a double-blind phone calling process — neither party knows the other’s actual phone number. The site also requires that users connect through Facebook, so there is a layer of identity verification in place there already. Founders can browse the Clarity directory through curated topic pages that show each adviser’s expertise, or plug a few sample questions into Clarity to get suggestions on who they should speak to. Clarity works for phone numbers throughout the world — in its five month beta testing phase, it has brokered 4000+ calls from people in more than 60 countries. Why It Matters Clarity was founded by Dan Martell , a young tech industry veteran of sorts who has built and sold two successful companies — and been on both the giving and receiving end of good advice. “For the first years of my working career, I was still living in my native Canada and I was desperate for advice. I emailed the minister of my province there, he respected that I was a young entrepreneur, and he introduced me to three guys that had built hundred million dollar companies. That was the reason that I moved to San Francisco in the first place,” Martell said. “I know that getting the right advice at the right time can dramatically change an entrepreneur’s life.” Martell says it’s a positive experience for both founders and mentors. “I’ve done about 400 calls myself during the beta, and what people don’t realize is that it’s hard to give someone advice without taking something away from it yourself. I’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m driving on the 101 Highway for 45 minutes, call me if you want to talk about product or marketing.’ You queue the calls, and you get in this rhythm, and it’s actually really energizing. I’ve talked to some entrepreneurs I’d absolutely invest in.” Phone Calls: Back To The Future? Clarity, which has been self-funded by Martell, is based in San Francisco and has four full-time employees. By the end of 2012 the company expects to triple in staff size to about 12. Right now, the service is focused on technology and business, but Martell said in the future it could expand to any number of topics, from the restaurant business, to athletics, to general life coaching. A lot of people are kind of proud of not using the voice communication function on their smartphones anymore, and call me old-fashioned — but I still think it’s an important skill to actually talk to other people (or as an old boss of mine used to say, “Give good phone.”) In fact, most of the really successful people I’ve met still prefer to talk on the phone over email or texting. It’ll be cool to see how Clarity takes off in the future. Here are a few more screenshots of Clarity in action:

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Clarity Launches Mobile Mentorship Service To Connect Startup Founders With Good Advice

Microsoft Asks Windows Phone Developers To Keep The Quality Up And The Sex Down

kram412 — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:50:24 +0000

Microsoft is trying to clean up the Windows Phone Marketplace and as part of this effort, the company just clarified some of its guidelines for developers who want to sell their apps in Microsoft’s app store. Among other things, Microsoft has decided to move to “a more stringent interpretation and enforcement of our existing content policy” for apps that are “‘racy’ or sexual in nature.” This is a problem we pointed early last month. As Matt Burns put it, Windows Phone has a nasty porn addiction . Microsoft clearly agrees and is thankfully trying to kick the habit. Microsoft, just like most of its competitors, doesn’t allow apps that contain “sexually suggestive or provocative” images or content. Swimsuits are fine. The company says that it will now pay “more attention to the icons, titles, and content of these apps and expects them to be more subtle and modest in the imagery and terms used.” According to Todd Brix, Microsoft’s senior director of the Marketplace, the company will contact those developers whose “racy” apps slipped through the earlier approval process and ask them to change their apps. Microsoft says that it is making this change to improve the shopping experience for all of its customers. It will also monitor its customers’ reactions and may remove apps that its users find offensive. Here are some of the images that would be acceptable under these new rules: Given all the problems Apple had with its rules for adult-themed apps, it’s probably a good idea for Microsoft to be proactive here. There are currently about 70,000 apps in the Marketplace and the store is growing nicely, though there have been some complaints about the quality of the apps in the store. In this context, Brix also used this opportunity to remind developers to keep the quality of their apps up. Developers, for example, aren’t allowed to submit the same app to multiple categories and can’t use more than five keywords per app. Since its launch, developers have also been trying to game the Marketplace by tagging their apps with popular tags (“Justin Bieber,” “YouTube” etc.) that had little or nothing to do with their apps. Microsoft now plans to crack down on this, too.

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Microsoft Asks Windows Phone Developers To Keep The Quality Up And The Sex Down