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Sprint’s EVO 4G LTE Has Cleared U.S. Customs, Pre-Orders To Be Filled As Early As May 24

blogger — Tue, 22 May 2012 03:19:05 +0000

Sprint’s launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we’re hearing that they may been hitting doorsteps and store shelves sooner than expected. According to Sprint , the devices are now currently sitting safely in Sprint’s warehouses and are expected to start trickling out into the world “on or around May 24.” And rest easy, you faithful pre-orderers — the world from on high is that you’ll still be getting your devices first. In case you’re new to this little shipping snafu, shipments of Sprint’s new EVO (along with those of their AT&T-based cousin, the One X) were prevented form entering the country thanks to an exclusion order handed down by the International Trade Commission. The entire convoluted story started last year, but here’s the tl;dr: Back in July, HTC was found by ITC judge Carl Charneski to have infringed on one of Apple’s patents — specifically, it involved recognizing a particular structure within a set of data and binding it to a particular action. Sounds pretty dry, I know, but if your phone lets you directly a call a phone number by touching it in an email, you’ve seen the patent in action. At the time, HTC stated that they were working on fixing the offending UI flourish, and part of the holdup for customers was apparently because the phones were being spot-checked for compliance. With Sprint’s EVO shipments said to be on the move once more, now the question becomes whether or not shipments of AT&T’s One X are as well. I’ve reached out to AT&T for confirmation one way or the other, and I’ll be updating the post as I hear more.

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Sprint’s EVO 4G LTE Has Cleared U.S. Customs, Pre-Orders To Be Filled As Early As May 24

Reuters Agrees: The Next iPhone Will Be Larger

Administrator — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:17:29 +0000

The Wall Street Journal made waves yesterday. Citing unnamed sources, the Journal reported Apple is ordering larger touchscreens for the next iPhone. Now, citing its own unnamed sources, Reuters somewhat confirmed the reported. Prepare yourself, iPhone diehards. All signs point to a larger iPhone. The thought of a larger iPhone clearly scares people. Read the comments on my post yesterday, “ It’s Time For A Larger iPhone. ” They say 3.5-inches is the best size. You don’t have to move your thumb to navigate the whole screen, they say. A phone with a 3.5-inch screen fits in my hipster jeans! But really, the main underlying thread seems to be some people are afraid that, just perhaps, Apple will adopt something from Android like the trend of a larger screen. Scary, I know. Change is hard. Apple has used the same form factor for 4 iPhone generations spanning 5 years. The iPhone 4, and the 4S for that matter, is still one of the best looking phones on the market, with an impossibly thin design and stunning good looks. But it’s time for a change. Besides, logic and other credible rumors point to an internal change that might be forcing Apple’s hand in using a larger screen. Along with a larger screen, the next iPhone is said to have 4G data connectivity. This requires a new mobile chipset, which, as proven by the new iPad presents a new set of challenges. Instead of growing the iPad’s height and width (and therefore the screen size), the new iPad was made a bit thicker to accommodate the larger battery needed to power the 4G chipset and retina display. Apple doesn’t have that luxury with the iPhone. The next iPhone cannot be thicker than the current iPhone. But it can be taller. 4G chipsets are generally not as mature as their 3G counterparts. They require more power and thus require a larger battery. Instead of making the iPhone thicker, logic suggests that Apple would then make the phone a bit taller, making room for a larger, likely retina, display. This change will likely upset the Apple diehards. As the screen size increased on Android phones, iPhone users took to Internet comments and forums to defend the smallish iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. It seems sooner versus later now, Apple will use a different screen for the iPhone. Change is hard. [image via Mark Wilkie/ Flickr ]

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Reuters Agrees: The Next iPhone Will Be Larger

Palantir Technologies Nabs $56M In New Funding, SEC Filing Shows

bestcbstore — Thu, 17 May 2012 03:10:11 +0000

Palantir Technologies, the big data analysis company founded in 2004 by a team of ex-PayPal employees including Peter Thiel, has raised $56 million in new funding, according to a document filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is by no means Palantir’s first go-round with venture capital investors. This is the company’s 7th round of funding, according to our records — back in October 2011, Palantir closed on a $70 million round of funding that served as its Series F. That raise was held at a $2.5 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch sources. To be sure, what Palantir does is not at all easy — or cheap. The company provides high-powered data crunching platforms that integrate, visualize, and analyze large quantities of information. Perhaps most importantly, Palantir specifically has targeted its products to two sectors that need super solid security: Government and finance. The company counts governmental organizations such as the FBI and financial institutions such as JP Morgan as customers. Palantir has doubled in size each year since it was founded, according to its website. We’ve reached out for more information from Palantir, and will update this post when we hear back.

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Palantir Technologies Nabs $56M In New Funding, SEC Filing Shows

Banters Hits The Deadpool, Co-founders Leto & Moberg Are Betaworks Bound

blogger — Wed, 16 May 2012 06:14:02 +0000

Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup’s co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site beginning June 1st. However, in spite of its tumultuous road and final splash into the deadpool, the news came with a silver lining. Both Leto and her co-founder, Patrick Moberg, will be taking up residence at Betaworks , the New York accelerator that has incubated or funded startups like bitly, Chartbeat, SocialFlow, News.me, Kickstarter, TweetDeck, and many more. As for some background, it was a little under two years ago that Texts From Last Night co-founder Lauren Leto and partner-in-crime Patrick Moberg launched Bnter , a simple way for people to share text, IM, and chat messages with their friends on the web — for all to see. The startup was backed by a cast of well-known angel investors, including Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), SV Angel (David Lee), High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher), and more. It later was the subject of some founder-VC drama along with Spark Capital and Tumblr , but came out alive and continued to iterate. While it initially focused on SMS, it later broadened its scope to let users share any sort of conversation, including GChat, in-person chat, email and more, and launched both iPhone and Android apps, a bookmarklet, in-depth Twitter integration, and supported Facebook Chat, Foursquare comments, GroupMe, etc. In spite of its full roster of available integrations and cross-platform functionality, Banters suffered from a clunky user experience, as its original model required users to launch the app or visit its home page, open a new post, attribute another user to bring them into the conversation, filling out various message boxes, adding tags — and then, at long last, posting. It had become too much like a CMS and had lost the lightweight feel of an SMS tool. Recognizing this process was arduous for users, Banters launched a new version of its iPhone app in January, which leveraged Siri’s technology to input conversations and quotes. The idea was to make adding a conversation to the app as easy as snapping a mobile photo. Along with its new iPhone app, the startup added more functionality, including a “like” button, activity stream and an ‘Explore’ tab to help surface the best conversations. And because it’s original name “Bnter” was tough for some to pronounce, Leto and Moberg changed the startup’s name to “Banters.” Unfortunately, try as they might, Banters ran its course. Leto said in a blog post today that, although its user base has been passionate, the platform simply hadn’t gained the traction, or user base, the co-founders had hoped it would find. As a result, beginning June 1st, the team will no longer be actively working on Banters. “We’re not outright closing the site down any time in the foreseeable future,” Leto says in her post, “but, for the sake of prudence, we’re encouraging our users to export their data here .” Although Banters is hitting the deadpool, its co-founders are moving on to new projects. Leto says that she had long been a fan of “Findings,” Betaworks’ tool that offers “a straightforward, intuitive way to share and discuss quotes from books and the web.” Seeing that Findings and Banters share similar goals, Leto and Moberg will be joining Betaworks this summer. Leto will become the General Manager at Findings, while Moberg will become Betaworks’ “Hacker-in-Residence.” Of the new move, Leto says: It’s never easy to stop working on an idea after having invested so much into it, but I’m thankful that we’ll have the opportunity to keep working on a product that closely aligns with the mission we set out with at Banters: to harness the timeless power of quotes and words, and share them in ways that have only recently been made possible by technology. It’s unclear to what extent the kerfuffle with Spark Capital handicapped the team’s ability to raise another round of capital, but as Sarah points out in the post, by the time of the botched funding, Leto had “reportedly cut her salary to zero to help the make the company’s ends meet.” Regardless, the experience didn’t end positively for either side, and it seems that Banters never found that new round of capital it needed to keep its fires lit. It’s tough, too, considering the fact that Banters seemed like it was onto a potentially big idea. Nevertheless, it’s great to see that the two co-founders have landed in a great spot and will, in some capacity, get to continue working on the idea. For more, see Leto’s blog post on the shuttering of Banters here .

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Banters Hits The Deadpool, Co-founders Leto & Moberg Are Betaworks Bound

Service As A SKU

vertical8 — Tue, 15 May 2012 08:43:33 +0000

Editor’s note: This post was written by Alex Rampell , the CEO of TrialPay . Rampell is a regular contributor to TechCrunch – see his previous guest posts here. The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce) . The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based engagements , and artificial scarcity. The still-unfulfilled opportunity in O2O today is tantamount to tacking barcodes onto un-warehousable services by standardizing and normalizing the units being sold, something I call “Service as a SKU.” Just as Amazon figured out how to build the best warehouses and technology in the world for delivering boxes, somebody will do this for “unboxed” services, with customers driven not by discounts or scarcity, but rather by the Internet’s hallmarks of customer experience and convenience. And unlike how “ship stuff in a box” ecommerce seems to be gravitating towards a few winners , Service as a SKU is still a wide open playing field. The idea is to turn every service, or unit of commerce, into what retailers typically call a SKU (Stock Keeping Unit). Imagine the following as “items” you can buy, and have “delivered,” with a simple click or tap: “1 Unit of Plumber-Fixes-Your-Leaking-Toilet” “1 Unit of Dentist Fixes Your Crown” “1 Unit of 12-Inch Hole-in-Roof-Is-Fixed” “1 Unit of Piano Tuner Tunes Your Piano” “1 Unit of Set Up a Home WiFi Network” Groupon and LivingSocial, early leaders in O2O commerce, started a wave I wrote about a few years ago, but have historically focused on discounting and creating demand by artificial time or quantity scarcity. There are two main problems here: -Adverse selection: Groupon et al tend to attract customers looking for deals. This is not what Amazon does, and not how most consumers shop for necessities (e.g., fix my toilet!). – Push v Pull : Groupon et al tend to rely on “push” (e.g., email) to drive a tremendous amount of sales. Unlike Google, eBay, Yelp, or Amazon, people don’t tend to go to Groupon “unprompted.” To successfully create a SKU for every service, you need to normalize both the service provider (price/quality) and the service being rendered. It’s more like buying produce than buying something mass-produced in a factory. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s more like booking a hotel reservation, where the rooms are anything but identical, there exist varying degrees of quality, but there are also quite a few commonalities. The company that pulls this off will need to have the following: -A seamless scheduling system, deployed at various service providers, to allow real-time inventory management. OpenTable does this for restaurants, and hence can provide a marketplace for “tables” at opentable.com. You can’t sell boxes without knowing how many items are in your warehouse; you can’t SKU-ify a Service without knowing how many hours are available. -A trusted ratings system to allow for normalization of services and parsing of consumer feedback. How do I compare a $100 “fix my toilet” plumber to a $175 “fix my toilet” plumber? Ideally this will work like hotels: every service provider has a “star rating” and an associated cost. Hotel rooms are reasonably similar; consumers can choose between a 5 star hotel or a 2 star hotel, and even different star levels have significant variance. Yelp and Angie’s List have tremendous assets in their community-based feedback, although payment companies like PayPal and Square have perhaps an even better potential asset on their hands (chargeback rates are a good proxy for merchant quality, every completed transaction can solicit quality feedback and not just from aggrieved/fanatical customers, etc). -A no-discounts, no-push site. OpenTable gets people looking for restaurants, and needs neither emails nor discounts to make that happen. Yelp, Google, eBay, Angie’s List, and Amazon are all contenders as they all have consumers “coming back” unprompted. If the product and site are sufficiently convenient, this often happens organically; having a well-designed and convenient search, shopping, payments, and redemption experience avoids the need for push marketing. -Relationships with offline service providers. Despite the flash nature of Groupon and LivingSocial, their merchant relationships are significant. Yelp has virtually every business profiled but perhaps not every business engaged in an economic relationship. It’s important to note that Service-as-a-SKU is not lead generation for offline services, nor is it just a glorified scheduling platform. “Leadgen” has been around since the beginning of the internet, but there is no standardization or normalization, not to mention the convenience of “one-click” purchase. There are leadgen services for housing relocation, laser eye surgery, insurance, etc, but none let you actually make a purchase online. The hard part is in “normalizing” to create a single “service item” that can be scheduled, paid for, and “delivered” with a mouse click or smartphone tap. As an example, Uber has done this for black cars, and EXEC is fixing hourly prices and limiting SKUs to low-wage labor services. At 8:01 AM on June 26, 1974, a shopper named Clyde Dawson bought the first item — a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum — to ever be scanned with a UPC (universal product code). Today, barcodes are a part of every mass-market product bought and sold throughout the world. You won’t see plumbers, dentists, limo drivers, or gardeners walking around with UPCs on their backs, but we are poised for another shopping revolution of equal magnitude.

Makers Wanted: Are You A Hardware Start-Up? Talk To Us

A D M I N — Tue, 15 May 2012 05:51:31 +0000

We’re about to launch a new video series called Makers here at TechCrunch and we’d love to hear from any and all hardware based startups. I want to hear about robots, toys, and railguns. I want to hear about new distilling methods, winemakers, and electric vehicles. I want to hear about anything that whirrs, chops, grates, goes, or crashes into a fireball. Over the next few months Jordan Crook, Josh Zelman, and I will try to cover every hardware startup we come across. If you think you’re worthy of inclusion, please drop us a line at john@techcrunch.com with the subject line “MAKER WANTED.” Describe your product and maybe send a photo of your facility? Are you building in the US or Europe? Asia or Mexico? Let us know. We’re accepting submissions for the next few weeks, so there is plenty of time. Just let us know where you are and what’s up and we’ll try to do the rest.

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Makers Wanted: Are You A Hardware Start-Up? Talk To Us

Warren Buffett Is A Punk

A D M I N — Sat, 12 May 2012 16:00:05 +0000

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written ten books. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and 40 Alternatives to College . You can follow him on Twitter @jaltucher . Warren Buffett is like my ten year old. When she gives me some BS story about something she needs or something she is suggesting there’s always a good reason for it. But whenever there’s a good reason, there’s always a real reason. And the two are starkly different. My job is to figure out the real reason while horse vomit is still spitting out of her ten year old mouth. With Buffett it’s the same. He’s like this saintly investor who can do no wrong in the public perception. He’s America’s grandpa investor, filled with sexual innuendos made honest and funny in that way that elderly people can transform ancient history into metaphor. And while he’s talking and you’re smiling, he very quietly tries to put his hand in your pants, on your wallet. It’s all innocent. Until you realize he just got more rich and you got more broke. And then you’re in handcuffs. And then you’re dead. Let’s look at his hidden agendas. Just like we should always look at the hidden agenda of anyone who has power over us (even my ten year old, who has infinite power over me). There’s nothing wrong with having hidden agendas. It’s just better to be aware of them than to be fooled by them. As background, I’ve attended his annual meetings, I’ve written a book about him, and probably hundreds of articles about him. A) He declared nuclear war on the US. This is a slight exaggeration but in 2001, almost immediately after the 9/11 events, he said on national TV that there was almost a 100% certainty that there would be a “nuclear event” on US soil within the next 50 years. He had no evidence to back this up. He said this when the US was at its most fearful. Living only 4 blocks from Ground Zero I took his words as gospel and I was very afraid and would have nightmares at night. After all, Warren Buffett has the trust of the nation and he’s saying we are going to be attacked by a nuclear event. I could only imagine it would be right near my home, where I had 1 kid, and another on the way. In part, I ended moving far away because of this. So what’s the reality of why he said this? Well, he has the largest insurance company in the world. Guess what? Suddenly he created a new market for himself. He’s the best businessman and salesman alive. He started insuring major events for nuclear catastrophes. After all, “there’s a near certainty” that one will happen. He made probably hundreds of millions of dollars over that one statement that instilled such fear in the nation. (I beg you, DO NOT buy this book) B) He has his hand in my wallet. The guy has made billions of dollars by exploiting every possible situation he could. That’s fine. That’s what capitalism is. I’m a capitalist. But take your stinking hand out of my wallet, you dirty ape. Why do you care how much someone is taxed? You say there is going to be societal unrest unless the people who provide funding for companies, create jobs, invest in innovation, are taxed? Societal unrest? Why not encourage that innovation instead of trying to steal everyone’s money straight out of their wallets. Why not shut down our various wars and 150 military bases if you want to pay down the deficit. There’s a million other ways to do it than putting your hand in everyone’s wallet. C) He pretends to give to charity . I have nothing against giving to charity. In fact, I often think people give to charity for the wrong reasons and don’t really understand much about the charities they are giving to. Buffett has said repeatedly he won’t give charity because he thinks its better for him to compound his money and then give upon his death, which is what he is doing with the Gates Foundation (and which he has already started to do). So suddenly he is labeled as the greatest philanthropist ever, when, in fact, he has barely given a dime to charity. Except in one case: D) He lies about his kids. He often says his kids will get basically nothing from him. He says, nobody should win the “genetic lottery”. In fact, there’s a notorious story where one of his daughters had to buy a necklace from Zales Jewelry (which Buffett owns) on a layaway plan. Meanwhile, Buffett has given each of his kids a charitable foundation with billions each to manage. If a foundation has $3bb in it, then something like $90mm can go to salaries. I think his kids will do fine with that kind of money. Buffett barely spent time with his kids when they were growing up (this is well-documented in every biography about him), he lies about how he gives them almost nothing, but meanwhile, they can make $90mm a year salary. I don’t care about any of this. Just stop lying to us all about parental values and lecturing people on how much they should leave their kids. It’s all BS and once again, take your hands out of my wallet. E) Taxes, part II . Despite his ongoing demands that people pay more taxes, Berkshire Hathaway has been in an ongoing tax dispute with the IRS since 2002. In other words, he doesn’t want to pay taxes (note how he conveniently avoids the estate tax by giving it all to charity upon his death) and his company doesn’t want to pay taxes. Why is this? Because he correctly believes that he is a better allocator of money than the US government. Well, I think I am also and most people are (I wouldn’t send little kids to fight 5 wars for instance). So why is Buffett so insistent that everyone pay more taxes than him? Think, people, what his real agendas are. F) He’s not your Grandpa . Everyone loves Buffett. He has fun sexual metaphors to describe complicated business situations (in the 70s when he found lots of cheap stocks, for instance, he felt like a kid in “a whorehouse”). Every annual meeting is usually filled with fun sexual innuendos and everyone laughs. “Oh, that Warren”. He has a small house on a suburban block. When I was in Omaha a cabdriver even offered to drive me past there. It really was a small house on a suburban block! That’s amazing! He’s so humble! I don’t know what homes he owns now but at least in the past ten years he owned this nice Laguna Beach $4mm home: Again, nothing against him. It’s just that my grandpa doesn’t own a home like that. G) Stocks forever . But it’s because of this “Grandpa” image that he’s able to say things to people like they should “buy and hold stocks forever” and people listen to him. Of course he wants you to hold a stock forever. Let’s say he owns the same stock as you. You own 10,000 shares and he owns 20 million shares. If things start to go down with that company you have an enormous advantage over Buffett. You can sell in one day, in one trade even. It might take him months to sell. Buffett does not buy and hold stocks forever . Just in the past six months alone he’s sold hundreds of millions worth of Kraft Foods and Johnson & Johnson. [See also, "10 Reasons To Never Own Stocks Again" or " Who Really Makes Money on Wall Street "] H) Healthcare. Despite Buffett’s support of Obama (he can support whoever he wants, I could care less) it’s interesting how he has common sense when it comes to Obamacare, saying that it is insufficient. However, even though I believe this also, I still think its worthwhile looking carefully at his agenda. Of course he is going to criticize any system that puts stress on the insurance industry. He’s the largest insurance company! One of his criticisms stated that the “medical industry is very focused on maintaining it’s income”. Duh! Again, Warren, keep your hands out of other people’s pockets. By the way, my own personal feeling, which I believe Warren supports, is that companies like CVS (which he just bought shares of ) and Wal-mart should continue to open cheap healthcare facilities to provide lower cost medical care. This is the real direction of healthcare right now. Not over regulation. Meanwhile, even more revealing about Buffett’s opinion on healthcare is his statement to John Gutfreund during the 1987 RJR Nabisco battle documented in “Barbarians at the Gates”: “I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty.” Great stuff, Warren. According to cancer.gov, of the “250 chemicals in nicotine, over 50 are known to cause cancer.” I) Is he a straight shooter? Buffett has long been known for his honesty and forthrightness. Little is brought up of his penny stock manipulation in the 70s (the SEC slapped him on the wrist ). Far worse were the financial transactions Gen Re arranged for AIG so AIG could produce fraudulent results that lifted its stock price. It’s these manipulations that, in part, caused the AIG collapse and part of the collapse of the entire economic system. Buffett’s firm paid a $90mm fine (give or take). A slap on the wrist. Did Buffett know what was going on? “I saw the contract” was all he admitted to. J) For more, see my post: “ 8 Unusual Things I Learned From Warren Buffett ” including his worst investment ever (not what you would guess) and his being a victim of reverse antisemitism (cruel irony considering his father was a John Birch republican) I don’t think Buffett is a bad guy. I don’t know him. I have no personal opinion of him. But he’s not your grandfather. Like any hard-core investor, he’d slit your throat in a dark alley before letting you make a dime of profit off of him. My main point is: always look at agendas. Try to understand the real reasons behind someone’s “good reasons”. And yes, I know there will be comments like “blah blah Buffett is 1000x the investor and man you are.” He probably is. I’m probably a worse punk thank he is. But I admit it. Also, before anyone brings it up: why is this on TechCrunch? Buffett has long commented that “tech is too complicated for me to invest in” and yet now he is one of the largest tech investors on the planet with his investments in IBM, INTC, and DTV. When someone who is so good at crafting agendas turns his eye towards you, you better keep your hands on your wallet.

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Warren Buffett Is A Punk

Here’s What The Facebook App Center Is Really About

ACMAir — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:00:31 +0000

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Chester Ng , co-founder and CMO of SweetLabs, makers of Pokki , an HTML5 app platform for the PC. The tectonic plates in the app world have been shifting quite a bit lately, in ways that will significantly impact developers and users. One major upcoming shift is coming from our friends in Redmond–Windows 8– and yesterday, we witnessed another major shift as Facebook announced their new App Center. After sleeping on it and reading dozens of generic blog posts about the announcement, this is what I think the Facebook App Center REALLY means (complete with lame taglines for your entertainment): 1. Throw a cat a bone. The dog has had enough to eat. The App Center is Facebook’s response to the big dog, Zynga, who recently launched their own social game portal on Zynga.com . While Zynga.com is Facebook-friendly for now, the threat of independence hangs heavy in the air. 15% of Facebook’s Q1 revenues were tied to Zynga games. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the App Center is hedging and diversifying. This is, combined with weapons like Open Graph, also about trying to help other “cats” (app and game developers) surface and thrive. The first battle in the social apps/games war is over, and Zynga won. But, as we know (and love), there is a plethora of creative talent out there ready to design, develop, and bring to market the next killer app/game. Facebook wants to make sure that happens within their walls. 2. All apps = social apps. Social apps = Facebook apps. So, all apps = Facebook apps? VentureBeat fell for it, when describing App Center as “a place to find social web, desktop, and mobile apps — and not just Facebook apps.” Hook. Line. Sinker. The App Center guidelines clearly state that to be eligible, your app has to be on Facebook canvas or use Facebook login. But, it somehow doesn’t have to be “a Facebook app”? Riiiight. Let’s pull the hoodie up off our eyes. Facebook intends to turn every app into a Facebook app, an important step towards global domination. A million apps aren’t cool. You know what’s cool? A BILLION apps. Now, that said, the Facebook App Center is theoretically more “open” and “friendly” to multiple devices than other app stores (iOS, Android, Metro). But it is not universal. This, to me, is further evidence that there is a real need… for an “Application System,” one that is not biased by any particular device, OS, browser, search engine, or social network. One that is all about the apps, not the walls around them. 3. Content is King. The King protects the walls. The majority of content in my Facebook activity stream consists of random updates/links, photos, and content generated by apps (and games). Well, Facebook will always own a monopoly on random updates/links, and they just paid $1 billion to gain control of the photo faucet. So, apps (and games) are the next logical faucet to grab hold of. Whether you scoff at or believe in the comparisons of Facebook to the original walled garden, Aol, we all know that those trusty walls collapsed when users flocked to content on the open web. Facebook is trying to get ahead of that possibility by ensuring that users can easily access and discover great content (apps) inside their walls. While I’m not a fan of handcuffs (unless they’re furry), the quality tilt is encouraging, if Facebook can leverage its data to improve app discovery. 4. fPhone + fOS is otw. The day will come for the Facebook phone rumors to officially die. That day will be the day the Facebook phone is released. Based on yesterday’s news, I’d expect the rumor-to-release cycle will be shorter than Google Drive’s 5 years. Apps sell phones. Phones sell apps. The App Center is paving the foundation for an OS and a phone, one in which “social” is no longer a descriptor or qualifier. It just is. As Facebook charges towards the “largest technology IPO in history,” there are a number of smart, strategic reasons for them to throw down on this App Center. But let’s not kid ourselves here with talk of a new, “open” approach to apps. This is ultimately all about deploying aggressive offensive and defensive measures to bolster their walls and connect everything and everyone to Facebook. Please “like” this post on my Facebook, thanks!

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Here’s What The Facebook App Center Is Really About

A Closer Look At Chorus, The Next-Generation Publishing Platform That Runs Vox Media

admin2 — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:53:49 +0000

The modern online newsroom is a 24/7 operation. It needs power tools to work efficiently, like modern carpenters need electric drills to build houses. The problem is that most content management systems, including web-native ones like WordPress, Tumblr, etc, are intended for smaller organizations or slower-paced writing. Which is why I’m so interested in Vox Media ‘s Chorus. The rest of us have been stuck turning screwdrivers. Features from last decade like admin interfaces full of buttons that need to be clicked, as well as heavy metadata entry requirements, static site designs, and weak distribution options. Chorus has evolved to solve these problems, and much more. Christened with the new name last month, the four year-old platform is now much more than a CMS. It comes with nearly every tool that’s needed for publishing, all tightly connected. And it’s already powering hundreds of SB Nation sports fan sites around the country, plus our gadget-oriented pseudo-competitors over at The Verge, forthcoming gaming site Polygon, and whatever else Vox decides to launch (I’ve heard there’s one coming about cars, for example). Chorus’ core is actually based on nearly a decade of experiences. SB Nation started in 2003 with many of the same features as any other CMSs, like posts, user profiles, comments, photos, and basic stats, but the company had to adapt to its user-driven network. The solution, one that I believe we’ll see more often at top online publications, was to create a tight development loop between developers and writers. “We don’t throw things over the fence,” explains Trei Brundrett , the company’s vice president of product and technology. “We map our development plan around the tools that our editorial and advertising teams tell us they need, and then rapidly evolve the product based on data and feedback.” He recently gave me a guided tour of the product, which I’ll sketch out below. Among many stand-out features, there’s full-fledged forums, an editorial workflow system, a streamlined article page that automatically includes some links and other metadata, a variety of options for laying out posts and advanced stats tracking features. Really, the biggest question in my mind around the company is revenue — and my doubts may very well be proven wrong. Community and Identity Because it was quickly launching new sites for unique communities — a college football team at a big state school, for example — it needed federated yet open access for community members. The identity system lets anyone create a user ID, then for any of its sites, administrators can convert commenters into authors, and comments into posts. Beyond the usual set of commenting features — threads, upvotes, etc. — it also auto-updates with new comments, flags possibly offensive ones, and comes with a big set of hotkeys for power users. Administrators of a given property can also carefully gate users. So, the fan-writers running the Yankees site could prevent Red Sox fans from coming in and trolling posts about Derek Jeter. Admins, who are themselves designated by senior Vox editors, also get a full back-end system for moderating comments, including the ability to see and block IDs based on IP addresses, or promote users based on recommendations from other readers. Today, any new site that launches on Vox comes with these hardy, field-tested community features, whether it’s about MMA fighting or video games. Editorial Workflow Another early problem faced by SB Nation was planning coverage across sports seasons and big events. The solution visible today is a sophisticated tool for assigning and scheduling stories, that syncs with the user ID system and the publishing tool. For those of you who don’t manage publications, this problem might not be obvious. But the way most of us who do are handling assignments these days are through whiteboards, spreadsheets, general-purpose management software like Basecamp or Asana (in my case), or through clunky legacy programs (in the case of many newspaper editors). Vox makes it possible to assign even a commenter a story, then write it, have it edited and then published to the site within a single interface. There are no issues with integrating between software programs. Having cofounded a startup that was trying to solve this problem with our own editing and workflow tools back in 2005, I’m very aware of how much more efficient it is to have a single system like this. Content Creation and Publishing One of the most maddening parts of publishing online today is all the data entry related to a story — adding links to previous articles, tags, categories, images, and any other non-writing elements within the text editor. This process often takes up more time than writing the story itself, and the only solutions I’ve seen have been half-functional plugins. Chorus appears to crush the competition here. It automatically checks words, including a semantic comparison for related types of terms. “If you mention ‘Derek Jeter’ and say that he’s very good, and is going to be the MVP, the software will analyze related text and tag the post with his name,” Brundrett explained as he showed me this feature in action during the demo. That’s not the only way it saves writers time. A bookmarklet lets them save links to articles, photos and videos from around the web, then see a panel next to a story that lets them drag the content into the post. On the topic of photos and videos, Chorus also has some careful solutions in place. The text editor includes a section that shows writers relevant licensed photos to use, whether from the AP, Getty or other services. It also comes with a streamlined photo editor to help writers crop images to their needs, and a tool for quickly uploading videos and photos that they’ve taken at events. Finally, when posts are ready to go, writers get an advanced set of options for promoting through social media. There’s a promotion section for deciding whether to share with Twitter, Facebook, Google News and other sites. The Web Site The main elements of the user-facing web site, from the overall design to individual posts, come with a set of templates to quickly create an original look and feel. Writers quickly create spacious, image-filled articles (like this Verge spread on jet packs ). And editors can easily pull in widgets including polls and photo galleries to add more engaging content. There are also specific iterations available for sites with special needs. StoryStreams, for example, is a template that Brundrett’s team built at the request of sports editors, that provides real-time updates to the home pages of sites (see our coverage from last fall). Readers can just keep a page open and watch for updates instead of having to constantly refresh the page. The commenting system is another example. Readers were using the section so much that they demanded shortcut keys for faster navigation. That’s what every Vox site comes with today. Statistics In addition to hooks in with Google Analytics, there’s a simplified dashboard that lets editorial staffers see how each story is doing. But there’s also a special part of the site, where Vox shows editors how stories might do in relation to a big news cycle. For the NBA draft, for example, it analyzes its own data from past years, public sources like Google search trends, and other sources that Brundrett wouldn’t reveal, and suggests dates and times for certain types of stories to be published. A lot of this may be intuitive to experienced editors, or deducible via careful analysis of other analytics tools. But the fact that it’s immediately available within the same system as everything else means teams can make quick, smart decisions related to traffic goals without having to go data mining. Revenue Now, for the business model(s). The main way that Vox is making money is ads. But, the company is able to offer something many others aren’t, which is increasingly large volumes of users who organize themselves by very specific interests. When the dozens of SB Nation football blogs cover game days in detail for each team, it’s a no-brainer for a beer company — Guinness, in the example above — to wrap itself around that branding. Literally, as you can see. There’s a background takeover, a top banner, a main ad to the right, and then the “presented by” branding around NFL Game Day. And, a contest for fans to engage with as they’re reading and commenting. Another example, with a more direct editorial tie-in, is a “Core Of Sports” themed set of posts that goes along with a recruiting campaign by the U.S. Marines. The series covers professional athletes who have also served in the corps. The internal slogan, chief executive Jim Bankoff tells me, is “substance is viral.” If you create the right kind of content for users, and wrap appropriate advertising around it, they’ll spread it themselves. “We have had a lot of success scaling our advertising model (5x growth in two years) in large part due to our tech platform,” he goes on to explain. “Our platform enables us to create, manage and track these high impact, customized ad campaigns at scale. The same back-end that powers the edit content also allows us to create ad campaigns, run them in our network, track and monitor and report against them in valuable ways.” The business model is a big indicator of Vox’s ambitions as a company. Even if it is still able to charge relatively high ad rates around its targeted content, it still needs huge scale to be able to compete against traditional media and the rest of the web (including TechCrunch’s parent company, AOL). It will need to continue to grow traffic to become one of the larger media companies out there in order to attract ad dollars — which, again, is why having such a high-tech editorial software platform is so crucial. That said, there are also some interesting opportunities for Vox as it expands into other revenue streams. Reviews of products, like gadgets or cars, are natural sources for attaching affiliate links to. And, there’s always the potentially lucrative but time-consuming conference business that many blogs (like this one) do to help make money. Software In The News Just as a carpenter needs to apply a power drill with skill in order to build a great house, an editorial operation needs top-quality writing and organization to be successful. Software is just one of many crucial elements. And there are plenty of other great tools out there. Tech companies large and small specialize in products that can meet the needs of big newsrooms. Some examples of what I’m using are Chartbeat, which provides real-time data on site traffic, and Asana, an especially streamlined task management tool. Newsrooms without the resources or time to build their own tools have the added challenge of stitching third-party services together, but get the benefits of each company specializing in making its product best-in-class. For example, WordPress VIP, which we use at TechCrunch, requires a good amount of customization on the part of the publications that use it. But it also serves as a platform for all sorts of plugins to add new functionality. And we can build our own tools on top. Still, having gotten my behind the scenes tour of Chorus, I am very impressed. This is a next-generation platform, and many publications live on publishing platforms from past decades. Both competing publications and the software companies who build products for them will need to think about how they too can create tightly-synced software suites to optimize the publication and distribution of top-quality content.

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A Closer Look At Chorus, The Next-Generation Publishing Platform That Runs Vox Media

uTest’s AppGrader Scores Mobile Apps, Helps Developers Squash Bugs

jos — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:50:26 +0000

uTest , a company known for providing a variety of testing solutions for desktop, web and mobile, is launching a new solution designed to grade mobile apps’ performance under real-world conditions, and then compare the app’s rating with that of its competition. The solution, for obvious reasons (i.e., desperate need ) is arriving first on Android, with an iOS version to follow soon. The app testing process takes just a few minutes, the company claims, and will then return a report grading the app on a scale of 1 to 100. In addition to the score, the report also details any issues discovered during the app download, installation and basic usage. To provide more context, the AppGrader report, as it’s called, also compares the app’s grade to those of the most popular applications in the Android Market Google Play store that are found in the same app store category. The system isn’t designed to replace the testing and QA work developers already do, of course, but is meant to function as more of a final step that can give more insight on how the app will run when actually put into the hands of users. Explains uTest CMO Matt Johnson, this “in-the-wild testing provides ‘last mile’ assurance that the apps work on real devices, under real-world conditions, in a wide variety of locations,” he says. However, there’s no reason why developers couldn’t continue to run AppGrader after the app’s launch, if need be, or as they continue to push out minor updates and tweaks to the app in question. To use the service, developers just upload the Android APK file to get started, and AppGrader will send out an email notification within a few minutes after the testing is complete. For apps that crash, developers will also be given the device-specific crash log for additional diagnostic details. For now, the service tests the apps on top Android devices, like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus/Samsung Galaxy S II, Google’s Nexus S, LG Nitro HD, Samsung Galaxy Tab, HTC Thunderbolt, Sony Ericson Xperia, Motorola Droid X2 and the T-Mobile My Touch. Apps are also tested on U.S. carriers AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. Although all mobile developers could benefit from more testing tools, there’s more of need to address the Android developer base first. On Android, developers don’t just have to deal with an incredible number of device types in the wild, they’re also constantly challenged by OS fragmentation, too. According to Google’s own statistics , only 4.9% of users are running the latest version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich), 3.3% are stuck on the version just prior (Honeycomb) while 64.4% are on Gingerbread, which was first released back in December 2010. The remaining 27.4% are running versions that are even older, if you can believe it. To put this in perspective, iOS users update to the latest version remarkably fast. (One report shows 38% hit iOS 5 within 5 days of its release, for example). It’s not entirely fair to make judgements about the users on either platform, however – iOS users have access to upgrades, while Android users, either due to carrier or OEM restrictions, often do not. But it does showcase the greater challenges that Android developers have to deal with when it comes to building apps for a number of handsets and software versions. uTest’s AppGrader is available now, from here . The service is free, as the company expects it might entice users to try out the company’s other mobile testing products.

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uTest’s AppGrader Scores Mobile Apps, Helps Developers Squash Bugs