Second generation platform as a service DotCloud is announcing its $10 million dollar Series A today, after a recent rockstar-filled seed round which included Ron Conway and Chris Sacca. Investors in the most recent round include Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures.

Along with the financing, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and Apple engineering manager Marc Varstaen will be joining the DotCloud board of directors.

DotCloud’s appeal is in its flexibility. Unlike the first generation Heroku and its clones, DotCloud lets developers to build and deploy their applications rapidly by allowing them to customize components and supporting multiple languages and tools.

But co-founder Solomon Hykes tells me that DotCloud is focused less on competing with Heroku clones and more on when developers should use Amazon and when they should use DotCloud, “It’s about being complimentary to infrastructure providers.”

Says co-founder Sebastian Pahl, "With DotCloud, developers get their dream application platform and they no longer need to fill that sys admin role. Instead, developers and their IT teams can choose a stack, push code into our automated system and see their apps deployed with very little work. "

DotCloud will be using the financing to amp up its marketing and engineering in order to develop a “world class support application right from the start.” “We’re definitely hiring,” Hykes tells me.

Fresh off a $48 million funding round, cloud storage and collaboration startup Box.net is launching a new product today that should further its presence in the enterprise space. The company is debuting ECM Cloud Connect, which acts as a bridge between on-premise enterprise content management systems and Box.net’s cloud platforms.

Box.net CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie tells us that while there are traditional software and systems to manage on-premise data within organizations, Box wants to help introduce cloud version of of this with ECM Cloud Connect. Here’s how it works. Box is partnering with EntropySoft to offer businesses a peice of software will sit behind firewall and will connect to both on-premise solutions and Box, acting as a bridge between the two platforms.

Once connected, ECM Cloud Connect will automatically synchronize data between any enterprise content management system (like SharePoint) and Box. Businesses can then migrate specific content to the cloud, and seamlessly archive it back to any internal infrastructure, all while keeping the same folder structure, permissions, and version history
(metadata support will be coming soon, says Box).

ECM Cloud Connect will also allows users to archive content automatically or on-demand from Box and will also allows users to easily migrate content to and from on-premise systems to Box’s cloud.

Users of the new offering also can access Box from any location, on any device, including desktop, laptop, smartphone, and tablet. Box also allows users to invite users to a shared workspace in the cloud with a secure web link and users can view and play content directly in the browser, including images, audio, video, and programming files.

So why would an company want to use ECM Cloud Connect? Levie says that for companies that have not yet migrated fully to the cloud, this offering gives them the best of both world in terms of having an on-premise system and the choice of migrating specific content to the cloud. This gives companies who may have been hesitant about transitioning fully to the cloud, a hybrid solution.

Of course, Microsoft Sharepoint has both an on-premise offering as well as a cloud-based platform, which achieves some of what ECM Cloud Connect aims to do. But Levie maintains that Microsoft’s offerings are clunky and Box’s ease of use and simplicity makes the platform more ideal for enterprise customers who want a hybrid infrastructure.

Currently, Box has 60,000 companies using its cloud platform, including 73 percent of the Fortune 500. EMC Cloud Connect could bring in a number of new enterprise customers who are on the fence about moving data to the cloud.

Don’t know your pre-money from your post-money or carried interest from convertibles? Now there’s a 99-cent iPhone app for startup founders to bone up on investing terms and concepts they might encounter when they first try to raise money.. It is called Angel Trivia Daily, and it tests your angel investing knowledge witha new question every day. Created by two Seattle entrepreneurs, Joe Wallin and Bill Carleton, it’s a fun way to learn the minutia of angel investing.

Some of the questions you must answer include:

Q: Who famously blogged, “Angel List is like Dangerous Sex with Super Models for Virgin Nerds”?

Q: If your pre-money is $3M, and you raise $1M, what is your post-money?

Q: How broad is the friends and family securities exemption?

Don’t worry, it’s all multiple choice.

Yuilop, a startup based in Barcelona, Spain, has secured 1 million euros in seed funding from Nauta Capital. The company has launched its mobile communication service in Germany, and says more markets will follow 'soon'. Much like the plethora of mobile messaging apps out there, yuilop bills its service as a real-time social communication hub. The application blends multiple conversations from a variety of channels (yuilop-to-yuilop, SMS, Facebook Chat and others) into a single conversation with your contacts and functions entirely independently from wireless carriers.

Samsung just announced their two new Galaxy Tabs, the 8.9 and the 10.1. Both are just 8.6 millimeters thick and support 4G and WiFi. Click through to watch the live video launch of these two Honeycomb tablets (with TouchWiz on top).

The new tablets have “HD displays” and Samsung is moving into more services like something called ReadersHub, an ebook solution for the Gal Tabs, and MusicHub, a music solution. It has 3 megapixel rear camera and a 2 megapixel front camera and supports Adobe Flash 10.2.

Read more…

An organization that aims to diversify and strengthen the pool of successful startup founders in tech, Women 2.0, today announced that it will spin out its mobile focused Founder Labs pre-incubator program as a standalone entity, and expand it from San Francisco to New York City this May.

Women 2.0 and Founder Labs founder, Shaherose Charania, told TechCrunch:

“We want to change the ‘founder force.’ There’s a pretty diverse work force here. But the founder force looks kind of homogenous. Founder Labs will create teams working in mobile that are diverse, in terms of experience levels, gender and ethnicity.

We want people not to just create apps, but mobile health, payment, and smart grid [technologies]. I don't think Silicon Valley or New York City startups and investors have gone into those spaces enough, yet.”

Lately, NYC has seen an influx of funds, incubators, co-work spaces, and other programs to support and inspire the formation of technology startups here, including from: Accel Partners, General Assemb.ly, HackNY, Turing Fellows, TechStars, DreamIt Ventures, and others.

[Ed's note: TechCrunch's Disrupt NYC 2011 event is part of this increasingly crowded ecosystem.] Is there room for more, really?

An adviser to Founder Labs, principal of Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson, opined in an e-mail:

“Founders Labs is focused on two underserved situations in the NYC market: the first is pre-accelerator mentoring coaching and assistance. Think of [it] as what you do before Y Combinator or Techstars. The second is teams with women founders. Aileen Lee’s post on TC explained why women founders are growing in importance. I could not have said it better myself.

I also see it as something like Startup Weekend, [because Founder Labs] really focuses at the very beginning [of a business]… We need more of that sort of thing. The format is different, longer, more intense. I think it is serving a real need in the market.”

Wilson’s involvement with Founder Labs is personal, he noted. He and his wife, entrepreneur and investor Joanne Wilson, are advocates for female entrepreneurship, especially in technology.

Charania noted that Founder Labs will not have a hard-and-fast affirmative action policy for admitting entrepreneurs to its 5-week program. It’s based on merit first, she said. However, she plans to recruit well beyond top-tier tech schools and well-known hacker and startup networks, to ensure a diverse pool of talent.

Here’s what Founder Labs will look for in New York as they have done in earlier programs in San Francisco: applicants of any age with five years of relevant professional, startup or technology experience; applicants who haven’t yet built their mobile product, or become too attached to their business concept; engineers, designers, product and business talent (about half of those admitted to Founder Labs are engineers); a group of men and women in equal numbers willing to form teams and collaborate.

Golden Seeds, and Union Square Ventures will provide space for some of Founder Labs NYC events. The program will admit fifteen prospective co-founders, and run from May 21 — June 29, 2011. Applications are due by April 20, 2011. The program costs $755 for five weeks of course work, events and ongoing mentorship from startup and mobile technology thought leaders including:

Rajiv Patel – Principal, Lift Projects (Design thinking and Idea Generation)

Ann Miura Ko – Founding Partner, Floodgate Fund (Customer Development and Business Models)

Theresia Gouw Ranzetta – Partner, Accel

Alex Osterwalder – Co-Founder, Business Model Foundry

Fred Wilson – Partner, Union Square Ventures

Joanne Wilson- Entrepreneur, Investor

Janet Hanson – Founder, 85Broads

Jenny Fielding – Founder, Switch Mobile, Entrepreneur, Investor

Jim Robinson – Partner, RRE Ventures

…and others to be announced.

IBM is making its first purchase of 2011 today with acquisition of real estate management software developer Tririga. Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter of 2011, were not disclosed.

Tririga’s software helps clients make strategic planning decisions regarding space usage, evaluate alternative real estate initiatives, generate higher returns from capital projects, and assess environmental impact investments. IBM says that property and real estate typically represents the second-largest expense on a company’s income statement, after employee compensation. Tririga’s software helps companies streamlines and cut these expenses.

Tririga’s software is used by more than 200 clients, including over one-third of Fortune 100 corporations as well as seven of the 15 federal executive departments of the U.S. government.
Tririga will be integrated into IBM Tivoli Software and IBM Global Business Services.

In 2010, IBM spent roughly $6 billion to acquire 17 companies, so it should be interesting to see what acquisition’s are up Big Blue’s sleeve in 2011.

The group buying industry has sprung out of nowhere over the past two years. A new report (embedded below) by daily deal aggregator Local Offer Network puts the U.S. gross revenues across the industry at $1.1 billion last year, and estimates gross revenues will grow 138 percent to $2.7 billion in 2011.

Groupon alone, according to other sources, is expected to bring in between $3 billion and $4 billion this year, up from $760 million last year, but those numbers are worldwide. If you figure at least half of Groupon’s revenues come from the U.S., you can get a sense of how much it dominates the market—capturing anywhere from about 50 to 75 percent of expected industry revenues this year.

But that still leaves as much as half left over for other group buying sites, such as LivingSocial and Gilt Groupe. And those are just the big dogs. Local Offer Network tracked 90,000 deals across 322 group-buying sites in the U.S. since January, 2010. And that doesn’t even include so-called private sale sites.

In the first quarter of 2011, it tracked 117 new deal sites, which is about double the number of entrants a year ago. The churn rate for these sites is about 25 percent, meaning that is how many fail, are bought, or go dormant.

The number of deals being offered is also accelerating. Last year, there were about 63,000 deals in the U.S. through group buying sites. In the first quarter of 2011, there will be an estimated 40,000. Groupon accounts for less than half of those published deals.

The categories that dominate are Food and Drink (27%), Beauty, Spa & Massage (19%), Fitness & nutrition (7%), Sports & Recreation (7%), and Home Products & Services (5%). The biggest cities for daily deals are Chicago (where Groupon is based), New York City, San Francisco, Boston, and LA.

Local Offer Network gets all of this data in a variety of ways, including business relationships with about half of the group buying sites, data feeds, APIs and web crawlers.

Oh Oh here she comes… she’s the iPad 2 . Apple’s ultrathin tablet will begin shipping to multiple countries on March 25 and then will ship in Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore in April. Expect it to arrive in Japan around the same time.

Read more…

According to data from a survey held by independent app store provider GetJar, demand for Android handsets has grown significantly, to the point where twice as many people will consider their next phone to run Google’s OS than Apple’s iOS.

According to GetJar, almost 40 percent of respondents said they will switch to Android for their next phone, compared to the 18 percent who said they would like to switch to the iPhone.

Of course, there are only a handful iPhone models with relatively steep prices, and hundreds of Android devices – ranging from very cheap to massively overpriced – but let’s not get things like the competitive landscape and distinct business strategies get in the way of a good story.

As always, please consider the source. As GetJar notes in its own press release, the company plans to “aggressively expand its offering to Android publishers in order to secure its position as the premier ‘open’ Android Market alternative”, so it is evidently in their best interest to market Android as a great alternative for the iPhone.

I’m not saying that isn’t the case (it all boils down to your needs and purchasing power) but you can see why GetJar is so keen on spreading survey results that predict a bright future for Android. Remember, they just raised $25 million to support their above-mentioned strategy.

GetJar also noted, unsurprisingly for anyone paying attention, that app usage is on the rise with the survey results showing almost 34 percent of consumers spending one hour or more using apps per day, compared to 49 percent who spend the same amount of time watching television. Fifty-eight percent of survey respondents use mobile apps more than once a day.

Other unsurprising survey results include:

- Gaming apps are the most popular, followed closely by social networking apps
- The amount of free apps and the ease of search topped the list of things users look for in an app store
- The cost of an app was the biggest deciding factor in whether to download an app or not

GetJar did not specify the research methodology or scope in the press statement.

Apple is on the receiving end of yet another patent infringement lawsuit. A company called Robocast alleges that Apple has willfully incorporated its patented automated browsing technology in a number of products, including iTunes, Apple TV and Front Row, without licensing their ‘invention’.

Robocast, which was founded by Damon Torres, who claims to have pioneered the use of automated web browsing in the nineties, has earlier sued Microsoft on similar grounds.

The court documents offer a fascinating read – as far as I’m concerned – so I’ve embedded them below.

The patent-in-suit is U.S. patent 7,155,451, entitled “Automated browsing system for publishers and users on networks serving internet and remote devices”.

According to the plaintiff, a provisional patent application was filed back in 1996, and issued in December 2006. The summary reads:

A method of sequencing and scheduling web resources, via a software application that collects URLs and feeds them to a Web browser, so that the amount of clicks and decisions are reduced when browsing the Internet. The method begins after a computer user with Net-access encounters a URL that leads to a collection of other URLs that the software application has arranged to be presented in a continuous, show manner.

This collection of resources then plays automatically, going from one resource to the next without the user being required to make a decision or click.

The decision-making process is not inhibited, it is made optional. A method of inserting full-screen advertising, public service announcements, news, etc. has been developed. The server software application module described herein allows a publisher to stream URLs to a user who does not have the client-side software. The publishing module allows a user to format resources to a particularly desirable size and characteristic that promotes readability during a show viewing session.

This same module can publish collections of nodes for others to view as a whole sequence, accessible via e-mail, screen saver or as a web resource.

Robocast says it has developed a number of software applications utilizing the patented technology. Hands up if you’ve ever heard of, let alone used, tools like Robocaster, RoboGuide, RoboMobile, RoboPublisher, RoboSearch, RoboStats or RoboSurf.

Now on to the good stuff.

According to the complaint, Robocast demonstrated its technology at a trade show in Los Angeles back in 1999, after which “at least one” Apple employee visited the company’s booth to learn more about it. Still according to the court documents, Torres met with an unnamed iTunes executive at a conference in San Diego, informing the Apple employee of his patent.

This is of course all meant to demonstrate that Apple knew about the ’451 patent and willfully infringed it by making and selling products and services such as iTunes and Apple TV, which allegedly incorporate aforementioned automated web browsing technologies.

Robocast seeks damages and for Apple to start coughing up an ongoing licensing fee.

(Via patent litigation news site PriorSmart)

Complaint _29_

CrowdFlower, a startup that helps businesses outsource mundane or repetitive tasks to the cloud, has raised $7 million in new funding led by Harmony Partners with Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million.

CrowdFlower, which launched at TechCrunch50 in 2009 and is a product of Dolores Labs, prices tasks and jobs based on the amount of time it takes to perform the assignment per unit (the user does the sample task). The startup mainly focuses on helping businesses complete tasks relating to data collection, content moderation and product search relevance.

The startup will break the task into units that can be performed by a single person and price the task accordingly. CrowdFlower then lets you choose the channels of work ranging from Amazon's Mechanical Turk to their own labor force to even a Facebook application where people perform task to earn virtual currencies. Once the task is finished, CrowdFlower will perform a quality control check and show the user the results of the task. The startup will indicate which workers were most productive and accurate. CrowdFlower will continue to employ workers who have high ratings. On the client end, businesses will only pay for task completed to a specified quality level.

Now, the startup is starting to offer industry and task specific offerings to businesses. A few months ago, CrowdFlower released a data collection offering that verifies business listings and local directories on the web. And today, the startup is releasing a categorization product that allows e-commerce sites to sift through data and categorize each product.

Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, says that many e-commerce sites get unstructured data from manufacturers and suppliers and find it difficult to sort through and categorize all this data. And if a retailers doesn’t categorize and tag data properly, then it won’t be searchable on their sites and will lead to less conversions. CrowdFlower claims that the product has 95% accuracy. Additionally, the API and customized dashboard enable an automated solution for data transfer to clients.

To date, CrowdFlower has completed 85.04 million tasks, 8.6 million of which were completed last month. CrowdFlower, which faces competition from CloudCrowd, plans to use the funding to scale the business and for new product development.

Social media monitoring company Meltwater Group has acquired JitterJam, a startup that develops CRM software. Meltwater purchased JitterJam for $6 million, and all of JitterJam's employees will join Meltwater.

JitterJam blends email and social media with your contacts database to provide an intelligent layer on top of sales functions to convert conversations into customers. Core features include social profiles of contacts, analytics, notifications, social search and more. JitterJam will be integrated into Meltwater’s Buzz product.

Meltwater offers a number of social media and news monitoring applications to business users. The company says it is now seeing $100 million in revenue per year, and serves more than 18,000 customers.

Meltwater previously bought social media monitoring client BuzzGain last year for $4 million and plans on acquiring more businesses this yeat to expand its product suite.

If you weren’t creeped out by data-mining startup Rapleaf after reading about their ways in a relatively unsettling Wall Street Journal article published last October (“The San Francisco startup says it has 1 billion e-mail addresses in its database”), chances are you will be now.

For its latest ‘study’, Rapleaf has tapped its database of identifiable information to extract a sample of 6,000 Google employees (email addresses ending in @google.com) and 16,000 Microsoft employees (email addresses ending in @microsoft.com) and subsequently analyzed their grocery purchase behavior in partnership with an unnamed loyalty cards aggregator.

Rapleaf anonymized the data, so the study doesn’t reveal any names of Google or Microsoft employees, but still. The PDF featuring the study results is embedded below.

For each company, Rapleaf looked at the percentage of customers who purchased major grocery store products and compared the percentages side by side.

According to Rapleaf, more Google employees buy junk food like bacon and ice cream, but balance things out by also buying more fresh fruits and vegetables than Microsoft employees.

Microsoft employees, who are generally older than Googlers, in turn tend to buy more butter and vitamins.

Here’s how Rapleaf – creepily – puts it:

Microsoft employees are more likely to buy butter, a food rarely consumed on its own and used primarily in cooking. Microsoft employees are also more likely to buy vitamins.

Together this data paints a cozy picture of old-school Microsoft employees enjoying home cooking and soundly taking their vitamins.

Rapleaf even took a look at brand preferences, and found that Mountain View loves Mountain Dew and Doritos more than Microsofties, while Microsoft employees buy more Capri Sun and Orville Redenbacher’s. They also score about even on the Coke/Pepsi divide. Just so you know.

More study findings from the report:

Microsoft employees are more likely to buy dog and cat treats and grooming products, a tendency our expert says also correlate with a providing more for children and family.

Which brings us to demographics. Even accounting for age, more Microsoft employees than Googlers are married, and more Microsoft employees have children.

We found that the income distribution peaks for Googlers between $50,000-100,000 per year, whereas 40% of Microsoft employees have an income of over $150,000. The discrepancy can probably be explained by the higher proportion of married employees at Microsoft, since income reflects earnings per household.

Google vs. Microsoft Study_Rapleaf

2011 has proven to be a monumental year so far for professional social network LinkedIn. The company filed its S-1 for a public offering, released a number of data-focused products and unveiled a social news reader for professionals. And today, the professional social network has hit an important milestone: 100 million users.

LinkedIn, which launched in 2003, says that it is now being used in over 200 countries, with more than half of its users originating from outside the U.S. To be exact, the U.S. has 44 million LinkedIn members, and there are 56 million members outside of the U.S. Brazil is seeing the highest growth rate, with new user adoption rising 428 percent year-over-year. Mexico is also seeing major growth, with membership growing by 178 percent year-over-year.

Currently 17.8 million LinkedIn users a members of the network’s Groups and 1.2 million post comments to Groups weekly. There are now over 2 million company pages, with eBay, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, EMC and Campbells as the most represented companies on the network based on the number of employees that are on LinkedIn. There are now 1.3+ billion connections between LinkedIn’s members and 79+ million job transitions/changes tracked on the network.

For LinkedIn, 100 million users comes with a caveat. As the company wrote in its S-1 filing, "The number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members, and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members… If the number of our actual members does not meet our expectations or we are unable to increase the breadth and frequency of our visiting members, then our business may not grow as fast as we expect, which will harm our operating and financial results and may cause our stock price to decline."

So while 100 million users is an impressive milestone, the company admits that its active users are below this number. How much below, however, is unclear. According to comScore, LinkedIn saw 71.5 million unique visitors worldwide in February.

And of course, it’s important to note that 100 million is one-sixth of Facebook’s 600 million userbase (Facebook saw 676.7 million unique visitors worldwide in February, reports comScore). But as the company prepares for a public offering, growth in terms of users will be an important selling point for potential investors. And LinkedIn’s revenue and profit is increasing steadily. It took LinkedIn 8 years to reach 100 million members; how long will it take the network to reach 200 million users?

It was two years ago when Ophir Kutiel, who goes by the stage name ‘Kutiman’, became an Internet sensation with a phenomenal video music project called Thru-You.

The project comprised of seven tracks composed entirely of YouTube video footage that was sliced and diced over a 3-month period in Kutiman’s home studio.

Kutiman spent the next two years riding the well deserved success of Thru-You, performing live, and exhibiting his work in the likes of the Guggenheim.

He’s now back with a brand new track with a jazzier groove called ‘My Favorite Color’… Enjoy!





Sister site The Huffington Post just went on a journalistic hiring spree (hide your bloggers/hide your editors), scooping up New York Times editor Maura Egan, who will be Deputy Entertainment and Culture Editor under recent hire and fellow NYT alum John Montorio, along with Reason’s Radley Balko who joins as a Criminal Justice Reporter, Rebecca Carroll who comes on as Culture Editor of Black Voices, GOOD’s Amanda Millner Fairbanks as Education Reporter, and Jaweed Kaleem as Religion Reporter.

But the most interesting HuffPo new hire doesn’t bring the added name value of old media publication or any publication for that matter. It’s Christopher Spurlock, a journalism student at the University of Missouri, whose ambitious resume as an infographic was posted to Huffington Post College on February 25th, and proceeded to go viral after Huffington Post Traffic and Trends editor Craig Kanalley tweeted it out to his 5,800 followers.

The original post, which amassing thousands of Facebook “Likes,” hundreds of tweets, and tens of thousands of pageviews, eventually convinced Kanalley to bring on Spurlock as a Huffington Post Infographic Design Editor, but not before Kanalley wrote a followup post “How to Make Your Resume Stand Out: 5 Tips From Chris Spurlock.” Indeed.

Kanalley weighed in on the hire, “It’s a step towards high quality content, stuff that people like. I definitely think it’s a continued move towards better journalism and a better site for us.”

The fact that a news organization as large as The Huffington Post is hiring into a full-time Infographic Design Editor position is a serious indicator of the state of journalism to come, and not necessarily in a bad way.  After all, you can’t necessarily game searches for infographics like you can for posts about what time the Super Bowl starts. People actually have to want to share them in order for a publication to derive traffic benefits.

And almost everyone, but especially the self taught Spurlock, loves infographics. Spurlock’s so obsessed that he eventually wants to build a J-School curriculum for people interesting in making visual displays of factual information.

Says Spurlock, “I always keep a Twitter search handy for the word ‘infographic,’ and every day there’s something that’s huge. That’s been retweeted a thousand times.” Imagine his amazement when his own creation eventually same fate.

“It’s something new and developing,” says Spurlock on his unique niche, “So there’s not really a place for it yet.“ When asked what his advice would be for J-School students trying to replicate his mainstream media success, “Do something different. You just got to get noticed, and it’s hard when the number of Journalism grads is increasing and the number of jobs is decreasing. But if you want someone to pay attention to you you have to make them.”

Welcome to the Internet, Chris.

In case you were holding out for a BlackBerry PlayBook: good news. Research In Motion this morning announced (expected) plans to make the tablet computer available in more than 20,000 retail outlets in the U.S. and Canada. Indeed, pricing starts at $499.

In the U.S., outlets include AT&T, Best Buy, Office Depot, RadioShack, Sprint and Staples.

Best Buy has already announced that the tablet computer is scheduled to be available from all Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile stores in the United States, as well as Best Buy and Future Shop stores in Canada, on April 19.

At Best Buy, the BlackBerry PlayBook with Wi-Fi will come in three models, featuring 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of storage at $499, $599 and $699 respectively.

BB customers can place their orders beginning today by visiting their local Best Buy store or by ordering on-line (starting at 8am ET).

Further reading:

Infograph Fun: BlackBerry Playbook vs Dell Streak 7 vs Apple iPad vs Moto Xoom

RIM Outs The PlayBook BlackBerry Tablet [Update: Video Demo!] (September 2010)

The full lineup of retailers and wireless carriers currently expected to carry the PlayBook:

United States

AT&T
Best Buy
Cbeyond
Cellular South
Cincinnati Bell
Office Depot
RadioShack
ShopBlackBerry.com
Staples
Sprint
Verizon
BlackBerry from Wireless Giant

Canada

Bell
Best Buy
Chapters / Indigo
Costco
Future Shop
Mobilicity
MTS Allstream
Rogers
Sasktel
Sears
ShopBlackBerry.com
Staples
Telus
Tbooth Wireless
The Source
Videotron
Walmart
WIND Mobile
WIRELESS etc.
WIRELESSWAVE

This morning Amazon is officially launching its Android App Store — a storefront for apps that will compete directly with Google’s official Android Market. We first broke the news about the impending App Store back in September and had some thorough coverage on the details in January when it opened to developer submissions. But now the store is finally going live to consumers (it will be rolling out over the course of the day, so you may not be able to access yet). And while there were leaks abound about this morning’s launch, there are still a few details that Amazon managed to keep quiet.

The biggest one: Amazon will let you ‘Test Drive’ nearly any Android application in the App Store directly from your browser using some very interesting technology (Update: Amazon says it’s available for “many applications”) . Click the ‘Test Drive’ button, and Amazon will launch an emulated instance of Android on its EC2 cloud, which you’ll be able to control directly from your browser (it uses Flash). Some features won’t work right now (like functions that take advantage of the phone’s accelerometer) but you should be able to at least get the gist of what you’re buying. Amazon was unable to give me early access to this prior to today’s launch, but I’ll update with my impressions as soon as I get to try it out.

The other big revelation is Amazon’s free app-of-the-day. Every day, Amazon will be choosing a premium application and making it free to consumers, giving people a reason to check in on the store on a frequent basis. This is made possible by the fact that Amazon, not developers, sets the pricing of each application. Here’s how I described the pricing model in my previous post:

The biggest departure from the mobile app stores we've grown accustomed to involves pricing. Unlike Apple's App Store and Android Market, where developers can set their price to whatever they'd like, Amazon retains full control over how it wants to price your application. The setup is a bit confusing: upon submitting your application, you can set a 'List Price', which is the price you'd normally sell it at. Amazon will use a variety of market factors to determine what price it wants to use, and you get a 70% cut of the proceeds of each sale (which is the industry standard). In the event that Amazon steeply discounts your application, or offers it for free, you're guaranteed to get 20% of the List Price.

In other words, if your app gets picked for Amazon’s deal of the day, you’re entitled to 20% of the list price that you previously set. That may not sound like much, but these daily specials are probably going to see download counts that are far higher than normal.

To coincide with the launch, Amazon is also announcing (as has been previously reported) that it has exclusive rights to the Rio version of Angry Birds, which is a tie-in to an upcoming feature film. The game will normally sell for 99 cents, but will be available free for a limited time. This is a smart move on Amazon’s part, as it will give legions of Angry Birds fans a reason to check out the store in the first place (and will also likely prompt word-of-mouth exposure as friends show off their ‘special’ version of the game to each other).

 

The App Store is a bold move on Amazon’s part because it’s going head-to-head with Google’s official Android Marketplace — and it may actually provide some serious competition. Unlike Android Market, which has a very open submission process, Amazon will be screening every application to ensure that it meets a certain standard of quality (it isn’t a high bar, but at least you’ll be assured the app won’t crash at launch). Amazon will also be undercutting Google’s marketplace on pricing. And it’s going to be recommending applications to users — even when you’re browsing physical goods on Amazon (if you’re checking out a baseball bat, it might recommend a baseball game for your phone).

Of course, while you can access Amazon’s App Store from both its website and a mobile application, it isn’t coming pre-installed on most Android phones the way Market is, so it’s going to take a while to gain traction. But that will likely change. Expect Amazon to work out deals with carriers to come preloaded on phones. And my hunch is that the store will become very important for various splintered versions of Android that aren’t backed by Google, not the least of which could come from Facebook.

Oh, and just in time for the launch, Apple is suing Amazon over its use of the name ‘App Store’.

I woke up this morning and my Twitter stream looked like a Facebook Wall on a teenager’s birthday. “Happy birthday, Twitter!” “Twitter, you’re the best, happy bday!” “Can’t believe you’re five Twitter!” These messages came in fast and furious from folks in the tech sphere, folks not in the tech sphere, celebrities, Twitter employees. On and on and on.

And that’s great. Twitter is awesome. Even if you’re unwilling to admit that it has changed the world, there’s no denying that it has drastically changed the tech landscape and the way information is created and consumed. And it continues to do so. So yes, happy birthday, Twitter.

And now it’s time to get back to work.

A couple self-congratulatory posts on Twitter’s main blog and the engineering blog today made it very clear that Twitter is now at the point architecturally where it’s full-steam ahead time.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes:

There are now more than 400 full time employees working at Twitter. In the last year alone we have made huge progress towards stability and performance. This work sets us up to continue innovating but it also allows us to build a profitable business on a strong foundation. We are in a position now which allows us to continue serving and delighting everyone who relies on Twitter to connect them to that which is meaningful for another five years and beyond.

Head of engineering Michael Abbott writes:

Last September, we began executing on this plan and undertook the most significant engineering challenge in the history of Twitter. We hope it will have a significant impact the service's success for many years to come. During this time, the engineers and operations teams moved Twitter's infrastructure to a new home while making changes to our infrastructure and our organization that will ensure that we can constantly stay abreast of our capacity needs; give users and developers greater reliability; and, allow for new product offerings.

Abbott goes on to detail how they executed their plan, including the need to move all of Twitter — 20 terabytes of tweets — two different times. He promises that they’re now in their “final nesting grounds”.

That’s great news, because it’s time now once again to focus on a couple core assets of the product that have long been neglected: search and the tweet archives.

It may be hard to believe now, but back in they day, Twitter had no search capabilities. Instead, a startup named Summize rose out of Betaworks and was quickly scooped up by Twitter in the summer of 2008 and turned into Twitter Search. As a 1.0 product, it was great.

But the problem is that Twitter Search hasn’t changed all that much since then. It’s still basically just a keyword search that lists items in reverse chronological order. Sure, they’ve added top retweeted items to the top of results. But as Twitter has grown, searching for anything beyond the most topical level is basically worthless.

In fact, FriendFeed, which was acquired by Facebook in 2009 and basically hasn’t been touched since, is still a much better Twitter search tool. At least it lets you search your own tweets and/or limit search to groups.

Twitter does have advanced search tools, but they’re buried on the stand-alone Twitter Search site that basically no one uses any more. And even those aren’t really any more powerful than they were a couple years ago.

Worse, results only go back five days. Let me repeat that: you can only search for tweets as far back as five days ago. That’s ridiculous.

Twitter’s stated reason for that is because they’re focusing on “real-time relevant” tweets. That reasoning makes some sense given Twitter’s nature, but it was also undoubtedly an engineering decision. Now that things seem good on that end, it’s time to expand.

We’ve been writing about the dream of Twitter as a serious search engine since 2009. But things have been rocky on that side of the product ever since. We’ve had teases that things were on the mend. But so far, not much to show for it. It’s time.

Another untapped treasure trove is tweet archives. Face it, a part of Twitter is about vanity. And that’s why it’s kind of insane that you can’t see what you’ve tweeted or what others have tweeted at you beyond a few days in the past. Just imagine if you had full access to your tweet archives.

Better: imagine if Twitter organized your tweet archives in a way that was useful. What if you could see what you talked about most often during a set period of time? Or if you could see your tweets in a calendar view as a ready-made diary of sorts? Sure, some third-party services do some of this, but Twitter, with full access to all of the data, could presumably do it better.

One of my favorite features of Foursquare is the History page. And the latest version of the service is finally taking advantage of it, telling you things such as the last time you checked-in to a particular venue. Imagine if Twitter could tell you the same types of things about your tweets?

Twitter has saved all of the tweets ever sent (again, some 20 terabytes worth), but the vast majority are just sitting there, dormant. There are a number of ways to make them useful again. If nothing else, for nostalgia purposes and pure vanity.

Whether or not Twitter will start focusing on either of those elements is anyone’s guess. Certainly, the drive to start generating revenue is well underway, and you’d think that search is a natural expansion area for that. So far, it has already been a key area with Promoted Trends and Tweets. But again, it could go deeper.

Tweet archives area a less obvious monetizable area. But search monetization might work there as well. Or I’d gladly pay something like $20 a year to be able to access my entire archive of tweets in an interesting way.

There are other things to focus on as well. One is geo. What on Earth is happening there? It entered in 2009 with much fanfare, now there’s talk that the team has been disbanded and assigned to other projects.

And what about annotations? Few Twitter products have generated as much buzz and hype, only to see nothing come of it. Last we heard, they were officially put on hold indefinitely. Is now the right time to bring that project back as well?

Again, happy birthday Twitter. It has been a great five years, and I’m really happy for all your success. It sounds like you’re now in a good place — time to finish up the cake and get back to work.

photo © 2006 Sharon Mollerus | more info (via: Wylio)When the details of the New York Times paywall/fence were announced on Thursday, Times PR representatives told press that it would be placing a five article a day limit on Google referrals, and only Google referrals.

This policy has somehow changed over the weekend, as the Times’ Communications Manager Kristin Mason tells me that the five article limit will now extend to “all major search engines.” Apparently the Google-only clause was only specific to the Canadian roll out and will be lifted during when the paywall launches worldwide on March 28th.

From Mason:

“After reviewing our options, we decided to extend the policy of five free clicks per day to all major search engines by the global launch on March 28. Our pre-launch period in Canada was undertaken to enable us to test the systems and fine-tune the model.”

“After reviewing our options” … ? Does this mean that it changed its mind? Did someone at Google make hay about being singled out?

For now the Times isn’t releasing any more information on what it categorizes as a “major” search engine (Bing? Blekko? DuckDuckGo? Nobody?), but the above statement brings up a lot of other questions, namely, “Do other search engines even have this kind of limitation technology already in place?” “How on earth will the ‘Times’ pull this off?”

Unfortunately the Times’ response to all of my subsequent asking was, “We really have nothing more to add to the statement.” We’ve contacted Bing, Google and Blekko about their New York Times paywall plans and I’ll update this post if they’re any more responsive.

But ultimately this news also begs another question, “Can this New York Times paywall model get any more complicated?”

Meanwhile, someone’s already figured out how to tear down the wall, using four lines of Javascript.

Update: Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has some ideas on how this policy might come to fruition.

“They’re going to force the others to do this, in my opinion, because they don’t want to be seen as singling out Google. But the only reason Google really seems singled out is because they’ve incredibly admitted that any link from any where will let you through.

The NYT wants its paywall cake and the social media frosting, too, and it really seems to have no foolproof way to have both other than to create a system that will block only fools themselves. And there are plenty of fools, so they’ll get some money off of this. But it’s insane that all the planning and money they apparently invested in this resulted in this laughstock of a plan.”

We cover electric bikes every now and then at CrunchGear, but while millions are sold in Asia and Europe, they remain a rarity here in the US, even on the mean cycling streets of Seattle. Certainly the convenience of cars and our highway-orientated infrastructure is partially to blame for the lack of interest in these extremely effective transportation tools, but I also think that accessibility has been an issue. The Eneloop bike I rode last year at CES, for instance, I have never seen nor heard of since, and the major conversion kits and full bikes seem like too great of an investment for the chary, green-curious consumer.

Clean Republic, a local Seattle start-up literally run out of a garage, seems to be of the opinion that what matters is simplicity, modesty in design, and of course low cost. In 2010 they’ve gone from prototype to 1,000 kits shipped and although they’re not bucking to be a billion-dollar company, they are building a sustainable business and could be trading in millions pretty soon.

Continue reading…

It was an idea as brilliant as it was shortlived: let people swap their eBooks with strangers free of charge using Kindle’s new ‘lending’ feature. And now, after around two months in operation, Amazon has given Lendle the boot.

A little background: earlier this year Amazon gave Kindle a new lending feature that will let you give an ebook you own to a friend for 14 days (Barnes and Noble has offered a similar feature on the Nook since 2009). The feature will only let you lend each book once, and only certain books even support lending in the first place. But it’s still a great feature for bookworms who have grown accustomed to swapping their favorite new reads with friends.

Of course, plenty of books go un-lent, gathering digital dust on our Kindles. Which is where Lendle came in. After signing up, the service prompted users to link their Lendle and Kindle accounts, which built a list of books that each user had available. Next, you’d search for whatever book you were looking for — the service would send a notification to a user that had that book available for loan, and they’d choose whether to give it to you for 14 days.

According to their tweet stream, Lendle was told by Amazon that the service was shut down because it doesn’t “serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site.” It isn’t terribly surprising that Amazon is shutting Lendle down as it could conceivably lead to people buying fewer books, but it’s another reminder of the frustrations associated with DRM-laden content — you may have just paid $10 for a novel, but you don’t really own it.

Lendle fans are up in arms, taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations (Lendle’s official Twitter account is retweeting many of them). Many of these users are actually complaining that Lendle led them to buy more books (or to purchase a Kindle in the first place).

We’ve reached out to Amazon for an official response.

Via Daring Fireball.

When it comes to files, we love to share. No, we need to share. Thanks to the massive capacities of Gmail and other email services, it’s become remarkably easy to share files.

Of course, most email services limit the size of the file you can share. Gmail’s, for example, is 25 megabytes. But if you want to share a larger file or multiple files — and even want a little privacy in doing so — you have to go elsewhere. As a result of these limitations, many peer-to-peer file-sharing services have popped up in an effort to fill the demand for transferring those hulking files you’ve got lying around.

Unfortunately, most file transfer services tend not to be particularly user friendly. They have awful UIs that can be difficult for the uninitiated to maneuver, test your patience with wait times, employ captcha guards, and can require sender and receiver to download the same software. There are plenty of apps out there that work towards finding a way around these problems and sites like WeTransfer and senduit offer the ability to share big files easily without the hassle and clunky interface — for free.

But even these services have size limits and haven’t really put all questions of security to rest. So, launching today, is Sendoid, a Y Combinator-backed startup that is aiming to become the last file transfer service you’ll ever use. Besides BitTorrent, of course.

Sendoid is a peer-to-peer and browser-based service, so the startup is betting that peer-to-peer sharing will mean faster transfer times than if you were to use a service that transfers via a central server — and that being browser-based will make you happy because there’s no software to install.

The in-browser sharing works by opening a 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encrypted pipe directly between the sending and receiving machines. Sendoid handles the connection to a peer introduction service, but all the data flows direct.

When it comes to sharing videos, music files, or photos, many people simply take to sharing links. Sendoid recognizes this trend and makes it so that, if you want to send a file, all you have to do is go to sendoid.com and select the file you want to transfer from your computer. It will then provide you with a URL, which you can send to the recipient to download. As long as the recipient is online, he or she can then open the link and begin download. Bada bing, bada boom.

Now, when I said that Sendoid doesn’t require you to download any software, that’s not totally true. Within the in-browser experience, Sendoid limits file size based on system resources (generally somewhere between 600MB to 1GB depending on the user’s configuration). If you exceed these limits, you will be prompted to download and use its desktop app. Sendoid remains free and speedy once you download the app, and you no longer have any limitations on the size of file you can transfer.

Most of the file transfer services out there are cloud-storage sites being used for file transfer or web-based bit torrent clients — and they don’t always require a password — so your files are stored on external servers. Because Sendoid is a link-based service, your files are only passed directly between parties, so you won’t have to worry about who’s touching the data on its way.

So, if you’re sending a large file to someone on a machine 5 feet away from you on the same network, you’re going to get much faster transfer speeds. According to Sendoid Co-Founder John Egan, Sendoid can transfer a 100MB file in approximately 35 seconds, versus the 25 to 30 minutes it might take a server-based service.

Partial uploads presently work desktop to desktop only, which includes a resume and restart function, regardless of which side disconnects. Adding this functionality for the web-based version is coming soon, Egan said.

Egan and his partner, Zac Morris, are both engineers and have been working on Sendoid for the last year. They created Sendoid, he said, because they were living on opposite coasts, working on a few other projects (Morris is a former Apple engineer), and had to constantly move large sensitive data back and forth (files larger than 500MB). They were unable to find any other services that opened an instant, direct connection and didn’t want to pay Yousendit $14 to transfer a single file larger than 100MB.

The earliest prototype of Sendoid, Egan told me, was a site called iSendr that they created in May of last year to test out the p2p technology. The prototype drew nearly 20K visitors on the first day and pushed them to apply to Y Combinator.

So how will Sendoid make money? Egan said that the business model will supplement free, unlimited transfers with premium services. Since you can send files “out-of-network” with Sendoid, Egan sees the service being particularly useful to film studios, enabling them to move raw media to post production, or to pharmaceutical companies to transfer confidential data within the company. Of course, these companies would require additional security controls and auditing beyond what Sendoid currently offers, so they would be required to pay for these added features.

Egan also said that they are looking to build a “premium groups” feature for intra-group sharing, where users can browse live shares from others in a realtime, collaborative environment.

Sendoid is currently in the midst of raising its first angel round and is working on apps for both iOS and Android.

It’s a cool service and, from my experience thus far, is quick and easy. So check it out.

Update: I think it’s worth pointing out that I am by no means familiar with every file-sharing service out there and no doubt have missed a few, so please chime in via the comment section to share what service you use and find to be the speediest.

Commenters also noted that I did not mention Dropbox, Box.net, or Ge.tt. All three of these companies offer fantastic services and, of the three I personally use Dropbox all the time — for work and personal file sharing. But, rather than debate which is the service to end all services, it’s probably best to see Sendoid as a complement to these file sharing tools. Each of them are, really, cloud-enabled file hosting services that offer sharing, and sync.

Sendoid differs in that it is peer-to-peer direct, so there’s no cloud and no size limit. So, if you take the example of Dropbox, you have a 2GB limitation (for starters), whereas Sendoid allows you to transfer far bigger (say, 100MB) files directly to another party’s hard drive. It’s as fast as your and your recipient’s network connections. If you’re working with fast networks, it’s a breeze. So if you need to transfer a big file to a colleague who lives across the country, and do it fast and securely, Sendoid is worth trying.

Earlier today, it was revealed that Microsoft was suing yet another company for infringing on their patents. The target this time? Barnes & Noble. Yes, Microsoft is suing a book chain. Why? Because they claim the Nook e-reader (which runs Google’s Android OS) copies status bars from Windows CE. Or something. If you’ll excuse my bluntness, it’s all a bunch of bullshit.

Devin has a good overview on CrunchGear of what the patents in question actually are. The whole thing is laughable. And everyone knows that except one party: Microsoft. The company has become completely drunk on their patents and subsequent lame lawsuits. And as a result, they’re quickly losing the hearts and minds of just about everyone that doesn’t work in Redmond.

So what is behind all of this? Is Microsoft really trying to stop Barnes & Noble from selling the Nook? No. Instead, they’re trying to force them to license the use of the patents from them so Microsoft can get a piece of the action for each Nook sold. How do I know? Well first of all, it’s a tactic Microsoft has been using for a while now.

In October of last year, Microsoft sued Motorola over their Android-powered phones. What was odd was that they weren’t suing HTC for the same thing — because they reached a patent licensing agreement with HTC for that very reason. Microsoft’s maneuver was simply trying to get Motorola in line to do the same. And now they’re doing the same thing with Barnes & Noble.

At least today they’re not beating around the bush anymore. Microsoft’s own General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, has put up a post on the issue with a title containing the words “Licensing is the solution.”

And to pre-empt posts like this one, Gutierrez notes, “Microsoft is not a company that pursues litigation lightly. In fact, this is only our seventh proactive patent infringement suit in our 36-year history. But we simply cannot ignore infringement of this scope and scale.”

Okay, let’s examine that “scope and scale” in Microsoft’s own words. In the post, Microsoft notes the following infringements by the Nook:

• Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;
• Enable display of a webpage's content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;
• Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;
• Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and
• Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.

“Easily select text”? “Navigate through information”? “Annotate text”? I mean, it reads like a joke, but it’s not. Next up, Microsoft is going to sue over the ability to type, look, and maybe even breathe. I’m sure they patented those things at some point over the past 30 years. They have something ridiculous like 20,000 patents.

And again, the worst part is that the suits are hollow. Microsoft really does not care about Nook sales being stopped because they’re copying their “innovation” — they’re happy to have them keep selling, just as long as Barnes & Noble pays them for each one sold.

Other companies, like Apple, for instance, may be no more in the right over these bogus software patents. But at least they really believe that companies like Google (by way of HTC) have copied their intellectual property and want them to stop doing it. For Microsoft, this is a business model.

The truth is that this laughable model is just an extension of the one that made Microsoft, Microsoft: licensing. Microsoft grew to where it is today because computer makers licensed Windows and Office. But as we dive into the mobile age, that model is not only broken, it has been destroyed. Google is licensing Android — but they’re doing it for free. It’s exactly why they were so easily able to kill off Windows Mobile.

Of course, Microsoft doesn’t understand that this model no longer works and they’re still trying to get OEMs to pay for their new Windows Phone OS. In fact, they’re even making new buddy Nokia pay them a licensing fee per phone! (While at the same time paying them back in billions of dollars in marketing and development costs.) It will not work.

And now we’re on to licensing fees 2.0: patents. How long until Microsoft is making more money on patent licensing than from their mobile unit? Serious question. Maybe they already are.

Even worse is the way Microsoft is going about all of this: straight-up bullying. That’s the only reason they’ve included Foxconn and Inventec in the most recent suit. Those guys have nothing to do with the infringements in question, but Microsoft is trying to apply pressure from all sides. And as more companies build products using Android, they’ll keep doing the same thing.

“To help companies address Android's ongoing infringement, we've established an industry-wide licensing program,” Gutierrez writes.

How swell. What great guys.

“Last year, HTC took a license covering its Android-based smartphones, confirming the viability of our license-first approach. In the e-reader space, Amazon.com signed a patent license with Microsoft last year covering its Kindle device. And many other device makers have also taken licenses to Microsoft's patents under a number of existing licensing programs,” he continues.

If your friends jump off a bridge…

The bottom line is that this needs to be stopped. Microsoft is threatening innovation across a range of industries with their attempt to instill their next great business model. The most bullshit business model of all time. This is the future of Microsoft, people. Is it any wonder why they’ve fallen out of favor with the general public? No one likes rooting for a jackass.

My favorite part of all of this is just how oblivious Microsoft is. Not only do they have Gutierrez writing ridiculous posts like the one today. They have their PR company, Waggener Edstrom, sending out emails to the press trumpeting the lawsuit! Hip hip hooray!

Microsoft still has many talented people doing great things. Kinect and even Windows Phone (the product, not the strategy) jump to mind. But the suits and lawyers are burying all of that under 700 metric tons of bullshit.

Update: And remember, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Android isn’t really free — you have to pay Microsoft a licensing fee for the patents.

[image: Warner Bros.]