Editor’s note: Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner is the founder of szceit.com in Shenzhen, China.

How do you end up with millions of new sales overnight with low development and implementation costs? In the case of Chinese electronics companies Rock Chips and Box Chips the answer has been simple – hitch a ride on Android.

China’s economy is booming thanks to low cost assembly, the country’s key advantage when competing on the global playing field. Manufacturers deliver low cost laborers who are able to follow processes and procedures to a reasonable degree of accuracy at very reasonable rates, and thus gain an edge over Western manufacturers.

In my years in China I’ve seen technologies come and go, but none have excited these manufacturers like the prospect of Android. It’s a solid, “open” operating system that lets them do a number of interesting things without many risks.

The West in turn has provided the "design" element of the process, enabling the overall product to be reliable and aesthetically pleasing. Chinese companies aren’t yet geared to competing in this arena. In order to undertake the gamble of developing an OS that gave them an exclusively Chinese platform (a la Microsoft or Apple for the US), Chinese firms would need an extensive process of re-education.

Then there’s the problem of IP. While Western competitors have strong rules in place (and real penalties) for infringement of their IP – Chinese companies face a business environment where their development costs would be lost overnight as soon as another company could clone their product. Success, then, often led to copying.

This of course doesn’t mean that Western companies in China get an easy ride. In fact Apple, a strong defender of its IP everywhere, has been unable to prevent clones and copies from flooding the market, all guaranteed to look similar to the original, though never approaching the same quality or usability.

So it becomes clear why Android is so appealing to the Chinese marketplace: it enables companies to move into the usability "design" space that they’ve previously been unable to access. Here you have a strong, internationally accepted operating system, with an open license to be copied (at no cost) and installed and used on any device you like. In fact the OS developer positively encourages you to do so.

It’s a stable platform with the weight of Google behind it and the thousands of talented computer science graduates in the country can play with it, adapt it and improve it – without having to design a system from the ground up. The market entry costs are limited to wages, so there’s a huge incentive for Chinese firms to get involved.

This means that the traditional IC players now face stiff competition from China, with Rock Chips and Box Chips already selling millions and another local firm, Actions, about to enter the fray. These companies can focus on the Android platform and develop newer and faster processors to support the latest hardware and Android updates. As the OS gains further market traction and the Chinese companies find a growing talent pool of skilled engineers to work with it, this competition is going to get stronger.

Niche developers in China will benefit, too. They’ll have local chip sets for reasonable costs, and a versatile workforce to draw on – moving more in the long-term to a quality model, based on customization opportunities and away from a volume pricing model.

Currently there’s still a defined lag from Chinese firms in the commodity technology market, and when Android first launched this lag was a year or more over developed nation equivalents, but today this is down to 3 or 4 months. Soon Chinese companies, playing to their own strengths in the supply chain, will close this gap to make it negligible or even begin to take a leading role.

For Google this is a big win too. The Chinese consumer market is a huge one and the trade-off for using a free Google service is that the user agrees to share data with Google. Of course Google's ability to aggregate massive amounts of personal data directly relates to the quality of their products and services, but it matters more how they can exploit the information they gain from their use.

China has only 40 million credit card users (based on slightly outdated figures released in 2010) and over 500 million computer users. This means that if the Android system were to appear on just 10% of all devices in the country, Google could conceivably, but probably won’t be able to access, more information on Chinese consumers than the country’s credit agencies! The rub is that the Android these firms are running is not “official” and as such rarely communicates with Google’s servers.

As the price of Android tablets and phones continues to decrease, the percentage of users is likely to grow exponentially.

This model of quality firmware partnered with lower-cost, mid-quality hardware, enables companies like Rock Chips and Box Chips to make millions of unit sales, and to win over not only the traditional "value" customer, but also the more discerning customers, domestically and overseas. It also encourages other IC manufacturers to come to the party and many will soon be joining them in an Android led technology revolution.

Another acquisition for Groupon, and a sign of how the e-commerce company is getting more focused on mobile as a route to future growth: it has picked up Kima Labs, which makes mobile barcode reading app Barcode Hero and mobile payment app TapBuy. The terms of the deal were not disclosed; we’re trying to find out.

The news comes just hours after news broke that Groupon had bought another mobile startup, Hyperpublic, which makes geolocation technology.

As a result of the acquisition, Barcode Hero — according to its site, which confirms that Groupon has purchased Kima Labs — will be closing down its service effective Monday, February 20. That means its iPhone app will no longer be available to download after that date. Those who already use the app will have until March 16 to download their data.

As for TapBuy, it’s not clear yet what will happen with the company’s service: the site still does not make any mention of the acquisition, so presumably users of its location-based deals will be able to continue using the service. Like Groupon, TapBuy offers daily deals, in its case for some 100 brands. It also processes transactions using credit card information provided by users, providing some intelligence behind it by grouping purchases together and adding coupons to purchases.

Kima Labs was founded by Blake Scholl and Jason Crawford, who cut their e-commerce teeth at Amazon.com, among other places, and its main focus is mobile shopping. Scholl has confirmed the acquisition directly to me, too, for what it’s worth.

Kima’s chief engineer, Andrew Miner, is also ex-Amazon. There, he led the team behind Amazon Global, the service that lets users buy from Amazon and merchant partners internationally. That points to this acquisition potentially having a wide remit for the company, which has expanded aggressively outside the U.S. (at a big cost, according to the last quarterly results).

All also worked together at Pelago, which was acquired by Groupon in April 2011. As TC reported at the time, Pelago’s CEO, Jeff Holden, now oversees product development at Groupon. Pelago’s most well-known product was location-based services/check-in app Whrrl.

Kima Labs has an impressive list of backers, including Naval Ravikant, Ron Conway, Owen Van Natta, and a strategic investment from the Washington Post Company.

The Kima Labs acquisition, coupled with the Hyperpublic news yesterday, represents a significant pick-up in mobile activity for Groupon under VP of mobile, Michael Shim, who hopped over to Groupon from Yahoo a year ago — one of the many bright execs that Yahoo lost last year in a spate of departures.

Put together, they give a strong indication of how Groupon sees its mobile future shaping up longer term: yes, the company wants to push good deals to you when you’re on the move and near a point of purchase, but Groupon could be looking to play an even more central role in the bigger opportunity in mobile commerce, too.

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Foxconn Increases Wages, Raises Pay By 16-25% For Chinese Workers

It seems like everyone’s discovered Pinterest this week! Alongside the countless posts dissecting its userbase over, sideways, and under have been a series of stories about how it’s “secretly” “monetizing” — a fact unearthed when LLSocial revealed that the startup was using a service called SkimLinks in order to drive affiliate revenue from purchases that originated on Pinterest.

Some reporters (ourselves included) used this opportunity to imply that Pinterest had funded itself through affilate revenue for two years and then ditched the service after it received serious venture capital — provoking an interesting counterpoint article in the WSJ about “Pinterest’s Rite of Web Passage—Huge Traffic, No Revenue.”

The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, admittedly not knowing the company’s financials, takes issue with the WSJ, and postulates that Pinterest could rake in $45 million in annual revenue using affiliate links with its current traffic.

Madrigal’s logic:

1)We know Pinterest is driving truly massive traffic to retail sites, by some accounts more than YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+ combined. It is, after all, a platform that’s perfect for shopping!
2) We know Pinterest used SkimLinks to add affiliate links.
3) Affiliate links generate revenue.

Should this add up to chump change? Let’s do the math just to get an order of magnitude estimate.

Commissions on sales for affiliate links vary widely, but they average around 5 percent. After SkimLinks cut, that’d be 3.75 percent (although SkimLinks says they can sometimes negotiate deals that would keep the percentage closer to the original number).

So, Pinterest has 10 million users. Let’s say that the average across all of them is that they buy items valued at $10 in a month through affiliate links on Pinterest. That’s $100,000,000 of sales for which Pinterest would get credit. That’s $3.75 million in monthly revenue, or $45 million of annual revenue.

This runs counter to what we’ve heard about the actual amount of revenue brought in to Pinterest by SkimLinks, which was modest for an Internet company — between 10 to 20k a year according to one source. Using Madrigal’s formula, this would represent somewhere between $300,000 – $615,000 in transactions coming through the service.

The truth is that the use of SkimLinks on Pinterest was more a question of the analytics it provided than any serious effort at monetization. Word on the street is that EVERYONE in the Valley passed on Pinterest when it was raising initial capital, something that wouldn’t have happened if it had indeed already discovered a viable business model.

The story of Pinterest right now is exactly what it looks like; It really is “hot startup gets venture funding, uses it to scale” not “startup hides the fact that it’s already profitable.” And with its kind of scale (and coffer) it could be losing a million dollars a month and still be a good bet.

Image via

In case it wasn’t already clear to you that later-stage social, mobile and deal-oriented companies led venture fundraising last year, here’s some analysis of CrunchBase data that drives the point home, courtesy of Alexey Tolkachiov at BuzzSparks.org.

421 Companies with the “social” tag in CrunchBase raised a total of $5.2 billion over the year. Out of this, Facebook alone was $1.5 billion; out of the 1,941 companies that were included in this analysis, Facebook alone raised 7.3% of the $20.5 billion total.

A few other social companies, including Twitter, Zynga, LivingSocial, Kabam, along with Chinese sites 55tuan and Lashou, count for another $2.29 billion. We’ll see how this category looks in 2012 — that is, look for a drop in private funding considering that so many of the leading companies in the category have already raised late-stage capital.

But wait, aren’t some of these companies not only social but also deals sites, or game developers? Yes, and this analysis in some cases double-counts ones that could fit in more than one category. The goal in doing so is to show how companies that are in multiple areas area impacting each of those areas. In any case, this type of categorization problem exists with any such data set; share your recommendations for how to make this clearer in the comments. And click on the categories in the graphic above to see each of the companies included.

Moving along… “Mobile” comes in second, with 393 companies raising a total of $2.3 billion. The fundings are relatively less concentrated at the top — InMobi, Square and Rearden Commerce all raised above $100 million, but that’s it. The third-largest category, Deals, is even more unbalanced than social. Groupon alone makes up more than half of the $1.9 billion total.

Mouse over the dots below to see the number of companies and total funding for all the various tags we have in the system.

Finally, the caveat you’ve all been waiting for. CrunchBase is a wiki-style database about startups, and while it seeks to be complete as possible, the data tends to skew towards Silicon Valley web companies. It’s also the largest free site of its kind, and worth analyzing despite any imperfections. In fact, you can help improve it by adding and editing entries about you and your company or venture firm.

MacRumors has done something very bad – they went and got themselves an iPad 3 display module. Actually, it’s not so bad when you can apparently just order one online. Normally this part even being online and available ahead of launch would suggest it was a scam, but what matters isn’t the name of the part (could easily be a scam) but the part itself.

They took a microscope to it, see — and it appears to have exactly four times the pixels of an ordinary iPad screen. It’s really just the latest in a long line of “confirmations,” but it’s nice nevertheless to see the thing itself.

The display module is just that: the LCD component, divorced from any display driver, processor, or backlight (so rumors of an improved backlight are still unconfirmed, though very likely). But the pixels of an LCD are visible under light from the right angle, and under magnification it’s clear that for every pixel on the normal iPad display, there are four on this new one. You can see it quite clearly in the image above (on which, if MacRumors doesn’t mind, I bumped the contrast to make the pixels more clear).

The implications of high-res screens, on iPad and (as rumored) on the MacBook Pro, I discussed already in some detail. It’s clear that this will be a major selling point going forward, and I look forward to some of the slip-ups in the Mountain Lion developer preview that hint at how Apple will be adapting its OS to this resolution bonanza.

Some say, I want to add, that a better display alone is no reason to upgrade your iPad. In fact, we said that. But I disagree. I’ve written about the resolution improvement as an important component of a larger change in how digital content is created and consumed. Apple is pushing the hardware side of that and, to some extent, the software, though they are pairing both with restrictions that the content community will eventually reject. I’m already sold on the iPad 3, but for reasons that may not be relevant to other users. To each their own — but like when the original Retina screen came out, I suspect that when you see it, you’ll want it.

Groupon has just acquired Hyperpublic, a NYC-based startup that’s spent the last two years building technology related to geo-location and the layers of information — like deals and events — that live on top of it.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but CEO Jordan Cooper describes it as a “huge win for our team and our investors”. He adds that Groupon was after Hyperpublic’s technology — this isn’t a case of it acquiring the team alone.

Cooper, who is also a General Partner at Lerer Ventures, says that a portion of Hyperpublic’s team will be moving out to Groupon’s engineering offices in California, while others will be leaving the company to pursue other ventures post-acquisition. Cooper will continue in his role at Lerer, and he’ll also be assuming a role with Groupon (he says he can’t get into specifics, but that he’ll be spending a lot of time in California as well).

The startup’s developer platform is going to be shut down, with maintenance and support continuing through March 2 2012 — all data will be deleted after that. Developers can find a FAQ on transitioning their data here.

The startup was founded in 2010 by Cooper and Doug Petkanics, who leads the company’s engineering team and helped forge what Cooper describes as a very engineering-focused environment. Hyperpublic raised $1.15 million in 2010 — Cooper says that board members Jordan Levy (Softbank Capital) Ken Lerer (Lerer Ventures) were also instrumental in the company’s development.

Finally, Cooper points out that Hyperpublic — which has more APIs than it does user-facing services — is a decidedly tech-heavy company. Which breaks with the stereotype of NYC startups being more focused on social platforms and media than on building ‘hard’ technology (incidentally, I suspect this stereotype will fade in the next year or so as the NYC tech community continues to grow).

So maybe there really is a sensible middle ground in the music business – somewhere between David Lowery’s pessimism and Bram Cohen’s blind faith in our digital future. That future may be the pop music band Pomplamoose. Its members are Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte, two young musician-entrepreneurs who are not only making a living marketing and selling their music online, but who even own a “nice house” with two recording studios. Nataly and Jack, I suspect (and hope), are the viable future of the music industry – one that will neither revolve around Platinum records nor completely free online content.

I met the talented and very charming Nataly and Jack earlier this week at SFMusicTech. Their business model is very simple, they explained to me. They create clever, scalable videos for YouTube which then feed their iTunes sales and their licensing deals. It’s a good business, they told me, with their 3 million monthly views on YouTube being directly correlated to their iTunes sales. Of course, they added, you still need to “make really good music” and have “excellent chemistry” – but the fact that Pomplamoose are making a decent living is great news for the thousands of other talented musicians trying to earn a living in today’s digital economy.

This is my third interview from SFMusicTech, following my encounters with Camper Van Beethoven’s David Lowery and BitTorrent’s Bram Cohen. Still to come are some conversations about what might turn out to be the most valuable player in today’s digital music business – the audience.

Does Address-gate have you terrified that your mobile apps are secretly slurping up your address book? AdiOS is a free new Mac program that in seconds detects which of your iOS apps have the ability to access your phone numbers and email contacts. AdiOS doesn’t indicate if or how the apps are transmitting your address book, but you should still delete any that access it.

No. That was a joke. This has all gotten ridiculous.

Heaven forbid your apps help connect you with friends. That’s what many of the apps AdiOS sniffs out use your address book for. I ran the program, which was developed by security software company Veracode, and found Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Skype, and Yelp were accessing all of my contacts. Some transmit that data without authorization, some ask permission, others use it locally, The Next Web reports.

Yes, I’d prefer to be asked and for the data to be hashed for security, but personally, I want to follow my friends on social services.

Angry Birds and Cut The Rope are checking my address book too, presumably so I can see high scores of friends. I am a little perplexed as to what non-social apps like Cheap Gas! or Uber are doing with the data, so Kudos to AdiOS for the heads up. Thankfully Apple will soon require apps to ask for permission to see your address book.

If you’re curious as to which apps are actually transmitting your address book, check out the console interface mitmproxy. A more mainstream-ready graphic user interface of mitmproxy would be more valuable, as AdiOS could cause unnecessary fear if misunderstood. I commend Veracode for including a “Don’t Panic” section on the AdiOS site, but I still see this as a security software company trying to cash in on media hype in addition to assisting people.

Maybe I’m a bit naive, but I think that with time we’re going to chill out about privacy. If you sell or misuse my data, I’ll scorn you, but I’m not that worried if it’s applied to improve my experience.

There are certainly risks to apps silently transmitting your address book, but privacy is such a hot-button issue that we’ve blown the problem out of proportion. I just feel like everyone is chasing the bumbling but kind-hearted hunchback with pitchforks and torches.

[Image Credit: Disney]

It’s a tense time for Google: controversial policy and user-experience changes are combining with a growing distrust of tracking and advertising to produce something of a toxic atmosphere. Not the moment, then, you would want a minor scandal to erupt in the form of Google circumventing, intentionally or unintentionally, the privacy settings of millions of Safari users.

The allegations have their source in a report by Stanford grad student Jonathan Mayer, who showed that using Safari triggered a special behavior in the normal cookie-creation process; his report was later played up by the Wall Street Journal. This behavior deliberately goes around the default Safari behavior of blocking all third-party cookies — like one from Google when you’re visiting TechCrunch.

Google says it’s a side-effect from something else, but even if that’s true, it’s still ugly.

The gist of the exploit is this: normally, a plain HTTP request to put a cookie on a machine running Safari would be acknowledged, vetted, and either accepted (for something like Amazon tracking your position on the site), or rejected (for something like DoubleClick meta-cookies). Google’s (DoubleClick’s, technically, but ultimately it’s Google’s) special cookie dispenser, however, would detect that Safari was being used, and “fill out” a form element on the client side, sending that out instead of a plain request.

It’s a documented feature, this form request for cookies, not some crazy illicit web stunt. Other online advertising companies do it as well, but that’s not really an endorsement. But the way it’s set up is fundamentally shady: using javascript to fill out an invisible form with the information that would normally be sent by other means, but isn’t — because the user has chosen not to. It sidesteps the Safari preferences neatly, by means of a loophole in the cookie-submission process.

Interestingly, that loophole was closed seven months ago in Webkit — by Google. One can view this cynically or generously. Cynically, it could be suggested that Google closed the hole but decided to exploit it in order to track Safari browsers — not the biggest piece of the desktop pie, but huge since it’s the default browser on iOS (also vulnerable). Generously, it could be said that Google fixed the problem and designed around a standard they helped achieve, and this tracking is in fact a side effect.

That’s something like what Google has actually said. In a statement, they say that last year they implemented some things to make sure +1 buttons (which of course are a form of third-party tracking, like most share elements) worked in Safari. They rigged a way to determine, on the level, whether a user had opted in or out to Google-related tracking, and if so, whether they were logged in. Fairly standard. But then:

However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser. We didn’t anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers.

Whether they are using the phrase “contained functionality” ironically isn’t clear. After all, they’re describing a security vulnerability they sewed up back in the day. Apple, for their part, has only said that they will be working to “put a stop to it.” Whether that means they’ll be adopting the same Webkit changes Google did isn’t clear.

It’s a bit much to swallow that Google designed functionality specifically for the browser and failed to notice this particular quirk. And the huge numbers of Safari browsers reporting data to Doubleclick should have been a red flag as well.

What matters in the end, though, is that a Google product violated the expressed privacy preferences of millions of users. Whether it was a mistake, an outdated browser on the user’s side, and whether the data was effectively anonymized — people won’t care about this. This is a big stumble when Google needed to be treading lightly. A little perspective and investigation might make this violation more or less serious, but the damage is done. Google is going to have to take some big steps to repair their image after the beating it’s taken over the last few months.

Here’s Google’s full statement on the matter:

The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.

Unlike other major browsers, Apple’s Safari browser blocks third-party cookies by default. However, Safari enables many web features for its users that rely on third parties and third-party cookies, such as “Like” buttons. Last year, we began using this functionality to enable features for signed-in Google users on Safari who had opted to see personalized ads and other content–such as the ability to “+1″ things that interest them.

To enable these features, we created a temporary communication link between Safari browsers and Google’s servers, so that we could ascertain whether Safari users were also signed into Google, and had opted for this type of personalization. But we designed this so that the information passing between the user’s Safari browser and Google’s servers was anonymous–effectively creating a barrier between their personal information and the web content they browse.

However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser. We didn’t anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers. It’s important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.

Users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome were not affected. Nor were users of any browser (including Safari) who have opted out of our interest-based advertising program using Google’s Ads Preferences Manager.

ProFounder, a startup that offered entrepreneurs ways to raise money for their startups and ideas, is shutting its doors, according to an announcement on the company’s site today.

ProFounder, which is the brainchild of Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley and fellow Stanford Business School alum Dana Mauriello, allowed entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues with investors (their friends, family, and community) over time in exchange for an investment.

Entrepreneurs could apply to Profounder, upload a pitch to offer to potential investors and then create a term sheet with Profounder’s templated forms and compliance sheets. ProFounder then gave businesses a page where they can invite friends, family, and investors to a destination page that allowed users to make contributions and investments directly on the site. The bonus of using ProFounder was that the platform allows unaccredited investors (i.e. friends and family as opposed to a venture firm) to participate, so anyone can be an investor.

Profounder says the current regulatory environment prevented them from pursuing further innovations on the site. Mauriello explains to us separately: “We wanted to provide more flexibility to our customers, for example around how they can send out invitations to invest and to who, however the regulation including the ban of general solicitation the 504D prevent that.”

The startup will also be joining forces with GOOD on crowdfunding and will be launching “new tools and community experiences to empower entrepreneurs and creators.”

Gillmor Gang Live – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor . Recording has concluded.

With the end of February nearly in sight, the tech community is all abuzz with talk about Mobile World Congress, the huge mobile conference set to take place in beautiful Barcelona in just over a week. All the big players will be there (though some will be less conspicuous than before), and of course among them will be Taiwan-based phone giant HTC.

Though HTC kicked off the Android device movement with the venerable G1 in 2008, the company has recently fallen on some hard times. Stiffening competition in the mobile space led HTC to finally break their long growth streak this past quarter, which has led company brass to take a step back and reevaluate their strategy.

Now with a renewed focus on creating a smaller number of “hero” devices this year, we’re expecting HTC to show off some serious hardware at MWC. Fortunately for us, some of the folks inside HTC just can’t seem to keep quiet, which means rumors and leaks are flying around like crazy. We’ve taken the liberty of sifting through all of the information to give you an idea of what HTC will have on display this year at MWC.

The One X:

I like to think that the One X was what HTC had in mind when they started talking up their new hero phones. Formerly known as the HTC Edge or Endeavor, the Ice Cream Sandwich-powered One X is the company's first quad-core smartphone thanks to the Tegra 3 chipset buried deep within it. It's expected to have 1GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage — a smart choice, considering HTC seems to have omitted the memory card slot. Fortunately, the word is that mass storage support has been added, which should make shuffling episodes of Doctor Who between the device and a computer a breeze.

Though I’m usually not a fan of custom UIs, Sense 4.0 should look mighty nice on that 4.7-inch 720p S-LCD display, while 1.3 and 8-megapixel cameras grace its front and back respectively. Interestingly, its waistline doesn’t seem to be suffering much for it — the One X is expected to be under 10mm thick.

The One S:

Those looking for a device that’s just a bit more manageable in the hand should take note of the One S. This little guy has been spotted more than a few times carrying the "Ville" moniker, and opts for a smaller 4.3-inch display instead of the One X’s gargantuan screen. On the software front, both Ice Cream Sandwich and Sense 4.0 are present and accounted for.

The One S expected to sport a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel rear camera, and a VGA front-facer. Most notably, the One S is said to be under 8mm thick — hopefully it retains that wonderful solid feel that HTC devices are known for.

The One V:

This Ice Cream Sandwich device is a relatively new addition to the rumor mill, and as such no spy shots have made their way out of HTC’s skunkworks yet — this is just a mockup. Sources have told Pocket-Lint that it’s a smaller, music-centric 3.7-inch screen display. The rest of spec sheet won’t set your world on fire: a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a 720p video capable 5-megapixel camera round out the package. If those specs sound familiar, it’s because the One V is rumored to be a Beats Audio-enhanced version of the underwhelming HTC Rhyme.

If real, then the One V is an interesting addition to the mix. It’s clearly more of a mid-range device than either the X or the Sdone, and almost seems to drag the One series down a bit. It could be that HTC and I are working with different definitions of “hero devices” here, but a moderately-specced phone geared toward music seems a odd when the Beats Audio feature is easily transplanted onto other devices.

The One XL:

HTC noted earlier this year that they would be reducing their presence in the tablet market, but their Quattro tablet seems to have been in development long before that change of heart. The One XL (as it’s now expected to be called) features the same Tegra 3 chipset as seen in the One X, along with a 10.1-inch display running 1024×768.

It’s expected to cram all that plus 16GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot, and both Bluetooth 4.0 and WiFi radios into a a chassis that’s under 9mm thick — seeing a trend here? The One XL should also have some solid streaming media services to work with, as an HD-capable version of the HTC Watch app and a potential HTC music service are reportedly in the works too.

So what’s up with these names?

Specs aside, one of the more notable things about these devices is the new naming scheme HTC seems to have gone with. HTC hasn’t officially confirmed their new branding efforts, although Pocketnow and Slashgear have both independently corroborated the new names with their respective sources.

At first glance, it seems like a smart move for HTC — aligning their products into a single series allows them to promote the line as a whole as well as individually, rather than trying to whip up a marketing strategy for a handful of devices with no discernible connection beyond the OS and the logo. Nokia has been doing something similar with their handsets — after announcing the change on their blog, Nokia gave all of their new devices a simple model number.

The idea was that the number would quickly give users a bit of context: a Lumia 710 is a higher-end model than the (rumored) Lumia 601. It seems to be working well so far, but going with letters as HTC seems to have done presents a new set of issues.

Context? There is none.

In fact, I could see the names causing a bit of confusion. If someone asked you to choose between a One S and a One V without explaining anything, you would have no godly idea which was the better device. Not that most phone names have terribly descriptive either, but while they can be lofty and ridiculous (and sometimes long-winded), they’re at least memorable. This new naming scheme is far simpler, but much drier to boot — there’s no personality to be had here.

Still, it has its upsides. Customers won't bemoan the addition of a, let's say, One G, because it isn't immediately obvious which phone is meant to be the better model. We’ll have to see if the One name sticks as these devices begin trickling into other markets, but there’s a very good chance that the hardware will shine regardless of the name that’s slapped on it.

In a move that demonstrates how cleanly Microsoft intends to cut itself off from the last 20 years of its most widely-used and widely-recognized products, they have given the Windows logo its most significant redesign in 20 years. Ever since Windows 3.1, the slightly curved, red-green-blue-yellow panes have greeted millions on startup, or at least peeked out from the corner of the screen.

No longer: Microsoft has abandoned the shape, color scheme, and even the start button. The new logo is monochromatic (or rather, polymonochromatic), straight, and unfamiliar. If they intended to show just how much they’ve changed the philosophy of the OS, this is a good way to do it.

The logo was actually leaked earlier this week on a Chinese site, but there was some question of its authenticity. Now that it has been explained on the Windows Blog, it’s official:

Some like the new design. Some don’t. But changes to major brands rarely produce anything but controversy, and this is no exception. Microsoft can’t go back on it, the way they can’t go back on the changes they’ve introduced with Windows 8. Whether you enjoy the new logo and look or not, at least you can say they are both new.

Personally, I’m not a fan. I understand the idea of the clean break and of evoking the Metro interface. That’s fine. But the logo fails for me because it doesn’t represent Windows as a brand, it represents a visual theme that hasn’t shipped and isn’t familiar to most users. The logo also changes color with your theme, which I think is a weak decision. The four-color panes were a little loud, to be sure, but that was what they had to work with back in the day if they didn’t want to dither but still wanted to show a decent image in an 8-bit graphics mode.

It has survived not just out of tradition, but because it’s instantly recognized by billions worldwide. That’s not brand capital Microsoft throws away lightly, I’m sure, but the question is why they’ve chosen to throw it away at all.

And the tilt on the “window” seems incongruous with both the OS and the logo itself. Is it coming, going, or just tilting? Does it ever tilt like that when you’re using Windows 8? If it’s meant to evoke the Metro UI, shouldn’t the Metro UI reflect that shape and angle more strongly?

But like I said, any change like this generates dissent like mine, while there are plenty who will find it magnificently clean, understated, and very in keeping with the Metro visual language. It’s here to stay, and a year from now when we’ve had it at our elbows and seen it on a hundred new devices, maybe we’ll feel differently.

Update: Just for fun, I made the logo as it might have looked with the old color scheme:

And, obligatory:

Features:

• 5-inch (16:9), 960 x 544 OLED screen
• Front and rear capacitive touchscreens
• Dual joysticks
• WiFi and 3G Wireless Broadband support
• MSRP: $249 (Wi-Fi Only)/$299 (Wi-Fi/3G)

Pros:

• Beautiful, bright screen
• Surprisingly light but solid
• Amazing, console-quality graphics

Cons:

• Too wide for smaller hands
• Vita game selection is currently limited
• 3-5 hours of battery life

The Short Version

Like a line of hard-marching Lemmings (or a swarm of Patapons), Sony’s countless, niggling enemies would like nothing better than to distract and steal the company’s hard-won fan base. The Playstation has long been the gold standard in console gaming, despite the Xbox’s recent challenges to the throne. And Sony does a good job. Graphics are better, gameplay is or can be more immersive, and in the battle for RPG dominance the PS3′s library is peerless.

But now Sony is fighting against lots of great ways to waste your time. Stuck in a long line? Whip out the iPhone, RAZR, or Blackberry. Want to play something bigger and bolder? Pull out a tablet and rock a few hours of Civilization Revolution or Need For Speed. Want to watch a movie? Bring up Netflix on any device in the house save your kitchen blender. There’s not as much space for a dedicated gaming device out there as there used to be, and both Nintendo and Sony know it.

So what, then, is the Playstation Vita and should you care about it? The Vita is Sony’s latest handheld device. It’s a small game console that takes SD-Card like cartridges but depends more on customer downloads and local storage. It can play multi-gigabyte-sized games that would look more at home on a console or PC than on a handheld.

You should care about the Vita because its success will define the value of the dedicated handheld in the marketplace. In a world full of devices vying for our attention; how a $250 handheld console designed with games in mind does in terms of sales and popularity is very important for Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft (not to mention stealth game console manufacturers like Apple and Google). Sony said this console has to last for another eight years in the marketplace, a prospect that seems a little far-fetched. The more important question is whether it lasts just one year without a major price cut and whether it lasts out this decade as a handheld console of choice.

All of this doom and gloom is distracting, however. Before anything else, the real question is whether the Vita delivers a great gaming experience. The answer to that question is a resounding “Yes.”

PSP Reborn?

The first thing we need to understand is that the Vita is far more than a PSP successor. Although it looks quite a bit like the old PSP, gone are the hard edges and moving parts of Sony’s previous design generation. The aesthetic here is rounded, soft, and usable – perhaps a nod to the softer, curved designs found in newer phones.

There are two clickable analog sticks on the left and right sides of the screen along with a four way directional pad on the left and four action buttons on the right. There are a two shoulder buttons on top along with a Vita card slot and HDMI/audio port. On the bottom is a port for a MicroSD next to Sony’s proprietary charging and data cable. There are no USB ports on this thing. But there is, famously, a touchpad on the back.

The 3G version has a SIM card slot on the left side. There are built-in stereo speakers and a small microphone as well as VGA cameras on the front and back.

The Vita is surprisingly light. It looks like it should be a dense product of Japanese engineering. Instead it feels almost hollow (in a good way) which makes it much easier to hold for longer periods.

The 5-inch OLED screen is powered by a Sony-built quad-core ARM-based processor and is amazingly bright and clear. The Vita contains 512MB of RAM and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support. It also contains an accelerometer for sensing position changes and a GPS chip. iFixIt found the device to be well-made and surprisingly serviceable.

All told, the Vita is very usable. The UI is based on “lozenges” that display various apps, including every game that has ever run on the device. This makes for some odd situations when you tap the lozenge for a game that isn’t currently in the Vita’s card slot (although you can transfer games to the on-board memory to remedy this). These lozenges are sort of like pointers to various content, a sort of reminder that you own a game rather than access to the game itself. The distinction isn’t important enough to discuss further, but it’s a quirk that bore mentioning.

The UI also uses a unique sticker interface to handle multi-tasking. You can multi-task in any app by pressing the dedicated Playstation button. When you do this, you bring up the main screen. Then you access other screens by swiping left or right. When you’re ready to “close” an app or game, you swipe from the upper right corner down, essentially “peeling” it from the screen. The same UI trick happens when you unlock the Vita – you “peel” off the lock screen. This makes it easy to see what is currently running and coupled with a sort of mini dock at the top of non-clickable icons, the Vita OS becomes more like a mini computer than a games machine. Clicking the Playstation button twice brings up a stack of current apps running on the device, including a notifications list where your trophy wins and download status resides.

Other apps include Sony Music and a video player as well as a Google Maps-based mapping app. There are also apps for the PSN Store as well as a trophy case, a Friends list, and a system for multi-player chat called Party.

Would You Like To Play A Game?

Gaming on a Vita vs., say, an iPhone is a revelation. The games are responsive, crisp, and vibrant compared to similar games on the iPhone and Android platforms. Uncharted: Golden Abyss, for example, is as good as any console game, with loads of textures and rich, high-poly environments that you would see on any PS3 or Xbox. Barring a few artifacts, you will be amazed at the quality. Because the Vita also plays some PSP games, you’re able to experience last gen gaming running on the Vita’s superior processor. For example, Dungeon Hunter: Alliance, a 1GB PSP game that I downloaded, was on par with an iOS native version of Dungeon Hunter 2. However, the game was much easier to play on the Vita because of the dual joysticks and – oddly enough – the rear touchpad.

This is not to say all is wine and roses on the Vita gaming front. If you are not a fan of Sony’s brand of gaming, you’re not going to be happy with the initial crop of games. The Uncharted title, while graphically stunning, is a long movie interspersed with running while the more casual titles like Super Stardust Delta display superior graphics and dubiously enticing gameplay.

Assessments of game quality are highly subjective, however, so I’ll leave those to a minimum. Sony has a massive following and their games are often considered the epitome of the video game arts (Final Fantasy and Metal Gear come to mind), at least by their fans. This device will do all of those titles justice.

Online play is very simple to set up with friends and/or strangers. Sadly, online play was mostly disabled for the titles I had access to simply because there weren’t many Vitas floating around on the network yet. However, the “friend discovery” system, called Near, is worth a deeper look.

Near

The most interesting part of the Vita UI is a system called Near. Near allows you to find people who are playing PS3 or Vita games and friend and/or challenge them. You can also chat and play with these nearby folks (once you’re connected) allowing you to create an ad hoc network of buddies who are within your general vicinity (say 2 kilometers or so).

While online play has been around for years, the PSP’s was historically abysmal and this means to rectify that. In fact, the “loose” nature of the networks created encourages game discovery as well as friend discovery, something that is slightly more difficult on the Xbox and considerably more difficult on the Wii.

In short, Near is the Vita’s way of going viral. If you can see others with Vitae nearby, you’ll be more inclined to consider other popular games and you’ll generally play more. It marries the best aspects of local discovery a la Foursquare with some of the better online gaming solutions.

The Bad

I write this last section with a bit of sadness. The Vita, while amazingly capable and very cool, may be the last of its breed, a bold experiment in its evolutionary stage waiting for the crash of a meteor to wipe it off the planet. Kotaku’s review hits the nail on the head: while the Vita (and, arguably, the 3DS) offers a superior gaming experience to any tablet or smartphone, my money is on the non-dedicated gaming device rather than a system that does one or two things well.

You’ll note that I didn’t cover the browser or the music services on this device. They exist and they work, but they are far from perfect — to be honest, they aren’t great. For example, the browser doesn’t work while a game is running in the background. The primary reason I browse the web around any game is to pop over to the FAQs or Wikis for a particular title (I’m not a very good gamer and Skyrim is hard). To be forced to close out of a game in order to browse is quite nasty. The browser also doesn’t support Flash 9 out of the box.

A battery life of 3-5 hours is strong but not ideal and the device doesn’t play well with some devices so there is no promise that you will be able to charge over USB. I tried a number of ports, including powered USB ports, and the results were mixed. The console really shines with in-depth, graphics rich games but if you know it’s going to die in a few hours, the impetus to get into an RPG is reduced. That leaves casual gaming, a space in which many other devices excel.

I want to love this device and I suspect a dedicated gamer will find it far superior to any other device, the Nintendo 3DS included. But I feel this will be the last iteration of the “dedicated gaming” handheld we see.

To be clear, the Vita does purport to be a connected console. It does support 3G and wireless and we can assume that some sort of Skype app will appear sooner than later. Netflix is coming. It already has voice chat with friends so something similar for general chatting can’t be far off.

The Bottom Line

As a device, the Vita is stellar. It has all the right pieces in all the right places – the huge, bright screen, the dual analog sticks, the acceptable battery life, the size, shape, and weight. I wish all Sony products were like this – intelligently designed, handsome, and usable. Sony has finally figured out how to put all the puzzle pieces into the right spots and it is an example of what the company can do when it produces a device dedicated to its biggest fans – gamers.

Who should buy it? PS3 and SCEA fans, definitely, and general gaming fans secondarily. If there are any titles that catch your fancy, you won’t be disappointed when you play them on this thing. However, as it stands I can’t actively recommend any of the launch titles as “must haves” although, as I said before, they are technically impressive.

Not a gaming fan but interested in this as a media player? Pass. There isn’t enough here to replace a good tablet or phone. I would, as a parent, also recommend caution before picking this up for the kids. The titles are not there to warrant the investment.

Time will tell how the Vita shakes out in the gaming market and everyone I’ve spoken to agrees that it’s an impressive and compelling package that, in many ways, feels like the end of the line.

Click to view slideshow.

I’m not even going to pretend that you don’t know what Angry Birds is… that would be insulting to both you and the game. But do you know what Angry Birds Space is? Nah, I didn’t think so. And truth be told, I’m not quite sure what it is either.

According to Rovio, Angry Birds Space will be the biggest launch for the company to date. Remember what a big deal Angry Birds Rio was with that whole 20th Century Fox partnership and a movie and all that jazz? Well guess what! Space is even bigger.

If you can’t tell from the past few sentences, I’m pretty excited about this. Angry Birds is the most popular mobile game in the world… ever… and Seasons and Rio were excellent additions to the series. But living/playing in a regular world, or a seasonal world, or even in an islandy world are things we’ve all done. Chilling out in space, on the other hand, is not.

There are little to no details so far. In fact, all we know is that the red bird looks much more devilish in space and that the game will debut on March 22. I predict that aliens will be our nemeses, and that gravity (or rather, a lack thereof) won’t be an issue.

You can check out the teaser video below and head on over to the official teaser page to download an Angry Birds Space wallpaper and/or glare into the burning eyes of our favorite little red bird.

The mundane Address Book was big news this week due to the privacy fiasco, but here’s a post about an impressive address book app with a different approach to privacy. Cobook is a Mac contact management app that’s simple, powerful and actually fun to use. The software, made by a boot-strapped startup, is now in a free beta test, with 60,000 downloads since it launched at the end of January.

Cobook is what the Mac OSX Address Book should be. It sits in the menu bar or can be undocked and instantly synchronizes with Apple’s Address Book. Any data entered into Cobook gets synced to your other computers and devices. Because it's a native app, adding contacts, assigning tags, and editing contact info is very quick. Your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn contact info can also be pulled in, and if you hover over it, a pop-up window displays your contacts’ Facebook info, Tweets, or LinkedIn profile. It’s the fastest way to read a contact’s info, much quicker than using any of those websites.

The address book controversy has focused on iOS apps that upload users contact data without their knowledge. For an address book app, you purposely want your data uploaded to the cloud so it can be viewed anywhere. So I was a little surprised when I installed Cobook and got a warning saying:

“Cobook cares about privacy. All your data is stored locally on your computer only, we don’t have any access neither to your data nor accounts. In fact we don’t even have any servers, except for a component that collects bugs.”

Cobook still lets you access your data everywhere, since it’s based on Apple’s Address Book and that’s where the syncing happens. You use iCloud, Google or Yahoo contacts to sync.

In the past, I’ve had problems syncing Apple’s Address Book, so I use Google contacts. To use Cobook with Google, I first needed to sync Apple’s Address Book to Google and wound up with three contacts for everyone. But, Google’s “Find and Merge Duplicates” feature fixed that.

And cleaning up bad contact info is fast and easy, much more so than with Google contacts or Apple’s default app. With 1,000 contacts, I never got around to it. But, Cobook has some neat features that make cleanup easy, such as viewing all contacts with no phone or email address.

One warning. Definitely backup your contact data before you do any syncing. Yeah, we know we should do this but often don’t. You will thank me later if you follow this advice just in case you run into any issues. I didn’t follow my own advice and lost half my contacts when I added a laptop to sync Google contacts with the Address Book. But, Google has a “Restore Contacts” feature that lets you travel back in time with your contact list and that restored the lost contacts.

I was able to get Cobook loaded on 2 laptops and a desktop, and via Google contacts, with an iPhone and iPad. I did run into one problem when I added a phone number in Cobook and it went to Google, but not to the iPhone. Hours after notifying Cobook’s support about the problem, they released a patch that fixed it.

The man behind Cobook is Kaspars Dancis, Founder and CEO of Codo. He worked at an enterprise startup that got acquired by a large company. After working at the big company for a few years, he decided he would rather work at a startup in the consumer space. Dancis wasn’t personally happy with any of the existing contact management solutions, and says he chose to “scratch his own itch.”

Dancis is now working on the project fulltime along with a team of three, in Riga, Latvia. He started building it last April.

Dancis says his vision is to make contact management something you don’t need to worry about. He says that just like Dropbox is for files, and Evernote is for notes, he wants Cobook to be for your contacts, so they are everywhere easily and quickly accessible.

Cobook is expected to come out of the free beta period by the end of March. The pricing hasn’t been set.

While Cobook is Mac only right now, they have a broader vision. Future plans include a PC version and mobile versions on iOS and Android. They might do some type of syncing service, where your data does get uploaded. Dancis says any such syncing would involve client side encryption so if contact data is stored on a remote server, it couldn’t be read without the user’s key.

Cobook faces competition from well-funded Xobni, which recently released a new iPhone app. Xobni, which launched at TechCrunch 40, also pulls data from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But it doesn’t have a native app. It runs as Gmail and Outlook plugins on the desktop and laptop.

Another competitor is everyme, now in private beta.

Here’s a video demo of Cobook:

Following up on its earlier report on iOS browser market share, ad network Chitika today released new results from a study which analyzed the impact mobile computing has had on traditional web browsing trends. In examining traffic across its network from August 2011 to February 2012, Chitika says that Windows web browsing market share has declined by almost 10%.

To determine its findings, Chitika analyzed data from hundreds of millions of ad impressions covering a cross section its network of 120,000 sites. Although a large sample size, we need to point out that this study is limited only to sites on the Chitika network. To be definitive, a larger study across multiple ad networks is still needed.

However, the data is interesting, especially in light of Chitika’s earlier discovery that iOS web traffic now surpasses that of Mac OS X. The firm theorizes that the new research, which involves an observed nearly* 10% decline in Windows web browsing market share, is due to the increase in browsing from mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. That is to say, mobile browsing is eating into traditional PC-based browsing. But the drop may also be the result of decreased PC production in 2011 arising from the component shortages that occurred during the recent monsoon season. The monsoons led to flooding in Thailand, which disrupted factories, and therefore overall PC production.

On its own, data like this could be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, but other signs that we’re entered the “post-PC” era have already arrived. For example, earlier this month, analysts at Canalys reported two major shifts in computing trends: one, that smartphone shipments outpaced PCs for the first time ever, and two, that Apple has become the world’s largest PC maker, assuming iPads are counted as PCs.

With that data in hand, Chitika’s insights into its own network feels more like further confirmation of the ongoing trends, and less like some weird fluke occurring with a niche number of websites.

* The chart shows a drop from August 2011 (78.3%) to Feb. 2012 (71.4%), which would be a 6.9% drop. But the percentage change between the highest and lowest points referenced in the study come out to 9.66% which rounds up to 10%. 

Having access to your documents and pictures is really easy these days. About a million services, including Dropbox and iCloud, allow you to sync your stuff between devices, but there’s one little thorn in our collective cloud-syncing side: it’s called a .zip file.

Fortunately, WinZip has just launched on the Apple App Store and it effectively rids us of this particularly annoying issue. After installing, a single tap will let you get a peek at what’s inside the .zip file. If you tap again, you’ll be able to look at individual files, even if you don’t have the associated applications installed on your iPhone or iPad.

Copy/paste functionality has also been integrated, to let you pull a snippet and pop it into an email or text message. Even encrypted .zip files can be opened.

WinZip is a free application that’s available now for download in the Apple App Store.