Whenever you see the same ad for a shopping site you just visited pop up across the web, chances are that’s not a coincidence but a remarketing effort by that site. These sites often offer users who abandon their shopping carts, for example, a discount to lure them back. The only way to get a hold of them once they have left the site, however, is to target ads to them on other properties around the web. Starting today, setting up these remarketing campaigns is going to get a bit easier for advertisers who use Google Analytics. Google just announced that it is bringing its Google Analytics and Google Display Network closer together to give advertisers an easier to use option to remarket to very specific audiences who have previously visited their websites. This new service, says Google, simplifies the remarketing process and gives its advertisers more flexibility and “new ways to connect with [their] target audience.”

Until now, website owners had to use at least two different tags on their sites to enable remarketing and weren’t able to use the same detailed stats that Google Analytics offers to segment their audiences. Now, with its new Remarketing for Google Analytics feature, Google is making this service significantly easier for advertisers, which will likely mean that you will also soon see significantly more retargeted ads as you browse the web.

By combining data from Analytics with their remarketing campaigns, advertisers will also be able to very easily fine-tune their efforts by crafting very specific messages for users who, for example, are regular visitors to their site or who browsed a certain sub-set of pages. Besides tracking them across their own sites, advertisers can also use criteria like their users’ visit duration, the browser and operating system they used and their location (down to the city they live in) to try to re-engage them. These last options weren’t previously available to advertisers on Google’s Display Network.

Advertisers love remarketing, but this isn’t exactly a feature that users necessarily feel comfortable with. Thankfully, Google now makes it relatively easy to opt out of these efforts through its recently introduced “Mute This Ad” feature, as well as the Ads Preferences Manager, and the Google Analytics Opt-out.

A Reddit user found this video recorded on his brand new HP laptop. It was stored in the My Documents folder and clearly depicts the mundanity of life inside a hardware manufacturing plant. This was taken in the Quanta Chongqing Manufacturing City in Chongqing and the worker seems to be testing the camera on this particular model.

Usually evidence of this testing is wiped out. It wasn’t in this case.

Essentially, you’re looking at the face of modern manufacturing. He’s not mistreated, he’s not chained to his desk, but he’s building the same thing, over and over again, a prospect not many of us would relish. It’s a mundane view inside a fairly secret world that we as consumers rarely get to see.

ViVOtech, a near field communication (NFC) software and systems company, is shutting down operations due to cash-flow problems. This, despite having raised nearly $100 million in outside funding over the past decade. The company is planning to announce the news to employees later today via conference call, according to a report emerging today from NFC Times.

We tried to confirm the news this morning by calling offices in the U.K. and California, but no one was picking up the phone. Media relations representatives have not returned emails or voicemails.

UPDATE:

ViVOtech CEO Mick Mullagh has sent out the following statement:

ViVOtech's  business fundamentals are strong and orders and contracts are building in both its reader and software businesses. Over the last six months the company has been executing a strategy to divest its reader business to a qualified buyer. This sale has moved slower than anticipated. ViVOtech has not ceased operations but is in the process of restructuring operations and has reduced its team to a smaller group with the goals of maintaining customer relationship and core contract work, and to address our supplier relationships and commitments,  as the company completes plans to divest the reader business and focus on the Software Business. ViVOtech is in dialog with its customers and suppliers on the current situation but will be no making no other public statements.

We’ve reached out to several other companies and analysts working in the NFC industry, and, apparently, today’s news has taken everyone by surprise.

If true, that means ViVOtech has nothing left from the $96+ million it has raised from a lineup which included Singapore's EDBI, SingTel Innov8, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, Alloy Ventures, Citi Ventures (the venture arm of Citigroup), Draper Fisher Jurveston, DFJ Gotham, First Data Corporation, Miven Ventures, Motorola Mobility, Nokia Growth Partners and NCR. Even more interesting, the company just raised another round of financing in March of this year. And it was hiring as of late June.

Founded in 2001, ViVOtech develops payment software and NFC products including smart posters, contactless readers and writers, over-the-air provisioning, and transaction management infrastructure software.

ViVOtech partnered with Google on Google Wallet, the company’s push to become a player in mobile payments, which uses NFC technology. It also partnered with Isis, the NFC joint venture between U.S. mobile operators AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

The company is responsible for over half the NFC terminals found in big-name retailers like McDonald's, Home Depot and Whole Foods as well as in taxi cabs. To date, it had shipped almost 1 million terminals worldwide. It also had over 80% U.S. market share for NFC readers, and reported sales in “double-digit millions,” back in 2011. It was even looking to IPO this year.

So what could have happened? NFCtimes’ sources say ViVOtech has “cash-flow” problems. It may have been struggling with hitting the market early, before NFC technology really took off and became mainstream (if such a thing ever occurs, to be fair), and it also suffered setbacks when competitor VeriFone dropped the company as a supplier of readers, in favor of its own.

According to NFCtimes, ViVOtech is now in talks to sell its reader business to PAX Global Technology, the owner of Shenzhen, China-based PAX Technology, which also makes point-of-sale terminals. Vivotech's software business, TSM and mobile wallet services and products, are also up for sale.

Developing…

It’s impossible to predict the future, but the idea that our technology will soon collide with our biological sense of vision continues to pop up in the world. Minority Report is the best fictional example, while Google Glass is obviously the closest real-world iteration of this type of collision to date.

But a new video (below) posted by Sight Systems takes a stab at how this marriage of sight with technology could manifest itself in the coming years (or perhaps decades).

The video depicts some kind of system in which the technology itself is embedded in your eyeball, meaning that tons of apps lead you through your day without any extra hardware at all. You see the main character, Patrick, work out on his floor, watch TV (on an entirely blank wall), get dressed using some type of virtual closet app, and use the Wingman app to help him through a date.

As with any large shift in technology, this type of lifestyle will have its pros and its cons.

People are constantly complaining about a lack of real-life interaction now that smartphones have pervaded the our world. You can’t talk to someone for five seconds without either their phone or your phone interrupting. And even without an interruption, there’s this constant need to Instagram it, post it to Facebook, tweet about it, text someone else about it, or even whip out the phone to look up the next stop on tonight’s journey. Sight Systems, if it was real, would change that disconnect a bit, but it would also externalize even more knowledge.

Devin explains it best in his post on the matter, but in short, the more we use knowledge found on the Internet (and not in our own minds) the less capacity we have to actually hold that knowledge internally. The best example in the video would be Patrick making his breakfast. Rather than knowing the recipe and cooking it, his Sight System gamifies the process and walks him through each individual step, virtualized on his counter-top.

While we’re already sliding down this slippery slope, Googling knowledge instead of retaining it, there are still limitations to it. Even in our hyper-connected world, there are certain times when you simply don’t have access to the Internet, and even if you do, there are things (very few things, but they exist) that cannot be looked up.

But by embedding the technology within our bodies, the externalizing of knowledge becomes internal. That sounds really meta — let’s see if I can clarify. Here’s an example:

The other day I realized that I can’t quite remember which temperature certain types of clothes should be washed at. I looked it up, and washed the clothes. That is knowledge that my mother gave me, but that I pushed out of my memory because I knew it was easily accessible (this is all subconscious, of course). If the Internet were broken, globally, and there was some sort of world disaster, the consequence wouldn’t just be me not knowing how to wash my clothes. The consequence would be billions of people who have no idea how to deal with an Internet-less world.

By embedding this type of technology in our bodies, there is absolutely zero freedom from this externalized knowledge. There is no way to resist the temptation to “look it up.” And thus, everything we know comes from the technology inside us rather than our own brains.

It’s a scary thought, but so is the ending of the video.

It’s that time again. We are super excited to give away not only a free ticket to Disrupt SF, but we are also giving away a free Nexus 7 tablet to one lucky winner. I know, read on.

Disrupt SF is shaping up to be one of the biggest technology events of the year. It’s still more than a month away and we have already announced some undeniably incredible speakers that so far include: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, The Honest Company’s Jessica Alba and Brian Lee, Ron Conway, Vinod Khosla, Kevin Rose, San Francisco Mayer Ed Lee, and many, many more. We still have a ton more announcements to make until September, so be on the lookout for those.

Ever since the Nexus 7 was unveiled at Google I/O this year, everyone has been talking about it. Even our very own columnist MG Siegler, an outspoken Apple lover, couldn’t deny the tablet’s capabilities.

There will only be one winner for this giveaway. If you would like a chance at winning both the Disrupt ticket (a value of $1,995) and the Nexus 7 (a value of $199), all you have to do is follow the steps below.

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

- Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag)
- Or leave us a comment below telling us why you want to win

The contest will start now and end July 30th at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet or comment once, or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner once the giveaway is over. This giveaway is for U.S. residents only. Please note the free Disrupt ticket is for one ticket only and does not include airfare or hotel.

It can be argued that today’s modern electronics lack the soul found in older devices. There was a time that a radio felt nearly alive thanks to its glowing inner tubes and wooden casing. But now, with printed circuit boards and mass produced plastic casings, electronics feel dead, disposable and down right stiff.

Tombox speakers are a bit different. Using repurposed vintage electronics, these speakers combine the warm feeling of older electronics with features of a modern kit — think steampunk without the gaudy nonsense.

There are a 10 models in this company’s collection, each with a 3.5mm input. The best looking model, the tombox 145 (top), is already sold. Since these are one-off products, they’re gone when they’re gone. The tombox 144 (below) is another good bet. Or, if you need something larger, the company also sells large floor models complete with casters and a large leather strap for wheeling it around a room.

Prices are bit rough with models starting out at 190 EUR. Worse yet, it’s rather difficult to give this company your money as the buy button links to an email account. But never mind those trivial features, these radios and large speakers restore my faith in design by ironically rehashing older designs.

Google has been in ongoing discussions (some might say a war of words) with The UK’s Information Commissioner. If you remember, Google’s street cars captured all sorts of information other than just pictures, like WiFi nodes and even IP traffic, when they drove around. Google is dealing with multiple cases across Europe with various public bodies about this.

Today Google confirmed that it had located additional payload data collected by its Street View cars prior to May 2010 and the ICO, which has repeatedly asked Google to delete the extra data, has thrown a few choice words in Google’s direction.

While the ICO’s head of enforcement Steve Eckersley wrote in his reply to Google that he was “grateful” for the information about the data, and noted Google’s “commitment to continued cooperation with the ICO on this matter,” it’s not all hearts and roses.

The ICO says this data was supposed to have been deleted in December 2010. The fact that some of this information still exists appears to breach the undertaking to the ICO signed by Google in November 2010, according to the ICO.

In their letter to the ICO today, Google said they wanted to delete the remaining data and asked for instructions on how to proceed. A copy of the letter received this morning by the ICO from Google can be downloaded here. Here’s the response.

Effectively, the ICO has demanded that Google must supply the data to the ICO immediately, so that “we can subject it to forensic analysis before deciding on the necessary course of action.”

The ICO says “this should never have happened in the first place and the company's failure to secure its deletion as promised is cause for concern." That’s a pretty big slap on the wrist for Google.

The ICO says it is also in touch with other data protection authorities in the EU and elsewhere through the Article 29 Working Party and the GPEN network to coordinate the response to this development.

As they say, this story will run and run.

Update:

Peter Fleisher, Google's Global Privacy Counsel, tells us: “Google has recently confirmed that it still has in its possession a small portion of payload data collected by our Street View vehicles in the UK. Google apologizes for this error.”

If you’re heading down to Radio Shack to buy a brand new Tandy 1000 (the hottest PC out there!) then you may want to bring this handsome brick handset designed to work with your “smaller” phone via Bluetooth. You can whip this baby out in line while you write a check out for your PC, modem, and MS-DOS 3.0 purchases.

Designed by a husband and wife team, Shisa Labs, in Jersey City, NJ (the home of the rolled up sport coat sleeve), the device is ready to start tooling and shipping in a few months. It costs $85 for the early bird model. Phones will come in multiple colors including Fisher Office Supply Beige so you and your buds can color coordinate your parachute pants as you roll down to the club, Cutty-Sark-pre-party-buzz just kicking in, and talk about how great Star Cops was.

The phone lasts for about 20 hours on one charge and works with any Bluetooth compatible device including cellphones and desktops. You can also use the phone as speakerphone for Skype or just as a funny prop for the skit you’re putting on at the Lock-in down at the Junior Rec Center. They’ve hit $5,601 of their very ambitious $150,000 goal, so here’s hoping they can bring out the old Eye Of The Tiger and totally push this into the Danger Zone.

Project Page

Wonderville, an education-focused technology startup built by eToys vets from the dotcom era, is today making its public debut. You might, at first glance, think of the company as something like a “Khan Academy” for the younger crowd, given that its goal is to augment a child’s education (K-8) with additional materials and teachings. But the similarities end there. Where Khan Academy focuses on delivering video tutorials to students, Wonderville sources third-party content from a number of places all over the web. This includes not only YouTube, but also Amazon and iTunes, among other things.

The company was founded in January 2011, and includes dotcom pioneers and advisors from eToys, eBay, Discovery, Disney, Scholastic, Sesame Street, and Child Magazine. All three Wonderville co-founders, Mark Eastwood, David Lenz, and Lawrence Leach, worked together at eToys back in the day.

“We’re going to have 80%-90% coverage of what’s happening in the classroom already,” says Eastwood, detailing Wonderville’s ambitions. “In addition to that, if you look at the core curriculum standards, one of the things we pride ourselves on is that, in the U.S., more and more focus is going towards reading, writing, math, and a little bit of science, and a lot of our stuff is really designed to augment the arts, civics, and geography,” he adds.

From iTunes, Wonderville pulls in mobile apps, ebooks and TV shows, and it uses these alongside the other sources, to build what it calls “smart galleries.” Each gallery contains a collection of digital content based on what kids are actually learning about in school. For example, a gallery might contain apps, videos, quizzes, and “fun facts,” related to Abraham Lincoln or Amelia Earhart, for example.

But not all the content is dry and stuffy. There are also collections about things which kids are just curious about, like Bigfoot, Evel Knievel, or puppies, for example. And the content is carefully vetted by those on the team with backgrounds in education before inclusion, of course.

Currently, Wonderville has sourced 3,000 items from iTunes and 4,000 videos from YouTube for its smart galleries. It will also soon launch an ebook platform with content from 500 independent authors. Initially, everything on Wonderville be free. However, after ebooks arrive later this fall, the plan is to beginning charging for access to those titles. Pricing is expected around $5.99/month per child or $9.99/month for a family.

On Wonderville, parents will set up accounts for their children, and each of these are personalized around the child’s age and interests. As the kids begin to customize the system by decorating their virtual “room,” their interests, as derived by their selections, will be later used to inform Wonderville about what kind of content will appeal to the child in future products. For example, a girl who chooses to decorate her “room” with soccer balls, won’t be shown the same ebook titles as a girl who chooses unicorns.

Further down the line, the company is planning to release a music subscription service as well (WKID radio), which will not just feature “kids music,” but will offer a wide selection of songs, while also teaching the child about what they’re hearing through things like artists bios and descriptions.

Wonderville is currently bootstrapped through private investments from the founders, friends and family, and others. Currently an HTML5-only offering, the startup is now thinking about raising in order to begin development of native applications.

Just in time for the 2012 London Olympics, Samsung, one of the games’ official partners, has released a Union Jack-bearing Olympics-edition Galaxy S III, a little something special for Londoners enjoying one of the most revered sporting traditions on the planet.

Unfortunately for everyone who isn’t on the Queen’s team, the phone doesn’t actually support the Olympic games as much as it does the hosting country, Great Britain. It comes with a limited edition Union Jack back casing on the same blue background we’ve come to admire on the GSIII. The idea is that Brits can wave their phone during the game to show support.

The phone will officially be made available at Carphone Warehouse on August 1, with prices starting at £28 per month.

But the phone is more than a clever case to be waved. Samsung recently announced that the Galaxy S III and its awesome NFC capabilities will allow users to open their hotel room doors with the phone (instead of a keycard), courtesy of a deal with the Holiday Inn in Statford city.

The phone can also control lighting and change the channel on the TV for competing athletes, according to the Inquirer.

Samsung’s VP of Telecommunication and Networks, Simon Stanford, had the following to say:

As a Worldwide Olympic Partner, we at Samsung want everyone to get behind Team GB and offer them support during the Olympic Games.

We are delighted to be able to offer Carphone Warehouse customers the chance to own this exclusive London 2012 Samsung Galaxy SIII handset, combining the chance to support Team GB with owning a piece of cutting-edge Samsung technology.

The OUYA could change the gaming scene. The low price Android gaming set-top box has the makings of something great. But as the old saying goes, content is king and without killer titles, the OUYA will have a hard time attracting consumers and developers alike. Enter OnLive.

The two companies took to the interwebs this morning to announce OnLive will ship with OUYA. This means the little Android device will have access to first-run traditional gaming titles at launch. OnLive’s library currently includes Assassins Creed Revelations, L.A. Noire, The Darkness II and a ton more. Having access to this deep library will likely give the OUYA’s creators a bit more time to court Android devs to make exclusive titles for their new gaming device.

“OUYA is rethinking the console business, making waves by using standard technology to make gaming for your living room accessible, affordable and more innovative than ever,” wrote OnLive’s general manager Bruce Grove this morning on the company’s blog. “In OnLive’s case, we pioneered a groundbreaking, cloud-based system that instantly delivers games to any device on demand.”

Along with announcing OnLive, OUYA also revealed the latest design of its gaming controller. Don’t worry about the colored buttons, the company noted on its Kickstarter page that they’re just placeholders. “We won’t leave out colorblind gamers. “, they said.

OUYA is the latest Kickstarter superstar. With 5.5M in preorders on Kickstarter and 12 days to go, the device is exciting gamers and developers alike by bringing Android gaming to the living room. The company behind the product aims to bring it to market at just $99, a relative bargain in the space with the Xbox 360 and PS3 retailing for $199 and $249, respectively. Since the device is powered by a quad-core Tegra 3 SoC, the device should be able to produce quality graphics, too. However, in order to be successful, the OUYA needs killer games, which is something OnLive can provide in large quantities at launch.

This is has been a good week for OnLive. Just days ago the gaming company helped the $99 Vizio Co-Star Google TV device sell out in just 12 hours. OnLive, and with that, alternative gaming systems in general, has had a hard time breaking consumers away from the big three gaming companies, but it seems, at least after this week, that times could be changing.

The iPhone 5 is coming. The latest rumors peg September 21 as its release date. But even though Apple has yet to announce the phone, there are already countless, as in, hundreds and hundreds, of cases available for the model. It was just a matter of time until one of those case makers filled in the blanks by inserting a logical prototype into one of their cases.

Now, the device shown here is likely not a real-life, completely working iPhone 5. Even if it is a real thing, it doesn’t matter since Apple already revealed most of iOS 6′s goodies. Case makers are given specific specifications, and from there, they design cases to properly fit the device. The hundreds of cases available tell a story of a taller iPhone like the one in the pictures here.

As Gizmodo points out, Shenzhen Coolzone Technology is responsible for this latest leak. The case maker is currently hawking 29 different iPhone 5 cases, each with the taller design and with the headphone jack located on the bottom of the device, next to what appears to be a spot for a smaller dock connector.

This isn’t the first time that an upcoming iDevice was revealed by case makers. It has happened to nearly every iPhone and iPod over the last few years. The sheer amount of cases with identical specifications seem to confirm the new, taller design. Last fall, when the iPhone 5 was supposed to hit, just a handful of cases spoke to a radical redesign. But this time around, Alibaba is filled with cases of the same form factor.

Assuming the prototype displayed here correctly foretells the next iPhone’s design, it’s a bit strange that it will look simply like a tall iPhone 4. Sure, the current design has a stately, almost classic design, but the style is over two years old now. And in the mobile world, two years is near-retirement age. Haters will no doubt point and laugh at the rehashed design, but Apple has its massive bank account for comfort.

Amid fierce smartphone competition between Samsung and Apple that has spilled into a multinational patent battle, it looks like Apple may have opened yet another front on the M&A side: it is buying mobile security company AuthenTec — which had only just signed a deal with Samsung for Android devices — for $356 million.

AuthenTec, among other things, makes fingerprint sensor chips that are used for security and identification purposes; these are embedded in computing devices. The news was first reported by Reuters; the full announcement was filed with the SEC.

Just earlier this month AuthenTec had inked a deal with Samsung to cover security and device management services to cater to the “BYOD” trend — that is, workers taking their own handsets into their enterprise environment. The AuthenTec service would let IT managers quickly secure and authenticate those devices.

Reuters reported the deal as $356 million — $8 per share of the company. But that’s actually a pretty cheap price, considering that before the company went public it had raised some $600 million (yes, million) in funding.

If we had been listening between the lines (so to speak), we may have even heard a clue to this deal earlier this week, when Apple reported its Q2 results.

In those results, CEO Tim Cook made several references to how well Apple was doing in the enterprise segment, citing “rapid adoption” of the iPad in particular, with the number of iPad tablets more than tripling among Fortune 500 companies. “The iPad has become an indispensable tool worldwide to help employees across the industries do their jobs more effectively.”

Cook also said that the iPhone was becoming “the standard device for the employees,” with the number of iPhones sold into Fortune 500 companies more than doubling in the past year.

We have heard some of that annecdotally ourselves. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told me this week that among the enterprise customers of Box’s 6-7 out of every 10 work in primarily iOS environments.

It’s not clear whether this deal will mean a continuation of existing deals, such as the agreement with Samsung (others include HBO for the HBO Go app, and HP), or whether Apple will use this as a way of cutting off the use of the technology by its competitors.

The 8-K has some details on Apple and AuthenTec’s intellectual property, and well as future R&D. It says that Apple is paying $20 million in an IP and tech agreement to “acquire non-exclusive licenses and certain other rights with respect to hardware technology, software technology and patents of the Company.” But there is also a clause for licensing IP on a “non-exclusive basis” for $115 million.

As for development, the 8-K notes that Apple will pay an additional $7.5 million for product development work. Any new IP that comes out of that becomes the property of Apple.

We will have to wait and see exactly what Apple intends to do with this purchase, but it’s likely to mean a stronger set of enterprise-friendly features, and possibly some security and authentication services that can be used for the whole of the iPhone user base.

Security has become a very strong focus with smartphones: the more wireless we become the more of our lives we put into the cloud, with those devices becoming a key way of accessing it. With the introduction of mobile wallet services — something likely to be on Apple’s radar — the importance of securing our devices will become even greater.

Full SEC announcement embedded below

A milestone reached as the world of old media continues its push in a digital direction: the storied, pink-sheeted daily newspaper the Financial Times, read by 2.1 million readers daily, today said digital subscribers now outnumber those in print, and that digital revenues now account for half of all sales in the FT Group. And what’s more, sales actually grew rather than declined.

The FT says that digital subscriptions grew by 31%, and now number over 300,000, while print subscriptions are now at 299,000. The digital portion is outpacing overall growth by quite some way: the FT’s total paid subscriber base (both print and online) is now at 599,000, and grew by only 2% on last year. Overall sales at the company for the first six months of 2012 were £216 million ($339 million), compared to $203 for the period a year ago, growth of 6%.

The numbers were revealed by Pearson, the FT’s owner, while reporting half-year results. Pearson also noted that it is on track for digital to make up half of all sales this year.

What’s also important to note is that all these digital moves are not just being made to offset a decline in print readers, but also another decline that comes as a consequence of that: in advertising. The FT noted that growth online and in luxury and personal finance “more than offsetting” declines in trade and recruitment. “Advertising demand remains volatile and visibility poor,” it noted.

The positive numbers are a pointer to how the FT’s freemium model, mixing limited free content with tiers of wider content access for those willing to pay, can work (those tiers are here; in the UK they are £5.19 or £6.79 per week). The lowest tier in that model is, predictably, the most popular at the moment: registered site users — you can register on FT.com for a limited amount of free content monthly — were up by 26% to 4.8 million.

Mobile has become a significant part of the FT’s business overall: a full 25% of all FT.com traffic is now coming from mobile devices, the company said — a signal, if one was needed, for any other newspaper or magazine that targets a similar demographic of largely professional readers.

The FT’s big bet on making a iOS-optimized web app — created last year in a gesture against Apple and its in-app subscription commission — is also paying off. It now has 2.7 million users accessing the site through its web app, a combination of users registering for free, limited access and paying subscribers.

The FT in January this year bought Assanka, the maker of that iOS-optimized web app, and they have been hard at work on extending the proposition to other platforms. It now also has a web app on Chrome for Android and a Windows 8 web app.

Content revenues now make up 61% of the company’s business, although the FT has been developing other digital initiatives. These include streaming of live events, as well as more big data/tech plays. One of these is called GatekeeperIQ, which is a subscription-based service to track large, retailer investment platforms.

Race fans, start your engines!

Today marks the start of the Red Bull US Grand Prix – the first stop in the US of the MotoGP series – at the world renowned Laguna Seca raceway. For those unfamiliar, MotoGP is the pinnacle of motorcycle racing and the equivalent of F1 but on two wheels.

By now you’re probably wondering why a racing series – much less a motorcycle racing series – is on TechCrunch, right? For starters, the prototype motorbikes racing in MotoGP are purpose-built and the technology used in these bikes eventually make there way down to production bikes that you and I can purchase. More importantly, the technology (fuel efficiency, anti-wheelie, etc.) that’s being refined by the likes of Honda, Yamaha and Ducati make the bikes we purchase safer and more reliable. Not quite the technology we normally cover on TechCrunch but important nonetheless.

While MotoGP is obviously more popular in Europe and the rest of the world, the premiere class has its fair share of Americans, including 2006 world champion Nicky Hayden (Ducati), 2009 Superbike World Champion Ben Spies, and two-time Superbike World Champion (2000, 2002) Colin Edwards.

So how can you follow along this weekend if you don’t have cable (Speed Channel) like me? As you’d expect there’s an app for that. The 2012 MotoGP Live Experience ($18.99) app for iOS and Android (24-hour free trial) is your cheapest way to follow along from free practice 1 to the race on Sunday.

Despite the poor reviews, the app now includes live audio commentary which was stripped at the beginning of the season and has since been reimplemented. And if you’re new to the sport there’s also an app chronicling the history of the sport spanning from 2002 until last season. (Grand Prix motorcycle racing first began in 1949, a year before F1 making it the oldest ongoing premiere racing series. “MotoGP” is just the latest iteration of the series.)

MotoGP Live Experience Full [App Store]

MotoGP Live Experience [Google Play]

MotoGP History [App Store]

PS – Here’s some slo-mo motorcycle porn and a better understanding of what the world’s best motorcycle racers are capable of doing on these machines.

Now that all the big handset makers have put in their quarterly sales figures, Strategy Analytics has done the number crunching for an overall picture of what happened in the mobile market. The upshot: just as many predicted, mobile as a whole — facing wider economic slowdown and “shifting consumer tastes” – remained largely flat, growing by just 1%. But smartphones, still at a less mature state, are selling much better: collectively, shipments (which equals sales in SA’s book) grew by 32% in the quarter, the analysts said, with Samsung and Apple leading the way with over half the global market between them.

That sounds like a good-news story for smartphones, except when you understand that 32% growth (146.1 million units total in Q2) is actually the slowest the smartphone market has expanded in three years. In comparison, the market grew by 77% in the same quarter a year ago.

Strategy Analytics says that overall mobile handset sales totalled 362 million units, compared to 358 million for the same quarter a year ago.

As it did last quarter, Samsung continued to widen its lead over Nokia in overall sales. Strategy Analytics estimates that Samsung sold 93 million handsets in the last quarter, accounting for just over one-quarter of the total number of handsets sold (Samsung didn’t report unit sales in its Q2 results so SA estimates). Nokia, meanwhile, dropped down to 83.7 million handsets.

What’s interesting is that smartphones really are driving growth (and decline) for these companies now, not just in a strategic but in a bottom-line kind of way: As you can see in the table below, smartphones, and specifically the Android-based Galaxy line, accounted for over half of Samsung’s total mobile sales (50.5 million handsets; 37% of the smartphone market). Analyst Neil Mawston notes that this was the largest number of units ever shipped by a smartphone vendor in a single quarter. “Samsung has been able to deliver hit models in most major price segments,” he notes — a vote in favor of a varied range of products from the larger Galaxy Note to the Galaxy Y, in comparison to Apple’s slimmed-down offering of essentially three models.

On the other hand, Nokia’s 10 million smartphone sales (4 million Windows Phone Lumia devices still being outnumbered by the older Symbian platform) translated to a 7% smartphone share, its lowest share in a decade, Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Shah noted.

Taking out smartphones from the mix, Samsung sold about 43 million handsets to Nokia’s 74 million. Feature phones, with models featuring dual-SIM slots and the Asha line of “smartphone-like” low-end devices, was one brightish spot for Nokia in its quarterly earnings: it grew shipments of these by 2%, although that wasn’t enough to offset continuing declines in smartphones.

Apple’s 26 million iPhone shipments were not exactly thrilling to analysts this week; and in Strategy Analytics’ ranking, it saw its overall share of all smartphone sales shrink as well. That’s something that had already been tracked by Kantar Worldpanel, which noted that over the past three months Android had been outselling iOS in all major markets that it surveys. And Apple itself noted particular softness in traditionally strong markets: European iPhone sales, for example, were “essentially flat” according to CEO Tim Cook.

Apple’s share is now at 17.8% (versus 18.4% in Q2 last year) — no match for Samsung nearly doubling its market share. In fact, Samsung was the only handset maker (again, using Strategy Analytics estimates, not number from Samsung itself) to have outpaced average smartphone market growth this quarter.

The emphasis now, Strategy Analytics notes, is on how well Apple will be able to execute the launch of its next device. Apple has yet to confirm anything about this but in CEO Tim Cook’s comments this week on the earnings call, he acknowledged Apple’s softening sales as possibly related to anticipation around the next device — people are holding off until the newer iPhone model comes out, implying this would turn around with the next launch.

The overall slowdown in phone sales has also meant something else. The threat of smaller players who had been hoping to break into the big time has effectively been neutralized, and those who are big but have been massively challenged more recently (eg RIM and Nokia) will probably find it even harder to turn things around.

 

[Image: Mike Fleming, Flicker]

Lew Tucker is the distinguished Cloud CTO for Cisco Systems. He’s a revered character in the “clouderati,” community for his clear views and his support for OpenStack, the open cloud effort that is getting a lot of attention these past few weeks.

He’s also a proponent of open source. In this video posted July 23, he says open source is an increasing part of Cisco’s future. It’s a way to give back to the community and make the world a better place. He describes how Cisco is responding to the market need for an alternative to Amazon Web Services. He says Cisco sees that as an opportunity to develop a network based service that is an integral part of OpenStack.

It’s a timely video. Cisco has been an active contributor to OpenStack, especially with its involvement in the Quantum Project, an effort to build next generation virtual networks more suited to the cloud than traditional physical networks.

It’s even more timely considering we now have VMware entering the OpenStack community through its acquisition of Nicira this week for $1.26 billion. Nicira is a software defined networking (SDN) technology company that is also active in OpenStack. Now that it is owned by VMware, its role in OpenStack is uncertain. Further, it raises questions about Cisco’s relationship with VMware. The two have been long time partners. The proof of how that relationship unfolds may very well come down to how VMware participates in the open cloud movement.

Nicira and other companies in the SDN space have helped usher in a change in the way we view networking technology. It’s now the network that is virtualized. The network can exist anywhere. Everything becomes a node. That changes everything. Now a network can be programmed on the fly. It completes the cloud triangle. Compute is virtualized. Storage is getting there. Networking is next.

But will VMware embrace OpenStack and tout an open, cloudy future? It already has Cloud Foundry, its open source platform as a service (PaaS). But in the great scope of things, Cloud Foundry plays a small role in VMware’s business. The company’s real muscle is in its virtualization technology where it owns the market. Will the company open it to OpenStack?

Earlier this week, I had a conversation with Joshua McKenty of Piston Cloud who helped me connect the dots about VMware and what it may ultimately do. McKenty is one of the original founders of OpenStack.

Paul Maritz’ departure from VMware earlier this month signaled what was to come. Stories circulated that OpenStack was spinning out and Maritz was being considered for the job. For now, he has landed at EMC as the company’s chief strategist, reporting to CEO Joe Tucci. But it doesn’t make sense for him just to lead Cloud Foundry. It’s a tiny group. Important, but tiny. The real connection comes when you consider that EMC, VMware’s parent company, is considering integrating Cloud Foundry with Greenplum, its big data analytics group. Then there is DynamicOps, the company VMware acquired earlier this month. Its technology is designed to orchestrate IT infrastructure. Nicira would complete the play, giving VMware the network virtualization backbone that until now it has not had.

Would Maritz lead this group? That would make sense. He’d be leading EMC’s most important initiative. An effort that would be nothing less than turning the company’s virtualization empire into one that is about delivering services on a cloud stack.

But there’s a catch. Cisco and Nicira had been collaborating through OpenStack on the Quantum Project. VMware is entering a den where it may not be accepted. Especially if VCE falls apart. That’s the company EMC, VMware and Cisco started to market big box, converged systems. In other words, new age mainframes.

But until the Nicira acquisition came into play, VMware’s cloud strategy was not entirely clear. And that brings us back to the question about VMware’s openness.

VMware seems to be admitting that the underlying infrastructure will be “federated,” as my friend and analyst Krishnan Subramanian argues. It’s hard to see it any other way. Infrastructures are fractured. Portability is pretty much nonexistent. Federating infrastructures would give VMware a way to build a network services environment with Nicira. Cloud Foundry would serve as the universal PaaS and Greenplum acting as an analytics engine. DynamicOps would serve as the orchestration layer.

In order for this scenario to play out, VMware would have to take a position that would be extreme by its standards. It would mean VMware making it easy to move its proprietary virtualization technology to OpenStack.

Cisco has made the move to OpenStack and through that has shown a commitment to open source efforts. It is working with other networking companies to develop a software defined network where the network goes to the application in an open environment.

Will VMware make its own jump into OpenStack? if it did then it would be a noteworthy shift for VMware and show a significant commitment to the open cloud. It would well suit OpenStack. It would mean that we see a new generation of clouds that are open yet suited to the needs of any individual organization. And it may determine what kind of relationship it has with Cisco.

I’ve gone through various stages of “connectedness” in my life. We all have. Some of you are so young that you’ve never known anything else and some of you remember the days when you only knew the local news and big events like going to the moon. Today, we no longer have to rely on travelers spreading information like a game of telephone through roadside diners along Route 66.

Nowadays the whole world is a social media stage, where everyone can step up to the mic and say hello and someone might listen.

When hurricane Katrina happened, Facebook wasn’t available to most of us. The tragic event was probably featured on the cover of every newspaper and was the headlining story for every news outlet. At work a co-worker said to me, “Well, I was heading to New Orleans today, but so much for that!” and I cluelessly responded, “Why?” He looked dumbfounded.

When the earthquake in Haiti happened, I felt more connected through Twitter than anything else. I watched real updates from people who were there to help rebuild and I wished I could help. But I really didn’t know how, so I donated some money to the Red Cross. When the protests started in the middle east, I followed along and looked at one bloody photo after another and watched what happens when a country tries to silence your voice and shuts off the Internet. When the Japanese tsunami claimed thousands of lives, I curled up in a ball and cried. I felt helpless.

Even though I was “connected,” I had no idea how to help. I could follow what was happening but I was merely an observer. So I just decided to set up a recurring donation to the Red Cross. A few days later, something transformative happened. I sent an email to a friend in Japan to check on his well-being and he responded that he was fine, but he was trying to raise funds to get his neighbors some supplies and toilet paper.

Take note: When a disaster happens–and people don’t think about this–you run out of toilet paper. This friend immediately filled my need to help. I offered to supply everyone he knew with toilet paper. That’s when I had an idea: why couldn’t we build a Kiva or a Kickstarter for something like this? Why couldn’t we directly fund people who were on the ground and local who could help in the time of disaster?

Well, for one, individuals aren’t charities and unfortunately some amount of fraud would inevitably happen. I pitched it to a few friends and, like many of my ideas, it died on the vine. But my feeling of being able to help didn’t. I knew someone who was directly helping and, by knowing him, I could also help.

Even though I consider myself one of the most connected people on the planet, I woke up on Friday and bragged to a friend that I was going to go see Batman. My friend looked at me and she couldn’t believe I had not heard the news, despite my connectedness. She pulled out her iPad and showed me the shocking news about the shootings in Aurora, Colorado the night before.

We all have different ways of dealing with tragedy. My way of dealing with it, was getting on to the Internet and searching for anything and everything related to shooter James Holmes. I was determined to figure out how he was connected to the global stage. In this day and age, he must have online profiles somewhere and it must be able to tell us all something about him.

I don’t have any bad ass ninja searching skills, apparently, but other people do. An Adult Friend Finder and Match.com page surfaced. Still, I became obsessed and spent every night searching. Looking for every clue that was handed to us and I came up blank. I read story after story of every victim and I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I just couldn’t make sense of this person’s senseless crime.

Guess what? I felt hopeless again. I thought maybe my Internet skills, or lack thereof apparently, would lead me to information that could help the victims. Nothing. I went to the Red Cross site, but something changed. I just couldn’t give them anything else. I don’t know where that money goes. I know they do great things. I know that. I just can’t see the faces. I can’t read the stories. I can’t see how my money directly impacts the people in need. I mean, I give to the Red Cross anyway, but I wanted more and I came up empty handed.

I thought about jumping on a plane and heading there to help in person, but then the power of connectedness happened. Saturday night, I got this direct message on Twitter: “Hey c. Could you please tweet this? :: See 5 ways to bring HOPE to Aurora, Colorado! Join us @ http://t.co/vp1ESWF“

I decided a long time ago to follow pretty much anyone who follows me. It seems polite and, as a result, I get some, but not a lot, of spam. I was prepared to ignore it, but the words “Aurora, Colorado” caught my attention. I clicked on the link and suddenly, I was filled with hope.

The link lead to a site called HopeMob.org, which is exactly what it sounds like–a flash mob of hope. It is a site that raises money for causes, currently one at a time, in a pretty neat way. Stories are submitted to their team and, once they are approved, they are put up to a community vote. Votes cost money (huge fan of this concept!) and the ensuing revenue directly helps the operations of their non-profit. Once a story is voted up and wins, it is locked in to be featured on the front page.

The other great thing about HopeMob is that 100% of the funds that are crowd sourced online for a particular story go to the people in need. The funds aren’t passed directly on, but rather the non-profit vets everything and pays the bills themselves or buys what’s needed for the victims.

Suddenly, I could help.

The top story on HopeMob currently is for the victims of the Colorado shooting and I immediately gave money to the Colorado fund, as well as HopeMob as an organization. As a business owner, I know how much effort it takes to run a company non-profit or not and I want to make sure this site succeeds.

My life is forever changed because of HopeMob.org. I now feel like I can really do something that’s meaningful and has real results that I can understand. I may not be able to save everyone, but maybe I can make a difference in a few people’s lives. In a world we perceive as fucked up, or a place like the US where we may dislike how our government is run, we can at least be what I truly believe we inherently are–good people.

Through the power of the Internet, we can help one another. I’ve already talked too much. Probably 700 words too much, but there’s no way for me to make this story short. Tonight, I received another direct message on Twitter. A model who was in Colorado creating a set submission for Zivity was shot several times in the movie theater. There is a prominent photograph of her gun wounds and the story of her survival. I was floored.

Suddenly, tragedy hit home. I was thankful she was alive. I read her brave story and I was even more thankful that she took credit for her survival and thanked all of the people with their years of experience and skill who helped her recover. I decided to pay her medical bills. I don’t know her. She doesn’t know me. We know of each other through the Internet. It seems like the right thing to do. A friend of mine said it best tonight: Our institutions may be broken but we can at least press buttons to help each other.

Move over, Nexus 7 — you’re not the only Jelly Bean-powered Android tab in town anymore. According to a handful of Droid-Life tipsters, it appears that Motorola’s aging XOOM tablet is finally getting its crack at Google’s latest and greatest dessert-themed OS update.

The process has been in the works for about two or three days now, with selected members of Motorola’s Feedback Network receiving the Android 4.1.1 build for soak testing earlier this week. At this point, the floodgates seem to have opened, though not every XOOM owner will be able to enter the fray just yet.

You see, the build currently making the rounds is meant only for the U.S. Wi-Fi model, and there’s no word on when Verizon-flavored XOOMs will get their update. Some folks on the xda-developer forums are holding out hope for a widespread release sometime before the month is out, but still others have a more pessimistic outlook — the Verizon XOOM only got its Ice Cream Sandwich update last month, while Wi-Fi models received it all the way back in January. On top of that, Verizon has been taking the slow approach to pushing out updates for its LTE-capable Galaxy Nexus while the GSM versions are already able to nab Jelly Bean over the air. C’est la vie, I suppose.

While 4G XOOM owners bemoan their choice of hardware, the rest of you can pop into the device’s settings and check for the new update. Don’t fret if it doesn’t appear immediately — some users have reported success in forcing the update by clearing the Google Services Framework (Settings/Apps/All/Google Services Framework/Clear Data) first. It may take a few tries, but it should be smooth sailing from there once that little hiccup is taken care of.

The iPhone’s design is iconic but the final version looked rather different from early designs. With sleek but simple lines, the iPhone set the bar for smartphone design. This bar was set so high that most agree the iPhone undeniably influenced other phones — a thought that Samsung is currently fighting against. However, as revealed by recent court documents, the iPhone we all know finally hit the market after several generations of wild concepts.

Apple and Samsung are currently locked into several brutal court battles. Apple is winning some individual conflicts while Samsung wins others but neither side is absolutely dominating the other. However, for us bystanders, the court proceedings are turning out to be a rather entertaining sideshow that randomly turns out nuggets of fun Apple and Samsung trivia with the latest being these fun iPhone and iPad prototypes

The latest court documents tell a rather wild story. The iPhone was influenced by Sony products. Apparently, Tony Fadell, known as the godfather of the iPod, circulated an interview with a Sony designer and then instructed a 2006 industrial designer Shin Nishibori to develop an iPhone prototype with some serious nods to Sony’s design language. The rendered device looks an awful lot like an iPhone 4, while other prototypes (like one code-named N90, which BuzzFeed points out means it was likely an iPhone 4 prototype) go in different and sometimes whimsical directions.

The Verge points to court documents that also revealed early iPad models. Some pics show prototypes with kickstands (a common feature on HTC devices) while others show widescreen models. There are even some that show large handles flanking the screen.

It’s hard to look at these images and not see Steve Jobs’ influence. The late founder of Apple was notorious for his obsession over minutiae. His biography explains that his adoptive father explained to a then young Steve Jobs that the backside of a product is as important as the front even if no one sees it. It’s clear Jobs passed on that lesson to Apple designers; even early Apple products looked just as good from the back as they did from the front.

These images are a rare treat for Apple fanboys and critics alike. It’s rare for any company, especially one as secretive as Apple, to reveal early prototype designs. Although these models failed to make it to market, they might still hold design cues and decisions for future products — and they might not be protected with patents. But don’t worry. Apple and Samsung are going at it hard in several courts around the world. We might get see even more prototypes and early designs before the two sides call it quits.

Click to view slideshow.