Apple is now the most valuable company of all time, with the Cupertino-based company’s market cap reaching a high of $621 billion. The company’s stock is trading at $664.12 per share, and reached a record price of $664.74 per share in trading today.

Microsoft previously set the record for a public company’s valuation at $618.9 billion in December of 1999.

Apple’s shares have been trading higher on the rumors of an iPad mini in production and a more powerful version of Apple TV. And of course, there’s been a frenzy around the upcoming release of the iPhone 5.

At least three major research firms believe that Windows Phone will overtake iOS by 2015, but peering that far into the mobile ecosystem’s future is damn near impossible. We can, however, get an idea of what will be happening in the next few months, and StatCounter predicts that Windows Phone will overtake BlackBerry very soon.

According to WMPowerUser, Microsoft’s mobile platform will surpass BlackBerry in the United States by November of this year. However, that has very little to do with Windows Phone’s success, and far more to do with BlackBerry’s almost impressive failure.

Both Samsung and Nokia, two major Windows Phone players, are expected to release a new round of WP-powered smartphones in the next few months, while BlackBerry 10 is said to launch before the end of the year. In either case, the U.S. market is all but officially lost to RIM, so the new WP handsets should help Microsoft surge past the beleaguered Waterloo handset maker .

Whether or not Windows Phone will eventually overtake iOS is another question entirely. It doesn’t seem likely based on what we know now, but Windows 8 may propel the soon-to-be number three OS further up in the ranks.

Profig, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, just launched its instant virtual phone system for small and medium businesses. The service is geared toward companies and individuals looking for a professional phone solution without the cost and hassle of using legacy hardware and software solutions. For just $30 per month, Profig offers its users one toll-free number, two local numbers, 500 minutes of calling time and 250 text messages.

To celebrate its launch, the company is offering the first 1,000 new users who use ‘techcrunch’ as their discount code when they sign up a $30 credit (enough for one month of basic service) to test Profig.

The service, as Profig’s co-founder Anantha Katragadda told me yesterday, works with your existing phones and is meant to be extremely easy to set up and use. Most currently available systems, Katragadda noted, are not just more expensive, but also lack the wide variety of features that Profig’s cloud-based system is able to offer. According to Katragadda, about a quarter of the current Y Combinator class has already signed up for its service.

What makes the service unique is that this one $30/month plan covers all of Profig’s services, which currently include the virtual phone system with features like an auto attendant, call routing, call screening and all the usual features one would expect from a phone system. Also included in the plan is a call tracking solution and a voice broadcasting service for reaching out to customers with automatic messages. All of these tools are accessible from one centralized dashboard.

You can, of course, always buy additional numbers and you are charged for calls and messages that go over the monthly allotments (that’s why you will have to give Profig a credit card number, even when you use the ‘techcrunch’ discount code).

With the basic system in place, the Profig team is now working on extending the service’s features set. The company, for example, just launched a click-to-call button that its users can integrate on their own websites to allow customers to contact them directly without leaving their site.

Profig is working on a solution for sales and support call centers and is already running beta tests of its full-blown SIP-based office phone system. The team is also working on integrating its solution – and especially its call tracking analytics data – with existing CRM solutions like Salesforce and Highrise.

For the time being, the two co-founders (who are also brothers) are the only full-time engineers working on the product. Interestingly, as Anantha and his brother Vamsi were working on a completely different idea when they were accepted into this summer’s Y Combinator class. After a few office hours with the program’s founder Paul Graham, however, it quickly became clear that the team’s talents were better suited for a product like Profig. Indeed, as they told me, the brothers had built a telephony system for their father’s business a few years earlier and that experience came in handy when the team decided to pivot.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 is one of the more exciting tablets to be released in a while. In fact, it may even pose a small threat to the iPad, considering its top-notch specs and Ice Cream Sandwich-flavored operating system. But beauty is only skin deep, and it’s what’s on the inside that counts, right? So let’s not judge this book by its cover:

iFixit, the team that loves to tear our favorite gadgetry apart, has just conducted its teardown of the Galaxy Note 10.1, finding that it’s one of the more easily repairable tablets they’ve encountered in a long while. It scored an 8.1 for repairability, whereas the new iPad only scored 2 out of 10 points on iFixit’s scale.

The team found that almost every internal component of the Galaxy Note 10.1 is individually replaceable. Even the chintzy glass over the LCD is easy to remove and replace. However, iFixit isn’t all that impressed with the 7,000mAh battery used to keep the Note’s profile as thin as it is.

We were pretty impressed with the Galaxy Note 10.1 and its cute little S Pen, but at the same price point as the iPad, is a good repairability score enough to tempt consumers away from Apple’s undisputed champion of tablets? Time shall tell, my friends.

In an effort to keep the kids from going with all Apple everything, Microsoft has teamed up with a number of vendors to offer a new “Buy a PC, Get An Xbox” plan along with a $15 upgrade to Windows 8 when it lands later this year. Non-gamers get a $100 Staples gift card, which sounds like cold comfort.

Student buyers who spend $699 on a PC will get the Xbox and the upgrade if they supply a student ID. Given that many PC shoppers are holding off until Windows 8 is official, this seems like a good move. Grabbing an Xbox and an inexpensive upgrade ensures that the laptops now mouldering in inventory are sold while Microsoft gains another revenue stream thanks to game purchases and Xbox Live subscriptions. Buyers, in turn, get some state of the art hardware that’s Win8 ready when it’s time to move over.

Given that folks may find Windows 8 a cognitive burden and that first-gen versions of Windows OSes usually end up pretty rough, it’s probably a good move to stick with Win7 for at least a few more months after launch to see how the UX and bugs shakes out. However it seems like a great opportunity for an early adopting student to pick up a nice laptop at a fairly nice price and waste a bit of time on Skyrim between, during, and after class.

via CNET

IAC’s Citygrid Media has bought Felix, a pay-per-call ad business from Yext, a service that helps businesses synchronize their listings across the Web. We hear the acquisition price was around $30 million.

Yext originally launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2009 as a pay-per-call advertising service. Earlier this year, Yext shifted its focus from this service to a new product called PowerListings. The company then spun off the pay-per-call part of the company into a wholly-owned subsidiary called Felix.

Felix listens to customer phone calls and determines which ones were actually good for your business. Felix itself is profitable, on-track to bring in nearly $30 million in revenue this year and currently has 85 employees.

Meanwhile, Yext just raised $27 million at a $270 million valuation led by Marker with CrunchFund (whose investor AOL owns TechCrunch), Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, and WGI Group participating. And the company is doubling down on its PowerListings service, which businesses use to make sure their information is up-to-date on all the different local search and listings sites across the Web. Businesses can manage their listings across dozens of sites like Yelp, SuperPages, Citysearch, Yellowbook, Local.com, Yahoo Local and more.

Currently, Yext syncs millions of updates for over 70,000 customer locations, including tens of thousands of small business, and 10 Fortune 100 companies.

Best Buy has been navigating some rough seas lately, but it would seem the company has finally found the skipper it’s been looking for. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that Best Buy has hired former Carlson CEO Hubert Joly to take over the CEO position from placeholder Mike Mikan.

Joly is slated to begin his tenure at the Minnesota-based company in September — he’s still working on getting his Visa.

That said, it doesn’t seem like Best Buy’s shareholders are heartened by this most recent turn of events. Best Buy’s stock price is currently hovering around half of what it was five years ago. It’s not the most dramatic drop I’ve seen a company’s stock price take recently — that dubious distinction goes to RIM — but I half-expect BB’s stock to level off once people get more of a feel for the talented Mr. Joly. At time of writing, Best Buy’s stock price is down more than 7.5% from its closing position on Friday.

Watching the goings-on at electronics retailer Best Buy these past few months is almost like watching a soap opera’s convoluted storyline unfold. The company’s recent financial woes (and an “extremely close relationship” with a female employee) prompted CEO Brian Dunn to step down. Founder Richard Schulze left soon after that because he failed to bring up said relationship with the company’s board. Oh, and Schulze is offering $8.5 billion to take his company private again.

Now there’s a new player on that stage.

There’s been much ado made about how the Frenchman has been instrumental to turnarounds at a handful of ailing companies (think Vivendi and Electronic Data Systems), but one has to wonder if he’s really up to a task like this. Best Buy was once comfortably at the top of the big box electronics retailer heap, and it was content to watch while rivals like CompUSA and Circuit City went belly up. These days, though, the company faces tremendous pressure not only from physical retailers but from major players like Amazon, whose inventory, aggressive pricing, and logistical prowess continue to provide consumers with a more convenient way to shop.

The company has already begin its pivot away from massive, warehouse-esque stores — the company committed to closing 50 of them earlier this year, and new store prototypes are said to take more than a few pages from Apple’s vaunted retail playbook. The ball is already rolling, and we’ll soon see what Joly does with it.

The Droid Razr HD has been making its way around the rumor mill for quite some time. Back in April, we noticed that EXIF data from a Picasa picture indicating that the long-rumored handset was in pre-production, and leaked images in June confirmed it.

But today a few tutorial videos were leaked onto the web (which have since been removed). Luckily, however, we have a few screen grabs that show us the clearest picture to date of the forthcoming battery-packed Razr HD.

We’ve received an invitation to a Motorola and Verizon event on September 5, and that’s most likely when we’ll see this bad boy up close and personal for the first time.

We haven’t yet confirmed what type of battery the Razr HD has, though we’re all hoping for that 3300mAh battery found in the Razr Maxx. Other than that, leaked images have confirmed a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor, microHDMI ports, the same Kevlar fiber casing that’s on the Razr Maxx, and the same display resolution we’re seeing on the Galaxy S III: 1196×720.

Pricing and availability are as yet unknown, but we should have those for you come September 5.

[via Droid-Life]

A startup called Groopt aims to make it easier for real-world groups to work together in a private, ad-free space — be it a club, a study group, a team of volunteers, or just a few roommates. And thanks to the launch of a redesigned site, as well as the new ability for any user to create additional groups for free, the company is hoping to expand beyond its initial customer base of fraternities and sororities.

There are plenty of other collaboration tools on the market, but most are focused on business teams. Groopt, on the other hand, is to a large extent trying to replace the email list. It can function as a lightweight communication tool for large groups (say, an alumni organization), while also offering features that could be useful for more active teams.

So there’s a general newsfeed for conversations, as well as shared calendars, document uploads, and WePay for payments. You can send messages to the whole group, subgroups, or individual group members, reducing the amount of message spam. And if you don’t want to keep logging in to the site itself, you can also get messages and alerts via email or mobile phone.

As I mentioned earlier, the product was initially designed for fraternities and sororities, a focus that was reflected in its original name, WebGreek. After all, not only do Greek organizations face the same communication challenges of any organization, they also want to keep members engaged (at both a local and national level) after they’ve graduated.

Even though Groopt is expanding beyond the Greek system, it’s still targeting those fraternities and sororities with its current marketing and sales efforts. After all, CEO Patrick Allen points out that the members of those organizations usually belong to other groups, too. And since Groopt allows you to set up new groups for free, Allen is hoping its current users will start using Groopt with people outside their fraternities and sororities, and the service will spread from there.

It’s easy for large organizations to get started, too, because they can just provide Groopt with a CSV file containing their membership list (which Allen emphasizes will be kept completely confidential and be used only for the initial invite), and every member will get an invitation to join their respective group or groups. Among the national Greek organizations that Groopt has already partnered with, Allen says that the sign-up rate is above 90 percent. In fact, he says Groopt already has more than 250,000 members, and has signed up organizations including Phi Gamma Delta, Alpha Omicron Pi, Alpha Tau Omega, Phi Kappa Psi, Alpha Sigma Phi, Theta Tau, and the University of California Irvine, which will be offering Groopt to all student organizations this fall.

You can sign up and create groups for free — Groopt charges for various premium services, mostly aimed at large organizations. For example, organizations can also use Groopt to create their public websites, which connect members to their Groopt groups on the backend.

Groopt is bootstrapped and profitable, and Allen says.

We’ve already written a few times about how Stitch Labs helps small, independent merchants manage their sales operations across a wide range of online marketplaces. Well now it’s making it easier to connect their online and offline sales, through a partnership with Verifone’s Sail payment processing system.

Stitch wants to make it easier for small, independent businesses to manage their CRM, product orders, and inventory all in one central location. To do that, it’s created a SaaS-based platform that allows independent designers, makers, and manufacturers to list their goods on multiple sales sites and keep track of their supply and demand, regardless of where goods were sold. To do so, it’s integrated with major sales platforms such as Etsy, Shopify, and BigCommerce.

But what happens when those vendors sell goods out in the real world, at craft or maker fairs, or at other events or expos? It used to be that there was no way to have those transactions automatically connect to their online sales systems — they’d have to go back and manually enter transactions after the fact to keep track of sales and inventory. Well not anymore: Stitch just announced an integration with Verifone’s Sail card reader and payment processing app.

With the Sail integration, Stitch customers will be able to sell their goods, process credit card transactions, and have inventory automatically updated on the fly. By doing so, Stitch (and Sail) can help bridge the divide between both online and offline sales, making it easier for small business owners to keep track of things, whether they’re selling at a craft fair or on Etsy.

That’s all possible because Sail has rolled out a platform that includes a mobile SDK packing encryption, real-time fraud screening and boarding APIs, and merchant processing and settlement services. The Sail offering is built to work with third-party marketing, loyalty, and social media tools, so connecting with an inventory management solution like Stitch makes sense. Sail charges a 1.9 percent fee for transactions made with merchants who pay a monthly subscription fee of $9.99 a month to use the service, and a 2.7 percent fee for sales of merchants who don’t pay the subscription fee.

Of course, Sail’s card reader competes with other payment processing solutions — like Square and PayPal Here, among others. But Square has rolled out its own inventory management solutions with Square Register, and has a closed API — so Stitch wouldn’t be able to hook up to its system. And PayPal, while it plans to be open, only recently launched. That’s not to say that Stitch won’t work with other payment processors in the future, just that this is the first integration it’s been able to pull off.

Stitch Labs raised $1 million in seed funding from True Ventures in February. It’s based in San Francisco and now has five full-time employees.

The Samsung Galaxy Note is coming. Are you ready for its massive 5.5-inch screen? Well, if Internet talk is to be believed, Samsung will reveal the tabletphone on August 29th at a Berlin event.

Samsung just posted this teaser video and it shows the Note 2 with a film director, cleverly pulling at aspiring artists. You see, just like with the first Note, Samsung is aiming the Note 2 at makers. The Note 2′s stylus and included art apps are perfect for sketching while on the go, says Sammy. Forget the Moleskine notebook and jump into the world of digital creation.

So far, not much is known about the successor to the original Note. An image claiming to be the Note II hit the web last week, which shows a device with the same styling cues found on the new Galaxy S III. Samsung’s quad-core Exynos SoC will likely power the device and its large 5.5-inch screen.

Tune in later this month for the full unveiling.

We’ve heard a lot of rumors in the last year, but now Barnes & Noble has finally unveiled its first official  plans for taking its Nook tablets and e-readers to markets outside of the U.S. Today it announced that it will be launching the devices, starting first with the e-readers, in the UK in October, along with a new UK online storefront for the Nook digital bookstore (2.5 million digital titles) and “partnerships with leading retailers” to sell them.

The move comes as B&N’s arch rival Amazon gears up to launch the Kindle Fire in the UK — in a deal with leading book retailer Waterstones that includes other Kindle devices as well as e-books. Both the Kindle Fire and the Nook are built on forked versions of Google’s Android OS.

The news also comes at a time when people are scrutinizing how well the Nook line of devices is performing, questioning what sort of an impact Microsoft’s $300 million investment in B&N will have longer-term.

Prior to Amazon announcing a Waterstones agreement, many had thought that B&N would partner with the UK bookseller itself as a way of getting its Nook line of readers and tablets into the UK market. The CEO of Waterstones had publicly praised Waterstones, and reviled Amazon as a devil.

In the absence of a Waterstones deal, B&N now promises “partnerships with leading retailers,” although it has yet to specify any names. It also says that pricing for the Nook readers and tablets will be revealed closer to the date of commercial launch.

Amazon already offers its Kindle e-readers in a number of global markets, and in that sense this is about B&N catching up: “The first products to be available when the company begins offering its products in the UK in mid-October,” it notes, “include Barnes & Noble's line of…E Ink Readers, NOOK Simple Touch and NOOK Simple Touch with GlowLight.”

The company does not specify when its tablets will be entering the mix.

B&N has for months now been building up its presence in the UK and the rest of Europe, so this may well be a first-move into the rest of the region. In March, the company incorporated in Germany and started to hire there. It has also been running events to cozy up to Android developers in the UK — although in the absence of local billing, and more concrete details on device launches here, that perhaps hasn’t been as buzzy as B&N would have hoped.

The company is due to report its quarterly earnings this week, and all eyes will be on how well its digital and device strategies are holding up, in the wake of people reading less paper books and general problems that have befallen other traditional booksellers like Borders.

Judging by how B&N has marketed the Nook in the U.S., its retail partnerships in the UK will be key to how well it does here. The company doesn’t have any physical stores of its own, and yet its sales strategy in the U.S. has been heavily based on promoting the devices in-store, creating reading areas and offering users free reading time while in the retail location. Whether it will take the same approach here has yet to be made clear. But again the fact that Waterstones, the biggest physical bookseller in the UK, is not going to be among those stocking it will inevitably be a setback in that sense.

The Nook tablet has less than 5% of the U.S. market for tablets at the moment, according to IDC. B&N says that it has sold “millions” of Nook devices to date.

CapLinked, a startup offering private workspaces for managing financial deals (such as startup funding), has occasionally been described as a competitor to AngelList. Today, however, it’s announcing a new feature — the ability to share links pointing to CapLinked workspaces — that makes it easier for companies to use the two services together.

The linking feature wasn’t built solely to integrate with AngelList — co-founder and CEO Eric Jackson notes that the links can be shared anywhere, like in an email or over Skype. But AngelList is definitely a big part of the pitch, and it’s an area where the links seem like they’ll be particularly useful.

Basically, you can think of this as the CapLinked version of Dropbox’s feature allowing users to share documents by just sharing a link. What’s actually being shared is different, but both features are trying to remove many of the barriers to sharing. In the case of CapLinked, companies can now post the link in the “investors only” section of their AngelList profile, then investors interested in a deal can click on it to view the documents they need to begin their due diligence. The company, meanwhile, gets to see who’s viewing which documents, and they can update everyone in the workspace whenever a new document is shared.

Previously, companies invited investors to their workspaces by logging into CapLinked and entering the investor’s name and email address. On its own, it doesn’t sound like an enormously onerous process, but Jackson points out that it’s really designed for situations where you already know the investor: “What we realized was that in some circumstances, you want to be able to invite potential investors that you don’t know yet,” he says. By posting a link to AngelList, CapLinked users can get the initial steps of the dealmaking process started with any interested investors.

The link isn’t really meant to be shared with the general public. It’s probably not a great idea to just put it up on your website. Instead, it’s best for semi-private situations like an email or the investor-only section of an AngelList profile. But in case the link is shared inappropriately, even after someone clicks on it, they still need to get approval from the company controlling the workspace in order to see the documents.

Jackson also says that CapLinked isn’t just for startups — it’s used by other companies to manage business transactions online, too. He adds that he sees the incumbent virtual data room services like Intralinks and Merrill Datasite as his competition, not AngelList.

“[AngelList] is an awesome site for connecting investors and startups,” he says. “Our site is much more about managing a transaction and handling documents that are very sensitive and confidential. They’re really kind of complementary, because where AngelList leaves off, CapLinked picks up.”

HTC, the troubled Taiwanese handset maker, today dealt its investors a one-two punch. The company will take a $40 million hit from its investment in the cloud-based gaming startup OnLive, but it will also be redoubling its efforts to find new sources of revenue, this time in enterprise services: it is making a $35.4 million investment in Magnet Systems, an enterprise applications startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, among others.

HTC says it will take a 17.1% stake in the company, a Series B investment, equivalent to $35.4 million. To date, Magnet had raised $12.6 million led by Andreessen Horowitz in a Series A round. The investment announcement was first spotted by Reuters.

The move signals a new strategic interest for HTC, in the area of enterprise services, at a time when its investments in more consumer-focused services seem to be falling flat.

“The investment will bring social, mobile, and cloud capabilities to HTC's portfolio of service offerings to its mobile enterprise customers,” HTC noted. “The leading-edge social, mobile and cloud technologies at the heart of Magnet's platform make it an ideal foundation for the applications and services that enterprises will be buying and building in the coming years.”

Magnet Systems is playing in an area definitely worth watching — touched by the two bugs of consumerization and cloud computing, businesses are investing in enterprise applications, with startups like Box and Huddle doing battle with the Oracles and Microsofts of the world to corner that still-young market. (Worth pointing out too that Magnet Systems is founded and headed by Alfred Chuang, who had also co-founded BEA Systems, which sold to Oracle for $8.5 billion in 2008.)

On the other hand, HTC’s move slightly smacks of desperation.

HTC has been hit hard as a smartphone-only device maker, with Samsung really stealing the Android show away from the company, which had an early-mover lead in Android but has not kept up pace with the breadth of blockbuster Samsung devices. In the last quarter the company reported revenues down 27% to $3 billion, and profits down by 57%. It also lowered its Q3 outlook.

And the company’s consumer investments have been less than fruitful.

HTC earlier today confirmed it would take a write-down of its entire $40 million investment in OnLive because of its sudden restructuring drama from over the weekend.

“Due to lack of operating cash and an inability to raise new capital, OnLive had completed asset restructuring over the weekend. HTC estimates that it will need to recognize a $40 million provision for this investment loss,” the company noted.

HTC had originally made its investment in OnLive in February 2011, as part of its push into content services that could be coupled with its devices.

On Sunday, OnLive announced that it has restructured and effectively sold itself to another company that will also be called OnLive, with the first investment coming from “an affiliate of Lauder Partners.”

The move also follows from HTC divesting part of its holdings in Beats Electronics. HTC had bought a 50.1% stake in Beats in 2011 worth some $309 million, but at the end of July the company said it would be selling back half of that to existing Beats investors for $150 million.

HTC has not explained the reason for its divestment — and claims it will continue to work closely with the company — but it points to a company that appears directionless in its investment and growth strategy.

“Reducing its holding to 25.57 percent signals HTC’s separation from Beats’ operations. Possibly it implies that there was not much synergy between the two companies from the beginning,” Morgan Stanley noted in a report on the news (via BI).

Good job, Netflix PR: Today the company announced it has hit 1 million subscribers for its video streaming service just seven months after launch in the UK and Ireland. That’s pretty impressive, by any measure, but it’s also somewhat old news. During last month’s Q2 financing results, the company openly talked about its numbers internationally, trumpeting growth in the UK and Ireland in particular, noting that — yes – it has reached the 1M mark.

TechCrunch, of course, reported this milestone at the time, when Netflix was also quick to point out that it had “pulled ahead” of its European competitor Amazon-owned LOVEFiLM in “every important streaming-related metric.” Unlike Netflix in the UK and Ireland, LOVEFiLM doesn’t just offer a streaming-only option, but is also playing in the legacy ‘DVD rental by post’ space, hence Netflix’s emphasis on streaming-related metrics.

However, PR wins aside, it’s hard not to be impressed by Netflix’s growth this side of the pond. 1M subscribers is a big number by any measure, especially when you consider how much free content is available through the BBC’s iPlayer television streaming offering, and the muscle of entrenched players like cable operator Virgin Media and BSkyB, which has recently launched its own streaming-only offering.

However, there’s another story here too. Netflix has been advertising very heavily here in the UK, not least on old TV, and at what must not be inconsiderable cost. In fact, the company has talked about its willingness to dip into the red in order to launch in new markets, and it would be interesting to know how much it’s spent on customer acquisition per-subscriber in the UK and Ireland. And, of course, retaining those subscribers is another thing altogether. This is definitely one to watch — no pun intended.

Google, along with the rest of the Internet, may be partly responsible for how ubiquitous English has become, but Google is also trying to counterbalance that by making it easier for people to interact in other languages. Among the latest moves, the search giant has created a tool that automatically translates Arabizi — Roman-character based Arabic language slang — back into Arabic script. The focus on Arabic also helps the company in a wider push it is making into the Middle East and North African markets.

“Although I do not like writing [in Arabizi] and I would always recommend using the Arabic language directly, some users may not have a keyboard in Arabic…so these tools facilitate the process and maintain Arabic language content,” writes Fayeq Oweis, a director in Google’s department of Arabic language and localization, in a blog post announcing the new Arabizi tool. As part of Google’s Input Tools translation service, unveiled in July, the Arabizi tool can be used with Google products like search, Gmail and Google+, but also across the rest of the Internet, and even offline.

Although some of Google’s Input Tools have made their way to Android, Google services and Chrome, the new Arabizi feature (downloadable here) is currently only available for Windows.

The move to extend support for Arabic speakers comes at the same time that Google is targeting Middle East and North African markets: its so-called “Arabization of the Internet” strategy. The company recently started a channel on YouTube dedicated to Ramadan programs to coincide with the religious holiday. Google’s MD for MENA, Ari Kesisoglu, recently noted that the region generates 167 million video views per day, second only to the U.S.

The addition of Arabizi is part of Google’s push to make its brand and services increasingly more localized — and also more ubiquitous. It follows several other initiatives to help Google better serve non-English speakers.

Last week, Google added voice search support for 13 new languages for its Android devices. And in June, Google also helped launch the Endangered Languages Project, a database and resource aiming to preserve some 3,000 languages that are in danger of being lost forever — partly because the march of technology makes them less and less useful to the cultures that traditionally would have used them.

Arabizi is a chat-based alphabet that arose out of text messaging over the Internet and mobile, but it has become a popular way for Arabic speakers to communicate more widely as well. Other languages that are supported by Input Tools include Russian, several India languages including Hindi, and Hebrew. Yet to be included are languages from further east such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean or Thai.

The new Arabizi language support will mean that users who have become comfortable typing in the combination of Roman letters and numbers that have come to symbolize the particular pronunciation of Arabic, will now be able to call up the word in actual Arabic script from a menu. This isn’t the same as encouraging users to all use Arabic but at least meets that goal halfway.

“If only we could get Scoble to sign up, all our problems will be over” — unnamed entrepreneur.

As a fledgling startup, reaching the most influential users or customers, as early as possible, is the Holy Grail of traction (which also explains why it’s the kind of thing that keeps CEOs up at night). But finding and targeting those influencers, and persuading them to actually try out your new service, is more often viewed as an art not a science — when, arguably, a more algorithmically-driven approach may work better.

To that end, PeerIndex, the Klout-like influencer and marketing startup, is announcing a tie-in with European early-stage seed investment and mentoring programme, Seedcamp, that will see it give away “£3 million” worth of bespoke influencer marketing. The idea being to help the qualifying startups identify the “tricky first few hundred users or customers”, the ones who it’s hoped will go on to become brand advocates, as it were. Headline-grabbing figure aside — it’s ‘in kind’ and is impossible to independently quantify in cash terms — what’s on offer does actually seem potentially quite valuable.

The way it will work is as follows: Any of the qualifying 200 or so startups (past and future Seedcamp finalists) will get to work with PeerIndex directly to run a ‘PeerPerks’ campaign so that they can find and incentivise those target influencers. Next, PeerIndex will help determine the ideal early user/customer, in terms of things like geography, topical interests and topical influence. Then, as with all PeerPerks campaigns, PeerIndex will help the startup develop an appropriate offer or ‘perk’, which might be something along the lines of an exclusive trial of the service or a ‘brand experience’ that is designed to appeal to those in the target market.

It’s then about building that ‘perk’ page, so that PeerIndex can start reaching out to a sub-set of its members and point them towards the offer. There’s plenty of social media sharing built into the process too, so as to boost the campaign’s ‘word of mouth’ effectiveness.

As for what’s in it for PeerIndex, CEO Azeem Azhar says it’s a way to “give something back to the startup community”, but it’s clearly also a nice bit of marketing for the company (and the whole concept of algorithmically-driven influencer targeting). It’s also worth noting that Azhar was a founding investor and former advisory board member of Seedcamp, although this was in relation to the older Seedcamp I not Seedcamp II, the fund that’s been making investments in the past two years. In other words, he doesn’t stand to benefit personally beyond the PeerIndex/Seedcamp partnership being announced today.

In March this year, London-headquartered PeerIndex raised a £3 million series A led by Antrak Capital with participation from the ex-head of Reuters, Tom Glocer, as well as Restoration Partners chairman Ken Olisa and angel investor Sherry Coutu. Often seen as a competitor to Klout in the U.S., the company is actually gunning for the ROW (Rest of the World) market — it recently hired Garth Holsinger, Klout’s ex-VP of Sales and Business Development, to help accelerate its marketing and partnerships on that front.

Walt Disney Corporation added a bit of nonsensical anti-open source fear, uncertainty and doubt to a kid’s sitcom that it aired this past weekend. But the dialogue is so ridiculous that you have to wonder if they have any clue about what they are doing.

In an episode that aired Friday on the Disney Channel, the show Shake It Up features two teenagers begging the stereotypical geeky kid for help with a computer that has apparently gone down.

The geeky kid, complete with sweater, parted hair and glasses, asks the two teenagers the oddest question: “Did you use open source code to save time and the virus was hidden in it?”

The intent is what’s worst about this. It raises suspicions with kids about open source even though the premise for the question is absurd. If it is open-source then what are the chances it would have a hidden virus? Of course, the geeky kid is using a PC laptop, arguably loaded with Microsoft software. Hmm - safe, huh?

The Disney show targets little kids and pre-teens. That’s a different approach than a company like Oracle that just does what it does to sell more software. CEO Larry Ellison will throw out some barbs, they’ll throw open source MySQL under the bus. Disney? It’s using kids entertainment to deride open source and spread FUD.

The YouTube comments say it best:

• Did you use precompiled binaries from Micro$oft™, with the NSA backdoor obfuscated deep in some vital system DLL?
• They obviously don’t know what open source means.
• Either that was a really fucking shitty joke, or the writers just have no clue what they are talking about at all.
• Why would someone complain about open source and then use an unidentified source for their code?

I guess after seeing this I wonder why Disney did this.  If anyone has any enlightenment on all of this, please let me know.

(Thanks to Jon Reed for the tip.)

I've been in a wonderful state of bliss for the past week boating in North Carolina (did ya miss me? I missed you). But I came back today and I'm still pretty pissed at Uber for charging me $97 for a $65 ride to the airport last Friday. More importantly, the charge worries me about the company’s future.

Last Friday I needed to get from my apartment (by AT&T Park) to SFO. Simple, right?

I like taking Uber and while it's more expensive than a taxi, it's a lot more convenient. Plus, I had a red-eye on a Friday, so most of my friends weren't quite in a state to drive.

I ordered an Uber and got a notification that there would be a 1.5x surcharge as it was peak hours. Makes sense, as it was a Friday night and the first night of Outside Lands. But I didn't want to pay one and a half times the already steep $65 fare to the airport.

So I looked at Uber's website and saw nothing clarifying whether surcharges apply to flat rates; Uber notified me on the app and through a text about the surcharge, but, again, it wasn’t clear whether that was for any ride or for non-flat rate rides. I figured I'd ask the driver whether the surcharge applied; if he said yes, I could walk a block to 4th and grab a cab (it was only 9:30).

The driver told me that the ride would be a flat $65.

Standing in the security line at SFO, I checked my email and received a swift kick to the groin courtesy of the good folks at Uber.

Oh, boy! Thanks for that 50 cent discount, now I can buy a pack of gum for my flight!

Of course, I went through a range of reactions…

From wanting to scream "the price is wrong, bitch" in the security line…

 To wanting to go all Johnny Drama on an Uber:

A $97 ride to the airport? For $97 I should be drinking champagne in the back while Dale Earnhardt gets me there in 5 minutes without spilling a drop of the bubbly.

I settled on emailing Uber support. Here's what they sent back:

I’m sorry for the sticker shock. I spoke to Marcos this morning and he told me that he said the flat rate is usually $65 but that he wasn’t sure what it was due to surge. Our goal is to be as reliable as possible and sometimes we see such high demand our supply of available cars gets tight. To ensure we have rides available for everyone who needs one, we have surge pricing which increases our rates incrementally as our demand outstrips our supply and then lowers them back to normal as demand goes down and cars free up. We take notifying you of the current rates seriously – you should absolutely be aware of the higher cost. So, to that end we show the screen pictured on this blog post on your app:http://blog.uber.com/2012/03/14/clear-and-straight-forward-surge-pricing/

We also include a reminder in our confirmation text that lets you know your driver is on the way just in case: “Hi William, your Uber is en route! Marcos (4.5 stars) will pick you up in 5 minutes. Note that your fare will be 1.5x the normal Uber fare.”

To compensate for any confusion, I’ve put $15 into your Uber account. Let me know if you have any questions!

I replied that the driver explicitly told me that the ride would be $65 (you know, words and stuff, like Me: “Hey, how much will this ride cost?” Driver: “$65″) and got back:

Since you were given the proper ride, were informed of the price and the driver did not pretend to know the exact cost of the ride, I cannot issue a refund. I have put $15 into you Uber account to compensate for the sticker shock. Let me know if you have any questions.

They’re right, the driver did not pretend to know the exact cost of the ride; he just gave me the wrong cost.

So Uber screwed me. But at least it bought me breakfast. Well, gave me a $15 voucher to get to and from breakfast. Like giving someone cab fare or bus money in the morning, but classier!

When I talked to Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick (for this post as a reporter, not as a customer relating to my complaint), he told me that the driver has no motivation to lie and that these are often “he says, she says situations.”

"You would have never been able to get to the airport without our dynamic pricing," Kalanick tells me. I asked him to clarify exactly what he meant for competition that night. "I mean at all. Because that was the first night of Outside Lands. There are no taxis anywhere…It is what it is. It was on one of the top four nights of the year"

This post isn’t just about me being pissed off about my personal fare increase. I still think Uber is a great company. I've covered their awesome marketing before and while I haven't decided if I'll keep using them, I really have enjoyed my time as a customer.

The company currently enjoys a large user base who is very devoted to them. And the surcharges aren’t unfair if you understand how supply and demand work. But the lack of transparency and not being willing to admit when you’re wrong would really worry me if I were running Uber. People get pretty pissed off when they feel they’ve been robbed or lied to.

I’m not the first one to be pissed at Uber for their surcharges (New Year’s Eve, anyone?).

"We run this in a bunch of cities in the weekends and we don't have many complaints,” Kalanick tells me. “People don't like higher prices. That's just a natural thing. But we've made it pretty clear at this point…People have to take responsibility for purchases."

Entrepreneur Brenden Mulligan wrote about redesigning the surge pricing screen to be more transparent to users after the New Year’s Eve fiasco, which Kalanick says the company learned a lot from, and Uber took some of his suggestions into its redesign in March. That’s a very positive thing.

"We need to make our best efforts to make sure that pricing is understood beforehand,” Kalanick says, explaining that they are always working on their algorithms and messaging. “Unhappy customers are not good for business."

But the latest version still doesn’t explicitly tell users that surcharges affect flat rates. It still doesn’t give users the resources to get a quote for a certain distance and/or time rather than sticking to a range of average fares. And finally, it should have better informed drivers who understand the rates and can articulate them to users.

A continued company culture of expanded up-front honesty with customers will help keep Uber growing and expanding its user base. Without it, they’re no better than the cab companies.

Mobile app developers are abusing push notifications and it has to stop. Although it’s widely understood that it’s not an effective strategy to continually ping users with non-critical updates, app developers can’t seem to help themselves to the free marketing channel that is the opt-in push. Continual notifications keep the app at the forefront of users’ minds, entice them to relaunch the app to see what’s new, remind them of something they may have forgotten, and more – or, at least, so the app developer hopes. But it’s a fine line between being seen as useful and friendly versus a source of never-ending message spam.

Push notifications can give a social app an air of popularity it wouldn’t otherwise have the means to display. The phone continually buzzes to indicate how many people are checking out the new app. But there’s only so much showing off a user can take.

Notification that a friend of yours signed up for the service, or left a comment, or “liked” something, or added you or followed you, etc. is very rarely must-have information. It’s not actual news. It doesn’t improve your life to know you have one more follower. It doesn’t deserve the right to pull your attention away from whatever you were doing out there in the real world, which is almost always far more important. While there may be the rare social app where you want to know these things immediately (Facebook perhaps?), in all likelihood, you don’t want to be interrupted with these sorts of updates for every app you install.

That’s just one genre, but social apps are often the worst offender. Beyond social, there are all sorts of push notification types out there. See this list courtesy of Urban Airship:

Entertainment

• New content (items, features)
• Time-sensitive events
• Routine features (word of the day)

Publishing

• Breaking news
• Local alerts
• Reader sweepstakes
• Service messages
• Free trial conversion prompts
• Single-edition to subscription upselling
• Special section or issue highlights
• Local offers

Media

• New content (full episodes, teasers, bonus content etc.)
• Reminders (show times, special appearances, live events)
• Polling (Questions, reminders, results)
• Drive users to other media (mobile site, television program)

Retail

• Ask for Product reviews
• Comments on your reviews and the products you follow
• Product availability/new styles
• Shipping confirmation
• Shipping updates
• Shopping cart expiration
• Deals/sales
• Personal coupons
• Recommendations
• Ask for customer service reviews
• Send branded entertainment/co-op and shopper marketing (video, picture, etc.)
• Push based on location data ie ski gear to people who have been in ski town zip codes ( expand to fit additional sports locations)

Social Networking

• Responses + feedback on posted content
• User interactions
• New content from followed accounts
• Feature updates
• Broadcasts encouraging engagement (new contest, your content has been featured, etc.)

B2B

• New articles
• Real-time support
• Real-time customer service

How many of those items above do you actually think are critical messages? I’ll bet you can count them on one hand. And even then, I’ll bet you have a few qualifiers about how often and when you want to see them.

The problem with push notification abuse is not just that it’s annoying when you’re interrupted by something that has no meaning to you, it’s that it creates an environment where users become suspect of the whole push notification mechanism itself. I’d argue we’re already there. If you’ve said “no” to an app upon first launch when it asks your permission to send push notifications, then you basically agree. Users can no longer trust developers to use the system properly, so we’re opting out of notifications entirely.

That’s a shame because when done well, push notifications can and do work. Urban Airship says that apps following “good” push notification practices can actually more than double the retention rate over a six-month period after download. And the benefits of “good” push grows over time. Good push notifications drive 67% of app usage the first month after download, 74% of usage two months after download, and 81% of usage three months after download, they found.

Good push notifications, in case you’re wondering, are those that are highly relevant to the user and focused on meeting their needs. Remember, that’s the user’s needs, not the app developers’ wants. Only developers care about how often an app is launched, not the user. "We've seen time and time again, push notifications that solely serve an app's or brand's objectives rather than what is really meaningful can turn people off fast," said Brent Hieggelke, CMO, Urban Airship. "It has to pass the family dinner test. Push interrupts their lives, so you have to make it worth it."

So what is a an example of a good push notification? Burton Snowboards is a perfect example, he said. They found a way to engage users with relevant information by offering to push fresh snowfall alerts to customers. Another company might have taken a different approach, like sending a ton of promotional sale messages. This would risk alienating the company’s best customers ("Hey, I already bought the snowboard! Give it a break!”) Instead, Burton builds goodwill and stays relevant by telling customers something useful.

Of course, the hard part is figuring out what a user considers “good.” Seemingly, a Burton Snowboards app user probably does care about fresh powder alerts. But every user is different, and ideally, they should be given more of a choice about what and how often you ping them. There should be controls in every app’s settings for this. And if there’s not, then developers should definitely err on the side of caution here. After all, it’s a lot easier to X an app from the homescreen than it is to toggle a switch deep in the phone’s settings somewhere.