The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Gilt Groupe Brings Flash Sales To The iPad
- Stephen Colbert Uncovers Secret iPad Feature For Making Salsa
- The New York Times Launches Free iPad App (For Real Now), Paid App On The Way
- Dropico Launches Drag And Drop Photo Sharing App
- Loopt Pulse Bets That Location On The iPad Is About Planning
- eBay’s iPad App: Go Graphic Big Or Go Home
- Aurora Feint Debuts Social Gaming App For The iPad
- Tapulous Looks To Repeat Tap Tap Revenge’s iPhone Success On The iPad With ‘Radiation’
- We Just Tested Twitter’s @anywhere Platform (Screenshots)
- Facebook To Launch ‘Relationships’ At f8, Teams With Zynga To Spur Romance Through Gaming
- NYTimes Request Correction/Removal Of Our Post. We Decline.
- Google Shows How HTML5 Can Run Quake In The Browser
- The iPad: Apple’s Trojan Horse
- Blippy Does An End Run, Harnesses Gmail OAuth To Re-Enable Amazon Support
- FreshPlanet Debuts With An iPad Game, Plus $1.5 Million From Clavier And French Angels
- Twitter Tweaks Search, A Few Popular Tweets Now At The Top Of Results
- Behind The Scenes Of YouTube’s ASCII Prank
- The App Store Is Now Completely iPad-Crazy Like The Rest Of Us
- And Now We Wait For Someone To Jailbreak The iPad
- Netflix For The iPad Is No Joke. It’s Very Real, And It’s Very Live
- Conde Nast Cooks Up A Tasty Digital Cookbook With The Epicurious iPad App
- RethinkDB Raises $1.2 Million For Its Database For Solid-State Drives
- With 50 Million Users, Pandora Looks To Make Beautiful Music On The iPad
- Omniture And Others Also Feed Off Facebook Ads
- Boom! Apple Breaks Its Own Embargoes On Hundreds Of iPad Apps
| Gilt Groupe Brings Flash Sales To The iPad Posted: 02 Apr 2010 07:44 AM PDT
Online sample sale site Gilt Groupe, is debuting its free iPad app today, letting users access its flash sales directly from the device. Gilt Groupe’s sales on luxury goods on its properties, including Gilt, Gilt Fuse, and Gilt Man, can all be accessed directly from the app. The app allows you to receive real-time sale alerts, check upcoming sales and receive an instant Gilt membership when you download the app. The app’s shopping cart, that is always visible, allows members to quickly touch and drag desired items into their cart. The flash sales model has proven to be a successful business for Gilt, which only launched in 2007. The New York Times reported last fall that that Gilt Groupe, co-founded by a former eBay executive, was able to bring in $25 million in it’s first year of operation. And according to The Business Insider, Gilt was expect to bring in $150 million in sales in 2009. The site has over 1.6 million members and recently raised an estimated $40 million in funding last July, which valued the company at $400 million.      
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| Stephen Colbert Uncovers Secret iPad Feature For Making Salsa Posted: 02 Apr 2010 07:40 AM PDT |
| The New York Times Launches Free iPad App (For Real Now), Paid App On The Way Posted: 02 Apr 2010 07:03 AM PDT
Now, the company has introduced its iPad app for real. It’s free and both advertiser-sponsored and advertising-supported, but there’s also a “full, paid app” in the works. Screenshots of the app had already surfaced yesterday, first on MacStories. The iPad application is dubbed The New York Times Editors' Choice app (iTunes link) and offers a selection of news, opinion and feature articles chosen by Times editors that can be downloaded automatically to the tablet device. It delivers two pages of content with the top eight to ten articles in latest news, business, technology, opinion and feature sections with accompanying videos and photo slideshows. The app is free of charge, but the launch was sponsored exclusively by Chase Sapphire and Medialets took care of the advertising part of the equation: a full-page vertical and horizontal interstitial ad. Features of the application include (straight from the press release):
Interestingly, The Times said there’s also a paid app forthcoming, but wouldn’t detail the price or what people would be paying for exactly. Presumably, the paid iPad app will let people access the full array of digital content the NYT has to offer rather than only articles hand-picked by its editors. A lot will depend on the price, but I assume the paid app won’t come with advertising. Would you pay for a NYT app if you had an iPad? How much would you say is too much?      
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| Dropico Launches Drag And Drop Photo Sharing App Posted: 02 Apr 2010 06:39 AM PDT
We profiled Dropico, an easy-to-use drag and drop photo sharing app, before when it was still in private beta and people seemed to dig the concept a lot. Well now, you can try it out for yourself. When you register for and log on to Dropico, you can select a number of popular services that allow you to share pictures, including Flickr, Facebook, several Twitter photo sharing apps, MySpace, Photobucket, Picasa and more (others can request to be included). When you connect to these services inside the main Dropico interface, you can view your photos and albums in separate frames, but also drag and drop them from one to the other. Dropico refers to this as a “cloud to cloud” service in the sense that it makes it easy for people to organize their photos and albums across multiple environments from a single location. The company also allows third-party developers to build services on top of its platform – one obvious addition that’s already live is integration with Pixlr for on-the-fly photo editing. Finally, Dropico also offers a white-labeled version of its platform, which the company says should appeal to storage and printing service providers, and a hosted solution specifically tailored for mobile operators. Dropico shared a couple of upcoming features with us – the next version will include a stream of photo updates from your friends across different social networking sites and photo sharing services, the ability to selectively share albums with others, and support for drag and drop video and document sharing. The company is also working on an iPhone client and yes, an application for the iPad. Give it a whirl and tell us what you think.      
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| Loopt Pulse Bets That Location On The iPad Is About Planning Posted: 02 Apr 2010 06:00 AM PDT
Founder Sam Altman believes that people are most likely going to use the iPad sitting around their homes or hanging out at local coffee houses, like Starbucks. If that’s the case, it means that the iPad may be better suited for planning events around location, rather than actively participating in location. With Loopt Pulse, you load up the main screen to see where you are and everything that’s going on around you. On the left side of the screen you get a list of places, and on the right, you can see each of those places on a map and more details about them. These featured places appear because a lot of Loopt users liked the place, or are currently there. Or maybe the place has positive reviews in the local paper. You can also sort by events and friends. On the friends tab, you only see places that your Facebook friends like (you connect via Facebook Connect). “To most users we’ve spoken to, that’s the recommendation they care about the most,” Altman says. But Loopt also wanted to take advantage of the iPad’s big, beautiful screen, so they also built a new feature that allows you to browse local places by pictures. As you can see in the second screenshot below, you can flip through pictures of different places like a book. Loopt Pulse is already live in the App Store alongside all the other initial iPad apps. And actually, Apple is already promoting the app on the main page of the App Store. This type of promotion is crucial when it comes to making or breaking an app. Loopt knows this well as it got off to a quick start in 2008 when it launched on stage at Apple’s App Store unveiling event. You can find Loopt Pulse here, it’s a free download.      
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| eBay’s iPad App: Go Graphic Big Or Go Home Posted: 02 Apr 2010 05:59 AM PDT Will big shiny images and touch-screen magic convince consumers to spend more time on eBay? The online marketplace is betting its iPad ambitions on it (pardon the pun). eBay is launching an iPad app that aims to engage the user by putting the image at the center of the design, using oversized thumbnails and bleeding image close-ups to the edges of the device. The iPad’s touch screen functionality augments the traditional eBay search by letting users dash through several search pages with a few swipes of the finger. There’s also a price histogram at the bottom of the page that will let you narrow your search to a certain price range— the histogram also includes a volume chart so you can see how the goods are concentrated along the price scale. It seems to be a vast improvement from the website and the iPhone app, in terms of feel and design but it’s not quite revolutionary. While it may not make or break eBay’s bottom line in the near term, I do think it provides a nice window into the company’s mobile strategy— a dimension that is becoming increasingly important to eBay. According to VP of eBay Mobile, Steve Yankovich, the company really researched and thought about the iPad user experience and psychology before designing the app. Yankovich says the eBay team envisioned an iPad user sitting somewhere comfortable, enjoying mental downtime, and looking for engagement and entertainment— which is why the site is designed to mimic an interactive “window shopping experience.” While certain features are specific to the iPad and its touch functionality, Yankovich admits that the app’s design will likely influence the main site and the basket of mobile products, as eBay begins to collect and analyze user feedback. As Robin Wauters pointed out earlier this week, eBay expects to double its mobile gross merchandising volume (the dollar value of transactions, before eBay’s cut) to $1.5 billion from $600,000 for the year ago period. The company’s iPad app launch also comes on the heel of two mobile launches: eBayClassifieds.com and the global marketplace. The flagship app has already been downloaded 8 million times. Of course, eBay mobile (which includes all the iPhone, Android and iPad apps) is not about to eclipse the main site. $1.5 billion is still a small fraction of 2009’s total gross merchandising volume of $59 billion. The mobile market is young but I expect eBay to make more aggressive moves in this platform, especially with social media add-ons, over the next few years.
     
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| Aurora Feint Debuts Social Gaming App For The iPad Posted: 02 Apr 2010 05:58 AM PDT
Unsurprisingly, the game leverages OpenFeint X, which allows game developers to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods. While the game is free to play, its main revenue source will be from microtransactions within its app. With the success of Zynga and PlayFish on Facebook, Aurora Feint wants to help grab a piece of the gaming pie, and wants to help create Farmville -like games on mobile devices. OpenFeint X games include a chat wall where players can interact with each other, a newsfeed showing recent in-game activity, game nudges and a a full virtual goods store. As we’ve written in the past, Aurora Feint’s strategy of trying to develop Facebook-like free-to-play games through Open Feint isn’t surprising. Peter Relan, executive chairman of Aurora Feint, also happens to be the executive chairman of CrowdStar, a social game developer on Facebook, which makes develops Happy Aquarium, Happy Island and Happy Pets. Aurora Feint started out as a puzzle game developer for the iPhone platform but has since evolved into the maker of a comprehensive social gaming platform dubbed OpenFeint that continues to attract independent iPhone game developers to join its rapidly growing community.      
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| Tapulous Looks To Repeat Tap Tap Revenge’s iPhone Success On The iPad With ‘Radiation’ Posted: 02 Apr 2010 04:00 AM PDT
Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem says that the new game is similar to the series of iPhone games in many ways — you still tap on-screen buttons in time to the music. But he says that some key changes were made to optimize gameplay for the iPad. For one, he thinks that most people will be playing the game with their iPads lying flat on a table or on their lap (as opposed to held at an angle with one hand like an iPhone). Because gamers will have both hands free, Radiation’s gameplay is more involved, prompting gamers to rhythmically tap these glowing blobs as they dance across the iPad’s entire screen. Multiple people will also be able to play simultaneously on the same device. Another key component to Radiation’s launch is the fact that it’s free. Many of the applications on the iPad are, unsurprisingly, substantially more expensive than their iPhone counterparts. But Decrem sees an opportunity here to become one of the must-own free applications, which would once again give it a very large install base early on in the device’s lifespan. With that install base, Tapulous would be able to cross-promote its future applications, the same way it does on the iPhone. Radiation will come with thirty songs for free, and will also offer in-app purchases for premium songs by Lady Gaga, Bink, and artists on Ultra Records. So is the game any good? Unfortunately, we don’t know — we’ve only seen these screenshots. But this will certainly be an app to keep an eye on during this weekend’s iPad launch.
     
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| We Just Tested Twitter’s @anywhere Platform (Screenshots) Posted: 01 Apr 2010 10:13 PM PDT
The site, which will almost certainly be pulled down soon after this post is published, is clearly a testing environment for @anywhere, but it’s currently open to the public. Update: Twitter has taken the site down. It features the following (all shown in the screenshots below): various variable states; a button to ‘Connect With Twitter’; buttons to follow twitter users @jack, @biz, and @ev; a test hovercard that allows me to see @wendyverse’s latest tweets and follow counts at a glance, and a test box that lets me tweet. It isn’t particularly easy on the eyes, but it works well enough. Hitting “Connect to Twitter” pulled in my Twitter profile photo and gave me the option to log out. Clicking on each of the ‘follow’ buttons appropriately changed the status from “Follow @jack” to “Following @jack” the next time I refreshed the page. (it just showed ‘pending’ until I refreshed). And sending a tweet from the tweet box worked properly (it says that my tweet was sent via Egg Boiling). If you’re fast, you may be able to try it out for yourself. Before logging in OAuth to login Connected to Twitter (but before image/logout link have loaded)
Image/logout link appear after refreshing the page Testing the hovercard After clicking the ‘more’ button on the hovercard Thanks to Spencer Transier for the tip!      
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| Facebook To Launch ‘Relationships’ At f8, Teams With Zynga To Spur Romance Through Gaming Posted: 01 Apr 2010 09:23 PM PDT
The gist of the new product? Dubbed ‘Relationships’, Facebook is going to soon offer a section of the site dedicated to helping users meet potential romantic partners. To do that, the company has been working with Zynga over the last four months to develop games that “synthesize romance and foster relationships through social gaming mechanics”, helping users flirt and get to know each other using Farmville-like games to help break the ice. In the post, Facebook says that it will look at the profiles of your previous boyfriends/girlfriends to determine the personality traits you’re attracted to most, and that it will also use advanced photographic analysis to figure out your preferred facial structure and body type. In an attempt to quell privacy concerns before they begin, Facebook notes that all of this is done automatically, and that at no point are employees allowed to view these reports on your innermost psyche. How reassuring. The site appears to be broken up into three sections: at the top is a section for ‘Flirts’, which displays the Facebook friends you’ve been interacting with most. In a move certain to cause riots, Facebook is now allowing users to keep tabs on how many times each of their friends has visited their profile. Facebook claims that this will make it easier to figure out who is lusting after you, and that “shadier” visitors will simply learn not to be so creepy. Below this is a section for games and lessons. These appear to be the Zynga-designed apps, which cover everything from flirting to lessons on hygiene. Finally, there’s a ‘Recent Dates’ section. It’s unclear exactly what this is for, but there’s a Facebook-branded baseball diamond that apparently prompts users to share “how far” they got on their recent dates to their friends’ News Feeds. Given how much these definitions have shifted over the years, this could get messy.
Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the new Relationships feature belongs to a new (and somewhat sinister sounding) ongoing initiative that Facebook is internally calling The 6.8 Project. The name, which is an allusion to Earth’s total population of 6.8 billion people, is meant to symbolize Facebook’s goal of connecting everyone on the planet. The concern is that that may not be enough. Facebook has grown so quickly over the last few years that the company is worried that its long-term expansion potential over the next decade is limited. At its current growth rate, Facebook will have saturated the market of Internet-using humans in seven years. So — to put things bluntly — they’re looking to encourage current users to procreate, though they’ve only said as much with cutesy euphemisms. Facebook wouldn’t comment on its future plans for the 6.8 Project, but we hear that the company intends to launch a ‘Babybook’ directory for children up for adoption, and there are also discussions about lowering Facebook’s minimum age to five years old. Excerpt from Facebook’s Blog:
     
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| NYTimes Request Correction/Removal Of Our Post. We Decline. Posted: 01 Apr 2010 08:50 PM PDT
The post, of course, is a fake. It’s the third of our April Fools jokes and while we knew it would be the most subtle, we didn’t realize that pretty much no one at all would get the message. So I’ll explain, but just a little. If you compare the post to the article linked from the post (there’s just one link in the whole post), you’ll notice that it is identical to the 1996 NYTimes article announcing their website. The only changes we made were to replace “Web Site” with “iPad App” and “Word Wide Web” with “iPad.” And the amazing thing is the story still works. With just a couple more tweaks, like updating the executives in the article, this actually could be a launch post for the NYTimes on the iPad. In fact it works so well that the NYTimes didn’t get the point. One NYTimes writer even happily retweeted the post. So you see, the more things change, the more things stay the same. The World Wide Web didn’t save the New York Times. And neither will the iPad.      
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| Google Shows How HTML5 Can Run Quake In The Browser Posted: 01 Apr 2010 07:47 PM PDT A lot of attention lately has been put on the video capabilities of HTML5 browsers, since the iPad doesn’t support Flash. It turns out not to really matter that much because most online video platforms are now drinking the HTML5 Kool-Aid. But what about other things that Flash does well, like games? Well, HTML5 might be a more powerful game engine than most peopel think. To show off what is possible with HTML5 in the browser, some of the engineers on the Google Web Toolkit team created an HTML5 port of the classic first-person shooter game Quake II. Check it out in the video above. It is based on an open-sourced Java port of Quake called Jake2. A post on the Google Code blog explains how they did it:
It works only on “modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome” and you can find the code here. I haven’t had a chance to try it out. If you can get it to work, tell us what you think in comments. I really hope this isn’t April Fool’s joke.      
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| The iPad: Apple’s Trojan Horse Posted: 01 Apr 2010 07:18 PM PDT  Something struck me about Apple's handling of the iPad launch this week. Instead of countless nerds spouting off in early reviews, only a few major tech press folks got early samples. Instead, the iPad showed up in a show the missus and I watch, Modern Family.* That's right: instead of an overfed talking-head tech reporter pawing over the iPad on morning TV, the iPad got prime-time coverage in a sitcom. Think about the last computer company to get that kind of screen time. Only Microsoft, in their abysmal product placement in Family Guy comes to mind. But in Modern Family the iPad was a major plot point. While I'm sure Apple paid a pretty penny for the exposure, I don't doubt the folks at ABC would have put the product in for free had Apple asked.
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| Blippy Does An End Run, Harnesses Gmail OAuth To Re-Enable Amazon Support Posted: 01 Apr 2010 07:02 PM PDT
The new Amazon integration requires users to grant Blippy access to their Gmail accounts via OAuth (this only works with Gmail, though the site says it plans to support other email services soon). After linking your Gmail to Blippy, the service will automatically scan your account for Amazon receipts, which it will use to display the items you’ve purchased in your Blippy feed. When I asked Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan if they had Amazon’s approval, he said they didn’t ask for it, and they weren’t sure they needed it, either. The addition of Gmail OAuth support could mean big things for Blippy. Because Blippy now has a relatively secure way to access your Gmail, it can add support for a plethora of online vendors who may not offer an API. Likewise, Blippy could use the same method to do end runs around services that don’t want Blippy tracking purchases in the first place. To be clear, OAuth is no magic bullet for keeping your data secure — you’re essentially giving Blippy the ability to monitor your Email. But users are already handing over their login credentials for plenty of services to Blippy, which is potentially an even worse security issue (with OAuth, they don’t actually store your password). Thanks to Mark Hendrickson for the tip      
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| FreshPlanet Debuts With An iPad Game, Plus $1.5 Million From Clavier And French Angels Posted: 01 Apr 2010 06:29 PM PDT If you are going to launch a gaming startup this week, you might as well make your first game for the iPad. FreshPlanet is a stealthy startup looking to make its public debut with the launch of an educational game for children, Red Fish, on the iPad (iTunes link). FreshPlanet is based in New York City and founded by two serial entrepreneur French brothers, Mathieu and Romain Nouzareth. It recently raised a $1.5 million Series A from Jeff Clavier’s SofTech VC and a bunch of French angel investors including Jacques Antoine Granjon (founder of Ventes-privees), Xavier Niel (founder of French ISP Free.fr), and Oleg Tscheltzoff (founder of Fotolia) via CapISF. Mathieu and Romain previously founded online game distribution service Boonty (sold t French company Nexway) and casual gaming site Cafe.com. Red Fish is based on a popular French kid’s learning Website called Poisson Rouge. FreshPlanet licensed the game and developed a version specifically for the iPad to start. There is no iPhone version. “The big screen is much more interesting for us,” says Romain. Red Fish teaches kids between 3 and 7 to count, read, spell, and even compose music all using the iPad’s engaging touchscreen. The app is free and comes with 12 different activities, but to unlock the rest (there are 50 total) will cost $9.99. You can watch a demo of the app in the video below. It gives you a good sense of how the iPad can become an educational game platform. Kids love touchscreens (mine are always fooling with my iPhone), and big touchscreens with games designed for them could prove irresistible. FreshPlanet is also testing a music quiz game on Facebook, and plans to design games for both Facebook, the iPad, and the iPhone.      
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| Twitter Tweaks Search, A Few Popular Tweets Now At The Top Of Results Posted: 01 Apr 2010 06:24 PM PDT As you may have noticed when Twitter introduced its new homepage a few days ago, Twitter has a new feature that allows them to group together popular tweets. They say this is done algorithmically, and have an account to capture them all here. Now they’re just turned on this feature on for Twitter search, and its API. As you can see in the search.twitter.com page (but not yet on Twitter.com’s own search), there are three pinned popular tweets at the top of the results (Twitter notes that it could be less than three, but that three is the max right now). Below each of these, you can see the number of times the tweet was retweeted, giving some indication of why it’s popular. A message today sent from developer advocate Taylor Singletary to the Twitter development and API Google Groups lets everyone know about the change. He also seems to reveal the keys behind the popularity algorithm:
Further, this search change is coming to the API too. Singletary says this feature will be opt-in for developers during this current phase. But it sounds like eventually this will be a standard part of the search API (that undoubtedly developers can choose to leave out if they want to). Here’s how the results will break down for those who do opt-in:
To make this new feature work, each tweet now has a new bit of metadata letting the search query know if it’s “popular” or “recent.” Singletary also notes that in the future other metadata layers may be added to further augment results. That seems like a pretty interesting way to make Twitter search more useful and less filled with spam. Update: Twitter has now added popular results to Twitter.com as well. Check out the screenshots below — it’s less obvious than search.twitter.com but the metadata is there. [thanks Alex]      
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| Behind The Scenes Of YouTube’s ASCII Prank Posted: 01 Apr 2010 04:53 PM PDT
Of course, TEXTp is just the latest April Fools prank to come from YouTube (past pranks have included Rick Rolling all of its users and flipping the site upside down). Yesterday, I had a chance to sit down with some of the people behind this year’s prank. Along with explaining how they actually got these ASCII-ized videos working, they also detailed YouTube’s process for figuring out which pranks get shown to the world. Be sure to check out our full list of other April Fools jokes here. So how did YouTube convert all of its videos to streaming lines of text? The company leveraged a piece of its existing and seemingly unrelated technology: their 3D video player. Engineer Peter Bradshaw, who is behind the site’s 3D viewer, says that fellow engineer Blake Livingston adapted his work with Adobe’s Pixel Bender (which is used to achieve the 3D effect) to convert the videos into ASCII. Billy Biggs, another software engineer at YouTube (who claims pranks are his full time job), also played a key role in the project. Bradshaw initially hacked the effect together in one evening, but it took around three weeks for the prank team to get that ‘last 10%’ done. The pranksters say that the idea had actually been circling at YouTube for over a year, and that there were many other pranks proposed. In fact, each YouTube employee is invited to submit their idea in the months leading up to April 1. To choose which one is actually deployed to users, YouTube uses Google’s Moderator tool. After voting concludes, a smaller panel made up of engineers, product managers, and PR reps congregates to figure out which ideas are feasible (and won’t offend anyone). The prank team didn’t take this too lightly, either: as I left the the conference room yesterday afternoon, the team was still tweaking TEXTp, trying to hone in on the optimal font size and color palette while waging a war against the letter ‘M’, which had the nasty habit of showing up too often. If ASCII art is your thing, you may also be interested in ASCIImeo, an ASCIIized version of Vimeo.      
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| The App Store Is Now Completely iPad-Crazy Like The Rest Of Us Posted: 01 Apr 2010 04:33 PM PDT
As you can see in the screenshot above, the front page of the App Store is now dominated by iPad apps. Yes, the iPad apps that 99.99% of the world cannot use yet because no one outside of a select few testers has the actual device. But that isn’t stopping Apple from promoting the hell out of these apps. And it’s working — at least for me. I’ve already bought a ton of them, and I don’t have an iPad yet. Humorously, Apple is promoting a bunch of apps that it has asked developers to create embargoes for, for the press. Earlier today, Apple moved that embargo time up from Saturday morning (the actual iPad launch) to tomorrow morning, undoubtedly because they knew they’d be rolling these App Store changes live. Still, Apple is already showing a ton of embargoed apps on its “New & Noteworthy,” “What’s Hot,” and “Staff Favorites” areas. As you can see, Apple has added a button to toggle between iPhone and iPad apps for each area (as well as the charts portion). Oh, and all of the featured areas on the main App Store page are currently iPad apps too except for the one App Store on Facebook promotion. This includes the main banner area which is shuffling through iPad apps such as Labyrinth 2, ABC’s streaming app, OmniGraffle, the WSJ app, and Apple’s own iWork apps. A few other iPad apps Apple is featuring include the Netflix app (yes, it’s real), Epicurious, and the Pandora app.      
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| And Now We Wait For Someone To Jailbreak The iPad Posted: 01 Apr 2010 04:27 PM PDT
It’s not until one of the thousands of hackers out there, with teeth sharpened on jailbroken iPhone apps, gets their iPad and cracks the mother wide open, that we’re going to have the real fun. And I have reason to believe that’s going to happen mighty fast.      
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| Netflix For The iPad Is No Joke. It’s Very Real, And It’s Very Live Posted: 01 Apr 2010 04:07 PM PDT
Assuming you’re a Netflix member, the new iPad app lets you watch as many movies as you want (assuming they’re available on Netflix’s Watch Instantly service) streaming to the device. Yes, this gives you access to some 20,000+ movies and television shows. You can also browse movies and manage your queue from the app. And you can even pick up watching them from where you left off on your TV or computer. And since the iPad is currently WiFi-only, you don’t have to worry about streaming over 3G, so performance should be good. It will be interesting to see what happens with this app when the WiFi + 3G models of the iPad hit later this month. And yes, the app is currently iPad-only — there is no iPhone or iPod touch version. At least not yet.      
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| Conde Nast Cooks Up A Tasty Digital Cookbook With The Epicurious iPad App Posted: 01 Apr 2010 03:38 PM PDT
We’ve heard about Conde Nast’s plans for iPad apps to showcase the publisher’s magazine content but with the release of apps on Apple’s App Store ahead of Saturday’s iPad launch, I found a gem of an app that would satisfy the tastes of any cook out there. Epicurious, which combines the content of shuttered magazine Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Self and user generated recipes, is a popular recipe database that features over 100,000 recipes, menus, articles, food guides and more. The cooking site’s companion, free iPad app just launched, and as an avid cook, it looks like a winner. The app, which is similar in features to its sister iPhone app, is essentially a tabbed digital cookbook which allows you to access 27,000 recipes from both Gourmet and Bon Appetit. You can browse recipe collections, search via keyword, and filter your searches by what’s in your fridge, seasonal foods, holidays and more. You can add any recipe to your favorites box to save it as well as email recipes to yourself and others. You can also add ingredients from your saved recipes to shopping lists and check off items as you buy them. What would be really useful is if your accounts on your iPhone and iPad apps could sync so that you could use your iPhone for your shopping lists on the go, and use your iPad for browsing recipes and to visualize recipes in the kitchen. Another compelling feature would be the ability for other users (i.e. a husband, wife or roommate) to add to the shopping list from a different device. At this point it’s unclear if you can sync accounts between devices. The nature of the iPad may breathe new life into cooking and recipe apps. While reading recipes on the iPhone and other mobile devices while cooking can be tough; the iPad's large screen simulates a digital cookbook. And we all know that the iPad will be used as an e-book, allowing users to download and access cookbooks directly from their device in addition to using apps like Epicurious’ offering. According to a recent survey conducted by Epicurious competitor AllRecipes, one out of five people bring their laptops into the kitchen to access recipes. However, the drawback to the iPad entering the kitchen is that it is a dangerous place for a laptop, with significant threats of spills onto keyboards. But the iPad should come with protective screens and stands, making it safer to use in the chaos of the kitchen. AllRecipes is also planning to launch an iPad app in the near future. Epicurious isn’t the only Conde Nast property with an iPad app to make into the store ahead of time. GQ’s app hit the App Store today and costs $2.99 to download.      
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| RethinkDB Raises $1.2 Million For Its Database For Solid-State Drives Posted: 01 Apr 2010 02:50 PM PDT
Solid-state drives — the kind of disk that you’ll find in your iPhone — likely represent the future of storage. Not only do SSDs do away with the moving parts associated with traditional platter based drives; they’re also fast. RethinkDB is looking to be at the head of the curve by offering a fully optimized MySQL storage engine that takes advantage of the benefits offered by SSDs. Among the features listed on their site: append-only algorithms, lock-free concurrency, and live schema changes (you can see more technical details here). There’s obviously risk involved with trying to      
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| With 50 Million Users, Pandora Looks To Make Beautiful Music On The iPad Posted: 01 Apr 2010 02:01 PM PDT
Version 3.0 of Pandora is a Universal app, meaning it includes builds for the iPhone and iPad. Those who have the app installed (likely most of you with an iPhone or iPod touch) probably downloaded the update automatically today through iTunes. So what’s in it? Well, obviously there is a completely redesigned interface for the iPad (see screenshots below). But Pandora has also added album artwork to the station list across all the platforms. Perhaps most significantly, Pandora has also improved the audio streaming across the board. This means faster start times and fewer dropouts. The iPad version takes advantage of the large 9.7 inch screen of the device. Rather than having to switch views to see things such as your stations, they can reside on the left hand side of the screen as your album artwork and artist information is on the right hand side. Artist information is a particular area of emphasis with this new app. The top player looks similar to iTunes now, with play and pause buttons, as well as thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. There is also an easy-to-access search box along the top. On top of the new iPad app, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad tweeted earlier today that the service has just signed up its 50 millionth user (up from 40 million this past December). Good timing, they’re potentially about to get a whole lot more from this new device. Find Pandora in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
     
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| Omniture And Others Also Feed Off Facebook Ads Posted: 01 Apr 2010 02:00 PM PDT Facebook is ramping up advertising by deepening its ties to other online advertising companies, particularly the ones which offer tools to manage and monitor ad campaigns. Today, it revealed its first set of partners to incorporate the Facebook Ads API into their own products. In addition to Clickable (which we discovered earlier), the other partners are Alchemy, Glow, Kenshoo, Marin Software, Omniture, and TBG. All of them variously help to manage and optimize ad campaigns across the Web. Advertisers who already use these tools, can now create and manage their Facebook ads alongside their other types of ads. All of this is done via the Facebook Ad API. The more that Facebook can get its ad system to work with the existing ad technology out there, the easier it will be for advertisers to start trying out campaigns on Facebook. Opening up its Ads APIs, though, also puts extra pressure on Facebook to prove that its ads can perform just as well or better than ads elsewhere on the Web. Advertisers who run their ads through these management and analytics tools can see the relative performance of each type of ad and adjust their budgets accordingly.      
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| Boom! Apple Breaks Its Own Embargoes On Hundreds Of iPad Apps Posted: 01 Apr 2010 01:41 PM PDT Maybe you’ve heard that Apple has this new device coming out on Saturday. It seems to be a pretty big deal that will get a tsunami of press coverage without Apple lifting a finger. But just in case, Apple has decided to embargo several iPad apps (and maybe most of them), so they can’t talk to the press before Apple tells them its okay. The only problem? Apple today unleashed all of their apps in the App Store already. Yes, Apple has broken its own embargo — hundreds of them. Awesome. Initially, Apple had set a Saturday morning embargo for these approved iPad apps to coincide with the iPad availability. But today, Apple apparently moved up the embargo time to early tomorrow morning, we’re told. But again, they’re actually already in the App Store now, complete with pictures and descriptions. So anyone who wants to write about any of these apps can just scan the store and write away. Even better, plenty of apps, if they’re Universal (meaning bundled with both an iPad and iPhone versions), are already auto-updating, so you probably have several iPad apps already even if you don’t realize it. Naturally, you can’t use the iPad versions until you have the device, but they’re right there on your machine. Apple, we hate embargoes too, so we think your undermining them is just great.      
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