The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Say Hello To The Palm Touchpad
- My6sense Injects A Relevance-Based Tweet Stream Into Twitter.com
- Jibe’s Social Job Board Attracting More Than One Million Monthly Job Views
- Hands-On With The Iomega Superhero iPhone Back-up And Charger
- Gartner: Android OS Sales Trump iOS And RIM, Grew 888 Percent In 2010
- Socialware Lands $3 Million To “Put Social Networks To Work”
- Visa Buys Virtual Goods Monetization Platform PlaySpan For $190 Million In Cash
- Square Goes High Fashion With Vivienne Tam Branded ‘Double Happiness’ Device
- Video From The Vaults: One Of Steve Jobs’ First TV Appearances
- Social Q&A Goes Local With Crowdbeacon’s iPhone App
- Kampyle Transforms User Feedback Into Lead Generation
- HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, But Native App Development Is An Oncoming Rocket Ship
- R.E.M. Stands For R.E.M.I.X. (The SoundCloud Singles)
- Valleywag’s Ryan Tate Publishes Photo of Zuckerberg’s House; Days Later, Stalker Shows Up
- NYC Hack Is Back
- i/o Ventures Is Now Taking Applications For Its March 2011 Program
- Stealth Startup Bubbli Raises Funding, Wants To Create A New Kind Of Photograph
- Watch Out Austin! Dogpatch Labs Is Opening A Makeshift SXSW Office
- PSA: Covering The iPhone In 4 Feet Of Concrete May Affect Signal Strength
- The Great Valentine’s Day Nook Color Case Gift Guide
- The Optimism Of The Gadget Maker
- Despite Pushback From Pubs, Apple Will Make iTunes Subscription Billing Mandatory
- Blue Marble Energy Raises $1.3 Million More To Make Carbon-Neutral Fragrances, Flavors And Fuel
- Keen On… The Domino Project: Seth Godin Reinvents the Book Business (TCTV)
- Mildred’s TV Parlor Is Almost Here
| Say Hello To The Palm Touchpad Posted: 09 Feb 2011 09:09 AM PST It’s official: HP/Palm is releasing a new tablet called the Touchpad. Precentral has some hot news about this new 10-inch Palm slate. It is a touchscreen device running WebOS. It weighs 1.5 pounds and 13mm thick and has a front webcam as well as up to 64GB of storage. Robert Scoble, of all people, also leaked something about the “littlest phone” he’s ever seen, a new Palm Phone that is as big as a pebble.        
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| My6sense Injects A Relevance-Based Tweet Stream Into Twitter.com Posted: 09 Feb 2011 09:00 AM PST
The my6sense Chrome browser extension takes your tweet stream and completely rearranges it. If that thought scares you, fear not, this is done in a new tab area that the extension creates on Twitter.com. This area holds a stream sorted by tweets that are likely to be most relevant to you. These tweets can be hours (or even days) old, or they may be brand new. It all depends on the relevancy. So how does my6sense determine this relevancy? A number of ways. The links you click on, the tweets your favorite, the tweets you retweet, the author of the tweets, the keywords in those tweets, etc. It all is monitored by this extension and then used to serve tweets back to you. And it works well. Once the extension got a sense for what I was interested in, pretty much my entire stream became Apple news. Perfect. The concept is an extension of the mobile applications that my6sense makes for the iOS and Android platforms. Those take into account a few different social signals (Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, etc), and gives you a stream of information you’re likely to care about. And that works because when you’re on the go, you may not have time to read through all of your social streams. Again, it’s the same sort of idea here, but parsing only the ever-flowing Twitter data. The idea is a good one. A lot of users would value a way to surface tweets based on relevancy rather than simply time. There have been whispers of Twitter themselves working on similar concept as well, but they would likely focus on user relevancy, rather than tweet relevancy. And the truth is that my6sense hopes that Twitter.com is just another stop for their technology. The Israel-based startup hopes to spread their attention graph across the web to all kinds of different sites. VP of Marketing, Louis Gray, cites Quora as on particular treasure trove of data they’d love to get their hands on. You can find the Chrome extension here, and the plan is to release a Firefox extension shortly as well to bring the same functionality to a larger segment of the web.        
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| Jibe’s Social Job Board Attracting More Than One Million Monthly Job Views Posted: 09 Feb 2011 08:33 AM PST
Jibe has signed up 25 percent of the Fortune 50 as clients and is announcing that the site has grown 454 percent since the start of 2011, surpassing more than one million monthly job views. In January alone, more than 540,000 job seekers visited JIBE to apply for jobs at Amazon, Bank of America, Intel, AT&T and Merck. On Jibe, job seekers sign in with Facebook Connect. The platform will then pull in their work and education history from their Facebook profile and from LinkedIn to pre-populate their Jibe profile. Then for every job posting, they can see if they are connected to anyone at that company. Jibe allows members to message those people directly to ask for a recommendation or job advice. Jibe uses a credit system that allows applicants to apply for jobs. Applicants can earn credits by linking their Jibe account to their various social networks, broadcasting their job search, sending private messages through the system, or updating their work history profile. On the enterprise side, Jibe allows companies to add a social layer to the evaluation and vetting process. And Jibe, which has raised $875,000 in seed funding, says that large companies like Amazon, MTV and HP are adopting Jibe because it can be easily integrated into existing recruiting software. Job boards are dying as social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook (i.e. BranchOut) take over professional networking and job search. But Jibe actually combines a job seeker’s LinkedIn and Facebook social graphs, which helps the site stand out from competitors.        
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| Hands-On With The Iomega Superhero iPhone Back-up And Charger Posted: 09 Feb 2011 07:12 AM PST I’m a big fan of backing up. Do it all the time. That’s why I’m intrigued by this Iomega Superhero iPhone Back-up solution. It’s basically a charger with an SD card built in. To use it, you have to download a free iPhone app, plug in the included 4GB memory card, and drop in your phone. The app allows you to back up your contacts and other personal info to the card and it charges the iPhone. It also backs up your photos. Once you’ve installed the app, the entire process is automatic. It produces incremental back-ups after the first, longer initial back-up. A back-up of my own iPhone took about five minutes.        
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| Gartner: Android OS Sales Trump iOS And RIM, Grew 888 Percent In 2010 Posted: 09 Feb 2011 07:02 AM PST
The increase in smartphone sales helped push Apple and Research In Motion up in the ranking of global mobile device manufacturers to the No. 5 and No. 4 positions, respectively, displacing Sony Ericsson and Motorola. In Western Europe and North America accounted for 52.3 percent of global smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2010, with smartphones accounting for close to half of all handsets sold in these regions. Apple sold 46.6 million units in 2010, which marks an 87.2 percent growth from 2009. Gartner attributes this increase to international expansion and the end of exclusivity deals. RIM’s overall mobile phone sales to end users in 2010 reached a total of 47.5 million units, an increase of 38.2 percent year-on-year, buoyed by strong sales in Southeast Asia, the U.K. and the Netherlands. Additionally RIM saw its market share decline from 19.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 13.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. Nokia also didn’t fare well in 2010 according to Gartner’s report. In 2010, Nokia’s annual mobile phone sales to end users reached 461.3 million units, a 7.5 percent drop in market share from 2009. And Nokia’s share of the smartphone market dropped 6.7 percentage points from 2009. In terms of sales by smartphone operating system (as opposed to manufacturer), Android grew 888.8 percent in 2010 and moved to the No. 2 position behind Symbian, whose market share dropped further in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 32.6 percent or 32.6 million units. Apple’s iOS took the No. 4 position in 2010, selling 46.5 million units in the year.        
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| Socialware Lands $3 Million To “Put Social Networks To Work” Posted: 09 Feb 2011 06:52 AM PST Socialware, which bills itself as a social middleware company, has raised $3 million in additional funding from its current roster of investors, which includes FLOODGATE, G-51 Capital and Silverton Partners, bringing its total to $4.8 million. Socialware provides the technology and social networking compliance tools to enable the highly regulated financial services industry, specifically, to engage with clients and partners via social networks within a solid framework. The company says it currently services nearly 100 customers, which include five of the top insurance companies in the United States, as well as other major financial brands. At the helm of Socialware we find Chad Bockius, previously at Bazaarvoice and BetweenMarkets, who started out leading the startup’s marketing and product strategy before transitioning to the CEO role.        
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| Visa Buys Virtual Goods Monetization Platform PlaySpan For $190 Million In Cash Posted: 09 Feb 2011 06:06 AM PST
This is a big exit for PlaySpan, which has raised a total of $46 million in funding since its launch four years ago. PlaySpan has been growing like a weed, striking partnerships with a number of social network, gaming and media companies, including Viacom, Disney, Facebook, Ubisoft, and Sanrio. PlaySpan’s flagship product UltimatePay is a 'Monetization as a Service' platform for apps, games, videos and digital goods. Based on the user's location, the payments platform draws from over 85 different payment options. Because of its vast variety of payment options (which include PayPal, pre-paid cards, and a number of credit cards), UltimatePay is designed for a global audience. Currently, PlaySpan powers virtual goods marketplaces across 1,000 video games, virtual world publishers and social networks. The company also recently launched a mobile version of UltimatePay, which gives smartphone developers a way to deliver a one-click payment experience to mobile gamers, and provide a comprehensive payments offering. The mobile focused platform allows players to view their balance and transaction history, while allowing them to purchase items in-app without ever having to leave the game. As virtual goods becomes a booming business, PlaySpan has reaped the benefits of technology and media companies looking to incorporate virtual goods into their platforms. Visa says that ecommerce sales, which reached an estimated $948 billion, are a big growth area for the company. Approximately 45 percent of U.S. online spending takes place on Visa's network today and for Visa's fiscal first quarter 2011, the company reported 25 percent year-over-year growth in ecommerce payment volumes globally. Visa is going to use PlaySpan to capitalize on the growing digital goods market, which generated an estimated $25 billion in consumer spending globally in 2010 and is expected to reach $280 billion by 20143. The acquisition is even more impressive when you conside that the company was founded by 12-year-old, Arjun Mehta, in 2006. PlaySpan is actually run by the teenager’s father, CEO and co-founder Karl Mehta.        
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| Square Goes High Fashion With Vivienne Tam Branded ‘Double Happiness’ Device Posted: 09 Feb 2011 06:00 AM PST
The brainchild of Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, Square was unveiled last December as a small credit card reader that could turn any iPhone into a mobile cash register. The startup, which just raised $27.5 million in new funding, unveiled apps for the iPad, Android and iPhone. Square has steadily gained traction as a simple payments option for small businesses and is processing millions of dollars a week in transactions. The branded Square reader is black lacquer-like and features the Chinese symbol for double happiness in red. The design is inspired by Tam's 'China Chic' style and representative of her personal mantra— two characters for happiness (xi) are joined to express the joy of wedded union. As stated in the release, Chinese culture favors equilibrium; yin is balanced by yang. Symmetry is an underlying principle not only in art and architecture, but also in all realms of design, terrestrial or celestial. For Tam, the 'Double Happiness' Square represents the two worlds of technology and fashion going hand in hand. The ‘Double Happiness’ Square will be available on the designer’s website and in her retail stores for $10 (the unbranded Square is available on its website for free). But proceeds of each purchase will be donated to the Happy Hearts Fund, an organization which aims to improve children's lives through educational and sustainable programs in natural disaster areas. For Square, this is the first branded partnership, but it’s unsurprising that Dorsey chose to introduce the device into the fashion world. Dorsey is no doubt fashion forward, and is admittedly personally fascinated by the interesection of art and technology. He tells us that Tam’s focus on fitting form factor in day-to-day life parallels his mission with Square. The technology-forward Tam isn’t new to the gadget scene. She has previously designed branded laptop and netbook computers for HP, as well as headphones. As for other branded partnerships, Dorsey says it is definitely something the company is looking at when it makes sense. “The Square is something that can be personalzied easily and can be a form of expression,” he explains. For now, Tam will not actually be using the device to process transactions, but Dorsey says that expanding Square beyond small businesses into larger-scale retail stores could be in the company’s future. “We want to explore larger retail partnerships,” he says, “but that requires more definition in our API.” Dorsey says that as the platform becomes more solid, we will see more retail partnerships later this year integrate with the device as a payments platform.        
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| Video From The Vaults: One Of Steve Jobs’ First TV Appearances Posted: 09 Feb 2011 05:49 AM PST
       
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| Social Q&A Goes Local With Crowdbeacon’s iPhone App Posted: 09 Feb 2011 05:30 AM PST Social Q&A services are springing up everywhere because often search is too cumbersome or imprecise to answer our questions. This is especially true on mobile phones. A new iPhone app called Crowdbeacon attempts to answer your questions with a local twist. It is designed to answer questions about restaurants, shopping, services, and activities in your immediate vicinity. The answers come from other users, local experts, and business owners, as well as Foursquare tips and Yelp reviews. Crowdbeacon reminds me a little of Aardvark, the social Q&A service that was bought by Google. When you join Crowdbeacon, it asks you what categories you want to answer questions about and it routes those questions to you. But it’s primary filter is your location. If you know a lot about antique shops, it will only send you questions about antique shops near where you live. Business owners can also sign up to answer questions. If someone asks a question within six blocks of their store in one of their designated categories, they will receive it via push notification on their iPhones. Some will no doubt try to lure questioners into their stores and turn them into customers, but others will realize that simply offering up their knowledge can generate goodwill and good buzz. To supplement the realtime answers from other users, Crowdbeacon will also surface related tips from FourSquare, reviews from Yelp, and shopping info from local shopping search engine Wishpond. Over time, the app will fold in answers from other APIs, including Twitter, OpenTable, and SinglePlatform. It uses basic semantic analysis to place this information into different categories so that they can function as answers when called upon. It also forces you to choose a category before you can ask a question, which can be a little tedious. Crowdbeacon is a bootstrapped startup was founded by Robert Boyle, who is an entrepreneur-in-residence at interactive agency Squeaky Wheel Media. He also helped launch Glassbooth, a non-profit website that tries to match people with the political candidates who share their beliefs. Competitors to Crowdbeacon include Loqly (iTunes link) and still-in-private-beta Localmind, which will let you SMS questions to people who are checked into a location on Foursquare.        
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| Kampyle Transforms User Feedback Into Lead Generation Posted: 09 Feb 2011 03:44 AM PST When I met Kampyle CEO Ariel Finkelstein last week, the first words that came out of his mouth were: “Can you tell me who the hell are these people that sit over there in the Valley and invent all these stupid terms like ‘Pivot’ … ?!” He then went on to tell me about the company’s most important product insight since launch and how it is changing their business. When Kampyle launched three years ago, the company had a clear product vision: A platform for site owners that gives them an easy way to aggregate and then follow-up on user feedback. The idea was to combine ‘feedback analytics’ with traditional Web analytics. The theory went that by helping companies close their feedback loop, they could better understand and serve their users and customers. The theory became practice, and Kampyle has been growing in every KPI since. This is when you would expect the story to take a twist with an unforeseen stick in the wheels. Except the opposite happened. Kampyle realized that all along, they were actually sitting on top of what could be a potential goldmine for their customers. The epiphany occurred when Kamyple began noticing that customers were employing user feedback as lead-generation. The consequences were dramatic… This meant that Kamyple could completely revamp their sales strategy and pricing. From a nice-to-have feedback analytics product for Marketing departments, they could now market the product as a lead-gen tool for Sales departments. User feedbacks would be seen as ‘qualified leads’ with ROI dollar values attached. Kampyle began rolling-out the lead-gen offering to pilot customers a few months ago. Finkelstein explained that 60% of users, on average, leave feedback along with their real contact details. So when such user feedback forms were funneled to sales teams, they were treated as qualified leads which converted at uncharacteristically high rates of 35-45%. One Kampyle customer, for example, saw conversions rates jump from 2.8% to 29% and average deal size increase by 220% compared to any other lead source used. With the new focus on lead-gen, Kampyle beefed-up their product offering with some new features:
So did Kampyle pivot? My feedback: No, they simply evolved.
       
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| HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, But Native App Development Is An Oncoming Rocket Ship Posted: 09 Feb 2011 12:18 AM PST
But what if that never happens? Let’s be honest: right now, most HTML-based mobile apps are a joke when compared to their native counterparts. It’s not even remotely close. In fact, you could argue that the discrepancy isn’t much smaller than it was three years ago. And considering that the App Store was only on the verge of launching at that point, in many ways, the discrepancy is even bigger. Just look at mobile games now, for example. Developers often state their love of HTML5 and their commitment to it going forward. But many have no choice. Native app development is not only difficult, it’s expensive. These days, if you’re going to do native apps, you at least have to support iOS and Android. That means at least two developers for each different language, and preferably more. And if your startup is big enough or hot enough (like Foursquare, for example), you’ll probably want to have apps for Windows Phone, Blackberry, and webOS as well (which, to be fair is largely HTML-based). Talking to developers, this is the single biggest pain point on the mobile side of things. And many talk about HTML5 as the remedy. A number now choose to build an iOS app then settle on a web app for Android at first. Others do both iPhone and Android but only offer rudimentary sites for the other platforms. But the fact that very few, if any, choose to go HTML5-only is telling. If we were anywhere close to the language being a unifier and savior, at least some would. We’re not close. Let’s look at the debate from the perspective of the three hottest technology companies right now: Apple, Google, and Facebook. Apple is basically all-in on native apps. Google is half-in on native apps, half-in on HTML5. Facebook is seemingly all-in on HTML5 (at least going forward). Apple is very interesting in this regard. When the iPhone launched in 2007, the only native apps were the ones made by them. Developers were told to build web apps in order to get on the device. Who knows if Apple planned third-party native apps all along or if they pivoted when they saw the opportunity, but a year later, we had the App Store. It’s the single reason there’s any debate right now. Apple is now obviously native app all the way. But it’s on their own terms. When a developer makes an app that Apple doesn’t like in some way, they recommend that they make an HTML5 app to bring it to one of their devices. It’s more or less a “my way or the highway” approach — it’s just a nice way of putting it. Apple is using the hype around HTML5 to their advantage here. They know that those apps can’t compete with their native apps, but so many people are so bullish about the future of the technology (and, to be fair, Apple seems to be as well at least on the Safari side of things) that Apple is able to play that to their advantage. They might as well say, “you’re welcome to build an HTML5 app *snicker*.” Google is significantly more gray with regard to their position. At the past two Google I/O conferences, all we’ve heard about from the search giant is HTML5-this and HTML5-that. But their actions speak louder than their words. Google has done some great work with HTML5 — some of their mobile web apps are quite good. In fact, they’re arguably the best web apps out there. But they too are nowhere near native app good. And take something like their Jules Verne logo today — it utilized the iPhone’s accelerometer via the HTML5 baked into Safari to move around. Very cool. But would anyone have thought twice about it if it were a part of a native app? No. It seems like Google is well aware of this native app/HTML5 app discrepancy. That’s why we’re seeing an increasing number of their once HTML-based apps going native. And it’s not only on their own Android platform, but on the iPhone as well. And that’s not all. Recent reports underscore Google going a bit native app crazy. There’s apparently a big push inside the company to hire any good app developers that they can get their hands on. And they’re even offering for them to work inside Google as their own startups. Essentially, it sounds like the Googleplex is becoming an app incubator of sorts. One that pays a salary. But wait, this is Google. Again, aren’t they supposed to be the main torchbearers of the HTML5 movement? Yes. But they’ve also been hedging their bet this entire time. That’s exactly why development of both Android and Chrome OS has continued totally separate from one another. Chrome OS, an operating system built entirely around HTML5 is still very much in beta mode. Android, an operating system built entirely around native apps is exploding with growth. Which would you back right now? And then there’s Facebook. Speaking at the Inside Social Apps conference last month, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor made it very clear that HTML5 is a the key focus for the social network in 2011. He reiterated as much to me when I spoke with him afterwards. In fact, Facebook is so committed to HTML5 that they’re going to be offering tools to their broad development community in order to help them bring their apps up to speed. Most significantly, this includes games, which are today largely based on Flash. Taylor echoed the hardships that startups face with mobile development across several platforms these days. Facebook, while much larger than a typical startup, still works in relatively small teams. And while he said that structural changes would help in 2011, they too are betting that HTML5 is the ultimate unifier. Facebook has an odd history in the mobile app space. When the iPhone first launched, they had easily the best mobile web-based app — which was developed by Joe Hewitt. When native apps were finally allowed, Hewitt built that as well, and again, it was clearly one of the best apps available (and the top downloaded app of all time for iOS). Then Hewitt decided he was fed up with some of the App Store rules. So he stopped doing iOS work. The Facebook app stood neglected for quite some time. And while it’s better today, it still has the same basic look and feel of the app that Hewitt built. Meanwhile, on the Android side of things, it has been a nightmare. The Facebook Android app has long been a joke when compared to its iPhone brother. Facebook keeps slowly improving it, but it’s still not as good. On the tablet side of things, Taylor said the iPad was an unfortunate casualty of Facebook’s lack of mobile team structure leading up to that device’s launch. He spoke about the importance of having a tablet-optimized version of the service soon. That seemed to indicate that this would be an HTML5-based web app. But I’ve heard reports from two different sources that Facebook has been internally testing a native iPad app in recent months. Maybe they won’t release such an app. And maybe they take an HTML5-only approach to tablets. But I certainly wouldn’t bet against a native iPad app. And maybe one optimized for Honeycomb as well. It sounds as if Facebook is all about HTML5 — except when native apps offer a better experience. Which, love it or hate it, is still always. And such a stance is more or less the attitude that everyone with the necessary resources seems to have. And that’s the point. After all these months and years, we’re still debating the HTML5 versus native app thing — but it still has yet to be a contest. Everyone seems to pay HTML5 plenty of lip-service. But look at their actions. Apple, Google, Facebook, and developers are all focusing on native apps, not HTML5 apps. And look at the platform pipelines. Android is (finally) about to get in-app purchasing. iOS is likely to (finally) get a revamped Push Notification system with the next iteration of iOS. Android Honeycomb will offer developers a whole new set of tools and APIs. Both platforms are likely to expand quickly into NFC and everything that can offer. All of that will be native app only. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It was actually Hewitt who said it best when he ripped the state of web development a new one last year with a series of tweets. The best was: “I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won't wait.” If HTML5 is an oncoming train, native app development is an oncoming rocket ship. And everyone seems to know that’s not going to change anytime soon. Even if they don’t want to admit it, their native apps speak for them. [photo: flickr/tom hilton]        
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| R.E.M. Stands For R.E.M.I.X. (The SoundCloud Singles) Posted: 08 Feb 2011 09:30 PM PST R.E.M.’s upcoming album Collapse Into Now is coming in March, but the band is already getting the buzz going with a little crowdsourcing experiment. A couple days ago, the album’s producer released some tracks from the song “It Happened Today” in files that can easily be imported into Garageband, the music mixing software that comes on new Macs. Fans are invited to remix the song and upload their new versions under Creative Commons license to SoundCloud. The individual tracks were also released under Creative Commons license so that anyone can download and remix them as long as it is not for commercial use. Producer Jacknife Lee writes:
So far there are already 41 tracks. This one is the best so far, IMHO, and this one plays the vocals backwards How long before a band lets fans remix an entire album?        
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| Valleywag’s Ryan Tate Publishes Photo of Zuckerberg’s House; Days Later, Stalker Shows Up Posted: 08 Feb 2011 08:12 PM PST
Specifically I said…
Tate himself was unable – or unwilling – to respond to my criticisms, or to offer any kind of defense for his actions. Instead he left it to his boss, Nick Denton, to reply. In an email, Denton wrote…
Indeed, rather than reining back his obsession with the Facebook founder’s whereabouts, Tate went all out. On January 13th, he published a follow-up post (which I won’t link to) identifying Zuckerberg’s new address, complete with a photograph which clearly showed a house number…. (I’ve blurred the photo in the grab below.) So what happened next? Yesterday Valleywag, with not one single word of self-awareness, published this story… Quote…
According to TMZ, Manukonda showed up at Zuckerberg’s house on January 24th – eleven days after Tate posted its location online. So there you go, Ryan. Q.E.D. Hope you’re pleased with yourself.        
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| Posted: 08 Feb 2011 07:08 PM PST There’s something happening in New York City. New York Tech Meetup just announced they will be presenting hack demo at every one of their sold out events, New York’s first Music Hackday is hitting this weekend and it will be quickly followed by Foursquare’s first hackday the weekend after. Did the TC Disrupt Hackathon prefigure a growing trend here in the Big Apple? This past weekend Columbia students demoed their best hacks, concluding their week-long DevFest 2011. Students had a week of workshops from local startups like Foursquare, Aviary and Bit.ly. The results were team hacks for everything from Facebook-generated birthday cards to time-sensitive, class-based messaging systems. Demos were presented to an audience that included New York startup luminaries including Fred Wilson, Chris Wiggins, Dave Jagoda, Steve Jacobs, Justin Singer and Thatcher Bell. Here are some of our favorites from DevFEst 2011. Highlights CU Board - Moses Nakamura, Andrew Hitti, Ephraim Park, & Mark Liu. A brilliant and potentially disruptive (for better or worse) idea for the classroom. Modeled on the anonymous boards in 4chan, the idea is to create discrete, time sensitive, open chat rooms tied exclusively to a class and only for the duration of a class. An online, digital note-passing system of sorts that gives students a voice and instructors an unvarnished, real-time view of their lecture. CU Generals – Jacob Andreas. Inspired by the university’s existing “assassins” game, Andreas created a mobile web implementation that allows for team play and ongoing campaigns. The game uses location services to ensure that users have to actually run around campus to play and win. Excellent UI and gameplay for one dev over a week, new users were signing up and playing while the demo was happening. Campus Walkabout – Benjamin Ludman, Jordan Schau & Eli Katz. A smartphone web app to give guided campus tours, Campus Walkabout allows prospective students and family to go at their own pace and cater walks to their particular interests (e.g. the campus history tour or historic building tour). Allows for community generated content and would scale well to other campuses. More great hacks MatchU.me – Cole Diamond – A kinder, gentler HotorNot, students browse pictures and decide whether they want to be matched. If two people are matched they can facilitate a meeting.        
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| i/o Ventures Is Now Taking Applications For Its March 2011 Program Posted: 08 Feb 2011 06:35 PM PST
The six companies in the last batch have all benefited greatly from being a part of the incubator, with two acquisitions and 4 financings between them: Damn The Radio was acquired by Fanbridge, SocialVision was a acquired by an undisclosed suitor, AppBistro raised around 700K from angels like Alfred Lin, Anomaly has raised a 500K round it will soon disclose more details about, Apprats has raised 400K from Dave McClure and other LA angels and Skyara is in the middle of financing a round. Co-founder Paul Bragiel says that one of the benefits, aside from the space, of being an i/o Ventures-backed company is the repeated exposure to other entrepreneurs and investors, “Our opinion is that the most valuable thing is all the people they get to meet through us and working very closely on a daily basis with us four partners.” CTO Former Lefora and Meetro co-founder Bragiel joins partners like former MyspaceAber Whitcomb, BitTorrent co-founder and Yahoo corporate development exec Ashwin Navin, HotOrNot co-founder Jim Young at the accelerator’s helm. You can read more about the first i/o Ventures demo day, here.        
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| Stealth Startup Bubbli Raises Funding, Wants To Create A New Kind Of Photograph Posted: 08 Feb 2011 05:52 PM PST
So what exactly does Bubbli mean when they say they want to reinvent photos? You’ve got me — the startup says it wants to “bring the real world to the flat web”, by capturing places instead of just a rectangular image. It sounds like it could be a sort of panoramic photo, possibly with an augmented reality layer on top, but at this point the company isn’t talking. Bubbli does have experience with augmented reality — while an intern at Yelp, cofounder Ben Newhouse built the ‘Monocle’ feature that was part of Yelp’s iPhone app, making it the first AR-enabled application to hit the App Store (you point your phone down the street, and Yelp will overlay each venue’s star rating). That feature led to quite a bit of controversy as it was snuck past Apple’s approval process as an Easter Egg, but Apple eventually approved it. The company’s second cofounder, Terrence McArdle, is a designer from NYC.        
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| Watch Out Austin! Dogpatch Labs Is Opening A Makeshift SXSW Office Posted: 08 Feb 2011 05:07 PM PST
The Austin branch of Dogpatch Labs will be located at Treehouse Pub, at 501 East 6th Street and will have all the amenities of Dogpatch New York, Cambridge and San Francisco: Free food, desks, WIFI, space, and (yes) foosball. Those wishing to avoid ill-chosen roomies, drunk co-workers or just mingle with like-minded people can sign up here. Polaris Ventures partner Peter Flint tells me they are trying to sign up as many entrepreneurs as possible so don’t be shy. Along with offering a workspace, VCs Flint, Mike Hirshland, Dave Barrett and Ryan Spoon will be holding office hours in Dogpatch Labs Austin and are obviously very interested in meeting with budding companies. You can grab a time slot here before everyone else does here. Here's the full Dogpatch Austin schedule:
Image: Melissa Gira Grant/Flickr        
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| PSA: Covering The iPhone In 4 Feet Of Concrete May Affect Signal Strength Posted: 08 Feb 2011 04:04 PM PST
Don’t believe me? Maybe you’ll want to ask any of the 16 million-plus people that bought an iPhone last quarter. Or maybe any of the 14 million-plus that bought one the quarter before that. The antenna issue was apparently such a big deal that not only did the iPhone chart record sales each quarter for Apple, but the reports of customers being upset with the product and returning it were basically unheard of. Damn, that pesky antenna — it nearly ruined Apple! Facetiousness aside, you would have thought that those behind the rally cries for Antennagate would have calmed down over what ended up being a total non-issue. But nope! Not iLounge. They’re back today with “Antennagate 2″ (trademark pending)! But this time it’s arguably even better. Not only is there a “death grip” problem with the Verizon iPhone, but now there’s a “death hug” problem as well. Now hear this: if you are able to wrap your entire hands around and iPhone and squeeze as hard as possible, you may lose some WiFi signal! Related: if you lock the iPhone in a room with no signal, you may also lose some signal. Beyond the fact that no one is ever going to hold their iPhone in the manner that they do in the iLounge video, and beyond the obvious link-bait (which we’re graciously submitting to), I’m just going to throw this out there: if Antennagate 1 was a 10 out of 100 on the problem scale, this is a 0. Or maybe a negative 1. While I’ve always stood by my stance that the iPhone 4 (the AT&T version, that is) antenna issue was very real, it wasn’t a really big deal, I see this as no deal. First of all, I cannot replicate the death grip issue on the Verizon iPhone. I could (and still can) on the AT&T version. I can’t here. It’s already known that Apple changed the antenna design with this new model, so it seems fairly hard to believe that they would have changed something without correcting that problem. Secondly, that said, the antenna still is on the outside of the phone. As as we were all made well aware this past summer, the human body doesn’t help boost its signal at all. In fact, it hurts it. I’m sure there are some acrobatic manuevers you can still do with your hands to get the signal on the Verizon iPhone to drop. Like a “death hug”, for example. Third, covering the iPhone in four feet of concrete will also likely affect signal strength. We’re still waiting on the video proof of this, but consider yourselves warned. [photo: flickr/coun2rparts]        
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| The Great Valentine’s Day Nook Color Case Gift Guide Posted: 08 Feb 2011 02:55 PM PST You know the drill: Valentine’s Day is next week so here’s come Nook Color cases that would make great gifts. Herp derp. We looked at Kindle cases yesterday so it only makes sense to look at the B&N counterpart. Not surprisingly, there’s a much smaller accessory market for Nook Color cases and that’s reflected in this gift guide. There simply aren’t that many to choose from and Barnes & Noble seem to understand this. The bookseller just put several very nice cases on special for the upcoming holiday. Check ‘em out. The official B&N cases are by far the best quality ones I tested.        
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| The Optimism Of The Gadget Maker Posted: 08 Feb 2011 02:11 PM PST
During the dot-com bust, and more recently during the housing crisis, gadget spending tanked and, as a result, gadgets on the aggregate were boring retreads of the same old stuff – laptops, monitors, tower PCs, and phones. Cast your memory back to 2008 when things were just getting rough. What were the the most popular devices? Netbooks: me-too machines made for the price-conscious consumer. There is nothing aspirational about a $500 6-inch EEE PC.        
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| Despite Pushback From Pubs, Apple Will Make iTunes Subscription Billing Mandatory Posted: 08 Feb 2011 01:59 PM PST When Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily launched last week, Apple’s VP Eddy Cue got on stage to announce one-click subscriptions for iPad publications through iTunes. The Daily already has the one-click billing option as a feature, and Cue promised it would be made available to other iPad newspaers and magazines soon. Cue then started to make the rounds of print media companies in New York City to explain how subscription billing will work on the iPad. Who will have control over subscriber revenues and data has long been a point of contention between print publishers and Apple. The magazine and newspaper companies want to be able to control subscription billing by sending readers to their own sites to process iPad app subscriptions, but Apple is insisting that they use iTunes. To get through this impasse, I’ve heard that Apple is offering a compromise. Publications might be allowed to route subscribers to their own websites or payment portals to grab their credit card numbers, but they will also have to offer the option of subscribing through iTunes. It is a brilliant countermove. Apple is basically saying, “Let the subscriber decide,” knowing full well they will choose iTunes. After all, it’s simply easier for consumers to subscribe to digital publications from one place. Nevertheless, already there is some public grumbling from newspapers about being forced to go through iTunes. Except for The Daily, which got to launch first with subscriptions and only offers them through iTunes (in contrast, News Corp’s WSJ app takes you to a website to process subscriptions). Apple obviously wants the rest of the print media industry to follow The Daily‘s example—both on billing through iTunes and the 99-cent-per-week pricing. (You’ve got to wonder whether Steve Jobs had any hand in convincing Murdoch to pick that price). But if other media companies insist on fulfilling subscriptions themselves, they will have to offer iTunes subscriptions as an alternative. The print media companies want to control subscriptions for a couple reasons. They don’t like the idea of handing 30 percent of every subscriber dollar over to Apple, but even more than that they cannot afford to lose the data that comes with a direct paying relationship with readers. They could live with sharing revenues if it weren’t on an ongoing basis. After all, magazines and newspapers already share their cover price with newsstands. And iTunes is simply the new digital newsstand. The difference is that one-time newsstand buyers sometimes convert into subscribers. As most of us know, once you subscribe to a magazine or newspaper, inertia can keep you subscribing for years. Once you are a subscriber, the print media companies know a lot about you: where you live, your name, and credit card number. Those details are enough for their database marketers to create fairly accurate demographic profiles of their readers and sell this targeted, captive audience to advertisers. Selling through iTunes, on the other hand, is just a black box. Although, as part of registering for the app, publications can collect some of the same information, such as name, email, and zipcode. What they are really worried about is that iTunes will make it easier to cancel unwanted subscriptions.        
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| Blue Marble Energy Raises $1.3 Million More To Make Carbon-Neutral Fragrances, Flavors And Fuel Posted: 08 Feb 2011 01:36 PM PST
Blue Marble’s biochemicals can be used to manufacture everything from food and perfume, to plastics, adhesives and synthetic textiles. The company also produces renewable energy from biomass. One of the company’s best known products is its perfume line, EOS, made partly with spent beer brewery grain from Freemont Brewing in conjunction with the hand-made fragrance retailers Sweet Anthem. According to the company’s website:
In late 2009, the Seattle clean tech company struck a partnership with the Odessa Public Development Authority (OPDA) to construct and run Washington state's first specialty biochemical biorefinery. The joint project attracted a $2 million award from Washington State's Community Economic Revitalization Board (CERB). The plant is now moving out of its pilot phase towards a higher-volume, commercial phase. In April 2009, the company raised its series A investment of $2 million from an entrepreneur involved in bottling and distributing sodas in Africa, Rajiv Shah who holds a seat on Blue Marble’s board.        
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| Keen On… The Domino Project: Seth Godin Reinvents the Book Business (TCTV) Posted: 08 Feb 2011 12:29 PM PST
Godin's thirteenth book may well be unlucky for the traditional publishing business. You see, Godin's big new thing is the Domino Project, a next generation publishing venture that he is launching with Amazon. And one of the first books published by the Domino Project will be his own little thing about initiative. What Godin is trying to do with the Domino Project is make books "spreadable." It's a big dream – one that reinvents books in the viral age of social media. But, as he told me when we met in New York last month, most start-up businesses fail because entrepreneurs don't dream big enough. See Part I of my interview with Seth Godin here. On the role of technology in the post industrial age On the Domino Project On the value of failing small        
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| Mildred’s TV Parlor Is Almost Here Posted: 08 Feb 2011 12:04 PM PST Ray Bradbury’s 1950s novel Fahrenheit 451 had a lot of stuff about book burnings. But it captured my imagination when I read it in 7th grade because of the TV Parlors – entire rooms where the walls were completely covered in TV screens, creating an immersive, interactive, 3-D experience. The protagonists wife, Mildred, desperately wants the fourth wall size screen to complete her TV Parlor. And we all kind of want that, too. Forget that 60 inch television or 30 inch monitor. We want screens that cover walls. Screens we can touch. Microsoft has done some interesting stuff with cheap infrared lasers and a projector that can create a touch experience on any wall. See this 2008 post where I tested the device. But that’s nothing compared to what’s being called the world’s largest touchscreen – a 10 meter by 2.8 meter monster that can detect up to 100 simultaneous touch inputs. Once again, infrared is being used to handle touch. Mildred would have been impressed. In the late 90s people started buying their first flat screen plasma TVs, paying $15,000 (installation included). Today $1,000 will buy you a much, much better flat screen TV. Would you pay $15,000 to have this 10 meter touchscreen in your living room? A lot of you probably would.        
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Twitter’s greatest strength is also often its greatest weakness: it’s a simple, constantly-updating stream. This keeps information fresh and flowing, but it also means that if you step away for a few hours (or even a few days — crazy, I know), you’re likely to miss a lot. And it means that scanning your Twitter stream can sometimes be tedious. A new product launching from 
We’ve covered 
It’s not often that I get to write about the intersection of art, design, fashion and technology, but 
Isn’t this just the cutest thing? It’s Steve Jobs, age 23, getting hair and make-up done for a TV appearance, possibly with KGO-TV in San Francisco. Watch him gape in amazement at the live national feed that is carrying him into homes in California and New York. This is probably the most “aw shucks” you’ll ever find Jobs and it’s a charming portrait of a kid who is definitely on the way up.
HTML5 versus native apps. It’s a debate as old as — well, at least three years ago. And pretty much since the beginning of that debate, there has been a general underlying current among the geek community that HTML5 is good and native is bad. Native is what we have to deal with as we wait for HTML5 to prevail.
A few months back, I had 
Smartphones with built-in cameras have sparked a wave of hot startups focused on photos, including Path, picplz, and Instagram. But 
If the above is what your SXSW workspace usually looks like, you’re in luck: For the first time, 
Remember “
We are at a strange point at whatever economic upturn we’re experiencing in the world economy. Things aren’t quite “right” yet, many are still out of work, and the general sense is that business spending has flatlined. However, things are looking up. How can you tell? Gadget makers are advertising again.
According to a 
Over the last fifteen years, innovation maven 
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