The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Zynga Is In Talks To Buy “Draw Something” Maker OMGPOP
- CafePress To Acquire T-Shirt Competitor Logo’d Softwear For $8.3M
- Deezer Launches Offline Browser Mode To Catch Up With Spotify
- Jolicloud Me, A Personal Cloud Organizing Serivce, Opens In Beta Today
- Samsung Fined In Korea (Again) For Obstructing Price Fixing Investigation
- Dumb Employers, Lucky Startups And An Untapped Reservoir
- 42Floors Takes Commercial Real Estate Online (Because Searching For Office Space Sucks)
- Meet Cerealize And The Rest Of The Apps Born On The 2012 Startup Bus [TCTV]
- Travis Kalanick Says Uber Will Drive Into London Before The Olympics
- Fandango Wins Yahoo Movies Deal Over Rival MovieTickets.com
- Apple And AT&T Announce Record Sales And Activations For The New iPad
- Microsoft, NetClean Aim To Stop Child Pornography By Bringing PhotoDNA Tech To Law Enforcement
- Scheduler: Groupon Rolls Out Free Online Booking Service For SMBs Across U.S. & Canada
- Execs: At $2.65 Per Share, Apple To Become One Of Largest Dividend Payers In The U.S.
- What Does Penguin Have In Common With A Whale? A Publishing Deal
- Motorola Handset With 4.6-Inch 720p Display Leaks, Possibly Droid Fighter?
- Tim Cook On The New iPad’s First Weekend Sales “We Had A Record Weekend”
- Linux For The Real World
- Sphero, The Electronic Ball-O-Fun, Gets A Set Of Wheels [Video]
- Test Flighting: Applover Launches Free, Crowdsourced Testing Platform For Android Apps
| Zynga Is In Talks To Buy “Draw Something” Maker OMGPOP Posted: 19 Mar 2012 09:45 AM PDT  Zynga is in talks to acquire OMGPOP, the maker of massive hit Draw Something, according to a source with direct knowledge of the discussions. Talks are still in an earlier stage and it’s my understanding that there may be other foreign buyers that are still pursuing the company. When asked for comment, Zynga said it does not comment on rumor or speculation. Given that OMGPOP has raised around $17 million to date, I’d expect the price for this deal to be in the $150 to $250 million range. In e-mails over the weekend, OMGPOP chief executive Dan Porter also didn’t answer questions about interest from Japanese buyers. If it did happen, it would be Zynga’s biggest publicly disclosed acquisition to date. Zynga’s track record is mostly in acquiring small teams for a talent-price range of $5 to $15 million. But it did make a fantastic deal in late 2010 to buy Words With Friends-maker Newtoy for a $53.3 million in cash and stock — a price that looks positively low in retrospect. After buying Newtoy, Zynga was able to double the Words With Friends’ daily active users in 120 days. By the time it had filed for a public offering, Zynga had grown its mobile footprint by tenfold, largely on the back of Newtoy’s titles. Depending on the price, an OMGPOP acquisition could be a big win for Zynga because it falls right in line with the company’s “With Friends” brand. Over the past year, the company has launched Scramble With Friends and Hanging With Friends, among other titles. But Draw Something has been such an unexpected hit that it’s taking some of the wind out of Zynga’s momentum on mobile platforms. OMGPOP’s title just became the largest game on Facebook by daily users last week. This story is developing….
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| CafePress To Acquire T-Shirt Competitor Logo’d Softwear For $8.3M Posted: 19 Mar 2012 09:44 AM PDT  CafePress, the company that allows customers to design, buy and sell merchandise including t-shirts, hats, bags, mugs, stickers, and more, has entered into an agreement to acquire customized clothing seller Logo’d Softwear, Inc. The acquisition, which was noted in an amendment recently filed to CafePress, Inc.’s S-1, states that the agreement allows CafePress to purchase all the assets of Logo’d for $8.3 million, with $7.5 million in cash and $800,000 in shares of common stock. Launched in 1999, CafePress filed its IPO papers back in June 2011. Last week, the company provided more details about its plans. CafePress took in $175.5 million in revenue last year, up 37% from $127.9 million in 2010. 4.5 million shares (2.5M from the company and 2M from selling shareholders) will be made available for $16-$18 each, raising between $72 million and $81 million. CafePress says it expects to receive about $36.7 million, after costs, which it plans to use for working capital and capital expenditures. The company is now in an SEC quiet period, so it cannot comment on the details of the planned acquisition at this time. However, the amendment notes that the company expects to close the acquisition during the second quarter of 2012. For background, Logo’d Softwear Inc. is the 17-year old company behind custom sportswear outlet LogoSportwear.com, as well as team uniform printers TeamSportswear.com, school apparel site Custom School Sportswear and a t-shirt print shop Custom T-Shirts Printed. To date, nearly 4 million designs have been created online at the company’s properties. Like CafePress, Logo’d allows users to set up their own Share and Sell stores with zero cost and inventory management – it’s all print-on-demand. CafePress currently has print productions facilities in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as in Portland, Oregon as a result of its acquisition of Canvas On Demand, LLC, and Raleigh, N.C., as a result of acquiring L&S Ventures, Inc. When and if the Logo’d deal completes, the company will be able to add additional facilities in Connecticut. The key details from the S-1 read as follows:
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| Deezer Launches Offline Browser Mode To Catch Up With Spotify Posted: 19 Mar 2012 09:35 AM PDT  Deezer came out well before Spotify appeared on the horizon – 2007 in fact – to disrupt the streaming music space, but it faces a problem. Spotify has sucked up a lot of air despite having less registered users, 15 million to Deezer’s 20 million. The again Deezer has 1.5 million paying subscribers when Spotify is over 3 million right now. What do they do next? Deezer is fighting back, doubling down outside of the U.S. aiming to launch in 200 territories this year (most recently the U.K.), although not in the U.S., where Spotify just launched. Still, the Paris-based company today iterates on its product with the launch of an off-line mode which will run inside the browser. It is currently available on Chrome, and will be on other browsers very soon. Yes folks, that means you won’t need a desktop app, unlike Spotify. The announcement was made today at the London Web Summit by CEO Axel Dauchez. The “off-line mode” allows Deezer Premium+ subscribers to download their music library to their computers and to access it offline This could be an advantage. It’s an open standard so it will be easier for Deezer to integrate social media features (Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm…) and faster to iterate than a desktop app. It will be interesting to see if this aids Deezer’s mission to be the music streaming service of choice for Rest Of World.
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| Jolicloud Me, A Personal Cloud Organizing Serivce, Opens In Beta Today Posted: 19 Mar 2012 09:17 AM PDT  Today marks another step in the evolution of cloud services for consumers: Jolicloud, the Paris-based company that was one of the first to move on offering users a “cloud-based desktop,” today moved on another product that extends what users can do in the cloud even further, with the introduction of Jolicloud Me. Available from today in private beta on Android, iOS and HTML5, Jolicloud Me is a kind of uber-organizer for all of your online assets, aggregating them and automatically sifting them into categories base on file types — eg, images, music, video and so on — and what’s especially nice is that it takes them from all of the disparate places that you may currently use for these services — and even those that you may have used once but have given up on over time. For starters, the service is launching with integration for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Picasa. Tariq Krim, the founder and CEO, says the plan is to add more sites and services to that list — including your email, similar to the kind of service that Attachments.me offers where it automatically saves your email attachements in a cloud-based folder. He adds that, for now, having Facebook and Twitter already loops in the bulk of recent sharing, since those are the two most used today: “the backbone of sharing right now,” he how he describes it, and also because they are open to other services like Spotify. Why the move to personal organization? Krim said that it was because of customer feedback. “Being a desktop was not enough. People wanted to have data,” he said. “We found that there was no easy access to all of our data online so we built it.” Although a lot of cloud startups these days are likened to Box and Dropbox, Krim points out that this is not where his company competes — yet: “Our goal is not to be Dropbox, but to help maintain a relationship or connection to data that you own. Everything you liked, received or generated in one place.” In fact, the company integrates with the files you store on services like Dropbox and other “cloudifiers” (his word, not mine). It seems very obvious, and certainly the kind of service you can imagine Apple and Google and probably Facebook are looking to develop and offer themselves — if not try to buy Jolicloud to get there a little quicker. For now, the advantage is that Krim’s organizer is here now, and it traverses boundaries across services in ways that walled gardens from the likes of Apple or Facebook (sometimes breached via APIs) may not. Jolicloud is of the “lean and mean” startup variety: just 15 people based out of Paris. And for now the service is envisioned as totally free to use. So what will the business model, longer term, be? Krim says it will likely be around a kind of insurance policy, or way of securing data for life. “It’s too early to talk about this, but it’s clear that there is a lot of value for people who want to keep the data forever.” He says this is the kind of thing that Jolicloud could offer “potentially with partners”, or maybe going solo… That’s one to revisit for competitive threats in the future. Krim said today at the London Web Summit that any attendee who wanted to give Jolicloud Me a spin should email him. While I won’t start putting out his email in this post, that at least is a sign that the private beta could be a little easier than you might think to try out, if you’re interested. For what it’s worth, in my little test of it, it’s a speedy little service that I could see myself using to help organize my pretty haphazard forays into different photo services and more besides.
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| Samsung Fined In Korea (Again) For Obstructing Price Fixing Investigation Posted: 19 Mar 2012 08:51 AM PDT  When Samsung (among others) was called out for taking part in a mobile price-fixing scheme last week I expected the company to pony up the 14.2 billion won and keep their collective heads down for a while. That would’ve been the smart move: pay up, show remorse, move on, etc. A few Samsung execs had a different idea though. According to the Korea JoongAng Daily, they instead obstructed an official investigation by the country’s Fair Trade Commission shortly thereafter, which netted the company another 400 million won ($356,000) in fines. The fine may not sound like much — especially in comparison to the one they were hit with last week — but it’s the largest that the Korean Fair Trade Commission has ever meted out for obstructing an investigation. That should give you an idea of how seriously the Korean government seems to be taking this situation, but what exactly did those Samsung employees do? The extent to which Samsung employees tried to cover up the company’s misdeeds was pretty astounding. A small group of Samsung security guards attempted to bar a team of investigators from entering the premises, even going so far as to say that President Lee Myung-Bak wouldn’t be able to enter without an appointment. While they ran interference, a "high-level executive in the wireless department" ordered employees to get ride of related data and replace computers to cover their tracks. And that’s not all. The Korea Herald reports that Samsung occasionally provided the FTC with falsified information intended to throw off the commission’s investigation. One unnamed Samsung executive was particularly tricky — he not only lied about attending a meeting in Seoul on the day of the investigation, he was also found to have completely wiped his PC’s hard drive. He later admitted that his computer contained information about their deals with carrier SK Telecom, who received the lion's share of fines (20.2 billion won, or $17.9 million) doled out by the FTC last week. You have to wonder what was going though these guys’ heads; did they honestly thought a quick-and-dirty coverup would be enough to stymie investigators? The whole thing seems very brazen to me, though I suppose I can see where fear and panic would take hold of these execs and drive them (and their employees by extension) to do some ridiculous things.
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| Dumb Employers, Lucky Startups And An Untapped Reservoir Posted: 19 Mar 2012 08:44 AM PDT  Editor's note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture's healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft's Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave. A group of women is re-entering the workforce today and reshaping how products are made across key tech sectors like health & wellness, commerce and social products. Not only do they have the experience of raising families, but they’ve been business and technology leaders earlier in life. They’re becoming founders and leaders at startups and in the very companies they’ve been buying products and services from. Not only do women make most of a family’s health decisions but 48% of graduating physicians are women and women compose 73% of medical and health services managers. As a healthtech startup, we think heavily about the importance of what I call the Family Chief Health & Wellness Officer (aka “Mom”). Avado is not unlike many startups in that we have two male co-founders. We’d be fools to not figure out ways to bring the female perspective into our business. A bootstrapped startup such as Avado has many challenges, but it also possesses some key advantages. I want to share one key advantage related to this topic. I think it may be one of the biggest untapped reservoirs of talent. The beauty of startups is results matter much more than rigid hiring practices. Big, dumb companies often have rules that preclude a huge category of the potential workforce from being tapped. It’s a category that I’m familiar with as my wife was previously a marketer at Apple and Microsoft, yet it’s likely neither would hire her right now as her time commitment with our kids during the day doesn’t allow her to show up during a normal work hours. However, we get the benefit because she is able to help us with our marketing in the windows of time she has. Another thing dumb employers do is look at gaps in “normal” employment as a big drawback. Let me give you an example of a new member of our team that we are absolutely thrilled to have on board. Julie Braman is our new Managing Director of Innovation for Pharmaceutics and Biotech. She and I worked together when I was running Microsoft’s health business and she was the founder of another industry business – pharmaceutics. Julie chose to stay at home while her kids were growing up. As I know with my wife, that hardly means one’s brain shuts down. Rather, it brings an entirely new perspective the business can benefit from. In fact, perhaps the most important trend in healthcare and the focus of the recently rolled out Stage 2 of Meaningful Use is “Patient Engagement.” As a member of the “sandwich generation,” many former professionals turned stay-at-home moms not only have had responsibility for their children but many are also increasingly responsible for their parents’ health. This gives them a particularly unique perspective. Since patient engagement is our central focus, the perspective of a boomer female head of household is invaluable. Having Julie join the team is a real win-win. She is able to jump back into a very meaty job without skipping a beat. For Avado, it’s a no-brainer. Julie was one of the pioneers in bringing pharmacists into active engagement in primary care practices while she was a practicing pharmacist at Group Health — this is a rapidly growing trend with the shortage of primary care physicians. Julie was also in Sales with pharma giant, Eli Lilly, so she understands that perspective as well. As Life Sciences has proven to be fertile ground for Avado, I couldn’t think of a better fit and I couldn’t care less that she’s been “out of the workforce.” Julie is far from unique. Brad Feld, Fred Wilson and others have written about the lack of women in tech yet there is a group of tech veterans re-entering the workforce that are an untapped reservoir. While many of my female colleagues continued working full-time, there are a boatload of them who either worked part time or were full-time Chief Health & Wellness Officers. Their kids have grown up and they are ready to fully re-engage with the workforce. They worked for the defining companies of the 90′s such as Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and others that were the Facebooks and Googles of their time. In other words, they were the cream of the crop then and they are the cream of the crop now. We feel lucky have them join our team and think other startups would be just as lucky if they learn how to engage this untapped reservoir of talent. Related Articles: What Pharma Can Learn From the Railroads and IBM Aetna: The Company Scaring Its Competition And Delighting Startups
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| 42Floors Takes Commercial Real Estate Online (Because Searching For Office Space Sucks) Posted: 19 Mar 2012 08:43 AM PDT  Jason Freedman, co-founder of the new YC-backed startup 42Floors launching today, says he got the idea for the startup because “searching for office space just really, really sucked.” The reason the process was so miserable, he says, is because he was powerless. To find commercial real estate, he had to go through brokers who all insisted they had access to proprietary data. But when each broker returned a list of search results to him, it was the exact same list, in the exact same order, from the same database of listings. Thinking that it was time to provide an alternative, Freedman decided to found 42Floors, a service that will allow people to search for commercial real estate online. The company is starting by hosting office space listings located in the Bay Area at launch, and will then expand into other markets. Taking advice from Paul Graham, Freedom decided he wasn’t just going to build a web product, but actually learn the industry first. He got his broker’s license, shadowed a broker in town, and learned, over the course of six months, that listing agents are actually eager to find better ways to market their spaces. “They don’t have a direct marketing channel,” he explains. “So I chose not to go to war with the brokers, but to work cooperatively with them. And they’re willing to give us their listings because they want to market better than they are currently,” he says. On 42Floors, the agents can list their properties for free, and the startup provides an additional service for them, also at no cost: they take photos of the property up for rent or sale. Typically, brokers’ listings only include shots of the outside of the building, but 42Floors will shoot inside – something that matters more when companies are looking to find new office space. The company will also handle the scheduling arrangements when a potential client requests a tour of an office space, and in a few months, it will launch a mobile app version of the service that will allow all parties to stay better connected while on the go. For now, 42Floors is primarily targeting tech entrepreneurs in need of office space, and it comes at the problem with a deep understanding of how startup founders think about finding this type of listing. “People want to be browse, they want to be inspired.” says Freedman. “Even if it’s only 1,000 square feet – that’s a tech entrepreneur who raised a seed round and wants five desks; that’s a CEO who’s building his new castle.” “People search for their dream offices, they don’t search for ‘commercial real estate,’” he adds. On the site, the listings can be filtered by type (e.g., lease, co-working, shared), size, price and (soon) region. At launch, the focus is on the Bay Area, but the plan is to roll out the service to other startup markets in the coming months, including New York, Cambridge, Boston, Seattle, and wherever else there’s a tech center where startups need office space. 42Floors will be focused on this vertical for most of the first year, before expanding into other types of commercial real estate listings. The reason for the focus on office space, Freedman explains, has to do with an unfilled need. Brokers make the most of their money from doing one big deal per year, not lots of small deals, so their focus is always on closing their high-priced listings. Meanwhile, 80% of commercial real estate transactions are under 5,000 square feet – spaces like those that startups would want to move into. These listings are currently ignored by the industry. In addition to Freedman, 42Floors’ team (listed here) includes James Bracy, Jon Bracy, Ben Ehmke, and David Woodworth. 42Floors has raised seed funding from Y Combinator, StartFund, and Ron Conway (through SV Angel), who put in an additional investment. It also has ten commercial real estate veterans who participated as angel investors in an advisory round. The company has raised $400,000 in total, all sources combined. And, in case you’re curious, the reason why the company is called 42Floors? Because 42 is the answer to everything, of course.
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| Meet Cerealize And The Rest Of The Apps Born On The 2012 Startup Bus [TCTV] Posted: 19 Mar 2012 08:43 AM PDT 
The StartupBus had its biggest year ever this year, with busloads of hacker-entrepreneurs from 11 regions in North America coding their way down to SxSWi with the goal of launching a minimum viable web app by the time they arrived in Austin. Last Sunday, a select group of the best StartupBus apps came together to pitch their work to a panel of potential investors. The winner was Cerealize, a website that lets you custom mix your own blended breakfast cereal and ships a box to your home. Watch the Cerealize team pitch their product to TechCrunch TV in the video embedded above. And below you can watch the entire footage of the StartupBus Grand Finals, shot by videographer Andy Newman, to see pitches from Bumper Crop, Curious City, Gourmair, Happstr, Scoringo, Spott, as well as Cerealize. Also, TechCrunch TV’s very own John Murillo rode the StartupBus all the way from San Francisco to Austin, and shot some great daily recaps of the entire trip:
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| Travis Kalanick Says Uber Will Drive Into London Before The Olympics Posted: 19 Mar 2012 08:30 AM PDT  Uber has built a business out of being, in the words of its founder and head Travis Kalanick, everyone’s private driver. But while the company is continuing to expand the number of cities where it operates, it is also building out a network to extend beyond vehicles and taxing people around, Kalanick said today. In a conversation with Alexia on stage at the London Web Summit today, he also laid out the first hints of when Uber plans to launch in London: it will be before this summer, when London is due to host the next Olympics. “We are definitely going to be here before the Olympics,” he said but also pointed to how important it will be a challenge and not necessarily one that it has faced before. “That will be a cluster for transportation, so we will have to have our game faces on.” In the world of cars for hire, London, for starters, has a tortuous tangle of streets and an extensive mini-cab network, encompassing not only small operations localized on different neighborhoods but also massive, London-wide fleets of cars that are ordered by phone, text message and often apps. That’s on top of the more famous (and expensive) black cab network. Taken together, that essentially means that Uber will be needing to disrupt not just one but two different, existing car services. (That’s to say nothing about public transport here, which is huge.) Kalanick notes that while Uber was originally about giving the experiences normally reserved for the “ultra wealthy” to the middle class masses, that paradigm has had to change with subsequent expansions. “When we roll out in a new city we are mindful of that city…we try to ingratiate ourselves in that city,” he said. “In New York it’s all about class and about being pretty classy, but in Seattle it’s more about grungy. So you do things differently because of that.” Apart from this, Uber has been pushing, bit by bit, the boundaries of what it is that it offers through its service. In Austin during SXSW last year it introduced pedicabs. This year, it added barbecue delivery to the ordering list (Kalanick today said of the BBQ service: “It’s creative and fun and people loved it. We delivered thousands of sandwiches.”) At the time, I pondered about how this might be a precursor to a time when Uber used its logistics network for more than just transporting you home from a bar late on a Saturday night — following the model of Amazon rather than Addison Lee. And so I was a little relieved to hear that Kalanick seems to agree. “I’d like to say that FedEx delivers packages tomorrow, and Uber delivers in five minutes,” he said, but once you are delivering a town car, why not something else? “Some of the things you will see we are building an urban and logistics framework. “What we like to say is that the vision for Uber is the cross between lifestyle and logistics. We are all used to seeing that on the internet. With the click of a mouse we are bringing that experience to the real world. I can now push a button to get what I want and it is delivered to me.”
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| Fandango Wins Yahoo Movies Deal Over Rival MovieTickets.com Posted: 19 Mar 2012 08:22 AM PDT  Movie ticket seller Fandango is announcing a partnership with Yahoo today that will see it becoming the online and mobile movie ticketer for Yahoo! Movies, a service which now has over 30 million U.S. users according to comScore. The new collaboration offers Yahoo users access to Fandango’s 20,000 screens across the U.S. and will support purchases online, on mobile and on tablets. Fandango, which added support for PayPal back in December, says that January and February have been the two best-selling months in the company’s history. Much of that increase in usage is apparently coming from mobile devices. Fandango says that 40% of its visitors come from mobile devices, including both phones and tablets. The company, which is owned by Comcast, also recently forged ticketing agreements with Regency Theatres and AMC Theatres. Combined, these two deals added 3,000 more screens to Fandango’s total, boosting it up to nearly 20,000 countrywide. They were critical deals to Fandango’s win of the Yahoo partnership, too, which allowed it to beat out rival MovieTickets.com. But those moves did not go unnoticed – in February, MovieTickets, one of AMC’s founding shareholders, joined a lawsuit against the chain of theaters, saying that AMC is in breach of a joint venture agreement that allowed MovieTickets exclusive rights to AMC’s ticket inventory. “Not content with the percentage of MovieTickets.com it previously negotiated for, AMC has intentionally sought to destroy MovieTickets.com’s present opportunity to maximize its value by achieving competitive dominance in the marketplace,” the suit states. It also alleges that AMC used its insider status to stop a $150 million+ offer from Comcast to acquire MovieTickets, which would have allowed for a merger with Fandango. The results of the case may also end up impacting the Yahoo deal.
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| Apple And AT&T Announce Record Sales And Activations For The New iPad Posted: 19 Mar 2012 08:22 AM PDT  After Apple announced that the new iPad drew record sales over this past weekend, AT&T is also reporting record sales. Exact sales numbers were not given by either company. Here’s the statement from AT&T: On Friday, March 16, AT&T set a new single-day record for its iPad sales and activations, demonstrating robust demand for the new iPad on the nation’s largest 4G network, covering nearly 250 million people. As we wrote earlier this morning, Apple’statement from CEO Tim Cook shows that the new iPad probably outsold the iPad But we still don’t have any number as to how many were sold over the past few days. Last year’s iPad 2 first weekend sales numbers were estimated at north of 1,000,000 units sold. We’ll see if other iPad retailers, which include Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sam’s Club and Radio Shack, come in with similar reports of record sales.
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| Microsoft, NetClean Aim To Stop Child Pornography By Bringing PhotoDNA Tech To Law Enforcement Posted: 19 Mar 2012 08:11 AM PDT  In a world where we can build all kinds of crazy apps and software, it’s a bit shocking that more hasn’t been done to stop the proliferation of child pornography on the Internet. But Microsoft is trying to do its part with the company’s PhotoDNA technology, which helps find and remove some of the worst images of child sexual exploitation from the web. The software is already used by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) along with Facebook, and should be rolled out across Bing, Hotmail and Skydrive soon. But Microsoft still wants to do more. That said, Redmond has partnered with NetClean to make PhotoDNA image matching tech available to police and law enforcement at no cost. Hopefully, this will lead to more empowered and efficient investigation and rescue of victims. Over 65 million images and videos of child sexual exploitation have been reviewed by the NCMEC since 2002, 10 percent of which are of infants or toddlers who can’t even speak up to protect themselves. Created in collaboration with Dartmouth College, PhotoDNA creates a signature for each image, which allows it to be compared with other image signatures to detect copies. This often leads to removal of the worst pornographic images of children that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
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| Scheduler: Groupon Rolls Out Free Online Booking Service For SMBs Across U.S. & Canada Posted: 19 Mar 2012 07:56 AM PDT  After purchasing OpenCal, the makers of an automated online appointment scheduling app, back in September of last year for an undisclosed amount, Groupon quickly went about incorporating the technology. Before long, the company had announced Groupon Scheduler, a service designed to make it easy for both customers and merchants to quickly close the loop between offer, booking, and scheduling. As Groupon looks to build its perceived and actual value for merchants, the OpenCal acquisition, and subsequent launch of Scheduler, made a lot of sense. Since then, the company has been pretty quiet about Scheduler, but that changed today, as Groupon announced a free beta version of Scheduler, available to all SMBs in the U.S. and Canada. Groupon claims that Scheduler now represents one of the most “intuitive and complete free products of its kind,” and while that’s not exactly true, as there are plenty of intuitive, cheap online scheduling solutions out there, combined with the Groupon brand clout, and its already existing suite of marketing tools, this is a good deal for small businesses. Merchants now have a free means by which they can accept online bookings (24/7), the ability to add a “Book Now” button to their website, along with easily integrating the service into the Groupon deals process. Another part of Scheduler’s appeal: Merchants can use it to manage all online booking for their business, whether offering Groupon deals or not. Merchants can customize Scheduler and take advantage of a client list and a business dashboard, which show realtime stats on total appointments, new customers, and percentage of bookable time filled. Importantly, Scheduler also gives merchants the ability to track Groupon redemptions. On the customer side, once a Groupon has been purchased, they can then proceed right to Scheduler and make an appointment. The service sends customers immediate booking confirmations, as well as email reminders up to 72 hours before scheduled appointments, according to the release. According to Groupon’s statement, the product successfully piloted in Sacramento and Miami, and is now ready to roll out nationwide — in beta, of course. For more, check out Scheduler at home here.
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| Execs: At $2.65 Per Share, Apple To Become One Of Largest Dividend Payers In The U.S. Posted: 19 Mar 2012 07:02 AM PDT  Last night, the news broke that Apple would be holding an “impromptu” conference call to talk about just what it plans to do with that nearly $100 billion in cash reserves it has in Scrooge McDuck’s Money Bin. Of course, Slate told us that Apple’s decision would be “a really big deal.” And, albeit without pyrotechnics, it was a big deal. For existing and new shareholders alike. The conference call this morning was designed to discuss Apple’s decision, which it had announced via sneaky press release earlier in the morning, revealing that it will be initiating a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share, along with a $10 billion share repurchase program commencing in September 2012. At $2.5 billion per quarter and $10 billion over the year, Apple will become one of the largest dividend payers of all companies, according to Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer. Apple CEO Tim Cook started off the call by reading a statement this morning talking about Apple’s prospects, which, along with the purpose of the call, was the equivalent of my calling you up to count my money. Apple is, of course, performing well — across all categories. And as to Apple’s recent announcement of the iPad 3, er, iPad, Tim Cook said “we had a record weekend,” but wouldn’t say more. After looking at what the company could do, while maintaining a war chest, they felt they had plenty of money to run the business, and initiate a dividend, and increase the shareholder bank in the process. So, part of Apple’s stated plan is to not only make long-time shareholders (and employees) happy, but to make the stock appealing to new investors, which is slightly humorous considering how widely held Apple’s stock is already. But there’s no doubt this adds some incentive. One caller asked the executives if the company was looking to maintain a specific amount of cash in the bank to ensure its fiscal well-being. “There isn’t a magic number that we’re trying to keep in terms of cash balance,” the CEO replied. And obviously, offering the dividend and buyback programs give Apple an end-around on paying domestic taxes on the repatriation of foreign money. Meanwhile, domestic cash is earmarked for “creating great products,” as well as maintaining a war chest for future opportunities. What’s more, when asked if they would be considering stock splits, Cook said “there is very little evidence that it supports the stock,” but the company — and this was repeated umpteen times — will continue to evaluate this option, as well as every other option as it befits its shareholders. While it was unclear last night just what Apple would do with its cash, with speculations ranging all over the board, many figured that it would be announcing either a dividend or buyback program. And, in the end, with nearly $100B in the bank, it decided to do both.
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| What Does Penguin Have In Common With A Whale? A Publishing Deal Posted: 19 Mar 2012 06:58 AM PDT  Pearson has been taking some decisive steps into using mobile to grow its traditional publishing business. And today sees a new chapter in that strategy: Puffin, the children’s division of Pearson imprint Penguin, has signed a worldwide deal with UK-based mobile games developer Ustwo to develop e-books based on Ustwo’s psychedelic Whale Trail mobile game, which features a whale called Willow. The two say that this is the first-ever publishing deal for a brand that first debuted as an app. The first fruit of the partnership — a digital picture book — is due in October 2012, with further e-books and physical books coming out in 2013. The deal underscores two different trends: that of mobile games publishers franchising out their brands for more revenues (a la Angry Birds swag); and that of traditional publishers looking for more routes on to new platforms like tablets and smartphones. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The official announcement is being made today by Eric Huang, publishing director, media & entertainment group, Penguin, at the Bologna Book Fair in Italy. Mills, the co-founder of the Ustwo studio, says that Ustwo will keep the rights to the game itself. However, the partnership could also see Penguin moving into making gaming apps, too: “We could do something with them app-wise if we chose,” he tells TechCrunch. At the moment, he adds, this deal is mainly about taking the Whale Trail characters “into a bigger narrative”: “Whale Trail was all about creating something that brings joy to users throughout the world. Penguin genuinely and passionately shares our enthusiasm for developing the brand further, and the coming together of the traditional publishing powerhouse and our first game IP, is a match made in heaven,” he says. The news comes as Ustwo is planning an update to the game itself: right now it costs $0.99 to download on iOS, but the update, due in June, will play around with that business model and also include in-app payments for certain features, he says. The deal with Penguin could also see the app picking up more profile, too: so far it has sold 170,000 on iOS, averaging 300-400 downloads per day. On Android, it’s currently making £1,500 in sales per day at a price of £1.49 per download. Although this may be the first time a book deal has been borne out of an app, this is not the first time that Penguin has made books based on digital brands: the company also has book series based on Moshi Monsters and Skylanders. “I discovered Whale Trail from Gruff Rhys’ music video. When I downloaded the app, I was hooked,” Penguin’s Huang said. “I wanted to know more about Willow and his world and thought, we should publish a book.”
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| Motorola Handset With 4.6-Inch 720p Display Leaks, Possibly Droid Fighter? Posted: 19 Mar 2012 06:50 AM PDT  Motorola has really been stepping up lately. If you would have asked me six months ago to choose between a Samsung handset and a Motorola phone, I probably would have chosen Samsung hands-down. But as Motorola evolves its design language and nails down some of our most necessary features — solid battery, thin profile, premium feel in the hand, and badass specs — I find myself more and more infatuated with the stuff Moto’s putting out. Take this leaked Droid Fighter, for example. If information from the PhonesHK forums is correct, Motorola is improving on its already successful Razr design language with an even bigger HD screen. While the original Razr had a 4.3-inch 540×960 display, this new (officially) unnamed beast has a massive 4.6-inch display, boasting a 720p resolution. After reading through the info provided at MFUNZ (the original source), it seems that not much else is known of the phone — in fact, we’re only guessing that this is the rumored Droid Fighter we’ve been seeing on leaked Verizon docs and such. If it is the Fighter, those same leaked documents peg this guy for a mid-April release on Verizon. I’d also just like to take a second and talk about screen sizes. The trend is clearly moving towards larger displays, which I think of as a good thing most of the time. The Nexus is mostly comfortable at 4.65-inches, and 4.5-inch displays are damn near perfect when it comes to a nice balance between mobile video/gaming and usability. This 4.6-inch display should be just as wonderful. Samsung is really the one to worry about. The 5.3-inch Galaxy Note tested my patience, and I can’t imagine that a 4.8-inch Galaxy S III will be much better (even if I am totally excited to get my hands on it). [via Engadget]
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| Tim Cook On The New iPad’s First Weekend Sales “We Had A Record Weekend” Posted: 19 Mar 2012 06:42 AM PDT  Today on Apple’s dividend and share repurchase program conference call, Apple CEO Tim Cook touched briefly on the new iPad’s opening weekend sales. Exact sales numbers were not given at the time but Cook did state “[Apple] had a record weekend.” That brief statement likely means that the new iPad outsold the iPad 2. Last year Apple was mum on exact details for the iPad 2 but some analysts pegged its opening weekend sales numbers north of 1,000,000 units sold. The big news of the day is that Apple just announced a dividend and $10 billion share repurchasing program. Cook and others on today’s call detailed that the intent is to provide income to long-time Apple stockholders while at the same time attracting new investors. The Apple bigwigs also constantly pointed out that the new programs will not disrupt Apple’s key goal to constantly innovate (and break sales records). Apple will likely never come out and detail the exact sales numbers for the new iPad’s opening weekend. It will instead note numbers at longer milestones. Retailers might release their own sales numbers, though. For instance eBay released an infograph charting the first two weeks of the iPad 2′s worldwide sales. As with most Apple products, analysts and the press are questioning the slight upgrades of the latest iPad. It’s just a faster data connection and better screen, they say. I said it, too. But if the new iPad outsold the iPad 2, it’s clearly a hit in the mind of the average consumer. They’re the only ones that matter anyway.
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2012 06:15 AM PDT  The recent Linux Foundation report about the Linux jobs market highlighted a need for experienced professionals, but the traditional Linux training and certification programs don’t always impart the kind of skills actually required by employers. In an attempt to bridge this gap, veteran Linux trainer and Linux Journal associate editor Shawn Powers has teamed up with CBT Nuggets to develop a series of Linux training videos entitled “Linux for the Real World.” According to the description, this course “goes beyond the hypotheticals to walk viewers through real-world situations.” The course is a user directed series of classes covering topics that fill in the blanks left by the normal certification process. Powers describes it as a “virtual internship,” in which he shares his professional experience to give students practical hands-on experience with Linux system administration tasks. Each 30 to 40 minute class, or nuggets as they’re called here, presents a single topic. Powers attempts to provide information suitable for all skill levels, from basic to advanced. The new Linux enthusiast can watch introductory material for each topic, as well as follow along as Powers dives into more technical aspects. Intermediate and advanced users can brush up on the basics of each task, and ideally learn a new thing or two. I chatted with Powers recently about the course, and what “user directed” video training actually meant in the context of video training. It’s not like students can interrupt the videos to ask questions. Powers told me that although he has a basic outline for the course, he has not yet recorded anything other than the first lesson. After each video, viewers will respond to a survey in which they can ask for more details and help influence the contents of future videos. Powers will collect and review the responses, and incorporate common themes into the next video he records. CBT Nuggets did a similar course called “Cisco for the Real World”, in which user feedback directly influenced the course. I reviewed a few of those videos and admit I was pleased with the result: the beginning of each video highlighted the themes from the feedback, or addressed a specific question pertaining to the previous topic, before diving into the next topic. Thirty to 40 minutes is just about right for absorbing content in this way: not so long that you get really bored if it’s largely review, but not so brief as to preclude interesting side-notes and in-depth discussions. As a professional Linux trainer and a professional system administrator, Powers is keenly aware of the knowledge gaps created by certification programs. People with certifications may not have any practical experience, which puts them at a disadvantage both on the job and during the job hunt. According to Powers, one of the primary goals of “Linux for the Real World” is to present students with some real-world situations, not just fabricated examples to demonstrate a specific technology. While I think calling this a “virtual internship” is a little much, I can’t fault the desire to fill the knowledge gap. I’ve just watched the first video in the “Linux for the Real World” course, on Linux installation. As a full-time Linux sysadmin, it didn’t present me with anything really new, but neither was it so rudimentary as to be a waste of time. Powers covers basic network installations of Ubuntu and CentOS, setting up a local mirror from which to install, and finally touches on Kickstart files for unattended installations. Powers’ demeanor is warm and personal, and his pacing is just right. True to his word, he presented a couple of real-world situations that are likely to come up during the installation process and showed how to deal with them. It’s true that all of the information in this video is available all over the Internet, and in countless books at your local bookstore. Not everyone learns well from reading, though, so video instruction like this is actually quite beneficial to some students. Auditory and visual learners will be well served by listening and watching, respectively, what Powers says and does. That first class is free for everyone to watch. Similarly the survey is open to everyone, so if you have an interest in guiding the development of “Linux for the Real World”, watch it and take the survey. For $600 you can subscribe to the full course, as well as the LPIC-101 and LPIC-102 training courses. You should be able to pass the LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 certification tests at the end, as well as benefit from all the real-world Linux education that Powers shares. CBT Nuggets is also running a little contest until April 1: describe in 200 words or less what you would do with a year’s subscription to their entire video training library. If you’re interested, submit your answers. In related news, the Linux Professional Institute has announced a Linux Essentials curriculum that “prepares the next generation to acquire the advanced skills needed to fill increasing shortages of workers in today's mixed IT environments.” This program targets people new to Linux looking to make sense of it and the larger open source ecosystem. Scheduled to officially launch in mid-June, it looks like a pretty solid introductory course.
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| Sphero, The Electronic Ball-O-Fun, Gets A Set Of Wheels [Video] Posted: 19 Mar 2012 06:02 AM PDT
But Sphero got a new toy. Using parts purchased from Sparkfun including a previously discarded toy car, trackball, an Arduino kit, and an H-Bridge, a developer hacked together a fun little car. The Sphero does most of the work as it essentially drives the toy car by rolling on top of the trackball sensor. Roll out! Sphero is part electronic goodness and part magic. The little ball is controlled by a smartphone app, which can also change the color of the internal glow. But at the end of the day, the Sphero works out to be just an expensive cat toy. Even with the included games, it quickly loses its novelty. However, Orbotix, the company behind the Sphero, is actively trying to curate a development community for its little creation with the hope to constantly provide owners with fresh ideas and games. I, for one, would love this Sphero car.
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| Test Flighting: Applover Launches Free, Crowdsourced Testing Platform For Android Apps Posted: 19 Mar 2012 05:39 AM PDT  Earlier this month, MG broke the news that iOS app testing platform, TestFlight, had been acquired by Burstly. In one fell swoop, TestFlight (which continues to exist in its current, free-to-use form) combined its app testing strengths with Burstly’s app monetization platform, launching a supposed one-two punch with TestFlight Live, a new product that allows developers to view realtime engagement, revenue, audience, and performance data — all in one dashboard! Of course, the issue is that, while TestFlight and Burstly most likely have it in the works, the service doesn’t offer support for Android. Oh, the shame. Not only that, if you’re of the same mindset as TeliportMe Founder Vineet Devaiah, no one does — at least not well, or for free. While Android makes it easier for app developers to push updates to their apps, the amount of different phones and OEMs using Androids makes fragmentation a wee bit of a problem. Because of this fragmentation, Devaiah thinks that simply providing an SDK for tracking and testing won’t cut it. As with so many things, this conclusion was informed by experience. TeliportMe’s image and panorama crowdsourcing app, "360″, which we covered back in July, is Android-only. Naturally, as a panorama app, 360 needs to be tuned with the camera, compass, gyroscope, JNI and hundreds of other activities, all while running complex stitching algorithms at various processing speeds — just to serve up decent results. Given Android’s fragmentation, this made developing 360 a tricky process — no doubt something with which many Android developers are familiar — to varying degrees. Not only that, but during early development, Devaiah says, the team didn’t have access to multiple phones or, really, many beta testers. In fact, only to, as he says, “the lowly HTC Wildfire.” When the app launched on the Android market, Devaiah writes in a blog post, they “got killed” with 1-star ratings, because, for some reason those downloading the app were all using HTC DesireZ phones. Despite bug-fixing like mad and praying to the Google Gods, “every day some new phone popped up with a new bug.” The only solution, they found, was to have access to a certain number of phones that could “augment the entire subset of Android phones,” which is why the team created Applover. Applover is essentially a community product, an app that crowdsources Android users and phones to create an organic testing platform that grants developers access to hundreds of different Android phones as well as real, live beta testers. Prior to launching Applover, Devaiah says, the team was stuck at a 3.1 average rating on the Android Market — for three months — daily receiving an equal number of 5 and 1-star ratings. After sourcing and building the testing platform to help improve their iterations, 3-months later, the app is up to a 4.1 rating and still rising, according to the founder. Over that period, the total number of ratings increased nearly five-fold. “While we made a lot of changes in our application which you could document as the reason for this increase in ratings, the fact is that our iteration rate got better and better,” Devaiah says, “we were able to push updates at a much faster rate and help build a better product and test faster.” Thus, the founder believes that Android stands to benefit significantly from a crowdsourced testing platform — to a much greater degree than iOS. So, this weekend, Applover opened up its platform to 200 beta testers and 20 app developers, who collectively have 5 million downloads on the Android Market. Sure, that number is still small, but Devaiah says that he wants the platform to be open, crowdsourced, and transparent, all the things that supposedly contribute to making the platform itself desirable. And with a smart, open community, and access to hundreds of phones and near-instant feedback from other developers and rabid Android users, the founder believes the testing platform can grow organically. Of course, there’s the question of just how Applover can incentivize beta testers and app developers to join the community and help out their fellow developers and Android users. There are plenty of popular solutions out there, like Apphance, which offer instant, accurate testing solutions for Android (and iOS). Of course, if you want testing on over 40 phones, Apphance will cost you $200 per month, per application. And, more generally there are sites like StartupLift, or BetaBait, which aim to help startups and app developers find beta testers and get actionable feedback. But those aren’t app developer-specific (or Android-only), like Applover. And although the team knows that they’re potentially relying on the fickle good-nature of the crowd by offering intangible incentives, they’re hoping that by building a strong community and offering a game-ified point system, the platform will eventually manage itself — all in a way reminiscent of Stack Overflow. And they might just be onto something. After all, the TeliportMe-spinoff startup has already had a few acquisition offers. Of course, the team is playing it straight and wants to see where the road of independent operation can take them — to victory, or the deadpool. For those interested in signing up, check out Applover at home here. The first 100 or so readers should be fast-tracked. Then come on back here and let us know what you think.
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