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Monday In Tech And Hip-Hop: Sheryl Sandberg Joins RapGenius, Everyone's Obsessed With Snoop's New App
May 06, 11:30PM
Mondays aren't always smile-inducing, but today two news stories cropped up that were pretty fun -- and showed the increasing crossover between the worlds of technology and hip-hop. First, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg signed up for a verified profile on Andreessen Horowitz-backed "hip-hop Wikipedia" RapGenius to help decode the preamble to her best-selling business book Lean In.Since Photos Are Boring Without Filters, Glassagram Will Spice Up Your Google Glass Pics
May 06, 11:01PM
Thanks to Instagram, we rarely see photos taken from camera phones without some type of filter on it. Even Twitter’s photo service uses Aviary to drop an earthy overlay or black-and-white treatment onto your digital masterpiece. Google Glass users aren’t going to be left out of this craze thanks to an app aptly named Glassagram. Again, this is the type of app that we’re seeing early on, consisting of the very basics that consumers will look for when thinking about whether Glass is a device for them, once they become available to the general public. Adding filters to photos is pretty consumery. Once you sign up for Glassagram, you simply share a photo with the service, then a card is sent back to your Glass timeline with all of your filtered options: The timeline card is going to be a main component in every Glass app that we see, as it will be the primary way for users to interact with what they’re seeing. For now, options like “share” are all we have, but I could see a day where more advanced controls like editing could be available. Something like Glassagram would be a perfect case for this. Once you get your options, simply scroll your way through them and reshare the one that tickles your fancy. It looks like you’ll get five different filtered options for your photo. The nice part about this is that it’s all done through the Glass UI, so you don’t need your phone or the web to do anything: Technological marvel? No. Handy app and an example of what’s to come from Glass developers? Yes. As I’ve been speaking with members of the Glass community, I’ve learned that quite a few companies are starting to look at the device to develop their own official apps, like Twitter. There seems to be interest in the developers who are getting a head start in the Explorer program from the companies, as well. This means that those poking around the Mirror API to figure out everything they can do might be able to land themselves a sweet job focusing on the device specifically. Will a company like Facebook dedicate a small team to figuring out the right experience for its users on Glass? It’s a safe bet that they will. Until then, we get to enjoy these small, but evolutionary, apps coming from Glass explorers. It feelsSenate OKs Internet Sales Tax With Overwhelming Bipartisan Support [Update]
May 06, 10:49PM
The United States Senate overwhelmingly supported a tax on Internet sales today, voting 70-24 in favor of the Marketplace Fairness Act. The outcome was expected after a similar non-biding show of approval passed the Senate with roughly the same number of votes, despite extraordinary opposition from eBay and other major Internet organizations.SkyGiraffe Raises Seed Round From 500 Startups Partner And Original .Net Creator For Mobile App Platform
May 06, 10:44PM
SkyGiraffe, an enterprise mobile platform provider, has raised a seed round from well-known investors, including Parker Thompson, a partner at 500 Startups and Yuval Neeman, a former corporate vice president at Microsoft, who started and led the company’s .Net development. SkyGiraffe makes a platform called SkyGiraffe Studio that connects data from different business groups with mobile apps, giving employees access to data from systems of record such as ERP or CRM environments. An IT manager downloads the client, installs SkyGiraffe Studio and then selects the back-end and data source to connect. IT can then define security access and other IT policies, said Co-Founder Boaz Hecht. Within 30 minutes, Hecht says an enterprise can provide employees with secure access to on-premise data from several backend systems. The opportunity is summed up in the corporate transition to a mobile culture. But the tools people use in the office have historically been accessed on desktops and laptop computers. Now people work remotely without the same level of security that comes with working at the office behind the firewall. They need different ways to access their business data. Mobile devices are the way to do it. SkyGiraffe competes with custom mobile app developers such as Capriza and IBM Worklight. The company is demonstrating its technology tomorrow at the Microsoft Demo Day in Mountain View and is accepting applications into its private beta. “FWIW, in this case it’s all about the product,” Thompson said about investing in SkyGiraffe. “This product replaces an internal development team with a solution you can get up in half an hour. It’s cheap for the enterprise and great revenue for SG. It solves a problem enterprises know they have and are already solving, but way cheaper and faster. Early traction reflects this. He added that at 500 Startups they are seeing enterprises that need to use data in the field. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and a distraction for these companies to build mobile development teams and do this themselves. “SkyGiraffe makes usable apps built on existing enterprise data fast and cheap so these companies can focus on their business. We think this is the right approach for the market,” Thompson said. It does look like SkyGiraffe offers a step forward in how mobile devices can be used much more effectively as a tool for employees. The question is the ease of set up. A customer needs the help of a data analyst to get started using SkyGiraffe.Protesters Smash Google Shuttle Bus Piñata In Fight Against Rent Increases [Video]
May 06, 10:12PM
Sick of high-paid tech employees driving up rent prices, protestors in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood held a "Anti-Gentrification Block Party" and beat on a Google bus pinata before cops broke up the crowd. The area has long been home to artists and Mexican-American families. But they're being forced out as techies move in, their employers set up shuttle stops, and housing prices skyrocket.PriceHub Wants To Tell You How Much Your Car Is Really Worth, With Data To Prove It
May 06, 9:50PM
How much is your car worth? It's an easy enough question to answer. Punch in the details at Kelley Blue Book and bam — question answered, ego stoked (or not.) But how do they know how much it's worth? For the most part, even the tried-and-true sources like the ol' Blue Book are kind of a black box. PriceHub wants to make the process more transparent.Adobe's Hardware Experiments Are More Than Just Hobbies: Hands-On With Project Context
May 06, 9:46PM
At its MAX conference in Los Angeles today, Adobe showed quite a few products that will soon be available to its customers, but it also highlighted a number of hardware experiments, including Project Context, a totally re-imagined way for creating magazine layouts, as well as an advanced stylus and a ruler for touchscreens. After the keynote this morning, I had a chance to sit back with Adobe’s David Macy to talk about both the newly announced Mighty pen and Napoleon ruler for touchscreens, as well as Project Context. All of these projects are definitely more than just hobbies for Adobe, something Macy acknowledged when I asked him about the company’s plans for these tools. While Macy obviously wouldn’t talk about when (or even if) Adobe plans to turn these prototypes into products, my feeling was that the company is clearly thinking about it. It’s also clear that the Adobe XD team, which is behind all of these projects, has the backing to explore these ideas. The idea for the Mighty Pen, for example, was born about a year and a half ago and the team has been iterating on the idea ever since. Out of the three projects, Project Context is clearly the one that is the most “out there” right now. It’s easy to imagine Adobe selling pens and rulers, but when it comes to giant touchscreens, that’s not exactly the company’s core focus. Right now Context is focused solely on magazine design, but because it runs on OS X (and actually uses two Macs for each screen), the system could be adapted for other uses as well (and Macy wouldn’t say if Wired or Conde Nast have any plans to use it in their actual production process). As Wired’s design director Claudia de Almeida noted when she demoed the project on stage today, layouts in newsrooms today are often still created physically with paper, scissors and boards where designers arrange their layouts. “The wonderful thing about Project Context,” she said, “is that it takes the best of what we do in the analog world and recreates it digitally.” That, of course, is also true of Adobe’s other two hardware projects. The Context system uses two 1080p high-def screens with a frame around it for picking up touch signals, as well as another screen set up as a Surface-like table in front of the other two screens. Because the screensSamsung Has Acquired MOVL To Build Out Better Multiscreen Mobile And TV Apps
May 06, 8:38PM
Over the last few years, Samsung has been working hard on building technology to improve the communication between its connected TVs and mobile devices, whether they be iOS or Android phones or tablets. Well, the company has acquired MOVL, a startup that should provide even more help in that category.An Anti-Abuse Ad With A Secret Message Only Children Can See
May 06, 8:28PM
In order to discreetly reach abused children, one aid organization designed a clever billboard that only displays a hotline number for people shorter than 4'5". The secret is a precisely serrated surface, a Lenticular lens, that reflects light differently to those looking from above and below a specified height. Shorter people (children) see the following message on a street sign: "If somebody hurts you, phone us and we'll help you," along with a confidential number to call the Spanish organization, Aid to Children and Adolescents.Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Freestyle Capital's Dave Samuel And Redpoint's Chris Moore
May 06, 7:30PM
After a brief hiatus for TechCrunch Disrupt, Ask A VC is back this week with two all-star guests in the investing world. First up we have Freestyle Capital's Dave Samuel. Later in the week, Redpoint Partner Chris Moore will be joining us in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we'll ask them during the show.Adobe's Flash Professional Gets Improved Support For HTML5 Publishing, Real-Time Mobile Testing And A New Code Editor
May 06, 7:30PM
Flash may be dead, but Adobe’s Flash Professional has already gone beyond just being a Flash tool and it’s getting a major update today. The new version, Adobe says, has been “rebuilt from the ground up to be faster, modular, extensible, reliable, more focused and more efficient than before.” That’s quite a promise, but new version does indeed sport quite a few new features and improvements. The company has re-engineered Flash Professional as a 64-bit application, which should make it more stable and allow users to easily manage multiple large files. The app, which Adobe says is now far more responsive, now also allows Flash developers to export their content in high definition video and audio, “all without dropping frames.” The tool now also sports a streamlined user interface to make dialog boxes and panels more intuitive. Users can now also choose between a dark or light interface. With this new version, Adobe is introducing enhanced HTML5 support – something most of us probably don’t think about when we hear the word “flash.” The enhanced HTML publishing support now uses the updated Toolkit for CreateJS, meaning the service now features new functionality for buttons, hit areas and motion curves. Also new in this version is support for real-time mobile testing. Developers can now test and debug their content by connecting multiple iOS and Android devices to their computers via USB and quickly see how their designs work on a real device. Other new features include a more powerful code editor, which uses the Scintilla library. This new editor, the company says, will allow users to search across multiple files and features a new “find and replace” panel. Also new are code profiling in Adobe Scout, a real-time drawing tool, and an unlimited size for Flash Professional’s pasteboard.About.com's New CEO On How To Stay Relevant
May 06, 7:08PM
Even with 84 million uniques each month, About.com tends to fly under the radar. But there is change afoot since IAC bought out About.com from the New York Times last year, most notably the appointment of Neil Vogel as CEO. We brought in Vogel, as well as Chief Strategy Officer Scott Kim (who also served as interim CEO for the past few months), to discuss how About might be changing in the foreseeable future. Neil has only been at About for a little over a month, but he has big plans. It’s a three-pronged approach really, involving social, mobile, and user experience. Where social is concerned, Vogel mentioned that About hasn’t ever given the vertical any “water or sunlight,” which means it’s a huge opportunity to leverage thousands of expert guides (content producers) and the massive flood of traffic coming to the site each month. He also revealed that 25 percent of About’s mobile traffic comes via mobile, and “it’s not cannibalistic traffic either, it’s a clear growth over the desktop traffic we’re seeing.” Confusing math aside, Kim explained that the mobile strategy doesn’t involve an app, since SEO is the primary driver of traffic to About. “The goal with mobile is the same as desktop, which means that we need to have the best possible user experience so people will travel throughout the site,” said Kim. I asked if SEO was enough for About, or if there are plans to bring users in more directly. “SEO is a thing now. As the internet evolves, SEO will become less and less of a thing as Google and Bing are getting better and better at what they do,” said Vogel. “They want to give you the best content possible when you want to solve a problem, and we have great content.” More important than how the consumer gets there, Vogel and Kim are concerned with keeping the user there. According to the dynamic duo, the plan isn’t a huge, monumental redesign. “It’ll be 1,000 small things we do,” said Vogel. “If you look at what we’re doing 12 months from now next to where we are today, it will look like we did something drastic, but we didn’t. We’re going to do it one new thing at a time.” After considering one of About’s greatest challenges, this plan actually seems much more logical. See, About is one of the top medicalThe Onion's Suspected Twitter Hack Reveals The Syrian Electronic Army's Morbid Humor
May 06, 7:01PM
The Syrian Electronic Army has apparently hacked The Onion’s twitter account, exposing the groups seriously morbid sense of “humor”. “UN retracts report of Syrian chemical weapon use: “Lab tests confirm it is Jihadi body odor”, went one tweet. We’ve seen fake hacks before, and given that The Onion is a satirical news site, it was hard to know whether this “hack” was just another tasteless ploy for attention. As of about 45 minutes ago (11:15 PT), all of the suspected tweets have been erased. So, either it was a legit hack or The Onion editorial board had a change of heart. The Syrian Electronic Army has been on a cyberwarfare tear, including a false tweet about an explosion at the White House from the AP twitter account, which caused a brief dip in the stock market. Twitter is reportedly implementing a more secure two-step verification to make it harder for cybercriminals to infiltrate accounts. Clearly, it can’t come fast enough. We’ve included a screenshot of the tweets below.Dropbox Announces Its First Developer Conference, The Invite-Only DBX On July 9th In SF
May 06, 7:00PM
Dropbox doesn't want to be a storage service. It wants to be the data layer uniting your information on all apps. To get more apps and enterprises integrated with its platform, today it announced DBX, the six year-old startup's first developer conference. To be held July 9th at San Francisco, you can request an invite for a $350 ticket to, DBX which could help Dropbox drive enterprise sales.Adobe's Dreamweaver Web Dev Tool Gets New Visual CSS Designer, Enhanced Grid Layout And PhoneGap Build Support
May 06, 6:35PM
Adobe‘s just announced the latest version of Dreamweaver, its tool for quickly developing web content. The new version has now caught up with a number of modern web development techniques and also features support for the company’s new syncing features in Creative Cloud. Adobe says it has greatly simplified and modernized the Dreamweaver interface in this release, making it more intuitive and allowing for smoother workflows. Adobe has also removed a number of outdated features in Dreamweaver, which should make the app feel lighter and faster. Dreamweaver CC also now features a new CSS Designer, a visual editing tool, which the company says, will allow developers to easily generate web-standard code for their sites and quickly apply CSS properties such as gradients and box shadows. The tool acknowledges that responsive design is here to stay. Dreamweaver now features an enhanced fluid grid layout that allows web designers to construct web designed and responsive sites visually. The uploaded “Fluid Grid Layout” interface, Adobe says, “makes it a cinch to design projects that display on different screen sizes for desktop and devices.” Edge Web Fonts, the company’s font library powered by Typekit is now also integrated into Dreamweaver, allowing designers to go beyond the usual Arial and Times New Roman fonts on their sites. For users who target mobile devices with their designs, Dreamweaver CC now also includes some new features. Thanks to PhoneGap Build Support, for example, they can now easily build and package native apps for iOS and Android right inside the application.Adobe Debuts "Project Mighty" Smart Stylus For Tablets And "Napoleon," A Digital Ruler And Guide
May 06, 6:23PM
Adobe surprised everyone by showing off a new hardware effort today at its annual MAX conference, including Project Mighty and Napoleon. Mighty is a pressure-sensitive digital pen that works with tablets and stores a wide variety of settings and preferences in the cloud. Adobe showed it off working on an iPad, and it looked similar to what we've seen from existing pressure-sensitive input devices from other companies, but with tighter integration into Adobe products.A Thought Experiment On How Google's New Palestine Page Could Undermine Peace Talks
May 06, 6:04PM
The Israeli Foreign Minister has sent a strongly worded letter to Google CEO, Larry Page, warning him that their new Palestine search page could undermine Middle-East peace negotiations. “Such a decision is in my opinion not only mistaken but could also negatively impinge on the efforts of my government to bring about direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” wrote minister Ze’ev Elkin, about Google’s decision to change “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine” on Google.ps (picture above). Careful followers of foreign policy news might question how exactly a tiny word change on a website could upset arguably the most resource-intensive diplomatic effort in human history, but we think such skepticism underestimates Google’s vast geo-political power. Here’s a thought experiment of 5 different ways Google could have a meaningful impact: 1. Well, maybe Google could…no, that wouldn’t do anything 2. … 3. … 4. … 5. … Ok, we can’t think of any. Google is simply following the lead of the United Nations and other major Internet governance organizations. “We’re changing the name ‘Palestinian Territories’ to ‘Palestine’ across our products. We consulted a number of sources and authorities when naming countries.” Google spokesman Nathan Tyler told the BBC. “In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], ISO [International Organisation for Standardisation] and other international organisations. While the highly controversial UN vote was an enormous symbolic victory for the Middle-Eastern region, the only way in which Google could make a meaningful impact on the global discussion is to be brazenly contrary to every other Internet body. And, it’s silly to think that “Well, Google doesn’t recognize you guys” would make much of a difference at the negotiation table. The Guardian probably had the best cheeky headline, subtly mocking the row over Google’s decision (as only the British can), “Palestine now recognised by greater power than US or Israel – Google” When Google does choose to throw its foreign policy weight around, it does so by taking on dictatorships, either by opening up shop in China, giving Google products to Iran, or mapping North Korea’s prisons. Elkin’s letter seems like a PR gimmick with Google as the political football. A note to our readers: every time we write something about Israeli politics, people get (reasonably) heated. For the record, we’ve written a lot of positive things about Israeli civil society, especiallySpiderOak Unveils Hive, Streamlines Zero-Knowledge Privacy Storage
May 06, 5:53PM
An old saying states that "security is inversely proportional to convenience." This explains the slow adoption of many important security technologies. HTTPS, the secure version of the HTTP protocol used to browse the world wide web, has been around for more than two decades, but it's only been in the last couple of years that it has been enabled by default on many major websites. Back when we sucked down email from our ISPs over POP3 connections, all your data was, literally, yours: it was under your control more often than it wasn't.Keen On… Jaron Lanier: Why Entrepreneurs Need To Make Their Customers Wealthy
May 06, 5:40PM
In his acclaimed new book, Who Owns The Future?, which is out today, Lanier takes Silicon Valley to task for monopolizing ownership of the future.Adobe Updates Edge Animate HTML Animation Tool With Motion Paths, Lets You Host Your Files On Adobe's CDN
May 06, 5:38PM
As part of its general update to Creative Cloud, Adobe today announced the latest version of Edge Animate, its timeline-based tool for creative HTML5 animations. While this is one of the minor updates on a day where the company launched new versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and virtually every single other one of its tools, Edge Animate is worth keeping an eye on, especially given that even though it’s still a newcomer in Adobe’s lineup, its focus on HTML5 makes it one of Adobe’s more cutting-edge tools as it switches its focus from Flash to web standards. In this new version, Edge Animate gets support for motion paths, for example, something Flash developers have long had access to. With this, developers can now use the tool to “animate elements along fully customizable, fine-grain motion paths for highly expressive movements,” as the company noted in today’s announcement. With this update, Adobe is also introducing template support in Edge Animate, so users can now save their custom templates for quicker access to their reusable assets. For developers who focus on mobile projects, this new version also adds support for left and right swipe events for mobile-focused projects. One of the coolest new features, however, isn’t even about how you create animations in Edge Animate. Adobe now allows you to host your Animate runtime files on its own content delivery network, which is powered by Akamai. This service is available for free as part of a Creative Cloud subscription.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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