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Clever Party Playlist App Anthm Evolves Into Jukio After Legal Woes
May 11, 10:44PM
After a legal kerfuffle with the band Rush's management company (no, seriously), the team at Anthm saw their social playlist app get unceremoniously booted from Apple's App Store. So what's a down-on-their-luck team of app creators to do? Why, give the app a bunch of new features, a mild facelift, and a new name -- Jukio -- before pushing it into the wild again.Email, Still A Sonofabitch
May 11, 10:11PM
Just about two years ago, I went off the deep end. I had come home early from an event in an effort to do something responsible: email. I was on the road and knew the situation would be dire (since I had not been checking my email all day). I was wrong. It was a disaster. It may as well have been Inbox Trillion. There was no way I could get through it all with my sanity intact. So I did the only logical thing. I quit email. It was both an experiment and a statement. I decided that I wasn't going to respond to email for an entire month. And while I did cheat a little (I would still check it from time-to-time in case of emergencies and to delegate some work-related items that couldn't wait), it was without question one of the best months I've ever had.Facebook Home Is Losing Steam In The Charts…Fast
May 11, 8:00PM
Facebook Home, the app which CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted as the “next version of Facebook,” has not been an immediate hit. Its Google Play rankings have been dropping steadily after the launch buzz wore off, according to new data from top app store analytics firms. Despite having an active user base of over a billion on the social network itself, the company announced on Thursday that it was just now “nearing” 1 million downloads for its Home app. Plus, AT&T also slashed pricing this week on the HTC First, the first Facebook Home-powered handset, which went from $99 to just $0.99. The data shows it’s been a struggle so far, in terms of user acquisition, for Facebook Home. The application became available for download on April 12th on Google Play, where only a limited selection of devices were supported: the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II. A preloaded version of the app was made available via the HTC First, which officially went on sale that same day. This week, support for the HTC One and Galaxy S4 was also added. To be fair, the limited rollout is partially responsible for the app’s inability to maintain a higher ranking. On April 24th, Facebook Home reached its best position on the charts in many of the countries where it was available, but its ranks have declined in several key markets since. Its moves indicate an early rush from curious Android owners, but then a tapering off as word got out that the app wasn’t quite ready for primetime. App Annie’s data demonstrates this rise, then subsequent fall. Shortly after becoming publicly available, Facebook Home reached #72 overall in the U.S., on April 16th. By April 23th, it had also reached the top 100 overall in 8 countries (Norway, Singapore, Canada, Denmark, Australia, Hong Kong, Hungary, U.K.), and the top 500 in 38 countries. By the end of April, it started to drop, then ranking in the top 500 in 29 countries, and having dropped out of the top 100 worldwide altogether. It has yet to return to the top 100 in any market. Distimo’s analysis of the top 500 apps on Google Play, also confirms the same general trends. Towards the end of April (4/29), the firm found that Facebook Home was ranked highest in Luxembourg, where it was #83 overall, and was lowest in Portugal where it was ranked #477, but its ranking was onHome Console Gaming May Suffer Death By A Thousand Cuts, Rather Than A Major Revolution
May 11, 6:30PM
The Ouya is making its way out to backers even now (though my shipping notification still hasn't arrived. Grrr.) and judging by early impressions, it's no silver bullet to take down behemoths like Sony and Microsoft. The $99, Android powered console still isn't fully formed exactly, but it's doubtful that between now and June 25 it'll take on giant-killer proportions. Likewise the recently-announced BlueStacks Android gaming console, which features a subscription-based pricing model, probably won't alone topple the giants.Gillmor Gang: Windows Too Late
May 11, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — broke from the gate and never let up in a barnburner of a show about the post-Jobs era. Will Google assume the mantle of leadership from an aging Apple, or is this just an evolutionary step along across the stream of innovation triggered by the iPhone/iPad? There's plenty of data on both sides of this coin. Certainly Google Glass has triggered a lot of the same atmospherics that accompanied Apple's storming of the Microsoft barricades. Every day we see the wreckage of the PC era float past us as our thoughts shift from Windows to Web to apps. Mobile has won the war for our hearts and minds. As Adam said to Eve: Stand back, we don't know how big this is going to get.Judge Tosses DMCA Defenses, Creating Unexpected Copyright Liability For Web Services In New York
May 11, 3:00PM
Editor's note: Sid Venkatesan is an IP partner specializing in high stakes IP disputes and IP counseling for technology companies in the Silicon Valley office of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP. James Freedman is an associate in Orrick's IP group and a recent Stanford Law School graduate. A New York appellate court has recently ruled in UMG Recordings v. Escape Media Group that the safe harbor protections that Congress designed for Internet companies do not cover sound recordings made before 1972. The decision is a new and unexpected break with earlier decisions by state and federal trial courts.America's Carriers Are Terrible. It's Probably Your Fault.
May 11, 1:00PM
A few days ago I landed in England and, expecting little, slipped an old UK SIM card into my phone. I'd bought it when living in London five years ago, and hadn't used it in over a year. But to my amazement it was still active -- as was the money I'd added to its pay-as-you-go account sixteen months earlier...and then I received a friendly text message informing me that my data costs were now L1 per 100MB. Another SMS popped up when I emerged from the Channel Tunnel in France a few days later, informing me it would cost me 8p to send texts and 7p per minute to receive calls. Can you imagine any of that happening with an American phone company?>From The Garage To 200 Employees In 3 Years: How Nest Thermostats Were Born
May 11, 11:16AM
Editor's note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs. I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs, the guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective "huh?" went through the tech industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs' office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world's only great hardware/software companies in the world.Asian Price Comparison Site Save 22 Gets Angel Round Of "Mid Six Figures"
May 11, 7:28AM
Singaporean price comparison startup Save 22 just got an investment of “mid six figures” in Singapore dollars, according to co-founder, Guyi Shen. S$500,000 translates to about US$400,000, as a reference. The three-year-old startup indexes prices of goods and displays a price comparison. Its mobile app also allows you to scan a barcode of a product with your phone, and it will display a list of stores that list the same item, organized by price. Its database covers about 500,000 products, and the listings come from both retailers and mobile app users who submit product and pricing data. The company says it has staff on the ground actively indexing prices of popular goods, as well. The funding round was led by Crystal Horse Investments, an angel firm in Singapore. Crystal Horse also invested in Singapore-based Dropmyemail and Hong Kong-based Frenzoo. Other participants in the round are Nuffnang from Malaysia, which operates the largest blog advertising network in Southeast Asia, Strategia Adventures and Little Lights Capital, from Indonesia. Chun Dong Chau, an investor with Crystal Horse, said the company was picked because of its engineering team. He claims that Save 22′s data engine on the backend mines data collected from retail partners’ catalogs. Compared with other price comparison websites, which just provide lead generation back to retailers, Save 22 is expected to develop an additional revenue stream from offering some data analytics back to third parties. The investor is pushing Save 22 to continue growing its database within the region, which will improve the quality of its analysis, he said. “Southeast Asia is going in terms of its GDP but also Internet and mobile penetration is growing massively. The market is quite big, and we don’t have plans to go outside yet.” The company competes with other players Asia like PricePinz. The latter has a pretty similar app that also does barcode scanning, but is a younger firm, and just launched its app at the start of this year. At the start of the year, PricePinz said it had just about 4,000 products cataloged. It also said in an interview with e27 that its focus is restricted to electronic goods for now, but plans to expand to other verticals like groceries and apparel within the year. If it’s a scramble to catalog more data, Save 22 is the winner for now in the region, but expansion plans will potentially open it upMystery Motorola Phone Passes Through The FCC, Looks Just Like Early X Phone Leaks
May 11, 6:43AM
Here’s a little noodle-scratcher for you fellow mobile hardware nerds to ponder this evening. This little Motorola Mobility beauty, brandishing the model number XT1058, recently passed through the FCC and left the customary paper trail in its wake. All right, maybe calling it a beauty is a bit of a stretch, but here’s the kicker: The rudimentary sketch included with the listing bears a striking resemblance to a slew of earlier leaked images that purportedly showed off Motorola’s secretive X Phone. Consider the alignment of those three circular elements on the back — those bits match up rather nicely with the camera, LED flash, and Motorola logo/button as seen in images of an unreleased smartphone originally circulated by the team at Tinhte.vn. Even the seemingly curved section along the top edge where the device’s headphone jack lives and the placement of what appears to be the sleep/wake button are spot-on when compared to those leaked photos. Having a hard time visualizing all that? Here’s a side by side view to give you a sense of the similarities: Of course, this doesn’t bring us any closer to figuring out what the device is actually capable of — all the FCC’s listing reveals is that this thing sports radios for Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac and NFC. It could be that this is the first regulatory appearance of the so-called XFON, a device that noted gadget leaker @EvLeaks posted photos of earlier this month. After all, the XT1058 has been found to support AT&T’s particular LTE bands, and the XFON’s IMEI label clearly calls it out as an AT&T device. At this point no one (save for the lucky chump who snapped those photos in the first place) can definitively say whether or not the XFON and this curious AT&T device are the same, but it’s distinctly possible. There are a few cosmetic similarities between the two — namely the Motorola logo stamped on the top-left corner, the shape of the speaker grille, and the placement of the indicator LED and the front-facing camera. Don’t pay too much attention to the chunky chassis though, as it’s not uncommon for non-final hardware to undergo testing clad in patently ugly shells. You may recall that BlackBerry’s Dev Alpha and Beta devices lived in similarly unflattering boxes before the innards were officially unveiled at a series of simultaneous launch events back in January. For all of theQFPay, The Square of China, Is Processing Close To $400M Per Year
May 11, 12:05AM
QFPay's card reader admittedly looks a bit clunkier than its U.S. or European equivalents Square or iZettle. It looks like a wonky, old calculator. But that's because Chinese consumers don't trust merchants easily and a basic phonejack reader without a keypad makes them nervous, says COO Tim Lee. He says consumers are worried that their PINs will get stolen by unscrupulous merchants.Norway's Crown Prince And Princess Talk Startups And Try Out The Oculus Rift
May 10, 11:47PM
Norway's Crown Prince Haakon and his wife Princess Mette-Marit were in Silicon Valley this week, and I asked them about their hopes to bring more startups and innovation to their home country. I interviewed Haakon and Mette-Marit at Norway's Innovation House Silicon Valley, a co-working space in Palo Alto for Norwegian startups looking to enter the US market. The couple saw demos from several startups — the prince even tried on some Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles — it was part of Making View's demo of its technology for capturing and exploring 360-degree video footage. (He said it was "pretty awesome.")Mark Zuckerberg's Lobby Unravelling As Musk And Sacks Leave
May 10, 11:37PM
The technology industry’s newest high-powered political lobby, FWD.us, is unraveling just a month after it launched, as two of its biggest partners, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Yammer’s David Sacks, leave the organization. Begun with a reported $20 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s own money, and rare op-ed by the politically shy Facebook founder, FWD.us has faced a torrent of criticism over funding advertisements that praise Republicans who support the controversial Keystone pipeline (below). Environmental groups were up in arms and circulated a boycott of FWD.us that had, ironically, had more supporters than FWD.us’s call to action. The Sierra Club, Progressives United and MoveOn.org were among a littany of progressive groups that are now boycotting Facebook advertisements. "Immigration reform – fine. Oil expansion and pipelines? NOT fine. Where's the transparency here, rich dudes? Or does FWD actually stand for Fine With Drilling?," wrote one angry commenter on the FWD.us Facebook page. Elon Musk, as founder of Tesla Motors, prides himself on a sterling environmental record, so it’s easy to see why he couldn’t tolerate being associated with a group indirectly funding pro-Keystone pipeline ads. But, David Sacks doesn’t have as much to lose publically as Musk, which means that Musk is likely hooking more high-level partners with his departure. Nor is this the group’s first PR disaster. Even before the group began, FWD.us director and Zuckerberg’s old Harvard roommate, Joe Green, had to issue a statement of regret for a leaked perspectus. “Given the status of our funders and quality of our team, we will drive national and local narratives to properly frame our agenda,” read the brash strategy note. As we’ve written about before, FWD.us has kept a tight lid on their funding and tactics. We do know that FWD.us splits its organization into Democratic and Republican teams, offering quid pro quo cash in exchange for support of its key initiative — immigration. This kind of back-door compromising may work in D.C., but it’s evidently not as well tolerated in the Valley. In my own off-the-record conversations with supporters, no one is happy with FWD.us right now. It’s going to become a political landmine to stay on board, let alone join the group. FWD.us is unraveling, and we predict it won’t be around much longer unless it becomes a lot more transparent and ditches the D.C. tactics. Stay tuned for more.Sina Weibo Will Monetize Through E-Commerce, Not Ads, Alibaba CTO Jian Says
May 10, 10:44PM
One interesting thing to watch is how social networking platforms mature divergently as businesses around the world. Sina Weibo, the public microblogging platform that has had a huge impact on online discourse in China, is veering down a path toward e-commerce and transactions after Alibaba took a stake worth $586 million in it last month. The platform is one of the two more influential social networks in China today, with the other being Tencent's messaging app WeChat.Through The Looking Glass: What You'll See Through Google's Lens
May 10, 10:00PM
I've spent a little over three weeks with Google Glass, and I've noted that the utility aspect of the device is strong, but the fun isn't there yet. It feels a lot like the original iPhone did, before it had the App Store.Formlabs Prepares To Ship The Super Sexy Form One 3D Printer
May 10, 9:07PM
The boy geniuses of Formlabs, David Cranor, Maxim Lobovsky, and Natan Linder have posted a video detailing their Form One 3D printer, one of the most well-put-together 3D printing devices we've seen in a while. The Form One uses a form of stereolithography that prints the objects "upside down" by activating polymers with laser light. The resulting objects come out of a bath of plastic looking like Neo tumbling out of his oozing cocoon in The Matrix.Yahoo's Acqui-Hire Spree Continues With Mobile Gaming Startup Loki Studios
May 10, 9:02PM
Yahoo has been gobbling up startups. In the last week or so, it has announced the acquisition of Astrid, GoPollGo, and Milewise. In fact, in a tweet today, Yahoo said that it has "added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team," thanks to the three aforementioned companies — plus a mobile gaming startup called Loki Studios. I've reached out to both Yahoo and Loki Studios for details about the deal, but the news seems to be confirmed on the Loki website, where the front page currently announces that the team is joining Yahoo:Twilio Is Raising A Series D Of Around $50M
May 10, 8:00PM
I'd been hearing whispers as of late that Twilio is meeting with VCs to raise another round, and I just got the good word from a very, very solid source. Twilio is in the process of raising a Series D, with a goal of raising around $50 million.Microsoft: Google Docs Is Not Worth The Gamble, Makes You Less Productive
May 10, 7:54PM
After Bing and its Scroogled campaign, Microsoft is now taking aim at Google Docs. Jake Zborowski, Microsoft's senior product manager for Office, actually published two anti-Docs blog posts today: one hones in on document fidelity, the other - which includes a number of user testimonials - argues that Google Docs isn't quite ready for primetime.Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz & Others Put $1.8M Into Aviate, An Intelligent Homescreen For Android
May 10, 7:48PM
Facebook is not the only company to invest in development of products that take better advantage of the Android homescreen. South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk also recently announced its intentions to release a rival Android launcher. And now, Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others have invested $1.8 million into Aviate, an ex-Googler backed intelligent homescreen for Android devices. The round also included participation from Freestyle Capital, Draper Associates, and other angels, most notably Dan Rose, Facebook VP of Business Development and Monetization, and Keval Desai. The company actually closed on the funding in December, but is only announcing now. The funds will be used to grow the team quickly, and further develop the product. The company behind Aviate, Palo Alto-based ThumbsUp Labs, was founded in November 2011 by a team with backgrounds in computer science, search and OS development. Co-founder Mark Daiss majored in Cognitive Science at the University of California, and previously founded Pupil, an image based Q&A app, where he also focused on the problem of bringing relevant information to smartphone users when it was most useful. Meanwhile, Stanford grad Will Choi worked for Google on its front-end search team; and Paul Montoy-Wilson, also a Stanford grad, worked as a Product Manager for the Android Marketplace (now Google Play), and had previously co-founded customer feedback app HaveASec. Each founder had his own take on how to make mobile phones more effective – Daiss having seen the app discovery and engagement challenges firsthand; Montoy-Wilson with insight into the Android ecosystem itself; and Choi coming at the problem from the search perspective – he wanted to rebuild mobile search from the ground up. What Aviate Does With the Aviate, the goal is to help mobile users de-clutter their Android homescreens, and instead view relevant information adapted to their surroundings, rather than a grid of apps. Where Facebook Home has taken over the Android environment as something of an “apperating system,” to use the term coined by Wired (referring to something in between an app and operating system), the team at Aviate believes there’s more that can be done with such technology, beyond simply optimizing your social networking experiences. Users today have a number of mobile applications on their devices which they access regularly, and that serve a wide variety of functions. It may not make much sense to give over complete control to just one, such as is the case with Facebook Home. (Early adopters of Facebook HomeIf 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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