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The Geeksphone Revolution Goes On Sale, Letting You Dual-Boot To Android And Firefox OS
Feb 21, 2:37PM
The mobile market may still essentially be a two horse race, with Android and iOS enjoying a significant lead, but there are lots of upstarts trying to make inroads, too. One of those is Firefox OS, Mozilla’s attempt to bring a web-first focus to smartphones. Geeksphone has been an early Firefox OS hardware supporter, and now it has put the Revolution up for sale, a higher-end device than its earlier efforts, complete with the ability to dual-boot to both Android and Firefox OS out of the box. If you’re used to working in a corporate environment but also being cool during evenings and weekends, then you might be familiar with dual-booting: I’ve been known to have my Macs run Windows on a Boot Camp partition for when I need to pierce the veil and travel to the Microsoft realm. It’s actually a pretty common scenario in desktop computing, and there are a number of products including virtualization software designed to facilitate it. But is there the same kind of utility in the mobile world? Firefox OS is definitely still an outlier when it comes to the mobile platform landscape, and as such, there’s very little in terms of pressing reasons to have it as an option. That said, the eternally curious and those who sympathize with Mozilla’s approach to software, open source and the web will probably find plenty to love about Firefox OS on a device with decent mid-range specs (it appears mostly on lower-end hardware, in keeping with Mozilla’s target market for the OS). Specs for the phone include a dual-core Intel Atom processor at 1.6GHz, as well as HSDPA cellular support, and an 8 megapixel rear camera with a 1.3 megapixel front shooter. The Revolution retails for €222, and is sold direct from the Geeksphone website. Shipments start going out March 4, so eager shoppers won’t have to wait long before they start acting like mobile chameleons.Gramr Wants To Help You Turn Expressing Gratitude Into A Habit
Feb 21, 1:54PM
As an expat, the proliferation of mobile devices is one of the best things that has happened in the seven years since I moved to Asia. I can send silly photos or pour my heart out to friends all around the world -- New Zealand, the U.S., Australia, England, Lithuania, Sweden -- anytime I want. But those moments of connection often feel fleeting and the more time I spend abroad, the more I worry that I'm not doing enough to keep my relationships from gradually evaporating. That's one of the reasons I was excited to learn about Gramr, a startup that wants to use the subscription-box business model to turn gratitude into a habit.Samsung's Unpacked5 Event Trailer Suggests Galaxy S5 Could Be Rugged, Built For Selfies
Feb 21, 1:41PM
Samsung has a new teaser out for its “Next Galaxy,” which will be unveiled February 24 at an event during MWC in Barcelona. The short video, which clocks in at just over 35 seconds, features a series of vignettes and snapshots with overlaid text offering up one-word summaries of what the new hardware is all about. Of course, whenever a company rattles off a string of buzzwords it’s probably best not to read too much into it, but there are some specific moments during this video that call to mind previously rumored features of the upcoming Galaxy S5, and some terms are given more focus and time than others during the montage. There’s “Wet,” for instance, which calls back claims that the new S5 will be a rugged phone with water and dust resistance. Samsung previously released an iteration of its S4 called the “Active” that offered these benefits, but it would make sense to see the company turn this into a standard feature for its main flagship device, especially given that competitors like Sony already do this with their own top-tier devices. Other focal terms include an “Alive” segment and “Outdoor” bit, both of which would seem to reinforce the idea of a smartphone ready for rugged use. There are also a number of suggestions that Samsung could bring improved camera features to the device, including some powerful selfie tricks. The ultimate reveal is just three days away at this point, but for the impatient, that just means there’s still around 72 hours breaking down this clip frame by frame and evaluating all the editing decisions at a granular level for clues about what’s in store for Samsung’s next-generation flagship.Google Acquires Spider.io To Help Spot And Stop Online Ad Fraud
Feb 21, 12:55PM
London-based Spider.io has been acquired by Google, the company’s DoubleClick advertising blog announced today (via Re/Code). Spider.io is a startup that specialized in weeding out fraudulent clicks around online ads. The three-year old company has tech that will help Google identify bad behavior around their content in video and display ads on the web, to help them get a more accurate picture of what is and isn’t succeeding. From Google’s official blogpost on the deal: Advertising helps fund the digital world we love today — inspiring videos, informative websites, entertaining apps and services that connect us with friends around the world. But this vibrant ecosystem only flourishes if marketers can buy media online with the confidence that their ads are reaching real people, that results they see are based on actual interest. To grow the pie for everyone, we need to take head on the issue of online fraud. Google isn’t revealing the terms of the deal, but the small London company is only seven strong, and this is a fairly specialized niche product so it’s unlikely to have been a huge exit. Still, the Spider.io team brings some impressive talent to Google’s ranks, including three PhDs and a an ex-Yahoo natural language processing and artificial intelligence expert. Spider.io’s tech is designed specifically to detect attacks originating from PCs infected by malware. Often these hijacked computers are programmed by their attackers to place a high volume of ad requests, thus skewing the numbers and defrauding online advertisers out of millions of dollars. An FT article from last year revealed that one botnet last year managed to falsify billions of web-based ad clicks, sometimes accounting for as much as two-thirds of the sum total of visits to some websites.Amazon Said To Be Looking At March For Streaming TV Box Launch
Feb 21, 12:28PM
A new report pegs Amazon’s potential TV set-top box launch for March. Re/Code reports that the ecommerce and digital media giant is indeed still hard at work on a streaming TV device, which has been reported previous, and which was supposedly arriving in time for the holidays last year before those plans were pushed back. Amazon’s streaming box should provide access to its content library of digital media, including titles from Amazon Instant Video and stuff that’s made available to Amazon Prime members in the U.S. for free. Amazon also has an extensive music catalog that would play well on a home theater device. Re/Code also says that the Amazon gadget will run Android, albeit a forked version of the same, similar to the OS that powers Amazon’s Kindle Fire line of tablets. The report doesn’t offer up any information about whether Amazon’s set-top box will also be a games machine, but we’ve heard from sources close to the matter previously that it will indeed feature game support, and based on what I’ve heard recently from industry sources, that’s likely still the case despite the missed holiday shopping season window. Amazon entering the streaming media center realm makes a lot of sense, and if it’s running Android and has access to the Amazon Appstore there’s a lot of potential for it to leapfrog some of its competitors, which have been slower moving at providing access to a truly open library of apps. The most interesting aspect still up in the air remains what Amazon will charge for such a device, and whether or not it might even become a free perk for Amazon Prime members, especially considering rumors that Amazon will increase the price of Prime subscriptions by between $20 and $40, which could be to help account for the cost of hardware.Rovio To Make Angry Birds Smart Covers For Jolla's Sailfish OS Handset
Feb 21, 11:19AM
In a Finnish startup love-in, Angry Birds maker Rovio and Sailfish OS smartphone maker Jolla are partnering for co-branded content on Jolla's first handset. Jolla is also working on an Android launcher as a taster of Sailfish -- ahead of releasing the full software for Android users to download and reflash their handsets.Apparently Students At Tim Draper's "University For Heroes" Are Selling Sex Toys For Class
Feb 21, 2:17AM
Well, that's an unusual school assignment. Colin Heilbut, who says he's a student at the Draper University for Heroes, emailed TechCrunch earlier today to inform us that he's selling Jimmyjane sex toys on Indiegogo as part of class. Apparently, today's assignment in the entrepreneurial training program (organized by venture capitalist Tim Draper) involves sales — specifically, sales of Jimmyjane sex toys.With $8M In Fresh Funding, Ezetap Is More Than Just A Square For Emerging Markets
Feb 21, 1:30AM
There are almost 900 million active cell-phone users in India now, and from newer startups to some of the biggest companies in the world, everybody is chasing the next mobile disruption that could potentially result in a business model for all of the emerging markets. One such startup is Ezetap, a mobile payment company backed by some of the biggest names in the VC industry, including Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and founder of Social+Capital Partnership, and Angelprime, an Indian seed fund run by serial entrepreneurs. Today, Ezetap is raising $8 million in Series B funding led by Helion Advisors, Social+Capital and Berggruen Holdings. This round takes the total fund raised by Ezetap to around $11.5 million (including $3.5 million it had raised in Series A funding in November 2012). The fresh capital will be used to expand Ezetap in Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Ezetap is much like Square, at least in terms of the basic model. It uses a rectangular device that can turn any mobile phone into a point-of-sales terminal when plugged in. The device including a card reader and chip, costs around $50, and Ezetap has been able to sell around 12,000 of them to date. The startup is aiming to have over 100,000 such devices installed across Asia-Pacific, Africa and Middle East in a year. “From day one, we wanted to go global and really felt that mobile payments in general is a great opportunity for emerging markets. There’s disparity in cash versus electronic payments leading to the challenges of financial inclusion,” Abhijit Bose, CEO of Ezetap, told TechCrunch. Ezetap was incubated in 2011 by Angelprime, a $10 million seed fund backed by Mayfield Fund, Palihapitiya and several others in the Silicon Valley. It’s run by three veteran entrepreneurs — Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya and Bala Parthasarathy. With the latest round, Ashish Gupta of Helion is joining the startup’s board. Helion is an India focused, $600 million fund. Ezetap is the second attempt by Abhijit and Sanjay to build a mobile payment company in India. In 2006, Sanjay was the CEO of mChek which had raised around $10 million by 2009, and Abhijit worked with another venture-funded payment startup called Ngpay. Back then, mChek and several others fizzled out because of several challenges. “I believe there was nothing wrong with mobile payment back then, it was just the timing,” said Bose. Indeed, the environment has changedBitcoin's Value Falls 10% As Faltering Mt.Gox Exchange Continues To Implode
Feb 21, 12:57AM
Mt.Gox promised to get its house in order, and get back to the Bitcoin community and its users today. It did, but didn’t open up withdrawals, or set a firm timetable as to when users might be able to get their currency off the exchange. In response, the price of Bitcoin on Mt.Gox has cratered, again. It now rests just above $110. That’s down from around $260 the day before. Users are betting more heavily now that their Bitcoin on the exchange is never coming back. This turbulence has not left the larger Bitcoin market unmolested. According to the averaged Bitcoin price, the dollar cost of a Bitcoin has shed around 10 percent of its value today, falling from $625 to $560. Mt.Gox, previously trading at around a 50 percent deficit, is now trading at one-fifth the regular price. Why would Mt.Gox bring down the value of Bitcoin on other exchanges? The failure of Mt.Gox highlights what sort of risk unregulated markets might entail. And in frankness Bitcoin has been on a slow deflate tip all year. The average Bitcoin price spiked over $900 in January, before settling into a pattern of decline. For now, enjoy some irony (screenshot taken today): IMAGE BY FLICKR USER HAMED AL-RAISI UNDER CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN CROPPED)White House Unveils Patent Protections, Including Crowdsourcing, To Help Find Prior Claims
Feb 21, 12:51AM
The White House isn't waiting for Congress to enact new intellectual property laws. President Obama has made good on his promise to go after so-called "patent trolls," businesses that hoard legal ownership over inventions but don't actually produce products. The latest series of executive orders is aimed at helping small businesses fight patent lawsuits, give expanded resources to the US Patent and Trademark Office, and help limit the scope of what can actually be patented.Steve Jobs Is Getting A Postage Stamp
Feb 21, 12:33AM
There are few canvases harder to find yourself portrayed upon than the US postage stamp. Unless you’re a state bird, a beautiful wild flower, or a historic/cultural icon, it’s pretty unlikely that your mug will ever act as proof-of-payment on a piece of mail. Joining the ranks in 2015: the late Steve Jobs. According to a list of upcoming subjects obtained by The Washington Post, Steve Jobs is set to get a limited release stamp in 2015 alongside the likes of Johnny Carson, Elvis Presley, James Brown, and an as-of-yet unnamed group of Science Fiction writers. The Steve Jobs stamp is listed as “In Design” — so there’s no image of what the actual stamp will look like just yet. The one pictured above is, of course, just a quick mockup. Update: I’m intentionally leaving this post sans commentary. Except for this: Few people did more to crush the US Postal Service, but okay “@TechCrunch: Steve Jobs Is Getting A Postage Stamp tcrn.ch/NfBc4K”— B.J. Novak (@bjnovak) February 21, 2014King's Forthcoming IPO Shows That Mobile Gaming Is Staggeringly Large, But Mature
Feb 21, 12:33AM
King’s long anticipated IPO filing dropped some staggering figures this week. The $1.8 billion in annual revenue that the Candy Crush Saga-maker earned last year was about $600 million or $700 million more than the whisper numbers I had been hearing at the end of 2013. It signals just how large free-to-play mobile gaming has become compared to older parts of the gaming industry, which deliver titles as finalized, packaged goods at $60 a pop. Just to put some of those figures in perspective (with help from some longtime industry observers): King’s ‘gross bookings’ last year were about 85 percent of Nintendo’s last reported annual gross sales from software, pointed out long-time game developer Ben Cousins, who is behind iOS first-person shooter “The Drowning.” The company had 93 million daily active players, or about 17.5 times as many PlayStation 4s as Sony as sold to date, pointed out Kristian Segerstrale, who used to head up EA’s digital strategy and sat on the board of the other European mobile gaming phenom Supercell. So there we have it. Traditional console players like Sony and Nintendo continue to be disrupted by the new platforms of Android and iOS, which are simultaneously cannibalizing audiences for older hardware platforms and expanding the market to a new generation of casual gamers. King is now one of two game developers that have produced a $1 billion free-to-play mobile title after Japan’s Gung-Ho with Puzzle & Dragons. But is it all so rosy? It looks like top-line revenue growth is stagnant or slowing not only for King, but also other top-grossing game makers. King’s overall revenue declined to $602 million in the last quarter of the year from $621 million the previous quarter. This is also extra notable because the holiday season is usually a strong one for mobile game makers. App download numbers usually peak around Christmas time, as consumers are gifted new iPhones, iPads or Android devices. So King’s top-line revenues declined quarter-over-quarter in what is usually a stronger season for game developers. And they’re not the only ones. Supercell, the Finnish gaming company behind two other top-charting hits Clash of Clans and Hay Day, also reported earnings this month. They posted $892 million in annual earnings for 2013, which is also extraordinarily impressive considering that they finished 2012 at $101 million in annual revenue. But that number isn’t that much larger than the annualized $716YouTube Gets Google's Card Design And Puts Stronger Focus On Playlists
Feb 21, 12:00AM
YouTube is rolling out a new design to its users today that takes its cues from the "card-like" design Google now uses on many of its other web and mobile apps. The aim of the redesign, Google tells me, is to emphasize playlists by putting them front and center in the left sidebar.Content Creation Startup Tackk Expands Its Visual Library With 500px Integration
Feb 21, 12:00AM
Tackk is announcing that it has partnered with photo-sharing startup 500px, making a wide variety of photos available to Tackk users. Tackks, for those of you who don't know, are basically pieces of content combining text, images, video, and other media. The company originally described them as "e-fliers" but the company now says it "allows anyone, to create anything, and share it anywhere."Former Motionloft CEO Jon Mills Arrested By The FBI
Feb 20, 11:10PM
Jon Mills, the founder and former CEO of real-world analytics startup Motionloft, has been arrested by the FBI. The arrest follows allegations that Mills lied to investors about an acquisition of his company, all while spending lavishly on private jets, expensive dinners, and parties with celebrities.Viki To Launch In Japan, 5 Months After Acquisition By Rakuten
Feb 20, 11:00PM
Viki, a streaming video platform that crowdsources translated subtitles, will launch a beta version of its site for Japanese viewers tomorrow. The announcement comes five months after Tokyo-based Rakuten paid a reported $200 million for Viki, which is based in Singapore.SV Angel-Backed Benchling Is Modernizing Software For Biotech Labs
Feb 20, 10:39PM
After the last two decades of consumer Internet and mobile innovation, is biotech or bioinformatics the next wave? There are a handful of San Francisco-based startups that cross the bridge between the worlds of biotechnology and computer science. Benchling is one of them. Backed with about $900,000 from YCombinator, SV Angel, Founders Fund’s angel investing fund, Draper Associates and other angels, the company offers DNA editing and analysis software to biotech labs and researchers. With the entire team coming from MIT with skills in both computer science and biology, they’re competing against older, more cumbersome software solutions in the space. “The quality of software is holding back innovation in life sciences,” said Sajith Wickramasekara, the company’s CEO. “In bio software, the people who code it are disconnected from the work that’s actually being done. So it ends up being crap.” The company’s team includes engineers who have done stints at Twitter, Palantir, Google and Facebook. Their research experience covers genetics, neuroscience, and synthetic biology. He added that researchers collaborate by e-mailing files or using Excel spreadsheets, which is tedious. While the company is starting with DNA editing software, Benchling’s longer-term mission is to ultimately create an app store for life sciences. “We imagine a lab where all the hardware will talk directly to Benchling’s platform. So that when scientists carry out experiments, they won’t need to write anything down, which would cause errors.” For every kind of data a biotech lab could produce, Wickramasekara envisions cloud-based software that would simplify the design, analysis and sharing of that data. Their second product will interface with imaging machines to analyze pictures from gel electrophoresis experiments So far, Benchling has 2,000 academics using it and 10 different for-profit companies. They don’t charge academic researchers, but enterprise deals usually cost anywhere from $50 to 100 per person. Already, researchers are using it to make yeast produce petrochemicals without oil, produce new antibiotics and even perform computation with bacteria. Wickramasekara thinks the market opportunity is huge. Costs for full genome sequencing are falling faster than Moore’s Law would suggest and companies like Illumina have recently unveiled machines that could do it for as little as $1,000. These lower costs will produce an immense wealth of data that will have to be studied. Not only that, there is the emerging field of synthetic biology, which will give rise to all kinds of new designs for biologicalHubub Raises $8.5M To Be The New Home For Conversations On The Web
Feb 20, 10:38PM
On the web, no one can hear you converse – or perhaps they can, but it’s not terribly easy to surface them and have a sustained, engaged dialogue around any particular topic. Threaded comment streams do this to some extent, as do forums, message boards, and even social networks like Facebook and Twitter. But none do thematic or topic-based discussion well, according to Hubub‘s founders, hence the need for the startup. Toronto- and New York-based Hubub launched in beta quietly late last year, and today it’s announcing its $8.5 million Series A round of funding. That money will help the company scale and add more engineering talent to its team to continue to build product, founder and CEO Peter L. Corsell explained to me in an interview. But it’s mostly business as usual, as the startup continues its mission of trying to build on what was started with the online forum, but never really improved since. “Specifically what really gave us the idea was that we were watching the Egyptian protests, in the latter part of the Arab Spring and we looked at the way people were using Facebook and Twitter, which was both inspiring and novel,” Corsell explained in an interview. “Yet it occurred to us that there was also an unmet need to give a tool to rapidly convene passionate, engaged communities around a topic of interest.” Thus was Hubub born, which is designed to build these communities, where users can jump in and contribute the best content, be it user-generated or collected from the best of the web, around specific topics. Hububs (the individual topic nodes created) are user-generated and user-curated, but there’s also a degree of automation where you can view auto-collected content around certain keywords, too, making this effectively an aggregation search engine, too. “When you think about the future of search broadly, I see it bifurcating between what I would think of as more tactical queries where you have a question and there’s one right answer or a small finite pool of good answers,” Corsell said. “The other type of search is, if you Google for example ‘what were the most searched for terms in 2013,’ it’s topics: It’s ‘iPad,’ it’s Bengazi,’ it’s ‘Kate Middleton.’ What excites me about Hubub is as the community matures, it becomes a really great place to go to immerse yourself, in articles, in photos and videos and more.”How Facebook Can Supercharge WhatsApp
Feb 20, 10:38PM
Just because WhatsApp will "operate independently" doesn't mean Facebook won't put its 6,000-employee muscle behind its new acquisition. We've heard a lot about how WhatsApp will save Facebook from losing the international messaging war, but sources close to Facebook tell me it actually did a lot to help Instagram. Here are the ways you can expect it to do the same for WhatsApp.HP Posts Modest FQ1 Beat With Revenue Of $28.2B, Adjusted EPS Of $0.90
Feb 20, 10:34PM
Today after the close, HP reported a slight beat in its fiscal first quarter, including net revenue of $28.2 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.90. Investors had expected $27.19 billion in revenue, and $0.84 in per-share profit, excluding items.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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