Useful feeds: May 2012

Menlo Park City Council Advances Facebook Expansion Plans | Simple.TV Targets Cord Cutters With A Kickstarter Campaign | Research In Motion Opens 10% Down A Day After Issuing A "Business Update" | Bukobot's $600 open-source 3D printer close to being a reality | Apple chief executive Tim Cook on his new job: "I've been loving every minute of it"

Menlo Park City Council Advances Facebook Expansion Plans

Posted by PCWorld

The Menlo Park, California, city council voted unanimously on Tuesday to approve Facebook's plan to expand its headquarters in the city, pending a final procedural vote at its next meeting on June 5.
Facebook has sought permission to house as many as 6,600 workers at its main campus in the former offices of Sun Microsystems and potentially to make taller its west campus buildings, which were once home to Tyco Electronics. The company first presented its expansion plans in December 2011.
Because the expansion will bring more traffic to the area and necessitate the removal of some mature trees, Facebook will be required to carry out environmental mitigation measures, including a cap on the num[...]

Simple.TV Targets Cord Cutters With A Kickstarter Campaign

Posted by TechCrunch

Simple.TV wants to help cord cutters record and have access to broadcast TV wherever they are, by connecting its device to an HD antenna and streaming those signals over the Internet. And it’s launching a Kickstarter campaign to help fund that vision, as it prepares to launch in mid-summer.Simple.TV makes a combination DVR and streaming device — kind of like a TiVo meets Slingbox — that lets users record basic cable and HD over-the-air TV signals, then stream them over the Internet to apps the company has built for the iPad or the iPhone. The company has also just built an HTML5 web app that will let users connect on devices that it hasn’t yet built apps for — l[...]

Research In Motion Opens 10% Down A Day After Issuing A “Business Update”

Posted by TechCrunch

After a rough day yesterday, RIM’s stock opened 10 percent lower today, trading at $10.05 at the opening bell. The stock price briefly recovered but it’s on a steady downward trend as of the writing of this post. If this slide continues, the stock is set to hit a low not seen since 2003.
Trading of RIM shares was halted for 15 minutes yesterday in order to issue a what the company called a “business update“. CEO Thorsten Heins detailed RIM’s recent challenges, and also explained that the company is employing the help of Royal Bank of Canada and J.P. Morgan to evaluate financial strategies. The company also warned that it will report a loss for the fiscal quarter[...]

Bukobot’s $600 open-source 3D printer close to being a reality

Posted by VentureBeat

If you’ve ever wanted the freedom to create 3D objects in your own home, look no further than the Bukobot.
The Bukobot is a Kickstarter project for an affordable (starting at $600) open-source 3D printer from Deezmaker. So far, the Bukobot Kickstarter project has raised nearly 400 percent more than the company needed — receiving $167,410 on a goal of $42,000. There’s been a rise in interest in 3D printers as their cost has come down on hobbyist-oriented printers from companies like RepRap and MakerBot.
3D printing (or additive manufacturing) is the process of creating nearly any object by laying down layer after layer of plastic. These gadgets are found in civil engineering[...]

Apple chief executive Tim Cook on his new job: “I’ve been loving every minute of it”

Posted by VentureBeat

The chief executive of the world’s largest company took the stage today at the tenth annual All Things Digital conference, also known as D10, in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
“I’ve been loving every minute of it, and I think everyone at Apple is loving every minute of it too,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said of his new job.
“The juices are flowing, and we have some incredible things coming out,” he added.
It was not Cook’s first interview since taking the helm of Apple last year after the passing of the company’s co-founder and late chief executive Steve Jobs, but it promised to be one of the most in-depth. With an hour scheduled for the talk, it wa[...]

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Google Nexus 7 Tablet Shows Up on Benchmark Site | Google Looks To One-Up Facebook With Google+ Local: A More Social Google Places, With A Twist Of Zagat | Play Safe For Android Locks Down Your Phone So Kids Can (Safely) Play | Hello new #NewTwitter: Blazing speed and death to those #!#! hashbangs | PlanGrid grabs seed round to make blueprints mobile

Google Nexus 7 Tablet Shows Up on Benchmark Site

Posted by PCWorld

The name disclosed on the Righware site, “Google Asus Nexus 7,” suggests this will be a 7-inch tablet manufactured by Asus for Google[...]

Google Looks To One-Up Facebook With Google+ Local: A More Social Google Places, With A Twist Of Zagat

Posted by TechCrunch

Google+, with 100 million active users, still has a long way to go before being anywhere near social network rival Facebook’s nearly one-billion subscribers. But it has been working hard to leverage its substantial audiences in other areas to do just that. And today saw the latest advance in that area, with the double news that it is launching Google+ Local, and sunsetting Google Places, its older, less social version of local listings and local search.
Now, if you go to the web page for Google Places, you get two options: a link through to Google+ Local, or if you are a business, an option to claim your spot in Google’s directory — soon to be converted into its own Google[...]

Play Safe For Android Locks Down Your Phone So Kids Can (Safely) Play

Posted by TechCrunch

Sometimes you just gotta do your own thing. Such was the case with Boris Vaisman, who dropped out of Y Combinator’s winter batch (where he was on kid-safe phone lockdown tool, Kyte). Says Vaisman, it was just a matter of “having a different vision in terms of how to move forward.” So what has Vaisman, along with co-founder Ankush Agarwal, now launched instead? Play Safe, an app for Android that lets kids safely play games on your own smartphone.
To be honest, Kyte has the arguably bigger vision. It wants to provide a kid-friendly user interface for kids’ own Android smartphones. A Net Nanny for the modern age, if you will, but one infused with family-friendly features[...]

Hello new #NewTwitter: Blazing speed and death to those #!#! hashbangs

Posted by VentureBeat

Twitter and performance issues have been synonymous for almost as long as Twitter has existed, turning the familiar fail whale into a common Internet meme. However, with a new update rolling out starting today, Twitter engineers are hoping for complete fail whale extinction and a better user experience.
#NewTwitter, released near the end of 2010, moved processing loads from the then-overburdened Twitter servers to users’ browsers, but it wasn’t blazing fast. Browsers struggled when trying to render all the user interface and page logic locally in Javascript. By contrast, the latest update has Twitter’s now well-architected-and-resourced servers re-shoulder some of the load,[...]

PlanGrid grabs seed round to make blueprints mobile

Posted by VentureBeat

Construction-focused startup PlanGrid, fresh from the Y Combinator incubator, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding.
Plangrid brings blueprints to iPads, eliminating the need for large paper blueprints. The company graduated from Y Combinator in April of this year and debuted at YC’s Demo Day.
Noted investors from Google, Box, and Loopt participated in the seed round. The full press release is below.
Sunnyvale, CA – May 29, 2012 – PlanGrid, a construction-focused startup and alumnus of Y Combinator, announced today that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding. The company plans to expand its team, build new features and accelerate its overall growth in delivering advanced solution[...]

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Cisco: Global 'Net Traffic to Surpass 1 Zettabyte in 2016 | BoxPAY Debuts Its Carrier Billing Platform For Smart TVs | Songkick's Tourbox Makes It Easier For Musicians To Trumpet Their Concerts Across The Web | Get and pay your bills from your phone with the just-launched doxoPay | Tim Cook: What I learned from Steve Jobs

Cisco: Global 'Net Traffic to Surpass 1 Zettabyte in 2016

Posted by PCWorld

Global Internet Protocol traffic will reach an annual rate of 1.3 zettabytes in 2016 as more people connect more devices and download more video over the Internet, Cisco Systems predicted Wednesday.
With global IP traffic surpassing the zettabyte (1 billion terabyte) threshold, there will be more Internet traffic in 2016 than in all years up to 2012, said Doug Webster, senior director for service provider marketing at Cisco.
"It is just a staggering amount of growth facing global networks," he said during the unveiling of Cisco's Visual Networking Index Forecast for 2011 to 2016.
The Internet traffic in 2016, at 110 exabytes per month, will be 10 times the traffic in 2008, Webster said. Glob[...]

BoxPAY Debuts Its Carrier Billing Platform For Smart TVs

Posted by TechCrunch

Betting big on the future monetization opportunities to be found in the “smart TV” ecosystem is boxPAY, a company which is now bringing the carrier billing option to TV apps and services. With boxPAY, consumers can pay for Smart TV apps or make in-app purchases by charging those purchases to their mobile phone, no registration or credit card required. Instead, the purchase would show up on the customer’s next monthly bill from their mobile operator.
Next week, the company will be demonstrating its service at the E3 conference in Los Angeles, where its software development kit (SDK) will be up-and-running on a Samsung Smart TV, the first platform the company plans to support[...]

Songkick’s Tourbox Makes It Easier For Musicians To Trumpet Their Concerts Across The Web

Posted by TechCrunch

I’m not a professional musician, but apparently it’s a headache for artists to publicize their tourdates on the myriad number of websites and apps that cater to music lovers. Not only is there Facebook and Twitter, but there’s YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud and Hype Machine.
Enter Songkick, a concert promotion startup that’s backed by Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. They have tons of those little widgets across the web that show when your favorite band is in town. Now they’re trying to make it easier for musicians to manage promotions themselves.
They’ve built a product called Tourbox, which connects to a musician’s Facebook fan page and automate[...]

Get and pay your bills from your phone with the just-launched doxoPay

Posted by VentureBeat

Can you pay your bills? Can you pay your telephone bills? Can you pay your automo’bills?
More importantly, can you pay them all from your phone?
Doxo, a startup focused on cloud document storage, thinks you should be able to, and to that end, it launched doxoPay today.
The new product is a way to receive and pay all your bills from your iPhone or Android device. The startup’s single-login, single-click payment features mean users can make paying bills much simpler, faster, and centralized.
Doxo said it’s also signing up banks, public utilities, and major phone and cable carriers to work directly with the startup on doxoPay features.
Doxo’s mobile apps deliver mobile b[...]

Tim Cook: What I learned from Steve Jobs

Posted by VentureBeat

Apple chief executive Tim Cook turned serious and emotional when he talked about his late mentor and boss, Steve Jobs, at the All Things D conference today.
It was clear that Jobs, who died in 2011 after an extended battle with cancer, had made a deep impression on Cook as a human being as well as the leader of a company.
“It was one of the saddest days of my life,” Cook said, “the day that he died. And as much as you could predict that, it really hit me.”
On what he learned from Jobs, Cook said, “I learned that focus is key. You can only do so many things well, and you should cast aside everything else. I think he taught all of us that life is fragile, and we[...]

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Microsoft Launches Office 365 Edition for US Government Customers | HTC Evo 4G LTE Review: Head-To-Head With The iPhone 4S And The Galaxy Nexus | BOKU Scales Up, Will Power Carrier Billing For In-App Payments In The T-Mobile Mall | Make your business' data pretty with Roambi's new iPad app platform | Badgeville's Kris Duggan: Six frameworks can gamify employee and customer engagement (interview)

Microsoft Launches Office 365 Edition for US Government Customers

Posted by PCWorld

Microsoft has released a government-specific edition of its Office 365 cloud-based email and collaboration suite that offers U.S. public-sector customers a cordoned-off data center infrastructure just for them.
Office 365 for Government hosts applications and data in a multitenant cloud reserved for U.S. government agencies, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday.
Suite components will include, as in other Office 365 editions, online versions of Exchange, Lync, Office and SharePoint as well as the full desktop productivity suite Office Professional Plus licensed on a subscription model.
Microsoft already offers government customers of its cloud services, including Office 365 and its predece[...]

HTC Evo 4G LTE Review: Head-To-Head With The iPhone 4S And The Galaxy Nexus

Posted by TechCrunch

The Evo 4G LTE is one of the best phones to land on Sprint shelves in a while, but that’s not to say it has no competition over at the Yellow carrier. The Galaxy Nexus has propped itself up as the Android phone to beat, while the iPhone 4S is available at the same price: $199.
So what will it take to pass up the iPhone and the GalNex for the latest iteration of the Evo line?
We’ve put together this head-to-head chart to answer just such a question.
As you can see, specs between the Evo and the GalNex are quite similar. The only noticeable differences come by way of UI and design language. If a pure Android experience is what you’re looking for, I would definitely recommend[...]

BOKU Scales Up, Will Power Carrier Billing For In-App Payments In The T-Mobile Mall

Posted by TechCrunch

Another big advance for mobile payments startup BOKU: it has inked a deal with T-Mobile USA to provide carrier billing for the T-Mobile Mall, the digital storefront operated by the carrier.The deal is a signal of some momentum for the company: it comes less than a month after BOKU announced a similar deal with Sprint, and hot on the heels of a $35 million round of funding in March[...]

Make your business’ data pretty with Roambi’s new iPad app platform

Posted by VentureBeat

Business intelligence app-maker MeLLmo, the creator of ultra-hot business iPad app Roambi, has launched a new app-building platform called ESX that will let other companies tap Roambi’s ability to make data gorgeous and accessible.
Roambi ESX will give companies that sell data for a living a way to create co-branded iPad apps without hiring design teams. ESX will let business create specialized publications that include text, images, Roambi data visualizations, and video and then publish the whole thing to the iPad.
The target audience for the platform will be the many small and large firms that collect and distribute data, Quinton Alsbury, MeLLmo’s president of product innovation, tol[...]

Badgeville’s Kris Duggan: Six frameworks can gamify employee and customer engagement (interview)

Posted by VentureBeat

Brands have embraced “gamification,” or using game-like behavior in non-game applications, as a way to engage their audiences. That is why gamification vendor Badgeville has more than 165 customers and is announcing today that it has raised $25 million in a new round of funding. Kris Duggan, chief executive of Badgeville, says gamification will let brands engage and retain their audiences. It also enables companies to inspire employees to collaborate or compete. Badgeville has a “behavior platform” to enable companies to measure and influence behavior by using game techniques. You can give salespeople rewards for hitting targets. Companies can embed the platform in we[...]

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New Open-source CRM App Uses Gamification | That's Amore: Has Apple Bought Italian Music Editing Startup Redmatica? | Here's Kleiner Partner Mary Meeker's Latest Data Dump: Mind The Mobile Monetization Gap | Inkling for Web brings interactive ebooks to your browser, no iPad necessary | Badgeville raises $25M to break out from the pack in gamification

New Open-source CRM App Uses Gamification

Posted by PCWorld

The backers of a new open-source CRM (customer relationship management) application called Zurmo are hoping to stand out in a crowded field via the use of gamification, the notion of applying game-like design principles in an effort to make users engage more closely with a product.
Now in beta, Zurmo is written in PHP and made available under the GPLv3 open-source license. A release candidate is slated for availability in July, with a "general audience" release scheduled for September.
Its core CRM features cover contact management, deal tracking and activity management, while the gamification elements include the use of points and badges that users receive based on the actions they take, bo[...]

That’s Amore: Has Apple Bought Italian Music Editing Startup Redmatica?

Posted by TechCrunch

Everyone is focused on what hardware product Apple might launch next, but out of Italy comes news of a software development: the company has bought Redmatica, a small startup that specializes in digital music-editing apps.The news was reported by the Italian blog Fanpage, which also did some sleuthing to dig up a document from the Italian communications regulator AGCOM that seems to prove it — although we have also reached out to Apple for direct confirmation[...]

Here’s Kleiner Partner Mary Meeker’s Latest Data Dump: Mind The Mobile Monetization Gap

Posted by TechCrunch

Mary Meeker, famed Internet analyst-turned-Kleiner Perkins partner, has released her latest data dump. Here you go:
Quick thoughts first:
Interesting slides are #16, which shows an estimate of $12 billion in revenue for mobile apps and advertising. She must be including feature phone revenue too, since Apple paid out about $2 billion with in-app purchases and paid app revenue last year on the platform. Google is obviously a fraction of that, but it has much, much higher mobile display ad revenue than Apple does.
Slide #20 shows how terrible average revenue per user is for mobile users compared to desktop ones. It’s just ugly. Mobile ARPU for Zynga is about one-fifth of what it is on th[...]

Inkling for Web brings interactive ebooks to your browser, no iPad necessary

Posted by VentureBeat

Sorry, college students. Losing your iPad is no longer an excuse for not doing your reading in Inkling’s electronic textbooks. The company today unveiled Inkling for Web, an HTML5 client that will give you access to all of Inkling’s titles in Google Chrome and Safari.
With Inkling for Web, the company is taking its first big step beyond Apple’s iOS ecosystem. Now anyone can buy Inkling’s digital wares, which include travel guides from Frommers, even before it releases an app for Android tablets. (I can’t say that I blame Inkling, given the mostly lackluster sales of Android tablets.)
For critics of Inkling’s iOS-focused approach, the new web reader is a we[...]

Badgeville raises $25M to break out from the pack in gamification

Posted by VentureBeat

Buzzword or not, gamification, or the use of game-like rewards to engage customers and employees, is getting real. Badgeville, the creator of a popular gamification platform, has raised $25 million in a third round of funding.
The large amount of the funding suggests that the market for gamification is taking off, said Kris Duggan, chief executive of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Badgeville, in an interview.
Badgeville is a relatively new company in a new field. The company has 170 customers for its platform and they interact with the platform more than 3 billion times a month.
A year and a half ago, people searched for the word “gamification” on Google about 700 times a month. Now 3.[...]

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Cisco Gets Boost in Server Shipments in Q1, Gartner Says | SlickFlick App Lets You Tell Stories With Your Photos, Signs Getty Deal | PowerInbox Now Makes LinkedIn Emails Interactive, Adds Email Widgets & More | Mitt Romney iPhone app misspells America, sets Internet ablaze (gallery) | The mobile web finally gets an easy, secure payment system for in-app shopping

Cisco Gets Boost in Server Shipments in Q1, Gartner Says

Posted by PCWorld

Worldwide server shipments grew at a slower-than-expected clip during the first quarter of 2012, but Cisco, which has a small market share, beat market trends as top server makers struggled with slow demand and weak economic conditions, research firm Gartner said on Wednesday.
Server shipments worldwide during the first quarter this year were 2.35 million units, growing by just 1.5 percent compared to the same quarter last year, according to Gartner.
The top three server vendors -- Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM -- saw declines in shipments. However, server shipments grew for Fujitsu and Cisco, which were in fourth and fifth place, respectively.
Cisco is mainly known as a networking equipment[...]

SlickFlick App Lets You Tell Stories With Your Photos, Signs Getty Deal

Posted by TechCrunch

It’s been fascinating to watch the proliferation of photo apps before and since the rise of Instagram and its sale to Facebook. EyeEm has a beautiful app which makes tagging images to locations ridiculously simple (plus all that filter goodness). LoopCam makes hilarious photo loops you want to share with your friends. Now SlickFlick has appeared with an iOS app to help you create fun stories around your pictures. [download from iTunes here]
The boot-strapped startup was founded by Maria Constantinescu who has been relentless in pushing her vision for the last two years and today she lands a big-brother partner in the shape of the Getty image library.
Basically you create visual stories[...]

PowerInbox Now Makes LinkedIn Emails Interactive, Adds Email Widgets & More

Posted by TechCrunch

PowerInbox, the email platform that’s been on a tear lately in terms of its releases, is rolling out yet another update today bringing a number of new features, including the addition of the most requested in-email app, LinkedIn. The platform already supports email “apps” like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Groupon, essentially making emails from those companies more interactive – you can like, reply, comment, tweet, circle and more directly from your email.
With the new LinkedIn app, you can now read more about the person requesting the invite, browse their network, and accept the invite right from your inbox. (Sorry LinkedIn inbox, but I won’t be vi[...]

Mitt Romney iPhone app misspells America, sets Internet ablaze (gallery)

Posted by VentureBeat

For most people, misspelling a crucial word in a promotional application wouldn’t completely ruin your career. But if the word is “America” and the promotion is for Mitt Romney’s 2012 Presidential campaign, you can be sure heads will roll.
Such is the case with a new iPhone app Romney and Co. released today called “With Mitt” that allows supporters of the Republican presidential nominee to snap photos with patriotic slogans. You can then share these photos with friends, family, and others who probably would otherwise ignore politics all together. One of these overlays contains the phrase “A Better Amercia,” with an obvious misspelling of the co[...]

The mobile web finally gets an easy, secure payment system for in-app shopping

Posted by VentureBeat

One of the biggest concerns developers have about the mobile web revolves around monetization: How are users going to find, pay for, and shop inside a mobile web app?
Quite a few parties are working on the first problem — Facebook being one of the most recent and notable — but secure and easy ways to get money running through the mobile web haven’t been as numerous.
Today, one startup is addressing that concern with a new product that will plug into any mobile web app and give its creators a quick way to start accepting payments from users. ZooZ, the goofily named company, is launching its not-so-goofy mobile web SDK that it swears takes just minutes to plug in and start us[...]

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Google+ Gets Zagat Ratings and Local Listings | Not Just For Native Mobile Apps Anymore: Parse Launches JavaScript SDK | TubeMogul Pitches Brand Safety With PageSafe, A Tool To See Where Ads Really Appear | Artificial Muscle's touch sensors can deepen the bass in headphones (exclusive) | Google tablet with Android 4.1 & Tegra 3 quad-core processor gets closer to reality

Google+ Gets Zagat Ratings and Local Listings

Posted by PCWorld

Google is trying to beef up its online reviews scene by adding Zagat ratings to local listings[...]

Not Just For Native Mobile Apps Anymore: Parse Launches JavaScript SDK

Posted by TechCrunch

Parse, the Y Combinator-backed startup that powers the back-end for mobile apps like Band of the Day and Hipmunk, is rolling out support for mobile web apps too.
The San Francisco startup has a new SDK for JavaScript that makes it easier to build HTML5 apps. Parse has long billed itself as the “Heroku for Mobile,” a service that takes over the hassle of building a scalable back-end for applications.
The new Javascript SDK comes with security controls, flexible data storage, advanced data queries, user authentication and geolocation. It’s built on top of the Backbone.js JavaScript framework from DocumentCloud. Parse co-founder Tikhon Bernstam said about 38 percent of the c[...]

TubeMogul Pitches Brand Safety With PageSafe, A Tool To See Where Ads Really Appear

Posted by TechCrunch

Media agencies want to ensure that their ads are only seen in the best light… But a lot of times, the networks they use to distribute those ads don’t do a good job of distinguishing between good content or bad content, or where an ad appears. That’s why video ad startup TubeMogul has opened up a new page that will let anyone — whether it be a brand, an agency, a publisher, or merely a curious observer — scan a URL and see how it ranks in terms of brand safety. That page, based on TubeMogul’s PageSafe technology, is a powerful tool to show off what viewers really see and what brand associations they’re getting when ads run against certain content[...]

Artificial Muscle’s touch sensors can deepen the bass in headphones (exclusive)

Posted by VentureBeat

Haptic feedback, or touch vibration sensors, have been built into game controllers for years. But now they’re also being used to improve the quality 0f bass sounds in high-end audio headphones.
Artificial Muscle is unveiling the audio application for its ViviTouch technology today, which makes the speakers in the headphones vibrate as if they had the benefit of a subwoofer. I listened to a demo version of the technology and felt the vibrations in my ears.
The company plans to show off the audio technology at the E3 trade show coming up on June 4 in Los Angeles. It is doing so because gamers are likely to appreciate the better sound quality. Artificial Muscle is in talks with multiple h[...]

Google tablet with Android 4.1 & Tegra 3 quad-core processor gets closer to reality

Posted by VentureBeat

A rumored 7-inch tablet branded by Google has been outed by a RightWare benchmark test and it appears the device includes a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and runs Android 4.1, according to some deep reporting by Android Police.
Like Google is doing with the unlocked Galaxy Nexus Android phone, rumor has it that Google will sell its own tablet running its Android OS. The RightWare benchmark lists a new “Google Asus Nexus 7″ tablet and it’s almost certain that’s the slate people have been murmuring about.
The Nexus 7 listing includes a lot of key specs that what we can expect, including a 7-inch screen with 768-by-1280 resolution and a quad-core Tegra 3 processor made by[...]

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Play Safe Android App Gives Kids a Smartphone Sandbox | Atlassian Launches A Marketplace For Project Management Add-Ons | Group-Payments Startup Payumi Poised To Launch After Seed Round | Leisure Suit Larry creator wants "infringing" Kickstarter campaign taken down (exclusive) | Google finally does something with Zagat, adds reviews with launch of Google+ Local

Play Safe Android App Gives Kids a Smartphone Sandbox

Posted by PCWorld

This fabulous freebie locks down your phone while giving your kids access to the apps and games you’ve approved[...]

Atlassian Launches A Marketplace For Project Management Add-Ons

Posted by TechCrunch

Atlassian, the Australian company that makes popular software project management tools JIRA and Confluence, has opened a marketplace where customers can download and buy add-ons for the company’s apps.Usually, the launch of a marketplace or app store signals a company’s broader platform ambitions, but Atlassian President Jay Simons says the platform approach has been “part of our DNA” for a long time. The company regards JIRA and Confluence, in particular, as its core products, so it has been building its own add-ons, and companies like Box and Zendesk have offered their own integrations. (Marketplace includes add-ons for a few other Atlassian products, too.)[...]

Group-Payments Startup Payumi Poised To Launch After Seed Round

Posted by TechCrunch

The whole area of making payments as a group of people, whether it be for joint gift purchases (weddings), or even simple things like housemates paying bills etc. has been an area several startups have tried to tackle.
ShareAGift in the UK focuses on joint gift purchases, but is more an affiliate gift sales model. In the US there is WePay and PayDivvy, both of which err on the side of being deposit account providers. WePay has moved to being a B2B play, trying to woo small merchants away from PayPal. In France there is Leetchi and FriendFund in Berlin. Many have substantial backing from VCs.
Now, Payumi in the UK is poised to come out of public beta and hopes to cover all the ‘group pa[...]

Leisure Suit Larry creator wants “infringing” Kickstarter campaign taken down (exclusive)

Posted by VentureBeat

Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe and his company Replay Games say they plan to sue Wisecrack Games today to shut down its $500,000 Kickstarter crowdfunding project because it infringes on their copyright and misrepresents Lowe’s participation in the project.
Chicago-based Wisecrack Games just started a project to raise $500,000 to create Sam Suede in Undercover Exposure. The game is a “comic adventure for the 21st century.” Like Leisure Suit Larry, it’s a sex farce. Ken Wegrzyn describes the game is a new one based on an original design that he suggested to Al Lowe years ago.
Wegrzyn and Lowe worked on the Sam Suede game about seven years ago. The idea is take a new[...]

Google finally does something with Zagat, adds reviews with launch of Google+ Local

Posted by VentureBeat

Google surprised a lot of people last fall when it announced that it was buying restaurant ratings company Zagat. Now, Google is finally making some moves with the buy via Google+ Local, an overhaul of Google’s local search.
With the revamp, Zagat reviews are now a key part of Google+ Local. The new local search adds restaurant ratings to Google Search, Maps, and as a new tab in Google+. Google will also be updating its Google Maps app for Android and iOS to add in new Google+ Local results.
As for the design, you’ll notice that Google’s five-star reviews are gone and replaced with Zagat’s 30-point scale. On the Google+ side, the Zagat reviews are joined by personal r[...]

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Verizon Boosting FiOS Top Speed to 300Mbps | Pinterest Rival Fancy Brings Social Commerce To iPhone & iPad, Announces 1 Million Users | Mary Meeker Weighs In On The Facebook IPO: Bankers "Did The Best They Could" | Mary Meeker's eye-popping annual Internet Trends report hits the web | Nest smart thermostat to be sold in Apple retail stores

Verizon Boosting FiOS Top Speed to 300Mbps

Posted by PCWorld

Verizon Communications is putting the pedal to the metal on its FiOS service with a new 300Mbps option next month, offering a majority of its customers a wild Internet ride, though it hasn't said how much that ride will cost.
The company said Wednesday it will refresh its portfolio of services next month, introducing four new speed tiers. The most eye-catching will be the top plan, with 300Mbps (bits per second) downstream and 65Mbps upstream. With that grade of service, subscribers will be able to download a two-hour high-definition movie in 2.2 minutes and upload five minutes of HD home video in 31 seconds, according to Verizon. The fastest FiOS service now is 150Mbps downstream and 35Mbps[...]

Pinterest Rival Fancy Brings Social Commerce To iPhone & iPad, Announces 1 Million Users

Posted by TechCrunch

Pinterest rival Fancy, which thinks it has figured out social commerce (or at least, before Pinterest did), is announcing today that it has reached 1 million users as well as an average of $50,000 worth of commerce through its service each week. To help further grow its shopping platform, which initially debuted in February of this year, the company has also updated its iOS application. The app doesn’t just support browsing and liking images (you “fancy” things, actually) as before, but adds the ability to purchase items directly from the app itself[...]

Mary Meeker Weighs In On The Facebook IPO: Bankers “Did The Best They Could”

Posted by TechCrunch

The fallout from Facebook’s initial public offering earlier this month continues to play out in the media, but according to some of the most senior players in the financial space, any negative aspects of the social network’s stock market debut may not have really been the fault of the company or even the bankers who managed it.The latest big name to offer this opinion is Mary Meeker.In an on-stage conversation at the D10 Conference in Southern California where she presented her latest report on the state of the Internet, the current Kleiner Perkins partner and longtime Wall Street analyst was asked what she would have done differently about the Facebook IPO had she been involved[...]

Mary Meeker’s eye-popping annual Internet Trends report hits the web

Posted by VentureBeat

Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, has released her latest compilation of eye-popping data concerning trends on the web and in mobile. Meeker’s analysis and data points are well-known for giving a comprehensive overview of what’s happening now in tech.
Meeker presented the report this morning at the All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
Related stories:
Meeker data: Mobile web growing fast, but monetization is piss poor
Meeker’s stats show how Asia is kicking our butt
Specifically, the report indicates that Web growth remains high and that mobile adoption is still at an early stage. It also highlights current economic trends in[...]

Nest smart thermostat to be sold in Apple retail stores

Posted by VentureBeat

The Nest smart thermostat may soon by sitting on an Apple store shelf near you, an appropriate move for a company created by the former senior vice president of Apple’s iPod division.
iLounge is reporting that the thermostat, which has gained much popularity in the connected-home-device category, will be sold at Apple stores for the same price on its website, $249. The thermostat proved that popularity when it was first made available for purchase. It quickly sold out of available pre-orders, and left people waiting into 2012 for their orders to be filled. Currently, Nest is available online, in your local Nest-approved stores, and in home improvement giant Lowes. The company also ann[...]

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Asus' Transformer Infinity Pad Tablet to Ship in a Month | Grubwithus Served $5M By GRP, Michel Daher To Take Its Social Dining Global | Mary Meeker: "Mobile Monetization Has More Going For It Than Early Desktop Monetization Had" | Can this app cure depression? | Microsoft says it has sold 67M Xbox 360s, 19M Kinects, and generated $56B in game revenues

Asus' Transformer Infinity Pad Tablet to Ship in a Month

Posted by PCWorld

Asus' highly anticipated Transformer Pad Infinity TF700T tablet, a challenger to Apple's new iPad, will become available in late June or early July, a company[...]

Grubwithus Served $5M By GRP, Michel Daher To Take Its Social Dining Global

Posted by TechCrunch

Grubwithus, the social dining network and 2011 Y Combinator grad, announced today that it has secured $5 million in new funding to snack on, led by GRP Partners with contribution from Lebanese entrepreneur Michel Daher, who is best known as the founder of Daher Foods and its Master Chips and Poppins cereal brands, two of the largest consumer packaged goods brands in the MENA region.
The startup’s Series A round follows the $1.6 million in seed funding it raised this time last year from a slew of prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, NEA, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Yuri Milner, Matt Cutts, Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, and Start Fund — to name a[...]

Mary Meeker: “Mobile Monetization Has More Going For It Than Early Desktop Monetization Had”

Posted by TechCrunch

We’ve heard a lot about how monetizing mobile content is difficult in the context of Facebook’s recent IPO. A lot of the company’s growth is coming from mobile, after all, but it’s currently very hard to make money of this mobile traffic. At AllThingsD’s D10 conference today, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker released her annual overview of Internet trends and she, too, highlighted this mobile monetization problem.
Here is the good news: Global mobile Internet traffic is growing rapidly right now and has now reached about 10% of all Internet traffic. Mobile commerce now makes up about 8% of U.S. e-commerce and grew over 15% last year.
At the same time, mobile[...]

Can this app cure depression?

Posted by VentureBeat

It may be time to sack your therapist. The researchers conducting the world’s first clinical study on the use of smartphone apps to treat depression have given VentureBeat a preview of the results. 73.5 percent of depressed participants who used an application called Viary, were no longer considered to be depressed by the end of the study.
Depression is a common and costly problem in developed countries. 15 to 17 percent of the population will suffer from a depressive disorder at some stage in their lives and depression is expected to be the highest disease burden, or the health problem with the greatest negative impact on society in terms of financial cost and mortality, by the year 2[...]

Microsoft says it has sold 67M Xbox 360s, 19M Kinects, and generated $56B in game revenues

Posted by VentureBeat

Microsoft said today that it has generated more than $56 billion at retail from its game business, and it has sold 67 million Xbox 360 consoles since 2005. It has also sold more than 19 million Kinect motion sensors since 2010.
Yusuf Mehdi, the chief marketing officer of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Division, said on the Microsoft blog that the Xbox 360 holds a 47 percent share of the current-generation U.S. console market. Xbox Live now has more than 40 million members who spend an average of 84 hours per month with the console. Back in October, Microsoft had said it had sold 57 million Xbox 360s.
By comparison, Nintendo has sold an estimated 96 million Wii consoles and Sony[...]

Email Attackers Take a Weekend Breather | Wrike Releases A Free Version Of Its Project Management App | Mark Pincus On Zynga's Facebook Addiction: "We've Never Thought Of It In Terms Of Attachment (Or Detachment)" | Why Square should be worried about Groupon | Evernote's contacts app Hello comes to Android, gets LinkedIn integration

Email Attackers Take a Weekend Breather

Posted by PCWorld

Email attacks which contain malicious attachments consistently fell on weekends, according to an analysis of the first quarter of 2012 by US security and malware analytics vendor, FireEye.
Like the typical office worker, the output of email attackers drops well below the average on Saturday and Sunday, picks up pace on Monday and then peaks on Wednesday.
"It seems these attackers don't like to work on weekends, either. Monday's attack level is average, while the midweek spike tapers off to below average levels by Friday," FireEye senior staff scientist, Darien Kindlund, wrote in a recent blog post, which looked at the first quarter of 2012.
The spike across Wednesday and Thursday was up to f[...]

Wrike Releases A Free Version Of Its Project Management App

Posted by TechCrunch

Wrike is hoping to expand its audience today with the launch of a free version of its project management tool.Wrike says it already has 2,000 customers including Accenture, Stanford, and Ticketmaster, but until now, the cheapest pricing level was $49 per month. Even though releasing a free version is an obvious way to get more people to try the product, CEO Andrew Filev says he approached the “freemium” model cautiously, to ensure that Wrike didn’t end up “cannibalizing” any of its sales[...]

Mark Pincus On Zynga’s Facebook Addiction: “We’ve Never Thought Of It In Terms Of Attachment (Or Detachment)”

Posted by TechCrunch

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus took the stage today at D10, and of course because Facebook is all people can talk about after its IPO two weeks ago, he got asked and asked and asked again about Zynga’s “attachment to Facebook.”
“Zynga is very tied to Facebook,” Kara Swisher brought up immediately, describing the two stocks as “tethered together.” Indeed, Zynga makes up 15% of Facebook’s revenue, and Facebook makes up most of Zynga’s.
“They’re really important not just to us.” Pincus said, “Facebook is providing a new part of [the ecosystem's] stack, there is now a social stack and an app stack.” Pincus went on to desc[...]

Why Square should be worried about Groupon

Posted by VentureBeat

Groupon’s POS order entry screen[/caption]
Longtime readers know that I’ve long been positive about mobile payments company Square and, well, not-so-positive, about daily deals site Groupon. (Disclosure: I have puts against Groupon.)
But I think Groupon’s new payments system could present a real threat to Square. And if I’m right, Square should be worried. Very worried.
I had the opportunity to try Groupon payments at a Bay Area ice cream shop on Friday. Although the early test system wasn’t nearly as polished as what Square offers, it worked well enough. And for a typical business, it promises to be a lot cheaper. Square is charging 2.75% of the transaction; Gr[...]

Evernote’s contacts app Hello comes to Android, gets LinkedIn integration

Posted by VentureBeat

In its ongoing quest to kill the alphabetical contact list, Evernote is bringing its Hello app to the Android for the first time on Wednesday. The app will have a few new features not available on the iPhone, including LinkedIn integration.
Hello, previously only available on the iPhone, uses picture tiles and a bit of psychology to make remembering people easier. The app uses contextual information — such as where you met someone, who introduced you, and what the person was wearing — to help you remember the people you meet. Its photo-heavy interface encourages you to remember faces and names together.
Now, Hello is coming to Android with a few features not seen in the iPhone v[...]

Verizon Doubling FiOS Internet Speeds | True&Co Takes $2M Seed Funding From First Round, SoftTech, Others To Shake Up The Bra Industry | ShareMyPlaylists Relaunches Spotify App Based On Hand-Curated Playlists | Netflix agrees to delete former customers' rental history after a year | Popular Photosynth panorama app finally makes it to Windows Phones

Verizon Doubling FiOS Internet Speeds

Posted by PCWorld

Verizon is upping its fastest FiOS download speed from 150Mbps to 300Mbps[...]

True&Co Takes $2M Seed Funding From First Round, SoftTech, Others To Shake Up The Bra Industry

Posted by TechCrunch

The women’s liberation movement once taught ladies to cast off their bras in solidarity and empowerment; now a new startup, founded by two women, is inverting that formula to make sure that when you put it back on, that bra fits like a glove.
True&Co is launching an online bra fitting service and shop that takes a very traditional (and tedious) process — finding bras you like that actually fit well — and makes it quick and kind of fun, and it is doing it with $2 million in seed funding from a great list of investors: First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, Aileen Lee, Softbank Capital and former LinkedIn executive Ellen Levy. (Lee’s investment comes from her new, yet-to[...]

ShareMyPlaylists Relaunches Spotify App Based On Hand-Curated Playlists

Posted by TechCrunch

ShareMyPlaylists was the first site to allow the sharing of Spotify playlists (launched 2009). It’s now relaunched its music discovery Spotify app based its 91,000 hand-curated playlists. The site competes with the record label Spotify apps like Digster (from Universal Music) and Filtr (Sony Music) but its advantage is that it allows music from all labels and allows user generated content – something the labels get nervous about.
The newly designed app has been completely rebuilt based on the service that the website offers with better Spotify integration with recommended playlists, drag and drop, genre browsing, featured playlists and pop up descriptions. Part of the app is now[...]

Netflix agrees to delete former customers’ rental history after a year

Posted by VentureBeat

As a Netflix customer worried about all those rental suggestions you’ve taken up from movie search site BateFlix, you can rest assured that your rental history will remain anonymous even to the company itself — kinda.
Yesterday, new U.S. District Court documents from a Netflix class action lawsuit revealed that the company has agreed to delete movie rental history of its former customers roughly one year after canceling their monthly service. PaidContent points out that the case was originally started nearly a year ago by Netflix and settled in February for $9 million, with $6.75 million going to various privacy organizations. But the company never mentioned the changes in its po[...]

Popular Photosynth panorama app finally makes it to Windows Phones

Posted by VentureBeat

Microsoft’s Photosynth is a hugely popular panorama-stitching photo app. We have no idea what took so long, but it’s now available on Windows Phones.
Photosynth is already the 23rd most popular photo app in the iTunes App Store with around 6 million downloads and a 4.5 star rating.
The app is a slick, smooth panorama stitcher that yields gorgeous results. Microsoft says it’s also the only application on any mobile platform that will let you photograph and stitch 360 degrees horizontally and vertically to make a spherical image of your environment.
Finished panoramas are shareable on Twitter and Facebook right from inside the app itself. You can also choose to make your pics[...]

The Changing Face of Information Security | Microsoft Launches Office 365 For Government | If The Spec Is Dead, So Is The Nexus Tablet | Bay Area companies get another nonstop flight to Capitol Hill | 17 percent of PCs are "walking around naked," says McAfee

The Changing Face of Information Security

Posted by PCWorld

In a previous article, I discussed the changing shape of Information Security and the influence it is having on the future of business--through an expanding scope and stakeholder base--and the resultant need to review how it is positioned organisationally. The other equally important element that complements the changing shape of Information Security is the changing face of Information Security specialists.
We all know that the unrelenting pace of technology change has driven many organisations to rethink business strategies and models to embrace new capabilities and extend their market reach. Increasingly this means the boundaries between IT and business are being blurred. Many companies wo[...]

Microsoft Launches Office 365 For Government

Posted by TechCrunch

Google scored an important win over Microsoft a few weeks ago when it won a $35 million U.S. government contract to bring its cloud-based office solution to the Department of the Interior. Microsoft’s legacy solutions, of course, remain a staple in government offices, but as more and more agencies want to move their productivity and collaboration services to the cloud, Microsoft is running the risk of losing out in this lucrative market. Today, however, the company is launching a new service that should give more of its government customers, which tend to have very strict data security and privacy regulations, the option to move to the cloud. Microsoft’s new Office 365 for Govern[...]

If The Spec Is Dead, So Is The Nexus Tablet

Posted by TechCrunch

It seems the much-rumored Google Nexus Tablet is nearing release. Citing Basemark benchmarking reports, the device is supposedly codenamed Grouper, running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and employing a 7-inch, 1280 x 768 display powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3. If true, this means the upcoming tablet will likely lack 4G wireless connectivity since Nvidia’s latest SoC is incompatible with current 4G chipsets. Without 4G, and since this is a forward-thinking Nexus device, it’s safe to say that the tablet will lack a data wireless radio of any sort and will instead ship with just WiFi.Besides, even without the compatibility issues (which might be resolved), Google will not be able[...]

Bay Area companies get another nonstop flight to Capitol Hill

Posted by VentureBeat

San Francisco is going from zero non-stop flights to Washington National Airport to two non-stops this summer. Virgin America announced today that it will start its service to the airport just a few miles from Capitol Hill on August 14. United started service on the route two weeks ago. Flights from San Francisco to Washington National had been illegal for more than 40 years. Virgin America got a much coveted exemption to the airport’s perimeter rule.
As Silicon Valley becomes more prominent in the lives of Americans and moves into more regulated industries, it needs to get cozier with Capitol Hill. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter already have strong presences in Washingt[...]

17 percent of PCs are “walking around naked,” says McAfee

Posted by VentureBeat

Seventeen percent of personal computers around the world are not using anti-virus software, or as McAfee’s co-president Todd Gebhart puts it, “walking around naked on the Internet.”
The anti-virus creator and research firm recently performed a study of 28 million non-Apple PCs across 24 different countries, finding that one in every six computers has either no anti-virus software installed, or the current anti-virus software has expired. The United States falls into the top five vulnerable countries with 19.32 percent of computers at risk, along with Mexico at 21.57 percent, Spain at 21.45 percent, Singapore at 21.75 percent, and Japan with 19.35 percent.
Finland, however,[...]

Cloud Contracts -- the Devil Is in the Details | InstaEDU On-Demand Video Tutoring Gets An A+ and $1.1M Seed From The Social+Capital Partnership | Keen On... Big Data: Why UC Berkeley Might Have An Edge Over Stanford [TCTV] | Want an example of Zynga's innovation? How about an Instagram feature for FarmVille? | Staying abreast of the latest bra tech at D10

Cloud Contracts -- the Devil Is in the Details

Posted by PCWorld

Cloud computing today is no longer a buzzword associated with universities or advanced technology organisations at the bleeding edge of innovation. It is now a mainstream sourcing model that most organisations are looking to as part of their broader IT strategy.
The shift away from building customised systems specifically for organisational requirements is fast approaching. Global financial scenarios are presenting a funding challenge for IT innovation initiatives, transformation projects and ongoing support services.
One of the greatest shifts was demonstrated and highlighted by a US Government White House Paper titled: "25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology[...]

InstaEDU On-Demand Video Tutoring Gets An A+ and $1.1M Seed From The Social+Capital Partnership

Posted by TechCrunch

It’s midnight before your final exam and you need help. Do you know where your tutor is? InstaEDU, says a $1.1 million seed round from former Facebooker Chamath Palihapitiya’s fund The Social+Capital Partnership and several angels. Stumped high school and college students pay InstaEDU by the minute to video chat with tutors from top universities at any hour of the day. InstaEDU will use the seed to grow its team and build critical features like advanced scheduling.Co-founder Alison Johnston was the community manager of on-demand Q&A service Aardvark which was acquired by Google. With plenty of students and their parents happy to pay to get into a great school or job, now she[...]

Keen On… Big Data: Why UC Berkeley Might Have An Edge Over Stanford [TCTV]

Posted by TechCrunch

Big data is not only hot in the startup world but also in the university. Stanford, with its intimate access to Silicon Valley is most readily associated with the study of big data. But UC Berkeley, the other great university in the Bay Area, is hot on Stanford’s heels in terms of making sense of our new data driven economy. And later this week (May 31-June 1), Berkeley is hosting a conference about big data entitled Data Edge which promises to explore many of the most interesting questions about defining, understanding and extracting value from big data.
Earlier this week, Professor Marti Hearst from Berkeley’s illustrious School of Information came into our San Francisco studio[...]

Want an example of Zynga’s innovation? How about an Instagram feature for FarmVille?

Posted by VentureBeat

Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus insists his company is innovative. They hold hackathons, have reinvented the company several times, and are always trying to invent news ways to keep you amused.
But the company is often accused of being a copycat, “borrowing” hot ideas from other companies shamelessly. So it didn’t help much when, pressed for an example of his company’s innovative ways, the best he could come up with was this:
An Instagram feature for FarmVille.
That’s right, FarmVille fans, you’ll soon be able to take hipster-ish photos of fantasy farms and share them with your friends, just like the massively popular Instagram app.
To be fair, his compa[...]

Staying abreast of the latest bra tech at D10

Posted by VentureBeat

Perhaps misunderstanding what the D in All Things D stands for, online bra-shopping helper True&Co is demoing its product at the annual D10 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. today.
As seen at the opening of every infomercial ever, sometimes the simplest tasks are actually quite difficult. Getting fitted for a bra in person, says True&Co, is uncomfortable, and doing it yourself at home is also difficult as “women today may not own a measuring tape.” The co-founders are taking what seems like a very analog problem and attempting to solve it Silicon Valley style: with code.
When you go to the site, which is launching today, you fill out a two-minute quiz about your b[...]

VMware VSphere 5.0 Gets Common Criteria Security Clearance | Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs Movie Probably Won't Be "Cradle To Grave" Biography | Mary Meeker: "We Are Still In Spring Training — Magnitude Of Upcoming Change Will Be Stunning" | Why flash in the cloud will shake up enterprise storage | Does console have a future?

VMware VSphere 5.0 Gets Common Criteria Security Clearance

Posted by PCWorld

VMware today said its virtual-machine infrastructure software, vSphere 5.0, has achieved certification under what's known as the Common Criteria program, a U.S.-supported international effort to test software in labs for security and general soundness in technical features.
VMware said vSphere 5.0 has attained the Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4+) under Common Criteria. This is considered a very high rating for commercial software using conventional security. In contrast, there are highly-specialized methods for ultra-high-security purposes demanded by the government which go beyond EAL4+ up to EAL7.
[In the news: IT staff, engineers among top 10 toughest jobs to fill in US]
[More: McAfee[...]

Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs Movie Probably Won’t Be “Cradle To Grave” Biography

Posted by TechCrunch

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin offered some early thoughts today on the movie adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs, which he has signed on to write.
Sorkin was speaking at the D10 conference, and it sounds like he hasn’t actually written any of the screenplay yet — he said the initial stages of the process will look at lot more “like watching ESPN.”
“It’s a process of procrastination, where you’re trying to figure out where the movie is going,” he said.
So before Sorkin has gone through this process (and before the screenplay goes through the rewriting that’s endemic to Hollywood) it’s hard to know exactly what the film w[...]

Mary Meeker: “We Are Still In Spring Training — Magnitude Of Upcoming Change Will Be Stunning”

Posted by TechCrunch

Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report is usually full of good stuff and this year is no exception. We already covered her comments about mobile monetization and the Facebook IPO, but one of the most interesting sections of her presentation were her thoughts about the future of the Internet. In her view, technology has already allowed us to re-imagine everything from book to news to note taking to crime awareness. Still, according to her, “we are still in spring training” and “the magnitude of upcoming change will be stunning.”[...]

Why flash in the cloud will shake up enterprise storage

Posted by VentureBeat

Flash memory has already transformed consumer devices like smartphones, tablets, and ultra-notebooks (think MacBook Air). These devices use a solid state drive, also know as SSD or flash drive, rather than traditional mechanical disk. Presumably, if you have a flash-based device, you don’t miss those quaint whirring and chirping noises that a PC’s hard drive makes, and flash also delivers radically better performance and battery life. What you may not know is that a similar shift is already underway in the data center: Google’s instant search and Facebook’s performance intensive applications are powered by flash rather than hard drives.
What’s going on is that storage based on mechanical dis[...]

Does console have a future?

Posted by VentureBeat

While recent headlines such as “Game sales crash!” and “Games retail collapses!” don’t paint a rosy picture, I believe the report of the death of console games is an exaggeration. Yet an uncertain future faces those console games companies that choose not to evolve rapidly.
When I blogged back in early 2010 that console games publishers were at risk of going the way of traditional media companies back in early 2010, readers reacted strongly. So I wasn’t surprised by the even stronger reaction last year when I wrote that the games market had fundamentally split into “Value” and “Volume” markets, both by sector and geography. The two-speed market this is creating may have more rapid and profou[...]

Mobile Payments Still Slow to Catch on in U.S. | MiniDates Schedules Real-Life (Legitimately) Blind Dates For You | Flipboard Officially Opens Up Their Android Beta To Interested Testers | Patent investor Nathan Myhrvold is okay with being unpopular, dammit | Microsoft rolls out Office 365 for Government, notes privacy concerns

Mobile Payments Still Slow to Catch on in U.S.

Posted by PCWorld

Even if the next iPhone has a mobile wallet app and a Near Field Communication chip inside, don't expect contactless payments to suddenly explode in the U.S[...]

MiniDates Schedules Real-Life (Legitimately) Blind Dates For You

Posted by TechCrunch

Traditionally, dating sites like eHarmony and OkCupid follow the same format. You input your info, browse through all the thumbnails accompanied by A/S/L, and send out a barrage of flirty messages. Then you wait. Maybe you’re hit with some match-type options, but for the most part it’s a lot of browsing/messaging. But a new crop of online dating services have found interesting ways to approach the space, not least of all MiniDates – Time2Meet.
MiniDates joins Cheek’d and Coffee Meets Bagel in pushing a real-life connection much harder than a virtual one, by simply scheduling dates (or MiniDates) for you based on your schedule and suitor preferences. No messaging, no b[...]

Flipboard Officially Opens Up Their Android Beta To Interested Testers

Posted by TechCrunch

Well, that was quick. The news of an impending Flipboard Android beta only began making the rounds earlier this morning, and now the Flipboard team has opened up the beta process to anyone interested in taking the plunge.
Users interested in taking the pre-release version of the app for a spin can mosey over to Flipboard’s Android landing page, where they can sign up for the beta and wait patiently to receive a download link in their inbox. The confirmation email mentions that the waiting period could stretch up to 24 hours, though we’re hearing that plenty of people are receiving their download links without too much of a delay.
I managed to get the new version of the app up and[...]

Patent investor Nathan Myhrvold is okay with being unpopular, dammit

Posted by VentureBeat

Intellectual Ventures founder and chief executive Nathan Myhrvold doesn’t need you to like him.
“I’m okay with not being popular. I never was a popular kid in my class, and I’m not a popular kid in this class,” he said, referring to the crowd at All Things Digital 2012. “If I want popularity, I go to a chef’s convention. I won two James Beard awards last week, dammit.”
Myhrvold was feeling the pressure after half an hour of questioning by ATD host Walt Mossberg and by audience questions aimed at getting him to justify Intellectual Ventures’ habit of acquiring patents, licensing them, and suing companies that appear to be infringing on tho[...]

Microsoft rolls out Office 365 for Government, notes privacy concerns

Posted by VentureBeat

Not only is Microsoft serious about the cloud, but it’s also serious about keeping its customers in the government happy. acknowledges
Today the company announced a new version of its cloud-based document software suite Office 365 for Government. Essentially, government version does everything its consumer counterpart does, including Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, Office Professional Plus, and more.
“We also know that security and privacy play a big role in any decision to move to the cloud,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post announcing the new version. “Today, Office 365 supports the most rigorous global and regional standards such as ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, EU Safe Harb[...]