Tuesday, September 29, 2009

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Touching: All Rumors Point To The End Of Keys/Buttons Top
Anyone who has followed Apple news/rumors/patents over the past couple of years has probably noticed a certain trend emerging: Apple seems to be slowly shifting its entire line of products to touch-based computing. That is to say, it’s moving its products away from buttons and keys, towards manipulation through a touchscreen interface. While obviously, MacBook trackpads have used some level of touch for a long time, this trend really started with the iPhone, which presented the first excellent use of multi-touch in a consumer device. From there, Apple slowly began adding multi-touch support to the aforementioned notebook trackpads, to the point where they all now feature it. And then of course, there’s the iPod touch, which is an iPod with multi-touch support. But where things really start to get interesting is when you look at Apple’s patents and the rumors that spin out of them. If you name any Apple product now, you’re almost for sure able to find some sort of rumor that it will be gaining touch support in the future. In fact, a few more have hit just this week; including a touch screen remote for the Apple TV and a new multi-touch enabled mouse. Touch Remote These latest two make varying degrees of sense. Apple’s current remote (that tiny white one), which comes with the Apple TV and as an additional add-on with any Mac, is pretty bad. It’s especially bad for the Apple TV, which now has so much content on it, that it can take dozens of clicks to find what you want. And God-forbid you have to search for anything (nothing is worse than text-input on that thing). But Apple came up with a very smart solution for it: Turn the iPhone and iPod touch into a remote. The result is brilliant . But would Apple really create create a new touch device that is only a remote? Such a peripheral would undoubtedly be exponentially more expensive than what it costs to produce the current Apple remote. But if Apple is finally ready to consider the Apple TV a real product (rather than just a “hobby”), it could well put in the effort to perfect a new kind of remote for a new kind of living room experience. Boy Genius Report, which is reporting on the rumor, says it comes from the same source that was dead-on in naming some of the iTunes 9 features weeks before that product launched. Touch Mouse A touch-enabled mouse is much more interesting to me. Some of you may recall my rant a few months ago against Apple’s Mighty Mouse. The device, quite frankly, sucks . And really, it continues a line of Apple mice (or whatever the plural of “mouse” is) that have been laughably sub-par. And what’s interesting about that is the reason they have been sub-par: Because Apple did not want to add multiple buttons to the thing. So in that regard, a multi-touch mouse makes perfect sense. It could eliminate the need for Apple to add more buttons to make a competent mouse, while at the same time adding new input functionality that we probably don’t even realize we’re missing with current mice (swipe left, swipe right, pinch to zoom, anyone?). And the worst part of the Mighty Mouse, in my opinion, is the track ball. The reason it’s awful is because it gets dirty way too easily, and it’s annoying to clean. Again, a mouse with say, a multi-touch top, would eliminate that ball, and thus, the headache. Touch Tablet Of course, the big fish in the touch sea is Apple’s long-rumored tablet. More rumors today suggest that device could be announced in January 2010 (which is what earlier rumors suggested as well ), and would be released sometime around the middle of 2010. I don’t think I’m going out on any limb by assuming the device is real at this point (we, along with many others, have been hearing about it for months now). So when it does launch, it will likely be the most important test yet of Apple’s touch goals. For all intents and purposes it will be a computer that is just a 9 or 10 inch screen. It undoubtedly will not have a physical keyboard, which means it will be entirely touch-based. How consumers react to this will be important. I would bet that at first, many will wish there was a physical keyboard to go along with it (and maybe Apple would even offer such an accessory as an option add-on). But then, as they get used to it, many of those people will forget all about the keyboard. The same thing has happened with iPhone. While plenty of people still bitch about its lack of keyboard, most of those people seem to be those who don’t actually have one (yes, there are exceptions), and/or haven’t used the touch keyboard extensively. Many iPhone users I talk to thought they would hate having no keyboard, but now would just consider it a waste of space. Touch Beyond And the idea that a physical keyboard is a waste of space is an interesting one, and one that I definitely agree with. The notion of a physical keyboard in this day and age is kind of silly. Back in the day they made sense as keyboard keys were physically connected to typewriter letters, and pushing one would produce type. But today, on computers, touching a key simply triggers a digital signal. Really, the keys are not necessary beyond our desire for tactile feedback. And they are a huge waste of space. While it may be hard to imagine right now, eventually there will not be physical keyboards. Apple’s tablet may well be the first product that will get users accustomed to this idea. And yes, as I said, plenty will bitch. But eventually, technology will improve, and virtual tacile feedback will improve, and there will be no need to take up so much surface area on any device with physical keys that really serve no purpose. That’s not to say that all computers will look like tablets. Certainly, there is something to be said for the ergonomics of the notebook — the keyboard on the bottom with screen on top. If you had to type long emails on a tablet, you’d either be looking straight down or your arms would get very tired. But eventually, notebooks will be folding devices with two screens, one where the current screen is, and one where the current keyboard is. This bottom screen could then be turned into a virtual keyboard as needed. Otherwise, it would be a touch manipulation area — or even just a screen. Or another idea is to have a tablet computer which could be converted into a keyboard with a screen that is then projected on some surface. Or vice versa; a screen with a virtual keyboard projected on some surface. Stuff like this graces the pages of publications like Popular Science every month, and it’s probably closer than we think, and certainly closer than some of us would like to think (remember: people don’t like change). Touch Microsoft Of course, Apple rival Microsoft is working on a lot of interesting things with touch computing as well, including the Surface and touch-support in Windows 7. Microsoft’s first true test of touch in its consumers products is the Zune HD. Early reviews are good , and you can probably expect Microsoft to pass along its notes on the device to some of its phone-making partners. Meanwhile, the Surface is an interesting device but it’s still too much of a gimmick at this point. There needs to be third-party software support (we’ve been told that has been coming forever), and more importantly, the thing needs to be thousands of dollars cheaper if anyone is ever expected to actually use it. Microsoft’s TouchWall is probably the much more interesting technology to watch as it relates to consumers. But there hasn’t been much word on that in a long time. Microsoft’s touch device getting the most buzz the past couple of weeks is the Courier tablet . Unlike Apple’s tablet, which is expected to be media-centric, it appears the Courier will be a virtual notebook of sorts that you manipulate with both your hands and a special pen. It looks very cool, and it’s apparently running Windows 7. And that means it’s likely much closer than the mock-ups and videos may have you believe. In fact, it could come as soon as mid-2010, just like Apple’s tablet, sources tell Mary Jo Foley . If that’s true, Microsoft looks to be at the leading edge of the touch revolution right alongside Apple. But because Apple has much tighter control over its entire ecosystem, it will undoubtedly be able to fully shift towards touch computing first, and as such, could well become synonymous with the technology (just as the iPhone has with multi-touch, even though other devices use it). The Golden Age Of Touch Computing, as we know it, is on the verge of a transformation. The input devices of yesteryear finally look ready to be replaced by methods that are not based on technologies that are decades (the mouse) or even centuries (the keyboard) old. It won’t happen right away, but it is starting to happen already. We just need devices like the ones listed above to serve as gateway drugs to touch. I, personally, can’t wait for my Minority Report -style computer system (yes, I seem to bring this up every few months). But for now, I’ll settle for a multi-touch mouse. Oh, and a touch tablet. No matter who makes it . [Minority Report images: 20th Century Fox/Dreamworks] Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Sean Parker Joins Yammer's Board Of Directors Top
Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer , where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors, we’ve learned. Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50 , recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client . We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications . As the core concepts behind Yammer are quickly becoming features that others in the enterprise space are realizing they will need to compete with, Parker’s guidance should help the company maintain an advantage, and push forward. Parker is currently serving as the Chairman of Causes , one of the most popular social networking applications, and is a Managing Partner at the VC firm, Founder’s Fund . He is perhaps best known for serving as Facebook’s President during the time it was founded. That role is about to get the Hollywood treatment in David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Social Network , based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the early days of Facebook. Parker also served as an expert panelist at this year’s TechCrunch50 a few weeks ago. Mr. Parker joins George Zachary , Keith Rabois , Adam Ross, Adam Pisoni , and David Sacks on Yammer’s board. The latter two serve as Yammer’s VP of Technology and CEO, respectively. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Financial Startups Demo Their Dashboards At Finovate Top
The following guest post is written by Larry Chiang , a co-founder of Duck9 who also regularly blogs for BusinessWeek . Today he is reporting from the Finovate startup conference. At the FinovateStartup conference in New York City today, it is clear that financial startups are pushing forward regardless of funding woes or a lackluster economy Companies here at Finovate center around financial innovations. They track personal finance and are aggressively plodding forward because consumer adoption of the internet is rising. These companies did not just present ideas, they brought along established industry stalwarts to their demos. What’s more, many of these start-ups are already white labeling their product and integrating into established company sites (T-Mobile ads, Yahoo, Bank of America). The user interfaces are better than average, which is perhaps influenced by Finovate’s previous winner Mint . Best in Show went to Kasasa , an Austin, Texas-based financial website that uses real-world rewards and charity donations to get people to open free deposit accounts. They dragged a community banker up to the stage who gave a testimonial about Kasasa’a ability to generate new saving accounts. BillShrink showed off a location-based ATM fee avoider and bank account selector . Canopy has tools to better understand and manage healthcare cost, including Health Savings Accounts. Their oh-so-chic iPhone App matches up medical services to your personal HSA. A typical company presenting was SmartyPig , which adds a social component to saving. It crowd-shares personal saving goals for a vacation or a set of golf clubs. FinanceWorks demonstrated online banking data aggregated into TurboTax. Outright takes and scrapes sales data for one-person businesses (such as eBay sellers) and helps the entrepreneur alleviate the burden of quarterly tax pre-payments. Home-Account seeks to be a Kayak for loan mortgage shopping. It plugs into Homes.com, Movoto.com and Bills.com and ‘B’- and “C”-grade paper companies like Freedom Financial Network. Most of the sites demoed today offer features such as interest payment tracking, loan shopping, expense account summaries and more everyday, core consumer finance applications. Many of the demos featured summaries of expenses, and visually extrapolated spending behaviors to identify trends. For example, Credit.com boils down 20+ pages of credit reports into one graph (with a trend line). At the heart of the functionality for consumer finance are apps that summarize “money in” / ‘money out’. In the same way that dashboards revolutionized the ability of C-suite officers to forecast a company’s revenues and expenses, the average consumer now is able to get dozens of data points that paint a picture of their personal budgets. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Dropbox Meets The iPhone; Access Files On The Go Top
Dropbox , the easy to use file access manager which syncs your files across all your computers and the web, has introduced an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. After almost 7 weeks of waiting, Apple has finally approved the application. With this new iPhone app, users will get access to all their Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your 'Favorites', they'll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud. One of Dropbox’s core features is sharing your files and folders stored in the cloud with anyone else who has a Dropbox account, and the iPhone is no exception. Users can easily share their Dropbox files and folders from their iPhone to any other Dropbox user by putting in their email address, just like on the web. The app allows users to upload photos for 3G users, and videos if you have an iPhone 3GS. What’s really cool about Dropbox’s iPhone app is that you can even stream music and movies from your Dropbox straight to your iPhone, without any noticeable delay. Dropbox’s app is also heavily integrated into Apple’s camera API with straight photo and video uploading available too. Just a few days ago, Dropbox reached 2 million users. Dropbox was a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
The VC, The Professor, And The Valley Of Death Top
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @ vwadhwa . Everyone seems to be waiting for the next great discovery which will change the world. But, believe it or not, the next Internet, semiconductor, or breakthrough in MRI technology may already have been discovered. It's just languishing on the shelves of the university research labs you drive by on your way to work every day. University researchers don't know how to commercialize their discoveries and smart, hungry entrepreneurs looking to meet the next Larry or Sergey don't know how to find them. These parallel universes rarely meet (well, except sometimes at Stanford). In 2007, U.S. universities performed $48.8 billion of research and filed 17,589 U.S. patent applications. In that same year universities received back revenues for licensing and royalties on patents of less than $2 billion. Those revenues include ongoing royalties from all of the research licensed over the past 40 years. The implication is clear. An astonishing amount of promising research is left in the lab. When I say this to university administrators, they get incredibly defensive (almost like the VC's I pissed off with my last post .) They rightfully argue that the role of the university is to teach and to add to the world's knowledge base. The real benefit comes from the students who universities educate, who go and start the Apples and Microsoft's. No argument there. But we have a goldmine of knowledge and potential innovation locked in our research universities. This goldmine could fuel the next two decades of economic growth. It is time to mine this goldmine. I'll sketch out a little treasure map for you in part two on this topic, posting later this week, but first, you need to know more about the inhabitants of the other dimension. Some of the brightest people in the universe work in our universities. After getting a science or engineering Masters degree (which could earn them six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley) they slog it out for 4-6 years at close to minimum wage to get their PhD's. Then they wait another decade to *maybe* become a full professor, usually by working at a series of lesser university jobs in less than optimal cities or towns. Even those PhDs who get tenure usually don’t make anything near what senior tech guys make in industry. Clearly they are not in it for the money. Rather their twin desires are often to acquire knowledge for knowledge’s sake and to do good for the world. I know these are foreign concepts to some of you, but this is the academic world. And by the way, they often see the business world as the "evil empire" that robs their discoveries of purity and puts a dollar sign on anything it can. For those reasons, they are usually more concerned about disseminating knowledge and publishing academic papers than creating patents that limit how this knowledge can be used. (I have known many academics who refuse to file patents because they don’t believe in them). These purists worry about the conflicts of interest that can arise when taking money from industry might be perceived to color their research. And they want to ensure that their teaching activities are not adversely impacted by the time spent on commercialization efforts. To make things worse, the funding which universities received from the government usually only covers the cost of writing some papers. They don't get enough to build a prototype or prove their technology. This is what most VC's want to see at a minimum before investing in technology, to make sure they are not investing in a “science project,” the industry term for leap-of-faith investments in lab science discoveries. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of university technology withers on the vine. This chasm between promising benchwork and investable prototype, between what professors and VCs can and are willing to do, is also known as the "Valley of Death". The challenge is to create a bridge between these researchers and the VCs or idea-seeking entrepreneurs who know to turn an idea into an invention. Many of the ideas and breakthroughs are easy to exploit and just require enterprising minds to come together with inquiring minds. But others require the investment and support which only VC's can provide. (Hey, I never said that venture capital didn't serve an important purpose – just that VC's don't innovate.) Taking these types of hard science discoveries from bench to fab or factory is sometimes very, very hard work that often does require VC capital, fat Rolodexes, and regulatory and industry specific operational expertise. But someone has to take these discoveries into a stage beyond "science project" – and this is where the entrepreneurs need to step in again—to hand VC's the "technology on a platter" that they expect. I asked a colleague at Duke University, Barry Myers – who is considered to be one of the leading biomedical researchers in the world and also happens to work part-time at a VC firm (weird, isn't it?), to help me create a guide for the adventurous entrepreneur. I must warn you that this isn't going to be easy. In my next post, I’ll walk you through what Barry said. Yes, we've got a cliffhanger. (Photo credit: Jon Sullivan ) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Mint Widget And Other YAP Apps Make It To Yahoo's Home Page Top
With the new Yahoo homepage that was previewed last July and is now rolling out more broadly as part of Yahoo’s new “It’s Y!ou” branding exercise , the main Yahoo homepage is taking on more of the personalization features on MyYahoo. There are all sorts of handy widgets in the left-hand column ranging from Facebook status updates to Gmail to any news feed (just type in a URL like Techcrunch.com and it will add the feed). When you hover over any of the widgets, a box opens up covering most of the homepage with information from that widget. Today, Yahoo is making it possible to add applications made on the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) to that sidebar as well. One of the first apps it is launching with is from personal finance tracker Mint , with its Budget by Mint widget. Other YAP apps launching today on the homepage include A-Z Wine Pairings from MyRecipes & Snooth, Books weRead by WeRead, Brain Trainer by Lumosity, a social version of the Flood-it game by LabPixies, kaChing’s virtual stock portfolio app, Movies by Flixster, and WordPRess QuickPress. YAP is part of Yahoo’s Open Strategy that it kicked off last year. The Budget by Mint widget and other YAP apps are already available on MyYahoo , but getting on the main Yahoo homepage potentially puts it on front of 118 million American users a month, versus 25 million for My Yahoo (comScore). The app ties into your Mint account, and shows pie charts and bar graphs of your budget, spending trends, and alerts. You can see the percentage of your budget that is going to taxes, shopping, dining, bills, and other expenses, and even share that with your friends if you are into that sort of personal financial transparency. Mint launched two years ago at TechCrunch40, and was bought by Intuit for $170 million earlier this month. Here is what the Budget by Mint widget looks like when it opens up in Yahoo: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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