Tuesday, October 26, 2010

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CherryPad Orders Unfulfilled, Customers Antsy Top
The Android-powered CherryPad was supposed to amaze us all with its amazing features and low, low price of $188. That said, folks who ordered a CherryPad probably haven’t seen it yet even though news of the device first appeared in September and most CherryPads should have shipped already. One reader, WCS, wrote us saying that he expected his pad to ship on October 15. That date rolled by and on October 20 he received a “tracking number” that tracks no existing package in the UPS, Fedex, DHL, or USPS databases. And then he waited. And waited. And waited. He writes: The Cherrypal “Support” forum (if you can call it that: replies to questions are not permitted, except by the Administrator, and it appears to actually be a polling platform) is increasingly showing posts from people who have received neither their Cherrypad nor their tracking number. In response, the Administrator claims the delay was caused by a typhoon in the Philippines and that everything is fine and users in California and Italy have received their units. Oh, and the “forum” cleverly substitutes the word “issue” when one types “scam”. Read more…
 
PayPal Apps Launches With Merchants In Mind Top
Today, at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco, PayPal is releasing an embedded apps platform that will give PayPal developers a fully integrated set of small business, and buyer and seller tools that enhance PayPal’s payments platform. PayPal Apps allows developers to embed applications directly on the PayPal website and offer SaaS apps which enhance PayPal's services. It’s similar in theory to eBay’s apps for Sellers. The new platform, which is launching with a number of pilot partners today, will be released to the public next year. For example, Shipping and order management startup Shipwire Anywhere has partnered with PayPal to gve developers a complete suite of shipping tools and multi-channel order management to manage their shipping without leaving PayPal. Other initial apps partners include Bill.com, CreditKarma, Expensify, Freshbooks, and Zuora are already building apps into PayPal.com. PayPal also launched its new micropayments product this morning, and announced Facebook as an initial partners. CrunchBase Information PayPal Information provided by CrunchBase
 
WePay Drops 600 Pounds Of Ice In Front Of PayPal Conference, Hilarity Ensues Top
If you’re headed to PayPal’s big developer conference in San Francisco today, you may spot an unusual landmark sitting in front of the Moscone Center: a massive, 600 pound block of ice with hundreds of dollars locked beneath the surface. The frigid booty comes compliments of the WePay team, and they’re trolling PayPal’s conference in an effort to tell everyone in attendance that “PayPal freezes your accounts” and that you should “unfreeze your money”… by switching to WePay, of course. It’s still early in the day, but the block of ice has already led to quite a bit of drama, including a moderate-speed chase involving a pallet mover. According to WePay cofounder Rich Aberman, the WePay squad wheeled the ice block over to the Moscone Center on a pallet mover and dropped off the cargo without issue. Aberman then quickly dashed away with the mover in tow, which he planned to hide nearby (Moscone security wouldn’t be able to remove the ice block without it). Aberman made it 2.5 blocks before being chased down by a member of the Moscone security team, who proceeded to grab the pallet mover and wheel it back to the block of ice. After getting the ice back onto the mover, he wheeled it off Moscone property. Now Aberman tells me that the WePay team has resorted to wheeling the ice in a circle around the block. WePay competes with PayPal on the group payments front. The service makes it easy to accept payments from multiple people, which makes it well-suited for everything from event ticketing to splitting your monthly bills with your roommate (without all the lame IOUs). In some ways, PayPal has this coming — and not just because of its account freeze issues. Back in its earlier days when it was still sparring with eBay, a group of PayPal employees headed to southern California for a major eBay event. The PayPal team then proceeded to offer conference attendees a chance at winning hundreds of dollars — but only if they wore special PayPal-branded T-shirts to the conference the next day. Many of them did, and eBay got to watch its conference get taken over by a competitor. Of course, eBay then went on to acquire PayPal. CrunchBase Information WePay Information provided by CrunchBase
 
PayPal Unveils Micropayments For Digital Goods, Facebook Signs Up Top
At the company’s annual developer conference today, PayPal debuted its much awaited micropayments product. According to a release issued by the company, the new product is an “in-context, frictionless payment solution that lets consumers pay for digital goods and content in as little as two clicks, without ever having to leave a publisher's game, news, music, video or media site.” PayPal equates the product as the online equivalent of dropping a quarter into a game machine. Pricing is set at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12, which PayPal says is lower than the fees typically charged by payment processors. For example, under standard PayPal pricing, a $1.00 transaction would incur a fee of $0.33. Osama Bedier, VP of platform, mobile and new ventures for PayPal says the product allows developers and merchants to get the revenue right away.With micropayment pricing, it would cost $0.10. While PayPal for digital goods will be available late fall this year, Facebook will soon integrate the new digital goods payment product. The company also announced a number of other partners including Autosport.com, FT.com, GigaOM, Justin.tv, Ooyala, Plimus, Tagged, Tyler Projects and Ustream. As we’ve written in the past, this product is huge for the payments industry because it can be used for an easier payments experience across a variety of industries, including gaming, online content and premium video. While the payments structure is slightly different than PayPal’s traditional take, this could bring in serious dough for PayPal considering the existing reach of the payments plaform. In 2009 alone, PayPal processed more than $2 billion in transactions for digital goods (out of $72 billion in total). In the first half of 2010, the company has processed more than $1.3 billion, and is in track to see $3 billion by the end of the year. In fact, over 50 percent of direct in-app transactions for virtual goods within social gaming environments are going through PayPal. The Facebook deal is pretty significant because there are a massive amount of micropayments that flow through the social network on a daily basis with Facebook Credits, gaming and more. Bedier says that the new payments platform brings value beyond just gaming—he says that video, news, even TV could use the digital goods payments service. For example, Ooyala has started using the platform as a payments mechanism for premium content. The Financial Times says that it has 189,000 digital subscribers who pay for its online news content. The news publication is using PayPal for micropayments, subscription payments and more. PayPal also announced embedded payments, which allows developers to insert direct purchases on any site, including Facebook with only a few lines of code. So purchasers can just click the “Pay with PayPal” button and checkout without having to leave the page. The company demoed the product using a Payvment storefront on Facebook. One of the more interesting demonstrations was FourthWall Media’s demonstration of its TV “Buy Button” using PayPal. The button allows TV users to essentially buy products on TV using their PayPal account. CrunchBase Information PayPal Information provided by CrunchBase
 
MapCrunch: It's Chatroulette Meets Google Street View Top
If Google Street View and Chatroulette mated and gave birth to a lovechild, it’d look a lot like MapCrunch . For the record, this is not a TechCrunch network site, and would have probably been better off with a name like MapRoulette or StreetviewRoulette or something. Either way, if you want to be taken to a random location on Google Street View (in North America, Europe, Asia or Australasia), either by clicking a button or automagically after a couple of seconds, MapCrunch is the mash-up place to be. Granted, it’s a silly little idea and site, but I still find it kind of mesmerizing, at least for a couple of minutes, to watch these random sceneries from all over the world pass by. Big plus: unlike Chatroulette, chances are pretty thin you’ll see some random dude masturbating every few seconds. Pro tip: enable the ‘Slideshow’ feature and just lean back. Update: also check Globe Genie and this one made by StreetViewFunny . Here’s a quick and dirty screencast I recorded: CrunchBase Information Chatroulette! Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Goodbye, MacBook Pro. The New MacBook Air Is That Good. Top
Last Wednesday, I got my hands on one of the new MacBook Airs. I haven’t touched my MacBook Pro since. It’s six months old . RIP. I know that sounds outrageous. Or like hyperbole. But it’s not. When I wrote up my initial thoughts , it was after only a few hours of usage. I hadn’t even used it outside the house yet. But now I have. I’ve used it almost everywhere I’ve been for just about a week now. There’s no question in my mind that this has replaced my MacBook Pro as my go-to machine. But here’s the really crazy thing. It’s not just the size of the thing that I love so much (I have the 13-inch model) — which is amazing — it’s the speed. This thing boots up in less than 15 seconds, ready to go. My i7 iMac with 8 GB of RAM takes something like 2 minutes. My i7 MacBook Pro takes at least 30-45 seconds, and it has an SSD drive. Applications seem to load quicker. Files transfer quicker. The thing shuts down in about 3 seconds. Macworld has the initial benchmarks . They don’t lie. It just screams. And by speed, I also mean “power”. Remarkably, for the first time that I’ve used one, this MacBook Air doesn’t feel underpowered. At all. Again, for the past 6 months I’ve been using a combination of an i7 iMac and an i7 MacBook Pro. Judging from processor, clock speed, and amount of RAM, both should be significantly faster than this Air. For certain tasks, they undoubtedly are. But for pretty much everything I’ve done this past week — basically, my regular work and play habits — I really can’t say I notice a difference. This definitely surprised me. Again, Macworld’s initial benchmark numbers seem to at least partially back up such a crazy claim. I have the baseline 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB flash storage hard drive. Their tests have this thing performing better than the 13-inch MacBook Pro with a faster Core 2 Duo processor and double the RAM. And it’s not that far off from the i5 Pro model. They largely credit the flash storage hard drive. And that’s undoubtedly a huge part of the performance. But another part is likely that previous MacBook Airs have run underclocked to deal with heat issues. That doesn’t appear to be happening with these models. So they can purr along at full speed. And it shows. Earlier tonight, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber wrote a post wondering where this new Air fits into Apple’s MacBook lineup? It is a good question considering the base model is the same $999 price as the base MacBook model. He thinks it might fit in as a secondary computer. I agree — for now. There is one thing holding back the Air: storage space. Thanks largely to Apple themselves, we live in a world where we have digital music, photos, movies, and TV shows that take up dozens, if not hundreds of gigabytes of storage. Because of this, a 128 GB hard drive isn’t enough for many people these days if they’re going to be using the Air as their primary machine . Increasingly, even 256 GB isn’t enough. Hell, I’m nearing 1 TB of media on my iMac. But. We all know that Apple has aspirations to move all of this media to the cloud . If they can do that and cut the chains around these machines, they’re going to fly. Off the shelves. In a hurry. Here’s how I see it: if storage didn’t matter, I think this 13-inch MacBook Air would almost immediately be Apple’s best-selling Mac. It’s that good. I can’t speak to the 11-inch model, as I haven’t used it, but it’s getting rave reviews as well . The 13-inch model I’m talking about here is the base model which is $1,299. The 11-inch models start at $999. It’s funny that I haven’t really even talked about the size of the machine yet — that’s the glittering lure that ropes people in. But the Air has always had that. What it didn’t have previously was a great price and killer performance. Now it does. Just in the past six days, five people that I’ve showed this thing to have already bought one. That’s the stuff iPhones and iPads are made of. It has the “wow” factor. And regardless of if storage capabilities hold it back or not, I have no doubt that the Air does point to the future of the MacBook lineup. They’re soon all going to lose their optical drives , gain flash storage drives, and work for hours on end. In fact, the only machine I can think of that I might enjoy more than this one is one that lasts even longer. To get that, I’d accept a model that’s slightly larger (15-inches), slightly heavier (maybe 3.3 pounds), but had 10 hours of battery life. That’s the future MacBook Pro right there. Speaking of battery life, again, this thing shines pretty nicely in that category as well. Apple says it will get 7-hours, and based on my usage, that’s close. I’m usually seeing between 5 and 6 hours depending on what I’m doing and screen brightness. A couple times I have gotten about 7 hours. As for the supposed 30 days of standby time? It’s hard to imagine me not using this thing for 30 days at a time, but I will say that I’ve gone to bed with it at 50 percent power and woken up several hours later with it at 49 percent power. And yes, the thing wakes up from sleep instantaneously. The only thing you have to wait for is for your WiFi to connect. As for the screen? Again, I thought it would be an issue switching from a 15-inch MacBook Pro to this, but it’s really not. This thing has the same 1440-by-900 resolution as the standard 15-inch MacBook Pro screen, so, there you go. People also can’t seem to believe when I tell them it doesn’t run hot. But it doesn’t. The only times I’ve felt it getting a little bit warm is when I’ve run — surprise, surprise — multiple Flash movies. But the heat doesn’t come close to my MacBook Pro. That doesn’t come close to my old MacBook Pro which was an upside down stove at points. It’s hard to know what else to say. This is the computer I’ve been waiting for . It makes me feel foolish for spending almost three grand on a brand new souped-up MacBook Pro six months ago. I just can’t think of a time I’ll ever want to or need to turn it on again. Goodbye, MacBook Pro. Your candle burned out long before your hard drive ever did. CrunchBase Information MacBook Air Information provided by CrunchBase
 
WITN: "I Don't Care what a Rich Person in Camden, Maine Says" Top
As he explains here , Paul spent the latter half of last week in Maine for PopTech. Which is great because while he was outside the Valley he was eligible to be a guest on Why Is This News. In this week’s episode, then, he talks about his highlights of the conference and elaborates on his comparison between it and TED. Meanwhile Sarah finds herself in the unusual position of being the one defending TED. Video below.
 

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