The latest from TechCrunch
- Facebook's First Tablet App Will Be For The HP TouchPad, Not The iPad (Leaked Pics)
- Myspace Expected To Lay Off At Least 150 Employees On Wednesday
- A Massive Solar Flare Of Activity Pushes Tumblr To 400 Million Pageviews A Day
- IBM "Buildings Whisperer" Dave Bartlett On The Dumb Ways We Waste Energy
| Facebook's First Tablet App Will Be For The HP TouchPad, Not The iPad (Leaked Pics) | Top |
| The world has been waiting for an official Facebook tablet app, and waiting , and waiting . But that app may not appear on the iPad first (although Facebook is working on an iPad app for sure ). Instead, Facebook’s first tablet app will appear on the HP TouchPad, which comes out this Friday and runs the WebOS it bought with Palm . Unless the iPad app also launches this week, the TouchPad will become the first tablet with an official Facebook app. Given the tension between Apple and Facebook, a concurrent launch on the iPad seems unlikely. Update: Facebook has reached out to clarify that “this app was not built by Facebook but by HP.” How do I know? I got my hands on some screenshots of the Facebook app for the TouchPad. You can see them here. But what I wonder is if this is also what the app will look like on the iPad. All I can say for sure is that these pics are from Facebook’s tablet app running on WebOS. A few features stick out. Along the left rail, which pops in and out, you’ve got your main navigation: Newsfeed, Messages, Events, Places, Friends, and Photos. The Newsfeed can be viewed in both a stream view or a more tablet-friendly tile view. The tiles make better use of typography and images. Also notice the addition of Places and Photos to the left rail navigation. Places opens up a map with nearby activity and the ability to check in. Photos displays your Facebook photos in a tiled album view. Profiles also highlight people’s photos. You can toggle between their wall, info, and photos. Judging from these images and others I’ve seen, the app really takes advantage of the extra screen real estate to good effect. Photos and Places especially shine. I really hope the iPad app looks similar. | |
| Myspace Expected To Lay Off At Least 150 Employees On Wednesday | Top |
| We’ve confirmed the rumors of Myspace layoffs with our own inside source; From what I’m hearing the company expects to lay off at least 150 of its around 400 employees tomorrow (37.5% of its staff). According to the source, another group of around 150 employees will be put on a transition plan, where they will still be laid off but can work with pay for a few weeks while they search for another job. Myspace cut around 47% of its staff back in January and these new layoffs come as Myspace is preparing itself for a sale, which we’re hearing will be signed tomorrow and announced on Friday. While there are multiple rumors circling regarding who exactly will be buying the beleaguered social network, the names being tossed around include a bidding group fronted by Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, Buzzmedia, and even LivingSocial. In any case this is turning out to be a banner week for Myspace, which closes its fiscal year on Wednesday. I’ve emailed Myspace PR for comment, and will update this post when they get back to me. CrunchBase Information MySpace Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| A Massive Solar Flare Of Activity Pushes Tumblr To 400 Million Pageviews A Day | Top |
| Last month, founder David Karp noted that Tumblr was now seeing over 250 million pageviews a day. As we noted , that was incredible since as recently as July of 2009, they were seeing 250 million pageviews for the entire month . But it turns out that the numbers are much more incredible than they first appeared. I noticed this when Tumblr President John Maloney posted earlier today that Tumblr was now doing north of 8.4 billion monthly pageviews. That number was around 7 billion just a month ago, and when I drilled down into Tumblr’s publicly available numbers on Quantcast, I noticed a massive surge in pageviews in the last few weeks. So massive, in fact, that the data looks more like a solar flare. So what happened? It turns out, there was a bit of a bug in Tumblr’s data previously — one that led Quantcast to undercount pageview data. ”Last week we noticed a growing discrepancy between our Google Analytics and Quantcast numbers. It turns out that we broke our Quantcast tracking code a few weeks ago and were no longer reporting any impressions past page one of the Dashboard. We fixed it and quickly saw the Quantcast data jump up to near symmetry with GA,” Karp tells us. So what does that mean for Tumblr’s numbers? Well, throw that 250 million pageviews a day out the windows. Last Thursday, Tumblr hit 400 million pageviews for the day, Karp tells us. It’s close to 5,000 pageviews a second, he notes. Karp credits international growth and faster response times to Tumblr’s amazing trajectory. Maloney is more specific. “Tumblr’s growth the last few months has been remarkable, overshadowing everything in the past. It’s coming from all over the globe and across all demos, in particular teenagers,” he says. Both men are also quick to credit the Tumblr engineering team which has been handling the load after downtime problems earlier in the year. With the new data, Tumblr is now one of the top 25 sites in the U.S. according to the data Quancast tracks. [image: flickr/ nasa ] CrunchBase Information Tumblr Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| IBM "Buildings Whisperer" Dave Bartlett On The Dumb Ways We Waste Energy | Top |
| IBM’s Smarter Planet division released a new solution recently that can make buildings energy efficient— even if they are huge and 100 years old like the company itself. Vice president of the Smarter Buildings division at IBM, Dave Bartlett, visited TechCrunch TV to talk about the stupid ways that people waste energy in medium to large buildings, and how the company’s new Intelligent Building Management solution can change that. According to an IBM press statement: “Buildings consume 42 percent of all energy worldwide; energy costs represent about 30 percent of a building's total operating cost— up to 50 percent of energy and water are often wasted. By 2025, buildings will be the number one consumer of energy in the world. IDC Energy Insights estimates that the global Smart Building market was $3.1 billion for 2010 and is expected to grow to $10.2 billion by 2015.” To address this rampant power consumption, IBM’s new “Intelligent Building Management” solution does something with all the data from smart devices that have proliferated through the years. Sensor makers like Honeywell, Siemens, Eaton and Johnson Controls have made everything from refrigerators and water heaters, to computer labs and gymnasiums “smart,” Bartlett pointed out, so now it’s time to give people using them an easy way to read and act on the data they transmit. Known as "the buildings whisperer" in retrofit and construction circles, Bartlett further explained: “We’ve packaged up some recommended rule sets and technology [that can] essentially read a building, and say ‘if this is happening, do that.’ Customers can add their own rules, but we are taking what we’ve learned from working with partners and at our own campus [in Rochester] to be able to share general best practices, and make them easy to follow.” One problem that IBM’s new solution diagnoses and eliminates in buildings is called “concurrent heating and cooling.” That’s where occupants have the heat on in one part of the building, but the air conditioning on somewhere else. It’s more common than you’d think, Bartlett reported, and it’s generally a big un-necessary waste of power. IBM’s solution is being used to control energy consumption and costs at the Cloisters museum in New York City, at Boston University, and Tulane’s campus in New Orleans (image, right). The company is reaching out to everyone from neighborhood residents, to building owners and local power providers to figure out where the most energy goes in such buildings, where it can be safely reduced, and which systems maintenance tasks can be automated, leaving building owners and operators to focus their time and money on more critical repairs and upgrades. Previously, IBM used its own industrial and commercial buildings as a test lab of sorts. According to the company’s new, sustainability reports , the Intelligent Building Management solution saved IBM’s Rochester campus— which consists of three million square feet inside of 35 interconnected buildings— 8 percent on energy used, year over year. IBM’s move into smarter buildings technology could prove a challenge for growing startups like EcoFactor, Retroficiency and Hara. Then again, IBM could become one of the top buyers of their services, or possibly an acquirer of these type of tech ventures. Watch the video for more insights about energy waste and IBM’s approach to stopping it, above. Photo: Richardson Building at Tulane, via Tulane Public Relations | |
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