Friday, April 6, 2012

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HTC's Rough Q1: Profits Down 70% Over Last Year, Revenue Dips 35% Top
htc-slippingHTC released their unaudited Q1 2012 earnings earlier this morning, and the results aren't pretty [PDF]. The Taiwanese company managed to pull down NT$67.8 billion ($2.3 billion) this past quarter, a nearly 35% dip year-over-year. What's more, HTC took an even bigger hit when it came to net income after taxes — in Q1, they only raked in NT$4.4 billion ($149 million), compared to the NT$14.8 billion ($501 million) in profits earned this time last year. Ouch. Just… ouch.
 
Do We Even Need NFC For Mobile Payments? PayPal, Google Weigh In (Video) Top
DavidMarcus-posterIf you tried to judge whether NFC mobile payments are ready for prime time — based on the amount of chatter you hear in your newsfeed — you'd think the contactless technology was on the brink of ubiquitous adoption. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there are documented sources out there citing that we are four, five, maybe even ten years away from a realistic and entrenched infrastructure that would allow the masses to make face-to-face payments using secure elements embedded in smart cards and mobile phones. Five years. Just think about where you were five years ago. What kind of phone did you have? Where did you work? How did you communicate with others in these days of yore? Seriously, what has changed for you in that time? What has changed in your environment in that time?
 
Arianna Huffington No Longer Runs The Aol Tech Sites Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-05 at 8.02.18 PMYou know every once in a while you come across news about your company and it turns out your boss is no longer your boss anymore. If you're me this probably happens to you every three months. Anyways this morning I read in the media that Arianna Huffington (who I think used to be my boss) gained more control within Aol and then subsequently read that actually she had been "demoted." Okay truth please guys?!
 
Seven Top
se7en-movie-title-stillWill Apple make a 7 inch iPad? That's the question being batted around yet again today. The true answer right now is easy: I don't know. No one does. Most likely not even Apple. They're undoubtedly thinking about it. And may even have to make a call soon. But it has probably not been decided just yet. But that's a lame answer. Let's sexy it up using history, logic, and common sense. Will Apple make a 7 inch iPad? Yes.
 
Nonprofit "Digital Public Library Of America" To Launch In April 2013 Top
iconThe Google Books project (just today pared down a bit) always impressed me with its sheer scope. Offering modern e-books is all well and good, but that's more of a business problem. It's the scanning and free availability of thousands upon thousands of old books that struck me as a worthwhile endeavor. But publishers and booksellers have been wary of the service, knowing that Google is a fan of free, and their scan-first, ask-permission-later strategy caused some consternation as well. And while access to all that knowledge is appreciated, it is lost on no one that the data is in the hands of a for-profit company. Enter the Digital Public Library of America, which aims to create a similar catalog of works, but both more comprehensive and unimpeded by commercial motives. It's been in the works for a while, but it seems it may finally launch as early as a year from now.
 
Nextpeer Pledges To Make Any Mobile Game As Social As OMGPOP's "Draw Something" Top
nextpeerThere were plenty of other Pictionary-like games in the iTunes app store before OMGPOP's Draw Something. But the secret ingredient behind Draw Something's runaway success was its very social, asynchronous gameplay. Most independent game designers don't necessarily have the extra manpower to build an engine that supports this. That's where an Israeli startup called Nextpeer comes in. It's kind of like the next generation of OpenFeint, a mobile-social gaming network that was acquired by Japanese gaming giant GREE for $104 million last year. Game designers can integrate Nextpeer's SDK to let their players compete against each other. Up until now, Nextpeer only supported synchronous gameplay, meaning that players had to be available at the same time. But now Nextpeer is offering an asynchronous mode, which means that players can finish a round whenever they have a spare moment. That's the secret sauce that has made games like Zynga's Words With Friends and then Draw Something insanely viral.
 
VCs: Secondary Funding Markets Are A Double-Edged Sword Top
Chinese_saberA lot of things have changed in Silicon Valley in recent years -- apps have access to a plug-and-play social infrastructure provided by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, the mobile boom has truly made the post-PC world a reality, services such as cloud computing allow startups to function at leaner levels than ever before, and so on. But for founders and investors, perhaps one of the most significant shifts has come from the increasingly common occurrence of late-stage funding rounds that are largely secondary stock purchasing situations. In a panel discussion held last night by Wealthfront at the Rosewood Hotel, the longtime Silicon Valley dealmaking hotspot, VC heavyweights Sameer Gandhi of Accel Partners, Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, and Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital discussed the upsides and downsides of this seemingly unstoppable trend.
 
Wingsplay Pays Influencers To Spread Viral Videos, Runs Campaigns For NBC And Oxygen Top
Logo_Wingsplay HDIf a business creates a fun, potentially viral video, what's the best way to convince people to share it? Wingsplay has a straightforward idea: Pay them. So advertisers pay Wingsplay to promote videos that they want to go viral. "Influencers" with accounts on Wingsplay then visit the site to watch the videos. If they like one, they can post a link to the video on Facebook, Twitter, or a blog, along with a personal message and the "#viralad" hashtag (to comply with the FTC's disclosure requirements). Then the influencers are paid based on every "seed" view of the video that they generate.
 
Twitter Puts Its Foot Down, Takes Five Biggest Spammers To Federal Court Top
no-spamA warning: You can only spam Twitter so much before it brings in the law. As Twitter grows -- the company now claims to have 140 million active users -- naturally, it's become an attractive target for spammers, which have collectively made their drek a familiar part of the social network's user experience. Now Twitter is officially putting its foot down and enlisting the help of the federal courts, filing a suit in San Francisco today against its five most aggressive spammers. In pursuing legal action, Twitter said in a statement on its blog, it believes it's going "straight to the source".
 
Wipe It! Security Hole In Facebook Mobile Apps Threatens Jailbroken / Stolen Phones Top
Facebook Mobile SecurityThere's panic about a security hole in Facebook's iOS and Android apps that surfaced this week, but the threat of identity theft is being blown out of proportion. You only need to worry if your phone is actually stolen, and even then a hacker would need it to be jailbroken, use tools like iExplore, or they'd have to take the device apart. Once a hacker has full physical access to your phone, you have a lot more than Facebook to worry about, as the thief could steal your contacts, cookies, and access all your apps if the phone was unlocked. Really, this security hole highlights the new dangers of having your phone stolen. Owners should make sure they have a remote wipe solution ready to nuke all their data or else things could get ugly quick.
 
Mobile Ad Wars: Augme Slaps Millennial Media With Patent Lawsuit Over Targeting Technologies Top
28380_augmelogoAfter debuting on the New York Stock Exchange last week with a huge pop in stock value, mobile ad network Millennial Media is now facing potential legal trouble from another mobile ad player. The company is facing a patent lawsuit by mobile marketing service, Augme Technologies. We've embedded the lawsuit below. The lawsuit, which was filed in Delaware, says that the patents in question are all generally relating to "systems and methods for providing targeted content over the Internet." From the patent lawsuit: "The '721, the '636, and the '691 Patents are generally directed to the manner in which content provided in a Web page, such as advertisements, music, videos, and the like, is customized based on the end user's computing environment, connectivity, bandwidth level, geographic location, gender, age, or other targeting criteria such as behavioral marketing data."
 
At Long Last, The Nexus S 4G Finally Gets Its Ice Cream Sandwich Update Top
nexusicsHey all you Sprint customers, you haven't been forgotten after all! Sprint has just revealed that the device's Ice Cream Sandwich has finally gone live, which is great news if you're looking to squeeze some more life out of your aging Nexus S 4G before you move into something a bit more modern. Sprint has said the update will be pushed to all devices over the coming weeks, but if you're impatient -- which I can't blame you for -- you should be able to jumpstart the process by going into the device's settings and checking for the update.
 
The Meh-Too Crowd Top
glass_photos4It's been a while since I came to Google's defense but I think it's time to talk about what an absolute downer it is to dig through a lot of tech commentary these days. The most recent example came after the launch of Google's Glass project, a HUD for future travelers that will let us connect to our world in a fairly non-obtrusive way. Arguably, the product is pretty pie-in-the-sky, but all things being equal, the potential device, even if it includes a small subset of the features we saw in the video, is pretty cool. Instead of oohing and guffawing and going back to, you know, living his life, Old Man Gruber took some time out to dump three links to examples of the potential problems Glass faces. He noted, quite rightly, that only the worst companies created flashy videos of non-existant tech.
 
Facebook Picks NASDAQ Over NYSE For IPO Top
NASDAQAccording to The New York Times, Facebook has picked the NASDAQ to list its shares in the company's upcoming IPO in May. This is a huge win for the exchange, which has been battling the New York Stock Exchange for tech company listings over the past year. Facebook, which will list its shares under the symbol FB, is set to be the largest public offering since Google, reports The New York Times' Evelyn Rusli. And Facebook could be valued as high as $100 billion in the IPO.
 
Google Launches Android App To Improve Its Indoor Location Accuracy Top
logo_Google Maps Floor Plan MarkerGoogle Maps, Bing Maps and a number of startups have been offering indoor maps for large venues like airports, malls and stadiums for quite a while. The problem with indoor mapping, though, is that it’s pretty hard for these companies to actually tell you exactly where you are on these maps. GPS obviously doesn’t work well in these spaces and WiFi and cell tower triangulation just isn’t very accurate. Now, however, Google has come up with a plan to improve indoor location accuracy for venues in Google Maps: venue owners who have uploaded their floor plans to Google’s mapping service can now use a new Android app to provides Google with feedback about how accurate its predictions are for their locations. All they need is an Android device (including tablets) that runs Android 2.3 or up.
 
Attention Melbourne: You May Now Begin Hunting For Virtual Eggs Top
eggWith all the talk about the potential of Google Glass, I thought it might be nice to drop back in on the current state of Augmented Reality — the kind where you still use a smartphone to view markers or images. In the spirit of Google's "20-percent time", Melbourne Australia based mobile app development company jTribe developed an Augmented Reality Easter egg hunt for their fair city this Easter. The company took one day a week (for the last 10 weeks or so) to work on their own project which launches today. The app, which is called EggRaider, has a radar-style viewer to show the general direction of virtual eggs the company has attached to landmarks all around Melbourne. Once you get close to an egg, you switch to Augmented Reality view (by tapping the camera button in the app) to see the egg and collect it. "Race against friends and family to collect the most" says jTribe. *Note that the virtual eggs are only available at Melbourne, Australia landmarks. There is a demo view though, so you can get the idea of how it works if you are so inclined.
 
By The Numbers: Larry Page's First Year as Google's CEO Top
Larry Page TGoogle has historically been paranoid about any numbers it publicly releases. For years, the management triumvirate including Larry Page had to personally approve any numbers the company issued in public, a policy I believe still stands. So it's worth pointing out all the figures the company has decided to share in a letter to investors that caps off Page's first year at CEO:
 
Publishers Sue As Boundless Learning Grabs $8M For An Open Alternative To Textbooks Top
Screen shot 2012-04-05 at 2.47.48 AMIt seems it's a big news day for eBooks and eTextbooks. Google is winding down its eBook service for indie publishers, while Apple and top publishers are the subjects of domestic and European probes into eBook price-fixing. On top of that, Boston-based educational startup Boundless Learning, which is trying to offer students an open alternative to textbooks (and even eTextbooks), is itself on the receiving end of litigation, thanks to three top textbook publishers. But a little litigation isn't slowing down Boundless, as it today announced that it has closed an $8 million series A round, led by Venrock -- the VC firm that began as the original venture arm of the Rockefeller family. The sizable chunk of pre-launch funding adds to the $1.7 million seed round Boundless raised last year from Nextview, Founder Collective, Kepha, and SV Angel.
 
Spotify Says It's Just Like Radiohead, Turntable.fm Says David Bowie Top
radioheadYes, that's one of the more random headlines I've written, but look — I wasn't the one who said it. Executives from Spotify and Turntable.fm really did compare themselves to popular musicians, and Pandora and TastemakerX took turns, too. All four companies spoke at the closing panel at ad:tech conference in San Francisco yesterday, and they were all instructed by moderated Brad Berens to choose a single musician or band to represent their company. (The Beatles and Elvis were out, because they're too obvious.) Here's what they said:
 
Wikipedia's Mobile Apps Drop Google Maps for OpenStreetMap Top
openstreetmap_logoIn the world of online mapping, it feels like things aren't quite going in Google's direction these days: Apple switched away from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap when it launched iPhoto for iOS. Foursquare, too, announced a similar switch just a few weeks ago and today, Wikipedia switched to OpenStreetMap in the latest versions of its iOS and Android apps. As our own Josh Constine wrote last month, Google's plan to charge high-volume users for access to its Maps APIs could backfire and this most recent defection is yet another clear signal that we will probably see quite a few more of these moves in the near future.
 

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