Tuesday, April 10, 2012

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Amazon's Takes In-App Purchases Out Of Beta: Here's How They're Getting Around That Pricing Issue Top
amazon-appsAmazon is taking the wraps off a new in-app purchasing service today in an effort to make its app store competitive with what Apple and Google offer developers. That should let developers for Amazon's appstore tap into what has emerged as the most lucrative revenue way of monetizing apps over the past year: staying free but offering virtual currency or other items for purchase inside the app. After undergoing testing for several months, the new in-app purchasing service is now available for everyone. It's based off Amazon's one-click buying experience and applies to digital content like in-game currency, expansion packs, upgrades and subscriptions from inside apps and games. But as I pointed out last week, the interesting part of this story is not whether Amazon is doing in-app purchases. It's obvious that the company would do this. The question is how is it setting up the pricing?
 
Android On Your PC: Qualcomm Invests In BlueStacks After Beta Sees 1M Downloads In 10 Days Top
New BlueStacks LogoIf you're an Android and a PC, you should check out BlueStacks --- before hackers catch on or Chrome sneaks in this functionality, take advantage. The startup's software has been going like hotcakes over the last few months, as it's offering a much-needed service for Android and PC users, having developed software that allows Android users to run their apps on all Windows PCs, tablets, and laptops — without any modifications. Thanks to this appealing concept, BlueStacks lured $7.6 million in venture funding pre-launch, $6.4 million more a few months later, and now it seems the yet another investor is on board. The startup finally released its public beta on March 27th, and so far users have been eating it up. In the first 10 days after its release, BlueStacks' App Player racked up more than 1 million downloads, with over 12 million apps collectively being run by its users. It's on the heels of this early traction that the company is today announcing that global telecom giant Qualcomm has joined as an investor.
 
The Nokia Lumia 900 Is Now Available In Canada, Hits The UK On April 27th Top
nokia-lumia-900The Nokia Lumia 900 train is rocking. After its first stop in the US on Easter Sunday, the party moved north of the border where Rogers is now selling the supersized Windows Phone. However, in a few short weeks, the phone will hit the UK on April 27th through Phones4U and Carphone Warehouse. It can be pre-ordered today.
 
Symbian Gets Productivity Power-Up With New Microsoft Office Mobile Apps Top
Office-edit-11The most notable fruit of Microsoft and Nokia's close working relationship is certainly the handsome line of Lumia Windows Phones, but the deal has had its share of fringe benefits as well. Take its impact on Symbian for instance — Microsoft announced last September that they would be giving the platform a shot in the arm with the initially Windows Phone-only Office productivity suite, and now they've made good on their word with the release of their Microsoft Office Mobile apps.
 
Photobucket Inks Editing Partnership With Pixlr, Dumps FotoFlexer, Looking For More Twitter-Like Deals Top
Picture 7The world of digital photography had a shot in the arm yesterday when Facebook picked up Instagram for $1 billion, and it's perhaps a sign of how all players in that space now need to up their game. Today brings news of a development from Photobucket, the online photo site that scored a huge deal last year when Twitter announced that it would power its image service. Photobucket has signed a deal with Pixlr, the cloud-based photo editing service from Autodesk, in which Pixlr's tools will be integrated on to Photobucket's site. The deal will see Pixlr replace Photobucket's current editing service, FotoFlexer, which had been working with the site since 2008.
 
Time Out New York Launches New iPad And iPhone Apps, Embraces E-Commerce Top
Time Out New York iPadTime Out New York is making a big leap into the digital world today, says Aksel van der Wal, who's president of Time Out North America and chief operating officer of the Time Out Group. Specifically, it's launching its first iPad app, an updated iPhone app, and a new e-commerce model for all of its properties. As a product, the new iPad app sounds the most interesting. (I wasn't able to try it, and also I don't live in New York, so I'm going off the company's description.) Time Out specializes in reviews and listings for arts, food, entertainment, and more, and now the iPad app personalizes the experience. Apparently, every time you select content in a specific category, that increases the likelihood that the app will present you with similar content in the future. In six weeks or so, Time Out plans to improve these personalization features, so that content that's been viewed or liked by similar users is also recommended.
 
Triple Threat: Toshiba Unveils Three New Quad-Core Excite Android Tablets Top
photo (9)Spring has come, and like new buds springing forth from the loamy earth, so too are new gadgets constantly being released into the real world. Today's first helping of new gear comes from Toshiba, who has just fleshed out their Excite line of Android tablets with three new entrants: the Excite 7.7, Excite 10, and the plus-sized Excite 13. These three new Ice Cream Sandwich-powered tabs share most of the same fundamentals — they all sport NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra 3 processor for example, as well as 1GB of RAM, a pair of rear and front-facing camera (5 and 2MP, if you're interested). Also appearing throughout the line are the usual complement of WiFi and Bluetooth radios, which are nestled within tidy aluminum frames. As their names imply though, each tab sports a distinctly-sized (and Gorilla Glass swathed) display that Toshiba presumably hopes will help them squeeze into a handful of niches.
 
Jumptap: Early Days For The New iPad Show A 'Heavy' But Still Marginal Impact On Traffic Top
new-ipad-black-640x480.jpegThe new iPad from Apple has so far smashed all of its own sales records for previous tablet models, selling 3 million units in its opening weekend, with total sales projections for 2012 at up to 66 million. But according to some early (possibly too early?) figures from the mobile ad network Jumptap, that is not yet translating into a surge of traffic from the devices. On the opening day, the iPad represented 0.52 percent of total iPad network traffic. That figure peaked at 2.28 percent on day three, and then declined to 1.92 percent of traffic by day six. In contrast, the iPad and iPad 2 each had 45 percent or more of total iPad traffic, Jumptap says in its latest MobileSTAT Report.
 
HTML Mobile Gaming Site Cellufun Is Now Tylted, Eyes Up "Substantial" Facebook Play, Virtual Goods, Ads Top
tylted logoFacebook is banking a lot on the future of HTML5 and the idea of people going web-first instead of native-apps for their mobile content fixes, and today mobile gaming company Cellufun taking one step in its strategy to position itself as a key player in that space, too: it's announcing that it is rebranding itself as Tylted. Tylted -- a name chosen from 30,000 entries in a competition run by Cellufun (the unnamed winner got $10,000) -- says that strategy also includes the launch of a new ad platform, the expansion of its virtual good business, and -- as you might expect from a social gaming company doing a lot of work in HTML -- plans to do a whole lot more on Facebook's mobile platform this calendar year.
 
Google's Chrome OS Will Soon Look More Like Windows Than A Browser Top
chrome-os-drawing-1It's hard to say how popular Chrome OS, Google's browser-centric operating system, really is. There can be little doubt, though, that Google is quite serious about this initiative. Today, Google launched the latest developer version of Chrome OS and this update sports the first major redesign of the operation system's interface since its launch in late 2010. In this new version, Chrome OS almost looks like a traditional OS, with a full-blown desktop and window manager instead of just a browser and tabs. Aura, as this hardware-accelerated window manager is known, is Chrome's next generation user interface framework and it is making its public debut in this new developer version of Chrome OS.
 
Adobe Online Ad Report: Search Spending Up 16 Percent, Mobile Traffic Quadrupled Top
adobe ad reportSearch may not be the most exciting area of online advertising right now, but it's still "the biggest driver of return on investment", according to a new report from Adobe. The report has the elaborate title, "Adobe Digital Index: Global Digital Advertising Update" and it covers the first quarter of this year. Compared to the same period last year, Adobe says that search spend increased 16 percent in the United States and 3 percent in the United Kingdom. That growth is coming from an increase in clicks, not an increase in the price that advertisers are paying for those clicks — which, for Google, actually fell 5 percent.
 
Foxconn Bears The Brunt Of Ivory Tower Assault On Capitalism Top
ShenzhenRecent media reports about working conditions in Apple's (Foxconn's) Chinese factories are way off the mark. Through Kogan, I have been working with China for the past six years. Having most of our production done in China, we take our factories and working conditions very seriously. I regularly visit all of our Chinese manufacturing facilities to keep an eye on what is going on and I am always talking to the factory owners, managers and assembly line staff.
 
From 0 To $1 Billion In Two Years: Instagram's Rose-Tinted Ride To Glory Top
instagram-1Even now, it's still shocking how the remarkably low distribution costs of the web can change a founder's fate overnight. Many startups are duds, and most grow at a clip that's just not fast enough to justify an interesting valuation. But once in awhile, a company comes along and just nails it. The right timing. The right market. The right place. Then all the rules you know about multiples, comparable benchmarks and so on just buckle under the pressure of momentum.
 
Xfire Hires Former Tencent Exec As CEO, Now Supports Chinese Language In-Game Chat Top
program3016Xfire has had a bumpy road over the last five-plus years. Back in 2006, Viacom bought Xfire for $102 million. In 2010, Titan Gaming took over ownership. Then, in October of last year, Xfire raising an additional $4M from Intel Capital and split off to become its own independent company. Again. Full-circle, and somewhat back to "square one" in just about five years. But not without some progress, as Xfire today continues to connect more than six million gamers each month, allowing them to share video, pictures and chat in-games. Looking to capitalize on its growing user base, Xfire today appointed a new CEO, Malcolm CasSelle, and announced a new partnership through which it intends to bring its social gaming experience to China, along with the exploding gaming markets across Asia.
 
Meet Chris Cheng, The Googler Who Moonlights As A Primetime TV Sharpshooter [TCTV] Top
chrischengSure, everyone knows that many techies love video games that involve shooting. But when you think of real-life expert marksmen, you usually think of people who have served in the military or the police force -- or at least, people who live in rural areas with big yards where they can practice shooting on lined up cans of Keystone Light (not that I have any familiarity with that.) San Francisco Bay Area techies don't usually fit in with any of those sterotypes. That's why Chris Cheng's rise has been especially fascinating. Cheng's day job is as a program and project manager at Google's Silicon Valley headquarters, but millions of people have come to know him in recent months as a contestant on the fourth season of Top Shot, a reality competition show airing on the History Channel in which 18 contestants battle it out to win the title as the top target shooter.
 
The Rat Race Top
rat raceWhen I was in college, I had a fixation on weight lifting. Like many other young men, I was obsessed with working out, with a disproportionate concentration on upper body muscle building exercise. Despite what it may have appeared, my focus wasn't on being fit (I rarely did cardio, had no flexibility), it was on appearing fit and having an adequately muscular build, especially when in comparison to my peers. Fit enough wasn't "fit enough to my own standard," but rather "looking more fit than everyone else." My mother always told me that if something was worth doing, it was worth doing your best. Unfortunately, the message got a little garbled in translation, and what I internalized was that if something was worth doing, you had to be the best. And ever since I've entered my adult life, I've always had a small knot in my chest every time I've done anything that can be compared; a small worrying reminder that I'm not the best at whatever it is.
 
Marriott Puts An End To Shady Ad Injection Service Top
adLate last week, one Justin Watt discovered something suspicious going on with the wi-fi at his hotel, the Times Square Marriott. Not content to charge him hundreds for the room and $16.95 for internet access, it appeared that the service provider was using JavaScript injection to serve banner ads on every website guests visited. The story spread like wildfire for obvious reasons, and at last Marriott has responded, saying the problem has been remedied and won't happen again.
 
Facestagram: Five New Features Facebook + Instagram Could Launch Top
Facestagram LogoPicture being able to filter your Facebook photos, or use your Instagrams as Facebook Checkins. Though Instagram will remain its own "independent" app, its $1 billion acquisition by Facebook could power many improvements for the two photo sharing services. Instagram founder Kevin Systrom and Mark Zuckerberg have reassured users that the Instagram they've grown to love isn't going away. But what will change? Here's a look at a five of the ways we think the two services could work together to further dominate photo sharing, make more money, and give you a better experience.
 
This Is What Change Looks Like: Washington, D.C. Mini Meet-Up Top
scaled.IMG_8315It'd be easy to forget, but startups do exist, and even prosper, outside of Silicon Valley. John and I believe firmly in this, and have thus decided to venture forth and find technology gems hidden away in cities with less prominent tech scenes. The first of these adventures takes place in Washington DC, and as I type these very words I'm surrounded with at least 300 entrepreneurs, startup employees, investors, and journalists. The energy is palpable.
 
Valley to Detroit: Motor City Woos Laid-Off Yahoo Employees Top
Valley to Detroit logoLast week, Yahoo announced that it would cut 2,000 jobs. Given the employee shortage in Silicon Valley, most of the qualified engineers that lost their jobs in this round of cuts will likely land on their feet pretty quickly. For those who just had enough of the Valley, though, Detroit-based Quicken Loans and its family of companies is offering these former Yahoo employees (and anybody else who wants to apply) a chance to move to the Motor City to "be part of something really big." Quicken, together with Detroit Venture Partners, Rockbridge Growth Equity and Fathead.com, has set up ValleytoDetroit.com to entice Silicon Valley engineers to apply for jobs at their companies and move to Detroit.
 

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