Thursday, June 28, 2012

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RIM's Q1 2013 Results: $518 Million Loss On $2.8 Billion In Revenue, BlackBerry 10 Launch Pushed To 2013 Top
rim-redRIM has just released their Q1 2013 financials, and they're about as bleak as the company expected. The Canadian company reported a net GAAP loss of $518 million (which breaks down to $0.99/share diluted) on revenues of $2.8 billion. To put that in a bit of perspective, RIM reported a net loss of $0.24/share diluted (or $125 million) on $4.2 billion in revenues in Q4 2012. Meanwhile, analysts expected RIM to report a net loss of $0.03/share on revenues of $3.1 billion in the days leading up to the release. The company also reported that despite their longstanding claims to the contrary, the first BlackBerry 10 smartphone isn't expected to see the light of day until the first quarter of 2013.
 
Fits.me Finally Shipping A New Robot That Makes It Easier To See What You're Going To Look Like In That Suit Top
fitbot01As a fat, lazy blogger, I find myself often buying clothes online only to discover that XXL for a designer in Spain is basically a XXS for babies in America. The resulting shape and return fees were enough to drive me to distraction - until I saw this wild robot call the FitBot. The robot - which is finally in production - essentially takes your measurements and reproduces them in real time. Got a big old tummy and broad shoulders? FitBot will show you what that shirt will look like on you. It can reproduce up to 2,000 body permutations and can be used by, say, an online store to show exactly what a certain shirt will look like on various people.
 
Peel Announces AllPlay TV, A Remote Control For Netflix, DVR, And (Eventually) More Top
UnknownSocial TV startup Peel is at the Google I/O developers conference today, showing off an upcoming Google TV integration called AllPlay TV. VP of Marketing Scott Ellis demonstrated AllPlay TV for me earlier this week. He says it's fulfilling "the vision that we've been aspiring to for a long time — live TV, DVR, and web-based content, multiple sources all brought together in the app experience." In other words, when you want to watch something, you should able to find it in one interface, regardless of the delivery method.
 
Hands On With Google Drive On iOS Top
photo 1As promised at this morning's Google I/O conference, Google has launched a version of its Google Drive application on iOS today, which offers native support for the service formerly known as Google Docs on both iPhone and iPad. The app is live now in iTunes, and looks to give competitor Dropbox a run for its money. Although Google Drive has offered a mobile web version of its service for some time, many people prefer using a native application on their smartphones or tablets. This is somewhere Dropbox has previously excelled, but it no longer has that same advantage after today.
 
Google Bows To Apple: Chrome On iOS Will Use Apple's Slow UIWebView To Render Web Pages Top
chromelogoGoogle is launching Chrome for iOS today. Many pundits assumed that Google was holding back Chrome from iOS because it couldn't use its own rendering engine, however, Google just told us that Chrome will actually use the same rendering engine that Apple makes available to every other third-party developer on iOS.
 
With New Mobile Apps, Eric Schmidt-Backed HealthTap Brings The House Call Back To Healthcare Top
99135v6-max-250x250Over 80 percent of people seek health-related information online, on everything from insurance to help diagnosing aches and pains. As the world goes mobile, so too does health. Instead of using Google for your health queries or perusing WebMD, HealthTap launched last year to give people a way to connect with doctors in realtime via their mobile devices. Today, the startup is announcing a significant update to their interactive mobile health network, including a suite of new apps for the iPhone, iPad, Android and the Web, and a revamped, cleaner UI.
 
White House Will Take To Twitter To Answer Questions About SCOTUS Obamacare Ruling Top
Obama_Tweeting_croppedThe United States Supreme Court today voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act (informally referred to as Obamacare), the health care reform bill that will require nearly all Americans to have health insurance coverage. It's a very, very big deal -- and it's apparent on social media sites that many Americans have very impassioned opinions about the ruling, both positive and negative. And lots of people out there just want to know what it all really means. And at 1:30pm PT (4:30pm ET) today, the White House will take to Twitter to clear up people's questions and worries, 140 characters at a time.
 
Wait, What? No Update For Google TV? Top
googletv2Heading into Google I/O, there was one thing that confused me: Sony and Vizio announced new Google TV products a few days before the annual developer conference. Which I thought was pretty silly, because like, why would anyone release new hardware days before Google announces new software capabilities at the conference? And then the conference happened, and the answer became clear: Because there is no new software for Google TV. A representative for Google says that its focus at this year's conference is on the devices that are coming out and already in stores, not any update to the platform. That includes Sony's Internet Player with Google TV, which is available for pre-sale now and will retail for $199, and Vizio's Co-Star streaming box, which costs $99 and will go on pre-sale next month. There's also LG's series of Smart TVs, which run the Google TV operating system and went on sale in May.
 
Google Takes Its Google+ Platform Mobile With Android, iOS SDKs & Social Plugins For The Mobile Web Top
Google+ PlatformGoogle+ is obviously a major focus for Google these days, but until now, the company hasn't really focused on extending the Google platform beyond its own services and its +1 buttons. Now, however, the company is extending the Google+ platform to mobile with the upcoming release of its Google+ SDKs for iOS and Android. This new platform will allow developers to use Google+ sign-in buttons, sharing widgets,  and the Google+ history API it quietly launched yesterday. Developers will also be able to pull in public Google+ content through the existing (but limited) Google+ API. In addition to these SDKs, these features are also now available as mobile web optimized social plugins.
 
Like Square But For Corporations: mPowa Launches New Dongle Payment Service In U.S. Top
Screen shot 2012-06-28 at 19.24.38Add one more company to the ranks of hopefuls that want to own the space where dongles and mobiles are used for card-based payments. mPowa, a UK-based startup, is launching in the U.S. today with a solution that looks a lot like Square, Here from PayPal, and others. But while Square and the rest currently target smaller merchants that do not have card facilities already, mPowa is first going after bigger fish: the large enterprises that do. "Our main focus are those businesses who already take cards but lack the mobile point of sale facilities to make transactions on the go, the Whirlpools or charities of the world," Dan Wagner, the founder and CEO, told me in an interview earlier today. "Now they can make home visits or collect money anywhere." And that's not the only difference. The service works on devices covering four different platforms: iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows, another way to aim for mass coverage.
 
"In the Studio," PrimaTable's Jamie Davidson Has A Taste for Culinary Experiences Top
Screen shot 2012-06-25 at 12.31.56 PMEditor's Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil "In the Studio" enters the summer months by inviting a former YouTube and Google product engineer, who then spent a "gap year" with Kleiner Perkins meeting with business leaders, entrepreneurs, and cooking up his own next move in the Valley. PrimaTable's Jamie Davidson came to the west coast as an engineer, landing at YouTube and eventually Google, where he and his colleagues applied their expertise in operations research to the world of online advertising. During his time at Google, Davidson became interested in the idea of "local," broadly speaking, and after being invited to spend a year at Kleiner Perkins, cofounded and launched his own new company, PrimaTable, which seeks to provide exclusive, highly curated culinary experiences for customers. For instance, Davidson and his team have arranged for exclusive menus at some of San Francisco's premier restaurants.
 
Chromebox Joins Nexus 7 Tablet, Q And Phone In Google's I/O Swag Bag Top
google-i_o-2012-logoGoogle just gave away a Chromebox, the desktop version of the company's Chromebook laptops, to all Google I/O attendees. Besides being a venue for Google's most spectacular launches (and jumps), Google I/O has also developed a bit of a reputation for all the products Google gives away to attendees. Yesterday, at the end of the first keynote, the company announced that every attendee would get one of Google's newly announced Nexus Q media-streaming devices, as well as a new Nexus 7 tablet and a Nexus phone. Google calls these giveaways its "Android Developer Package".
 
Running On Empty: WakeMate Finds Out What Happens When Partners Break Up Top
scaled.shutterstock_54736237Something strange happened this week with Wakemate, a Y-Combinator-funded project that was a tech world high flyer for a while. The product, a wrist strap that sensed your movement during sleep and ostensibly woke you at exactly the right time, was on hold. In 2010 the product apparently burst into flames (literally) and little was heard from the company at all. Suddenly, however, co-founder Greg Nemeth began approaching media to write about a new Wakemate project. He wrote in an email:
 
Google's Chromebooks Are Coming To 100 Best Buy Stores Across U.S., More Retailers Coming Soon Top
chromebooksGoogle just announced that its Chromebooks will hit 100 Best Buy stores across the U.S. at its I/O developer conference today, and that's just the start. The company also announced that it plans to expand this program to include "many more retailers" before the end of the year.
 
Google Launches Compute Engine To Take On Amazon Web Services Top
computeengineGoogle has spent the last decade building a huge amount of infrastructure to support its own services and applications. Now anyone will be able to take advantage of all that investment, as Google is rolling out a set of infrastructure-as-a-service products that could compete with industry heavyweight, Amazon Web Services. Google has already built one of the largest data centers and networks to connect those data centers. And in 2008, Google created App Engine, which Holzle said now supports over 1 million active apps and 7.5 billion hits per day. It's the largest public NoSQL data store in the world.
 
Google Drive Now Has 10 Million Users: Available On iOS and Chrome OS Top
Screen shot 2012-06-28 at 1.30.38 PMGoogle has just announced over 10 million users that have signed into Google Drive, Google's new cloud-syncing storage platform. The product only launched in April of this year, so this is quite the milestone. Clay Bevor, director of product management for Google Apps made the announcement, also mentioning that Google Drive is now available on iOS and Chrome OS. He demoed Drive on the iPad, searching through a file full of receipts in the search box. It used optical character recognition to find the search query inside an image. But going even a step further than that, he searched for pyramid and Drive offered up saved images of the Egyptian pyramids. Offline saving and collaboration have been added to the platform, and all of that is available later today on the iPad.
 
Google Docs Will Now Support Offline Editing Top
Screen shot 2012-06-28 at 10.36.00 AMToday at Google I/O, Clay Bavor, director of product management for Google Apps, announced that Google Docs will now work for offline editing. Bavor proved it by opening a Google Doc via Google Drive right on stage, entering in offline text. The Google Docs offline editing should work on multiple devices, including the Chromebook and smartphones. All formatting changes will now be saved to a local cache and then synched to Google Docs once the user gets back online.
 
Gmail Now Has 425 Million Users, Google Apps Used By 5 Million Businesses And 66 Of The Top 100 Universities Top
gmail-logoGoogle announced that Gmail now has 425 Million users at its annual Google I/O developer conference today. It's being used by government agencies in 45 states and 66 of the top 100 universities in the U.S. have already gone Google. Google also announced that over 5 million businesses have now "gone Google." This, says Google, includes a number of large companies, including Roche, KLM and others.
 
Anatomy Of An Open Source Acquisition: From GlusterFS To Red Hat Storage Top
glusterGluster was founded in 2005 to productize their eponymous global distributed filesystem, GlusterFS. As an all-software solution for storing immense quantities of distributed and replicated data, it quickly caught the eye of many working with big data including Red Hat, who purchased the company late last year. Yesterday at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat officially announced their branded solution based upon the Gluster foundation: Red Hat Storage. As an all-software storage solution, Red Hat Storage lives atop the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and provides robust scale-out storage for both block and file level volumes. Prior to its acquisition, Gluster had raised over $8 million in funding. Red Hat bought them for $138 million. That's a pretty remarkable difference between those two numbers. I spoke with a number of Red Hat executives about the acquisition, specifically asking if they felt they'd gotten their money's worth.
 
Google's Chrome Browser Now Works On The iPhone And iPad Top
Screen shot 2012-06-28 at 1.48.40 PMToday at Google I/O, the company announced that it is launching a new version of its Chrome browser, which will be available for iPhone and iPad users. The new app should be on the Apple App Store today, allowing users to sync all their tabs, bookmarks, and credentials across all their devices. Importantly, it's not just the iPhone and iPad through which users can sync all their information -- the latest version of Google Chrome will let users access all the tabs that are open across multiple devices. Google VP of Chrome, Brian Rakowski demoed the capability today, showing how he could use open tabs on Chrome browser from his Macbook, Chromebook, Android mobile phone and Android tablet. Then showed the same capability on the iPhone.
 

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