The latest from TechCrunch
- Facebook Closing In On Acquiring Check-In Service Hot Potato
- Turn Your Blog Into An iPad Native With PadPressed
- Last Chance for Tickets to the Summer Party at August Capital
- Android Takes A New Approach To Fighting Piracy With Licensing Service
| Facebook Closing In On Acquiring Check-In Service Hot Potato | Top |
| We’re hearing from sources close to the deal that Facebook is in late stage negotiations to buy Hot Potato , the social activity service. The deal is not yet finalized from what we’re hearing, but could be at any moment. Terms of the deal are likely still be negotiated, but it’s believed that this would largely be a talent acquisition for Facebook. Yes, another one . Hot Potato raised a small $1.42 million Series A round late last year, so it likely would not be too expensive for Facebook to buy such a company. It would undoubtedly be much less than the supposed $50 million in cash and stock they paid for FriendFeed last year, for example. Hot Potato’s About page currently lists 8 employees. Hot Potato actually launched at our Realtime CrunchUp event last November. Since then, they’ve slightly pivoted away from check-ins based around events, and more towards check-ins based on anything you may be doing. While the service hadn’t yet exploded in usage, the team behind it did seem impressive in the way they built their application – particularly their mobile app for the iPhone. As I alluded to above, Facebook has been on the prowl for talent acquisition targets recently, from what we’ve been hearing. In particular they’re supposedly looking to bulk up the projects under Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross, and on the mobile side of things, we’ve heard. This Hot Potato deal could fulfill either of those — or both. If the deal is completed, it would be the seventh known company that Facebook has acquired — with five of those deals taking place in the last six months (and a sixth, FriendFeed, happening just about a year ago ). Earlier this year, Facebook is believed to have sniffed around both Loopt and Foursquare as potential acquisition targets. Hot Potato is often clumped in with those two as a location-based service. But, as I said, the latest revamp moved the service away from location check-ins, and more toward general check-ins — a space which is currently heating up quite a bit. But again, this would seem to be a pure talent buy. If the deal is finalized, you can probably expect Hot Potato, the service, to be shut down at some point in the future. CrunchBase Information Hot Potato Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Turn Your Blog Into An iPad Native With PadPressed | Top |
| Created by Jason Baptiste, PadPressed is a WordPress plugin that makes any WordPress blog look like a native iPad app when accessed from iPad. PadPressed bestows upon your humble blog the iPad features we’ve come to know and love such as “swipe to advance” articles, touch navigation, accelerometer positioning and home screen icon support when you’re really jonseing for that authentic app feeling. Baptiste started with WordPress because 8.5% of all websites (including our own) are WordPress, but has grander aspirations, “We did WordPress first because it’s the largest thing there is next we’re doing Tumblr, Posterous, Moveable Type, and then custom CMSs.” Exciting! We demoed the app and while the sparse interface harkens to the web browser/news aggregator hybrid we’re starting to see more of on the iPad (ala Pulse , and Flipboard ) we’ve noticed some issues with its touch functionality. We had difficulty swiping article pages (you have to press down really hard and the pages tend to flicker) and accessing articles from images. Baptiste says he will address the flickering issue and the touch sensitivity in a minor update, “We don’t want it to be too easy to change, but we will do controls in the future to show how sensitive the touch will be. Right now you have to click on the title in order to access, but these simple things we can change.” While not yet nearly as fluid and visually breathtaking a way to view content as native apps Flipboard and Pulse , the advantage to PadPressed is that you don’t have to direct readers to download anything. If you aren’t looking to use a prebaked solution Sencha, an HTML-5 based mobile framework is another way to circumvent the app store. So If you’re a web publisher that wants to optimize your content specifically for the iPad as inexpensively and quickly as possible PadPressed is available now for a $49.95 one time fee which includes any updates to the theme. To try out on an iPad before you buy, you can check out Baptiste’s PadPressed personal blog here . CrunchBase Information PadPressed Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Last Chance for Tickets to the Summer Party at August Capital | Top |
| We’re releasing our final batch of 100 tickets now to our July 30 summer party at August Capital. Before that party we’re also hosting an all day event – the Social Currency CrunchUp. You can see the full agenda here . Ron Conway and Paul Graham kick off the morning, and then lots of great product discussions will follow. We’ve also lined up a half dozen different local retailers to share their own experiences using social currency in the wild. Combo tickets for the conference and the party are here . Here’s a sneak preview of this year’s artwork for attendees generously provided by Hugh Macleod, the artist known as Gaping Void . We have lots of other great surprises in store as well. SecondMarket is hosting margaritas. PlacePop is organizing our photowall. Pandora will be spinning tunes, also our 5th year running. We’re live streaming the day with Ustream . Zong and Payvment have exhibits and treats to share with you. Engrave your phone with Coveroo . Thanks also to Adobe and Katalyst Media , Cannonball wine, Eventbrite , DesignAboutTown and BuildASign for support. There’s still time to grab a table, host beer or run a game. Contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozzo for sponsorships. See who’s going to the Social Currency CrunchUp and August Capital party via Plancast as well. Contact Laura Boychenko to request a press pass. | |
| Android Takes A New Approach To Fighting Piracy With Licensing Service | Top |
| Pirates looking to illegally copy Android applications are about to face a new challenge: today, Google’s Android team announced that it is releasing a new application Licensing Service for Android. The service, which is meant to help developers secure their applications from piracy, forces apps to ping Google’s home server at regular intervals to verify that they were legitimately purchased. Fail that check, and the app can lock you out. According to the Dev Guide , developers are free to decide how they want to deal with an application that is deemed to be pirated (a developer could disable the app entirely, or perhaps they could activate a trial mode prompting the user to purchase the real thing). Only paid apps can currently be used with the service, though I’m not sure why you’d want to pirate a free one. The feature can be implemented on Android versions 1.5 and above using a set of official libraries. Of course, cloud-based verification requires that your phone has network access — Google’s guide says that in the event that a device can’t communicate with the server, developers can add license caching behaviors. For example, you could set you app to only require verification, say, once a week. So why go through all of this? Android has historically stored applications in a device’s internal storage — often with only be a few hundred megabytes or less available — but it recently began allowing developers to add support for encrypted SD card installs as well (SD cards typically offer far more storage space). But now Google appears to be abandoning the copy protection strategy in favor of this server-side verification. Google gives a few reasons for this: A limitation of copy protection is that applications using it can be installed only on compatible devices that provide a secure internal storage environment. For example, a copy-protected application cannot be downloaded from Market to a device that provides root access, and the application cannot be installed to a device’s SD card. With Android Market licensing, you can move to a license-based model in which access is not bound to the characteristics of the host device, but to your publisher account on Android Market and the licensing policy that you define. Your application can be installed and controlled on any compatible device on any storage, including SD card. If this effectively wards off pirates then it will be great news for Android developers, but it adds one more potential issue for users: it’s up to devs to decide how often they want to have their application phone home to request verification, and an over-restrictive application could be really frustrating if you’re trying to use it on a plane or in an area with poor connectivity. That said, if a developer implements a policy that forces you to ping Google’s servers every time you launch the app for no good reason, then it’s probably going to get hammered with negative reviews. CrunchBase Information Android Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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