Thursday, April 28, 2011

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Keen On… Robert Vamosi: When Gadgets Betray Us + Book Giveaway Top
Can gadgets betray us? Is the Pope Catholic? Last week, we ran an interview with Robert Vamosi, a senior security analyst at Mocana, and the author of When Gadgets Betray Us, about the iPhone location tracking kerfuffle. But Vamosi's new book goes beyond a critique of Apple and Google. When Gadgets Betray Us is a broad warning about how the latest technology hardware – from smart meters to medical devices – is leaking our data. And Vamosi offers a broad critique of technology, even arguing that we need to redefine the concept of "hacking" in an age where both privacy and traditional notions of intellectual property are in crisis. So is Vamosi correct? Can gadgets really betray us? To celebrate Vamosi's new book, we are giving away 3 free copies of When Gadgets Betray Us. If you want one, you don't need to betray anyone. Just follow these steps to enter: 1. Retweet this post and include the #TechCrunch hashtag 2. Let us know how you've been betrayed by a gadget. The giveaway starts now and ends tomorrow at 12:00pm PST. When gadgets betray us How to protect ourselves against prying gadgets Why we need to redefine the idea of hacking CrunchBase Information Robert Vamosi Information provided by CrunchBase
 
The Complete Guide To Watching And Tracking The Royal Wedding Online Top
For any of you caught up in the frenzy over the royal wedding between England’s Prince William and Kate Middleton, we’ve collected a comprehensive list of where to watch the festivities online, where to find photos, dedicated mobile apps, Twitter accounts following the Royal Wedding and more. As opposed to the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, this Royal Wedding is particularly unique because of the web didn’t exist back then. And neither did social media. This will be one of the most publicized and watched weddings in history and thh whole world is invited to view and comment both on TV and the web. Where To Watch YouTube’s Royal Channel: As we noted a few weeks ago,The YouTube account for the British Monarchy will be streaming the festivities live beginning at 5 AM ET on Friday. NBC’s The Today Show will be streaming their coverage live on the show’s site. The Today Show’s Royal Wedding Blog Windsor Knot will be posting pictures and coverage. FOX and ABC will both be streaming their coverage of the Royal Wedding on Hulu . ABC will also be syndicating its stream to Yahoo’s Royal Wedding portal. CBS will be streaming the wedding on Ustream. PBS, PopSugar, and ET will also be using Ustream as a platform for their live coverage. CNN will be livestreaming the day’s events on CNN.com, including views from inside the Abbey as well as the parade, and via the CNN Apps for iPhone and iPod touch, iPad and Android tablet. TV Replay will be pulling real-time clips of the ceremony, moments like first kiss etc, that will be live on AOL’s Royal Wedding portal. How To Follow Using Social Media The British Monarchy’s Facebook Page will be posting photos, news and more on the social network. And you can follow the Monarchy’s official Twitter account, @clarencehouse , which will be posting news from the event. While I’m sure there will be many hashtags on Twitter marking Tweets about the wedding, you can follow #rw2011 and #royalwedding. In case you are worried about downtime, we hear that Twitter is preparing for the impending traffic that Tweets about the wedding could cause for the platform. E! will be livestreaming their coverage of the wedding directly from Facebook . The British Monarchy’s Flickr page will be updated with photos from the event, and you can access more information on the official site for the wedding. You can also access photos and news from AOL’s Royal Wedding portal and Yahoo’s Royal Wedding news site. Photo sharing app Color and The Telegraph have joined forces to share real-time eye-witness photos of the royal wedding and the celebrations going on across the UK. A live stream of photos taken using Color in the UK can be accessed here. Of course, we hear that Royal Wedding guests will be able to Tweet from inside the ceremony so if you follow one of the lucky guests (i.e. Victoria Beckham , and Elton John ) you may be able to get an insider’s account of the wedding. HuffPost Style will be featuring the fashions from the festivities, including the wedding gown, bridesmaid dresses and more. Mobile Apps The official Westminster Abbey (where the marriage will take place) app allows you take a 3D tour of the royal church. Dress The Royals allows you to dress the British Royal Family for the event. You can also download People Magazine’s The Royals App, The Royal Wedding By Hello Magazine, BBC’s The Royal Wedding Insider , and NBC’s Royal Wedding App .
 
(Fly Or Die) Can TweetDeck's New iPhone App Survive A Twitter Acquisition Top
TweetDeck’s new iPhone app came out a couple days ago . It is completely redesigned from the ground up and looks more like it’s Android cousin than the first TweetDeck for iPhone. Instead of cramming as much as possible into an iPhone screen, TweetDeck stripped everything out but the essentials. The result is a spare mobile stream reader that packs a lot of punch. We take a look at the new TweetDeck for IPhone in this episode of Fly or Di e, along with SounTracking , and Zapd . As usual, the CEO behind one of these products appears as a surprise guest during the show. With Twitter rumored to be negotiating a $50 million acquisition of TweetDeck to keep it out of the hands of Bill Gross’ UberMedia, it is not clear whether this brand new product will survive such a deal . After all, Twitter has its own iPhone client, among others. It doesn’t need two. For now, though, you can enjoy it. The new TweetDeck for iPhone still lets you add as many columns as you want and swipe through to view different streams, but you also get a unified Home column, which can combine your Twitter and Facebook streams into one. The app has nice subtle touches, such as the diagonal swipe to see more Tweets from the same account (my favorite). And instead of timestamps cluttering each Tweet, the timestamp changes at the top as you scroll through your stream. If you want to jump to the top to the most recent Tweet, just tap the actual time (yeah, someone had to point that one out to me too, but these are the kinds of hidden features power users love). In this show, we also look at SoundTracking, a music-sharing app that just passed 250,000 downloads in six weeks. John Biggs, my co-host, calls it Instagram for music. You can Tweet out, or share on Facebook, a link to any song, It can be the song you are listening to in the iPod app on the phone, one that you search for, or one that the app identifies through the microphone. Finally, there is Zapd, which is also close to 250,000 downloads since it launched only four weeks ago. Zapd lets you create simple, themed websites from your mobile phone. Snap a picture, add some text and a few links, and your site is up in no time, and you can keep updating from your phone. It’s like Tumblr, but even easier. CrunchBase Information TweetDeck SoundTracking Zapd Information provided by CrunchBase
 
It's Face Time: Google Talk For Android Phones Gets Video Chat Support Top
If you’re on an Android device, you may know that there are already plenty of ways to conduct video and voice calls using various third party applications (Qik, Fring, etc.). But that functionality has never been included with stock builds of Android (at least, not for phones), the way Apple’s FaceTime has been integrated into iOS for the last year. Today, that’s starting to change. Google is currently rolling out an update to Nexus S devices that adds voice and video chat to Google Talk, which is included as part of the core set of Google applications that come pre-installed on many Android devices. The feature will work on both Wi-Fi and 3G/4G wireless networks, and allows calls between phones, tablets, and any computer with Gmail and Google Talk enabled. The update is gradually rolling out over the air (a process that usually takes a couple of weeks), and it also includes numerous bug fixes. The Nexus One will be getting an update as well, but it won’t include the video chat support (it doesn’t have a front-facing camera, though it would have been nice to have a voice-only feature for VoIP calls). We should note that the tablet version of Android, Honeycomb, has actually offered video chat in Google Talk since it launched, but this is the first time it’s been available on phones. Google says that the feature will roll out to more Android 2.3+ phones in the future. CrunchBase Information Android Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Microsoft Revenue Up 13% to $16.43B, Earnings At $0.61 Per Share Top
Microsoft just reported its third quarter 2011 earnings today with revenues of $16.43 billion, an increase of 13% from the same period of 2010. Microsoft's operating income was $5.71 billion, its net income was $5.23 billion and its diluted earnings per share were at $0.61, a 36% increase from last yer. With this report Microsoft surpassed Wall Street  analyst expectations which were at 56 cents per share on $16.19 billion in revenue. Microsoft said that the strong financial results were primarily due to Office, Xbox and Kinect sales. From Microsoft CFO Peter Klein : "We delivered strong financial results despite a mixed PC environment, which demonstrates the strength and breadth of our businesses. Consumers are purchasing Office 2010, Xbox and Kinect at tremendous rates, and businesses of all sizes are purchasing Microsoft platforms and applications.” On the strength of Office sales, the Business Division grew 21% since last year at $5.25 billion in revenue. Servers and Tools grew 11% at $4.1 billion. The Entertainment and Devices division reported a 60% increase in sales, bringing in $1.95 billion in revenue with an operating income at $225 Million. The company’s Online Services division, which includes Bing, made $684 million in revenue (a 14% increase), operating at a loss of $726 million. While Microsoft did beat the street at $16.43 billion in revenue (versus $14.5 billion last year), its net profit was $5.23 billion which means that rival Apple has trumped it in profits as well as revenue and market cap, bringing in $5.99 billion in profit last quarter. CrunchBase Information Microsoft Information provided by CrunchBase
 
The Final Shoe Drops: Apple Now More Profitable Than Microsoft Too Top
Just about a year ago, when Apple passed Microsoft in market cap, the Redmond loyalists were out in full force: that means nothing — look at the revenues! When Apple passed Microsoft in revenues last October, it was: who cares — look at the profits! We were looking, and we projected that this quarter just ended would be the one in which Apple passed Microsoft in that regard too. Sure enough, they have. Easily. Microsoft has just announced their Q3 2011 results . The numbers appear to be good, beating analysts’ expectations. But with net income now at $5.23 billion, Microsoft now comes in well behind Apple, which had a net income of $5.99 billion last quarter . Last October, despite Apple pulling ahead in revenue, the profit gap was about $1.1 billion in Microsoft’s favor. Last quarter, that gap was down to roughly a $600 million. And now, rather remarkable, it’s over $700 million in the other direction — a $1.3 billion swing in just one quarter. And you can probably expect that trend to continue. Meanwhile, on the revenue side of things, Apple now holds a roughly $8 billion advantage — $24.6 billion to $16.43 billion. And in market cap, Apple’s advantage is just about $100 billion — $318.45 billion to $224.43 billion. Times change. [image via ] CrunchBase Information Apple Microsoft Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Accel Invests $35M. in 99designs…After Years of Trying Top
Accel Partners has invested $35 million in the crowdsource design service 99designs – a monster of a series A. Of course, 99designs is not your average early-stage startup. Born in Melbourne, Australia out of an older company called sitepoint.com, 99designs is bootstrapped, profitable and growing revenues at a rate of about 120% a year. A few strategic angel investors also participated including Michael Dearing , Stewart Butterfield , Dave Goldberg and Anthony Casalena . Accel’s Andrew Braccia and Ryan Sweeney will join the board along with Dearing. The growth helps explain why Braccia has been courting this deal since 2009. And he wasn’t alone. 99designs CEO Patrick Llewellyn says several VCs have been pinging the company, and until now, they’ve all been turned away. They all seem to find out about the company the same way: One of their portfolio companies uses the service to get a good, cheap logo. In Braccia’s case, it was Cloudera. 99designs was reluctant to take money for the good reasons: They didn’t necessarily need it, and without it the four owners were able to control the company’s destiny without outside meddling. But as the number of design contests doubled in the last four months, it became clear they were onto something and it was time to scale, says Llewellyn. After all, more than 90% of 99designs’ customers come through word of mouth. Imagine if the company actually invested in sales and marketing. But the clincher was how hard 99designs found it to hire once they moved the sales part of the business to the Valley. “Any employee you look to hire here asks, ‘Who funds you?’” Llewellyn says. “You realize there’s a psyche that’s very different from Australia. To go to the next level and bring on the talent we wanted was going to be hard being a bootstrapped company from Australia.” A good portion of the cash will go to the founders, who don’t have an operational role at the company. Meanwhile, the deal frees up new options for the team. The rest of the cash will juice sales and marketing, hire some engineers to build new features, and maybe buy a smaller complementary company or two, Braccia says. So why’d Accel win? Persistance and its increasingly international focus that expands beyond just China and India, Llewellyn says. This is the third Australian deal the firm had done in less than a year. Why’d Accel want to win so badly? As the above numbers show, 99designs is growing like a weed. It has paid out $20 million to designers over the last three years and some 6.5 million logos have been submitted. These days it’s paying users more than $1 million per month. It’s part of a wave of companies that are finally leveraging the Web to cost affectively sell to small businesses. That’s a trend that’s talked up every five years or so, but has yet to break wide open. “We’re starting to see Vegas emerge from the desert,” Braccia says. “This is a big investment thesis for Accel.” Indeed Accel companies Groupon, Etsy and Dropbox all fit into the same bucket. This growth — and no doubt the funding news– pisses a lot of people off. 99designs is hated by a vocal segment of the graphic design community, because it relies on designers presenting unpaid work to compete for jobs. Google “99designs” and “99designs scam” is the first phrase that pops up in the auto-complete. Many argue this devalues their work and ultimately destroys an industry. This backlash has caught 99designs by surprise–especially because the contest model wasn’t the company’s idea. It was something that happened organically on the wonky designer forums that were a part of sitepoint.com, the older company 99designs spun out of three years ago. They simply gave the community a platform to do what they were doing already, and, of course, took a cut of the transactions. (Cue more haters saying the company is getting rich off free, spec work.) “We still take it very personally,” Llewellyn says. “We feel like what we’re doing is helping designers.” To his point, $1 million per month is a lot of money. It’s important to underscore the haters are an intense, vocal minority. Many established graphic designers hate the idea of spec work, but don’t have to do it because they have established careers. 99designs isn’t competing with them. And many entry-level kids out of school like the idea of competing for the chance to make a few hundred dollars per job, rather than doing free work to build up experience and a portfolio. And 99designs’ most successful members use the site as a lead generation engine, keeping the customers they meet on the site for future work and never giving 99designs another dime. The haters are missing two things: An obvious reality and a hidden reality. The obvious one is: The Internet does this to nearly any business where a service provider is charging a premium because of an inefficient market. Graphic designers should be thrilled that it took so long to get to them. Go cry to travel agents, independent bookstores, music industry executives and anyone in old media. It’s a sucky reality, but a reality nonetheless. The good news is in any period of industry volatility, there are huge opportunities for people to out-earn what they could have made under the old system. Consider tech media: Arrington has become a millionaire, as thousands of journalists who didn’t embrace new media have lost their jobs. Since I jumped from old media, my income has gone up, and I’d guess the bank accounts of Erick Shonfeld, Om Malik and Kara Swisher would say the same thing. If you hustle and you’re talented, there’s still plenty of work. Come to the Valley where there’s a full-scale war on for great designers. And, I say this as a wife of a graphic designer who’d never do spec work, but doesn’t exactly lose sleep over its existence either. That’s the obvious reality. The more hidden reality is that services like 99designs are giving equal opportunities to talent around the world– particularly in emerging markets where making a few hundred dollars for a winning logo can be a life-changing amount of money. We’ve already seen this trend with services like Elance and oDesk . Now, it’s just being pushed up the skill ladder, from basic coding to more aesthetic skills like design. 99designs may create opportunities for a kid in San Francisco to get his foot in the door of an industry or for a single-mother in Minnesota to earn income on her own time, but in emerging markets the impact is more staggering. In the Philippines, one designer was winning so many logo bids that he won an extra $10,000 sweepstakes 99designs was offering. The total was several times his annual salary as a registered nurse. In Pakistan, a man won so many contests he was able to pay for his sister’s wedding– a huge sign of pride and prosperity in a nation with few options for high-margin, creative jobs. Indonesia has been one of the most aggressive 99designs markets, which was no surprise to me. There is so much creative talent in Indonesia, and unlike other large demographic countries, there aren’t a flood of multinational jobs or foriegn venture capital ferreting them out and putting them to work. The potential impact of something like this is beyond these individual stories. Juicy markets throughout the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia– where Western investment doesn’t flow quite as freely– have an ecosystem catch-22. With more than half of the populations under the age of 25 and job creation paltry, high-growth entrepreneurship is imperative for these countries– and frequently for America’s national security interests in these regions. But without more signs that high-margin, skilled jobs like design and engineering pay well, people train for jobs they know they can get instead of following their passions. Local examples like the ones listed above, have tremendous ripple effects in these markets, that taken along with greater social, technology and financial changes have the potential to transform the “other half” of the world’s population only now surging into middle class modernity. CrunchBase Information 99designs Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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