Yahoo reinforces its utter lack of ideas and/or strategy by threatening to launch a patent suit against Facebook: ow.ly/1HfqQg
Showing posts with label Tech News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tech News. Show all posts
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Hands On With The New iPad
I’ve just gotten out of a quick hands-on session with the new iPad (and yes, it’s just called the iPad), and have come away with exactly the feeling I expected to have: that I need to buy one.
The first thing you should know, and also the reason there aren’t many pictures, is that as far as weight and shape, it’s almost exactly the same as the iPad 2. They wouldn’t allow comparison shots — probably because the new iPad is a little thicker — but the dimensional differences are minor and the overall feel is near-identical.
Let me tell you why I’m going to buy the new iPad. Or rather, let me show you.
Open it in a new tab to see the pixels up close.
The top picture is the new Retina screen, the bottom picture is the original screen. This close up (about a quarter of an inch), you can see the pixels. But from a normal distance, the text is so clear and the overall visual effect is so smooth, I can’t help myself.
I would love to read books and magazines on the iPad. I’d love to work from it, do my photo editing on it. But reading text and viewing images just wasn’t ever good enough. Now it is. The sharpness is as good as you expect, the device otherwise is more or less the same. Were you hoping for a redesign? That will happen eventually. Don’t be greedy.
As for the new apps, which they demoed for me, they look great. iPhoto feels like a lot of fun to use, though professionals will of course prefer the more robust controls in something like Aperture or Lightroom. For everyone else (and perhaps me), these basic controls over exposure, color, and so on (non-destructive and fairly robust; the brushes are nice) will be more than enough.
Beyond that, what’s to tell? Objective benchmarks will appear when we have our own unit; performance of the updated apps will have to be evaluated by users of the old versions; the new apps and games will have to be actually tried (the new Epic game wasn’t available for testing and Infinity Blade wasn’t upscaling very well); 4G speeds and coverage will be progressively evaluated; dictation is worthless in a crowded hands-on room; the cameras can’t be tested properly in a dim room with little connectivity; the main fact I ascertained is that having my hands on the new iPad was a lot like having my hands on the old iPad.
But having my eyes on it? That’s another story.
Major Changes In Facebook’s Amended S-1: Mobile Ads, Zynga, Yahoo Patents, Credit
Facebook today filed an amended S-1 to IPO that describes new risks based on its launch of ads for mobile, Zynga’s standalone gaming platform, and a patent dispute with Yahoo. It also explained how its concentrated voting structure would impact investors, and listed additional underwriters.
Here are the major revisions to the S-1 compared to the original Facebook filed at the beginning of February. Quotes can be interpreted as strict additions:
Risks
Mobile
- Facebook announced it will now start monetizing mobile using Sponsored Stories ads. It now states its ability to monetize mobile in “unproven” rather than noting it does not advertise on mobile.
Terms Of Service Violations
- Violation of its terms of service, such as creating duplicate accounts, is now listed as a risk that could harm its reputation and business. The Facebook brand could be negatively effected “by the actions of users that are deemed to be hostile or inappropriate to other users, or by users acting under false or inauthentic identities.” Investments to stem these problems may be unsuccessful.
- For example, another prolonged hacking attack like the one in November that spread pornography or gore in the news feed could reduce visits.
Zynga
- Zynga recently launched an off-Facebook gaming platform. If relations with Zynga worsens, it tries to migrate its users to its hosted gaming platform, or it stops investing in its Facebook games, Facebook’s business could be harmed.
- Facebook confirmed it makes a 30% tax on user purchases in Zynga’s games, despite agreements regarding traffic guarantees.
Patents
- Yahoo recently accused Facebook of violating 13 of its patents. Yahoo hasn’t commenced legal action against Facebook but could in the future. Additionally, “we face increasing competition and gain an increasingly high profile, including in connection with our initial public offering, we expect the number of patent and other intellectual property claims against us to grow.”
Inaccurate User Count Measurement
- Inherent challenges in measuring its user base could hurt Facebook’s reputation and business. If advertisers or developers believe its user counts are inaccurate they may be less willing to allocate budgets and resources to Facebook.
- For example “There may be individuals who have multiple Facebook accounts in violation of our terms of service, despite our efforts to detect and suppress such behavior. We estimate that false or duplicate accounts may have represented approximately 5-6% of our MAUs as of December 31, 2011.” This estimate is based on a sample that may not be representative and so it could be inaccurate.
- Mobile metrics may be inflated due to devices hat automatically ping Facebook’s server without a user taking action. “We estimate that less than 5% of our estimated worldwide DAUs as of December 31, 2011 and 2010 resulted from this type of automatic mobile activity, and that this type of activity had a substantially smaller effect on our estimate of worldwide MAUs and mobile MAUs.”
Voting Structure
- Facebook now lists itself as a “controlled company” whose board of directors does not have an independent nominating function.
- It notes that through voting agreements with major stockholders, Mark Zuckerberg has a large percentage of voting power. “ As a result:
- “Mr. Zuckerberg has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support. This concentrated control could also discourage a potential investor from acquiring our Class A common stock due to the limited voting power of such stock relative to the Class B common stock and might harm the market price of our Class A common stock.”
- The dual class structure of Facebook’s common stock and the voting agreements among certain stockholders concentrate voting control with Zuckerberg and other directors, which could limit or preclude stochkholders from influencing corporate matters.
- CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg work for Facebook at-will with no specific time commitments.
Finances
- Last month, Facebook terminated its prior credit facility, raising its facility from $2.5 billion to $5 billion, and moving from a 0.15% commitment fee to a 0.10% commitment fee per annum on its daily undrawn balance.
- Facebook entered into a bridge credit facility allowing it to borrow up to $3 billion “to fund tax withholding and remittance obligations related to the settlement of RSUs in connection with our initial public offering.”
- When the post-IPO lock-up period ends, substantial sales of stock could cause the stock price to decline.
- Major additional underwriters now include Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, RBC Capital Markets, and Wells Fargo Securities.
- Further added underwriters include Blaylock Robert Van LLC, BMO Capital Markets Corp., C.L. King & Associates, Inc., Cabrera Capital Markets, LLC, CastleOak Securities, L.P., Cowen and Company, LLC., Lazard Capital Markets LLC, Lebenthal & Co., LLC, Loop Capital Markets LLC, M.R. Beal & Company, Macquarie Capital (USA) Inc., Muriel Siebert & Co., Inc., Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Pacific Crest Securities LLC, Piper Jaffray & Co., Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Samuel A. Ramirez & Company, Inc., Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated, The Williams Capital Group, L.P., William Blair & Company, L.L.C.
User Growth Stats
- Brazil and Germany are now estimated to have penetration rates of 30-40%, not 20-30% as previously listed.
- The US user base grew to 161 million by the end of 2011, up 16% from the end of 2010.
- “DAUs as a percentage of MAUs increased from 54% in December 2010 to 57% in December 2011, which we believe was driven entirely by increased mobile usage of Facebook. We believe that increases in DAUs and in DAUs as a percentage of MAUs generally positively affect our revenue”
- “Worldwide mobile MAUs increased by 76% from 245 million as of December 31, 2010 to 432 million as of December 31, 2011″ not 425 million MAUs as previously listed.
- “We estimate that approximately 58 million mobile MAUs accessed Facebook solely through mobile apps or our mobile website during the month ended December 31, 2011, and the remaining 374 million mobile MAUs accessed Facebook from both personal computers and mobile devices during that month.” That’s a very small percentage of users who are only accessing via mobile where Facebook’s monetization potential is unproven — a bright point in the revised S-1
Sales Growth
- “As of December 31, 2011, over half of our revenue was generated by users in the United States and Canada. However, we are experiencing rapid revenue growth in markets such as Brazil and India due to growth in the number of users and their engagement and an increase in our sales efforts in those markets.”
- Facebook believes new advertising initiatives, including mobile ads, will increase the return on investment for advertisers and thereby increase advertising demand and spend.
- Marketers now have access to real-time Insights on their performance. This could increase spend on Sponsored Stories ads because advertisers will immediately know if a Page post is getting a positive enough reception to make it worth paying to turn into a Sponsored Story.
Post PC Indeed: Gartner Says 2012 PC Shipments Will Only Grow 4.4% To 368M Units
At yesterday’s Apple event, CEO Tim Cook ran through some big numbers that underscored just how strongly the iPad is pacing against PCs when it comes to consumer interest. Today, Gartner released some forecasts that underscore how that story is not set to change any time soon.
The analysts say that PC shipments are on track to grow by just 4.4 percent in 2012 — to 368 million units, as consumers continue to prioritize purchases of new tablets, and smartphones, ahead of buying new laptop or desktop computers. But at least this is a slight improvement on 2011, when Gartner said that shipments were essentially flat on 2010.
Post-PC, in this sense, is about sales rather than actual usage:
“It’s not that consumers aren’t using PCs. They are,” Gartner analyst Ranjit Atwal told TechCrunch. “It’s just that they’re using their current models and not replacing them anymore with new PCs.”
Of course, if you follow that to its natural conclusion, then eventually growing sales will translate into a tipping point for usage, although that is still a far way off. Figures out recently point to only about eight percent of internet traffic coming from mobile devices like phones and tablets.
Gartner notes that the fact that you can do all the basics now on a device like a tablet — email, social networking and internet access, not to mention all those apps — makes it even less of a priority to make sure that your PC is the newest and fastest of its kind. The move to more cloud services, relying significantly less on on-device storage, also takes another unique selling point away from PCs.
In the realm of sales, Atwal says that the challenge has been laid at the foot of PC makers by companies like Apple — or if we’re honest, by Apple alone — which have been setting the bar for what kind of functionality people want out of their internet devices these days.
Products like Windows 8 could advance the case for PC makers, and we’ve seen some interesting implementations of the OS already. (I was intrigued/bemused by the Acer device that turns a Windows 8 laptop into a Windows 8 tablet, Transformer-style.) But the question is, will that be enough to sway consumers’ attention, or as Atwal puts it, “Given all the innovation that PC vendors are promising, can they get to the front of the buying queue for consumers again?”
He notes that many of the new products built on Windows 8 are not likely to make their way to the market until close to the end of this year, meaning that if PC makers are going to catch up, it won’t be in 2012.
The figures over the last few years point to PCs having had a largely dry spell for sales while products like the iPad have been seeing very swift gains.
Atwal says that in 2011 the market was flat no growth. PC shipments totalled 350 million. In 2010, the sector saw a “blip” with growth of 13.8 percent to 350 million units. He says that was largely due to the mini-craze around notebooks and mini-notebooks. In 2009, the market grew only 5.5 percent to 308 million.
According to Cook yesterday, the iPad sold 15.4 million units last quarter — more than any single PC maker sold of its devices. HP was the nearest competitor at 15.1 million PCs for the quarter; Lenovo had 13 million PCs; Dell sold 11.9 million PCs and Acer sold 9.8 million PCs.
Post PC Indeed: Gartner Says 2012 PC Shipments Will Only Grow 4.4% To 368M Units
At yesterday’s Apple event, CEO Tim Cook ran through some big numbers that underscored just how strongly the iPad is pacing against PCs when it comes to consumer interest. Today, Gartner released some forecasts that underscore how that story is not set to change any time soon.
The analysts say that PC shipments are on track to grow by just 4.4 percent in 2012 — to 368 million units, as consumers continue to prioritize purchases of new tablets, and smartphones, ahead of buying new laptop or desktop computers. But at least this is a slight improvement on 2011, when Gartner said that shipments were essentially flat on 2010.
Post-PC, in this sense, is about sales rather than actual usage:
“It’s not that consumers aren’t using PCs. They are,” Gartner analyst Ranjit Atwal told TechCrunch. “It’s just that they’re using their current models and not replacing them anymore with new PCs.”
Of course, if you follow that to its natural conclusion, then eventually growing sales will translate into a tipping point for usage, although that is still a far way off. Figures out recently point to only about eight percent of internet traffic coming from mobile devices like phones and tablets.
Gartner notes that the fact that you can do all the basics now on a device like a tablet — email, social networking and internet access, not to mention all those apps — makes it even less of a priority to make sure that your PC is the newest and fastest of its kind. The move to more cloud services, relying significantly less on on-device storage, also takes another unique selling point away from PCs.
In the realm of sales, Atwal says that the challenge has been laid at the foot of PC makers by companies like Apple — or if we’re honest, by Apple alone — which have been setting the bar for what kind of functionality people want out of their internet devices these days.
Products like Windows 8 could advance the case for PC makers, and we’ve seen some interesting implementations of the OS already. (I was intrigued/bemused by the Acer device that turns a Windows 8 laptop into a Windows 8 tablet, Transformer-style.) But the question is, will that be enough to sway consumers’ attention, or as Atwal puts it, “Given all the innovation that PC vendors are promising, can they get to the front of the buying queue for consumers again?”
He notes that many of the new products built on Windows 8 are not likely to make their way to the market until close to the end of this year, meaning that if PC makers are going to catch up, it won’t be in 2012.
The figures over the last few years point to PCs having had a largely dry spell for sales while products like the iPad have been seeing very swift gains.
Atwal says that in 2011 the market was flat no growth. PC shipments totalled 350 million. In 2010, the sector saw a “blip” with growth of 13.8 percent to 350 million units. He says that was largely due to the mini-craze around notebooks and mini-notebooks. In 2009, the market grew only 5.5 percent to 308 million.
According to Cook yesterday, the iPad sold 15.4 million units last quarter — more than any single PC maker sold of its devices. HP was the nearest competitor at 15.1 million PCs for the quarter; Lenovo had 13 million PCs; Dell sold 11.9 million PCs and Acer sold 9.8 million PCs.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Jumptap: Android, iOS Now 91% Of All Mobile Ad Traffic, Kindle Fire 33% Of All Tablet Use
The onward march for Android and Apple continues apace, and leaves a big question mark for how other platforms can hope to compete, at least in the U.S. market: New figures out from Jumptap indicate that in the month of January, the two combined made up 91 percent of all smartphone traffic on its U.S. mobile ad network — representing a new high for the two most-dominant mobile phone platforms.
But while Apple has seen a huge jump in smartphone users following the launch of the iPhone 4S last year, Jumptap’s figures indicate that in tablets it has a strong competitor in the form of the Kindle Fire, which now accounts for 33 percent of all tablet traffic on the network.
While these numbers do not exactly speak to how many Kindle Fire devices there are in use compared to iPads (we have a bit more on that subject here), it does point to the fact that people are using their Amazon devices for a whole lot of ad-based services.
Jumptap’s numbers indicate that while Apple (at 32.2 percent) and Google (at 58.8 percent) are dominating across its U.S. ad network of 95 million monthly users, the weak appear to be getting weaker: RIM’s BlackBerry platform is at a “new low” of 6.7 percent share of impressions, while Symbian accounted for 1.4 percent of impressions, and Windows Mobile for even less: 0.5 percent.
Jumptap’s prediction is that despite gains that Microsoft may make as a result of Nokia’s new line of Windows Phones, collectively the bottom three will not have more than 10 percent of impressions at any point this year. Still, that is actually leaving room for some growth…
In tablets, Amazon is proving to be a strong competitor, at least in the area of usage. In January, it accounted for 33 percent of all tablet traffic, and as you can see from the table below, that share has risen quickly over the last three months, outpacing even the growth of tablet traffic itself. Apple’s share, meanwhile, is at its lowest in four months, at 48 percent. Ditto the collective force of all of the other tablet makers.
This is a key point, because it indicates that those who are buying the Kindle Fire are also buying into the whole service-led proposition behind it: content is something that Apple has, up to now, been able to say that it does better than any other Android tablet maker, but Amazon’s mix of its appstore apps, plus offerings of streamed content and more besides appears to be giving that idea a run for its money. That also indicates to developers that this is a potentially strong platform to develop for.
What remains to be seen is whether Apple has another “new launch” effect in the coming months, as a result of its news on Wednesday. It’s expected that Apple will reveal a new iPad and in the process could see the same effect on the tablet market that the introduction of the iPhone 4S had on its market share in smartphones last quarter — when, by most accounts, its share jumped quite significantly compared to those of other device makers.
In Mobile Apps, Free Ain’t Free, But Cambridge University Has A Plan To Fix It
The issue of information privacy around free services like some mobile apps and social networks has often been met with a rebuttal from the other side of the argument: if the service is free, you the user are the product, and so you shouldn’t be surprised when your information is “sold” as part of that business model, the so-called “hidden cost” of free.
That can seem like an uncomfortable arrangement, however, so now some academics at Cambridge University in England are coming up with a way of fixing that, and are revealing some striking research about data collection in apps as part of their effort.
If you are among those concerned by how your information is shared, app stores are a ripe target. Focusing on the Android Market, the researchers devised an API to analyze free and paid apps in the store. Combing through more than 250,000 of them, they found that 73 percent of the apps were free, and that of those, 80 percent relied on targeted advertising as their main business model.
Within those apps using targeted ads, the Cambridge researchers found that 70 percent of them are collecting data that is not relevant to the apps themselves.
Free applications are far more popular in terms of downloads, they note: only 20 percent of paid apps get more than 100 downloads and only 0.2 percent of paid apps have more than 10,000 downloads, while 20 percent of free apps get 10,000 or more downloads. Still, not even paid apps are immune to superfluous data collection, it seems: 40 percent of them are collecting information that isn’t actually needed for the app to work.
Some examples: within the comics category, 35 percent of free applications requested access to a user’s location; in other cases, games collected a user’s phone number and contacts. Other “sensitive” data collected by apps that is not actually needed for the app itself to work included access to a user’s messages (e-mail/sms), contacts, calendar, phone number and IMEI.
The issue with blocking everything that is not needed, though, is that it would impact how developers could build a business on free apps. That’s where the Cambridge researchers a proposing a solution: separate app information from ad information, and make sure that the ad networks get only what they need to work, and nothing more. Their term for this is “decoupling”.
“Then the apps wouldn’t use ads as an excuse to collect information,” explains Dr. Ilias Leontiadis, one of the researchers. “An app would collect just what it actually needs.” Taking the idea further, personal information that was not necessary for an ad to display would get automatically blocked.
The problem with the current model, he says, is that developers are responsible for the collection of everything, including location, demographics and the rest, which they subsequently forward to the advertising networks. “You don’t know if the data is for the app or the advertiser, and you don’t know how it would be used.”
Leotiadis says a service that separates the information could take the form of a filter that comes in an app itself, or potentially could be incorporated into a mobile platform to work by default: Leontiadis says he would prefer to see a platform provider offer this by default. In any case, he doesn’t think it would be realistic to ask developers to manage this themselves: “There are over 52,000 developers in the market but only eight big ad networks,” he says. “It’s easier to control those networks than those developers.”
Notably, Cambridge’s investigation focused only on the Android Market. Leontiadis tells me that is because of how Google has set up permissions requests for users: these come up every time a user downloads an app — problem being that people tend to click OK without really looking at what they are agreeing to, he noted. Apple, in contrast, manages these independent of each download, and so would be more difficult to track.
Dollar Shave Club Launches Razor Subscription Service, With Kleiner Funding
There are few things in my life that seem less exciting than razors, but a new startup called The Dollar Shave Club wants to disrupt the market. And it has convinced some big names in the venture world, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz, to back its vision.
Dollar Shave Club is relaunching today and announcing that it’s the latest company to emerge from Science, Inc., the incubator whose partners include former MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham. The basic model is simple — at pricing that starts at $1 per month (plus $2 for shipping and handling), customers get a monthly shipment of razors delivered to their home.
Founder and CEO Michael Durbin argues that the high-end of the market has gotten ridiculously overpriced, with “a vibrating handle, a back-scratcher, and all of that stuff.” On the low-end, he says that people with “well-developed self images” don’t want to walk into a K-Mart or Wal-Mart to buy a pack of cheap razors. (I buy cheap packs of disposable razors at my local Walgreens, but hey, I’m a tech journalist, so my self-image is screwed up in all kinds of ways.) When it comes to price, it’s hard to beat $1 a month, and when it comes to convenience, it’s hard to beat a delivery to your doorstep.
Strangely, this isn’t the first company to offer razor deliveries — the memorably named Manpacks is offering a monthly package that includes razors as well as other necessities like underwear. Durbin argues that Manpacks is looking at things “a little too broadly,” because it’s hard to predict exactly what you’ll need from month to month. Shaving, on the other hand, is “one of the most regular things we do. It’s a no brainer.”
Dollar Shave Club has raised more than $1 million in a round led by Kleiner and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Andreesen Horowitz, Shasta Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Shevin Pishevar, Dennis Phelps, and David Honig.
So what makes this a venture-backed business with big potential, rather than a novelty? Well, there’s the size of the personal grooming market, which Jones estimates at $2.6 billion in the press release. Durbin says he can take a significant portion of that market by building a memorable brand. Its first promotional video is a good example of the “very irreverent, smart, fun, very Internet” identity that Durbin wants to create. For some reason, I’m not supposed to post the video until 5am Pacific, but I’ve watched it and basically love it — it is, after all, titled, “Our Blades Are F***ing Great.”
Durbin also hopes to create a stronger relationship with consumers as Dollar Shave Club expands the product line. It’s already adding new types of blades with the relaunch — the 4X blade for $6 a month and The Executive for $9 — and when it gets into shaving cream, the company will actually ask people to vote on the formulas on its website.
Friday, March 2, 2012
NASA: We’ve Been Hacked Thousands Of Times Because Of Inadequate IT Infrastructure
Paul Martin, NASA’s Inspector General, gave written testimony in a House committee earlier this week detailing the security threats faced by their IT infrastructure. The thrust of the document is that NASA needs to double down on cybersecurity but, naturally, needs more money to do so.
Their IT budget is $1.5 billion, but of that only $58 million was spent on security. Considering the enormous network of datacenters, laptops, operations centers, and research labs scattered around the world, this may not be nearly enough. As it is, in the last two years NASA has been hacked thousands of times. In one instance, the hackers gained full access to some NASA systems and credentials for 150 employees.
NASA counted 5,408 security breaches where some access was given or malicious software was installed. In 2011 alone they had 47 attacks they described as “advanced persistent threats,” serious attacks by well-funded “individuals or nations.” Of those, 13 succeeded, and one attack based in China gained complete access to Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) systems — read, write, delete, add and delete users, modify logs, everything.
Furthermore, they have lost dozens of laptops. And while government-wide, more than half of laptops are encrypted, NASA has yet to implement encryption as standard practice. The result: only one in a hundred NASA laptops is encrypted.
People in security are likely shaking their heads. Encryption of employee laptops and total isolation of root access is something even a small business should be trying to do, to say nothing of a major government entity with enormous amounts of sensitive data.
And that’s the point of this report: Martin is saying that NASA is the target of very serious hackers, and their approach to security is wildly out of date. They also are working hard to bridge the gap between security and control and the benefits of cloud computing.
Martin describes the need essentially for modern security: thin clients and cloud computing, a top-down administration of security, 21st-century standards like encryption and password regulations, and a general move to a “continuous monitoring approach,” the way modern IT should be. They’ve addressed dozens of security issues and implemented many real improvements to their systems, but it’s a good example of a organization totally reliant on technology, yet unable to move as quickly as the threats they face. For tech and research entities, agility is becoming more important yearly, and NASA hopes to convince the House of that.
Here’s the testimony in full:
Foursquare’s Inflection Point: People Using The App, But Not Checking In
When Dennis Crowley, the CEO of Foursquare, visited the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last year, he told me he spent a lot of time explaining Foursquare to the operators and vendors that are the main visitors at this event.
This year, he said the number of business cards he was handed was “like this,” making a big C-shape with his index finger and thumb. Why the change? “I think we are one of a handful of companies that builds products that would actually encourage people to upgrade their devices,” he said. That’s an important fact to remember as smartphone penetration continues to grow and takeup slows down, specifically in the developed markets where Foursquare has most made its mark.
That growth in reputation has been matched by a growth in Foursquare’s business: the company has tripled its numbers in the last year, going from “around five million” to more than 15 million, Crowley said.
That’s something that is impressing investors, too — with news that Spark Capital is reportedly buying up employee stock. But perhaps more interesting, he says, is that the company is starting to notice a marked change in behavior:
“People are using the app, but they’re not checking in,” he told me. “I asked myself: did we break something? But in fact, it’s because people are using Foursquare to look for where their friends are, to find things, and as a recommendation service. It’s almost like it doesn’t occur to them to check in.”
Crowley compares this to the moment on Twitter in 2009 when the service suddenly shifted gears, and it was not about the number of people tweeting but about how many are reading those tweets.
“When you start, you are so focused on engagement,” he said. “Then you hit this point when you are big enough and say there is something awesome going on anyway. At some point you look and say, oh wow, the consumption model is actually taking off.”
That seems to fit well with Crowley’s vision of how Foursquare is going to grow in the near future.
Some social media sites like Facebook have made a big effort to net in members using whatever means possible — so, for example, you get pared-down Facebook experiences delivered on some of the most basic phones around.
But Foursquare seems to be more interested in behavior than the scale: “We want to change experiences,” he said. The best way to do that, Crowley added, is to use maps, access to GPS and the other sensors you have on smartphones. “We want people to use the stuff we build, and to do that you have to focus on the great things,” he said. “These are not toys; they are big defining features that are changing the tune on location services.”
That has so far taken the company to making apps for most major mobile platforms, and while some of those are seeing especially strong usage in particular markets — BlackBerry usage, he says, is highest in southeast Asia and Brazil — by far the most popular platform is iOS.
But that growth has only partially manifested in staffing: Foursquare has gone from 18 people eight months ago to 100 now, but some big holes remain. There is, for example, only one business development guy in Europe, Omid Ashtari, who apparently currently works out of Soho House’s East London outpost, Shoreditch House (Foursquare also has a BD intern in the UK) . There are also some key engineers coming on board from Google and other places.
And, that growth is slowly but surely starting to emerge as monetization on the platform, too. Crowley says that so far there are already 750,000 merchants registered on its platform, and most of that growth has been viral, without a sales force driving it.
None of those merchants are being charged “yet”, but he said but he said Foursquare will probably start experimenting later this year with new features that will be charged.
He said he’s confident that there will be a market for this because there are already companies calling up asking what they should be budgeting for the services — even without them launched.
What will those features be? The kinds of tools you are already seeing around retail engagement, but with a Foursquare flavor: “We have enough check-in data to make some amazing stuff,” he said.
It sounds like the data will take the form of a kind of dashboard that would segment customers and popular items. Whether the connection to the Foursquare app makes either that data easier to collect, or more unique than what can already be gathered by the businesses themselves through their loyalty programs, is the big question.
But if it appears that Foursquare is becoming a more commercial network, one thing that Crowley says it won’t be in the near future is a way to pay for things. “It’s not something we are actively working on,” he said. “It’s the bottom of the funnel for us and if we did something it would probably be in partnership.”
That is probably a good thing, given how many other companies are piling in on mobile payments now, not just operators, but credit card companies, startups, and if you believe the WSJ today, big retailers like Target and Walmart.
But as a measure of how far he seems to be from this scene, he is pretty dismissive of NFC — a big topic this last week at MWC — when it comes to making transactions if a credit card works just as well. He can however see the merit of “tap to checkin/save/share” places. “I prefer to find solutions to actual problems that exist.”
[Note: The second, non-financial part of using NFC is something that wasn't in the original post but it is something Dennis and I talked about, and he asked me to include here to make it clear that he's not totally against NFC.]
[I'll be posting a short video from our conversation soon, with material not in the story. Watch this space.]
Apple Inc., Made In America
Apple has been under fire lately regarding its overseas manufacturing partners. Apple hired the Fair Labor Association to conduct voluntary audits of the final assembly partners, including Foxconn’s massive Asian facilities. But consumers and activists alike aren’t buying it. It’s a smokescreen, they say. Foxconn will just hide the children and give everyone a new pillow prior to inspector’s arrival. This has rightly put Apple on the defensive.
To a growing minority Apple is viewed as just another unethical company employing cheap overseas labor to assemble its wares while filling its coffers with the savings. Groups are calling for radical but compassionate actions to improve the working conditions in China and abroad. Apple will not deny its products are assembled by Foxconn and others, but it’s still an American company and responsible for a large chunk of jobs in America. Apple is essentially stating today that even though your iPhone was made in China, the company supports American households as well.
The page launched by Apple today breaks down employment numbers. There are 47,000 people employed directly by Apple in the U.S. There are Apple employees in all 50 states. iOS developers account for 210,000 jobs in the U.S., Apple says.
There are also 257,000 employees in support roles at different companies. As Apple notes, this number is comprised of many jobs, including employees at Corning making the iPhone glass, and the FedEx man delivering your MacBook Air. Apple also includes third party consumer sales staff, transportation professionals and healthcare associates in this estimate (don’t forget about the bloggers!). This estimate no doubt came from a standard employment multiplier applied to Apple’s base employment and U.S. expenditures.
Apple goes on to state that there are 27,350 Apple Store employees in 44 states, 9,700 U.S.-based AppleCare Advisors with 2,000 of them working out of their homes. As Apple says, they directly and indirectly employ a lot of Americans. But they should. They’re the most valuable company in the world with more cash on hand than many entire countries.
I’m not part of the pitchfork-wielding mob randomly shouting outside Apple Stores. Apple doesn’t employ the people that build its products; Foxconn and others pay those people’s wages. I think the idea of an ethically-built iPhone is a pipe dream — but I am also glad there are people naive enough to believe in it.
Massive entities like Apple need accountability. Unyielding affection leads to corruption. Fanboys need haters to bring the conversation back to reasonable territory. For every MG Siegler, there needs to be a Mike Daisey. The call to build an ethical iPhone will fail, but it will also improve the working conditions and wages for hundreds of thousands of assembly workers. In fact, Foxconn raised the base worker’s salary just days before the first inspectors arrived last month.
There’s a movement in America to bring the country back to its manufacturing roots and Apple is one of the prime examples, thanks to its recent success. Let’s get Americans to build products used by Americans, the movement’s activists yell. But that’s not how a global company like Apple, General Motors, IBM, or Nike survives. The same plants contracted by Apple are also used by HP, Dell, Sony, Amazon and nearly every other consumer electronic brand. Apple will never build a manufacturing facility in America’s heartland to manufacture and assemble iPhones. Chinese factory-cities have a head start of decades and billions in investment, and America isn’t going to catch up by putting up a few poky facilities here and there.
Apple is on the defensive. This page proves it. But the company is also one of America’s greatest success stories. Three guys started Apple 35 years ago and it is now the world’s most valuable company. Apple added 7,800 jobs in 2011. It’s growing and helping Americans grow as well. The point they are trying to make is that while iPhones may not be made in America, Apple was, and though it has to rely on China to get you your iPhone for less than a grand, it’s still giving back to the country that made the company possible.
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AT&T Officially Makes Unlimited Data Plans Not So Unlimited With New Throttling Rules
Welcome to the brave new world, everyone. AT&T announced today new guidelines in regards to older so-called unlimited data plans. Subscribers will still be able to keep these plans but they’re essentially limited to AT&T’s new 3GB/5GB data plans.
Let’s be clear: AT&T’s unlimited plans are now officially limited.
AT&T, like most other wireless carriers, started selling unlimited data plans several years ago to curb anxiety in regards to data usage. At that time, mobile data was still limited to email, web browsing and photo messaging. Streaming media was still very rare. These unlimited plans offered carriers’ marketers and salesmen an easy tool to get people to upgrade to smartphones. But now they’re supposedly killing the network — or so carriers would have consumers believe.
Today’s change essentially caps these legacy data plans at 3GB for HSPA+ and 5GB for LTE. Any overage will result in throttling, which as anyone who has been throttled before will attest, essentially kills data connectivity. Even mundane tasks as browsing the Internet are painfully slow. This cap remains in place until the end of the billing cycle. You will still have unlimited data, but on AT&T’s terms.
AT&T started throttling customers in 2011 in response to increased data usage. However, it was always somewhat shrouded in mystery. The policy was public, which caused misconceptions and confusion. The caps were also set at 2GB even after AT&T rolled out new, $30 3GB data plan. This new move by AT&T, while shady at best and a breach of contract at worst, at least puts the company’s policy in clear view. It even gives tips on how to better manage data.
However, as I stated previously, throttling subs on legacy products affects those nearing the end of their AT&T contracts. AT&T should be courting these people rather than driving them toward other carriers.
London’s Conference Drought Ends As Le Web, LWS and Digital London Turn Up
There’s an old saying in London. You wait an hour for a bus and then three come along at once. Thus, for the last few years people have been asking me when London would get a large technology conference which catered for startups. Admittedly I had a good go with GeeknRolla, which has now been replaced by the London Web Summit on March 19. But now London is being spoiled by yet another event: Le Web, the huge annual conference in Paris in December, is adding a Summer edition conference in London. If you’re looking for a ‘third bus’ to complete the analogue, then check out Digital London, a slightly more corporate event but one which looks like it has some interesting tracks on the future of cities, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Due to be beld on June 19th and 20th, I’ve heard that Le Web London is partly the result of heavy lobbying by the UK government and the UK Trade and Industry department’s Tech City team to get them here. So it looks like our taxes are starting to bear a little fruit…
The venue will be Central Hall Westminster, so super central London. No confirmed speakers as yet but we’re sure Loic and Geraldine Le Meur will pull off a great show with great speakers, as their contact book in Silicon Valley is hard to beat.
Registration is now open, including a 50% discount on the ticket price for the next two weeks and a special discount package for Le Web London and Lew Web Paris.
Meanwhile, please don’t ask in the comments if they will change the name to “The Web” for London. That joke boat has sailed.
Here’s Loic and Geraldine with the announcement.
Record Exec Says Google Music Is Losing Users. But Is It Worth Saving?
Users are tuning out of Google Music, the search engine’s foray into music cloud storage, streaming and sales. A high-ranking digital music executive told The Music Void that Google Music is losing users week after week, despite its preferred access to over 200 million Android installs. Seems its lack of marketing, the missing Warner deal, and competition from iTunes Match and Spotify are taking their toll.
If Google needs music to win mobile, it should put its weight behind this product. Otherwise, it’s time to unplug.
Google Music still just seems to be another experiment for the search giant. It has plenty of ways to promote it but doesn’t. It released a mobile web app but nothing native for iOS. Perhaps Google should have branded its music offering with YouTube. At least that’s service people actually associate with fun content.
Google loves to dip its toes in, test the water, and then decide if its worth steamrolling the existing players. Shipping a minimum viable product works with software and platforms, but big-name content is another story. You’ve either got all the artists (sans stingy holdouts like The Black Keys), or you’re missing a big chunk and don’t really work.
Google needs loyal Music users if it’s ever going to succeed with its own home entertainment system hardware. Though they’re still only rumors, manufacturing hardware that runs a service no one uses is a quick way to find yourself in a quagmire.
It may be time for Google Music to get serious or ride into the sunset. The choice should come down whether there are deep strategic synergies between music and its other products. If owning a music service is crucial to the future of Android, it should pay off Warner, get their catalogue, and market the hell out of Google Music. Do it while Spotify is still small and while people still perceive iTunes as an old-school MP3 store.
If it’s not essential, Google should feel free to euthanize the service with no shame — it has plenty of other things to focus on, and content’s a crappy business to be in. If Google Music ever took off, you know that every time their contracts need renegotiating, the labels would reach deep into those deep, search ad-lined pockets.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Demand for this card seems to be fairly high and I can understand the reason. It's got all the major boxes checked including a quiet aftermarket cooler, great looks, and a pretty hefty factory overclock!
Why You Can’t Dismiss Nokia’s 41-Megapixel Phone
My first reaction upon hearing about Nokia’s 41-megapixel 808 Pureview was that it was an absurdity, a perfect example of the very worst of consumer electronics, and a total miss. But the more I read, the better I understood that this phone isn’t just some freak of nature with a ridiculously high number attached to it. It’s just the slightly awkward first steps of a serious move by Nokia to differentiate itself.
If you’ve only skimmed the news, there are some things you should probably know about this strange beast of a camera.
First, the 41 megapixel figure is really misrepresentative, not to say untrue. It doesn’t take 41-megapixel photos in any way, shape, or form. Even in the special high-res creative mode, it “only” produces 38 megapixels. Mostly it will be taking normal-size shots, between 3 and 8 megapixels. So what the hell does this 41 megapixel figure even mean?
It means Nokia is being smart about the way cameras at this size actually work. I wrote a while back about how HD does not always mean high definition, and cameraphones were an excellent example of this. Their tiny sensors and bad lenses meant that while they may produce pictures of a certain size, the quality was sorely lacking. This was because they insisted on wringing every possible pixel out of an incredibly small sensor.
The 808′s sensor (supposedly manufactured by Toshiba) is not small. At 1/1.2″, it’s four or five times the size of most cameraphone sensors, including the one in the iPhone 4S. Bigger in fact than the sensors in most point-and-shoots. Now, when you make your sensor bigger, you can either keep the same resolution but have bigger wells or photosites (which detect light and make up pixels), which usually improves sensitivity. Or you can keep the same photosite size and just put more of them on the sensor, which improves resolution. In this case Nokia has done the second thing.
But they’ve done it almost to an absurd amount, and they know that their lens, good as it is (and fairly fast — F/2.4 is solid, though there’s lots of distortion right now), can’t really resolve detail well enough that 41 megapixels would be necessary. Even on full-frame cameras that many pixels is questionable.
So instead of just bumping this one spec and expecting it to sell itself, they built a whole photo system around the idea. The 808 camera doesn’t take 41-megapixel photos; it collects 41 megapixels of data and uses all that data to create a very nice photo of a much smaller size. Imagine a photo around 8000×5000 pixels that isn’t particularly sharp; now shrink it down to something significantly smaller — maybe around 3000×2500 pixels (~8MP), just as an estimate. You do it intelligently, sharpening and de-aliasing and doing noise removal.
Here’s a rough estimate of the sizes (DPReview lists more specs):
They’re using 41 megapixels of raw material to give you 8 megapixels of product. And that 8 megapixel product is going to be significantly better than a “real” 8-megapixel image captured by a sensor a quarter the size of your pinky fingernail. Their camera really is better.
Of course, this comes with the standard caveat that independent testing must be done and what really matters is how it performs in everyday situations like dimly lit kitchens, restaurants, and out of the windows of cars. We’ll try it out ourselves, and will be sure to let you know if any more photographically-inclined authorities find out anything interesting.
The other shoe
And then there’s the handset itself. It’s chunky, it’s a weird shape, the camera sticks out the back. And it runs Symbian. Symbian! Why would Nokia do such a thing?
Because this project has been going on for five years, and five years ago the idea that Nokia and Symbian would be fighting for dear life wouldn’t quite have been believed. Nokia was still king of the world, iOS was just being born, and everyone was looking forward to Limo instead of Android.
They’re running it on Symbian because it was designed for Symbian, and it was too late to port the software and adapt the hardware to Windows Phone 7, which came along at the 11th hour, and at any rate the design spec for their Lumia phones would never have admitted a lens bump like the 808′s.
But they’re promising to bring the whole package to WP7 — which means Microsoft just got five years of Nokia R&D for free. It also means that if these guys play their cards right (a big “if”), WP7 could be the de facto gold standard for mobile photography in a year or two. When you consider how point and shoots are giving way to camera phones, and WP7 is aiming at the exact population that loves point and shoots, the pieces start looking very complementary indeed.
Nobody will buy the 808. It’s an evolutionary dead end. But the camera is a desirable trait that will be introduced to the Nokia-Microsoft hybrid soon — if either of these companies has any sense. Again, that’s a big if.
But this camera has restored some of my faith in Nokia and in mobile photography, something I truly didn’t expect to happen any time soon, and not by them of all.
Yahoo Stabs Facebook In The Back, Says Pay For Its Patents Or Get Sued
After years of positive relations, friendly blog posts, and referral traffic, Yahoo may have just been biding its time waiting to declare war on Facebook. Today it suddenly accused its former ally of infringing on 10-20 of its patents. It demands a settlement from Facebook or it says it will sue. The betrayer only warned Facebook privately once the New York Times had publicly published details passed to it by Yahoo. Though dastardly opportunistic, this patent trolling could produce a big windfall for Yahoo’s investors.
Facebook tells me it was blindsided, saying “Yahoo contacted us at the same time they called the New York Times, so we haven’t had the opportunity to fully evaluate their claims.” Facebook has been very conservative about its use of patents. It bought some especially far-reaching social networking patents originally owned by Friendster from Malaysian company MOL for $40 million in 2010, but never used them offsensively even when it felt threatened by Twitter.
Yahoo has long worked closely with Facebook, using the social network to power sign-up and login of its email service and Flickr. Just 11 days ago, Facebook congratulated Yahoo in a blog post noting its Open Graph protocol had helped Yahoo’s news reader app gain 25 million users, including 2 million each day, and more than 500,000 referrals a day. I doubt we’ll see such courtesies between these two anytime soon.
Today’s attack comes at a particularly vulnerable time for Facebook, during the quiet period leading up to its IPO. Facebook could be forced to license the patents or settle with Yahoo by paying out pre-IPO stock, the same way Google was coerced into giving Yahoo 2.7 million shares in a patent settlement before the search giant’s 2004 IPO.
Details are sketchy on which of Yahoo’s patents it believes Facebook has infringed upon. However, Forbes reported in November that Yahoo held 1,100 US patents with 2,661 pending, and it could have 3-4x that many international patents. These include patents on paid search that Facebook may be violating through its deal with Microsoft Bing, and basic social networking patents that could apply to core parts of Facebook’s business.
Yahoo has held these patents defensively for years as a deterrent to trolling by other patent holders. But Facebook is a young company without a robust portfolio, and with record buzz about its IPO, now might be the perfect time to shake down the social network. A Yahoo crony tells the NYT that the two companies met today, and now it says “We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights.”
Honestly, this is despicable. After relentlessly stagnating as Facebook innovated, to now try to extort Zuckerberg’s company just as it enters the spotlight reeks of desperation. The only positive news from Yahoo in recent memory was thanks to the viral nature of Facebook’s social graph that Yahoo may says it owns the rights to. Did the Winklevii join Yahoo’s board?
GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram puts it eloquently:
Perhaps Yahoo sees Facebook as too big of a threat to its ailing display ad business. Even if it does score cash or stock in a settlement, Yahoo’s shareholders should be worried. Your business model shouldn’t depend on the remarkable shortsightedness of a patent officer who thought it was ok to let someone own the concept of connections between personal profiles online.
Monday, February 27, 2012
EPIC Isn’t Taking “No” For An Answer, Files Emergency Appeal In Google Privacy Case
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, also known as EPIC, isn’t backing down from its desire to have Google’s privacy policy changes investigated by the Federal Trade Commission. On February 18th, the FTC basically told the organization to “mind its own business” (as The NYT put it), suggesting to the court that EPIC has no legal standing in the matter, and asked the court to dismiss the case. The court later agreed.
Today, EPIC announced its plans to appeal that decision, and is again pushing for a ruling by March 1st, when the new privacy policy changes are set to go live.
PIC says it filed an “emergency appeal” within hours of the ruling where the court stated that it could not require the FTC to enforce a prior consent order against Google. The reason for the emergency status of the new appeal has to do with the fact that the privacy changes Google plans to enact will go live on March 1st, 2012. EPIC is therefore asking the appellate court to overturn the earlier decision before March 1st.
Google announced in January its plans to consolidate more than 60 separate privacy policy notices into one single, simple policy. The company said that the change will allow it to treat individual customers as a single user across all its products which will mean “a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.” Says Google, not only will the policies be in one place, they’ve also been rewritten so they’re easier to read and understand.
EPIC, however, is concerned about what the change means in terms of Google users’ right to privacy, and how Google is safeguarding users’ personal data. Specifically, the organization claims Google didn’t fully comply with a consent order from the FTC which required Google to answer detailed questions about how it protects the personal information of Google users. EPIC says that Google “chose not to answer many of the questions,” and did not explain the impact on user privacy that will take place on March 1st.
While the allegations being made by EPIC regarding the policy change may or may not have merit, the court essentially ruled that it’s not EPIC’s place to get involved. The FTC, instead, has the right to decide whether or not the Google violated the consent order and what should be done if so, the court said.
To say that the ruling angered EPIC would be an understatement. The organization lashed out last week, saying that Congress has “clearly told the FTC to enforce its final orders.” And in response to the claim that EPIC’s request for action by March 1st was “arbitrary,” the organization responded:
“If the government is unaware that Google plans to make a substantial change in its business practices on March 1, 2012, it should turn on a computer connected to the Internet.”
Ouch.
Clearly, today’s announcement of the emergency appeal is a hope for a second shot at forcing the FTC’s hand in the matter.
