VentureBeat |
- Ouch: Nokia plans to cut another 3,500 jobs
- Travel search service Hipmunk launches new Android app
- Trulia brings its real estate expertise to Android with tablet, rentals apps
- Android Ice Cream Sandwich showed off by lucky eBay buyer (video)
- For PapayaMobile’s social games, the women are the “whales” (exclusive)
- Just like with TV, there’s a prime-time for apps too
- Socialbakers gets funding hot out of the oven after recent launch
- Plantronics headset lets you tweet with voice commands
- Achievers raises $24.5M for employee rewards platform
- Start-up’s gaffe raises questions about blogs in Silicon Valley
- Webinars aren’t dead yet, says BrightTalk and its $20.5M round
- Synaptics hires former AMD executive as CEO
- Apple may kill iPod Classic and iPod Shuffle
- Amazon makes ad-supported Kindle pricing the new normal
- Kindle, Nook, Kobo or iPad: Which tablet or e-reader should you buy?
- Study: 52% of BlackBerry users plan on switching to iPhone 5
- It’s finally here: Amazon’s Kindle Fire (photo gallery)
- 10 things you need to know about the Kindle Fire
- Amazon has more hits on its hands with Kindle Fire tablet, Kindle Touch (video)
- The future of online music services: Rights, tech and money
- Flickr launches its first official Android app, plus iPhone “Photo Sessions”
- Signpost’s sales force to rival Groupon by 2012 (exclusive)
- Box.net hooks up with Chatter, now pre-loaded on Motorola Xoom
- VentureBeat takes a “leisure dive” into San Francisco Bay (video)
- Unity Technologies hopes to woo developers with new 3D game tools
- Investing titan Marc Andreessen says there’s no bubble because “stuff just works”
- Microsoft and Samsung sign huge cross-licensing patent deal to stop Android lawsuits
| Ouch: Nokia plans to cut another 3,500 jobs Posted: 29 Sep 2011 08:49 AM PDT
The slashed jobs will be added to the 4,000 jobs Nokia already announced it would cut in April. At that time, Nokia said it would cut 4,000 positions by the end of 2012 and transfer 3,000 jobs to Accenture. Nokia is in the midst of a major transformation led by CEO Stephen Elop in which the company is significantly cutting operations and switching its phones to run Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS. The company has lost a lot of ground in the past few years, transitioning from a powerhouse smartphone seller in the world to a stagnant manufacturer that hasn’t embraced innovation like Apple, Samsung and HTC. “We are seeing solid progress against our strategy, and with these planned changes we will emerge as a more dynamic, nimble and efficient challenger,” said Elop in a statement. “We must take painful, yet necessary, steps to align our workforce and operations with our path forward.” The new job cuts will come from closing a factory in Romania and people from its supply chain operations, which accounts for 2,200 employees. It will also cut 1,300 jobs from its commerce and location businesses. Do you think Nokia has a chance to recovering lost ground with slimming down its company and embracing Windows Phone 7? Filed under: mobile        
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| Travel search service Hipmunk launches new Android app Posted: 29 Sep 2011 08:38 AM PDT
Much like Hipmunk’s website, the Android app aggregates ticket fares from airlines and allows people to sort them by time, price, flight duration, airline as well as “agony,” Hipmunk’s algorithm for discovering the most enjoyable flights. Similar to its iPhone app, Hipmunk for Android’s visual interface optimizes the travel search experience for a mobile device without sacrificing any of the key features that makes the service so desirable to use. The app also lets you see which flights have Wi-Fi access, lets you save searches and sends you directly to an airline’s website or third-party travel service to book your tickets. Hipmunk faces competition on the Android Market from competitors like Travelocity and Kayak. Co-founded by Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman in 2010, the San Francisco-based startup has $5.2 million total funding from Ignition Partners, Y-Combinator and a handful of angel investors. The company has a total of 10 employees, including Hipmunk Senior programmer Christopher Slowe, formerly of Reddit. Images via Hipmunk
Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Trulia brings its real estate expertise to Android with tablet, rentals apps Posted: 29 Sep 2011 07:34 AM PDT Online real estate finder Trulia is launching a big play on Android this morning with two new apps: an Android tablet app, and an app made specifically for renters. Both apps show the increasing importance of mobile for Trulia, which the company says accounts for 25 percent of its overall traffic. It’s also a sign that companies are finally beginning to take Android tablets seriously, after they failed to get much traction last year. Trulia touts its tablet app as the first of its kind for Android. The app includes all of the features you’d expect. You can search for properties to buy or rent, view large photos of properties, and contact a real estate agent from within the app. In my brief hands-on test, it appears to be well-designed and, most importantly, fast. The tablet app requires Google’s tablet-optimized Android 3.0. The Trulia “For Rent” app is, not surprisingly, built specifically for rental hunters. In addition to helping you find rental properties, it’s packed with features to make your search easier. You can organize and customize rental searches and keep track of your notes and photos about a rental property from within the app. You can also easily share your notes and photos with family members, roommates, or friends. The company tells us it’s also excited about Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, which was unveiled yesterday. It’s currently working on an app for the Fire’s marketplace, and Trulia expects it to be available when the Kindle ships on November 15. Trulia is based in San Francisco and has raised $33 million so far from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Android Ice Cream Sandwich showed off by lucky eBay buyer (video) Posted: 29 Sep 2011 07:29 AM PDT
Because Android is the number one smartphone OS in the world and 56 percent of new smartphone buyers choose Android, many people can't wait to see what Google has in store with the next update of the OS. By contrast, Apple’s iOS remains in not-close-at-all second place with 28 percent of new smartphone buyers choosing it. We first saw some tasty photos of the next version of Android floating around the web in mid-August. The OS seen in the video looks a lot like what we saw in those photos, so it appears to be the genuine article. Verizon Wireless will reportedly be the first carrier with a phone running Ice Cream Sandwich when it launches Samsung’s upcoming Droid Prime in October. Ice Cream Sandwich appears to take cues from both Honeycomb and Gingerbread. It uses a blue color instead of green on notifications and icons, has a Honeycomb-like multitasking menu and a revamped notification bar and camera interface. Sadly, the tipster who took the video claims his new Nexus S was remotely locked and wiped after the video appeared online, so now there’s no way to double-check the unit’s authenticity. Still, it’s fun to see what Google may have up its sleeve. The full Ice Cream Sandwich demo video can be viewed below: Filed under: mobile        
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| For PapayaMobile’s social games, the women are the “whales” (exclusive) Posted: 29 Sep 2011 07:00 AM PDT
In hardcore games, most of the fanatical customers are men. But many social mobile games appeal to women more than men. The data from Beijing-based Papaya shows that when the content suits women, they can be big spenders on games as well. Whales are extremely important to game companies, as Papaya says they account for 60 percent of revenue.
Those games are free-to-play, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual items in a game. Usually, only a few percent of players will bother to pay. The company defines whales as customers who pay more $100 on a game. Those whales make up about 4 percent of the players. Mid-spenders — who spend $10 to $100 on a game — account for 17 percent of players. And minnows, who spend less than $10, account for 79 percent of the users. While whales are 60 percent of revenue, mid-spenders are 32 percent of revenue and minnows are 8 percent. Whales spend their virtual currency on “consumable” virtual goods, which expire, such as energy in a game. About 96.65 percent of whale spending is focused on consumables. For minnows, only 80.93 percent is spent on consumables. The rest is spent on “durable” virtual goods which don’t go away, such as avatars.
As you can see in the chart at the right, the average spending by whales peaks in the second and third months of playing a Papaya game. Minnows, on the other hand, spend more than whales in the first four days after downloading a game. Then the minnows stop spending. Whales are also more social. They spend 2.5 times more time in social network sessions than minnows do. The whales also reply to comments in mobile chat rooms about 2.5 times ore than minnows do. Whales also do six times more updates to their status bars than minnows. In general, Papaya concludes that whales, particularly women, help drive monetization by extending the time of engagement with an app and by generating more revenue over a long period of time. Filed under: games, mobile, social        
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| Just like with TV, there’s a prime-time for apps too Posted: 29 Sep 2011 06:00 AM PDT Mobile app usage peaks at around 7 pm during the day, according to the mobile analytics firm Flurry. The data shows that, just as there is with television, there is a prime-time for mobile apps as well. Mobile app users generally use their apps from 3 pm to 10 pm, with the peak time being around 7 pm. That’s slightly off from the usual television prime-time, which lasts from around 7 pm to 11 pm. By comparison, the prime-time for the internet is around 3 pm to 11 pm. Advertisers will find that particularly interesting, as it suggests that they might profit by advertising on mobile apps during certain times of the day. With TV, advertisers seek to target audiences as efficiently as possible. For instance, they could target 24-year-old to 35-year-old females during prime-time TV shows that reach that audience. For TV, prime-time is the period that attracts the most viewers and has the most lucrative advertising. For radio, driving time is the most valuable “daypart.” On the internet, the evening is the most active time. Flurry tracks 110,000 mobile apps on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and J2ME phones. Flurry looked at apps such as games and social networks that are used by more than 15 million consumers (15 years and older) a day. The source for the internet and TV data is Michael Zimbalist, vice president of research for the New York Times. Overall, compared to TV viewing and internet usage, mobile app usage is higher from 6 am to 6 pm. Mobile app usage starts sliding downward fast around 9 pm. From 7 am to 10 am, the percent of mobile app users who are using apps is greater than that of mobile internet users. During 10 am, roughly 30 percent of mobile device owners use an app during that hour. One day, Flurry says, advertisers will be able to target a tightly defined audience that uses different apps. Flurry also notes that the number of users who sign on to mobile apps from 7 am to 11 pm is equivalent to 17 American Idol finale show audiences. Filed under: games, mobile, social, VentureBeat        
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| Socialbakers gets funding hot out of the oven after recent launch Posted: 29 Sep 2011 01:09 AM PDT
The company is surrounded by competitors calling themselves “social media analysts,” with big names like Radian6, to smaller ones like ViralHeat, all playing in the same pool. But Socialbakers, whose founders launched the product wearing white chef’s hats, thinks the company has a different approach and has already been successful doing it. “As a company we were profitable from day one, basically,” said Jan Rezab, CEO and co-founder of Socialbakers, in an interview with VentureBeat. The profit comes from looking at social engagement instead of just keywords. Most social media analytics involves listening to social behavior: You watch a company or keyword’s stream, listen to the conversations, and determine whether they are positive or negative. From there you can tell the client whether a product is doing well, or if people have opinions about a particular service. ViralHeat even tries to predict whether a person intends to purchase a product or not, which they call “Human Intent.” Socialbakers, on the other hand, analyzes individual products less, and focuses on online presence and social media campaign success more. The company does this by manually ranking different brands based their industry, which Socialbakers checks for accuracy and objectivity. It then looks at the brand’s social pages to make sure the pages are official and not fan-made. The software then begins the listening process and watches for engagement. In order to scale, Socialbakers crowdsources rankings from the public. The company says it gets nearly 1000 requests to help out daily. Most importantly, Socialbakers can show you how your social media initiatives are doing stacked up next to your direct competitors. You can see if they are receiving more engagement and why. The company does this by aggregating data from around 5 million Facebook pages and places. The company plans to put the new capital right into its product to spur growth plans and advancements. The company is also showing off some of its analyics prowess in the infographic below. Some gems from the infographic: automotive and retail industries both see the most fan-based social engagement, but airline and telecom companies are the most responsive. It also shows the United States has the most Facebook users at 155.7 million, but surprisingly Indonesia comes second at 40.4 million. Socialbakers was founded in 2008, initially as an agency to help improve its own social media performance. The company sees 250,000 unique visitors a month, and has over 500 paying clients including L'Oréal, BMW, Vodafone, Samsung, Ogilvy, and Kraft. Filed under: DEMO, social, VentureBeat        
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| Plantronics headset lets you tweet with voice commands Posted: 28 Sep 2011 09:01 PM PDT
The Plantronics Marque M155 uses the Vocalyst voice service to post to Facebook or Twitter, send emails or text messages, or check the weather via voice command. To answer a phone call, you don’t have to press a button. You just say the word, “answer.” The device shows that even makers of Bluetooth headsets have to offer fancy services and apps in order to differentiate their hardware from other companies. The headset is capitalizing on the trend toward mobile work. By 2015, more than half of handsets in use will be smartphones, according to IHS Research. The smart headset will compete with high-end Bluetooth headsets such as the Jawbone devices. In addition to recognizing your voice commands, the Marque M155 can also play audio of your feeds via your phone so you can catch up on news, listen to sports data, or catch up on your social messages. A year of Vocalyst subscription service comes free with the purchase of Marque, which is Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Plantronics’ smallest headset. It weighs seven grams, or less than most ballpoint pens. You can use the Marque to listen to music, hear navigation directions, and talk with people. The Marque will work with Android and Apple devies and its app is available in the App Store and and the Android Market. The Marque M155 is available in black or white for $60. Filed under: mobile        
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| Achievers raises $24.5M for employee rewards platform Posted: 28 Sep 2011 07:16 PM PDT
That seems like something every company should do. But Achievers gives them a helping hand, and the company has grown 105 percent in monthly revenue over the last 12 months. The company has programs such as social recognition, which allows employees to share their work accomplishments on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Employees can forward their recognitions via email and can accumulate points that they can cash in for real-world rewards such as TVs or vacations. Achievers’ clients include Marriott, Microsoft and 3M. Sequoia Capital led the funding, which was the company’s third institional round. Other investors included JLA Ventures, GrandBanks Capital, and the Ontario Venture Capital Fund (managed by NorthLeaf Capital). Total funding to date is $38 million. Achievers has 150 employees and recently moved its headquarters from Toronto to San Francisco, where it hopes to hire 40 more people. Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia, said employee rewards and recognition is a $48 billion industry that is fragmented and largely handled manually. Achievers, on the other hand, has turned the process into a software-as-a-service. Achievers is available in multiple languages with round-the-clock support. It targets firms with 500 employees and up. Achievers was founded as I Love Rewards in 2002. Rivals include internal recognition programs as well as Globoforce and Rypple. Founder and chief executive Razor Suleman has been starting businesses since he was 15 years old.  Filed under: enterprise, games, VentureBeat        
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| Start-up’s gaffe raises questions about blogs in Silicon Valley Posted: 28 Sep 2011 06:12 PM PDT We’ve pulled this story down after talking further with the startup involved. We apologize to the startup and to TechCrunch. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
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| Webinars aren’t dead yet, says BrightTalk and its $20.5M round Posted: 28 Sep 2011 04:30 PM PDT
The funding comes from North Bridge Growth Equity for a minority stake in the company. Webinars are inherently a dry topic. You watch or listen to a person talk about their product or company for a half hour and look at PowerPoint slides in the meantime. Technology today allows for collaborative, exciting ways of presenting knowledge, even in consumer entities such as Google+’s Hangout feature, but webinars seem to remain in the Stone Age of static earnings call hell. But BrightTalk sees a future for webinars: marketing. “The platform we’ve built is a webinar video platform that’s used by marketers so they can get their content … distributed to the widest possible audience,” said Paul Heald, chief executive and co-founder of BrightTalk in an interview with VentureBeat. The product is thus a place where company leaders can upload their webinars, show off their “thought leadership” and supply context for their industry wisdom. Currently, BrightTalk allows these leaders and their marketing arms to add in supplemental materials and distributes the full package amongst the community of business folk who make up BrightTalk’s audience. BrightTalk will soon introduce social features to the mix with the goal of providing rich and engaging content. Webinar participants will be able to interact on what was once a very unidirectional piece of content. Heald hopes that with the social and supplemental materials along with the webinar itself, BrightTalk will become a content distributor as opposed to just a webinar distributor. Heald says the biggest industries BrightTalk serves are the technology and financial services industries. “These are industries where the knowledge frontier is moving very quickly. Companies need to get their thought leaders on their feet … and talking to their audience on a regular basis,” said Heald. BrightTalk was founded in 2002 and is located in San Francisco, New York and London. [Photo courtesy of NinaMalyna/Shutterstock] Filed under: deals, media        
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| Synaptics hires former AMD executive as CEO Posted: 28 Sep 2011 04:24 PM PDT
Bergman will lead Synaptics into the future of human interfaces for computers, mobile phones, and entertainment devices. Synaptics currently makes the software and sensors for touchpads, which replace the computer mouse in a laptop. Users swipe their finger across the touchpad to get a cursor to move to a different part of a laptop screen. Synaptics also makes touchscreen interfaces for tablets and smartphones. Bergman resigned from AMD last week, not long after the chip maker hired former Lenovo executive Rory Read as its new CEO. Bergman was senior vice president and general manager of the products group at AMD. Bergman, 47, succeeds Russ Knittel, who was interim CEO since October, 2010. Knittel replaced Thomas Tiernan, who served as Synaptics CEO for a little more than a year before resigning last year for personal reasons. A familiar figure to VentureBeat readers, Bergman has been a longtime executive in the graphics chip business, serving in top jobs at ATI Technologies before it was acquired in 2006 by AMD. At AMD, Bergman was responsible for delivering microprocessors and graphics chips to AMD’s customers and for Fusion, which are the combination chips that put a graphics chip and processor on a single piece of silicon. During Berman’s tenure, AMD grew its share of the graphics chip market in competition with Nvidia. Francis Lee, chairman of Synaptics and its former CEO, said that Bergman is a visionary leader who can help take Synaptics’ capactive touch technology to new markets. Before joining ATI in 2001, Bergman was the chief operating officer at S3, another early graphics firm. He was also head of marketing at Exponential (where I first met him), and he worked at Texas Instruments and IBM. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Apple may kill iPod Classic and iPod Shuffle Posted: 28 Sep 2011 03:17 PM PDT
The news would hardly be surprising. The Classic is an old-style designed iPod that’s essentially a music storage device that plays music. The Shuffle is essentially just a smaller music storage device no screen. With Apple’s push to a cloud-based business model, both devices seem like relics that no longer fit within the company’s long-term strategy. It also doesn’t help that both devices are arguably the least glamorous in Apple’s entire hardware product line up. I don’t see how either device could evolve into something better at this point either. The cloud-based storage strategy makes the Classic obsolete, and Apple’s iPod Nano is small enough in size that it could easily take the Shuffle’s place as Apple’s low-end iPod. Apple is also planning to reveal some minor changes to its iPod touch, according to TUAW’s source. It’s unknown if Apple will make these announcements at its October 4 press event. Filed under: cloud, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Amazon makes ad-supported Kindle pricing the new normal Posted: 28 Sep 2011 02:41 PM PDT
The company announced today its new Kindle Touch for $99 and a revamped keyboard-less Kindle for $79. Remove the Special Offers though, and the price for those e-readers jumps to $139 and $109, respectively. Amazon introduced its ad-supported Kindles in April, which it offered for $114 (Wi-Fi only) and $139 (with 3G). The latter went on to become Amazon’s best-selling Kindle for that quarter. That was a major signal that Kindle buyers didn’t mind a few ads if it meant saving cash (the ad-supported 3G model was $50 cheaper than the version without ads). Given the success of its earlier ad-supported Kindles, it certainly makes sense for Amazon to make them its new standard. U.S. customers likely won’t have much of a problem with it, but the change is confusing to international buyers, Slashgear reports. Amazon’s Special Offers service is only available in the U.S., so customers in other countries will have to pay the full price for the hardware. That will certainly dampen the excitement of many international users seeing headlines for a $99 Kindle Touch. Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Kindle, Nook, Kobo or iPad: Which tablet or e-reader should you buy? Posted: 28 Sep 2011 02:32 PM PDT Amazon’s announcement of the Kindle Fire today threw down the gauntlet for both tablets and e-book readers. At just $199, it’s not much more expensive than previous e-readers, and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than competing tablets. In fact, you might be asking yourself: Why would I want a drab, monochrome E Ink reader when for a little bit more money I could get an awesome 7-inch tablet? Conversely, why would I spend $500 and up for an iPad or Galaxy Tab when I could get a slightly smaller tablet for a fraction of the price? We’re glad you asked. We can help you answer both questions. Here are the features, pros and cons of a number of tablets and e-book readers, sorted by price from low to high. What did we miss? Let us know in the comments and we’ll update this list. $79 Kindle
Kobo Wireless
TouchPad
Kobo Touch
Nook Simple Touch
Kindle Touch
Kindle Fire
Nook Color
BlackBerry PlayBook
Xoom
iPad 2
Galaxy Tab
* Battery life claims come from the device manufacturers, and depend on usage. For instance, you’ll get less battery life if Wi-Fi is turned on and you’re watching a movie than you will reading a black-and-white text document with Wi-Fi and 3G off. Additional reporting by Heather Kelly Related articles
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| Study: 52% of BlackBerry users plan on switching to iPhone 5 Posted: 28 Sep 2011 01:46 PM PDT
Many people are anticipating Apple will unveil an iPhone 5 at its just announced Oct. 4 event, so anticipation is running especially high for the device and details about its features. Analysts predict that Sprint will become an iPhone carrier and the phone will feature a larger screen, a faster processor, an 8-megapixel camera and a powerful virtual assistant. The InMobi study talked to a sampling of mobile device users in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Participants said their top four most-desired additions to the phone were “improved battery life, increased processing speed, higher-quality screen resolution and stronger phone service.” Research in Motion appears to be the biggest loser from InMobi’s study, as a staggering 52 percent of BlackBerry users plan to switch to the iPhone 5 with their next phone purchase. Fifty-one percent of current iPhone owners plan to pick up the iPhone 5, while 27 percent of Android owners plan to switch. However, InMobi’s study indicates that if the iPhone 5 is only a minor update, similar to the bump from the 3G to 3GS, less than 15 percent of mobile consumers will be likely to buy the phone. If the new iPhone is only a minor spec bump from the iPhone 4, 28 percent BlackBerry users still plan to make the switch, indicating many BlackBerry unsatisfied users. Do you plan to purchase an iPhone 5 as your next phone? Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| It’s finally here: Amazon’s Kindle Fire (photo gallery) Posted: 28 Sep 2011 12:49 PM PDT Amazon confirmed rumors with the announcement of its own tablet device called Kindle Fire, which features a seven-inch touch screen, eight gigabytes of storage, an eight-hour battery and all the benefits of Amazon’s cloud services. While you won’t be able to get your hands on a Kindle Fire until November 15, you can enjoy some product shots from Amazon. We’ve also included some hands-on photos of Amazon’s new Kindle e-ink Readers taken by VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| 10 things you need to know about the Kindle Fire Posted: 28 Sep 2011 12:34 PM PDT
Many analysts think the tablet and e-reader could cut into sales of Apple’s iPad and be a huge holiday hit with its $199 price point. One senior analyst at Forrester Research even predicted Amazon’s tablet could become the number two tablet in the world after the iPad by the end of 2011. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also used the New York event to launch a $79 version of the original Kindle and the new $99 touch-enabled Kindle Touch, two smart devices sure to also help Amazon sell a lot of units this year. But back to the big announcement from the show, the Amazon Kindle Fire. Here are 10 important questions and answers about brand-new Kindle Fire. 1. How much does it cost? The Kindle Fire will retail for an impressive $199, which is less than half the price of the most inexpensive iPad, which costs $499. 2. What kind of screen does it have? The tablet features a 7-inch, Gorilla Glass-protected, multitouch IPS display with 1024 by 600 resolution. It can display 16 million colors. 3. How good is the hardware inside? Inside the Kindle Fire is a Texas Instruments OMAP4 dual-core processor that will enable all types of media playback. Notably, it does not have 3G connectivity and only lets you stream over a Wi-Fi connection. 4. How big is it and how long does the battery last? The Kindle Fire measures 7.5 by 4.7 by 0.45 inches and weighs 14.6 ounces. It will feel similar to other 7-inch tablets in your hands. The battery is rated for up to 8 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback, with the Wi-Fi turned off. (We expect the battery will be less than this in real usage.) 5. What sort of software is it running? The Kindle Fire runs on a completely new version of Google Android in which you can hardly see the Android components. It includes a cool web browser called Silk, a native e-mail client and a document reader. 6. Does it run apps? Yes, you will be able to run Android applications including popular games like Angry Birds and utilities like The Weather Channel. Apps will be purchased through Amazon’s App Store. 7. How will reading e-books on it compare to the original Kindle? The biggest difference between the new Kindles and the original Kindle in terms of reading is the screen. The original Kindle and new Kindle Touch feature an E-Ink screen that makes for especially comfortable reading, while the Kindle Fire’s LCD screen is more versatile but less friendly on the eyes while reading for long periods. Amazon’s bookstore offers more than 1 million books, including 800,000 titles priced at $9.99 or less. 8. What other kinds of content will I be able to enjoy on the tablet? Using the $79-a-year Amazon Prime service, you can stream more than 100,000 movies and TV show episodes to the Kindle Fire. You can also buy music from Amazon’s catalog of 17 million tunes or stream already-purchased music from Amazon’s Cloud Drive. Notably, you can also download magazines such as Bon Appetit, Elle and Oprah in full color. 9. How much storage does it have and how does it work with the Amazon cloud? The Kindle Fire has 8GB of onboard storage, but Amazon offers a unique way of storing items so you never really run out of room. Anything you purchase — such as books, music and movies — will be backed up in Amazon’s cloud so you can delete and re-store items on your device at any time. 10. When can I buy it? The Kindle Fire will begin shipping on November 15. It can be pre-ordered starting today. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Amazon has more hits on its hands with Kindle Fire tablet, Kindle Touch (video) Posted: 28 Sep 2011 12:17 PM PDT  Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet and Kindle Touch look like the company’s best consumer devices yet, based on demonstrations from Amazon staff at the company’s launch event today in New York City.
Software-wise, the $499 Kindle Fire definitely doesn’t resemble any other Android tablet, except for perhaps Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color. It features a customized carousel-based interface that shows off your recently added content, as well as a more traditional bookshelf to keep your favorite content within reach. The tablet moved along smoothly in the demonstration, thanks to its dual-core processor. It’s difficult to judge just how well the Kindle Fire performs yet. The demonstrator played a clip (which I believe was in high-definition) from the film X-Men: First Class, and played a short round of the game Fruit Ninja. But there are plenty of smartphones on the market that can perform both of those tasks today without a sweat. The real test for the Kindle Fire will be how it juggles more intensive games, as well as multiple types of content at once. As for the Kindle Touch, it appears to work just like other touch e-readers from Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Sony, which also offer infrared based touch interfaces. The $99 e-reader ($139 without Amazon’s Special Offers ad feature) lets you change the size of text by pinching and zooming, just as you would with a modern touchscreen smartphone. The Kindle Touch has a couple features not found in the competition: It has “EasyReach” tap zones, which let you turn pages easily with one hand, as well as an “X-Ray” feature, which makes factoids and Wikipedia entries about the page you’re reading easily accessible.  Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat, video        
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| The future of online music services: Rights, tech and money Posted: 28 Sep 2011 12:02 PM PDT
There is a fundamental disagreement about the value of and revenue models for distributing recorded music. The Spotify music streaming service was a runaway success in the U.K., but took well more than a year to gather the rights it needed to launch stateside. The lingering question about Pandora is how much it will pay for music rights when it renegotiates the rate in 2015. Turntable.fm, the media darling product launch of 2011, has an abundance of backers, but a scarcity of rights, something it’s actively working to address. Meanwhile, investment dollars in the music space are slowly starting to rebound after a long quiet period. But are investors buying good properties low, or just throwing good money after bad? As these dynamics shift, the opportunities to discuss them need to shift as well. Billboard’s FutureSound — taking place November 17-18 in San Francisco — will get decision-makers from all sides of this equation into focused, drill-down discussions on the major stumbling blocks and opportunities in the digital music and entertainment space. This will not be panel after panel of leaders in just one sector preaching to themselves in 20,000-foot platitudes. Instead, this event will have a series of focused keynotes from the top minds in investment, technology and music today. A handful of presentations from thought leaders will offer specific solutions structured around answering the most pressing questions, then workshopping these ideas further backstage with additional experts to produce solution-oriented recommendations. The results will be published in the following week’s Billboard magazine and on Billboard.biz. VentureBeat readers get 15 percent off by using promo code VENBEAT11. Keynote speakers: Billboard will also showcase both under-the-radar digital music startups defining tomorrow’s competitive landscape and cutting-edge musical acts during a party after the day wraps on Nov. 18, pulling in top names from what’s next in music in the way only Billboard can. Register today to learn and shape the discussion that will shape the music business. Confirmed speakers include: Register now and use the promo code VENBEAT11 for a 15 percent discount. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Flickr launches its first official Android app, plus iPhone “Photo Sessions” Posted: 28 Sep 2011 11:57 AM PDT
The site launched its first Android app today, and also introduced a new feature for iPhone and iPad customers called Photo Session. Photo Session lets you “flip” through a gallery of photos with friends, no matter where they are in the world, using your iPad or iPhone. “Photo Session is like sitting next to your friend and flipping through photos, but your friend can be anywhere in the world,” Flickr said. Flickr has had an iPhone app since 2009 but Android users have had to content themselves with unofficial, third-party alternatives until now. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, has 68 million users, 200 million Creative Commons-licensed photos, and the largest pool of geotagged photos of any photo-sharing site, according to Yahoo. Yahoo is now calling itself “the premier digital media company,” according to Yahoo vice president Steve Douty. Flickr is now the focus of this digital emphasis. Yahoo claims more than 600 million unique visitors a month, and delivers 42,000 customized home pages to site visitors every 5 minutes, he said. Improving the company’s mobile reach is the next step. “We are committed to being a bigger player than we are today in the mobile space,” Douty said. The new app is meant to put photography front and center, according to product manager Marcus Spiering. “We focused around very clean, beautiful design where the photo is in the center of the foreground,” Spiering said at today’s press conference. Upon entering the app, the “You” screen gives you access to all of your photos, albums and contacts. Taking a cue from the surging popularity of upstart mobile-phone photography apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic, the new Flickr app includes photo filters as well as sharing tools. There are filters designed to create high-quality photos. Photos go to Flickr automatically but photos can be shared across other social networks including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. You can easily add metadata, and geolocation data is optionally automatically embedded in each photo. However, said Spiering, privacy options will protect those who don’t want to share their pictures with the whole world. “We want people to feel very safe, photos are something that are very personal,” said Spiering. Related articles
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| Signpost’s sales force to rival Groupon by 2012 (exclusive) Posted: 28 Sep 2011 11:34 AM PDT
Signpost employs local contractors, called Deal Scouts, to sign up local businesses for the service. They’re paid based on the number of businesses they sign up. Signpost is adding about a thousand new scouts per week in a growing number of cities across the country and expects to have over 13,000 before the end of the year. By comparison, Groupon employs more than 7,000 full-time employees. “If we maintain our current level (of growth), Signpost will have created a local sales force that will rival any daily deal company,” Wall said, adding that Signpost’s model works for all parties involved because it charges its local business clients a $99 monthly fee rather than taking half of every deal transaction the way Groupon or LivingSocial do. A growing number of critics have branded Groupon as bad for small businesses, because Groupon employees are paid on commission — meaning better deals are more lucrative to the employee, regardless of whether that deal is good for the small business. Signpost, however, allows those businesses to take all the profits from a daily deal. Its Deal Scouts are motivated to make sure local business clients have success using Signpost’s service — not how much money the deal will bring in. Scouts earn money for the number of new and existing businesses they work with. A person who works full-time as a scout can clear about $65,000 in a year, according to Wall. Founded in 2009, the New York-based startup has over $1 million in funding from Spark Capital, Google Ventures, Jason Calacanis and others. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| Box.net hooks up with Chatter, now pre-loaded on Motorola Xoom Posted: 28 Sep 2011 10:55 AM PDT
Box.net is now shipping its content over to Salesforce.com’s enterprise social network Chatter. Users can pull content from Box.net — like shared files and the comments attached to those files — in activity streams in Chatter. Chatter had around 60,000 customers when last reported, although that number has grown significantly since then, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told VentureBeat. Yammer, a Chatter competitor that has gained good traction in the enterprise social network space and is led by former PayPal graduate David Sacks, also has an existing partnership with Box.net. “Our strategy is to be the social Switzerland where we integrate with any and all applications including Saleforce.com, SharePoint and many others,” Sacks told VentureBeat. “This announcement has no impact on that strategy.” Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie made the announcement at the company’s first BoxWorks annual conference in San Francisco, Calif. He said Box.net’s application on Google’s Android mobile operating system will now also come pre-loaded on the Motorola Xoom, the current flagship tablet for the company. Box.net unveiled plans to pre-load its mobile app on Samsung tablets in January this year. While Box.net is an enterprise application, it could punch a hole in the niche Dropbox has carved out as a mobile cloud storage provider for consumers. “Box has to be the easiest way that you can securely share information in the enterprise. That’s the whole reason why software doesn’t work today — it’s cumbersome,” Levie said. “And for employees that want to use a tablet or a smartphone, the power of those devices are comparable to laptops just a few months ago, they’re becoming an integral part of the enterprise.” The company also unveiled a new version of its desktop sharing app, Sync (pictured above). That application creates a folder for your desktop that automatically copies the information to a remote cloud-based server. The new version of Sync works across both Mac and PC computers. Any changes made to a file on a PC are immediately transferred over to the same file in the shared folder in the Mac. The process works the same way in the other direction. Box.net recently turned down a buyout offer worth more than $500 million, as we reported exclusively earlier this month. Box.net previously raised $48 million in its most recent round of funding led by Emergence Capital in February. It is also in the process of finalizing an extension to that round of funding worth $35 million. The company has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 77 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. The company is based in Palo Alto, Calif. Filed under: cloud        
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| VentureBeat takes a “leisure dive” into San Francisco Bay (video) Posted: 28 Sep 2011 10:18 AM PDT
Leisure diving is like planking, only instead of lying face down on random surfaces, you jump horizontally into a body of water while looking as relaxed as possible. The online phenomenon was started by Alex Scott, my cousin, who works at Google when he isn’t being leisurely. “Get perfectly parallel to the water with legs straight or one leg straight and the other knee bent like you’re laying on your side at the beach,” Scott advises would-be leisure divers. “Have one arm cocked with hand on hip the other cocked to the side of your head or with a prop or leisurely beverage.” There’s also the essential “leisure face.” “You are relaxing. You are the picture of calm. You are not scared, excited or about to receive a blow to your abdomen,” says Scott. So naturally, we had to test this ourselves.
For good measure, we made our editor-in-chief Matt Marshall jump in too. Actually, executive editor Dylan Tweney said he would do a leisure dive into the Bay as soon as we hit a traffic milestone. We destroyed the milestone and Tweney had no choice but to start scouting leisure dive locations. Marshall was “peer pressured” into joining Tweney by writer Dean Takahashi. You don’t say “no” to Takahashi. “I’m going to need luck on my side to pull that off,” said Tweney before his dive. “I will be leaping off a wooden dock into water of unknown depth, after all.” Pay no attention to the massive “NO DIVING” sign that looms over Tweney and Marshall as they do their dives. Thank goodness we accomplished the feat before November when the water gets even colder. Tweney probably took the pending water temperature plummet into consideration, along with our mad skills as writers. And so, without further ado, I give you the VentureBeat Leisure Dive. Photos taken by Dean Takahashi and Heather Kelly; video created by Christopher Peri Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Unity Technologies hopes to woo developers with new 3D game tools Posted: 28 Sep 2011 10:00 AM PDT
The new update offers more 3D graphics features that will make Unity-based games more realistic when it comes to depicting 3D imagery in browser-based and mobile games. The new features help make Unity more broadly useful to game companies and will help it compete with high-end game tool makers such as Epic Games. The advantage for developers is they can create a game for the Unity platform and then run it on many different devices, from game consoles to the web and mobile devices. San Francisco-based Unity unveiled the technology updates at its Unite 11 developer conference today in San Francisco. Unity targets all sorts of developers, from small indie developers to big game studios working on marquee console games. Joachim Ante, chief technical officer of Unity, said Unity 3.5 is another step in the pursuit of a full-featured, high-end game engine that helps developers create bigger and better games. The new version allows for multi-threaded rendering, where graphics images can be processed more efficiently and quickly through the use of parallelism. It also enables better lighting effects and particle systems, such as better smoke effects. Unity 3.5 will be available later this year. The company also said it has opened a Canadian office via its acquisition of animation tech startup Mecanim. Mecanim is headed by Robert Lanciault, Sonny Myette and Pierre-Paul Giroux. All were pioneers in computer graphics. They founded Mecanim in 2009. Luma Arcade, a web and mboile game developer, said that its Bladeslinger mobile game (pictured) will use Unity’s technology. Unity also said that the first console game based on Unity will be launching soon. Recoil Games will launch its Unity-based game Rochard on the PlayStation Network. Going forward, Unity is releasing a social applications programming interface so developers can easily add features such as leaderboards, achievements and friend list to their games. That social API will allow developers to add social features to games for iOS, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, web, and Facebook games. Unity is enabling in-app purchases and analytics as well. Unity’s goal is to democratize game development so that anyone can make games, from hobbyists to console developers. Unity is used in more than 2,000 games and the company has 150 employees now. The company has opened an Asset Store to allow developers to sell assets that can be used in games. Other developers can buy them and then use them in their own games. In the keynote this morning, David Helgason, chief executive of Unity, said the company has launched a “AAA initiative,” to make sure that Unity is a rock solid engine for use in the best games. On stage, Ante showed a feature dubbed “level of detail,” which allows a developer to show a scene with 20,000 buildings where you can zoom in and zoom out fluidly. Unity has also added an artificial intelligence program into the Unity engine. Filed under: dev, games, VentureBeat        
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| Investing titan Marc Andreessen says there’s no bubble because “stuff just works” Posted: 28 Sep 2011 09:44 AM PDT
Some major companies in the Web 2.0 era have become incredibly popular and have ballooning valuations. Facebook, for example, is valued at more than $80 billion. Social gaming company Zynga recently filed for an initial public offering in order to raise up to $1 billion and is reportedly valued somewhere around $10 billion. Those colossal valuations have made some investors and entrepreneurs concerned that the companies are overvalued and are contributing to a tech bubble similar to the one that led to a recession in the early 2000s. But a decade ago, during the last emergence of the last technology investing bubble, Facebook probably would never have made it off the ground because of the massive infrastructure costs and requirements. Thanks to cheaper online storage and the cloud computing revolution, it’s become trivial to start a company that at one point would have to pay millions of dollars to Oracle and others for servers and hardware. That massive shift in development and computing has led to the emergence of Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, Twitter and others that have revolutionized the way people use the Internet, Andreessen explained onstage at the Box.net Boxworks conference in San Francisco, Calif.. “It costs so much less to run a company like Salesforce.com today than it would 10 or 15 years ago, so you can get these amazing services actually delivered to people,” Andreessen said. “The cost structure today is so much lower, 10 years ago Facebook would have been impossible to have as a company, the infrastructure costs would have crushed it.” Andreessen is considered one of the most prominent investors in the valley after he started Netscape during the last dot-com boom. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has invested in companies like cloud storage provider Box.net, Groupon, Foursquare, Twitter and Zynga. Most of the companies that his firm has invested in use those new cloud-based computing applications like Amazon’s AWS service and Google Docs, he said. Companies like Amazon and Google, which run powerful servers that can handle computing-heavy applications remotely, weren’t around a decade ago. Back then, each new startup had to “sign four checks to Oracle, Sun and two others” before they got off the ground to handle their infrastructure costs, Andreessen said. That meant much larger early capital costs, which required larger — and more risky — early-stage investments, Andreessen said. “People who lived through the 1990s, investors and entrepreneurs are so psychologically starved of the bitter disappointment that it’s hard to look at this landscape and see the things that are working and not get upset,” Andreessen said. “Stuff is actually just working, it seems like it’s real.” [Photo credit: Matthew Lynley] Filed under: cloud        
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| Microsoft and Samsung sign huge cross-licensing patent deal to stop Android lawsuits Posted: 28 Sep 2011 09:34 AM PDT
Under the agreement, Samsung will pay a royalty fee to Microsoft on every Android tablet and smartphone it produces, and the two won’t engage in any legal battles over patents related to Android. The agreement follows several deals Microsoft has made with Android manufacturers, with companies like HTC, Acer, ViewSonic, Velocity Micro and Winstron paying similar fees per Android device. “Together with the license agreement signed last year with HTC, today's agreement with Samsung means that the top two Android handset manufacturers in the United States have now acquired licenses to Microsoft's patent portfolio,” Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith and IP lawyer Horacio Gutierrez said in a Microsoft blog post. “These two companies together accounted for more than half of all Android phones sold in the U.S. over the past year. That leaves Motorola Mobility, with which Microsoft is currently in litigation, as the only major Android smartphone manufacturer in the U.S. without a license.” Samsung has also agreed to coordinate with Microsoft on Windows Phone 7′s marketing and development, signalling a renewed Samsung commitment to creating non-Android phones. Samsung already has some of the best Windows Phone devices on the market and no doubt it will want to create more after Google announced plans to acquire competitor Motorola Mobility in mid-August. Microsoft’s Smith and Gutierrez said they hope this kind of agreement will be how major tech companies choose to resolve patent lawsuits, rather than continuing to fight in court. “There undoubtedly will be a good deal of additional drama before this new generation of patent issues sorts itself out in its entirety,” Smith and Gutierrez wrote. “But as all of our agreements illustrate, a solution is increasingly in sight. Put in this context, today's announcement does not yet represent the beginning of the end for this industry-wide assortment of issues. But to borrow a well-known phrase, perhaps we've now reached the end of the beginning.” Do you think cross-licensing deals will ultimately be the way companies like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, HTC and Nokia resolve the escalating patent battles brewing now? Filed under: deals, mobile        
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