VentureBeat |
- Nokia’s killer Lumia 900 Windows Phone hits CES on Monday, says NYT
- Marvell unveils SMILE Plug to create teacher-controlled wireless networks in classrooms
- WowWee shows off its latest App Gear toys that interact with downloaded apps
- Case study: How & why to build a consumer app with Node.js
- A link-by-link guide to the New Hampshire Republican primary
- Silicon Valley may be too smart for its own good
- Rackspace open-sources Dreadnot for failure-free software deployment with Node.js
- Skype exec flies the coop to join Urban Airship
- Woz, Spock & the best party you ever missed (video)
| Nokia’s killer Lumia 900 Windows Phone hits CES on Monday, says NYT Posted: 08 Jan 2012 09:26 AM PST
The Lumia 900 will be initially available on AT&T and is described as “sleek” and “metallic,” sources tell the New York Times. It’s a particularly exciting device for Nokia and Microsoft because it will likely be the first “must have” Windows Phone for many consumers. The Lumia 900 may end up being call the Nokia Ace when it hits the US, according to previous rumors, which also pointed to it being the first LTE 4G device available for Windows Phone. It’s said to sport a larger 4.3-inch display than the Lumia 800 (which only has a 3.7-inch display), and a front-facing camera, according to leaked images. Under the hood, it'll run the same 1.4-gigahertz processor as the 800. While it may seem confusing for Nokia to launch yet another high-end Windows Phone only a few months after it debuted the Lumia 800 (and its inexpensive sibling the Lumia 710), I don't think anyone will complain about the Lumia 900′s specs, as it seems to fix all of the issues I had with the Lumia 800 (in particular, the small screen and lack of a front camera). Image via PocketNow Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Marvell unveils SMILE Plug to create teacher-controlled wireless networks in classrooms Posted: 08 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST
To be unveiled this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, the Smile Plug is part of Marvell’s larger “Classroom 3.0″ environment that is aimed at creating a connected, secure learning atmosphere that simplifies and speeds the deployment of technology to students around the world. Marvell collaborated with Stanford University to create the Marvell SMILE Plug (named after the Stanford Mobile Inquiry Based Learning Environment program), which uses Marvell’s Armada processor and creates a “micro cloud” wireless network within a classroom that is completely controlled by the teacher. The Smile Plug is essentially a small server designed for delivering classroom materials to students. It can be combined with the OLPC XO 3.0 tablets, a Marvell-powered education tablet created by One Laptop per Child. Weili Dai, co-founder of Marvell, said that SMILE Plug and OLPC XO 3.0 are both important additions to the world’s classrooms and show that Marvell is committed to improving education worldwide. She says they can help transform learning from a one-way process into a two-way interactive experience. the Marvell Smile Plug uses the company’s Armada 300 series SoC processors and Marvell Avastar 88w8764 WiFi chips to create a small wireless network that can be used by as many as 60 students at a time. That network delivers safe and secure internet access that can be controlled by the teacher. Marvell created an easy-to-manage wireless access point for the SMILE program, with tools that provide teachers control over the system. The Smile Plug computer features an open platform based on Arch Linux for ARM. SMILE Plug will be available in the spring.
Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat        
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| WowWee shows off its latest App Gear toys that interact with downloaded apps Posted: 08 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST Toys and electronics are mixing more than ever these days. That’s why toy robot maker WowWee has created a new line of collectible toys, dubbed App Gear, that interact with free downloaded apps for smartphones and tablets.
Rather than take a backseat to the digital experience of video games, toys can help enhance it, according to WowWee, the maker of the Robosapien robot toys and Paper Jamz electronic toy guitars. App Gear toys will give retailers a piece of the app pie, with toys selling for $9.99 to $19.99. The goal is to get beyond the gimmick and make the toys true parts of the games. App Gear products work with all of the iOS and Android mobile devices. Rivals include toys such as Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure from Activision Blizzard and the Appmates mobile app toys from Disney. AppToyz also recently launched an AppBlaster toy gun that uses plastic extensions to tap the screen of an iPhone when you fire. The game inserts creatures to shoot at into the environment as you move around a room. One of the newest App Gear toys is Akodomon, where kids star with a collectible kid monster, a terrarium and an environment marker piece. The users can see the animated creature come to life on screen. You can raise your creature, teach them to play, shape their personality and evolve them into unique interactive characters. You can play against other players and purchase upgrades for the app via micro transactions. You can go online and share your unique creation in the online part of the app. Every App Gear Toys will connect or interact with the free downloaded app; collectible figures, interactive play sets and customizable toys will be included with each pack. Every App gear product is compatible with all IOS and Android platforms.
Filed under: games, mobile, VentureBeat        
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| Case study: How & why to build a consumer app with Node.js Posted: 07 Jan 2012 03:25 PM PST
But is Node just as good a fit for web agencies and developers that build dozens, scores, or even hundreds of sites a year? Making the switch away from tried-and-tested platforms such as Ruby, PHP, Python or .NET for a fresh technology barely out of its infancy, especially when it's not your product and when you're working for global brands that simply can't fail, is a risky proposition. So why would you want to use Node.js? As a high-volume web agency, here are the reasons we chose to go with Node and the tips and tricks we learned along the way. Why we chose Node.js» It’s JavaScript! Every developer also knows at least some JavaScript. Introducing Node.js, then, is relatively easy. Everyone in a given web shop knows the basics and just has to learn about the event loop, callbacks and to how to use async flow control. At our own agency, as people got to know Node, we actually saw that our browser-side JavaScript code improved in quality and structure. » Code re-use at every level: browser, back end & database JavaScript is the language of the browser, but JavaScript also powers many of the new NoSQL databases. We tried a couple of them for building content management system and quick fell in love with MongoDB. MongoDB uses JavaScript for querying data, which means at the very worst that we can copy and paste code and use it in different layers of the system. What might be written as a parser for the browser might be used to format a report executed on the database. Taking this one step further, we are standardising the include mechanism to actually reuse code and modules across the layers. This means all layers can include the same file, massively reducing the maintenance needed of code and cutting down the time required to write tests. » Strong, responsive and enthusiastic community IRC, meetups, bloggers, Twitter and Github are all alive with the chatter and support of Node.js. But not only are they alive; there is an excitement which you don't normally see on this scale. So for our developers and many others, this is an invaluable resource when bugs, issues and obstacles do occur. » Large productivity gains in HTML & CSS using Jade & Stylus HTML and CSS guys love working on Node because using Node means we'll be using Jade and Stylus by TJ Holowaychuck. We loved HAML and SASS before Node.js, and now we can't imagine using anything other than Jade and Stylus. » Performance and scalability We have found that Node.js scales really well. The non-blocking event loop allows for a phenomenal amount of traffic compared to our old, highly-optimized PHP stack running through Apache. On our first project for a national newspaper, we used a front-end nginx proxy for load balancing to the various node instances and were ready to add extra instances during the peaks caused by TV and national newspaper advertising. The peaks came but the load on the first instance stayed low. The single Node.js instance hardly broke a sweat, despite seeing one of the highest requests per seconds we'd ever seen. With PHP and PostgreSQL we could scale up, but it felt really hard and gave us many sleepless nights. Using Node.js with a MongoDB backend scaling up is quick and easy; but because Node can handle more traffic, you don't need to as quickly. » Wealth of hosting options: No.de, Joyent's SmartMachine, Heroku, Nodejitsu We host our production sites on our own private cloud, but for smaller companies there are many cost effective and easy to setup hosting providers. We've got a couple of new Node.js projects in development and will be deploying them on Joyent's SmartMachines. » Make your developers famous I always try to ensure our developers work on open-source projects in contracted hours as much as possible. Encouraging them to start projects that benefit the community as well as the business. When building projects for our clients, we look for modules that have common functionality which could be packaged up and made into open source projects: For example, Gzippo is connect middle-ware developed by one of our staff to perform gzip compression of static assets. We like to manage compression and expiry times of static assets in our Node.js layer because it gives us the freedom to either serve directly from Node or to stick a caching proxy in front. This way it is served from the caching proxy for all other requests and keeps all the configuration in the Node app, meaning you only need node.js on your development machine to work on projects and do QA using Pagespeed or ySlow. » Developer happiness There is something intoxicating about coding JavaScript on the server side; throw in the event-loop and it's heaven for developers. They just can't get enough of it! Maybe it's because we've been coding PHP for such a long time, but Node.js has really inspired our developers. If you were to ask any one of them, "How do you find coding in Node.js?", you can bet your bottom dollar you'd hear "I love it!” right back. A sample Node development stackThis is a snapshot of our ever-evolving development stack. There are a couple of staples, but for the most part if we find something better we can just switch it out. 0.4.12 and 0.6.6
Point releases often break backwards compatibility. We manage our version using the excellent tool n, also by TJ Holowaychuk.
Anyone wandering into the world of Node.js quickly make a choice how they are going to handle flow control. There are a number of methods out there. We've stuck with one of the most popular Async.js and depend on it in nearly all modules.
The de facto standard Node.js web application framework is the Sinatra inspired Express.js which builds on top of the Connect middle-ware framework by Sencha Labs. We use Jade as our template engine in the view layer to generate the HTML, and we use Stylus for creating CSS. If you've not checked them out then you should, they are a compelling reason for using Node.js. Here is an example of the sort of thing that our designer are doing with Stylus.
We use Winston writing to files and also pushing log data to the excellent Loggly cloud logging service, which consolidates the logs from each of our node.js instances.
There are a lot of testing frameworks for Node.js. Knowing which to chose it hard. We looked at a few and made the decision to go with something very simple, in this case Expresso and Should.js. New projects are now using Mocha, the successor to Expresso. Conclusion We are on our fifth large project with Node.js (for us, “large” is around 150 worker-days) and are continuing to support the previous projects whilst developing a handful of small and medium-size projects in between. Less than a year has passed since we adopted Node.js, but the project stats are already looking really good. Initially, the projects we undertook did take longer as our developers learned the intricacies of Node and as we found our feet with the hosting, editors and tools needed to develop and deploy a large scale applications. However, our last project in node was actually under budget, something that rarely occurs at Clock. Once you get used to event-based async programming, settle on a set of standard development patterns and an architectural style. You quickly start to reap the benefits of working solely in JavaScript. This makes Node.js not only fun but extremely effective to program in.
Filed under: dev        
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| A link-by-link guide to the New Hampshire Republican primary Posted: 07 Jan 2012 02:41 PM PST Want to know what to expect in the New Hampshire primary this coming week? Here’s a nicely curated, Internet-powered playlist of links that will take you step-by-step through the Republican race to date, including info on each candidate, news items, speech videos, and cold, hard stats. Best of all, you’ll get most of the news you probably wanted to read from reliable sources and mainstream media outlets while dodging some of the, uh, santorum you might have to wade through in a typical Google News search for information on the primary. Check it out: Click to see full widget. Although the widget is ordinarily embeddable, it’s not playing nicely with our WordPress install. We apologize for the inconvenience. This handy playlist comes from MentorMob, a fairly freshly minted startup based in Chicago. The company launched its first public product just two months ago. The goal of these playlists, a company spokesperson tells us, is to “organize the best content on the web … so users can educate themselves on topics of their liking.” For example, this New Hampshire-themed playlist was created to help web-surfing voters get all the relevant information about the Republican race as it meanders toward the upcoming primary, including data “about each candidate's goals and platforms in an unbiased fashion — that way anyone can comprehend the event and its participants in simplest terms,” the rep concluded. Co-founder Kris Chinosorn has said he wants MentorMob to be “the Pandora of learning.” In many ways, the product reminds us of webrings (remember the nineties?!), but with a handy navigational sidebar to keep you from falling into the bowels of the Internet. And for use cases like this one (or for guiding students through a selection of Wikipedia articles and published research, or for any similar instance where guided curation is needed), MentorMob seems like a decent solution. Here’s more about MentorMob from its team: Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Silicon Valley may be too smart for its own good Posted: 07 Jan 2012 01:15 PM PST
But that brilliance comes with some blinders. Instead of figuring out how to adapt to real users, we too often expect them to adapt to us. In a post last week about car-service Uber's outlandish New Year's Eve surcharges, I made the seemingly innocuous comment that the multiplier Uber used to explain the pricing was confusing to casual users; that it’d be better to display a rate in dollars or the minimum charge at a given time. A number of people responded that a user can do the math, so it’s not a big deal. Yes, an Uber user who knows the regular rate could multiply it by the multiplier and figure out what the current rate is. But why should they have to? A computer can do it better and faster. One of my core design philosophies is that you shouldn’t make users do work that computers can easily do. Although Uber claims to have tested price elasticity on New Year’s Eve, what they really tested was the ability of drunk people to comprehend a bad user interface. If they had truly tested price elasticity, there should have been no complaints about the surge pricing because the people who paid 6x the normal rate would have been satisfied with their decision. I hear similar tone-deafness when it comes to things like screen size, compute power and connectivity. We Silicon Valley types are sitting at 24″ monitors with the latest hardware connected to 20 Mbps pipes designing products that are used by people with five-year-old computers at DSL speeds or worse. Not everyone has the desire (or the money) to upgrade their computer or phone every year. I see many products that while beautiful and elegant in the right environment, wouldn’t work well in many homes. I recently met with EverFi, a company that provides online learning tools to high schools. EverFi actually ships discs with Flash files to some schools because their connectivity is so bad that an entirely online experience wouldn’t work well. That’s the kind of thinking I like to see, but more commonly, companies would take a “Let them buy iPads” approach. Many in Silicon Valley often miss the fact that most of the population does not dramatically change behavior overnight. Behavior changes gradually over time. I spend a lot of time talking with small businesses and entrepreneurs who are trying to sell into small businesses. Inevitably, entrepreneurs will tell me how they plan to wow small business owners with the reams of great demographic data they can generate, if only the business will switch its operations to a new platform. They’re shocked when I tell them most small businesses don’t give a shit about data. That’s not how they run their business. They will, some day. But not now. I’ve met with business owners who run daily deals that don’t use computers on a regular basis. In some cases, they can’t even tell if a voucher was redeemed because tracking is done with pencil and paper. In Silicon Valley, we live and breathe data, so this is hard to fathom. It’s not because they’re country bumpkins who live in flyover states. Anyone trying to sell in to small businesses should read what it takes to sell to a restaurant by Jonas Luster, who describes himself as an “uneducated Southern hick,” though he is anything but. I worked at a startup that sold unified communications services. If you don’t know what that is, you’re not alone. The initial product was designed by a team of rockstar telecomm engineers who had left Lucent. It did everything you could ask for. But consumers weren’t asking. We dramatically simplified the product into services consumer could understand — fax, phone, voicemail. We nearly doubled our prices and got more people to buy. Too many people in Silicon Valley are enamored of technology for the sake of technology. Two of my favorite companies — GrubHub and Savored — use decidedly low-tech ways to accomplish their goals. GrubHub sends orders to many restaurants via fax machine (gasp!). Savored creates the impression of dynamic pricing for restaurant reservations, even though in reality discounted tables are manually blocked off based on typical traffic patterns. Savored could have focused on developing the ideal yield management system, but their approach works today and provides at least 80% of the value. Square, another great company, uses 1980s technology because that is the technology used on hundreds of millions of credit cards that are in consumers’ wallets. People who have never used a computer can pay a Square merchant by pulling out a piece of plastic. At the same time, Square innovates with products like Card Case, which allows more tech savvy consumers to pay just by saying their name. On the merchant side, Square is getting people hooked with an elegant solution that solves an immediate, easy-to-understand need (payments) and then slowly inching them into other more sophisticated products like point-of-sale systems. People in Silicon Valley are passionate about their products — which is great. They should be. But you can’t assume that your users are. Most consumers aren’t going to read every email you send them, follow you on Twitter or read your blog. The product needs to stand alone. It needs to get people excited. The competition for most startups is not the 10 other companies that are doing essentially the same thing, but NFL football, American Idol and the billion other things that people could be doing. “The truth is, startups design stuff for people like themselves, not for the mass market,” wrote Cynthia Schames, a friend from outside the Valley. “And they expect everyone to put up with a half-baked, unreliable ‘product’ just because TechCrunch wrote about it. “It’s almost like they’re too smart for their own good; like that guy at a cocktail party who refuses to speak in anything but hedge fund terminology … he’s not getting a date, because she can’t tell what the hell he’s talking about, and also because he’s an insufferable ass.” When things go wrong, the reflexive action in Silicon Valley is to blame the consumer instead of taking at least partial responsibility. Uber’s blog post in response to the surge pricing is arrogant. The tone is “You just don’t get it. We’re really, really smart.” AllThingsD asked if New Year’s Eve was Uber’s “Netflix moment.” Uber didn’t make a giant mistake. There isn’t a fundamental business model problem. The company provides a valuable service that some people are willing to pay a premium for. It has users and drivers who love the service. It can get past this: Fix the UI, offer no-questions-asked refunds of the New Year’s Eve surcharge to customers who feel they were misled and move on. Tech writers aren’t immune from Silicon Valley’s blinders. Too many blog posts repeat vanity milestone statistics released by companies instead of asking tough questions like “Do real people actually use this?” “Is there a business here?” Instead of being critical and pushing companies to be better, we do glowing profiles of founders. We snicker at “idiots” who don’t understand pricing strategies that were deliberately designed to be confusing. They’re not idiots. They’re real people with real money to spend. And as special a place as Silicon Valley is, we sometimes forget that not everything innovative happens here. After my piece on demand-based pricing and Uber, a friend from Minnesota called me out for using the San Francisco demand-based parking meter experiment as an example when other cities have been testing it, too. Such reporting helps foster the impression that there is nothing of value anywhere else and gives people in the Valley a bigger head, he said. Tech blogs should use more examples from outside the Valley. He’s right. GrubHub is based in Chicago and EverFi is based in Washington, DC.
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| Rackspace open-sources Dreadnot for failure-free software deployment with Node.js Posted: 07 Jan 2012 11:44 AM PST
It’s free and open-source; it’s built with Node.js; it purports to make continuous deployment a breeze (relatively speaking); and if all that doesn’t excite you, you’re probably not the kind of hacker that would find this post interesting, in which case we direct you to this video of a robot petting a kitten. Our good buddy Paul Quera, who was recently hanging out in the VentureBeat video studio to chat about Node.js, writes on the Rackspace blog that Dreadnot was created to deploy large-scale software with a minimum of manual labor and/or Kafkaesque horror-scapes of failure. “The Rackspace Cloud Monitoring team is fanatical about continuous deployment,” he says. “We love being able to iterate quickly on our product and believe that our customers will get the best experience possible by doing so.” Originally, the Rackspace cloud monitoring team had been using Etsy's Deployinator for these tasks. However, as Querna points out, “The Deployinator was developed for a single region product and took some shortcuts… Each [Rackspace] team was faced with creating many customizations in Deployinator to fit the models we desired.” The team also needed a solution for multiple-region deployments, which Deployinator didn’t support. So the Rackspacecadets went back to the drawing board and built Dreadnot, which Querna calls “a relatively simple Node.js application built on top of the Express web framework and Twitter's Bootstrap Javascript and CSS utilities.” Dreadnot gives clever engineers like you a step-by-step control mechanism and window into the deployment process. If any of its steps fail, Dreadnot will pause its operations and wait for you, the aforementioned clever engineer, to address the issues, all while directing traffic to another region. “Dreadnot was developed to assist with the most common multiple region deployments,” Querna writes. “However, for the complicated deployments, or those deployments that experience a fatal error, you can proceed manually without interference from Dreadnot.” When Dreadnot is finished with deployment for that region, it reconfigures the load balancers to direct traffic back to the newly enhanced region. Then, Dreadnot lathers, rinses and repeats for the rest of the regions in the deployment. Qurena also explains that staging and other environments get isolated Dreadnot instances for security reasons and to keep testing separate from production code. Dreadnot is open sourced under the Apache License version 2.0. Go get it (or fork it, or whatever) on Github. Filed under: dev        
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| Skype exec flies the coop to join Urban Airship Posted: 07 Jan 2012 10:42 AM PST
Christopher Dean, formerly Skype’s chief strategy officer and the company’s global business development head, will now be Urban Airship’s chief revenue officer. At Portland-based Urban Airship, Dean will head up sales and business development efforts for the still-young startup. Dean will work out of the mobile services company’s San Francisco office. "To be a truly great startup there has to be a combination of first-timers hell bent on changing the world, and been-there-done-that execs who know how to focus teams and leverage the best opportunities," said Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton in a statement. "We get a little bit of both with Chris, and he will be a phenomenal addition to the leadership team." Dean began working at Skype in 2008. Prior to that, he help biz dev positions at tech companies such as FaceTime Communications (now Actiance, geospatial data company Analytical Surveys, tech investment firm Epoch Partners, and SmartAge, a dotcom consultancy that was acquired in or around 2000. Late in 2011, Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo, a San Francisco-based startup focusing on providing data to mobile developers. Since that’s very much Urban Airship’s home turf, the acquisition made a lot of sense. "Urban Airship has the opportunity to take the leadership position in a new and important category of products critical to companies that are now interacting with customers on mobile devices," said Dean in a statement. "The team is a blend of the very best technical, marketing and creative talent I've seen in a long time, and I'm excited to be part of it." Urban Airship provides tools for mobile developers to make money and engage users will their apps. Clients include Warner Bros., Groupon, Yahoo any many others. The startup says it is responsible for more than 250 million app installs. UA was founded in 2009 and has taken $21.6 million in funding to date, around $15 million of which came from last year’s round from Salesforce and Verizon. The company reported that it saw a 600 percent year-over-year revenue growth in October 2011. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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| Woz, Spock & the best party you ever missed (video) Posted: 07 Jan 2012 09:44 AM PST Chances are, if reading tech blogs is what you do with your Saturday, you’re gonna love this video. It features an all-star cast: VentureBeat CTO Chris Peri, “alien chic” bewigged Jolie O’Dell, and a server rack so fast you could whiten your teeth just thinking about it. We shot this week’s episode in the thick of a party we just co-hosted with server tech company Fusion-io and DEMO. Held in trendy San Francisco bar Temple, it was one of the coolest events we’ve been to since, like, the nineties. We had go-go dancers, a wall of mist bearing video projects, a psychedelic soundtrack, and special guests Steve “The Woz” Wozniak and Leonard “Mr. Spock” Nimoy. To see Nimoy’s talk in toto, check out this awesome video. Also, we have a lovely clip of Woz and Nimoy onstage together, if you’re in the mood for a geekgasm to end all geekgasms. And yes, both Peri and O’Dell actually spoke with and physically touched Mr. Nimoy. Written expressions of jealousy may be addressed to VentureBeat’s main office. Filed under: VentureBeat, video        
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Just as we expected, Nokia will unveil its Lumia 900 Windows Phone — which will be tasked with reinvigorating the mobile platform as its new flagship device — on Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Node.js has been getting great press for being used to build real-time web applications and fast networking tools that help big web sites run and scale.
Paul Serby is CTO of Clock, a UK web agency, where he directs technology choices, architects software, manages large development projects, writes code, makes tea and preaches the virtues of good software design. Clock developed Sun Perks, one of Britian's largest consumer facing Node.js implementations for News International. Followed shortly by another ground breaking service, the Eat Out Dining Card for The Times. Both leveraging Node.js and a whole host of young and exciting supplementary technology.<
The hard-working nerds at Rackspace have a gift for you: 
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