Posts Tagged ‘DigitalBeat’
Vator Splash event on May 13 (VB discount included)
, a place where innovators and entrepreneurs can broadcast their news and showcase their businesses, is holding its second Vator Splash event this year. The evening event takes place May 13, 2010 at the Cafe du Nord in San Francisco.
CEOs and/or founders of 10 companies, chosen by their peers and vetted by judges, will have the opportunity to win prizes, and present a three-minute pitch onstage in front of some 400 of their industry peers, VCs, and media.
Want to present onstage? and join other onstage presenters, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal, as well as VCs from August Capital, Bessemer, Founders Fund, Hummer Winblad, Javelin, Jafco, Lightspeed, Mayfield, Norwest, Scale, Softech VC, SV Angel, and many more.
Get a 25% discount on your ticket today using the code “VatorVentureBeat” .
Microsoft unveils two Kin phones to recapture youth market
Microsoft finally unveiled its mobile strategy to entice consumers in their teens and twenties. It’s coming out with two phones — — that deeply integrate social networking features.
The launch is an attempt by Microsoft to bring back the glory days of Danger’s Sidekick device, which was incredibly popular among young people. Microsoft purchased Danger Research in 2008, and since then there’s been little public success from that union; it wasn’t difficult to imagine that they were working on something covertly.
, president of the entertainment and devices division at Microsoft, said the audience he’s aiming at desire a “multi-screen life” and want “a deeply social phone” that will amplify their lives.
“It’s couture software,” Bach said. “It’s custom fit for young people’s lives.”
Verizon will be the exclusive wireless partner for the new Kin phones in the U.S., and the device will roll out to its stores in May. Vodafone will carry the phones in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom this fall. Microsoft is positioning the Kin phones as complementary to Windows Phone 7.
The Kin One (pictured right) has a compact keyboard for one-handed texting. Users can drag and drop photos and pieces of content across the screen to share them with friends on social networks like Facebook. Photos are automatically geotagged. It has a 5.0 megapixel camera with flash and shoots SD video. The small phone also has four gigabytes of disk space, which is enough to store 1,000 songs. Those, of course, are played through Zune. The Kin Two (pictured below) has a larger keyboard meant for two-handed texting. It has an 8.0 megapixel camera with 8 gigabytes of disk space.
The company is pairing the devices with online services called Kin Loop and Kin Studio (pictured below) that help users keep track of their friends’ lives and manage their own videos and photos.
Companies:
People:
Twitter acquires maker of Tweetie, stoking concern among developers
Twitter , the maker of a popular iPhone client for the microblogging network called Tweetie, today. The acquisition represents a big sea change in the way the company has cultivated its developer ecosystem.
For months and months, the company has kept its web site relatively spare and instead encouraged third parties to build out novel features and presences for it on other devices. The acquisition, for which terms weren’t disclosed, may stoke fears among developers that the social network is encroaching on their turf.
Today Twitter and bought Atebits, creating an official iPhone app. Its chief executive said the company bought Atebits because it wanted to offer newbies an easy way to find a well-designed mobile app for reading tweets.
“People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up,” said. “It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.”
The purchase caps off a tumultuous week for developers and long-time observers of the company. Twitter investor and Union Square Ventures principal Fred Wilson said last weekend that only patched up core offerings the company should have had from the very beginning. He said he hoped that developers would start building entirely new services centered around verticals like travel, health and entertainment. The post spawned a by building or buying apps while pushing third-party developers out of the market. It seems Wilson’s post really did foreshadow today’s acquisition.
While Tweetie is a well-designed app and definitely fills a need that Twitter has, this acquisition could backfire. Twitter’s ecosystem is still relatively young and small — the company supports 50,000 developers, compared to Facebook’s 500,000 apps and Apple’s 185,000 apps in the iTunes store.
Now, there is always a risk when you’re building on top of someone else’s platform, that they could come and compete with you.
But both Facebook and Apple’s App Store have spawned lucrative breakouts like Zynga, Tapulous and PopCap Games. Twitter’s ecosystem has yet to produce a runaway hit in terms of profit. Yes, there are the Seesmics, Hootsuites, Brizzlys and Tweetdecks of the world, which we all know and love and have millions of users between them. But they don’t charge for their apps, and they’re not aggressive with advertising. A few third-party developers like Bit.ly and Tweetmeme are experimenting with new kinds of shareable ads or by charging companies for their very own branded URL shorteners. But, as Wilson implied, we have yet to see the Zynga or Playfish of Twitter.
For middle and lower-tier developers, the other platforms also offer well-trodden paths to profitability. (Yes, Facebook, Apple and Twitter’s platforms are not mutually exclusive.) But here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a one or two-man developer band. If you go with building Facebook apps, you have opportunities to earn money through social ads, offers and virtual goods (which, by the way, are on track to be a $1.6 billion industry in the U.S. this year). If you’re a developer for iPhone or iPad apps, you can earn a living by charging for apps, advertising, or through in-app payments, among many other revenue possibilities. But with Twitter? The company hasn’t even nailed down its own business model yet.
So there’s a big question — will new developers want to come and build on top of Twitter’s APIs knowing a) that there is no killer revenue model yet and b) there’s a very real possibility that Twitter might come their way, pick off the best of the bunch and leave the rest out in the cold?
Companies: ,
People:
Always-on iPhone apps raise new promises, perils for location privacy
With Apple’s , app makers will soon know where you are from moment to moment. But will you know where that data is?
Apple Thursday lifted one of the limitations that has long rankled startups in the location space, , or running more than one application at once. For companies like Yelp and Facebook, that means their apps will be able to track your location constantly if you allow them. While Google Android users have long had this functionality, Steve Jobs’ announcement today means in-the-background location may become more mainstream.
It’s a change that promises new features that iPhone users have yet to experience — like automatic notifications when friends are less than a half-mile away.
But it will also renew myriad privacy concerns about behavioral ad targeting. Plus, app developers may face new legal quandaries if they’re subpoenaed by government officials and asked to hand over your location history. A deep-pocketed company like Google or AT&T might demand due process before turning over data, but what about the two-man band behind your favorite iPhone app?
Recognizing the privacy concerns that persistent location-tracking raises, Apple showed off a few controls today during its announcement. When you open an app, the top bar will show a little arrow in the right-hand corner, indicating location awareness (pictured to the right). There will also be a dashboard where you can toggle location-tracking permissions on and off for different apps (pictured at the top).
It’s a thoughtful move, but undoubtedly, many more iPhone users will have their location being picked up by many more companies than they did before.
This raises a lot of privacy implications on several fronts. Location-sensitive ads represent a huge opportunity for marketers that is much more accountable than other traditional forms of brand advertising. McDonald’s could theoretically serve 10,000 people mobile ads in a city and receive analytics showing what percentage of them later actually went and visited a McDonald’s — whether that might be 24 hours or three months later. That’s much more measurable than buying a 30-second spot on TV, which can’t return granular data on how it affected purchasing behavior.
Brands and local businesses are clamoring for analytics like this, and location startups like Foursquare and Loopt have experimented a bit in this space. Foursquare launched an analytics dashboard for local businesses last month, which shows a place’s top visitors and most recent check-ins.
Today, Apple officially broke into the advertising space by unveiling a platform called iAd. The company said it expects to serve 1 billion ad impressions a day by summertime.
Now, there is a pretty important distinction between an advertising network targeting you based on where you are right now and an ad network targeting you based on years and years of your location history. As an advertiser, I could push you a coupon to a Starbucks if you’re standing near one now. Or I could push you coupons at certain times of the day, knowing your habitual route to work or your occasional penchant for dropping into a Starbucks at 3 p.m. on Wednesdays. Slightly creepy.
Jobs didn’t reveal too many details about how these ads will be targeting users. Location will almost certainly be a variable but it’s not clear whether that means location history or location now. Quattro Wireless, the and built iAd with, targets based on media type (whether you’re using an app, video or SMS), demographics (age, gender, ethnicity from your registration information), mobile device and present location and time. That will evolve.
Plus other companies like Facebook will want to encourage users to keep their apps on the background. How will third-party apps factor in persistent location data into their ads?
The other thorny issue around persistent location-tracking has to do with government intervention. Legally speaking, there isn’t a coherent standard that covers when mobile carriers and online services should hand over your location history to legal authorities. There are legal authorities to have search warrants in order to get tracking data from wireless carriers, but it isn’t codified. That’s the reason why about a dozen companies including Google and Microsoft to lobby the government to have this requirement explicitly written into the law. Big public companies like Google have developed a system over time for responding to government inquiries, but small-time developers probably haven’t.
That said, in-the-background location offers lots of new possibilities.
Up until now, location apps have resorted to check-ins, a lightweight way of temporarily and explicitly sharing your location. It’s one of the reasons that Foursquare was able to bound ahead of other location apps like Google’s Latitude in mindshare. At first, it was a way of getting around a technical limitation, but check-ins were also successful because of social norms — you might be really uncomfortable with having location tracking always on, for example.
Now that Apple has done away with that limitation, location apps may be able to evolve dramatically in look and feel. Apps like Plancast could send push notifications about nearby events that friends are attending while Yelp or Groupon could send you deals from businesses blocks away.
Sam Altman, chief executive of Loopt, said he’s already planning to port over features that let you know when friends are close by. (This functionality is already available in versions of Loopt on other platforms like Android.)
“We can build a nice hybrid model — one that combines the best of automated location updates with check-ins,” he said. ”This will enhance serendipity when you’re near other people or places. That’s really big.”
[Photos are from GDGT, which announcement today here.]
Companies:
CONNECTIONS: The Digital Living Conference and Showcase
Over 40 percent of U.S. broadband households are very positive on TV Everywhere services — offerings that let cable customers view TV programs online as part of their subscription — but only 16 percent are willing to pay an additional $5 per month for this service. These consumer realities create business challenges for companies in the digital living space, even as new technologies open more opportunities in value-added services and connected CE.
, hosted by international research firm Parks Associates on June 8-10, 2010, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, tackles these and other issues in the markets for connected home technologies and digital living solutions. focuses on key topic areas:
- Entertainment Platforms & Value-Added Services
- Consumer Electronics
- New Media and Digital Content
- Home Systems & Controls
Sessions feature analysis from industry executives and leading consumer research from Parks Associates on the best business and product strategies to succeed in the connected home industries:
- Connected CE will exceed 100 million units worldwide in 2010 – and the number of device sales/installations of will increase threefold from 2010 to 2014.
- Over one-third of smartphone owners are very interested in using this portable device to stream multimedia content from home CE, program a DVR remotely, and monitor their home.
CONNECTIONS™ keynotes:
- Scott Birnbaum, Vice President, Samsung LCD Group
- Eric B. Kim, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Digital Home Group, Intel Corporation
- Mitch Singer, CTO, Sony Pictures Entertainment; President, DECE
- Scott Smyers, Senior Vice President, Sony Electronics; President and Chairman of the Board, DLNA
, June 8-10, 2010, Santa Clara Convention Center.
Apple bans Flash-to-iPhone conversions in apps
Steve Jobs didn’t mention it onstage this morning at Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 press event at the company’s Cupertino headquarters. But Apple has made a change to the wording in the company’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, to which all aspiring app developers must agree.
The new wording says:
“Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”
Apple pundit John Gruber translated the legalese to English: . Previously, developers were allowed to use conversion tools to build iPhone apps from pre-existing Flash games. Now, they’ll need to build iPhone versions more or less from scratch.
Adobe’s upcoming Flash-to-iPhone compiler seems to be the target of the change. “It could hardly be more clear if they singled out Flash CS5 by name,” Gruber wrote.
Beyond Flash, the new rule may also be used to block cross-platform app maker software such as or . As always with Apple’s app review process, we won’t know what’s going on until the first few apps are accepted or rejected, which could take weeks.
Update: , saying they’re “looking into it.”
[Image: ]
Companies: ,
People:
Apple to deliver advertising to iPhone apps with iAd
Apple revealed its plans this morning to get more directly involved in the mobile advertising business. It announced a new service called iAd, which is built into the upcoming version 4.0 of the iPhone operating system.
The announcement — – made at a press conference at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. — comes as no surprise, since this was clearly Apple’s intention when it earlier this year, but today was the first time the company offered any real details about its mobile ad plans.
Chief executive Steve Jobs said iAd will allow advertisers to deliver an unprecedented combination of interactivity and emotion in iPhone ads, . By “emotion,” he seems to mean the high-quality, media-driven experience that you might get with, say, a television ad. He showed off a Nike ad with high resolution video as an example.
By building the technology into the operating system, Apple should be able to offer richer integration with the device and with apps, compared to other mobile ad services. Jobs showed off or at least mentioned the ability to play a game in an ad, have an ad detect your location, make purchases in an ad, shake your phone to play another ad, and then return to your application once it’s over. Apple will sell and host the ads and pay developers 60 percent of the revenues.
During his discussion of iAd, Jobs also made some digs at Adobe and Google, two tech companies whose relationship with Apple has turned contentious, particularly in relation to the iPhone. First, Jobs noted that mobile advertising should occur in the app, not in the web browser, where Google has made so much ad money: “Search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop.” (Though Google will be moving more aggressively into in-app advertising if .) Jobs also noted that the video and interactivity of ads is delivered using , not Adobe’s Flash technology — a remark that apparently drew big laughs from the crowd, since the iPhone OS has been widely criticized for its lack of Flash support.
[image: ]