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News: Kozmic 3423blk Womens Executive Leather Briefcase in Black

2012-02-16T14:43:00.001-08:00

3423blk Color: Black Features: -Middle zipper pocket.-Inside one zipper pocket.-On front and back two compartments close with magnet snaps.-Three front zipper pockets.-Both side tab close with buckle.-One short handle.-One shoulder strap. Construction: -Constructed of genuine leather. Dimensions: -Dimensions: 15.5” H x 11” W x 6” D.

Kozmic 3423blk Womens Executive Leather Briefcase in Black

News: Spalding 8312S Inflating Needles

2012-02-16T10:50:00.001-08:00

Inflating Needles

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Spalding 8312S Inflating Needles

The Latest from TechCrunch

2012-02-16T09:43:00.001-08:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

YC-Backed Glassmap Launches A “Find My Friends” For Facebook Users
Eyeing The Indian Market, Facebook Partners With Saavn On Global Social Music Service
With Clik, Your Smartphone Can Control Screens Everywhere
Better Late Than Never: Hulu Plus Finally Arrives On The Wii
Code Hero Is A Game That Teaches You To Make Games
Crowd-Sourced Learning Platform Memrise Nabs $1.05M From Matt Mullenweg, Lerer Ventures And More!
Apple’s iCloud Is No Dropbox Killer (It’s Much More)
Yes, It’s True: Kids Are Tablet Fiends. And Gaming Apps Are The Winners
With Mountain Lion, OS X Prowls Closer To iOS
Podio Plugs Google Docs Into Its Collaboration Tools
Kayak Partners With Trip Advisor To Integrate 60 Million Travel Reviews Into Hotel Search
Samsung Galaxy Note Review: Head-To-Head With The Galaxy Nexus And Streak 5
Nature Publishing Group Officially Launches New Interactive Textbook
OS X Mountain Lion Brings The Mac Into The Game
Test Drive Apple’s New Messages App Before Mountain Lion Launches
Auraslate Is An Open Source Android Tablet For Hackers
As OS X Mountain Lion Proves, Twitter Is Apple’s Social Network
Not So Fast, Google: China Wants A Look At Your Motorola Deal First
Surprise! OS X Mountain Lion Roars Into Existence (For Developers Today, Everyone This Summer)
StockTwits Gets More Interactive With Conversations

YC-Backed Glassmap Launches A “Find My Friends” For Facebook Users

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:01 AM PST

YC-backed Glassmap is a new mobile application publicly launching today that presents a viable challenge to realtime, location-sharing apps like Apple’s Find My Friends or Google Latitude. Where those two competitors focus on enabling social experiences on top of their own platforms or ecosystems, Glassmap is enabling a third alternative: realtime location tracking built on top of Facebook’s social graph. Yes, it’s like a “Find My Facebook Friends.”

However, this app isn’t using Facebook check-ins to track your friends – it’s actually tracking them in real time, by running the app passively in the background. And that’s where Glassmap’s killer feature comes in: the startup is using “relay” technology to minimize the typical battery drains associated with realtime location-sharing apps today.

To use Glassmap, you first have to authenticate with Facebook, then invite those friends you want to share your location with. For obvious reasons, it’s not going to immediately start tracking all your Facebook friends upon first launch – it’s an opt-in experience, and one that requires either an iPhone or Android. However, even if you don’t explicitly invite a Facebook friend to join, but they install the app on their own, they’ll show up in your friends list. If you would prefer they don’t see your location, you can toggle a switch to block them.

Overall, the app itself is simple. There’s nothing much more to it than a Google map, a settings screen, and list of online and offline friends. But in this case, the simplicity works in its favor – the app is incredibly easy to use.

Glassmap was founded by Geoffrey Woo, Jon Zhang and Jonathan Chang – three Stanford engineers who dropped out from their Stanford MS programs to start the company. They specialized in distributed systems, circuits, web and mobile development and industrial design.

It’s this background that helped them design what may be Glassmap’s best feature: its relay technology. Before, typical location-sharing apps would drain a smartphone’s battery at about a rate of ~5% drain/hour. Glassmap, however, claims to be an order of magnitude (~0.5%/hour) more efficient. To accomplish this, its servers dynamically push and pull data from client devices. The server, which stores the state or context of all Glassmap clients, has more data than any one client has. This framework allows the app to take advantage of what’s happening locally and socially around the user to fix location more efficiently than having the app update every few minutes or as you change cell towers.

“For example, if it’s 3 AM at night, and no one’s actually trying to look for you, there’s no reason to actively update your location all the time,” explains Woo. “But if I’m trying to meet up with you, I can pull in your location data dynamically, and I can do that in real-time, without killing the battery.”

Although today is Glassmap’s public debut, it was actually soft-launched earlier this year on college campuses, starting with Stanford, where it’s now used by an estimated 10% of undergrads. As of today, Glassmap is live on 10 college campuses, and the company’s goal is to reach 50 more over the next 3 months.

While the big goal is to build a better location-tracking application through technology improvements, there’s also a company philosophy that realtime location sharing is the future. They believe that startups like Foursquare, which requires manual updating, represent out-of-date technology.

“We think that check-ins are an artifact of technology. We think that they’re a middle step in what location sharing will eventually be like,” Woo explains. “Having to pull out your phone and manually tag a location is pretty low-tech.”

He’s really not kind to the lowly check-in, referring to check-ins as everything from “a fad” to “a novelty” to “a lot of work” throughout our conversation. But while Foursquare, for now, seems married to the concept of the check-in, it could move to automate or speed up the process for its users, while avoiding the privacy concerns of automated location tracking.

What Glassmap pushes us to ask ourselves, is whether our realtime location can form the basis of a new social service beyond the college kid set, or whether realtime tracking an area that’s still best for family locator apps.

Glassmap thinks it can be both. “We think there’s so many applications for location,” says Woo. “while we’re focusing on the market we understand the best [colleges], we want to be the general, de facto location sharing service. That is the ultimate goal.”

The team was a part of this summer’s Y Combinator program, and also has funding from SV Angel and StartFund.

Eyeing The Indian Market, Facebook Partners With Saavn On Global Social Music Service

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST

Saavn, a startup that’s been called the Spotify for Indian music, has partnered with Facebook to launch its social and global music service on the social network. The integration, which debuted in December, has already brought over 700,000 new Facebook users to the network, says Saavn.

Saavn (which stands for South Asian Audio Video Network) is an ad-supported digital music service for Bollywood, Indian and regional South Asian music available globally on Web, iOS and Android that allows users to create and listen to playlists for free; Saavn makes money via targeted display and rich media ad units for global advertisers. The platform is a little bit like Spotify in that it allows users to listen to Indian music on-demand and create and share playlists, and also adds an element of Pandora with a radio function. Users can create radio stations by song, and Saavn will show users similar songs to the initial track.

The company boasts the most comprehensive catalogue of Indian music, licensed from over 200 content providers. While the service is free, premium features include offline access and more. Saavn has 1million-plus tracks under license, which is 99% of the known catalog across Bollywood, regional, and devotional music.

With Saavn's partnership with Facebook, the startup launched an app that allows users to discover and share music from their Facebook Timeline, Ticker, and News Feed. It’s similar in some way to the integrations Facebook launched with Spotify and others last year. One of the big differences is that Saavn has a niche audience when it comes to the genre of music. And Saavn has struck global distribution deals with its content partners so that music can be streamed to any location. In fact, the service is available globally with users from 219 countries. Now, nearly half of Saavn's new registered users now use Facebook Connect.

In its first four weeks as a Facebook Open Graph partner, daily new users of the Saavn Facebook application increased a whopping 40 times, with content shares increasing four-fold and monthly active users jumping from 35,000 to 785,000. These users have generated over 750 million Facebook story impressions since launch. Currently Savvn has 1.3 million users across India, Indonesia, the Phillippines, Turkey and even the U.S.

For Facebook, Saavn could be one way in which Facebook increases its user base in India. The country is already a high growth area for Facebook, but there is still roomfor more user acquisition in the country. Savvn says the music is a particularly appealing way to bring users online in India, as music is an integral part of the country’s culture. As Saavn explains, “We are helping Facebook build local relevance in India through Indian music. Bollywood is a cultural phenomena that connects all of India’s 30+ languages and religions.”

With Clik, Your Smartphone Can Control Screens Everywhere

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST

You’ve probably heard of Kik Messenger, a phone messaging app with the backing of Sequoia Capital. It turns out Kik was just the beginning of the company’s plans — today it’s launching Clik, which is even more impressive.

Put simply, Clik can turn your phone into a remote control for any screen with a browser.

CEO Ted Livingston demonstrated the app for me earlier this week. Here’s how it works: You point your desktop browser at ClikThis.com, which generates a unique QR code. Then you open the Clik iPhone or Android app, aim the camera at the screen, and the app uses the code to figure out which device you’re trying to control. Once it’s synced up, you can select YouTube videos from your phone, and they’ll play on the screen.

The idea of turning a smartphone into a remote control isn’t new, but using Clik, the process of syncing up a phone to a screen is a ridiculously fast and easy, and it requires no extra hardware.

Once you wrap your head around the concept, what’s really impressive is the speed. When Livingston demonstrated the app, he could play videos, jump ahead, and adjust the volume instantaneously. I tried it out in the TechCrunch office, which has some of the worst AT&T reception known to man, and the lag was just 1 or 2 seconds. Apparently, Livingston and his team have had the idea for Clik for years, and they spent much of that time developing infrastructure capable of delivering that speed. In the meantime, they realized the technology could also be used to power a super-fast messaging app (namely, Kik), so the team “left Clik behind” for a little while, Livingston says.

And while the Clik app is limited to playing YouTube videos, that’s not the real vision. Instead, he says the app is more a proof-of-concept for potential partners, who may be in the video, music, photo, or games industries. Any online video service, for example, could use Clik to turn their smartphone app into a remote control for their desktop site. It’s particularly powerful because multiple phones can be synced up to a single screen — so you could challenge your friend to an online game, with both of you using your phones as controllers. Or if you’re throwing a party, you could have multiple DJs controlling the music from their phones. (On the second thought, that last scenario could turn into a disaster).

For now, you need an Internet browser for Clik to work, which rules out most TVs. Livingston said he’s currently targeting college students, who consume most of their media on computers anyway. In the long-term, however, it sounds like he has a plan for getting onto TVs too — in fact, he argues that this is a better approach to creating Internet-connected “smart” TVs. Rather than trying to build and push entirely new devices onto the market, Livingston says that with Clik, “Every screen just becomes a dumb output for your smart remote.”

You can download the iPhone and Android apps here. Clik is also starting to look at partnership requests, through the partner@clikthis.com email address.

Better Late Than Never: Hulu Plus Finally Arrives On The Wii

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 08:22 AM PST

The folks over at Hulu originally promised Wii users would have access to their Hulu Plus streaming service by the end of 2011, but things didn’t exactly pan out the way they had hoped.

Well, after a few extra months of waiting, the Nintendo-faithful are finally being rewarded for their patience: the Hulu Plus app can be downloaded from the Wii Shop Channel. The app itself is free, but actually using it will cost users the standard $7.99/month.

While I’m glad Hulu finally managed to make good on their word, their work isn’t over yet. 3DS owners are still patiently waiting for their chance to stream back episodes of The New Girl, and let’s not forget that Nintendo has been hard at work on the forthcoming Wii U console for months now. With any luck streaming content providers like Netflix and Hulu can quickly adapt to that new multi-screen paradigm.

After all, what better way is there to revel in togetherness than for two people to watch two completely separate video streams at the same time?

Joking aside, it’s heartening to see Nintendo get serious about streaming content so late into the Wii’s lifespan. As their hardware prices drop (and you can bet that the Wii will sink below $150 at some point), the Wii could eventually find itself competing with other low-cost streaming devices like the Roku 2 series. While the Wii would come up short up in terms of PC connectivity, its decent web browser and support for services like Hulu and Netflix could bolster its adoption into even more non-gamer households.

Code Hero Is A Game That Teaches You To Make Games

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 08:15 AM PST

“Shoot code here!” Don’t you wish all programming were that easy? You’re working on a huge PHP project for work and you need a dynamic table and all you do is whip out your code gun and shoot some into your IDE. Now you can, at least in a limited sense.

Code Hero is a Kickstarter project that teaches you to program games using Unity or Javascript. You can build games using ready-made building blocks and progress through increasingly difficult levels as you become a gaming master alongside your guide, a robotic Ada Lovelace.

The Unity game engine that Code Hero teaches you how to code in is the ultimate indie game development powerhouse. You can use Javascript, C#, and Python-like Boo to write games that run on everything: Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, XBox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, Web player, Flash, Native Client… You can put what you make into the App Stores and have your creations for sale to start your own indie game company! Master the Unity3D game engine from the inside out to make games of your own and become the next code hero!

$42 gets you a pre-order of the game and lesser donations get you sneak peeks and discounts on the finished product. You can also sponsor the makers by sending along a few thousand in order to help kids learn how to program games instead of stare at ready-made titles blankly for hours at a time.

Project Page

Crowd-Sourced Learning Platform Memrise Nabs $1.05M From Matt Mullenweg, Lerer Ventures And More!

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 07:38 AM PST

Memrise, an online community that attempts to teach people languages through crowdsourcing, is announcing its $1.1 million in seed financing today, from Matt Mullenweg’s Audrey Capital, Avalon Ventures, Balderton Capital, Lerer Ventures, Zynga Boston head Nabeel Hyatt, former Facebook data head Jeff Hammerbacher, Bill Warner, Scott Heller, Walt Winshall and Ken Baumann.

Memrise incorporates a unique way of teaching and teaching foreign words; It crowdsources Mems, or Mneumonic devices from its community and then imparts them to users through online lessons involving animated gifs (below). The startup uses a gardening metaphor to represent a student’s journey — each Mem you learn is a plant, your total sum knowledge is a garden, etc.

I’m still sort of doubtful that any online education model works, but right now I have six Mandarin “plants” sprouting, which is a lot more Mandarin than I knew before Memrise.

Founder Ed Cooke swears by this five minutes a day of Mandarin, and has kept bugging me about how I should continue my Chinese language learning after this post. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Founded by Cooke, who happens to be US memory grandmaster, and Greg Detre, a Princeton Neuroscience PhD, the community attempts to position itself against pre-existing online education properties like Kahn Academy by its novel crowdsourcing model and testing process.

“We believe that learning and testing should not be separated but that both, are, forms of learning when done right,” Cooke tells me.

“The vast majority of people experience learning as an anxious boring thing that they’d rather not do,” Cooke continues, “With Memrise we’re trying to help people learn quickly and painlessly — Take all the pain out of learning and turn it into a recreational activity.”

Right now the service is focused on teaching Mandarin, French, Spanish and Italian, but Cooke says that SAT vocabulary will be coming in the next twelve months in addition to “phrase” learning instead of just words. Mobile apps and more languages are also in the pipeline.

Apple’s iCloud Is No Dropbox Killer (It’s Much More)

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 07:33 AM PST

With today’s reveal of the next version of OS X - OS X 10.8, aka Mountain Lion – Apple is more deeply integrating its iCloud service into the operating system itself. No longer will storing your documents in the cloud feel like an extra, value-added feature – it will feel like part of the OS itself. The cloud is just another drive, Apple seems to say, and saving to the cloud should look and feel no different than saving to your Documents folder or your Desktop.

The idea, of course, is not novel. It’s what startups like Dropbox are doing today: making a drive that appears like any other, but that can be accessed from any machine. While on the surface, it’s easy to dub iCloud “Apple’s version of Dropbox,” the truth is actually more complex: it’s about building a new computing paradigm.

In testing the new iCloud integration in Mountain Lion, a file could be open in multiple locations – say, your Mac, iPad and iPhone – and when a change was made, it would appear almost instantly across all three devices in real time. You don’t have to wait for a notification, or reload the file. It just appears. While the immediate thought is that iCloud is rapidly turning into Apple’s own, improved version of Dropbox, it’s also a fierce competitor to Google Docs, and the long-rumored Google Drive.

With Google, however, the philosophy is that file creation itself can be migrated to the cloud. An online office suite is “good enough,” if not as good, as a native one. And “good enough” will win due to ease of use. With almost a completely opposing view, Apple’s iCloud is doing the reverse: bringing the capabilities of the cloud to the richer, more robust native apps. This includes not just office apps in iWork, but through the use of developer APIs, it will extend to any apps that need to be iCloud-enabled. Although today, iCloud support is more limited for third-parties, the APIs will improve in time. Eventually, any app running on the Apple platform (desktop or mobile), will have the tools to move data between its different installations.

To make the transition to the cloud seamless, Apple has embedded the cloud deep into the new version of OS X, right down to the “Open” and “Save” dialog boxes. Mac Store Apps will be able to immediately save to either the local file system or iCloud. The iCloud is also baked into the Finder, showing a realtime list of files, sorted by application. And managing those files has an iOS-like flair: you drag and drop them on top of each other to make a folder, for example. And even the background here looks like the iOS springboard.

But Apple’s iCloud is not just about building a better Dropbox – it’s about keeping everything in sync: Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Bookmarks, Notes, Photos, Accounts, and more.

For now, the end user sees iCloud as this Internet location, as represented by a new choice to make: “save to iCloud?” As if the iCloud is merely an online storage bin! But this almost feels like a transitory step between the world we’re accustomed to - that of physical hard drives – and a future in the cloud. The funny thing about this in-between step is that it somewhat misrepresents the cloud in its attempt at simplicity. The cloud is not actually a “hard drive in the sky” (hello, Microsoft). It’s a fabric that allows us to maintain a single computing environment, no matter where we are or what device we use.

Yes, It’s True: Kids Are Tablet Fiends. And Gaming Apps Are The Winners

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 07:27 AM PST

If you own a tablet and have children, chances are that this will not come as news to you. For those who don’t but work in mobile, it’s something worth remembering when you’re concocting up your next big product: Kids are crazy about tablets.

According to some research out today from Nielsen in the U.S., in households that own a tablet, seven out of 10 children under the age of 12 use them. That usage is on the rise: those numbers are for Q4 2011, and are a nine percent increase on the quarter before.

We’ve seen a lot of moves already from large companies looking to court kids in the tablet space. They include companies like Amazon moving into children’s publishing to boost kids’ content for their Kindles. And Apple has also been stepping up, in January laying claim to 20,000 educational apps in the App Store, and 1.5 million iPads being used in schools.

But while that sounds very high and noble, this is not, by a country mile, the most popular content, according to Nielsen. That honor goes to games, with 77 percent of kids playing things like “Angry Birds” (my son’s favorite) or the knock-off “Cut the Birds” (my daughter’s). Educational apps come only second at 55 percent.

Tablets are also, it seems, joining games consoles, books and toys as distractions for kids when they are taken out in public: 55 percent of parents say that kids use their tablets while traveling; 41 percent use them in restaurants.

Finally, Nielsen observes that most of children’s tablet use is about solitary entertainment: only 15 percent of kids use them for communicating with friends and family. That could spell an opportunity for someone.

(Image: flickingerbrad on Flickr)

With Mountain Lion, OS X Prowls Closer To iOS

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 07:10 AM PST

Ever since Apple released OS X Lion, its desktop operating system started the long trek towards iOS, Apple’s other, more popular operating system. With the next version of OS X, Mountain Lion (released today as a developer preview), OS X will prowl even closer to its iOS cousin.

A number of the new features in OS X come directly from iOS. These include deeper iCloud integration, Messages, Reminders, Notes, a Notification Center, a Game Center, AirPlay, and built-in sharing to Twitter, email, and more.

As time goes on, Apple is building more and more iOS features into OS X to create a more seamless experience between the two. As Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned earlier this week at a Goldman Sachs conference, many more people’s first experience of an Apple product is an iPhone or iPad than a Mac. “The iPhone started to introduce Apple to hundreds of millions of people who had never met Apple before,” he said. This the famed halo effect of the iPhone is orders of magnitude larger than it was for the iPod. People who buy an iPhone are more likely to buy a Mac, and when they do buy a Mac they are going to expect a familiar experience.

Of all the iOS features being ported to the the Mac, the most significant ones are iCloud, notifications, and social sharing. Of course, iCloud is already a part of some Mac desktop apps like iPhoto, but with Mountain Lion it will embrace iWorks docs. All of your docs will be synced to the cloud, eliminating the headaches of keeping track of different versions. Apple could open up this iCloud functionality to other apps as well, making it a key feature of the OS (but it is going to have to increase the free storage from the measly 5 GB it offers now). iCloud is the link between iOS and OS X apps, and it will only keep growing.

Apple’s own desktop apps such as Safari will start featuring the sharing button icon familiar to iOS users (the box with the right-facing arrow coming out of it). This will allow users to share a web page, photo, or document via email, as a message, to Twitter, or other services. In this way, sharing will be baked right into the OS. Facebook isn’t included as an option here yet, but that could happen if the two companies ever work out their differences.

Finally, adding push notifications to the desktop could be the biggest change of all. Anyone with an iPhone or iPad knows how addictive the app notifications can be (or annoying, if it’s not your iPhone). Notifications have become the new message bus—persistent, always in your face, and realtime. They are IM for apps, and increasingly they are the way our machines talk to us, pulling us into an app with constant pings saying, “Hey, something just happened.” These push notifications will start with Apple apps, but will soon become available to developers via an API. As iOS developers create more Mac companion apps, you should start to see the same notifications pop up whether you are on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

Podio Plugs Google Docs Into Its Collaboration Tools

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 07:00 AM PST

Startup Podio says it just addressed one of the top feature requests from the 40,000 companies that use its collaboration tools — it now integrates with Google Docs.

When TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis wrote about Podio a year ago, she called it “Yammer with its own app store and app builder.” Judging from the demo I saw earlier this week, many aspects of the basic interface will indeed feel natural to Yammer users (or really anyone who can handle a threaded conversation), but as Alexia’s description suggests, Podio’s real selling point is extensibility — if Podio doesn’t have a feature you want, you can build a simple app for it, and the company also integrates with other online services through its APIs.

One of the company’s goals, says VP of Apps Ryan Nichols, is getting as much information into Podio as possible. He argues that existing chat and project management tools can create an unnatural divide — you do your work, and then you go to a website where you talk about doing your work.

Podio, on the other hand, should be the place “where you actually get work done.” So everything on the site is associated with a file. You can create a conversation and assign tasks around a document or a spreadsheet, replacing the tedious and confusing back-and-forth that can happen over email.

Until now, however, you couldn’t do that with Google Docs — or rather, if you wanted to include Docs, you had to use a clumsy workaround like pasting the links into Podio and hoping the invites and permissions worked properly. With the new integration, Google Docs work like any other file in Podio.

This builds on a feature released last December, Podio for Google Apps, which allows you to turn Gmail messages into actionable tasks. With these integrations, Podio is hoping to both appease existing customers and reach new ones. However, in Europe (which makes up 40 percent of Podio’s customer base, and a higher percentage of premium customers), Nichols says penetration of Google Apps is relatively low, so there’s also an opportunity to introduce Apps to Podio customers.

Kayak Partners With Trip Advisor To Integrate 60 Million Travel Reviews Into Hotel Search

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 06:59 AM PST

Kayak is boosting its hotel search today with the integration of hotel reviews from Trip Advisor into search results. Via an agreement with the reviews giant, Kayak will be integrating all all TripAdvisor reviews into the Kayak Hotel Search. Simply put, when you search for a hotel on Kayak, all of the over 60 million TripAdvisor reviews will be included in the KAYAK search results.

In October, Kayak launched a hotel Recommendations filter that allowed users to narrow results by expert recommendations, and pulled in reviews from Frommer’s and Budget Travel. Users will also be able to filter search results by TripAdvisor as well, ticking off a box will filter out any non-TA reviewed properties.

When you filter hotels by Trip Advisor ranking, you’ll see how many stars each hotel received on Trip Advisor, where the hotel rated overall (excellent, very good, average, poor etc.) and what the hotel’s rank is on TripAdvisor in the destination. The feature will be launching in the US and the UK today will be rolling out globally and mobile apps soon.

Considering TripAdvisor’s place as the leader in user-generated reviews in the travel space, this is a big content win for Kayak. After a search for what hotels are available for a given trip on Kayak, I tend to go to TripAdvisor afterwards to checkout which hotels had the best reviews in my price range. And Kayak says that most of its users exhibit similar behavior as well. Clearly, by incorporating these reviews in search results, Kayak is saving users time.

For TripAdvisor, the Kayak integration will certainly help spread the reach of the site’s reviews into other travel portals. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. TripAdvisor also has similar deals in place. For example, Expedia already integrates travel reviews from TripAdvisor.

With the IPO on hold, Kayak has been heads down on product development over the past few months. In December, Kayak redesigned its iPad app and consolidated the app with its iPhone cousin. The company’s website most recently got a big UI upgrade, creating a more universal and comprehensive consumer experience across all Kayak platforms: web, mobile web and apps. Kayak cleaning up and innovating as the company battles with Google in the travel search space.

Samsung Galaxy Note Review: Head-To-Head With The Galaxy Nexus And Streak 5

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 06:42 AM PST

If last week’s showdown between the Droid 4, Droid 3, and iPhone 4S didn’t get your blood pumping, prepare yourself for the heavyweight round. We’ve got the hotly anticipated Samsung Galaxy Note going up against the Dell Streak and the beastly Galaxy Nexus.

Obviously the Streak is a somewhat older device, but it’s very similar in size to the Note which should give former Streak owners a good idea of what to expect out of the Note. Meanwhile, the GalNex is yet another huge screen that Note enthusiasts are probably considering, as well.

Onward!

The Streak is just a hair thicker than the Note, at 10mm compared to the Note’s 9.7mm waist line, and sports a smaller 5-inch screen. The Streak can also be used with a capacitive stylus, though it really can’t compete with the pressure-sensitive Wacom-style S Pen. And to be quite honest, the Streak can’t compare with the Note in terms of performance either.

That’s not to say the Streak is a bad phone, but it’s simply too outdated to show any real competition in the spec department. For example, the 5-inch Streak display only has a resolution of 480×800 while the Note boasts a 1280×800 resolution on a 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED screen. The Note is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core processor whereas the Streak runs on a 1GHz single-core processor.

So again, the Streak is duking it out based on size similarities rather than performance, but the Galaxy Nexus is a different story.

Anyone who’s interested in the Galaxy Note is down for a giant screen, which means the Ice Cream Sandwich-flavored Galaxy Nexus is probably in the running too. Obviously the G-Nex doesn’t have a special stylus like the Note, but it does have Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich which could be way more valuable than an S Pen, especially for you die-hard phandroids. (Who knows when ICS will come to the Note?)

The Nexus is a bit smaller than the Note (but what isn’t?), measuring 8.9mm thick and boasting a 4.65-inch 720p display. That means pixel density on the GalNex is far greater than that of the Note — a difference of 316ppi vs. 285ppi. The Note has a better spec’d camera at 8-megapixels vs. 5-megapixels but that’s not the best determiner of quality. To be honest, neither camera is all that inspiring but the fact that the GalNex camera allows for so many extra cool features (like facial unlock and Google Hangouts) perhaps gives it a leg up.

At the same price, I’d have to say the value return is likely better on the Nexus unless your profession really calls for that S Pen functionality. As I mentioned in our initial impressions video, the Note’s S Pen only seems worthwhile in a few very specific circumstances. It’s fun and all that jazz, but doesn’t bring with it the same varied functionality as ICS.

Nature Publishing Group Officially Launches New Interactive Textbook

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 06:34 AM PST

Last spring I wrote about Nature Publishing Group’s plan for a $49 electronic textbook packed with interactivity and unlimited content updates for life. The original publication date was scheduled for September 1, 2011, but for a variety of reasons the release was pushed back. Today marks the official launch of “Principles of Biology”.

This book is “born digital”, according to Vikram Savkar, SVP & Publishing Director at Nature Publishing Group, and is the first in a line of texts that NPG plans to release for the life and physical sciences. It’s not an e-book or fancy PDF, but a dynamic interactive website that can be customized by the instructor, contains built-in assessments that students can take, and works appropriately on any device that can access it: desktop, tablet, or phone.

In fact, Savkar’s group struggled with whether to even call this a “textbook”, or push for something more descriptive like “interactive textbook” or “i-text”. They finally settled on boring ol’ “textbook” because although they’ve updated the actual college text as a product, they have not (yet) changed how college texts are selected and sold. Professors and instructors generally select the texts for their class and although this book may have been born digital it’s a fair bet that most college instructors weren’t. These folks appreciate a little familiarity. At the end of the day, NPG has a product to sell, and they need to make sure it makes sense to their market.

Another example of how this new text straddles the old and new worlds: it has a beautiful cover page. This page serves absolutely no functional purpose, and is in fact a distraction to digital natives: it’s one extra click between you and the content you want! But the purchasing audience (again: instructors, not students) like the familiar connotations of the cover page.

After that, though, “Principles of Biology” is something new entirely. The instructor can modify the organization of the modules, or select to omit some modules altogether from the version used in their class. Diagrams and figures can come to life through animation. Examples can leverage drag-and-drop tools to interactively reinforce key concepts. And each student’s copy is personalized — for the life of the book — with assessments. The instructor can review each student’s assessments and get good insight into where a student might benefit from additional instruction.

The $49 purchase price is certainly a novelty in the realm of college textbooks, which normally sell for several times that amount. The dirty secret in college textbooks is that the average text is resold three times after the initial purchase. From the publisher’s point of view, this is three lost sales, so they inflate the retail price to try to make up for this. NPG’s book won’t be resold — it’s tied to an individual student — so they can keep the price low.

As great as “Principles of Biology” is right now, it’s not without some warts. Because it’s basically a really fancy website, it requires network access. There’s an Adobe Air application that allows desktops and laptops to access the book offline, but tablets and smartphones don’t yet have that option. Savkar assured me that there’s a plan in the works to remedy that situation, but it’s not ready for the product’s official launch.

Another flaw, at least right now, is that the page navigation controls are bloody small on a smartphone’s display. They’re also painfully small when using the Amazon Kindle Fire’s browser. Savkar agreed with me, and pointed out that updates get pushed to the product every second Tuesday. These updates include content and functionality, so it’s quite likely that a forthcoming update will improve pagination on smaller screen devices.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that in all other respects the book performed beautifully on the platforms with which I tried it: my Linux laptop, my iPhone, and my Fire. Animations play in the proper format for the device being used, and the content resizes nicely for the various sized screens. A lot of engineering and design effort has gone into the book, and the results show it.

NPG is taking a bit of a risk with this book, but they’re pretty confident that they’re on to a winner. A typical college textbook usually takes about five years to get to market. Savkar hopes to reduce this to 18 months for their texts. And their all-digital product avoids printing and distributions costs, which allows them to more easily enjoy a global focus. Savkar informed me that universities in Nicaragua and Portugal had just this week decided to use “Principles of Biology”.

OS X Mountain Lion Brings The Mac Into The Game

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 06:20 AM PST

Gamers, start your engines, lift your fruit-slicing swords, and lace up your Temple-running shoes.

Game Center, Apple’s gaming/social hub for iOS, has finally made it’s way over to the more mature Apple OS, OS X Mountain Lion. This is huge. Not because you’ll be able to enjoy the features of Game Center while playing around on your Mac (which will likely be great fun, too, I’m sure), but because gaming will now bust through the platform barrier allowing you to duke it out with anyone on just about any Apple device.

That’s right. We’re no longer in the era of PC-to-PC/phone-to-phone gaming as OS X Mountain Lion will enable Mac-to-iPhone, Mac-to-iPad, and Mac-to-iPod touch gaming. Like I said, that’s huge.

Apple claims to have over 100 million registered users and 20,000+ Game Center-enabled games on iOS, which is a solid starting point. Of course, developers will have to go in and tweak their apps to provide a beautiful gaming experience across all of these devices, but according to MG’s account of the cross-platform gaming in action, “it works very well.”

Test Drive Apple’s New Messages App Before Mountain Lion Launches

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 06:09 AM PST

Members of the general public will have to wait a few more months before they can play with Mountain Lion proper, but one of the update’s newest features is ready for a taste of the limelight. Apple has just made their revamped Messages app available for everyone to download, but don’t go looking for it in the OS X App Store.

Since Messages is still in beta, interested users will have to download it from Apple’s website instead. Be warned though — Messages will only work if your Mac is running OSX Lion with all of the recent latest in place, so all of you still chugging along with Snow Leopard (like yours truly) will have to sit this one out.

If you choose to take the plunge, you’ll find that Messages replaces iChat almost completely, though Apple notes that iChat services will continue to work. While Messages retains support for all the major messaging protocols, the biggest addition to the mix here is seamless support for iMessages. Conversations over iMessage that are initiated from a Mac carry over to any other iOS device that’s tied to the the same Apple ID, which makes for an easier transition as users bounce between their myriad Apple products.

Messages also allows for dead-simple multimedia transfers between users on Macs and their iOS compatriots, as dragging images and video into a conversation sends it over to your buddy post-haste. FaceTime calls can also be initiated from within Messages, though The Verge notes that FaceTime will still exist as a separate application. If Apple could somehow fold SMS support into the app we could be looking at a real winner, but these are early days for Messages — hopefully the best is yet to come.

Auraslate Is An Open Source Android Tablet For Hackers

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 06:02 AM PST

If you’re sick of firmware lockdowns and failed reflashings on your other Android tablets, the Auraslate may be for you. It’s basically an Ice Cream Sandwich-compatible tablet built from the ground up for hax0rz and programmers alike.

There are two models – the 7-inch 726B and the 10-inch 1026 – and the 1026 can run the latest version of Android. You can upload any version you want, however, and even the hardware is open source in that you receive a hardware source disk for about $20 extra.

To be clear, you won’t be blazing through web pages on this thing or playing high-end video games. For about $130, you get a standard Android CORTEX A9 tablet from a Chinese OEM that you could get for about $95 if you really dug around. However, Auraslate is promising open source software updates for their hardware and you also get a support community and the source code. This sort of package is ideal if you’re working on an Android hardware project, for example, as you will be able to talk with a community of hackers dealing with the same hardware and software rather than picking up a fly-by-night tablet from China and hoping it works.

Auraslate just launched (thanks tipster!) so we’ll have to wait and see how popular and useful the product becomes. However, as a tool for developers it seems that the founders’ hearts are in the right place.

Product Page

As OS X Mountain Lion Proves, Twitter Is Apple’s Social Network

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 05:57 AM PST

At Apple’s WWDC event last June, Twitter made a new best friend: Apple. The tech giant announced that it would bake the social network into every single iOS device by way of the new iOS 5 software. This left many stunned for two reasons. 1) Apple rarely does such deep partnerships with third-parties. 2) It wasn’t Facebook.

It was all-around a huge win for Twitter. And a win for Apple as well, as it has been proven throughout the years that they don’t get social — a subject which was a topic of debate again yesterday coincidentally. Apple needs to build it’s own social network, Dan Frommer argued! No, they need to get their social platform right, argued TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon. Well, today they’re taking a big step: by doubling down on Twitter.

Apple has just revealed that Twitter is also going to be baked into the latest version of OS X, Mountain Lion. This means that every single new Mac sold beginning this summer will have Twitter functionality built in. And all of the older ones that upgrade will have it too. There are now just over 60 million Macs out there. Again, a huge win for Twitter.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in December that following the iOS 5 integration, Twitter monthly sign-ups jumped 25 percent. iOS already has a much larger user base than the Mac does, but still, Twitter could see another double digit jump from this integration as well.

More importantly, Twitter has now firmly established itself as not just the iOS go-to social service, but Apple’s go-to social service. Sure, Apple could always rip Twitter out of iOS and OS X at any point in the future, but doing so would now piss off users who are being trained to expect it as an Apple core OS feature. For a service still not making a ton of money and as such, has its future questioned constantly, this is important. It’s a huge endorsement.

It’s also big news for Twitter because it opens up a whole new world for the service as a method of authentication. With iOS, apps can choose to use Twitter to ease new sign-ups — allowing people to get going with one or two clicks. Now Mac apps will be able to do the same thing. I don’t think there’s any question that Facebook still dominates this authentication space, but Twitter’s Apple alliance is making them much more compelling for this purpose — for developers, at the very least.

Just last week, some were criticizing Twitter for seemingly wayward focus. Today, they just scored a second massive partnership with the most valuable company on the planet. That sure seems like a sign of good focus to me.

Not So Fast, Google: China Wants A Look At Your Motorola Deal First

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 05:51 AM PST

Google has overcome two big regulatory hurdles in getting its $12.5-billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility approved by both U.S. and European regulators. China has until March 20 to decide whether or not it will wave through the deal, too.

The country’s Anti-Monopoly Bureau is now reviewing the deal — a routine part of the procedure for companies that make more than 400 million yuan ($63 million) in China and 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) globally. (Google reported revenues of nearly $38 million for 2011.) Now some think that China might use the opportunity to get Google to bring back its search business to the Mainland from Hong Kong.

Google has had a thorny relationship with China, and in 2010 relocated the bulk of its operations — its search business — to Hong Kong after allegations of hacking by Chinese authorities.

But China also spells a huge opportunity for the company: Android devices are selling like hotcakes on the mainland — with Q3 figures from Analysys International putting Android’s smartphone OS share in the country at nearly 60 percent (effectively swapping places with Nokia’s Symbian, which was 23 percent).

However, Google is, at the moment, missing out on a lot of the benefits of that, with every OEM, carrier, internet portal and their mothers offering forked versions of the OS, complete with third-party app stores, and other services that disintermediate the company.

Its search business, as of Q3 2011, had dropped to around 17 percent of the market, with local companies like Baidu dominating the space.

The Bureau will decide by March 20 whether to put the deal through another stage of the review process. Google first filed for approval in September 2011.

And according to a report in Reuters, there could also be a twist: citing two analysts in the area, it notes that regulators could use the deal as “leverage over Google” for its move to Hong Kong, to begin a “dialogue” with authorities over how Google could return to doing business more fully in China.

However Google’s negotiations go, it seems unlikely China will seek to halt the deal altogether. Edward Yu of Analysys International, speaking to Reuters, said that if China does object, the deal will fall apart. But with China gearing up to replace its party leadership, he said: “I don’t think there will be anything extreme” on the cards in terms of decision-making.

There have been a lot of question marks over what, exactly, Google wants most in a Motorola acquisition. There is the question of patents, for sure — 17,000 already in existence and applications for a further 7,500. But even if Google has said it would run Motorola as a separate business unit, owning a handset maker could give the company a crack at making its own range of Android devices that it could sell in countries like China, creating a foothold for other money-making services.

Bargaining over growing its business in China may well fit into a wider Google strategy anyway, with reports (like this one from the WSJ) that the company is on a hiring run in the country again, picking up engineers, sales people and product managers, as well as launching new services this year.

Surprise! OS X Mountain Lion Roars Into Existence (For Developers Today, Everyone This Summer)

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 05:31 AM PST

Confirmed: Apple can still surprise.

On July 20 of last year, Apple began a journey. With OS X Lion (aka OS X 10.7), the company started taking some of what they had learned from iOS, and the iPad specifically, putting in their more mature OS. Today, that transition continues with OS X Mountain Lion.

Yes, Apple is already ready to show off the next version of OS X — technically 10.8 — just seven months after the last version was released.

Actually, it hasn’t even been a full seven months. But given how quickly iOS development is moving, Apple wants to make sure OS X can keep up.

For the past week, I’ve been using an initial demo version of OS X Mountain Lion. To be clear, it’s not quite complete yet, but it’s already fairly polished. With that in mind, Apple will be releasing a developer preview of Mountain Lion today to Mac developers. And the plan is to release the new OS sometime this coming summer.

So what’s new?

The best way to think of OS X Mountain Lion may be to think back to OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). If you recall, Apple positioned it to be a smaller upgrade to OS X Leopard (10.5), hence the naming convention. My sense is that the same is true here — and again, hence the naming — but Apple isn’t really positioning it that way. Instead, they view it as the next step towards a more unified Apple ecosystem.

To be fair, while Snow Leopard mainly focused on improvements in speed and size, Mountain Lion actually packs a bunch of new features. Much like they did with OS X Lion, Apple is focusing on ten key ones (though there are dozens of other changes).

I’ll give the rundown of those first.

iCloud

Apple says there are now over 100 million iCloud accounts. With Lion, iCloud had a number of points of integration. But they were tacked on after the initial release. With Mountain Lion, the connection is much deeper. Actually, from the first screen in the setup assistant, you’ll now be asked to set up iCloud.

One key addition is Documents in the Cloud. In iOS 5, apps like Pages take advantage of automatic saving to iCloud. With OS X Mountain Lion, the circle is complete as all documents in the iWork suite of apps will save this way as well.

In the Document Library, you’ll actually now see a realtime list of all your documents stored in iCloud sorted by application. And you can create folders of documents simply by dragging one on top of another. Again, very iOS-like.

And the editing process between Mountain Lion and iOS 5 is seamless. You can change something on your Mac and almost instantly, the change will happen to an open document in iOS as well. Very nice.

Messages

This is a new app built right into the OS itself. It technically replaces iChat, but with some tweaks, you can find that old interface as well. But the focus now is on a unified dashboard of all your messages, meaning yes, iMessages as well as IM messages.

Heavy iMessage users are going to love this. Apple says there are already over 100 million registered iMessage users and that 26 billion iMessages have been sent since the iOS 5 launch in October.

The best elements of iMessages now come over to Messages, including delivery and read receipts. You can drag and drop both photos and videos from OS X to send them to iMessage users on iOS. You can also FaceTime right from within the app. And there’s group messaging.

Yes, the good old IM protocols still work as well. You can still hook up AIM, Google Talk, Jabber, and Yahoo Messenger by default.

One thing you can’t do is message between the various services to iMessage. So, for example, you can’t send an iMessage to an AIM users and hope to continue that coversation on your phone later. And, of course, SMS won’t work with Messages, it’s iMessage-only.

Good news: Apple is actually releasing Messages as a public beta today on Apple.com. The final version will ship with Mountain Lion in the summer.

Reminders

If you’re using iOS 5, you know what Reminders is — it’s Apple’s to-do list app. Now it’s coming to OS X as a stand-alone app. Previously, these were awkwardly baked into Calendar in OS X, not anymore.

As you might imagine, thanks to iCloud, all of your Reminders will stay in sync between iOS and OS X Mountain Lion.

Notes

Same deal as with Reminders, Apple has taken an iOS app and built a stand-alone OS X version. But the new version is beefed up, you can include photos. And you can pin a note to your desktop (like a sticky note — “Stickies” still exists as a separate app too, FYI).

This works with iCloud too, obviously. And yes, Notes has been removed from its former awkward home in the Mail app in OS X.

Notification Center

One of the hallmark features of iOS has long been Push Notifications, now they’re coming to OS X in Mountain Lion. And to make them manageable, the OS is getting a Notification Center, not unlike the one iOS gained in version 5.

The Notfication Center in Mountain Lion resides to the right of any screen you’re on. Hidden by default, you trigger it by hitting the dot-within-a-circle button in the upper right hand side of the menu (or by doing a two-finger swipe on a multi-touch trackpad — though this wasn’t working yet in the version of Mountain Lion that I tested). Doing this will shift your desktop to the left to show all your notifications in a way very similar to iOS.

There are also two types of Push Notifications you can get in Mountain Lion: Alerts and Banners. Alerts pop-up and give you the option to “close” or “show”. Banners show up for five seconds in the upper right of your screen then fade away (think: Growl). These notification types are configurable (and you can choose not to receive notifications for any app).

In the version of Mountain Lion that I used, only Apple apps (Calendar, Safari, Reminders, Messages, Mail, App Store, and Game Center — more on that in a bit) could receive Push Notifications, but fear not, there is a developer API. This means that all third-party apps will potentially have access to the feature as well — or at least those sold through the Mac App Store, I believe.

Share

In iOS, it’s easy to share something from just about all of the core apps. In OS X, it hasn’t been. With Mountain Lion, you’ll now see a Share button (the right-facing arrow you’ve see in iOS) in many of the apps.

In Safari, for example, you’ll now be able to send any website you’re on with two clicks to Mail or the new Messages app. In other apps, you’ll able to send directly to AirDrop from the drop-down. And depending on the app, you can do the same for photos, videos, and documents as well.

One nice touch is that Share isn’t limited to Apple apps — Apple has worked with Vimeo and Flickr so that you can send videos and pictures to those respective services from the drop-down.

And there will also be a developer API for the Share box. Though my understanding here is that this will only be on a per-app basis. Meaning a Facebook app, for example, could include a “share to Facebook” link in the Share button drop-down but only for that app. System-wide sharing options will require dealing with Apple — again, as Vimeo and Flickr did.

Long story short, no, Facebook isn’t in the system-wide drop-downs. At least not yet.

But another app is…

Twitter

Just as with iOS 5, Twitter integration is coming to OS X Mountain Lion as well. And again, this is system-wide, meaning you can share just about anything from anywhere to Twitter with two clicks.

If you’ve used the integration in iOS, the Tweet Sheet will look familiar to you. Geotagging will work from here as well. And, of course, attachments. You’ll be able to attach photos, web links, and even Mac App Store links.

You’ll be able to sign in to your Twitter account from the settings area in Mountain Lion (technically, it’s under Mail, Contacts & Calendars). However, unlike iOS, I’m told that you won’t be promoted to download the Twitter for Mac client. Instead, Twitter is mainly meant to work in the background for when you want to socially share something. (Meaning there is no built-in way to view your Tweet stream.) But Tweet notifications for @replies and DMs should eventually come into the new Notification Center in Mountain Lion, I’m told.

Third-party developers will be able to take advantage of this Twitter integration as well, just as they have been with iOS. And you’ll be able to update your Contacts app with Twitter profile pictures.

Game Center

As I alluded to before, another app making the jump from iOS to OS X is Game Center. Apple says that their gaming social network now has over 100 million registered users. And there are over 20,000 Game Center-enabled games for iOS. That should get a considerable shot in the arm now that there will be Mac support as well.

What’s really promising about Game Center in Mountain Lion is that it’s not just about Mac-to-Mac gaming, it will enabled Mac-to-iPhone, Mac-to-iPad, and Mac-to-iPod touch gaming as well. Obviously, this is going to require game developers to custom tailor their apps for seamless gaming, but I’ve seen it in action — someone playing a racing game on a Mac versus someone on an iPhone — and it works very well.

You can probably expect a rush of iOS games being ported to the Mac by this summer.

AirPlay Mirroring

AirPlay is maybe my favorite feature of iOS right now simply because it seems like it’s magic. You can not only push things like movies to the Apple TV from your iPad or iPhone, you can push your entire iOS experience as well.

And with Mountain Lion, you can push your entire OS X experience as well.

In the menu area of Mountain Lion, you’ll see a new option to push your entire desktop to an Apple TV via Airplay. This will essentially turn your television inot a massive monitor.

I’m told there will be no limit on content that can be pushed, though developers may have the option to block certain content down the road (HBO is an example of one iOS app that doesn’t work with AirPlay, which is lame). There’s resolution matching to 720p HD video.

Gatekeeper

This is an entirely new security feature in Mountain Lion. While Apple feels like they’ve largely avoided some of the major malware problems out there, they acknowledge that the threat is still very real. With Gatekeeper, they offer a solution. And it’s going to be controversial.

Essentially, Gatekepper gives you control over the kind of apps that can be installed on your computer. There will be three options: allow apps from anywhere (the way it works today), allow only Mac App Store apps, allows Mac App Store apps and identified developers.

The reason why this will be controversial is because the final option will be the default one. To be clear: this means that by default, you won’t be able to install any app from the web on your machine.

Now, hold on for a second. Calm down. You can easily change this in the settings (it’s actually not all that different from Android’s default setting, oddly enough). And the truth is that this is likely to be a good thing for many people who might otherwise download bad by accident.

Apple is not requiring that all apps go through he Mac App Store (though, again, this is an option), but the Mac App Store + Identified Developers option gives them a way to still offer a higher level of protection to the average user.

The other controversial element will be the way you become an “identified developer” — you’ll have to sign up to be a Mac app developer (which is $99 a year). Again, this doesn’t mean you’ll have to sell your software through the Mac App Store — nor will your apps be pre-screened by Apple — but it will make it so Apple can know who you are as a developer. And if they find out one of your apps is bad, they’ll quickly pull your credentials.

China

Apple is thinking a lot about China. And it’s hard to blame them — it’s the area accounting for their fastest growth. With Mountain Lion, there are a number of new features specially tailored for Chinese users.

First, there are improvements around the Chinese input methods. Apple notes that the Chinese language is evolving quickly, so they need to be able to update it quickly for things like word suggestions. And they also now have the ability to mix Chinese and English words (without switching keyboards), which apparently is a popular thing to do.

Apple is also integrating the Chinese search engine Baidu, into Safari by default for Chinese users. This makes sense as it’s by far the market leader in that country. Along those lines, they’ve added Tudou and Youku support for video uploads. And they have Sina weibo (sort of the Chinese Twitter) integration for microblogging. And there are several popular Chinese email providers as options in Mail now as well.

I’m told these special Chinese features have nothing to do with blocking any kind of information that would otherwise be a part of OS X — though I still wonder if the Twitter integration will fully work, for example.

Other Things

While the things above are the 10 key new features that Apple is highlighting in Mountain Lion right now, there are dozens more not mentioned. A few of the ones I’ve found so far:

A unified search/URL bar in Safari. Yes. YES!!!! (And yes, like Chrome.)

A “VIPs” area of Mail to mark your favorite contacts. (Yes, sort of like Priority Inbox for Gmail.)

A search box in Launchpad (to see for apps if you have a ton).

Better date editing in Calendar (a calendar drop-down finally).

A much better way to add/remove widgets in Dashboard (more app-like).

There’s a new galaxy background (!).

Running “Software Update” now re-directs to the Mac App Store. It’s not clear if that’s the way all updates are going to come from now on or if that’s just due to the preview status of Mountain Lion.

AirPlay Mirroring will require an Apple TV software update.

Running “Shut Down” and “Restart” now remembers your last-used “Re-open windows” setting (finally).

There wasn’t a noticeable different in real-world use speed between Lion and Mountain Lion. I ran both on a 1.7 GHz MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM.

Startup and shutdown speed was noticeably slower with Mountain Lion (but again, this is the first release, that may change).

Battery life doesn’t seem to be altered by OS X Mountain Lion versus Lion. If anything, it’s maybe a little better (though the machine was also newer).

Apple says that over 19 million copies of Lion have now shipped (including both Mac App Store and new Mac numbers). This means the software makes up about 30 percent of the total OS X user base in under seven months. They say that it took Windows 7 twenty-one months to reach that milestone.

Now the next race is on. Microsoft will release the first Windows 8 beta in two weeks at Mobile World Congress. The final software is due out before the end of the year. Apple beat them to the punch with the Mountain Lion preview. And they should beat them to the punch with the release this summer as well. (No word on the exact price of OS X Mountain Lion just yet, but Apple says it will be very competitive, just as Lion was — Lion was just $29.99. As you might expect, Mountain Lion will also be distributed exclusively through the Mac App Store.)

If the initial developer preview is any indication, Mountain Lion won’t be as big of a sea change as Windows 8 will be. Instead, it’s more of a continuation of what Lion started. Apple has far more iOS users than OS X users at this point. Now it’s about getting everyone on the same page. This early build is a great start.

Update: As OS X Mountain Lion Proves, Twitter Is Apple's Social Network

StockTwits Gets More Interactive With Conversations

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 04:19 AM PST

StockTwits is unveiling a new feature called Conversations, which should make it easier to not just track the online discussion about a stock, but to join in, too.

Co-founder and CEO Howard Lindzon says that StockTwits has “always been about context,” trying to show users all the Twitter discussion about a certain stock ticker symbol in one place. However, that discussion can get pretty overwhelming — he notes that the latest Apple earnings report spurred 110 tweets per minute using the $AAPL symbol.

“We’ve got to figure out different ways to keep it focused on the key conversations,” Lindzon says. Twitter has added some light conversation-tracking features, showing some of the context around individual tweets, but Lindzon says, “Twitter just doesn’t work for stocks. We’re finding our own feature set.”

A Conversation in StockTwits is exactly what the name suggests. With the new capabilities, any StockTwits member can start a discussion around any piece of content within the service. There’s a single URL pointing to the entire Conversation, so it’s easy for other members to see what has already been said and then join in, creating a thread that hopefully becomes a focused discussion, rather a largely unconnected stream of topically-related tweets. (Of course, any of the comments in a Conversation can be posted to Twitter, too.)

COO Francis Costello said that the feature should be particularly useful for StockTwits’ publishing partners like CNN Money, Globe & Mail, and Yahoo Finance — now it’s possible for someone looking at StockTwits from a partner site to see the full discussion, making them feel comfortable enough “to enter a conversation across our distribution network,” Costello says. After all, the majority of the StockTwits viewership occurs on those sites.

Last year, the company started to reveal its business model with a product for investor relations. (Lindzon says the Conversations product probably won’t appeal to StockTwits’ IR customers, who are more interested in amplifying their messages through social networks than they are in having this type of discussion.) StockTwits will continue to release enterprise products for the financial community, and it’s building a team to sell those products, Lindzon says.

Other plans included a gradual opening of the StockTwits API, and a bigger emphasis on mobile.

News: Topeak Dual Touch Bike Storage Stand

2012-02-16T04:56:00.001-08:00

Includes two bike mounts with room for up to four mounts
Great for house or garage
30 degree adjustment on bike holders to accommodate bikes with sloping-up tubes
QR locking stepper foot secures stand
Weight Capacity: 39.7 pounds per mount; 158.7 pounds per stand

$ 123.54
Display and storage racking for bikes.Arms adjust 30 degreesQuick-release for height adjustmentStands fully extended at 10.5 feet or 123 inchesAn elegant solution for storing your bikes, the Topeak Dual Touch Bike Storage Stand looks great in the house or in the garage. It includes two bike mounts with room for up to four mounts (extra mounts optional; not included). Bike holders adjust from 0-30 degrees to accommodate bikers with sloping up tubes and has a large knob that adjusts quickly and securely. The handlebar stabilizer keeps the front wheel from turning and the QR locking stepper foot secures the stand. Features: 2 Bike mounts included Holds maximum 4 bikes 30 degree adjustment on bike holders to accommodate bikes with sloping-up

Topeak Dual Touch Bike Storage Stand

9 new stories on The Next Web today

2012-02-16T04:08:00.001-08:00

9 new stories on The Next Web today

Microsoft’s $40,000 per Xbox patch explains why updates are slow to roll out
Orange just made it easier for African mobile users to access Facebook on the go
Rejoice! EU court rules in favor of Netlog, and fundamental freedom, in content filtering case
Freedom of tweet: Twitter, censorship and the law
In 2011, Apple products appeared in over 40% of No.1 US Box Office films
Opera acquires two mobile ad firms for up to $64.5 million, reports solid earnings
Deutsche Telekom reportedly mulls selling its UK Everything Everywhere stake
Chinese Internet giant Baidu is reportedly planning to expand into South America [Updated with response]
Google reportedly to release Android 5.0 ‘Jelly Bean’ by June 2012
UK bank Barclays targets PayPal with new mobile number money transfer service Pingit

Microsoft’s $40,000 per Xbox patch explains why updates are slow to roll out

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 03:58 AM PST

Given that all modern console platforms are Internet-connected to allow multiplayer gaming, video and music downloads and deliver in-game purchases, one of the biggest upsides is that game developers can patch their titles to deliver additional content or patch bugs.

Sometimes, gamers are left waiting for developers to fix errors within a game, lamenting at the apparent delay in submitting a patch to Microsoft and then updating the game.

However, Tim Schafer, the man behind Psyschonauts (and apparent sequel funding offer from Minecraft creator ‘Notch’) has provided some insight into why such updates take time to roll out, suggesting it’s the cost that ensures development studios incorporate as many game fixes and refinements into their update before submitting it to Microsoft.

In an interview with independent game site Hook Shot Inc., Schafer spoke of the closed nature of Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation platforms, suggesting that indie game developers are made to overcome a lot of obstacles to patch a game:

Those systems as great as they are, they're still closed. You have to jump through a lot of hoops, even for important stuff like patching and supporting your game. Those are things we really want to do, but we can't do it on these systems. I mean, it costs $40,000 to put up a patch – we can't afford that! Open systems like Steam, that allow us to set our own prices, that's where it's at, and doing it completely alone like Minecraft. That's where people are going."

Schafer doesn’t provide any context with the figure, so we don’t know whether this is for a small update or a complete overhaul of a title.

Nonetheless, it would align with a strategy that Microsoft could employ to ensure that it doesn’t find itself constantly fighting to patch hundreds of game updates, but also that it would ensure developers made their titles as bug-free as possible before launch.

The update cost may also explain why some bigger DLC upgrades are paid downloads. If a company needs to push a 4GB patch, it is ultimately paying to push the update (but also gives it a change to recoup additional development costs.)

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Orange just made it easier for African mobile users to access Facebook on the go

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 03:21 AM PST

Today Orange announced a new initiative which aims to make it easier for African mobile subscribers to access Facebook on the go.

A first for the continent, Orange is using USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) technology, a low-bandwidth option which bypasses costly data prices in Africa, making it possible to get onto Facebook on pretty much any phone.

Facebook via USSD could play a significant role in increasing Facebook mobile usage in Africa. The social networking site has seen explosive growth throughout Africa over the past year, with numbers doubling in some countries, making it the most visited site in most African countries.

South Africa-based mobile network MXit has proven to be a tough competitor for Facebook, but providing users with a far more mobile experience on Facebook could help balance the figures out. Currently South African Facebook penetration stands shy of 10%, with 4.8 million users. In contrast, MXit still has double the number of South African users, with 10 million users.

The new Orange service is text-based, so users who don’t have a data plan can still access Facebook, without having to shell out for an expensive smartphone. Users are able to access all of Facebook’s major features – search for and invite friends, accept and deny friend requests, update their status and interact with their friends’ posts with comments and likes.

There are currently four payment options for Facebook via USSD. Users can pay either by timed sessions of 10 to 20 minutes, or they can pay per day, week or month.

Strong Beginnings

Orange launched the service at the end of last year, through Egyptian mobile operator Mobinil, and the service was instantly picked up by over 350,000 customers in just one month. The next stop on Orange’s Facebook-via-USSD road is the Ivory Coast, with more countries to come throughout the year.

USSD sends information over 2G networks, so for areas in Africa where 3G has yet to make a mark, Orange’s initiative will no doubt be a welcome change, and its expectations for the service are high, estimating that over one million customers will use the service in its first year.

"Social networks such as Facebook have completely changed how people stay in contact with their family and friends, and it's important that our customers, regardless of the phone they have, are able to access and participate in these services," said Xavier Perret, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Orange. "We feel that it is our role to help our customers enjoy a digitally rich, connected life, and services such as Facebook via USSD this make that possible for even more of our customers."

With the vast majority of African mobile subscribers still using feature phones, and Nokia continuing to dominate the mobile phone market, this isn’t the only initiative that Orange has launched ensuring that its subscribers can access some of the world’s more popular sites.

Earlier this month, Orange launched an initiative dropping all data charges for its subscribers when accessing Wikipedia, proving that the network clearly has its finger on the pulse of what the region needs.

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Rejoice! EU court rules in favor of Netlog, and fundamental freedom, in content filtering case

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 03:13 AM PST

Excellent news for social networks and Web service providers and their users this morning, as the European Court of Justice has ruled (PDF) that such businesses cannot be required to install monitoring, filtering or blocking systems to prevent illegal trading of digital music and other copyrighted material.

In 2009, SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, had filed a lawsuit against Netlog, a social networking service operated by Massive Media, in an effort to impose an injunction requiring the installation of such filtering systems on its website. As a Belgian, I’m familiar with SABAM, which basically means I plan to do the happy dance later today because they lost.

This morning, the EU Court decided that it is against European law to order such a measure, asserting that the generality and broadness of such an injunction is against freedom of communication, freedom to conduct business and privacy rights:

The owner of an online social network cannot be obliged to install a general filtering system, covering all its users, in order to prevent the unlawful use of musical and audio-visual work.

Such an obligation would not be respecting the prohibition to impose on that provider a general obligation to monitor nor the requirement that a fair balance be struck between the protection of copyright, on the one hand, and the freedom to conduct business, the right to protection of personal data and the freedom to receive or impart information, on the other.

Respect for fundamental freedoms for the win!

And, as La Quadrature Du Net puts it, a very crucial and timely ruling.

Last November, SABAM also lost a separate case in which it sought to require Internet and hosting service providers to install filters that would prevent the illegal downloading of files. Sucks to be them right now. :)

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Freedom of tweet: Twitter, censorship and the law

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:59 AM PST

“The last 12 months have shown us just how truly transformative the Internet can be: the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, WikiLeaks and the continued aggregation of private data into global corporates.

But with great power, comes great responsibility. From individual users, to the corporate world, to governments and lawmakers the challenges are coming thick and fast: from the courtroom to the boardroom to the living room.”

On Tuesday we were at Freedom of Tweet: Censorship, Governments, Marketers & The Law, which saw Mark Stephens CBE, one of the UK's leading legal minds and a veteran of WikiLeaks, discuss freedom of speech and censorship.

Legal frameworks

The Internet circumvents international boundaries with aplomb for the most apart, but it’s impossible for legislation, regulation and those responsible for upholding it to follow suit. Even within individual countries, the likes of Twitter serves to sow the seeds of gossip, rumor and, sometimes, facts so that they’re read by millions before the powers-that-be even have a chance to take stock of the situation.

Despite a certain British footballer attempting to sue Twitter and a number of its users last year for not adhering to a super-injunction that sought to block his name being associated with an alleged affair, it was a foolish move from the start, and was doomed to fail.

“Now there’s a man who really knows how to make a disaster out of a crisis,” says Mark. “It really does show the challenges we’re facing at the moment within the legal system of trying to enforce national legal frameworks on an international medium. Of course, the position with Twitter was that once his name was out there in the open, because Twitter doesn’t have a legal presence in the UK, the British judges’ ruling didn’t bind Twitter and therefore they could happily publish away the material the courts said we couldn’t know about.”

It’s changed days, for sure. It wasn’t that long ago when authorities could prevent an entire nation from learning about information it felt could be damaging to the country.

“We have changed culturally,” says Mark. “If you look back to the Duchess of Windsor and the (royal family) abdication crisis in the UK. The American and European papers were reporting on the relationship with the King, yet the British papers, through a conspiracy of silence, kept that story – information that was known to the editors – away from the UK public. As a result of that, the public were less informed. In the modern era, that’s just not possible, that information would’ve been out on Twitter, if nowhere else, within a few minutes or hours.”

Looking back to the infamous super-injunction case in the UK last year, there was a suggestion at the time that everyone who retweeted the information in England and Wales would’ve been in breach of the court order.

“Technically, these people could’ve been held up for contempt of court,” says Mark. “But the practical implications of doing that, let alone the cost…even a Manchester United player couldn’t afford that. There was then a question about whether they could go back and find the sources. They could’ve traced the source through Twitter and launched proceedings in California through that end, but this ultimately would’ve been doomed to failure because California law would’ve been used to defend that.”

Mark even went so far as to praise the way that Twitter handled the whole episode, noting that other large digital companies haven’t always put up such a rigid defense when asked to reveal private information. “It takes a very strong and powerful organization with good principles, as Twitter had, to stand up and protect their customers’ identities and not hand over information,” he says.

Everyone’s a publisher

How DO you go about upholding peoples’ privacy when a platform such as Twitter acts as an open conduit for information to flow? Twitter is still only used by a relatively small number of people on the grand scheme of things – 100m active users at the last count. Twitter's goal is to reach all 7bn people on Earth, and if it can reach even one fifth of that, can you begin to imagine how difficult it will be to curb the flow of information around the world? If it’s difficult now, it certainly won’t get any easier.

Twitter is playing ball a little bit though – last month we reported that it was taking measures to block specific content on a country-by-country basis. This still means content will be viewable in other countries though, it just means Twitter is looking to appease authorities around the world to ensure its service remains switched on.

As for the super-injunctions, Mark suggested a much more tactful route for celebrities and companies to go down, noting that he had personally been approached by individuals seeking court orders. “I can’t guarantee anonymity, though I can pretty much guarantee I’ll get you the court order,” he says. “I can’t guarantee it [the information] won’t come out. The very nature of these things is that people talk, people gossip and ultimately there’s a serious risk it will come out.

“It will also be really expensive,” he continues. “It will cost you somewhere between £75,000-£125,000 and you don’t even get a definite outcome. Would it not be better to take, say, £50,000, and give it to a jolly good PR person to generate a lot of good noise around you to drown out the bad noise? I think that’s a much more sensible use of the money than lining lawyers’ pockets.”

Indeed, one of the issues of super-injunctions is that they can’t possibly work with Twitter around. Sure, newspapers can be informed of super-injunctions and be forced to adhere to them, but the millions of people that use Twitter can’t all personally be informed that a super-injunction is in place. All it takes is one anonymous person in the know to drop that first seed, and it’s game over. Everyone is a publisher these days, and that can’t be controlled.

Internet censorship isn’t the answer

One of the issues legal systems the world over are struggling to manage is the speed at which new technologies are being developed. In most democratic countries, laws take time to be passed and enforced, and by the time this happens it’s likely some other new technology is already coming to the fore.

Last year, the UK government considered, albeit briefly, whether it would be right to close down social networks in times of crisis – a discussion fueled by the riots that kicked-off in London and soon spread to other parts of England.

It’s safe to say that most people were against that idea. But it was indicative of how the authorities were thinking – the UK is a pretty fair, open and uncensored country, but with the hype surrounding the role social networks were playing in events, it clearly felt as though it needed to assert more authority on the situation. This is despite Twitter and Facebook not really being used to organize any of the rioting that went on.

“In places like Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East – are we happy seeing the authorities, the regimes, switch off the Internet so we can’t see what’s going on elsewhere in the world?,” asks Mark. “Every BBC report is prefaced by ‘we cannot vouch for these pictures, or the number of people that are dead’. Actually, I’d quite like people to be vouching for it, and citizen journalism…the more of it there is, the more likely it will be verifiable.

“Restrictions on free speech need to be extremely narrowly-tailored,” continues Mark. “Whether it’s in relation to national security, or any other sphere where you’re going to limit speech. There has to be some pressing social need to have it.”

A few weeks back, Google took to the stand at the UK’s Leveson Inquiry, a public inquiry looking at the culture and ethics of the British media. As we noted at the time, whilst Google has localized domains around the world, it is absolutely answerable to local law, but even if it does censor illegal content from its index in one country, this can be easily bypassed by simply visiting Google.com, rather than the in-country equivalent. Whichever way you look at it, Internet law is a minefield, and we’ll no doubt continue to see countless more cases highlighting the sheer difficulty of regulating a global medium.

As for Twitter and other US-based social networks, Mark reckons its position is pretty straight forward. “Why on Earth would you try and comply with every law on the planet?,” he says. “I think you should stick to a standard, and the US standard for a US company seems to the right one. Otherwise all that you get is this fracturing of information again, on a country-by-country basis. In order to inform yourself of what’s going on in the world, you need to understand the international dimension.”

You can monitor all our coverage from Social Media Week here.

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In 2011, Apple products appeared in over 40% of No.1 US Box Office films

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:48 AM PST

Having secured top spot for product placements in television and films in 2010, it’s not surprising that the world’s biggest technology company has ranked first again in 2011, with its products appearing in 42.5% of number one films at the US Box Office over the course of the year.

The Cupertino-based company took the 2011 Award for Overall Product Placement in the Brandcameo Awards, with its products appearing in 17 of the 40 number one Box Office films. This year saw product placements increase for the company, growing its 30% share in 2010, but couldn’t hit its ten year peak of appearing in almost half (20 of 41) of number one films in 2009.

That said, Apple has already appeared in 50% of number one films in 2012.

Dell, Chevrolet and Ford tied for second place, appearing in 22.5% of the top films. Cadillac, Coca-Coca and Mercedes-Benz all appeared in 17.5% of the #1 films.

BrandChannel reports that as a result of its strong showing in the media, particularly over the past few years, Apple products have now appeared in more than a third of all number one films at the US Box Office between 2001 and 2011. At least one Apple device or computer has been seen in 129 of the 374 number one films during that period.

That puts it behind Ford (with 153 of 374) but ahead of Coca-Cola (103 of 374), which placed third.

The interesting thing to note is that Apple products appeared in many more films that didn’t top the Box Office charts. This included (and there are many more): What’s Your Number, Trust, One Day, Friends with Benefits, The Muppets and Girl with The Dragon Tattoo.

Whilst it’s not easy to quantify how all that product placement affected sales, Front Row Analytics used its placement analytics platform to predict that in the five minutes that Apple spent on the screen in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Apple would have seen value of over $23 million.

According to BrandChannel, Front Row’s analysis takes into account the total theatrical distribution, gross box office receipts, product location factoring, integration of product into script/scenes, product affinity, appearance value and additional parameters to isolate the overall impact the product has in the film.

It’s a staggering amount, especially when you consider Apple doesn’t pay a dime for coverage (well, it insists it doesn’t). Whether this can be labelled product placement remains to be seen, typically brands pay movie studios to have their products featured, but it shows filmmakers are looking to get the most current technology brands and trends represented in their releases.

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Opera acquires two mobile ad firms for up to $64.5 million, reports solid earnings

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:24 AM PST

Opera Software, Norway’s finest browser maker, this morning announced its acquisition of not one but two mobile advertising firms, 4th Screen Advertising and Mobile Theory, to strengthen its offering for advertisers and mobile publishers alike by adding full-fledged demand-side advertising services across the US and Europe.

Opera also wants to “better monetize the traffic that flows” through its mobile browser products, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, the company said.

In a separate release, Opera outlined how much it is paying for the two companies.

For Mobile Theory, which is based in San Francisco, Opera is putting $5 million in cash on the table. Another $13 million in cash was put in escrow and will be paid to Mobile Theory in 2013 and 2014, provided certain revenue performance targets are met. In addition, there’s an earn-out cash consideration that can amount up to $32 million (based on “aggressive” revenue and EBIT targets).

For 4th Screen Advertising, based in London, Opera is also paying $5 million in cash and putting $3 million in escrow. The additional earn-out cash consideration for 4th Screen – also based on “aggressive revenue and EBIT targets” – can amount up to $6.5 million.

This comes down to a total of $64.5 million for both companies if all targets are met, but we should point out that this would be rather unusual.

Opera says it currently serves more than 160 million monthly active users that generate more than 100 billion page views, as of December 2011.

Said Lars Boilesen, chief exec of Opera Software:

"This is yet another important step in Opera's quest to create even more economic value in the mobile ecosystem. Two years ago, we announced the acquisition of AdMarvel – which has grown to become the global leader as a supply-side platform (publisher platform) for mobile advertising. Last year, Opera helped generate well over $200 million in revenue for our publishers globally.”

Speaking of AdMarvel, Opera says total advertising impressions from the service grew 134 percent in the fourth quarter of last year compared to Q4 2010, to 72 billion.

Opera also reported its earnings for Q4 2011 this morning, posting revenues of 253.1 million Norwegian Krone (roughly $43.5 million).

The company said most of the revenue growth came from its Desktop, Device OEMs, Mobile Consumers and Publishers & Advertisers divisions, noting that they’re seeing a shift towards recurring revenue streams.

Earnings before interest and tax came in at 67.6 million Norwegian Krone ($11.6 million), EBITDA at 78.8 million Norwegian Krone ($13.6 million).

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Deutsche Telekom reportedly mulls selling its UK Everything Everywhere stake

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:06 AM PST

Following the collapse of its proposed deal to sell T-Mobile USA to AT&T, it seems Deutsche Telekom could sell off its UK interests.

According to a report from Bloomberg Business Week, the company is considering the sale of its stake in UK firm Everything Everywhere, which it jointly owns with France Telecom. The German giant planned to use funds from the $39bn AT&T deal to reduce its debt by €13bn ($17bn) and repurchase €5bn of its own shares. It is also looking to fund upgrades to fiber and wireless networks in Europe.

Everything Everywhere operates the T-Mobile and Orange brands in the UK. Any plan to offload Deutsche Telekom’s Everything Everywhere stake is reportedly at a very early stage, with no official word from the company or France Telecom. Indeed, a spokesperson for the German firm told Bloomberg that it had a "long-term commitment" to the U.K. market and that its venture is "competing successfully,” while France Telecom declined to comment.

This isn’t the first report of a shakeup at Everything Everywhere, which currently has the largest marketshare in the UK mobile market when both its brands are combined. Last month, there was talk of both the Orange and T-Mobile brands being jettisoned in favour of a single, unified name.

We have contacted Deutsche Telekom for comment.

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Chinese Internet giant Baidu is reportedly planning to expand into South America [Updated with response]

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 01:38 AM PST

Chinese Internet giant Baidu is reported to have made plans to expand its operations into Latin America, in a move that would see it further rival Google in new part of the world.

Updated with comment from Baidu below.

According to reports in Brazil cited by China Daily, the firm is poised to open a regional office in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo. Initially it is aiming to recruit a staff of 20 over an initial six month period, however it is reported that the number could increase as its ramps up its services.

The move would not be its first step outside of China as its search engine has been available in Japan since 2007, while it has launched an Arabic version of its question-and-answer service — Baidu Knows – and a Thai version of its web directory.

However, the company has been criticised for its modest performance in Japan, where it lags both Google and Yahoo by some way. While, as China Daily reports, it has lost more than $100 million from overseas operations since 2008, according figure provided to the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2011.

Pundits have claimed that the company struggles overseas because it fails to differentiate itself from the competition, leaving it unable to stand out to attract users. The same fate may well await it in South America, where it will line-up against Google’s services once more, although it may gain an early mover advantage as the continent’s Internet continues to grow into the mainstream.

Nonetheless, the criticism is unlikely to stop Baidu CEO Robin Li from pursuing his lofty ambition of making the company a household name in at least half of the world, as he told media last year.

Things are very different in its homeland, where Baidu dominates the search market. A recent report concluded that the firm’s incomes accounted for 78 percent of the industry’s estimated $866 million revenues. Its progress is showing no sign of stopping domestically either, with revenues tipped to increase by more than 90 percent this year compared with last year.

Not only does Baidu rival Google on search, but it has its own mobile OS — Baidu Yi, ironically based around Android — while it offers a maps, a Chinese encyclopedia, a Google Docs-like service among a host of other products.

We’ve reached out to Baidu for confirmation of this rumour and will update this report with any information that we are provided with.

Update: A Baidu spokesperson has told us that the company is not commenting on the reports at this point.

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Google reportedly to release Android 5.0 ‘Jelly Bean’ by June 2012

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 01:17 AM PST

Before Ice Cream Sandwich has managed to reach more than 1% of Android devices, reports are suggesting that its successor, Android 5.0 ‘Jelly Bean’, could launch as soon as June.

The news comes in the form of a Digitimes report, which is known for being hit-and-miss with its accuracy, but cites supply chain sources that state the search giant will seek to release its new Android platform to provide competition to Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system, which will debut in the third quarter.

With Android 5.0 thought to deliver yet more features for tablet devices, Taiwanese suppliers are already to deliver dual-OS tablets and notebooks, which will be able to instantly switch between Google’s and Microsoft’s mobile-friendly platforms.

Despite officially launching with the release of the Galaxy Nexus at the end of last year, Ice Cream Sandwich has yet to reach the majority of new Android smartphones and is only expected to receive a boost in take-up when the world’s biggest mobile vendors release new devices at Mobile World Congress, commencing at the end of the month.

By February, Gingerbread (in particular versions Android versions 2.3.3 - 2.3.7) accounted for 58.6% of Android gadgets, while the latest flavour accounted for just one percent of devices.

It is believed that Google will use its new Android release to galvanise its re-entry into the notebook and netbook markets, after Chromebook sales failed to take off. As a result, Google’s partners are reported to be “conservative” about utilising the new platform.

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UK bank Barclays targets PayPal with new mobile number money transfer service Pingit

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 12:08 AM PST

From today, any customer banking with UK bank Barclays will be able to utilise the company’s new mobile money transfer service, Pingit, which allows money to be sent and received using just a mobile phone number.

Barclays says that Pingit is Europe’s first person-to-person service for sending money this way, requiring customers to own just a UK current account and a domestic mobile phone number. The service does away with bank details by linking a customer’s account to their mobile device.

The good news is that, whilst the ustwo-designed app is available to Barclays customers at launch, it will be made available to all current customers of UK banks and building societies, with full UK access expected to be rolled out by March.

You’re probably going to ask how it works, and whether you can trust the service to securely transfer money to and from your account.

The service first requires a bank customer to link their current account with their mobile number, this enables payments to be sent directly to that account with just a phone number for reference. To send funds, you can download the free Barclays Pingit app (available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry) or sign-up receive mobile transfers by registering online.

Each transaction is protected by a five-digit passcode, which is set by you, and payments can be between £1 and £300 with a maximum of £5,000 per day.

From today, only Barclays customers can utilise Pingit to send money, but the UK banking giant says that with the release of the second version of the app, which is available soon, non-Barclays current account customers with smartphones can register via the app and send money.

However, any UK current account holder can receive payments by visiting www.barclays.co.uk/pingit and registering their mobile device.

With banks seeing billions of pounds transferred between accounts via services like PayPal on mobile devices, one has finally launched its own service that is capable of rivalling the eBay-owned company.

The service is aimed not only at helping friends and family send payments between accounts, small business owners will also be able to register numbers on the service and receive payments for goods and services, without the need for a credit card machine.

In that sense, you could say it’s the perfect mix of PayPal and US mobile payment platform Square.

➤ Pingit - iOS | Android | BlackBerry

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News: Pearl Izumi Men=?UTF-8?B?4oCZ?=s Cyclone Glove

2012-02-15T16:21:00.001-08:00

Our most popular cool weather cycling glove features best?in?class reflectivity, wind protection and soothing Comfort Bridge Gel padding.
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ELITE Softshell provides superior wind and water protection Clarino synthetic leather palm is soft and durableComfort Bridge Gel padding relieves pressure on Ulnar and Median nerves for riding comfort Soft windproof fleece wiping surface on thumb Gauntlet keeps wrists warm Anatomic fit maximizes finger dexterity for shifting and brakingSilicone–screened finger tips for a performance grip Hook and loop closureReflective elements for low–light visibilityBack: 63%nylon 16% spandex 12% polyurethane 5% airprene 4% polyester Palm: 52% nylon 29% polyurethane 10% airprene 7% nylon 2% spandex

Pearl Izumi Men’s Cyclone Glove

The Latest from TechCrunch

2012-02-15T10:01:00.001-08:00

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Communication is the Most Important Medical Instrument

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:43 AM PST

Editor's note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture's healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft's Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

“A good scalpel makes a better surgeon. Good communication makes a better doctor."

- Dr. Josh Umbehr

The future of medicine in the U.S. is clear. The days of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement are numbered as they have produced one of the most inefficient healthcare systems in the world. While there are many unknowns regarding the future model, one thing is crystal clear — highly effective communication will separate the winners from the losers.

The quantum improvement in the depth and breadth of communication seen in the consumer Internet and in the consumerization of the enterprise (iPhones, Yammer, etc.) has yet to fully impact healthcare. With healthcare representing nearly 20% of the economy, the stakes are so high that it is inevitable that communications will be a key driver separating the winners from the losers as the tectonic shifts in the landscape shake out. This will usher in an array of new technology entrants similar to consumer and enterprise arenas disrupting ineffective and expensive communication methods of the past. The stars are aligning to make this happen.

“I don’t think you can overstate the importance of communication in clinical care. Even with devices, robotics, genomics and personalized care, it all rests, and depends on, clear communication.”

- Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson, MD, MBE, FAAP

The Individual (aka the Patient) is the Most Important Member of the Care Team

It’s long been said that the most important member of the care team is the individual (or their family member).

Quite simply, in a world where one is compensated on value and outcome, it’s nearly impossible to have success without recognizing the importance of the patient. Consider the diagram in this article. It is clear and appropriate that the “system” — i.e., the collection of healthcare providers — is in control of decisions that drive outcomes in high acuity cases such as when one is unconscious in the hospital. In contrast, in low acuity situations such as managing a chronic condition, the individual and/or their family are clearly in control of actions that will drive the ultimate outcome. Whether adhering to an exercise, diet or prescription plan, the patient/family plays the central role in determining the outcome.

The importance of this can’t be overemphasized given that 75% of healthcare spend results from chronic conditions. Decisions made while a condition is in low acuity can rapidly lead to high acuity flare ups that drive large medical bills. As Dr. Swanson states, “the steering wheel should be attended by the patient.” After all, 99+% of an individual’s life is spent away from healthcare providers and no one else besides them is in the driver’s seat.

It is a good thing that there has been great focus put on improving communication between healthcare professionals through standards and incentives related to the new models being driven by private and federal insurance programs. The Patient Centered Medical Home and the Accountable Care Organizations are the two most high profile of these. However, the communication focus has been about the patient not with the patient. Having worked in and seen literally hundreds of healthIT systems, the fact is the fundamental purpose of the patient as envisioned by these systems is that the “patient” is merely a vessel to attach billing codes to — not a core part of the care team. This legacy approach will prove to be a fatal flaw in the new reimbursement models. Throwing bodies (e.g., care coordinators) at the problem can help, but will be at a disadvantage versus approaches that combine the best of human and technology driven communication methods.

There are efforts being made to tweak legacy software to address these requirements. Unfortunately, they are as likely to meet the new imperatives as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have been at becoming market leaders in social networking. The reality is Facebook built social networking into their core design from the ground up and bolting a dramatically different approach onto an old system rarely works whether it is social networking or patient-provider communications.

Good News for Forward Looking Healthcare Organizations

I get knowing nods from my physician friends when I exclaim that I hear more frequently from my dog’s vet than my doctor or my kids’ doctor. We realize why the historical reimbursement models have contributed to this dynamic. Considering that people retain less than 20% of what a doctor tells them, this lack of communication and patient retention is a brutal combination driving sub-optimal outcomes. The good news is there is a tremendous competitive advantage that a healthcare provider can realize if they choose to focus on improved communications for the 99+% of the time when a patient isn’t staring them in the face.

Not only can this opportunity provide a competitive advantage, it is imperative in the new models. Simplistic patient portals, however, won’t get the job done. I’ve yet to meet the physician or individual who thinks that just making lab results available to patients or allowing for secure messaging is changing the care paradigm.

Whether out of desire or necessity, consumers are ready for improved communication so they can save on their healthcare costs. It’s expected that roughly one-third of the workforce will be permanent freelancers, contractors, consultants, etc. with zero expectation of employer-provided insurance. Even those with employer-provided insurance, are picking up an ever-growing percentage of the premium. The current average is 30% of the costs are picked up by an employee (up from 10% in the recent past). This coincides with the rise of consumer empowerment that has happened in virtually every other sector. Dr. Patricia Salber wrote about DIY Healthcare to explain how far things have already come and to assert her opinion that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Thought-leading Physicians Are Ready

Fortunately the economics and simplicity of the consumer Internet and SaaS have finally come to healthcare. Once upon a time, sophisticated new software was first deployed in large enterprises. Today, greatly improved communication technologies begin with small organizations. Consider a physician like Dr. Craig Koniver who uses various free (e.g., Evernote) and low-cost off-the-shelf software to manage his communications without employing any administrative staff. Dr. Kent Bottles wrote about reverse innovation in healthcare talking about offshore innovation making its way to the U.S., but it’s not just offshore healthcare that can be a source of innovation. Dr. Howard Luks, an orthopedic surgeon, is another example of an innovative individual physician that is more sophisticated than most large healthcare providers by simply using free and low cost software to communicate with current and prospective patients.

As was highlighted in The Rise of Nimble Medicine, there is an explosion of disruptive innovators as well as innovation groups inside established healthcare organizations. In many respects, healthcare has been measured on production with an almost factory floor-like model of producing as many “widgets” (i.e., procedures, appointments, tests, prescriptions, etc.) as possible. However with a shift to a service model where success will be driven by factors such as satisfaction and health outcomes, smart healthcare providers recognize that systems optimized for production are ill-equipped to optimize for outcome. With that in mind, recognition grows that communication becomes the most important medical instrument of the future.

Zynga Ramps Up Private Cloud Infrastructure zCloud; Now Stores 1.4 Petabytes Of Data

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:30 AM PST

As mentioned in yesterday’s earnings call, Zynga revealed that the company’s zCloud, its private cloud infrastructure has been scaling significantly in the past year. At the start of 2011, only 20% of Zynga’s daily active users (DAU) were in the zCloud. A year later, nearly 80% of Zynga games' DAU reside in zCloud, and 20% in the public cloud (powered by AWS). Today the company is revealing additional information about the zCloud and how much data is being transmitted through its infrastructure.

Zynga has been quietly investing in powering up the zCloud over the past few years, explains Allan Leinwand, Zynga’s CTO of Infrastructure. As Leinwand explains, the infrastructure looks, feels, and operates similar to the AWS public cloud, but allows for greater performance, scale and reliability. zCloud physically resides in Zynga’s private datacenters and is designed specifically for social games in terms of availability and performance. And Zynga has created tailored automation tools for large server environments and built custom monitoring and management tools.

As GigaOm reported last year, xCloud was built using Cloud.com's CloudStack software. And startup RightScale provides a management console for Zynga’s public cloud (powered by AWS) and the private cloud.

Between 2009 and 2011, Zynga says that it doubled down on increasing physical server capacity in order to move games over to the private cloud. For Zynga, this increased not only the ability to scale but also reliability. For social games specifically, zCloud offers 3x the efficiency of standard public cloud infrastructure. For example, games in the public cloud would require three physical servers, zCloud only uses one.

Last year, Zynga began to launch games directly in zCloud instead of in the public cloud. The first new Zynga game to launch in zCloud was CityVille Hometown in June 2011. Since then, every Zynga game has launched in zCloud. For example, CastleVille, which holds the record for the fastest growing Zynga game was launched and scaled in zCloud.

Currently, Zynga stores 1.4 Petabytes of data at any time and has the ability to deploy up to 1,000 servers in a 24 hour period. The company says the power they deployed for zCloud alone during the second half of 2011 could've kept 166 international space stations in orbit. 36 billion gifts were gifted during the holiday season in 2011, and Zynga has increased its server capacity by a 100 times over the past year (see infographic below).

For now, Zynga has no plans to eliminate public cloud powered by AWS. But clearly, this infrastructure is being used sparingly.

Onswipe Now Recommends Partner Content Throughout Its Network

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:14 AM PST

Tablet publishing platform Onswipe is launching its content recommendation throughout its network of publishers today — introducing a Outbrain like feature where readers are given choices of articles from its thousands of partners in realtime. (Readers can access the feature by tapping on the Rocketship in the bottom right corner of the page.)

This move could mean a double digit % lift to publishers according to Onswipe founder Jason Baptiste. The Onswipe network manages tablet publishing for companies like BBC, Ziff Davis, Moguldom, Slate, Thomson Reuters, NY Times, Conde Nast and brands like Amex, Verizon, Tom Ford, Sprint and Lincoln and its readership is in the millions.

“This is really the first time we’re launching a feature that is a glimpse into a big part of our mission of connecting the web together through experience,” Baptiste tells me, “If the tablet is the TV of this generation, we see Onswipe as the platform powering and connecting all the channels together. Today’s release lets us finally do this – start driving traffic between all of the sites in our network.”

Baptiste holds that content recommendation is the first step in his plan to solidify Onswipe as a network of touch-friendly sites, “We always ask ourselves this question: ’How can we leverage all of our publishers to start bringing them more traffic?.’ Everyone also thinks the app store is a driver of distribution for publishers, when it’s really not. We can now tell publishers: publish with Onswipe and we can also get you new distribution+more traffic.”

The startup has a few more network-themed releases slated for 2012. “ We’ve never seen Onswipe as a tools company that lets people just build sites. We see Onswipe as a connected network of sites,” Baptiste said.

Motorola Outlines Further Ice Cream Sandwich Update Plans

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 09:08 AM PST

Motorola has already confirmed that the Xooms, Droid Bionic, Razr, Razr Maxx and the Droid 4 will get a hefty helping of Ice Cream Sandwich this year, but the company has added a few more devices to its ICS upgrade schedule. The Photon 4G, Atrix 4G, Atrix 2, and the Electrify will all see Android 4.0 at some point during the course of 2012.

Motorola lists most of the devices for a Q3 release, with just a few getting Q2 treatment, so there’s still quite a road ahead for you Gingerbread-packing phandroids.

That is, if you even own a device slated for the update. There are quite a few Motorola handsets that will never see Ice Cream Sandwich at all.

It’s also worth noting that both the Q2 and Q3 releases are best-scenario projections. The updates must go through testing with both Motorola and the carriers before being sent out to the masses, and a single slip-up somewhere down the line could slow things up considerably.

For more information on Motorola’s update plans, check out their massive chart of who gets what when.

With Localmind 2.0, It’s About Expert Local Answers, Not Just Immediate Ones

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:47 AM PST

Following five months of work, location-based Q&A platform Localmind is launching its biggest release today since its original debut with the arrival of Localmind 2.0. The newly revamped platform represents a shift for the company, which, as you may remember, sits on top of Foursquare, allowing you to pose questions in real-time to those checked in at local venues.

Today, the company is expanding its focus by allowing users to ask questions of local “experts,” even if they’re not currently checked in to a given location. However, answers can still be replied to in real-time, preserving the sense of immediacy found in the original product.

The problem with Localmind’s previous version, as anyone who used the product could tell you, is that the people checked in to a given location may not necessarily be the best ones to answer your question. While, sure, they could tell you whether the bar was crowded or whether the tuna was the special for the night, the limited use cases (and, frankly, the need) for this feature limited the product’s growth. Outside of buzzy events like SXSW where Localmind first took off among the early adopter crowd, the real-world need to ping someone with immediate questions about local businesses was far less pressing.

What people more often want to know are broader questions than those relating to the current situation found in a given venue. They want to know if it’s true that this food cart has the best tacos, or if that French place is family-friendly or more often frequented by couples having a quiet night out. They want to know about parking situations, outdoor activities and general “things-to-do” type recommendations.

More importantly, they want answers they can actually trust. The latter is the hardest part of the equation, and something that user ratings and reviews sites have always struggled with. Does that unhappy customer have an ax to grind? Was that review or tip slyly posted by the business owner himself?

Although Localmind is not a user review site per se, it offers some similarities as it also relies on crowdsourced opinions as its main value driver. So, in order to make the A’s of Localmind’s Q&A’s more trustworthy, the service uses a suite of algorithms to surface experts based on their actual activities – going out, checking in, leaving tips, etc. – as opposed to the Facebook graph of “likes.”

Over time, Localmind learns who’s an expert in what, and what types of questions they prefer to answer, then routes those questions appropriately. Today, the Localmind experts answer 90% of questions, typically in three minutes time.

While the new focus on a broader reacher is an important step for the company, there’s still the potential issue of growing the service’s expert network. For Localmind to prove its value outside of dense urban areas like NY, or tech hotspots like San Francisco, it may need to find ways to surface answers through less real-time means.

The new version of Localmind is live in the iTunes App Store here.

Cowbird Is A Community For Amazing Storytellers, And Another Reason To Love The Internet

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:33 AM PST

Not yet familiar with digital storytelling platform Cowbird, despite recent glowing coverage from the likes of Wired and The Washington Post?

Well, if you like reading, seeing or listening to a good story as much as I do, you will be mighty glad I’m introducing you to the site today.

On a sidenote: I’m very happy that my last TechCrunch post is about something like Cowbird, because it’s one of those things that make me ever so grateful for the existence of the Internet.

Simply put, Cowbird is a place where you can go to tell a story that you think is worth sharing with a wider community of lovers of good stories. The idea is for people to tell short location-tagged stories based on their own experience using text, photos and sound or a mix thereof. The more personal and authentic your story, the more it will resonate with the still relatively small Cowbird community.

I added some screenshots below to give you an idea of what it looks like.

I signed up a few weeks ago after seeing the founder of the project, nauseatingly interesting American digital artist and entrepreneur Jonathan Harris, talk about Cowbird at the recent DLD Conference in Munich. I’ve since received some truly amazing stories in my inbox every day.

And it’s not just that the stories are great, it’s also the fact that Cowbird is beautifully designed, simple but interactive, a repository that seems to be in motion constantly, a place where depth is welcomed.

If I haven’t convinced you to request an invite to join the project yet, there’s no hope for you.

Did I say project? As of yesterday, Cowbird is a company.

I asked Harris to tell me more about Cowbird, and this is what he sent me back:

We have three main goals: The first is to create a space for a deeper, longer-lasting kind of self-expression than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. The second is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. The third is to build a public library of human experience — a kind of Wikipedia for life experience.

We take a slow and measured approach to everything. Prospective authors can request an invitation by telling us a little bit about who they are and what kind of stories they would like to tell. We personally contact each new author to welcome them into our community. Telling stories on Cowbird asks a little more of you than dashing off tweets from a cell phone, but we think it gives back a lot more, too.

It’s soul food, not fast food.

Check it out folks, you won’t regret it.

Evidence Of A Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Sprouts Up All Over The Place

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:25 AM PST

Remember when that Samsung product marketing manager Ryan Bidan let slip a few details on the next-gen GalTab and/or Galaxy Note? He mentioned the inclusion of an S-Pen, 3D gestures (courtesy of a front-facing camera), and voice controls. Well, it would seem that further proof of the product he was detailing has trickled out, and just like the last time, it’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth.

According to the Verge, Samsung posted an invitation to its Samsung Developer Day at MWC which just so happened to mention a Galaxy Note 10.1. Presumably, this would be a larger version of the Galaxy Note that excludes a 3G/4G radio but keeps the S-Pen.

It’s possible that this is a mistake, but we don’t believe that to be the case. The mention of this device’s specific name alongside comments made by Mr. Bidan is pretty solid evidence as it is, but there’s more.

On a site called BackStage (a casting call website for acting jobs), the Galaxy Note 10.1 made another appearance as Samsung is apparently looking for a teenage guy to “take pictures, record, edit, copy,” and more, I’m sure. According to the listing, the target demographic for this XL GalNote will be in the education, financial planning, and art industries.

While I’m not entirely familiar with the process of creating and distributing a commercial, it would seem that the listing posted on January 17 leaves the company enough time to be up and running with the ad by MWC. According to the invitation, that’s when we’ll see this rumored, even-more-giant Note.

Buck (Formerly Billing Revolution) Launches Single-Click Mobile Payments Service, Adds New Partners

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:04 AM PST

Buck, the mobile payments company formerly known as Billing Revolution, is launching its new, single-click credit card checkout today, which allows shoppers to pay for goods or services without an account, username or password. Coinciding with the launch is news of where you can actually use the service: the company has lined up several new high-profile customers, including Glamour, SpyderLynk, Papaya Mobile and credit card processor Braintree.

The way Buck works is that, at first, it does require a more traditional checkout process, including entry of the appropriate data like credit card number, expiration date, etc. The difference is that after that initial transaction, your phone then becomes a mobile wallet in the sense that any other Buck-enabled merchant will automatically recognize that you’re a member of the Buck network. You won’t have to type in your information again the next time you check out on a Buck-powered site.

The platform also supports SMS notifications for receipts, and all major card types (MC, VS, Amex, Discover) are supported.

In addition, Buck doesn’t have to be only for web-only merchants. With the new Glamour integration, for example, Buck will be powering the purchases of beauty products advertised in the pages of the magazine’s March issue, tying together print and mobile. Meanwhile, thanks to the deal with credit card processor and payment gateway Braintree, Buck will be offered to the company’s thousands of merchants as another payment option.

Obviously, a solution like Buck’s is only truly helpful when multiple merchants adopt the same platform, so today’s news of at least a few more major brands getting on board is a promising step for the young company. Other Buck customers include Condé Nast, L’Oreal, Mocospace, Grindr, Thornton’s, Big Fish Games and more.

Launched in 2008, the startup raised $6.6 million in Series B funding last spring, led by DCM and SK Telecom Ventures. In October, it was also one of the companies selected for DCM’s A-Fund investment, which aimed to encourage Android entrepreneurs.

Bring On The Web Apps: StackMob Launches Hosted HTML5 Service

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:00 AM PST

You can’t call StackMob a “backend service provider for mobile” anymore, because as of now, it’s a full end-to-end solution. The cloud-based platform for mobile developers is today launching hosted HTML5 services that tie to StackMob’s backend, making it the first platform offering integrated HTML5.

Developers can use the new service to host full HTML5 apps for desktop, tablet or mobile, or can use it to host the HTML5 running within their native apps.

“We had to start with backend first because it takes much longer to build in the flexibility and scalability,” explains StackMob CEO Ty Amell, “but now that we have that system down, now we’re launching our hosted HTML5 solution.”

What this means is that developers can now upload and run their HTML5 from StackMob. The company is also offering GitHub integration to make doing so even easier. There’s a service hook for StackMob, so when developers push changes to their GitHub account, StackMob will pull those changes and put them onto Amazon’s S3. The company has also created a streaming API, where it will stream and cache those resources for its developers.

The benefit for developers is two-fold. First, they no longer have to worry about hosting their own HTML5, it’s just a part of the StackMob service. (And there’s no fee increase to use the feature). Secondly, with hosted HTML5, there’s the ability to tie in to other StackMob features, both current and forthcoming.

For example, thanks to the GitHub integration, StackMob can keep track of the history of the HTML5 deployments, and offer developers the ability to roll back changes. But in the long run, there are other benefits to hosted HTML5.

“There’s a lot we can do to increase the performance of HTML5,” says Amell. “We can push these out to CDNs, we can do a lot of internal caching, we can do adaptive serving where we look at what URLs are being served and we pre-fetch the next one,” he explains. “We can do things around developer tools where we add JS templates, making your app use HTML5 app cache out of the box. There are a lot of different technologies that we can add in the future that we can do because we host [HTML5].”

Also planned for the future is a build service, where developers can add native wrappers to their HTML5 apps (iOS, Android, BlackBerry Windows Phone). This will arrive by Q1, followed by advanced access controls, the use of CDNs, and auto minifying.

For StackMob, going the HTML5 route has always been on the roadmap. The company envisioned itself being an end-to-end service from the beginning, but now was the right time to make that shift, according to Amell. “We’re getting very close to where there’s a massive increase in network-connected devices,” he says. “It’s smartphones, tablets, cars, thermostats, cars, TV, even consoles – so when we think mobile that’s what we’re thinking.”

He’s also a big supporter of HTML5 as a platform. “Eventually, HTML5 is going to win because of this network-connected device world. You’re not going to have the ability to write for whatever proprietary language all these platform devices are going to be on,” he explains. ”Even your toaster is going to be network-connected and have to talk to the cloud.”

Wait? Even my toaster? Oh dear lord.

“I bet you it will happen. Less burned toast.”

LocalResponse Debuts Pro Version Of Social Advertising Platform For Marketers

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:00 AM PST

Local Response, a social advertising platform that allows local businesses to respond to the “check-in” with marketing campaigns, is launching a pro version of its analytics and action platform for marketers.

LocalResponse’s DirectResponse product aggregates real-time social media check-‐ins from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and dozens of other services to provide a simple interface for local businesses to directly respond to their most influential and valuable customers. What makes LocalResponse compelling is that it analyzes massive amounts of data in addition to check-ins from the Twitter firehose, photo sharing sites and more to find other forms of check-ins. These could be posting a picture on Instagram of a dish from a restaurant or Tweeting that you are visiting a particular bar.

LocalResponse’s proprietary technology collects and prioritizes social data both explicitly (i.e. check-ins on Foursquare) and implicitly (by analyzing natural language on Facebook, Twitter, etc.; e.g. "I'm headed to ShakeShack").

For example, in a recent campaign, Walgreens used Direct Response to respond to customers in-store to disseminate store promotions, such as flu shots and HALLS coupons. Average click-through-rates for LocalResponse's Direct Response product are greater than 50%, says the company.

Another LocalResponse product is Intent Retargeting allows marketers to deliver mobile display ads against various real-time intent data points. The product can serve ads to explicit check-ins, implicit check-ins, competitive check-ins, as well as relevant sentiment. For example, Intuit's TurboTax uses Intent Retargeting to serve TurboTax banner ads to people who have expressed challenges in doing their taxes on Twitter. Average clickthrough-rates for LocalResponse's Intent Retargeting are 1%.

The PRO Dashboard provides real-time analysis for brand's and brand's competitor's consumer foot traffic, intent, and sentiment. The PRO version basically allows marketers to access this in-depth data and then activate contextual and targeted advertising easily.

To date, LocalResponse has worked with a number of high-profile advertisers including Audi, Coca-Cola, Dell, Estee Lauder, FedEx, General Electric, General Mills, General Motors, H&M, Hersheys, Kmart, Lowes, McDonald's, NBC-Universal, Pepsi, Pizza Hut, Verizon, and Walgreens.

LocalResponse has raised $6.5 million Cava Capital, Vodafone Ventures, Progress Ventures, Verizon Ventures, Metamorphic Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, Jim Pallotta, Greycroft Partners, and others. The startup also recently acquired social TV check-in and advertising platform Philo.

SanDisk Acquires FlashSoft To Expand Enterprise Lineup

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:22 AM PST

Flash memory maker and storage system technologies provider SanDisk announced today that it has acquired FlashSoft, a company focused on caching software products. Going forward, SanDisk will sell FlashSoft’s products both as standalone software, as well as offer them in combination with its other products, including SAS, PCIe and SATA enterprise solutions.

The company says that it expects the acquisition to be neutral to its earnings in 2012 and accretive in 2013, but additional details were not provided.

FlashSoft is currently the maker of software for Flash Virtualization which lets customers increase application performance and virtualization capability while reducing hardware and operational costs. The software is available for Windows, Linux and VMWare platforms.

With SSD-based caching, the most frequently accessed data resides close to the CPU in high-performance memory – this is how it offers the touted performance improvements. For customers, the end result is smaller, more cost effective storage configurations, which, in turn, allows them to deploy more virtual machines per server.

Through the acquisition, SanDisk is moving towards becoming a complete solution provider for enterprise and cloud customers by offering SSD-optimized software, including those from third party providers.

MTV Takes The Beta Label Off Its Music Meter App For Finding New Artists

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 07:00 AM PST

MTV is unveiling an update to its Music Meter mobile app today. This is version 2.0, and also the first version to abandon the “beta testing” label, suggesting that MTV has worked out any early kinks — and is ready to make money.

The app first launched in March 2011 as the mobile equivalent of MTV’s Music Meter website. The goal is to track the online buzz for musicians, and to use that data to create a daily ranking that helps fans find new music. If you see an artist who interests you, the app offers songs, photos, and videos, as well as news and a brief biography. Senior Director of Product Development Mark Mezrich calls it an “artistic snacking” experience that should give you everything you need to get acquainted with a musician. Nor is that snacking limited to the daily list — Mezrich says there are more than 1 million artists in the system.

The app, which is available for iOS and Android has already been downloaded 1 million times. The new version includes integration with Songkick’s concert listings, as well as the ability to browse the app based on genre.

MTV is also introducing advertising to the app through an exclusive sponsorship from Wrigley’s 5 gum. When asked about what she expects from future Music Meter ads, Vice President of Digital Music Strategy Shannon Connolly says she’s “open to exploring different scenarios.”

“Obviously, it’s important that the apps be free,” she says. “Any payments within the apps should be supporting the artists — buying music and buying tickets.”

Apple Yanks The iPad Off Of Amazon’s Chinese Shelves, But Why?

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 06:44 AM PST

If for some reason you were to mosey on over to Amazon’s Chinese website and perform a search for the iPad, you know what you’d find? No iPad.

Now, you might think to yourself, “Wow, Proview pulled it off,” but that’s not the case at all. In fact, an Amazon spokesperson said that the Apple was the one who requested that the iPad be taken off the site. Proview hasn’t even requested an online sales ban.

Yep, this is tricky, so let’s parse through it together.

The trademark battle between Chinese tech company Proview and Apple has been heating up in recent months, with the Shenzen-based company asking for import and export bans of the iPad in China. Apple contends that it purchased the Chinese trademark rights to the iPad several years ago in ten different countries, but Proview and its lawyers have deemed that those trademark rights don’t extend into China.

“Proview refuses to honor their agreement with Apple in China and a Hong Kong court has sided with Apple in this matter,” said an Apple spokeswoman.

If Proview were to win, it could be a serious issue for Apple. China remains a huge manufacturing hub for Apple, and if Cupertino can’t get its iPads out of China it could deal a heavy blow to the company’s worldwide sales numbers. In fact, it could deal a significant blow to Apple’s Chinese sales numbers, which came in around $13 billion last year. On the other hand, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Proview Technology Chairman Yang Long-san told Reuters that “customs have told us that it will be difficult to implement a ban because many Chinese consumers love Apple products. The sheer size of the market is very big.”

According to Reuters, Apple lost to Proview in late 2011 after a court ruled that Proview had rights to the iPad trademark. True to Apple fashion, Cupertino appealed the decision and the next hearing, which will yield a final decision from the courts, is set to begin on February 29.

So that’s what’s going on between Apple and Proview, which brings us back to Amazon China.

M.I.C. Gadgets reports that Apple has made no comment regarding the removal of the iPad on Amazon’s website, and Proview’s lawyers admit they didn’t see it coming either. As I said, Proview never filed for the administrative ban of online sales in Beijing, where Amazon China is based.

Other retailers within various regions of China have been asked by officials to pull the tablet as the dispute heats up, but this is the first instance in which we’ve seen Apple yank its products off of virtual shelves.

But this is undoubtedly tied to the Proview case in some way. See, Apple has limited options when it comes to dealing with this mess. It could try its hand with this appeal, but the decision on February 29 will be as final as an answer on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” — there’s no turning back. The other option is to settle with Proview, but as it stands now that would be a rather large payout.

MicGadget speculates that this may be a part of Apple’s strategy. If Apple can demonstrate that its iPad branding is only valuable because its tied to the Apple iPad, the company might be able to bring down a proposed settlement figure. Or Apple’s twenty steps ahead of all of us and we have absolutely no idea how this one move fits into the grand scheme of things.

BabyNotify: You Know, For Notifying People When Your Baby Comes

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 06:29 AM PST

Has this happened to you? You’re trapped on a pirate ship with your pregnant wife and Bluebeard the Pirate wants you to walk the plank but after your wife has given birth to the baby boy that he will adopt as his pirate son and train in pirate ways. You want to tell your family – and an army of ninja warriors – about your new arrival so they can congratulate/save you but you’re only able to move one finger every hour because of some strange poison Bluebeard gave you. So you need a one-button way to notify the world of your child’s arrival (and maybe get saved and give old Bluebeard a taste of cold steel) as well as a method to let the in-laws know they can buy you the Quinny Buzz now.

BabyNotify has your freaking back.

That’s right: BabyNotify a website that lets you notify people with on click that you’ve given birth. To be fair, if you’re giving birth you probably won’t want to press that button during the cord cutting but if you’re a modern, plugged in dad you’re probably totally fine with turning away from your plump new baby boy or girl and your angelic wife and calling up a website. Note: if you’re Lt. Garp and all you can say is Arp and then Arrrr, this probably isn’t for you. You’d need to be able to move and own an iPhone or Android device.

Andy Schwarz-Gulley and his wife founded the site after discovering there was no easy way to tell all their friends that they reproduced. Necessity, they say, is the mother of websites dedicated to granulated activities.

Generally web services solve one simple problem: I need to put my bank statements in one place, I need to send a short message to my friends, I need to kill a pirate, I need to let people know about something. At these last two, BabyNotify excels. It’s a simple idea and I can’t imagine it took longer than a few hours to code up and get out the door. They have iOS and Android apps for folks who can’t be bothered to log into a website and it supports Twitter, Facebook, text message, and email updates. You simply enter the pertinent data, a list of recipients, and you’re good to go.

But why leave it at babies? Why not make a system for all medical conditions (post-flu announcements, post-gout emails) or life events (first spray tan, maybe?). Monetizing those would be simple, as is monetizing this site.

Anyway, it’s clear that BabyNotify is a niche product – how many people are born each day? Like three? – but it’s a fun idea and I love me some babies. I may set it up for when our little one arrives in a few weeks but I’ll probably swap the weight and the length and tell everyone the baby is 48 pounds and 7 inches long.

Groupon: Offering Deals With No Time Limits?

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 06:17 AM PST

When Groupon was gearing up for its IPO last year, there was a lot of talk about whether the company would be able to sustain its business on a diet that mainly consisted of daily deals. Today, a little sign of what Groupon might be cooking up for its next course.

Over in Germany, Groupon has launched a new site, Groupon Deals, an Amazon-like storefront that sells a range of goods, from boots to bodysuits.

Like Groupon’s mainstay-daily deals, the products are being sold at big discounts, of up to 70 percent on some items. Unlike the daily deals, these products do not have timeouts on buying them.

According to the site, Groupon Deals offers consumers a "complete shopping experience," although at the moment, the selection of goods on offer is pretty small. That points to this being a local experiment more than anything else for now.

But even so, it is already starting to market the service in some form: A reader tells us that offers from Groupon Deals started appearing in his Facebook feed earlier today.

It is unclear at this point whether this is something that Groupon is planning on offering only in Germany, or whether it intends to roll out similar storefronts in other regions, which currently serve 33 million active users.

We have contacted Groupon to ask questions and will update this post as we learn more.

Extending out its services to a more conventional model of selling goods online is not exactly disruptive and cutting-edge, but it is probably also a natural move for Groupon: the company already has extensive relationships with retailers and brands for its time-based daily deals, which cover not only events and services, but a range of physical products, too. Each product on the site comes with a list of “supplier details”: that might mean Groupon has a platform for third parties to upload products for sale.

It also puts Groupon even more directly in competition with the likes of more established players like Amazon and eBay, to mention nothing of more local online retailing operations.

International is a division where Groupon is focusing hard, but at a price. In the company’s Q4 earnings reported last week, Groupon reported a loss of $350 million, with $137 million of that attributable to international expansion costs.

Groupon's European operation was kick-started back in May 2010, when it bought Germany-based competitor Citydeal for an undisclosed sum. At that time Citydeal was already active in several European markets.

Vox, Meet Big Box: Kobo eReader To Hit Best Buy Stores

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 06:16 AM PST

You’d be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Kobo’s Android-powered Vox eReader before — it has a tendency to get glossed over in favor of bigger names like the Kindle or the Nook. Kobo’s hoping to remedy that with another retail push, and this time they’ve inked a deal to get those Vox readers into Best Buy stores across the country.

The Vox is probably best known for its Pulse social reading service, which comes off as something like a virtual book club. It allows users to interact with each other while reading through the month’s bestsellers, with a bright visual indicator to let readers know how active a particular page is.

Being Android-based, users are also able to pore through and download apps, but forget about unfettered access to the Android Market — Vox readers can choose from a curated selection of about 15,000 apps.

I’m sure Kobo is glad to have nabbed another big physical retail deal, but I wonder how much good it’ll do them in the long-run. Best Buy counts the Kindle and Nook families among their wares, and the Vox is likely to be a tough sell against known quantities like the immensely-popular Kindle Fire. I’d definitely give the Vox the style advantage with its four arguably handsome color variants, but a pretty paint job does not a bestseller make.

Still, the Vox has enough going for it that it’s worth at least a second glance from consumers, and that’s probably exactly what Kobo wanted out of this deal.

Bleacher Report Announces YouTube Lineup

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 06:07 AM PST

Popular sports startup Bleacher Report was announced as of YouTube’s new content partners late last year. Now it’s actually ready to debut its new channel and announce the initial slate of shows.

Bleacher Report allows regular sports fans to offer commentary on teams and games, an approach that leads to much more content than a traditional sports site — the company says it has 1,000 featured columnists and 6,000 contributors total. In some ways, it seems like a good match for YouTube, since it’s taking a similar approach to sports writing as the one YouTube took to video.

Which isn’t to say that these are going to be purely crowdsourced shows. Instead, Bleacher Report’s shows will mostly be hosted by established names from the sports and entertainment world. Here’s the lineup:

B/R5 — A rundown of the five biggest sports stories of the day, hosted by Desi Sanchez (of E! News Now and MTV). Broadcasts every Monday to Friday, starting today.
NFL Draft 365 — A weekly discussion of the NFL draft, hosted by Alex Panos (HGTV's Run My Money and SNY's Beer Money), with a different current or former NFL player as guest analyst in each episode. Starts later this week.
Why We Watch — A weekly show featuring short-form sports documentaries, supposedly highlighting a small story with big significance, or offering a new take on more well-known news. Starts later this week.
Full Ride — A weekly look at college football recruiting, starting in March.

Sell Simp.ly Rebrands As Chirpify; Launches New Twitter Commerce Platform For Brands

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 05:49 AM PST

We first covered Sell Simp.ly in November last year, as it looked to capitalize on the increasing interest in social media as not only a place to advertise and build an online presence for brands, but as a platform for conducting social commerce. Most of that interest has surrounded Facebook, as a host of solutions and services have emerged that allow big brands and startups alike to create retail storefronts on Facebook, sell to customers, and to a certain extent, manage their transactions.

With an enormous reach in its own right, one might expect that Twitter would look to leverage its platform (which has also become popular among celebrities and brands looking to hawk their wares) to throw its weight around in the emerging social eCommerce marketplace. As of now, Twitter has shown no interest in building this into its repetoire, with CEO Dick Costolo saying that the company is making enough money on advertising, thank you very much.

That’s why one-man-show Chris Teso launched Sell Simply — as a simple way to take advantage of this big market opportunity — and enable consumers to buy, sell, donate, and transact right on Twitter. The goal was to turn Sell Simply into a digital marketplace, making it possible for any Twitter user to buy and sell their products or items, just by replying “buy” to any tweet listing.

While the idea has a lot of potential, Teso was operating as a solo founder, and to really make it work, he says, he knew that he needed help. The Founder turned to a new Portland-based accelerator called Upstart Labs, which offered him $50K in seed funding and access to a team of designers and developers that would assist in scaling the business.

A by-product of joining UpStart Labs has been that the startup will no longer be known as Sell Simp.ly, as the team changed the name to Chirpify, in turn offering a new logo, a rebranded site, and a whole lot more functionality (along with some changes) to the original model.

After launching last year, Teso says, he came to the realization that if he wanted to roll out the Twitter commerce service to millions of users, the platform itself would have to be inherently scalable. In its prior incarnation, Sell Simply just didn’t quite have the foundation and infrastructure to do that, but with help from his new Portland friends, things are looking up.

Under the prior model, to kick off the transactional process on a tweet, users essentially had to “reply all” on that tweet with the word “buy” included. Teso said that, simply put, users found this proces confusing, and they didn’t really understand the concept of the reply all. And to that point, Teso said that many users saw Sell Simply as a competitor to Etsy or craigslist, or, in other words, just a virtual storefront for Etsy merchants to sell their wares on Twitter. Many weren’t quite understanding that the platform was meant simply to be a way to facilitate direct transactions and purchasing on Twitter.

With some road behind it, Chirpify is now launching its direct and P2P payments and donations (and retail sales) service with additional functionality for brands. Going forward, Chirpify users will be able to use Twitter as a direct sales channel, as the platform offers businesses an easy way to turn Tweets into transactions, opening up a new channel that combines social marketing with commerce.

But, how does it work, you ask? Chirpify taps directly into PayPal to facilitate secure transactions on Twitter, allowing users to make purchases or donate just by replying to a tweet, a thus: “@BarackObama Donate.” Another cool bonus is that Chirpify is trying to build some deep integration into existing eCommerce solutions, like Magento “for back-end fulfillment, listing, and transaction management,” Teso says.

When Chirpify merchants want to sell something, they just click the “List on Twitter” button when drafting a listing in their new eCommerce dashboards. Then, inbound sales info appears as an email or “as part of the retailer’s back-end system, or via a direct message on Twitter.”

How it works: Chirpify integrates directly with PayPal to offer secure transactions on Twitter. Purchases and donations are as simple as replying to a Tweet: “@favoritebrand Buy,” or “@politician Donate,” for example.

Additionally, Chirpify offers deep integration with existing e-commerce storefronts, including Magento, for back-end fulfillment, listing and transaction management. To use Chirpify, merchants simply click the “list on Twitter” button when drafting an item listing for sale in their e-commerce dashboard. Inbound sales information appears as either an email or as part of the retailer’s back-end system, as well as via a DM on Twitter.

It may be a bit confusing at first, but in the end, the concept is deceptively simple. Chirpify works everywhere Twitter does, which means that its device agnostic.

When I asked the Founder about where Chirpify will be going next, he told me that social commerce adoption has been slow, especially on Facebook. But what really surprises him is that things like flash sales haven’t yet been applied to social commerce and Facebook. So, next the founder says he wants to offer flash sales, time-limited sales, and give brands the option to serve all manner of deals to their customers.

Although he wouldn’t cite specifics, the Chirpify Founder did say he’s in talks with some big brands (potential partners), and more news will be forthcoming. So stay tuned.

For more, check out Chirpify at home here.

Apps Uploading Address Books Is A Privacy Side-Show Compared To DPI

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 05:33 AM PST

While the hand-wringing over the future of journalism, blogging, the nature of conflicts of interest, yada yada, has been deeply interesting (alongside the personal attacks – we all like a good public fight don’t we?), it’s worth recalling that the furore was kicked off by a fairly pertinent point. To whit: Path was uploading user’s address books without their explicit permission.

Yes it was a rare omission by Nick Bilton to not call out the 50 or so other apps that often do this by default. But his essential point remains correct, and it’s kicked off a wave of excellent reporting into which apps behave like this, and why Apple has allowed this to go on for so long.

But while we continue to point the finger at startups with smartphone apps designed to be social, I’d like to remind Silicon Valley about another business which, despite claims to the contrary, is deeply interested in our private affairs, and is unlikely ever to be as contrite as Dave Morin was just recently.

I speak of the sector known as Deep Packet Inspection.

Video Plays On Tablets, Mobile Devices And Connected TVs Nearly Doubled in Q4

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 05:24 AM PST

From Redbox and Verizon teaming up to take on Netflix to Connected TV and Netflix's premier of Lillyhammer, offering consumers video content where and when they want it is no longer just a second thought. Serving content across platforms has become essential for publishers and brands that want to grow their audiences and earn more revenue with online video.

Ooyala, the online video provider, today released its fourth quarter review of web video, in which it analyzes the viewing behavior of 100 million monthly unique users. (You can find the full report here.)

As we learned in Q3, the rabid adoption of mobile devices has been leading to increased engagement with online video. Not only that, but connected TVs are really beginning to make waves, Google TV in particular. Ooyala’s report found that video plays on tablets, mobile devices, and connected TVs nearly doubled in the fourth quarter (from Q3).

What’s more, viewers are now twice as likely to compete a video when watching on a tablet or connected TV, as compared to watching video on a desktop. And, unsurprisingly, when viewers plop down on their couch in front of their connected TV, they’re watching four times as many long videos compared to short videos, as videos longer than 10 minutes now account for more than half the hours played on connected TVs.

While the average conversion rate across all devices increased from 35.1 percent in Q3 to 39.6 percent in Q4 (with viewers watching longer on all platforms), it seems that connected TVs saw the biggest growth in Q4, as their viewers proved to be the most engaged of all the platforms, completing videos at a rate of 47 percent (with tablet viewers following close behind at 38 percent.)

What’s more, users of connected TV devices and gaming consoles were 70 percent more likely to watch three-quarters of a video. And, in terms of name brands in connected TVs, Google TV’s share of video plays increased by 91 percent this quarter.

Tablet viewers were the most engaged in Q3, and they certainly remained an attentive audience in Q4, proving to be 45 percent more likely to complete three-quarters of a video than those watching on a desktop. Not only that, but tablet viewers watched 21.9 percent longer per video in Q4 than the prior quarter.

Another interesting tidbit from Ooyala: Though this may not be particularly surprising, Facebook remains a much more active source of online video sharing than Twitter: For every video shared via Twitter in Q4, more than 10 were shared on Facebook.

Image credit: OnlineVideoMarketingTips.com

News: Mongoose Men=?UTF-8?B?4oCZ?=s Otero Comp Bicycle-Red

2012-02-15T09:42:00.001-08:00

Heat treated 6000 series aluminum frame
Suntour SXCM 100MM travel front shock & Kind Shox KS290 rear shock
FSA A-Drive tripple crankset
SRAM X-4 rear derailleur and SRAM X-4 shift levers
Alex PC19 double wall rims, stainless spokes and Kenda Komoto tires

The 26″ Mongoose Otero Comp is light years ahead of the competition. This bike is equipped with an all aluminum full suspension frame and aluminum rear linkage, Suntour XCM long travel front suspension fork, SRAM X-4 rear derailleur and SRAM X-4 shifters for quick and responsive shifting. Promax dual disk brakes with alloy brake levers. The wheels are set up with Alex PC19 double wall alloy rims,stainless steel spokes and mounted with Kenda Komoto black skinwall tires, Richey logic Zero aheadset and WTB Speed V sport saddle complete this bike.

Mongoose Men’s Otero Comp Bicycle-Red

9 new stories on The Next Web today

2012-02-15T04:05:00.001-08:00

9 new stories on The Next Web today

Thailand and China strike a deal to give tablet computers to Thai schoolchildren
Despite the iPhone’s monumental Q4, Android still powered 50% of all smartphones sold
Men are from Foursquare and women are from Facebook, apparently…
Two worlds collide: Twitter, the butterfly effect and the future of Journalism
Tunisian Facebook activists look to overthrow…marijuana laws
North Korea’s reported mobile phone ban is false, says the country’s only operator
Kicking it whilst it’s down, Apple seeks court approval to sue bankrupt Kodak
Save the Children harnesses the power of Twitter for its first ever 12-hour conference
Google Wallet users can buy prepaid cards again as one security issue is fixed
Now China’s trademark ruling sees online retailers stop selling the Apple iPad

Thailand and China strike a deal to give tablet computers to Thai schoolchildren

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 02:59 AM PST

The government of Thailand has agreed to a deal with China that will see it import 860,000 tablet computers for its one-tablet-per-child scheme, a project to provide a device to all first grade students in the country.

Although a government-to-government memorandum has been signed, Thai authorities are yet to conclude a price or purchasing agreement for the devices. A report from FutureGov claims that they are assessing three manufacturers — Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo — for the order, however Thailand’s ICT Minister Anudith Nakornthap says the supplier list is yet to be finalised.

Any deal on price will be coordinated by China’s government but that hasn’t stopped Huawei from publicly questioning the $60 per unit price that Thailand is offering, according to the Bangkok Post. That price is half of the retail cost of the company’s device and Michael MacDonald, CTO of the firm’s Thai operations, told media that it would need to be increased in order to strike a deal.

Despite driving a hard bargain, Minister Nakornthap foresees that an agreement will be reached by the end of the month, which falls in line with Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra wish to see the devices in schools by March.

While it has signed an agreement for an order already, the Thai government will need to raise additional funds as its $63.3 million (1.9 billion THB) budget will only cover 560,000 tablets, that’s more than 200,000 units short of the full order.

In conjunction with the initiative, Thai authorities are also planning to introduce WiFi connectivity at all schools across the country, while it may also extend the plans to provide tablet devices to other age groups in junior schools.

Last November we reported that the government had commenced a trial of the laptop scheme, which had been a key proposal from the successfully elected Pheu Thai party. The plan has faced criticism from some academics who believe that the money could be better invested in other areas.

The one-tablet-per-child policy could see governments in neighbouring countries adopt a similar approach and its supporters believe that it will help demonstrate the potential that technology has to assist learning.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Despite the iPhone’s monumental Q4, Android still powered 50% of all smartphones sold

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 02:35 AM PST

Despite selling more than 35 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, sales of Android handsets more than doubled those of the iPhone, as the Android platform grew to hold 50% of the smartphone market, a new report from Gartner reveals.

Apple and Samsung were the biggest contributors to the smartphone market in that period, as worldwide sales topped 149 million units, up 47.3% from the previous year. Put into perspective, fourth-quarter sales accounted for 31% of all smartphone purchases in 2011, as they reached 472 million units over the year (up 58% year-on-year).

Recording 35.45 million iPhone sales in Q4, Apple not only became the third-largest mobile phone vendor (with a 7.4% share) in the world at the expense of LG, it cemented its place as the world’s top smartphone maker during that time, securing 23.8% of device sales.

Samsung smartphone sales trailed Apple by less than 2 million units (totalling 34 million), helped by impressive sales of its Galaxy S II handset, which is reported to have accounted for more than half of the company’s smartphone sales in the fourth quarter. The Korean company’s growth was at the expense of LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and RIM, which posted lower-than-expected results and financials in the quarter.

However, growth in the midrange and low-end smartphone market saw ZTE and Huawei gain market share, as consumers looked to powerful but affordable Android devices as they transitioned from featurephones to more capable Internet-connected handsets.

Given the split between Android device vendors, the platform continued its immense growth, as sales rose by 45 million units year on year to hold a 50.9% share of the smartphone market, up from 30%.

For Nokia, it was another period of decreasing mobile sales, as it slid by 8.7% from 2010. However, with the release of the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, the company delivered its first Windows Phone smartphones. The handsets performed adequately during the Finnish vendor’s fourth quarter but are positioned to capitalise on Android device demand with aggressive pricing and marketing.

Gartner is clear to state that Apple’s impressive fourth-quarter share is likely to decline over the next two quarters, as “the upgrade cycle to the iPhone 4S slows.” Apple bucked tradition in 2011 by releasing its next-generation iPhone in October, having traditionally scheduled releases in the Summer in previous years.

Apple will likely return to its familiar June launch-cycle in 2012 but this year it is likely to be joined by Samsung, which has decided to skip its usual Mobile World Congress reveal and launch its new flagship Android device at a dedicated event, scheduled to be held in the first half of this year.

Android smartphone vendor HTC also targets a return to form in the first and second quarters of 2012, focusing on ‘hero’ devices that may include a new range of quad-core superphones.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Men are from Foursquare and women are from Facebook, apparently…

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 02:16 AM PST

“The battle of the sexes has raged for centuries, and today men and women use social media in very different ways based on the same underlying human characteristics.”

Men are from Foursquare, women are from Facebook. An alluring headline, and one that certainly grabbed our attention during Social Media Week. Could it really be true – guys are more in tune with the Foursquare way of doing things, whilst gals gravitate towards Facebook?

Helen Nowicka, UK head of digital/EMEA social media strategist at Porter Novelli, was on hand to guide us through the thinking behind the tongue-in-cheek title. “It is about something very important, and that’s relationships,” said Nowicka. “The relationships between men, women and social media, and the relationships we have between friends in social media. Men and women are both very active on social networks, but what we’ve found five trends that really show different online behaviours reflecting their offline preferences”

Of course, this make sense, right? The intrinsic difference between men and women should naturally be reflected in their social networking habits on the Internet. And it’s these habits that Nowicka says can help businesses fine-tune the way they target consumers online, “…understanding these can help shape digital strategies and delivery,” she says.

The Porter Novelli study looked at around 10,000 consumers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands, and found some interesting insights.

If I was to write an executive summary, it would run roughly as such: Men prefer to share status and promote their opinions, whereas women use social to build on existing connections, whilst interacting with friends and family.

Here’s the key findings…

1. Women are more socially active than men

Women are more socially active than men, with 65% of women accessing social media at least once a week, compared with just 51% of men. This trend holds true across Europe.

2. Women are more likely to connect with the people that they know

Women strengthen existing friendships through social networks. Women are more likely to connect with people they know, with 93% using social media to read posts and view pictures from friends, or to comment on their friends' profiles. For men the numbers dropped to 89% and 84% respectively.

3. UK women are most likely to ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ brands for deals

UK women lead Europe in terms of following brands to access deals and offers, with around 64% of women motivated by discounts in social media, compared to a European average of just 52%. UK men, on the other hand, ranked at 56%.

4. Men are more likely to display status or opinions in social media

If you were wondering where the Foursquare/Facebook angle was coming, this is it. The study found that men are more likely to say where they are, with 45% of UK men using social media to check-in to places compared with only a third of women. This was consistent across the European markets studied.

Men also tend to broadcast status and opinion to the world. “Maybe women are more cautious about saying where they are and what they’re doing,” pondered Nowicka. “It could also be because men enjoy the status that comes with saying where they are.”

According to Forrester research, women prefer to participate in communities, share information, and engage in conversation, whereas communication among men online is more linear and competitive. “Men are more likely than women to be collectors, creators, and critics,” says the Forrester research. “They watch videos, create content, and are more dominant in posting opinions in online forums. For example, only 15% of Wikipedia content is female-generated."

The Wall Street Journal studied a week of Foursquare check-ins, and found that from 100 categories women were most likely to check-in to cosmetic shops, doctors’ offices, educational venues and shops. Men? Well, apparently gay bars and tech-startups had the highest proportion of men, whilst travel and airports also featured highly.

In contrast to the European figures, the week’s global data showed that 60% of check-ins were male, 38% were female and, well, it’s anyone’s guess where the other 2% lies.

comScore data has previously shown that women connect more and for longer. Globally, women spend longer on social networking sites, 16%, compared with 11% for men. Also, on average, women have 8% more Facebook friends than men.

5. Men are more active in the blogosphere

We’ve previously reported on how more females read The Next Web than the average tech blog, but it seems men are far more active in the blogosphere over all. 54% of digitally-active men say they seek out other people's blogs to read, compared with 46% of women.

The Next Web is out and about at Social Media Week in both London and New York this week, and you can monitor all our coverage here.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Two worlds collide: Twitter, the butterfly effect and the future of Journalism

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 02:05 AM PST

“Whether it's the exposing of super injunctions, Middle Eastern revolutions or the Occupy movement, social media is having an ever more significant impact on our society and people's desire for change,” was how the opening gambit went for this event at London’s Social Media Week. “We explore how Twitter is changing the news industry, how journalists use social media to connect to the story and how collaborative reporting is leading to activism and change.”

Packed into a first floor room at the Innovation Warehouse in London’s Farringdon area, more than a hundred people gathered to debate the effect Twitter is having on the noble art of journalism. “The media is not the message, the messages are the media,” commented David Carr in the New York Times a few years back. And it was against this backdrop that the debate kicked in to action.

The assembled panel consisted of Andrew Walker, founder of Tweetminster; Paul Lewis, Special Projects Editor at the Guardian; Anna Doble, Senior Online Producer at Channel4 News; Steve Butterworth, founder of Flumes Media Limited; and Titia Ketelaar, UK correspondent at NRC Handelsblad.

Are we overstating the impact of social media?

“Social media has transformed journalism quite significantly in some ways, but I’ll begin by arguing against myself,” says Lewis. “I think there are some ways in which we massively overstate the impact of social media – and Twitter in particular.

“If I think of the big three investigations in the UK over the last few years, phone-hacking, MPs’ expenses and WikiLeaks,” continues Lewis, “none of these were generated through social media. Those last two DID have a significant digital element – they were stories of the digital age – but they weren’t social media generated stories.”

It’s probably worth bringing in the London riots at this point, with both Twitter and Facebook implicated for their role in events. Indeed, there was some discussion from politicians at the time about whether it would be right to close them down in times of crisis, even though they weren’t really used to organize any pillaging as such – the rioters preferred the closed-network BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).

So, could it be that we are overstating the impact that social media is having on society and, more specifically, the journalism fraternity?

Certainly, I’d agree that the real scoops are still garnered from good old-fashioned investigative journalism, with social media used as a tool – among others – to get results. There is growing skepticism around news that breaks through Twitter and other social channels, and whilst there’s little that can be done to curb the flow of falsities, a lot can be done to validate said ‘facts’, which is where journalists come in to play.

Tell the truth now – where did you head when you first read about Whitney Houston’s tragic death on Twitter last weekend?

omgg , my aunt tiffany who work for whitney houston just found whitney houston dead in the tub . such ashame & sad :-(

— Aja Dior M. (@AjaDiorNavy) February 12, 2012

Did you seek other mentions on Twitter or head to the BBC, New York Times or other reputable news sources?

Twitter is just a tool

Nearly everyone had their doubts about the Whitney Houston tweets until the first news of it trickled out from more official channels, and this helps to illustrate that whilst social media may be changing the way that journalists operate, it’s far from the be-all-and-end-all. It’s just a tool of the trade, and it isn’t necessarily the enemy of journalism. As we wrote last year:

“Professional journalists still have serious clout over the tweeting mob. They are trained, they know how to properly fact-check and validate whatever information comes their way. It's a precise profession that relies on persistence and objectivity to separate fact from fiction, whilst constructing all the salient details into narrative form for the public to consume. Whilst there are countless cases of journos failing on this front, they are at least accountable for what they write. Unlike that lot over in social…

…behind a wall of anonymity, citizen journalism can never guarantee any degree of reliability. Twitter can spread misinformation across all 7 continents before a real journalist even gets a whiff of a story, thus the information becomes legitimised through social media and nobody is really accountable for anything false that's written. It's basically gossip with the volume turned up.”

Furthermore, even if a tweet is ‘fact’, it often lacks context and any kind of meaningful background information. “A lot of stuff gets retweeted as a news ‘fact’,” says Ketelaar. “When Whitney Houston died this weekend, there came a point when you know that, but you want to know the rest – the whys, whens, wheres and so on. I don’t think Twitter is the platform for that.”

Butterworth agreed that Twitter wasn’t a great channel for breaking the Whitney Houston news, and reckons that with the rise in so-called citizen journalists, the need for professional journalists is greater than ever. “I think social media works much better when it’s just a form for pushing across just some very raw reporting,” he says. “Because there are now more people around the world publishing news and information, through taking photos and videos with their mobile phones, the need for journalists is more important than ever to validate this information.”

This is a key point – journalists as fact-checkers – and one that reared its head throughout the discussion. “It used to be the news sources that reported the events AND explained them to us at the same time,” adds Walker. “The journalistic part is really the explanation and back-story. What we’re seeing with the availability of the tools to broadcast and record news, they’re (citizens) now owning the part that the news distribution channels used to have.

“But the explanation of those events is still fundamentally where the journalists come in,” he continues. “It makes journalism a lot more important. In fact, there are more journalists today, working and explaining the world to us than there has been at any other time. Journalism has never been stronger. The recording of the news is where the new technologies come into play, but we conflate these two concepts and think that they’re both reporting. But that’s not the case.”

Broadcasting the banal

So many people now feel the need to broadcast every facet of their life on Twitter, a habit journalists aren’t impervious to either.

“I think that if I look at how twitter has behaved in the sphere of Westminster journalism over the last few months, it can often be very superficial,” says Lewis. “So often, journalists will use it, essentially, as a promotional tool to tell people what they're doing. Both in terms of work and boring stuff too, such as what they're eating. I'm seeing that more and more, and I don't think it's particularly innovative, or particularly useful for those consuming it.

“Dianne Abbot, Ed Miliband – these are mini controversies that the Twittersphere claims as its own,” continues Lewis. “They believe them to be great journalistic scoops, but they’re not. Ed Miliband mis-types something in a tweet, everyone kicks up a storm, then a journalist writes a story about it. But that’s not profoundly Earth-shattering journalism. It’s the opposite.”

Of course, he is an advocate of social media in general, he was just striving to retain a degree of perspective. Social media is often over-hyped and it’s important to look at how social media really does play a role within journalism.

“The pattern of travel of information has changed since Twitter arrived,” says Lewis. “But I don’t think it should be used all of the time in every single story. If you have a crowd that you feed stuff they’re not interested in, they’ll soon turn off. I tend not to involve my followers unless there’s a reason for it and I think they value it.

So how has social media changed journalism for the better? Lewis pinpointed four main areas:

Finding people – essentially crowdsourcing the pubic for information on the whereabouts of witnesses or other key figures in a story;
People who self-publish – activists (holding regimes to account), bloggers or anyone in need of a voice who would otherwise not be given a voice;
Big events – the London riots was an excellent example of how journalists could harness the power of Twitter to follow leads and chase down stories. The ensuing chaos was too big and too fast-moving for journalists to manage on their own;
The butterfly effect – a small action creating a ripple effect. It has to be a tweet containing very valuable information, which can be hard with 140 characters. One example would be the tweet that broke the Ryan Giggs super-injunction.

While Twitter has fundamentally transformed parts of journalism, its role shouldn’t be overstated…yet. Twitter is still only used by a relatively small number of people – 100m active users at the last count, out of a global population of 7bn.

We’ve previously written that about Twitter’s goal to reach all 7bn people on Earth, and if it can reach even one fifth of that, we have an astronomically powerful journalistic tool on our hands.

“Twitter is a digital footprint of things that are happening around the world,” says Lewis. “If Twitter becomes as ubiquitous as the mobile phone – there’s 4bn mobile phone users in the world – that’s huge. As a journalist who wants to find out things people don’t want you to know, that’s very exciting.”

Hitting the streets

One of the real dangers of the digital age – and this extends beyond Twitter and into all forms of computer-based interaction – is that it can be easy to slip into a comfy life behind a desk. Why should you head out and film events yourself and speak to people, if you’ve got a thousand citizens already pointing their iPhones at a scene and uploading it to YouTube?

A whole lot of information is missed by not being out there and speaking to people. “You have to be there,” says Lewis. “You probably get about 10% of a story if you’re not there. It’s very difficult to convey how much more valuable it is to be out there on the ground, but any professional journalist will tell you how important it really is.”

Ketelaar agrees, citing a recent example when she hit the streets of Scotland to report back to her publication in the Netherlands on what the feeling really was on the subject of independence north of the border. “As a traditional reporter, I still go out on to the streets,” she says.

“I spent three days in Inverness and Invergordon to report on Scottish nationalism, and the answers people gave me there turned out to be completely different to the ones I read on Twitter. You always need to get out there and talk to people. It turns out that the (Scottish) nationalists are very good on Twitter and they get retweeted a lot, but they don’t represent the general Scottish opinion.”

This feeds into the earlier discussion point about overstating the significance of Twitter. So many people don’t really know what it is, let alone use it. Apart from my fellow journalist and technology-fiend friends, very few people I know have a Twitter account – and these are all educated people. So does Twitter skew consensus? Is it really a fair representation of the mood of a nation? It might give journalists a rough idea, but as we’ve heard already, it’s imperative to get out there and speak to people on the ground.

Anna Doble also gave some good insights from within the newsroom at Channel 4. “Maybe setting the agenda falls to various heads or editors at Channel 4, but within a story – social media absolutely shapes how we go about it,” she says.

“I remember with the Norway shootings, we physically didn’t have that many reporters to get out there, so there was a discussion in our news room to have two people go out there and two stay behind to monitor social media and get contacts. It was better mixing it, having two sweeping through social media, and two out there on the ground.”

Indeed, it may seem like a trivial point, but a lot of time is wasted getting to places – waiting at airports, getting transfers and so on, so it does make sense to have people covering all bases.

It’s clear that looking at professional journalists, and tweeters/bloggers/citizen journalists, as standalone entities isn’t helpful. Collaboration is the name of the game – journalists use citizen journalists and vice versa. Likewise, having folk out on the ground speaking to people, otherwise known as journalism, is priceless. But feeding into this, is the well-oiled social machine that lets real-time information flow so freely. Modern day journalism isn’t about ‘traditional vs. new’, it’s about traditional AND new.

“I probably thought a year ago, from a technology and social media point of view, that journalism’s dead…we’ve got the social Web now, right?,” says Butterworth. “But one thing I’ve learned over the past year is the value of journalism, and I think it’s very different to the kind of information we get on social media.”

You can monitor all our coverage from Social Media Week here.

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Tunisian Facebook activists look to overthrow…marijuana laws

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 01:35 AM PST

Whenever you think of social media and the Middle East – the first thing that comes to mind is revolutions, right? Admit it. When talking about the Middle East, we’ve consistently had terms like Facebook revolutions and Twitter activists pushed in our faces for over a year, starting with Tunisia, last January.

Right now, there’s a social media campaign brewing in the birthplace of the protests, which has nothing to do with overthrowing aging dictators. Instead, it has its sights set on a getting rid of what is seen as an archaic and unconstitutional law.

Global Voices points to a Tunisian campaign, using social media, to legalize marijuana, and a Facebook page has been created to raise awareness about the laws surrounding marijuana in Tunisia. Not only is Marijuana use illegal in Tunisia, but citizens can be subjected to random and arbitrary drug tests at the request of a police officer at any time. If caught, the punishment includes a one-year jail sentence and a $750 fine.

The Facebook page lists the group’s demands, and points to reasons why they feel legalization is the safest route to go, citing Portugal as an example, where drug use has decreased drastically since the decriminalization of all drugs.

Through the Facebook campaign, Tunisian activists are calling for an end to the law, while continuing to ban the use of marijuana in public places.

Through a Facebook event with almost 5,000 confirmed attendees, the campaign is also going offline in its attempt to have marijuana legalized in the North African country. The event is inviting Tunisian Facebook users to a protest in front of the Parliament headquarters this Saturday, calling for an end to the law banning marijuana.

So while social media has certainly done its part to highlight the perils of the Middle East, and a glaringly obvious lack of freedom of speech in some countries, Tunisia is at the forefront of showing an entirely different side of the region. With this campaign, Tunisian activists are taking two Middle Eastern stereotypes we’ve seen far too much of in the past year, and are turning them into something refreshingly new.

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North Korea’s reported mobile phone ban is false, says the country’s only operator

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 01:09 AM PST

Last month, the world was shocked as reports claimed that authorities in communist North Korea had banned the use of mobile telephones during the mourning period following the death of Kim Jong-il. However, it has emerged that the story is untrue and no ban is in place there.

According to a report from the North Korea tech blog, the country’s only telecom operator — Orascom — has confirmed that the reports are false and North Korean citizens remain allowed to use mobile devices.

The operator, which has just celebrated reaching one million customers, confirmed that “the information about North Korea is not true”. The validity of the reports had indeed been speculated on the SinoNK blog as recently as last week.

The story is plausible, given that a ban was introduced in 2004, but both blogs point out that it there are questions to be asked. Orascom is growing strongly in the country and its CEO made a significant visit to the country this month, which would be strange were his firm unable to do business there. While equally, a more effective measure would be to shut down the network rather than ask people to refrain from using phones.

The original report in the Daily Telegraph cited a source from research institute Good Friends which claimed the ruling Workers’ Party had issued the warning.

We’ve reached out to Good Friends for clarification, we’ll update the article with any comment that the organisation makes.

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Kicking it whilst it’s down, Apple seeks court approval to sue bankrupt Kodak

Posted: 15 Feb 2012 12:30 AM PST

Kodak, one of the pioneers of modern photography, could soon be on the receiving end of another potential cash-consuming lawsuit, if Apple receives approval to sue the company in a New York court over alleged patent infringement.

Having already filed for bankruptcy in January and announcing last week that it would kill off its camera business to focus on its core products, Kodak now awaits a decision from a bankruptcy judge who may give Apple permission to file a patent complaint over technologies used in printers, digital cameras and digital picture frames.

The kicker for Kodak? Printers and picture frames are exactly what the company has announced it will focus on following its restructuring.

If the US Bankruptcy Court approves Apple’s request, the Cupertino-based company’s next stop is the International Trade Commission and the US District Court in Manhattan, where it will file lawsuits and seek a block on Kodak’s infringing products.

Bloomberg reports that Kodak can ask the court to delay the district court case until the ITC makes it ruling, although Apple has said that it will commence with its action regardless.

Kodak and Apple have fought over patents previously, with Apple asserting that it shared camera patents with Kodak. The ITC issued a split decision on ownership of the patents and now Apple is requesting that the case is transferred to the court in Manhattan.

Kodak believes it will save more than $100 million in annual operating savings as a result of phasing-out its digital camera business — if Apple has its way, it will see the very products that Kodak is focusing on blocked from sale, if the ITC and New York courts agree.

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Save the Children harnesses the power of Twitter for its first ever 12-hour conference

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 11:53 PM PST

Twitter chats are certainly not a new concept. Everyone from US Vice President Joe Biden to the the UK Metropolitan Police Commissioner have used Twitter as a way of connecting with their audience, and it has proven to be a successful vehicle for interviews. Today, Save the Children is taking the concept to a new level with their first 12-hour Twitter Chat.

The event, which can be followed right now under the hashtag #HiddenCrisis or on its Twebevent page aims to raise awareness about malnutrition in children around the world.

The event kicked off in Australia, has now moved to Singapore, and will slowly be making its way around the world via Twitter, going to Indonesia, Rwanda, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, the UK, Kenya, South Africa and Brazil. The 12-hour event is also accompanied by offline activities taking place in over 12 countries.

50 moderators, 3 continents, 12 timezones, 3 languages and a collective reach of millions of followers, the online event is taking on the form of a conference rather than a chat, and is a great example of how the power of Twitter can be harnessed for good.

The Tweet Chat panel includes the Rwandan Health Minister Agnes Binagwaho and Bollywood star Kunal Kapoor, as well as Kenyan and South African activists and Egyptian development workers, among others. Experts, charities, civil society groups, bloggers, and more are all coming together to discuss a problem, both online and offline, which leads to the deaths of 2.6 million children per year.

While it is common for Twitter to play an integral role in conferences, with attendees live-tweeting every minute detail of the day, Save the Children’s approach of making Twitter the actual venue allows for a truly global experience, where all you need to participate is a hashtag.

With an ever-present fixation on how Twitter is being used by brands to promote their products and services, Save the Children’s Twitter Chat is a great reminder of the ways in which the social network can be used to raise awareness, and that there’s truly no limit to the ways that you can push the platform to meet your own needs, 140 characters at a time.

If you’re looking for tips on how to use Twitter to have your own Twitter chat, check out our guide here.

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Google Wallet users can buy prepaid cards again as one security issue is fixed

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 09:57 PM PST

Google Wallet users are once again able to buy prepaid cards for the mobile payments service, after Google restored the functionality having temporarily barred the issuing of new cards following a security issue.

In an update to a previous blog post, Osama Bedier, Vice President of Google Wallet and Payments, clarified that it has fixed an issue that enabled prepaid accounts to be re-privosioned to other users.

Yesterday afternoon, we restored the ability to issue new prepaid cards to the Wallet. In addition, we issued a fix that prevents an existing prepaid card from being re-provisioned to another user. While we're not aware of any abuse of prepaid cards or the Wallet PIN resulting from these recent reports, we took this step as a precaution to ensure the security of our Wallet customers. If you are unable to access your previous prepaid card balance for any reason, please contact our toll-free support for assistance.

The saga is one of a number of security issues that has been raised around the mobile payment application over the past week.

While Google has fixed the issue that could allow prepaid accounts to be accessed and used on lost or stolen devices, there is still a question mark around whether user accounts can be accessed after a device is rooted.

Google maintains that rooting a device will clear all data that is stored on it, however it has been claimed that it remains accessible, thus meaning that Google Wallet accounts on unsecured devices could be accessed if in the wrong hands.

In its defence, the company has rightly pointed out that all Android device owners should set their PIN security and immediately telephone for assistance in the event that they lose their device. While no application is 100 percent safe, there must be concern that devices and accounts can be at risk.

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Now China’s trademark ruling sees online retailers stop selling the Apple iPad

Posted: 14 Feb 2012 09:14 PM PST

Online retailers Amazon China and Suning have become the first Web-based sellers to remove the iPad from their catalogues in China, as the fall-out from a trademark ruling develops the potential to massively affect Apple.

Apple is appealing the decision, which ruled that local firm Proview holds the rights to the word ‘iPad’, but it has already seen retail stores in Chinese city Shijiazhuang remove the product from their shelves, and now the action is moving to the Web.

Though the two firms are relatively small players in China’s online retail space, the news — reported by QQ Tech and translated by Penn Olson — is a worrying development for the Cupertino-based firm in one of its most important markets.

Just yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook reiterated that China remains a key focus for the company, but the possibility of a full trade ban on the iPad in the country, which Proview is pushing for, is becoming a distinct possibility.

Screenshots from QQ Tech show that the iPad 2 was nowhere to be found on either Amazon China — which was recently rebranded from Joyo — or Sunings websites. Penn Olson verifies that a search instead brings up a series of accessories for the device.

From Amazon China:

From Suning:

Tim Cook is predicting that the tablet market will grow to be as big as the PC market, but the company has a real challenge if it is to fulfill the prophecy for its business in China.

As we said when retailers first began removing the device, it will be fascinating to see how this develops. The eyes of the world are on China and its legal system, which could cost one of the world’s most notable brands millions.

In the meantime however, this momentum may see more retailers delist the iPad online or remove it from their shelves.

Update: The New York Times reports that a second city — Xuzhou, 1.8 million population — has put iPads under “"temporary impoundment".

Update 2: An official from the Chinese customs authorities has claimed that an import ban would be difficult to manage, as Apple Insider reports.

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News: Garmin FR60

2012-02-15T03:45:00.001-08:00

The Garmin FR60 Heart Rate Monitor with ANT+ technology is a sleek fitness watch plus workout tool that tracks your time, heart rate and calories burned! When bundled with the wireless foot pod, the FR60 can also track speed and distance, indoors or out! Wirelessly send your workout data to your computer for later analysis with the FR60! With FR60′s wireless ANT+ technology, this heart rate monitor will keep you on track for your exercise goals!Note: The ANT+ technology allows for connection to other ANT+ compatible devices, like the included heart rate monitor, optional foot pod or even ANT+ compatible fitness equipment. (This is only the Heart Rate Monitor watch)

Garmin FR60

News: Kid Factor 3 Combination Bicycle Lock

2012-02-14T23:56:00.001-08:00

96016 KID FACTOR 3 COMBINATION
KID FACTOR 3 COMBINATION LOCK

$ 3.01
3′ long chain is covered in a vinyl sleeve to protect bikes from scratches. Four digit combination secures the cable without the hassle of keys.

Kid Factor 3 Combination Bicycle Lock

News: Ergo The Seat Classic Bicycle Saddle

2012-02-14T17:28:00.001-08:00

Black vinyl
Ergonomic design
“Hornless” design is approved by physicians to reduce numbness and pain
Weather resistant seat with polyurethane foam

$ 21.22
Weather resistant seat molded with a cushion of polyurethane foam for a softer riding experience. The SEAT takes the pressure off soft tissues and tender organs and lets you sit where you are supposed to sit on your sit bones”. The SEATs innovative, ergonomic design eliminates the protruding horn or nose found on conventional bicycle seats, providing a significantly more comfortable and healthy ride. For many people, buying a new bike also means shopping for a more comfortable seat. Traditional bike saddles cut off circulation, leading to discomfort and, in some cases, sexual dysfunction.