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Archive for the ‘Tech News’ Category

Every year, we come across dozens of new applications looking to capitalize on March Madness, when millions of basketball fans across the country try to predict the outcome of the heated 65-team NCAA tournament. One new app that’s launching today is called tweetBracket, which gives users an extremely easy way to share their picks with their Twitter followers. The application, while basic, is notable because it’s a preview of the technology being built by a Y Combinator startup called 140bets.

Using tweetBracket is simple. You sign in to Twitter using oAuth, and are presented with a random matchup from today’s games. Click the team you think will win, optionally tweet your choice to your followers, and repeat. The game keeps track of your picks throughout the tournament, and prizes are being awarded to the people with the most correct predictions for each round.

tweetBracket is built off of the platform that 140bets is currently developing, which makes it easy to build apps around a binary interface (the company has also put together a similar app for American Idol fans called Tweet Idol). CEO Jason Wilk says that the platform is still early in development, but that eventually it will be used for more real-time interaction (for example, you might keep it open as you watch a game and predict whether or not a player is going to make the free throw he’s about to take).

In a brief statement, Apple has announced that one of the company’s board members, Jerome B. York, has passed away. The veteran auto-industry executive was hospitalized in serious condition after a burst brain aneurysm this morning, according to the WSJ, and he apparently died soon after.

York was chairman, president and CEO of Harwinton Capital. A former CFO of IBM and Chrysler, and former vice chairman of Tracinda, he joined Apple’s Board of Directors in 1997.

He was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1938. He graduated from the United States Military Academy, and received an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

Trained as an engineer, York worked his way up through Chrysler to become CFO.

You can read more background on the man here.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a statement said: “It’s been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I’m going to miss him a lot.”

Jack Dorsey’s Square was unveiled last December as an innovative way to let people quickly and easily accept physical credit card payments from their mobile phone.

Since then, Square, which has been in limited beta, has been used in a variety of use cases. E.g. philanthopic organization charity:water recently used Square at the SXSW festival to collect donations.

A local flower cart in San Francisco is using Square to take payments from customers. Denim, a jeans store in New York is using Square to take payments from shoppers. We even used Square at this year’s Crunchies to raise money for the UCSF Foundation.

Here’s how Square works: A small device attaches to the phone via the headset/microphone jack. The device gets the power it needs to send data to the phone from the swipe of the card, and sends the information over the microphone connection. The device is compatible with both the iPhone and Android. It’s similar in some ways to PayPal, but anyone can now accept physical credit card payments, too. With no contracts or monthly fees. People are sent receipts by text and email. If you haven’t seen Square in action, check out this video.

And now, a new use case has popped up for Square: political fundraising.

Square is currently being used in two campaigns. Silicon Valley VC Josh Becker, who is running for state assembly in California’s 21st district, has been using Square at fundraising events. And lawyer Reshma Saujani, who is running for Congress in New York’s 14th district, is using Square at campaign fundraising events, including at an event in San Francisco on Friday.

Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons.

Currently, if you want to donate money at a fundraising event, you often have to fill out a form and hand over a check or cash at the event. If you don’t have your checkbook or cash handy (which, many of us don’t), credit cards are the only option. You can write down your credit card number and info for fundraisers to charge at a later date, but you have to trust that the fundraiser keeps track of that information and paper.

With Square, there is both a convenience added for both the payee and fundraiser. The donation is instantly processed, and Square will send the receipt via SMS or email to the payee. Of course, political contributions and donations are a little more complicated because of the reporting requirements associated with donations.

For many types of donations, you need to take the donator’s name, occupation, address, and other information. Currently Square doesn’t allow users to input all of this information but Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together.

Dorsey says he’s already getting significant interest from politicians and political candidates across the country, but because Square is in limited beta, is being selective about how the service is distributed. Dorsey expects Square to be open to the public sometime in the next few months.

Valued at $40 million even before launch, Square is off to an impressive start. And technology’s most notable investors and leaders seem to think so as well.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, investor Ron Conway, Google’s Marissa Mayer, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, Digg creator Kevin Rose, investor Esther Dyson and a host of others have invested in Square. The company also raised funding from Khosla Ventures.

I’ll let the video after the jump do most of the talking on this one but RunKeeper has improved its sharing service by building out a cool run sharing service that works like a social network for the preternaturally skinny yet surprisingly hungry.

The system allows you to share runs with friends and/or strangers. You can turn off maps for privacy and selectively share runs with the world. For example, I have one visible activity while RunKeeper founder Jason has like 5,000 (actually 130). This means he is better than me and, in fact, better than most of us.

According to Opera Software, downloads of its latest desktop browser (10.5) have increased in number significantly after Microsoft started offering Windows users in Europe a choice in browser with a so-called ballot screen.

The Norwegian software maker says that on average, more than half of the European downloads of Opera’s latest browser come directly from that Choice Screen.

The increase represents more than a doubling from the normal download numbers. At the beginning of this month, Opera touted that browser downloads actually tripled at first, so maybe that growth rate won’t last forever.

I’m also very curious if Mozilla, Google and Apple are spotting the same trend for their respective browsers.

According to plans Microsoft has agreed to with the European Commission, the rollout of the Choice Screen will continue into May for existing Windows computers and for five more years on new installations.

No wonder Opera Software is trying to push for a global roll-out of the choice screen.

The following numbers are the percentages of country downloads of Opera’s latest desktop browser that originate from the Choice Screen, as part of the total Opera 10.5 numbers:

Not an easy thing to conceptualize indeed, but according to eMarketer there will be more mobile Internet users in China than the entire population of the US by the end of this year.

For your reference, the 2010 estimate of the size of the United States population stands at roughly 310 million people according to Wikipedia, so that’s a shitload of people browsing the Web from their phones right there.

The report, which you can purchase here, also says the number of mobile Internet users in China will grow fast to reach a staggering 957 million, and that the country will count approximately 1.3 billion mobile subscribers by 2014.

eMarketer points out that those mobile Internet users do not currently monetize as well as smaller mobile audiences in, say, the States, which means that mobile advertising spending levels in China are still low relative to the size of the mobile Web user base. Also, the company highlights another key trend in China, which is that mobile subscriber growth is actually slowing while mobile Internet user growth is accelerating.

More in this blog post (via Twitter).

(Photo credit: Flickr / lime*monkey / CC BY 2.0)

Mobile analytics startup Motally is bringing in a seasoned analytics executive, John Forese, as the startup’s new CEO. Forese was previously Nielsen Mobile’s Senior Vice President of Product Management. Additionally former Google Vice President of Product Development, Doug Garland, has joined Motally’s board of directors.

Prior to his tenure at Nielsen Mobile, Forese was a senior vice president at mobile metrics and research company Telephia where he led overall product strategy and had P&L responsibility across the company’s product lines. Telephia was eventually acquired by Nielsen in 2007. Forese also worked at several telecom and technology based start-ups, including Flashpoint Technologies, Netro and Pacific Bell Mobile Systems.

In addition to their new CEO, Motally has also elected Doug Garland to its board. Prior to joining Google, Doug was an executive in residence at the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Earlier, he was a senior vice president at Yahoo!, where he led the launch of the broadband access business and the company’s mobile efforts.

Motally has been expanding and innovating at a rapid pace over the past several months. The startup just launched an analytics platform for mobile game developers, rolled out an extension of their mobile analytics to include content developed on Apple’s iPad and released a flexible API.

Currently, Motally supports analytics for applications on the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry platforms as well as the mobile web. For a young startup, Motally has seen significant traction as a mobile analytics provider. Backed by renown investor Ron Conway, Motally’s clients include Twitter, Yelp, Fandango and Verizon.

Steve Riggio has signed off as CEO of bookseller Barnes & Noble to become the company’s Vice Chairman. Replacing him at the helm will be William Lynch, who has heaps of experience in e-commerce under his belt and was previously President of B&N’s main website (bn.com).

The company also announced the promotion of COO Mitchell Klipper to chief executive of the company’s retail group, which encompasses the Barnes & Noble retail business and the Barnes & Noble College Booksellers business.

William Lynch joined Barnes & Noble in February 2009 as President of Barnes & Noble.com and has been responsible for the company’s core online business since then. Lynch launched the company’s digital commerce platform as well as the nook, Barnes & Nobles’ eBook Reader.

Prior to Barnes & Noble, Lynch was xecutive Vice President of Marketing and General Manager of HSN.com. From 2004 to 2008, he was CEO of IAC subsidiary Gifts.com, which he co-founded. From 2000 to 2004, he was VP and General Manager, E-Commerce, for Palm., where he oversaw all of the company’s Web properties, including Palm.com, the Palm Online Store, the Palm Software Connection and the Palm.Net wireless ISP.

Stealth startup Trada launched to the public today as an online marketplace allowing small and medium businesses and agencies to essentially crowdsource search engine optimization services. The startup has raised $2.2 million from the Foundry Group and angel investors Alan Warms, Carlos Cashman, Dan Murray, James Crouthamel, Stuart Larkins and Robert Wolfe.

As we all know, search advertising is necessary for businesses but SEO can be a time consuming, perplexing and tedious task. Many businesses overpay for common keywords or don’t use the right keywords to drive traffic. Trada comes into play here by crowdsourcing SEO experts to build and manage and advertiser or business’ paid search campaign across search engines. The service currently supports Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

Essentially, Trada ends up being a middleman for coordinating SEO service. Advertisers use Trada to enter information about a campaign and experts, who must be AdWords or SEMPO certified and pass Trada certification, use the site to find interesting campaigns and submit keywords, ad copy and bid prices across the search engines and to track and optimize campaigns across the ad networks. Trada coordinates the payments and takes a small cut of each transaction between advertisers and SEO experts.

The benefit for the SEO experts is that they don’t have to deal with the administrative and management issues with clients. Experts earn money when they generate clicks or other actions for less than the advertiser’s target price. Advertisers get 25 qualified experts to work on their campaigns and according to Trada, those businesses who participated in the private beta of the service are seeing successful results.

Trada entered private beta in January 2009 and currently has 70 advertisers and 280 experts to date. Founded by entrepreneur Niel Robertson, Trada was born after Robertson grew frustrated managing his own $8,000-a-month paid search campaign. Realizing that paid search campaigns are best left to experts, he thought an online marketplace for PPC experts and businesses would be the best way to maximize SEO. The startup faces competition from Kenshoo, Conductor and many others.

For the past couple of years now, when talking about the Apple TV product, Apple likes to throw out the word “hobby.” It’s as if they’re ashamed of the device. And considering sales are anemic next to Macs, iPods, and iPhones, it’s no big surprise that they talk this way.

But there’s actually nothing to be ashamed of. The Apple TV is a good product. Apple just needs to put some proper time and energy into it, to expand it to its full potential. And news today about the so-called “Google TV” should do just the trick.

Apple and Google are on the verge of war. The formerly close allies are increasingly competing in key spaces for both, and the living room is likely to be a new battleground because it’s still very much up in air. As the New York Times reported yesterday, Google is working with partners including Intel, Sony, and Logitech to bring a Google TV experience into the living room. This is, of course, where the Apple TV resides. And Apple would be foolish to simply cede any ground it does have to its new favorite rival just because it’s focused on other things (*cough* iPad *cough*).

That’s a Microsoft move.

As Nick Bilton points out, this Google TV would be based around the Android platform. This means that the key idea is likely to have third-party developers work on it to make applications built for a television set. That’s easier said than done, but Android’s open nature should yield some interesting results rather quickly.

Apple, meanwhile, is of course anything but open with regard to their devices. In fact, the Apple TV is entirely closed right now, as only Apple is able to modify its software (without hacking it, of course). I suspect that will change, following this revelation.

The idea of running iPhone-style applications on the Apple TV has long been a sexy one. Hell, people have even ported apps over to a TV screen to show how well it could work. The main problem with developing iPhone apps for the Apple TV seems to be resolution. With the iPhone (and iPod touch), Apple offers only one screen size/resolution, ensuring developers have an easy time making great-looking apps — while at the same time, making sure end users have a great experience.

But the iPad has already changed everything. With their new device, Apple has kept things as simple as possible by making iPhone apps scale up two times to work on the bigger display, but it’s still shows a willingness to move beyond the one screen size. Unfortunately, with the Apple TV, it can be attached to a screen that could be a huge variety of sizes, so it would be hard to control that.

Google doesn’t care about that because Android already runs on dozens of phones with different screen sizes. But Apple clearly cares about how apps look on its devices (so much so that the iPad itself was likely designed at a strange ratio simply to make scaling apps look as good as possible). So does that mean they start offering an actual Apple TV (as in a screen)? Rumors of that have been around for a long time. Or maybe they black-box apps to a certain resolution — similar to what they’re doing on the iPad when an app isn’t scaled up?

Who knows. But what I do know is that upon hearing this Google TV news, the Apple TV became a little less of a “hobby” yesterday.

Aside from calling it a hobby, Steve Jobs has referred to the Apple TV as being a potential “fourth leg” of a chair Apple is building. Leg one is the Mac, leg two is the iPod, leg three is the iPhone, and Jobs had hoped the Apple TV would complete the chair one day. But it seems clear now that he thinks the iPad could be the fourth leg instead.

Screw that. I think it’s time for Apple to build a whole dining room set of furniture. We, as consumers, need a living room arms race between Apple and Google (and Microsoft, TiVo, Roku, Boxee, and the rest) to kick the cable companies’ shitty television user experience to the curb.