They’re not quite as juicy — Oracle has always had the better flair for the dramatic in this case — but in releasing them, HP clearly intends to paint Oracle, the new owner of Sun Microsystems, as out to hurt HP by kicking it straight in the teeth by damaging its Business Critical Server operation.

The first of the batch is an instant message exchange between some Oracle sales guys, who happen to use salty language in relation to HP. (Sorry about that.)

The second appears to show that Mark Hurd, while still CEO of HP, was informed about Intel being both aggressive and excited about a forthcoming version of the Itanium chip, which would seem to run contrary to the argument Oracle has made that Intel was prepping for the Itanium line’s end of life, while allowing HP to lie about it to its server customers. In the message, Martin Fink, who figured so prominently in Oracle’s document dump today, writes to Hurd: “I’m not sure what exactly this means, but I have rarely seen Intel so agressive on anything to do with Itanium EVER, and they are working very hard to get this moving forward.”

Another, from February 2011, appears to show Oracle unwilling to release a security software patch for a version of one of its applications that runs on HP-UX and therefore on an Itanium-based server. Another from the same day is an email from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle’s server technologies, asking if support documents had been updated to specify “no more one-off patches for Itanium.” The date is key because Oracle first announced that it would no longer support Itanium systems on March 23 of that year. It should surprise no one that the top echelons of Oracle management knew this announcement was coming.

The next is an email showing HP getting ready for a big strategy launch. “Kinetic” was HP’s internal name for a strategy that leveraged all of HP’s IP that enabled mission-critical products into a cohesive whole. Plans for Kinetic included extending HP-UX and Integrity, HP’s line of Itanium-based servers, indefinitely, as well as bringing up X86 chips, like Intel’s more mainstream Xeon, under the “mission critical” umbrella. As HP sees it, this was the plan all along.
 
Finally the last one is another IM exchange between Oracle sales execs. Toward the end, one of them complains about being forced to sell Sun hardware that is described as a “pig with lipstick at best.” Again as HP sees it, once Oracle owned Sun it had every motivation to do whatever it could to hurt HP, including ducking out of previously contracted commitments.

As I did with the Oracle dump this morning, I collated everything into a single PDF. I think I got everything in chronological order this time. Read for yourselves!

HP-Itanium-docs.pdf

According to the latest metrics from Gartner — which measure sales of handsets to customers, not shipments into the channel — Samsung sold 86.6 million mobile phones in the first quarter, 25.9 percent more than it sold during the same period a year ago. That was enough to give it a 20.7 percent share of the market, and to seize the title of “world’s largest mobile handset vendor” from Nokia, which sold 83.2 million cellphones during the quarter, as its market share slipped to 19.8 percent from 25.1 percent a year ago.

Unfortunate news for Nokia, which had been the market’s leader since 1998, but inevitable given the company’s recent decline and, perhaps, its choice of Windows Phone as an OS for its newest handsets.

Because what’s driving Samsung’s growth is Android. According to Gartner’s sales data, Samsung was by far the largest Android smartphone vendor, claiming nearly 44 percent of Android-based smartphone sales. Interestingly, no other Android phone manufacturer captured more than 10 percent of the market.

So, if Samsung commandeered the handset market’s top spot in the first quarter, and Nokia its second, who claimed third? Apple, which sold enough iPhones to capture 7.9 percent of the total mobile phone market.

As for mobile OS market share, Android continues to rule the market — 56 percent of smartphones sold to end users globally in the first quarter of 2012 run the OS, far more than the 22.9 percent running Apple’s iOS.

This “Knowledge Graph” is a two-year-old project that evolved in part out of Google’s acquisition of Metaweb in 2010. Google now says it understands 500 million entities and 3.5 billion attributes and connections.

When users search for a term that triggers the Knowledge Graph, they’ll see a box of information on the right-hand side of the search results page.

The boxes contain all sorts of information that’s specifically relevant to the search term. For instance, a results box for Leonardo da Vinci would have a brief description of him, his birth and death dates and his parents’ names, pictures of five of his most famous works and links to other artists that people often search for when they’re looking up da Vinci. It’s a lot like a dense and visual Wikipedia page.

When relevant, Google will ask users to specify what sort of entity they are looking for. So if you search for “kings,” the box might include disambiguation links for the Los Angeles Kings of the NHL, the Sacramento Kings of the NBA and the NBC drama “Kings.”

With all that information right there on the Google results page, users might be less likely to click through to other Web pages. I asked Google search engineer Ben Gomes about that, and he deflected the question.

“Our goal is help you explore a topic more,” Gomes said. “We’re providing you with a skeleton which we’re using to organize information. But if you actually want to find deep information around a topic, we have the Web pages to provide you with that information.”

At least on an interface level, Microsoft is on a similar track with Bing — where it just launched custom panels for results in 150 categories. But what Google is doing goes quite a bit deeper.

Gomes described the Knowledge Graph project as part of Google’s overarching “progression from data to information to knowledge.” He said that Knowledge Graph results will turn on for a “significant fraction” of Google queries — about the same as local results.

Former iPhone engineering manager Hugo Fiennes, former Gmail designer Kevin Fox and long-time firmware engineer Peter Hartley co-founded the start-up, which is intended to help users monitor, control and get alerted by their devices.

Electric Imp founders Peter Hartley, Hugo Fiennes and Kevin Fox

Some potential applications are a laundry machine that texts a user when the wash is done or a power charger that turns on when the price of electricity goes down.

The premise is that hardware makers are not great at making cloud services, so they can just add an Imp slot and let Imp take care of the Web interface.

Each Imp card will contain Wi-Fi and an embedded processor. You could think of it as a souped-up version of an Eye-Fi card, which uploads pictures wirelessly when used in a camera’s memory slot. Or think of it like “The Matrix,” where the computer downloads the software needed to control itself once it connects to the Internet.*

Founded last summer, Electric Imp plans to release a developer preview bundle in June and the first compatible devices later this year.

Though it surely would have played well on Kickstarter — like, for instance, the Twine smart sensor project — Electric Imp went a more traditional route for funding, taking $7.9 million in Series A money from Redpoint Ventures and Lowercase Capital.

*Hat tip to Redpoint principal Tomasz Tunguz for the “Matrix” analogy. By the way, this is the first publicly disclosed venture investment for Tunguz, who was formerly a product manager at Google.

While Facebook is slowly working out the kinks to bring more games to mobile, there’s a small company in Menlo Park, Calif., that has beat them to it.

ISwifter is announcing a new iPad app today called theWorx for Facebook, which gives users the full Facebook experience — social games and all.

That means users can check their crops, maintain their cities and feed their fish without having to boot up their computer.

A small company of 20 employees, iSwifter is almost entirely bootstrapped, having generated $10 million in revenue last year.

As my colleague Ina Fried wrote, the previous iPad app allowed users to access any Flash-based content on the Web by running a browsing session on its servers and streaming the results to the iPad. What iSwifter quickly realized was that “one of the major use cases is Facebook games,” said the company’s co-founder Rohan Relan.

TheWorx will work similarly to the old app, except that it is tailored specifically for Facebook. ISwifter will host the content on its servers and then stream the games to the user on the iPad, with little latency. By taking this approach, users will have access to all games on Facebook without developers having to lift a finger.

Additionally, all of the original ways to monetize the applications will be in place, including advertising and Facebook Credits. TheWorx will be free for a short trial period, and then users will pay for additional access. The app will come out later this month or in early June. At that time, Relan said, the company will figure out how much it will charge. The iSwifter app currently costs $5.

“Our plan is if we do everything that the Facebook app does, then we can charge for that functionality,” Relan said.

The biggest threat to iSwifter is if Facebook starts bringing more content to mobile. “That would be pretty devastating to us,” Relan admits. However, he said there’s not an easy way for all developers to bring their content to mobile. Currently, some of the largest game developers, like Zynga, have created content specifically for Facebook’s app, but it has been a slow process.

“Some of the big apps have made native versions, but it will take time for the Long Tail to migrate over,” he said.

Here’s how the app works:

The Chicago-based daily deals company expects to announce his appointment later this afternoon. Hegde will be based in Seattle, overseeing the company’s marketing technology expansion, and will also be in charge of opening a new 20-person office here.

At Amazon, Hegde spent six years managing payments, and another six years heading up several business units, including social networking, email and browser teams. He also ran Amazon’s “Traffic Systems” group, which works on driving traffic to Amazon from both paid and free channels.

Groupon has a number of former Amazon executives on its team, including CFO Jason Child, SVP of Product Jeff Holden (who joined through the acquisition of his start-up, Pelago); and more recently, Kal Raman, who joined as SVP of Americas.

The Seattle office, which will be based in the city’s International District, just south of downtown, expects to have about 20 employees by the end of the year. The office will be charged with automating the company’s marketing efforts, which will make it cheaper to acquire higher-quality customers.

The Seattle office will work closely with the Palo Alto technology teams, where there’s already several hundred employees. As VP of engineering, Hegde will be in charge of both locations.

Groupon is the latest technology company to open an office in Seattle, following Zynga, Facebook, Google, eBay and others.

Typically, transmitting data across this band has required large, power-hungry equipment. But now researchers in Japan have managed to do it with far less complex equipment, and in doing so, have broken the terahertz wireless-transmission speed record.

Using a device called a resonant tunneling diode, Tokyo University researchers were able to achieve a 3 gigabits-per-second data transmission over the terahertz band — double the speed of the previous record set back in November by chipmaker Rohm.

Truly an impressive speed, though, as is often the case with advanced technologies like these, it comes with a caveat. The connection over which the data is transmitted is only good over distances of about 30 feet. So it’s not really an outright replacement for Wi-Fi. That said, there are plenty of short-range applications for which it would be perfect — transmitting media among home entertainment devices, backing up a PC to a wireless hard drive, etc.

Tripping CEO Jen O'Neal

Built through partnerships with FlipKey, HomeAway, Roomorama and others, the new Tripping is a “Kayak for Airbnb,” as well as a cultural exchange site.

Tripping doesn’t have listings from Airbnb itself yet. But CEO Jen O’Neal said Tripping already has a much bigger inventory — 750,000 rentals, compared to 100,000 on Airbnb. She thinks that amounts to 35 percent of the total listings in the category.

How’s this for “dogfooding” your own products: O’Neal told me she recently got chastised by a neighbor for having too many “Trippers” stay over at her house in San Francisco’s Presidio neighborhood.

Tripping has raised about $1 million from investors including Quest Venture Partners and Draper Associates.

The documents were released as part of a new offensive by Oracle to ratchet up the pressure on HP and take its case to the marketplace — that HP and Intel had already planned to bring an end to the Itanium chip’s life, and that HP lied to its customers about the chip’s long-term future.

HP has long denied Oracle’s contention, and has tried to portray this as Oracle’s failure to live up to its end of a contract.

In an open letter to affected customers, Oracle said it was releasing the documents in order to allow customers to “make your own decision” on the matter:

Dear Customer:

A little over a year ago we announced that we would no longer be developing new versions of Oracle’s database and other products on the Intel Itanium platform due to our strongly held belief of Itanium’s imminent end of life. We ensured our Itanium customers would have an easy transition to the platform of their choice by committing to 10 years of support for existing Oracle software running on Itanium.

Hewlett Packard strongly disagreed with our characterization of Itanium’s future and launched an immediate campaign designed, in their words, to foment “customer outrage.”

At this time, there are many documents that have been disclosed through litigation that describe the true state of Itanium in Hewlett-Packard’s own words. Rather than us interpreting this situation for you, we thought we would give you access to the public HP documents so you can make your own decision regarding your investments in Itanium technology.

After reading these documents we are confident that you will agree with our decision, taken with the best interest of our joint customers in mind.

Sincerely,
Jeb Dasteel, Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer
Oracle

Bloomberg Businessweek got its hands on some of these trial exhibits, but in its posts this morning — and presumably in the tech section of this week’s magazine — stuck to a fairly limited set of highlights. And in fact there’s not so much that’s surprising, if you read my story on the unredacted version of Oracle’s cross-complaint from January.

Basically, the new documents add more color and a lot more tension to the state of the HP-Intel relationship over the production of the Itanium chip. It also lends a lot of weight to Oracle’s narrative heading into that trial: That HP relied heavily on profits earned from multiyear sales and support contracts with customers who bought its Integrity servers that run Intel’s exotic and expensive Itanium chip. In support of that, it paid Intel nearly a half-billion dollars to keep the chip alive, despite the fact that, outside of HP, there was no other single vendor using Itanium chips.

In the emails, Intel, for its part, certainly looks like it wants out of the business of making the chip, but is willing to accept HP’s money to keep churning them out. Asked at one point what would happen if HP didn’t pay a certain amount to Intel, Intel would — in the words of Martin Fink, then-head of HP’s Business Critical Server business — shut down the teams producing certain chips that were in the process of being designed, and slap “high fives all around.”

On its face, there’s nothing inherently wrong with HP paying Intel to keep making a particular chip. HP had customers willing to buy these servers, and it made money supporting them, so paying Intel to keep them coming — remember, HP for all intents and purposes, is the only vendor buying this chip — was more or less a cost of doing business.

However, Oracle’s argument has been that HP refused to play straight with the wider marketplace, insisting that Itanium would be around for many generations to come. Even Intel itself insisted that was true last year, when Oracle first announced that it would stop making new applications that support the chip, which of course led HP to sue last June.

AllThingsD has compiled all of these documents into a single 75-page document; you can read the entire collection below. They’re ordered by exhibit number rather than chronological order. I’ll probably have more to say as I go through them.

HP just sent a statement:

“Intel has provided unequivocal and repeated statements to the marketplace that Itanium is not at an end of life. The undeniable fact is there is committed support for Itanium that extends out toward the end of this decade. Statements that Itanium was at or near an end of life are false. With the unsealing of court filings, the public can see the undisputed facts of Intel’s Itanium roadmap clearly showing a long and sustained future for Itanium.”

An Intel spokesman had no comment, saying it is not a party to the lawsuit.

Update: So let me try to curate these documents a bit. They cover a time period beginning in August 2007, and go through to April 2011. In the first, (Ex. 6) Fink writes to another HP exec and says, “Intel dropped a bomb on us last night” during a meeting that included talk of “canceling Poulsen,” a future version of the Itanium chip that was on internal road maps. Poulson, for the record, is Intel’s code name for a 32 nanometer version of Itanium that was to be released sometime this year. The response: “Call Pat G,” referring to Pat Gelsinger, the once very senior Intel executive who was at one time widely considered to be a possible successor to current CEO Paul Otellini, but is now the COO at EMC, and likely to be its next CEO. Fink’s response: “I did, spent an hour … This was a high tension call.” Intel was worried that an HP server was being built using a competitor’s chip, presumably one from Advanced Micro Devices.

From there, skip forward to Exhibit 43. The email to Fink from Scott Stallard, now a retired HP exec, details a discussion with Intel’s Tom Kilroy, then VP of its enterprise business. The message to Intel: “Don’t possibly signal to the world” the end of the Itanium road map.

The next document is notes from a meeting between Intel and HP led by Otellini and then-HP CEO Mark Hurd in September of 2007. According to those notes, Intel’s Kilroy concedes that the then-current core used to build the Itanium chip has reached its end of life, and that there are two paths forward, one expensive, the other painful — a “crash landing.” Otellini then says that Intel can’t continue to lose money on the product. Hurd goes on to say that HP had by that time sold a combined $9 billion worth of Itanium-based servers, and that it “would be hard to walk away from those customers.”

Otellini then says, according to the notes, that “we need to address the inevitable on the future of Itanium.” Both sides then agree that over the next several years they’d like to glide toward using Intel’s more plentiful and more mainstream Xeon server chips, and essentially keep Itanium alive until 2013. Intel then proposed a new business model that would turn Intel essentially into a contractor for HP. Its goal would be not so much to make money on the Itanium business, but to stop losing money on it. Hurd agrees to take a serious look at the numbers.

Next in line is Exhibit 55, in which Stallard outlines the November 2007 Intel proposal to HP. The key point: HP would pay Intel $488 million over five years to keep building Itanium chips. It includes provisions for an annual “true up,” where Intel gets paid for any difference between its costs and what HP has already paid it for that year. Stallard writes: “So you ask, why should that be that we are forced to true up Intel to break-even? lt is because Tom [Kilroy] says Paul [Otellini] has been consistent on one thing all along, that if we do any other scenario than Tukvale (e.g. shut down the business early) then “Intel can’t lose any (more) money on this thing.’”

Next is Exhibit 15, a PowerPoint deck outlining the strategic rationale for HP to consider buying Sun Microsystems. Key phrase: HP-UX, its version of Unix developed specifically for Itanium servers, “is on a death march” because of Itanium’s inevitable demise. The slide also shows HP’s worries concerning a scenario in which IBM acquires Sun. The key phrase there: Such a deal “Isolates and exposes HP-UX as 3rd tier player, accelerates our decline (product/service) as customers look to consolidate vendors.”

We all know what happened instead: Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 and, in a stroke, took over its server business, giving Oracle an obvious motivation to cut its support for Itanium and hurt its new rival HP in the process. I’ve hit a few high points here, but I think you can get the gist from a careful reading of the documents below.

Update: I’ve re-uploaded the exhibits to Scribd in more logical order, so you don’t have to skip around. Sorry if that was confusing before.

Oracle Itanium Exhibits Chronological

Not at all.

“We’re very happy with it,” Hesse said of Sprint’s deal with Apple, during the company’s annual shareholders meeting Tuesday. “Carrying the iPhone will be quite profitable.”

But not for a few years, at least.

By its own admission, Sprint won’t profit from the device until 2015. But according to Hesse, who was reelected to Sprint’s board during Tuesday’s proceedings, that initial heavy upfront investment in the iPhone is worthwhile because it will slow subscriber turnover and create a new segment of higher-value subscribers.

“We believe in the long term,” Hesse said. “And over time we will make more money on iPhone customers than we will on other customers.”

And there, it would seem, Hesse does have a point. Sprint sold 1.5 million iPhones in its first quarter, with about 44 percent of them going to new customers. And those sales helped spike Sprint’s average revenue per user 6.9 percent, the largest year-over-year increase ever charted in that metric in the U.S.

UC’s next target is the U.S., where the company released localized Android and iOS versions this past week, and plans to open up a Silicon Valley office later this year. (It has already made inroads into India, where it has 20 percent share and is close to knocking off market leader Opera, execs said.)

UCWeb's Roy Rong and Yu Yongfu visit AllThingsD.

UC Browser is more than a just dumb container for Web sites; in China, the browser includes its own virtual currency accounts, identity system, social network and navigation services. In a way, it’s more like a mobile-only Facebook platform than the pure Chrome or Safari browsers.

Plus, UC browser is quite fast, because the company maintains local data centers from where it compresses Web sites and sends them to phones. Opera Mini and Amazon’s Kindle Fire Silk browser use similar techniques.

Bridging to the U.S. market won’t necessarily be easy, but UC’s design and experience across the spectrum of low- to high-end phones could be instructive.

CEO Yu Yongfu — who’s on a grand tour of Silicon Valley this week — emphasized that while his company started doing all this in 2004, the U.S. smartphone market only launched with the iPhone in 2007.

And beyond that three-year lead, China is supposed to oust the U.S. as the world’s biggest smartphone market this year.

Yu said he thinks he understands how to deal with the limitations of mobile — small screen size, reduced bandwidth, limited input, short battery life and some eight different operating systems — better than just about anyone.

Still, it’s not clear that the pillars of the UC Web strategy — compressing sites to speed up page loads, and bundling in services and shortcuts — will go over well in the U.S. smartphone market, where we have tended to like our browsers to just show Web pages for us, while leaving heavier lifting to dedicated apps.

UC Browser has 200 million active monthly users, with 50 million of them on Android and the rest spread across other platforms. It gets about a quarter of its users from deals to be preinstalled on phones, said CFO Roy Rong.

The new U.S. version of UC Browser for iPhone

Like other browsers, UC receives revenue through search referral agreements (in China, the default is Baidu; in the U.S., it’s Google). The UC app also includes paid links, display ads, and virtual goods sold in the Flash games it licenses for users. It has its own “app store,” and helps users save bookmarks to HTML5 apps on its home screen. It’s almost like a mobile Web OS.

Rong and Yu said they couldn’t think of any examples of Chinese Internet companies with significant usage in the U.S., so they are hoping to blaze that trail.

To get things started, they rented data centers in Los Angeles and Dallas, signed an agreement to bundle Evernote in UC Browser to help it get distribution in China and vice versa (and plan to do so with other apps), and tweaked the browser’s interface to be more spacious and empty.

For whatever reason, people in China seem to prefer more clutter, Rong said.

Production is set to begin next month for the screens, which measure at least 4 inches diagonally compared with 3.5 inches on the iPhone 4S, the latest phone from Apple, the people said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

There’s a popular maxim in Silicon Valley: Find your user base and the revenues will come later.

For a while, it seemed to be the easiest way for a founder to explain his or her way out of a proper business model. But with Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the entirely revenue-free Instagram, that adage now carries more weight than ever.

Enter Viddy and Socialcam, two of the hottest start-up apps, both of which have the buzz of being the “Instagram for video.” The pair have exploded in popularity over the past few months, with each garnering user bases in the tens of millions seemingly overnight.

But the growth of one of these apps is not like the other.

Using a combination of fortunate timing, Facebook’s Open Graph influence and a new way of playing the system, Socialcam has effectively gamed Facebook, YouTube and the App Store to keep a strong grip on that ever-so-valuable user base. In the short term, at least, the three-man Socialcam start-up team has discovered a method to beat the 20-plus person outfit that is Viddy.

The method is so effective that Socialcam skyrocketed from around 1.4 million monthly active Facebook users to a whopping 40 million in a span of little more than two weeks. Socialcam surpassed Viddy in the Facebook app rankings last week, and currently sits fat atop Apple’s powerful App Store as one of the most downloaded free applications.

Some have started picking up on Socialcam’s tactics. Threads arose on Quora and Hacker News questioning the validity of the app’s growth, and TheNextWeb picked some of this apart on Thursday.

But there’s far more to it.

History

The concept of social video has been simmering for some time. Viddy was founded in December of 2010, while competitors like Mobli, Klip and Socialcam came along at various points during 2011.

But it was only over the past few months that the mobile social video concept began to boil. Socialcam hit the three million user mark in December. The Instagram acquisition announcement hit the web on April 9th. Two days later, Viddy hit 4 million users.

At some point on April 24, social video apps exploded, and it suddenly became clearer that Viddy and Socialcam were leaving all of their competitors behind.

Web view traffic to Socialcam through Facebook skyrocketed from around 10 million monthly active users to an astounding 40 million MAUs over a period of two weeks. Viddy jumped from around eight million MAUs to upwards of 36 million over that same period.

It was as if someone had flipped on the awesome traffic switch.

What Happened That Fateful Day in April?

What isn’t clear is just who or what flipped that switch. But I’m hearing many different theories.

Theory No. 1: Socialcam received its Facebook Open Graph integration around this time, thus increasing the app’s visibility in users’ Timelines. But Viddy’s Open Graph integration had already occurred on March 12, more than a month previously, at South by Southwest, and both apps received immense boosts in traffic during that same time period.

It’s possible that Socialcam’s Open Graph jumpstart fueled Viddy’s growth by mere virtue of being another social video app. Or perhaps it was the announcement that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Shakira and Jay-Z would back Viddy financially, the news of which occurred two days before Socialcam’s Open Graph integration.

Theory No. 2: A more conspiracy-like theory in which Facebook itself made changes to its News Feed in favor of the “Watch” action for social videos on the whole.

Consider this: When the once-popular Facebook social reading apps like the Guardian and Washington Post Social Reader recently started tanking in their monthly active user ratings, Ryan Kellett, a Washington Post employee, confirmed to TechCrunch that it was indeed changes in Facebook’s News Feed that led to Social Reader’s decline. It’s feasible, then, to think that Facebook could tweak things in the other direction, in order to favor video apps.

And, indeed, SocialCam, Klip, YouTube, Viddy and DailyMotion all saw spikes in Facebook traffic on April 24 — some more than others — with Mobli’s traffic following suit shortly thereafter.

Facebook declined to comment to AllThingsD on the near instantaneous rise on April 24, although it did shrug off the date in question to the New York Times: “The popularity of videos and other user-generated content on Facebook is not new, so it’s no surprise that social video apps are growing as friends share with each other and as more developers experiment with this type of content on Facebook.”

In a tweet on Saturday, TechCrunch writer Josh Constine noted that the sudden burst of growth on April 24 was due to a reporting error from Facebook to third-party app tracking site AppData. That also seems reasonable, although doesn’t fully explain the sudden traffic explosion that occurred over that two- to three-week period.

Whatever actually happened, Socialcam saw the chance to seize its moment.

Gaming Facebook

After receiving the boost, Socialcam’s founders discovered the perfect way of keeping that veritable fire hose of Facebook Web traffic pouring in.

According to multiple sources, it was around this time Socialcam began scraping video content from Vevo and YouTube to add to its own network of users, which essentially amounts to ripping content directly from other services.

As you might imagine, it’s not a welcome practice.

Then, sources said, Socialcam uploaded that video content to its own servers, where it began distributing it via different dummy accounts on the Socialcam network. There’s a slew of “YouTube Popular” accounts doing much of the distribution, along with others.

So, in effect, when a Socialcam user on a mobile device clicked on what he thought was a Socialcam video, he was taken into SocialCam’s Custom player, where the ripped YouTube video was played from Socialcam’s servers.

Herein lies the cleverness of the plan: Scraping and ripping stripped each video of its YouTube wrapping, or in the case of Vevo, its pre-roll advertising. So initially, users weren’t even aware they were watching YouTube videos. Socialcam systematically targeted a number of the most viral videos uploaded YouTube in the past four to five years, said sources, aiming to harness that viral success and bolster Socialcam’s network.

Why go to this trouble, especially since it’s against the terms of service to rip off the YouTube APIs? That risks sullying a relationship with a large and powerful online content powerhouse. Embedding the YouTube code within a Socialcam video instead of ripping YouTube’s content would comply with YouTube’s ToS. It’s also potential fodder to get its app booted from Facebook’s platform.

When asked if Socialcam was ripping YouTube videos, YouTube was cagey, only telling me this:

“While we don’t comment on individual cases, however, we take any violation of our open API’s Terms of Service seriously and take action against known abusers,” a spokesperson for YouTube told me.

A Facebook spokesperson concurred: “If it comes to our attention that an app is violating our policies, we will take action. We have no further details to share at this time.”

Vevo declined my request for comment.

Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel responded: “Socialcam has weekly and often daily interaction with the developer relations teams at both Facebook and Youtube. To the best of our knowledge, we are not violating the terms of service of either company.”

But what apparently happened, said sources, was that Socialcam got caught scraping and was told to knock it off. So to continue with its plan but stay compliant with Facebook and YouTube Terms of Service policies, Socialcam then began embedding the YouTube videos into Socialcam posts, effectively doing the same thing as before, only with the YouTube branding in place.

As of last week, nearly every top trending video on Socialcam’s site was a YouTube video.

Combine the viral nature of those YouTube videos with Facebook’s traffic-driving Open Graph, and you’ve got a recipe for success. If an app is integrated into Open Graph like Socialcam and Viddy are, using those apps publishes activity to three sections of Facebook: Timeline, Ticker and the News Feed. With every click, each user would broadcast the videos they had just watched, and that traffic fed on itself.

Despite the fact that social video on the whole received early initial traffic boosts by some yet-to-be-pinpointed variable, Socialcam was able to retain that traffic through proliferating YouTube videos throughout Facebook.

In a way, the guys behind Socialcam are brilliant, cracking a method of using YouTube and Facebook together to extend the app’s reach in a matter of weeks.

And it worked: The app still sits atop the App Store, using its Facebook viral success to boost download numbers immensely. It has soared beyond Viddy and other similar apps, most of which have been around much longer than Socialcam has.

Is All Fair in Apps and War?

And here’s the thing: Aside from the alleged initial screen-scraping, doing what Socialcam is currently doing isn’t breaking any rules.

Sure, its largest competitor, Viddy, is definitely not a fan of the practice. The company spent the past 18 months building its subscriber base out with user-generated content, not to mention raising tens of millions of dollars in venture funding in order to do so.

And Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien is making no bones about his discontent.

“Viddy is built on 100 percent community-generated original content, which we feel is the only way to build a true social community as Facebook, Instagram and others have done,” O’Brien told me in an interview, a thinly veiled slight at Socialcam’s YouTube video poaching. “Our active community of over 27 million Viddyographers is passionate about Viddy and is actively growing the community through sharing. Viddy is clearly filling a consumer need to easily create, beautify and share original video content.”

The problem for Viddy is, others are catching on. Of the top 10 fastest growing Facebook apps from the past week, half of them are social video apps. Most recently, Chill gained more than eight million users in as little as two weeks. All but Viddy use a mix of content, both user-generated and user-curated — although Socialcam still remains the most adept at working the larger ecosystem.

It seems, however, that in light of the recent negative press Socialcam has received, the company decided to tweak its app on Tuesday afternoon, incorporating a handful of subtle changes. YouTube videos are now labeled much more explicitly. A bug which kept users auto-sharing their videos to their feeds — whether they turned the option on or off — has been fixed. And now Socialcam’s “Trending Bar” — the one replete with YouTube videos — is gone from the site.

Still, as the social apps using these methods proliferate, it’ll only get harder for non-viral videos to rise to the top. According to one source, Facebook’s News Feed only allows for a certain percentage of its inventory devoted to video. The algorithm that determines which videos make it into that inventory is based on click-through rate, as well as the number of comments, likes and shares it received. Still, click-through rate weighs heavy on that scale.

In that case, it’s obvious that when Socialcam — and apps like it — seed Facebook with the most viral YouTube apps of all time, click-through rates and shares will skyrocket, and those apps will take a much larger portion of the video News Feed pie.

The question, then, becomes a philosophical one: Is it fair? Since Socialcam essentially cracked the video sharing code, does it not deserve its seat at the top of the charts?

That point remains contentious. As Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel told me, the company’s “simple goal is to allow users to create amazing videos and watch videos shared by their friends.” And as Seibel explained on Bloomberg West last week, “people want to see the videos that their friends are watching.”

But, if all that is being watched are the most viral videos Socialcam has seeded, are users not just watching what Socialcam directs them to?

The war isn’t over. Perhaps Facebook will tweak its algorithm to compensate for the types of videos. Or perhaps Socialcam and others like it will ride to the top on YouTube videos, then see an influx of user-generated content after reaching a critical mass of subscribers.

And again, like that old Valley adage goes — it’s all about the user base, right?

Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs will be the best or worst movie I’ve ever seen.

– Dan Frommer, via Twitter

“China Mobile and Apple both have the will to strengthen cooperation,” Chairman Xi Guohua said, according to Bloomberg. “When there is more specific news, we will disclose it.”

The company reportedly indicated that it is unclear whether a deal will be reached this year. An Apple representative was not immediately available for comment.

However, sources have said that a meeting with China Mobile was among the stops CEO Tim Cook made during a China trip earlier this year.

With roughly two-thirds-of-a-billion users, China Mobile is the biggest carrier in the world, as measured by number of customers. The company’s current 3G network doesn’t work with today’s iPhone, but a next-generation iPhone could well work with China Mobile’s 4G network, which is currently in a few spots.

China Mobile has also applied to offer service in the U.S., Reuters said, but it is unclear how well that bid will be received.

But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing.

If you’re a Facebook bull, those words sound reassuring. Facebook sold $3 billion worth of ads last year, and it’s just getting started. Imagine what happens when things really kick in.

But if you’re a skeptic, and there are lots of them, that uncertainity is a real problem. When Google went public in 2004, it had already built AdWords, the search ad engine that still generates the majority of its revenue today. Facebook doesn’t have an AdWords, so it doesn’t have a tried-and-true plan it can present to advertisers: Put dollars in here, see results over there.

Instead, Facebook marketers try different things over time. A few years back, they were all building Facebook apps. Then they started concentrating on amassing fans/followers. Now, digital marketing people tell me with confidence that all of that thinking is outmoded, and that the real Facebook pros are the ones who create “engaging content” on the site, then buy ads to “amplify” that message.

Facebook’s challenge gets even tougher because instead of search ads, whose success and failure are easy for advertisers to evaluate — Did someone click on my search ad? If they did, did they buy something or fill out a form once they got to my site? — Facebook aspires to the big branding dollars that advertisers spend on TV. And those are much harder to score. So convincing GM or anyone else to move big money from traditional ads, which marketers are at least comfortable with, to the wild world of social, requires a lot of work.

The good news for Facebook is that it’s so big that it might succeed even if it never cracks the social ad code. Any Web site with 900 million users and counting, who spend a ton of time there, is going to pull in a lot of ad dollars through sheer force of gravity. If Facebook can keep its users happy, it may get away with muddling through on the ad part.

But being a big, lumbering giant that attracts ad dollars without knowing what it’s doing isn’t the message Facebook wants to sell to advertisers. Or to investors.

OK, on to the “this isn’t that big of a deal” arguments. I’ve heard a bunch, all of which come from (different) people who don’t want to be quoted.

• Obviously there’s a backstory here. If GM didn’t want to keep advertising on Facebook, it didn’t have to announce that three days before an IPO.
• Big Fuel, GM’s social media ad agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in December. For the record, here’s a quote from a Big Fuel rep: “GM never seemed persuaded of the value of social media in general and Facebook likes in particular. In a sales-driven culture, it is very hard to wrap your head around putting money in places where you don’t see immediate results in an uptick in sales.”
• Starcom, GM’s media buying agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in January.
• How the heck did GM spend $3 on Facebook “content management” for every $1 it spent on Facebook ads, as the WSJ reports? That’s a sure sign that someone was doing something wrong.
• Ford loves Facebook.
• GM is pulling $10 million out of Facebook. Facebook did more than $3 billion in ads last year.

Again, all of those may be valid points.* But if Facebook really wants to allay outsiders’ fears, it needs to be able to prove conclusively that its ads work, in a scalable way, for a wide variety of advertisers. It can’t do that yet.

*I’m totally amazed by the $3-to-$1 ratio, and am wondering if it’s not to late to pivot myself into a “Facebook content creation consultant.” Those numbers also remind me very much of the late 90s, when companies like Organic went public based on the fact that they knew how to build Web sites and their clients didn’t, and they could charge accordingly. That didn’t last long.

One consequence, in the eyes of these Microsoft executives, is to confer an advantage on the company’s main operating-system rival, Apple.

Now, Microsoft is doing something about the situation. In a program unknown to most computer users, the company has been using its small chain of retail stores and its online computer store to sell customized versions of popular PC models that have been streamlined for a cleaner look and better performance. It calls these machines “Signature” PCs. They retain the maker’s brand, but sport a special Signature desktop and configuration. And they cost about the same as the identical stock version of the machine sold elsewhere.

Microsoft also offers a program that, for $99, will turn users’ Windows 7 PCs into Signature versions, if the owner brings the computer into one of its 16 stores, due to grow to 21 outlets in coming months. All Signature computers come with 90 days of free phone support, as well as help at the stores’ “Answer Desks,” which are like the Genius Bars at Apple stores.

I’ve been testing three Signature models and comparing them with the same machines as sold elsewhere without the Signature modifications. I found the Signature versions much cleaner and easier to navigate and faster in a variety of tests.

A Folio 13 model PC desktop, as shipped by Hewlett-Packard, shows a cluster of third-party software icons.

I’d recommend that prospective Windows PC buyers who live near a Microsoft store, which are mostly in the West, or are willing to shop at the company’s online store, consider a Signature machine. Information on store locations, as well as a link to online PC shopping from Microsoft, is at microsoftstore.com. Information on Signature is at signature.microsoft.com.

Some important caveats are in order. The hardware makers presumably believe, and some consumers may well agree, that the extra software, utilities and settings, which Microsoft removes or buries, are beneficial. Some of these, like offers to join game or music services, may be viewed as welcome bonuses. Others, like customized networking utilities, or launchers for the PC makers’ own media software, may be viewed as better matched to the hardware, or superior to Microsoft’s approach, even though they duplicate Windows functions. Many can be turned off, or removed, by a user with sufficient skill and time.

Also, Microsoft loads Signature machines with its own add-on software, such as its free email, photo and video programs, its Zune music and video program, and a stripped-down “Starter” version of Microsoft Office, that includes only Word and Excel, plus ads, and an offer to buy the full version.

However, the company says the stores will remove any of these a customer doesn’t want and even help the customer install competing software, such as Google’s Chrome browser, or Apple’s iTunes for Windows.

The same PC as sold by Microsoft in its Signature configuration.

At my request, Microsoft supplied me with before-and-after laptops from Hewlett-Packard, Sony and Samsung. Over the past few days, I’ve been comparing the stock and Signature versions, and testing how much time it takes to set them up, start them and restart them in daily use, resume them from sleep, and shut them down.

The Signature desktop, which is labeled “Microsoft Signature,” features a picture of a sunset over a lake as its wallpaper. It contains no icons other than the recycling bin. The Taskbar contains only icons for Internet Explorer, the Explorer file browser, and Microsoft’s free email, photo and moviemaking programs. The system tray, to the right of the Taskbar, contains only the bare minimum of items, such as the network and battery indicators.

Signature machines are also configured with battery, audio and touch-pad settings Microsoft considers optimal. The usual third-party security software—which is typically provided for only 30 to 90 days, makes you go through some setup, and nags you to subscribe—is replaced by Microsoft’s own Security Essentials program, which is free, required no registration or subscription and updates itself automatically.

By contrast, my test HP Folio 13 had eight icons besides the recycling bin, including several that were come-ons for music and game services. It also featured several HP utilities.

A Sony EH37FX included an app from Best Buy that launched every time the PC started (though you could turn this off). Both stock machines festooned the IE browser with two space-hogging toolbars, including one from Microsoft’s own Bing search service; the Signature machine had none.

The Samsung Series 7 I tested came with 10 extra icons and a bunch of special utilities.

Signature isn’t the same on every machine. In most cases, it strips out some of the added software and utilities, and retains others, but hides them in a folder buried in the Start Menu. In some cases, however, where a utility is deemed essential for a computer’s particular hardware, it retains these.

Such decisions, and indeed all of the Signature settings, are controlled by a team of engineers housed in Microsoft’s retail division.

In my speed tests, Signature beat all the stock machines on all my trials, but the margins weren’t dramatic, usually from a few seconds to 25 seconds. On the HP, the differences were especially minimal. Across all three machines, the biggest differences were the time it took to set the PC up out of the box and the time it took to shut down the PC.

One Microsoft official told me that Signature represents “Microsoft’s perspective on Windows,” rather than that of the hardware maker.

In my opinion, although it may generally benefit Microsoft at the expense of the hardware maker, it also makes for a better experience for the user.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120515/microsoft-gives-windows-a-clean-sweep/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120515/shipments-of-htc-one-x-evo-4g-lte-delayed-over-customs-concerns/ http://allthingsd.com/20120515/shipments-of-htc-one-x-evo-4g-lte-delayed-over-customs-concerns/#comments Wed, 16 May 2012 00:59:40 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=208709 HTC confirmed late on Tuesday that availability of two of its latest smartphones will be delayed, as U.S. Customs ensures the phones aren’t in violation of an International Trade Commission exclusion order.

“The US availability of the HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE has been delayed due to a standard U.S. Customs review of shipments that is required after an ITC exclusion order,” HTC said in a statement to AllThingsD. “We believe we are in compliance with the ruling and HTC is working closely with Customs to secure approval. The HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE have been received enthusiastically by customers and we appreciate their patience as we work to get these products into their hands as soon as possible.”

HTC has been in a patent battle with Apple, which won an exclusion order late last year for certain HTC phones.

The HTC One X is bound for AT&T, while the HTC Evo 4G LTE is headed to Sprint and was due to go on sale on Friday.

Sprint declined to comment beyond HTC’s statement. An AT&T spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

HTC has been counting on its One line (along with the Evo for Sprint and a new Droid Incredible model for Verizon) to help it regain its footing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120515/shipments-of-htc-one-x-evo-4g-lte-delayed-over-customs-concerns/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120515/jetsetters-founder-and-ceo-drew-patterson-suddenly-asked-to-step-down/ http://allthingsd.com/20120515/jetsetters-founder-and-ceo-drew-patterson-suddenly-asked-to-step-down/#comments Wed, 16 May 2012 00:28:36 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=208676 Drew Patterson founder and CEO of Jetsetter, has stepped down from his position as head of the high-end luxury discount sales travel site owned by Gilt Groupe.

Patterson’s departure was first reported by Betabeat and confirmed by a Jetsetter spokeswoman, who added that he was asked to step down because of staffing issues and low morale — not because of the company’s operations.

Clearly, there are signs of trouble in paradise: This time, pretty pictures of luxurious vacations in exotic locations like Turks & Caicos can’t cover up what’s really going on at the New York-based start-up. Prior to Patterson’s departure, a handful of executives left, including Jetsetter’s chief marketing officer, Barry Herstein; VP of merchandising and operations Heather Leisman; and former head of marketing Stephanie Dolgins, Betabeat reported.

Rob Deeming, who has been at Gilt for the past three years, and recently was in charge of opening Jetsetter’s U.K. office, will become acting general manager.

Betabeat, which interviewed Gilt’s CEO Kevin Ryan about the executive shake-up, also reported that the travel division has faced other problems with getting its international operations up and running, and that it was burning a ton of cash. However, the company claims that Jetsetter is on track to record $100 million in gross bookings this year, and to be profitable next year.

This is not the first internal shake-up at Gilt Groupe, which earlier this year trimmed roughly 10 percent of its employees, including some of its management team. At the time, Ryan downplayed the situation by saying that the cuts were designed to get the company to cash-flow positive by the second quarter, and profitable by the fourth quarter. But other reports painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

Prior to Jetsetter, Patterson was part of the founding team at Kayak, where he was VP of marketing.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120515/jetsetters-founder-and-ceo-drew-patterson-suddenly-asked-to-step-down/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120515/quote-saving-app-banters-to-shut-down-founders-jump-to-betaworks/ http://allthingsd.com/20120515/quote-saving-app-banters-to-shut-down-founders-jump-to-betaworks/#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 23:42:16 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=208661 After struggling to attract a significant user base over the past year, conversation-saving app Banters is closing up shop, co-founder Lauren Leto announced via company blog on Tuesday. Leto and partner Patrick Moberg had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from the likes of Chris Dixon, Khosla Ventures and SV Angel. The two will join Betaworks — Leto as general manager of the firm’s Findings product and Moberg as a “hacker-in-residence.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120515/quote-saving-app-banters-to-shut-down-founders-jump-to-betaworks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120515/bing-goes-sleek-and-more-social/ http://allthingsd.com/20120515/bing-goes-sleek-and-more-social/#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 22:43:47 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=208634 If you’ve ever cleaned off a cluttered desk, replacing messy stacks of paper with framed photos of people who really matter, you have a rough idea of what Microsoft did with its new Bing search engine this week. Gone are the distracting, multicolored search results. Gone are the lists of recently searched terms that you never looked at anyway. Gone are the search results mingled with Facebook “likes.”

What’s left? A lot of white space, which creates a calmer environment for reading and digesting information. A new middle column, which Microsoft calls Snapshot, displays task-oriented content to help people do things like making restaurant reservations, getting directions or seeing movie times. And Bing’s most unusual new feature is a flush-right column called Sidebar designed to automatically surface names of relevant Facebook friends and others around the Web who could best help you with a specific query.

Bing’s Snapshot column helps users do things like make a hotel reservation. Its Sidebar column, far right, shows friends who may have answers to help with a person’s current search.

The new Bing is automatically available to about 20% of users starting Tuesday. If you’re not one of the 20%, you can see the new interface and Sidebar on Bing.com/new. By June 1, all features will be automatically available to everyone.

I’ve had access to this revamped Bing for the past week, and its prospects are promising. It feels cleaner and clearer. Sidebar’s integrated social knowledge of friends linked to Bing through a person’s Facebook account—or people from Twitter and blogs who are suggested by Bing—can turn the solitude of Web searching into a group activity. For example, a search for Napa Valley restaurants smartly brings up the name of a friend who recently posted a photo album from Napa, a colleague who lists Napa Valley as his hometown as well as a well-known blogger who reviews restaurants in that area. Sidebar maintains a neat list of your queries and the responses, saving you the trouble of hunting through past Facebook posts.

Compared with the way Google integrated Google+ “personal results” with regular search results—which ruffled a lot of feathers—Sidebar is more sophisticated.

But Bing’s Sidebar faces a challenge: People aren’t used to searching like this.

As fun as it is to poll people—even specifically suggested people—in queries, we usually search alone. Many of the things I type into Bing are quick ask-a-question-get-an-answer searches, and Sidebar’s format requires waiting for someone’s response. It’s possible that it just takes time to adjust to this new way of searching, but I’m comfortable with the Web sources that I already know and trust. (No offense, Facebook friends.)

Additional partners, including LinkedIn, Foursquare and Quora, will eventually be included to help with queries in Bing’s Sidebar. Some of these will work later this summer. For now, Twitter provides the biggest source of people from around the Web who might know the answer to your query.

Bing will continue to make improvements, according to Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing search. By late June or early July, you’ll be able to tag friends in queries even if Bing doesn’t suggest those people as relevant to a query. This would have helped me when I searched for restaurants in Boston, where my foodie sister has lived for 11 years, though she didn’t automatically appear as a suggested source. Then again, when I searched for a Mexican restaurant in Kirkland, Wash., called Cactus, a friend who “liked” another Mexican restaurant in nearby Seattle popped up in my Sidebar.

I didn’t realize this friend had ever visited Seattle or that he enjoyed one of Seattle’s Mexican restaurants enough to “like” it on Facebook. These helpful, serendipitous experiences may be enough to keep people using the Bing Sidebar.

Bing’s Sidebar queries currently have a clumsy way of working with Facebook. If I query three people who are auto-suggested as friends who might know the answer to my question, the query only shows up on my Facebook page, not on the pages of people who were questioned. They must visit my Facebook page to see responses, an extra step that may discourage ongoing conversations. An Activity feed in the Bing Sidebar shows all Facebok friends’ query activity, but people look at Facebook more often.

The middle column of the rebuilt Bing, called Snapshot, doesn’t always display content. When it does, it is geared toward helping people accomplish specific tasks, like booking a hotel room or restaurant table. In a search for the Oval Room, a Washington, D.C., restaurant, Snapshot showed a map of its location, four ratings from websites like TripAdvisor, hours of operation and a link to OpenTable for making a reservation.

A shrunk-down version of this new Bing—including its cleaner look, Snapshot and Sidebar—will be available this week to run on smartphones including Windows Phone, Apple’s iPhone, Android phones and RIM’s BlackBerrys. Microsoft says it will work on tablets by early July.

The new Bing is sure to get people talking—and its Sidebar is likely to tell you something you didn’t know about a friend that may or may not help you make a decision. But until it gets more accurate and more partners, I’ll use Sidebar like a side dish: It won’t make a big impact on my overall search experience.

Write to Katie at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120515/bing-goes-sleek-and-more-social/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120515/netsuite-turns-commerce-into-a-cloud-service/ http://allthingsd.com/20120515/netsuite-turns-commerce-into-a-cloud-service/#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 22:30:16 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=208593 As services in the cloud have taken hold, we’ve become accustomed to seeing a lot of products marketed as X-as-a-service. The first one, or at least the first such example of which I was aware, was software-as-a-service, the approach popularized by cloud computing pioneer Salesforce.com.

Other examples that have punctured my attention bubble in recent years are platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service, and there are probably many more. Then they get turned into ever-weirder acroynyms: Saas, PaaS, Iaas. You get the idea.

Today, Netsuite, the cloud player whose traditional approach is essentially to run your business from the cloud, today contributed its own new thing offered as a service: Commerce. (Cue the acronym: CaaS.)

One of the big things that businesses have to do is buy and sell goods and services from other businesses. The most basic example is that widget makers have to buy cardboard boxes from a supplier, because the goods don’t show up on the loading dock by magic. The same goes for every bit of physical stuff a business needs and also the services it pays for to keep its operations running smoothly.

Netsuite isn’t just managing the back-end business-to-business commerce, but also the direct-to-customer type of commerce. And the experience works pretty much anywhere a customer may be coming from: On a phone, tablet or PC, in a store or on social media.

As customers have essentially come to expect to be able to buy anything and everything online, the traditional back-end commerce engines like Microsoft Dynamics, Great Plains, Sage and even SAP were imperfectly combined with patchwork solutions for selling on the Web. And the bits of the system that faced customers have rarely if ever been unified with the ones that also face suppliers, which has a way of complicating things like inventory, the supply chain and everything else that stems from basic ebb and flow of supply and demand.

And things are getting even more complicated as machines are programmed to automatically buy things from other machines based on a pre-defined set of circumstances.

NetSuite has built what it calls a commerce engine — dubbed SuiteCommerce — that speaks directly to the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) functions that are already its bread and butter. In English that means that the new engine comes into the process already knowing what everything is, and also who everyone is. That makes it ready to wheel and deal not only with customers but also with suppliers. And when you get down to it, that’s a good way to reduce a lot of friction in any business, which is pretty much what cloud computing is supposed to be about.

The commerce service was probably the biggest news to come out of Netsuite’s SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco today, where CEO Zach Nelson (pictured) gave a keynote address. The company also announced a partnership with Square, the maker of little white credit-card reading thingies that you can insert into an iPhone or iPad for the purpose of accepting payment. Square’s Register application has been integrated with SuiteCommerce, so if you see more businesses using Squares, maybe this has something to do with it.

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