“At Twitter, The Future is You!” is described as an internal Hackweek project to “make the best/worst recruiting video of all time.” It does indeed manage to be both laugh-worthy and cringe-worthy. (Bonus: Watch Twitter CEO Dick Costolo try to keep a straight face.)

By the way, this isn’t Twitter’s first witty recruiting video, though one from two years ago was more “Rushmore” where this is more “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”

Earlier today, Harvard University and New Enterprise Associates announced the Experiment Fund, aimed at making sure that future Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates can stay on campus and innovate without having to head West.

The irony of the pair of legendary entrepreneurs dropping out — decades apart — of the even more legendary university to start two of tech most significant companies, Facebook and Microsoft.

No longer, apparently.

The early-stage incubator, which will award funding to four to six start-ups in amounts from $250,000 to $500,000. It will focus on early stage ventures in the area around Harvard, which includes many other schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Experiment Fund was co-founded by Cherry Murray, the dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Its faculty members will advise for the fund, but the university has no financial stake.

In an interview NEA’s Patrick Chung said the intent was to enable talented students to “build a company here in Boston rather than have to go elsewhere.”

NEA will have full-time staffers working on the fund, investing in a wide range of companies. It has already backed a health app company, as well as a live Internet television offering.

“There has been an envy of the left coast, certainly,” said Chung. “Now, these talented engineers don’t have to leave when they reach the boundaries of the university where the ideas are formed.”

Added Chung: “They can walk right out of class and into a place that can make those start-ups real.”

Let’s hope the third time’s a charm.

Here’s the map and official press release:

XFund press release

“Save money and unlock rewards” based on stuff you and your friends like. Now that sounds like a pretty interesting service.

And one that makes a whole lot more sense than “You’re supposed to ‘check in’ when you go some place. And also you might get a ‘badge’ or something,” which is where Fourquare has been for most of the past three years.

Of course, during that time Foursquare has racked up plenty of gaudy growth statistics, and big piles of VC money, and seems to have fended off would-be competitors from Gowalla to Facebook to Google. So you could argue that they’ve been communicating just fine, thank you very much.

But even though everyone you know knows about Foursquare, 15 million users — and a much smaller, and undisclosed, number of active users — isn’t close to a full-on mainstream service. So this kind of messaging is important as the company tries to grow into something much bigger.

Also important: Actually delivering on the promise of the video above. The idea is that you give Foursquare lots of data about what you like and what you do, and it offers up value to you in return, in the form of suggestions, or deals, etc.

We’re starting to see glimpses of that now, but my sense is that this is still more aspirational than anything else, and that Foursquare’s management and backers agree. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, in a meta post where he comments about someone else’s comment about his video, hints that there’s much more to come. Fun to watch.

The piece elicited a variety of reactions — even Roger Ebert seems to think it might be too late to learn a new keyboard. I also received a fair number of follow-up emails pointing out some interesting technologies that I’d missed.

So here are some other options for the touchscreen-averse:

Talk Emo to Me

A company called Siine is trying make touchscreen typing even quicker by replacing words or entire phrases with emoticons.

The Siine Writer app is based on editable icons. Each icon, or “Siine,” is supposed to convey three different words or phrases, depending on how many times the user taps it.

So, instead of typing out a text-laden message, users tap a series of visual cues that send the message to the person on the receiving end.

Users make the Siines by downloading the app from the Android market, going to the emoticon screen, holding down an emoticon and selecting “create,” to assign a new picture, a name and the corresponding text for the emoticon. After that, the Siine emoticon will appear on the user’s keyboard.

It’s a pretty nifty idea, though there would likely still be a need to enter text for more random words, and words used less frequently.

Siine is based in London and Barcelona; the company launched in 2007, and received funding last February from Atomico, the VC firm of Niklas Zennstrom, best known for co-founding Skype.

The free app is available in both English and Spanish for devices running Android OS. There’s also a tablet version of the app, available exclusively from Samsung Apps; at the moment, there isn’t a Siine app available for iPhone or iPad.

The Next Productivity Killer at Work

Here’s a familiar sequence of events: You’re typing away at your desk, and your phone pings — loudly — alerting you and the rest of the office to the fact that you’ve got a message. You’re in the middle of doing work, so you ignore it. But you don’t, really: You glance at your phone’s interface, quickly, just to check. But, wait — it’s your friend, asking if you want in on tickets that are going to sell out in exactly 47 seconds. Or it’s your significant other, asking if you could meet the handyman at the apartment. Or it’s your mom. You simply have to respond.

What if you could just keep typing on your desktop keyboard — and still respond to your urgent calls?

That’s the kind of keyboard Matias has come up with.

The Canada-based company uses Bluetooth technology to wirelessly connect your phone to your keyboard and toggle between your desktop screen and phone — you’re still typing on your keyboard, but the text is appearing on the screen of your smartphone. (Here’s a video from CES that shows how this works, courtesy of Engadget.)

There are three Matias models — the $79 Slim One Keyboard, the $99 One Keyboard and the $199 Tactile One Keyboard — and all of them work on both PCs and Macs. The One and the Slim One are available now; the Tactile One will begin shipping in May.

The cheapest model, the Slim One, does not include a hub for your phone. The $99 One Keyboard includes a USB 2.0 hub and in-keyboard stand to hold your phone. The $199 Tactile One Keyboard has all of that, plus Alps mechanical key switches, which means there are real switches under each key.

And for those of you who wrote to me and suggested the Dvorak style of keyboard as an alternative to the traditional keyboard layout — Matias also makes a Dvorak keyboard for PCs and Mac computers.

Projecting Into the Future

We’ve seen at least one example of a laser-projection device that can create a keyboard out of any opaque surface. But what if you could make a keyboard out of any surface? What if you could make a keyboard … out of thin air?

MicroVision, a company specializing in laser-display technology, announced earlier this month the availability of its new laser-display engine, the PicoP Gen 2 HD laser display (the company’s patented display, PicoP, is actually the tech behind OmniTouch, mentioned in the previous article.)

The Gen 2 display takes it a step further: MicroVision’s PicoP Gen 2 can turn any projected image into a virtual touchscreen, regardless of the surface it’s being projected onto — or whether there’s even any surface at all. The PicoP Gen 2 HD laser display engine boasts 720p HD image projection and interactive displays up to 200 inches diagonal. MicroVision also announced technology for 3-D projectors, which could project 3-D images from a small display device.

While this kind of technology might have a more obvious place in the gaming market, it can also be used in conjunction with mobile devices to allow users to “step away from the screen.”

The company is emphasizing that this is still a prototype; MicroVision expects to begin sending samples to selected manufacturers for testing sometime early this year.

(There aren’t any images of this technology being deployed, so you’ll just have to imagine that keyboard in thin air for now.)

Forget the Keyboard — It’s All About Voice

Still other readers threw the four-letter word at me. Not that one. They were talking about Siri — and her competitors — saying they believe that touchscreen technologies, tactile or otherwise, are all moot because of the emergence of voice-command technology. Voice recognition is now in smartphones, gaming consoles and “smart” TV sets; is it only a matter of time before we’re dictating everything to our computer screens?

Rakuten is set on challenging Amazon’s global dominance by appealing to the third-party merchants Amazon works with today and by growing it’s digital content business to compete with the Kindle.

We recently learned about the company’s strategy through the eyes of Neel Grover, the CEO of Buy.com, Rakuten’s online shopping subsidiary in the U.S.

For now, Rakuten is admittedly Amazon’s much smaller competitor, though it is dominant in Japan.

The publicly held company is worth $14.5 billion compared to Amazon’s $85 billion market capitalization, and it pales in comparison to Amazon’s mass in the U.S. Buy.com is ranked 410th here versus Amazon’s sixth-place standing, according to Compete.

But Grover said Rakuten has a two-part plan for going up against Amazon.

First, it will target and partner with third-party resellers and merchants.

Amazon does this, too, but often ends up competing with the merchants because it has its own warehouses and products that it is selling, he said.

“Oftentimes Amazon will compete with the retailer. [Third-party merchants] teach Amazon what to buy and sell, which is ultimately not good for the merchant,” he said.

Rakuten, on the other hand, does not own any warehouses or any inventory itself and instead gives retailers — brick and mortar or e-commerce — the tools and traffic to support their own businesses.

In May 2010, Rakuten acquired Buy.com.

“I sought out Rakuten. … I thought their model was one that would give us a unique differentiator in the U.S. and we could learn and bring their model to our site and customers,” Grover said. “We are still in the final stages of transforming, and it’s taken a bit of time to get it transformed.”

But, he confidently added, “It will win out in the long-term.”

A similar approach is being taken by eBay, another e-commerce giant in the U.S.

The second part of Rakuten’s plan is to go after Amazon’s growing digital business, spanning music, e-books and other content.

In November, the Japanese company purchased Kobo, a runner-up in the e-reader race behind the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. It paid $315 million in cash for the Canadian company.

Rakuten is banking on the Kobo in assisting with its move into providing downloadable media to consumers, starting with e-books.

At the time of the acquisition, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis told All Things D that Rakuten will give Kobo the financial backing to grow internationally, as well as compete in the U.S.

“The U.S. is absolutely important. It’s fundamental. We have millions of U.S. users today, and we plan to grow that substantially, and internationally it represents a big opportunity as well,” he said.

Earlier this month, Buy.com started linking to Kobo from its site, so that consumers have the option of buying a physical copy of a book or a digital version. Other integration efforts are also under way.

It also wants to get into other digital content, like music. Back in 1999, Buy.com was one of the original sites to have a digital music store, but Grover said it was a pretty poor experience because of all the restrictions that record labels were mandating. A lot of that has now changed.

“We are definitely looking as a group at all digital content. … We are looking at different solutions, but today we have not continued on with our initial music store,” he said.

As with Kobo and Buy.com, acquisitions are always an option, he said.

“We’ll continue to look at everything that would make our business better. It hasn’t been shy over the past two years. We have a global vision to create an e-commerce marketplace offering all goods, and we continue to see that grow.”

And going up against Amazon, some serious growth is what Rakuten and Buy.com will need.

Facebook could file papers for the IPO as early as this coming Wednesday, but that timing is still being discussed, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is currently looking at a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion, this person said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Asa Mathat | AllThingsD.com

Why leave Hewlett-Packard now?

A few months before we shipped the TouchPad, I told Todd Bradley (executive vice president of HP’s Personal Systems Group) that once we shipped I wanted to move on. And he asked me to stay for a while in an advisory role and to help out with the transition to webOS and brainstorming about the directions of PSG, so I told him I’d stick around. And I did. And now there’s a path for webOS and PSG has its path and it’s time for me to move on. This has been in the works for quite some time.

What are your thoughts on webOS as it exists today? Do you think HP made the right call open sourcing it?

Do I think HP made the right call open sourcing it? Versus what? (laughs) You know, we always developed Enyo so it could be open sourced because we saw it as a very powerful cross-development platform. The future is clearly Web-based apps. And some people don’t get that, and I certainly understand, but that is the reality. And, frankly, we were way ahead of our time. WebOS is a great piece of work and really it’s just beginning.

Okay, assuming that’s the case, what does the future look like for webOS?

Well, if HP invests in it the way it says it’s going to and they can build a community around it — and that’s not just people developing for the platform, but other companies using it — it will do well.

Can anyone break through the Apple/Google lock on the smartphone market?

The smartphone market’s a tough one, because it’s controlled by the carriers in a lot of ways. So it really depends on what the carriers do. The route to market isn’t controlled by consumers, it’s controlled by carriers.

What went wrong with TouchPad? Clearly, it wasn’t the resounding success for which you’d hoped.

Well, it wasn’t exactly given much time to find out. But I really don’t want to rehash all that. There’s really no point.

Do you regret selling to HP?

This wasn’t something where I had an opinion. The process was very carefully crafted, as all aquisition processes are, and HP is the one that won the process. I don’t get an opinion on the subject; I never did.

What are your plans for the next year?

I spent the past few years working really hard on webOS and working really hard on turning Palm around and getting it into good enough shape where someone would want to buy it, so I’m going to take a break.

So are you retiring?

No. I’m going to spend some time with my family and think about what to do next. Who knows what I’ll do. Anything’s possible.

FURTHER READING:

• Former Palm Head Jon Rubinstein Leaves Hewlett-Packard
• With HP’s Raising of the World’s Biggest White Flag, Will Jon Rubinstein and Todd Bradley Surrender Too?
• HP and webOS: But They Seemed So Happy Together!
• Another Day, Another Shake-Up at Hewlett-Packard
• Exclusive: Palm Boss Talks Past, Future of WebOS
• Palm Boss Jon Rubinstein: We Still Have a Chance to be a Major Player
• Palm Chief: By Birthright, Palm Should Have Owned the Smartphone Market
• Palm CEO Jon “Ruby” Rubinstein Talks About the HP Deal
• Who Will Buy Palm? If Not HTC, How About HP?
• Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein: I’ve Never Used an iPhone
• Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein: The Full D7 Session
• Guess That’s What You Call a “Pre” Forma Loss, Eh?
• Palm’s New Pilot: Jon Rubinstein

Rubinstein is said to have no immediate plans, and had completed a 12- to 24-month commitment to stay with HP after the acquisition. “Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well,” HP spokeswoman Mylene Mangalindan said.

In a brief comment to AllThingsD, Rubinstein said, “I am going to take a well deserved break after four and a half years of developing webOS.”

Best known for his work on Apple’s iconic iPod music player, Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and joined Roger McNamee as a partner in the private equity firm Elevation Partners, following its 2007 investments in Palm.

In 2009 he replaced longtime Palm executive Ed Colligan as its CEO, and oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the company’s products, including a significant rebuild of its smartphone operating system. Gone was the legacy PalmOS that had been used in so many popular devices like the Treo that for a time competed seriously against Research In Motion’s Blackberry.

PalmOS was replaced by WebOS, which first appeared on the Pre smartphone, then later on the Pixi and Veer devices. After HP acquired Palm, WebOS was also used on the abandoned TouchPad tablet, and is now an open source operating system overseen by HP.

Rubinstein’s departure is no big surprise. Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware. His future plans have been the subject of speculation for some time.

After HP decided to exit the WebOS hardware business, Rubinstein was assigned to a vaguely described “product innovation role” within HP’s Personal Systems Group during a management shakeup last July. It was an unusual move and one made with little explanation at the time. But sources say it was a preface to Rubinstein’s departure, one intended to lessen its PR impact when he finally left. “That ‘innovation’ gig he was given in July was his first step toward the exit,” said one source, a former Palm exec with close ties to Rubinstein.

Here’s the video of Rubinstein’s onstage interview at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco in December 2010.

FURTHER READING:

• Rubinstein Interview: With webOS Transition Under Way, It Was Time to Leave HP
• With HP’s Raising of the World’s Biggest White Flag, Will Jon Rubinstein and Todd Bradley Surrender Too?
• HP and webOS: But They Seemed So Happy Together!
• Another Day, Another Shake-Up at Hewlett-Packard
• Exclusive: Palm Boss Talks Past, Future of WebOS
• Palm Boss Jon Rubinstein: We Still Have a Chance to be a Major Player
• Palm Chief: By Birthright, Palm Should Have Owned the Smartphone Market
• Palm CEO Jon “Ruby” Rubinstein Talks About the HP Deal
• Who Will Buy Palm? If Not HTC, How About HP?
• Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein: I’ve Never Used an iPhone
• Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein: The Full D7 Session
• Guess That’s What You Call a “Pre” Forma Loss, Eh?
• Palm’s New Pilot: Jon Rubinstein

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/former-palm-head-jon-rubinstein-leaves-hewlett-packard/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/apple-ceo-any-suggestion-that-we-dont-care-about-supply-chain-workers-is-patently-false/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/apple-ceo-any-suggestion-that-we-dont-care-about-supply-chain-workers-is-patently-false/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:20:47 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=168233 Apple cares about every worker in its supply chain, and any suggestion to the contrary is untrue. That’s the gist of the all-hands email sent to Apple employees today by CEO Tim Cook, who’s taken exception to a New York Times report claiming working conditions at the company’s overseas manufacturing partners are still sorely lacking.

In the message, first published by 9to5Mac, Cook says Apple is not “ignoring the human cost” of its supply chain, and dismisses accusations that it is complicit in worker abuse as mendacious.

“We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern,” Cook wrote. “Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are.”

And for evidence of that, one need only look at Apple’s supplier-responsibility efforts. If there are problems at overseas suppliers, says Cook, no one is doing more than Apple to prevent them.

“Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain,” Cook explained. “As we reported earlier this month, we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.”

Which is probably true. Apple has been conducting supplier-responsibility audits and issuing reports on them for years now. And it recently became the first tech company to join the Fair Labor Association, which will serve as an independent auditor for its supply chain.

That said, there’s still a lot more to be done, and Apple could likely do it. With the $13 billion in profits it reported earlier this week, and that $97 billion in cash it’s sitting on, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

As a former Apple executive told the New York Times, “Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

An overly simplistic argument, I suppose. The solutions to these issues are far more complex than threats over contracts. But again, more could be done. And not just by Apple. There are plenty of other big consumer electronics companies using offshore labor. And ultimately, the biggest driver of these issues isn’t Apple or HP, but our own buying habits.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/apple-ceo-any-suggestion-that-we-dont-care-about-supply-chain-workers-is-patently-false/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/like-sports-on-cable-pay-up-dont-like-sports-on-cable-pay-up-anyway/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/like-sports-on-cable-pay-up-dont-like-sports-on-cable-pay-up-anyway/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:39:15 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=168176 It’s been a couple years since we last took a detailed look at the way your cable dollars get split up. Takeaway from our 2010 review: You pay a whole lot of money for sports TV, whether you like it or not.

Let’s take another peek, courtesy of SNL Kagan and Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente, who has an updated list of wholesale prices by channel* (the list on the right is for ad rates, which we can ignore for the purposes of this story):

Takeaway from today’s chart: Nothing has really changed — you’re still paying a lot for sports, and you’re paying a lot for ESPN.

That’s why Disney’s sports channel is the most valuable asset on your cable dial. And it’s also why you’ve been hearing increasing grumbling — from both customers and ESPN’s non-sports cable competitors — about ESPN’s drag on your cable bill. (We’ll talk to new ESPN boss John Skipper about this topic next week at Dive Into Media.)

As I’ve noted before, the odds are that this doesn’t change anytime soon: Disney and ESPN can charge that much because the cable guys, like Comcast, think the programming is worth it to their customer base. And they’re signing up long-term deals that will keep that fee structure in place for the next decade.

But there is a chance that a “virtual” cable operator, using the Web, decides to offer a package that doesn’t include ESPN. They could either use that unspent money to lower customers’ bills, or plow it into other programming.

Again, this will also mean that subscribers couldn’t get any Disney programming, because Bob Iger has zero interest in splitting up the bundle. But I know of a few folks who have at least contemplated the idea.

So what about that “over the top” option, anyway? Some industry observers, like BTIG’s Rich Greenfield, are sure that someone — Apple, Google, Verizon, who knows — will offer one this year. Today, Bernstein’s Craig Moffett has a long essay describing why that won’t happen for a long time, if ever. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said something similar this week, alluding to the fact that Microsoft has reportedly bailed on its Web TV subscription plans.

*The 2012 chart omits regional cable channels, which is why Fox Sports Net has disappeared in the new chart. I don’t know why the new one includes outliers like 3net, a 3-D channel that isn’t widely available (and/or relevant, as best I can tell).

[Image: ESPN]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/like-sports-on-cable-pay-up-dont-like-sports-on-cable-pay-up-anyway/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/facebook-police-timeline-violations-will-not-be-tolerated/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/facebook-police-timeline-violations-will-not-be-tolerated/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:00:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=168087

This Jimmy Kimmel mocking of Facebook’s requirement that everyone move next week to the social networking site’s Timeline profile is simply hilarious and unmissable.

The “friend your momma” requirement in the video is my favorite:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/facebook-police-timeline-violations-will-not-be-tolerated/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/cisco-fellow-bruce-davie-joines-steath-startup-nicira/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/cisco-fellow-bruce-davie-joines-steath-startup-nicira/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:56:48 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=168117 It has been a while since we heard any rumblings from the super-secret stealth networking start-up Nicira. When last seen, the company — backed by investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA, plus personal investments from VMWare founder Diane Greene and venture capitalist Andy Rachleff — had just hired Alan Cohen from Cisco Systems as its vice president of marketing.

I’m told Nicira has just made another key hire, again from Cisco Systems. Bruce Davie, a longtime Cisco employee and a Cisco Fellow, has joined Nicira as its Chief Service Provider Architect.

Davie is pretty well known in networking circles, and is one of the co-inventors of MPLS, or multiprotocol label switching, which is a fundamental basis for the high-end business class Internet service that many carriers deliver.

Davie joined Cisco in 1995, and has been a Cisco Fellow since 1998. Since 1997, he has worked in the Internet Technologies Division at Cisco, and leads a group that represents the company before the Internet Engineering Task Force. If there’s anyone who truly understands how the Internet’s pipes really work, he’s probably among them.

Before Cisco, Davie worked at Bellcore, a.k.a. Bell Communications Research, the old research and development arm of the regional phone companies, or “Baby Bells,” that resulted from the 1982 court-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. Bellcore is still around; it eventually became Telcordia and ended up in the hands of Swedish telecom concern Ericsson, in a deal that closed earlier this month.

Davie has a B.E. from Melbourne University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Edinburgh University. He is the author of three books on networking, and lots of technical papers. He is also an active participant on both the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Research Task Force; a senior member of the IEEE; and has, in recent years, been a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Davie would appear to be the eighth person at Nicira (by my likely incomplete count) with a Cisco connection. Its CEO is Steve Mullaney, a veteran networking executive who has worked at Palo Alto Networks, ShoreTel and Cisco. Its CTO and co-founder, Martin Casado, did his Ph.D. on the technology the company plans to bring to market. Its other founders, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, are electrical engineering profs at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively. Last January, the outfit also hired Rob Enns, a veteran of Juniper Networks, as its VP of engineering.

There’s still no official word about what Nicira is doing, but all these hires are making it look ever more interesting by the day. Nicira is working on technology aimed at “virtualizing the network.” Data center networks today are too inflexible, complex and costly, especially in the age of the cloud, when everything is on-demand, flexible and cheap. Nicira’s Web site says the product is a software solution that runs on existing networks, requires no new hardware and is aimed directly at large-scale cloud data centers. Interesting, indeed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/cisco-fellow-bruce-davie-joines-steath-startup-nicira/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/twitter-can-censor-by-country/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/twitter-can-censor-by-country/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:30:49 +0000 Loretta Chao and Amir Efrati http://allthingsd.com/?p=168103 Twitter Inc. says it can now make content selectively available to users based on geography, and plans to use that ability to enter countries with “different ideas” about freedom of expression as a human right — reflecting the difficult ethical questions facing Internet companies.

The announcement, published on the official blog of the microblog operator, said Twitter is now able to withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available to the rest of the world.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/twitter-can-censor-by-country/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/a-quick-spin-around-mini-macworld-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/a-quick-spin-around-mini-macworld-video/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:01:04 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=168032 Last year, the big complaint about Macworld was that there were too many iPhone-case makers on the show floor at the expo.

This year, even the big case makers took a pass on the show.

Although attendance is projected to be up slightly, to 25,000 people, the show floor didn’t reflect the surge of popularity around Apple’s products — a surge that has led to a significant rise in Apple gear at the Consumer Electronics Show. Macworld organizer IDG World Expo wouldn’t say how much square footage it had sold this year, saying only that there were about 300 exhibitors.

The biggest name on the floor was Hewlett-Packard, whose large booth was at the entrance to the exhibit hall at Moscone West in San Francisco.

From there, the big names were few and far between. Of course, Apple wasn’t there. Nor was Adobe, or Microsoft. Also missing were big accessory makers like Belkin, Speck and Griffin.

In their place was an odd collection of start-ups looking for attention.

Several of the booths showcased former Kickstarter projects hoping for new business partners. Olloclip was there, pitching their add-on iPhone lenses, while iKeyboard was there to show a physical keyboard that attaches to the face of the iPad to give the touchscreen a tactile response. Another booth was pitching an interesting docking station called LandingZone, designed specifically for the MacBook Air.

There were still lots of iPhone and iPad cases, of course, even if fewer than at CES or Macworlds of years past. One interesting product line featured eco-friendly, made-in-the-U.S. phone cases that are also compostable, for when Apple comes out with a new model and you need to switch.

One of the other vendors that caught my eye was VanGogh Imaging, which was using four Kinect sensors to capture 3-D images and create a visual model. While creating a virtual Mini-Me, company CEO Ken Lee explained how VanGogh hopes that cellphones and tablets can be used to capture, render and display the models.

“We’re here to look for partners,” Lee said.

But my favorite was the booth for a gadget insurer called Worth Ave. Group. The company had created a cellphone twist on the classic Whac-A-Mole arcade game, allowing convention-goers an opportunity to pound out their smartphone frustrations.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/a-quick-spin-around-mini-macworld-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/report-internet-economy-set-to-nearly-double-to-4-2t-by-2016/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/report-internet-economy-set-to-nearly-double-to-4-2t-by-2016/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:45:49 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=168097 The Internet economy of G-20 nations will nearly double in value to $4.2 trillion by 2016, according to a new projection by the Boston Consulting Group, released at an event with Google today. That’s up from $2.3 trillion in 2010.

It seems that Internet companies are particularly concerned about earning their spots at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. Earlier this week, Facebook and Deloitte released a more specific (and self-serving) study about the social networking company’s revenue and jobs contributions to the European Union.

There will be three billion Internet users in 2016, or 45 percent of the world’s population, the BCG study estimated. By 2013, there will be more mobile broadband connections than fixed-line connections.

By 2016, China will have 800 million Internet users — as many as France, Germany, India, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. combined. At that time, its Internet economy will be about the same size as that of the U.S., BCG noted.

BCG highlighted the value of social media in a couple of emerging areas. More than 90 percent of Internet users in Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico engage in social media, a higher contingent than in many more-developed markets. Plus, small- and medium-sized businesses with significant Internet presences expect to grow 5 percent faster than those that do not.

(Photo courtesy of World Economic Forum)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/report-internet-economy-set-to-nearly-double-to-4-2t-by-2016/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/heins-im-here-to-help-rim-catch-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/heins-im-here-to-help-rim-catch-up/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:59:41 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=168059 Thorsten Heins, Research In Motion’s new CEO, hasn’t won much of an endorsement from shareholders his first week on the job. The company’s stock slid nearly 7 percent following his appointment, as investors reacted with disappointment to his insistence that RIM is on the right track.

That commitment to the current strategic direction of the company, that complacency, suggested to many that Heins — just like his predecessors — hasn’t fully recognized the dramatic loss of traction RIM has suffered in the market it once dominated. Add to this the fact that he served as RIM’s COO during a time when the company made a number of operational missteps, and Heins really didn’t inspire much confidence. Meet the new boss, same as the old bosses, right?

Maybe. But perhaps Heins isn’t quite as oblivious as former RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. In a Thursday chat with CNBC, he sounded a bit more realistic about RIM’s plight, acknowledging its missteps and conceding that the company has suffered as a result of them.

“It hurts me to see us losing market share in the U.S.,” Heins said. “There was a paradigm shift, and we did not shift with it. I know we’ve made mistakes, and I know I’m in for a fight. We want to stop the bleeding.”

Sounds far more encouraging than his spiel in that abysmal “meet the new boss” video RIM posted earlier this week, right? Certainly, it’s more honest. And admission is the first step in recovery …

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/heins-im-here-to-help-rim-catch-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/viral-image-the-biggest-and-bluest-marble/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/viral-image-the-biggest-and-bluest-marble/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:33:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=168079 I am at the funeral of my aunt today, giving the eulogy later, and it’s a sad occasion.

But for some reason, this stunning new version of the “Blue Marble” photo of Earth — taken on Jan. 4 by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite instrument on NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite — is vaguely comforting.

Perhaps because it speaks of a much bigger picture, and of how delicately and elegantly life hangs in the dark universe.

All via an amazing piece of tech, the Suomi NPP, which NASA said is the “first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.”

Enjoy:

(Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/viral-image-the-biggest-and-bluest-marble/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/kabam-acquires-top-lucasarts-game-makers-to-help-build-hardcore-social-games/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/kabam-acquires-top-lucasarts-game-makers-to-help-build-hardcore-social-games/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:18:39 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=168074 Kabam, known for developing hardcore social games such as The Godfather and Kingdoms of Camelot, has acquired a company with deep roots in the console game space.

Fearless Studios was co-founded two years ago by notable game makers Haden Blackman and Cedrick Collomb.

Blackman was the creator and senior executive producer of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Collomb was formerly director of engineering at LucasArts. The two will immediately join Kabam, along with all members of the team from Marin, Calif.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Acquisitions in social gaming are common, especially as emerging companies try to gain scale. But it is not often that a social game company purchases a console game developer.

In the case of Kabam, it matches with what that company is trying to achieve. It is the goal of the Redwood City, Calif., company to challenge the notion that all gamers on Facebook are housewives in their mid-40s. Instead, it wants to bring some of the high-end games found on consoles to social networks in order to attract more engaged players, who are willing to play — and pay — more.

In a release, Kabam CEO Kevin Chou said the team at Fearless has the right game-design skills and technology set to help social games become higher fidelity.

“Having the background and emerging technologies and proficiency in making the transition from 2D to 3D on consoles mesh perfectly with Kabam’s strategy,” Chou said.

It is not clear if Fearless Studios ever released any games, but in an interview with USA Today, the founders did say the team was interested in developing for the Xbox, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii, and for other devices, such as the iPhone.

Fearless will be joining a much more established organization, with roughly 400 employees. But there are already some common threads between the two companies: Kabam’s COO, Chris Carvalho, worked at Lucasfilm for a decade; and Blackman spent 13 years with LucasArts.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/kabam-acquires-top-lucasarts-game-makers-to-help-build-hardcore-social-games/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120127/mission-kimpossible/ http://allthingsd.com/20120127/mission-kimpossible/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:01:31 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=168057

Earn respect, friendship, wisdom and money with your support for the Kimpire. The Kimpire can make you rich and the other way around. The Kimpire will rule the world, so better be a part of it ;-) …

– Megaupload CEO Kim Schmitz, a.k.a. Kim Dotcom, via his Web site in 2003, recruiting volunteers to power his new “Kimpire”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/mission-kimpossible/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/googles-head-of-consumer-payments-vikas-gupta-resigns/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/googles-head-of-consumer-payments-vikas-gupta-resigns/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:35:15 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=167966 Google’s head of consumer payments Vikas Gupta has resigned, AllThingsD has confirmed.

Gupta joined the company 18 months ago after Google acquired Jambool, a virtual goods payment platform where he was a founder and CEO. More recently, he’d been one of the leaders on the payments team, overseeing Google Wallet and reporting to Osama Bedier, Google’s VP of Payments.

“I can confirm that Vikas has left Google and we wish him all the best in his future endeavors,” a spokesman said.

Jambool’s product, Social Gold, was rolled into Google’s payment products and is being used for in-app purchases on both Android Market and Google+ Games.

According to Gupta’s LinkedIn page, he joined Google in August 2010 and held the title of head of consumer payments. Jambool reportedly was purchased for $55 million before any additional earn-outs. Prior to founding Jambool, Gupta worked at Amazon.

Gupta’s departure is the second management move made in the Google Wallet ranks over the past week.

A spokesperson declined to say if the division was undergoing a wider restructuring, but last week, I reported that Google’s VP of Commerce Stephanie Tilenius was moving into a more global position. And, as part of that, Bedier will be taking on a larger role within Google Wallet, though his title will not be changing.

The Wallet is Google’s mobile payments strategy that allows users to tap their phone at the register to pay using near field communication technology. The company has already successfully formed alliances with both banks and retailers, and is leveraging its vast install base of Android users.

Today, it is live with some merchants, although it does face some challenges.

Currently, it only works on one phone from Sprint, and both consumers and merchants will most likely have to upgrade their hardware for it to work. Additionally, some carriers, such as Verizon Wireless, have decided to disable Google Wallet on phones they are shipping. Other carriers, which are part of a mobile wallet joint venture called ISIS, are expected to follow suit, effectively limiting access for many U.S. consumers.

More than six months after hosting a flashy launch event, the business may be getting a lot harder than it originally looked.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120126/googles-head-of-consumer-payments-vikas-gupta-resigns/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/motorola-raises-barely-a-ripple-in-the-tablet-wave/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/motorola-raises-barely-a-ripple-in-the-tablet-wave/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:22:00 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=168007 Some disappointing numbers in Motorola Mobility’s latest earnings report: A loss of $80 million on revenue of $3.4 billion, and mobile device shipments of 10.5 million versus 11.3 million a year ago. Still, few were as grim as these: 200,000 tablets shipped in the fourth quarter and just 1 million shipped for all of 2011. In other words, it took MoMo a full year to ship 1/15th the number of iPads Apple sold in its most recent quarter.

And this is the company that Google has decided to spend $12.5 billion on.

Of course, Motorola Mobility has always known it had its work cut out for it on the tablet front. As Christy Wyatt, VP and general manager for mobile devices, told AllThingsD’s Ina Fried last month, “I think tablets have come a long, long way. Adoption of Android tablets in the broad consumer sense, and especially with enterprise users, is still something we would like to focus on for the next year. A lot of that has to do with the application ecosystem, making sure we have the applications that we need. [Google's] Ice Cream Sandwich [Android update] goes a long way to unify the developer communities across screens.”

And why will people pick Motorola out of the legion of Android contenders? “At the end of the day, there are certain brands that consumers trust,” said Wyatt. “People tend to go to the Motorola brand where they are looking for a brand that they trust for reliability, for quality.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120126/motorola-raises-barely-a-ripple-in-the-tablet-wave/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/the-president-of-the-united-states-visits-intel-again-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/the-president-of-the-united-states-visits-intel-again-video/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:10:13 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=167975 The president of the United States loves Intel. A day after delivering his annual State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, President Obama paid the second visit of his presidency to an Intel facility, this one in Chandler, Arizona.

The first was last year in Hillsboro, Oregon, and during the visit, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced that the new chip plant, or “fab” as they’re usually called, would be built in Arizona.

The main reason that Obama loves Intel is that it’s an example of the kind of manufacturing work that he’d like to see more of in America. As such, the sight of Intel spending $5 billion to build a new plant and adding 4,000 jobs is the sort of thing that any president would like to stand close to, especially at the onset of what looks to be a tough re-election campaign. It’s also one of those rare companies that’s riding high despite an uncertain global economy.

One thing Obama certainly didn’t mention was that Intel added plants in Israel and China in the last year as well. He’s also in no hurry to remind the audience that the chips that Intel makes will be shipped to China and inserted into computers and servers, many of which will be shipped into the United States.

We also learned this week from the New York Times, Obama seemed vaguely baffled by the notion that Apple’s iPhone is manufactured in China, and in a meeting in Silicon Valley last year asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs why they couldn’t be made in the U.S. Jobs’s answer, which is correct: Those jobs aren’t coming back. David Ricardo’s law of Comparative Advantage strikes again.

Anyway, the only video of the full speech that I’ve found came from the local TV station, ABC15, and thankfully they have made it embeddable.

In his remarks, the president is impressed both with the grand scale of things involved in building chips — he remembers seeing an electron microscope at Intel’s plant in Oregon that was powerful enough to display atoms, which is certainly impressive. In Chandler he’s impressed with what he says is the world’s largest land-based crane, which is being used in the construction effort. Enjoy the speech.

(Image is a screen grab from earlier in the video.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120126/the-president-of-the-united-states-visits-intel-again-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/motorola-mobility-posts-q4-loss-on-merger-costs/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/motorola-mobility-posts-q4-loss-on-merger-costs/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:45:25 +0000 Drew FitzGerald http://allthingsd.com/?p=168005 Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. swung to the red in the fourth quarter as costs tied to its pending acquisition by Google Inc. offset higher revenue from handsets.

The company’s stronger-than-expected core earnings come about a year after predecessor Motorola Inc. split its smartphone and set-top box businesses from its mobile and networks operations. Tech giant Google is now in the process of taking over Motorola Mobility after it made a roughly $12.5 billion bid for the smartphone maker and its extensive patent portfolio.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

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