Build it with your mom in mind.

That’s according to Eric Migicovsky, the 25-year-old creator of the Pebble watch that shot to time-telling fame in no time and has smashed records on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding Web site through which people make pledges to projects in the works.

The watch just surpassed $10 million in pledges from nearly 66,500 backers, with eight days to go before the campaign was set to close. The Pebble, which is expected to ship this fall, is now “sold out.”

So what’s the big deal about the Pebble watch? AllThingsD’s Ina Fried covers this quite well here, but in short: It’s a Bluetooth 4.0-enabled wristwatch that integrates with iPhone and Android smartphones to show app updates and other data on its E-Ink (so, sun-friendly) screen.

The idea of a “smart” watch, with some computing functions or the ability to pair with a smartphone, is hardly a new thing. Here’s my recent review of Sony’s latest SmartWatch, to give you an idea of how some of these watches work.

But Migicovsky, who sat down with me a few weeks ago to talk about the project, thinks he’s hit on something different. Prior to the Pebble, he created three watches, including a BlackBerry-friendly watch called inPulse; none of them took off the way this one has.

Migicovsky, center, with the Pebble team.

“When you make something that your friends say is amazing, and not just because they’re being nice, that’s when you know you’ve hit on something,” Migicovsky said.

He added, “I definitely have my mom and dad in mind when I build something.” Migicovsky said his mom isn’t particularly tech-savvy, but even she has taken to his Pebble project, to the point where she’s helping him with media outreach. She even threw a party to celebrate the success of the gadget.

And speaking of friends, Migicovsky hasn’t gone far in his search for the handful of new employees he’s hired over the past few weeks.

“I’m basically hiring all my friends,” he said.

In an interview, co-founder and President Anil Dharni said the company was founded two and a half years ago, but it didn’t make its first mobile game until nine months ago. Since then, it has launched three titles, including Crime City, Modern War and Kingdom Age, all of which have generated more than 20 million downloads.

The quick multimillion dollar sale is reminiscent of Zynga’s recent $180 million purchase of OMGPOP, which had been around for awhile but only recently catapulted to the top of the iPhone charts with its overnight hit Draw Something.

Dharni said the two back-to-back sales are not necessarily an indication of a trend in mobile games.

“We tend to hear only about the successes,” he said. “If you look at some of the other mobile gaming companies, some have gained traction but there’s others struggling that have fallen off the charts. … I think the downward trend is also happening.”

All three of the company’s games are free to play and monetized through in-game items. Both Kingdom Age and Modern War are among the top 25 grossing apps on the iPad. Crime City is the company’s oldest title. Neither Funzio nor Gree disclosed how much the apps are grossing, but Dharni said what makes its games stand out from the rest of the pack is player retention. And generally, the longer players engage with the games, the more likely they are to make purchases.

Funzio, which previously raised $20 million in capital, is expecting to be completely integrated into Gree’s San Francisco operations, relocating all of its 125 employees to Gree’s offices, where the two will have more than 300 employees all told.

“From day one, the thing we proposed was that we didn’t want to be an independent studio. We want to be integrated as much as possible in Gree,” he said.

Gree, which is a mobile-gaming powerhouse in Japan, is aggressively trying to build a worldwide social network for games on mobile devices. Rivals include DeNA’s Mobage network, which came to market through the acquisition of San Francisco-based Ngmoco, and Apple’s Game Center.

Funzio will now begin developing games for Gree’s mobile social platform, although they will not necessarily be exclusive.

Dharni said both he and the company’s co-founder and CEO Ken Chiu started talking with Gree a few months back, and since then had discussions with a number of other suitors, whom Dharni characterized as the “usual suspects.”

What stood out about Gree was its vast experience and knowledge about the mobile gaming space, he said.

“Mobile games in Japan make a ridiculous amount of money and we are just getting started in America. They are two to three years ahead of us in terms of understanding game mechanics and monetization. We can learn so much from them,” he said. “They are super smart and hungry folks and their vision matched ours. We had excellent alternative options, but we found the perfect partner.”

Apple’s stringent guidelines on submissions to its App Store are no secret to developers: Abide by our rules or prepare to get your app nixed.

So why, then, did Dropbox recently blow by Apple’s guidelines with its software development kit?

Here’s the deal: Last week, developers utilizing Dropbox’s SDK in their own iOS apps started getting rejection notices from the App Store after submitting their apps for review. As evident from this saucy exchange between a developer and an Apple employee, Dropbox’s SDK included a link to the desktop version of its site, which allows users to purchase an upgrade in storage space for the service.

That’s a feature that Apple has explicitly banned in any iOS apps submitted to its store. According to section 11.13 of Apple’s App Store penal code (er, review guidelines): “Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app, such as a ‘buy’ button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected.”

Apple confirmed to AllThingsD that this was indeed the guideline Dropbox had violated with its SDK.

As first noticed by The Next Web, developers were peeved at their apps’ sudden rejections, and rightly so. Resubmitting an app can take a matter of weeks to move through Apple’s approval process. And in the fast moving mobile world, time is money.

“I hope you enjoy rejecting decent apps for having normal functionality while letting all the fart apps through,” wrote independent developer Goran Peuc in an exchange with an Apple representative.

Dropbox’s response to the dust-up? An ever-so-subtle dig at Apple: “Apple is rejecting apps that use the Dropbox SDK because we allow users to create accounts,” a spokeswoman for Dropbox told me in an emailed response (emphasis mine). “We’re working with Apple to come up with a solution that still provides an elegant user experience.”

Update: Dropbox elucidated further after this story was first published, claiming that the problems lie in the inherent difficulties of Apple’s In-App Purchasing mechanism. “Apple requires paid services that allow account creation to offer the option to upgrade via In-App Purchase (IAP),” a Dropbox spokeswoman told AllThingsD in a statement. “We abide by this policy in our app, where we offer upgrades only via IAP. However, we are unable to offer IAP in our SDK to third-party developers due to limitations of IAP. Additionally, our SDK allows only free accounts to be created from third-party apps and has never been used to promote our paid plans.”

And to Dropbox’s credit, the SDK has already been patched, so developers shouldn’t come up against the issue any longer.

It would seem, then, that initially one of a few scenarios occurred: It was an oversight, and Dropbox accidentally left a link in the SDK, and it went unnoticed by Apple for the better part of seven months (which is how long Dropbox’s SDK has gone without alteration). Alternately, it was intentional, and the company wanted to see if the app could slide through undetected. Or perhaps the link seemed innocuous enough to Dropbox that the company thought Apple wouldn’t make a stink.

Obviously, the latter outcome wasn’t what happened.

Dropbox didn’t respond to my request for further clarification, but one would think that the company would have been wise to this beforehand. The slew of iOS app rejections in the past few years have been highly publicized in the tech press, especially the instance in which Apple rejected Sony’s Reader app last year.

In other words, Dropbox should have known better. If there’s a way for you to sell your product within Apple’s ecosystem — be it virtual goods, e-books or online storage — Apple wants its cut and always has. There’s really no way around it.

Perhaps Dropbox wanted to play the honey badger this time — and we all know that honey badger just don’t give a s#!*.

(Image courtesy of Mark Bridge/Flickr)

And if you combine the two? You get Vungle, a barely hatched start-up that just raised a $2 million seed round.

Vungle’s pitch is straightforward: They help app developers make video promo reels for their stuff, and turn them into “in-app” ads (you can see a sample below). There are a whole lot of ways to buy in-app advertising for other apps already — it’s a big chunk of the mobile ad business right now — but the Vungle guys argue that they make it easy. And that unlike iAd, AdMob, Millenial, etc., it’s all they do.

Fair enough. No way to really tell now, as the company is only in “alpha,” with a handful of paying customers that include Path, the buzzy next-gen social network, and Pocket Games, a game developer. A more open beta comes this summer.

At least as interesting as the pitch is the backstory, which has co-founders Zain Jeffer, 24, and Jack Smith, 23, leaving London on a whim to join the AngelPad start-up factory last fall, then finding themselves in a whirlwind round of financing. For instance, they pitched Crosslink’s David Silverman at his home on a weekend, and got a commitment a day later.

Multimillion dollar seed rounds would have been unheard of a couple years ago. Now they’re increasingly commonplace (here’s one for $4.2 million), at least for a certain class of incubator-blessed start-ups. And they’re part of the reason that you’re hearing lots of bubble talk right now.

For the record, the Vungle guys say they had no intention of raising so much out of the gate. But “as soon as you tell people you don’t want money, that’s when they want to give you money,” Smith says. Among those chipping in: Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, Charles Hudson, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy and Tim Draper.

Six years ago this month, I revealed in Businessweek that Apple had incorporated in Nevada where the corporate tax rate is zero. So I found the Times’ account — written by Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski, about the many financial tricks that Apple employs to minimize its tax exposure — to contain a lot of old news, but also some new, fascinating details. Who couldn’t love a phrase like “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich” to describe arcane accounting and legal tricks?

But the implication the story leaves a reader with — that Apple is somehow doing society a disservice by not paying its fair share of corporate taxes — is simply wrong on many levels. The most dubious of the lines that the Times attempts to draw is between Apple and the budget crisis at De Anza College, a Cupertino community college where Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was once a student. The college is facing a “death spiral” because of a decline in funding from the state. This funding, the reader is led to conclude, would be more plentiful if corporations like Apple were to step up and pay, and not escape the tax bill by setting up an office in neighboring Nevada.

What the Times fails to make clear is how community colleges are funded in California. The picture is much more complicated. California community colleges draw the majority of their funding from the state’s general fund — which is drawn directly from the state’s personal and corporate income taxes — and from local property taxes collected by counties. As of the 2009-2010 budget cycle, these two buckets made up about 88 percent of the system’s funding. State lottery funds, federal funds and student fees made up the remainder.

Tax policy wonks — which I’m not — will remember that California was the birthplace of the property tax revolt movement in the 1970s. In 1978, California voters overwhelmingly approved a measure that limits the amount by which property taxes can increase each year. Since then, at least one estimate pegs the amount that the state’s taxpayers have avoided paying at north of half a trillion dollars as of 2009. In February, the property tax shortfall facing the state community-college system was $41 million. Conclusion: If there is to be blame for the shortage of taxpayer funding at De Anza College, a healthy portion of it should be laid at the door of California’s own voters and taxpayers, who in 1978 thought that property-tax limitations were a good idea.

I had a few other problems with the story. Take sales taxes. When you buy a Mac in New York, you pay a sales tax of 8.875 percent. For a base-level iMac, priced at $1,199, that works out to more than $106 in taxes. While some states charge no sales tax — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon — the average sales tax in the U.S. works out to 9.6 percent.

Putting aside the fact that the average sales tax in Canada is higher, let’s assume that Apple’s North American sales of $38.3 billion in its fiscal 2011 were taxed at that rate, and do the math: We get $3.7 billion in sales taxes paid into the coffers of states and municipalities, except in those five states that have no such tax. That amounts to more than 1.5 times the $2.4 billion the Times says Apple would have owed the federal government. Factor in VAT and other similar taxes in the U.K. and throughout Europe, and you get the idea that Apple is generating tax revenue aplenty on the sale of its goods. Yes, those taxes are passed on to customers. But isn’t that the case with every tax a corporation making consumer products pays?

Finally, you may remember that earlier this year Apple released an extensive report on the number of jobs it had created and supported both through direct employment and in the orbit of the products it creates. It seemed an odd thing for Apple to release at the time, and now we know why: It reads almost like it was prepared by Apple in advance, knowing this story was in the pipeline at the Times. The final number, by its reckoning: 514,000 U.S. jobs are created by the Apple universe, including 47,000 employees; 210,000 jobs were created as part of the app economy, which didn’t even exist until 2008.

Assuming that each of those jobs pays a salary north of $35,350 a year, taxes collected on that income could range anywhere from 25 percent to 35 percent, depending on the income bracket. And that’s before accounting for any stock-based compensation.

At this point, the discussion turns to a deeper question: Is it better for society to have a company pay more in taxes, or to create more jobs? You can argue that had Apple not taken advantage of the various strategies it employed to pay less taxes, it might not have flourished as well as it has, and thus created fewer jobs. But people smarter than I will likely hash out the finer points of this argument in the coming days.

(Image is a screen grab from this silly Beatles cartoon built around the group’s song “Taxman.”)

With the rise of social networks, professing one’s love for a particular brand is as simple as clicking “Like” on a Facebook page. But, for Facebook, that activity can be somewhat siloed: You’re either preaching to the choir on a fan page or sharing that love with your circle of friends via status updates.

While that may not irk the average “Twilight” fan, it’s a potential thorn in the paw of social media marketers who want their campaigns to go viral.

Enter CrowdFanatic, the recently launched app that lets fans interact on Facebook by pitting opposing groups against one another.

Thus, Google Android fans can challenge Apple zealots in an “arena,” a page where participants can exchange comments back and forth, making the case for their particular beloved product. From there, anyone can share a link to the discussion to attract others.

In other words, the app essentially gives fanboys of different stripes a battleground in which to duke it out.

In a time where viral marketing can make or break a given product (thePebble smart watch, for example), the idea is an interesting one for brands looking for a wider reach. Get enough users to rally behind your cause — be it a movie, a political candidate or a laundry detergent — and the court of public opinion could turn more customers and supporters your way.

While individual fans can start their own “arenas,” the most obvious use case is for social media marketing campaigns. The app is currently free to all Facebook users, but founder Yaron Bazaz and his team are currently working on a plugin for Facebook brand pages, wherein companies could connect CrowdFanatic to their page for a licensing fee, as well as a cut of the revenue share from an online donation system.

“Brand pages on Facebook are isolated islands, crippling their efforts to promote their agenda and engage users,” Bazaz told AllThingsD in an interview. “After the first ‘Like,’ most of the supporters will never return to the brand page.”

Of course, it seems that little stands in the way of each “arena” devolving into a vitriolic back and forth, or even keeping participants on topic.

The Apple versus Android debate I created, for example, had three responses, last I checked, all of which were extolling the virtues of the vodka + Red Bull cocktail. Bazaz and his team have the ability to manage comments, arenas and topics, although this seems difficult to scale if the app takes off.

To be sure, CrowdFanatic is still in its infant beta form. Bazaz has raised an ample $300,000 in seed funding, he said, and is now aiming for a Series A round. The six-employee start-up has offices in Vancouver and Sunnyvale, Calif.

(Photo credit: Nerds on Call/Flickr)

It’s not a sustainable diet, but that’s what was available at the relatively few shops around San Francisco and New York City that are accepting Pay with Square and PayPal’s mobile app.

In case you’ve missed it, there’s a battle brewing over the future of mobile payments — that is, the ability for consumers to ditch the leather wallet and purchase things with their mobile phones. Companies like Google, PayPal, Square, wireless providers and credit card companies are debating various forms of mobile payment technology.

But in the battle over who gets to control your digital wallet, it’s important not to forget the consumer experience. Is it really that much easier to pay with a mobile phone than it is to just pull out cash or a credit card?

That’s what I set out to find this week, mainly using Pay with Square.

Square is a company known for creating a device for small businesses that plugs into an iPhone and can read a swiped credit card, but the company recently renamed and relaunched its app for consumers. Now called Pay with Square, the app works only at stores that are using Square’s register system for the iPad. Currently, around 75,000 merchants across the U.S. are accepting payments via the Pay with Square app.

In my experience, Pay with Square proved to be an easy, enjoyable app to use to purchase things using my smartphone — though it won’t be an everyday app for me until there are more businesses accepting it.

The free Pay with Square app works with iPhone and Android phones. It used to have a wallet-like interface, but now it simply lists nearby merchants, and has a rotation of featured businesses at the top of the page.

I first used Pay with Square at a coffee shop in San Francisco. I had to link the app to my credit card account, and then upload a picture of myself; otherwise, I wouldn’t be allowed to pay. Square says this provides a layer of security on top of other standard security measures it puts in place, alongside the security your credit card company provides.

Of course, a customer could upload a picture of their cat or something, and use that as their Pay with Square image. It’s up to the merchant to decide whether it’s a good idea to accept payment from someone whose photo doesn’t align with what they look like.

Then, on the coffee shop’s page within the app, there was the option to auto-open a tab for payments. Once I indicated in the app that I wanted to open a tab, my name and photo appeared a few moments later on the cashier’s iPad register, and the cashier was able to tap on my name and charge me.

Square has been touting the idea that this app actually allows for “hands-free” payments, which means a user shouldn’t even have to take her smartphone out of her pocket in order to pay, provided that the auto-open tab is turned on. I had mixed experiences with this at shops in New York.

One shop I bought coffee at didn’t see my name right away, even though I had turned on the tab in the iPhone version of the app. I tried to buy another item using the app on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android phone, and my name didn’t appear at all on the list of customers in the store.

But at another downtown coffee shop I was able to walk in, place my order and say, “Charge it to Lauren Goode” — without taking my phone out of my pocket — and the transaction was completed in seconds. This worked well on both iPhone and Android.

The app has a new tilt-to-map feature that I like a lot. Tilting your smartphone at an angle turns the screen into a full map, with little red pins showing where Square-friendly merchants are. I could also tweet from within the app that I was at a shop and paying with Square, text-message the same notification, and email the store’s link to a friend.

One part of the app that I found lacking was the amount of information that some merchants list on their pages within the app. Some show addresses, phone numbers, business hours and full menus. But a couple of Square-friendly venues in the app only listed their business phone numbers or addresses, so I had to exit the app to run an additional search and find out what the business actually sold.

This past March, online payments giant PayPal introduced PayPal Here, a Square-like dongle for small businesses to accept credit card payments on a mobile phone; PayPal also has a mobile app that uses location services to recognize where a customer is. PayPal already has the advantage of a massive user base of over a hundred million and, unlike Square, it is available in international markets.

But PayPal’s triangle device for payments still hasn’t been fully rolled out yet, so locating businesses where I could test that in conjunction with the PayPal app was challenging. The company says it’s still in “beta,” so it’s unclear how many merchants are actually using the triangle.

So that’s how I found myself buying beef jerky from a merchant amid a row of warehouses in Brooklyn on a rainy day. The founder of Kings County Jerky used to use Square, but he is now using the PayPal triangle.

Once I arrived, I opened the PayPal application on my iPhone. It recognized my location and listed a couple places nearby that would take my money via my PayPal app.

Since data service on my phone happened to be particularly bad in that area, I initially had trouble dropping the digital pin within the app that’s supposed to let the merchant know I was there. The merchant also had to reboot his phone once to process the payment on his end.

But once I switched over to Wi-Fi, I had four options for paying him: Pay directly from my PayPal account through the app; handing him my credit card, which he would swipe through the PayPal triangle; and scanning my credit card. The last resort would be for the merchant to manually enter my credit card number into his phone, though he would get charged a slightly higher fee for processing my payment that way.

Mobile connection issues aside, paying through my PayPal account on the app was relatively quick and painless.

In terms of loyalty rewards and discounts, mobile payment companies are trying to make paying with a smartphone compelling, but I haven’t been using the apps long enough to glean the rewards. Square, for example, gives merchants the ability to offer purchasers 10 percent off transactions just for being repeat customers, and while Google Wallet is currently only available on five Android smartphone models, the company has partnered with name-brand retailers to offer small promotions to app users.

Paying with Square was an easy way to pay with my mobile phone and, for me, the current lack of merchants accepting it was its biggest downside. This category of technology is too young here in the U.S. to see what the real benefits — and drawbacks — will be, but consumers can likely expect to see more options to pay with their smartphones in the near future.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120430/paying-with-squares-new-mobile-payments-app/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20120427/welcome-to-mac-app-store-population-10000/ http://allthingsd.com/20120427/welcome-to-mac-app-store-population-10000/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:27:40 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=200896 When Apple first launched the Mac App Store in January of 2011, it featured just over 1,000 apps. Today, it boasts a number 10 times that. As noted by MacRumors and MacGeneration, the Mac App Store now hosts well over 10,000 apps — 10,334, to be exact. So, a new milestone to add to the 100 million app downloads mark announced last December.

Now, 10,000 apps is a paucity compared to the 600,000 or so apps available in the iOS App Store. But remember, the Mac App Store is a PC software store that’s changing a longstanding software purchasing paradigm. And changing a decades-old paradigm is far more difficult than creating a brand new one.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120427/welcome-to-mac-app-store-population-10000/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120426/cinemagram-app-sees-quick-growth-for-artsy-animated-photos/ http://allthingsd.com/20120426/cinemagram-app-sees-quick-growth-for-artsy-animated-photos/#comments Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:15:45 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=200304 As a smartphone owner, half the fun is finding a nifty new magical app to show off to your friends. One that nicely serves that purpose is the artsy animated photograph creation tool Cinemagram (iOS only for now, but coming to Android), which has quickly accumulated 1 million downloads since being released as a free app a couple of months ago.

Cinemagrams are created by taking a video, isolating a particular section within the shot, and looping movement while keeping the rest as a still photograph. On a touchscreen, you can do this editing with your finger within the Cinemagram app. The rest of the interface is basically just like Instagram — with overlay filters, social features, a popular page, etc.

Cinemagram uses the age-old Internet format of animated GIFs, so these creations play automatically on many Web pages and within the app.

There’s also an artistic aspect to the format, originating from two New York photographers named Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg, who started creating and posting beautiful “cinemagraphs” on Tumblr a couple years ago.

Cinemagram doesn’t have a relationship with Beck and Burg. It’s also not the first app to try to offer “an Instagram for cinemagraphs” — but it’s one of the better ones I’ve played with so far.

Cinemagram comes from the small Montreal team that built the social news reader Smartr, which they’ve now shut down. I chatted with co-founder Temo Chalasani this morning, who’s out in California fundraising.

“People shake their heads as soon as they hear animated GIF, but we think they’re pretty cool,” Chalasani said. “Personally my favorite kind of Cinemagram is one in which the animation is subtle and surprising. But people are creating ones where it’s not subtle but still great.”

The standard starter Cinemagram, Chalasani said, tends to be new users winking their eyes or sticking their tongues out. But from there they can get pretty creative. See below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120426/cinemagram-app-sees-quick-growth-for-artsy-animated-photos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120424/apples-8-billion-media-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20120424/apples-8-billion-media-business/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:14:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=199745 Apple is really in the hardware business, not the software business — it just uses the sales of apps, music, movies, etc., to help sell gadgets.

But boy does it sell a lot of software: iTunes sales came in at $1.9 billion last quarter, which puts the digital store at a run rate of $8 billion.

That’s up 35 percent from a year ago, when iTunes did $1.4 billion.

During Apple’s conference call today, CFO Peter Oppenheimer answered a query about delays getting new content into iTunes with a boast about the depth of the store’s music and video catalog. But as always, my assumption is that the bulk of that growth is fueled by app sales, not traditional media sales.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120424/apples-8-billion-media-business/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120423/sonys-smartwatch-not-ready-for-primetime/ http://allthingsd.com/20120423/sonys-smartwatch-not-ready-for-primetime/#comments Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:00:15 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=198589 Watches with some computing functions have been around — in theory and form — for decades, but they’ve generally been bulky, super geeky and aimed at hard-core tech enthusiasts.

Now, techie watches are gaining some traction, as part of the growing trend of wearable devices. Apple’s iPod nano can be worn with a wristband, creating a music player and watch in one. Other electronics makers, like Sony, Motorola and the minds behind the Pebble watch project on Kickstarter are incorporating Bluetooth into “smart” watches. Wearers can wirelessly connect the watch to their smartphones to receive quick text, email and social notifications and to decide whether that call or email is worth answering. They can also control some smartphone apps, such as a music app, from the face of the watch.

This week, I’ve been testing Sony’s latest entrant in the market, the $150 SmartWatch. It’s Sony’s second attempt at a watch that works with a compatible smartphone to show notifications and allow the wearer to control apps from the face of the watch.

After five days of wearing the watch, I found this smart watch to be less than intuitive. The interface of this SmartWatch is confusing, the set-up was tedious and some notifications come through more regularly than others. The watch also doesn’t display time all the time, which conserves battery life, but it isn’t as much of a watch when you look down and see a blank screen.

The SmartWatch is eye-catching. People noticed it and asked about it, because it obviously wasn’t a standard watch, but unlike high-tech watches of the past (like calculator and TV watches), it isn’t clunky and super geeky.

The plastic-and-aluminum watch measures 1.42 inches tall by 1.42 inches wide and 0.3 inch thick — slightly smaller than the iPod nano. The watch itself is black and white, but wristbands are available in up to six different colors.

It has a 1.3-inch OLED display, though its app icons aren’t as bright as those on the iPod nano.

Sony estimates that the SmartWatch’s battery should last around four days with typical usage, though it could last as long as a week with lighter use. In my experience, it lasted five days, though at times the watch and phone weren’t paired, and notifications sent to the watch were intermittent.

The watch uses Bluetooth 3.0 technology and is meant to work with Android phones only — ideally, Sony’s own smartphones that are “optimized” for the watch, though there are a variety of Android phones that are verified compatible with the watch.

I initially tested the SmartWatch with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone — a phone that isn’t verified to work with the watch. After downloading the necessary software apps onto the phone and pairing the two devices via Bluetooth, I only got two calendar reminders through the watch, even though I linked my calendar, email and social media accounts.

So next I tried a Sony-recommended phone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray.

Setting up the Xperia phone to work with the watch was a multistep process, as it was with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. On more than one occasion, I had to first “unpair” the two devices, and then pair them again, in order to get them working together properly.

Then I installed an app called LiveWare Manager, which is available for free in the Google app market. Then I connected the watch and smartphone using Bluetooth. After that, I had to install another app on the phone, called SmartWatch. Then I chose which notifications I wanted to receive on the watch — including email, weather, text messages, phone calls and social media updates — and then I had to log into some of those accounts again, despite the fact that I was already logged into those apps on the smartphone.

Finally, I started getting notifications on the SmartWatch.

The watch would buzz, and show a text message, tweet or email excerpt. There was a “View in Phone” option at the bottom of the screen, and if I pressed that, the corresponding app would open on my phone, allowing me to read the full info there.

But I had to press the SmartWatch’s screen firmly and sometimes more than once to get the info to appear. And navigating throughout the various options on the watch was confusing. The watch supports both apps and widgets, a nice touch since widgets show more information right on the screen, but it requires a combination of swiping side to side or up and down to access the apps and widgets. Tapping with two fingers brings you back to the previous screen.

When it came to getting back to the main screen, I was lost. I kept swiping and tapping the phone’s face, with no results. Turns out I had to pinch it to get back to the main screen.

There were some functions of the watch that hinted at the future of easy-to-access data through wearable devices. In one instance, I was on a phone call and the watch buzzed, letting me know that my boss had just emailed, which was helpful. I read a portion of the email on the watch and was able to evaluate whether I needed to get off the phone to address something quickly, or whether it was something I could respond to after the call. When I tried the Find Phone feature on the watch, the Sony Xperia phone chimed, so I could find it buried under the comforter on my bed.

Another feature of the watch that worked well for me were the phone call and SMS notifications. When the Xperia phone rang, the watch’s display immediately lit up to show me who was calling. I had the option to reject the call from the face of the watch or accept it, which would require me to pick up the phone. When I asked someone to send me text messages as a test, they appeared on the watch at the same time they were sent to my phone. I could also send quick, preformulated responses back from the watch.

This was especially useful when I was driving, although the watch’s screen is hard to read in sunlight.

Social media updates appear on the watch, at most, every 15 minutes. There’s an option deep in the phone’s LiveWare Manager app for setting the frequency of such updates, which I only became aware of after my Twitter and Facebook notifications on the watch seemed sporadic. On one hand, I might not want to get constant Twitter notifications on the watch, since I follow more than 800 active Twitterers. But the controlled frequency seemed to negate the point of real-time updates.

Lastly, it’s important to note that in order to work properly, the watch has to be within about 30 feet of the smartphone. This means that when I was on the treadmill at the gym and the Android phone was stuffed in a locker, the two devices weren’t connected and I wasn’t receiving updates on the watch. The watch was effectively just a watch — only, as I said, to save on battery life it doesn’t display constant time, which means I had to keep pressing the power button to see the time of day. Sony said it is at work on a software update that will give the option to have the clock showing on the display at all times.

The point of this kind of watch is to pair with a smartphone and provide quick and easy alerts, but the Sony SmartWatch wasn’t especially easy to use. If you’re an Android smartphone user and are in the market for this kind of compatible device, I’d hold out for a smarter smart watch.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120423/sonys-smartwatch-not-ready-for-primetime/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20120417/read-it-later-trades-in-its-literal-name-for-the-more-open-ended-pocket/ http://allthingsd.com/20120417/read-it-later-trades-in-its-literal-name-for-the-more-open-ended-pocket/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:30:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=197097 The most popular source of content on the service Read It Later is YouTube. Thus, its once eminently grokkable name didn’t make as much sense anymore.

So, starting today, Read It Later will be called Pocket. All the San Francisco-based company’s apps will be made free, with a fresh coat of paint today and a freemium model to be introduced later.

Pocket has 4.5 million users who save 400,000 items per day. It’s integrated into apps like Zite, Flipboard and Twitter, and it’s available for iOS, Kindle Fire, Android, Google Chrome and Firefox.

Usage stats from Pocket/Read It Later

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120417/read-it-later-trades-in-its-literal-name-for-the-more-open-ended-pocket/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120411/bbc-worldwide-invests-in-games-technology-company-spaceport-io/ http://allthingsd.com/20120411/bbc-worldwide-invests-in-games-technology-company-spaceport-io/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:05:06 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=195330 BBC Worldwide has invested in spaceport.io, which is building a platform that enables games to play across both mobile devices and the Web. Details of the investment were not disclosed. Burlingame, Calif.-based Spaceport.io will use the capital to hire additional employees and to develop its HTML5 and Flash-compatible technology. BBC Worldwide plans to use the technology to lower the cost of delivering HTML5 games and apps across iOS, Android and TVs.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120411/bbc-worldwide-invests-in-games-technology-company-spaceport-io/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120410/did-i-say-rim-was-removing-playbook-sideloading-im-sorry-i-meant-improving/ http://allthingsd.com/20120410/did-i-say-rim-was-removing-playbook-sideloading-im-sorry-i-meant-improving/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:28:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=194974 Looks like Research In Motion is having second thoughts about dropping app sideloading as a feature of the BlackBerry PlayBook. Either that, or it’s just bemoaning its decision to announce the move in an offhanded/ham-handed way over Twitter.

In a post to the BlackBerry Developer Blog this morning, RIM VP of Developer Relations Alec Saunders denied that the company is dropping sideloading from the PlayBook, though that is exactly what he said just a few days ago. According to Saunders, there is a more “nuanced” interpretation of the statement he made on Twitter.

What Saunders really meant when he said “we’re removing sideloading for consumers” is this: “We’re not getting rid of sideloading on the BlackBerry PlayBook OS or in BlackBerry 10.”

In other words, “removing” was simply a euphemism for “not removing” that went right over all our heads.

Clever!

So now Saunders is setting the record straight. In short, RIM will retain sideloading as a developer feature, and will add some antipiracy measures to it that will prevent its abuse by consumers.

“Sideloading on our platform is changing in nature,” Saunders wrote. “Sideloading is a developer feature. It exists so that developers can load their apps onto their own devices to test. It’s there so developers can send a beta release to their testing community for review. It is definitely not there for some people to side load a pirated app. … Starting with our next release of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS, we’re introducing a feature that will encrypt apps so they can only be run by the user who purchased the app.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/did-i-say-rim-was-removing-playbook-sideloading-im-sorry-i-meant-improving/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120410/amazon-extends-the-power-of-1-click-purchasing-to-mobile-apps/ http://allthingsd.com/20120410/amazon-extends-the-power-of-1-click-purchasing-to-mobile-apps/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:00:40 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=194698 Starting today, Amazon is finally giving developers in its Appstore the opportunity to sell digital content and subscriptions within their apps.

As part of the announcement, the retailer is also confirming that it will take a 30 percent cut of each transaction, which is the standard across Apple’s App Store, Facebook and Google Play (Correction: In an earlier version, it stated that Google takes 5 percent, which only applies to the Google+ game network.)

The announcement is not a huge surprise, since Amazon has been testing in-app payments over the past few months with a number of developers in the Amazon Appstore, which runs on the Kindle Fire and a number of Android handsets.

The payments platform utilizes Amazon’s well-recognized and trusted “1-Click” purchasing experience that so many consumers are familiar with from shopping online. By bringing it to mobile, it will make it easy for consumers to purchase a few more coins inside a game or to subscribe to a magazine.

But while the announcement sounds fairly basic, the rollout is important for Amazon to get right, since developers’ initial reception to the Appstore was a little strained — and stories of making money on the platform have been mixed.

That’s because, unlike other app stores, Amazon has decided to dictate how much an app sells for, and in some cases, the company elects to make apps free as part of its Free App of the Day promotion. In doing so, developers sometimes make less revenue than they would normally expect (especially since there was no potential upside from in-app purchases).

Developers and publishers will be able to set the price of the items within the store, including virtual goods or subscriptions, an Amazon spokesperson said.

Based on developers that participated in the beta tests, so far Amazon’s Appstore looks like it has been monetizing well.

Storm8, which was one of the game developers that participated in the beta test, told AllThingsD that it generated $700,000 in revenue from in-app purchases in March — before Amazon’s cut. The Redwood City developer said it has 10 free-to-play apps in the store, including such titles as Kingdoms Live, Nightclub Story and Farm Story; at one point, four of its games ranked among the five most popular free apps on Amazon.

Flurry, which provides analytics software to developers, also estimated  that Amazon’s in-app payment platform monetizes well, and that it outperforms Google Play, but falls short of the industry’s gold standard, which is Apple.

Still, it’s unclear whether Amazon will be able to woo developers, given that it is so much smaller than the other players. Last month, after celebrating its first year in business, Amazon confirmed that it had more than 31,000 apps in its store, which is far fewer than either Google or Apple.

It’s also unclear how many devices the Appstore is installed on, since Amazon does not share much information, including how many Kindle Fires it has sold.

According to a report by IHS iSuppli, Amazon shipped 3.9 million Fires in the fourth quarter, to claim 14.3 percent of the market. That makes it the world’s second-largest tablet vendor, surpassing Samsung, which has been in the market far longer, with many more devices.

In the future, what could potentially be even more interesting for developers than in-app payments is if Amazon will let them use apps to sell merchandise, such as Rovio’s plush toys, or DVDs and other cross-promotional items.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the possibility.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/amazon-extends-the-power-of-1-click-purchasing-to-mobile-apps/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120409/oh-and-another-thing-about-facetagram-your-location/ http://allthingsd.com/20120409/oh-and-another-thing-about-facetagram-your-location/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:38:39 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=194601 Last August, it was reported that Facebook was considering the introduction of photo filters to its service, as the millions using popular photo-sharing app Instagram continued to multiply. Now, it’s gone ahead and spent $1 billion on Lo-Fi, Valencia and the rest of them.

It’s not all about the filters, of course.

But it is about mobile photos. Facebook is currently the largest photo-storage site in the world, with an average of 250 million photos uploaded per day, as Kara Swisher notes here. A 2011 Pew Internet study showed that 20 percent of Facebook users cop to commenting on a Facebook photo at least once a day. Many felt that Instagram, with its user base of around 33 million — and with about a million of those users having signed up immediately after the Android version of the mobile app launched last week — was increasingly becoming a real threat in the social networking space.

And there’s another small-but-noteworthy value-add here for Facebook as well: Your location.

Instagram, which was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger back in March of 2010, has an easy-to-use geotag feature in its photo-sharing process that lets users tell everyone exactly where they were when they took their photos.

So simple, in fact, some users complained it was too easy to accidentally geotag photos when they didn’t mean to. Last May, the company released an updated version of the app that made it more clear to consumers when they were letting the world know their location.

It’s still unclear what percentage of Instagram photos shared are actually geotagged. Instagram hasn’t responded to AllThingsD for comment yet, presumably because its dozen or so employees are still popping champagne corks.

Anecdotally, my own Instagram feed is filled with vintage-y photos that tell me exactly where people are: Central Park on a nice spring day, the office on a mundane Monday, parts of Italy during a vacation or even that artisanal food shop on a Friday night (hipsters and their photo apps!).

When a location isn’t specified, Instagram loses some of its original appeal: That of the modern postcard, easily shared through a simple mobile app.

Now, let’s look at Facebook’s mostly failed efforts in location up until now. In 2010, the company bought and shut down geolocation app Hot Potato, in a move that was seen largely as an “acqhire.” In December of 2011, the social networking giant bought location-based-turned-local-guide app Gowalla, again for its talent rather than its technology (it also shut that app down). And, in August of last year, the company quietly shut down Facebook Places, due to the fact that few were using it, and instead offered users the ability to add their locations to status updates — or photos.

Sound familiar?

That’s not to say it’s not easy to share your location when you upload a mobile photo to Facebook. The option is right there, in a “Places”-like pin, when you go to share a photo or status update. Update: It’s been pointed out to us that just last week it was revealed that around 200 million users are tagged by location on a monthly basis on Facebook.

Other aspects of the Facebook mobile experience, however, aren’t as seamless, while Instagram has clearly nailed the mobile-only social networking concept.

Mobile location sharing is still relatively nascent. Data shows that usage of location-based social apps on mobile devices grows only incrementally year over year, despite the hype surrounding mobile apps like Foursquare (which Instagram taps into for lists of venues), and the fact that many other apps are introducing layers of location-based “Look at where I am!” features.

And, of course, more recently we’ve seen the downside of those location-based services, with the much maligned Girls Around Me app, which triangulated data from Foursquare and Facebook to let creepers know where females were congregating.

But, for the companies behind these networks, and not the consumers, there’s little downside to knowing more about where you are, allowing them to serve up more local deals and more targeted ads.

It’s still to be determined how Instagram’s photo-sharing services will align with Facebook’s, even though Mark Zuckerberg has vowed, for now, to give Instagram room to breathe. Maybe the answer, though, isn’t in “active” check-ins. It might just be in your photos, already telling everyone where you are by sight and deed.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s a video from the archives in which Instagram’s Systrom tells Digits host Simon Constable and me how he thinks Instagram helps those other social networks:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/oh-and-another-thing-about-facetagram-your-location/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120409/sephoras-not-afraid-of-mobile-phone-carrying-customers/ http://allthingsd.com/20120409/sephoras-not-afraid-of-mobile-phone-carrying-customers/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:55:21 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=194377 Sephora has completed an entire makeover of its digital presence today, including a new Web site, a new mobile site, an iPhone app, and iPads and iPod touches in many of its stores.

Unlike other stores that flinch when consumers pull out their phones, fearing that they are scanning bar codes to compare prices, the beauty supply company is embracing the practice.

“The reality is there’s not a lot of price differentiation in our world, and most of our users are loyalty card holders, so it doesn’t worry us,” said Julie Bornstein, SVP of Sephora Direct. “It makes the experience better if you like to shop that way.”

The Sephora app allows consumers to track what products they’ve purchased in the past, find out how many reward points they have, and look up the ingredients of a particular soap, lotion or eye shadow. So far, the app has been downloaded two million times, and the retailer says that shopping from mobile devices grew by 300 percent last year.

Besides, how could Sephora fear mobile, when all 304 stores have iPods and 20 stores have iPads?

Increasingly, retailers are rolling out mobile devices in their stores, especially iDevices, to empower workers to know more about products or even shorten the checkout lines.

Bornstein says Sephora employees walk the store floors with souped-up iPods that have a credit card scanner, so they can ring up a customer after helping him or her find a particular product. The employees also carry around mini-printers, in case the customer wants a paper receipt. But the iPads are not used for checking out; rather, they are a way for customers to access more information about a product, including different kinds of looks that can be created with makeup.

Bornstein says the intention is not to replace the cash register with a mobile device. “We haven’t made any decisions to walk away from registers in stores,” she said. “It’s nice to have a hub.”

As part of the company’s digital makeover, it also has fully integrated with Pinterest, so that users can “pin” any of the 14,000 products on Sephora.com to the bulletin-board service. Bornstein said that of the Web site’s social media traffic drivers, Pinterest is already second only to Facebook.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/sephoras-not-afraid-of-mobile-phone-carrying-customers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120409/rim-will-end-playbook-sideloading-to-escape-android-market-cesspool/ http://allthingsd.com/20120409/rim-will-end-playbook-sideloading-to-escape-android-market-cesspool/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:14:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=194120 Sideloading is a great way for PlayBook owners to get more Android apps on their tablets while they wait for native versions to be released. But for Research In Motion, it’s becoming a developer-relations problem at a time when maintaining good ties is paramount.

The growing list of paid Android applications being repackaged as free ones that can be run on the PlayBook is causing their creators some dismay. Which is understandable. It doesn’t take much to repackage an Android app for PlayBook, and once it’s repackaged, it’s quite easy to distribute and easily pirated.

For developers, that means lost revenue — and, potentially, bruised reputations — if the repackaged app doesn’t perform as it should. And for RIM, which is hellbent on creating a thriving developer ecosystem around the PlayBook, that’s bad news, indeed.

So the company is doing something about it. It plans to drop app-sideloading support from the PlayBook in a forthcoming update. “We’re removing sideloading for consumers,” said Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP of Developer Relations, adding that the company is very sympathetic to developers’ concerns about app piracy.

“Piracy is a huge problem for Android devs, and we don’t want to duplicate the chaotic cesspool of Android Market [now Google Play],” he said.

Instead, it looks like RIM may follow Apple’s lead, adopting for BlackBerry App World the same sort of closed system that gives Apple such tight control over the iTunes App Store.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/rim-will-end-playbook-sideloading-to-escape-android-market-cesspool/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120406/microsoft-banks-on-mobile-apps/ http://allthingsd.com/20120406/microsoft-banks-on-mobile-apps/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:00:18 +0000 Shira Ovide and Ian Sherr http://allthingsd.com/?p=193804 Microsoft Corp., struggling to dent the dominance of Apple Inc. and Google Inc. in the smartphone market, is stepping up efforts to court app makers like Hemi Weingarten.

Last fall, Microsoft aggressively recruited Mr. Weingarten to convince him to build his nutrition app Fooducate for its Windows Phone. Microsoft proposed putting a Fooducate engineer in Tel Aviv through a weeklong boot camp, and offered a new Windows-based Nokia phone for software testing.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

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