AllThingsD » iPhone

Eleven Things About Demand Media's Richard Rosenblatt

Beth Callaghan — Fri, 18 May 2012 21:08:37 +0000

Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt is perennially upbeat, and given the fact that his company just turned in a strong Q1 despite potentially disastrous changes in Google’s all-important search algorithm, he’s got good cause, at least for now.

Here, in keeping with the Ten Things tradition of sharing more than 10 things, are 11 things about Rosenblatt:

What qualities do you like in a person?
I admire people who are curious, innovative, respectful to everyone and eternally optimistic. I firmly believe that the best days are in front of us and we must always try new things while learning from others, in order to continually grow as people.

What qualities do you dislike?
People who are constantly negative rather than being constructive, or those who are jealous of another’s success. Being positive is a state of mind and all about how you perceive a situation — is it a permanent fall or a chance to learn and get back up? I’m also disillusioned by how negatively people react to another’s success when it’s not a zero sum game.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
Education. No question. Whether it’s formal or informal. There is unlimited knowledge available via the Internet, and we need to find an effective way to spread this knowledge globally to people who can benefit from it.

Do you still buy CDs or rent DVDs?
No, I download all media on my iPad or stream it through services such as Spotify or Netflix.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
I’d be looking for the next opportunity to innovate in the online media landscape and increase my lecturing opportunities at UCLA and USC.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
Raising three respectful kids who are curious, innovative and optimistic.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
All iPhone all the time.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
Twitter to get some news and tweet some info. Then eHow.com, Livestrong.com and Cracked.com to see what’s new and exciting on our properties. And then I’m tweeting again.

What was the last thing you fixed?
Boy, that’s a tough one. I’d say (and my wife would punctuate the point) that “handiness” is not one of my strengths. But, I inflated a flat tire on my son’s bike last weekend, and, as of now, it’s holding air.

If you could have any superpower, what would you choose?
Freeze time, so we would all have more time in the day!

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Wine, paddle tennis and pizza (without cheese). The perfect day would be enjoying all three at once!

Forecast for Revamped Weather Channel iPhone App Looks Bright

Bonnie Cha — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:15:45 +0000

If you get your weather updates from your smartphone, you might want to check out the Weather Channel’s revamped iPhone app.

It’s the first major redesign of the app since 2009, and brings a sleeker design and more personalization and social features.

The changes are apparent as soon as you open the app, where you’re presented with a more visual representation of the current weather. For example, if it’s sunny, the background image shows blue skies; if it’s rainy, the image displays raindrops. You can also customize the background with a favorite photo.

In addition to the visual improvements, the main page now features controls for quicker access to more detailed weather information and the ability to search for other locations. If you have more than one location saved to the app, you can simply swipe left or right on the screen to see the forecast for the other cities.

Finally, a new camera button on the front page allows you take a snapshot of the weather at your location and then share it via Facebook, Twitter, or the Weather Channel.

The updated version of the free, ad-supported Weather Channel app for the iPhone and iPod Touch is available now through the App Store.

The Era of AppNation Has Arrived

Beth Callaghan — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:59:49 +0000

Judging by two of the most hyped deals in recent Silicon Valley history — Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion and Zynga’s acquisition of Draw Something for $200 million — it seems like a foregone conclusion that the era of the app has arrived.

And some new numbers from Nielsen that chronicle the rise of “AppNation” on Android and iOS between March 2011 and March 2012 back up that notion. The study shows the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped from 32 apps to 41, and growth in time spent on app usage outpacing the growth in mobile Web usage on smartphones by a hefty margin.

And while Nielsen’s measure of the top five apps — Facebook, YouTube, Android Market, Google Search and Gmail — remained constant, the rest of the top 50 was more of an open playing field, with more than 20 percent of the remaining spots entering as new players, and plenty of maneuvering going on.

Data courtesy Nielsen

iPhone Engineer and Gmail Designer Team Up on Electric Imp to Connect Devices

Liz Gannes — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:00:46 +0000

A new start-up called Electric Imp promises to turn almost any product into a connected device with the addition of a tiny card in a slot.

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

Electric Imp founders Peter Hartley, Hugo Fiennes and Kevin Fox

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sprint's Hesse: We'll Make Money on the iPhone … Eventually

John Paczkowski — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:00:13 +0000

Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse took a $3.25 million pay cut earlier this month, as penance for orchestrating the company’s pricey iPhone deal with Apple. Has outcry over the agreement — which will cost Sprint an estimated $15.5 billion over the next four years — soured him on it?

Not at all.

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

But not for a few years, at least.

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

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

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

Dominant in China, UCWeb Brings Its Mobile Browser to Silicon Valley

Liz Gannes — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:00:26 +0000

With 50 percent of the mobile browser market in its home market of China, UCWeb is now looking across the Pacific.

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

UCWeb's Roy Rong and Yu Yongfu visit AllThingsD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple Moves Toward Larger iPhone Screens

Lorraine Luk and Juro Osawa — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:30:06 +0000

Apple Inc., which is expected to launch its next-generation iPhone later this year, has ordered screens from its Asian suppliers that are bigger than the ones used in iPhones since they debuted in 2007, people familiar with the situation said.

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

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

China Mobile Confirms Talks With Apple on iPhone

Ina Fried — Wed, 16 May 2012 06:01:13 +0000

China Mobile told its shareholders on Wednesday that the company is in talks with Apple about carrying the iPhone.

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

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

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

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

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

Bing Goes Sleek and More Social

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:43:47 +0000

If you’ve ever cleaned off a cluttered desk, replacing messy stacks of paper with framed photos of people who really matter, you have a rough idea of what Microsoft did with its new Bing search engine this week. Gone are the distracting, multicolored search results. Gone are the lists of recently searched terms that you never looked at anyway. Gone are the search results mingled with Facebook “likes.”

[ See post to watch video ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ESPN Retools Radio App, Launches on iPad

Lauren Goode — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:00:39 +0000

Rabid sports fans are about to get even less productive at work.

ESPN has reengineered its streaming radio app to offer improved sound quality, push alerts for when a favorite program is going live and content-caching for listening to podcasts without an Internet connection.

It’s also launching the app for the first time on iPad. The app is already available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry; the updated version will hit Android in June, and a Windows phone app will be available this summer.

If you vaguely recall ESPN having just updated its radio app, you would be correct: The company retooled it less than 18 months ago to include new search and personalization features, as AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka reported here.

Marc Horine, ESPN’s vice president of digital and print media, says that with the newest version, the network is trying to refocus on what’s most important with a radio app — the listening experience. Files have been compressed for faster streaming and downloading, and the sound quality has been enhanced, Horine says. And the app includes DVR — which allows users to skip ads, by the way, though I doubt ESPN would encourage that — and the ability to download full podcasts for listening offline.

Most of the content on the app is commentary, though there are some live play-by-play game options, and there’s a SportsCenter update available every 20 minutes (for the really, really rabid sports fans). To lure listeners to the app, ESPN has mixed up its app offerings to include original, app-only programming with stuff that’s already broadcast on terrestrial radio, like “BS Report with Bill Simmons,” “Pardon the Interruption” and “Fantasy Focus.”

At $4.99, the new ESPN Radio costs two dollars more to download than the old version, and runs in-app ads as well as commercials throughout the podcasts.

Horine says the mobile radio app has been downloaded more than 740,000 times since it first launched two-and-a-half years ago. That’s actually a pretty small percentage of the 24 million weekly radio listeners ESPN claims across all platforms.

And the majority of listeners — 90 percent, Horine says — listen to radio while at work Monday through Friday. But now, with the ability to stop and start radio podcasts on your desktop and pick up right where you left off on the mobile app, ESPN envisions mobile will become a growing fraction of those listeners.

(Full disclosure: I worked as a non-Disney employee for ESPN from 2003 to 2006. I was not involved with network’s radio programming.)

Going on Vacation? Ditch the Paper Guidebook and Try These Apps.

Lauren Goode — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:02 +0000

The restless mind only rests when the body is in transit — that’s what I tell myself when my feet are feeling particularly itchy.

Fortunately, the summer travel season is upon us, and vacation isn’t too far away. So, over the past week, I tested a couple of iPad apps for travel. To be clear, these apps aren’t geared toward finding deals on flights or hotels, but are digital guides that offer written and visual information about various destinations.

The first one I tested is Stuck on Earth, a free, iPad-only app from photo blog Stuck in Customs that takes a different approach to travel planning, with crowdsourced photos and suggestions based on your personality type. I compared this app to one of the new day-by-day apps from the trusted travel authority Frommer’s. The Frommer’s guides, which range in price from $10 to $15, are available for iPad and iPhone. With the HTML version, coming out shortly, users will be able to access travel info from any Web browser or use on an Android device.

There are many more travel apps in the App Store beyond these, including Lonely Planet’s $6 to $10 apps for iPhone and Android, offering seven country guides and 83 city guide apps for iOS. And if you’re taking a more social approach to your travel planning, Gogobot combines trip recommendations from friends with Instagram-like photo filters to create postcards.

[ See post to watch video ]

Stuck on Earth featured some inspiring, exotic photos, but after testing it, I found it was better for brainstorming trip ideas than it was for firm planning. The Frommer’s guide was more comprehensive, and is the one I’m more likely to use on a trip. However, Frommer’s and Inkling, its publishing partner, have put out only seven digital guides to date, spanning just a few states and a handful of countries.

First I tried Stuck on Earth. That app uses a narrator named “Karen,” whose suggestive tone might raise some eyebrows in a public place. “Well, hello there,” Karen said, her voice dripping like syrup on the iPad. She then asked me which personality type I am: Daydreamer, Explorer or Photographer; or a combination of the three.

From there, the Stuck on Earth app guided me to a main page divided into sections: One featured a world map and a local map; another was dedicated to My Saved Trips and Top Lists of destinations, selected for me by a Stuck on Earth curator.

I created a few folders for My Saved Trips: One was for France, one for Barcelona, and one for India. (A girl can daydream, right?) Then I went to the world map, where “pins” in the form of photo albums appeared in locations around the world. It was easy to get lost in the app’s photo albums. When I saw a photo of a monument, street fair or cafe that looked interesting, I added it to one of my trips; I could also share it via email, Facebook and Twitter.

All of the photos in Stuck on Earth are first posted to Flickr by users who are visiting or have visited that location. You might think this would mean that some photos are shoddy, but I found many of the images to be beautiful and unique. The creator of Stuck on Earth, Trey Ratcliff, says that the photos are chosen from a pool of 25 million photos on Flickr, and the app’s curators pick and choose which ones will be added to the albums. If I wanted to upload my photos to the app, I would have to join the Stuck on Earth community on Flickr and send them there first.

As much as I liked it, it’s not likely that I’d use Stuck on Earth as my main travel app. While the long photo captions are interesting and, in some instances, even include great personal anecdotes from the photographer, they didn’t offer enough information to really plan a trip. Also, the app is iPad-only, and I might not want to carry my iPad everywhere while traveling.

While testing Frommer’s iPad apps, I decided to focus on France. I downloaded the day-by-day guide for iPad for $9.99; Frommer’s also has guides for Alaska, California, Costa Rica, Great Britain, Japan and Spain.

The app has a whopping 18 chapters. Thumbing through the digital pages required a combination of swiping up and down and left to right, but it’s all pretty intuitive. The chapters offer both one-week and two-week tours, and itineraries for day trips, with static maps. There are photo slideshows, too.

A helpful spotlight tool searches for key phrases — like “red wine.” My favorite part of the Frommer’s guide was the ability to highlight content and make notes.

I browsed through a two-day tour of Paris, and explored the best tours for outdoor activity and dining. When I pressed my finger on the text for the Musée du Louvre, I had the option to highlight it, which would add it to my personal notebook, or to leave a public note for other app users to see. After a couple days into my virtual tour, I had left a few public notes (“So romantic!” near the Eiffel Tower), highlighted the Loire as a cycling route, and remarked in my notebook that I loved the Salers beefsteak at Le Baillage. Since the app is so new, I didn’t see any public notes from others yet.

The Frommer’s France app comes with voice dictation for language translation, though this feature is buried within the app. When I touched words or phrases in the glossary, I could hear the proper pronunciation of “Le plein, s’il vous plait?” (this translates to “Fill the gas tank, please?” in English).

The last chapter also included a ton of information about different types of accommodations, currency exchange, ATM locations, etiquette and customs, pharmacies, hospitals and other fast facts.

With international travel, there’s always the possibility that you might not have cellular service or an Internet connection on your mobile device, depending on your carrier and whether you’ve opted into international service. To test how these apps worked without service, I put my devices into airplane mode.

When I opened Stuck on Earth, Karen immediately told me that I didn’t have an Internet connection, but that I could look at my saved trips. She also thanked me for not turning off her voice. Using Frommer’s on the iPad in airplane mode, I was still able to see the full guide, maps and notes, as well as links to other content within the guide.

Frommer’s also offers the same apps for iPhone — which is great if you don’t want to lug your iPad around — but the apps currently don’t sync between iPad and iPhone. So if you’ve created a day’s itinerary on your iPad app, the iPhone version won’t show all of your notes. Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis says that a solution for this is coming soon.

If you’d rather just carry your smartphone while traveling, you may want to make all of your notes within the Frommer’s iPhone app from the start.

Fortunately, Frommer’s and Inkling are planning on introducing more app titles this summer. If you’re planning on traveling to one of those destinations, I’d recommend checking out the app.

Microsoft's Sneaky Success: The Xbox Is the Most Popular Video Player in the U.S.

Peter Kafka — Thu, 10 May 2012 18:41:24 +0000

More evidence that Microsoft is increasing its lead in the digital living room race: Data that shows its Xbox gaming console is the most popular non-PC device to watch Web video.

That is, more people are watching Web stuff on Microsoft’s machine than on the iPad, iPhone or any Android machine, anywhere. And when it comes to home viewing, competitors like Apple TV, Google TV and Roku are so far behind they’re not even competitors.

This data comes from Freewheel, an online video ad company, and it comes with caveats. We’ll get to those below. But first, take a look:

Now the asterisks: Freewheel is only measuring “professional content” that runs with ads, because that’s how it makes its living. So that means it’s counting stuff from companies like NBC, CBS, ESPN and Vevo, but not YouTube cat videos. It’s also not measuring Netflix usage. On the other hand, this isn’t a poll or sample, but data compiled by the company’s own ad servers.

So it’s possible there’s some variance here with the larger Web video world, but it seems reasonable to assume that this is at least directionally correct. At the very least, it gives credence to Microsoft’s claim that Xbox users are spending more time watching videos on the machines than playing games, and that its deals with conventional TV programmers may be bearing fruit.

And it shows you how much ground Google will need to make up as it gets ready to relaunch its Google TV. Ditto for Apple, if and when it ever gets serious about transforming Apple TV into something other than a “hobby.”

Pebble Creator on How He Closed $10 Million on Kickstarter: Build for Mom

Lauren Goode — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:20:45 +0000

How do you build a tech product that sells out before it even really exists?

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.

"Cross-Device" Ad Tracker Drawbridge Rounds Up $6.5 Million From Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins

Peter Kafka — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:30:18 +0000

Drawbridge, an ad tech start-up founded by AdMob engineer Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, has raised $6.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer. Drawbridge says it can help marketers target potential customers by tracking them as they move around from device to device — like from a laptop to an iPhone. Sivaramakrishnan put in six months at Google after it acquired AdMob, before starting her own company.

Backed by Skype Co-Founder Zennstrom, FreedomPop Starts Taking Sign-Ups for 4G iPhone Sled

Ina Fried — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:16:41 +0000

FreedomPop on Thursday started taking preorders for its first product, an add-on sleeve that gives the iPhone 4G data capability.

The company, which is backed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, is promising users who buy the $99 device upwards of 500 megabytes of free data use each month. The company isn’t building its own network, but is using data service to be provided by Clearwire and others.

Those who order the device being are told that it will ship by the end of the summer, though they can request a refund if they get tired of waiting.

Although it is giving away Internet bandwidth for free, the company aims to make money by selling other, as yet unspecified, services. FreedomPop also plans to sell data packages for those who want more than the included free bandwidth.

“The timing couldn’t be better for our product,” said FreedomPop VP of Product Mauricio Sastre in a statement. “Carriers are throttling data and increasing prices and users are desperate for affordable alternatives. As the mobile industry flexes its joint oligopolistic power, we want to ensure that we are keeping them honest.”

Google Revamps Google+ for iPhone

Lauren Goode — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:23:47 +0000

Google has launched an updated version of Google+ for iPhone, with larger profile pics, optical cues, a more prominent “+1” atop the news stream and other visual enhancements to create a more eye-friendly app. Google+ app users can also sync photos from their iPhones to a Google+ album, use mobile “Hangouts” to video chat with friends and view a “Nearby” news feed to see status updates from people around the same location.

iPhone 4S: Forward Into Ubiquity!

John Paczkowski — Tue, 08 May 2012 22:05:22 +0000

Once a relatively short list, Apple’s lineup of regional iPhone carriers is growing longer by the month. In April, the company added five partners in Alaska, Kentucky and Wisconsin. Later this month, it will add three more in California, Kentucky and Kansas.

On May 18, Kentucky’s Bluegrass Cellular, California’s Golden State Cellular, and Kansas’ Nex-Tech Wireless will add the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S to their portfolios. And all three will sell the devices at a $50 discount to the prices charged by AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.

With the addition of Bluegrass, Golden State and Nex-Tech, Apple is now selling the iPhone on 12 carriers across the United States. Clearly, the company is executing on the plan for carrier expansion Tim Cook outlined last year to Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi and has no intention of ceding any smartphone market share to rivals.

T-Mobile CTO: Network Should be Ready for iPhone Users by Q4

Ina Fried — Tue, 08 May 2012 02:29:44 +0000

While much of the attention on T-Mobile’s planned $4 billion network upgrade has centered around its plans to launch LTE next year, there is another key component to the strategy.

T-Mobile is also looking to free up space in another part of its spectrum that should finally allow iPhone users to run on its network at full speed. The company has about a million iPhone subscribers, even though those devices can only run at slow 2G speeds. T-Mobile USA does not sell the iPhone itself.

At a dinner event in New Orleans on Monday, CTO Neville Ray said that the effort to reclaim some of its 1900 MHz spectrum should reach a critical mass in the fourth quarter of this year, allowing the company to more aggressively court AT&T subscribers that are no longer under contract.

Ray declined to comment on whether the company would directly target iPhone users in a big marketing push planned for later this year.

“It would make sense,” Ray agreed, but added, “We’re not there yet.”

The company announced on Monday night two of the companies that will help it build out its next-generation network: Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks.

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In Wake of Instagram Acquisition, Twitpic Launches iPhone App

Mike Isaac — Tue, 08 May 2012 01:46:52 +0000

Despite having been founded four years ago, Twitpic only launched its first free iPhone application on Monday, complete with basic photo editing tools and comments section. The app debuts as competition increasingly heats up in the mobile photo-sharing space, intensified by Facebook’s recent $1 billion acquisition of similar photo-sharing service Instagram.

Flipboard CEO McCue Likely to Step Down From Twitter Board Over Potential Future Conflicts (Or Closer Cooperation)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:37:24 +0000

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has approached Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey about moving off the board of Twitter.

It is not clear when McCue — who became a director of the San Francisco social communications company in late 2010 — will step down, but it could come soon.

The reason, sources said, is McCue’s growing feeling that the companies are on a product collision course, with a possible troubled or perhaps more attractive result.

In other words, Flipboard will either face increasing rivalry from Twitter or will end up as a possible acquisition target for it or other companies.

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies.”

Indeed, Twitter has bought several companies that help users read and discover, such as Summify.

The goal has been to better make sense of the massive amount of data that the service produces daily; to that end, Twitter has pushed to improve its user interface design on a number of devices.

And Twitter is a big part of Flipboard’s app, which is very dependent on the tweet feed and accounts for 70 percent of its links, sources said.

Flipboard is also more of a “mobile first” company, which is where Twitter is also headed even more aggressively.

Already popular on the Apple iPad, Flipboard launched its iPhone app late last year and it is prepping a version for Google Android soon.

That’s why, in addition to being a rival, it is also an obvious acquisition target for Twitter, as well as others such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

In fact, Google already tried to buy it last year, before Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast’s venture arm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll, Flipboard launched to much attention in mid 2010.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate personalized format.

Google has mounted a competitor, called Currents, as has Yahoo with its Livestand offering, neither of which have gotten much traction. In fact, sources said, Yahoo is likely to shut Livestand down completely.

There have also been a spate of other similar readers, such as Pulse and Zite.

Spokespersons for both Flipboard and Twitter politely declined comment.

In U.S., Slightly More Women Than Men Are Using Smartphones

Ina Fried — Mon, 07 May 2012 15:00:25 +0000

By now, we all know that about half of U.S. phone owners have smartphones, but what’s interesting is some new data on just who is more likely to be in the smartphone camp.

According to Nielsen, ethnic minorities were highly likely to have a smartphone, with Asian Americans leading the way at 67.3 percent opting for smartphones. Nearly three in five Hispanic mobile subscribers use a smartphone as do a majority fo African-American phone users.

By contrast, only 44.7 percent of white mobile phone subscribers have a smartphone.

Women were slightly more likely than men to have a smartphone, with 50.9 percent of women having a smartphone compared to 50.1 percent of men.

As for which smartphone people are using, recent trends continue as Android is the most commonly used operating system, running on 48.5 percent of smartphones, while the iPhone is the most commonly used smartphone model, at 32 percent of devices. RIM’s share of the U.S. smartphone market is down to 11.6 percent. Microsoft made up 5.8 percent of smartphone users in the U.S, but the old Windows Mobile accounted for more than twice as much of that than did Windows Phone 7 devices.

A Scanner for All Seasons

Lauren Goode — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:00:14 +0000

Every year, come tax season, I curse myself. I might write about all things digital, but when it comes to receipts and important documents, my record-keeping is analog amateur hour.

So this year I’m getting serious about scanning. Fortunately, there are plenty of portable scanning options out there, ranging from mobile apps to wand-like scanners.

This week, I set out to determine whether an app or a pocket-sized scanner with receipt-management software can really do the job of a larger scanner. I tested three options: The smartphone app JotNot Scanner Pro by MobiTech 3000, PlanOn’s tiny SlimScan SS100 scanner and Xerox’s new wand-shaped Mobile Scanner.

The JotNot Pro app uses the iPhone’s camera to capture images of documents. And after five days of testing, it became apparent that the app was great on the go, but I wouldn’t use it to scan tons of files. The SlimScan scanner’s size was attention-grabbing, but the device and its software were problematic for me. Despite its larger size and $250 price point, the Xerox scanner was my top pick, because of its fast scanning and its wireless connectivity via an Eye-Fi card.

[ See post to watch video ]

I began the scanner tests with JotNot Pro for iPhone, which was updated late last year and costs $1.99.

I was at a conference last week, accumulating business cards and receipts, so it was a good opportunity to test the app. After I snapped a horizontal photo of a business card, the app immediately found the edges of the card and cropped the image. Then it processed the image, and the text in the final file was clear and easy to read. I did this with receipts as well.

JotNot Pro let me enhance each file before processing it, whether it was a hard-to-read receipt or a file with lighter text; and I could also adjust the contrast or add a timestamp to the files.

Next, I shared the files. I had the option to email the files, print or fax them, open them in compatible apps, such as DropBox, or copy them to DropBox, Evernote, Box and Google Docs. JotNot Pro can also easily convert the saved files into PDFs.

I was impressed with all of the options packed into the JotNot Pro app, and would continue using a mobile app to scan when I have my phone and no other options. But for high-volume scanning, I wouldn’t rely solely on an app.

I had high hopes for the SlimScan, but it didn’t deliver. The SlimScan SS100 is a super-thin, credit-card-sized device that launched last month and currently lists on Amazon.com for $106. It claims to store up to 600 scanned images before you have to dump the files off of it, and its expected battery life is 200 to 300 scans per charge.

It confused me from the start. The SlimScan has five tiny unmarked buttons, and I had to read the instruction manual to figure out which one was the power button, which is never a good sign. I had to dig my nail into each button to press it down. When I removed the bottom portion of the stainless steel device to start scanning, I felt like I might break it.

I found that with the SlimScan, I had to have a slow, steady hand as I was rolling the device across a file, or the images wouldn’t scan properly. The first few images I scanned were cut off or missing lines of text as a result of this.

PlanOn’s software for the SlimScan, which is installed straight from the device, was confusing at first as well. The software doesn’t work on Macs, so in order to test it I installed the software on a laptop running Windows 7.

I initially had some trouble transferring files from the scanner to the SlimScam file-management system. The PlanOn software on my laptop would only recognize the files when I renamed them with a JPEG extension. It turned out I needed to install an additional software component in order for SlimScan to convert the files to readable files, and PlanOn suggested I upgrade the software running on the actual scanner as well. According to SlimScan, any SlimScan software earlier than version 4.3 needs to be updated, and my SlimScan was running version 3.8.

After I managed to import images of receipts, business cards and a portion of a book cover, I had the option to move the info to Contacts and export it to Outlook, among other things. Some of the scanned data from business cards didn’t transfer over to Contacts, though optical-recognition software often isn’t 100 percent accurate.

The $250 Xerox Mobile Scanner launched in January, and is comparable in size to the mobile scanner made by The Neat Company, which has been making digital filing and scanning products since 2003. The Xerox scanner can be set up to wirelessly share images, too.

The scanner is 11.5 inches by 2.75 inches by two inches, and weighs 1.5 pounds. Its expected battery life is 300 scans per charge. Like the SlimScan, it isn’t fully compatible with Macs, though Xerox says a Mac utility will be available soon. The Xerox scanner has ports in the back for a flash drive as well as an SD card, so you can scan directly to those, then transfer the files to your computer.

Getting set up to transfer files from the Xerox via Wi-Fi was a bit of a process. First, I inserted an Eye-Fi card, which comes with the scanner, into my laptop, and signed up for an account online. Then I moved the Eye-Fi card to the back of the scanner. I had to temporarily disable other nearby wireless networks so I could “train” my devices to use the Eye-Fi card as a wireless hotspot.

I also had to download a Xerox app for my smartphone if I wanted the files to wirelessly transfer to my phone.

But after all that, I was a scanning machine. The Xerox device scanned all of my business cards, receipts and documents well — and quickly. And files transferred seamlessly to both the Xerox mobile app on my phone and my Eye-Fi dashboard on my laptop. From there, I could email the files or share them with more than 25 productivity, social networking and picture sites.

If the Xerox app itself took photos, it would be the perfect mobile app companion to the hardware. The Xerox mobile scanner may be expensive and slightly less portable — and it probably won’t make tax season any more fun — but for scanning lots of documents and easy file transfers, it gets the job done.

Sprint Chief Cuts Pay After Shareholder Criticism

Greb Bensinger — Sat, 05 May 2012 15:52:40 +0000

Sprint Nextel Chief Executive Dan Hesse agreed to cut $3.25 million from his compensation after shareholders complained it didn’t reflect the hefty upfront expense of carrying the iPhone. Hesse, in a letter filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission Friday, said he was voluntarily cutting some short- and long-term bonuses as well as some stock awards.

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Apple Ordered to Produce Documents in Suit Over iPhone Location Data

John Paczkowski — Sat, 05 May 2012 13:18:26 +0000

Another legal headache for Apple. A California judge has greenlighted a class action lawsuit accusing the company of collecting users’ iPhone location data without their express permission.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ruled this week that the discovery phase of the class-action lawsuit will proceed and ordered Apple to turn over relevant documents to the plaintiffs’ legal team by May 17, without any “game play.”

An unfortunate turn of events for Apple, which fought to have the case tossed, arguing that the plaintiffs have so far failed to prove that they suffered any injury at Apple’s hands.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

Funzio's Big Exit to Gree Fueled by Only Three Hit Game Titles

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 04 May 2012 23:42:46 +0000

Funzio’s $210 million sale to Tokyo-based Gree this week makes it the second mobile game company with a relatively short operating history to be snapped up recently.

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.”