Facebook Becomes A Local Party Discovery Tool With “Events For You” Redesign

Just because you weren’t invited, doesn’t mean Facebook can’t help you crash the party. Facebook Events on the web got a slick visual overhaul today that includes a new “Events For You” tab that recommends gatherings it thinks you’ll enjoy, even if no one invited you, friends aren’t going, and you’ve never been to the venue. Rather than just being a calendar of your invites and a few suggestions based on what friends are doing, Facebook is now applying everything it knows about you to get you out of the house and somewhere fun…where you can take photos and post them to Facebook.

After we spotted the unannounced redesign today, Facebook confirmed to me it’s testing it with some users globally before a mid-paced rollout to everyone in the coming weeks. A similar design for Events will be coming to Android and iOS later this year too. You can see how it looks on web above.

The main Events feed now has a much cleaner, more condensed, iOS7-ish feel to it. A tabbed interface lets you quickly jump back and forth between All your events, Invites, events you’ve “Saved” but not RSVP’d to, and ones you’re “Hosting”. A shortcut on the right lets you hop immediately into past events or the creation flow. The design makes it much easier to manage invites because they get a dedicated space, instead of being meshed in with ones you’ve already accepted or declined.

But what’s really important here is Facebook’s concentration on Event discovery. The new “Events For Your” section on the right sidebar that can be opened into a list has more suggestions based on a lot more data. A Facebook spokesperson tells me “The recommendations you see are based on the information you have shared with Facebook (i.e., Pages you like, groups and communities you’re a part of, events that friends are attending), and other relevant contextual information such as day of the week and location.”


Essentially, Facebook can look at an Event, assess what it’s about and who is already going, and use that demographic and interest data to match it to more potential attendees. This is much more powerful than when Facebook dipped its toes into recommendations back in 2011. Facebook Events will now compete with a host of Event discovery apps ranging from catch-all services like YPlan, Applauze, Fever, and Eventful to focused ones like WillCall, Seatwave, and StubHub’s Showdrift for music and Sosh for cultural events. Bafflingly, Eventbrite still does a mediocre job of event recommendations despite having such a strong database of local happenings.

Facebook’s push into event discovery could be big for a few reasons. First, I think this looks rich enough to become its own standalone app. Some people aren’t avid News Feed readers and do their messaging elsewhere, but they have to use Facebook because of Events. Otherwise, their meatspace social life could suffer.

WillCall and Applauze take a highly stylized approach to Event discovery, compared to Facebook’s utilitarian approach

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me in an on-stage interview last year that certain Facebook features buried in its interface like Groups would benefit from having their own standalone apps, and I think this applies to Events as well. He said “…if you have something like Groups, it’s always going to be kind of second-class in the main Facebook app, or even messaging for that matter. In order to make these things really be able to reach their full potential, I do think over time we’re going to have to create more specific experiences.” An Events app that helped you find fun things to do around you as well as manage your invites could be a killer tool you can’t get elsewhere.
There’s also a ton of monetization potential in event discovery. Concert halls, conferences, clubs, and bars might very well be willing to pay to get their events injected into Facebook’s suggestions.
While it might seem counter-intuitive, getting people off the computer and out on the town is productive for Facebook. Events are where you meet friends that strengthen Facebook’s social graph, and take photos to share back, and interact with Businesses you could Like. If Facebook can be the portal to fun IRL experiences, it will win a place in your heart.
And finally, Events help Facebook achieve its mission to connect people, and fights the perception that it actually isolates us. The Events feature has quietly become one of the social network’s most critical over the years. Seems Facebook is finally ready to celebrate it.






Source: TechCrunch

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Windows Phone’s Market Share In The United States Isn’t Growing

The latest data from Comscore regarding the United States smartphone market isn’t great for Microsoft. The company’s Windows Phone platform managed no growth, ending the May period with a 3 month market share average of 3.4%, the same level that Comscore reported for the platform in February.

Android was flat, Apple picked up 0.6%, and Blackberry lost 0.6%. Android and Apple, however, control nearly the entire United States market, so to see little motion from them is hardly surprising. For Microsoft, which has invested billions into its mobile strategy, maintaining market share isn’t enough — it needs to grow.
Microsoft has seen some international success with Windows Phone, but given the importance of the United States market in terms of developer density, the company can’t afford to neglect its backyard. Microsoft recently announced an OEM kit that may increase support for its mobile platform.
Windows Phone or bust, you could say. Redmond recently deployed more than $7 billion to buy Nokia’s hardware business, in hopes of spurring its mobile efforts. It’s certainly true that as it has aged, Windows Phone has improved.

What Microsoft can do to breakthrough in the United States isn’t clear. The company’s recently announced Windows Phone 8.1 software update contains a number of new features, including Cortana, a voice-activated digital assistant most often compared to Apple’s Siri.
Now that the Nokia deal has closed, Microsoft can execute whatever strategy it’s had on tap. We’ll see the impact of that effort in the next set of data.

Source: TechCrunch

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eCommerce magento e-commerce eBay-Owned E-Commerce Platform Magento Shuts Down Services Aimed At Smaller Retailers

E-commerce platform Magento, owned by eBay’s Enterprise division, is closing down two of its products designed to reach small to medium-sized online retailers: Magento Go and ProStores. The company has posted notices and informational guides on both product websites, directing current customers to “Migration Center” dashboards and various FAQ’s that will help them move their businesses to other platforms.
Combined, the two products include around 10,000 merchants.

Bought by eBay in 2011 for over $180 million, Magento is now telling customers via email that the move to shut down these products “was not an easy decision and we understand it may not be welcome news.”
The company also says that the two products will not go dark until February 1, 2015 – well after the busy holiday shopping season, during which time the sites will continue to “operate and perform normally” and customer support will be provided.

However, affected Magento customers can make preparations to migrate their stores ahead of the holidays, if they choose. To aid in the transition, eBay named competitor Bigcommerce as its official migration partner, in part because the company already has experience porting Magento customers to its platform.
In an announcement, Bigcommerce notes that it has already moved over 6,000 ProStores customers to its platform previously, alongside 6,000 more customers from other competitors. It also supports tight integration with PayPal and the ability for clients to sell on eBay, which is what many of the booted merchants will be looking for. Bigcommerce today has over 50,000 customers, and will be offering special incentives to those arriving from Magento, it says.

In a related statement posted online, Mark Lavelle, SVP, Product and Strategy at eBay Enterprise explains that Magento is making this move in order to focus on Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Community Edition which he positions as “two solutions that better support and better equip small and medium size merchants to prosper in the evolving and increasingly competitive eCommerce landscape.”
However, Magento Community, the open source version of the Magento platform, is generally aimed at larger retailers who need more flexibility with their code. And of course, Enterprise Edition, as its name implies, is not aimed at those with smaller shops, but rather those with millions in online sales.

In the documentation shared with Magento Go site owners, the company explains that “changing market requirements” were a significant factor in its decision to close things down. Meanwhile, the newer versions of its flagship products will offer features not available in Go, it notes, including a new responsive design reference theme, and new payment options to streamline checkout.
Magento, as you may recall, saw a number layoffs earlier this year, with nearly 50 jobs cut from the e-commerce division, according to reports.

And though Magento now stresses in that same client document that it “remains committed to small and medium size businesses,” its move to focus on platforms that generally serve much larger clients says otherwise.

source: TechCrunch

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Google Play Edition Samsung Galaxy S4 And HTC One Now Available, Will Start Shipping By July 9

Despite plenty of rumors that attested to the contrary, Google didn’t show off any new Nexus phones at its I/O developer conference. Instead it trotted out a version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 that ran a largely untouched version of Android 4.2, and Google SVP Sundar Pichai followed up with an announcement about a similarly unfettered HTC One. The announcements left Android fans (myself included) slobbering in anticipation.
Well, the wait is over — the so-called Google Play Edition S4 and One are available in the Google Play Store for $649 and $599, respectively, and Google says they’ll start shipping by July 9. A bit expensive, sure, but you’re not locked into a long-term contract with a carrier (throw in a GSM SIM and you’re golden) so arguably the good outweighs the bad here.
By now, there’s been plenty of ink (digital and otherwise) spilled on the two devices — consider our lengthy GS4 and One reviews — but it’s worth noting that these devices aren’t running a strictly stock version of Android (hence the non-Nexus monikers). Sure, the overwrought skins and UI elements endemic to Samsung’s TouchWiz and HTC’s Sense are nowhere to be found, but certain tidbits from the original software had to be migrated over in order to keep some of their more compelling features intact. That means that, among other things, the Google Play Edition One retains its Beats Audio profile to keep its twin front-facing BoomSound speakers pumping out the audio, while the GS4 still plays nice with Samsung’s curious notification-revealing flip covers.
We’re still waiting to get our hands on some demo units to really put these things through their paces, but it’s heartening to see Google and its OEM partners take our pleas for (mostly) stock Android on premium hardware seriously. Of course, the fact that nearly all of the software differentiators between the two have been given the axe means that the quality of hardware may weigh more heavily in people’s purchasing decisions — maybe HTC’s One will finally find the success the company needs it to.

Source: TechCrunch

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Microsoft Opens Up Bing As A Platform For Developers

At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft today announced that it is opening up quite a bit of Bing‘s advanced functionality to developers. As Microsoft corporate VP Gurdeep Singh Pall noted, developers are already using Bing APIs, of course, but apps can now use Bing’s entities and knowledge, natural user interfaces and new mapping and visualization capabilities (including Microsoft’s just-announced 3D imagery for maps).
As Singh Pall noted, Microsoft has been using all of these capabilities privately already, of course, but he thinks that “if we can do something with an API that is good, third parties can do something that is dynamite.”

Bing, he said, “is not just a great search engine, but the team has built some great capabilities.” Bing, after all, is pretty good at understand user intent, unstructured content on the web and other queries and data types that are not trivial for a developer to implement.
The team, he said, always believed that Bing could do a lot of things that can “actually be very valuable outside of the search box. For a long time, we’ve now thought that you could use these capabilities to create some great experiences.”


Developers will get access to much of Bing’s data, including it web index and relevance engine, as well as its knowledge base and understanding of entities. The Bing team has also worked on lots of natural user interface technologies, including voice recognition, which will also be available for developers to add to their apps.

Source: TechCrunch

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Sony Supersizes Its Xperia Smartphone Line With 6.4″ Full HD Xperia Z Ultra Phablet

It was only a matter of time before Sony jumped on the phablet bandwagon. And that day is today. The mobile maker has just announced the Xperia Z Ultra: a frankly gigantic addition to its smartphone line-up that packs a 6.4″ full HD display. This phone is so big that one of the accessories Sony is lining up is a slender Bluetooth handset for taking calls — i.e.so you can leave the whopping slab on the table.
Sony is following in the footsteps of Samsung, with its Galaxy Note devices but obviously it didn’t say that. Pierre Perron, president of Sony Mobile Comms for NW Europe, said the mobile industry has  seen “increasing consumer demand for larger screens”, adding: “The big screen segment is one of the fastest growing segments.”
The LTE/4G Xperia Z Ultra slots into Sony’s line-up between its Xperia Z high end smartphone, announced earlier this year at CES, and its Xperia Z Tablet.

The Xperia Z Ultra is big across the front, but very slender around the waist: at just 6.5mm thin.
Sony’s head of global product design said the designers are approaching the limit of how thin they can make phones.  ”You can’t make the phone any thinner because of the connectors — we’re at the point we’re going to have start working on connector technology,” he said.
The overall look of the Z Ultra continues the Xperia Z and Tablet Z design language, with the same blunt-edged, high gloss slab form. It’s also waterproof and dustproof, as the Xperia Z is.

The display is full 1080p HD, and incorporates Sony’s Bravia TV display technology — including its Triluminos tech, which it said supports a greater range of colours, with natural shades, and also its X-Reality technology for improving the viewing experience of low res video.
Under the hood, the Xperia Z Ultra is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 2.2GHz quad-core chip. Its rear camera is 8 megapixels.
Sony’s phablet supports stylus interaction — Sony said “any pencil” can be used on the screen, rather than requiring a dedicated gizmo to poke it. Sony has also created a software keyboard designed for the larger phablet form to support one handed-typing.
The phablet is due to launch “later this year”. There’s no word on pricing as yet, or specific market availability.

Also today, tacked on at the end of the press event — entirely overshadowed by the attention being lavished on the Xperia Z Ultra — Sony announced a new smart watch, with the unimaginative name of SmartWatch 2.
Sony has been dabbling in ‘smart watches’ for years – literally – and made a point of trash-talking competitors who ‘may or may not be launching a smart watch’.
Sony’s new SmartWatch 2 can run a handful of dedicated Android apps, including Facebook and Twitter, plus a call handling app, email, Gmail, a music handling app, weather, Runtastic, a new aggregator app and a few others. The watch can also be used to remote control apps running on another Sony smartphone, by, for instance, being used to take a photo from the phone remotely without having to tap the phone’s screen.
Hardware wise, it has a 1.6 inch Transflective LCD display, which Sony says is designed for improved visibility in sunlight. The display has apparently been “optimised” over Sony’s prior SmartWatch, now rocking a resolution of 220 x 176 pixels. The watch itself is comprised of aluminium and plastic, and take a standard 24mm watchstrap.
Battery life — which remains the biggest hurdle to smart watch success — is good for three to four days “typical usage”, according to Sony, or five to size days low usage.
There’s no word on pricing as yet. Sony said the SmartWatch 2 will be available worldwide from September.
 
Source: TechCrunch

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A Year After Microsoft Bought It, Yammer Nears 8M Users, Deeper MSFT Integration… And Klout

One year to the day after Microsoft announced that it would acquire enterprise social networking tool Yammer for $1.2 billion, the pair are today publishing some updated usage numbers and news about a raft of new features to demonstrate that Yammer is on the up and up, and that Microsoft is riding the wave. This includes more subscribers, more people paying for service and much tighter Microsoft integration — but also partnerships with companies outside of Microsoft’s walls, such as a new partnership with Klout, to enhance what users can do with Yammer.
The company says that in the last year, total subscribers are up 55% and are now approaching 8 million, with usage activity — that includes messages, and photo/file exchanges — doubling in that time. Yammer says that paid networks increased by 200% over last year, although it doesn’t give an indication as to how much that translates into in terms of actual revenues or users. Recall that when Yammer was acquired, the company said that 20%, or 800,000 users, of its total subscriber base was paying for services; but at the time it didn’t break out how many networks made up that number. And in February 2013, Yammer noted 7 million users and paid user growth of 165%, adding 290 accounts in Q4 of 2012.
“A year ago, Microsoft presented us with an amazing opportunity to accelerate our business in the areas of both product and distribution,” Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks writes in a blog post. “Today we are seeing those benefits come to fruition.”
But Yammer and Microsoft have to keep a fine balance in how they go forward. On one hand, they are trying to show that Microsoft is putting its $1.2 billion social acquisition to work — if not in specific revenue terms, at least in terms of value-add for the wider range of software products that Microsoft offers. But on the other hand, mindful that Yammer has a number of subscribers who extend beyond those using Microsoft products, it is trying to show that the company remains independent and not simply another extension of the Microsoft shop, by continuing to link up with third parties.
First to the Microsoft enhancements. The company today said that Yammer will be getting a boost in coming months with significantly more integrations with existing products. These include:

• Further integration between Yammer and email. No details yet on how this would work, and whether this is Outlook-exclusive or would extend to other platforms;
• Enhanced document collaboration. This will give users of Yammer and Office 365 more document editing capabilities. (Looks a bit like a Huddle competitor in that regard.)
• Expanded Yammer messaging and external communication. This is something of a holy grail in my book with Yammer. Will this be long-awaited Skype integration? In any case, Yammer has been sorely in need of more real-time elements and hopefully this will mean more of them.

Further down the road there will also be more SharePoint search integration. Again, this is another way of using Yammer to enhance one of Microsoft’s existing products and make both more useful; although it would be great if it could be used with other platforms that were non-Microsoft-based as well.
These plans come on the back of recent integrations that have included adding the Yammer newsfeed for users of SharePoint Online and Office 365, and plans to add the new Yammer app to the Office Store to drive more users. The latter, Microsoft says, will be in place by the end of June and will let users embed Yammer group feeds into SharePoint sites.
It’s not too much of a surprise to see that for now most of the efforts for new services at Yammer are aimed at improving channels with other Microsoft products but the company continues to try to show that Yammer is doing more than just expanding on that front. To that end, the company today noted that it has doubled the number of partners in its app directory — Yammer’s smaller equivalent of Facebook’s App Center — in the last year, with developers using Yammer APIs now up by 70%.
As with those numbers around paying users, Pavan Tapadia, chief product officer for Yammer, doesn’t spell out what that growth translates to in actual figures, but today the company is highlighting one of their new, and more high-profile partners: Klout.
This integration will let Yammer users publish Klout scores and expertise on their Yammer profiles, and for those companies that choose to do it, they can also turn on an additional feature which applies Klout’s algorithm to a user’s internal activity on Yammer itself to create network-specific Klout scores.
As with Klout’s role in the wider world, it’s hard to decide whether there is really any merit to knowing about how influential a person is, but presumably if you are in a large enough work network that you don’t know certain colleagues all that well, it can be a useful bridge to collaborating more closely with them in the future.
“If you’re someone who has a lot of influence in the public social-sphere, this is a cool way to showcase your Klout score in the workplace,” writes Tapadia optimistically in a blog post. “The second aspect of integration allows Yammer admins to turn on a deeper integration with Klout to produce Yammer-specific Klout scores for employees based on their activity within their company’s Yammer network. This is a great opportunity for organizations to identify top contributors and subject matter experts based on their Yammer participation.”

Source: TechCrunch

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How Sony’s SmartWatch 2 Stacks Up To The Pebble And The MetaWatch Strata

Sony’s first go at the smartwatch mostly went unnoticed – a lot of people, myself included, had to be reminded of its existence when the Pebble made big waves for its huge Kickstarter funding success. But Sony’s not letting its early mover advantage go to waste, nor is it letting the SmartWatch brand die on the vine: Today it unveiled the SmartWatch 2, a successor to its original that improves specs and functionality in a number of ways.
The Sony SmartWatch 2 has competition from the aforementioned Pebble, and from fellow Kickstarter success MetaWatch Strata, which is another smartwatch category incumbent. If fact, so is Pebble, which means that this entire generation of devices is actually not the first, but may well be the first with the chance to actually gain some traction with the wider consumer market. Accordingly, a tale of the tape is definitely in order.

Platform support

Both the Pebble and the MetaWatch win this round, as they support both iOS and Android, while the SmartWatch 2 only works with Android phones. Sony has improved on the previous generation thanks to opening up support for any Android phones, instead of just Xperia devices, which makes this about 1000x more useful. And while the other devices support iPhone, there are limits put in place by the platform that make using smartwatches with iOS far less useful, though many of those are on track to change with iOS 7, which, for example, brings support for third-party app notifications to Pebble.

Battery

Battery life is going to be key to any kind of wide smartwatch adoption, and both Pebble and MetaWatch highlighted their multi-day power capabilities ahead of their device launches. Pebble says it can keep the watch powered for over a week on a single charge, and MetaWatch says its Strata will run for 5 to 7 days on a single charge – in practice, I’ve found both to be at the low end of their estimates, and the Pebble slightly under on some cycles.
Sony’s new watch makes some specific claims about its battery life, as well as making the biggest claim of all: The SmartWatch 2 has the “longest battery time for a smartwatch,” Sony says in its press release, a stat which it says has been verified by Strategy Analytics as of June 21, 2013. But the listed battery time expectations fall under those listed by its competitors; Sony claims 5 to 6 days with low usage, and 3 to 4 days with “typical” use. Testing standards may differ, but it looks like this will be right in the same general area as the competition when it comes to battery life overall, so don’t expect anyone to have a real distinct edge here.

Connectivity

The Pebble uses Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, as well as 4.0 Low Energy (LE) to connect to your device, which gives it some extra notification magic on iOS, while the MetaWatch Strata has Bluetooth 4.0 only. Sony’s SmartWatch 2 uses Bluetooth 3.0, which is interesting since it also claims the longest battery life without Bluetooth LE and with a much larger, color screen. The SmartWatch 2 also offers NFC, a trick neither of its competitors has, which does little beyond simplify the pairing process. Still, it’s an added convenience for users with NFC in their smartphones, and shouldn’t be discounted.

Display

SmartWatch 2 is the only one in the crop with a color display, boasting a 1.6-inch 220 x 176 pixel screen. The Pebble has a 144 x 168, 1.26-inch display, and the MetaWatch Strata has a 96×96-inch screen, which is 1.16-inches. The screens are all close, but there are key differences that users will want to consider. Both the Strata and the Pebble offer a nightlight LED for illumination, but lack any backlighting. This helps with power, but the Sony SmartWatch 2 with its colour display will be more legible in dark environments.
The MetaWatch Strata uses a reflective surface as the base for its screen, which results in it being virtually unreadable in certain lighting conditions, but the Pebble is mostly very legible, though the environmental light level detector is hit or miss. Sony claims that its colour display will be sunlight-readable, but generally speaking an e-ink screen like the one in the Pebble should fare better in that kind of environment.

Water resistance

The SmartWatch 2 is “splash-proof,” but that basically seems to mean you can wear it in a light rain shower or while washing your hands. Sony says not to wear it while showering, bathing, swimming, diving, snorkeling, fishing or doing “water related work.” Also, it notes that the watchband it ships with is neither water- nor splashproof. Basically, you can get it wet – but don’t get it wet.
The Pebble offers water resistance to up to 5 ATM, in both salt- and freshwater, which means you can take it swimming, or run in the rain. Pebble says not to use the watch in hot water, or while diving. The Strata likewise is rated to 5 ATM, or a submersion death of 165 feet. Both the existing devices win out in this category, for sure.

Apps

The Pebble has an API that’s being used by developers to build apps, but apps are coming relatively slowly, and offer fairly limited functionality. No doubt we’ll see more, but out of the box, the Pebble offers little beyond watch faces, notifications, and controls for your on-device music playback. MetaWatch does notifications, but email, calendar, Facebook and Twitter are still “coming soon” and there’s no word on third-party apps. The Strata does do music controls, and has weather, stock and calendar widgets, as well as an out-of-range alert so you don’t leave your phone behind.
The SmartWatch 2 offers call handling on the device (as does the Pebble) as well as a call log, notifications for calls, email, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and more. It does music remote functions, and offers calendar, weather, runtastic and new events aggregation. That’s out of the box, and there’s more planned. You can also remotely snap photos from your SmartWatch, control presentations and more using SmartWatch applications created by developers. Sony might have the edge in terms of app features, if only because it has more clout to convince and sign up developers.

Charging

It’s a small thing, but really important: the SmartWatch 2 uses micro USB to charge, while both the Pebble and the MetaWatch Strata use proprietary cables. That means added expense should you lose the single cable they ship with, and just general inconvenience. Sony definitely comes out ahead here.

Bottom Line

I don’t know if any of these smartwatches will be the one to break the mass market; more than likely, they won’t. But they show an evolution, and Sony’s at least trying to do better than the last time out, and has also clearly learned from the progress of its upstart rivals at Pebble and MetaWatch. Anyone other than early adopters might still want to hold off until OEMs devote and platform makers make more of an effort to actually support smartwatches, but at this point at least you won’t be in for an entirely frustrating experience if you pick one up.

Source: TechCrunch

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Advice From The Game Maker That Made GungHo Worth $14B: “Listen To Your Wife.”

One of the most absurd stories this year has been the rapid rise of Gung-Ho, the Japanese gaming company that saw its stock surge by more than 6,000% in a single year because of one hit mobile game called Puzzle & Dragons.
The company is now worth $14.4 billion on public markets. That’s more than twice as much as Electronic Arts is worth and about seven times Zynga’s market capitalization. For a brief moment, GungHo even surpassed Nintendo’s valuation earlier this month.
GungHo’s rise came through Puzzle & Dragons, a title that earned it an estimated $113 million in April — solely in Japan. It also recently hit 15 million users just a week ago, primarily in Japan.
The game itself is a puzzle matching title. The player has to line up several matching tiles in a row and they collect cute animal characters as they level up and battle other monsters and bosses.
The company’s success underscores a big shift in power between mobile gaming platform providers like DeNA and GREE, which ruled in a predominantly feature phone era, and first-party game developers, which don’t need to rely on an extra distributor on top of Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android platforms.
For the company itself, which is 300 employees strong, Puzzle & Dragons’ massive success has begged the question from rival developers — “What’s your secret? How’d you do it?”
But producer Daisuke Yamamoto could only say, actually half-seriously, “Listen to your wife.”
After being originally inspired by another Match-3 game called “Dungeon Raid,” he created a concept with more Dragonball-like art and a wizard-like theme.
Then he just listened to a lot of the improvements his wife wanted in the game.
Initially, it was just a team of four with him as the producer and other programmers and designers. It took a few days to develop the game, and then six and a half months until the company felt it was strong enough to go live.

Among the many changes his wife wanted: the ability to move a stone around the entire game board, instead of only one slot over at a time. She also wanted larger stones on the screen. He said that womens’ longer fingernails often get in the way of playing the game, so they need to be bigger to make the UI more player-friendly.

As the game grew into a cultural phenomenon, it kept taking GungHo’s servers down. The company started giving away virtual stones as an apology, giving rise to the word, ‘Wabishi,’ which is a combination of the Japanese words for ‘stone’ and ‘apology.’
He also said the company doesn’t internally focus on quantitative metrics that much, and instead relies on qualitative feedback from Twitter. That’s a pretty big difference from other freemium gaming companies, which focus on user funnels and retention rates over several days to a week to a month.
“Japanese people are really conservative. They don’t disclose their actual names,” said in an interview at Supercell’s Free Your Play event in Helsinki last week. “Because you can use a nickname on Twitter, it’s a much more effective way to listen than Facebook.”
As revenues ballooned, GungHo’s stock has gone on a rampage, growing from a valuation of just over $200 million a year ago to $14.4 billion today.

But Yamamoto says internally they try not to pay attention to the company’s soaring valuation. “We’re try not to focus on the stock prices. We just focus on creating games and that’s all we do,” he said.
He also said that even though GungHo is now worth more than longtime mobile gaming giants DeNA and GREE, they don’t intend to go for any kind of platform play.
“We’re pretty much not in favor of platforms like [DeNA's] Mobage and GREE. DeNA and GREE are IT companies. They are not gaming companies. All they focus on is how much revenue they will have,” he said. “But for us, we’re a gaming company. We emphasize game creatives. If all Japanese gaming companies started to focus on the creative side, it would be a really good move for the entire industry.”
He says to celebrate the game’s success so far, his team “just drank beer and ate pizza.”
He said his life hasn’t changed that much since the game became a massive hit. But he’s hoping that he can build out stronger branding for Puzzle & Dragons. “I’ve always wanted to do a game with good characters and IP [intellectual property],” he said.

So it wouldn’t be that surprising to see GungHo come out with merchandising and licensing deals akin to what we’ve seen with Angry Birds-maker Rovio or Cut The Rope-maker Zeptolab.
The company is also focused on improving localization for Western markets. Currently, the game seems to have done some basic translation work but the tutorials and art could probably be localized more. The company just announced a partnership with Finland’s Supercell to build in a bunch of exclusive in-game features that will appear in both Puzzle & Dragons and Clash of Clans.

“We’re not really satisfied,” Yamamoto said. “We’ve just been quiet so far, but we’ll be aggressive from now on.”

Source: TechCrunch

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“Facebook Reader” Is Real, But It’s Not RSS Or A Google Reader Wannabe

Facebook is working on a fresh way to read news, a source tells TechCrunch. It’s not based on RSS, and Facebook isn’t rushing the launch of a product that could compete with Flipboard. That’s because news reading is a high-stakes, long-term project that could get us to invest even more time in the social network.
Since our source brought us that info last week, the WSJ ran a story saying that Facebook is working on a product, code-named Reader, but had few details about how the product worked. It compared Reader to Flipboard because it supposedly aggregates news and presents it in a tablet- and smartphone-friendly format.
The report matches up with a post we published a little over a week ago, when we predicted that Facebook would soon be launching a reader product. We were wrong about the launch date, but can now confirm Facebook has indeed been working on a news-reading interface.
Facebook refused to comment on any of this, but we have been digging around and here’s what we’ve found so far.
This Is Not A Google Reader Competitor
Our source tells us Facebook’s product will not be based on RSS and follow in the footsteps of Digg, Feedly, NewsBlur, Zite and most recently AOL among the many trying to fill the hole that will be left with Google Reader’s imminent demise.
In fact, RSS is “too niche” an area for Facebook to bother with, the source says. The RSS code that appeared in Facebook’s API? It was just a prototype and not related to any specific product apparently. It has now been pulled.
While a vocal minority of hardcore Internet users will mourn the soon-death of Google Reader, much of Facebook’s user base has probably never used RSS. It’s not a particularly convenient standard to jump into, and most Facebook users would have to put in significant work finding and subscribing to RSS feeds before they get any value out of it. That’s too high of a barrier for Facebook’s mainstream user base.
The social network has said it aims to apply its resources towards products that can benefit large swaths of its user base. That is why Facebook didn’t build a phone by itself. It leaves building for niche audiences up to its platform partners.
We have confirmed that “Reader” is being led by Mike Matas, as WSJ reported. Matas is known as a user interface design visionary, as well as a great photographer. This lends weight to the idea that Facebook Reader is big on visuals and images, rather than text and RSS.
You may recall that Matas joined Facebook in August 2011, when Facebook acquired Push Pop Press, a startup he co-founded. Push Pop Press helped authors and publishers convert physical books into iPad- and iPhone-friendly formats. That expertise and focus on other forms of text beyond news could come in handy for this new product. And as the WSJ hints, long-form content could be part of this “Reader,” too — sitting alongside more immediate and classic “news” and news shared by friends.
This Has Been In The Works For A While
Specifically, our source says Reader has been in development for a long time and is “not a competitive response” to those different Google Reader-style offerings, nor to Flipboard.
This backs up our theory that Reader may be what we saw Facebook employees testing in December – a standalone iOS app or interface within Facebook for iOS that lets users browse news via full-screen or near-full screen photos.
There’s a chance this whole “Facebook Reader” thing is actually just Facebook’s next evolution of the mobile news feed, as Josh reported in December. If Facebook were to completely overhaul the look of the mobile news feed in its main Facebook for iOS and Android apps, that would be a product worthy of years of work and design revisions.
Right now if you look at the feed on mobile, you see a ton of dead space. Empty white screen and product chrome. While Facebook Home hasn’t gotten much adoption because its app launcher is sub-par, Cover Feed does a great job of making the news feed more immersive by replacing the dead space with full-screen photos. Cover feed is a very stripped-down version of the feed, though. A more fleshed out mobile news feed with Cover Feed’s full-screen images could work well.

We Devote Time To News

As Facebook matures, and services like Tumblr and Twitter continue to grow, it needs to find ways to get users to continue visiting the site. Launching new features is just a normal part of the life of any service, but as an advertising-supported platform, it’s even more imperative for Facebook to continue to look for ways to make sure users spend more and more time with it.
On mobile, the need is in some ways even greater: that is where most of their user growth is happening today, but it’s also a format that lends itself to less browsing in general. Adding video to Instagram is also another move to make Facebook properties more engaging. We wouldn’t be surprised if whatever the codeanmed “Reader” is doing is also a “Viewer” and “Listener.”
Whatever it is, we were told that it’s still too early to say exactly what this product will contain in the end. If Facebook launches a better way to read news and it’s a success, it could turn the social network from a collection of stories about your friends into a streamlined way to consume the entire web.

[Featured image of Mark Zuckerberg by Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP, remixed by Wired, via Tsevis]

Source: TechCrunch

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Firefox 22 Launches With Built-In Asm.js And WebRTC Support

Mozilla today launched Firefox 22, the first stable version of the popular browser that supports the WebRTC protocol and includes support for the organization’s asm.js JavaScript subset that offers near-native performance for web apps.
For the most part, browser releases have now become routine, especially since all the major vendors – with the exception of Microsoft – have switched to a rapid-release schedule. Both WebRTC and asm.js, however, have the potential to change how developers create web apps, so even if you usually ignore Firefox releases, this one is definitely worth a look.

Built-In WebRTC Support

WebRTC allows developers to create web apps with built-in video and audio calls, as well as file sharing without the need for any plugins or third-party software. A number of companies, including, for example, Tokbox, are already betting big on WebRTC. Until now, however, only Google’s Chrome supported the budding standard in its mainstream browser releases. Now that Firefox also supports it in its stable branch, we will likely see a large number of startups and established companies examine this technology far closer. Microsoft, so far, remains the only major vendor who has decided to go ahead with a different standard for the same functionality, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Internet Explorer, too, would support WebRTC out of the box in the near future.

Asm.js

Asm.js is another technology that has the potential to be game changer. As we explained in more detail in March, asm.js is a subset of JavaScript that runs with near-native speed in the browser. It is, as Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich explained it to me back then, a sub-language that “effectively describes a safe virtual machine for memory-unsafe languages like C or C++.” Thanks to tools like Emscripten, which can compile C and C++ code asm.js, developers can also use it to convert their C and C++ programs to run in the browser. Asm.js currently gets to within 2x of native performance and the team is working hard to speed it up even more.
You can test all of these new features with Mozilla’s BananaBread game demo, which uses WebGL, Emscripten, asm.js and WebRTC to “show how you can deliver high-end 3D multiplayer games while still maintaining a fast and stunning experience.”
Other small updates in version 22 include improved WebGL rendering performance, a download progress bar in the Dock application window on Mac OS X and support for display scaling options on high-res displays on Windows. You can find the full release notes here.

Source: TechCrunch

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Android-First Mobile Messenger Invi Raises $3 Million For Its SMS Replacement App

Invi, a mobile messaging app for Android which lets users search for and share photos, YouTube videos and more, is today announcing $3 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary’s A-Grade Investments, Alpha Investment, UpWest Labs, and Silicon Valley angels from Google, Nokia, Yahoo, Groupon, Spotify, SRI, Cisco, Chegg and others.
The new funding comes on the heels of an earlier $750,000 round from Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, and various angels announced back in November. This $3 million round includes that previous raise.
“Messaging hasn’t been evolved much,” explains invi co-founder Iddo Tal of his company’s inspiration. Even though users are now sending out dozens if not hundreds of texts per day, the majority of those communications still take place over SMS.
Co-founder Lior Gonnen says that the idea with invi is to integrate every app on a user’s phone into invi’s chat. When you share a piece of content – whether an Instagram photo, YouTube video, song from Spotify, and more – the link (URL) for that content is transformed into a “virtual widget” inside invi displaying the rich media. Sort of like Gmail’s “preview” feature, recipients can then view that content right in the invi app.
In its original incarnation, invi was more of a private mobile messenger which offered users the ability to communicate with other invi users for free over data or Wi-Fi connections in order to avoid SMS fees. This is a model which has proved successful for a growing number of messaging startups worldwide, but still one that limits an app’s potential user base. So today, invi is attempting to expand its user base by also introducing the ability to text with other, non-invi users at regular SMS rates.
However, despite adding this new ability, users attempting to share a photo or video from their Camera or Android Gallery app, are still be met with an “Invi Only” flag in the messaging app. They can search and share YouTube videos, but other options like “Contact” or “Music” are listed as “coming soon.”
With the additional funding, the plan is to grow invi’s now six-person team with more engineering talent, including those who can help bring the app to iOS, Windows Phone, and the Chrome web browser, too. Longer-term the plan to monetize the free app involves letting users send each other gifting that are more transactional in nature.
And no, for once, a messaging startup doesn’t plan to make selling sticker packs its business model.
Instead, the founders explain that the company, once it has established a big enough user base, would help users send more meaningful items to their closet friends, like perhaps presents, cards, or even money.
In the near term, however, the plan is to add support for other user requested items like group chat and landscape mode, for example.
First launched in October 2012, invi has seen several hundred thousand downloads so far, with over 50 percent of those in the U.S. Today, the app is being localized in a dozen more languages, and is available worldwide in Google Play here.

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Tencent, Naspers JV Ibibo Buys Redbus To Grow Its Online Travel Empire In India

China’s internet giant Tencent and South Africa’s media powerhouse Naspers are doubling down on tech in India. TechCrunch has just found out that Ibibo, their domestic joint venture, has acquired redBus.in, a Bangalore-based online bus ticketing company that has become a dominant and disruptive force in how people travel in the country. A formal announcement (which we are embedding below) will be coming out shortly.
Ibibo’s CEO and founder, Ashish Kashyap, tells us that the terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but there have been rumors of an acquisition in the works for some time, with prices in the region of around $135 million. The acquisition is interesting not only because it signals more activity for Ibibo, which is 80 percent owned by Naspers and 20 percent by Tencent, but also raises questions of whether the two plan to take Redbus’s platform and business model to new markets, like China for example.
Kashyap confirmed to TechCrunch that the company will keep Redbus running independently and operating as a separate business. It plans to bring Redbus into its existing travel portfolio which includes a B2C travel aggregator, Goibibo.com, and TravelBoutiqueOnline, a B2B travel agency platform.
He also reiterated that Phanindra Sama, the co-founder and CEO of Redbus, will be staying on and running the business under the new owner. “Yes. Absolutely. He is going to continue to participate with me and continue his role as the CEO of Redbus.”
Rumors have been swirling for the past week on Redbus’ acquisition, since a NextBigWhat report quoted a source saying a buy-out was on the cards for an estimated $135 million (800 crores).
Again, we don’t have details on the final sale price, but there are a number of signs of the company growing fast. Since the company’s founding in 2006, Redbus has shot past the 2 million user mark, and last year hit 10 million in ticket sales, using a combination of online reservations with confirmations delivered via SMS, usable across handsets in this feature-phone-dominated market.
It employs more than 600 staff, and sells more than a million tickets each month, across daily listings of 228,000 seats. It takes a commission from bus operators upon successful transactions.
If the $135m figure is accurate, it looks like a healthy exit for the copany. Bangalore-based Pilani Soft Labs, the formal name of the holding company that owns Redbus, raised a Series A round from Seedfund of $1 million. A Series B from Seedfund and Inventus Capital Partners in 2009 was for $2.5 million, and in 2011, Helion Venture Partners led a Series C to raise $6.5 million. Invenus and Seedfund came in for that latest round, as well.
As Drew pointed out when he visited Redbus in February, the company has been one to watch. Its chief product officer, Alok Goel, is an ex-Googler who approaches the business of organizing how people find and pay for bus tickets to a new level of big data. You can see how this model could be subsequently applied to the same situation further afield, or to different problems altogether.
If that is a problem that ambitious Redbus—and now its ambitious owners Tencent and Naspers—want to tackle, it could be some time before that happens. “The Indian online bus market itself is under penetrated at less than 6 percent,” Kashyap told TechCrunch. That means more room to grow at home first.
There is also the case with platforms. For now the majority of Redbus busines is online; the company only really started to make a push on mobile in February. With India as one of the world’s fastest-growing smartphone markets at the moment, this could present a new spurt of growth and opportunity for the company. IDC estimated that only 2.5 percent of mobile phones in the country were smartphones in 2012.
Tencent has also been keen to get in the Indian market. In July last year, it launched its mobile messaging app, WeChat, in India through Ibibo. When I visited its offices in Shenzhen earlier this year, the company spoke about how it conquered the domestic social networking scene, and its plans on expanding to more Asian countries. It’s started releasing TV ad campaigns in some of the countries in the region, and we can expect the company to continue to push its products in India.
Ibibo is owned by Naspers’ online media arm, MIH. Last year, MIH led a Series D round of $150 million in funding in Bangalore-based e-commerce company, Flipkart. MIH also won a board seat on Flipkart as a result of the funding. Flipkart sells a wide variety of consumer products such as books and apparel. The acquisition of Redbus could have it start cross-selling bus tickets on the site to the growing numbers of Internet-connected Indians.
Naspers has also declared it will up the ante on e-commerce, as online businesses grow for it in its home country of South Africa and abroad. Naspers chairman, Ton Vosloo, said during the company’s November 2012 earnings call that it is starting to place increasing focus on selling online. Last year, it acquired a majority stake in eMag, one of the biggest e-commerce sites in Romania. It also has a minority stake in Souq.com, an e-commerce portal in the Middle East, and bought 70 percent of Turkish shopping site, markafoni, in 2011.

Naspers, through its Indian subsidiary, ibiboGroup acquires redBus.in

ibiboGroup (MIH India), has executed a binding agreement to acquire India’s leading online Bus ticketing business, redBus.in(Pilani Soft Labs Pvt. Ltd) for an undisclosed amount.
This transaction will expand and diversify ibiboGroup’s existing travel assets : Goibibo.com  (one of the leading B2C Online travel aggregators) and TravelBoutiqueOnline (a B2B Online travel platform that enables thousands of small and medium agents)
The combined volumes of redBus.in and ibiboGroup’s existing travel assets makes the group, one of the biggest online travel players in India.
All the travel entities of ibiboGroup (MIH India), including redBus.in, will continue to run independently and operate as separate businesses to drive deep focus. The founders and management teams of each of these entities will continue to build out their businesses.
redBus.in, founded by Phanindra Sama in 2006 is India’s number one online bus ticketing platform by all metrics : sales, transaction volumes and available inventory. redBus aggregates bus inventory from thousands of bus operators and makes it available real time to end consumers and agents across the country via its e-commerce portal www.redBus.in.
redBus aggregates 228,000 seats per day, sells more than a million tickets a month and has 600+ full time employees.  The core business model of redBus is commission revenues on successful transactions.
Speaking on this event, Phanindra Sama, Co-Founder & CEO of redBus.in said “We are excited to be a part of ibiboGroup. Naspers’ strong belief in internet industry and operating experience in multiple countries will help redBus grow into a renowned brand in the coming years.”
According to Ashish Kashyap, CEO of ibiboGroup : “Our key motivations to acquire redBus are :  Strong management and founding team that will continue to run redBus as an independent operation. Second, significant leadership and market share of redBus in the online bus ticketing space.  Third, this marriage leap frogs us to become an even stronger online travel player in India.  This gives us significant combined scale in terms of daily transaction volumes and GMV. Lastly, we see this as an exciting market opportunity. Online penetration of the bus market is only 5.7% compared to 28% for air travel, suggesting headroom for rapid future growth”

Source: TechCrunch

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Photoful Improves On iOS 7′s Photo Gallery With A More Open, Gesture-Based App

Photoful, a new mobile application which is the rebranding and relaunch of the earlier app known as PhotoSocial, is hoping to attract iPhone users who want the Photos experience the new iOS 7 mobile operating system will offer…and then some. As with iOS 7′s re-imagined Photos app, Photoful will also sort your photo collection into smart groupings like iOS 7′s “Moments,” but it will allow users to do more, too, including photo tagging and advanced editing, printing, and sharing with several third-party services, as well as navigating through, selecting, and discarding photos using gestures.
As with PhotoSocial, which somewhat mimicked the original Apple Photos app, but then added capabilities on top, Photoful takes its inspiration from the redesigned version of iOS. It has the iOS 7 look-and-feel, making it one of the first to transition to the new mobile experience Apple recently debuted at WWDC.
Often, it’s apps like this that eventually blaze the trail for Apple’s own native applications, which is a precarious position for a startup. For this model to work, the company has to continually stay ahead of whatever Apple is building itself. (Case in point: the new iOS 7 Photos app has taken its own “inspiration” from a number of photo app makers, including Everpix, Moment.me, flayvr, Tracks, Cluster, Story, Flock and more.)
That being said, Photoful establishes itself as a fairly robust alternative to the native Photos app. And with some of the options it will add in the near future – like support for other third-party services such as Flickr and Tumblr and photo printing – it will get even better.
“You need to start with beating what they have today and rounding out the corners,” explains Photoful founder Jeff Bargmann. “[Apple's Photos app] is a closed ecosystem – that’s the big problem I see here. No other application can rope into this, and that’s a position that Apple isn’t really going to move from…That’s an opportunity for us.”
Bargmann’s background is in designing utilities that augment the features and functions available on the native OS. He previously created Windows desktop utilities like Stardock’s Fences and ObjectDock, 1UP Industries’ Bins, and was project lead on Stardock’s Impulse, which later sold to GameStop. Afterwards, he wanted to expand his skill set, and learned iOS development to build PhotoSocial, now Photoful.
Among the new app’s long list of extras, including Aviary-powered filtering and editing tools, a collage builder, a slideshow maker, Postagram export, and more, the best feature is simply how you interact with the app: gestures. Not only do you edit album titles with a tap (which is a fairly common behavior), you can also slide your finger across rows of photos to select or unselect them. Plus, you can pull photos off to one side of your screen to delete them or off to the other side to share them via email, SMS, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
The gestures are really natural and intuitive, unlike some apps where you struggle to learn the new interactions. Here, you immediately just get it. And as soon as you do it, you realize that Apple’s Photos app is lacking.
Being able to tag photos, too, is another great addition – especially for those who find the tagging paradigm, and the streams of related content that it allows for, to make more sense that having to place photos into folders or manually create albums.
In the future, Bargmann plans to extend the Photoful app to sync and share with other services like Flickr, Tumblr, and messaging clients like WhatsApp, as well as partner with other developers to offer users different photo editing options, whether that’s through in-app integrations or directing users to third-party apps that could be purchased and launched from within Photoful.
Today, however, Photoful is a free download from the Apple App Store here.



Source: TechCrunch

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Hands-On With Instagram’s New Video Feature

We’ve just made our way out of Facebook’s Headquarters in Menlo Park, where Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom took the stage to debut the app’s new (and not un-Vinelike) video functionality.

Kevin Systrom suggested on stage that they’ve been thinking about how to do video since day one — and if that’s the case, it shows. The new video functionality slips right into Instagram’s UI as if it were meant to be there.
As you scroll through your feed, videos are highlighted with a small play icon in the upper righthand corner. You can stop scrolling and hover over an item for 2 seconds and it’ll auto play, or you can tap it to begin playing it immediately. Even on the cellular connection I’m on right now, videos seem to start playing quickly, without a noticeable amount of time for buffering.
If you’re accustomed to Vine, the process of recording a video on Instagram is very, very similar: put your thumb down (in Instagram’s case, on a record button) to record, lift it to stop. Each time you do this, you create a new “segment” to your video, each of which can be deleted independently in the not-unlikely event that you mess up your video halfway through creating it.
Though clearly quite similar in concept, Instagram and Vine aren’t without their differences: Instagram’s max video length is over twice as long, at 15 seconds as opposed to Vine’s 6. The videos on Instagram don’t loop, which is interesting; while looping is something that may be a bit signature to Vine, I feel like it’s a bit limiting to not at least give the user the option. Oh, and of course, you’ve access to Instagram’s signature feature: filters.
Like with photos, filters must be applied after you shoot a video — you can’t see how a filter would look in a certain environment before filming. Once you’ve got your video shot, though, filters are applied in realtime on top of the video as your preview plays back.
One big catch: while you’ve always been able to import photos from your phone’s camera roll into Instagram, you can’t do that with videos — at least not in this first version. If you want a video in Instagram, you have to shoot it in Instagram. Kevin tells me that this is largely an interface challenge (how do you make it just as simple to edit an imported video?), but issomething that they’re considering changing in future releases.
So, what do you think: will you use this? If you’re a Vine user, would you switch away?

Source: TechCrunch

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