The Artiphon INSTRUMENT 1 Is A Symphony, Rock Band And DJ In The Palm Of Your Hand

It’s just four days in and Artiphon INSTRUMENT 1, the electronic device that can become almost any instrument you want it to be has already surpassed its Kickstarter goal by almost $250,000.

The Artiphon INSTRUMENT 1 allows you to play hundreds of instruments on one device in a number of different ways using an iPhone as the controller. Not only can you play piano, violin, guitar or loop beats as a DJ, you can also mix up the way you play those instruments. You can play the guitar with the sounds of piano keys or play the piano with the sounds of a banjo, for instance.

Artiphon is also creating a companion app so that you can literally program the device to become any instrument you want it to be. “Any number of combinations can be used,” said founder Mike Butera.

The idea for the Artiphon INSTRUMENT 1 came about one day while Butera was on the road with his band.

“I was carrying a viola, cello, guitar, an electric guitar, all these instruments and it was hard to lug all that around. I got to thinking about GarageBand. It can sound like anything because it’s software. I wanted something like that to exist as an instrument,” he said.

It just so happens that Butera also holds a PhD in sound studies and was a product developer for stereo systems at the time – technical skills that enabled him to dream up what this sort of instrument would look like.

It took four years and many iterations before the product came to be what we see today. An earlier version debuted during CES 2013.

AOL founder Steve Case liked the idea and gave Butera some investment money for research and development. Dave McClure, Eric Reis and a some musical angels from Nashville were on board as well. Butera took in a total of $700,000, hired a team of engineers, brought in his co-founder and CMO Jacob Gordon and started testing the product out on various musicians.

Bands such as The Weeks, Wild Cub, Moon Taxi, Mikki Ekko (who produced Rihanna’s ‘Stay’} and even Moby have given the product a spin.

Most Kickstarter campaigns don’t start out with this much support. “We were told by Kickstarter that we were 99 percent ahead of most campaigns, actually,” Butera said.

So why a Kickstarter campaign for something with so much backing already? Part of it is about getting the idea out there for marketing purposes. Kickstarter provides that platform for Butera and his team to reach the potentially interested masses. But it can also provide that extra bit needed to get the product into production.

“Hardware is pretty intense,” Butera said. “The angel funding helps with the R&D process but we needed working capital to manufacture it.”

The Artiphon campaign is reminiscent of Gtar in some ways. For those unfamiliar, the GTar is an interactive digital guitar that helps beginners learn to play using an app on their iPhone. The GTar went $250,000 over the original campaign goal. The difference is Artiphon can simplify for beginners, but can also become virtually any musical instrument it is programmed to be. It’s also in a later funding stage than where GTar was when that campaign ended.

We could also see this instrument on the shelves at our local Apple Stores in the next year. Butera confirmed his company is in discussions with Apple’s retail arm and that he plans to add the INSTRUMENT 1 to other retail outlets by late 2016.

The Artiphon crew will be traveling to the film, interactive and music festival SXSW this next week to share the instrument with festival attendees. “We’ll probably have some great spontaneous performances there, too,” said Butera.

Source: Techcrunch

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Vivaldi Is Quickly Becoming The Alternative Browser To Beat

Opera’s former CEO Jón von Tetzchner launched the first preview of its new Chromium-based Vivaldi browser in January. Now in its second technical preview, which adds a boatload of new features, the browser is quickly shaping up to be a worthwhile alternative to Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE — and especially for former Opera users.

Vivaldi unapologetically sees itself as a browser for power users in the vein of Opera’s original ambition (which it watered down over the last few years, according to von Tetzchner). The first preview introduced a couple of neat built-in features like tab stacking, note taking and Quick Commands (its Spotlight-like keyboard commands for the browser). The deal breaker for me at the time was the missing bookmarks bar. Now that the second preview has added this — and a bunch of other new features — Vivaldi is most definitely worth a second look.

Also new in this technical preview are on-demand image loading (which isn’t all that useful to me, but may be worth a shot when you are on a really slow WiFi connection) and Fast Forward and Rewind. With this, Vivaldi will automatically figure out if there is a second page to an article or search results page, for example, and lets you go right there without having to scroll down to the bottom of the site. This works pretty well on sites like Google, Hacker News and even TechCrunch, where there are obvious second pages. On more complex sites, like the New York Times homepage, its choices were a bit more questionable (it first took me to Ask Real Estate and then, maybe to give me a chuckle, to the IE8 Support page). Opera, unsurprisingly, offered a similar feature before its switch to WebKit and Chrome users can try this add-on to see how it works.

The other major new feature is spatial navigation. Like Quick Commands, it’s a feature for keyboard shortcut aficionados — but it’s should also turn out to be very useful for anybody who can’t use a mouse. You simply hold down Shift and then use the arrow keys to navigate between links.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at alternative browsers like Opera and Maxthon, and the various custom builds of Firefox (think Pale Moon and Waterfox) and Chrome. None of them have ever come close to replacing Chrome as my default browser, but I think Vivaldi has a shot (and even more so now that it can — at least unofficially — also handle many existing Chrome extensions).

I’m also a bit worried that building an email client into the browser will weigh it down. I really don’t need an email client in my browser, but many former Opera users are clamoring for this feature in Vivaldi and when I last talked to von Tetzchner, he was also a fan of the idea. Still, the team clearly has some good ideas and the technical ability to make them work.

Vivaldi is worth a try now, but I’m pretty sure that it’ll only get better over the next few months.

Source: TechCrunch

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The Apple Watch Is Time, Saved

Over the course of investigating the Apple Watch, I’ve spoken to several sources who have spent extended time with it. 

There are a lot of interesting details, some of which we’ll get into. But, by far, the biggest recurring theme is how little you use your iPhone once you have one.

After these discussions, it seems certain that the Apple Watch will shortly be the primary way you access your iPhone during the day.

People that have worn the Watch say that they take their phones out of their pockets far, far less than they used to. A simple tap to reply or glance on the wrist or dictation is a massively different interaction model than pulling out an iPhone, unlocking it and being pulled into its merciless vortex of attention suck.

One user told me that they nearly “stopped” using their phone during the day; they used to have it out and now they don’t, period. That’s insane when you think about how much the blue glow of smartphone screens has dominated our social interactions over the past decade.

There are a few ways Apple is making this happen.

Stay On The Watch

The Watch will have more context about you than a phone alone ever could. For example, it takes your heart rate periodically, providing you with a last-checked time, which could offer major benefits to health applications and other contextual processes.

Here’s a tidbit you might not know — in order to receive notifications from apps, the Watch must be on your wrist and locked. The Watch requires contact with your skin to receive notifications. There will be no in-app dropdown notifications or constant pinging while it’s off your wrist. Push notifications also cease when the battery reaches 10 percent. Those decisions speak to the care with which Apple is handling notifications.

The notifications are also different at an elemental level than the ones on your phone — both on the developer and user side of things. These are seen right away rather than at some point. You act on them quickly and they don’t stack up like they do on the phone.

There is that added bit of context because you know exactly when they got it, which means that time-sensitive notifications like those that recommend a precise establishment or ping you during a live event become much more germane.

One user told me that they nearly “stopped” using their phone during the day; they used to have it out and now they don’t, period.

If you’re a developer who deals with notifications you know how powerful that could be.

And, as a user, those notifications activate as part of the app right on the Watch home screen, allowing you to act on them without any sort of sliding, unlocking or other junk. These are immediate, actionable items that you can access without the obligations inherent in taking out your phone.

Mechanics

Because the screen of the Watch is so small, there has been a lot of talk about its use as a “notification window.” Yes, notifications are a powerful part of it, but the mechanics of the device actually support much, much more than that.

People that have used the Watch extensively say that the touch targets are actually very precise and sensitive. This means that you will be able to trigger smaller buttons and interactive elements fairly easily. (As a note, the unusual clustered home screen layout means that the “hot” spots for apps will be at the edges, rather than the center. This way you can jet out to the edge of a group in any direction and find an app. Your “bottom row” will become your “outer ring.”)

The display is also very sharp and easily readable from your wrist. When your attention is on the Watch, you’re going to want to do more there than you think, rather than having to move over to your phone. This means that you may find yourself reading short articles and other content on your wrist. This could affect the way that publishers want to build their apps. They shouldn’t just be redirection machines that punt people to their phones; there is an opportunity to give people what they need now and let them get back to what they’re doing.

Battery life is also much better than some previous reports, so Apple has been working on it. In a normal day of on-and-off use, the battery usually ends up at around 25 percent, which means that you should be able to make it through a full day. It only takes around two hours to charge fully.

The digital crown is an important part of the navigation process and has been matched precisely to the scroll velocity. This should give a sense of context that helps when viewing on the smaller screen, as you’re not chasing the scroll with your finger. It’s also changed physically since the Watch was first shown off, and now has more friction for a weightier, higher-end feel.

Pressing and holding the crown activates Siri, which sources have said works incredibly well on the Watch. It can be used for labeling, directions, commands executed by the phone and more. If — and this is a big IF as Siri has been hit and miss over the years for me — if it is truly a “say it and forget it” experience, the confidence in using your wrist as a “commander” for your life is expansive.

Why Watch?

So, let’s discuss. Does it kind of suck that we have to buy a $500 accessory to return to a normal life? Sure. But such is the deal.

You’re not going to give up your smartphone. That Faustian bargain has already been struck. We get access to an entire universe of information and communication and we sacrifice our bloody attention on its smooth glass altar. 

But the Apple Watch can return some of that attention and, more importantly, time back to you.

If you argue the Watch isn’t going to sell or do well, it’s worth pointing out that there are very, very, very few products that allow you to hand someone cash and be given back TIME.

This will be the Apple Watch metric to track: time saved.

We’re getting a tad metaphysical here, but really the only resource we all have exactly in common is time. Kings don’t have more of it than peasants. Not everyone will be able to afford an Apple Watch (or even an iPhone), but if they’re in an economic situation where that’s feasible then they’re also in the situation where they are probably willing to trade money for time.

And that is the target market of the Apple Watch. Not “rich people” (though there’s a model specially for them), not “tech geeks” and not “Apple fanatics.” It’s people who want more time, and that is a very large target.

This, for some reason, is the thing that Apple has had a hard time articulating. This is the primary use case of the Watch. It’s not just that it’s a “notification center”; it’s that it allows you to act without any additional distraction.

For now, the iPhone is a dominant business for Apple and the smartphone is a domineering force in our daily lives. But one day something will come along to destroy it. And, as Apple has expressed many times in the past, it is willing to be the one that finds that thing. With the Apple Watch, we could be seeing the beginnings of that process.

Perhaps someday, the Apple Watch could do the impossible: it could make you stop using your phone.

Source: TechCrunch

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Music Streaming Eats Downloads With On-Demand Up 42% Over 2013, Digital Sales Down 12%

Nielsen’s U.S. music report on the first half of 2014 shows digital music consumption rapidly shifting from downloads to streaming. On-demand streaming was up 42% over the first half of 2013, racking up 70 billion play in the first half of 2014. Meanwhile, digital track sales fell 13% to 593.6 million and album sales fell 11.6% to 53.8 million. The report on US trends (not international) makes Apple’s acquisition of Beats looks smart, as its iTunes download sales model is quickly dying out. As a whole, dismal digital and physical sales dragged total music sales plus streaming industry down 3.3%.
Back in the analog world, hipsters are making a serious impact as vinyl sales rose 40% over 2013 to 4 million in the first half of this year. That’s the only medium where sales grew.

[Update: It's important to note that abroad, where iTunes is available in 83+ countries and streaming services often aren't, the download may survive longer.]

If you use the standard 10X multiplier convert album sales to tracks, you get a combined 1.131 billion songs sold in the first half of 2014, down 12% from that period in 2013.

While YouTube’s music videos have been strong provider of music streaming for years, the rise of apps like Spotify is pushing on-demand audio music streaming to grow faster (+50%) than video (+35%). The two are now nearly the same size, as 33.65 billion songs were streamed in the first half of 2014, compared to 36.64 billion music video streams. At this rate, pure audio streaming will overcome music video streaming in the U.S. by the end of 2014. Internationally, where many of the top streaming apps aren’t always available, YouTube is probably still a bigger chunk of consumption.

You can see Nielsen’s full report here:

The State Of MusicTech

The music industry’s rapid recent changes make more sense after looking at this report. With the death of the download and the rise of the stream, power is up for grabs. While iTunes and to a lesser extent Amazon ruled the age of the legal download, Spotify, Google Music, and Beats are poised to reign over the streaming era.
That’s why Apple bought Beats. A source close to iTunes’ executives told me before the acquisition that Apple didn’t want to shock users and the music industry’s bottom line by suddenly converting iTunes into a streaming service. Instead, it bought Beats to allow for a graceful transition, permitting late-adopters to stick with the familiar a la carte download model while early adopters moved to Beats’ all-you-can-hear streaming subscription.

Google just acquired contextual playlist app Songza to bolster its bolster its on-demand Google Music All-Access streaming service. Google’s combatant looked a bit dry before, especially compared to Beats’ focus on expertly crafted playlists for different themes, situations, and moods. Now Google Music has a more human understanding of what people want to hear and when.

Spotify has raised over a half a billion dollars, making it too big to buy for all but the biggest players like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. At this rate it’s going to fly independent into an IPO, though that could be tough to sell since it’s saddled with high royalty rates that scale alongside it’s popularity. Spotify bought data provider EchoNest earlier this year, and is now experimenting with an API that let’s users play their Spotify music through third-party apps. Becoming the legal backbone of music streaming in tons of apps could make its subscription more attractive to users, and I see developing an ecosystem of niche music apps around it as high-potential way to fight the platform owners.

Samsung is trying to popularize its own device-specific music service with Milk, but since its phones run Android, it highly vulnerable to Google’s native offering. While Pandora still has a huge user base, personalized radio has been commoditized and bolted on in the form of iTunes Radio and Spotify’s ad-supported version. Meanwhile, Pandora’s licensing model doesn’t allow it to offer on-demand song choices like they do, which is why I foresee it struggling in years to come.

SoundCloud offers on-demand streaming of songs and long mixtapes that users and artists upload themselves. It’s seen labels cracking down on unlicensed streaming through the app, which is trying to build out its own advertising system. While music fans view it as an authentic place to connect with artists, it’s still figuring out how to become a succesful business. The “YouTube of music” might benefit from being acquired, though Twitter recently passed on the idea, which I believe was because it needed to spend the money to get its own monetization squared away by buying ad tech companies instead.
Amazon just launched its Prime Music on-demand service.

 But rather than trying to win over serious music fans, it’s using it to simply add value to Prime subscriptions that help it earn money by selling physical goods.

Nielsen Music 2014 Mid-Year US Report

It’s more of a threat to services courting casual listeners like Pandora who just want to hear something and aren’t too picky. YouTube is expected to launch its on-demand music streaming subscription service soon as a complement to its ad supported music video streaming that gets little press but is extremely popular, especially with kids. While the on-demand service has a tough uphill climb ahead given Google already has its native Music All-Access service to promote, its free browser-based videos reduce the need to pay for a dedicated music app.

In 15 years we’ve gone from CDs to Napster piracy to iTunes downloads to Pandora radio to YouTube’s music video streaming to Spotify’s audio streaming app. Perhaps the next shift will finally see the labels loosen their death grips and allow a cornucopia of music discovery apps to flourish atop a few legal rights holders so everyone can get a listening experience that’s their jam.

Source: TechCrunch

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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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