Here are two ads — called “Alive” and “Together” — that Apple just released to tout its iPad and iPad mini. They’re a clear departure from Apple’s previous TV spots.
With jazzy music and quick word-association, they are much more hyperactively catchy than the usual doink-doink, thinking-nerd style of many others, and they feature a range of very active and visually arresting apps.
Here they are:
Crashlytics, the mobile crash-reporting and analysis platform that was acquired by Twitter last month, said today that it will make its enterprise-level features available for free. In a company blog post, the company’s co-founder, Wayne Chang, said, “The features and usage we used to charge for based on limits are now unlimited across the board.”
The Android app Google Now — with its promise to provide personalized, highly relevant, in-the-moment information — is one of the more interesting projects in consumer tech these days. But at this stage, its developments are incremental. Today, Google is releasing a trio of updates to the product that help users get stuff done quickly.
So, a scenario where this might come in handy:
What’s odd about Google Now — but also, key to the philosophy of the product — is that this all happens in the background. There’s no real way to go to Google Now and explicitly request it to do something for you. Instead, you have to trust the great Googley Moogley machine to automatically detect what might be useful and do it for you.
“If we don’t have anything for you, we shouldn’t notify you and risk being annoying,” explained Google Now product manager Baris Gultekin today. “We like to be as relevant as possible.”
Next, Google Now has also built a real estate card through a partnership with Zillow. So if Google Now detects that a user is in the market for a new home via repeat real estate searches, it will trigger a card with nearby listings in the area. And when a user with that card walks into an open house, Google Now will detect the location and show information about the house.
What’s next for the Google Now product roadmap is not some giant leap forward, according to Gultekin. Rather, it’s more of these incremental improvements.
“There are so many different situations when our users need help,” Gultekin explained. “My goal is to anticipate all your needs and anticipate the right thing when you need it. It’s a huge undertaking. We are basically trying to focus on trying to get you information you need when you need it before you ask.”
But the Google Now team — which originated as a 20 percent project in Google Maps but now is part of Android — is making one more change today to be a little less subtle than it has been.
Since it was debuted at the Google I/O developer conference last summer, Google Now has been available on certain Android devices when the user swipes upward. That’s cool, and something no other Android app has access to, but if you don’t know to swipe up, you might never see it.
So, also in today’s update, there’s going to now be a Google Now widget for users’ home screens that automatically updates to show a glance at the top-most card.
The folks at the Exploratorium in San Francisco are some of the best in the world at designing participatory exhibits that teach visitors about their own perception and the world around them through direct experience.
The Exploratorium’s first free iPad app, Color Uncovered, has been downloaded one million times since late 2011.
Today, it’s launching a second, called Sound Uncovered, with a set of fun and mind-bending audio illusions, manipulations and tests.
Jean Cheng, who led the team that built the app, took me through a series of mini-iPad exhibits on a recent visit to the still-under-construction new Exploratorium building on the water at Pier 15 in San Francisco.
For instance, there’s a Mobius strip kind of demo of a chord progression, where it’s impossible to find the highest note. There’s another one where you move a slider until you can hear a high-pitched sound, and the app estimates your age. There’s another that plays your voice backward so you can teach yourself audio palindromes.
They’re not necessarily things you’d do over and over again, but they’re pretty neat in the moment, with explanations of what phenomena are occurring.
Asked what ages Sound Uncovered is appropriate for, Cheng declined to say. “Anyone’s experience is authentic,” she said. “This is for curious people of all ages. It’s not about answers, it’s about a ‘what happens’ style of thinking.”
Sound Uncovered was developed with a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Exploratorium doesn’t have any particular ambition of making money from it.
During a wide-ranging interview at D: Dive Into Media, Rose talked about how Facebook views media, and how media should view Facebook.
“Facebook is primarily two core pillars — identity and sharing,” Rose said, adding that both pillars are part of Facebook’s media pitch.
“From an identity perspective, so much of who we are and how we identify ourselves comes from what we read and what we watch,” Rose continued. “So our identity platform can’t be complete without media being part of it. Similarly, the sharing piece can’t be complete without status updates about news stories, music friends are listening to, updates about movies people are seeing.”
The high-level principle driving this is the idea of finding the perfect balance between great user experience and delivering audience to platform partners.
“At its core, what we’re really striving to do is find the perfect equilibrium from a great user experience and a strong platform that developers and partners will continue to invest in,” Rose said. “… We need to keep the news feed interesting, and one of the ways we do that is through media.”
At the same time, however, Rose said Facebook must “honor” content, and presumably appetite for audience and buzz that’s ever-present behind it.
“We think it’s our job to honor content,” Rose said. “Media content deserves to be honored and respected in the news feed. For example, we recently increased the size of images from media partners. That’s more engaging for users, and for partners it’s great, because click-throughs and engagement increased.”
Media content also deserves to be consumed, says Rose. And here, too, Facebook plays a big role, and hopes to play an even bigger one in the future.
“How did you hear about ‘Downton Abbey’?” Rose asked. “I discovered it on Facebook. I kept seeing it pop up in my news feed. The simple fact is most of us find the TV shows we enjoy by listening to suggestions from our friends. That’s the primary discovery mechanism for content right now. Imagine a future, though, in which you turn on the TV and see a feed of all the shows your friends watch. We think that’s a very compelling idea. Content discovery always has been and always will be social.”
Additional Notes From the Session
[ See post to watch video ]
On Tuesday evening, Apple’s App Store over at itunes.apple.com started experiencing significant slowdowns. We first noticed the store’s pages stopped loading properly at 4:23PM EST, meaning the outage has already lasted over half an hour at the time of writing.
While this means you can’t access apps such as Facebook for iPhone from the company’s website, a quick check on iOS devices shows that this issue is not affecting the app store on Apple’s mobile devices (aside from app developer pages not loading). The issue is, however, also causing problems for the iTunes store (apps and media content) on the desktop, the Mac App Store, and the iBookstore.
For some, those stores are not loading at all, while for others they are loading but take forever to do so. Apple’s status page for its Services, Stores, and iCloud showed green across the board up until 4:43PM EST, at which point it showed problems for the App Store, the iTunes Store, the Mac App Store, and the iBookstore:
Twitter users started to notice as well, with the earliest report coming in at 4:51PM EST. A search for app store down on the social network shows that more users started reporting the problems right after.
We have contacted Apple about this issue. We will update this article if we hear back.
Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
And then there’s LinkedIn, one company in the minority of consistently strong tech market performances over the last few years. Since the company debuted on the NYSE nearly two years ago, it has spent most of its time on the market moving in an upward trajectory (save a nasty period in mid-2011).
This afternoon’s expectations are little different. The Street consensus is positive on its earnings report, with an average estimate of $279.5 million in revenue — nearly an 11 percent quarterly sequential increase — and an EPS of 19 cents.
Why so bullish? Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia attributes some of his positive outlook to new products debuted over the last quarter, citing an increase in overall user engagement.
“We believe new features such as Professional Insights (ability to follow thought leaders) and Linkedin Today (a social news curation product that provides members with news most relevant to them) would have helped increase engagement,” Bhatia wrote in a research note to investors this week.
Coupled with the site’s overall design refresh last fall, LinkedIn is focused on its engagement issue. The company saw a 2 percent sequential decline in page views last quarter (down to 9.4 billion, which is certainly no slouch). Part of the problem is the perception that LinkedIn remains an online resume, something you update with your most recent career information and then don’t return to. (Or “set it and forget it,” as Ron Popeil might say.)
Obviously that’s not what LinkedIn wants, and it has beefed up its efforts to increase engagement over the past year. Now users are prompted to leave feedback on each others’ profiles in the form of “endorsements,” essentially a “Like” for someone’s ability to do something (I, for example, get endorsed for journalism by my connections). Or take the little profile completeness progress bar on the right-hand side; LinkedIn wants you to keep coming back, to add content to your page, and to stay up to date on what others are doing.
That’s not an easy feat. Perhaps, as every other Web company seems to believe these days, the answer lies in mobile. LinkedIn’s unique mobile-only visitors jumped to 25 percent in Q3, nearly double that from a year-ago quarter. If the company can continue to bolster its mobile apps on Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone, we could see that mobile growth sustained. I’d keep an eye out for mobile numbers in today’s earnings release.
We’ll have coverage of LinkedIn’s numbers this afternoon.
Confirming news first reported by the Nikkei, a BlackBerry spokeswoman told AllThingsD Thursday that the company is indeed pulling out of the Japanese market — at least for the time being.
“We are in the process of launching BlackBerry 10 globally in key markets, and we are seeing positive demand for the BlackBerry Z10 in countries where it has already launched. Japan is not a major market for BlackBerry, and we have no plans to launch BlackBerry 10 devices there at this time,” spokeswoman Amy McDowell said. “However, we will continue to support BlackBerry customers in Japan.”
The company declined to comment on its plans for other non-critical markets.
A surprising move for BlackBerry, though perhaps it shouldn’t be. Over the past few years, BlackBerry’s market share in Japan has suffered a decline so precipitous that it no longer even ranks by name on comScore’s survey of the top smartphone platforms in country. As of June 2012, BlackBerry was lumped into the research firm’s “Other” category which itself claims only a 0.4 percent share. At the time the survey was conducted, 24 million people in Japan owned smartphones. So, while the country may not be a major market for BlackBerry, it is very much a major smartphone market.
Developing …
Dropbox is unveiling a brand new API for developers today that should give mobile app makers an excellent new tool to work with. The Dropbox Sync API allows apps for iOS and Android to treat files stored on a user’s Dropbox account as if they were local, managing syncing, caching, offline access and tracking changes easily so that developers only have to worry about building an app, and not the storage and management of the files users create with said software.
I spoke to Dropbox Product Manager Sean Lynch about the new API and what it can offer developers. Essentially, Lynch said this is yet another attempt by Dropbox to simplify the lives of developers when it comes to creating apps that can work seamlessly across platforms with remotely stored files, just like the Dropbox Chooser the company unveiled back in November 2012.
“Dropbox’s mission is really to let users access their data wherever they are, and that’s not necessarily geographically speaking,” he said. “Whatever device, whatever platform, whether their computer at home, their smartphone or their tablet, iOS or Android, it doesn’t matter; what we want users to be able to expect is whatever device they plug into, they can access their files on Dropbox when they get there.”
That means that helping developers integrated Dropbox access into their apps is of crucial importance to the company’s overall mission, Lynch explained.
“How do we simplify the story of integrating with Dropbox so that we can get developers everywhere integrating with the service?” has been the main question driving new product development on the API side, Lynch said. “The chooser was definitely the first step in that… We released it on a Thursday, and over the Friday and over the weekend we saw developers go home and paste a couple of lines of JavaScript, integrate the Chooser, and launch the following Monday with Dropbox integration.”
The Sync API essentially simplifies the process of integrating Dropbox storage into apps. Using the previous API, as a developer you’d have to download the file, re-try it if it fails, store it somewhere and set up that location, and then also handle re-uploads. Plus, if a user came offline, you’d also have to figure out a way to track the changes and re-upload them when a mobile network connection is available once again.
Now, the Sync API takes care of all of that for developers, handling inconsistent network connections, offline caching, automatic uploading and offline storage all in one. In a release about the news, Squarespace Note developer Chris Cox said the new Sync API cuts the amount of code it takes to integrate Dropbox into his app in half.
Lynch says that Dropbox is excited about what developers will do with the Sync API, beyond the more obvious use cases of making sure that documents edited on mobile devices remain up-to-date and accessible from other platforms. We could very well see some uses similar to how devs have employed the iCloud syncing API from Apple, but with content saved on a user’s own Dropbox account and therefore accessible not just to iOS and Mac devices, but to virtually any computing platform.
The fallout from Ofcom’s March 2012 decision to allow the company now known as EE to refarm existing 2G spectrum to build a 4G network continues. That decision paved the way for the launch of the U.K.’s first 4G network, 4GEE, up and running at the end of October 2012. Now EE’s rivals, Vodafone and Three, have asked the U.K. telecoms regulator to liberalise their existing spectrum holdings to allow them to run 4G services too.
Ofcom has gone further — and is proposing to liberalise all mobile licences in the 900 MHz, 1,800 MHz and 2,100 MHz bands for 4G — kicking off a consultation today. Here’s what it’s proposing:
to liberalise all mobile licences in the 900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2100 MHz bands to permit the deployment of 4G services (where such licenses have not already been liberalised). This will align the permitted technologies across all mobile spectrum licences, including the existing licences at 900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2100 MHz and the licences to be awarded by auction in the 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz bands. This will meet a long standing objective to liberalise all mobile licences so that there are no regulatory barriers to the deployment of the latest available mobile technology;
The consultation document includes a table detailing the current breakdown of U.K. spectrum holdings — which shows that only EE and Three (H3G) currently have liberalised spectrum (in the 1,800Mhz band), and also underlines how EE, the joint network entity formed by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile, was able to use existing spectrum holdings for 4G because it held such a large tranche of spectrum (2 x 45MHz). Other carriers aren’t so well furnished:
All the U.K.’s major carriers are currently bidding to acquire new spectrum — in the 800MHz and 2.6 GHz bands — which would enable EE’s rivals to launch their own 4G networks by late spring/summer. Despite Ofcom’s proposal to liberalise more existing spectrum licences for 4G use, it’s unlikely that EE’s rivals would be able to launch new 4G networks in their existing spectrum for a variety of reasons.
For one, Ofcom’s consultation on the liberalisation runs until March 29, after which the regulator would need time to consider the responses it has received before making and implementing its decision. Additionally, carriers would need to ensure they have cleared existing users of the liberalised spectrum before being able to deploy 4G services. Whereas the spectrum bands going under Ofcom’s hammer at present are being prepared for an imminent 4G launch — talks between the carriers, Ofcom and TV broadcasters last fall resulted in a speeding up of the clearance schedule for the 800MHz band, for instance.
Assuming Ofcom does go ahead with the proposed liberalisation, Matthew Howett, telecoms regulation analyst at Ovum, reckons it could be years before these existing spectrum holdings could be put to use for 4G.
“Despite operators being able to deploy 4G services in these bands previously restricted to 2G and 3G technologies, most are unlikely to do so in the short term,” he said in a statement reacting to Ofcom’s consultation. “They would first need to be cleared of their existing use through a process of refarming that would probably takes years rather than months, and so the spectrum that is currently being auctioned by Ofcom will most likely be used for Vodafone, O2 and Three's initial deployment of 4G services.”
Howett added that Ofcom is moving away from a “command and control” approach to spectrum policy towards a “market-based management mechanism that lets the users of radio spectrum decide its real economic value and the best way to use it”. So, while the near-term impact on U.K. carriers’ 4G deployment plans might not be that great — the longer term move to free up spectrum licences to support speedier deployment of future technologies could have a much more significant impact.
“As mobile technologies advance and demand for mobile data traffic increases, regulators have acted to liberalize certain spectrum bands from previous technological restrictions,” Howett added. “Many regulators have updated the conditions of the licenses to accommodate the principle of technological neutrality, which removes restrictions on spectrum use and allows operators to deploy other technologies in these bands. This is a positive move.”
Discussing the medium term consumer benefits of liberalising spectrum licences for 4G, Ofcom’s consultation document refers to the increased “flexibility” it will offer carriers to decide which technology to deploy in which band, and ultimately, therefore, to better tailor services to customers’ preferences:
In the medium term, liberalisation may give operators greater flexibility to decide which technology to deploy in which bands. This may allow them to supply services that better meet their customers' preferences.
… we recognise that operators may not immediately deploy 4G services in the newly liberalised bands. If so, then the consumer benefits associated with liberalisation would not occur immediately. However, it is likely that the operators will take advantage of the increased flexibility, and that consumer benefits will flow from this, in due course.
HTC is set to show off something at a special press event in NYC on February 19 (the day before Sony’s, it turns out), and it’s quite likely that the company will debut its rumored new flagship phone, the M7. And now new leaks from the generally dependable Evleaks suggest the company has a multi-device lineup planned to follow the M7 with retail availability in Spring.
The two phones detailed by Evleaks on UnwiredView suggest that HTC will follow-up the M7 with a device with slightly more moderate specs, akin to how the One S was designed to complement the One X last year. And there will also be a down-market device, called the G2, that will be 2013′s equivalent to the HTC Desire C.
The M4 will reportedly pack a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, with a 4.3-inch 720 p display, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage and a 13 megapixel rear camera. It’ll have a fairly limited 1500 mAh battery (but fewer pixels to push compared to the M7), and should run Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.
The HTC G2 (which is unrelated to the previous HTC phone of the same name) will have a 1.0GHz ARM Cortex processor with 512MB of RAM, a 3.5-inch HVGA (480 x 320) display, with a 5 megapixel rear camera and no front shooter, a 1400 mAh battery and Android Ice Cream Sandwich as its operating system.
Once again, HTC looks set to deliver a trio of solid Android handsets designed for various consumer budgets, but I am a little concerned that this won’t be different enough from the status quo to really excite consumers and propel sales to higher than HTC’s rather disappointing performance overall in 2012. That said, it’s still very early to be judging these phones considering they haven’t even been made official yet, so maybe there’s more to HTC’s 2013 lineup than what’s apparent from the spec sheets.
On Thursday, shares of the smartphone pioneer continued the downward slide they began the day before, during the unveiling of its long-awaited BlackBerry 10 OS and handsets. BlackBerry shares opened down 10 percent and, at $13.21, they’re down nearly 4 percent as I write this.
Why the pessimism after what seemed to be a fairly successful launch event? The estimated arrival dates of the first of BlackBerry’s BB10 phones. Though the touchscreen Z10 debuted in the U.K. and will ship in Canada and the United Arab Emirates next week, it won’t hit the U.S. market until March. And the Q10, a BB10 handset with a physical keyboard, won’t be available anywhere until April. Later-than-expected ship dates imply smaller-than-hoped-for unit shipments, and the Street clearly finds that disappointing.
Beyond that, there are concerns about the BlackBerry ecosystem and addressable market that I mentioned earlier this morning. That said, BB10 is a vast improvement over its predecessor, and has certainly closed the gap with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. It’s not hard to imagine it appealing to BlackBerry diehards looking for a next-generation device. But the legacy user base is an easy mark. Those BlackBerry users who have defected to iOS and Android over the last few years will be a far harder sell.
Imangi is giving Rovio a (temple) run for its money. According to a press release, Imangi Studios’ newest game, Temple Run 2, was downloaded 50 million times in 13 days, besting the previous record held by Rovio Entertainment’s Angry Birds Space, which crossed the 50 million threshold after 35 days last year. It’s worth pointing out, however, that the main version of Angry Birds Space costs 99 cents, while the Temple Run games are free. Rovio’s game has been downloaded more than 100 million times, and was the most popular paid app on both iPhone and iPad in 2012.
Out of the box, the 128GB version of Surface Pro offers only 83GB of available storage, and the 64GB model just 23GB. That’s a sizable disparity between advertised storage space and actual storage space, and something for those considering dropping upward of $899 on the device to keep in mind.
To be fair, a portion of the 41GB of the unavailable storage with which Surface Pro ships is dedicated to a recovery partition that users can easily free up, but still. The 64 GB iPad has about 57 GB of available storage. My understanding is that the 128 GB will have about 121 GB, though I’ve not confirmed that.
Microsoft, for its part, stresses that any storage woes Surface Pro owners might encounter are easily solved by external drives and the like.
“Surface Pro has a USB 3.0 port for connectivity with almost limitless storage options, including external hard drives and USB flash drives,” the company said in a statement. “Surface also comes pre-loaded with SkyDrive, allowing you to store up to 7 GB of content in the cloud for free. The device also includes a microSDXC card slot that lets you store up to 64 GB of additional content to your device. Customers can also free up additional storage space by creating a backup bootable USB and deleting the recovery partition.”
RebelMouse, a content aggregation and curation site that lets users set up a profile and pull in content from their social networking accounts, as well as other sources, has hired some key former employees from CNNMoney and VaynerMedia.
Since launching to the public last June, RebelMouse has had 240K sites created and is hitting 1.5 million unique monthly visitors to its landing pages. The company tells us that it has seen a big demand from publishers, and has partnered with TIME magazine for its person-of-the year campaign. Additionally, it worked with C-Span for the presidential inauguration, will power an ESPN Magazine online experience for the Super Bowl and continues to bring in movie and television properties to create their own “portals.”
To help RebelMouse build out these partnerships and plans for the future, it has hired former CNNMoney social product lead Niketa Patel as Director of Content and Stephanie Bagley from VaynerMedia as Director of Partnerships. This is an interesting hire since Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of VaynerMedia, is an investor and advisor in RebelMouse. Both will report to Sam Epstein, RebelMouse’s VIP of Platform, who previously worked at Google and HuffingtonPost. Yes, this is the beginning of a power team in content curation and distribution.
In addition to these roles, the RebelMouse development team is now at 24, and has added both iOS and Android specialists to build out its mobile offerings. I spoke with RebelMouse CEO, Paul Berry, about where the company is now and what we can expect from it in the future.
TC: What direction do you see RebelMouse heading?
Berry: RebelMouse is solving a core problem with publishing on the realtime and social web. Everyone’s efforts are fragmented working on each network, and everyone needs to bring it all together to show who they are and highlight their efforts and the best of their community. We believe enterprise and individuals are increasingly using the same tools and this is a perfect example for that. Big publishers and brands will use RebelMouse to power more and more sections of their websites. RebelMouse will stick with a freemium model where rebelmouse.com/You is always going to be free, but you can pay as you use RebelMouse to power your domain and engage with more sophisticated features. RebelMouse should be the solution everyone uses, from companies with massive revenue or traffic to small companies. We believe we can apply a network effect to the open web. This year we are focusing deeply on building more and more network dynamics and engagement into the product while helping gain significant scale with partners and directly with consumers.
TC: What is it about content aggregation that makes the space so interesting to you?
Berry: I don’t see RebelMouse as a simple aggregator. Its the combination of curation plus content creation that is so interesting. Everyone’s struggling with their blogs because of what realtime and social have done to us. Five years ago if your last blog post was three weeks ago you were totally fine with that. Today it starts to get embarrassing. So when you can have your site constantly fresh with the work you’re doing on these vital social networks then you begin to also publish more original content.
TC: How do companies like Twitter and Facebook react to what you’re doing? Basically you’re stealing some eyeballs from their destination sites.
Berry: Our mission is to prove that a Twitter user who joins RebelMouse finds Twitter more vital and essential to them than ever before. Now instead of just reaching the people who are following them at the time they tweet, they know that these interactions are populating their website, not as a widget but as a core part of the content that shows who they are and who loves them and what articles support their thesis of the world. We work very very hard to make sure we are adding value to these networks. We push follows back to the networks they came from instead of asking them to follow only on RebelMouse. We believe that as astounding as the scale and growth of these networks has been, they are still nascent and we can be a strong partner to them, helping give more ROI on efforts to engage. We were one of the first companies to move onto the new Twitter API and to officially match new display requirements. We’ll always iterate and work quickly with them as they grow.
TC: How are you working with social networks right now and how will you work with them in the future to display things in a beautiful way for your users?
Berry: We are working with each to help users get into latest best practices on engagement and display. For example because Facebook is a mix of private and public, we look carefully at the permissions of each post and only publish what is marked clearly as public and send stuff that is just for your friends to draft so you can decide to make that public or not. One of the fundamental features of RebelMouse is the ability to freeze stories into a spot, so something that is particularly meaningful to you as an individual or as a company isn’t just lost in the stream.
TC: What’s next for the product?
Berry: We’re tremendously excited about the updates we have coming. We’ve reached a critical point where instead of having aspirational hopes about how what we were building could be used, it’s being used by some of the smartest people in the world and in high-traffic, high-impact situations. So we’re iterating with them, taking their feedback and looping it back to make RebelMouse sophisticated but simple.
In particular we’re really excited about adding contributions to Rebel Nav because essentially people are able to create topic-based front pages on the fly and invite guest editors and meet new people as they organize and create content. We’re working on sponsored content solutions, turning on revenue where it makes the product durable and focusing on creating network dynamics at every level of the software.
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We all share a lot of things, and it’s hard to put all of our favorite content into one place, displayed in a way that’s consumable by anyone who isn’t completely obsessed with the inner-workings of the Internet. At its very core, RebelMouse lets you curate your own magazine, full of photos, stories and videos that you choose to share, in the order that you’d like them shared. It’s a nice breakaway from the current model of reading a constant stream of information on Twitter or Facebook.
Think of RebelMouse as your Internet mixtape. While it’s not a completely new concept, it is very relevant in the age of people collecting items on Pinterest so it’s the right time for this product. Plus, it’s kind of fun to play with.
New Year’s Eve celebrations always kick off with Sydney’s memorable fireworks display where over a million people can gather at Sydney harbour to enjoy the spectacle. But this year, Sydney wants the celebration to be a lot more interactive, and an app has been created to allow anyone with a smartphone to join in and (hopefully) create something quite unique.
The app will be made available for free to both iOS and Android devices. The idea being that the app will fill each phone’s display with changing colors in the lead up to midnight. What Sydney is hoping for is lots of smartphones being held to the sky running the app, which in turn will create a light show to equal that of the fireworks.
Chances are good that many in the crowd that gathers will have a smartphone in their pocket. But getting everyone to download the app and remember to use it at the right time is going to take some memorable advertising and nudges from the event’s ambassador Kylie Minogue on the night.
Sydney has two fireworks shows planned for New Year’s Eve. The first is the family fireworks event at 9pm before the main event at midnight. The event organizers should use that 9pm show as a practice run for the smartphone light show, as many of the crowd will probably return for the midnight celebrations and be more inclined to remember to pull out their phones at the right time.
via Physorg. Image credit: Adam J.W.C
Today, users have been receiving notifications from the Google Play store that the Nexus 4 will now be in stock starting at 12pm PST. However, in line with the device’s rocky launch and early life, it’s only in stock in the US — not exactly appeasing the rest of the world that has been patiently awaiting their new phone.
Google’s new phone sports a rocky history regarding its initial life cycle. Google’s big New York City event planned to announce the Nexus 4 was canceled by a literal natural disaster, Hurricane Sandy, and Google had to settle for a much less exciting blog post instead. Then the smartphone launched on November 13, and has been hit with limited availability ever since. Customers have been reporting that their phone is still on backorder, and though the release was two weeks ago.
At launch, the Nexus 4 was not supported by the Android Open Source Project, which is what helps make the platform so open and so starkly different from Apple’s operating system. The phone also didn’t launch with 4G LTE connectivity. Then, during the drought, the device appeared on eBay for a ridiculous $1900 — essentially a price you can’t pay without massive regret, a notion that was shown when the auction didn’t receive a bid. If that wasn’t enough, customers who ordered and were eagerly awaiting the Nexus 4 were met with emails from Google stating their shipment would be delayed up to three weeks.
So, if you’ve been clamoring for the new Nexus 4, hop on the Google Play store as soon as you can, and keep your finger on the refresh button. Just like with the initial launch, Google has not disclosed how many units will be made available. If you’re not in the US, be patient, as Google wants to sell your their product as much as you want to buy it.
via Daniel Charlton
Read more: The Nexus 4 has LTE after all
People love posting pictures of their food … blah, blah, blah. So, no surprise, the photo-sharing service Instagram rushed out the “news” that it had its busiest day so far, when users posted more than 10 million Thanksgiving-related photos. The Facebook-owned company said in a blog post that during peak hours on Thursday, people were posting more than 200 photos every second, double the amount from the day before. By comparison, Instagram users uploaded around 800,000 photos during Hurricane Sandy, and more than 100,000 images on Election Day. (And, yes, this is what a slow news day looks like here at AllThingsD.)
Apparently this is now a officially a thing, so here are some stats taken from the latest snapshot as of 3 pm ET, because we just know you’re not shopping on a tablet, you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to hear about how many others are:
So you might be wondering how IBM gets all this info. It’s all part of its strategic play in the world of big data, essentially helping companies make more sense of the huge troves of data they’ve gathered that were previously being ignored. Smarter Commerce is the area of IBM devoted to helping retailers better understand that data so they can come up with improved ideas concerning how to sell more stuff.
Where they gather that data is the IBM Benchmark. It’s a cloud-based digital analytics platform that soaks up digital information about how consumers respond to different ways of selling things online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, from 500 different online retailers. IBM won’t name them — they joined the network under condition of anonymity — but Big Blue says the companies that participate include about half of the companies named on the Internet Retailer Top 100 list. A lot of the technology comes from Coremetrics and Unica, acquisitions IBM made in 2010.
Last year, I talked about all this with Craig Hayman, IBM’s VP of the WebSphere, Application and Integration Middleware Software Division of the IBM Software Group. One quote from that conversation sticks out in my memory; it bears repeating here:
“If you think about consumers, and you think about the amount of technology that they have at their hands, to reach out to read reviews and talk to friends and families, they're incredibly empowered. There's not one purchase decision that they make that is not impacted by some element of social networks. What does that do to the companies that have to deal with that by offering the best products and services, and you see companies are struggling to do that: To make the right offer at the right time with the right price. When they do it well, we all talk about how it went well; and when they do it badly, we talk about how annoying it was.”
So now you know. Not only are retailers and your credit card companies watching you shop, so is IBM.
“Texas Instruments Inc. said it will cut about 1,700 jobs, or 4.8% of its global workforce, in a cost-reduction move as it shifts away from the mobile market,” Kristin Jones reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“The Dallas company said it expects restructuring charges of $325 million, mostly in the fourth quarter, in connection with the job cuts. It expects annual savings of roughly $450 million by the end of 2013,” Jones reports. “TI recently had around 35,000 employees, according to its website.”
Jones reports, “The company has said the smartphone and tablet markets, among the fastest-growing parts of the technology sector, have become less attractive over the past year because big companies like Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. have increasingly been making their own sales.”
Read more in the full article here.
