Will the world’s oceans someday be filled with robots monitoring ports, searching for new oil and gas reserves and tracking endangered marine life? A company called Liquid Robotics, which makes a wave-powered marine robot, took one step closer to world domination and announced on Tuesday that it’s raised its first round of institutional funding — a $22 million round from Silicon Valley venture firm VantagePoint Capital Partners and oil and gas vendor Schlumberger.
Along with the funding, Liquid Robotics also brought on a new CEO, Bill Vass, who was the former president and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal, a subsidiary of Sun that delivers services to the U.S. government. Vass also worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon and was CTO and the technical lead for U.S. Army worldwide personnel systems. So clearly Vass has a long history in the defense sector (and also isn’t someone to mess with in a bar fight).
The unmanned robots, called Wave Gliders (pictured), use the motion of the waves and solar panels to power themselves (they use no fossil fuels or batteries) and collect data from under the water and at the surface of the water above the ocean environment. The robots, which are controlled by satellite, can transmit data up to a cloud service to be used by whatever organization is employing them, whether it’s academia, the defense industry or oil and gas firms.
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The benefit of the design, compared to other marine drones, is that Liquid Robotics says the Wave Gliders are much cheaper, can last a lot longer out at sea and have far fewer carbon emissions. Other companies, like PolyPlus, which makes seawater-fueled batteries, are looking to test out its tech with unmanned marine drones, too, given that the application is one that tests the limits of long-lasting power.
Liquid Robotics says the Wave Gliders are already being used by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Hawaii.
The Wave Gliders could help fight climate change in another way beyond carbon-free wave power: monitoring oceans and marine life for signs of rising oceans and atmosphere warming. Drawn over years, that type of detailed data could be valuable for pinpointing what areas will be hardest hit first by climate change. Google has also been working on an ocean-monitoring climate change project via Google Earth.
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Low power server maker SeaMicro has raised another $20 million in funding, according to a filing. A SeaMicro spokesperson tells me that the company has now raised $60 million total from venture capitalists and strategic partners, and the company will use the funds to “continue to support our rapid growth, add engineers and engineering resources, expand our sales organization both domestically and internationally and build out our marketing organizations.”
SeaMicro, which recently expanded to a new 68,000 square foot headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., has designed server technology that consumes a quarter of the power of a regular server but packs more than 2,000 CPU cores and costs about $139,000. The innovation uses Atom chips and its own specially designed silicon to manage the networking, and the bet is that Internet giants will be willing to buy servers from a young startup to save on the ever-increasing energy costs of computing.
SeaMicro's technology, which it launched about a year ago, re-architects server components to consist of hundreds of low-power processors and a box that consists of 10 racks and consumes less than 2 kilowatts of power. The server itself can fit on a credit card and eight of them fit on a single motherboard. The basic idea is to strip all of the extra hardware and functionality out of the servers to provide enough performance, but not deliver overkill, leading to a lot less energy consumed– most web servers just need to offer up a website or grab a photo and don’t need to deliver super high performance that gulps power.
One indicator that SeaMicro’s tech could be huge: Intel manufactured a dual-core Atom chip to go inside SeaMicro’s box and it was perhaps the first time that Intel built a chip especially for a startup. Intel has been trying to defend its territory against low-power ARM chips moving in, and SeaMicro launched the second iteration of its server tech in February. SeaMicro also counts Skype, France Telecom and Mozilla as customers.
Other startups like Calxeda are also working on low power server technology. As Internet companies expand their data centers and devices get always-on connections, the amount of energy that is going to power servers in data centers will continue to grow. Reducing that cost is becoming a competitive advantage.
I migrated to Android when it became mature enough for me. That was in January of 2010, with the purchase of a then-cutting-edge Nexus One handset, complete with Android 2.1. I was enthralled with the nearly unlimited personalization options as well as the support for — perhaps even encouragement of — custom ROMs, that unlock a device sort of like jailbreaking does for an iPhone. It wasn’t until then that I realized how little I cared for the iPhone’s notification system, and how much I appreciated the deep integration of third-party apps in Android. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I’ve been using Google services full-time for several years, in which case Android provides me a better experience.
In general though, I’m impressed with what Apple has done. I don’t think it’s enough to sway me back to using iOS full-time, but it’s darn close. Here’s why, from the standpoint of someone who has used Android phones for the past 1.5 years, while supplementing the experience with an iPad and iPod touch.
Notifications are no longer disruptive
Yes, they may look and work just like Android, but the new iOS 5 notifications fix the age-old problem of being too disruptive and difficult to manage. They appear on the iOS lock screen, where you can swipe to unlock the device and go directly to the app that notified, and they appear in a list instead of just one at a time. In a way, this is similar to HTC’s Active Lockscreen I showed yesterday on video, but much more powerful since HTC’s version is limited to four specific apps of the user’s choosing. It can’t display notifications on the lock screen, either.
By building the Notification Center window-shade, iOS 5 allows notifications to appear briefly and then disappear on their own, which is far less disruptive. And since such notifications aren’t lost forever, users can manage them when they see fit, not when iOS does. It’s a much more elegant and effective system: Precisely like Android’s, with the added benefit of notification management from the lock screen. I would like to see a way to clear all notifications with one tap, however.
Twitter integration is a start, but…
One of the Android features that iOS users may not be aware of is how Android integrates third-party apps for sharing. Google’s platform does this natively: Once an app such as Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr is installed, it immediately shows up in the list of share options for photos, the browser, or Google Maps, for example. No additional input from the user is required.
Apple has taken a step in this direction by adding Twitter integration in iOS 5, and while it’s welcome, it’s just a start. For other sharing services, users will have to install bookmarklets or turn to email. That lack of integration caused me to add a Flicker upload email address as a contact to my iPhone in the past. Since there was no way to share photos with Flickr directly, I had to come up with a workaround. My hope is that as iOS matures, the sharing options are less controlled by the operating system, and are simply enabled through the installation of third-party apps.
Music in the cloud sounds great
When I called for music collections in the cloud two Decembers ago, I was summarily dismissed, but a billion dollar data center and 18 months of time heals all wounds. Apple’s new iCloud service will store music purchases and enable downloads to devices on demand; you can already get a look at the service on current iOS devices. In fact, I did just that, and found a few albums that got lost in the shuffle as I’ve moved between various computers over the years. Thanks to the new feature, I regained those albums purchased prior through iTunes.
Both Google and Amazon recently started similar services for Android devices, and I’ve taken full advantage of each. One benefit over iCloud is that both are hybrid services: Your music is stored on the web but can also be streamed as needed; handy for when you’re low on storage. Since Amazon couples its Cloud Player with its Amazon MP3 store, I’ve chosen that over Google Music for now. Still, iOS 5 comes close to parity with iCloud and support for iTunes on Apple’s servers. And kudos to Apple for iTunes Match, the service that adds your ripped music to the cloud without requiring uploads. It’s a safe bet that Apple worked this feature out with the recording labels while Amazon and Google didn’t, a very likely reason why both currently require you to upload your music collection before you can access it.
Wireless sync for all
Speaking of music, native synchronization with iTunes is welcome in iOS 5. As an Android owner, I almost never sync my phone to a computer; at least not with a cable. Instead, I’ve relied upon doubleTwist, which can shoot, playlists, music and video files from a computer to an Android phone over Wi-Fi. The software added support for wireless streaming and AirPlay as well, making it a full-featured solution.
Given that history, I really don’t like connecting my iPod touch or my iPad to a computer for syncing. That goes away with iOS 5 and a new version of iTunes. Gone too is the computer from the setup equation for iOS 5. Instead of connecting a new device to the computer for setup and sync, iOS 5 will support direct setup over a wireless network, akin to how Google Android devices have worked since launching in 2008.
iMessage or Google Voice?
I haven’t used BlackBerry’s Messenger service extensively, but iMessage in iOS appears extremely similar. It’s almost a cross between text messaging and IM, complete with read receipts if desired and activity icons to see when the other party is typing. While that sounds great, it illustrates why I never used BBM: the service has always been limited to BlackBerry devices. Apple’s iMessage has the same limitation with support for iOS to iOS communications through Apple servers, although it’s supplemented by standard text messaging on the iPhone.
iMessage is sort of like my current setup with Google Talk and Google Voice. I use Google Talk on my handset, but also within iChat on OS X via a Jabber configuration. And Google Voice has been my go-to text messaging service for well over a year. No matter what device I’m using — mobile or desktop — I can send and receive free text messages to any phone on any platform. Apple’s iMessage still looks appealing however, as it integrates FaceTime and email options in a conversation. Of course, I’d like FaceTime much better if Apple had worked to make it an open standard by now, as promised during the service launch. For now, FaceTime is too limiting for me from a mobile perspective because it only works on iOS devices, along with computers.
How compelling is iOS 5 for Android users?
I’m a huge believer in using the right tool for the task, especially when it comes to personal decisions about mobile devices and platforms. That’s why in the past three years, I’ve personally bought phones that run iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, and webOS. Many of the reasons I looked away from iOS and towards Android have been addressed by iOS 5. And to be honest, it really doesn’t matter to me who created a feature or function vs. who might have copied or borrowed heavily. At the end of the day, if the smartphone is improved and meets my needs, that’s all that counts.
Will I switch from being primarily an Android phone owner to one who uses an iPhone? That depends on few things, and although I didn’t cover all of the new iOS 5 features, there’s much to like.
I’m not sure I can live without the useful widgets that Android supports, but perhaps that’s a feature Apple is still working on with iOS 5. Hardware too will play a part of my decision; the next iPhone is sure to have a dual core processor and improve in other ways, but I still think there’s room for a 4-inch iPhone and I prefer a larger screen. I’m also not sure I want to give up Google Maps navigation and I had hoped that improved voice recognition that rivals Android’s would appear in iOS 5.
Regardless of my future phone choice, even as a heavy Android phone and tablet user, iOS 5 looks to offer an improved experience that’s worth strong consideration. And strong consideration is what I’ll give the next iPhone, whenever it happens to be announced, because there’s room for several great mobile platforms in the growing smartphone space.
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Since 1965, hard-core Grateful Dead fans have been camping out in America’s open fields and fairgrounds with their fellow Deadheads in communal, hippy paradises.
Now, San Francisco startup Tripping is helping the band add community-service projects and communal liter removal to the jam sessions and other, ahem, festivities.
The peer-to-peer travel site, which connects worldwide travelers with hosts willing to provide free places to stay and opportunities for cultural exchanges (also known as meeting for drinks), is pairing up with the Grateful Dead to create a band-sponsored online micro-community to organize days of service everywhere the band plays.
“The band recognizes that everywhere they go, fans roll in and set up camp and often trash is left behind. They wanted to do something to foster good relations and help the communities that are generous enough to host them,” said Tripping founder Jen O' Neal, a former StubHub marketing manager (and that company's fifth employee), who financed Tripping with the funds she received when StubHub was sold to eBay in 2007.
Today, O’Neal is leveraging her ticket-industry connections to create affinity networks on the Tripping site for bands and festival goers. While the Grateful Dead is the first band Tripping will partner with, the site is in talks with others to form communities where fans can organize ride shares, campsite meetups, extra couches and whatever else the band wants to include.
Tripping is similar to popular global-crash-pad sites like Couchsurfing, but sets itself apart with a strong social-networking component and a stringent security system that includes verifying the identify of users through video chat sessions with Tripping employees via Skype.
And unlike Couchsurfing and other sites, Tripping is a for-profit startup, which just happens to be totally free for users.
Still, eventually it will have to bring in revenue. And one of the fastest growing features on Tripping is its network program that allows entities from the Grateful Dead to university study abroad programs to create open or password-protected networks for members.
While it has offered the service for free in order to drum up interest, it plans to eventually charge private groups for the service.
"We know that they are willing to pay for this service," O’Neal said. “Which is great because we want to keep this service free for individuals to use. We never want to have to charge our members. That’s why we decided to be a for-profit company, so we wouldn’t have to ask for donations or get money from our users.”
Launched in January of 2010, Tripping is gaining momentum fast with users in 130 countries. In fact, the company just closed an undisclosed, "modest" seed round with Quantum Technology Partners last month when some news really boosted enthusiasm for the service and generated buzz for the company.
Blogs began reporting that peer-to-peer vacation rental site Airbnb was raising upwards of $100 million and was now valued at a billion dollars. And while the sites offer different services in travel space, investors became extremely interested in Tripping.
"It’s been absolutely nuts around here, our phones started ringing off the hook," O'Neal said. "I mean when you are fundraising, investors never call, they are calling us now."
While investors have been sniffing around, the site doesn’t really doesn't need all that much money to grow, O’Neal said. Still, the company is considering opening up “just a bit” to include other investors with experience in the travel and peer-to-peer sectors.
For the seven-person Tripping team, working out of a shared office space in North Beach, the news had a more psychological effect.
“The investors are really excited about this peer to peer space. They all see the writing on the wall. This is the way the economy will be going even though this is just the beginning,” she said.
“Really it amounts to external validation,” she said. “We are sleeping a bit easier. Now we can say, ‘okay it's a real opportunity we have here’ and its really exciting.”
It’s been clear for years now that a shortage of available Internet addresses was bound to occur under the current IPv4 protocol. And in February, the IP address distribution organization ICANN announced that the 4.2 billion addresses available under the IPv4 protocol had all been taken up. IPv6 supports a much higher number of addresses — 340 undecillion, to be exact– so the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is largely understood to be a difficult but necessary step for the long-term maintenance of the world wide web.
With all the coverage of the IP address shortage issue — we’ve been covering the topic for years — it’s a bit hard to believe that the time has come for a large-scale test of the new protocol. Google, Yahoo, Facebook and several Internet networking companies are all taking part in World IPv6 Day and will offer their content over IPv6 for a test run of the protocol.
So what will World IPv6 Day mean for the average Internet user? Not much, according to Facebook network engineer Donn Lee. “We anticipate that 99.97% of users will not be affected at all,” Lee wrote in a company blog post about Facebook’s participation in World IPv6 Day. “The small number of users who may be affected may find that pages are slow to load and we are working to minimize the impact.”
Google, which plans to deliver virtually all of its services including Search, Gmail and YouTube over IPv6 for the entirety of the 24-hour test, expects a similarly low impact for the end user. “In all likelihood, you won't even notice the test,” Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti wrote in a company blog post. “The vast majority (99.95 percent) of people will be able to access services without interruption: either they'll connect over IPv6, or their systems will successfully fall back to IPv4.”
That still leaves a potential .05 percent of end users who could experience failures. According to Colitti, failures will most likely be “slow or unresponsive” experiences on participating websites such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Bing. People can test how well their computer is expected to handle IPv6 through Google’s IPv6 test or at the independently run website Test-ipv6.com.
Are you undergoing any preparations for IPv6 Day? How do you expect the big transition to pan out? Let us know in the comments.
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RunKeeper, which began as a way to track runs for users, is now poised to become a full-fledged fitness network with the release of a Health Graph API that lets developers and device makers tap into its growing data set and community. The API opens up the RunKeeper experience enabling a host of apps and devices to publish to RunKeeper’s FitnessFeed and contribute to its Health Graph.
That will allow its 6 million users to start integrating a much wider array of fitness data into their health history, allowing them to better understand how their progress changes over time and how it compares to others. And it positions RunKeeper as a destination for the growing number of people who are using websites, apps and devices to help improve their health.
RunKeeper had previously integrated with select devices like the Fitbit Tracker and the Wi-Fi Body Scale from Withings. But now many more devices and apps will be able to easily tap into RunKeeper’s back-end, helping create a full picture or map of a user’s health. Foursquare, Zeo, Withings, Polar, Wahoo and BodyMedia have been announced as launch partners for the Health Graph alpha.
“Imagine a system that can identify correlations between a user's eating habits, workout schedule, social interactions and more, to deliver an ecosystem of health and fitness apps, websites, and sensor devices that really work, based on a user's own historical health and fitness data. The Health Graph has the potential to completely alter the health and fitness landscape,” wrote RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs in a blog post.
RunKeeper will store a host of data from the distance and pace of runs and bicycle sessions to data on weight, blood pressure, sleep and diabetes. And it will evolve over time to absorb any health-related information and body stats from third-parties.
This is part of a larger evolution of RunKeeper, which I wrote about earlier this year after the company went freemium by eliminating the cost of its $10 app. The move helped grow downloads of the app and build a big community of RunKeeper users, but it also accelerated RunKeeper’s ambitions to be a broad holistic platform for users who want to track their overall health and fitness.
There’s a lot to like about RunKeeper, which has been out in front in the charge to help turn smartphones into health devices. By tapping into the phone’s sensors as well as connecting to other third-party devices, RunKeeper has been able to make it easy to achieve the idea of the quantified self, where we’re able to better understand ourselves through self-tracking. It should get even better with new improvements to Bluetooth, which my colleague Kevin pointed out is helping enable a lot of medical related devices.
And now by opening up the platform to developers and device makers, RunKeeper is poised to be a repository for our health data as well as a social network for fitness-minded people. I think it shows that there is a need for more specialized social networks like this that are tailored to a specific audience. And it’s just great to see that all of this technology and social engineering can be brought to bear on the real issue of health. People have a hard time tackling their own health problems but I think RunKeeper, if it continues to evolve, can be a valuable resource in helping not just fitness and running buffs but a much larger swath of the population who want to improve their health.
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Working remotely sometimes means getting hired remotely – which often means nailing a video interview. Whether it's over Skype or using some other tech, communicating your qualifications and reading the interviewer's body language through the barrier of a lens can be a challenge. So how can you ensure success?
First, don't mess up the obvious. Clearly you want to look presentable and be in a professional enough space. Your gear should be working (test it beforehand) and if the interviewer is halfway around the world, make sure you've worked out the time difference correctly (different countries don't always switch daylight saving time on the same day).
If there is just the camera, focus on the camera and nowhere else. If the interview is between you on one side of the camera and another person on the other side of the camera, focus on the camera. If you notice all of those television talking heads, when the news gets read, there are only two places they look: into the camera or at their notes. They don't look off to the side, they don't look up in the air, they don't glance sideways; no, they look into the camera or at their notes…. Staring at that camera is hard work. But look at it you must.
On the other hand, you could have a person in the room with you and a person on the far end both doing the interview. In this case, if the person in the room is asking the question, answer the question to the person in the room by looking at that person. If the person on the far end asks the question, answer the question by looking into the camera.
As remote working becomes more common, interviews using video probably will too, so now is the time to train yourself to excel at them. One way to do that is through recording and reviewing your efforts, which is relatively simple if you’re using Skype. Inc. has video interview tips geared towards interviewers, but their advice on how to set up recording could just as easily apply to those answering the questions:
When you first set up a Skype account, there’s not a direct ‘record’ button for you to push, but there are several plugins that are compatible with Skype. A popular plugin is Vodburner, which records video and audio from both sides and also allows you to edit it and upload the content to YouTube and other platforms.
How? Simply click on the ‘Extras’ option located under the ‘Tools’ tabs on the menu bar. From there click on the ‘VodBurner Video Call Recorder’ tab and download the plugin.
Sure, watching yourself interview might be wince-inducing, but if you’re brave enough, it's also a great opportunity to objectively see what impression you're making and which answers are still in need of some improvement.
Cisco has spent the last few months admitting its distraction in the market and cleaning house by dumping its Flip line of video cameras and its social media publishing software as it returns to its networking roots. Tuesday morning the equipment vendor unveiled its latest in a line of gear that may indeed help save the company, as it tackles the challenges that beset the network as multiple devices hook into the Internet and deliver petabytes of traffic. The gear, an upgrade to its ASR 9000 family, increases both the capacity and intelligence of the overall network, while also enabling service providers to create a unified view of myriad distributed network elements across wireline, cellular and other types of networks.
First, the product news: Cisco is expanding the ASR 9000 series with the new ASR 9922 edge router and the ASR 9000v, which sits in the network aggregation layer. The new products, along with all other ASR 9000 products, will add Cisco nV (network virtualization) technology, which allows ISPs to manage all network operations from a single interface. The introduction of those products and the new virtualization tech also will help boost overall capacity in the network, to 96 Tbps.
That kind of capacity will soon become necessary, as Cisco’s own VNI research forecasts global Internet traffic will quadruple by 2015. That increase will be driven primarily by video, which is expected to grow to 62 percent of global Internet traffic in five years. With 96 Tbps of capacity, Cisco says the ASR 9000 family has the ability to enable networks to transmit the equivalent of 180,000 DVDs every minute.
The number of connected devices are also expected to grow to 15 billion, which will necessitate new ways to manage networks. As Om reported earlier this year, the growing number of connected devices is putting a strain on networks, which need to become more flexible and dynamic. Cisco is trying to provide that flexibility through its network virtualization technology, which will help operators to quickly deploy IPv6 services necessary to reach multiple devices.
The technology also simplifies the design and management of those networks with a unified control system. That means that any ASR 9000 network operator can manage all edge, aggregation and access points in one place. Providing unified network management also comes with significant cost savings: Cisco claims that its equipment adds 70 percent opex savings over the competition, which would enable the system to essentially pay for itself in just one year.
According to Cisco, the ASR 9000v product is available now, with the ASR 9922 becoming available early next year. But existing customers won’t have to deploy all new gear to take advantage of Cisco’s new virtualization technology. Cisco says the 500 operators who have already bought ASR 9000 gear will be able to introduce the intelligence with a simple upgrade.
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Nintendo unveiled its next generation console today, with the Wii U. The Wii U has a new controller that features a 6.2-inch touchscreen built-in, which effectively acts as a tablet. We couldn’t help but think that Nintendo, far from innovating in this instance, borrowed liberally from the iPad and the way people use it for gaming and watching TV.
Nintendo Wii U extracts the two-screen experience from the model used by Real Racing HD 2 and discards most of the rest. The Wii U controller can’t act independent of the Wii U console, but it can handle gaming visuals entirely on its own screen, and it appears to support stylus input for functions beyond gaming, like drawing.
Making two-screen gaming the entire focus of Nintendo’s next-gen console is a very smart move at this point, since it’s happening before the concept takes off in a big way with iOS devices. It should work out well for Nintendo, but it could be even better for Apple device owners in the long run, if the Wii U concept inspires iOS developers to take two-screen gaming further.
Of course, gaming isn’t the only thing iPad users do in front of their TV. Television viewers have been distracting themselves with laptops and mobile phones for years, and the iPad was lends itself to be the ideal second screen device. Nielsen said in May that 70 percent of all tablet owners use their devices while watching TV. And last year, a study found that 86 percent of all mobile users access the Internet while watching TV.
Nintendo also added some media sharing features that were clearly inspired by efforts to use the iPad as a second-screen device. Wii U users will be able to flick photos and videos that they find online towards the TV to watch them on the big screen, something Yahoo demonstrated at this year's CES, and a key feature of Apple’s AirPlay technology. And the handheld controller will feature a front-facing camera to give users a chance to video chat while watching TV — a feature that will sound familiar to any iPad user as well.
Nintendo obviously concentrated on gaming during the introduction of the Wii U, but we shouldn’t be too surprised if the new controller was being utilized for other kinds of second-screen activity like Twitter and Facebook that has so far been the domain of the iPad as well.
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We often take for granted what Twitter and other social-media tools offer in terms of instant publishing, until someone live-tweets a historic event like the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound or a congressman torpedoes his political career with an ill-advised photo. In another example of the power of instantaneous publishing, a woman in Florida who was raped posted messages about her attacker and the incident to Twitter — raising questions about how the traditional media should handle such an event, and reinforcing how the way we consume news and information is changing.
The victim, whose name appears on her Twitter profile, posted a message about the attack within minutes of it happening, describing the man who raped her and the vehicle he was driving. She followed that up with several other tweets about her physical and mental state as a result of the attack. She even posted a message from the back of a police car as she was being taken to the hospital by the police. Eventually, the Florida authorities asked that she stop posting messages relating to the details of the actual crime, presumably because they might affect the investigation of it.
As Mallary Jean Tenore and Kelly McBride note in a piece at the Poynter Institute website, this kind of real-time reporting by someone involved in a potential news story can make things very complicated for the mainstream media. Should newspapers and wire services have used the woman’s name? Typically, those kinds of details aren’t released by the police and other agencies involved in a sex crime — but what if the victims release names themselves? The woman in this case has said several times on Twitter that she had no real expectation of privacy when she posted the messages, nor did she mind people writing about it (although she did ask later that the Poynter piece not use her full name).
Using Twitter during such a sensitive personal incident may look like just another example of social-media “oversharing,” but the victim said she specifically decided to continue talking about her rape despite the police request because she thought it might help other women who had also been involved in sex crimes. She also said many people contacted her saying they had been, but were afraid to talk about it (she also said that one of her main concerns about her name being used was that the reports would follow her whenever someone searched for her name in Google). She told Poynter:
Many of my close friends and I communicate via Twitter. It was a way to reach out quickly to a large number of people who had the potential to have information or the ability to help. People I have never spoken with before have sent their support via Twitter. I could not have gained that through any traditional means of communication.
In a media-related sense, this is another example of what programmer and media theorist Dave Winer has called “the sources going direct,” meaning that a potential source for a news story — someone directly involved in an incident, or someone with a newsworthy opinion about an event — publishes their thoughts on Twitter or Facebook or in a blog post, without waiting for a reporter to interview them. Billionaire Mark Cuban became well-known for doing this after interviews with journalists, posting his own thoughts and email responses as a way of setting the record straight. But Twitter allows anyone to publish while an event is occurring.
On the one hand, that can provide different viewpoints on a news event — including those of the victim or victims, those of the police (who have started to use social media for their own purposes), as well as bystanders and so on. While that can be valuable because readers no longer have to rely on a single “official” version of events, however, it can also be difficult to pull together all these different viewpoints and make sense of them (the BBC has been experimenting with new ways of showing a story with multiple conflicting viewpoints).
That’s one reason why I’ve argued that we need more people collecting and curating and making sense of these kinds of stories — whether they are professional journalists or amateurs, or even people who don’t see themselves as journalists at all. We need more ways of curating and making sense of real-time news now that it is coming at us from dozens or even hundreds of different directions.
On May 30, 2006, after nearly five years as my personal blog, we incorporated GigaOM, the company. Just 24 hours later, our investors, True Ventures, wired me the seed money to get going. They also presented me with a check in an envelope that had three simple words: live the dream. GigaOM was True’s first investment. A few days later, I told my boss, Josh Quittner (who just joined Flipboard) that I was going to leave Business 2.0. Of course, someone leaked the news to Gawker’s Valleywag.
And just like that, five years have gone by. These have been the startup equivalent of street fighting years. I’ve shared the lessons I’ve learned on occasion, but when I look back over these past five years, I always think of people. I never think of the stories I did, the news I broke, the analysis, the interviews, the money, the fundraising, the offices. I just think of the awesome people who have worked to make my dream come true.
I didn’t want to write a five year blog post. I didn’t want to do a stat-based round-up, though it would have been pretty cool. So when I brought my dilemma to Chris Albrecht — a dear friend, confidante and our creative chief — he suggested that perhaps we should do a video. And so we did. We have a lot of people, so not everyone is in this video, but they are all part of who we are. They are GigaOM!
One regret — Chris is not on camera, but he is in the video – he shot it, edited it and conceptualized it. And like everyone else in the team, Chris did everything to make me look good.
In the end, this video is about us and also about you, our readers, our community. You give us strength to do what we do, every day, every hour and with every single post. We succeed sometimes, we fail often, but we try. Thank you for lavishing us with your attention, for without you, we are no more than “yet another dumb website.”
Think what you will about Glenn Beck's politics, you gotta admit that his newest venture is pretty ambitious: Beck is launching a subscription-only online TV network this week. GBTV, as the venture is called, promises "a mix of news, information and entertainment programs," but it's biggest attraction is undoubtedly a daily two-hour talk show hosted by Beck himself.
The live show will air at 5pm Eastern starting this September, according to the New York Times. This means Beck will reclaim the very spot he lost when he was shown the door at Fox News, directly competing with whomever replaces him on the cable news network.
However, even more ambitious than his plan to compete with Fox online is Beck's business model. Viewers will have to pay $5 a month to access the daily show. Premium subscribers that are willing to pay $10 per month will get access to a video broadcast of Beck's radio show as well as other additional material. Beck is announcing further details with a live behind-the-scenes show at 7pm ET Wednesday.
Subscribers will be able to watch the show online starting September 12, and also access it through an iOS app as well as a Roku channel. The latter could be a boon for Roku, introducing the device to new audiences and helping it on its way to reach its next milestone of three million sold devices by the end of this year.
Beck is tapping into an existing subscriber base for GBTV. The controversial host has been able to amass some 80,000 paying subscribers for a kind of fan club for his radio show, giving paying subscribers access to video streams of the show as well as the Glenn Beck University and other features that will now be rolled into GBTV.
The venture isn't without risks, despite the guaranteed revenue. Earlier attempts to launch subscription-only online networks have largely failed, including one that catered to a very similar audience. The Los Angeles-based conservative blog venture Pajamas Media launched an online TV network dubbed PJTV in 2008.
PJTV's original goal was to build a conservative network that would rival TV news operations and finance itself entirely through subscriptions, but even prominent commentators like Glenn Reynolds and Joe the Plumber didn't attract a paying audience that was large enough to sustain these efforts. PJTV continues to publish videos online and offer a number of subscription plans, but current videos are available for free and largely provide additional content the associated Pajamas blogs.
One has to wonder whether Beck's venture will suffer a similar fate, or whether he'll succeed in bringing Fox News-like audiences behind his company's pay wall.
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The Bluetooth standards body today added support for two specific data types in the Bluetooth 4.0 specification: The Health Thermometer Profile and the Heart Rate Profile. This will give rise to wireless devices that can help monitor and send health information from wearable sensors to smartphones and central monitoring systems, proving that Bluetooth still has legs. Expectations for such health devices are high, predicted to be a $2.1 billion industry by the end of this year and worth $9.3 billion by 2014.
Both the Health Thermometer Profile and the Heart Rate Profile were built to enable the wireless monitoring of body functions – in this case, body temperature and heart rate. While the Bluetooth SIG created the technology, its members, consisting of the leading health, medical and fitness device manufacturers, create the specific ways it will be used. For instance, one potential use case for the Health Thermometer Profile involves a thermometer patch that can send temperature measurements to a mobile phone every half hour to enable a parent to closely monitor the fever of a sick child without disturbing them
This development should squash the decade-old grumblings that Bluetooth is dead; ironically, it's doing so by helping people live potentially longer. As my colleague Stacey pointed out in a recent GigaOM Pro article (subscription required) on the subject, the low-power wireless standard is finding its way into a number of connected consumer devices where data is only needed to travel short distances. Wearable health monitors, GPS devices and even today's prototypes of tomorrow's smart watches are all still leveraging Bluetooth.
I'm particularly interested in what devices will leverage these and other new profiles expected in Bluetooth 4.0: a profile to transmit blood pressure information is expected next month, for example. I run every single day (157 consecutive days and counting!) and currently carry my smartphone for both music and GPS tracking, for example. While I don't yet use a heart rate monitor for my workouts, it's something I've been considering, but I don't want to add more power-hungry or bulky devices.
I'm expecting to see new wearable monitors with multiple sensors inside small packages that can help me track far more health aspects than today's devices. Our mobile gadgets are gaining more sensors — think accelerometers, gyroscopes, and even barometers — but wireless standards to get that data in real-time is needed for instant feedback. Who knows, maybe the next cycle of Bluetooth-enabled sensors will actually help me improve the angle and length of my running stride.
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Amazon’s success with its Kindle business is hitting an inflection point as it nears a full one-tenth of the company’s total revenues, according to an analyst report. The online retailer is likely to see Kindle-related revenue hit 10 percent of its total revenue by next year, said Citi analyst Mark Mahaney.
Mahaney said based on recent disclosures by Amazon and Citi’s own analysis, he believes that Amazon will sell 17.5 million Kindle units this year, worth more than $2 billion in revenue, and 310 million Kindle books, which will generate more than $1.7 billion this year. He said that would mean a combined revenue of almost $3.8 billion or about 8 percent of revenue through Kindle activites.
Next year, Mahaney said he expects Amazon to sell 26.2 million Kindles and 751.5 million Kindle books, worth a combined $6.1 billion in revenue or 9.9 percent of Amazon’s total. Mahaney said when a business segment reaches 10 percent, it has the potential to impact the growth rate of the total business.
The analysis comes on the heels of news last month that Amazon is now selling more ebooks than physical titles. As of April 1, Amazon is selling 105 ebooks to every 100 physical books, not including free Kindle titles. The company should see even more mainstream adoption of its Kindle readers as the hardware price comes down below $100, which Mahaney believes will happen by the end of this year. Amazon’s cheapest unit is now the $114 ad-supported Kindle, which Mahaney said is the best selling unit in the Kindle family.
This is pretty impressive growth no matter how you slice it. And it shows how quickly consumers have shifted their reading habits to digital content on a plethora of devices. Amazon is on a roll and seems to have even bigger ambitions for its book business. As my colleague Michael Wolf reported, Amazon has been adding new imprints to become a “book industry in a box.”
Mahaney said there are still challenges posed by the iPad and offline retailers getting their act together in the ebook industry. But Amazon seems to be in the driver seat with ebook sales and it’s now realizing how big a businesses it has on its hands.
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Cloud-management platform provider RightScale is launching a new service to help customers manage private and hybrid clouds similar to what RightScale customer Zynga does with its vaunted Z Cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud computing appears to be the end-game for many companies’ cloud strategies right now, and RightScale’s new MyCloud service might represent an ideal way of thinking about the model.
RightScale’s new offering provides the proverbial single pane of glass through which to manage private-cloud infrastructure based on either Eucalyptus Systems or Cloud.com as well as public cloud-based resources that are managed via RightScale. And although Zynga built its RightScale-based cloud setup from scratch, RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said it offers what might be the ideal model for doing hybrid cloud computing. Rather than focusing on simple cloudbursting, which Crandell calls “naive” in certain situations, Zynga honed in on standardization as a focus of its cloud efforts.
By utilizing standard server templates, Zynga is able to stage, test and launch games in Amazon EC2, then easily migrate them to its private cloud when the time comes by launching a cluster of identically configured servers in-house. Last week, RightScale opened its MultiCloud Marketplace, which is like an app store for infrastructure configurations that features a wide range of templates for everything from web servers to Hadoop clusters. With MyCloud, users can now create their own Zynga-like experience by utilizing Marketplace templates on private cloud infrastructure as well as in the public cloud.
Another use case for MyCloud, Crandell said, might be to spread different components of an application architectures across both public and private resources. Depending on bandwidth costs and the need for high-speed interconnects, it might makes sense for certain parts (e.g., an on-demand processing engine) to run in the public cloud while others remain on premise.
Crandell will be present at Structure 2011, being held June 22-23 in San Francisco, to discuss the future of cloud application platforms and what issues they’ll need to address as mainstream interest picks up. MyCloud is currently available for free through an early-access program, although more-functional, and paid, Standard and Enterprise versions are on the way.
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UberMedia, an independent maker of apps for Twitter, continues to go Hollywood. On Tuesday the company launched Uber50 for iPhone, a customized UberSocial iPhone app designed by rapper 50 Cent. Uber50 for BlackBerry was launched in April.
Uber50 for iPhone will be available in a free version or a $1.99 premium version with “exclusive art” and sounds “recorded or selected by 50 Cent,” the company said in a press release. The Uber50 iPhone launch comes on the heels of the May 23rd debut of A.plus, an UberMedia-powered desktop application custom designed by actor Ashton Kutcher.
Celebrity endorsements are an age-old strategy for consumer product companies, but they have not historically been de rigeur for technology companies– at least not in such an straightforward fashion. But all that has shifted in recent years, as the Internet becomes less and less the domain of the tech-savvy minority, and more of a mass-appeal extension of traditional media such as television and magazines. Many Silicon Valley companies seemed to have put the kibosh on overtly courting the entertainment industry years ago, when former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel caught flack for hob-nobbing with Tom Cruise and Ellen DeGeneres as the more geeky Google took the market lead. Google, which for years did not even advertise on television, inspired other tech companies to stick to their knitting and leave the entertainment industry’s glitz and glam alone.
But Twitter, with its verified celebrity accounts, has in a way reopened the floodgates for tech firms to associate with stars as a legitimate business strategy. And now even Google has jumped onto the bandwagon, with television commercials featuring Lady Gaga and a rumored new strategy to feature stars on their own YouTube channels. How UberMedia and the larger tech industry’s new Hollywood push will pan out remains to be seen, but it will almost certainly be entertaining to watch.
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Developers building atop platforms like iOS and Twitter should go in with eyes wide open, said Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, who reminded entrepreneurs about the dangers of relying on someone else’s APIs. In a talk last night before an audience of entrepreneurs, Wilson said developers need to plan for the day when platform owners work against their interests.
“You should expect that the platform you're building on top of to do something that’s not in your interest,” Wilson said. “If you’re going to stay on top of that platform forever you might wake up one day to find that the owner of the platform is competing with you and that sucks.”
Wilson said building on someone else’s platform can be helpful in gathering an audience or moving into a market quickly while eventually migrating the user relationship off the platform. But developers shouldn’t be naive about what the platform owners may end up doing over time, he said. When asked about the impact of the then just announced iOS iMessage app on third-party messaging app Kik, which Union Square Ventures invested in, Wilson said Kik should be fine because it’s a cross-platform service. That suggests that developers, at the very least, should hedge their bets by focusing on multiple platforms so they’re not caught flat footed by changes in one ecosystem. Kik is also a good object lesson for developers because it was pulled by RIM for allegedly breaching a contract agreement.
Now, developers shouldn’t necessarily assume the absolute worst of their platform owners. If they did, very few mobile apps would ever get built. And as I discussed yesterday, many app developers on iOS still feel like there’s plenty of opportunity to differentiate and go deeper than what Apple is offering. Twitter has also suggested new areas where developers can focus their energies.
But a larger lesson holds true for developers: Sleeping with one eye open is not a bad idea. Chris Dixon, founder of Hunch and an investor with Founder Collective told the audience that platform holders generally focus on building out their core infrastructure before looking to subsume apps that they think are useful. The desire to take on other third-party apps becomes even more tempting for companies that are still working out their revenue models, said Dixon.
“It's much safer to build on top of platforms with existing business models,” he said.
Platform owners carry their own risks competing with their own developer community. A lot of a company’s success can come down to how much developer support it can gather around it. Competing too much with your own developers can hurt some of the good will that helped build their original success.
But ultimately, the platform holders are the ones with the ball and they decide how the game is played. They’re not going to pick up their ball and go home. But they will look for opportunities to make the game play in their favor. Smart developers know this already but it bears repeating in light of the number of companies building their businesses on the backs of other companies.
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Research in Motion has a new software update available for BlackBerry PlayBook devices that adds in-app purchase support, improves some existing apps, such as Facebook, and can even give a boost to music playback. Version 1.0.5 of the tablet’s operating system can be downloaded and installed on existing PlayBooks today; customers purchasing a new PlayBook after today will be prompted with the update upon device setup. While welcome, the enhancements are minor when compared to what the PlayBook really needs: More applications and native support for email without a BlackBerry phone.
Among the features and updates in the 312 MB software download:
Facebook is pre-loaded in this version, so it becomes a pre-installed application for all Playbooks; going forward, device owners won’t have to download Facebook from the BlackBerry App World. The software gains video uploads, message deletion, access to Pages, and the ability to choose photo albums when uploading images.
In-app payment support arrives in PlayBook applications, which provides additional revenue streams to developers. In turn, the potential revenue could attract more developers to the platform over time, given that other mobile platforms, iOS, Android, and even BlackBerry smartphones, already offer this feature.
The PlayBook can now be charged while powered down and the device will alert if an incompatible charger is attached. Tapping the battery indicator on the device offers three choices: restart, power off, and standby mode, plus a method to adjust screen brightness.
Five additional languages are supported: French, Italian, Dutch, German, Spanish, and UK English.
Video chat between a public network and firewalled enterprise network is enhanced through support for the TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT) protocol.
Automatic Wi-Fi hotspot detection is improved for connecting during the set-up process.
Headsets gain an audio boost for increased volume.
All of the updates are welcome, but clearly this is a minor release, evidenced by the version number itself. The new features and tweaks are what I’d expect from an already mature device, but for many the PlayBook still has two large gaping holes and these updates address neither.
First, the breadth of solid software applications is still lacking, although new titles are being added to the BlackBerry App World. In March, RIM announced plans to address that with a software emulator which can run Google Android applications, but that solution still isn’t available. And even when it does arrive, PlayBook owners won’t have access to the more than 200,000 Android Market applications, since RIM will curate compatible applications.
Second, and possibly a bigger issue, is the lack of a native email client for the PlayBook; the tablet still requires a BlackBerry handset to power the email system. I’ve been using the web for email on the device and that certainly works, but it’s not optimal. Instead of an email application with push notifications, I have to jump in my browser session and look for new messages. Last month, RIM showed off a native email client, but doesn’t expect it to arrive until sometime in the next three months.
I still think there’s much to like about the PlayBook: The operating system is intuitive, the device is a champ at multitasking, gesture support is stellar and the browsing experience is outstanding. Those are all qualities I’d look for in a 7-inch tablet, but they’re not all I’d look for. And I suspect potential tablet buyers are looking for more as well.
Things might be different for the PlayBook had it been introduced 12 to 18 months prior. Instead of trying to catch up to Apple’s iPad lead, the device could instead be a top seller by comparison. But Apple is moving forward with iOS 5 by bringing new features and enhancements. It can do this because it nailed down key basics first; a different strategy than the one RIM is taking.
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Without doubt there are few companies in the world that genuinely understand and practise the power of good design in their products and their businesses. Probably the first example was Peter Behrens and his work for the German company AEG, in the early part of the 20th century. He might be considered to be the founder of corporate identity. Adriano Olivetti was close behind as he transformed his father's Italian company, Olivetti. Having become aware of this scarcity at the start of my career in the 1950s, I am sorry to report that the situation does not seem to have improved to this day.
I have always observed that good design can normally only emerge if there is a strong relationship between an entrepreneur and the head of design. At Apple this situation exists – between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive.
I am always fascinated when I see the latest Apple products. Apple has managed to achieve what I never achieved: using the power of their products to persuade people to queue to buy them. For me, I had to queue to receive food at the end of World War II. That's quite a change.
They understand that design is not simply an adjective to place in front of a product's name to somehow artificially enhance its value. Ever fewer people appear to understand that design is a serious profession; and for our future welfare we need more companies to take that profession seriously. (The Daily Telegraph of the U.K.)
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Ever since the iPhone and iPad arrived, publishers have spent millions building dedicated software to try and cash in on the app boom. Everyone who was anyone — from the Wall Street Journal to Wired — just had to have an app… even though the business reasons weren't that great.
Now, however, one of the biggest names in the news industry has decided it's spent enough time bowing to Steve Jobs — and thrown down the gauntlet.
The Financial Times, the newspaper beloved by the business community, has taken a direct shot at Apple by launching its own web-based reading app, which it hopes can bypass the need to work with iTunes.
The app — which uses techniques offered by HTML5 to produce a rich reading experience — is available now to FT subscribers. They can simply visit app.ft.com and enjoy. And what it has done looks good, as you can see in the promo video.
The FT isn't making any bones about why it is doing this. The timing — coming just hours after Apple announced the launch of Newsstand, the company's attempt to bring more magazine and newspaper outlets under its wing — is surely no coincidence. Publishers have long been irritated at Apple's ownership of the customer relationship, as Mathew pointed out yesterday, and the FT has been one of the most strident critics of that situation.
Indeed, on its app page, the FT admits quite clearly that it wants the HTML5 app to become a long-term replacement for its iOS equivalent — urging users to switch away from the existing platform:
We're encouraging our readers to switch immediately to the new FT web app, as many new features and sections will be added over the coming weeks. Make sure you don't miss out on these updates.
But even if, as it seems, the publication was acting out of anger towards Steve Jobs and his staff, breaking away from Apple is an important strategic move in the long run. Information companies are locked in a David and Goliath struggle against the technology industry, but yet they seem to capitulate at every opportunity. While the momentum is clearly with the likes of Apple and Google (the FT's parent company, Pearson, is the world's largest publisher — yet its $15.14 billion market cap is dwarfed by Apple's current value of $311.43 billion) the truth is that defending their corner may be the only way for publishers to stop being crushed completely.
It is not only about a philosophical battle, however. In fact, opting to route around the technology companies has a significant number of other real-world advantages over native apps.
For a start, it's independent of anybody. This is important because it ends the possibility of content being blocked on spurious grounds, something writer and citizen media pioneer Dan Gillmor has been banging the drum about for some time. In effect, nobody owns the presses apart from the publisher. That also means updates — such as more types of content, technical tweaks, new features — can happen instantly, rather than require approval (as is the case with Apple).
It also allows publishers to stop worrying so much about specific devices. The hardware market is very broad, and only the craziest outfit would try and satisfy all device users simultaneously — yet, in the past, many publishers have done exactly that. However, even when the market is narrower and publishers only have to worry about a handful of download stores, they are still pulled in many different directions. Do you produce native apps for each of the different platforms, or focus on a couple? Do you try and satisfy your users on less-popular platforms like webOS or Windows Phone?
In fact, HTML5 offers creators an even easier option, since most high-end mobile browsing actually uses the same engine — WebKit. Using that as its basis, publishers can produce a single service that is rich and highly readable on an iPhone, iPad, Android device, BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia S60. Even the Kindle uses WebKit. This makes Web compatibility easier than going through all those different download stores, each with their own requirements and demands.
And this, in turn, allows publishers to take advantage of new developments as they happen — rather than rush to keep up with the secretive production cycles of the big technology firms. Who would prefer to work with native apps whose capabilities are dictated by companies, when you can use HTML, where standards and development are open and well-documented? And it can makes apps as dynamic as the web itself — the sort of move that means publishers can say goodbye to huge, cumbersome, static magazine downloads.
Quite how this all plays out in the long run is no clearer today than before: ultimately the FT's app may be just a tiny shot in the arm for publishers. But it's an important step forward, and one that other publishers and outlets should sit up and take notice.
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Google has rolled out appointment slots, a useful new feature for Google Calendar that allows users to publish available appointment times on a publicly available calendar that other users can then book. For example, a manager could use appointment slots to indicate available times for meetings with team members.
Appointment slots are shown on a booking page, which you can embed on a website or share with colleagues or clients. People visiting that page will then have their own personal calendar overlaid over the available appointment slots and can click to book a time; a shared calendar event is then created for both users.
Here’s a short screencast showing how to set up appointment slots and how the booking process works:
Google Calendar’s appointment slots are easy to use and should greatly streamline the process process of booking appointments, eliminating email back-and-forth. However, unlike dedicated meeting scheduling tools like TimeTrade, Tungle and Setster, which also offer this kind of appointment booking functionality but only require the person advertising their availability to sign up for the app, Google’s feature requires both the person broadcasting their availability and the person booking the appointment to use Google Calendar. So while appointment slots will probably be very useful within companies where everyone is using Google Apps, it’s not going to be suitable for, say, a personal trainer offering appointment bookings on a publicly accessible website.
Note: While I have access to the appointment slots feature on my Google Apps account, I don’t yet see it on my personal Google Calendar, so it may be that it hasn’t been rolled out to all users yet.
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It looks as if solid-state cache specialist Fusion-io’s IPO on Thursday has investors thinking big about the possibilities of flash storage in the enterprise. Flash array maker Violin memory raised a $40 million Series C round from strategic public-market investors — on the heels of a $35 million round in February — and a software company called VeloBit emerged from stealth with an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Fairhaven Capital and Longworth Venture Partners.
In the case of Violin Memory, the new money represents only a fraction of a capital infusion intended to ramp up operations at this critical juncture. CEO Don Basile told me his company also took on $140 million in debt financing, bringing its total amount of new cash to $180 million. I highlighted Violin Memory’s unique position in the flash world — that of an array producer rather than a component manufacturer — a couple months ago, and it has only gotten stronger. Basile said the market validation of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s decision to power his high-powered transaction-processing appliance with flash has been bolstered by EMC’s decision to soup up a number of its arrays, too, with flash as primary storage layer.
The Oracle situation led to a strong partnership between Violin and HP around creating a competitive appliance, although the EMC validation addresses an even broader market. Regardless, Basile explained, the involvement of large systems vendors in the flash game means that price is coming down fast, which means that companies like his can begin touting flash’s price-performance edge over disk with more gusto than ever. If it’s cheap enough and if customers know their blue-chip providers such as Oracle, HP and EMC are invested in it, Basile said they’ll very seriously consider buying when their system refresh cycles come around. He says Violin can deliver a far lower price per transaction than can spinning disk.
One issue right now might be the need to write applications to take full advantage of the performance gains of flash, which explains the emergence of VeloBit. Although details are sparse, the company claims to be developing a software product that “allows customers to deploy SSD without changing their applications or primary storage, thus preserving their existing investments in data protection and storage management.” It’s a similar situation to that with multi-core processors, in which hardware advancements outpace advancements in software development.
VeloBit, though, appears to be targeting caching use cases — similar to that which Fusion-io addresses with its components — whereas Violin wants to store companies’ primary data in its arrays.
If flash storage catches on and drops in price like Basile is convinced it’s ready to do, the possibilities are endless in terms of data center evolution. Big data applications are all the rage right now, and flash-based systems would take performance to new level. Likewise, the notion of delivering flash performance as a service could revolutionize cloud computing and democratize access to Google- or Facebook-like infrastructure. We’ll discuss the future of next-generation distributed systems and cloud storage at Structure 2011 in two weeks, and flash is almost certain to be a big part of that discussion.
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The difference between Apple and Google is even clearer after today’s announcements. Apple is all about the apps. Google may have a stronger footing in the cloud today, but its browser-centric approach to client applications leaves room for Apple to improve things, especially in the mobile realm. Apple is playing to its existing strengths regarding hardware/software integration, but now it’s bringing that game to the cloud, too.
Google’s app-less cloud for tablets
To Google, the iPad is just a larger display surface for ads. Just looking at what Google has done on the iPhone compared to iPad, there’s a definite commitment gap. Unlike Google’s continued commitment to apps on the iPhone, the company seems content to let the web stand in for iPad-specific options. This strategy is not new; it’s very reminiscent of Oracle’s Acorn and Sun Microsystems’ JavaStation. One of the reasons these solutions failed was because they assumed the browser was a good enough application delivery system, and not just a dynamic content delivery system. It’s a failure Google is destined to repeat if it isn’t careful.
Apple’s iOS/OS X updates and the iCloud
Apple’s decision to distribute OS X online via the Mac App Store, make the rebranded MobileMe free, and open the cloud even more with enhanced online music services in iTunes, are clear and decisive steps for a company with its sights set on a networked wireless future. For a company not previously known for a strong cloud presence, Apple has really stepped up its game, especially if you include some of the new enhancements to iOS, including better notification support, single sign-on with Twitter, and the new iMessage service. Like Google, Apple is now heavily invested in the cloud. But Apple isn’t creating web-based access to these services. Instead, it’s enabling the core SDK for developers, and when appropriate, making rich native apps of their own. Making the cloud an invisible backend component of local apps is a great way to get consumer buy-in for a concept that may not be widely understood. It’s definitely easier to understand than the idea of a web app, which is easily confused with a plain old website, and for good reason.
Apple’s blended iOS/OS X app-based approach to the cloud has the benefit of being cross-platform, while avoiding feeling like a “best fit” solution like a web app often can. And while the user interface is distinct for each platform, the code base that developers write to interact with the cloud can be shared across all three. This creates a much deeper experience for the user as they move from platform to platform. It will be interesting to see if Google’s ‘We’ve got a URL for that’ can compete with Apple’s consumer-focused app strategy.
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Verizon announced Monday that it is unbundling data plans from its video subscriptions, providing a more flexible offering to its customers. By doing so, the telco enables its FiOS customers for the first time to pick and choose the data plans they want to purchase without them being tied to a certain number of video channels. The ability to do so speaks to the growing importance of broadband to their customers in relation to the amount of television that they watch.
FiOS previously marketed its video, broadband and phone services in a “good, better, best” fashion, ensuring that double- and triple-play subscribers that wanted the fastest broadband would also have to pay for the most robust TV package. In that way, if you wanted its 35Mbps up- and down-stream broadband, you had to go whole-hog and purchase a $129.99 triple-play package or $109.99 double-play package. Same goes for those that wanted the biggest TV package but only wanted Verizon’s starter for broadband services.
But now it’s breaking down those bundles. With its new package options, Verizon subscribers can create more personalized plans, enabling broadband addicts to, for instance, get Verizon’s 35 Mbps broadband package with its smallest pay TV package for $109.99 triple-play and $89.99 in a double-play package, enabling them to save roughly $20 a month each way. Verizon also has double-play options for high-speed Internet and voice starting at $74.99.
Verizon’s broadband packages increase by $5 for each 10Mbps increase in speeds, while video packages increase by $10 as they step up from about 200 channel to nearly 400 channels. At the same time, the margin difference between offering higher-speed broadband or more cable channels is pretty dramatic.
Arturo Picicci, director of product management at Verizon, said the new plans are all about providing different segments of customers the right bundles. In particular, he said that Verizon is seeing younger customers demand higher broadband speeds with less TV networks.
Choosing more broadband is actually beneficial to operators because data margins are much higher than video margins. Since Verizon has to share revenues from video services with content partners, a portion of any incremental revenues it receives from subscribers ends up being passed on to partners. But since Verizon has already invested in the infrastructure required to deliver that kind of speed over its fiber-to-the-home network, the incremental cost of delivering higher-speed broadband speeds is extremely low. While that’s a plus for Verizon, Picicci said the new bundles are more about increasing sales and penetration among different segments.
Verizon isn’t the only pay TV operator and ISP looking to leverage its broadband services as consumers increasingly turn to Internet video services for entertainment. At an investor conference last week, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said his company sees an opportunity to capture broadband-only subscribers. Furthermore, he said that broadband was becoming Time Warner Cable’s primary product.
Media industry research shows that more and more newspapers are implementing paywalls, possibly inspired by the launch of a “metered” wall at the New York Times earlier this year. Frederic Filloux argues in a blog post at The Monday Note that the metered approach can have benefits for papers that implement it, by boosting revenue and appealing to advertisers. But those positives can be more than outweighed by the negatives of a paywall, particularly for smaller newspapers — the main one being that a wall creates an opportunity for free competitors, of which there are a growing number.
In his post, Filloux makes the case that a well-constructed metered wall such as the one the New York Times launched in March — which was based in part on the experiences at the Financial Times‘ similar metered approach launched in 2007 — can produce revenue from a paper’s most devoted readers, and can do so without having much of an impact on advertising revenue. Even though page views inevitably decline with the launch of a wall, Filloux says most news sites don’t sell all of their advertising inventory anyway, and the loss of those eyeballs is made up for by subscription revenue.
The amount of inventory sold to advertisers varies widely. In the U.S. market, the "sell-trough" [sic] ratio is about 60 percent, but it can go as low as 30 percent on some markets. This means the media can sustain some loss in page views due to the implementation of the metered system without losing ad revenue.
Filloux theorizes that a site getting 5 million unique visitors and about 100 million page views per month likely has advertising revenue of about $15 million a year. If it can convince even 2 percent of its regular readers to pay $10 a month — which is similar to the approach taken by the New York Times — it could generate $10 million in additional income without eating into its existing ad revenue. In some cases, Filloux says, advertisers are even willing to pay more to advertise to readers who have subscribed, because they are seen as more engaged and therefore more valuable.
This is clearly the kind of math that the New York Times is hoping will work in its favor. A month or so after the paywall launched, the newspaper said it had racked up about 100,000 new subscribers, and NYT executives have said it hopes to increase that figure to about 300,000 by the end of the year. Despite those rosy numbers, however, even an optimistic view of the paywall’s financial outcome produces only $35 million or so in revenue — a drop in the bucket for a media company whose overall revenues are more than $500 million. According to Reuters media blogger Felix Salmon:
I hear that the brass at the New York Times expect its paywall to be revenue neutral — the amount of money they expect to bring in from online subscriptions is pretty much equal to the amount of money they expect to lose from online advertising.
Despite the math, a recent survey of the newspaper industry done by the Missouri School of Journalism found almost half of the small papers surveyed said they were implementing a paywall of some kind. Why do this if the numbers are so inconclusive? In most cases, these walls are likely to be driven by the same rationale that Rupert Murdoch used in launching paywalls at two of his British newspapers: namely, to keep print readers from deserting the paper product in favor of reading online, something that would remove a paper’s main source of ad revenue.
But to me, the biggest flaw in a paywall isn’t that the math is questionable, or even that a wall is inherently a backward-facing strategy, aimed at stacking sandbags around a paper’s content to try to keep out the digital hordes. The biggest flaw from a business perspective, particularly for smaller newspapers, is that walling up your content is an invitation to free competitors — from AOL’s Patch.com and Huffington Post to Mainstreet Connect and Neighborhoodr and Topix.net — to come and take away your readers.
Newspapers like the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal can make paywalls work because their content is extremely focused and (arguably) more valuable than that produced by free competitors. The New York Times is hoping it falls into that category as well, although as a mass-market newspaper, that conclusion is more of a gamble. But if you are a small-town or even medium-sized metro paper, walling off your content could be a recipe for disaster, by giving your more nimble competitors exactly what they are looking for: readers eager for a free alternative.
Edit note: iCloud’s services do not involve streaming in the same manner as services like Netflix and Pandora do. However, the bandwidth should still be more than predicted by broadband providers. Apple’s iCloud assumes that users will “store” the music predominantly in the cloud and move it back and forth between the cloud and iOS/OS X devices. This means that the gigabytes downloaded per month will still increase, although operators will not have to worry as much about the complexity of delivering traditional streaming content.
Apple’s iCloud product, which will be discussed and dissected on many other blogs, poses both a threat and an opportunity for Internet service providers. The iCloud product itself, which will deliver streaming music and photo content (but not videos) is an acknowledgement that people are ready to stream get their content on demand, and online rather than store it on local hard drives, which has huge repercussions for broadband providers.
ISPs can point to Netflix content streaming, or send subscribers notices about consuming too much bandwidth by blaming forgotten Pandora streams playing in the background, but when a major player like Apple — which has 200 million credit cards in its iTunes store — gets into the streaming over the air content delivery game it’s an acknowledgment that today’s broadband is robust enough to support a streaming service such heavy traffic as well as a potential wake-up call to the ISPs complaining about their overburdened pipes.
Years, ago a Comcast spokesman told me the company had seen a huge jump in bandwidth immediately after Apple released its iTunes product. People downloading songs and TV shows changed the profile of the average Internet user. Now, as Apple prepares to launch a streaming an over-the-air service — even one without movies — it’s likely that ISPs should get ready for consumer usage patterns to change again.
This time, ISPs appear to be ready, trying to implement tiered plans and caps that limit how much a subscriber can download in a given month. Currently, AT&T has a 150 GB cap on DSL subscribers and a 250 GB per month cap on U-verse customers (although folks going over the cap can pay more). Given that both one hour of HD video content and about 20 hours of music streaming at average bit rates of 128 kbps consume about 1 GB , it’s easy to see how the wider adoption of streaming more downloads could affect usage. And while Apple isn’t announcing streaming a similar service for movies or television today, it’s not too far-fetched to anticipate that occurring in the future. What then?
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Now that Apple has announced its new iCloud service, which will be available at no charge, MobileMe users who have been spending $99 a year for similar services will be entitled to a refund.
Anyone having an active MobileMe account as of today will have their service extended at no charge through June 30, 2012. If you let your account expire recently (as I did), you’re out of luck, since if you try to log into the old MobileMe website at me.com, you are told that your account has expired and that it cannot be renewed.
Apple says that the new iCloud service:
will be available this fall and free for iOS 5 and OS X Lion users. When you sign up for iCloud, you’ll be able to keep your me.com or mac.com email address and move your MobileMe mail, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks to the new service.
It is no longer possible to create new MobileMe 60-day trial accounts, use codes from unused MobileMe boxes, upgrade from an individual account to a Family Pack, or purchase additional storage. You can, however, create accounts if you have an existing Family Pack membership.
If you have a MobileMe activation code that is unused or was used for 45 days or less, you can get a full refund. If your activation code has been used for 46 days or more, you will get a pro-rated refund based on the date of your request.
Unopened boxes can be returned to Apple Stores or to authorized dealers if they were purchased within the last 14 days; otherwise, you’ll need to go through the refund procedure, which can take 4-6 weeks. If you wish to cancel your current MobileMe service and get a refund, you may do so by going to the Cancellation Request Form.
There is no mention of getting credit for the new iTunes Match service, so if you aren’t using MobileMe, you should probably cancel as soon as possible to get the maximum refund, and wait a few months to sign up for Apple’s new services.
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UPDATED: Jonathan George, CEO of Boxcar was on pins and needles as he tuned into the coverage of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, waiting to find out if Apple was about to squeeze his business or allow it to flourish. George, who founded the push-notification service, breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the announcement that Apple was introducing Notification Center for iOS, which organized all text messages, missed calls, calendar alerts and app alerts in one place. While the new offering may affect his messaging in-box feature, it will leave intact his core business of delivering messages, especially from companies that don’t have mobile apps.
“I was pretty concerned before the announcement because you don't know what Apple is going to do, but it turned out great,” said George. “We can all send a lot more notifications now so this helps everyone.”
Not everyone was so lucky. Marco Arment, founder of Instapaper responded with a short but concise tweet of “s***” when Apple announced the new Read Later feature for iOS. He later recovered and said, “Glad I’ve invested in social and editorial features. Not dead yet!”Later in a blog post, Arment said Apple’s foray into time-shifted reading will likely be good for Instapaper because it will shine a light on this sort of application, which is unknown to most users. And that could help encourage people to eventually pay up for Instapaper’s premium services, he said.
“So I'm tentatively optimistic. Our world changes quickly, especially on the cutting edge, and I really don't know what's going to happen. (Nobody does.) But the more potential scenarios I consider, the more likely it seems that Safari's Reading List is either going to have no noticeable effect on Instapaper, or it will improve sales dramatically. Time will tell,” Arment wrote.
The reaction shows how developers are often at the mercy of platform makers, who create vibrant ecosystems but can also wade into the market with their own native features and apps that compete with, and can sometimes, displace existing third-party apps. It’s a lesson some Twitter developers are learning the hard way lately. Apple’s latest mobile operating system and iCloud roll out touched on a lot of existing third-party services from cloud storage and note-taking apps to reading programs, camera apps and group messaging services.
But in talking to developers, many came away upbeat about the latest announcement. John Casasanta, principal at tap tap tap, maker of the photo shooting and editing Camera+ app, said he was not worried about Apple’s improvements to its native camera and photos apps, which will soon offer the ability to get access to the camera from the lock screen and the ability to shoot pictures with a press of the volume button, something Camera+ popularized before the feature was banned. The new iOS tools also include simple rotating, cropping and red-eye removal. Casasanta said the new features shouldn’t eat into Camera+’s 3 million users and may serve to feed the appetite for more robust apps like Camera+. He said he’s excited to hear what kind of lower level API access Apple grants third-party developers, which could mean better apps for everyone.
“The bottom line is it will make things much better for camera apps in general,” Casasanta said of Apple’s release of 1,500 APIs for iOS. “The third-party camera apps market is huge. People love them and we’ll probably see more camera apps now.”
For Jared Hecht, founder of messaging app GroupMe, the announcement reminded him that it was good to invest in cross platform apps and multiple technologies. While Apple on Monday introduced iMessage, which allows users to send text messages, photos, videos or contact information to a person or a group, it is confined to iOS products and works over a data connections, not SMS. GroupMe, on the other hand, works on Android and BlackBerry as well, and uses SMS when a data connection is weak.
“What Apple did is good for the iOS ecosystem but what we’re doing is fundamentally different. What we’re doing is being accessible for all people whatever phone they have,” said Hecht.
George said the reality is that Apple always has the right to encroach on the turf of developers. But it often leaves an opening for good developers who are willing to go deeper or more broad with their services. It doesn’t mean developers are always safe but it’s not all doom and gloom with new iOS releases that have competing features.
“None of these affected apps will go away because they offer deeper functionality. But (the new iOS 5) introduces the masses to those kinds of applications,” George said. “There is always a segment that wants deeper functionality and that's something Apple just doesn't do. Apple has done a good job of creating more opportunities than they destroy with their new releases. But you have to remember you’re playing in Apple’s ball game.”
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The iOS 5 upgrade introduces a lot of changes for Apple’s mobile operating system, but iMessages is one of the most significant. It lets iPad, iPhone and iPod touch owners send messages back and forth, including photos, videos, locations and contacts, all free of charge and without limits. If you’re thinking it’s the BlackBerry Messenger of the iOS world, you’d be right, and that’s bad news for RIM, but also for carriers.
BBM is one of the few remaining advantages RIM’s aging platform has over its younger competition in the smartphone market. (Check out this tweet representative of reaction toiMessage’s announcement if you don’t believe me.) People appreciated the way it integrates tightly to your device, and its delivery and read receipts let you know your messages aren’t getting lost in the ether. It’s been a life raft for RIM in the violent sea of the ongoing mobile battle BlackBerry faces with iOS and Android.
However, iMessage brings a lot of what’s good about BBM not only to the iPhone, which just passed RIM in terms of U.S. smartphone ownership trentds, but also to all iOS devices. With iPad and iPod touch users factored in, the potential audience for iMessage is huge, and it should cause at least some BBM-faithful to flee RIM’s platform for greener pastures.
But while Apple’s aggressive move against a competitor is easy to understand, iMessage also represents a more subtle attack on some of its closest partners: the mobile operators.
The service iMessage works over both Wi-Fi and the cellular network, and is unlimited and free. Text messaging, while often bundled with other cell phone services, is seldom free and only sometimes unlimited. Using MMS services almost always costs more money on top of that, and text messaging doesn’t have delivery receipts or work across multiple devices simultaneously.
Like BBM, iMessage is limited only to devices from one hardware maker, but it didn’t hurt BBM’s popularity, and it’ll hinder the uptake of Apple’s service even less. iOS is a growing platform, and since iMessage can work even without a cellular connection on non-phone devices, it appeals to a much broader swath of mobile users. It’s like that iMessage use will cut into text messaging, and it will lead to a decreased ability to generate revenue from that vector for carriers.
Apple wrestled control over the user’s relationship with device software away from carriers with iPhone OS and the App Store, and then it won even more autonomy by requiring iPad data plans be available without contracts. Reports say that it also wanted to go after the SIM card, arguably one of the carrier’s best tools for maintaining control over the customer relationship.
But if Apple didn’t make this power play, Google would have. Google has already made inroads with Google Talk, Google Chat and Google Voice on Android devices. A unified messaging platform was the next logical step for Google, as Om suggested in a post earlier this year. Facebook acquired group messaging startup Beluga, and has already begun building out its own cross-platform rich messaging product, so it too is interested in this space.
Apple may just be taking a first step with iMessage, which basically mimics BBM but expands availability to different device categories, but it’s just a first shot in a battle that will include all major mobile players, and in which carriers may end up suffering the greatest losses.
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Although the HTC Sensation 4G doesn’t arrive in retail T-Mobile stores until June 15 (and WalMart locations as early as June 12), we received an early review unit late last week. This first look shows what’s in the box, and of course, HTC’s newest phone for T-Mobile. The 960 x 540 display isn’t quite as bright as the Super AMOLED Plus screens used in Samsung devices, but it’s a noticeable step up from prior HTC smartphones. So is Qualcomm’s 1.2 GHz dual-core processor which keeps the device moving along quickly.
Surprisingly, the Android 2.3 handset isn’t too large or heavy, even with the 4.3-inch display, mainly because it’s reasonably thin as compared to other high-end smartphones. And the cover is fairly unique as well; you can see in the video why I say I’m not putting the cover on the phone, but instead, putting the phone inside the cover. You have to see how it works to appreciate it.
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Apple has been working on a single digital newsstand for newspapers and magazines since last year, but ran into some significant roadblocks with several publishers. One issue was the control over subscriber information: some media companies didn’t want to have to ask their readers to give up personal details, but wanted direct access to that info the same way they have it with print subscriptions — since it is a crucial part of their sales pitch to advertisers. Apple stood firm, however, and eventually a number of mainstream publishers started to cave in to the company’s demands.
As my colleague Darrell Etherington has noted in his coverage, Conde Nast has recently signed up to offer digital magazine subscriptions for a number of its properties including Wired magazine, Glamour and Vanity Fair, and Hearst (publisher of Esquire) has also signed up to offer subscriptions (Time Inc. is one of the few remaining holdouts). And contrary to what some publishers feared, a surprisingly large proportion of users seem to be fine with providing their personal info through an app.
With the launch of the new Newsstand, all of a user’s newspaper and magazine subscriptions will be available in a single interface, the same way that books are available through the iBooks interface — the design of the newsstand even looks the same, with the wood-style virtual shelving similar to a bookstore or magazine store.
The newsstand completes the transition of magazine and newspapers away from just being apps in the traditional iTunes app store and towards actual subscriptions with their own home. When publications were first offered on iPhone and iPad, users had to pay for each individual issue of a magazine and then download it separately. Now, with Apple’s support for in-app purchasing, subscriptions for Wired or The Daily or the New York Times will automatically be updated every month without requiring users to do anything.
The biggest issue for publishers, however, is that dealing through the Apple ecosystem still means they have to give Apple 30 percent of their subscription revenue. Some publishers were getting around this by sending users to a website outside their app in order to sign them up for a subscription, but Apple closed that door last year, by requiring any publisher who charges for content to do so from within the app as well as outside it.
Conde Nast and Hearst seem to feel that giving Apple that kind of control over their access to a subscriber base — not to mention 30 percent of their revenues — is a fair trade. But is that a sign of how compelling Apple’s offering is or how desperate publishers are?
Apple officially launched its much-hyped iCloud suite of services at its Worldwide Developer Conference Monday, and although the capabilities are sure to be the talk of the town among consumers, it’s Apple’s cloud infrastructure that makes it all work. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said as much during his WWDC keynote by closing with an image of — and shout-out to — the company’s new iDataCenter in Maiden, N.C. Details about the technology that will power iCloud have been sparse, but those who’ve been watching it have uncovered some interesting information that sheds some light on what Apple is doing under the covers.
Probably the most-interesting data is about the iDataCenter itself. It has garnered so much attention because of its sheer scale, which suggests Apple has very big plans for the future of iCloud. As Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge has reported over the past couple of years, the iDataCenter:
Will cover about 500,000 square feet — about five times the size of the company’s existing Silicon Valley data center.
Cost about $1 billion to build, which is about twice what Google and Microsoft generally invest in their cloud data centers.
Is only one of two similarly sized data centers planned for the site.
The other big Apple infrastructure news came in April, with reports that the company had ordered 12 petabytes of worth of Isilon file storage from EMC. It hasn’t been confirmed where all that storage will be housed — in the iDataCenter, in Apple’s Newark, Calif. data center or in the new space it has leased in Silicon Valley, or spread among the three facilities — but its mere presence suggests Apple is serious about storing and delivering files of all types. As Steve Jobs noted during the keynote, iCloud is the post-PC-world replacement for syncing everything — photos, audio, documents and more — across all your Apple devices. The company even rewrote the core MobileMe functions as iCloud apps and, much like Google with Google Apps, is giving them away for free.
Despite all that storage capacity, though, Apple won’t be housing individual copies of everybody’s media files. Even 12 petabytes would fill up fairly fast with the combined audio of Apple users worldwide, which is why Apple’s focus is still on local storage for iTunes. This way, instead of storing millions of individual copies of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” for individual customers, Apple can house minimal copies of each individual song and sync purchased files to devices based on purchased licenses. Even iTunes Match merely applies iTunes licenses to files within users’ personal libraries that weren’t originally purchased via iTunes, rather than uploading each track into the cloud before syncing.
This differs from both Amazon’s and Google’s cloud-based music services, which literally store your music in cloud. That could help explain why Apple will charge only $24.99 a year for the iTunes Match service instead of charging customers per gigabyte. This model and the huge storage infrastructure will come in handy, too, should Apple step up its cloud-based video services, which bring even greater capacity issues to the table, as well as those around encoding for delivery to specific device types. (A skeptic might say that Apple’s reliance on local storage is antithetical to the cloud’s overall them of access anywhere (not just on your Apple devices), but that’s a story for another day.)
But Apple’s cloud story doesn’t start and stop with iCloud and its related services; in fact, the cloud touches almost every aspect of pretty much every new service and feature discussed during the WWDC keynote. Every time Apple is syncing anything — from application data to system settings to media — it’s touching Apple’s new cloud computing infrastructure. That’s why Jobs highlighted the iDataCenter in his keynote and why Apple recently hired noted cloud data center expert Kevin Timmons from Microsoft. When you’re selling as many different types of devices as Apple does, the real value of the cloud is in syncing data among devices and users, and that requires a robust cloud infrastructure.
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Here’s one feature you won’t find in Apple’s new iCloud service: video syncing. The cloud-based media storage service introduced at Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco on Monday offers the ability to sync your personal music library with the cloud without uploading any of the actual files, making it possible to access thousands of songs on any of your devices in a matter of minutes. Apple calls this feature Music Match, and charges users $24.99 per year to instantly access their personal music library online.
However, it won’t be able to do the same thing with movies. iCloud can sync videos across devices, but it does so by uploading each and every file to the cloud and then downloading it to other devices. Depending on the file size, this can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. There were rumors before the event that Apple was in talks with Hollywood to secure similar rights for movie streams, but details about these negotiations were scarce.
A cloud solution for Hollywood fare could have been a great extension to Apple’s existing iTunes video offering, which largely centers around rentals and sales of movies and TV show downloads. Apple does offer streaming of select TV show episodes for $0.99 on Apple TV, but it hasn’t made this price point and functionality available to users of the iTunes desktop client, or to other iOS devices like the iPad or iPhone.
That’s a problem, especially in the mobile space where storage is oftentimes limited. Google announced at its developer conference in May that it is going to stream to Android devices through its new Android Movie service, and Amazon has been offering streaming to a variety of platforms. However, both companies don’t extend these services to videos that customers already have on their hard drives either. Google’s recently launched cloud music service doesn’t have any movie streaming functionality, and Amazon’s Cloud Drive only offers basic support for video streaming that requires users to upload each and every video file individually.
Hollywood was also notably absent from other parts of Apple’s WWDC keynote. iPhone software SVP Scott Forstall made a point of saying how many songs (15 billion), apps (14 billion) and books (130 million) have been downloaded through iTunes, and he said that Apple now has 225 million customer accounts with credit cards. However, he didn’t mention how many movies and TV show episodes these customers rented or purchased.
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After taking 992 days to reach 5 million members, Evernote said today it has now hit 10 million members just 208 days later. It has also eclipsed 400,000 premium members, putting the company well on its way toward its goal of 1 million paid users.
Evernote hit 5 million users on Nov. 10 last year and was up to 6 million users by the first of the year. It’s since grown by 67 percent in a little over five months to 10 million users with the last million signing up in 32 days. It had 3.6 million unique visitors in the last 30 days, up 70 percent since the beginning of the year. And perhaps most impressive is Evernote’s paid conversion growth. Premium users have more than doubled from 201,308 on Jan. 1 to 424,736 now, a 111-percent jump.
“Ten million users seemed like an inconceivable number when we were getting ready to launch the service into open beta less than three years ago. Well, it wasn't literally inconceivable; we actually put it on business plans and investor pitch decks and everything. Yup. 10,000,000 users in three years. That what we told people. We had really pretty graphs showing the projections. Reality is much more impressive than projections,” wrote CEO Phil Libin in a blog post.
The latest news caps off a wave of activity this year by Evernote, which has been working to improve its products across different platforms. In March, it launched Evernote 4, a new version of the app on the iPhone with better tools for accessing and organizing notes. It followed up later that month with a more robust web-based app that showed how Evernote was making the web a priority. More recently, Evernote provided new updates for Android, Windows and Mac with better sharing, editing and security features. Evernote said three quarters of its members access the service from two or more platforms.
The company is showing it’s not sitting still after taking in $20 million in Series C funding in October. At the time, the company said it still had $9 million of the $11 million it previously raised, but was taking on more funding to help it achieve its goal of hitting 1 million paying customers. Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, said last year that Evernote was converting about 2 percent of its customers to its paid service. By January, it was up to 3.3 percent and now, it’s up to 4.2 percent.
The company still needs to more add many more users if it wants to hit its premium user goal. But with sign-ups accelerating, it might not be that far off. We’ve been fans of the service for some time because of its simple way of helping you wade through notes and memories. And it has been a great example of how a freemium service can thrive with the right balance between paid and free services. Things are getting more interesting now that Apple just included a reminder service in iOS 5 for note taking and shopping lists. But with Evernote’s fast growth, it’ll take more than that to derail its momentum.
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The difference between Apple and Google is even clearer after today’s announcements. Apple is all about the apps. Google may have a stronger footing in the cloud today, but its browser-centric approach to client applications leaves room for Apple to improve things, especially in the mobile realm. Apple is playing to its existing strengths regarding hardware/software integration, but now it’s bringing that game to the cloud, too.
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