|  |  |  | | | | | GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Another week, another Facebook privacy firestorm. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking giant came under fire once again this week for potentially violating users’ privacy, after online security firm Sophos issued an alert Tuesday that Facebook had quietly turned on facial recognition technology worldwide. Facebook is using the technology to suggest how users should tag photos they add to the site. The company said last year that it had developed facial recognition capabilities, but at that time it only announced plans to demo the feature with test groups in North America. This past week, users worldwide noticed that the technology had been switched on as an apparently wide scale launch — without any warning from the company. Facebook soon confirmed in a company blog post that it had indeed begun rolling out the feature “in most countries.” Users can opt out of facial recognition by adjusting their privacy settings, but the feature is active by default. The issue has set off privacy concerns at the highest levels — the European Union is reportedly set to probe the legality of the new feature — and the web is abuzz with opinions on whether Facebook’s use of face recognition technology is good, bad or just creepy. Here are some of the more salient points people are making: - Even Facebook has admitted it should have handled the roll-out with more transparency. A company spokeswoman told the Register:
“When we announced this feature last December, we explained that we would test it, listen to feedback and iterate before rolling it out more broadly. We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them.”
- Facebook’s latest privacy fiasco has Google smelling of roses. The search engine giant has said it has developed its own facial recognition technology, but has publicly expressed hesitancyto use it. SearchEngineLand editor Danny Sullivan says that’s not an accident:
- But not everyone was freaked out by the feature. Software engineer Todd Kitta said all the hubbub was unwarranted:
 @toddkitta
Todd Kitta regarding facebook's facial recognition: first, whether true or false, calling privacy foul on facebook or others is becoming banal. @toddkitta
Todd Kitta second, the new facial recognition feature doesn't do anything that actual people weren't already doing. if you don't like it, sign off. - And of course, some just used the news as an excuse to crack wise:
 @gcluley
Graham Cluley Since FB is now using facial recognition to suggest tags, I'm tagging all my pics as "Mark Zuckerberg" http://bit.ly/lyiWuV  @jkendrick
James Kendrick Will the Facebook facial recognition freak out when it sees a photo of the woman with all of her friends tattooed on her arm? :) If you have any thoughts about Facebook’s facial recognition rollout, please be sure to chime in via the comments. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  The business of helping people save money on the web just keeps getting bigger. Digital coupon company Coupons.com has closed on a $200 million funding round brokered by boutique investment bank Allen & Company.
About half of this round will be used to cash out early investors and stock-holding employees at the company, which was founded in 1998, CEO Steven Boal told me in an interview. The remaining $100 million will be used to fund the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s growth, through new customer acquisition, domestic and international expansion, and opportunistic acquisitions, he said. “Right now we have about 300 employees based in Silicon Valley,” Boal said. With this new funding, the company plans to add 100 new staff members in the next six months and add new sales offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Coupons.com will also focus on adding new mobile and social networking technologies, he said. When asked about the larger industry landscape, Boal expressed confidence about Coupons.com’s foothold in its space. “We are the clear industry leader in the digitization of the kind of coupons that had traditionally been found in the newspaper,” he said. “This is not a situation where we’re raising money to create market demand; it’s to meet market demand.” Boal said that daily deals sites such as Groupon are more sales certificate businesses than coupon providers, and as such don’t present direct competition to his company. But while Boal was happy to discuss Coupons.com’s consumer traction, he was notably mum in our interview on disclosing details about the company’s financial performance. He declined to answer my questions about Coupon.com’s sales figures, its prior funding history, whether or not it’s profitable, or who exactly participated in this latest financing round. A separate source with knowledge of the company’s financials told me Coupons.com is on track to make revenue of over $100 million in 2011, roughly double what it made in 2010. The current round was raised from institutional investors such as mutual funds, the source said. According to regulatory filings, Coupons.com has in the past raised at least $46 million in venture capital; the company’s most recent filing to the SEC was in December 2006 for a series E round worth $20 million. That would make this week’s $200 million round technically a series F raise. Despite its complicated financial history, Coupons.com clearly has the kind of entrenched brand and top-line revenue growth investors like to see. Judging by the recent successes of other tech companies with long and varied pasts such as Skype and Photobucket, now is as good a time as ever for Coupons.com to have its second wind. With fresh funding and a clearly receptive customer base in a currently hot industry, the 13-year-old Coupons.com is clearly entering into a new chapter. Image of Steven Boal courtesy of Coupons.com Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  T-Mobile’s HTC Sensation 4G isn’t due to hit store shelves until Sunday, but it could be followed by a version for AT&T. According to the Wireless Goodness blog, the handset with support for ATT’s network passed through the FCC’s certification process; usually an indication that a device will soon arrive. Regardless of the carrier, Android power users are trying to figure out if HTC will lock down the phone and prevent deep customizations. According to the company and my own light research, odds are good that the Sensation 4G will indeed be hackable.
The lock-down in question has to do with the bootloader: If the bootloader is locked, the Android handset won’t accept a modified operating system that isn’t signed by the smartphone manufacturer. This would effectively prevent the ability to install a customized operating system; a practice that only a minority of Android device owners do, but one that’s extremely important to this audience. I count myself in that group, having flashed different software on my Android phone and tablet well over 100 times in the past 18 months. Originally, HTC indicated that it would be locking phones going forward, but on May 26, the company recanted with this official statement on Facebook: There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones. I want you to know that we’ve listened. Today, I’m confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience. — Peter Chou, CEO of HTC.
Unfortunately, for the current HTC Sensation 4G on T-Mobile or a future offering by AT&T, it will take time for HTC to implement a change. Forum members at the XDA-Developers site have inquired as to when the Sensation 4G would have an unlocked bootloader, but no firm timeframe has come from HTC, based on this chat statement from the company: We are currently developing new bootloader unlocked software for your phone. HTC is still committed to allowing our customers to unlock the bootloaders if they wish, however we are still implementing the policy and many updates were already finalized prior to our change in policy. We apologize for the inconvenience, but be assured that we are working on a solution for our customers and our commitment has not changed. Please stay tuned to our official channels for ongoing updates on how we will be implementing this policy.
 Hopefully, the effort won’t take too long to change, and the review unit I’m testing indicates the device doesn’t require a boot file signed by HTC, as evidenced by S-OFF in a picture of the bootloader screen I took. Since this is a review unit, I won’t unlock or hack the device. Perhaps HTC can revert back to this image for the device, which may save time, but with the handset hitting retail shelves soon, it’s nearly impossible to flash all of the inventory before launch.
My guess is that customers who purchase an HTC Sensation 4G at launch — or before, since WalMart is reportedly selling them early — will see a locked bootloader for at least a few weeks while HTC works out the software change. The same could apply to AT&T devices, if and when the Sensation arrives there, although HTC can work with the carrier to adjust the software prior before it makes it out to customers. Related: our first look video at the HTC Sensation 4G and HTC Sense 3.0 software Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Like oil and vinegar, marketing and IT just don't mix well. Never have. Since the two industries first met way back in 1994–when a digital magazine called HotWire (an offshoot of Wired) played host to the world’s first display ad–these bedfellows soon set up shop in different corners of the internet.
Today, they remain mostly segregated within the corporate offices and advertising budgets of the world’s biggest brands. Even as folks embrace data for everything from customer relationship management to testing the best news headlines,the traditional advertising industry is still happiest storyboarding sexy high-concept campaigns featuring supermodels racing German cars against jungle cats in exotic locals (shot on location in Bora Bora, of course). Creativity, expression and artistic license drive the industry. Data and analytics …. not so much. But as social media flourishes and marketers try to use it to their advantage, it’s really time to bridge the gap and get these departments speaking the same language, said Peter Kim, Chief Strategy officer at Dachis Group, an enterprise-focused social-media consultant firm. During an interview Wednesday, Kim said the relationship between the creative and the IT side is the "same as it ever was,” but that needs to change, especially as consumers live more digital lives. Big data, cheap processing, and social media, are changing the advertising and marketing landscape. IT has been quietly hammering away on advanced analytics systems and platforms to aggregate and filter data, while sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can provide exactly the detailed demographic data that marketers say they need. Put it all together and you have technology that can spit out almost personalized advertising on one side and deliver quantitative measurements to gauge the effect every little marketing decision has on the bottom line. Kim says there are three major issues keeping IT and marketers apart. - Budget cycles. While IT budgets follow a three or five-year cycle, marketing budgets are allocated on a quarterly basis. But getting processing power or software to process big data or manage business intelligence isn’t a cheap quarterly expense (unless you use the cloud). The two need to get more in sync if the departments are to work together to create campaigns and projects.
- And to justify what might be larger spending plans for more gear or technology, marketing has to have a means of showing executives how that will pay off. But to do that, the industry needs accepted metrics to determine the impact of social media. While we can measure display ads and click-throughs, there is no clear way to measure return on investment in the social sphere, something Kim believes is a big opportunity. Without metrics, brands can’t understand the actual value of social media and the best ways to implement social strategies.
- Finally, among some of the creative types, there is an aversion to big data. Getting marketers to understand the world of big data is a challenge, Kim said. And while platforms like Facebook and Twitter are giant storehouses of consumer information, information overload is a huge problem. Plus, "it’s boring, and on the back end," Kim said.
Alas, identifying the barriers standing in the way is the easy part. Breaking them down is tricky. Can companies bridge the gap between marketing and IT? Should they? Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | When Steve Jobs flashed inside images of Apple’s new cloud data center during his WWDC keynote on Monday, he ignited a mini firestorm of speculation about just what kind of hardware is filling its immense surface area. No one outside of Apple and its hardware partners know for sure what it houses, but it appears as if HP and Teradata were among the big winners in Apple’s big cloud build-out. Here’s what the experts had to say: - It’s full of HP servers. Storage analyst Stephen Foskett and ZDNet Editor-in-Chief Larry Dignan both noted as much, even going into some detail on models and specifications. Both suggest Apple bought a large number of HP’s commodity ProLiant DL 300 series boxes. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. I spoke with HP Vice President of Industry Standard Servers and Software recently, and he explained to me just how prevalent HP gear is among the world’s largest web sites, search engines and social media sites. He also highlighted HP’s major partnership role in helping Facebook design its cutting-edge data center and servers. Certainly, HP has the cloudscale chops to be part of Apple’s cloud foray.
- It has a large Teradata data warehouse. Foskett and fellow storage analyst Robin Harris agree on this. Both identify the gear as Teradata’s Extreme Data Appliance, and there appear to be about 30 of them. Harris noted that, fully configured, just the number of appliances visible in the picture could store about 8 petabytes. Harris astutely notes that the Teradata analytics appliances aren’t for storing music, but likely are for storing personal data, perhaps even of the geospatial variety. It’s difficult to say for certain that he’s right or wrong, but perhaps this fresh job listing from Apple can shed some light on the situation:
The Global Business Intelligence (GBI( team within Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization is implementing a 250+ terabyte database to support analytical and reporting needs of hundreds of global Apple users. To drive this effort, GBI is looking for a senior architect with expertise in designing and implementing big data solutions using technologies like Hadoop, Teradata, Memcache, Casandra, Informatica and Java. . . . The ideal candidate will have a bachelors degree in computer science and seven or more years experience with at least three of them being on big data, NoSQL platforms like Hadoop using Hive and HBase. A good understanding of relational databases is required. Experience with MPP databases like Teradata, ETL tools like Informatica, and BI tools like Business Objects will be a big plus.
Earlier job listings from Apple suggest that it’s using Hadoop, as well as other advanced analytics techniques for improving the iAds mobile-advertising platform and iOS, so there’s no guarantee that Apple has all that Teradata gear solely for storing personal data that it ultimately wants to sell. 
- Maybe there’s some NetApp in there, as well. Foskett thinks he spotted a variety of NetApp storage products in Apple’s data center, which is somewhat interesting because Apple reportedly bought 12 petabytes of Isilon file storage from NetApp rival EMC. Of course, there’s no requirement that Apple go single-vendor across its storage infrastructure and, in fact, Apple customers might take solace in the fact that it appears to have gone best-of-breed for its various storage needs.
- It’s efficient. Data Center Knowledge’s Rich Miller noted some of the data-center-design principles that Apple employed, including “a slab floor and a cooling system in which cold air enters the equipment area from overhead. Apple is using containment systems to separate the cold supply air for the servers from the exhaust heat, a strategy which dramatically improves the efficiency of data center cooling systems.”
What’s certain is that Apple didn’t approach its iCloud infrastructure build with a light wallet or the mindset that it has to build its own gear and software like Google and Facebook have done. As Jobs said during his keynote, “It’s full of stuff. Full of expensive stuff.” Indeed, it cost Apple $500 billion. Apple’s customers can complain about iCloud’s features, but it doesn’t look like they complain too much about Apple’s investment in the infrastructure that supports it. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  “The Earth is full,” says New York Times Thomas Friedman in a column this week. A similar sentiment has been echoed across the media in recent weeks, from new research on rising food prices and the warming climate, to reports that say feeding 9 billion people by 2050 will take a colossal organized effort. Reading these articles and headlines tends to spur a few reactions, including depression, apathy, and anger.
That last feeling is pretty useful when it comes to acting as a catalyst for changing behavior. And it can often lead to another, even more positive, step: empowerment, which comes from contemplating and adopting possible solutions. The problem of feeding, and providing water and energy to 9 billion people by 2050, many of which are expecting a quality of life as high as Americans (at the same time as we reduce the world’s carbon emissions) will require many, many technology solutions. While a lot of these tech solutions are expensive, and will take decades to deploy (clean power or, say, Bloom Energy’s dream of distributed home fuel cells), in the near term, there’s technology solutions that we’re using everyday that can help deliver the use of resources more efficiently, and reduce personal energy and fuel consumption — that’s the Internet and cell phones. In a unique way the web can act as a sort of operating system for physical “stuff.” More and more people are joining car sharing networks, giving up their cars to use shared cars (via Zipcar, City Car Share or even RelayRides), and turning to web systems and mobile apps to manage the reservation systems for those cars. Joining car sharing services tends to remove cars from the roads and uses each car far more efficiently. With the successful IPO of Zipcar and the emergence of second-generation peer-to-peer car sharing, the year of using cars as a service has really arrived. Other new sites are rapidly emerging, too, to help people share other stuff like housing space (AirBnB), tools and items with neighbors (Neighborhood Goods), second hand baby clothes (ThredUP) or kids toys (Toygaroo). I think the web sharing movement is starting to reach a tipping — as I wrote in this article last week. Pioneers of these newer sites are web companies like eBay, and Craigslist, which helped get us used to bartering with people online. Shiply, is an almost three year old startup from the U.K., that uses available extra space in moving vans and trucks to help people ship goods for a low cost. Shiply founder Robert Matthams explained to me in an interview that transport companies bid on shipping the items via an eBay-style web auction system, and the system enables the shipped goods to piggyback on trips already being taken, and thus reduces the need for extra trips. Shiply has helped reduce almost 10 million kg of carbon emissions to date. For Friedmand’s column this week he interviews author and environmentalist Paul Gilding, who Friedman says asserts that eventually “We will realize . . . that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less.” Owning less perhaps in technical sense, but maybe (in an optimistic world) using a similar amount of shared resources via this new sharing economy, and using them in a smarter way. The web and mobile of course aren’t magic bullets for freeing the world from the problem of how to manage 9 billion people by 2050. But they are key tools that can help us get ready. And that’s one solution I can rely on in the short term, while I read the daily headlines and waver between feelings of depression, apathy and anger. Image courtesy of Zipcar, Zimrides. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  While Google’s Android Market is growing fast, it has an attrition rate that is twice as high as Apple’s App Store. That explains why, contrary to previous reports, Android Market is not on pace to overtake Apple’s App Store in overall apps any time soon.
The analysis comes by way of app discovery service Appsfire, which found that of the 300,000 apps that have been published overall on Android Market, 95,000 or about 32 percent, have been pulled over time. Meanwhile, of the 500,000 apps that have appeared on Apple’s App Store, 80,000 or about 16 percent, have been unpublished at some point. This undercuts previous research from Distimo and research2guidance, which counted many more apps for Android Market and predicted that it was on pace to eclipse Apple’s App Store later this year. Appsfire said the attrition rate was likely not factored into previous counts and needs to be included if you want an accurate picture of the app stores. Indeed, while some had said Apple was close to half a million apps, it reported at its WWDC conference this week that it has 425,000 apps available. And Google recently shared at its developer conference last month that it has 200,000 apps available in Android Market, meaning it’s unlikely it will overtake Apple any time soon. So why are apps less likely to stick around in Android Market? Appsfire said it’s likely because the apps there are more experimental and may be designed to give developers more experience, making them easier to pull. Android Market’s lower barrier to entry, along with tools like App Inventor, also invite more of these apps compared to the App Store, which has stricter guidelines, a review process and a $100 development fee. Appsfire also hypothesizes that app developers may be pulling their apps more quickly because they encounter more trouble monetizing them or find it’s not worth it to maintain them. Or they unpublish apps as they change course in their strategy. Now there are more Android apps out there than just the ones found in Android Market. With the rise of third-party app stores, there are some apps that don’t appear in Android Market though most, I wager, end up there. But the larger story is that we need to be look more at the overall state of these apps stores and consider that they are still different in their approaches. And they have different appeal with developers and consumers. As I wrote about earlier, Android is great for cutting-edge apps while iOS is better for making money. Trying to compare the specific number of apps they have doesn’t paint a complete picture of their health and may not be as relevant when you’re comparing such large numbers. What matters for consumers is having good apps and we’re seeing that Android is catching up in both quantity and quality and has the edge in some areas of niche apps. And for developers, they may have a lot of objectives that include making money but may also include other things. As Android matures and becomes a better place to money, the comparisons may be more relevant. But right now, it’s still early and both stores are thriving. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Apple has rolled out phase one of its cloud music offering this week, allowing iTunes users to download additional copies of past purchases on up to ten devices.
However, users that bought their music on iTunes before Apple abandoned DRM some two years ago better get ready for an unexpected surprise: Files originally bought with Apple's Fairplay copy protection are also once again downloaded with DRM.  Apple still charges users $0.30 per track to get rid of DRM. A number of users complained about this strange behavior on Twitter and on the web, with one stating that this would bring back "bad memories." We were able to confirm it by re-downloading a DRMed track as well. Apple introduced the ability to "upgrade" copy protected tracks to DRM-free AACs by paying $0.30 per song in early 2009. The so-called upgrade to iTunes Plus is still available, so it might make economic sense for the company to not offer free upgrades as part of the new ability to download additional copies of previously purchased songs. However, the fact that iTunes still serves up DRM to users who were honest enough to pay for their music may add fuel to recent criticism that Apple's iCloud offering rewards piracy. Beginning this fall, customers will be able to synchronize their entire music library with iCloud without uploading a single song to Apple's servers as part of the iTunes Music Match subscription. iCloud will instead match songs by title and audio fingerprint, allowing users to download higher-quality copies of songs even for those 128 kbps files they originally downloaded from LimeWire back in the day. Music Match will cost users $25 per year. ZDNet blogger David Gewirtz called Music Match "complete music pirate amnesty" this week, and Evolver.fm’s Elliot van Buskirk said that the offering "reinforces the practice of downloading music without paying for it" (hat tip to AllAccess.com). The good news is that iCloud's Music Match will likely also work for DRMed iTunes purchases (Apple PR didn't respond in time to requests for comment), meaning that paying subscribers will be able to free their existing iTunes libraries from DRM by paying $25 per year instead of $0.30 per track. Until then, Apple's practice of serving up DRMed downloads to paying customers more than two years after the company announced with big fanfares that it would abandon DRM serves as an important reminder: Once businesses and consumers buy into a copy protection scheme, they’re gonna have a hard time getting rid of it. Image courtesy (CC-BY-SA) of Flickr user Ben Cumming. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  We've seen some eye-catching headlines in response to to Apple's new iMessage, which enables iOS 5 users to send unlimited texts and other content to fellow users without incurring carrier charges. The biggest noise surrounding the service is that bloggers and industry insiders claim that SMS revenues "are going away" because iMessage "makes texting obsolete" and — for good measure — that "Apple has finally stuck a dagger into SMS."
Don't believe the hype. Let me be clear: I'd like to see SMS snuffed out, too, given the outrageous prices that carriers charge for transmissions that barely impact the network. (One blogger determined in a 2008 analysis that carriers charge roughly one cent for every byte of data in an SMS message when charged per message. At that rate, downloading a song would cost about $6,000.) And it appears there's a lot to like about iMessage, from its integration with SMS (so messages are sent through the platform automatically and marked as such in the user interface) to the fact that it gives iPad and iPod touch owners another way of communicating on their devices. But iMessage won't impact SMS usage and revenues much more than BlackBerry Messenger (which boasts 35 million users) has, and with that in mind, let's examine a few reasons why iMessage isn't about to ring the death knell for SMS: - It works only on iOS devices. Yes, there are more than 200 million iOS gadgets in use, but Apple's mobile operating system accounts for a little less than one-fourth of the overall U.S. smartphone market, according to new data from ComScore. Smartphones are still outnumbered by feature phones in the U.S., so Apple's share of the overall handset market is much smaller. And while smartphone users consume far more mobile data than their feature phone-toting counterparts, nearly everybody sends text messages.
- SMS is typically bundled. Service operators sell text messages to consumers in bulk or package them with voice services, so it's highly unlikely that users who text often are paying 20 cents or so per message they send or receive. There are a few scenarios where iMessage could replace SMS — families or small businesses where everyone carriers an iOS device, for example — but those cases are not as common. The vast majority of users will be highly unlikely to change their messaging plans.
- Carriers can tweak their SMS plans accordingly. As Sascha Segan at PCMag.com noted, carriers control the networks. So they could identify iMessage missives and count them as SMS if they choose to, or they could simply raise overall data charges for all users to offset any lost revenues.
For more thoughts on why iMessage doesn't pose a mortal threat to the cash cow that is SMS, please see my weekly column at GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Image courtesy Flickr user russeljsmith. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Rovio is on a tear right now. In just a couple of years, the Finnish games company behind Angry Birds has gone from being just another developer to owning one of the hottest properties on the planet. The game itself has now been downloaded more than 200 million times — a level of success has helped the business raise $42 million to fund further expansion plans.
On the back of its investment, Rovio boss Peter Vesterbacka (his job title is actually "Mighty Eagle", but I can't bring myself to say that out loud) has been talking a lot recently, most recently at the Inspire Conference in London, outlining those plans. And they are certainly ambitious. For starters, he wants to get into the business of "hiring and acquiring"; in addition, he wants to move more heavily into animation (in fact, last week Rovio bought Finnish animation studio Kombo; and if that wasn't enough, he also says he wants to make the company the most popular entertainment brand in China in 2012. You may well ask: China? Well, it's a huge market and Vesterbacka thinks that the development of Angry Birds-related films, animated series, plush toys and other goods can help it become an entertainment franchise that apes the level of success of, say, Hello Kitty. You can't blame Rovio for wanting to cash in on its success, of course — not least because striking gold wasn't luck, but part of a long-term plan to create a monster hit that very nearly failed to pay off. Indeed, the company had made 51 games before it made Angry Birds, a process which saw them come close to bankruptcy at points (this in-depth piece from Wired UK gives plenty of background). But even though it has a huge success on its hands, is this a short-sighted answer to the question of "where next"? After all, all these plans, however grand, are essentially about one thing: exploiting Angry Birds. Seemingly unstoppable brands can get milked to within an inch of their life, for example: the original makers of Cabbage Patch Kids went bankrupt, despite wild early success; or Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog, for example, was a smash that rapidly became a cultural touchpoint — yet failed to help the company in the longer term. In order to have lasting success the chances are that Rovio needs to try and use the success of Angry Birds to breed another huge hit — to build an empire. That's the model that other top companies have followed to develop broad, highly successful media properties. Nintendo used the success of Mario and the NES to build a platform that kept it going forward, creating new hardware and franchises like Zelda and Pokemon. A toy company like Hasbro, which started with Mr. Potato Head, reinvested in new ideas, created new hits and slowly built itself into giant that now dominates toys, board games and action figures. I'm sure that Vesterbacka and his team are well aware that fads run rampant in toys and games. But in order to make something that really lasts, they must make sure that when the next Angry Birds comes along — whatever it is — they are the ones who made it. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Comcast unveiled a home security product in six markets on Wednesday in what I expect will become a larger effort for Comcast as well as other Internet Service Providers that want to avoid becoming just a broadband delivery pipe. As their traditional pay TV and voice businesses face pressure from folks deciding to cut both the pay TV and wireline phone cords, service providers are seeking other ways to boost their bottom lines. Home monitoring is one such option that’s been bandied about the industry for a while.
The Comcast Xfinity Home Security service offers traditional home security components with 24/7 monitoring as well as the ability to adjust digital thermostats, turn lights on or off and watch secure live streaming video from wireless cameras while away from home. So there’s a security and an energy savings component here, one that’s likely easier than the set up that Kevin rigged up for himself a few months back. And like any hot new service, it also comes with an iPhone (a aapl) app, so customers can monitor and control their home settings on the go. The service works over Comcast’s wired network and has a cellular component (presumably tied to Clearwire and Sprint which are Comcast’s partners on the wireless side). The connected nature of the product offers the ability for consumers to watch their home surveillance cameras via the web, but also to get alerts via email or text when a window opens or something occurs. I remember sitting with the CEO of a startup back in 2003 pitching the same idea only to watch as that company spent millions of venture dollars and eventually failed, in part because broadband wasn’t as widespread and also because the video quality sent over DSL and older cable networks wasn’t as high as it is now. The Comcast service, which starts at $39.95 a month, was first unveiled in Houston in mid 2010 and is now being rolled out in parts of Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; Jacksonville and Sarasota/Naples, Fla.; Chattanooga and Nashville, Tenn. Additional markets will be introduced on a rolling basis. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Consumers may be turning to Wi-Fi in the face of capped data plans, but that isn’t stopping the growth of the HSPA cellular network subscribers. The GSMA, a wireless trade organization, today noted that HSPA subscriptions will hit 500 million globally this month, and it expects that number to hit 1 billion by the end of 2012.
This growth rate, fueled by an increasing number of connected devices and apps to run on them, means the 3G standard is the fastest growing wireless technology in history. Although faster LTE networks now have 1 million subscribers, HSPA will continue to outpace LTE for at least the next five years. In its press release today, the GSMA says the HSPA take-up rate is 10 times faster than it was for 2G networks back in the 1990′s. Of course, that decade was very different than present day: Today smartphones are eating up bandwidth thanks to online video, picture sharing, social networking and of course, the downloading of media and applications. So many of the currently available apps are bite-sized chunks of functionality sprinkled with the web for a flavorful, but connected experience. Aside from the billions of mobile app downloads — 44 billion are expected by 2016 — helping to drive 3G adoption are the devices and networks themselves, per the GSMA: More than 3,100 devices support HSPA and there are now 350 live HSPA networks across 132 countries worldwide. Furthermore, 88 HSPA networks across 50 countries have been upgraded to HSPA+ with a further 52 network upgrades planned. HSPA+ offers peak download speeds of 84Mbps, potentially rising to 168Mbps if deployed in wider spectrum bands.
 From a network operator standpoint, this means a continued rise in average revenue per user (ARPU) for data as voice minutes lose value and eventually will become just another form of data on the faster networks. But to keep data ARPU rising, individual carriers will have to continue their network investments, else run the risk of consumers defecting to competitors.
Operator investments in HSPA, HSPA+ and LTE networks are expected to top $100 billion through 2015 in order to keep up with greater number of devices consuming a growing amount of mobile broadband. Less investment is likely in existing EVDO networks as the few large operators that opted for the 3G technology are moving now towards the GSM-based technologies such as HSPA and LTE. Here in the U.S., Verizon Wireless will surely maintain its EVDO footprint for several years as it transitions consumers and devices to its new LTE network. Globally, however, the lion’s share of investment dollars will continue to be in HSPA technologies until LTE supplants it as the new king of speed and coverage. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  IT analytics company Splunk has received a patent for its method of organizing and presenting big data to mirror the experience of browsing links on the web. The patent validates Splunk’s unique approach to the problem of analyzing mountains of machine-generated data and hints at a future where writing big data applications doesn’t require a Ph.D.
Splunk began as a simple IT search company to let systems administrators easily peruse log files, but Co-Founder and CTO Erik Swan said the goal has always been bigger. Between the filing of the patent five years ago and now, Splunk has been transforming its product to fit its vision of creating what Swan calls a navigable space linking one event to another using “what effectively look like hyperlinks.” Essentially, he explained, Splunk wants users to think about big data like a web problem and not like an analytics problem. And it wants to transform its product from an indexing engine into an application engine. Ideally, the result of Splunk’s efforts is that even web developers can use its products to extract meaningful business insights from machine-generated data. Traditionally, writing big data applications and making sense of the results requires what have come to be called data scientists, but Swan said that’s in part because tools like Hadoop present results as CSV files. Splunk, on the other hand, turns data into HTML. It’s not about algorithmic horsepower, he explained, but about learning how to move around within the web of data. To a large degree, the web navigation experience is present in Splunk’s product today, but the one thing missing is true web-style application development. That’s why, Swan said, the company has hired a team of developers in Seattle to create software developments kits and APIs to open Splunk data to Java, Ruby and other web developers. If this effort is successful, Swan said, developers will be able to get MapReduce results without writing heavy-duty applications. Splunk is ahead of the game when it comes to democratizing big data, but it’s not alone. Even for something as relatively complex as Hadoop, there are numerous startups (e.g., Hadapt and Datameer) building products on top of it to mask the complexity and let everyday business users run Hadoop jobs. However we get there, the end has to be big data products that take the high science out of analytics. Everybody is interested in big data, but it’s likely still rather intimidating for most companies without the means to hire teams of data scientists. Image courtesy of Flickr user jonny golstein. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Strong demand for U.S. display advertising is helping pump up projections for the overall online advertising market, which is now set to grow by 20 percent this year to $31.3 billion, according to new estimates from eMarketer. The firm updated a previous estimate of 10 percent growth for 2011, largely on the strength of display advertising which is now poised to overtake search advertising within five years.
EMarketer said search advertising will grow by 19.8 percent this year to $14.4 billion, outpaced by online display ads, which will grow 24.5 percent to $12.3 billion. Increased video and banner ads are fueling the growth of display advertising with video ads expected to pull in $2.2 billion this year and banner ads estimated to get $7.6 billion. Overall, online advertising is expected to account for almost 20 of all major media ad buying this year, up from 17 percent last year and by 2015, online ads will represent 28 percent of all U.S. media ad spending. Online advertising is creeping up on TV, which is expected to hover at 38 percent for the coming years. Online advertising grew to $26 billion last year, a 14.9 percent increase over 2009. It eclipsed newspaper advertising for the first time to move into second place in market share. And with this latest projection, it looks like the good times are only getting better for online publishers, who can expect to get more dollars as advertising continues to migrate online. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
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Plenty of people are adopting blog-publishing platforms like Tumblr, which has been growing rapidly over the past year or so, but few have made the leap in the way that Steve Rubel — executive VP of digital strategy for the PR firm Edelman — did recently: he started a new Tumblr blog, and then deleted the hundreds of posts he had created over the years on two other blogs. I wondered why he would take such a radical approach, so I called him and asked him. Rubel said he was driven to do it by the fact that Google is paying more attention to social signals for search, and being on a social platform like Tumblr is more important than having old blog posts, whatever their Page Rank might be. But is he right? In a blog post about the move, Rubel said he believes media is becoming an interlocking system of four elements he describes as a clover-leaf — with traditional sources, newer web-native digital entrants, corporate or branded content and social media. People are increasingly looking across all four of these different sources or networks to find out what to believe, he said. With a news event like the death of Osama bin Laden, for example, reporting occurred on social networks like Twitter, but at the same time “people were still going to media sources such as the New York Times or the Huffington Post to validate what they were hearing.” More and more of those media entities are using Tumblr as a way to redistribute some of their content, which is part of the reason Rubel said he wanted to move his online identity there. But the main reason for the switch was the need to have a more social platform, because of a sense that Google is increasingly focusing more on social cues and information as part of search rather than just traditional links. “I think with Google relying more and more on social signals, you’d better make your website social in a big way or you will be in trouble,” Rubel says. “Blogs that aren’t social are effectively islands.” 
The extent to which Google is using social cues for search is unknown, but the launch of real-time results from Twitter and “social search” — which shows results that users in your social graph have posted or retweeted — as well as the new +1 ranking system are signs that the web giant is definitely trying to add more social data. As we’ve written before, social is one of the areas where Facebook has the upper hand, given its knowledge of a user’s social graph and how it reflects their search interests, and this is potentially a serious threat to Google’s dominance. “I think +1 is their play to get more authoritative signals, and to weed out lower-quality content and find better quality content,” Rubel said. “I think that and [your social activity] is what will control your presence in Google in the future.” Rubel says he chose Tumblr because “I wanted one domain, to centralize everything in the middle of that clover leaf,” and Tumblr was the closest to offering what he wanted. “I wanted to have all the content and the social signals — the plus ones and the likes and the retweets — in one place.” Tumblr is also inherently a much more social platform, he said. There’s no question that Tumblr has more social elements, and seems to be closer to a social network than competing platforms such as WordPress. The reblogging function is much more like Twitter’s reweet feature than a traditional blog publishing tool, and the way that posts can “go viral” and be retransmitted across the entire network of blogs is fairly powerful — which likely helps explain Tumblr’s dramatic growth. But why the “scorched earth” approach of deleting all his old content? Why not keep those posts available for the “long tail” of Google search — not to mention retaining all the old links to his posts that other bloggers have made, as some observers have pointed out? Rubel says he considered that, but decided not to because he didn’t want to have multiple sources of content, for fear of confusing Google. Tumblr also doesn’t have any easy way to import old blog posts from other publishing systems, so Rubel says he would have had to pay someone to manually recreate or duplicate them. So would he recommend that clients of Edelman do the same? Rubel said that for most companies that wouldn’t be the right approach, but for “thought leaders” it makes sense to be where the action is, and for him this was more important than having older content. It’s a dramatic gesture (and likely also a marketing exercise on Rubel’s part, since he is selling his services as a consultant on exactly these kinds of issues) but in the end Google will be the one to decide whether he was right or not. Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user James Vaughan Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Online travel search has been one of the tech industry’s most crowded and cutthroat spaces since the launch of Expedia some 15 years ago. But the stiff competition didn’t stop Adam Goldstein, the CEO of San Francisco-based travel website startup Hipmunk, from throwing his hat in the ring.
So far, the bold move has paid off. Hipmunk has become a popular online destination for a devoted and growing base of users. The company has secured $5.2 million in venture capital from an impressive list of investors including Ignition Partners, Ron Conway, Paul Bucheit, and even Silicon Valley’s favorite Hollywood gate-crasher Ashton Kutcher. A defining feature of Hipmunk is its user interface (UI) and the way it ranks search results based on a variety of factors such as price, layovers and overall travel time– a method meant to minimize a traveler’s overall “agony,” the company says. Most existing sites prioritize low prices above all else when it comes to ranking flight search results. Hipmunk has been so successful in part because it’s so young, Adam Goldstein told me in a recent interview. According to him, Hipmunk’s UI is optimized for how users want to behave today, rather than for the technology limitations of the past. “The way that most existing sites sort travel information is easier from a technical standpoint. They’ve been doing it that way for 15 years,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been possible to build Hipmunk 15 years ago.” The website itself is written in Python, and its back end is built on Tornado, the open-source framework built by FriendFeed. Hipmunk’s super slick front end is comprised of “boatloads of Javascript,” Goldstein told me with some pride. “It’s kind of impressive that we pulled this off without any Flash.” Indeed, it’s very clear that Hipmunk’s technical credibility is Goldstein’s top priority– which makes sense, considering the source. He began his own technical career early, authoring two books for O’Reilly while still in high school. He went on to launch a startup called BookTour while earning dual engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Talking to Goldstein in person, it became clear to me why top-tier investors have taken bets on his company, even with its long-shot entry into a very competitive space. He represents what many investors have described to me as their holy grail– a highly technical engineer with product sense and good people skills. An added bonus is how he carries his capabilities in an approachable way, without the type of hubris often exhibited by talented business people and good engineers. Those qualities, and the fact that Hipmunk had achieved profitability before taking on its first venture capital round, have enabled Goldstein to be choosy about who he partners with, and how Hipmunk grows. The company has only 10 employees, and has no plans to scale its staff up in any major way in the months ahead. Most of the $4.2 million in funding the company took on in January of year will stay in the bank for a while, he says. The company is no longer operating profitably, but Goldstein told me he’s fully confident that Hipmunk will be able to regain cash-positive operations without putting UI-interfering ads on the site. Currently, the company’s main source of revenue is collecting a commission on each flight or hotel booking it facilitates. That’s an honorable strategy, but it’s not exactly unique. Other startups, such as Twitter and Facebook, began with zero-ad ambitions, only to change their tunes in response to growing investor pressure. no one ever said achieving it would be easy. Goldstein told me he’s aware of the paths of his predecessors, but he is determined to stay his own course. “We’ve said very clearly to our investors that we don’t want to just flip this company around [in a sale to a larger company],” Goldstein said. “We want to do this in a way that respects our customers. That’s how we keep them.” Hipmunk has a lot of fans hoping that the company’s initial vision will continue to bear out. But as evidenced by many of Hipmunk’s travel site forebears, no one ever said it would be easy. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  We’ve chronicled the state of Android development and the various solutions aimed at helping the developer community squeeze more money out of their apps on the platform. Game developers in particular have had trouble making as much money as they see on iOS . The latest problem-fixer is gaming service WildTangent, which is opening up a rental service later this year that will allow Android users to rent games and apply their fees toward purchases.
It may sound a little funny renting apps that often don’t cost more than $1. But it’s another tool for developers, who are now able to see if there is a market for games that perhaps might not merit full price at first but could entice people with a one-day rental. And it can also work as a way to minimize risk for consumers, who can try out a title for a quarter before electing to pay for the whole game. WildTangent, which operates a gaming service for HP , Dell and other PC makers, believes it can make the rental service work by bringing over its gaming partners and marrying their titles with a new business model for mobile that hasn’t been tried much on smartphones. Vodafone launched a monthly game rental service in Europe last October but that was a subscription service, not individual rentals. WildTangent said it will launch with T-Mobile later this summer and is looking to sign up other carrier partners. The way it will work is Android users will need to directly download a WildTangent Games app from WildTangent, similar to how Amazon users download the Amazon Appstore for Android, or they’ll be able to get the app through T-Mobile, which will pre-load the app on future phones. The app will feature a catalog where users can choose to rent a title using WildCoins, WildTangent’s currency. Users will be able to get a 24-hour rental of an app for as little as one coin, which generally is worth 25 cents. When the game expires, a user can choose to keep playing by using another coin. If a player ever chooses to buy the app, their rental costs are applied to their purchase.  WildTangent is also bringing over its BrandBoost feature which allows gamers to rent a title or obtain an in-app item by watching a video from an advertiser. That will also be a help for developers, giving them another way to monetize and get their apps out to consumers, especially ones who don’t have the ability to pay by a credit card or prefer not to.
The entry by WildTangent in Android gaming adds another store for consumers, who may be getting dizzy at the growing number options available to them. And the fact that it will likely require a separate download directly from WildTangent may limit how many people are aware of the service and try it out. Also, having to use WildCoins could add another layer of complexity for new users who are not familiar with WildTangent. But there is some promise in this service because it taps into an existing community of gamers that WildTangent said is more than 100 million strong. That means many gamers are already familiar with WildCoins, which they will be able to use for Android titles. And WildTangent also has a strong stable of publishing partners including Disney, Nickelodeon, Ubisoft, Activision, THQ, Capcom and others so it may help encourage them to bring more games over to Android. And perhaps most importantly, it creates another way for people to consume paid games. Not everyone wants to buy a title outright, just like they don’t want to own every movie they see. But they do want access to quality games and may find the rent-to-own model attractive. And many Android developers would love to have more options to monetize their games besides paid downloads and in-game advertising. That’s why we’re seeing more pay-per install incentivized campaigns being run. We still have to see how things turn out when WildTangent launches but it could be another tool in helping Android developers unlock more dollars from the platform. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Semantic ad technology company ADmantX has raised $2.8 million in funding from Atlante Ventures Mezzogiorno, the venture arm of Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo.
ADmantX came out of beta in March, officially making its technology available to advertisers that want to target ads based on the content and meaning of web pages. While many advertising technology firms are focused on targeting ads based on user behavior, using tracking cookies and the like, ADmantX is based on the semantic web, natural language processing and social collaboration. The technology is designed not only to recognize the words on a page but also to recognize the emotional appeal of its content and the reader emotions and behaviors likely to be surfaced by the content. Not only does it work to target ads, but it also works to protect advertising from appearing against unsavory content, ensuring brand safety. As a result, the ads that it does serve can command higher CPMs. Since it doesn’t rely on user tracking, it also sidesteps concerns about behavioral targeting and do-not-track regulation. The tech firm was spun off late last year from Expert System, which provides semantic technology to discover and interpret text. With the outside round of financing, Atlante Ventures Mezzogiorno will take a minority stake in the company, with Expert System maintaining a majority. Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  As network operators continue the move away from unlimited mobile broadband data plans, consumers are making a move of their own to free or low-cost Wi-Fi hotspots. According to the quarterly Devicescape Wi-Fi Report, due out later today, 64 percent of consumers surveyed hit hotspots at least once a day. Home Wi-Fi use can help reduce data usage, but for most smartphone owners that supplement their data plan with Wi-Fi, a full 89.8 percent use Wi-Fi both at home and on the road.
This Wi-Fi adoption is good for both the carriers and the Wi-Fi industry, of which Devicescape is a part of. The San Bruno, CA company creates software that helps devices connect seamlessly to Wi-Fi networks and surveys its customers every three months for the wireless report. Some additional highlights from this quarter’s data include: - Of those who use Wi-Fi outside their home or office, most (24.4 percent) connect at a café or coffee shop, 17.3 percent at a hotel, and 15 percent at a school campus.
- Data capping continues to play a role in consumer satisfaction this quarter, with 72.9 percent of respondents presuming they will switch carriers if faced with data capping.
- A full 80 percent will likely adjust their downloading habits if data capping is introduced by their carrier.
- Wi-Fi is still considered a necessary feature, with 82 percent of respondents expecting it to be included in their overall data plan.
 The last point may be of more interest to network operators, who are increasingly looking for ways to combat data demand that’s rising fast. Earlier this year, Cisco said it expected the average mobile user to consume 1,185 MB of data per month by 2015. That’s far more than the 250 MB that AT&T claimed was used by 65 percent of its customers when the carrier switched from unlimited to tiered mobile broadband plans. In light of this demand growth, network operators are looking to offload data users onto Wi-Fi networks, in addition to using other demand reduction strategies. With nearly three-quarters of the 1,227 Devicescape survey respondents saying they’ll leave their carrier if faced with data caps, I’m wondering who they’ll turn to. Following AT&T’s move to plans with limited amounts of data last June, Verizon has suggested it will do the same this summer. And due to AT&T’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile, the no. 4 carrier, AT&T and Verizon will account for nearly 80 percent of all cellular customers in the U.S.; all of which are likely to have limited mobile broadband plans. Instead of leaving the major carriers, it’s more likely that most mobile subscribers will keep their contracts and simply find more hotspots. Even with a relatively small surcharge for Wi-Fi, consumers want to keep the data flowing on their smartphones and tablets. We’ll see if the subscriber numbers change after Verizon modifies its plans, but one thing is certain: Wi-Fi has surely migrated from a lowly home network connection and has become a major go-to solution on the road for many data users. Image courtesy of Flickr user fboyd Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req'd): 
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