State Department Builds A Panic Button App

Imagine you are a pro-democracy protester on the streets of a repressive government. You’ve got your cellphone and you are messaging your friends. In the crowd near you, the police start making arrests. Fearing the government will confiscate your phone and investigate your contacts, you push a “panic button” on your phone. It deletes the contacts in your address book and sends out an alert. Such an app wasn’t readily available so the U.S. State Department, acting as a venture capitalist, decided to build one.

The State Department tells TechCrunch government funded work is underway to build an Android version of this “panic button” app. No release date has been set. Another version designed to work on low-cost Nokia phones, more common in the developing world, is being considered. No iPhone app is planned for now.

The special app, first reported by Reuters, is part of an initiative to promote new technologies for social activists. So far, the State Department has funded $22 million in “Internet freedom programming.” The money goes to innovators in the form of small grants ranging from a few to tens of thousands of dollars. TechCrunch asked who was getting the money, but due to the sensitive nature of the project, the government won’t disclose names.

An open, competitive bid process was used to award the grants. While the government isn’t looking for more help building these apps, they may have future projects designed to advance “Internet Freedom” in other ways. Keep an eye on www.grants.gov for any additional info. Some of the past program objectives have included developing technology “to enable users in closed societies to get around firewalls and filters in acutely hostile Internet environments” and training bloggers and activists to safely and anonymously participate in online forums.

The effort is another example of how the administration sees the important role social media and technology has played in global politics. In 2009, the U.S. asked Twitter to delay maintenance work so real-time information about the Iranian protests could continue. The White House has also called on Egypt and Libya to restore internet blackouts.

The State Department says it’s not just writing checks. The government is trying to use venture capitalist techniques to produce the best results. No, the goal is not to make 10x on the investment. But, the government is supporting a diverse portfolio of innovation rather than just funding big established technologies. It’s providing knowledge and connections, not just cash. And they are investing to incubate a new community focussed on the intersection of technology and human rights.

Of course with any well intentioned program, there could be negative side effects. What happens if the panic button app gets into the wrong hands, such as drug dealers or terrorists? A State Department spokesperson tells TechCrunch it’s a legitimate concern and they are taking that into account when planning the distribution and publicity of the app. It seems TechCrunch readers won’t be a problem.


True Colors: Bathing Mobile In An Entirely New Light

Editor’s note: Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks.  He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah

Color Labs is assumed to be the newest combatant in the photo-sharing wars. Many people ripped its floppy launch, interface, crashes, and some are feeling creepy about the Chatroulette aspect. Then there was the backlash to the backlash, where believers applauded the vision, risk-taking, and promise of mining meta-data from phones. Even with the latest update pushed out last night to address some of the initial product’s shortcomings, Color remains the most polarizing Silicon Valley startup since Quora’s rise and, appropriately enough, folks at Color have been answering questions on the company’s Quora topic page. The source of the furor varies from the amount of money raised ($41m) to the team size (27) to the buggy app (despite updates). A good chunk of the backlash is because users perceive it as a photo-sharing service. But, what if Color is more than a photo-sharing service?

Color Labs is on the record stating they are more of a data mining company with technology that, operating in concert on the phone, can paint a detailed mosaic of our mobility. Its patent-pending technologies are said to able to place users in proximity to others based on sounds and images, can capture the angle at which we hold our phones, how fast we move them in gestures, and how bright the environment is. And when users actually have the camera open, that’s when the real show begins, tagging images, setting context, and opening the type of world Christopher Nolan conceived of in The Dark Knight, when Lucius Fox and Bruce Wayne use cell phone triangulation to create a digital reflection of the real world.

At the same time Foursquare and Facebook are clamoring to obtain our location, others already have a much better implicit depiction of our whereabouts and purchasing behaviors, mainly credit card companies and phone companies. For months, Facebook’s mobile apps have gently signaled to users if friends have been spotted nearby. A few weeks ago, Foursquare inked a groundbreaking deal with AMEX to tie the app to a payments system. And, a well-known secret in Silicon Valley is that Facebook is hard at work building its own mobile operating system that will bake “social” into as many mobile devices as possible. In order to get more information than credit card companies have, the phone companies need the user’s assistance and permission. And in the case of Color, the user has to have the app running, preferably with the camera open—at dinner, at a sports game—along with all the other apps competing for attention in a crowded, fragmented mobile apps marketplace. Color could give phone companies the chance to get as much as, or more, information about us than the credit card companies have.

Before any of this can happen, however, the question looms: Will Color be able to withstand this initial backlash, iterate, and keep improving on their app? Some believe the team will find its way. Others believe that in such a competitive environment, it’s not possible to get a second chance. The truth is that nobody knows, but if Color weathers this initial storm and is successful, what could it evolve into?

My sense is that Color Labs is thinking ahead two to three years, by which time users may grow tired of sorting through a constellation of apps and services to share and broadcast their location, purchases, and pictures. Instead, these features will converge in a slightly smaller number of unified apps. We’ll have folks using phones running on Android, iOS, or Facebook variants, among others, and we’ll have a chance to leverage features from Color Labs’s systems.

This is what I believe Color Labs is going after: The augmentation of mobile operating systems. Ultimately, they don’t want their service to run as yet another fragmented app on your phone—they want their system to entirely augment mobile operating systems, using their technologies to document every sound, image, movement, transaction, and message your phone transmits or receives. The folks creating this system are building tools for a world in which our mobile phones and tablets will take the place of many of today’s traditional computing devices. In this world, users will carry around their wallet, books, and other files in their phones and tablets, docking them into monitors and screens as they move from location to location.

This is pure speculation on my part and nothing more than a fun attempt to connect some dots.  But if a seamless mobile operating experience is their ultimate goal, this is the type of undertaking that truly needs venture capital, and lots of it. Part of the reason folks may be lashing out against the concept and launch is that, frankly, we haven’t seen a concept this big emerge for a while. Everyone loves a big concept, but a concept remains just that until the products gets in the hands of enough users to make a real impression.

Color Labs may be on a mission to perfect and harmonize its technologies to dramatically augment the mobile operating experience. Its founders are accomplished, its team is big, its technologies are novel. The brand is polarizing. Its a company that can convince Sequoia Capital to invest about 1.8% of its current fund for the chance to build something fresh from the ground up. It’s a company that’s being built entirely within a mobile world, an attempt to test the lasting power of Facebook’s symmetrical relationships and offer, as Fred Wilson notes, a more “implicit,” or as the company notes, “elastic” network, one that is built with a different set of rules, norms, and permissions that could perhaps more accurately reflect the random ebbs and flows of our social interactions in real life that have yet to be captured fully by any digital network.

Photo credit: Flickr/Pilottage

Information provided by CrunchBase


Apptitude Uses Facebook To Figure Out Which iPhone Apps Your Friends Are Using

Noisetoys, creators of music discovery and promotion App Hitmaker, have come out with another hit this week. In the same App-discovery space as Explor and Chomp, Apptidude is an iPhone App that shows you the iPhone Apps that your friends have most likely downloaded, all based on their posts and Likes on Facebook.

“Quitely” launching in the App Store this week, the App recommendation App is currently number 29 in the App Top Free Apps list, most likely because it incorporates social elements and Facebook Connect as a way of gaging what’s actually hot in the anti-social Apple App Store, where homegrown Top 25 lists leave much to be desired.

When you initially open Apptitude and log onto Facebook you see a scrollbar of your Facebook friends stack-ranked by the number of apps they’re using. When you click on your friends’ profiles you can swipe through a series of chosen apps and you can also to drill down into specific stats about how many Facebook friends use the app, many people have Facebook Liked the app as well as into the ability to download directly to your phone.

Apptitude creator Shalin Mantri hopes to use all this social app data to eventually create a better way of finding relevant iPhone apps, and tells me that an eventual Facebook-powered recommendations list based on what apps are trending in your social graph will be including in v1.1, which Apptitude will be submitting to the App Store next week. Wish I could be a fly on the wall in the iOS review room on that one.

You can download the App here.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Google Increases Lead In Smartphone Market, But Verizon iPhone Wins February

comScore’s February mobile report was released today, and it looks like good news for Google. Android increased its lead as the top mobile platform, growing 7 percentage points since November, and strengthening its top position with 33 percent market share.

Following behind Android is RIM, ranked second with 28.9 percent market share, and Apple with 25.2 percent. Microsoft and Palm rounded out the top five, with 7.7 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively.

In the big picture, the mobile numbers continue to impress. Over the last three months, an average of 234 million Americans (13 and older) used mobile devices. That’s 75 percent of the population. Nearly 67 million of those mobile users were employing smartphones, representing a 13 percent rise from November. Smartphone usage only continues to grow, as you will remember that comScore’s November report showed smartphone usage growing by 10 percent since the summer of ’10.

Of the millions of mobile devices in use this year, Samsung remained the top manufacturer with 24.8 percent of mobile subscribers, followed by LG at 20.9 percent, Motorola at 16.1 percent, and RIM at 8.6 percent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple had the biggest surge since November, gaining a percentage point of market share, though it continues to trail the other manufacturers at 7.5 percent. The principal cause of Apple’s three-month gain? Why the Verizon iPhone, of course. According to comScore, the Verizon iPhone was the most acquired handset in February.

Lastly, comScore’s report shows that the many particular uses of smartphones are, again, on the rise. Text messaging, mobile browser use, app downloading, social networking, games, and music all were on the rise on mobile in early 2011. Accessing social networks represented the largest growth on mobile over the last period.


Color Updates Its iPhone App With More Intelligible Icons, Navigation And Faster Speed

Bye bye 69 symbol! Valley media darling/scapegoat Color has updated its iPhone App to 1.0.2 to address certain um, user interface issues. Color’s launch caused a big splash in the Valley a couple weeks ago, due to what some people viewed as an unfairly allotted and foolish $41 million in funding as well as problems with the usability of the actual app — Namely that it didn’t work if other people weren’t nearby.

Color co-founder Peter Pham tells me the latest update was “crowd-sourced” as in Color listened to user feedback. Already it looks like the largest user complaints have been addressed, at least cursorily.

The homepage icons now have text descriptions and are more intuitive to use, like a Map for “Nearby,” a Globe for “Feed,” a Calendar for “History” and a Letter for “News” (the fade text descriptions also really help).

The bizarre revolving 69 button has been split into two buttons, the Map and Globe. The Heart button, which allowed users to share photos via Facebook and Twitter, has now been replaced by a more reasonable Paper Airplane button. A Home button also brings users back to their homepage, like it should.

Color 1.0.2 also makes it a lot easier to delete a photo, block a user or see more or less of a person (+,-) and view user profiles. In addition you can now choose a Color profile image from your iPhone photo library, which means no more dark, less than ideal profile images. The phone also now comes localized in French, Japanese and Chinese.

Color is like Rebecca Black’s Friday video: People hate on it in public but keep going back to it privately. And while this is an improvement over what existed before, Pham tells me there’s an even larger (“pretty major“) re-vamp to come. “This is just the beginning,” he said.

The Android app is coming tomorrow.

Information provided by CrunchBase


10 Things That Simply Need To Be In iOS 5

WWDC. It’s like Christmas for OS X and iOS developers. Each year, they flock to San Francisco’s Moscone Center, anxiously awaiting the pair of gifts that Apple annually bestows: the new iPhone, and a bundle of new features on which they’ll build their next big thing.

If whispers and hearsay hold true, this year’s WWDC will only feature the latter; the iPhone 5, says the rumor mill, won’t be showing its face until Fall. Instead, this show is purportedly going to be all about iOS and OS X. While Apple doesn’t come right out and say it, it’s pretty safe to assume that by “iOS” they mean “iOS 5″.

Given that we’re writing about iOS on a regular basis and talking about it with readers and friends even more, we’ve got a pretty finely-tuned wishlist for iOS 5. We also happen to know that a heaping handful of Apple folk read TechCrunch regularly — and with the feature lock stage of iOS 5′s development cycle (wherein they absolutely refuse to add anything new and just focus on what they’ve already started) presumably riiiight around the corner, we figured there was no better time than now to put it out there.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>


Accel and IDG Double Down on China Partnership, Raise $1.3B in Seven Weeks

When Silicon Valley venture firms set out to conquer China five-to-seven years ago, most of them picked one of three strategies.

There was the branch office strategy, whereby the China partners and Valley partners would still work as one firm, making all investment decisions together as a unit and sharing in the returns equally. There was the more common franchise model, where a brand name Valley firm lent its name to a group of local Chinese investors, but mostly left them to make their own decisions. And then there was the joint venture model, where a well known Valley firm didn’t seek to create a China office, it just partnered with an existing one.

That last tack – the join venture model – is the one Accel took, partnering back in 2005 with IDG Ventures– one of the pioneers of investing in the Chinese consumer Internet.

IDG already had a great hit-rate, having backed an all star roster of Chinese Web giants including Ctrip, Baidu, Sohu and Tencent. But it was investing out of a relatively small seed fund with no allocation for follow-on rounds. That meant a early IDG investment in Tencent netted a tidy 20x return– but paled in comparison to the return that South African media firm Naspers got when it bought the company out in the early 2000s. Naspers bought out existing investors for a cool $30 million, giving it 50% of what has become the third largest Internet company on the planet. Ouch.

The partnership with Accel allowed IDG to make sure that didn’t happen again, by co-raising two growth funds (which is more like what we’d consider a classic early-stage fund) and a capital fund over the last six years, a combined total of nearly $1.5 billion dollars that has already yielded seven IPOs. “Even though we did very well with previous IDG funds, we could have done better if we had larger fund sizes and could invest more aggressively in follow-on investments,” says Hugo Shong, the founding partner of IDG who negotiated the original deal with Breyer.

Last night, the two closed on the third growth fund totaling $550 million and the second capital fund totaling $750 million. Here’s the best part: The funds were raised entirely in seven weeks, mostly from Accel’s existing US limited partners. Ok, part of that is due to a raging Chinese Web bubble: One-quarter of all US IPOs last year were by China-based companies. But it’s still an impressive feat.

Breyer had nothing but positive things to say about the partnership thus far, noting that none of the senior IDG partners has left. Indeed, that’s something not even firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia can boast. And IDG has a 99-person team spanning five cities in China. When I asked what hadn’t gone as well as planned — this is China after all– Breyer said, “The most challenging part is the pace of the market it China. It moderates fast when the market declines, and when it’s up and to the right as things have been in China deals are somewhere between being priced for perfection and outright euphoria. Navigating through the euphoria is a challenge.”

When I asked if he was worried about a China crash, he laughed and said, “I’m always concerned about crashes– both here and in China.”


Making Angels: The Pipeline Fund Announces 2011 Fellows

The New York-based Pipeline Fund, which aims to increase the number of women who become angel investors and social entrepreneurs in the U.S., today announced its inaugural class of Pipeline Fund Fellows and mentors (listed at the end of this post).

The Pipeline Fund Fellowship accepted ten women who are influencers in their fields, and have a track record of charitable giving. Together, they will go through a six-month “boot camp” in New York, learning how to route some of their wealth into angel deals, that will score them an equity stake in for-profit, for-good businesses.

The founder and chief executive of the Pipeline Fund, Natalia Oberti Noguera (image below) is serious about resolving bias against women that she — and many others — perceived in the investment and startup ecosystem.

She believes that women with enough cash to become angels, while they may not be “needy,” could use help from seasoned investors figuring out: what makes a viable portfolio strategy, how they should conduct due diligence, valuations, or scare up a strong pipeline of deals. She’s enlisted accredited angel investors, many of them men she noted, as mentors.

Accepted Pipeline Fund Fellows are required to chip in $5,000 each to a collective fund, and agree to select a female-led, for-profit social venture in which to invest their first $50,000 together. They’ll be asked to run a pitch “summit,” which they’ll host in June in New York City, to select the right startup.

TechCrunch asked Ms. Oberti Noguera if she is concerned that the philanthropists who get hip to the notion of investing in for-profit social ventures, may wind up slowing down their philanthropic giving. She said she would never encourage them to divert cash from charitable efforts. She also explained:

“This is the inaugural year of our program, so we don’t really know what the impact will be in full, but we will study the outcome carefully.

In the application process, we told fellowship candidates, there will be a group decision to be made about funding a social venture. We asked: what if your favorite is not chosen, how will you react?

Several applicants said they would consider investing on their own, beyond the Pipeline Fellowship. We view that as a positive for social ventures, and female founders.”

[Ed’s note: While optimistic about programs that support a diverse investment and entrepreneurial community, TechCrunch will be interested to see if these newly-minted angels continue to invest in businesses led by women after the session ends. For more on women in tech, investing and startups, check out TechCrunch’s ongoing coverage.]

Image: Snow angel (CC) via Lars Christopher Nøttaasen

2011 PIPELINE FUND FELLOWS

Dawn Barber
Dawn is the co-founder of NY Tech Meetup, and is also the Apprenticeship Director for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She is on the board of InSITE, and is a New York City Trustee of The Awesome Foundation. Dawn lives in New York City with her husband and daughter, and received her B.A. from Clark University.

Conor Barnes
Conor currently works at Good Cents Bookkeeping providing financial management to small businesses while pursuing a Master’s Degree at Rutgers University Business School. She is also a member of Echoing Green’s Social Investment Council. Conor holds a A.B. in Political Science from The University of Chicago.

Monica A. Barrera, D.D.S.
Monica holds a D.D.S. from New York University. She has owned and operated her own dental practice in New York for the last 16 years. Monica is a medical member of the Surrogate Decision-Making Committee of the state of New York, which advises on medical needs for patients with disabilities.

Elizabeth Crowell
Elizabeth is the partner/owner at Sterling Place, a Brooklyn-based, boutique retail store that specializes in home furnishings, rare antiques, and specialty gifts. She serves as the Co-Chair of the Atlantic Avenue Business Improvement District Steering Committee and as a Troop Leader for the Girl Scouts of Greater NY. Elizabeth holds a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Latin American Literature from Smith College.

Erica Frontiero
Erica is a Senior Vice President in Capital Markets at GE Capital. With over 10 years in debt sales and trading, Erica sells commercial loans raised for corporations and private equity clients across a wide spectrum of industries to investors. She is also the co-leader for the NY/NJ chapter of the Women’s Network at GE, which fosters women’s professional development, and is an active volunteer with Dress for Success; serving as the President of Y.E.S.!, Young Executives for Success. Erica is a member of the creative advisory board for Orchid Worldwide and holds a B.A. in Economics from Wake Forest University.

J. Kelly Hoey
Kelly is a business strategist and adviser to companies and firms on networking; creating and engaging voluntary communities; and, business relationship development strategies. She is the former President of 85 Broads, a women’s global business network. Kelly holds an L.L.B. from the University of British Columbia and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Victoria.

Diane Kaslow
Diane is the President of Kaslow Fine Art and an investor in Food52.com. She has been actively involved with the development and growth of several charities. Diane holds an M.B.A. from Case Western Reserve University and a B.S./B.A. from John Carroll University.

Jessica Magoch-Roazzi
Jessica most recently served as Regional Vice President of Sales at Atlantis Health Plan. She is a Kundalini Yoga instructor and Shotokan Martial Artist. Jessica holds a B.F.A. in Acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Emma Nothmann
Emma is a Principal at Booz & Company and is based in San Francisco, California. She leads the firm’s North American Education Practice and currently serves as a Harvard College Interviewer. Emma holds an A.B. from Harvard University in East Asian Studies.

Maggie Williams

Maggie recently joined the Wright Group, a government relations firm where she assists social justice organizations with their legislative advocacy. Prior to the Wright Group, Maggie worked in the New York State Senate, first as counsel to then Senator now Attorney General Schneiderman and as Judiciary Counsel to the Democratic Majority. In addition, Maggie serves on the boards of the North Star Fund and Resource Generation. Maggie holds a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and a B.A. in History from Yale University.


2011 PIPELINE FUND FELLOWSHIP MENTORS

    Neil Anderson, Founding Investor, ARC Angel Fund; Founder, Immersive Enterprises Incubator; Director, Acol Advisory
    Rob Delman, Vice President, Astia; Managing Director, Golden Seeds; Partner, ARC Angel Fund
    Brad Feld, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Foundry Group; Chair, National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT)
    Francine Hardaway, PHD, Co-Founder, Stealthmode Partners
    Katie Rae, Managing Director, TechStars; Co-Founder, Project 11 Ventures
    Ed Reitler, Partner, Reitler Kailas & Rosenblatt LLC; Founder, Angel Round Capital, L.P.
    Dimple Sahni, Founding Partner, DS Inc; Co-founder, Epylon.com
    Kathleen Utecht, Principal, Wharton WVP Ventures
    Claire Wadlington, Partner and CFO, FA Technology Ventures
    Mike Yavonditte, Founder and CEO, Hashable


Mobile Ad Network JumpTap Raises $20 Million

Mobile ad network JumpTap has raised $20 million in new funding, according to a recent SEC filing, out of a $27 million round. This would bring the company’s funding to nearly $90 million. We’ve contacted the company for confirmation.

JumpTap is one of the largest remaining independent mobile advertising networks, in addition to Millennial Media, Greystripe, InMobi and others. Jumptap’s data-driven technology promises highly targeted advertising and the company partners with digital and media agencies, publishers, wireless carriers and brand advertisers to serve an array of mobile advertising solutions.

While it’s unclear who the investors are in the round, the company recently landed a deal with Tokyo-based cyber communications (cci). Part of the partnership included an investment in the mobile ad network, so the SEC filing could relate to this deal.

Despite the heated competition in the mobile advertising space, JumpTap appears to be growing, at least in terms of employees. The company added 23 employees since the beginning of 2011 from companies including Apple, IAC, Time Inc, and Maxus.

Information provided by CrunchBase


‘Rachel Sequoia’ And ‘Share The Air’ Were A Prank, But The Pitch Event Wasn’t


It’s always feels sort of good to be able to de-bunk a prank on April Fools. Now most of us got that Rachel Sequoia’s insane startup pitch for ‘Share The Air’ was fake, but the event it took place at, the SEO-optimized Venture Capital Fundraising Club of Silicon Valley was real in the sense that 5-6 real start-ups pitched there, hoping to practice in front of an audience of 80 people before they pitched VCs.

The whole thing was orchestrated by Trademarkia founder Raj Abhyanker and Spiral Moon’s Dan Carlson for two purposes, a) To give young startups a place to practice their pitches b) To add some levity to the mix with Rachel Sequoia/’Share The Air’ parody of Silicon Valley.

Actress Rachel Cherones was paid a $100 for the unorthodox gig and was given two hours to come up with the character after being given slides created by Carlson. She too was surprised by how much pickup the YouTube video, initially uploaded as a personal record of the presentation, received. Said Cherones, “Most of the people that came up to me afterward said, “I don’t care about blessing the air, but I think they’re legitmately a market for what you’re doing.” Heh.

The fake Rachel Sequoia account now has over 2,000 followers on Twitter, the video has over 200,000 views on YouTube and people have approached SpiralMoon, who is now working on a feature length film, with  acquisition offers. The second meeting of the Venture Fundraising Club of Silicon Valley will take place on April 28th.

See you there!


(Founder Stories) “Every Day, I Try To Get Rejected”

If you meet a lot of CEOs and startup founders, you will notice a personality trait that many of them share. No matter how many people tell them they are wrong or stupid, they remain unusually optimistic, almost blindingly so. In the Founder Stories video above, which is an outtake from last week’s interview with Bnter CEO Lauren Leto, host Chris Dixon talks about the importance of rejection. “Every day, I try to get rejected,” he tells Leto. Sometimes this requires him sending emails to Steve Jobs that never get a response.

But being able to handle rejection, and even seek it out, is a crucial skill for entrepreneurs. The flip side of getting rejected over and over again, of course, is perseverance. It doesn’t matter if 49 VCs pass on your startup if the 50th one hands you a check for $1 million, or if 24 engineers say No, but the 25th is a rockstar who says Yes. Getting to yes means letting the negativity wash over you.

Leto and Dixon also talk about pitching VCs and the need to own the room. Confidence matters. You need to leave the room with investors thinking there is a one percent chance your company can be the next Twitter, Google, or Facebook. Leto had this experience when she raised money for Bnter after Texts From Last Night took off. You can listen to the full interview here.

Check out other Founder Stories episodes or subscribe on iTunes.


Amazon’s Cloud Player Tests The Limits Of The Record Labels’ Patience

Amazon may have introduced its digital locker music service, the Cloud Player, before similar services from rivals Google and Apple (that are widely believed to be launching this year), but that doesn’t mean it will be an easy existence. Not long after the company published a note on its Web site inviting users to give Cloud Player a try did one of the major record labels offer a warning. “We are disappointed that the locker service that Amazon is proposing is unlicensed by Sony Music,” a Sony spokesman said. Is Amazon on a collision course with the music industry, and if it is, could that be a good thing for consumers?

Read more…


Ex-Microsoft Games Chief Apologizes For ‘Consolization’ Of Gaming

Robbie Bach, the former president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, has apologized to PC gamers for the “consolization” of their hobby. “Am I happy to have been a part of the destruction of PC gaming? No, of course not. But I am proud of the fact that I’ve helped convince a generation of gamers that it’s cool to pay $10 for a pair of virtual sunglasses and that playing online should be considered a premium feature. Look, guys, no one’s stopping your from installing Doom II and playing through that again, right? I mean, what’s the difference between that and Black Ops, really?”

Read more…


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