Category: Tech news

Apple has been issued a couple new patents by the USPTO today (via AppleInsider), including one for hover touch sensing, the likes of which we’re starting to see rolled out in Android-powered devices lately like the Samsung Galaxy S4. Another patent issued today covers an embedded heart rate monitor that could add one more sensor to the iPhone, with potential for biometrics and fitness apps.

The touch and hover patent describes a means for detecting when a person’s finger is near to, but not actually in contact with, a touchscreen device. It outlines ways in which hover input can be used to issue commands to a device, with those screens outputting an electrical field to help determine the position of a user’s finger. But the system is about more than just the kind of hover controls that other OEMs have implemented to relatively little effect: Apple describes how the system can be used to offer more effective and accurate errant touch detection.

The hover field could help a mobile device better identify which touches were meant to actually spark an action, and which were accidental or incidental to something else. Apple already does some touch rejection with the latest iPads and their thinner side bezels, and with palm rejection in some apps, but this could theoretically help improve the performance of any accidental touch detection.

The patent also describes a method for better dealing with changing weather and environment conditions when it comes to accurate touch detection. It would work by allowing touch devices to take a baseline reading when conditions are optimal, and then detecting via sensors when conditions change and tweaking touch detection settings slightly to modify and improve accuracy when, say, the weather gets cold. In general, Apple seems to be looking at hover touch tech as more of a supplementary tech than something that will find expression in actual interface design.

As for the heart rate monitor, Apple’s patent describes a sensor found in the screen bezel or other conductive portion of the device that could read EKG data. You could imagine it going into the conductive metal ring around the Touch ID sensor in the current iPhone 5s design, for instance, which would be fitting also because of similar function between the two sensors.

Apple’s patent for heart rate monitoring sensors describes ways they might be used to identify a user according to their unique biometric information. The fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 5s serves a similar purpose, but paired with a heart rate sensor, it becomes less of a convenience factor and more about secure identification.

As always, don’t expect to see these Apple patents go into devices immediately, but they do provide an interesting look behind the curtains at Apple’s R&D efforts. Two-factor biometric security would definitely put Apple even more in the lead when it comes to device-based security, and improving touch screens and their performance will always deliver benefits. And Apple already leads the pack in that regard, too, according to recent comparative tests.

The size and scope of the Consumer Electronics Show is unfathomable for the uninitiated. CES has been called a cesspool. It’s been called a shitshow. And those descriptions are accurate. It’s a clusterfuck of consumer electronics companies, big and small, vying for attention. That’s why TechCrunch attends.

For the 2014 show, which is just two short weeks away, TechCrunch is, for the first time, breaking out its Startup Battlefield event from Disrupt. Called Hardware Battlefield, this startup competition has been tweaked and reworked to focus on, and celebrate, the brightest and most promising unlaunched hardware startups. And what better place to host it than CES?

CES is the largest startup show in the world, and to say that it takes over Las Vegas is not hyperbolic. The city is consumed by CES: Nearly every hotel room is booked; almost every conference room is used. For every Samsung and Microsoft, there are at least 100 smaller companies — the best and brightest of which often do not have an official spot on the CES show floor.

For years, CES has been held at the Las Vegas Convention Center. This massive facility has four exhibition halls nearly large enough to hold air shows within. But in recent years, with the LVCC bursting at its seams, the show expanded next door to the Hilton, The Venetian and Palazzo. If that’s not enough, companies and startups often save a bunch of cash, forgoing the traditional CES experience and rent suites in other casinos. Then there are hackathons, press events, and more lame parties than one can possibly attend.

CES is not for us, the press or the average consumer. It’s a show for buyers and exhibitors. It’s a show for innovators and salespeople. It’s a show for the consumer electronics industry. Yet, year after year, the tech press shows up with trailers and broadcast booths, attempting to boil down this overly complex show to a consumable morsel.

TechCrunch attends CES not to reblog press releases and help Samsung announce its latest tablet. We attend the show to find the next big thing. For 2014′s show, we’re sending more writers, editors and video personnel than ever before. Our broadcast booth is bigger than last year’s. And I’ve created more CES planning spreadsheets than I would like to admit.

We’re even holding a startup competition this year.

Just like its Startup Battlefield counterpart, our Hardware Battlefield will pit startups against each other for a chance at a $50,000 cash prize. We have amazing judges and 16 companies from around the world. This happens twice a day at our broadcast booth. Show up to watch it in person (here’s our booth) or follow along live thanks to Ustream.

I predicted 2013′s show to be the year of the gadget startup. And I was dead-on. It was the first CES of the modern era without Microsoft. Nokia, Dell and HP were skipping the show. The year before that was the noisiest CES in recent memory. CES was headed into a wall. But startups saved the show.

Over the last few years gadget startups have risen in prominence. Once hampered by long development cycles and poor designs, thanks to crowdfunding and understanding venture capitalists, hardware startups can now operate nearly as lean as web-based companies.

Best yet, countless startups have risen out of the ashes of the consumer electronic wasteland to help consumers turn ideas into companies. As John explained, 2014′s CES will be the year of the maker.

Planning this year’s CES was a daunting task. There are just so many companies within TechCrunch’s scope of coverage attending the show. Best of all was scanning the map of the show floor and spotting companies like GoPro and Parrot, once tiny companies, doing the show big with sizable booths in prominent locations.

If you or your company are headed to CES, we would love to talk. Stop by our booth in the LVCC Central Plaza to watch the live interviews, shows and competitions. We’re the booth circled in red here.

The folks behind CES, the CEA, fully understand that the show is on the cusp of turning into something different. They have made moves to make the show more accessible to smaller companies, creating special venues to better suit the needs of the startup. Of course adding more exhibit space does not address the bloated feeling of CES. As before, it will seem overwhelming and excessive but still exciting and magical in its own special way — especially to the startup attending CES for the first time.

[Photos via International CES]

British Sky Broadcasting Group (called BSkyB) has made a $350,000 investment in Jaunt, an early-stage startup that captures and displays 360 degree video content. BSkyB said that the new partnership will give it “additional insight into developments within the field.”

Though Palo Alto-based Jaunt’s placeholder site currently offers no information besides “stayed tune,” the company has been building its engineering team. Its current team already has an impressive pedigree and includes CEO Jens Christensen, who also launched Ellerdale (acquired by Flipboard in 2010); CTO Arthur van Hoff, who previously held the same position at Flipboard; and VP of engineering Tom Annau, whose resume includes a stint as a senior software engineering manager at Google.

Jaunt’s LinkedIn profile says its technology “combines computational photography, statistical algorithms, massively parallel processing, cutting-edge hardware and virtual reality.”

For Sky, Jaunt fits in with a series of investments it has made in video-related startups.

For example, back in May 2013, it invested $1.9 million in TV streaming platform Roku, one year after joining several other investors, including News Corporation, Menlo Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners, in a $45 million round.

Other investments include digital media platform 1 Mainstream, in a partnership that Sky said could expand its potential reach to 18 million international viewers, as well as social media specialist Zeebox, which Sky owns a 10% equity stake in.

Image source

Mobile health tech startup Healint wants to make life better — and safer — for patients suffering from neurological conditions like strokes, epilepsy and migraines. Their first product, Android app JustShakeIt, is an emergency alert system triggered by shaking a smartphone. You can help its development by signing up for the app’s public beta test.

JustShakeIt is only the beginning for the startup. Healint’s co-founders say their upcoming products will focus on preventative care and helping patients monitor their health between doctor visits. Co-founder Francois Cadiou says Healint is developing predictive analysis tools using smartphone sensors and proprietary algorithms to help identify warning signs for chronic neurological conditions.

The startup has received early funding from JFDI.Asia‘s accelerator program, as well as individual investors in India, Europe, Japan and Singapore. It is currently seeking pre-seed funding.

JustShakeIt is designed to let people who are at risk for strokes and other conditions send an alert to their caregivers by shaking their smartphones, which sends an SMS and email blast to designated recipients with the user’s real-time location. The company hopes to log at least 5,000 active usage hours on each of  the 10 Android smartphone models they are currently testing to maximize the app’s reliability. JustShakeIt completed its close beta testing round by 50 active users earlier this year.

The app uses Healint’s machine learning algorithms and data sourced from users to continuously improve the reliability of the app. Strokes can affect a person’s ability to speak, see and move, so JustShakeIt was designed to be operated with one hand. The app runs in the background and works without needing to unlock the smartphone.

The team’s tasks during public beta testing include ruling out movements that can accidentally trigger the app, so users can keep their smartphones in their pocket or bag without worrying about false alarms. Low battery consumption is also key; JustShakeIt is designed to run in the background, but use less power per day than the equivalent of a five-minute phone call.

The status of the public beta, with current test results for each Android smartphone, is currently available on Healint’s site. The startup says they are ranking which devices collect the most accurate data so they can recommend certain smartphones to patients.

Though its products will be available for users around the world, Healint is headquartered in Singapore because the country’s high smartphone penetration rate and rapidly increasing number of older residents gives the startup a good test market.

Healint’s team all have backgrounds in the pharmaceutical or med-tech industries. CEO and co-founder , is also the founder of Asia’s INSEAD Healthcare Alumni Network, a group for people in the pharmaceutical, med-tech and bio-tech industries. Veronica Chew, Healint’s CMO and co-founder, was a global project manager at GE Healthcare. Lead researcher Edouard Amouroux, is a data scientist who focuses on behavior modeling using Agent-based modeling methods, which help simulate social interactions.

For Cadiou, Healint’s mission is personal.

“My father had two strokes and we saw that there was a need to be able to make life simpler and safer for those types of patients and work better with doctors,” he tells me. The startup has collaborated with neurologists and neurosurgeons from hospitals in Singapore including Mount Elizabeth, Gleneagles, Raffles and Tan Tock Seng, as well as patients, to get product design feedback.

Healint uses sensors in smartphones instead of wearable tech devices because people are used to carrying a mobile phone with them everywhere, Cadiou explains.

“You cannot ask a patient with a neurological condition to wear a lot of sensors because that changes his behavior,” he says. “You have to find a way to measure the patient’s quality of life without changing his behavior massively. You have moments where they forget their Fitbit, for example, so you have a chunk of missing data, which is a huge problem in terms of data quality.”

Healint is currently developing tools that can help stroke, epilepsy and migraine patients keep track of their movements and warn them if their health is at risk. Before joining Healint, Amoroux worked on a project in France that made it possible to detect when Alzheimer’s patients needed extra care based on how they were consuming electricity in their homes. The startup hopes to create products that are just as easy to use for patients and caregivers.

For example, the startup is currently working on a tool that can “intelligently display all possible symptoms and warning signs before you have a migraine,” says Chew. “Neurologists sometimes give patients a paper diary but there are things that you can record and things that you can’t. You might remember that you slept five hours last night, but you can’t remember how much you slept last week. We’re looking for more intelligent ways to collect data for patients.”

Other data that Healint’s migraine tool might track include the frequency of headaches during weather fluctuations or the efficiency of certain medications and treatments.

For caregivers, Healint’s tools can collect data that shows how active patients are or how much they sleep. Its founders say that balancing the privacy of users with their safety is a major goal. For example, tools focus on tracking movement, not location.

“For example, I know when my father wakes up, and I can see if he woke up, so I don’t worry. I can also see if he woke up during the night,” says Cadiou. “But you can choose who sees the information. We don’t want people to be pressured by relatives into giving too much information, so we don’t take too much.”

Indian streaming music startup Dhingana faces an uncertain future after T-Series, its biggest music label partner, said it will not be renewing their licensing agreement.

Soundbox reported last week, and T-Series president Neeraj Kalyan confirmed to TechCrunch, that the company will not renew the license set to expire for nearly 8,000 songs from Dhingana’s catalogue. “We were not able to see much traction in the service and secondly we couldn’t agree on the commercials and both parties thus decided to part ways in an amicable manner,” said Kalyan.

However, it looks more like a near-death experience for the music service and not an imminent shutdown. Dhingana CEO Rohit Bhatia said that any new developments will be shared this week. He declined to comment on whether Dhingana will indeed shut down.

Any recovery from T-Series ending its licensing agreement would depend on whether Dhingana can overcome the hurdles of poor ad rates, rampant music piracy, and rising costs of supporting its free service in the country — issues facing every streaming service in the country.

Dhingana is among the top-funded music startups in India. It raised $7 million in Series B funding in October last year from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partners. Bhatia told Medianama that Dhingana is in the process of restructuring its operations.

Dev Khare of Lightspeed declined to comment on Dhingana, and executives at Inventus Capital (another investor in Dhingana), also refused to comment.

Another source, a music industry executive familiar with Dhingana’s negotiations with T-Series said Dhingana didn’t agree to the music label’s commercial terms and more importantly, was running out of money. “T-Series’ exit is a trigger, but Dhingana’s problems are much beyond that,” this person said over the weekend.

The Challenges Facing Music Streaming In India

Earlier this year, India’s largest e-commerce company Flipkart shut down Flyte, its digital music store, citing piracy and complex payment mechanisms among the top reasons for the decision.

Whether or not Dhingana shuts down, being a pure-play streaming music startup in India is going to get tougher for sure.

There are some big challenges facing both the free streaming and the pay-for-download models in India — music piracy is clearly the toughest to battle, with most consumers still preferring to download free music from illegal sites like Songs.pk. The other challenge is that most big music labels demand stiff fees for awarding any digital music rights apart from the per-stream cost for each of the songs.

The recent Bollywood hit Chennai Express for instance, sold music rights for an estimated $2 million. The music labels want bang for their bucks and they cannot achieve that by being too generous in their commercial arrangements with the streaming services.

The Holy Grail for all these music startups is to reach a scale where they are more comparable with a Spotify. But as the CEO of one of the music startups in India told me over the weekend, becoming a Spotify will require very deep pockets, enormously patient investors and, above all, an industry where more consumers are willing to pay for legal music downloads. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. India’s media and entertainment industry loses about $4 billion every year due to copyright infringement.

Telecom operators like Vodafone on one hand, and aggressive Internet platforms like YouTube on the other, are threatening to hit these pure play music startups very hard. YouTube’s rumored music streaming service on top of what it already offers is set to put more pressure on advertisers to increase their ad spending with Google.

So will other music-streaming services face this ‘loss of faith’ from music labels?

Gaana.com (backed by Times Internet Ltd) and Saavn (the Spotify for Indian music), continue to survive and even expand their services, thanks to the deep pockets and some innovative business models. Their success (so far) also reflects that the digital music scene in India may not be so gloomy after all. Gaana has around 7.5 million monthly active users.

Satyan Gajwani CEO of Times Internet, which owns Ganna, said the focus is more on building consumer habit of paying for legal music.

“We have started to convert free users into paid ones, but our primary goal today is to build the habit of using Gaana before piracy, and we are confident over time of converting free users into paid ones,” he added.

Saavn CEO Vin Bhat told me that despite challenges of music piracy and competition from Google’s YouTube in getting a bigger share of the ad market, there’s a large addressable market in India. Already, almost half of Saavn’s 11 million monthly active user base is from India, and it’s growing.

Kalyan of T-Series added that it will continue to work with Saavn, Gaana and others, as these platforms continue to show good traction.

“The streaming business has to slowly move from free economy to paid economy as sustainability of ad-supported revenue model is a big question mark. Free music is a very dangerous thing, and we would not like our next generation grow up believing music is for free,” Kalyan said.

Lead picture courtesy Soundcloud.

Silicon Valley is no stranger to unusual ideas, and today the world got to witness another: noted investor Tim Draper is proposing a ballot proposition to split California into six separate states. There were obviously a lot of questions raised by Draper’s “Six Californias” proposal after we first broke the news last Thursday, so the man with the controversial plan held a press conference this afternoon.

“The status quo is just not going to work,” said Draper. “The existing breadth of industry and various interests in California is untenable.”

Draper’s ballot proposition itself breaks California into six entities: Silicon Valley, West California, Jefferson, South California, Central California and North California.

Other than Draper’s desire to decentralize Californian governance, we really didn’t know how it would all go down until today. So, here are your burning questions answered:

How Will California Be Redrawn?

“We allowed great flexibility” for individual counties to finely tune the rough outline of the six different territories, Draper said during the press event. He expects the citizens to crowdsource many of the ideas around water rights, a new state flag, and other official duties.

What About Congress?

Each state is supposed to get two senators, this would add 10 more to Congress (five additional states total). So, presumably, federal authorities will have to buy more chairs for the Senate floor, and also completely shift around the tight two-party balance that the Senate has maintained for over 200 years.

“They’ll be nervous about change,” says Draper, who thinks government will eventually accept a better governed region.

Who’s Paying For This?

Draper is bootstrapping his own political brainchild. “I will make sure it gets on the ballot, he said. This can cost millions of dollars and there’s no big partners yet on board. But Draper says he’s seen a lot of grassroots interest.

There’s still a lot of process questions that have to be worked out. What happens after it passes? Who’s in charge of creating new governors, redrawing congressional districts, and distributing natural resources? Draper couldn’t answer these in great detail, because they’ll supposedly be answered over the next several months.

When Draper first proposed this idea to me at the Nantucket Project conference, I had my doubts. But, yes, this is in fact happening. Six Californias. Draper expects to hold another press conference when he gets a million signatures.

This is not exactly the merriest of times for Target. Last week the retailer revealed that credit card data from 40 million customers had been stolen. Now it looks like the giant retailer could be liable for up to $3.6 billion.

Target could face a $90 fine for each cardholder’s data compromised, which translates to the $3.6 billion liability, according to a post on the SuperMoney website.

Here’s how it breaks down. Target will already likely face all sorts of lawsuits and the added cost to assure that everything in its infrastructure is secure, SuperMoney explains. But that’s just part of it. Back in 2006, Visa, American Express, JCB, Discover and MasterCard formed the PCI Council to oversee the new Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The data security standard defines how organizations manage cardholder information. The standard, obviously, is meant to help reduce the likelihood of credit card fraud. Target and other vendors usually get reviewed by the PCI Council once a year to make sure they are keeping their house in order. It’s also a bit of a sham, too. The PCI Council likes to say none of those that they have certified have ever been breached. Well, not exactly. The PCI Council has retroactively revoked certification after a retailer has had a breach.

Regardless, things can get pretty brutal for the retailer. They can face civil fines, suspension of credit card acceptance by a merchant’s credit card account provider and a loss of all the trust that retailers bank on so much with their customers. Four states are now asking Target questions for a potential class action lawsuit. Suddenly, the retailer’s big target logo has a whole new meaning.

But the real damage becomes apparent when the fines are added up on a per cardholder basis. Even if a company is 100 percent PCI-compliant and validated, “a breach in cardholder data may still occur,” according to the Focus On PCI website. Cardholder breaches can result in $50 to $90 fines per “cardholder data compromised.”  T.J. Maxx faced a similar dilemma in 2007 when the data from 90 million cards was stolen.

There are lots of theories for how the breach happened. But the worst part is how this affects people like you and me. The credit cards we use here in the United States for the most part have magnetic strips. All that data is being pulled off the credit cards and put on counterfeit cards that are then sold on the black market, as pointed out by security expert Brian Krebs and discussed in a post by TechCrunch’s John Biggs.

But it’s easy to pin all the blame on Target. The old-fashioned magnetic strip makes fraud so much easier for the crooks out there. Data encrypted on microchips has been used in Europe  and other parts of the world for years but the U.S. lags way behind, making it a haven for black market hackers. Encrypted microchips are not a cure-all, but it could go a long way in protecting consumers, the most vulnerable out of this whole monster mess.

[Image: Flickr/Sean Davis]

Two more Apple acquisitions have reportedly been unearthed today by 9to5Mac. The first is of Catch, a note-taking app similar to Evernote that was likely acquired back in July, and the second is BroadMap. The BroadMap acquisition seems more complicated, however, as the company maintains that it still exists and operates separately from Apple, despite much of its staff having moved to Apple according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Apple issued a statement to AllThingsD, but it only contains its boilerplate response to these requests, which is essentially a non-committal ‘we make acquisitions but we don’t talk about them’ comment. Ordinarily, that’s enough to consider the acquisition confirmed: Apple generaly won’t discuss anything at all in cases where there’s smoke but no fire. But this time, BroadMap took the unusual tack of denying an acquisition outright via its official Twitter profile (since removed).

Still, at least seven former BroadMap employees now list Apple as their employer on LinkedIn, and all departed the company around March of 2013. So what’s the deal? It looks like this may have been a case where Apple acqui-hired without the “acqui.” According to Geographic Information Systems specialist and blogger James Fee, BroadMap did indeed lose both executive talent and IP to Apple, but it continues to exist as a separate entity, licensing the tech it sold Apple and reselling that to current clients, which include Nokia, Nielsen, MapQuest and others according to BroadMap’s website.

My theory in this case is that BroadMap had a number of longer-term existing contracts in place with clients that would’ve made termination of those deals expensive and messy for Apple. Better to gut the company of its talent, keep BroadMap alive in name only as a delivery vehicle for tech that Apple now owns but licenses, and keep it staffed with a skeleton crew to make that happen (with new developments around geo software from the team that built it going directly to Apple, without a requirement to share). In other words, it’s an acquisition in practice, even if it ultimately turns out that it isn’t technically an acquisition.

As for Catch, 9to5Mac says it’s working on iOS software. Its app resembles Google Keep, and if Apple is looking to build out better functionality in Reminders, Notes and its audio recording apps, this is likely a good team to have in pursuit of that goal. Catch also released an enterprise collaboration tool just before shutting down, which could help Apple with its relatively new push toward greater business market appeal.

We’re still looking for more specifics related to these deals and will update if we find any additional information.

Apple has a brand new Mac Pro with an all-new, bold design that’s assembled at home in the U.S. in a facility in Texas. It’s easily among the most bold and unique designs of a Mac in recent memory, bringing to mind equally mould-busting creations like the G4 Cube and the original ‘flowerpot’ iMac. It’s also got a distinctly Darth Vader vibe, and with its unique removable outer casing, that impression comes across even stronger.

We still have to take the new Mac Pro through more testing before we can deliver our full review, but first impressions are that this thing absolutely leaves any other current Macs in the dust in terms of loading, rendering and processing speed. It’s also extremely quiet, and actually produces a small amount of updraft from that exhaust port in the top, which is funneling air from its ‘unified thermal core.’

It’s a futuristic machine with futuristic good looks, and while I wouldn’t advise using it in the conditions pictured above, the currently frozen wastes of Toronto make an excellent backdrop for this demon machine. Stay tuned for our full review and more thoughts about Apple’s first new Pro desktop computer in many years.

The Walt Disney Company just announced that Jack Dorsey (co-founder and CEO of Square, as well co-founder and chairman at Twitter, as if you didn’t know) has joined its board of directors.

“Jack Dorsey is a talented entrepreneur who has helped create groundbreaking new businesses in the social media and commerce spaces,” said Disney CEO Robert A. Iger in the release. “The perspective he brings to Disney and its Board is extremely valuable, given our strategic priorities, which include utilizing the latest technologies and platforms to reach more people and to enhance the relationship we have with our customers.”

The company’s tech bets in the past few years have included the acquisition of gaming companies Tapulous and Playdom. But presumably Disney’s interest in technology goes beyond any one area of the company.

Plus, of course, it acquired Pixar back in 2006, a company that had its roots in technology, even if it wasn’t exactly a startup. The deal brought Apple’s Steve Jobs to the Disney board and made him the company’s largest shareholder — so this is another way that Dorsey is following in Jobs’ footsteps (who he clearly emulates).

Disney’s board also includes Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and John S. Chen, former CEO at Sybase.

Dorsey, meanwhile, has become one of the best-known executives in the tech industry and the startup world, with a recent New Yorker profile not just looking at his achievements at Twitter and Square, but also asking what he’s doing next (for one thing, Dorsey has mentioned repeatedly that he’d like to run for mayor of New York one day). He alluded to the Disney news in a tweet, where he quotes Walt Disney himself: “I only hope we don’t lose sight of one thing—that it was all started by a mouse.”

The Silk Road 2, a hidden website modeled on the original Silk Road contraband marketplace, is regrouping as the users and single remaining moderator prepare for a Christmas lockdown. The group faced a setback on Friday when US and Irish authorities arrested moderators Andrew Michael Jones, Gary Davis, and Peter Philip Nash. A final moderator, Cirrus, remains on the site. The arrests happened in conjunction with the shut-down of the first Silk Road and are probably unrelated to the new version.

The site is currently “closed” to orders and will reopen after Christmas on the 28th. On the 22nd a moderator named Defcon allowed the site to remain open twelve more hours so users could withdraw funds. Defcon wrote:

“Make no mistake – Silk Road is not dead, the marketplace is not compromised, and it will return after the break regardless of how this plays out,” wrote Defcon.

New markets that use improved cryptographic systems, including a service called the Marketplace, are on the rise. Users and admins claim that that they are ostensibly safer than the Tor-based Silk Roads. It is, as they say, business as usual on the DarkNet.

Hardware analysts at IDC are estimating that 3D printer shipments will grow 10 times in the period between now and 2017. Printers, once the provenance of hackers and engineers, will soon be household commodities.

“Print is extending beyond output on media to the creation of an actual object, and that presents incredible opportunity,” quoth Keith Kmetz, VP at IDC. “While traditional print technologies are facing maturity, 3D printers will see worldwide unit shipments grow by 10 times over the forecast period, and worldwide hardware value will more than double in the short term.”

IDC cites the move by HP to enter the 3D printing market in 2014 as well as Konica Minolta’s agreement to distribute higher-end 3D printers. Add in the mid-level players like Makerbot and upstarts like Afinia and Lulzbot and you have a robust market. Furthermore, patents controlling the process of laser sintering are set to expire in 2014, thereby opening up new possibilities for the new home 3D printer. Because patents often discourage the small manufacturer from exploring a particular technology, this patent expiration should improve things considerably in the metal and plastic printing front. O brave new world, That has such printers in’t!

via 3Ders

Android app AllCast has just left beta, and is now available as a full version for all to try out. There’s a free version and a paid license, so you can find out if this Swiss army knife of media streamers for Google’s mobile OS works for you. It accomplishes the impressive feat of letting you stream from your Android phone or tablet to the Apple TV, or any other AirPlay-enabled devices you may have.

This is pretty much the dream app for anyone heavily invested in Apple’s accessory ecosystem but looking to make a switch to Android. The current version only supports video and image streaming, but it works as advertised, and the developers promise music support is coming soon. All of my AirPlay speakers showed up as available devices, as well as my Apple TV, and the interface presents a simple two-step process where you just pick your streaming destination and then choose the media you want to stream (the app automatically scans your phone for compatible file types).

Unlike with native AirPlay, content has to be played from the AllCast app itself to work, but it also supports DLNA streaming and will broadcast to Roku, Xbox One (and Xbox 360), Samsung and Panasonic Smart TVs and any Google TV device. Chromecast, Google’s tiny streaming dongle, isn’t supported, but AllCast says the ball is in Google’s court to enable that as of right now.

It’s still early days for AllCast, even though it’s stable enough for a 1.0 release, so you might have to relaunch the app to get it to work properly with your target stream destinations and if you throw it into landscape during playback you might lose control over play/pause functions. But once it gets properly set up, it just works, and it’s amazing how good it feels to be able to get the content on your Android tablet or smartphone up there on the big screen using devices you already own, instead of having to look around for something with Miracast built-in, or going directly to Google for a Chromecast, even if that is only 30 bucks.

We might be heading into the height of the holiday season, but tech news has not slowed down just yet! So we had quite a few things to discuss in CrunchWeek, the TechCrunch TV show that brings together three writers to talk about the hottest news stories of the past seven days.

In this episode, Leena Rao, Alex Wilhelm and I talk about the big crash that cut the value of the Bitcoin currency in half (and the latest law enforcement crackdowns on the new Silk Road 2 exchange), the far-out proposal by renowned technology venture capitalist Tim Draper to split California into six pieces and turn Silicon Valley into its own state, and Square founder Jack Dorsey giving back 10 percent of his equity in the company.

TechCrunch is about to hit the road again. Starting in late February, we’re bringing the magic of our Pitch-Off events to Atlanta and New Orleans. Then, a month later, we’re hitting Washington D.C., New York City, Boston and The City of Angels, Los Angeles. And that’s just for the first half of the year.

Like previous pitch-offs, tickets will be just $5 and grant you access to an evening of pitching, drinking and general tomfoolery, TechCrunch style. And like before, the events will be a boisterous good time.

These meetups have evolved over time. Once just John Biggs and family touring the East Coast in a rented van, these events are now large productions featuring fun interviews and a pitch-off competition involving the best startups in each city. If you’ve attended a previous TC meetup, you’re going to want to come to 2014′s events, too.

Tickets and venues will be released in the coming weeks.

Our sponsors help make events happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected].

• Atlanta – 2/18/2014
• New Orleans – 2/20/2014
• Washington D.C. – 3/18/2014
• New York – 3/20/2014
• Boston – 4/8/2014
• Los Angeles – 4/10/2014