Category: Tech news

Your humble correspondent begs your indulgence for this flu-fuelled stream-of-consciousness post, but deadlines wait for no virus, so needs must I expel the contents of my febrile mind onto this screen and thence to yours.

To wit: Google Plus is a total mess.

You probably knew that already. But you may not have realized that of late it has become an interesting mess…like Frankenstein’s monster.

These days there’s a lot of disingenuous chatter about how G+ is just a “social layer on top of Google,” and was never intended as a direct competitor for Facebook; which is, of course, revisionist nonsense. Two years ago it seemed pretty obvious to just about everyone that G+ was intended, or at least hoped for, as a Facebook killer.

Which obviously never happened, not least because Google shot themselves in the foot as they came out of the gate: the tech community of early adopters that could conceivably have become a critical-mass beachhead were the same group who reacted most strongly and negatively to G+’s controversial, divisive, and just plain dumb real-names policy. It wasn’t until it became painfully apparent that Facebook had nothing to worry about that G+ pivoted to Plan B, its current status: a thin social veneer atop all of Google’s products.

Which has been moderately successful. Google Plus is awfully quiet, true, but it’s not the ghost town that’s often claimed. Some numbers from my pet project Scanvine, which tracks how and where news articles are shared online:

• The average news article tracked (as of this writing) has been shared/liked 890 times on Facebook, mentioned/retweeted 147 times on Twitter–and shared/+1d a paltry 19 times on Google Plus. That’s 2 percent of Facebook. Which is pretty bad (by Google’s standards) in terms of overall reach, but probably good enough in terms of accumulating a semi-representative sample of social-media signals to feed the ever-hungry maw of Google’s search algorithms.
• Mind you, this distribution varies quite a bit from source to source. Fully a sixth of The Verge’s shares come from G+, compared to 0.1 percent of Upworthy’s. (Similarly, LinkedIn is basically nonexistent for many sources, but is a huge contributor to the Harvard Business Review. G+ does okay on TechCrunch, too, in case you’re curious, but what’s notable here is the massive outperformance of Twitter.)
• I’ve heard rumors that G+ is big in India, but the numbers for The Times of India offer at best tepid evidence for that: six shares/story via G+ vs. 137 via Facebook. Better than the overall 2 percent average, but not by much.
• In general, G+ outperforms for tech sources and underperforms for, errrrr, let’s say “non-tech” ones. Its population seems to be heavily STEM-oriented — or, to quote an anecdotal report from elsewhere, “Google+ loves math.” We may tentatively conclude that it has caught the attention of many technically inclined early adopters, but two years on, its use doesn’t seem to be expanding much from that core. It’s a foothold, not a beachhead.

So. G+ failed as a Facebook killer, and while it may have attracted enough of a STEM-loving audience to serve as Google’s social layer, it isn’t exactly setting the rest of the world on fire. What it does do, however, which Facebook mostly doesn’t, is serve as a means for aggregating and filtering stories. G+ “Circles” can be coerced into news feeds for a particular type of story; for instance, Brad Acker shared a “Futurists” circle with me which is a really interesting aggregated source of cutting-edge science/tech news.

But even that doesn’t quite work right. You can share Circles with other people individually, but there doesn’t seem to be any way for me to, for instance, post a link to that “Futurists” circle here so that anyone could subscribe. (Please correct me if I’m wrong; this seems like such an obvious feature that I suspect my flu-ridden state is the reason for my inability to find such a link.)

Moreover, I’m using that Circle as a news aggregator, but the posts there are still social — i.e. they’re built around people, with smiling-face icons and commentary and so forth — when actually I really just want to use it asocially. I mostly don’t know or care about the people who are posting to it; I’m just interested in the links they’re aggregating. The rest is distracting noise. Hacker News, for all its ugliness, gets this right. G+ does not.

Circles are still really useful for all kinds of things, from small-group conversations to project-oriented discussions to news aggregators that nothing else can quite match–but at the same time, they suffer from G+’s attempt to be all things to all people. Admirable ambition, but unless your UX design is superb, you wind up seeming like a bundle of individually good ideas bolted together awkwardly into a shambling mess. Like Frankenstein.

But that’s not actually the criticism it may seem. People tend to think of Boris Karloff’s portrayal of a brute monster: but Mary Shelley’s original novel had the subtitle The Modern Prometheus, and its creation was eloquent, educated, and intelligent, but unfairly rejected by most of the world because of his physical deformities and inability to fit in. Alas, I fear the same may be true of Google Plus.

Apple is said to be preparing a lower cost iPhone for later this year, with a plastic shell instead of its typical recipe of metal and glass to lower component costs. Now a site called Techdy, which creates Android knock-off handsets of higher-end devices, is claiming to have obtained the new phone’s plastic casing and front-screen assembly.

The supposed early manufacturing prototype leak shows a smooth plastic shell in white that Techdy says feels much higher-quality than the plastic casings used in phones by other manufacturers like Samsung. The front resembles the screen of the iPhone we all know and love and has a black design that will reportedly be common to a variety of different color options for the back plastic half.

The slightly contoured edges on the rear of this supposed budget iPhone are very much reminiscent of the current-generation iPod touch – essentially, this looks like a slightly thicker version, which makes sense given the additional room required for cellular antennas, ambient light sensors and other components. Apple brought expanded color options to the iPod touch with this generation, so that could have been in preparation for launching a line of lower cost iPhones with similar design themes.

Comparison shots taken of the iPhone 5 with the leaked plastic iPhone case shows a design that’s only just slightly thicker than the current existing Apple smartphone. The screen size is the same, and among the only other significant outward differences is the use of just one speaker grill on the bottom edge of the device instead of two.

Techdy is marketing an Android-powered clone of the device already, so definitely take this with a grain of salt. But it is in keeping with what we’ve heard about a supposed low-cost iPhone in the past, and that right there is definitely an attractive device. If Apple can manage to release a plastic iPhone for cheaper than its flagship that feels and looks better than the top-end designs of its rivals, we could see a very different smartphone game come later this year. There is lots more to see in the massive gallery Techdy put together depicting the supposed iPhone from every possible angle, so be sure to check it out.

If you work for a company that depends on advertising revenue, you won’t hear people talk that often about using Adblock Plus, but it’s something that millions of consumers probably can’t imagine their Internet browsing without at this point. It manages to block out most ads on websites, providing a relatively clean experience that’s sometimes night and day from the standard web.

The thing is, some ads do get through, and Google at least appears to be paying to make that happen, according to a new report that’s prompting a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Adblock Plus has an “acceptable ads” filter that allows certain content by default, and the company makes no secret that it charges big companies for whitelisting services – it mentions it right in its FAQ.

AdblockPlus says this fee is about helping it to maintain its filter list, which also whitelists some small websites and blogs for free, in addition to charging those larger companies like Google that participate. But it’s easy to see Google and others  buying the right to put ads in front of web-browsing users, with Adblock Plus essentially acting as a gatekeeper meting out access to that sizeable chunk of consumers. Which gives Adblock a lot of power, and companies like Google that can pay a sizeable advantage over mid-sized competitors who can’t.

On Hacker News, this has spun into a discussion of the merits of online advertising in general, and it’s a very interesting read, even if you’re not that concerned about who can and can’t afford to buy a whitelist from Adblock Plus (which still also offers the ability to turn off even “non-intrusive advertising” entirely via the extension’s settings). Like it or not, display ads are still by and large the currency of the web, even for Adblock Plus, a company that’s built around reducing the user experience impact of ads online.

Yahoo has been snapping up companies left and right lately, and the revitalized company’s hunger means that some well-received apps and services have gone (or will soon go) offline. Earlier today, another company threw its name into that particular pile: task management service Astrid will officially go dark on August 5, just over three months after co-founder/CEO Jon Paris announced the acquisition on the team’s official blog.

At the time, Paris noted that Astrid would only exist in its current state for about another 90 days and seemed content to leave the service’s future punctuated with a (potentially hopeful) question mark. Users hoping for some sort of clemency on Yahoo’s part probably won’t take the news very well, but, as promised, Astrid’s team has made a data export tool available and pointed to former competitors Wrike, Wunderlist, Sandglaz, and Any.do as potential replacements.

Of course, that’s little consolation for the users that Astrid is leaving behind — the company’s Facebook page (which likely isn’t long for this world anyway) is peppered with comments lamenting Astrid’s death… not to mention Yahoo’s role in the matter. At this point it’s still unclear what the Astrid folks are working on over at Yahoo now that the task management service is getting shuttered — Yahoo’s acquisition statement lauded the team’s “background in personalized mobile experiences,” but remained frustratingly vague about what they would actually contribute to the company’s pronounced mobile push.

Meanwhile, other mobile-centric companies that Yahoo snapped up have been allowed to keep working on their wares — it recently picked up Disrupt SF alum Qwiki for a cool $50 million, and has said that it won’t kill off the brand (for now, anyway).

Songza is one of the hottest music-streaming services on the market, with a special feature called Concierge that matches specific, expertly crafted playlists with activities it thinks you might be doing based on time, day and your preferences.

Until very recently, Songza was an entirely free experience with a few visual ads (never audio ads) to help pay the Songza bills.

But Songza has just introduced a few new revenue streams to the mix, including native advertising, high-intensity pre-roll experiences, and a subscription ad-free version of the app called Club Songza. According to co-founders Elias Roman and Peter Asbill, users had been clamoring for an ad-free Songza for a long time, and now for $.99/month, they have it in Club Songza.

And beyond that, users will have access to exclusive content, including special activities like “stargazing,” celebrity-crafted playlists, and especially rare songs that can’t be heard anywhere else.

Obviously, $.99/month is a pretty low barrier to entry, but with the growth of Songza’s userbase, it should still rake in some cash for the startup. Songza reports that, in May, the streaming service saw 4.8 million monthly active users who spend around 70 million minutes every day on the service.

This is why competitors like iHeartRadio, which copied Songza’s concierge feature to a tee, Pandora and iRadio aren’t such a threat to the little music startup out of Long Island City, NY. Songza collects so much data around its users, and has been for so long, that the Concierge experience can’t really be copied, Roman tells me.

Plus, the company has plans down the road to finally nail social in the streaming space. Roman explains that one-to-many broadcasting is not very popular among many users, as it “outs” their feelings or activities in a way that’s personal. Instead, he sees one-to-one recommendations as a good way to make social work for Songza.

Good news, everyone! Wait, no. Not that one. The other one.

Bad news, everyone!

AT&T is considering selling your usage data (location, web browsing history, etc.) to advertisers, having seemingly decided that it’s been too long since everyone was mad at them.

They noted the plan in a preview of an upcoming change to their privacy policy published earlier this week.

AT&T is quick to point out that other companies, like Verizon, have been doing this for a while. (Oh, okay — as long as everyone else’s data is getting thrown about, too, I guess it’s okay. Cough.)

They also note that Facebook and Google do similar things, somehow forgetting that those users generally aren’t already paying those guys $100 a month for a phone that can only make or receive calls when it feels like it.

If there’s any upside, it’s that AT&T is promising to anonymize and aggregate the data before they sell it. It’s just too bad that “anonymizing” large chunks of data doesn’t really work.

At least you’ll be getting a sweet discount on your bill since AT&T is making a bit of change slingin’ your daterbits around, right? Just kidding, you won’t. They’re just going to use it to show you “more relevant advertising.”

Fortunately, it’s not too hard to opt out — you just have to know to do it, and then dig around AT&T’s site to find the link.

Don’t feel like digging? Here’s the link you’ll need: http://att.com/cmpchoice. Sign in, opt out, and you’re done. If you feel like digging a bit deeper, here’s AT&T’s entire page about opting-out of things like this.

And for all of you who might’ve just learned that your carrier probably does something similar:

• Here’s Verizon’s program. You can opt out by calling 1-800-333-9956.
• Here’s Sprint’s program. Opt out at http://www.sprint.com/mychoices
• Here’s T-Mobile’s program. T-Mobile goes through a company called Network Advertising Initiative, and doesn’t seem to offer an account-wide opt-out. The closest thing I can find is a browser-by-browser, cookie-based opt-out system, found here.

Microsoft knows how to build platforms, so when it announces a new one, it’s worth taking a closer look. Until last week, Microsoft mostly wanted you to think of Bing as a search engine that could compete with Google. At its Build developer conference, however, the company made a surprise announcement: Bing is now also a developer platform. Microsoft is opening up tools like Bing’s Entity API, speech capabilities, optical character recognition, translation and a number of other tools for developers of third-party apps. It’s also bringing its existing Maps API under the Bing Services umbrella.

Microsoft describes these services as “an intelligent fabric” that it uses to build products “to help people interact with the world’s knowledge and their surroundings in a more human way.” Microsoft already uses some of these capabilities internally, but it’s now opening them up to others, as well.

The Entity API is the highlight of the Bing services. If Microsoft plays this smart, it could establish Bing as the go-to platform for developers who need easy access to information about the real world for their apps. While not everything from Bing’s advanced Satori Entity engine — Microsoft’s version of Google’s Knowledge Graph — will soon be available through the Entity API (Microsoft has not announced a launch date for the Entity API yet), the company believes it will allow developers “to build scenarios that augment users’ abilities to discover and interact with their world faster and more easily than they can do today.”

As Microsoft’s Director of Search Stefan Weitz told me during a brief chat after Microsoft announced the new Bing developer services, there had been some discussion inside the company about making these tools available to developers outside of the company. It’s a very good sign that those in favor of opening the platform up to outsiders won this fight.

The limitation right now is that some of these new Bing services will at least for now only be available for Microsoft’s own platforms, including Windows 8, 8.1 and Xbox One. Given Microsoft’s push to get more and better applications onto the Windows 8 platform (in the form of more “metro” apps), this move makes sense in the short-term, but if Microsoft really wants to turn Bing into a developer platform, it will have to open all of these services to developers on all platforms.

Microsoft knows that it’s competing for developers’ attention and mind share. Google already offers a plethora of services for developers, and Microsoft, despite its investment in Azure, Visual Studio, Team Foundation and the ecosystem around them, was never the go-to company for most developers who were looking for API-based services like maps, speech recognition or search tools.

If the company continues to invest in Bing as a platform and can demonstrate its commitment to these tools, it has a real chance to attract many developers who otherwise would have never considered using its tools or building for its platforms.

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Lightbank partner Paul Lee stopped by the studio. Lee, who is based in Chicago, joined Lightbank as a Partner in February 2011 and has led investments in BabbaCo, Udemy, ElaCarte, Skyvu and Contently.

Previously, Lee was Managing Director and Group Head of Digital at Playboy Enterprises and was a founding Partner and Senior Vice President at the Peacock Equity Fund, a joint venture between NBC Universal and GE Capital. Lee wrote an interesting piece on finding your perfect co-founder, so we asked him what advice he has for entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley who are looking to partner with someone on an idea. We also talked about how founders should structure salaries for themselves and employees at the early stage.

Tune in above for more!

Crowdfunding has been a godsend for getting lots of projects off the ground that otherwise may not have attracted dollars from traditional powers-that-be in retail manufacturing, music, movies, and the like. So at a time when the federal dollars that typically fund medical research are under more constraint than ever, doesn’t it make sense to bring that same model that has worked so well for wristwatches and rock albums to work for curing breast cancer and new methods for lung transplants?

That’s what Molly Lindquist believes, so she founded a non-profit organization called Consano for allowing people to browse through vetted medical research projects at select universities and research institutions, and then contribute funding directly to the ones they find compelling.

It’s a fascinating model that could really shake things up and help to empower individual scientists. So we invited the Portland, Oregon-based Lindquist to come by the TechCrunch TV studio when she was in San Francisco recently to tell us all about it.

Lindquist told us that herself is a breast cancer survivor, so the roots of Consano come from a very personal place. She realized when she was diagnosed that she wanted a way to provide direct funding to research about the specific gene that may have triggered her ailment, which is the same gene her two young daughters also carry. Organizations such as Susan G. Komen for the Cure are wonderful for getting the word out about breast cancer and funding general research, but Lindquist also wanted a way to provide direct support to projects herself. After lots of discussions with medical professionals and research institutions, Consano was born.

Please watch the video above to see what the site looks like and hear more about Consano’s beginnings and plans for the future.

“The Roost–stop hunching over your laptop,” I read, back and neck aching as usual. I had been working at my laptop like a gargoyle since early in the morning. But in the Roost, a laptop stand that’s raised almost $100,000 on Kickstarter, I’ve finally found a solution.

My main issue with most laptop stands is that they’re big and bulky. At the least, I’d have to buy a stand for the office and one for home. But as a writer and college student, I’m constantly working on the move–so even multiple stands wouldn’t help me much. Last summer, I resorted to resting my laptop on a box at the office, which was less than ideal.

Enter James Olander, a literal rocket scientist who decided that designing systems at Lockheed Martin wasn’t for him anymore.

“I was on this blind path for working on aerospace for probably no other good reason than rocket science sounded cool,” he says.

Olander started working at Odesk, where he would work remotely a couple days a week. He says that after a few months, his hands, neck, and back shut down on him, and he had to see multiple doctors and start physical therapy. Olander says he was terrified of being unable to use a laptop, and he bought “probably every stand that’s on Amazon.”

“I didn’t find anything that really met the need, because nothing was portable enough to the point that you’d actually use it,” he tells me.

Naturally, Olander decided to build something himself, and The Roost was born. The Roost, which Olander builds himself in Denver, weighs just five ounces and folds down to a 1” x 1.5” x 13” package. Olander built it using strong materials (carbon fiber and a super plastic), so it’s also incredibly durable. It’s going for $65 on Kickstarter right now, more than some of the most popular stands on Amazon, but well worth it in my opinion.

He sent me a near-production unit to test out and I’m going to miss it sorely when I return it. The stand is super convenient–I toss it in my bag every day along with my thin Apple keyboard and track pad, and can quickly set up shop in the office, in coffee shops, wherever. The laptop clips on to the stand and is really secure and sturdy.

About four months ago, Olander had a chance meeting with Eric Migicovsky, the creator of the Pebble smartwatch that raised over $10 million, who told Olander to put his project on Kickstarter.

Olander set out hoping to raise $10,000, but the stand has obliterated that goal on Kickstarter, now approaching six figures in funding with over a thousand backers. The campaign ends Monday, but Olander says that won’t be the end of the Roost.

“I’ve been approached by a lot of folks that want to resell it,” Olander says. “As well as folks interested in joining the team to make it into a real company. I want to explore all ways to produce more Roosts but I’m really set up right here to produce them in my shop in Denver.”

Boxee got bought by Samsung this week, and announced that it would be closing down the Boxee Cloud DVR’s cloud DVR feature. So that’s done. Both Samsung and HTC disappointed investors, albeit in very different ways, and Motorola’s next big play got some early details.

We’re chatting about that and more on today’s TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast, on this Friday after the July 4th holiday. We’re so festive you can practically taste the BBQ.

Today on the show fearless leader John Biggs is absent, but Matt Burns valiantly steps in to lead Greg Kumparak, Darrell Etherington and Chris Velazco into battle. Strap in, take a swig from the beer in that stars-and-stripes patterned beer koozie and enjoy!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

People like to eat and generally don’t like to cook. All of which means that food delivery is becoming all the rage among startups lately.* Anyway, there’s a whole new food delivery service called Fluc, opening up for service in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, that hopes to let people pick and choose all their favorite foods and have them delivered for a small fee.

Fluc, which stands for Food Lovers United Corp, began the way I imagine most food delivery services do: as a result of its founders feeling lazy and not wanting to cook. In this case, Fluc founders Tim Davis, Adam Ahmad, and Pako Magdaleno were all living together in a hacker house in Palo Alto. None of them wanted to use the kitchen, because it was generally messy all the time, and because, well, hackers.

So they started thinking about what they would want out of a food delivery service. They wanted something fast, of course, and they wanted something comprehensive — something with every menu item of every popular restaurant nearby. They wanted something where they could modify their orders and make sure that their cheeseburger didn’t come with pickles or that their Starbucks order came with an extra shot of espresso.

So they built all of this into the system.

Fluc is starting small, just making deliveries in select areas of Silicon Valley at first, and only launching with a select group of restaurants in those areas. The startup has a website of options available and also a mobile app for perusing choices.

Unlike services such as Seamless or Grubhub, it doesn’t start out work directly with the restaurants themselves, so the team is inputting menu options on its site and app. That said, it is talking to local businesses about the service as a way for them to provide delivery without paying for a “delivery guy” who sits idle most of the time.

The startup wants to differentiate itself mainly by the ability to customize your orders, and the fact that they do only food. There’s no writing special notes which get ignored by the restaurant — all orders are fully detailed. They also have nice branded boxes to keep food warm while en route and cup holders to keep drinks from spilling.

(There’s also the name, which inspires hilarious conversations like, “Let’s get Fluc’d” and “Fluc me? No, Fluc you.”)

Fluc charges a $5.95 flat rate for each delivery, and has inflated prices of menu items slightly within the app — about 5-10 percent to make a small margin on those sales.

==
* Seriously, I’ve talked to like, a dozen of them over the past month.

The five-day work week. Chevrolet. Grand Funk Railroad. Steel plants on the shores of Lake Michigan. This is America.

There is a rebirth happening right now. It’s happening all over the country. Pockets of makers here, a consumer electronics company there. A startup accelerator in beautiful Harbor Springs, Mich. They’re appearing all over this land. And it’s all heavily advertised.

“Made in America” is, sadly, in vogue right now. “Imported from Detroit”, “This American buys American.” All bumper sticker catch phrases fueling America’s greatest innovation: capitalism.

And why not? Manufacturing is the brawn that built this land but capitalism is the beating heart.

Capitalism drives this country. And it drove companies out, too. Labor is cheaper elsewhere. Tim Cook’s supply chain management became the norm. Profit and loss statements trended towards “build it somewhere else.”

“Made in China”. It’s stamped on the bottom of my coffee mug. On the back of my phone. It’s everywhere because we put it there.

There was a time not all that long ago that America was the center of manufacturing and innovation. General Motors. Bell Labs. Motorola. Fairchild Semiconductor. Silicon Valley. The lone entrepreneur making it big.

America has always been a land of chance. Risk it all and move out west. Find gold. Build with silicon. It’s this sense of entrepreneurship that makes the country great. Most startups fail. A dramatic amount fail. But it’s that sense of possibility that initially made America great and is fueling its current growth.

All across this land, young technology companies are popping up, addressing the needs of a select few or the masses. App makers building with bits. Makers building with things. Coders hacking together and occasionally stumbling upon something great.

There’s innovative companies like Tesla, MakerBot, and Betaworks. There are visionaries like Limor Fried, Troy Carter, and David Karp. Deborah Benton, Marissa Mayer, and Gentry Underwood. They’re all united in building, growing, and making “things” in America.

There’s the lesser known: FarmLogs, a data-driven farming startup from the middle of Michigan. LitMotors, attempting to reinvent transportation. And Durham, NC’s Bound Custom Journals, makers of customizable paper journals.

These companies, along with countless others, do not have to stamp a “Made in America” sticker to the front of their products to sell it. They’re making a world-class product, in America, that will sell on its own accord. They’re doing it right.

I write this while sitting in a diner in Flint, Mich. It’s a safe harbor in the midst of massive abandonment. Capitalism built my city and ultimately destroyed it. And it’s the fine people here and in other cities like it who are wronged by companies playing to their broken emotions.

American consumers want to buy and use products made by Americans. Lay-Z-Boy recliners. Whirlpool washers. Chevy trucks. Many will pay a premium with the hope a bit of their cash will help other Americans.

Sadly, the spirit of capitalism preys on the ignorant. The Chrysler 200 might be imported from Detroit as the infamous Chrysler Super Bowl commercial proclaimed. But it’s a pathetic example of an automobile compared to other U.S.-made cars. Eminem might sell his song for a paycheck, but he wouldn’t buy that car.

There’s an ugly side of “Made in America”. The part where the American origin of a product is more loudly advertised than the products themselves. The products advertised with a waving American flag, white picket fence and an old Ford truck.

It’s sickening. Disgusting. The “Made in America” label should be used with pride, not greed. It’s too often a cheap ploy. A tactic designed to incite emotion over practicality. And it’s this trick that companies need to use sparingly. Companies need to walk a delicate line, carefully crafting an American message without overplaying a point that can be construed as trivial.

Shinola is a Detroit-based watch maker. I spoke with the company’s CEO, Heath Carr of Texas’ Bedrock Manufacturing, at some length about Detroit, making watches, and selling on a schtick.

“Ultimately it came down to ‘Why not Detroit?’,” Carr told me. “Everyone we met [in Detroit] wanted to help. There wasn’t a city that had a trained workforce. We didn’t expect there to be one.”

Shinola now employs 130 people in Detroit making watches, bikes, and paper journals. And Detroit needs every job it can get. Born out of Bedrock Brands, a privately held Texas-based firm owned by the founder of Fossil Inc. Tom Kartsotis, Shinola now occupies a 30,000 square foot space in Detroit’s historic Argonaut building.

Carr explained that Shinola wants to be transparent. Its website lists the sources of all the materials used.

In this case, the transparency is obnoxious. The “Made in Detroit” mantra is exclaimed loudly throughout Shinola’s website. Carr believes that the product can stand on its own. Most watch geeks disagree, pointing to inexpensive Swiss movement and mass manufacturing.

But the watch isn’t the problem. It’s the messaging. Tone down the rhetoric. “Where American is made.™” Just make the damn product. Who cares where it’s made?

Makerbot invigorated the maker movement and never left Brooklyn. Yet these amazing products are advertised on their own merits, not place of origin. The only place you see Brooklyn is hidden under the machine – where “Made In China” used to hide.

MakerBot’s Bre Pettis explained to me that American manufacturing is extremely important to him. A fact proven by the pains the company had to endure keeping the manufacturing process in the New York City area.

“By manufacturing MakerBots with Brooklyn pride, we can iterate faster and innovate more,” Pettis said. “Our mechanical engineers work closely with our manufacturing engineers to build solutions quickly. It really helps to have everyone in the same borough when you’re making a precision engineering tool like the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer.”

There are inherent advantages of having products built here. Practical advantages. Financial advantages. And yes, advertising advantages.

Tesla, for their part, is trying to sell cars in America. On their own. But in every city they try, the entrenched car dealerships are trying to stop them. Mom and Pop car lots, fat on the benefits of zero competition, are standing in the way of the upstart manufacturer wanting to sell cars on their own. “That’s not how it’s done.” That’s not how it’s done in America, friends. If we’re going to put down the flag and do business, it should be on an even playing field. Tesla isn’t going to sink Grandma’s Chevy out on Route 60. Grandma is going to sink her own dealership if she doesn’t grow up.

I live just outside of a dead factory town. It’s with that thought that I find it so refreshing to see small-scale manufacturing return. Parts are made elsewhere, sure, but it’s important to many that the gadget is, at least in part, from here.

Take the Nexus Q. It was to be made in America at a low volume facility just up the road from Google. That was bigger news than the device’s feature set.

Many Americans desperately want to buy products from here. Assembled, manufactured, made — the actual amount of work doesn’t matter. Just as long as American hands had a part in the process before the product was encased for retail. They want to feel like part of the solution. They want to help fix the country. And a few companies have hijacked that sense of pride to hawk their wares.

But that’s freedom. That’s America.

The grand old BBC may sound about as cutting edge as a buttered scone and a cup of Yorkshire Gold but the taxpayer-funded British broadcaster has pushed the boat out on the digital front, with, for instance, its pioneering iPlayer on-demand TV service. It’s also not been a tech laggard when it comes to 3D. Auntie — as the Beeb is affectionately referred to by long-term consumers of its programming (aka the British) — has been running a pilot 3D broadcast program for the past two years. But not for much longer. It’s decided to pull the plug on 3D TV production, in the face of massive audience 3D ennui.

According to a report in the Media Guardian, Kim Shillinglaw, who heads up the Beeb’s 3D pilot, told the Radio Times that viewers were finding 3D too much of a hassle — adding that the time was therefore right “for a good old pause.” Swiftly followed by a nice cup of tea, no doubt.

“I have never seen a very big appetite for 3D television in the UK. Watching 3D is quite a hassly experience in the home. You have got to find your glasses before switching on the TV,” she is quoted as saying.

She also speculated that take-up of the tech might be being held back by difficult economic conditions. When times are tough, a 3D TV set isn’t exactly going to top the shopping list.

“We will see what happens when the recession ends and there may be more take-up of sets, but I think the BBC will be having a wait and see. It’s the right time for a good old pause. I am not sure our job is to call the whole 3D race,” she said.

So, in other words, 3D isn’t going to fly until glasses-killing autostereoscopic TV sets have been honed to headache-free, multiple viewing angle perfection. And are cheap as chips. Which means: don’t wait up for this one.

The forthcoming Wimbledon ladies‘ and mens‘ tennis finals will both be broadcast in 3D by the BBC but Shillinglaw said there are no further plans for the format after the trial period ends. According to the Verge, the last 3D BBC broadcasts will take place in November — and will include a 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who.

Samsung has missed expectations for its quarterly earnings guidance, which is bad news since those expectations were already pretty low. The slowing growth of the smartphone market dominator is being attributed to lackluster Galaxy S4 sales. Samsung’s premiere handset has reportedly sold 20 million units since its launch, according to a recent report from Yonhap News, however.

Overall, the picture is of a briskly selling phone (faster than the previous generation) that’s nonetheless not growing Samsung’s smartphone sales at the rate analysts and investors were hoping. Samsung may be able to rectify this by throwing a whole bunch of new devices at the problem, including the S4 Active, that fall under the S4 brand and therefore inflate the number of sales for the flagship, but it’s still an issue that Samsung’s Galaxy S4 isn’t selling at the pace of either the iPhone 5 or the iPhone 4S when those devices first debuted.

Samsung didn’t do poorly by any standards that normal people would respect: its profits were up to a record $8.3 billion, for instance. But stock price tumbled on the miss of expectations, and fears there’s no longer anywhere to go higher in terms of the global smartphone market. Fears the global market is reaching a saturation point aren’t limited to Samsung; Apple CEO Tim Cook has been discussing the iPhone’s growth potential in recent talks, a subject which wouldn’t come up unless there were worries that wasn’t the case.

Still, the less-than-staggering Galaxy S4 numbers give Apple a big chance to impress in the fall, and for Cook and company to show investors, analysts and company watchers that there is indeed room for continued growth in the smartphone market.

There are challenges inherent in accomplishing that, however; the iPhone coming in the fall is likely an iPhone 5S device, which would be only a slight hardware improvement over the iPhone 5, and not a complete redesign. That could fail to convince some to upgrade. But there’s also the possibility Apple will debut a low-cost version of the iPhone, which could greatly enhance iPhone total sales numbers for the period. Word is this won’t be bargain-basement priced, but as the first addition to the iPhone line that is made concurrent with the flagship model, it’s sure to attract a lot of attention if it ships.

The industry is looking at Samsung and Apple for indication of the health of the global smartphone market, and they’ve found Samsung lacking this time around. That puts a lot of pressure on Apple to perform come fall, but with a newly redesigned mobile OS and a potentially dramatic change to the iPhone product line, Cupertino could be up to the challenge.