The Zortrax Is A 3D Printer From The Polish Motherland

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Zortrax! Drukarka moja! Ty jeste? jak zdrowie. The Zortrax (yeah, really) M200 is a $1,899 3D printer made in Poland that will be shipped internationally by a team of crack Polish engineers and designers. It has a 7×8 inch build plate and can print objects of up to 488 cubic inches. It prints ABS and Nylon and has a specially treated plate so you don’t need to lay Kapton tape down before you build.

The best thing? As the creators note, it comes in a “slick, aluminum” case “that just works.” “It really ties your office space together,” they write. Finally: a 3D-printer company that is thinking about the Feng Shui of your crib. Best of all, this guy makes it for you:

All kidding aside, it’s interesting to see this sort of crowdfunding project coming out of Europe, let alone Poland. The company that created the Zortrax is called Gadgets3D and has headquarters in Poland and Hong Kong. They seem to have a great deal of experience in RepRap kits and the like, and this is their first foray into a fully functional 3D printer for less than $2,000. That they’re taking a chance on the world stage – and that they’re nearly funded – is a testament to the power of crowdfunding sites.

Should you consider the badassedly-named Zortrax vs. something local like Makerbot? I’m not certain. However, if you want a bit of a deal, want to support the Polish motherland, and like your 3D printers to smell like kabanos, this might be the model for you. You can check out the Kickstarter project here.

Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With General Atlantic’s Brett Rochkind

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On this week’s Ask a VC show, we have General Atlantic Managing Director Brett Rochkind in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

Rochkind leads General Atlantic’s Palo Alto office, where he is co-head of the firm’s global Internet & Technology sector. He also recently returned from GA’s Hong Kong office, where he focused on investment opportunities in Greater China and the Asia-Pacific region, including the firm’s investments in Alibaba Group, Renren, Soufun and Lenovo. Rochkind has worked closely with many of GA’s portfolio companies in technology, including Box, Appirio and Bazaarvoice in the United States; Decolar, MercadoLibre and Grupo Linx in Brazil and Latin America; and PowerDsine in Israel.

Considering his experience investing in the technology sector in both Silicon Valley and Asia, we’re curious what companies Rochkind is bullish on in China and the surrounding countries.

Please send us your questions for Rochkind here or put them in the comments below!

Keen On … Antitrust: Why Startup Entrepreneurs Should Fear Google

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Nobody can accuse Gary Reback, the acclaimed Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer, of being intrinsically anti-Google. After all, it was Reback, back in the 90s, who spearheaded the U.S. government’s efforts to sue Google’s nemesis Microsoft – an enormously consequental event for the tech industry that made it possible for start-up entrepreneurs like Larry Page and Sergey Brin to successfully take on the Redmond leviathan. But now, Reback says, Google has, in a sense, become Microsoft, not only by abusing its dominance of the market but also by crushing all opposition to its products and services. “Keep clear of Google,” Reback thus advises any startup entrepreneur with an innovative idea in search.

But Google hasn’t completely become Microsoft, Reback explains. What Google has learned from the Microsoft case, he says, is the importance of playing the political game – a game that Microsoft, at the height of its economic power, couldn’t or wouldn’t play. Thus Google has invested such vast sums in lobbying the U.S. government that, Reback argues, the FTC dropped their case against them because it was “too scared” to go after a company with many powerful friends in the Obama administration. Reback, however, urges government – both in Europe and in the U.S. – to be more resolute in their antitrust case against Google. If EU Competition Commissioner Almunia want to leave a meaningful historical legacy, Reback suggests, he should aggressively confront what he describes as  Google’s “eminently provable” violations of European law. While in the US, Reback advises Edith Ramirez, the new FTC chairperson, to cede the Google antitrust case to the more powerful Justice Department.

So who really cares what happens in some complicated and seemingly never-ending legal case in faraway Brussels or Washington DC, some of you might be saying. But, as everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Ron Conway have realized, politics is critical if we are to enable genuine economic innovation. And just imagine if Gary Reback hasn’t spearheaded that antitrust case against Microsoft back in the 90s? Not only would Google probably not exist, but our thriving Silicon Valley ecosystem would be a pale imitation of what it is today. That’s why Reback may well be prescient in warning that the real loser, if Google isn’t reined in, are startup entrepreneurs, the Larry Pages and Sergey Brins of today, seeking to disrupt well-entrenched monopolies.

Google Play Still Missing Top App Titles From iOS, Many Of Which Are Games

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Many of today’s tech companies and startups are still building their apps for iOS first, despite Android’s growing market share. The problem stems from a lack of in-house talent, fewer Android-owning beta testers, technical hurdles, fragmentation issues, potential for revenue and more. And yet, there’s this general perception that when it comes to the size and scope of the two competing app stores, Google Play and Apple’s iTunes App Store are neck-and-neck. This is not the case.

Leaving the critical metric of revenue aside (Apple is stil reigning there), Google Play is still lacking a large number of the “top” applications, both free and paid.

During the first 20 days in May 2013, only 32 of the top 50 free iOS applications were available in the Google Play store, and only 29 of the top 50 paid applications were available.

The data comes from Canalys, which last week offered similar findings illustrating how both Windows Phone and Blackberry’s app marketplaces were missing top iOS and Android applications. Of the top 50 free and top 50 paid apps featured in the Apple App Store and Google Play in the United States (during the same time frame), the analysts found that only 34 percent were featured in either the Windows Phone store or BlackBerry World.

So one has to wonder what hope either BlackBerry or Windows Phone has, when even a platform as massive as Android struggles to keep up.

“The results show that Google still has some work to do itself to ensure that top iOS titles are making it into the Google Play store,” says Tim Shepherd, Canalys senior analyst, of the new findings.

In terms of the missing iOS apps on Android, he says, some are services — like Twitter’s Vine app or Twitter Music, for example — while others are utilities like flashlights or “emoji” apps, where the functionality is more important than the app’s name itself. Others still, like “Find My Phone,” are Apple ecosystem-specific.

In other words, you can try to make the argument that this data alone can’t paint a complete picture about the discrepancies between the two stores.

But drilling down further where brands and titles do matter, Google Play still came up short in a number of key areas. The standout category where Google Play is missing top iOS titles is games — 9 of the missing 18 apps in the top 50 free iOS titles were games, and 12 of the missing 21 paid iOS titles were also games. Included in this group are Draw Something 2, Robot Unicorn Attack 2, and Sonic Dash on the free side of things, and Kick the Buddy: No Mercy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run, among the paid apps. This seems to indicate that, as studios continue to build out their lineups, they too are often going iOS-first.

Meanwhile, other notable missing apps Canalys spotted include Wood Camera and Camera+ (though there’s an impostor for the latter benefitting from the gap, as is far too common an occurrence, I’ve found). Also missing, as noted above, are Twitter’s latest expansions to video and music, plus several popular utilities.

Though Canalys was focused on the top of the charts, the problem extends much further down into the long tail, which makes the cost of switching from iPhone to Android more difficult for established users. (Having attempted the full switch myself for ages, I speak from experience. My SIM card today is in a Nexus 4, but my apps are on my iPhone 5.)

For example, some apps which early adopters — like TechCrunch readers — may miss when moving to Android include the following:

Social address books Cobook and Brewster; LinkedIn’s CardMunch; Facebook’s Camera and Poke; family messengers Hubble and Tweekaboo; smart assistants and calendaring apps like Tempo, Sunrise, and Cue; Tumblr’s Photoset; photo and social apps like Albumatic, Timehop, Cluster, and Everpix; photo print and card apps Simple PrintsMosaic, and Red Stamp; video apps like Frequency, Squrl, Threadlife, and YouTube’s Capture; Instagram ecosystem apps Gramory, Pic Stitch, and Instaflow; TV brands Bravo, ABC Family, A&E, USA, Lifetime, and TLC; betaworks’ new game dots; hot email app Triage; shopping apps like Poshmark, Threadflip, eBay-owned Svpply’s Want; activity finders Calendo, Now, and Spindle; news apps Circa, Thirst, and Prismatic; and more.

This is from a cursory glance at my own device, mind you. If you have favorite utility, business tool, kid’s games, or something even more narrowly focused – like AngelList-scouring apps aWings or Angie, for example — you’ll generally have better luck on iOS. Younger companies have limited resources for app-building, so they have to choose somewhere to start. And until reports like the latest from App Annie tell them there’s more money to be made on Android, they’ll make the choice that has the most potential to impact their bottom line.

It’s an unfortunate situation, to say the least, because on many fronts — cloud, services like Google Now, plus a willingness to experiment and push forward with innovations like NFC-based mobile payments or air gestures, for instance — Android (and its OEM partners like Samsung) lead.

Today, Android’s footprint is growing, and Samsung is breaking its own records. There’s a hunger out there for something new, but still, those missing apps matter whether they’re at the top of the charts or just those important to you. So for now, the answer to the question about which is the better platform — iOS or Android? — is “both of them.”

(apps image credit: Adobe/Treehouse)

Adobe Acqui-hires Creative Consultancy Ideacodes, Names Co-Founders As Creative Directors Of Creative Cloud

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Adobe just announced that it has acqui-hired Ideacodes, a San Francisco-based creative consultancy that specializes in “the design and user experience of smart application, digital product and networked communities.” Ideacodes’ co-founders Emily Chang and Max Kielser will join Adobe as creative directors of Creative Cloud. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Ideacodes worked on products like the gdgt user interface (now part of the AOL family just like TechCrunch), SOMA Magazine‘s new website (home to an interesting portrait of our own Alexia Tsotsis) and numerous other online properties.

“For the last nine years we’ve worked to re-envision the design of digital products and create the ultimate user experience for their customers,” said Emily Chang and Max Kiesler, co-founders of Ideacodes. “We’re thrilled to join Adobe at a time when Creative Cloud is beginning to take form, the potential to harness the power of connected networks is being realized, and the influence of good design on experience is being appreciated and expected from people worldwide.”

According to Adobe’s Jeff Veen, “The Ideacodes team will help us realize our goal of making Creative Cloud indispensable for creatives worldwide.”

Today’s announcement comes just days after Adobe also acquired mobile developer Thumb Labs. That acquisition, too, was mostly an acqui-hire, as Adobe also noted in its announcement today.

Meetup Surpasses 100 Million RSVPs To 10 Million Meetups

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Meetup has been around for a while, but growth has been staggering of late. The company recently announced that it has surpassed over 10 million meetups and 100 million RSVPs since it launched almost ten years ago.

We sat down with founder and CEO Scott Heiferman to discuss the increased interest in Meetup.com to maybe get better insight into why users are flocking to the idea now.

Meetup is a tool that lets people use the internet to get off of the Internet and meetup in real life. Organizers pay a monthly fee to set up the meetups, and then users from the whole of the community can RSVP to interact with others based on various passions and interests.

The site is now used by one in every seven New Yorkers, though it’s a global product, and there are around 10,000 – 15,000 meetups that happen each and every day. But the big numbers didn’t fly in quickly.

According to Heiferman, the first 50 million RSVPs came over the course of the first seven or eight years, and the second 50 million happened in the past couple years.

“We’re a weird story in our little industry,” said Heiferman. “A lot of people think that if you don’t become Google or Facebook right away, that you don’t matter. There’s some idea of a normal lifecycle for a startup. We were successful from the get-go, but when you’re doing something hard like getting someone to go online to get offline, you have to be in it for the long haul.”

Of course, the boom in mobile has certainly helped Meetup’s growth, but Heiferman actually believes this increased growth has more to do with a larger shift in the way we treat the internet.

Once the internet became mainstream, services like Facebook and Twitter have aligned themselves to provide a friend-filtered form of it. But the web used to be about something different, about finding the others.

According to Heiferman, the old promise of the internet was that you could connect with people who were like you, but that you’d otherwise never meet. That’s why he created Meetup in the first place. Though most people believe that the internet is somehow safer or more friendly now that we see it through the lens of our friends, there is also a growing trend of wanting to connect outside of your own sphere.

“The world is starting to be ready for Meetup, but isn’t really ready yet,” said Heiferman. “But I think we’re about to get there.”

Reminder: The Austin TC Meetup+Pitch-Off Is This Thursday

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Here we go: the TC team will be rolling into Austin on Thursday for our first Meetup+Pitch-Off in the Lone Star State. We’re looking forward to seeing you and meeting our 24 finalists in the Austin Pitch-Off where the winner gets a spot at Startup Alley at Disrupt SF and the chance at greatness on the Disrupt Battlefield stage.

The Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off will be held at The Stage On Sixth promptly at 6pm on May 30, and will come to a close around 10pm.

Tickets include booze (21 and older please), live entertainment in the form of that 60-second pitch-off contest, and there will even be some prizes and a fireside chat with a local Austin luminary, Bijoy Goswami. Tickets to the event are selling out quickly, so if you’d like to come hang out with myself, Matt Burns, and your local tech community, click here and grab a ticket.

We’ll also be joined by Noah Kagan and Bijoy Goswami, two Austin luminaries who will take the stage to talk a bit about the world outside of SXSW. Special thanks to Neeraj at Siminars and Josh Baer for help organizing the program.

Here are the pitch-off finalists. We promised 20 but you got 24 because we couldn’t decide. It should be a cavalcade of amazingness.

  • Flair.me – Flair uses #hashTags and #cuteIcons to give compliments directly to the staff – waiters, bartenders, baristas and entrepreneurs(owners)
  • Sportybird – Sportybird is a cloud-based social platform built for in-game analytics of youth soccer.
  • Synapse – Synapse is a mobile concierge service with social dynamics.
  • Toopher – Prevent online fraud and identity theft using the location-awareness of your smartphone.
  • Teachergraph – TeacherGraph is a cloud-based web app that simplifies parent/teacher communication by organizing important information and interactions into one, easy-to-use tool.
  • Lingo-Live – Lingo Live teaches Spanish & Portuguese online using native professionals all over the world combined with online tutorials.
  • CampusSlice – Campus Slice is crowdfunding site that helps students raise money for college.
  • EyeInTheSky – Created by musicians and music fans, Eye in the Sky is presenting a new model to empower the emerging middle-class musician using our software solution to more easily manage their fans, sales and content across multiple platforms while developing a sustainable career through direct-to-fan connections.
  • SameWave – SameWave is a new breed of performance management software that banishes bad meetings, increases productivity and drives better business execution.
  • DrinkMagnet – Fast and accurate happy hour finder for the iPhone. Using a proprietary drink special database paired with a unique mobile app user experience.
  • GuysKeepScore – GuysKeepScore (GKS) focuses on helping people improve their sex life through gamification.
  • CrowdFeed – The CrowdFeed experience allows fans to engage deeper with performances at concerts and festivals in real-time.
  • First Cut Pro – First Cut Pro’s user-friendly interface allows for feedback on a frame-specific basis when reviewing with internal stakeholders, clients and test audiences which is then assignable to collaborators.
  • Divvy – For people who are overcome with burden of keeping up with their friends on multiple social networks, Divvy combines your Facebook and Instagram photos into one newsfeed and adds features to make them more user friendly.
  • Amumba – Amumba is a social mentoring platform that rewards students for doing the basic things they need to do to excel academically.
  • ModelRevolt – Model Revolt is a subscription-based platform for aspiring and professional models, photographers, and their fans.
  • Polygraph Media – Polygraph makes Facebook “real-time” by mining public interactions on Facebook.
  • Hydrojet-E – Electric motor technology.
  • Scaveit – To change the world you need good ideas … we help you uncover good ideas, find people to make them great, and help you change the world.
  • NoChains – NoChains is about discovering the best restaurants you’ve never heard of, reviewed by the menu not the venue.
  • Camperoo – We’re like OpenTable, for kid’s activities.
  • sxtyscnds – sxtyscnds repurposes proven content (best-selling books, magazines, training-manuals) into “snackable” mobile games.
  • Embarkly – Pre-screened dog boarding near you.

Want to demo your startup on the event floor? Head over here and grab a demo table at the venue. What you’ll get:

  • A table to call your own
  • A tabletop sign
  • Electricity & wi-fi
  • Two tickets!

Don’t miss this chance to show off all night to local VCs, investors, TechCrunch editors, and more.

See you this Thursday!

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

Judicata Raises $5.8M Second Round to Build Out Advanced Legal Research Systems; Keith Rabois Joins Board

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Judicata, a legal research startup, has closed its second round of financing, a $5.8M round led by Khosla Ventures. Keith Rabois, a former PayPal and Square executive who recently joined Khosla Ventures, will take a seat on Judicata’s board. The new round comes just five months after Judicata raised a first $2M round involving Rabois, Peter Thiel, Box co-founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, and David Lee and his firm SV Angel.

I visited Judicata at its offices in San Francisco last Friday to meet the team and see what they are working on. The three founders are Itai Gurari, Blake Masters, and Adam Hahn. Gurari, the CEO, is a lawyer and engineer who worked previously at Jones Day (a large global law firm) and at Google on Google Scholar. Masters, also a lawyer, has done stints at Box, a law firm, and Thiel’s Founders Fund. Hahn, the CTO, was an engineer for over three years at Adap.tv, a video advertising company.

At a high level, Judicata turns unstructured legal text into structured data, and then provides lawyers with a smart interface to that data. The company uses the more user-friendly tagline “mapping the legal genome.” The goal is not to replace lawyers, but to use technology to make them better. Judicata does this with a combination of automated, semi-automated, and manual tools, processes and people on the backend.

This strikes me as the right approach, having attacked many of these problems myself in the past for a Stanford Law School research project that spun out as Lex Machina, another young player in the space (which also raised a financing round recently). Plain English is hard enough for machines to process, but legal text, which few humans can penetrate, and often only then with special training. is even harder. So what Judicata has accomplished so far, and the speed with which it got there, is impressive.

What Judicata has built contrasts starkly with the incumbents in the legal research market, LexisNexis and Westlaw. Those giants, both owned by multinational publishing conglomerates, are severely behind in technology. Lawyers and law students spend years mastering arcane search syntax and poring over page after page of search results. Although both have launched UI-centric product refreshes in recent years, the underlying technology still dates back years, and in some cases decades.

Judicata, and other young legal technology companies, on the other hand, have no crippling legacy code, and instead leverage open source text analytics, search and cloud computing tools and bodies of knowledge that have blossomed in the last decade. (Lex Machina is advised by Andrew Ng and Chris Manning, experts in machine learning and natural language processing in Stanford’s Computer Science Department.) One advantage the incumbents have is large staffs of lawyers who have hand-coded and organized cases for decades. Judicata will do some of this, too, but with a more scalable hybrid human/machine system based on its more advanced technologies.

Why did Judicata raise so much cash and how will they spend it? The founders say this comparatively large round allows them to “do everything, and do it well.” With the technology kernel largely in place, the plan now is to build out structured legal content by subject area and jurisdiction. They hope to have a beta release for California employment law this summer, which will help iron out scaling and other issues before accelerating into nationwide, full-spectrum coverage. Scaling to this level of coverage will take both significant manpower and engineering resources, and to that end, they will soon be hiring engineers and lawyers. Distribution will also be challenging, given the position of the incumbents. For example, to hook lawyers while they’re young, both Lexis and Westlaw give law students free access, send representatives to every law school in the country, and hire current law students to promote their services.

I asked the founders what they thought the future held for Judicata. Despite some big exits in legal technology in the past, Gurari says they want to build an independent operating company that will change the way law is practiced. It’s an ambitious goal, but this team is well-connected, well-funded, and well underway.

Disclosures: Ansel Halliburton worked on the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse, which spun out as Lex Machina, but he does not hold shares in the company. Through his law firm, ComputerLaw Group, he also contributes to chapter updates for a treatise on software law that is published by Thomson Reuters, which owns Westlaw.

The New York Times’ Mobile Guide ‘The Scoop’ Gets A Citi Bike-Sponsored Update

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With today’s update to its iPhone app The Scoop, The New York Times may have accomplished something that advertisers and publishers often boast about but rarely achieve — it may have found a genuinely useful way to incorporate sponsored content.

And the update isn’t only relevant to New Yorkers (who can actually take advantage of The Scoop’s recommendations for the best restaurants, bars, coffee shops and more), but also to observers of the Times as a business, suggesting new ways that the company could monetize its content on mobile. The Times said this is the first time it has featured advertising content outside of an actual ad unit in one of its mobile apps.

The Times’ mobile product manager Dan Blumberg told me that when users open the updated app, the main menu will include an additional icon for Citi Bike, the new bikesharing service operated by NYC Bike Share. When users tap on the icon, they’ll see a map showing data from the Citi Bike app, specifically nearby Citi Bike locations and the current number of bikes and docks. The map will also show the location of Times editorial picks for the best restaurants and coffee shops.

So if you’re thinking about going out and you like to bike, or at least you aren’t set on a specific mode of transportation, this could be a way to figure out where you’re going and how you can get there — something that The Scoop could conceivably have included even if Citi Bike weren’t an advertiser. At the same time, Alexandra Hardiman, executive director of mobile products at the Times, noted that the Citi Bike icon will be clearly marked as sponsored: “There will be no confusion for users about whether or not they’re looking at a piece of advertiser content.”

Hardiman said that this update is “part of a larger strategic relationship” with Citibank, and that there’s no specific end date planned for the integration between The Scoop and Citi Bike. She added that the integration goes both ways, with the bike-sharing service’s own smartphone app adding listings from The Scoop later this summer.

As for how campaigns like this might apply to other Times apps, Hardiman argued that her team has “more latitude” to do something like this in The Scoop, which doesn’t run hard news. (Other standalone apps from The Times include The New York Times Real Estate app and a fashion app called The Collection.) This is very much an experiment, she said, but she could “see lessons coming out of it — things that we could extend to other properties.”

You can download the new version of The Scoop here.

Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker Departs The Company

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Zack Urlocker, the tech industry veteran and open source software expert, has stepped down as COO at next-generation customer service software provider Zendesk, sources tell TechCrunch.

The move hasn’t been announced formally, but Urlocker’s biography and photo are now absent from Zendesk’s official management team webpage. We’ve reached out for comment from Zendesk but have not received word back yet. Update: A Zendesk spokesperson has provided the following confirmation and comment:

“We can confirm that Zack Urlocker has decided to leave Zendesk after helping us grow the company substantially over the past 2 ½ years. He joined when we had 5,000 companies using Zendesk to serve 22 million customers. Today, more than 30,000 companies use Zendesk to give great customer service to more than 200 million people. We thank Zack for the major role he played in getting us to this point, and we wish him well as he spends more time in early stage software companies where he has been active as an advisor, investor and board member.”

The spokesperson also said that Zendesk will not be seeking to fill the vacant COO spot right away. “The operations responsibilities formerly in that role will be shared among our executive team, including with our CEO.”

It’s a significant change at the top executive levels for Zendesk, as Urlocker’s hiring back in December 2010 was seen as a big coup for the company as it looked to continue turbo-charging its growth. Before Zendesk, Urlocker had previously worked as an executive at MySQL where he was instrumental in growing its annual revenues to more than $100 million prior to its $1 billion sale to Oracle in 2008.

In a blog post back in January 2011 one month in to his tenure, Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane described Urlocker’s management style like this:

“Before we hired Zack, I had a long and good talk with Mårten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL. He told me that Zack would come to me with all the stuff that I didn’t want to hear, but needed to hear in order to scale the company. That turned out to be true. In the short time that Zack has been with Zendesk, we have tried to look at our business with new eyes. It’s not always easy, but man, it’s rewarding.”

We’ve also reached out to Urlocker for more details on the departure and what’s next for him, and will be sure to report back with any additional information.

Google Adds In-App Purchases To Chrome Build, Pretty Soon The Web Could Be Mostly Freemium, Too

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Chrome is a platform unto itself, and Google likes to push it forward to make it an ever-more powerful one, too. Next up for the browser and the desktop OS which is built upon it seems to be in-app payments, according to developer and Chromium evangelist François Beaufort (via TheNextWeb). The change means the appification of the web continues, and could pave the way for a Chrome OS that looks a lot more like the kind of mobile platform people are used to.

Right now, the feature is enabled for Chrome Packaged Apps and embeds the Google Wallet App for Chrome to enable in-app transactions, but it’s also limited to the Chrome Canary Build, which is the furthest public build away from the stable consumer release most people use as their daily browser. That means it’s probably a ways away from a general launch, and for right now, it’s not actually being used to let you buy anything, but it’s still a pretty solid sign this is something we’ll eventually see introduced to Chrome apps for the web and Google’s Chromebook devices.

What does that mean for web-based apps? Well, it provides an easier way for developers to put in place the sort of freemium or free-to-play experience that has done so well on mobile. Freemium titles account for an overwhelming percentage of revenue on Android, for instance, as Google spelled out in no uncertain terms at its recent I/O conference.

Coincident with this news are efforts by Mozilla to develop a standard web payments API, something which it says is inspired by the very Google Wallet for Digital Goods API that Google is presumably using to make its own Chrome app payments work. Mozilla doesn’t talk specifically about in-app payments, since it’s targeting the open web and not packaged Chrome apps in particular, but it could also be applied to this problem in theory in the future.

In-app purchases could be the best way for content providers looking to monetize to leverage the habits of increasingly mobile-first users and make money where it’s been difficult before. And tying that to Google Wallet, which has growing reach thanks to the success of Android, is likely a smart way to hasten acceptance among desktop users.

Opera Launches First Preview Of Its Chromium-Based Desktop Browser, Spins Off Email Client

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Opera today launched the first preview version of its Chromium-based desktop browser for Windows and Mac since the company announced the switch from its own browser engine to Google’s in February. This switch has allowed Opera to add new features like support for Google’s SPDY protocol into its browser, but Opera Next includes quite a few more new features than just a new engine.

Opera, for example, has revamped its Speed Dial new tab page, which allows you to easily filter your shortcuts and sort them into folders. The browser now also finally features just a single bar for URLs and search queries, just like Chrome. It’s also been given a full user interface redesign, which now gives the browser a markedly more modern look.

The team also developed a new customizable news discovery feature that “allows you to lean back and get fed with new articles from your country, or whatever region you want to get inspiration from, right in your browser – all in one place.” It’s basically Google News in your browser and includes the ability to filter stories by category (arts, food, technology, etc.). It’s not clear how Opera chooses which stories to display here, but after a short test, it feels like the service aggregates a good number of relevant sources, and the Pinterest-like layout works well for quickly scanning the news.

Also new in this version is Opera’s new “Stash” view, which allows you to quickly bookmark sites (just press the heart icon in the URL bar) and then later compare them with a resizable page preview. This feature, the company says, should be especially useful when you are comparison shopping or doing travel research. Here is what this looks like:

It’s clear that the switch to Chromium and Google’s rendering engine is already making the browser feel faster and allowing the company to focus a bit more on the features that can differentiate it from the competition instead of having to worry about its own rendering engine.

In return, however, the new version is also missing quite a few features. The browser, of course, still includes some Opera staples like the Turbo mode (now called “off-road mode”), but gone are Opera Notes, Link, tab thumbnails and a number of other features Opera users have been accustomed to. It’s not clear if they will come back in later versions.

Opera Mail

With this launch, Opera has also spun out the formerly built-in email client, which is now available as a standalone product. It’s a surprisingly lightweight mail client that may actually have a leg up on some of the recent startups that have tried to reinvent email. Opera Mail easily lets you attach labels to messages and filter out emails with attachments like documents, images, videos and audio files.

CrunchWeek: Yahoo’s $1.1B Tumblr Purchase, Lyft’s Big Raise, And Microsoft’s Xbox One

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It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show where a few of us writers chat up the most interesting stories from the past seven days.

Ryan Lawler, Greg Kumparak, and I chatted about Yahoo’s $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr (and the reports that the company is eyeing a purchase of Hulu); Lyft’s $60 million raise from Andreessen Horowitz and the big reveal of Microsoft’s next generation gaming console, the Xbox 1.

Tune in above for more!