Hiring Developers? Codassium Combines Collaborative Code Editing And Video Chat Into One Web App

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As just about any startup in the valley world could tell you, hiring good developers is one helluva process.

First you’ve gotta find the rare developer who isn’t already drowning in job offers. Then you’ve gotta sit down and chat ‘em up to make sure they’ll be a good fit for your team. Then you’ve gotta make sure they can actually, you know, code. All in all, the process can take weeks, with a dozen false-starts along the way.

By combining a collaborative code editor with live video chat, Codassium makes the process a bit less painful.

While I personally find the idea of coding on-the-fly while someone I hope will give me lots of money stares at my face terrifying, it’s a pretty standard part of the developer interview process. Sometimes the interviewer will ask you to code out a bit of functionality with whatever language they use internally to gauge just how well you grok the nuances. Sometimes they’ll ask you how you might make a certain operation more efficient. Other times, they’ll just throw in a bit of broken code and say “Quick! Find the bug!” while sounding an air raid alarm and blasting a fire extinguisher in your face*.

Generally, this part of the process entails having the interviewee come into your office (which, in many cases, means flying them out to wherever you may be), or trying to juggle a video chat app like Skype alongside something like Collabedit. Codassium takes those two pieces of the puzzle, crams them together, and sticks them in one browser window.

Using Codassium is quite simple. You click one button to start a chat, give your browser permission to access your webcam, then share the unique URL with whoever else you want to join in on the conversation. I’m not sure if they’ve set a hard cap on how many people can be video chatting in one room at once, but I was able to cram in 6 talking heads before I ran out of room onscreen.

Codassium is built with Google’s rather awesome (if a bit nascent) WebRTC framework. The upside: that means the video chat works without Flash or any other third-party plugin. The downside: it also means that it currently only works in Chrome (or a pretty recent nightly build of Firefox).

While Codassium isn’t quite as fully-featured as something like Sublime Edit (it currently lacks support for tabs, for example), it has most of the basic bases covered. It handles tabs as you’d expect, and does syntax highlight for most of the major languages, from Python and Javascript to C++ and Objective-C.

While I don’t see myself leading any developer interviews anytime soon (I’m a half-way decent coder, if I do say so myself, but we’ve got people waaaaay more suited for that task here at TC), I like it for a totally different reason. I recently took a bit of a hiatus from writing to brush up on a few rusty skills, coding including. I’m fortunate enough to have a few friends who are way better coders than I am, and they were often willing to lend a hand whenever I’d get stuck trying to wrap my head around a particularly tough topic. This usually meant hopping on the phone and pasting bits of code back and forth over Skype, which was… not awesome. I would’ve loved to have something like Codassium in my toolbox at the time.

Codassium is built by Wreally Studios, a small firm out of LA that just builds a lot of neat stuff. If you’re a journo or some other archetype that often finds themselves transcribing audio recordings, be sure to check out their audio player/notepad mashup app, Transcribe, as well.

[* I dont know if this actually happens, but I like to imagine that it does.]

YC-Backed Kippt, An “Evernote For The Web”, Lures Developers With New API, App Gallery

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Kippt, which lets you collect and share content from across the web, is looking to attract developers with a brand-new API and gallery of apps.

The two-person startup has relied on outside developers to have a mobile presence on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Kippt just returned to San Francisco from Helsinki, almost a year after graduating from Y Combinator’s summer batch.

“An API is not only good for us, but it’s good for our users,” said Karri Saarinen, who co-founded Kippt and leads design. “There are some companies that fear this kind of openness will somehow harm the company, but we feel it brings value.”

He pointed to more than a dozen third-party apps that bring Kippt to the iPhone or turn it into an elegant mobile reading list. Popular reading app Pocket added support for Kippt recently, too. Saarinen said that some developers have already organized hack days around the API.

It’s steady progress for the product, which started as a side project while Kippt’s other co-founder Jori Lallo was collaborating with Leah Culver on message board app Convore.

Over time, however, Kippt started to take on a life of its own. Like a more evolved version of early social bookmarking site Delicious, Kippt is a tool that lets people save and organize links into lists and share them with friends and work colleagues.

A recent redesign made the tool much more visual with image previews and a Pinterest-like layout for collections of links. Saarinen shies away from the word “bookmarking,” though. The idea with the recent redesign was to make saving links much more about the content rather than the URLs.

“People know what bookmarking is, but that they also have this preconceived idea of what it should do,” he said.

Kippt has a freemium revenue model: There’s a pro version for $25 a year that won’t have any advertising and will give people unlimited links.



Glass Explorer Edition To Ship Within The Next Month, Google Confirms

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Today during Google Venture’s “Glass Collective” event, Google told us that it hopes to get the Glass hardware into the hands of developers “within the next month.” The exact date for when Google plans to ship the first publicly available versions of Glass remains unknown, but Google has now confirmed to us that it is now very close to shipping the $1,500 devices to developers.

Shipping Glass within the next month, of course, makes sense, given that Google will host its annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco from May 15 to 17. Glass will surely take center stage at this event, and if Google wants to get developers excited about the project and talk about (and launch) Glass’ Mirror API during I/O, it needs to get the hardware into the hands of developers soon.

Last year, Google allowed I/O attendees to pre-register for Glass, but the company never really reached out to these developers since — except for sending them glass blocks with their wait-list number engraved on it.

Google also recently allowed others to compete for the right to be among the first to buy Glass by posting their reasons for wanting Glass on Twitter and Google+. That project, which was going to bring about 8,000 additional early testers into the Glass community, was heavily criticized because it seemed Google (and the company it partnered with for this) just picked people randomly. Google later rescinded some of these invitations.

Users who won the right to buy Glass have to pick it up in person in L.A., San Francisco or New York. It’s not clear if developers will have to do the same, but it would make sense for Google to allow developers to pick their kits up at I/O.

Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins And Andreessen Horowitz Team Up As "Glass Collective" To Invest In Google Glass Ecosystem

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Today, Google Ventures announced a partnership with two of the biggest technology venture capital firms in the world, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, on what they’re calling the “Glass Collective.” While this isn’t a fund, the three firms will be sharing seed investment dealflow for entrepreneurs and developers who are working on Google Glass software and hardware. If one firm sees an interesting opportunity, it will go to the others with it. The hope of this collective effort is to kickstart the developer ecosystem for Glass and bring it to mainstream users as soon as possible.

Steve Lee, product lead on the Glass team, confirmed that Google will start shipping, hopefully within the next month, the Glass Explorer kits to developers who showed interest in Glass when it was introduced last year at Google I/O. So the three firms want to get in front of the activity that is currently, and will be in the future, happening in the ecosystem. With the billions of dollars that the firms have, it’s safe to say that they’d like to corner the market on Glass investments immediately. This is similar to the approach that Kleiner Perkins took with its iFund, which has invested more than $450 million into mobile applications.

While the forming of the group doesn’t guarantee that the two firms will participate in a round of funding for any given project, the firms do tend to invest in other companies together already, so sharing what they’re seeing among one another makes sense. It was also made clear that there are no plans to bring in any other firms, so the “Glass Musketeers” will be going at this on their own.

During the announcement, Google Ventures’ Bill Maris was joined by Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. The three discussed their excitement for the immediate potential of Google Glass as a platform, not just a wearable computing product. The Glass API, called “Mirror,” was announced and shown off at this year’s SXSW.

Before the meeting started, we were able to test out the latest iteration of Glass, which has come a long way in just the past few months from what I could tell. That fact, tied with the obvious implications for real businesses to form around Glass, made these firms want to jump in early.

Maris started off by discussing his introduction to Glass:

I first saw and heard about glass from Sergey when it was just an idea of his. The early prototype didn’t function like the one you see today. As the team got built and the device has evolved, it’s more obvious that we could be sitting on the edge of a paradigm shift, similar to the ones we saw with browsers and mobile phones.

It didn’t take much to get Andreessen and Doerr interested, as Maris says he barely got “Glass” out of his mouth before both said yes in separate phone calls. From those calls and discussion with the Glass team on how Google Ventures could get involved, the “Glass Collective” was born. Doerr went on to say that this group felt it “getting the band together again.” Kleiner Perkins was an early investor in Google, of course, and Doerr was also involved with Andreessen when he was working on the Mosaic web browser, which turned into Netscape, another Kleiner Perkins investment.

Yep, that’s the future.

Doerr’s excitement can be summed up in this statement:

We all know the power of platforms. When you have a great product and robust APIs that will unlock the imagination of entrepreneurs, amazing things happen. We saw it with the web, we saw it with the app store.

Andreesen was more succinct, saying: “You put on Glass and you say yep, that’s the future.”

The recurring theme of this meeting, which Google co-founder Sergey Brin eventually rolled into on his bike, was that Google Glass is the next evolution of browsing the web and mobile devices, all wrapped up into one.

The possibilities for Glass do seem infinite. As far as applications are concerned, there are still those who feel like the device will face criticism from privacy experts, citing the ability for rogue applications to be developed for nefarious activities. Today, these firms say that they will treat Glass investments like any other investment in that they won’t be funding any application that isn’t good for consumers in the end.

As far as what those applications could be, Maris, Andreesen, Doerr and Brin shared some of their ideas for Glass that could make an impact in the world and bring a bit more fun to it. Andreesen would like to see an interactive zombie game on the fun side, but feels like the implications for Glass’ usage in healthcare, for surgeons and patients, could be huge.

Doerr agreed and added his hopes of seeing Glass used in the education sector to help remove some of the isolation in today’s learning environment. The person who has spent the most time with Glass, Sergey Brin, would like to use Glass as a viewfinder for his digital SLR camera and tracking his heart rate and performance while riding his bike.

So far, the applications that have been conceived and built during Glass’ early hackathons have been promising, the Glass team said today.

The Glass Collective’s first investment could be coming soon, as Maris stated that there are a few developers working on interesting things that might need some money to get going, and Doerr added that Path and Twitter are already thinking about the applications that they can build on top of the Glass device and platform.

With the experience and history of these three firms, it’s safe to say that other collectives like this will have a hard time getting set up and launched in time to make early deals. When you have the ability, as an entrepreneur, to get access to three world-class investment firms, one of which has direct access to the Google Glass team, it will be hard to justify taking your idea elsewhere. One thing is for sure, Google Glass isn’t going to be the easiest sell to consumers, as it takes some time getting your eyes used to seeing notifications pop up in front of your face. To be successful though, these firms don’t think that it needs millions of adopters to get entrepreneurs excited about building things on the platform.

IRS Doesn’t Deny Snooping Emails Without A Warrant

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The IRS refuses to deny whether its Criminal Tax Division rummages through suspected tax dodgers’ emails without a warrant. In response to the American Civil Liberties Union request for its privacy policy, the IRS dumped 247 records, revealing that the agency definitely believed it could access emails without a warrant before a court deemed the practice illegal. The agency is conspicuously silent on whether it still applies those old spying rules.

“The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communication,” wrote IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief Counsel in 2009.

Under a law widely acknowledged as an antiquated privacy law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), governments can access emails opened or older than 180 days without a search warrant. The giant loophole was responsible for the notorious resignation of General David Petraeus after the FBI gained access to his mistress’ incriminating emails.

Recognizing that people now regularly store email in the cloud indefinitely, a federal court in U.S. v. Warshak needed probable cause to compel a company like Google to hand over access.

Here’s the kicker: The IRS won’t say whether it now applies the privacy protections in Warshak to its investigations. Sometimes, what isn’t said can mean more than what is.

Sendicate Takes Its Email Newsletter Service Out Of Beta, Launches An API

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Sendicate, a startup aiming to make it easy for businesses to create beautiful email newsletters, is moving out of beta testing today with the launch of version 1.0. In addition to removing the beta label, the company is launching an API, so that other products can integrate with the Sendicate service.

When the company launched its open beta in November, it was pitched as an attempt to reinvent email newsletters for the present day without being weighed down by legacy technology. In advance of today’s launch, co-founder and CEO Chad Jackson also said that Sendicate is an attempt to meet the needs of publishers, marketers and e-commerce sites that want something more than a generic email service but can’t afford an expensive enterprise product.

“There’s really nothing in the middle,” Jackson said. “If you have 100,000-plus customers, you’re stuck with the same tools as someone running a list with five people. … [With] the really enterprise level tools, you can’t even create an account with them. If you say, ‘Hey I want to send 50,000 emails,’ they won’t even talk to you.”

You can see Sendicate in-action in the video below. One of the main points being emphasized is the ability to try out your newsletter with a wide range of customizable design templates, with the content being tweaked to match each template. It also has a slick, simple interface for managing your messages and subscribers. As for pricing, there’s a self-serve option that’s free for customers with fewer than 500 subscribers, with an increasing monthly fee that reaches $499 for more than 75,000 subscribers. And Jackson said Sendicate is also launching a concierge/managed version, which will include “dedicated account management, design and strategic services, template production, results optimization, custom integrations, etc.”

And now, thanks to the API, customers can use Sendicate with other services. So far, the API has been used to build integrations with mobile guestbook Guest’d , web automation service Zapier, and e-commerce service Magento (in the form of a Magento plug-in). I’ve been told to point potential partners to this Ruby gem which is supposed to help with API integration.

Even in the beta period, the company says that it sent more than 10 million emails from more than 2,000 customers, and that in March, email volume went up 40 percent while revenue went up 50 percent. (Those customers include Bobbi Brown / Estee Lauder, LiveIntent, Gyft, Focus Forward, and A Hotel Life.) Jackson also pointed out that Sendicate was an honoree in the Webby Awards – specifically the web services and applications category.

Sendicate is also announcing that it has brought on Evan Whalen as CTO and co-founder.

Google Wants To Operate .Search As A “Dotless” Domain, Plans To Open .Cloud, .Blog And .App To Others

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If it gets it, Google wants to turn .search into a “dotless domain,” the company told ICANN a few days ago. Last year, Google applied to manage the .app, .blog, .cloud and .search generic top-level domain (gTLD) names as part of a major expansion of the domain-name system.

ICANN, which is managing this expansion, hasn’t awarded any of the gTLDs yet, and the whole program remains controversial. But in May, Google sent a letter to ICANN telling the organization that it would soon provide some specific details about its plans for these top-level domain names. Now, Google has done so through its Charleston Road Registry subsidiary (we have embedded the full letter below).

At the time, it looked like Google was ready to open up these gTLDs to the public and wasn’t just planning on using them for its own services. In its letter to ICANN, Google now confirms that it is working with “the relevant communities related to .blog and .cloud to develop technical standards relating to the operation of those top-­level domains.”

Google’s Plans For A Dotless .Search

The most interesting plan here is to use .search to operate a redirect service on the “on the ‘dotless’ .search domain (http://search/) that, combined with a simple technical standard, will allow a consistent query interface across firms that provide search functionality, and will enable users to easily conduct searches with firms that provide the search functionality that they designate as their preference.”

Dotless domains (think http://example and email addresses like mail@example) are something ICANN has discussed for a while now and that security experts are not in favor of. Google plans to run http://search/ as a redirect service that “allows for registration by any search website providing a simple query interface.”

“The mission of the proposed gTLD, .search, is to provide a domain name space that makes it easier for Internet users to locate and make use of the search functionality of their choice,” Google writes in its amended application.

What exactly this will look like in practice remains to be seen, however. It’s definitely a novel use of the domain system, and judging from the amended application, Google will open this functionality up to third-party developers and its direct competitors.

Of course, it remains to be seen who will actually get to manage .search. Besides Google, Amazon, dot Now Limited, and Donuts.co have also applied for this gTLD.

.Blog, .App and .Cloud

The .blog TLD, Google says, “should be simple and easy for .blog registrants to associate their second-­level domain with their blog on the blogging platform of their choice.” New .cloud domains, too, should have a direct association with “projects hosted in cloud platforms.” While it’s not clear how Google plans to do this, the letter notes that the company is working on a set of technical standards that will “allow users to automatically link their domain name to their blog at the time of registration.”

As for .app, Google plans to restrict this TLD to use by “relevant developer communities” without restricting it to a specific platform.

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Well, That Was Fast: Twitter Already Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

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This morning, payments startup Ribbon announced support for “in-stream” payments on Twitter.com, allowing users to click a button directly within a tweet in order to make a purchase without having to leave the Twitter.com website. However, it appears that Twitter has already shut this feature down – almost immediately after its public debut.

Ribbon Co-founder Hany Rashwan has confirmed that Twitter has indeed shut them down, and the company is now in the process of trying to contact Twitter to discuss. We’ve also reached out to Twitter with questions, and will update if and when we hear back.

It’s possible that the way Ribbon implemented the in-stream payments using Twitter Cards (via the Player Card model) was a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service. What’s interesting is how quickly Twitter reacted to the situation, which makes one wonder who might have brought the violation, or issue, to Twitter’s attention.

For background, Ribbon, which is something of a “bit.ly for payments,” previously allowed Twitter users to click and link and be redirected to a separate page offering a simple, one-page checkout experience. But today, it introduced a new, more integrated option for payments, which took advantage of Twitter Card functionality to allow for payment processing directly on Twitter.com.

On an expanded tweet, users could just click a “Buy Now” button, enter their email and credit-card info, then click “Pay.” The entire checkout experience took place on Twitter.com itself – the idea being that by not redirecting you off-site like PayPal does, merchants can increase their conversion rates.

However, now those same tweets no longer offer in-stream checkout, but instead point users to click a “view on web” link taking them to the Ribbon.co checkout page. You can see the new and current (degraded) experiences in the screenshots below.

Before:

After:

Update, 1:20 pm PT: Ribbon posted a statement on its blog:

At 11:00 AM PST, we launched the ability to do payments in-stream on Twitter without ever leaving a tweet. Top publications like TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOM, The Next Web and others all wrote about the news. More importantly, hundreds of tweets came in about this news, and people were genuinely excited about using this.

At around 12:24 PM PST, with no heads up, our integration of Twitter Cards was taken down, and now Ribbon links go back to Ribbon.co without the in-stream buying experience.

Before we released this, we made sure to validate our Twitter Card implementation (screenshot below), and all lights were green. We’ve had discussions with Twitter in the past, and are eager to find a way to work together. This is clearly something that’s good for not only Twitter, but also for Twitter users all over the world.

We look forward to seeing what happens in the future regarding this.

Internet Pioneer Dwight Merriman To Speak At Disrupt NY This Month

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We’re very pleased to announce that Dwight Merriman, the co-founder and former CTO of DoubleClick and now the co-founder of hot New York startup 10gen, will be joining us onstage at Disrupt NY this month. He’s been at the forefront of Internet advertising and engineering for the past two decades and is an icon of New York startups.

DoubleClick began life in 1995 by serving some of the first banner ads on the web. Merriman led its technology side for the first 10 years, through an IPO in 1998 and a merger as it grew to become a main way that websites made money. Google eventually bought it in 2007 for $3.1 billion, and the company now exists as part of its core display ads business.

Merriman is now the chairman and co-founder of 10gen, which sponsors the widely used open source NoSQL database MongoDB. The company has been quietly surging, with total funding north of $80 million and an employee headcount expected to reach 500 in the next couple of years.

He joins our growing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, super angel Ron Conway, and more to be announced in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Tickets are currently available with the early-bird discount ending tomorrow, April 11.

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

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Dwight Merriman
Chairman & Co-Founder, 10gen

Dwight is one of the original authors of MongoDB, the open-source document database. In 1995, he co-founded DoubleClick (acquired by Google for $3.1 billion) and served as Chief Technology Officer for 10 years. Dwight was the architect of the DoubleClick ad serving infrastructure, DART, which serves tens of billions of ads per day.

Earlier he was Co-Founder, Chairman, and the original architect of Panther Express (merged with CDNetworks), a content distribution network (CDN) technology. Dwight is also a Co-Founder of, and investor in, Business Insider and Gilt Groupe.

Dwight received a B.S. with honors in Systems Analysis from Miami University of Ohio.

[image via tie.org]

Bitcoin Suffers A Correction Amid Apparent DDOS Attacks On Some Exchanges

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Bitcoin is undergoing a classic correction after quintupling in price over the past 30 days. The currency, which was trading as high as $265 earlier today on Mt. Gox, plummeted and is now trading at around $150.

We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what happened. But another San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill is saying that the crypto-currency is falling because of there are apparent distributed denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox and Bitstamp. A denial of service attack happens when an attacker overwhelms a target with external requests, so that it can’t honor regular requests from legitimate users.

This also happened last week when Mt. Gox when Bitcoin reached $142 and hackers attacked the exchange. At that point, Mt. Gox said it had suffered ”its worst trading lag ever.”

The Tokyo-based exchange said last week that hackers are engaging in a strategy to manipulate the price of the currency: “Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit.”

It looks like this may be happening again. Aside from that, any kind of 400 percent increase over 30 days is probably unsustainable from a technical point of view. A correction at this point would be healthy and natural.

Movile Helps Users Get Connected With Apps To Find And Share Access To Free Mobile Hotspots

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Mobile content company Movile has over the last several years distributed content and applications for a primarily Latin American audience. But what happens when a mobile user isn’t connected to a wireless data network? To help solve this problem, Movile has introduced a pair of applications that will help users connect to free WiFi networks.

The apps are named Free Zone and Wifipass and both are designed to let users know when they’re near WiFi hotspots that they’re able to connect to. But they differ in that Free Zone focuses on connections to open public hotspots, while WifiPass enables users to more easily get access to networks which are password-protected.

Movile is increasingly making its products available in other markets, such as the U.S. and Europe. Take, for instance, the launch of Zeewee TV, a Facebook-based video app for viewing Spanish-language television content. Bringing Free Zone and WifiPass to a global market is just one more way that Movile is seeking to connect with users even if they’re not based in Latin America.

Already, Free Zone has been wildly popular in Latin America, drawing more than seven million users in its home market, without really marketing it elsewhere. The app scans for and alerts users when they’re near open WiFi networks that they can freely connect to with a single tap.

The number of smartphone users is rapidly growing in the region, but wireless data access is still spotty and can be expensive. Free Zone enables users with WiFi-capable devices to gain access to the Internet without having to pay outrageous fees to do so. Eduardo Henrique, head of U.S. operations for Movile, says that more than 7.2 million free WiFi access points are available on the app. And, well, the more users who are connected to the Internet, the more users there will be looking at Movile content.

Anyway, that’s great for the Latin American market, but in other places around the world, people can be a little more protective of their WiFi networks. With that in mind, Movile has released WifiPass, a more U.S.-centric app that connects with Facebook and allows its users to share password-protected WiFi hotspots with their friends. The app works by allowing users to connect without having to jot down and manually enter in SSID and passwords. It also allows users to save WiFi network info and connect to them later.

For now, Wifipass is only available for Android, which is kind of a bummer for iPhone users like me. But Free Zone is available for both iOS devices and Android.

ComiXology Reverses Ban On The Latest Issue Of Saga, Says Apple Isn’t To Blame

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ComiXology just published a blog post discussing (and ultimately backing down from) a recent decision to ban the latest issue of Saga from its iOS comics store.

Yesterday, Saga writer Brian K. Vaughan described the situation thusly: “Unfortunately, because of two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex, Apple is banning tomorrow’s SAGA #12 from being sold through any iOS apps.”

Judging from what I’ve seen, the online reaction was pretty negative, and deservedly so — not just because the images in question were indeed pretty small, but also because Saga has included graphic sex and violence in the past without trouble. It didn’t help that the title is the big success story in creator-owned comics from the past year.

Over at the science-fiction site io9, Charlie Jane Anders wrote: “Apple’s stone-cold vision of the future has no room for gay people, at least not if they’re going to express their sexuality.” And the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund published a post (which includes the images in question) noting that distribution of the comic is protected by the First Amendment. To be clear, the CBLDF didn’t question “Apple’s rights as a private company to refuse to carry the comic,” but it wanted to make sure comic book stores weren’t scared into following that example.

Turns out, however, Apple wasn’t to blame, at least according to ComiXology CEO David Steinberger. He wrote that it was ComiXology, not Apple, that made the decision — although it was based on the startup’s understanding of Apple’s policies. Steinberg also insisted that the decision wasn’t based on sexual orientation: “We did not interpret the content in question as involving any particular sexual orientation, and frankly that would have been a completely irrelevant consideration under any circumstance.”

He went on to say that ComiXology is reversing its decision and will begin selling Saga #12 soon — and it sounds like Apple may not have been too happy about the controversy: “After hearing from Apple this morning, we can say that our interpretation of its policies was mistaken. You’ll be glad to know that Saga #12 will be available on our App Store app soon.”

Mozilla Makes Leadership Changes: CEO Gary Kovacs To Step Down Later This Year, Mitchell Baker Becomes Executive Chair

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Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox, Firefox OS and other online tools, today announced that its CEO Gary Kovacs, who joined Mozilla in 2010, will step down “later this year.” The organization has already started a search for his replacement. Kovacs will remain a member of Mozilla’s board of directors.

Previous to becoming Mozilla’s CEO, Kovacs was the senior vice president of markets, solutions and products at Sybase (through its acquisition by SAP), the general manager and vice president of mobile and devices at Adobe and the vice president of product marketing at Macromedia.

More Leadership Changes At Mozilla

In addition, Mozilla is making some changes to its leadership team. Mitchell Baker, for example, will become the executive chair “as she returns to a deeper involvement in Mozilla’s daily activities.” Her focus will be on “ensuring that organizations and individual contributors have the tools they need to make meaningful contributions to unlock the potential of the Web.”

Jay Sullivan, who was previously Mozilla’s senior vice president of products, will now become its COO and Harvey Anderson has been appointed senior vice president for business and legal affairs. Li Gong has been appointed senior vice president for mobile devices, in addition to his current role as the organization’s president of its operations in Asia. Brendan Eich will remain Mozilla’s CTO and senior vice president of engineering.

These changes, Mozilla says, come as it is building up its “pivot to mobile.”

Gary Kovacs

As Mitchell Baker, who was Mozilla’s CEO from 2004 to 2008, notes in a blog post today that Kovacs joined Mozilla “to make a dramatic pivot — to move Mozilla from the desktop browser world into the mobile ecosystem.” She also noted that he has “reinvigorated our focus on working with commercial partners, a trait that was central in Mozilla’s early life but less so during the Firefox desktop era.”

Kovacs himself notes in today’s announcement that “the past two and a half years have been pivotal in the evolution and rapid growth of Mozilla. I am very proud of our accomplishments as a team. In our mission to empower the next two billion Web users, we’ve made great advances in desktop and mobile and in our ability to lead at the pace of the market. With this solid foundation and a strong team in place, this is the right time for me to announce the transition plan and a vote of confidence in the abilities of the leadership team. I am grateful for the privilege of leading this organization during this period of rapid growth, and I look forward to helping guide Mozilla’s impact on the future of mobile.”

In an interview with AllThingsD, he also notes that he is leaving Mozilla “to move back to something more commercial.”

Google’s Forthcoming Chat Client “Babel” Shows Up All Over The Web In Screenshots, Bug Reports, Forums & More

Google-Babel

Google Babel, the forthcoming unified messenger service from Google that’s all but confirmed thanks to a number of screenshots, bug reports, developer forum posts and more, is now being said to only include Google Talk, Google Hangouts and Messenger in its initial release. Google Voice integration, apparently, is on the back burner.

This is the latest from Android enthusiast site Droid-Life, which is reporting that Google Voice will eventually come to the platform, but not at launch. The service will include notification syncing across devices and platforms, which is similar to Apple’s iMessage in that it will work on desktop, tablet and phone, the report states citing undisclosed sources.

The site also claims to have gotten its fingers on a Google memo about Babel, which details the feature set, noting that it works on the desktop via a Chrome app, includes Google+ Hangouts, offers cross-platform notifications, includes over 800 emoji+, has the ability to go on or off record like in Google Chat, and will even involve an iOS native application.

This news follows earlier reports (which Droid-Life backs up in its post) from TechRadar. That site says that the name is in fact Babel and not “Babble,” per the original Geek.com leak. That’s something it learned from screenshots sent by an anonymous source. (See below)

From TechCrunch’s own ex-Googler sources, we’ve confirmed this service is coming, and we’ve also been pointed to bug reports (not publicly accessible), which reference the name “Google Babel.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean Babel will be the commercial name for the product once it goes live, but it does confirm that it’s the name being used internally.

We were also pointed to this Google+ post, which reconfirms the name, again thanks to a bug report. The post reads:

And here we are – first sign of the Google Babel Android app!

/data/data/com.google.android.apps.babel/lib/libvideochat_jni.so

Looks like there will be video…

Source:https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/issues/detail?id=826

Most official Google apps start with “com.google.android.apps” like inhttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.docsor https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.plus

So let’s keep an eye on this url https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.babel

This post included a screenshot as well:

The name “Babel” has also been popping up in Gmail (source 1, source 2 – verified by AndroidPolice.com)

You can actually find information about Babel all over the web if you’re looking in the right spot. For example, a ton of bug reports discussed here, hereherehere and elsewhere on Google Groups refer to Babel by name.

Screenshots below:

Gmail’s Google Groups page also has a post from a user who spotted Babel (which looks like the image that later made it to Google+):

So while the above don’t confirm the final product name or launch date (probably Google I/O, though), it definitely looks like Babel is the real deal. Now, who wants to a leak an APK?

Lead image credit: Phonearena

Payments Startup Ribbon Now Lets You Buy In-Stream On Twitter.com, Launches YouTube Support & Price-Matches PayPal

ribbon-logo-2

Ribbon, the AngelPad-backed payments startup that introduces a simpler checkout experience when buying from merchants online or via social media, is today rolling out two big new features: support for YouTube payments and a new Twitter “in-stream” payment option that lets you buy without ever clicking away from Twitter.com. The company has also reduced its fees in order to be more competitive with payments competitors like PayPal and Stripe.

You can think of Ribbon as a “bit.ly with payments,” co-founder Hany Rashwan once said when describing the service. That is, Ribbon offers sellers a shortened URL that can then be shared in an email or anywhere on the web, including Twitter, Facebook, or even a seller’s own website or e-commerce shop, for instance. Clicking a Ribbon link takes users to an easy-to-use, one-page checkout. But what makes Ribbon unique is how it’s been working to bring that simplified checkout directly to the supported platforms themselves.

That makes it different from something like Chirpify or Soldsie, where people comment or reply “buy” on social media sites in order to make a purchase. Instead, Ribbon is looking to bring an integrated checkout directly to Facebook and Twitter, and soon others, like Pinterest.

Rashwan says the commenting process used by others is not ideal. “We tried letting people reply ‘buy’ to purchase an item, but the flow was just too long for us. It didn’t make sense for our buyers,” he says. People  were clicking the links and heading to the one-page checkout instead of interacting with the tweet, Rashwan explains.

However, the one-page checkout is still an option for those viewing the tweet on platforms that don’t offer true in-stream payments, such as Twitter’s native apps and its mobile website – these currently instruct users to “view on web” pointing them to Ribbon.co to make the purchase.

Today’s launch of Twitter in-stream payments is similar to the support Ribbon added earlier this year for making in-stream purchases directly from the Facebook News Feed. Ribbon uses Twitter Card technology to make the process work. And the process of buying is simple. On the expanded tweet, you just click the “Buy Now” button, enter your email and credit-card info, then click “Pay.” Everything takes place on Twitter.com itself – the idea being that by not redirecting you off-site like PayPal does, merchants can increase their conversion rates.

Meanwhile, YouTube is now supported as well, but Ribbon is not as integrated (yet) as it is on Twitter and Facebook. Via YouTube annotations, a video’s viewers can click a link that pops up over the video, which takes them to a Ribbon one-page checkout. Below is an example of how that looks.

Rashwan says that already Ribbon has over 10,000 merchants who have adopted the payments platform. Some are using Ribbon to sell, others to collect donations – like the American Cancer Society, for example, which used Ribbon’s API to create custom links for participants in its Relay for Life. Other sellers have included LitMotors, which has been using Ribbon to take reservations, jazz musician Eric Harland has been selling tickets, and Grammy-nominated artist Paul Wall has been selling songs.

Now that Ribbon has grown a bit, it’s also reducing its fees. Previously, The company charged 5 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, which was higher than Stripe and PayPal which charge 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, and Gumroad which is 5 percent plus 25 cents.

Today, Ribbon has lowered its prices to 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction.

Payouts are now possible every two weeks instead of monthly, and the goal, of course, is to shorten that time frame even further.

“The reason we didn’t do this at the very beginning is that we wanted to make sure that we built something that people wanted that wasn’t solely based on price,” says Rashwan of the price drop. “We wanted to compete on features first.”

Though having pulled in $1.6 million in seed funding also likely helps with that pricing change, too.

Rashwan declined to share details as to the numbers or size of the transactions on Ribbon’s service today, but hinted at its growth noting that 55 percent of March’s transactions occurred within the last week of that month, and 35 percent took place the week prior. The recent bump in adoption, though, could be attributed to the mid-February press coverage the startup had after closing its seed round – it’s too soon to extrapolate those numbers out to imply longer-term commitments from its early adopters.

But the funding has helped the company grow its team (13 by June), and gives it about a year-and-a-half runway to keep building its customer base. The plan is to grow through strategic partners – like recent addition Wix.com – which will give it access to larger networks and communities more quickly.

Ribbon is currently backed by Tim Draper’s Draper Associates, AngelPadSiemer VenturesEmil Michael (Klout COO), Naguib Sawiris, Winston Ibrahim (Hydros), MicroVenturesGokul RajaramSierra Ventures, and InterWest Partners.