Category: Tech news

It keeps getting worse for French iPhone owners. The agency for telecommunications ARCEP has just announced that it would meet with the four French telcos to know if and when it should refarm Bouygues Telecom’s 1,800MHz band to bring LTE to the iPhone 5. The three other companies are begging the ARCEP to wait until at least 2014 to start this process, effectively lobbying for slowing down innovation in this industry.

Last July, Bouygues Telecom sent a request to the ARCEP to reuse its old 2G 1,800 MHz band for LTE communications. It would give a head start to the third largest telecommunications company. According to the French law, the ARCEP has up to eight months to reply.

That’s why the agency finally explained what it plans to do in the coming months. On February 7th, the four telcos will have to present their arguments. Bouygues Telecom wanted to reuse its 1,800 MHz band in early 2013. It definitely looks like the ARCEP will miss the mark. Even though it first agreed with Bouygues Telecom, Free now wants to wait as long as possible as the company is already having a hard time laying out its 3G network and meeting ARCEP’s coverage requirements.

Finally, Orange and SFR are acting like spoiled children, begging the ARCEP to wait until the end of 2013 or even 2014 before even thinking about refarming the 1,800 MHz brand. In 2012, the two companies bought the so-called “gold spectrum” in the 800 MHz band for around $1.6 billion (€1.2 billion). This band is effectively useless for the iPhone, many Samsung devices and many other brands as it only works with a few Android handsets, such as the HTC One XL and the Motorola Razr HD. It was overpriced.

All these companies are playing the job card as well. Delaying or refarming the 1,800 MHz band would create hundreds of jobs depending on which company you take side with. It will be a key argument for the ARCEP, even though the four companies are inflating those numbers.

Allowing LTE plans sooner than later would enable the four telecommunication companies to increase the average data plan subscription price. As plan prices have greatly decreased recently, those companies desperately need a new steady influx of money to invest in optical fiber and other infrastructure improvements.

According to Les Échos, the ARCEP won’t make any decision before the end of 2013. Other countries, such as the U.K., have allowed the 1,800 MHz band refarming for LTE — but bureaucracy, lobbying and general slugginess will once again hurt the end customers who won’t get LTE on their iPhone or Galaxy Note II devices any time soon.

Ever since it was launched in 2011, e-sports streaming specialist Twitch has been free to view. Like other streaming video sites on the web, Twitch has relied on ads as its primary source of monetization. But frankly, no one likes ads, and so the company is rolling out a new premium tier, called Twitch Turbo, which will provide ad-free viewing, as well as a few other features, for $8.99 a month.

Turbo users will be able to freely stream all their favorite e-sports events, matches, and tutorials, all without any pre-rolls or overlays. But there are other advantages to being a Turbo user — most notably, improved chat features. Paying for Turbo means having a whole new set of colors and emoticons to use during chat. They’ll also get priority customer support, as well as a badge which recognizes them as a paying subscriber.

In an email, Twitch VP of marketing Matt DiPietro wrote that the Turbo offering came after extensive research from users about what features they’d want and what they’d be willing to pay for. Chat was one of the features that users enjoyed and wanted more flexibility around, and the company expects that part of the offer to be popular.

Surprisingly enough, there was actually some concern among users surveyed about a reduction in monetization for Twitch broadcasters if ads were stripped out. But DiPietro wrote that its streaming partners will continue to get paid for impressions that come from Turbo users, even if no ads are shown.

The new offering comes just a few days after Twitch launched its first in-game broadcasting deployment on a game console — with a pretty huge partner. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 gamers will now be able to connect their Twitch account and begin instantly streaming from the Xbox, with the same capability coming to Sony PS3 and desktop versions soon.

The company, which was spun out of streaming video provider Justin.tv, had raised $15 million from Bessemer Venture Partners last summer. It now claims more than 23 million unique viewers per month, with 6 billion minutes of video viewed in December.
Those viewers are tuning into more than 300,000 unique broadcasters and more than 3,000 official partners. And we can expect even more broadcasters soon, as Twitch recently made an SDK available that will make it easier for game publishers to embed Twitch broadcasting tools directly into their games.

Nokia was an early mover in the tablet space – in 2007, years before the iPad burst onto the scene, it was unboxing its N800 Internet Tablet (which looks more like a phablet by today’s enormo-phone standards). But these days the Finnish high-end and low-end mobile maker does not play with slates — at least, not yet. That could soon change though, judging by comments made by Nokia CEO Stephen Elop who has given the company’s clearest hint yet that it wants to get back into the tablet space.

Speaking to the Australian Financial Review, Elop stopped short of announcing a Nokia-branded tablet is coming but confirmed the company is taking a close look at the space. “We haven’t announced tablets at this point, but it is something we are clearly looking at very closely,” he told the newspaper. “We are studying very closely the market right now as Microsoft has introduced the Surface tablet, so we are trying to learn from that and understand what the right way to participate would be and at what point in time.”

“It is the case that in the months and years ahead, you will see us broaden out the portfolio, which means pushing to lower and lower price points, in some cases smaller form factors and so forth,” he added.

So what OS would a future Nokia tablet run? Windows seems inevitable — what with Nokia being a Microsoft partner for its Lumia line of Windows Phone-based smartphones — but Elop was careful not to rule out alternatives such as Android.

“We would consider any option [Android or Windows],” the newspaper quotes Elop saying, although he went on to described “the Microsoft side” as Nokia’s “first focus”.

“It is important to note that the opportunity for companionship is something that any user is looking for. So, when you think about the Lumia 920, running on Windows phone, having a Windows tablet or PC or Xbox is something that will give us the opportunity to have a pretty integrated experience. Our first focus on what we look at is clearly in the Microsoft side,” he said. “But we have made no decision or announced nothing.”

Elop has previously talked about keeping an open mind about OS alternatives, telling Spanish newspaper El Pais last month that it was looking further ahead in smartphones and considering what role Android or other alternatives might play, while remaining “immediately focused” on Windows Phone. But in the interview with the Australian Financial Review, Elop said that Samsung’s growing dominance of the Android market had vindicated Nokia’s decision to eschew Google’s platform.

“On the Android side, we were very worried that we would be entering Android late relative to everyone else in the industry, that perhaps one vendor was already well on the road to being the dominant Android vendor at the expense of everyone else,” he told the newspaper. “If we look back two years to when we made the decisions, then Samsung was big, HTC was pretty big and Motorola was pretty big. Of course what has happened in the two years is that Samsung has captured the lion’s share of it and the others have been squeezed down to much smaller market share. We were worried about exactly that pattern forming.”

According to Twitter, it was hacked and 250K useres were affected, so they received emails from the company to change their password. This is not the first time this has happened, but this time it was a real hack, rather than a blend of real hacks and “false alarm” blast of emails like last time.

Way to start off our weekends, Twitter. Who knows if you’ll even get the email from Twitter about it, I know that I filter all of those things out. You can read all of the details about that here.

I find it really confusing when anything like this happens, because it feels like companies try to diminish the impact caused by seeing sad tweets from your friends about how they got hacked. I even had one person tell me that they felt like they weren’t cool enough because they didn’t get hacked.

Instead, or in addition to, just go change your password. We’re all cool enough to get hacked. The number, 250K affected, seems a bit too tidy to me, and I’m not saying that Twitter is lying, I’m just saying that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Twitter also suggests this course of action, which sounds like a way to slither away from blame if you ask me:

We also echo the advisory from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and security experts to encourage users to disable Java on their computers in their browsers.

Happy Tweeting Friday!

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Twitter is sending out emails to 250,000 users it says may have had their accounts compromised in the last week as the site experienced “unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data.” Twitter tells TechCrunch that this is “not related” to the widespread, but intermittent, outage the site saw yesterday.

The text of the email is below. In its blog post on the hacking, Twitter recommends that all users make sure they have a secure enough password on their account. In truth, there still seems to be some big unanswered questions. Twitter notes that “attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords”, which can also be interpreted as “may not have had access”, or may not have had access to all of those different elements. The reader who sent in the letter below tells us that he had not seen any unusual activity on the account recently — so any password or other kinds of compromises had not yet translated into actions, for him at least.

One coincidence that appears to be emerging is that many of the people who have been affected were among some of the earliest adopters of Twitter. Our reader signed up in 2007, and we have heard similar reports from others receiving the email.

Twitter says that it believes that other websites may have been compromised.

“This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” Bob Lord, director of information security at Twitter, notes in the blog post. “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

Twitter would not comment on whether it had any information on which other companies may have had related attacks — although by coincidence Amazon yesterday also had an outage, although TechCrunch understands that Amazon has determined that outside groups were not involved. Twitter does, however, refer to the security breaches at both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the recent security issues with Java in browsers, as examples of how hacking is everywhere (and to possibly deflect a little attention from what has just happened on its site).

 

Hi, XXX

Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter. We’ve reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account.

You’ll need to create a new password for your Twitter account. You can select a new password at this link:

XXXXX

As always, you can also request a new password from our password-resend page: https://twitter.com/account/resend_password

Please don’t reuse your old password and be sure to choose a strong password (such as one with a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols).

In general, be sure to:

• Always check that your browser’s address bar is on a https://twitter.com website before entering your password. Phishing sites often look just like Twitter, so check the URL before entering your login information!
• Avoid using websites or services that promise to get you lots of followers. These sites have been known to send spam updates and damage user accounts.
• Review your approved connections on your Applications page at https://twitter.com/settings/applications. If you see any applications that you don’t recognize, click the Revoke Access button.

For more information, visit our help page for hacked or compromised accounts.

Last night’s Sixth Annual Crunchies Awards show was nothing short of a huge success. With big names like Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg, Ron Conway, and Mayor Ed Lee in attendance, and equally huge companies like Google, Square and Instagram in the house, one wouldn’t expect anything else.

But Crunchies tickets can be hard to come by, which is why we wanted to bring the show to you.

We’ve put together some of the greatest moments of the show, including Greg Barto’s accidental name-slaughtering of the Wu Tang Clan’s GZA and the acceptance speech for GitHub, Best Overall Startup of 2012, along with some interviews from Google execs, the man responsible for the Mars Curiosity Rover, and an interesting exchange between Tim Armstrong and Michael Arrington.

All in all, it was a night I’ll never forget. But even if I do, we have this excellent highlight reel to relive the magic.

Enjoy!

For this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Foundation Capital’s newest partner Anamitra Banerji, who was just promoted from entrepreneur in residence to investment partner at the firm.

We chatted about Banerji’s decision to become a VC vs. founding a startup, and how being an entrepreneur in residence helped him come to that decision. And as the first product manager at Twitter and the company’s lead on advertising products, Banerji had some insights into how and why Twitter’s ad revenue is growing fast.

Check out the video above for more!

Editor’s note: Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. You can read his full bio here and find him on Twitter @howardlindzon.

It’s Super Bowl week so it’s time to talk about chips – the ones that go in “smart” things, not the ones eaten by Americans. This week’s headlines have been dominated by Facebook. I hear they are quite big with the college kids. But, Qualcomm really is crushing it. They deserve a little attention. They are bigger than Facebook at $108 billion. Today, Qualcomm added approximately $5 billion to their market capitalization, thanks to a blowout quarter of sales ($6 billion) and profits ($2 billion).

It has not been all giggles and balloons for Qualcomm. You TechCrunch readers don’t remember the good-old days. The “real” bubble. Not  your silly web 2.1314 diversion. In 1999, Qualcomm went from $3 to $83. That was on the Nasdaq, not AngelList. It was a glorious bubble. Taxi drivers did not have Square…they had E-Trade accounts.

QCOM data by YCharts

As you can see from the Qualcomm chart above, things got a little messy in 2000. There was no Facebook to save us. Mark Zuckerberg was sneaking half drunk gin gimlets at Bar Mitzvahs. My “smartphone” was a Star-Tec. Retina display? Yeah right!

Qualcomm stabilized in 2003. The new attack on 1999 all-time highs began in the middle of 2010. Time will tell if Qualcomm can stay friends with everyone. The great thing about the stock market is you do not have to be first to catch a trend. Qualcomm is doing business with all the handset leaders and couldn’t care less about the fights between, Apple, Google, Facebook and Samsung. If you love the mobile web and the “Internet of things,” put Qualcomm on your list of companies and stocks to watch more closely.

Gillmor Gang – Keith Teare, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded for today

Google continues its push to bring its web-centric Chromebooks into schools, and it looks as if the fact that Google is in this project for the long haul is starting to pay off. According to Google, 2,000 schools worldwide now use Chromebooks for Education. That, by itself, isn’t a massive number, but what’s important to note is that there are now twice as many schools that use Chromebooks compared to just three months ago.

Google’s Global Education evangelist Jaime Casap made this announcement at the Florida Educational Technology Conference earlier today. In a blog post on the company’s Enterprise blog, Casap also noted a number of new deployments, including at the Transylvania County Schools in rural North Carolina deploying 900 devices; top Catholic prep school St.Thomas Aquinas High School in Florida, which now uses 2,200 Chrome OS-based devices and the Bay Area’s urban charter network Rocketship Education, which now uses 1,100 Chromebooks for its students.

These are all relatively small deployments, but Google clearly believes in this project. The fact that there is a steady stream of new schools deploying Chromebooks for their students shows that sticking with this project is starting to pay off for the company and its partners, including Lenovo, which just launched its first Chromebook in January. Outside of the education space, it seems Chromebooks are picking up some steam, too, with Acer, for example, saying that its $199 C7 Chromebook now accounts for 5-10 percent of its U.S. shipments, for example.

CrowdFlower, a startup that helps businesses manage crowdsourced labor for tasks like image moderation, is looking to expand the types of jobs it can tackle with the launch of new Skill Tests — which, as you probably guessed, are online tests used to measurement workers’ proficiency in various skills.

Until now, anyone doing work on CrowdFlower had been able to access any job. As people do the work, the company performs automatic and human checks to ensure that the results are up to par — if someone’s work isn’t adequate, then all of their results are removed.

However, CEO Lukas Biewald (a former college roommate of mine) and Tools and Platform Product Manager Joseph Childress told me that some potential customers are interested in a particular skill or knowledge set — they might, for example, want results from people who are knowledgeable about golf, or cars. The Skill Tests allow CrowdFlower to target jobs to workers with specific skills. In Biewald’s words, it’s a way to create “a fair system” where people can still access the jobs they want, while also finding “higher value crowds” within the company’s overall workforce.

“This is like how LinkedIn allows people to endorse your skills, except that instead of using your network, we actually verify that people do know about these specific areas,” he said.

The tests consist of 50-60 questions in five or six categories, the company said. The first tests focus on URL acquisition and image moderation.

Childress said the goal is to add new types of work that are more lucrative, rather than adding new requirements to existing jobs. At the same time, he said the new tests could also help workers by giving them a clear idea of skills they should develop.

With this addition, Childress said CrowdFlower is now taking a three-pronged approach to quality control, combining the automatic and human checks mentioned above with skill tests, as well as checks from the most reliable workers on a given job.

It’s never been easier for would-be inventors to take a harebrained concept and turn it into an actual, sellable product, but the process of getting those products to the masses could still use a little work. Sure, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have laid the groundwork for a revolution in how these passionate folks sell, but the team at YC-backed Swish feel like there are even better ways to do it.

“Kickstarter is way too much work for small creators, manufacturers and businesses who want to get their projects out into the world,” said Swish co-founder and CEO Iolanthe Chronis. “We’ve built something that’s truly retail just for the little guy.”

Swish came about, curiously enough, because of a keychain. Six months ago, Swish CTO Brad Stronger came up with a design for a new kind of keychain, but was summarily shot down when he submitted the project to Kickstarter for reasons that were never really made clear. That unfulfilling exchange at first filled Chronis, Stronger, and fellow MIT alum Heather Brundage with the desire to build “a Kickstarter with better customer service,” but they soon realized that they could (and should) do so much more. Thus, Swish was born.

At its core, Swish is a crowdfunded marketplace that focuses strictly on physical products, but what really makes it so special can’t really be discerned at first glance. There’s no behind-the-scenes curation process here. For one, anyone at all can list their product on Swish for 30 days for all the Internet to see. The Swish team is very keen on delivering a Reddit-esque experience, with users and buyers pushing the best products to the very top of the site while kitschy, useless projects fall away from the public eye.

After those 30 days are up, Swish takes all the money that users have pitched in and places a single wholesale order to the manufacturer. From there, the folks making the product have 350 days to complete the full batch of goodies, and in the event that they can’t come through, all that money is refunded to the product’s backers. That said, the real magic happens when the products are completed — the full shipment is delivered not to individual buyers but to the team at Swish instead.

Rather than put the onus of fulfilling every single order on the product’s creators (an often overwhelming process that puts plenty of strain on smaller operations), the Swish team does it all themselves. The end result is a process that’s incredibly friendly to inventors and creators. All they really need to do is focus on creating the best products they can, because the hassle of fulfillment is handled entirely by Swish.

As you’d expect, this seemingly altruistic move can come at a cost. While services like Kickstarter take 5 percent of a project’s funding total, Swish’s approach is more akin to the one seen in traditional retail. The prices of the products sold on Swish all have some degree of markup built into them, and Swish keeps 35 percent of that markup for themselves. That seems like quite a jump, but considering the costs that go into fulfilling orders for a successful project, it’s a more equitable arrangement than it seems at first glance.

At least, that’s the sentiment that the Swish team has heard when bringing word of their service to the masses. According to Chronis, many people trying to get their products out into the market get stymied by risk-averse retail buyers, and often wind up shelling out considerable chunks of money in exchange for oft-ignored booths at trade shows. To that end, the four-person Swish team has been criss-crossing the country hitting up these major events to put the service in front of ambitious product designers and inventors that probably wouldn’t have discovered Swish otherwise. Their recent travels include visits to CES and the International Gift Fair, and the team’s itinerary is already loaded up with future trips.

For all the smack that the team had to talk about Kickstarter, there’s little question that they owe the popular crowdfunding platform a bit of gratitude for being so limited.

“We are indebted to Kickstarter for inspiration,” Chronis said. “They’ve made it clear that there are some very interesting things to be done in this space.”

“There’s a kind of land grab going on here,” Stronger added. “And we think we’re ahead of that curve.”

San Francisco’s Flurry initially got its reach through offering a basic package of analytics that more than 95,000 different developers snapped up.

But as the iOS and Android ecosystems have matured, app makers are getting more sophisticated. The biggest ones often juggle 30 to 40 ad networks and marketing channels, and need to understand which ones perform the best.

So Flurry’s rolling out user acquisition and crash analytics today. The company’s crash analytics lets developers get automatic alerts on new errors and common crashes. They can then diagnose where these errors are originating from with full stack traces including symbolication.

The company’s user acquisition analytics helps app marketers understand how much they’re spending for users on different cost-per-click and cost-per-install advertising campaigns and e-mail marketing campaigns. They can evaluate the users they get through these different channels based on how long they end up staying with an app, how often they engage with it or how much they spend on it.

Both are free and are part of the same analytics SDK that developers regularly use. The user acquisition or marketing analytics are available now on both platforms, but crash analytics is in beta for Android and will come out for iOS later this month.

In crash analytics, Flurry faces off against Crashlytics, which Twitter recently acquired. In user acquisition analytics, Apsalar’s ApScience looks at marketing campaigns to see how effective they are. Similarly, there are a host of game-centric service providers like Chartboost and Playhaven that may veer in this direction as well this year.

Flurry build its crash analytics solution with Plausible Labs, which is the creator of the Open Source PLCrashReporter, already relied upon by thousands of developers. Flurry says it improved that reporting solution, by no longer requiring developers to keep track of dSYM files, implement custom configurations that include symbols and increase the size of their app to get actionable crash reports.

As for the company itself, Flurry recently took $25 million in funding led by Crosslink Capital, the late-stage firm that backed Pandora ahead of its offering. The company, which has been around since 2007, used analytics to cultivate relationships with thousands of developers, which they later parlayed into an advertising business that now produces about $80 to $100 million in revenue every year.

With a simple post on its privacy page, Facebook yesterday announced it had re-enabled its photo Tag Suggestions feature in the US after the feature was temporarily suspended last year, supposedly to allow for some “technical improvements”. The feature means users can use the facial recognition capability of Tag Suggestions to help them “easily identify a friend in a photo and share that content with them”. The announcement is not exactly being trumpeted – so far it only has 178 Likes on the post, a very low number given that over a million users have Liked the Facebook privacy page. In addition, Tag Suggestions does not look like it has been switched on in Europe yet, since we’re not seeing it on European Facebook accounts right now.

The Tag Suggestions feature was first available in the US in late 2010 and available worldwide by June 2011, but it experienced a backlash both in the US and in Europe for privacy reasons. The feature has returned with no changes, and is set to “on” by default. So it would appear that Facebook is testing the waters for our acceptance of the whole idea. Making photo tagging easier is crucial for increasing Facebook’s engagement metrics and return visits. The move could also signal that facial recognition is ready for mobile.

Because tags are suggested to you automatically, this streamlines the process of tagging photos, and is a way of Facebook to more accurately measure your social graph based on the photos in which you are tagged. Of course, that then improves Facebook Graph Search.

It’s possible to opt out of tag suggestions by clicking on Account Settings, Timeline and Tagging, then editing the option “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?”.

The question is, will there be another public backlash, or will users simply grow to find the Tag Suggestions useful rather than just a little creepy? We’re about to find out.

Hard to believe President of #Egypt uses twitter to issue statements. He says security will act decisively to PROTECT state institutions

—
benwedeman (@bencnn) February 01, 2013

In an ironic twist of fate, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has threatened military force against thousands of student protesters through one of the very mediums used to liberate the country in 2011: Twitter. “Security forces will deal with the utmost decisiveness to law enforcement and the protection of state enterprises,” tweeted the official account, through a string of 1984-ish updates. “Presidency confirms that these destructive practices that have nothing to do with the principles of the revolution and not to any illegal practices in the peaceful expression.” (Google Chrome translation from Arabic).

Deadly clashes have erupted across the country, as protesters demand greater adherence to democratic principles from their newly elected leaders. Instead of being a faithful steward of democracy as Egypt transitions from authoritarian rule, Morsi has made disturbing grabs for executive power by declaring that courts cannot overturn his decisions, and cracking down on protesters with excessive force.

A hallmark of the Arab Spring, Egypt’s coup was hailed as part of the “Twitter Revolution.” While there is some debate about the impact of social media within the country itself after the government tried to block Internet access, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube became an extraordinary rally cry for citizens around the world to spread messages and show solidarity.

Now, in its fragile state, Morsi appears to have co-opted the tools of democracy to announce swift force against protestors. We’ve screen-grabbed the full stream of his tweets below: