Category: Tech news

FuzeBox is trying to entice startups to use its video conferencing and online meeting tools with its new FuzeFund, which offers FuzeBox Pro accounts at an appealing price point — free.

CEO Jeff Cavins says the current FuzeBox customer base includes both large enterprises and startups, but with the FuzeFund, he’s trying to expand the startup side of things significantly. As FuzeBox’s Christel Mes puts it, “A handful of these startups are going to grow into enterprises.”

In order to participate, companies need to have fewer than 15 employees, less than $2 million in funding, and be fewer than 18 months old. FuzeBox says it will judge the applications based on criteria, including “revenue, employee headcount, and the level of creativity exhibited in responses.” Every company that’s accepted into the program will get two free FuzeBox Pro accounts (which allows for meetings with up to 25 attendees and four HD video feeds) for two years.

FuzeBox plans to select up to 500 companies for the FuzeFund, so all of those free licenses should be worth a total of $1.2 million. (Part of the reason FuzeBox can afford this is the fact that it recently raised a $20 million Series A.) FuzeBox will also be offering free licenses to all of the companies launching over the next two days in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

You can read more about the the FuzeFund and apply here.

RidePal, a company providing a turnkey commuter bus system for companies, is today announcing having closed half a million in seed funding from 500 Startups, Amicus Capital, and Jeff Clarke, Chairman of Orbitz. The system, which the company refers to as a “Google Shuttle for the rest of us,” offers shared commuting buses which are equipped with Wi-Fi, as well as a ticketing, reservation and management platform. The business customers who want to offer the service as a benefit to employees don’t have pay for the entire bus – instead, they only pay for the capacity they need, which allows them to save on costs.

The company currently offers 15 routes in the Bay Area, specifically between San Francisco and other cities in the south bay, east bay and the peninsula. It’s an area that makes sense for such a startup, as local companies compete fiercely for top talent and want to be able to offer a commuter bus as a recruitment and retention tool. Plus, it’s an area where the commuters themselves see the drive to work as time that could be better spent doing other things (at least when Wi-Fi is available.) And San Francisco works as a good test bed for these kind of companies because it’s rife with early adopters and a solid base of people willing to try more eco-friendly solutions.

For growing companies, like those that need to bring in employees from other areas outside of where they’re based, RidePal can function alongside other community shuttle programs. This allows the company to offer the commuter bus benefit to more employees, and can also offer the company a way to test and analyze routes (via RidePal’s reporting system) before determining whether or not to commit a bus of its own to service an area.

“We prioritize our new routes based on our corporate customers’ needs and the needs of our riders,” says Chief Revenue Officer Dominic Haigh, explaining how the funding will impact RidePal’s ability to serve new customers. “Companies can subscribe to a particular stop they need, for example, because they wish to retain a particularly valued employee who lives nearby, or close a key new hire.” Riders can also “Vote for a Ride” at the RidePal website, and provide details of their commute requirements when they register. “We don’t, therefore, have a specific plan for the specific routes and stops we will offer, but respond in real time to where we see most demand,” Haigh adds. “With this funding we can scale our infrastructure to handle several times the number of routes we currently offer.”

At present, RidePal is closing in on 600 registered users, Haigh says. It has agreements in place with a number of bus company partners, in order to have access to a large number of buses as and when they are needed. After establishing service in the Bay Area, the plan is to then start expansion to the top 20 urban clusters where RidePal’s research has shown to be the largest markets.

RidePal launched out of the San Francisco-based startup accelerator known as Greenstart, which is aiming to make the cleantech space a little sexier.

This spring, Tango raised $40 million in a Series C round and announced plans to expand beyond its original focus of enabling video calls between mobile users. In fact, it’s no longer accurate to call Tango a “video chat service” as we once did — it’s now a social platform. The company has been slowly inching in this direction with the launch of video messaging and, more recently, text messaging. Today, it goes even further with the debut of photo-sharing features and its first in-app game, which Tango users can play together in real-time.

According to Tango co-founder Eric Setton, the company has benefitted from the attention apps like Skype and features like Apple’s FaceTime receive, saying that every time video calling was mentioned, it helped to raise Tango’s profile. That being said, the company felt like it could do more. “If I look at mobile social communication, there’s no question in my mind that’s bigger than just video calling,” he says. “It’s an exciting evolution and opportunity for us,” Setton says about moving beyond calls. “It’s a disruptive market. You need to understand mobile, and not so many people do yet.”

Setton explains that while Tango is taking a step toward a merger of social and communication with the new release, they didn’t want to “bury users in functionality.” So the first new feature in today’s release expands upon the previously launched text-messaging option, also allowing photo-sharing between Tango users. Another addition sees more branded “Tango Surprises” — the cutesy animations with which users can decorate their video call screens. The new ones come from Sesame Street, Strawberry Shortcake, and Care Bears. Setton says a third of Tango calls are between family members, like parents or grandparents phoning the kids, so these brands make sense.

More interesting, however, is the in-app game. Squash is a turn-based, “whack-a-mole” type of game, which two users play during their call. Many-to-many game play may be an option in the future. And Setton says that Tango will release more games by the end of the year. Because Tango is a free app, all monetization is through these value-add features, such as animations, greeting cards, and now, gaming. This first game will be free, but future games may be paid. There’s also the possibility that Tango will accept third-party submissions down the road — if Apple is OK with that, of course. Ninety to 95% of Tango’s user base is mobile-only (iOS, Android, Windows Phone), so monetizing through gaming on the desktop only wouldn’t make much sense.

Tango’s user base of 65 million now extends across 212 countries and continues to grow. After the company launched text messaging earlier this year, it took only four weeks to convert 20% of its daily average users to adopt the feature. As for how many daily actives or monthly actives there actually are, Setton declined to say. But in April, he had told us that there were then 45 million users, 10% who used it daily and 44% who used it monthly. Those proportions are still the same, he says.

While 65 million is a number any early-stage startup would lust after, it’s still far short of Skype’s 250 million monthly connected users (not to mention its 600 million+ registered users). Tango, in other words, still has a long way to go before it will be worth the $8.5 billion Microsoft paid for Skype. But it’s still growing. Now it’s time to see if going more social instead of focusing only on the utility of communication is the right choice for the company.

Photo by Anthony Barbato for Wired

The temperature gauge flashed “103″ as I rolled to a stop behind a solid wall of traffic on the Major Deegan Expressway. We sat unmoving, the sun cooking my fair-skinned fiancée and I like hogs at a luau. The soft, beautifully quilted and quite obviously non-ventilated leather hides beneath our thighs began to feel like melted pudding.

Even so, I refused to close the lid on the Italian sun devil we had on loan for the weekend. Around us and beneath us, simultaneously making us smile and sweat, was the body of Lamborghini’s latest and greatest Gallardo Spyder, the LP550-2 — and there was no way I was going to let a little heat spoil our weekend together. Putting up the top and flipping on the A/C would be akin to taking the sails down on an America’s Cup racer during a really breezy day.

What’s most interesting about Lambo’s latest bull is that it’s technically less advanced than its AWD counterpart. It’s mechanically simpler, slightly less powerful, a bit lighter and generally more involving — and all of this amounts to good news for drivers.

New for 2012, the rear-wheel-drive Gallardo LP550-2 Spyder represents a departure from the standard AWD-system Gallardo and Gallardo Spyder have employed since they were introduced in 2003, save for a few RWD specials along the way. In fact, it’s been more than 10 years since Lamborghini offered rear-wheel drive in one of its sports cars — the last time we’ve seen one was on the pre-VW-acquisition Diablo. The LP550-2 pays homage to the limited production (and also RWD) Balboni Gallardo that had 2009 Geneva Auto Show-goers lusting for a dusty stretch of back road somewhere. That car’s name was chosen to honor Lamborghini test driver Valentino Balboni, a man who’s been fine-tuning these raging bulls for more than 40 years. Lambo’s original Balboni offering was limited to 250 production units, but the company has since expanded availability by offering both RWD and AWD variants in base trim. So go ahead, Gallardo shoppers — take your pick. Lamborghini isn’t explicitly limiting production of this model, but the company expects it to be “very exclusive.”

More good news: The cost of entry to the Lamborghini owners club gets lowered a smidge with the LP550-2. This RWD version starts at $209,500, about $16,000 less than its AWD counterpart — which is perfect, because you’ll spend nearly half that much on the gas-guzzler tax ($2,100) and super unleaded fuel during the first two years of ownership. Then again, anyone complaining about luxury taxes and fuel costs probably aren’t in the market for a $200,000-plus sports car.

Going from AWD to RWD in the Gallardo required more than simply removing the front differential and calling it a day. (And actually, Lamborghini removed both the front and center differentials.) The heroic 5.2L V10 needed some retuning and “optimization” in order to provide the purist rear-wheel character we all long for in a driver’s car: sky-high revs, hard pulls in any gear, intoxicating sounds.

This requires a bespoke electronic engine management system, new springs, dampers and control arms in the suspension, and a revised transmission setup optimized for rear-wheel drive with a mechanical limited slip differential and a locking ratio of 25 to 45 percent. As the alphanumeric model designation denotes, the LP550-2 has 10 fewer ponies than its all-wheel counterpart. But the engine control software covers up the loss, and the car actually feels faster, thanks to less power shuffling between differentials.

Photo by Anthony Barbato for Wired

The aerodynamics have also been altered to account for the change in the distribution of force, but when comparing it to the previous Spyder, it’s impossible to spot any differences with the naked eye. Maybe the vents are more ventilated?

Take away the little silver plaque residing just ahead of the rear wheel wells, and 99 percent of the population couldn’t tell the all-wheel and rear-wheel-drive variants of the Gallardo apart. Nor could the hoi polloi tell you this was a brand-new car — this second-generation Gallardo looks just like the 2008 LP560-4 Coupe I drove when it hit the market five years ago.

Aging platform aside, the exotic shell and bespoke interior still play the part quite well. My tester — a gunmetal grey metallic (Lambo calls the color “Grigio Lynx”) specimen optioned up to $239,045 — drew plenty of interest from onlookers around town and on the highway. I got several requests to “Rev ‘er up” throughout my time behind the wheel.

One minor gripe: Inside of the beautifully hand crafted “Marrone Jenus” (Italian for “brown”) interior, there appears to be some inappropriate parts bin sharing. I applaud Volkwagen’s efforts to bring Lamborghini into the 21st century and everything, but I simply can’t get over the fact that this $240k sports car has a navigation unit — and a noticeable amount of overlapping switchgear — lifted directly from my dad’s 2009 Audi A3.

Drawing something is great, but you can sketch only so many cats before you need a change of pace. Challenge your opponents to one of these turn-based multiplayer games.

Hero Academy

What would chess look like with explosions and orcs? Like our dreams. It would also look like this board game. Field knights, wizards, priests, and archers against your friend’s army, or boost your forces with in-app purchases of dwarves, elves, and shamans.

WIRED Challenging strategy hooks you. Hot elven assassins (if you’re into that sort of thing).

TIRED No single-player. Serious case of “dwarf envy” if you don’t buy the $2 upgrades.

Hero Academy, Free for iOS, Android coming soon.

Ticket to Ride Pocket

Your mom can’t handle Hero Academy, and you’d rather gouge your eyes out than play another round of Words With Friends. This touchscreen take on the popular Ticket to Ride board game is your solution. Draw cards to create routes between designated cities before Mom does the same.

WIRED Mix of luck and strategy makes it fun for both geeks and casual players. Simple yet elegant interface.

TIRED It can take longer to open the app than it does to complete a single turn.

Ticket to Ride Pocket, $2 for iOS

Worms 2: Armageddon

These irate worms have been around since even before those birds got angry. But it’s taken until now to get a push-to-play version of this addictive strategy romp. Lob grenades, explosive sheep, and an overwhelming arsenal of other weapons to subdue your opponent’s worms.

WIRED You read the part about explosive sheep? Hosts up to 16 concurrent games.

TIRED Steep learning curve. Almost too complex for iPhone screens.

Worms 2: Armageddon, $3 for iOS

The Motorola Photon Q, a Sprint exclusive, has a slide-out keyboard. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Smartphones with physical keyboards are a dying breed. But if you’re a fan of these QWERTY-keyed sliders, you’ve got to applaud Motorola. Nobody is footing a larger share of the smartphone keyboard’s life support bills than Mr. Moto.

In February, the Google-owned Motorola delivered the Droid 4 on Verizon — a solid handset with a great keyboard, but sadly a less-than-stellar display. And now Motorola has dropped the Photon Q 4G LTE, a keyboard-equipped Android phone, available exclusively to Sprint customers for $200 on contract.

Sadly, just as with the Droid 4, the Photon Q feels like it’s lagging in comparison to today’s top-of-the-line Android handsets, particularly at the $200 price point. The crummy screen and the device’s slow performance are the biggest problems, but there are enough additional downsides here that I can only recommend the Photon Q to existing Sprint customers who absolutely insist on using a physical keyboard.

It’s a shame the Photon Q isn’t a better device. After all, Motorola isn’t facing much serious competition in the Android-with-QWERTY realm, outside of the T-Mobile MyTouch Q and the latest Android-powered T-Mobile SideKick 4G, (now more than a year old).

On the inside, the Photon Q is slightly more spritely than the Droid 4, with a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor instead of a 1.2GHz chip. Both handsets pack 1GB of RAM. This looks fine on paper, but in testing, the Photon Q always felt sluggish. It was never as responsive or as fast as I wanted it to be, especially when compared to other $200 handsets I’ve tested this year, such as Samsung’s Galaxy S III and HTC’s One X. Even the $100 Motorola Atrix HD, which has the same Snapdragon CPU and 1GB of RAM inside, is faster and more impressive.

The Photon Q also comes with just 8GB of storage, which is a ridiculously small amount of space once you’ve loaded up on apps and games, and after you’ve shot a month’s worth of photos and videos with the 8-megapixel rear camera. Just about every other $200 phone on the market includes 16GB of on-board storage. It’s the industry-wide standard now, and anything less is inexcusable. There’s a MicroSD card slot for up to 32GB of additional storage, but MicroSD cards are, of course, sold separately.

My biggest gripe of all is with the display: it’s simply not good enough. The Photon Q’s 4.3-inch touchscreen has a “qHD” resolution of just 960 x 540 pixels. This feels like a cut corner — Motorola, I know you can make a better display than this. Again, I point to Motorola’s own $100 Atrix HD, which has an iPhone-rivaling 1280 x 720-pixel display of indisputable beauty. The Photon Q’s lower-resolution “ColorBoost” LCD screen is bright, and the colors are slightly oversaturated, but still attractive. And it’s actually one of the better-looking qHD displays I’ve seen, but the low resolution results in everything looking cluttered and cramped. With dozens of HD games sitting in Google Play waiting for download, and with Netflix and Hulu (and everyone else) capable of streaming videos at 720p or better, shipping a $200 phone with a display this low-res is just silly.

The Q is 0.54 inches thick. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

I had a chance to discuss an amazing new non-profit program called CODE2040 with one of its founders today, Laura Weidman Powers. The mission of this program is to bring diversity to Silicon Valley by bringing in talented minorities, who are in school for engineering, to Silicon Valley for the summer, mentoring them and finding them positions with companies.

The non-profit is the brain-child of Tristan Walker, current EIR at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and formerly of foursquare. The list of board members and mentors are nothing short of impressive:

Tristan Walker, Ben Horowitz, Amber Saloner Tennant, Bea Perez and Marc Hedlund sit on CODE2040′s board. The mentors include Megan Quinn, Marc Bodnick, Charles Hudson, Wences Cesares, Tracy Chou, Kevin Weil, Matt Hunter, Richard Kerby, Marc Hedlund, Erin Teague and Hunter Walk. These are all extremely talented and knowledgable people here in the greatest place for technology in the world.

Here’s our chat, I specifically enjoyed learning about the meaning behind the organization’s name:

TechCrunch: Can you tell us how the idea for the non-profit came about?

Laura Weidman Powers: Tristan Walker (currently an EIR at Andreessen Horowitz, formerly head of business development at Foursquare) set out to create CODE2040 to fix two problems he saw contributing to the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley: 1) lack of awareness – not enough knowledge about the opportunities in the Valley and how great it can be to build a career in the innovation economy; 2) lack of access – many of the most high performing people of color don’t have access to the network you need to be incredibly successful in Silicon Valley. Tristan faced both these issues firsthand at the start of his career, not understanding the power and potential of the Valley until he moved here for business school, and starting out without any of the network he needed to succeed and with very little guidance on how to begin building that network.

This is all in the context of a massive demographic shift that our country is undergoing – Census projections show that people of color will collectively be the majority in the US in the year 2040. It’s important to have that shift reflected in the ranks and the leadership of innovation hubs like Silicon Valley. Currently studies show this is far from the case with fewer than 1 in 18 technical employees in the Valley being Black or Latino/a. CODE2040 aims to open doors for talented underrepresented minority talent in the Valley in order to help diversify leadership in the Valley and in the US as a whole in the area of high tech innovation and entrepreneurship.

Tristan and I were classmates at Stanford GSB. We got together for coffee in late 2011 right after I left a job in product development at a startup. Tristan pitched his idea to convince me to be the person on the ground launching CODE2040. I was excited about it and agreed to join Tristan as the organization’s Founding Executive Director. The organization launched in February of this year with Tristan as Chairman of the Board, and myself at the helm.

TechCrunch: What’s missing in Silicon Valley when it comes to bridging the gap with minorities and how does your organization help that?

Laura Weidman Powers: Silicon Valley is a place where smarts and ability are prized but where investors and hiring managers tend to mitigate risk by relying on their networks for intel on potential hires or investments. We are working *with* that mentality by creating an institutional bridge into these high performing networks, and short circuiting the time it generally takes to amass a top tier network.

TechCrunch: Talk a bit about the submission process and who you’re looking for.

Laura Weidman Powers: The application process focuses on finding outstanding engineers with a passion for entrepreneurship. There is a written application, a coding exam, a phone screen, and then a matching process with our host companies. We are looking for top Black and Latino/a engineers excited to immerse themselves in Silicon Valley, learn what it’s like to work at a startup, hear from founders, engineering and product leads, and get top notch executive coaching and hands on experience via interactive workshops.

TechCrunch: What does the future look like for the organization and do you see a big shift in diversity coming in Silicon Valley?

Laura Weidman Powers: We are recruiting 10-15 companies to host about 20 students in summer 2013. We are also starting to think about what expansion will look like, e.g., to other cities. We are also excited to support our alumni in ther careers as we grow. Our long term goal is to execute ourselves out of existence. We hope CODE2040 isn’t needed anymore by the year 2040.

We definitely think diversity in Silicon Valley will shift because the market is shifting and SV companies will need to adapt to meet their markets where they are. We think we are really well positioned to help startups make this shift to ensure that they are and remain competitive.

TechCrunch: Tell us what you’ll be doing at Disrupt.

Laura Weidman Powers: Spreading the word! We had an awesome first summer and are really excited to recruit and gather partner companies that want to host interns in summer 2013. We are looking for companies who are excited about hosting top engineering talent and also excited to support CODE2040′s mission. Come find us in Startup Alley!

—–

So there you have it, a fantastic idea turned into an actual organization, planning to help make real change in the world. It doesn’t get much better than that, and we’re excited to chat with the CODE2040 team at TechCrunch Disrupt next week and watch the support build around them.

So Amazon launched a new publishing program called Kindle Serials yesterday, but it’s not the only company with serialized fiction on its mind. In fact, three of the eight Kindle Serials launch titles were created in collaboration with a new startup called Plympton.

The company was founded by Jennifer 8 Lee (former New York Times reporter, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles) and Yael Goldstein Love (author of The Passion of Tasha Darsky). Lee tells me that she was inspired, in part, by the success of the Kindle Singles program, where Amazon publishes works that are longer than your average short story/magazine article but shorter than a full-length book. Costing as little as 99 cents, Singles seem to be close to the ideal price for digital goods — as Lee put it, they cross the “impulse buy/why not” threshold.

At the same time, she says, “You don’t make money from getting people to pay 99 cents once.” Instead, you get them to pay 99 cents again and again and again, which is why Plympton is reviving a classic-but-dormant idea — novels that are broken up into smaller episodes, like TV shows or comic books. Plympton says that for its first series, the titles have been broken into five chunks of between 8,000-25,000 words, and a new installment will be released every two weeks.

Lee says Plympton calls itself a “literary studio” because it takes some elements of the Hollywood development model and combines it with traditional publishing. Not only does it look at submissions from writers, but Plympton works with authors from early in the creative process to help them develop their ideas. And even though classic authors like Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote serial novels, Plympton had to do a lot of work to figure out how the model would work today. One of the biggest challenges, Lee says, was solving the “episode three” problem — it’s relatively easy to write a good “pilot“, but it’s harder to turn that into an engaging, sustained narrative.

The company is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise $30,000. In addition to raising money (Plympton is already profitable, thanks to the deal with Amazon), Lee wants to use Kickstarter to build up a community of readers.

Speaking of Amazon, despite the obvious advantages of a partnership, I wondered if Lee was worried at all about eventually being crushed by her partner — which is, after all, getting into serialized publishing itself. She says it’s not really a competition, because Plympton is “a little tiny thing” compared to Amazon.

“It’s such a nascent field,” Lee says. “The more the merrier.”

Earlier this year, VEVO unveiled a huge new redesign, adding continusous playback and social features designed to get more people engaged when watching its music videos. And while it made that experience available on its website and on its Xbox Live app, there was one device clearly missing — the iPad. Well, it just released an updated version of its iPad app, making a lot of the same features available, as well as a few more that have not yet made it to other platforms.

I got a chance to get a walkthrough of the app from VEVO SVP of Product Michael Cerda in the company’s brand-new San Francisco development office today — more on that later — and the thing is pretty slick. The first thing that you’ll notice when you open the app is a rotating carousel of featured artists that, when clicked, brings you directly to videos by those artists.

The iPad app, like other apps from VEVO, is focused on increasing viewership time. As a result, it defaults to a continuous playlist of videos. Once one is finished, users will automatically start watching another. After an initial pre-roll ad, the app inserts additional ads after every three or four music videos, according to Cerda.

The iPad app also pulls in a lot of social features that came online with the spring relaunch of the website. That includes Facebook Connect and Open Graph integration — letting users import their “likes” and get personalized playlists based on those artists. They’ll also be able to see what music videos their friends on the social network are watching, and share out what they’re watching with others. Users can also import their iTunes libraries to get playlists based on the music that they already own.

But a lot of what makes the new iPad app cool is stuff that wasn’t in the homepage redesign. Cerda told me that one area of improvement was adding the ability to add and customize playlists, which was a bit constrained in the initial release. VEVO has also done a good job of building out artist profiles, which show biographical information on the musicians that viewers want to watch, while also providing a list of videos, tweets, and tour dates. The app also collapses a lot of the menu options that appear on the website into a more manageable navigation flow. The biggest feature, though, might be AirPlay integration, which allows users to instantly stream continuous playlists of music videos to their TVs through Apple TV.

A lot of the new iPad-specific features — like the condensed menu, artist profiles, and better playlist management — will eventually make their way back to other VEVO products, like the homepage or mobile web site, Cerda told me.

Cerda, who has founded startups like Threadbox, Jangl, and Ooma, joined VEVO late last year to lead the company’s product initiatives. Recently, he opened up the Silicon Valley branch of VEVO and drafted some developers he knew — and a couple he didn’t — to help out on product. While the team was previously working out of his garage, it just opened a brand new, very startup-ish office in downtown San Francisco.

He’s divided VEVO product mostly into front-end and back-end teams, with one in charge of user experience and the other making sure the plumbing works. But product work is still split between developers in New York, and those who recently joined or agreed to ship themselves out to the West Coast. In fact, the teams have a dedicated video hangout setup so that its developers can ask or answer questions of each other from across the country.

While the iPad app is one recent innovation for VEVO, it’s not the only one. The company is looking for new ways to reach consumers wherever they are — whether that means making embedding videos available in users’ Twitter streams (which is available now) or streaming directly within Facebook wall posts (which could be coming soon). Look for more updates as time goes on!

Apple’s new iPhone, which the company is set to unveil next Wednesday, will have better worldwide support for LTE than the latest iPad, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. While the iPad supports LTE spectrum bands used only in the U.S. and Canada, the new iPhone will apparently work with multiple bands, making it compatible with networks in Europe and Asia as well.

The WSJ’s sources don’t believe that the new iPhone will manage to be compatible with all worldwide LTE networks, however. That’s not surprising, given that there are aas many as 36 LTE bands around the world, many more than there are for 3G, according to International Data Crop. analyst John Byrne speaking to the WSJ. Making a single device that with the radio antennas required to work on a variety of networks is difficult, but Apple has already pulled off a similar feat with the iPhone 4S.

And as much as it presents an engineering challenge to achieve multi-spectrum capabilities, Apple has one goal in mind for the long-term life of its products, and that’s simplifying manufacturing processes and making it easier to make big profit margins on products sold. Apple’s margins are notoriously high when compared to their competitors, and a big part of what Apple’s success in terms of market cap and cash reserves are based on, more so than simple volume of sales. Making a single iPhone that works on LTE across all of its major markets will be a key help to maintaining those margins.

When you search for “Bettina Wulff” on Google, the search engine will happily autocomplete this search with terms like “escort” and “prostitute.” That’s obviously not something you would like to be associated with your name, so the wife of former German president Christian Wulff has now, according to Germany’s Süddeutschen Zeitung, decided to sue Google for defamation. The reason why these terms appear in Google’s autocomplete is that there have been persistent rumors that Wulff worked for an escort service before she met her husband. Wulff categorically denies that this is true.

German’s former first lady now wants to ensure that Google stops autocompleting searches for her name with these terms. The rumors, she claims according to the German newspaper’s report, are “defamation” and have “destroyed her reputation.” For the most part, of course, Google suggestions just reflect how widespread these rumors are on the Internet. Google’s algorithms, after all, make these suggestions based on its analysis of what the majority of Internet users search for.

This, of course, isn’t the first time Google has faced similar issues with autocomplete. Just this June, for example, a number of French groups accused the company of violating French anti-discrimination laws after Google’s autocomplete started suggesting the term “juif” (Jewish) to complete searches for a number of prominent media figures and celebrities. Google settled with these groups.

In Japan, a man recently filed a suit against Google after the autocomplete feature started linking his names with a number of crimes he says he wasn’t involved in. A court in Japan then ordered Google to delete these terms from autocomplete. Google also lost a similar suit in Italy in 2011.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Motorola unveiled the new RAZR family at a big media gala in early September. The company proudly rolled out the supercharged RAZR HD and RAZR HD MAXX. The $99 RAZR M stole the show. The 4.3-inch RAZR M LTE packs a lot of the same goods as its larger counterparts. For just $99. And the M is available now as the others will be released later this fall. Here’s the thing: this is Motorola’s best answer to the iPhone yet.

Apple will introduce the new iPhone next week. It will likely sell for the bargain price of $199, pushing the current model, the iPhone 4S, down to just $99. The 4S still has one of the best cameras, and consumers love Apple’s iOS ecosystem. At just $99, the iPhone 4S will dominate most budget Android handsets. That’s why the RAZR M is available now and why it stands a chance. This is a great phone at a great price.

Click to view slideshow.

I’ve used the M for the last few days. As Jordan shows in the video below, it’s a very capable phone. There’s a touch of lag on the Android 4.0.4 install and the haptic feedback seems off by a few milliseconds. The screen is very bright and sharp. The build quality is fantastic; it feels great in the hand. This is a fine alternative to the iPhone 4S. It’s certainly the best Android phone at this price point.

Walk into most wireless shops and you’ll instantly see a huge variety of large Android phones. And the iPhone 4S. By going big, Android handset makers have left the iPhone to be virtually the sole option with a small form factor. The RAZR M suddenly offers the iPhone 4S some direct competition with a form factor that’s very similar, but with a larger screen and the Android operating system.

The RAZR M uses a large screen in a novel way. Motorola claims the M has very thinnest bezel of any phone. It’s certainly tiny, a few millimeters thinner than the iPhone 4S’s. In fact the M matches up very closely to the proportions of the iPhone 4S. It’s a touch longer, but the two phones have virtually the same thickness and the M is just bit wider. Motorola managed to cram a lot larger screen onto the phone. And that counts for a lot.

Android makers are seemingly throwing everything they have behind a single flagship. These handsets, like the Samsung Galaxy S III and RAZR HD, have massive screens and as many hardware features as possible. They’re superphones. And judging by the Samsung GSIII’s sales numbers, consumers have shown that they like superphones. The smaller iPhone also says that there are a good chunk of people interested in a phone of more modest proportions.

More and more consumers are latching onto smartphones. The market is changing rapidly, and with that, consumers need options at every price point. Not everyone wants the large Moto RAZR HD or Samsung Galaxy S III. Some prefer Android over iOS. Some do not want to spend $200 on a phone. And with the RAZR M, Motorola is providing a fresh handset instead of simply dropping the price on older hardware.

Loic Le Meur, the French entrepreneur who moved to Silicon Valley to found Seesmic back in 2007 and led it through to its sale to Hootsuite this week, has taken a long and winding road to this most recent success. Over the past five years Le Meur has changed the business direction of Seesmic more times than he can remember, moves that have led him to be pegged by some as the “king of the pivot.”

There’s obviously lots to talk about here, so it was great to have Le Meur stop by TechCrunch TV yesterday, just one day after TechCrunch broke the news of Seesmic’s sale, to have a conversation about all that’s happened over the past five years and what’s on deck for the future. Le Meur tells us he will not be moving to Hootsuite full-time, but will be shepherding his team through the transition. Otherwise, he will continue to work on expanding his very successful Le Web conference series — and is already brainstorming on new startup ideas.

Watch the video embedded above to watch our conversation in full.

When we launched our iPad app (to much fanfare) you all asked us when the Android version was coming. We finally have an answer: Right now. It’s real and it’s spectacular.

The new app, built by the excellent AOL team led by David South, is a nice port of our current iPad with lots of comment control, CrunchBase integration, and fancy, auto-resizing images. The app connects our blog content with live Internet reactions as well as some amazing functionality centered around CrunchBase data. You can also just view Gadgets and Mobile content with one click and an offline mode will cache content for the road.

You can grab it right here and enjoy it on nearly any Android device including the Nexus 7.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Bryan Schreier (@schreier), Dropbox’s board member and partner at Sequoia Capital. Sequoia is an investor in Dropbox, Evernote, Stripe, Tumblr, Instagram and Airbnb and a TechCrunch Disrupt Partner. 

Everyone follows the mainstage events at Disrupt, and with good reason. Who can forget Heather Harde recovering the missing check for Mint at TechCrunch 40, David Sacks and Yammer winning TechCrunch 50, pretty much every Arrington interview, and most of all, the many impressive founders who’ve marched their companies across the Battlefield over the years. My favorite moment was watching Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi introduce Dropbox to the TechCrunch community back in 2008. It was a powerful springboard and well worth the time we invested preparing.

But the biggest disruption occurs the weekend before the conference itself at the Disrupt hackathon. It’s where more than a thousand developers get together to brainstorm, build, collaborate and caffeinate. One of these hackathons gave birth to Groupme, which Skype acquired following the rapid adoption of the company’s group messaging service. With a broad roster of APIs and more hackers than ever, this year’s event offers innumerable opportunities to learn and have fun.

At Sequoia we have the privilege of working closely with Dropbox, Evernote, Stripe, and Tumblr, so I thought I’d try to convince the developers among you to hack away at their individual APIs — either at the event or whenever you can spare a few hours. Here’s why you should …

Dropbox: Today you need to build applications for an ever increasing number of platforms and devices that don’t always allow users to easily access their own content.  Dropbox makes your life easier by providing APIs and SDKs that allow you to build cross-platform apps effortlessly, and leverage its infrastructure, scale, and availability. The Dropbox API lets you quickly add storage and sync for user data and connect its app to almost any computer, smartphone or tablet to give people new ways to engage with their content.  The possibilities are endless, from a Dropbox client for XBox to a download to a Dropbox browser extension to sharing and saving from Facebook Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter. You can read about Vimeo’s integration here.

Evernote: If Evernote is a second hippocampus to help you remember everything across all your devices, its API is a quick firing neuron to access and retrieve the information. One of the most interesting use cases for the API is applications that surface contextually relevant information at just the right moment, like an email client that shows a few Evernote notes related to the message you’re currently reading. To make this easy for developers, the company launched a new related notes API at the recent Evernote Trunk Conference, and we’d love to see developers find innovative ways to use it this weekend. Evernote client apps are intentionally very general purpose, so many successful third party apps are more focused on individual use cases that help guide users into specific reasons for capturing and retrieving information. For more ideas, check out the Devcup gallery.

Stripe: Many of the most interesting Internet startups of the last few years have had payments at their core. Consider AirBnB, Etsy, Kickstarter, and Uber. Over the past year, Stripe has become the default way for startups to accept payments online. Stripe’s APIs enable you to instantly add credit card payment support to a website or a mobile app. It also works pretty well for hackathon projects since you have test API keys to make example charges without paying anything and there are no setup or monthly fees- you pay only for successful payments.Stripe makes as much data available as possible via the API and offers webhooks to give you the flexibility to build tools for other users, from the simple (ringing a bell when you’ve been paid) to the sublime (an iPad app for managing your Stripe account).

Tumblr: Many of you have leveraged Tumblr’s API to share your creative works. For example, Instagram and Paper have greatly enriched the Tumblr experience with their content. There are some big opportunities for you to create innovative ways to discover and consume the more than 30 billion Tumblr posts on the network today. They’ve invested heavily in their API over the past 6 months and now provide even more support, including a new developers blog at developers.tumblr.com.

The DOE, Ford, Locu, Mashery and Qualcomm will also be presenting API workshops this weekend so I’d encourage you to give their APIs a spin as well. We can’t wait to see what you build. Happy hacking!