Category: Tech news

Elegant is not the first word that comes to mind when photographers think of most camera bags. Boring is more like it. The Kickstarter-funded bags offered by Langly change all that.

Based on World War II rucksack designs, a Langly bag looks like something you’d find in a high-end men’s clothing store rather than a camera shop.

“World War II is an obsession of mine, and for some reason rucksacks are really hot right now,” says Langly creator and photographer Evan Lane.

This fresh take on a primarily utilitarian category of bag feeds many a photojournalist fantasy. Now you can feel like Joe Rosenthal while you’re shooting flowers in the park. Thoughtful details like brass hardware and vegetable-tanned leather straps complete the indulgent escapism.

“Photographers have an aesthetic eye,” says Lane, “so it makes sense to have a bag that is aesthetically pleasing.”

There are two versions, the Alpha and the Delta. The Alpha primarily uses straps, and the Delta has one strap holding the main flap down, with zippers used for the other closures.

You won’t be embarrassed to wear the bag out on assignment, or through the streets of Barcelona, Paris or any other major fashion hub. Nor need you worry about Langly putting form over function. The padded camera compartment at the base holds a couple of camera bodies and lenses, and the rear laptop compartment fits up to a 15-inch MacBook Pro.

One of the ways Lane was able to keep the design so clean was by cutting down on straps. There are only the necessary straps and buckles for keeping the flaps closed. You’re not going find any of the fancy waist belts or chest straps that come standard on a modern backpack. But, hey, that’s the price we pay for looking good, right?

The exterior surface of the bag is crafted from waterproof canvas. I hate worrying about getting thousands of dollars’ worth of gear wet, and the well-protected material thoroughly allays those fears. You can feel the waxy, waterproof coating, and the canvas is thick enough that you could hack it up and start building a tent. The Langly’s unassuming exterior also serves as a sort of camouflage from potential thieves on the lookout for a standard black nylon camera bag.

This isn’t the bag I would take with me on assignment to Afghanistan, but that’s only because it’s too small. Lane claims the bag’s upper compartment can hold clothing for a multi-day adventure, but I say it’s more suited to an extended day trip that requires extra layers.

I’m not the only one impressed by the Langly line — the company is well past its original Kickstarter funding goal of $30,000. Lane says the money received will go toward production costs, and he hopes to have the California-made bags in his backers’ hands by the end of July. The rest of the public will have to wait until later this summer to order one on the Langly Bags website.

On the Kickstarter page, the bags costs $160. But when they’re released on the web, both the Alpha and the Delta will retail for $200 each. In the world of quality camera bags, that’s not an outrageous price. And if you consider that you might pay similar prices just to buy a regular retro backpack in a high-end store, it’s actually kind of a steal.

WIRED Built to perform, even in harsh conditions. Doesn’t scream “photographer,” making it less likely you’ll get jacked. It’s the only bag equally at home in Iraq and on the Paris runway.

TIRED Too small for a multi-day trip. Don’t like the fit? Too bad, it’s not very adjustable. There’s no way to squeeze a 400mm lens inside — sports photographers who want to look cool are out of luck.

Last fall, ex-Googlers Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga launched a new mobile travel platform called Triposo, which aimed to bring a little PageRank order to an unruly ocean of travel content in service of a greater good: Giving we, the end user, more relevant, personalized travel recommendations. Because there’s already a mess of public destination and travel information in databases like Wikitravel and Open Street Maps, rather than become another player in the brimming social travel space, Triposo took an algorithmic approach to travel recs.

This approach allows it to come up with relevant suggestions no matter where you are, with little effort require from the end users, making for what the founders call a “lean-back” travel experience. Even though models, users and money have favored the social approach, Triposo has seen high ratings and has attracted nearly two million downloads of its travel guides on iOS and Android since launch. This early traction has also been appealing to investors, with the latest interest coming in the form of a $3.5 million series A round led by Keval Desai of InterWest Partners.

InterWest is the sole (return) investor in the startup’s latest round, which will see Desai joining the startup’s board of directors. The InterWest partner was also behind the firm’s recent investment in Gojee, which Billy covered yesterday. Both investments can be seen as part of the investor’s thought-provoking understanding of the evolution of the Web: That it’s moving from “a need-driven utility medium to a discovery-driven entertainment medium with room for multiple winners.” (More here.)

In a way, this helps answer the question of why, if search (Google) is looking to improve relevance and personalization by serving socially-authenticated results and much of the attention in travel revolves around friendsourced, social graph-based models, one would choose to invest in (or use) a tool that eschews friends for algorithms.

Obviously, Google results will remain a mix of both, even as social gets more play, and there’s no reason Triposo can’t add social layers on top of what they’re building. Plus, as Desai says, as the audience grows and our behaviors change, there’s going to be room for multiple winners — at least, that’s the idea.

For Triposo, the new investment adds to the $700K in seed funding it had raised to date from late-joining CrunchFund, Chris Sacca, Taher Haveliwala and Google Wave Co-founder and Google Maps Lead Engineer Lars Rasmussen — to name a few. The round brings Triposo’s total investment to $4.2 million.

Co-founder and COO Richard Osinga tells us that Triposo will use its new capital to expand its team, specifically in the engineering department, and to move into its new headquarters in Berlin.

The team also just revealed a new and improved iOS app, which, in Osinga’s words turn Triposo into a “self-starter” — a travel guide that actively offers suggestions as to where users should go next. As users move about the country (and world), the app adjusts to location, the time of day, the weather, and the hours of local businesses in your vicinity, tailoring recommendations for destinations and adventures based on that realtime data. Pretty cool.

While the app represents a big step forward for travel guides, it’s still a work in progress, and the co-founders tell us that they’re now developing a big “version 2″ of the app, which they hope to launch around the first of August. Stay tuned for more on that — assuming, of course, it doesn’t suck.

I’ve avoided rehashing the specifics of how Triposo’s algorithmic model works (so you can read more on it here), but it’s definitely an interesting point of differentiation in comparison to the friend-sourced and social authentication of travel sites like Gogobot, Trippy, and Tripping. (Though really the ones that stand to lose are traditional travel publishers, like Lonely Planet.) Not only that, but the better it can adjust to real world cues (location, weather, etc.) and serve useful recommendations accordingly, the more Triposo will stand out from the field. Utility + relevance + entertainment = happy travelers.

More on Triposo here.

“Look for Jetpack 2 in 1995.”

The message carried on the 1993 2D video game “Jetpack,” created by 16-year old Adam Pedersen and distributed by Software Creations on floppy disk, pledged an updated sequel to fans in a couple of years.

19 years later, Pedersen, now a single dad, is belatedly working to deliver on that promise. He has taken to Kickstarter in an attempt to raise $40,000 by the end of July for “Jetpack 2.”

Pedersen tells me that, as a sixteen year-old, he was a big fan of “Lode Runner,” “Jumpman,” and “Boulder Dash” and wanted to make a game like those.

“A game that I would enjoy playing,” he describes, his voice filled with excitement.

In 1997, after Software Creations had gone out of business, Pedersen put the game online. By 2003 it had reached over a million downloads.

After fighting with chronic fatigue and other health problems that kept him from building a sequel, Pedersen was ready to build a revamped game in 2008. He took it to major distributors. Most passed on the sequel. One deal came close but then fell through.

Pedersen decided to bypass distributors and work part-time on “Jetpack 2.” In 2010, he left his job working with the Obama campaign at Blue State Digital to work full-time on the game.

But that was before the rise of Kickstarter: Now he is using the popular crowdfunding service to raise funds so that he doesn’t have to put the project on hold again. Pedersen says he resorted to Kickstarter because he couldn’t afford to keep working full-time on the game and support his family without an income. He says he also needs funding to pay for “an artist and level enhancers to give the game more polish.”

Pedersen told me if he doesn’t hit the $40,000 benchmark, he will most likely do another Kickstarter with a lower goal and scale back some of his graphic goals and enhancements.

Backers can donate increments from $15 to $5,000 with varying rewards. The base pledge will get you a copy of the game for immediate download when it is released and a few other small rewards. $50 will earn you a personalized “easter egg” that the character collects.

For an affordable $5,000, Pedersen will make you into the game’s evil scientist nemesis. “I’ll distort your voice, and my artist will make a cartoon animation of your face, along with evil scientist hair,” he writes on Kickstarer.

At the time of publication, Jetpack2 had 51 backers and had only raised $1,810. So if you’ve got five large lying around, you still have time to grab the lone evil scientist spot.

Will you play Jetpack 2? What other classic games would you like to see brought up to 2012 standards? Let us know in the comments.

A good source tells me that Twitter is set to make its sixth acquisition of 2012 with NY-based Sense Networks. Terms of the deal are still under wraps but it is expected to go through this month.

Twitter declined to comment.

Sense Networks was founded in 2003 and in 2006 launched MacroSense, which the company says “turns massive amounts of mobile location data into actionable, predictive behavioral data.” What that means is Sense not only collects location data from mobile devices when shared but also takes that data and creates a unique behavioral user profile to serve ads that users would find useful.

In other words, Twitter may soon have a way to really monetize its targeted local ads. And users will finally get relevant local ads.

The below video is simply called “location data simulation” with no other descriptive info attached but appears to be a visual representation of what the company does for the layman.

Vanity Fair is one of my all-time favorite magazines — it publishes loads of incredibly well-written stories about fascinating topics and people. Its regular features, like My Stuff and the Proust Questionnaire, are always entertaining.

So, I was pretty excited to get an email from one of Vanity Fair‘s publicists this morning, offering an advance copy of a story that will run in the August issue. Written by Kurt Eichenwald, the piece is promised to be an unflinching deep dive into the past ten years at Microsoft while Steve Ballmer has been at the helm — specifically, I’m told, Eichenwald uncovers the stifling bureaucracy and “astonishingly foolish management decisions” that have held Microsoft back while Apple ascended to dizzying heights in the eyes of global consumers and the stock market.

It sounds like a doozy. People have already begun Tweeting and blogging about the teaser that was published today on Vanity Fair‘s website. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the full piece. So I emailed the publicist back within minutes: Yes, yes, yes, please send the entire thing over! This was the response:

Now, that’s a question I certainly never thought I’d encounter from someone pitching a story to TechCrunch — unless we were being punk’d once again, or perhaps if it was a piece that required crazy sensitive court documents or something. Who faxes anymore? OK, besides Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Wintour (maybe it is a Condé Nast thing.)

Anyway, it struck me as so funny I had to forward the thread along to my colleagues. They responded in kind:

The thing is, I would have fired up TechCrunch HQ’s fax machine if I could have. But like many reporters often do, I’m working remotely today (right now I’m about halfway through a 5-hour flight, with another 2-hour flight to go after that one. In-flight Internet for the win.)  Faxing is just not going to happen.

I explained this to the publicist, and asked if she could perhaps use her own fax machine to scan the document, which she could then send along to me as a PDF attachment. I pretty much provided step-by-step instructions. That was five hours ago, and I haven’t heard back yet.

But I still really wanted to read this thing! So, I earnestly took to TechCrunch’s internal Yammer to ask if one of my coworkers could please figure out what our fax machine number is, receive the document, scan it, and send it to me. No one was up for it, but I did get assigned a different story idea:

Now I’m following the orders of my editor. Well, actually, two of my editors.

I’m not sure that there is a big takeaway here, but it is amusing — and also maddening. The whole thing is just ironic, or at least Alanic: The distribution of an apparently awesome article about one company’s old-fashioned business habits and suffocating bureaucracy is slowed down by the old-fashioned business habits and suffocating bureaucracy of the company that published it. It’s also a sign of how far new technology still has to go before it becomes really mainstream.

(And yes, in case you’re wondering, it is also a slow news day.)

So. I still want to read all about the Ballmer dirt. I want to write a post with a scathing excerpt and tell all the TechCrunch readers out there to run and pick up a Vanity Fair, pop some popcorn, and read all about it themselves. But at this rate, I might just have to wait until it comes out on the newsstand myself.

Image of fax machine credited to Michael A. Keller/Uniphoto via Britannica.com

Last week, developer Tom Waddington uncovered Facebook code that points to the creation of a “Want” button — a plugin that potentially points to a new kind of commercial innovation being developed by Facebook itself, different from “want” buttons already being developed by third parties (one example here), and partially working but only within Facebook’s Graph API tester.

He’s continued to dig around and today has presented us with some of his latest finds: looking deeper into Facebook’s code, he found more references that point to how Facebook might be thinking about how users can share purchasing information with each other.

The presence of a “Want” button and these related commercial actions point to ways that Facebook can continue developing other streams for revenue-generation to complement what it is doing in advertising and existing commercial services, such as in-app purchases.

Playing around with the Want action, Waddington focused on the object of the Want action, called “ogproduct”. “I think they’re using ogproduct while testing – it’ll move to product when [if] it goes live,” he says.

While looking around in the ogproduct code, Waddington found code for a “product.purchased” action, with options underneath for a donation, message, product, and game_item.

While Inside Facebook has pointed out how the Want button would be useful for indicating purchasing intent, versus the more general “Like” button — and subsequently enabling more targeted ads against Wants — these newer details potentially give a clue as to what kinds of purchases Facebook could enable, and allow to share on your timeline.

Donations could be about charitable donations; but they could also be about group donations for purchases or events (similar to what Crowdtilt does today). Product and game_item also seem pretty straightforward. “Message” less so: could that be a way of incorporating an element of the social gifting service Karma, which Facebook bought in May?

Facebook has told us, in response to the emergence of the “Want” button, ”We’re always testing new Platform features, however we have nothing new to announce.” But in addition to the kind of detail mapped out above, there are other signs that a social commerce product might be closer than you think. “It’s clear that Facebook is working on a new OpenGraph representation of products. They’re even calling the current Product object ‘Product Old’,” he writes in his blog post.

You may have noticed some new bylines popping up these past couple of days. You’re not hallucinating! We’ve quietly made several new additions to the TechCrunch roster this summer and hiring continues to be our first priority across all departments.

In addition to specialist writers like Alex Williams and Greg Ferenstein, we’ve added a couple of interns and a rockstar product manager to our team. We’re also busy with other parts of the company, adding more people to our events team, and working on important but unglamorous projects like getting the site to load faster (hallelujah).

Here’s the latest on the newest folks we’ve got working here, and why you might want to talk to each of them.

Gregory Ferenstein is a technology journalist and educator. At TechCrunch, he writes about the intersection of technology and politics, education and any other way the Internet changes the traditional way we organize. As an educator, he has taught every age, from elementary school to college, and does academic research on curricula. He also holds a Master’s in Mathematical Behavioral Science. In his free time, he’s an avid Cross-fitter and does Capoeira, an acrobatic Brazilian martial art. Email contact here.

Alex Williams is a veteran technology blogger, journalist and analyst. He led the cloud and enterprise channels at ReadWriteWeb before joining SiliconAngle, where he worked as a senior editor. As our new enterprise writer, he’ll cover the rise of the Web, mobile and the cloud as the key drivers in organizations shift to a more consumer-oriented work environment. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and has worked as journalist, blogger and producer since 1989 with various stints in marketing, community management and event development. Alex has a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Northwestern University and a B.A. in French Literature from the University of Denver. He got his start in journalism when he wrote about his experience as a college student playing baseball in France. Email contact here.

Christine Ying is TechCrunch’s new product manager, responsible for its web products. She has worked as a software engineer, product manager and product marketer for NASA, Oracle, Visto and most recently Yahoo. There, she helped launch its iPad magazine, Livestand, and worked on Yahoo! Maps, Upcoming and other popular products. She has a B.S. in Computer Science from MIT, and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Billy Gallagher is our editorial intern this summer, helping us to cover the Silicon Valley startup scene. He’s also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily, leading the student paper this coming fall after having been a managing editor of news for the past two volumes. He’s on track to graduate from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics in 2014. Email contact here.

Natalie Swope is our intern this summer via AOL Tech. A junior at the University of California, Davis, she is majoring in computer engineering and minoring in technology management. An active blogger at reference site hackcollege.com and at her personal blog, swopeswope.com, Natalie also won the internship through her social media prowess, by collecting the most votes on her about.me page.

Watch out for exploding prices! Verizon Wireless just stopped subsidizing tablets, which naturally results in a lot higher advertised prices. Want a 16GB Motorola XYZBoard? That will be $629. A Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7? Hand over $549.

Verizon Wireless quietly made the switch late last month when launching the “Share Everything” family plans. With this new service contract, subscribers have the option of allowing a tablet access to the bucket of data shared among devices. In the past tablets required a separate data plan, and therefore a separate contract, which locked owners into a tablet that will likely be quickly outdated.

This new pricing scheme puts Verizon’s Android tabs on the same level as the iPad which was never offered by any US carrier with subsidized pricing. Previously, Verizon sold Android tablets like phones and offered deep discounts in exchange for a two-year commitment on a data plan. But that strategy doesn’t work as well for tablets as phones. The churn cycle of tablets is much faster than phones. New tablet models almost always leapfrog the capabilities of previous models. Plus, U.S. carriers have never offered stellar subsidized deals on tablets. Aside from initial sticker shock, selling tablets at the full retail cost with month-to-month data plans is the best thing for consumers.

Hopefully other carriers will follow suit. While AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile give the customer the option to buy at full retail or with a discount, they still rely on subsidized pricing to lure in unsuspecting customers. Tablets should be sold like computers, rather than phones. Well done, VZW.

We reached out to Verizon Wireless for comment but they have yet to respond.

As we spend more and more time online, as our virtual interactions increase, so too does our appreciation for tangible, real-world experiences — especially those that arrive via the mailbox. Remember how good it feels to receive a letter from a friend in the mail? Now imagine that friend is someone you admire and that letter is an awesome gift, and you have the basis for Quarterly, a subscription-based service that launched last December.

Promising curated gifts from notable designers and tech industry celebs for $25/month, Quarterly quickly found an eager audience. In fact, founder Zach Frechette tells us that due to high demand (i.e. $100K in gross sales in 12 weeks), Quarterly had to shut its doors on new users so it could catch up on fulfilling original prescriptions and re-architect for scale.

It was this demand (and the need for more capital) that led True Ventures and Collaborative fund to invest $1.25 million in Quarterly in March. At the time, we were just working off the company’s Form D filing with the SEC, as the team remained heads-down, dealing with the challenge of keeping up with demand.

Today, the startup revealed that, in addition to Tony Conrad joining its board of directors, Quarterly has added a number of new investors, including SV Angel and Initialized Capital (otherwise known as Y Combinator partners Alex Ohanian, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan). The newcomers join Collaborative Fund, Scott Belsky, Brian Sugar and Ryan Jacoby — the startup’s initial batch of seed investors.

With some growth capital in the bank and an impressive list of investors and advisors in place, Quarterly finally re-opened its doors this week to new subscribers, celebrating the re-launch, Frechette tells us, by adding two new contributors to the site: Jason Kottke, the longtime editor of Kottke.org and the Stanford d.school. What’s more, 4-Hour Workweek author Tim Ferriss will also be joining as a contributor in the near future.

On top of that, Quarterly is also announcing several new additions to its leadership, including Tonya Michlin, who joins Quarterly from Green Dot where she was the VP of Retail Production, and Mitch Lowe, who will be joining the startup’s advisory board. Lowe is best known for being a founding executive at Netflix and, most recently, the president of Redbox.

The new additions to its leadership will help Quarterly take the sting out of its growing pains, hopefully preventing it from having to shut down to new subscribers. The startup has already attracted a big audience and the addition of new contributors on top of its initial list (which included the likes of “Moonwalking with Einstein” author Joshua Foer, The Atlantic Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal, President of the Rhode Island School of Design John Maeda, hilarious tweeter and Mule Design Founder Mike Monteiro, author of The Happiness Project Gretchen Rubin, to name a few) will keep the demand high, along with spreading the love amongst a bigger set of gift-givers.

The subscription-based mail service has become increasingly popular of late, as we’ve seen a number of companies pop up, working in a variety of industries, that seek to connect us with exclusive products and ideas from the people (and brands) we admire. Forbes compiled a list of these champions of snail mail, which includes well-known services like Birchbox. Or there’s the athlete and guy-centric newcomer 12Society.

While each of them have slightly different audiences, Quarterly is fast cornering the market on design, tech, and geek-focused gift-giving, which should be music to your ears. Either way, these services are giving us the tangible interaction and real world community we crave, and startups should take note. There’s money in the mail.

Find Quarterly here.

Redux has been through a couple of iterations over the years: Originally launched as a platform for social discovery of video, the startup bet big on building an app for Google TV to create a “lean back” experience for navigating channels of online video. Now it’s adding a distribution platform for independent content creators to the mix called Redux for Artists.

When Humble Bundle released its first movie, Kooky, it was Redux that powered distribution for the film. The next project to leverage Redux for Artists will be Smiley, a feature-length film that was a collaboration of YouTube stars like Shane Dawson and Michael Gallagher. Those folks will be distributing the film directly to fans online, selling it for $8 and making it available as a stream or download.

Viewers will be able to watch the film online or on a number of different connected platforms. That includes mobile phones, tablets, and even connected TVs. For that last part, Redux will be leveraging work it did with CE manufacturers to make its video app available on their devices. Redux CEO David McIntosh says that will be available through 40 million connected TV devices in total.

Of course, Redux isn’t the only player to enter this space recently. A few weeks ago, I wrote about VHX, which also launched a distribution platform that is being pitched for creators to release their own videos and sell them directly to fans. VHX was chosen for distribution of Aziz Ansari’s comedy special and the online release of Indie Game: The Movie.

And frankly, there have been a number of platforms over the years that have enabled creators to directly sell their videos to the public, and they’ve all kind of failed. So what is it about the current environment that makes self-distribution an actual viable business right now? If you ask McIntosh, there are a number of factors at play.

For one thing, people aren’t just watching these digital movies on their computers anymore. We’ve reached a critical mass of connected TVs and other devices that allow for streaming to the biggest screen in the house. There’s also a number of portable viewing devices — like smartphones and tablets — that people watch videos on as well. In a lot of ways, Netflix has helped lead the charge with its connected device strategy.

With all those pieces in place, independent content creators no longer need to go through a movie studio or TV network to amass a large audience of viewers. Instead, they can sell directly to fans instead. That’s good news for creators and good news for fans, as they generally get more freedom and flexibility to consume content.

Google is continuing to shut down services which aren’t core to its business – something it has been actively doing ever since Google co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO. Today, the tradition continues as Google is announcing the shuttering of five more services, the most notable of which are Google Video and iGoogle, its personalized homepage offering.

Clearly iGoogle has outlived its usefulness. The service dates back to a time when homepage portals were people’s entry points to the Internet. These days, we just never close our browser tabs, it seems. iGoogle is getting the ax on November 1st, 2013, which is far enough away for users to export their data, says Google.

Another big-name closure is Google Video, a service which has long been overshadowed by Google-owned YouTube. It’s actually surprising that Google Video is still up-and-running, given that it stopped accepting uploads in May 2009. Google Video’s shutdown is arriving much sooner, however, so if you’ve dragged your feet in moving videos over to YouTube, now is the time. Google Video is no more as of August 20th.

Other services fading to black today include Google’s Symbian Search App (bookmark Google.com, Google advises), Google Talk Chatback (a Google Talk widget for websites – Google says try its new acquisition Meebo instead) and Google Mini, an enterprise appliance that’s been around since 2005. Note that Google isn’t exiting the enterprise by any means, it’s just that Mini’s functionality is now offered by other products like Google Search Appliance, Google Site Search and Google Commerce Search, the company blog post reminds us. Google will honor its existing contracts for Mini customers, though. You can read more about the closures here.

If you’re starting to lose track of the services Google’s has killed off in recent months, here’s a brief refresher:

Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Friend Connect, Google Gears, Google Search Timeline, Google Wave, Knol, Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C), Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook, Sidewiki, Subscribed Links,Google Flu Vaccine Finder, Google Related, Google Sync for BlackBerry, mobile web app for Google Talk, One Pass, Patent Search, Picasa for Linux, Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac and Picasa Web Albums Plugin for iPhoto, and all Slide products. 

During the 2008 campaign (probably the first election where social media played a significant role in getting a president into office) Lee Brenner handled political programming at Myspace. This time around, he’s part of team launching a new a site of its own, called WeForPresident — aiming, in his words, to “build a platform that can democratize the debate.”

The site was created by HyperVocal (the online media company co-founded by Brenner and Slade Sohmer) and BlocRally. It’s hardly the first website for political debate — over the past few years, I’ve talked to several companies trying to launch debate platforms, most recently Politix, the politics-focused service from forum company Topix. Brenner, however, argues that WeForPresident is the first site to integrate this deeply with Facebook and other social networking services.

When you go to the WeForPresident site, you sign in via Facebook, then start browsing different discussions, where users answer questions like “How do YOU Create Jobs?” and “Corporations: Good Or Evil?” You can jump in and participate in the discussions yourself (your comments can be automatically posted to Facebook), or just upvote the comments that you like. There are also opportunities to get more informed on the topics that you’re arguing about — there’s a sidebar with news stories from the Associated Press, and whenever you include a hashtag in your comments, the term will link to the appropriate entry in Wikipedia.

As you participate, you earn different badges on the site, working your way up from “intern” to “chief of staff”. There’s also a political word association game, where you can look at a photo (say, of Stephen Colbert) and enter whatever word comes to mind.

Upcoming features include a mobile version, as well as integration with other services like Tumblr. Eventually, Brenner says the same platform could be applied to other topics, too.

The biggest challenge for a site like this is getting people to participate. To that end, it sounds like Brenner has recruited some powerful allies, namely the College Republican National Committee, the Young Democrats of America, and Rock the Vote. The first two, in particular, will have a presence on the site, and will be encouraging their members to participate.

I was always a sucker for Palm and HP’s little mobile operating system that couldn’t — for all its faults, webOS brought with it some features that put it ahead of the curve. It’s sort of a shame then that most webOS phones tended to suck in terms of execution.

The original Pre was light and plasticky, the Pre 2 didn’t improve enough, the Pixi was underpowered, the Veer was strangely small, and the Pre 3 died before it ever made it to our shores. There was another webOS device that was killed before it ever saw the light of day though, and a newly revealed video from design visualization firm Transparent House shows off what would have been HP’s next smartphone.

The first thing you’ll notice about the device in question (codenamed “WindsorNot”) is that it lacks the all-too-familiar QWERTY keyboard that had graced every other webOS phone until then. It doesn’t look entirely unlike a Pre 3 that went on a diet, and the folks at webOS Nation peg its sizable screen at around 3.6 inches — pretty generous considering Palm and HP’s track record.

What’s more, the WindsorNot bears a striking resemblance to a keyboard-less webOS device dubbed “Stingray” that appeared in the wild in April 2011. That original leaked image combined with the fact that marketing materials were already in the works means that the device was likely very close to its launch before HP decided to “discontinue operations for webOS devices” later that year. Interestingly enough, Transparent House posted the video nearly nine months ago, well after HP put an end to the production of webOS hardware.

Unlike other bits of webOS history like the 7-inch TouchPad, no Stringray/WindsorNot units have been seen out in the real world after the company’s mobile hardware ambitions were scuttled. While the chances of someone scrounging one up and posting a hands-on video aren’t zero, for now all we webOS fans can do is watch this video and think of what might have been.

Mobile app component marketplace and former Disrupt finalist Verious has just announced a strategic partnership with mobile operator Deutsche Telekom which will expand its international footprint and reach. The mobile operator is now launching its Verious-powered Developer Garden Component Marketplace across 14 countries in Europe, where it will feature not only mobile app components for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and HTML5, but also Telekom’s own APIs.

The APIs offer access to a number of Telekom’s services, like machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, cloud-based voice applications, SMS messaging, operator billing, and more. The newly added Telekom Tropo API, for example, uses tech from U.S.-based Voxeo Labs, allowing apps and websites to forward calls, talk to callers, evaluate responses, among other things.

The news of the Verious launch follows the operator’s recent announcement which sees a collaboration between it and Microsoft’s MSDN network to provide developer access to APIs for use in smartphones, tablets and PCs. Through this and another partnership with Intel, the Developer Garden site now targets 17 million global developers, the company says. During the launch period for the component marketplace, some special promotions will be offered for developers looking to build with telecom APIs. Later on, Deutsche Telekom plans to allow developers to also distribute and sell their applications through its online services, too.

In addition to appearing on the Deutsche Telekom branded developer site, the telecom’s APIs will also appear on the main Verious.com homepage and its developer network, the latter which reaches over 1 million app developers monthly through newsletters and third-party websites.

Many mobile operators make their APIs available to developers – Telekom is not the first to do so. Just recently, Chris covered some of AT&T’s moves in this area, for example. However, Telekom is the first out of the gate to offer its developer community a fully fledged mobile component marketplace where its APIs are listed alongside other components that can help speed developers’ time to market. According to Verious CEO Anil Pereira, this move shows that developers need code in addition to APIs. “Forward thinking service providers are trying to give developers as much value as possible as things move toward an ‘app world,’” he says.

The sentiment was echoed by Rainer Deutschmann, Senior Vice President of the Core Telco Products business unit of Deutsche Telekom, who said the company launched the marketplace to help support developers and make their work “easier and more profitable.” The marketplace is now available here.

If the car-crash Facebook IPO has sent VCs running scared and accelerators issuing warnings to their young charges then perhaps it’s time to just break out the crowd-funding campaign? Plenty of startups seem to be doing it these days, but not many get their nine-year-old daughter to front a video on their Kickstarter campaign.

Founder and CEO of Pora Ora Neil Gallagher – who put his daughter up to it – tells me he thinks the startup will “end up doing a VC round” as a result of their Kickstarter campaign. That’s clearly not guaranteed, but the campaign is having a dual effect. “We’re adding about 3,000 new users a week whether people on Kickstarter financially back us or not.” Could Kickstarter be the new marketing platform?

An educational 3D virtual online universe aimed at 5-12 year-olds, Pora Ora already has 25,000 users so it’s not as if it’s starting from scratch. And although they are asking for $100,000 (and have reached $18,109 after a few days) the Kickstarter campaign effect on the userbase is worth the risk of not raising the cash.

However, Gallagher is still aiming to raise a VC round to develop more gaming features and apps including a coding game and tools to enable children to create their own worlds.

Created by holding company Caped Koala Studios, Pora Ora features games, puzzles and quests geared to a global school curriculum. Children learn through their avatar whilst exploring the worlds of Pora Ora alongside their Pora Pal (virtual pet) who needs wisdom, creativity and exploration points to keep them healthy and happy.

And in contrast to the issues recently experienced by Habbo Hotel, the game has strong security settings where children must complete an eSafety quest and gain parental permission to access the interactive features. Pora Ora can also be set to “school mode”, which lets teachers use the game in the classroom. Teachers and parents can then control the safety features, track the child’s progress and offer in-game rewards through the parental controls.