Category: Tech news

Our own beloved TechCrunch app, an app that is, at least in my opinion, the best TechCrunch-based application on the Internet today, has just been updated by our handsome and well-spoken dev team. The new app includes improved comment counts, a Crunchbase map that allows you to see where your favorite startups are based, and new sharing options including Instapaper.

The app also supports multiple text sizes for the visually acute and includes some tweaks requested by you, our dear readers. The team has been working quite hard over the past few weeks and we’re pleased to have any iPad app, let alone one as eminently acceptable as this one.

Product Page

In case you missed it the first time around, go to Google and search for “Do a barrel roll.” Clever, right? It’s a fun play on the classic Star Fox saying. But with the power of Google Now, Android users can perform a barrel roll by simply speaking to their phone. Try getting Siri to do that.

Google Now is part Siri killer and part automated personal assistant. Google announced the Jelly Bean feature last week at I/O. The barrel roll trick uses the feature’s voice prompt, however Google Now is mostly centered around rather clever serendipitous updates. Google Now loads weather information in the morning, traffic reports when you leave for work, and sports scores for favorite teams. That said, it features a voice input mode very similar to Siri to assist with pulling the info — and performing barrel rolls

[via Droid Life]

As we all know by now, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had an outage on Friday. It would not have been much of a big deal except that it was AWS. And the fact that the outage took down big consumer properties like Netflix and Instagram.

AWS is usually quite silent about what it does but to its credit they have posted a lengthy explanation about what happened in North Carolina when the massive storms hit the East Coast and took out one of its data centers.

In scope, AWS said its generators failed in one of its data centers. That led to the downtime for Netflix and others. About 7% of the instances were affected in the”U S-East-1 region.”

But there’s more to this story.

And it’s what I find fascinating about what happened. Bad information caused a cascading effect that magnified the failure. And it all happened in the machines.

A bug AWS had never seen before in its elastic load balancers caused a flood of requests which created a backlog. At the same time, customers launched EC2 instances to replace what they had lost when the power went out caused by the storm. That in turn triggered instances to be added to existing load balancers in other zones that were not affected. The load, though, began to pile up in what equates to a traffic jam with only one lane available out of the mess. Requests took increasingly long to complete, which led to the issues with Netflix and the rest.

This is in part what separates AWS from other service providers. The AWS network is really a giant computer. It’s a living, breathing thing that relies on machine-to-machine communication. It’s the AWS secret sauce. Without it, Netflix could not economically offer its on-demand service. Instagram would have to rely on a traditional hosting environment, which can’t come close to what can be done with AWS.

It’s the constant tuning which makes AWS special. It’s those highly efficient machines that make it possible for AWS to keep its prices so low.

I think this is what the market does not often understand. Sure, AWS goes down. And they are taking steps to do that as explained in their summary. It’s like tuning a machine. They are learning and iterating so the giant computer it created performs better the next time. The machine will have trouble communicating sometimes, but there are programmatic ways to fix it, which AWS does pretty well.

Customers need to take this into account.  Since AWS is a giant computer, it provides you with control over your own application on the infrastructure itself. It has flexibility. It has ways to make the app available no matter if a certain data center goes down. You just need to understand that and design your applications accordingly.

Just because Google I/O is over, that doesn’t mean the Google+ announcements have stopped flowing. Yesterday, the company revamped its Google Places iOS app (it’s now “Google+ Local” and includes Zagat integration), and today, it’s integrating Google+ into its Chrome Web App Store. The integration presents itself in a section dedicated to social discovery of new apps, add-ons and games called “From Your Circles.”

Now users signed into Google+ can see which Chrome extensions their friends have recommended –  a metric based on users’ “+1′s,” aka the Google version of the Facebook “Like”. The section offers small, square thumbnails of the Chrome app’s logo and underneath, an indication of which user or users among your Google+ friends have explicitly recommended it via a +1. When you hover your mouse over the app thumbnail, a brief description and an “Add to Chrome” button will appear, allowing you to quickly add the app to your Chrome web browser.

To recommend apps to others both in the store and on Google+ itself, just head over to the app’s detail page then click the +1 located there.

This sort of Google+ integration was hinted at back in April, when a company spokesperson told TNW that Chrome Web Store users would soon be able to see applications and extensions their friends had +1′ed “in the next few weeks.”

The new Web Store integration follows the Google+ integration which recently arrived on YouTube, giving users the option to switch from their YouTube username to their G+ identity.

This is the second notable update to the Chrome Web App store in recent weeks, we should note. Just prior to I/O, Google also added an option that allows app developers to separate app reviews from bug reports in the store. This tweak was an effort to cut down on duplicate bug reports as well as to better highlight the comments about the usefulness of an app in the comments section. Frederic speculated that the feature might later roll out to Google Play, with the Chrome Web Store serving as something of a testing ground. It wouldn’t be surprising to see deeper integration between Google+ and Google Play arrive in the future, too.

A report out earlier today from NPD highlighted how tablets are taking over from notebooks as the mobile PC of choice. By coincidence, a survey has been published by Gartner today that sheds some light on the “how” behind that shift: more people are using tablets for the functions that used to be the preserve of PCs, such as checking email, social networking and checking the weather.

The survey also found that tablets are becoming a mainstay for people who read newspapers, magazines and books. More than 50 percent of respondents said they preferred to read on tablets instead of on paper. It’s not clear if ‘tablets’ in this case includes devices like the Kindle as well, but what’s clear so far is that a portable touchscreen is not replacing the physical versions of those completely, yet: it’s about “less paper” rather than “paperless”, Gartner says.

Gartner’s findings are from the end of 2011 and covering just over 500 consumers in the UK, U.S. and Australia, was run as a diary where people recorded what they did on their three most-used devices: those, it seems, were predetermined as tablets, mobile devices and PCs. The research does not look at the actual devices, to see whether the iPad, for example, is seeing more usage than an Android tablet.

Gartner found that just as it is with PCs, email was the most popular activity with respondents: 81 percent said they checked email on tablets. After that, newsreading was the second-most popular activity at 69 percent; checking weather was the third-most popular at 63 percent; social networking was at 62 percent; and gaming in third at 60 percent.

And what’s interesting is that while we’ve heard a lot from magazine, newspaper and book publishers about how the rise of tablets has changed their business models around, the Gartner survey gives us the other side of the deal: it shows that consumers are really using their tablets as a replacement for all three, with a majority of respondents, 51 percent, saying they preferred to get their periodical hit from their tablets more than the paper versions.

Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, notes that tablets scored much higher as a printed matter replacement than phones or PCs.

“The rapid adoption of media tablets is substantively changing how consumers access, create and share content,” she writes. “On average, one in three respondents used their media tablets to read a book, compared with 13 percent for mobile PCs, and 7 percent for mobile phones.”

In fact, at home tablets seem to stand in a class of their own for consumers, in that they are used alongside whatever else a consumer is using; meanwhile, that “whatever else” is often shifting, from TV to PC to mobile device depending on what users are doing. Tablets, Gartner notes, are used most in the living room (87 percent), the bedroom (65 percent) and kitchen (47 percent), and less on the weekends than on weekdays, when we tend to be out of the house more.

And just as the NPD analysts pointed out that notebook PCs are being more tablet-like, here we get some confirmation from the consumer side that we clearly have a taste for the tablet form factor at the moment: they are small and lightweight, and that’s convenient. And while PCs are often shared commodities in a household, perhaps because of their size or price, or for the fact that they are not exactly designed to be shared, tablets occupy a personalized position more akin to the mobile handset: some 45 percent of respondents said they “do not share their tablet at all”.

Gartner also provided some survey feedback on how other devices are used. It noted that if tablets are dominant at home, mobile phones are the most dominant when considering day-long use. They are used eight times per day on average, the survey found. As a point of comparison, tablets are only used twice per day on average, and mobile PCs are used three times per day (although the hours spent in those times will, of course, vary). In terms of what they’re used for, it’s a spread similar to tablets, except that music is added in as a top-five activity (weather drops out).

Like tablets, mobiles are used most of all in the living room (78 percent). Gartner’s conclusion: TVs are fighting for users’ attention, which is also being captured by these portable devices. Mobile TV remains a very niche activity: only five percent of users said they watched mobile TV on their phones. On-demand content scored somewhat higher at 15 percent.

A bit on gender differences, too: while both use Internet at home more than outside the home, men say they use their devices for gathering information, while women say they use them for entertainment like gaming and socialising on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Survey Analysis: Early Tablet Adopters and Their Daily Use of Connected Devices.” The report is available on Gartner’s website at.

* Note to Editors
In November 2011, Gartner interviewed 510 consumers via an online survey in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. Respondents had to own a media tablet and at least two other connected devices.

Mobile payments platform Dwolla has the potential to disrupt how money moves in the new, digital economy. It’s an idea of how a payments network should look, if one had been built today, as opposed to tacking on digital payments to the legacy system that is the current credit card network. But there has been one big problem for end users of Dwolla – no one had any clue where they could actually try the darned thing. That’s going to change starting today with the launch of  Dwolla “Places.”

Believe it or not, until now, the company had not maintained a directory of its merchant partners, which includes both brick-and-mortar stores and online sellers. But there are 15,000 businesses in the U.S. where you can pay with Dwolla, and today’s launch aims to better highlight those merchants.

“For the first time, you can actually search for where you can use Dwolla,” says CEO Ben Milne. But he admits, “There are 25 million businesses [in the U.S.], and Dwolla isn’t everywhere you want to use it yet.” That’s why the new “Places” product allows customers to also request Dwolla support by clicking a “Want” button next to the merchant where they’re hoping to see the service implemented. Dwolla will then begin using these votes to better target which merchants it starts talking to next.

“That way, when a merchant comes online, they already have customers ready to go,” says Milne of how the change will impact Dwolla’s merchant outreach. “And then we have a mechanism for telling those customers that the merchant you want to use Dwolla with is now online,” he adds. He says customers will be alerted to their requests via email notification.

The new feature also comes with social sharing options, allowing Dwolla’s more rabid fan base to campaign for votes via Twitter and Facebook. You can also connect to Foursquare to see if your favorite check-in spots already support Dwolla. And merchants who discover they’re starting to get votes can “claim” their profile page following a short verification process.

Meanwhile, for existing Dwolla merchants – which Milne says are largely brick-and-mortar retailers – the “Places” feature means improved discovery through public profile pages. But users won’t have to just know the merchant by name – you can also search for generic terms like “coffee” or “auto body,” for example, if you want to support Dwolla-friendly businesses.

The feature is currently in beta, so it may be buggy, the company warns. It’s also currently available online online, but mobile app integration is in the works. However, Milne says that Dwolla is working on a larger update to its mobile apps which will include a redesign to support “Places,” among other things. “It’s likely that you’ll see some similar structure extended into the mobile apps,” he says. But that update may not come immediately. Internally, Milne says the thought process around mobile, where apps haven’t been updated in half a year or more, is: “let’s not do a marginal update, let’s do something meaningful here.” Stay tuned.

The Nexus Q is a simple sphere, and is sold with optional matching speakers. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The Google Nexus Q is a device most of us can ignore for the time being.

It does generate a lot of curiosity, which is deserved, as it’s a gorgeous product that demonstrates Google is getting more serious about two things: selling digital content, and making Android devices without touchscreens.

The Q is an austere, matte black sphere that streams music and videos from the cloud. The entire top hemisphere is an endlessly rotating volume knob that’s also touch-sensitive. (Tap it to mute the audio.) Around the equator is a ring of bright, colorful LEDs that dance to the music. The lower hemisphere is a die-cast zinc base with a number of ports — micro HDMI, micro USB, optical audio, Ethernet, and analog speaker connections — machined into the back. Inside are the guts of an Android smartphone and a 25-watt amp for powering a pair of speakers. The whole thing is made in the United States, and it represents a huge milestone for Google, as it’s the company’s first consumer product developed and manufactured entirely in-house.

It’s a visual and tactile joy, and a marvel of engineering. But beauty is only skin-deep, and the Nexus Q’s functionality is so severely limited out of the box, it’s difficult for all but the most hardcore audio gadget fanatics to justify the $300 price tag.

You heard me: $300. But the eyebrow raising doesn’t stop there. It’s only capable of streaming content from Google Play and YouTube. Confoundingly, you can’t use it to play any of the MP3s on your local network, nor can you stream music from Rdio, Spotify or Pandora. It requires an Android phone or tablet running a special app to control it. There’s no support for iOS or Windows Phone. It forgoes regular analog speaker posts in favor of banana plug sockets.

So, it’s an enticing device — if you’re fully committed to buying and renting stuff from Google’s music and movie store, if you’ve bothered to upload all of your music to Google’s cloud service, if you have an Android phone or tablet, and if you have a pair of speakers sitting around that happen to be able to accept banana plugs. That’s a lot of ifs.

The Q is controlled using an app on your Android phone or tablet. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The $300 price tag seems shocking, but when you think about it, that’s actually not too bad. I see a lot of audiophile devices, and for something that feels, looks and sounds this nice, is made in the United States, and has a high-quality 25-watt amp and a fully capable Android circuit board inside — complete with a dual-core OMAP 4460 chip, 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM — $300 is reasonable.

Google is also selling a set of matching Triad bookshelf speakers ($400 for the pair, which is also a fair price, though competing audiophile brands are less), and a set of shielded speaker cables ($50) with banana plug connectors shaped to fit snugly into the Q’s back. Google loaned us the full complement of accessories so we could test everything.

First off, the Q sounds great. I have about 500 tracks stored in Google’s music cloud, so I listened to dozens of songs across multiple genres. The Q’s amp is efficient and clean, and gets plenty loud without growing distorted. In addition to the Triad speakers, which sound phenomenal, I hooked the Q up to a pair of vintage Advent speakers. These have regular speaker posts instead of banana jacks, so I had to spend $10 on a set of adapters and fashion my own connections.

Queueing up tracks using the Google Play Music app is an easy enough experience, and I like the design of the player. If you have two (or more) friends on the same Wi-Fi network, you can all take turns throwing your music onto the Q. Whatever songs each individual has access to in Google’s cloud, just select them and add them to the queue. You can also select entire albums at once. Anyone can reorder the list to make their songs play sooner, sort of like you can do in iTunes DJ. But unlike iTunes DJ, which only pulls songs from the host’s library, the Nexus Q lets you each play songs from your own individual cloud-based libraries. And after your friends leave your house, you can keep listening to whatever songs they loaded onto your Q for a full day after they walk out the door. All the sharing is, of course, reliant on everyone having Android phones or tablets with the Nexus Q app installed. (If their phones have NFC chips, they can tap the Q to initiate the app download.) Regardless, the sharing features are very cool, and they turns the sleek orb into a social listening device (though this orb is probably more fun at parties).

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The Cannondale SuperSix EVO Team is the same bike the members of the Liquigas Cannondale Team, including podium threat Vincenzo Nibali, will be racing at the Tour de France this July. As one would expect of such a dyed-in-the-carbon-fiber racer, the EVO is about as lively it gets.

The 14.3-lb bike is a joy on the climbs, but the aggressive geometry and big, thin-walled tubes make for a responsive but temperamental ride. The EVO’s connection to the pavement could be a bit tenuous at times.

That’s not to say it’s not a great ride. It was. But I sometimes had a hard time keeping the wheels on the ground when accelerating uphill or sprinting. And that lively frame doesn’t so much carve through high-speed turns as it rips through them. If you’re not an experienced racer, it can sometimes feel like you’re along for the ride, rather than completely in control.

At the same time, the EVO was thrilling, diving into turns and whipping in and out of pace lines. Stand up on the pedals and the bike launches out from under you. There’s no doubting that this is one efficient frame. Cannondale claims the 815-gram frame has the highest stiffness-to-weight ratio available.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

It actually gets lighter. The blue-and-green color scheme on the Team model actually adds 120 grams to the the bare 695-gram frame. None of this matters to the team, though. Even with the heavier frame and deep-section Mavic Cosmic Carbone SLR wheels, the riders still have to add weight to the bike to get it up to the sports minimum weight of 14.96 pounds.

The EVO definitely belongs in the top tier of race bikes. Sprinters and climbers, especially, would be hard pressed to find anything better. But if you mostly ride for fitness or have some loose fillings you’re worried about rattling out, you might want to look elsewhere.

WIRED Surgically precise shifting from the 2012 SRAM Red components. Custom Cannondale green paint job on the Red shifters is just cake. Twitchy handling is perfect for racing in tight quarters. Aero Carbone wheels slice through the wind.

TIRED Temperamental frame not ideal for long, casual club rides. Carbon rims don’t have the best braking surfaces, especially when wet. Jittery front end.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

In terms of all-out blistering speed, I’ve never experienced anything like the Foil. It’s the rare aero-road frame that feels every bit as light, stiff, and snappy as its more traditional, round-tubed brethren, yet it holds huge aerodynamic advantages over those frames. (Scott claims a 20 percent boost over round-tubed frames.) In essence, the Foil is free speed.

Aero-road frames have been around for only four or five years, but they’ve quickly become a required product for any serious frame manufacturer. The frames borrow the teardrop tube shapes of triathlon bikes but with geometries and components made for road racing. The idea here is to find some extra speed on the bike while preserving the responsive handling and lateral stiffness of standard road frames.

But the narrower tube profiles can introduce a lot of side-to-side flex, which robs pedaling efficiency. This isn’t as much of an issue on triathlon bikes, where riders race at a steady power output. But it’s detrimental in road racing, where frequent brutal accelerations and all-out sprints are the norm. The only way to combat this is to add more material in the frame. So buyers of aero-road frames have generally had to choose between a bit of lateral flex or extra weight.

Scott solved this by cropping off the back end of each tube. If you think of the aero tube cross section as being teardrop shaped, Scott chopped off the rear third or so, the part that narrows down to a point. As with Trek’s patented Kamm tail shape, the trailing edge of each tube is flat and runs perpendicular to the frame. This not only sheds weight, it stiffens the frame.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Our 15.2-lb test rig (56cm) felt like possibly the stiffest bike in our test. It lurched forward with every pedal stroke. It leapt up hills, cut through headwinds, and flew down the descents without feeling squirrely. The Foil’s shape hit the sweet spot in all three categories — it’s as stiff and as lightweight as a round-tubed frame, but offers 20 percent less wind resistance.

Despite the racer DNA (this is the same frame Australia’s GreenEDGE team will ride in the Tour de France), the Foil is surprisingly comfortable. I definitely wouldn’t call it plush. But I could take it out for six-plus-hour rides without feeling beat up. Our tester had mechanical Shimano Dura-Ace components and Mavic Cosmic aero rims, which aided the aero feel of the bike but definitely made for some challenging rides whenever the brutal Bay Area winds were coming at me from the side.

WIRED Everything that makes standard race bikes fast, plus aero benefits they can’t match. Surprisingly comfortable for such a twitchy, race-oriented frame.

TIRED Ho-hum graphics and overall look. Frustratingly slippery seatpost clamp; I finished several rides with my saddle a few millimeters below where it had started.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Nobody likes to admit it, but if you’re a working professional, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with sweat stains. The commute to work, the stress of meeting a deadline, the faulty air conditioning in the boardroom, cotton weaves — all of these things and many more have been known to conspire against you, the working professional. Luckily, Ministry of Supply feels your stinky, stinky pain.

While athletes have Under Armour, business attire has more or less remained the same for the last century. So, armed with some of the same technology NASA uses in its space suits, Ministry of Supply has developed a line of dress shirts — called “Apollo” — that adapt to your body to control perspiration, reduce odor, and make you feel like a million bucks.

Founded in 2010 by MIT grads, Gihan Amarasiriwardena, Aman Advani, Kit Hickey, and Kevin Rustagi, Ministry of Supply launched three limited lines of premium dress shirts back in October. Of course, they quickly found that, in order to continue iterating and sell at scale, they would need funding. They went to venture capitalists for backing, and while there was interest, most wanted to see more proof of concept. So, like many before them, they took to Kickstarter to raise money for their hi-tech dress shirts.

And the working professionals of the world responded. The team set out to raise $30K and within 5 days of launching the campaign, they met their goal. Today, that total is at $123,386, and the excitement continues. The Ministry of Supply founders tell us that, over the last week, they’ve been averaging $8K in donations per day.

But what is it about these dress shirts that has people so excited? The team’s line of dress shirts, called “Apollo” use a knit, synthetic (and proprietary) blend of fibers that use “Phase Change Materials” to control your body temperature by pulling heat away from your body and storing it in the shirt. Find yourself back in air conditioning and the shirt releases the stored heat to keep you feeling warm — and like a million bucks.

The shirts, like Under Armour, also wick sweat and moisture away from your body and, by using an anti-microbial coating, get rid of that pesky bacteria that makes you smell like a barnyard. Not only that, but having done strain analysis and designing the shirt with motion in mind, the Apollo line adapts to your movements and stays tucked in and wrinkle free all the live long day.

In essence, it’s a magic shirt.

Ministry of Supply also wants to keep jobs in the U.S., so the whole production process — packaging to fabric — is done at home. The funds the startup has raised from Kickstarter will be put towards managing these costs and paying for the production of the proprietary raw materials that go into the Apollo line.

Not every Kickstarter project is lucky enough to reach its initial goal — let alone exceed that by tens of thousands of dollars — so, to keep people engaged, the team has been updating its page with video and has been setting new milestones in addition to the ones put in place at the outset.

At $75K, the team pledged to switch from XS to XXL to standard collar-sleeve length sizing; at $125K, they pledged to add two new colors to the mix, and if they reach $200K, they’ll add patterns, either a thin stripe or a plaid, the founders tell us.

And, if they reach $291,494 and become the highest-funded fashion-related Kickstarter project, the founders tell us that they plan to launch their backers’ names into space on a “ridiculous weather balloon.” To that end, they assured us that they have two aerospace members of the team, one of whom works for SpaceX, who will help make that happen.

When I asked what contributed to their success thus far, the founders said that it’s been important to them to bring the same intense iterative process to the development of their dess shirts that one sees when designing products for consumer electronics or for the consumer Web. They’ve done dozens of iterations of Apollo, A/B testing, you name it.

As the founders themselves boast experience working for IDEO, Apple, Lululemon, and more, the focus on design and iteration isn’t surprising.

As to what’s next? The team is working on finishing a showroom in Boston, which should be completed in the next couple of months, as well as a dedicated eCommerce site. The founders have been inspired by the work of Warby Parker and Indochino, and plan to initially do most of their selling online — and through their showroom in Boston. Just like their shirts — it’s a blended approach.

But with so much interest both at home and abroad, it won’t be long before the team begins to work with retailers to distribute their dress shirts. Right now they’re planning on selling them for about $130 a pop, so their Kickstarter campaign provides a good opportunity to get in early before prices start rising.

For more, find Ministry of Supply at home here. Kickstarter video below:

“I believe CrunchBase will gain a lot of attention from the academia soon, which is always eager for high-quality data set,” writes Guang Xiang of Carnegie Mellon University, who found that he could predict Mergers and Acquisitions much better using the unique business variables available in CrunchBase than the traditional databases used by academics. Thanks, Xiang, flattery will get you everywhere.

“Traditionally, people only used numeric variables/features for M&A prediction, such as ROI, etc. CrunchBase and TechCrunch provided a much richer corpus for the task,” he writes. Specifically, CrunchBase gave him data on a volume of companies roughly 43 times the normal dataset (2300 vs. +100,000) and access to valuable variables, such as management structure, financing, and media coverage.

For instance, “Strong financial backing is generally considered critical to the success of a company,” but traditional datasets won’t have detailed information on the management, their experience, and the funding rounds.

Even better, the news coverage itself on Techcrunch could also be a predictor of merger or acquisition (because, well, duh, if a company’s doing well enough to make the news, there’s a good chance someone is also itching to buy it out).

But, just when we were starting to blush, Xiang brought out the criticism, “Despite its large magnitude, the CrunchBase corpus is sparse with many missing attributes,” because the community-created database tends to focus on more popular companies and features. That said, even with drawbacks, the researchers still achieved “good performance,” with CrunchBase — Which impressively enough has been managed all these years by superwoman Gene Teare.

M&A activity is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are all sorts of business questions that could be answered using the vast amounts of data provided by CrunchBase. So, statisticians and business analysts, go nuts. And, when you find something cool, let us know first ([email protected]).

Late Thursday, an extraordinary thing happened: Adobe announced in a blog post that it would not provide Flash Player support for devices running Android 4.1, and that it would pull the plugin from the Google Play store on August 15. The retreat comes five years after the introduction of the iPhone, the device which thwarted Flash’s mobile ambitions, almost even before they began.

That Adobe would make such an announcement nearly five years to the day that the first iPhone was sold is kind of funny. I’d like to think that the Flash team has a sense of humor and was well aware of the timing when it posted the blog entry, but I could also see the entry as unintentionally ironic. Either way, it caps off a five-year battle to win the mobile landscape — a war which for Adobe ended in defeat.

At the time the iPhone was announced, lack of support for Adobe Flash seemed like a glaring omission, for a platform that was so hell-bent on being a portable computing device. But it wasn’t until the iPad came out, two-and-a-half years later, that the battle between Apple and Adobe, Flash vs. HTML5, and “open” vs. “proprietary” reached a fever pitch.

The iPad Effect

The iPad was announced in January at WWDC, but wasn’t available until March. And when it did finally become available, people began to notice that the lack of Flash, which then was the de facto standard for video playback and interactivity on the web, was missing. For the iPhone, not having Flash was a minor annoyance — after all, few other smartphones had very good Flash support at the time… But for the iPad, which in many cases was being used as a laptop replacement, at least for consumption of media, that was a big deal.

It wasn’t long before Google latched onto this and began promising an alternative to the “broken” Apple devices which wouldn’t give users access to the full web, as publishers intended them to view it. It’s tough to believe now, but at one point, Flash on mobile devices was actually considered a feature. There was Google’s Andy Rubin in April 2010, announcing that Android would have full Flash support in Froyo, the next version of the operating system to be released.

The Impact Of “Thoughts On Flash”

Battle lines were drawn, and just a few days later, Steve Jobs issued his epic missive “Thoughts on Flash,” which sought to explain, once and for all, why Apple didn’t — and wouldn’t ever — integrate Flash into its mobile and tablet devices. There were numerous reasons, and Jobs debunked the trope of Flash being “open,” as well as its ability to access the full web. He also brought up security, reliability, performance, and battery life issues that plagued devices using the plugin.

Most importantly, though, Apple didn’t want Adobe developers to create cross-platform apps which didn’t take advantage of the most latest features, development libraries and tools. Jobs wrote:

“Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.”

It turns out Jobs was right. When Flash finally did ship on Android devices, it didn’t provide users with the full web, as was promised. Android users who wished to watch videos on Hulu through the Flash browser, for instance, were met with a message saying that the content wasn’t available on the mobile web. Same thing for users who tried to access most premium video sites on Google TV, which also supported Flash. More importantly, even when those videos or interactive Flash elements did appear on Android devices, they were often wonky or didn’t perform well, even on high-powered phones.

The end result was that users stopped seeing Flash on mobile devices as a good thing, and developers quit trying to support the framework on those devices.

The Flash Issue Isn’t Just About Mobile

But the impact of that battle goes beyond just how people view content on mobile phones. While pretty much all developers have settled on building native apps or coding for the mobile web when trying to reach those users, the battle has also had an impact on the way that developers think about multi platform web development. Even when not building for 4-inch screen, they’re increasingly turning to HTML5 to build new user experiences or render interactive applications, rather than writing to be seen in the Flash player.

Video might be the last industry where the Adobe Flash Player continues to have a hold on how content is displayed, but even then, a growing number of sites are moving to HTML5-based video players for delivery. YouTube and Vimeo are leading that charge, displaying their videos in a HTML5 player first, when available, and only falling back to Flash when the player isn’t supported. And many others are following that lead.

Frankly, Flash had never been a huge business for Adobe, even when development for interactive websites using the plugin were in high demand. As time goes on, it will become an even less important part, as its development tools — where Adobe makes the bulk of its revenue — focus on catering to a developer base that is increasingly interested in building HTML5-based web applications. As more can be accomplished in-browser without a plugin, that’s good news for users and developers alike.

For a tech company founder in San Francisco, I’m a terribly late adopter of new technology. My buddy in med school had a smart phone before I did. The iPhone was out for a year before I bought the 3G. The iPad? I’m embarrassed to admit, I got my first one a month ago.

I held out on the iPad because I didn’t get it. It didn’t have retina display, and comparing the screen after looking at the iPhone 4, it just seemed… pixelated. My friends who had the original version bought them as a novelty, which quickly seemed to wear off. I didn’t know what I would do with one once I had one.

So, when I finally buckled and got the iPad 3, I came to the realization that the rest of the world had over 2 years ago: the iPad is an amazing consumption device. You don’t need a keyboard, because if you’re doing any work at all it will be to send iPhone length one-liner emails. Most of what you’ll be doing on the iPad is playing games, watching videos and shopping.

There’s a plethora of iPad games, and you can download almost any movie or tv show from iTunes, but the shopping experience leaves a lot to be desired. When I first turned on the iPad, I went through and downloaded all the popular apps I recognized. In the shopping / ecommerce category, this was Gilt and Fab.

Both of these companies have amazing iPad experiences. For a while, I was browsing them every day; not because I actually needed to buy anything, but because I enjoyed the virtual window shopping experience of browsing through amazing photos of cool looking products. As any retailer knows, getting people in the store is half the battle, and pretty soon I was back to buying things off Gilt (when I had previously sworn off of it after their fulfillment sent me the wrong thing on multiple orders).

Inspired to find some shopping apps that weren’t flash sales sites, I simply couldn’t find any decent ones. All the apps for department stores and brands seemed like screenshots of their websites. In most of them, I couldn’t even purchase anything.

The ecommerce experience for iPad has been dominated by the deals sites because the deals sites are the only retailers heavily innovating on the technology side. That doesn’t have to be the case. The thing that makes a Gilt or Fab iPad app stand out is that they are extremely polished and conducive to casual browsing, which leads to serendipitous discovery and purchase. Also, they have a great excuse to bring you back in their “store” with a push notification every day — they have a new batch of inventory for you to check out.

Therere a couple other reasons iPads are natural platforms for ecommerce. On iPads shoppers are in a different state of mind (they are relaxing instead of being distracted with work or IM), and are more likely to make impulse purchases. Also, because of the high switching cost of opening up new tabs in Safari or switching between apps (when compared with a browser), a well designed app can keep users engaged for much longer than they would be on the web.

I think the next generation of ecommerce apps for iPad will focus less on the discounting and more on creating an amazing curated browsing experience. Recently, I got a preview build of an app called Monogram by founder Leo Chen (who I’m now advising), which does exactly that: curates collections of clothing from around the web, bringing the user a personalized boutique that updates every day with new outfit suggestions. Like Gilt, the emphasis on the app is about browsing and discovery. When I’m using apps like Monogram and Gilt, I find myself spending more time and browsing/buying more products than I ever do on the web. Apparently I’m not the only one.

A couple things I think this next generation of apps will have to figure out:

1. Some way of differentiating their product inventory. Some will be vertically integrated companies that are bringing their own designs to market, like Everlane or Warby Parker. Others will focus on curation of existing products. I personally have been waiting for a store that curates the very best item I can own in every category, and tells me why it is the best.
2. A great offline experience. Few companies in the ecommerce space have focused on innovating on what happens after you checkout with your shopping cart, and they all happen to be owned by Amazon (Amazon, Quidsi, Zappos). I believe there’s a lot of room to innovate in how products are packaged and delivered, and not many people are doing that at the moment.

Right now the iPad is like an entire country of 60 million consumers with only a few stores competing for their purchases. The denizens of iPadlandia are waiting to buy your awesome stuff. Why are you not letting them?

For the past few years, we’ve been told over and over again that NFC will eventually replace the common wallet. And yes, NFC is a great technology. Parts of Europe and China are using it for public transport transactions, and the sharing of content between devices is incredibly cool (just check out this commercial). And moreover, the ability to ditch all of your loyalty cards and combine them in one place (potentially) PassBook-style would be highly convenient. But where mobile payments are concerned, there is no problem to be solved.

Let’s just start with the small stuff. For one, the motion itself should be no different. It’s not like contactless payments via mobile is a more physically efficient form of living and transacting. You grab your credit card out of your wallet in your pocket, and swipe it through the reader (or in some cases tap it, just like the phone). In the case of NFC, you grab your phone out of your pocket, open Google Wallet (or whatever), and tap it to the reader. It’s the same exact motion.

But that doesn’t even matter when we start to consider the real obstacles for NFC mobile payments. There are two issues: the smaller is that, along with not being any faster or easier physically, no one is actually getting rid of their wallet. For one, everyone needs an ID and an ID isn’t safe in a pocket or loose in a bag. So, until I can use my phone as a form of identification at the airport, with the police, or to go to a Dr.’s appointment, my wallet will still remain. And it’s fair to assume that at least some people prefer to have a little cash on them, just in case.

I took a quick Twitter poll using PopTip (a newly launched TechStars company), and it turns out that the few respondents I had mostly feel comfortable without any cash. But, I also assume that the majority of my Twitter followers are generally tech-savvy early adopters, so I still stand behind the fact that you’ll continue carrying a wallet, or some other carrier of small, valuable pieces of paper like insurance cards, IDs, etc.

Moreover, all merchants would need to be set up for NFC transactions to allow the consumer to ditch their wallet, not just forward thinking giants like American Eagle, Macy’s and OfficeMax. It’s not like consumers will stop shopping at non-NFC merchants just because they aren’t set up — paying with a credit card is just as easy, so why even go through the trouble of setting up Google Wallet? Google Offers is a nice incentive, but it isn’t enough to sway all consumers, and it certainly isn’t attractive enough to woo merchants.

In essence, the only true value given to the consumer is the fact that it’s “cool.”

And then the problems intensify when we visit the merchant side of things. There is no benefit to merchants to implement these systems. Sure, Google and Isis can try to convince these SMBs that NFC is the future, but in reality it’s only an added cost to overhaul the system. Even at a minimal cost, the only value is a slight increase in efficiency pushing customers through POS. Companies could potentially market through their POS using NFC, as is the case with Google Offers, though I’m not sure this is welcome on either side. As Mirth so gracefully stated at Disrupt, merchants aren’t quite as enthusiastic about deals services as consumers are.

This comment thread on LoopInsight says it well:

There’s no tangible, proven way to get any return on investment for the implementation. So why do it?

Credit cards are ubiquitous. Credit cards are fast and easy. Almost all merchants have the ability to process payments via credit card. So why? Why are we solving a problem that doesn’t exist?

And even if there is some added benefit, most research predicts that the ubiquity of mobile payments via NFC is between five and ten years away. That’s more than enough time for another disruptive payments solution, likely something that doesn’t require a complete merchant systems overhaul, to supplant NFC before it ever hits its stride.

Again, NFC is an incredibly useful technology. In fact, the social media implications of NFC ubiquity in mobile devices (not at POS) are kind of mind-boggling. Just look at these TagStand figures, and pair them with Google’s recent announcement of 1 million NFC Android devices shipped every week, and then imagine Facebook and Twitter bigger than they’ve ever been before. That is the future of NFC.

Very soon, we’ll be using it in all kinds of interesting and productive ways. I just don’t think mobile payments is one of them.

“There’s an oligarchy in the media and that needs to be broken up” Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker tells me. So he’s building #waywire, a news site that features original and syndicated video content, but that also lets viewers record and share their responses. “Traditional news sources aren’t in any way talking to millennials” Booker says, so #waywire is designed to deliver them content from their perspective. It’s now taking registrations for its upcoming private beta.

#waywire want to challenge old media outlets like CNN, but also create a news discovery alternative to Facebook and Twitter. It’s bold ambition convinced First Round Capital, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter and other angels to fund #waywire’s $1.75 million seed round. And the startup has told TechCrunch that Oprah Winfrey and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner are investors too.

Booker believes “There are practical solution to [creating] more jobs, lower crime, better education. If more people could find their voice and be part of the national dialogue, we could solve these problems.”

As the mayor New Jersey’s largest city, once named “The Most Dangerous City In The Nation” by Time, Booker is no stranger to big problems. Nor is he a stranger to innovative solutions, as the steward of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to Newark’s public school system.

To make his idea for #waywire a reality, Booker has recruited some co-founders with deep digital experience. including TechCrunch’s own former CMO Sarah Ross whose also worked with Katalyst Media and Yahoo. Nathan Richardson, former president of Gilt City, CEO of ContextNext Media, and head of Dow Jones online will be #waywire’s CEO.

When it eventually launches, #waywire will pull in data from your social sites like Facebook and Twitter to help you build a personalized newswire of topics you care about. #waywire plans to start by creating 10,000 minutes of original video content hosted by all-millenial newscasters, which will be combined with clips syndicated from established outlets.

While the company has yet to release any screenshots, Richardson tells me these pieces of professional content will appear flanked by video responses from the #waywire community and your networks. You’ll be able to shoot video responses to offer up your own opinion, and then share the news and your rebuttals to social networks, making #waywire inherently viral. Plus, there’s a badge and reward system that lets aspiring anchors and editors become part of a trusted set of curators who determine which content is highlighted on #waywire.

Richardson gave me an example of the content you’ll see on #waywire. “Say I see this post from a traditional media source on something like healthcare, but don’t understand what it means to me. {On #waywire I’d get] a millennial point of view. ‘Oh, you just graduated and can be on your parent’s healthcare plan until you’re 26. You just scored.’” You can see a promo video explaining the need for the product here.

As a voracious but busy news reader, I worried that video which can’t be scanned like text might make #waywire difficult to quickly browse. Richardson assured me, though, that there will be written summaries beside official clips to help you deciding whether to watch.

And if you’re scratching your head about why the medium is so critical, you might be older than #waywire’s target audience, the YouTube generation who are growing up with video as a format for creation, not just consumption. “All the research shows millenials want more video content” the startup’s CEO tells me. The fact that the startups name is a hashtag should indicate just how serious it is about courting young digerati.

Still, turning #waywire popular enough to change the world will be no easy task. Millenials are already saturated with stimulation. Facebook and Twitter have built brilliant mouse traps for attention, and their text and photo-focused inputs erect smaller barriers to participation than webcams and video. #waywire’s content is inherently sharable, though, so if it reaches critical mass as a news discovery tool, links to it could be pumped out across the social web.

And thankfully, Mayor Cory Booker is relentlessly inspirational. He tells me “Right now, we don’t have enough voices in the national dialogue, and it’s causing slowness in the pace of change. I want people to raise their voice, find something they’re passionate about. With that spirit we’ll see a country that moves further and faster down the pathway of change.”

Sign up for early access to #waywire’s private beta