Category: Tech news

Apple is rumored to be working on an Apple TV successor, planned for release in the first half of this year according to 9to5Mac. The update would be a set-top box just like its existing model, but with improvements to the new OS and additional content types, the report claims. A separate report out today from iLounge says that Apple will introduce native gaming support to the Apple TV, along with direct support for game controllers, which currently only work via connected iOS devices.

The Apple TV is already a gaming box in that it supports AirPlay streaming of game content from iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. Developers can build experiences that employ the Apple TV in specific ways, too, so that they can provide multi-screen gaming experience to users, as is the case with the Real Racing series. And new controllers that are supported under Apple’s MFI program and the new Bluetooth game controller API provided with iOS 7 (like the new SteelSeries Stratus which goes on sale today) will work with existing Apple TV devices, likewise through the host iOS device.

iLounge claims knowledge of an update that would add game controller support as well as direct game installation on the Apple TV themselves. 9to5Mac, however, suggests only that Apple is building new hardware to replace the current Apple TV, and suggests that a game or app store is a strong possibility for inclusion. 9to5Mac’s own-sourced rumor reporting has a very high rate of accuracy, for what it’s worth.

Apple’s existing method for getting games on the Apple TV, i.e. using connected devices and iOS software combined with AirPlay, has a number of advantages for the company in terms of promoting platform buy-in and halo purchases, and with the iOS 7 Bluetooth controller support, the combination of the two effectively becomes a home microconsole, so it’s unclear how much the company would have to gain by building support for Bluetooth HID gaming hardware or game software directly into the Apple TV. A hardware refresh that updates things like streaming performance or other core parts of the Apple TV experience makes more sense in the context of these reports.

The current Apple TV last received a significant update in March, 2012, so it’s due for a refresh. Rumors of a dedicated Apple television haven’t borne fruit, and don’t look likely to do so anytime soon, but a refresh of the set-top box as an early 2014 launch makes sense in the overall picture of Apple’s hardware update cycle as a way to keep things fresh, since the company tends to favor fall for major announcements on the iPhone/iPad side of things these days.

When contacted by TechCrunch, Apple declined to comment on these reports.

The New York County District Attorney announced that the NYPD arrested four men on March 21, 2013 suspected of using concealed card skimming systems to grab card numbers and PINs from hundreds of victims at gas stations in Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia. The thieves targeted RaceTrac and RaceWay pumps with their tools and nabbed $2.1 million from stolen credit and debit cards.

The system they used is similar to skimmers found in gas stations throughout California. Designed to connect in line between the card reader and the pump computer, the skimmer reads PIN input and the magnetic stripe and stores it locally. The thieves could then drive by and pull the data off wirelessly using Bluetooth-equipped phones.

The four defendants – Garegin Spartalyan, 40, Aram Martirosian, 34, Hayk Dzhandzhapanyan, 40, and Davit Kudugulyan, 42 – are charged with 426 counts of money laundering, criminal possession of stolen property, and grand larceny. Additional defendants were charged with counts of Money Laundering in the Second Degree or Money Laundering in the Third Degree.

“In this case, the defendants are charged with stealing personal identifying information from victims in southern states, used forged bank cards on the East Coast, and withdrew stolen proceeds on the West Coast,” said District Attorney Cyrus Vance. “My Office’s Cybercrime and Identity Theft Bureau also operates across borders, and will continue to track and prosecute identity thieves here in Manhattan and around the world.”

Brian Krebs has further detail on the scam which involves sticking the devices into gas pumps using a universal key and simply driving by later to gather the numbers. Crooks can then clone the cards they steal and use them to withdraw cash at ATMs.

Writes one officer involved in stopping the scam in California:

The moral of the story? In short, don’t use your PIN number at a gas pump. Because these tools are so well-hidden there is no way to simply push or tug on the reader to test for tampering (I actually pull card readers at every ATM I use to see if they are affixed poorly or have been tampered with.) Having a credit card number stolen is far preferable to having your bank account cleared out via your PIN.

1.21.14 Gas Station Skimming and Cash Out Scam

Tech companies shelled out over $61 million to influence America’s political leaders in 2013, with Google leading the pack at a handsome $14 million. From high-skilled immigration reform to regulation, tech companies have become increasingly forced to preempt limitations imposed by policymakers.

The graph below is based on figures compiled by Consumer Watchdog from the House Clerks disclosure database.

In some cases, lobbying is a much cheaper and more successful investment than dealing with fines and laws after the fact. Google avoided a massive antitrust fine from the Federal Trade Commission by gaining friends all over the nation’s capitol.

In other cases, Google money could have been more productively spent on kale chips for their well-fed employees. Despite years of multi-million dollar, star-studded campaigns, the entire tech sector has yet to get legislation passed for high-skilled immigrants.

So far, the money has been quite good at protecting individual companies on non-salient issues. But, it’s yet to be seen whether the tech sector can influence a national issue, in the same way the National Rifle Association staves off gun control. According to OpenSecrets.org, the NRA and its affiliates spent less than $3 million, so money alone isn’t the deciding factor in getting one’s way.

As 2014 ramps up, expect intensified lobbying over net neutrality, surveillance reform, and immigration.

After Jon von Tetzchner left Opera in 2011, things went quiet around the company’s former CEO and Opera itself quickly went into a different direction under its new leadership. As part of that change, the company decided to shut down its My Opera community by March 1, 2014.

My Opera launched in 2001 as a support forum and a few years later, it morphed into a very active community site, with built-in blogs, photo sharing and other services that were often also integrated in the browser. While it’s mostly been under the radar of the tech press, the service still has close to 10 million users who will now be looking for a new place to call their online home.

To give the old My Opera a refuge after the service shuts down, von Tetzchner gathered about 20 former Opera employees to develop a replacement at Vivaldi.net. The name already hints at its relationship to Opera. As von Tetzchner told me, most meeting rooms and many other things at Opera were always named after composers, so Vivaldi was a logical (and available) choice.

“When Opera decided to close the community site,” he told me, “that gave us a very good reason to build a new community site.” Right now, the service is mostly geared to those former My Opera users, with forums, the ability to write blog posts and an email service. It doesn’t currently have all of My Opera’s photo-sharing features and layout tools for the built-in blogs, but then, the team only had a few weeks to build the current iteration of the site.

The self-funded service is currently available for free, and as von Tetzchner stressed, he does not want to monetize it through advertising. “We will not be going into the data and using that to provide advertising,” he told me. Instead, he believes the team can find other ways to monetize the service in the long run.

The team plans to listen to its users when it comes to developing new features. Tomita Tatsuki, a former Opera employee who previously led Opera’s efforts in Japan and now works on Vivaldi, told me that this may often mean finding the right balance between privacy and functionality.

While Vivaldi was designed as a replacement for the old My Opera community, though, von Tetzchner stressed that it is open to all. Given its heritage, the team believes, the service will mostly appeal to a more technical audience and currently, the most active forums are indeed about technology and, especially, browsers.

The servers for the service are based in Iceland, which has very strong privacy laws. Another draw for von Tetzchner (who was born in Iceland but now lives just north of Boston) was the fact that the team can host its servers in green data centers that run on renewable energy and barely need air conditioning thanks to Iceland’s climate.

Jon von Tetzchner

As for Opera, von Tetzchner told me that the company is “moving in a very different direction than what I would’ve liked to see.” A lot of the company’s focus has been on areas that didn’t directly involve the browser and instead on advertising services and acquiring companies like Skyfire.

Because of this, he believes, “the browser part has not been getting the same attention as before” and there has been “much less focus on innovation.”

He is also not a fan of Opera’s switch from its own Presto engine to Blink, Google’s open-source browser-rendering engine. “We had worked so hard on building this great kernel, but for the last four years, the focus on Presto was reduced. There was not enough investment and then they just decided to throw it away.” Presto, he said, “was great and flexible and easy to maintain,” but all that investment just “went down the drain.”

Von Tetzchner had no comment when I asked him if Vivaldi would ever consider building a browser.

[Image of Jon von Tetzchner via Flickr]

Earlier this week, some Pinterest users noticed that the company was experimenting with support for animated GIFs on its site – the popular, moving images that, until recently, defaulted to static photos when pinned. Today, Pinterest says that it’s rolling out support for GIFs to all pinners on the web, with mobile support expected “soon.”

According to the company, around 1 million users see a GIF on Pinterest every day, and there are already 10 million GIF images across the site. These pins will retroactively become animated GIFs, it seems.

Going forward, when you pin a GIF to Pinterest, a “play” and “pause” button will appear in the lower left-hand corner of the pin itself, Pinterest explains.

That doesn’t mean you’re in charge of determining whether your pin will be animated or not when you post – instead, the play button is visible on the GIFs found in Pinterest’s main feed, category feeds, and search results pages. In other words, Pinterest is keeping the look-and-feel of its site the same as before (meaning, static images), but now you at least have the option of clicking play to see the GIF right on Pinterest, instead of clicking through to the site where it’s hosted.

GIFs have been popular on the web for some time, but until now, Tumblr has been the social service best known for GIF sharing. With Pinterest’s support, that could change. (Especially with Tumblr traffic looking flat these days.)

Meanwhile, Facebook has rolled out autoplay videos, which some suspect may be a precursor to animated GIF support. But while the social network could technically enable GIFs at any time, it may not have wanted to dilute the experience with the busy, and sometimes bothersome, images.

Pinterest, however, seems to have found a nice middle ground.

In a move that could give brands and publishers more insight into what to tweet, today Twitter is rolling out Analytics For Twitter Cards. The dashboard shows impressions, URL clicks, and app installs of a publisher’s tweets and mentions by other users, as well as easy ways to measure favorites, retweets, and follows. If Twitter can teach publishers how to create better content, the service as a whole will become more informative, engaging, and monetizable.

Twitter has provided a basic analytics tool for all users since June, though many people don’t know it exists. But Twitter card publishers and advertisers will gain access to the new in-depth analytics dashboard over the next few days, and developers can check out details on how it works on the documentation page. You can check out this video which explains its features in more depth than Twitter’s blog post:

Instead of only showing insights on a publisher’s own tweets, the analytics measure the impact of all tweets to a publisher’s site. Twitter tested out the product with BuzzFeed, NBC News, Time Inc., ESPN, MLB, Flipboard, Etsy, Foursquare, and Path, but soon it will be available to anyone using Twitter cards.

On the dashboard there are three tabs at the top for URL clicks, install attempts, and retweets. You can select a date range to see details for that time period. A high-level snapshot shows how many links to your site have been tweeted, how many impressions they’ve received, and how many clicks.

A Card Types tool lets you compare your metrics against the average Twitter publisher, and provides tips that highlight what’s working best for your account. For example, you might be getting the best click-through rate and much higher rate than other accounts when using the Summary Card, so Twitter will suggest you use more of that one.

The Influencers sub-tab helps you determine which other accounts are giving you the biggest boost. If there’s some web celeb who always tweets your links and they drive a ton of traffic, these analytics could inspire you to build an even better relationship them.

Analytics For Twitter Cards also provides dedicated stats for your own tweets, and the ability to track how your follower account has increased over time. it even provides demographic breakdowns of location, gender, accounts your followers follow, and their top interests such as “mobile” or “open source”. Meanwhile, the Sources sub-tab shows what interface people tweet about you from, such as TweetDeck, Twitter’s website, or Twitter for iPhone. For now, there doesn’t appear to be a way for users to opt out of having this information shared with the accounts they mention.

Two parts of Analytics For Twitter Cards that are sure to grow more important with time deal with app installs. The Devices sub-tab that shows what percentage of users who view your Cards have your app installed, while the App Installs tab shows how many clicks to the app stores your Cards generate.

With millions of apps available for download, the app stores are becoming hopelessly cluttered. The only organic way to really gain big traction is to the the top charts, but to do that you need to hit a threshold of installs. Twitter’s App Install Cards, including paid ad App Install Cards, can give developers the boost they need to reach the charts. These new analytics could give them the confidence to spend more on Twitter’s App Install ads. The same paid app discovery business has been big for Facebook, and could be a highlight of future Twitter earnings calls.

Until now, Twitter’s most important content creators have to some degree been tweeting in the dark. The analytics dashboard could let them hone their publishing strategy, whether they’re trying to gain widespread mindshare through retweets, drive specific business objectives through URL clicks, or grow their audience for the long-term.

And that won’t just help publishers but Twitter itself. The better content it’s filled with, the more informative people will find the service, and the more often they’ll come back and see its ads.

Nope, it’s not just you. Google recently changed the top menu on its search result pages so that it will dynamically adjust based on the topic of your current query, the company tells us.

The “More” drop-down menu where options like “Blogs,” “Discussions,” “Patents,” and others were once found, has been replaced by a truncated list of search filters. Meanwhile, the bar at the top that lets you filter by “Web,” “News,” “Images,” “Books,” “Maps,” etc., will also now update based on your queries.

This is a minor, but still notable, change impacting Google users who may have previously relied on that “More” menu to better filter their search results. “Patents,” for example, was especially useful for doing research, and it’s gone – even when your query contains the keyword “patent!”

That “More” menu no longer has an extensive list of filters, only four. Depending on the search, this could include verticals like “Maps,” “Shopping,” “Books,” “Applications,” “Videos,” or “Flights,” for instance. Meanwhile, the main menu will always be led by “Web” in the first spot, but the other options will rearrange themselves as need be.

Above is an example of the Google menu from earlier this year. Below, are some sample searches that show how the menu will now change based on your queries.

“We’re always making changes to Search to help you find the most useful things more easily,” a Google spokesperson says, also confirming that the change is a very recent one. “For example, if you search for ‘English to Tagalog’ you’ll see ‘Apps’ that’ll help you with translation as well as ‘Books’ and ‘Shopping’ in case you’re looking to buy a printed or electronic dictionary,” she offers as an example.

As for the missing options themselves? While they may no longer be available as a standalone search filter, we understand that content will now be included within the main search results.

A recipe search engine is present as well, we’re reminded. For example, try a search for “chicken pot pie,” and then click on “Search Tools.”

You’ll then be able to filter your searches by ingredients, cook time, calories, and more. Recipe search is not a new feature in Google – the company has been working on this service since 2011. But in light of Pinterest’s launch of its own recipe search engine this week, it’s worth pointing out (eh, Google?).

(image credit, old menu: Blumenthals.com)

On-demand ride-sharing service Lyft has been expanding pretty aggressively over recent months, and plans to continue adding new domestic and international cities over the coming year. To help the company navigate a shifting regulatory environment, it’s hired former Google X Legal Director David Estrada as its new Vice President of Government Relations.

Estrada was hired to oversee a growing government relations team within Lyft and to help it establish a legal framework around ride-sharing in new markets. Coming from Google X, he led a team that sought to gain regulatory acceptance for a number of new and experimental technologies.

Most notable among those projects was Google’s self-driving car, for which Estrada and his team was able to get laws on the books in California, Florida, and Nevada. But the legal team also worked on technologies like Google Glass and its smart contact lens.

Now he brings that expertise to Lyft, which faces some regulatory challenges of its own. After nearly nine months refining its service in San Francisco, Lyft’s 2013 was spent adding a number of new markets. While it only added a city here or there for the first half of the year, the last few months punctuated an expansion plan that brings the total number of markets it serves to about 20.

But not every new market has been openly friendly to the concept of ride-sharing, with some regulators and politicians seeking to shut down or curtail operations of services like Lyft, SideCar, or Uber. And while Lyft had success in helping to establish a new set of regulations for ride-sharing services in California, it’s also faced minor skirmishes with local authorities in places like Los Angeles and Seattle.

To date, Lyft has been sending founders John Zimmer and Logan Green, along with other representatives, to rally support for ride-sharing in these local markets when issues arise, but the company recognizes that there’s more it can do to move regulation and political acceptance forward. That’s where Estrada comes in.

He and his team hope to take the success that Lyft and other ride-sharing services have had in establishing regulations in California, and offering those rules as a model for other jurisdictions. But first, much of the work ahead for Lyft’s government relations team will entail educating lawmakers and regulators about ride-sharing. Also, how it differentiates itself from existing models of transportation and other services.

“I think how we have to start is by understanding the interests of local policymakers, to educate them about what Lyft is and how it operates, the relationship between us and the drivers, and answer any questions they have about safety and insurance,” Estrada told me.

And when the company does face local opposition, Estrada hopes to understand where it comes from before moving forward. “We have to determine what is the basis of the opposition? How much is it based on safety, and how much is it protectionism?” If it’s the latter, he says, “sometimes we might have to call out behavior that is purely protectionist.”

To a certain extent, that might signal a slight change in tone for Lyft. While Uber has been very vocal in calling out regulators it believes are seeking to protect the entrenched taxi industry, in most cases Lyft has quietly worked behind the scenes to push its agenda forward.

“We don’t think we need to walk in and act like a heavy and engage in name calling,” Estrada said. “But to the extent that we don’t think that’s winning the day and we have to call out unfair practices, we’ll call out unfair practices.”

So why Lyft? Estrada says he became interested in the transportation problem as a legal advocate for self-driving cars at Google X. But he says Lyft is more than just about saving CO2 emission by having users share rides or reduce the number of cars on the road. In many ways, it’s about building a new type of social interaction around transportation that doesn’t fit with established transportation services.

Estrada says that what differentiates Lyft is the community connection between drivers and passengers, which contrasts with the traditional model of hopping into the back seat of a cab and having an unequal social or class situation.

“I love that Lyft is ‘your friend with a car’ and you’re making new connections with every ride you take,” Estrada said.

For a look into how Estrada pitched self-driving cars while at Google X, you can check out this video from April last year:

I got my first real Guitar Wing
Bought it at the Kickstart thing
Played it ’til my fingers bled
It was the winter Jay Smith and Travis Redding introduced their new $149 guitar rig

The team and some guys from Austin
Had a band and were into tech.
“Guitar Wing is a wireless controller covered in sensors designed for electric guitars and basses,” said rep Mike Fratamico.
It connects right below the neck.

Oh, when I look at their Kickstarter page
You see they want $45K
And they’re planning on shipping
In probably early May
And there are 30 days in the campaign

Ain’t no use in wonderin’
About how it works because we can ask Mike:
“We are including WingFX with the hardware that acts as a standalone application or a plugin for existing DAW’s like Garage Band, so users who have never used any kind of MIDI controller can start playing with it right away. As with all of our controllers, we have an idea for how they will be adopted but the truly exciting part is seeing what our users end up doing with it. Usually, these are things we never imagined,” he said.
And it’s covered in shiny lights.

Want to set off fireworks?
The Guitar Wing can control lights and effects.
Vernon Reid of Living Colour
Says this is the best gear for his gigs.

I asked the team if they’d call it “bitchin’”
Mike said “Yes I would.”
Can you play it in the kitchen?
Presumably there it will also sound good.

“We are small enough to take chances and put out unprecedented products,” said Mike.
“We often have little way of knowing how well one of our products will truly perform in the market since our releases are often the first of their kind.”
The team made lots of cool instruments
And this is the latest in their line.

(With apologies to Bryan Adams)

Nokia confirmed today that it sold 8.2 million Lumia Windows Phone devices in the fourth quarter of 2013. That figure represents a decline of 600,000 from the third quarter in which Nokia sold 8.8 million Lumia handsets.

The fall comes on the cusp of the sale of the majority of Nokia’s hardware assets to Microsoft, meaning that the slip is more Microsoft’s problem than Nokia’s. But it is a weak indicator for the larger Windows Phone platform that was showing signs of gathering momentum.

Last year was an excellent one for Windows Phone. Nokia sold 4.4 million devices in the fourth quarter of 2012, meaning that total volume nearly doubled on a year-over-year basis. And, except for the fourth quarter, Lumia sales expanded like clockwork in the year. Between the second and fourth quarters of the year, for example, Nokia sales expanded from 7.4 million to 8.8 million, a healthy quarterly delta of 1.4 million.

(Quickly, given the massive share of the Windows Phone market that it controls, Nokia’s Lumia sales can be treated as an essential proxy for the health of the platform at large. So, when we discuss Lumia sales we are essentially discussing around 90 percent of Windows Phone sales. The unit volume tracks up and down with Lumia sales.)

The decline is surprising. Windows Phone had showed little other than growing strength since the release of Windows Phone 8 in the twilight of 2012, and the release of increasingly excellent Nokia hardware.

So, from whence the decline is the question. Some have posited that the loss of momentum could come from Nokia curtailing its advertising for Lumia handsets, as the company is almost done unloading the assets. It could be that Nokia’s advertising decelerated in the period, but the company itself highlighted a number of other reasons for the decline.

As TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas reported this morning, Nokia said the following:

The year-on-year decline in discontinued operations net sales in the fourth quarter 2013 was primarily due to lower Mobile Phones net sales and, to a lesser extent, lower Smart Devices net sales. Our Mobile Phones net sales were affected by competitive industry dynamics, including intense smartphone competition at increasingly lower price points and intense competition at the low end of our product portfolio.

In short, Nokia indicated a very competitive market, and one that was becoming more so where it had seen much of its 2013 growth: low-priced handsets. The inexpensive Lumia 520 and its variants have been key volume drivers for Windows Phone. If Lumia sales at the lower end of the market stall, the platform itself could see its expansion slip.

There are two cases to be made. The first is that, as Tom Warren calculated, Lumia sales were up 86 percent year-over-year in the final quarter of year, and total unit volume (30 million) was up 125 percent for 2013. Regardless of the final quarter, those are strong figures.

The second case is that in a growing market, you need to expand more quickly than the industry to boost your share. Windows Phone shrank in a potentially strong quarter in a growing market. Shrinking unit volume implies that Microsoft lost market share in the quarter. That’s the wrong direction. Microsoft without question needs to grow its market share to attract more developer attention.

What’s next is a good question. I think the bull case on Windows Phone is that Microsoft, with its far greater financial resources, can pour cash into marketing its platform, and therefore grow unit volume by buying it.

Still, in a quarter in which most — your humble servant included — expected another quarter of predictable sales growth, Windows Phone stumbled. Blip? Trend? It’s too soon to tell, but falling sales aren’t as good as growing sales, and given the still extant fragility of Windows Phone, the fourth quarter’s performance matters.

Somewhere in Canada people are having a pretty good day.

History really does repeat itself.

Just like previous rumor seasons, Apple is reported to release two phones later this year. Except this time around, they will have larger screen.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the WSJ reports that one iPhone model will sport a 4.5-inch display, and the other version will have a display larger than 5 inches. That’s on par with the screen size of the Galaxy S III and Galaxy S4, respectively.

According to the report, both of these next-gen iPhones will have metal framing like the iPhone 5s, ditching the plastic iPhone 5c-style casing.

The iPhone originally launched with a 3.5-inch display, which was bumped to four inches with the iPhone 5. The most recent models, iPhone 5s and 5c, both sport 4-inch displays.

However, there has been pressure on Apple to experiment with larger screens ever since Android phones started growing. With Apple set on a smaller screen size, Android manufacturers used size to differentiate, slapping five- and six-inch displays onto flagship devices.

In fact, we’ve seen the phablet market grow to the point where I’m using the term “phablet market” in articles. Over 20 million units were shipped in 2013, and Juniper Research estimates that number growing to 120 million by 2018.

Another big factor here is China.

The company finally struck a deal with China Mobile, the country’s largest mobile carrier, after years of negotiation. As it happens, larger screen phones are more popular in Asia than they are in Apple’s usual territory.

Of course, for now this is all unconfirmed by Apple and thus a rumor. We’ll have to wait until Apple announces the next-gen products until anything is for sure. (But remember, history does tend to repeat.)

When AngelList — the network for young startups to find funding and employees – announced a $24 million round of funding last year, it noted that it had already helped 3,000 people find jobs through free listings. Now, it’s experimenting with ways to charge for them.

Today, a message has been popping up for would-be job posters: pay either 10% of the salary, or 0.25% of company equity, with the amount payable only after a person is found and hired, and refundable if the candidate leaves the job before 90 days. We have a screenshot of how the offer looks here.

Naval Ravikant, the CEO of AngelList, tells us that this is just a “test/expermiment right now.”

“It’s cheaper than anyone else out there, cash or equity (company’s choice) on hire only and only for new listings (95% of companies / activity are still free),” he tells me. AngelList is not making a big announcement because the test may change, or disappear altogether.

The move to charging for job listings should not come as a surprise. AngelList has been adding more monetizing features to its site over the last several months, namely around its syndicate investing model (which it is now expanding by offering free investor accreditation and Syndicates in Europe).

And last year, when AngelList announced its funding, Ravikant specifically referred to recruitment as one area that it could monetize.

“We’re not charging for recruiting today but that’s a logical place to do it,” he told AllThingsD, noting that the charges could range from “$10,000 to $30,000 per hire.”

According to AngelList’s salary tracking tool, right now the average salary for a developer on the site is $101,000 through to $85,000 for those in marketing roles.

Update: Just to emphasize that the test now is just for new listings, with the charge only payable with a successful hire. But as some have pointed out in the comments below there may be some challenges around tracking referrals — Ravikant says paying up will be on an honor system. And how young startups might be able to afford such fees (the solution here, says Ravikant, is to offer equity). Then again, in what is currently a very tight employment market for tech, the rates work out more competitive than other options, as Ravikant points out.

Mobile consumers today are becoming used to ads that redirect them to the App Store to install applications when tapped, but a new product from marketing analytics company Tapstream will now take things a step further. The company is today introducing something it calls “Deferred Deep Links,” which will effectively create landing pages inside mobile apps, which advertisers can wait to redirect users to until after the app is installed.

This is a change from how most deep linking schemes work today.

For those unfamiliar with the term, deep linking refers to a way to interconnect parts of mobile applications so they work more like pages on the web. That is, it offers a way for app developers to “link” to a particular section within an app. It’s something I’ve personally been interested in for years, while observing more of our “web surfing” activity transitioning over into what have been fairly isolated native applications.

There are a number of ways deep linking can be implemented at present, but unlike on the worldwide web, there are no standards surrounding the practice. Currently, companies like URX, Quixey (AppURL), Cellogic (Deeplink.me), Appsfire, and recent Yahoo acquisition SPARQ, have been developing technologies and tools that have made deep linking possible.

Typically, when a user taps on a deep link, they’ll be directed to a particular page within an app if the app is already on their device, or sent over to the App Store or Google Play, if not. With what Tapstream is introducing, the destination that the deep link is referencing is not lost, in the latter case. Instead, those users who don’t already have the app installed will see a brief message that lets them know they’ll reach their destination as soon as the installation is complete.

Tapstream is calling its solution “Deferred Deep Links,” and it’s now available for both iOS and Android, the company tells us.

Explains co-founder and CEO Slaven Radic, Deferred Deep Links was created in response to what they realized was a lost opportunity for mobile user acquisition. The service can create landing pages inside apps that have the ability to navigate users to the correct product page, store location, venue, or anything else being advertised, he says, regardless of whether the app is installed when the user first clicks an ad.

Other companies, including URX and Cellogic, have been working on something similar, we understand, and have both separately described the idea as rather “cool.” However, deferred deep links don’t always work that well on apps that require you to login before viewing content, which is the case with a good many apps on the market today.

But Radic says Tapstream’s system even works on apps requiring registrations. “Basically our back-end passes any navigation links to the app on launch and then the app can hold onto it while it does whatever on-boarding is required,” he explains.

Tapstream’s service is now live and available with every customer account, including free accounts. It will work with any app that can already handle user intent or registered URLs, the company notes. In addition, customers are also able to use their account to measure real-time ad performance, including metrics on things like link utilization, user engagement per campaign, in-app purchases, shopping carts, and more.

Note: article updated after publication to clarify Tapstream does work with apps requiring registration.

The gym is being disrupted from all angles, from workout gear, the quantified self to even how we workout at home. Fitmob is launching today with a new way to create workout, and redefine what the gym is in the digital age.

Founded by Snapfish CEO and Mayfield VC Raj Kapoor and Ness Computing co-founder and former Palantir Engineer Paul Twohey, fitmob is placing its bets on connecting people through local, indoor and outdoor group workouts with high-quality trainers. With San Francisco as the first market, fitmob is announcing $9.75 million in equity and debt funding from Mayfield Fund, Silicon Valley Bank, and angel investors.

Via the fitmob mobile app or website, you can find local workouts in a park or indoor facility near you, sign up, enter your credit card info and attend the class. For now, fitmob will offer 30 workouts per week in San Francisco at the Brannan Street Wharf in SOMA, at fitmob’s HQ on 5th Street and in Dolores Park, focusing on strength, cardio and yoga fusion. Workouts are open to the public with the first week free for new members. We’re told fitmob will continue to expand to new neighborhoods and cities over the next year.

Fitmob’s drop-in workouts start at $15, and the more you use fitmob every week, the less you pay per workout. So participants who come twice a week pay $10 per workout, and those who come three or more times a week pay only $5 per workout.

On the trainer side, fitmob certifies trainers, and allows them to create their own workouts according to their skills. Signature workout experiences on fitmob include Weapons of Ass Reduction, Sweat Soiree, Twerkout Conditioning and Guru Gone Wild. The company also says that Tony Horton, the celebrity fitness trainer behind the boot camp style P90X workouts, is a co-creator behind the company’s concept.

Personally, I’m a big fan of hacking the workout, and finding alternative ways to get exercise in. The appeal of fitmob is being trained nearby in a group setting by professional trainers and also being able to meet people who share your fitness interests. Eventually it would make sense to see fitmob expand into workouts around smaller, vertically-focused groups such as new moms, marathon enthusiasts and more. The startup has even carefully hired trainers who not only can provide quality workouts but entertain the group as well.

In the video above, you can hear Kapoor talk about why he went back into the operational world from VC and how he sees fitmob evolving in the future.

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