Category: Tech news

Early this morning, Valve announced that they were working on a new interface for Steam, custom-tailored for virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift.

Unless you’re a super-ultra-mega early adopter and have a Rift nearby , it can be kind of hard to picture what such an interface might look like. Here’s how it looks:

Shoutout to Youtuber candlejac for uploading the video

If you were hoping for some crazy, entirely brand new interface with all sorts of interactive bits whizzing around your head, you might be a bit… underwhelmed.

For now, Valve has taken the Big Picture interface they built for TVs and adapted it, projecting the interface onto a simulated plane just a few feet in front of the user’s virtual view. It’s essentially simulating a large, widescreen display inside of the Rift, preventing you from having to take off the headset (which is terrible at handling traditional 2D interfaces) just to navigate around Steam.

For those who haven’t used a Rift before, a bit of explanation: the reason you’re seeing two of what appears to be the same image is that the Rift headset pushes one slightly-offset image to each eye. Your brain then takes each of these images and combines them into one (theoretically) seamless view, allowing you to feel like you’re peering into a virtual world rather than just staring at a screen that’s way too close to your face.

[If you are a super-ultra-mega early adopter with a Rift, you can find directions for enabling a Beta version of the VR interface here]

Horace Dediu of Asymco does good work. Yesterday he published a thought-provoking article entitled “When Apple reached parity with Windows,” which immediately caused readers to lose their minds. Dediu set up a very specific analytical perspective: Windows-based PCs compared to Apple’s more diverse lineup of tablets, phones, mobile computing devices (the iPod Touch), and Macintosh PCs.

When comparing the two, declines in the larger Windows PC market lead to a unit volume chart for Microsoft that rises inexorably and then falls. That decline is compared to the aggregate unit volume of Apple’s computing products, making a graph that depicts an ascendant Apple and a troubled Microsoft:

As far as charts go, that’s a doozy. It says that Windows-based PCs dominated computing for decades until Apple founded several new device classes, thereby exploding its volume and, perhaps, putting it in a position to possibly overtake Windows this year.

Dediu looks at changes in the computing market through the lens of new buying patterns. Now that every individual can make computing device purchase decisions, the advantage that Windows-based machines had selling to large customers and governments is in decline:

We have to understand that the Windows advantage itself came from the way computing was purchased in the period of its ascent. In the 1980s and 1990s computing platform decisions were made first by companies then by developers and later by individuals who took their cues from what standards were already established. As these decisions created network effects, the cycle repeated and the majority platform strengthened. […]

Ultimately, it was the removal of the intermediary between buyer and beneficiary which dissolved Microsoft’s power over the purchase decision. It’s not just unlikely that this situation will be reversed, it’s impossible.

That analysis is worth considering because it underscores the rising trend of Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, that is changing the face of computing inside large companies.

Aggregate Volume

While Dediu has made interesting points, and I think highlighted trends worth considering, I would augment his analysis slightly.

He compares “platforms” but does so in a way that I find too narrow. If we want to compare devices built by two companies and how they reflect changes in purchasing trends and the like, I think that we should broaden his definition of Windows.

As Microsoft moves to unify its various platforms, we need to expand what counts as a Windows machine. Windows Phone and the Xbox One, for example, depend on Windows code to run. And, as Microsoft’s hinted-at plan to unify Windows RT and Windows Phone continues, the difference between a Windows Phone handset and a Windows tablet becomes incredibly blurry.

I think that we should count Windows Phone handsets and Xbox One consoles as Windows machines, because they are.

The question is simple: Is aggregate Windows unit volume declining, as the above chart indicates, or are we more so seeing a slowdown in Windows-based PC shipments that is offset by new, less traditional machines?

Before we get to that, I don’t dispute that Apple has shown incredible growth, nor am I trying to denigrate it as a company. Instead, I want a clearer picture of Microsoft and Apple’s current aggregate platform device volumes to better understand their market position.

Here’s Dediu on the PC market in recent years:

In 2013 there were 18.8 times more Windows PCs sold than Macs. This is a reduction in the Windows advantage from about 19.8x in 2012. This decline is mostly due to the more rapid decline in Windows PC shipments relative to the more modest decline in Mac unit shipments. Gartner estimates that about 309 million Windows PCs were shipped, down from 337 million in 2012 (which was down from 344 million in 2011, the year PCs peaked.)

So, discounting non-traditional Windows-based devices, Windows saw its unit volume in the PC market decline by about 28 million from 2012 to 2013. That’s no small number, and it illustrates just how rough the PC market has been for Microsoft and its OEM partners.

The Xbox One sold 3 million units in 2013, a small figure, but given its limited sales window, it is a workable sum.

Windows Phone is harder to calculate. Nokia sold 5.6 million Lumia handsets in the first quarter of 2013, 7.4 million in the second quarter, 8.8 million in the third quarter, and a yet to be determined number for the final quarter. Let’s be conservative and say 10 million, giving Nokia less growth in the holiday season than it managed between the second and third quarters of the year.

That yields a 31.8 million device figure. Nokia is around 90 percent of the Windows Phone market, so given that sales figure for the one company, we can presume total global Windows Phone sales of 35.3 million. Add the 3 million Xbox One consoles sold and we have a tally of 38.3 million devices. Keep in mind that this number is slightly conservative, given that Microsoft said that it sold “over” 3 million Xbox Ones, and we presumed very moderate growth for Nokia in the final quarter of the year.

The 38.3 million non-traditional, Windows-based device unit volume figure is larger than Dediu’s calculated decline in the PC market of 28 million. So, instead of his graph going down, if we take a more holistic look at what constitutes a Windows machine, we see Microsoft’s total unit volume growing by around 10 million or so in the year.

Of course, that does nothing to diminish Apple’s tear in the device space, but it does increase the delta between their aggregate volumes, and could forestall Apple’s overtaking of Microsoft’s diverse Windows platform for a short spell.

The PC market is expected to post a moderate decline of 3.8 percent or so this year if I recall correctly. Presuming a decent year of Xbox One sales (10 million units?), and continued growth of the Windows Phone platform, it seems reasonable to forecast another year of rising device volume for Windows.

Apple, especially if it launches a new device class, could pass Microsoft this year in the platform wars, but we’ll have to keep an eye on its growth rates.

And finally, all the above is almost moot, given the comical rise of Android, something that is spanking both Cupertino and Redmond alike.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Good news! You just shot what might be the world’s funniest video ever. You’re going to be a friggin’ YouTube sensation. You’re totally going to hang out with Ellen.

Bad news: you shot the video in portrait mode. Whoops! Now the entire Internet thinks you’re dumb.

Horizon is an iOS app that auto-magically ensures that your videos are shot in landscape (read: widescreen) mode, no matter how you’re actually holding the phone. Even if you rotate the phone while shooting, the video’s orientation stays the same.

Wondering why the whole portrait/landscape thing matters? Others have explained it more aptly than I probably can, but in a nutshell: pretty much every damn screen we watch video on these days is meant for widescreen/landscape content. When you shoot videos in portrait mode, you end up with big ol’ ugly black bars on the sides that take up an overwhelming majority of the screen.

With Horizon, when you start shooting a video in portrait mode, it ends up looking like it was shot in landscape. When you start it in landscape, it still looks like it was shot in landscape. And if you start shooting in landscape, but turn the phone to portrait mode mid-way through? It keeps its landscape orientation throughout, but zooms in a bit.

“But wait! Can’t people just learn to hold their phone the right way?” You’d think so. But given that mountains of crappy vertical videos that get uploaded to YouTube every day, it doesn’t seem like people are getting the idea. Alas, the people who need this app the most are probably the least likely to buy it — if they haven’t worked it out by now, they probably just don’t care. Apple ought to swoop these guys up and tuck the functionality right into the built-in app, doing away with vertical video (unless manually selected by the user) once and for all.

I shot a quick demo video using Horizon earlier today. Whenever it appears that I’m just moving toward or away from the keyboard, that’s Horizon adjusting the frame by zooming in or out. Check it out below:

So, how does it work? The video geeks in the audience have probably figured it out already. The answer: clever, on-the-fly adjustment of your video’s framing. Whenever you’re shooting a video in portrait, Horizon automatically crops off the top and bottom of your video and zooms the image a bit to fill the full frame. You lose a bit of image quality by expanding the image like this, but it’s better than having big ol’ black bars taking up the entire screen.

(Alternatively, you can set the frame to always stay zoomed in, without any rescaling as you change orientation. The downside of this, of course, is that you’re always zoomed in pretty far— so in landscape mode, quite a bit is being cropped out that doesn’t need to be.)

Oh, and just for good measure: it has filters, because the world loves it some filters. It’ll do the standards like sepia and greyscale, but it has a few trippier, cartoony offerings as well.

I’ve been using the app for a good chunk of the morning, and it’s pretty solid. It does seem like videos shot with Horizon come out a bit shakier than those I shoot with the built-in iOS camera, though, presumably because of the constant, real-time frame adjustment.

Horizon is available for iOS only, and currently goes for $0.99 on the App Store.

French startup Youmiam released a new version of its recipe sharing website and just announced that it has raised $410,000 (€300,000) from angel investors Patrick Robin (24h00), Thierry Petit (Showroomprivé) and Denis Chavanis (former managing director of Nestlé Waters). Youmiam makes it easy to browse, create and share recipes online.

It’s a full-fledged social network that is very reminiscent of YouTube or Soundcloud, because recipes are very shareable — you can embed your recipes on your blog or website. On the website itself, you get a profile with your recipes, recipes from others that you have shared (remiams). And of course, you can follow your favorite cooks and build a cooking social graph.

When you first load the site after signing up, you are presented with a beautiful grid of appetizers, entrées and desserts. It looks a lot like Pinterest, but with food and only food. If you click on a dish, you get the list of ingredients as well as the time required. A recipe is basically a slideshow — each slide represents a different step in the recipe.

If you want to create a recipe, you just have to fill out forms describing your recipe step by step. You can’t write long paragraphs of text, just short sentences. It makes recipes very readable.

Finally, one of the most important feature is certainly the search feature. If you have an idea but don’t know how to cook something, you can just search for it. Yet, you can also search by time, ingredients, types or keywords (#easy, #summer, #chocolate…) to try something new.

Youmiam’s take on the recipe website is quite different as many recipe websites bet everything on SEO and content farm strategies. With a good reward system, Youmiam could make creative cooks stand out and get better recipes than your average recipe website.

In 2013, the team of five participated in the 3-month Microsoft Ventures program in Paris (formerly Microsoft Spark). Part of the first batch, Youmiam is actually the first company to raise that much money. It also received $34,000 (€25,000) from 101projets, a project to foster youth entrepreneurship led by Xavier Niel (Free), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (Vente-privee.com) and Marc Simoncini (Meetic).

With today’s funding, the company plans to release an English version (coming in February), mobile apps, as well as a new recommendation engine. Now that the product is starting to look good and will target an international audience, the team will have to tackle a difficult problem: creating a flourishing community around recipes.

A company helping mobile developers optimize their app store listings for better discoverability, MobileDevHQ, is this week making its basic set of tools free for app marketers while branching out further into the enterprise, with the debut of an API. The API will provide the service’s high-end customers with programmatic access to Top Charts and Search Ranking data, which can then be pulled into internal dashboards or used for custom analysis.

MobileDevHQ, for background, first launched its ASO (App Store Optimization) toolset for developers in the beginning of 2013, after spinning out from earlier efforts which saw the service branded as AppStoreHQ, reflecting its then focus on its app store search and discovery platform. But the real business which emerged over the months that followed involved helping developers better understand the current ASO landscape – like what keywords to use, what competitors are doing in terms of keywords, app titles and descriptions, and other choices that impact rankings.

This is an increasingly important area of focus for app store marketers, as search position and rankings play a bigger role in getting an app found by an app store’s end users. And no company, no matter how notable or buzzy, is immune from having to pay attention to this area. For example, when Jelly, the new app from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, launched this month, it was so low ranked for the keyword “jelly” that it was virtually impossible to find via an app store search. (This has since improved, thanks to downloads, reviews and getting an App Store featured listing).

Today, MobileDevHQ CEO Ian Sefferman says his platform has seen over 30,000 sign-ups to date, and while the company won’t disclose the number of enterprise customers, he would say that the number has increased by 100% over the last couple of months.

Going forward, MobileDevHQ is making both its “indie” plan a free plan, as well as the “Professional” plan, which was previously $125/month. (Indies are automatically upgraded to the Professional tier.) This allows app marketers to access the tools need to track multiple apps across regions on both iOS and Android, as well as access the Keyword Research tool, with the ability to view up to three months of historical data. Plus, MobileDevHQ has removed the earlier restrictions around how many keywords and number of competitors which can be tracked, making the service more useful overall.

Those who were already paying for the Professional plan are now getting bumped up one tier to “Publisher” for three months at the same price as before. When the trial wraps, they can then decide whether or not they want to continue paying or drop back down to the free service.

Most importantly, the company is launching an API for app store marketers, which offers access to ASO reports, Top Charts, and search rankings. The REST-based API is included with all enterprise plans, and can return results in either JSON or XML.

This was one of the most requested features by enterprise customers, says Sefferman. “They are often using a dozen or more different services and this allows them to bring back that data into a single dashboard to get a holistic view of their performance: Top Charts rank, Search Ranking, competitive intelligence, downloads, revenue, paid vs organic performance, and so on,” he explains.

The company also claims that its average user increases downloads by 20% after using its toolset, which highlights the importance of proper ASO.

The decision to make most services free was touted as being due to the growing enterprise customer base, but MobileDevHQ is also operating in a very competitive space – the company is one of many services targeting app marketers today, where competitors also include Mobile Action, SearchMan, Appnique, App Promo, Appcodes, and many others.

More details on the product and sign up is here on the MobileDevHQ website.

Google today released the latest stable version of its Chrome browser. Version 32 includes many of the features that recently arrived in the beta channel, including improved malware blocking and tab indicators for when a site is playing sound, accessing the webcam and sending video to your Chromecast. Google uses a speaker icon, blue rectangle and red dot to indicate these different functions.

Those indicators are a godsend for anybody who has ever tried to figure out which tab suddenly started playing music or a video. Google first started playing with this idea in early 2013, but the beta only got this feature in November.

This new version also includes Google’s new malware blocker, which arrived in the experimental Canary build of Chrome last October. With this, Google will automatically block any downloads its systems have flagged as malware.

For Windows 8 users, the new version now sports a new look in “Metro” mode (Google still uses that term, even though Microsoft itself has moved away from it and left it rather unclear what the new terminology should be). In Metro mode, Chrome now looks like ChromeOS  with its integrated app launched on Windows. In previous versions, the Metro mode simply presented users with the regular Chrome interface. This never looked quite right, but with this new interface, Google is actually using the Metro mode to its advantage and is basically bringing ChromeOS to Windows.

Also new in this version is support for Chrome’s “supervised users” feature, which is officially still in beta. With this, family members can check on a kid’s browsing history, for example, and set up site restrictions through chrome.com/manage.

As always, this release also includes a good number of security fixes (21 in total), as well as stability and performance updates.

Google essentially makes the Moto G as it is – they own Motorola’s handset business, and both the Moto X and Moto G were designed and built under Google’s parental supervision. But that hasn’t stopped Google from creating a Play Edition Moto G.

The Play Edition strips out the few non-stock elements of Android that were still present on the Moto G to begin with, but keeps the same $179 price point for an 8GB version and $199 cost for a 16GB model. Like other Play Edition devices, it’s U.S.-only (at least at launch) and will work on both AT&T and T-Mobile networks. Remember that the Moto G is 3G-only, too, if you’re considering picking one up.

The main advantage of a Play Edition Moto G would appear to be its ability to get timely updates. The first Android 4.4 KitKat update rolled out to Moto G devices just last week, which means that it trailed the original 4.4 launch by a couple of months. The Play Edition will likely get updates much faster, so users who want to stay on the cutting edge would do well to opt for this variant. Motorola has introduced some slick software additions to the standard Moto G, however, so it really comes down to preference in this case.

I suspect Google is also motivated by a long-term desire to make Play Editions a consumer option for just about every major Android phone. If consumers start gravitating towards them, they get greater control over the pace and consistency of software updates. If they don’t, at least some developers will be pleased with the option.

Twitter just announced some new capabilities in its recently launched Tailored Audiences program for ad retargeting, and it sounds like the company is enabling some pretty specific targeting.

In a blog post, Revenue Product Manager Kelton Lynn describes the additions as new ways to create Tailored Audiences, either using a customer relationship management database (something that Facebook added a while ago — in both cases the emails are sent as hashes) or lists of Twitter usernames or user IDs (the user ID being the unique number that identifies your account). Lynn said advertisers will be able to exclude certain audiences from their advertising in the same way.

The post includes two infographics outlining use cases for advertiser Style For Us — advertising an exclusive offer to loyalty card members, or targeting users who use fashion terms in their bios and have “many” followers. Those examples suggest that the new features could be particularly useful for targeting existing sales leads or customers, or for targeting people who are influential in a specific category.

Lynn writes:

The combination of these tools enables a highly relevant and useful message for the user and creates the opportunity for you to reach these known audiences on Twitter with more efficient campaigns. [Advertisers] will continue to receive the same reports that include how many users saw, clicked on or converted from an ad, without identifying specific users.

Also on the privacy front, the post notes that users can opt out of the program in their settings, and it says there’s a “minimum audience size” to avoid “overly specific targeting.”

Jelly, the new startup from Biz Stone that’s designed to help people crowdsource answers to any question they may have, has been on the market for around a week now and we’re seeing the first numbers about its usage so far.

RJMetrics, which analyzes engagement data and traffic for a number of startups including Fab, Frank & Oak, Threadless and others, crunched the numbers on Jelly’s first active week using information that’s publicly available through API endpoints that aren’t necessarily publicized very widely yet.

Using his own Jelly account, RJMetrics CEO Robert J. Moore found out the following about usage among Jelly’s network of early adopters:

Total questions asked on the network are around 100,000, which is a big number for one week of active public use.

Of those, around 25,000 or one quarter were answered. It’s not optimal, but it’s also not bad; there’s also a stickiness factor through which each interaction made by a user increases the likelihood they’ll come back and use it again.

Still, daily active user (DAU) count is trending downward according to Moore’s findings. That’s also to be expected after a high-profile launch, but Moore has found that people answering questions is dropping at a quicker pace than is the number of those doing the asking. He ascribes this to increasing specificity and difficulty in the type of questions being asked as people get used to the service, leading to harder answers. If Jelly can’t provide answers for the questions that members are asking, that doesn’t bode well for long-term viability.

To make sure that people are happy with both the question and answer part of their Jelly experience, it may be useful for the startup to look at what kind of questions are being asked most frequently, and somehow encourage more answers for the more popular types of queries. Once people do answer, they keep coming back to answer more, after all.

Moore found that “What is this?” accompanied by a photo was the most common type of query by far: Of the top 10 most popular questions on the platform, each contained an image identification aspect. “Who,” “Where,” and “What” were also among the top results according to Moore’s data.

It’s early days yet for Jelly, and this data may not be providing a complete picture, coming as it does from these unexposed API endpoints. But it’s probably fair to infer that the trends Moore identifies are at least on the right track. Jelly has an interesting model, and one that requires a different kind of engagement from other popular social tools like Twitter and Facebook, but it’s still working out its place in the market, so we’ll be watching to see how community interaction develops in the coming weeks.

If Ford built a private toll highway that only allowed Mustangs, Americans would be outraged. Infrastructure is the bloodstream of an economy; if powerful established players controlled roads, telephone lines, and Internet cables, they could favor the highest bidder at the expense of the savvy entrepreneur, choking off the meritocracy that makes market economies so innovative.

This is precisely why many in the Internet community are up in arms that a U.S. circuit court threw out the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality law, which prevented internet service providers from choosing which websites to favor with faster connection speeds.

“Most of the great innovators in the history of the Internet started out in their garages with great ideas and little capital. This is no accident. Network neutrality protections minimized control by the network owners, maximized competition and invited outsiders in to innovate,” wrote Harvard Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig.

Verizon and litigants of the the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet Order argue that the First Amendment protects their right to decide how to treat content over the Internet lines they paid to distribute. According to Verizon’s own legal defense, The Open Internet order violates the “First Amendment by stripping them of control over the transmission of speech on their networks. And it takes network owners’ property without compensation.”

Verizon has a tempting argument that appeals to America’s love of Individualism: your property, your business. And, I would be standing at Verizon’s side waving an American flag disdainfully at consumer advocates if the telecommunications company had also paid for the billions in government research that discovered the principles of peer-to-peer computer networking.

Verizon stands on the shoulders of public engineering giants, such as Google’s Vint Cerf, who toiled in Defense Department laboratories to birth the rent-free free code that Internet providers happily borrow to run their networks.

As the original architects of the Internet recall, it is a libertarian fantasy that government employees and taxpayer dollars were not the genesis of the Internet.

Democracies have always granted special legal responsibilities to infrastructure. Indeed, Adam Smith, the philosophical godfather of capitalism said it best, arguing that the government has,

“a duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain because the profit would never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.

In other words, meritocracy must be a timeless principle, allowing the scrappy new entrepreneur every bit as much opportunity as the established players once had.

Net Neutrality, like all laws, is a complicated issue. Some providers would like to treat video hogs differently on networks with limited bandwidth. Airplane WiFi may need to limit Skype for the sanity of its passengers. The nuance of neutrality is a healthy debate to have.

But, Verizon should not fool anyone into thinking that the decision is theirs to make because they dug holes in the ground for Internet fiber. They did not build the Internet alone. They do not own it. We all do and it is our decision to democratically make.

[Image Credit: Flickr User woodleywonderworks]

With new technologies making it easier than ever before to share and distribute quality learning content, businesses are rushing to take advantage. Plus, with the pace that technology changes these days, companies want to help keep their employees up to speed and familiar with the latest version of Salesforce, Excel or whatever the case may be.

Online training resources have been around for years, but OpenSesame is on a mission to make buying and selling eLearning courses and content as simple as buying a song or movie on iTunes. As the online training market takes off, OpenSesame wants to be the App Store or go-to marketplace for the best content, where any company can buy courses without paying for a subscription or expensive licensing fees.

Through OpenSesame’s marketplace, businesses can search through over 20,000 courses from over 300 sellers. They can preview the content, read reviews from other buyers and learn more about the company selling the content. OpenSesame allows the seller to set the price of the content, offering the owner a 60/40 share of the profits for distributing through its marketplace.

But the real value, says OpenSesame Joshua Blank, is what the company has done technologically to ensure that the content available through its marketplace is compatible with the Learning Management System (LMS) or whatever platform the buying company is using to display the content and offer to its employees. Companies use a wide range of LMS platforms to organize and manage their corporate training content, and Blank says that OpenSesame’s content is now compatible with about 75 percent of the options out there.

With content from publishers and resources like FranklinCovey, Pearson and John Wiley, Blank says that OpenSesame has been able to land customers like DISH networks, Five Guys and Dun & Bradstreet and is now working with several hundred enterprise customers in total.

As part of its effort to become the largest single source for business-centric eLearning courses, OpenSesame announced today that it has raised $8 million of Series A financing, in a round led by Partech Ventures. The round sees Partech General Partner Nicolas El Baze join the startup’s board of directors, and brings OpenSesame’s total financing to just over $10 million.

With MOOCs changing the way that education content is delivered, OpenSesame is working to change the purchasing mechanism, drawing on the tried and true marketplace model of iTunes and many others. Offering training courses for employees and businesses, the idea is for OpenSesame to act as an online store where customers can buy a la carte, paying for what they need, when they need it, at a cost that ends up being much more affordable than in-person training — or at least that’s the idea.

Blank says that the model has led to 200 percent month-over-month growth in revenue for OpenSesame, something that the company hopes will continue with its new funding under its belt and a bunch of new products and additions (particularly mobile) heading down the pipeline early this year.

Google today added an activity stream to Google Drive that finally makes it easier for its users to track changes to documents that are shared with multiple users. This feature, Google says, will roll out over the next week, so it may be a few days before you will see it in your account.

Being able to easily edit documents with multiple users in real time is one of the features that always made Google Drive stand out. As the company rightly argues, though, keeping track of all the actions users take in these documents was virtually impossible. While most document-centric services like Podio offer similar streams, Google never offered this feature, despite its focus on document sharing.

The stream will track edits and comments, as well as actions like adding new spreadsheets, renaming documents and who a file was shared with.

When you go to drive now, you can click a new info button in the top navigation bar and the new activity stream will pop up.

Google has recently increased the rate at which it updates Drive again. Just last month, it added a new drop-down menu that makes it easier to rename folders and rename and organize them. While that wasn’t a major new feature, it did make using Drive easier, just like today’s update makes it a far more usable solution for team.

Umoove is a mobile-focused Israeli startup that plays in the eye- and face-tracking space. It’s a nascent area of tech development, with smartphone maker Samsung adding a basic eye-tracking feature to its Galaxy S4 flagship device last year (aka Smart Scroll). While a head-tracking patent filing reported earlier this month suggests there’s more to come in the next iteration of Samsung’s flagship smartphone.

Reports have also attached Amazon to an interest in building an eye-tracking mobile interface — to stick on a phone it might also be building — which watches to see where the user is looking (and then presumably uses that to power recommendations for more relevant stuff you might want to buy).

As a space, camera-based tracking tech on mobile is certainly hotting up — which is good news for Umoove. Umoove’s system is designed to utilise the front-facing camera on any smartphone to figure out where a person is looking. While the tech underpinning the startup has been in development for almost four years, it’s just today launched an (iOS) app showcasing one example of a face-tracking interface — which takes the form of a game that lets users steer a flying avatar through a 3D landscape by moving their head (screengrab shown above). 

Umoove is not looking to replace touchscreen interfaces with nods and head shakes. It tells TechCrunch it views eye-/face-tracking as supplementary to existing touch-based interfaces — as a way to augment touch with additional, potentially more immersive functionality, rather than as a wholesale replacement controlling mechanism.

“We’re talking about adding another layer on top of touching, similar to what the mouse did with the keyboard — they didn’t throw out the keyboard, it actually added suddenly the ability to have another layer of interaction, so it’s the same sort of thing here,” says CEO Yitzi Kempinski.

“It’s supposed to be something that mimics real-world experience. I’ll give you an example… if you think of a first-person shooter, those games you play and you have to shoot, and then you have the joystick to move around and you have to drag the screen to move around the room. Basically what we do is simple: based on where you face that’s where you’re aiming.”

The business opportunity here, for Umoove, is also not to sell games — its first iOS app game effort is free to download, as you’d expect for what is really just a tech demo designed to show developers what the tech can do. And start to get users used to the concept of controlling stuff with their head — which is not as intuitive as touch and certainly involves a learning curve, at least, if not a bit of initial neck-ache.

Umoove is not charging indie developers to use its SDK to add a face-tracking interface to their own games, although Kempinski says it is being selective about who gets to use it. Its business model is down the line — i.e. if it can sell the concept of a new interface layer that augments touch to enough users and other companies.

Applications for its face-tracking tech beyond gaming could include ecommerce use-cases, says Kempinski – by, for instance, giving users the ability to view products in 3D from different angles by moving their head. He also says it’s talking to OEMs (he won’t name names) about adding the tech into future devices.

The eye-tracking component of Umoove’s technology is something with perhaps even more obvious revenue-generating potential, with opportunities to partner with marketing/advertising companies and furnish them with the ability to track what mobile users are looking at — or even quantify how engaged they are by particular content. Other scenarios he mentions include diagnostic medical use-cases for doctors or opticians, or applications in the security space.

“We have one main partnership that we’ve done [in the advertising space] and we have a pilot… with some big brands that we’re going to start in a few months. But there we’re basically building a platform — that’s one of the main focuses now, from a product perspective, is this whole ‘user interest analysis’,” he adds.

The applications for Umoove’s layer — or any similar tracking techs built for mobile by rivals — will doubtless come in time, assuming users can be convinced that it’s useful to move digital stuff around with (gentle) head movements.

And — crucially — not too creepy to have something in their pocket that’s actively watching and assessing them. If you think the increasingly pervasive nature of technology is danger of feeling a bit creepy now, following NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s dragnet surveillance revelations about how the security services are doing a deep-dive into everyone’s digital lives, there’s little doubt the increasingly voyeuristic devices and services we use are going to be using in future will feel a whole lot more invasive — as tracking technologies continue to evolve to divulge more of the secrets of their users.

Umoove has raised around $3 million in total funding to date (a $1.5 million seed round, and a freshly closed <$1.5 million Angel round from undisclosed investors). As mentioned before, it has developed its eye- and face-tracking tech to work with non-specialist hardware. So there’s no infrared camera required to shine a reference point on the user’s eyeball (as with some other eye-tracking systems). Instead it tracks eye movement by also taking face position into account.

“The technologies are very much connected,” says Kempinski. “The key to good eye-tracking is very good face-tracking.”

By face-tracking it’s referring to the location of the head, rather than to facial expressions (which it doesn’t currently monitor — not least because on mobile the front-facing camera isn’t always in a position to see all of the user’s face, and may only have a partial quarter view of their head).

As well as working with non-specialist hardware, Kempinski says the software been designed to function in the variable everyday lighting conditions where phones might be in use — arguing that this gives it an advantage over competitors (such as Tobii) that are trying to transfer tracking systems built for desktops or other hardware over to mobiles.

Incidentally, Kempinski pours cold water on the concept of using eye movements alone as a controlling mechanism for consumer electronics, as in the case of Samsung’s relatively poorly-reviewed eye-tracking scroll tech. He points out that people make a lot of involuntary eye movements, which can confuse such systems, and also that there’s no clear way to separate a controlling eye gesture from a user simply moving their eyes over a piece of content that they want to read or look at.

Hence the need to track both the eye and the face, and to think carefully about where best to apply this sort of interface. ”Every day we’re getting requests [to use the SDK] and a lot of it is just not thought out enough — they haven’t really understood what should be done and could be done with it,” says Kempinski. “And that’s one of the reasons why having something out there [i.e. Umoove’s own demo game] really helps because they can feel it. And once they’ve felt it and touched it it’s much easier to grasp what you can do with it.”

Google Cloud Storage has long had the ability to run Hadoop so developers can do advanced analytics on its distributed computing platform. Today, Google is attempting to simplify this process with a new connector that the company says makes it easier to run Hadoop on the Google Cloud Platform.

The Google Cloud Storage connector for Hadoop manages the cluster and file system for developers so they can focus on the logic of their data processing without the complexity of setting it up and managing themselves.

Google originally developed the Google File System in 2003. It is now the basis for Hadoop, an open-source distributed computing environment managed by the Apache Software Foundation that allows for data to be kept in small pieces on server clusters and then processed to do data analytics. Out of Hadoop has emerged a diverse ecosystem anchored by companies such as Cloudera and Hortonworks.

The new Google Connector for Hadoop is based on Colossus, the latest iteration of the company’s cloud storage system. The new service uses a simple connector library, allowing Hadoop to run directly against Google Cloud Storage, giving the customer the ability to leverage Google’s expertise in large data processing.

Google lists a number of benefits that come with the new connector. Developers can start up a Hadoop cluster pretty quickly as it is all managed in one place on Google Cloud Storage. It leverages Google’s scalability, giving the user higher availability.  It costs less as there is no need to keep two copies of the data. With most traditional Hadoop systems, the user has to keep a copy of the data for running Hadoop and another for backup. Instead, Google handles it all through its storage system.

Hadoop has hit the mainstream of the data-analytics world. As I noted in a post last month, Hadoop is an important technology for Internet companies like Twitter that process data by the petabyte. It is also of increasing importance for more traditional organizations that also now must process unprecedented amounts of information.

But Hadoop has traditionally been a complex undertaking, requiring people with multiple talents to unleash its potential. Google Cloud Storage Connector for Hadoop shows how Hadoop is becoming more accessible and readily available as a service more so than a complex undertaking that requires any number of skills to leverage.

Tumblr today has added a small, but notable, change to its service which could have a larger impact in terms of making the now Yahoo-owned blogging platform feel more like a social network: it has added support for user mention notifications. That means you’ll now be able to tag others by typing in the “@” symbol before someone’s username in order to trigger a notification.

The company says these notifications will now appear for others both in-stream on the main Dashboard as well as on the “Activity” page, where users today see things like follows, likes, reblogs, and more.

To date, Tumblr, if anything, has downplayed its social components, leading third parties like Missing E and XKit to fill in the blanks with more tools for connecting users through things like “post crushes,” automatic replies, faster replies, better user profiles and much more.

Though currently users can message others directly through the “Tumblr Ask” feature (if enabled), actually getting the attention of another user on the service generally involves either liking and/or reblogging their posts.

The ability to simply @ mention another user to reference something they may have said instead of fully reblogging from them could now potentially reduce the number of reblogs on Tumblr, assuming the feature is adopted by Tumblr users. While reblogging has helped define the service, a change there might not be a bad thing – as posts go viral and are reblogged again and again, it can become difficult to track who said what and when.

Tumblr is hardly the first social network to adopt the @ mention feature, orginally popularized by Twitter. Other networks, including Facebook and Instagram have done the same. And both LinkedIn and Facebook also support a variation of this, with the auto-complete. (Tumblr @ mentions auto-complete as well.) With this addition, the Tumblr Dashboard may start to feel more like a social “news feed” than one just suggesting posts to read. Meanwhile, Facebook’s social news feed is moving more in Tumblr’s direction, as the company is working to increase its focus on “real,” not just social, news.