Category: Tech news

Apple likely has a few different announcements on tap for its event in San Francisco, next Tuesday, October 22, judging by the invitation received by press. We’ll be there live to tell you exactly what’s being announced as it’s being unveiled, but for now, we’re making predictions based on available information just like everyone else. Here’s a breakdown of what we expect to possibly see next week, and how likely it is we’ll see it.

New iPads

First on the list are new tablets from Apple, and it’s a near-certainty we’ll see those next week. The iPad lineup was last refreshed around this time last year, and there’s a lot of anticipation in particular around the iPad mini, which many are anticipating could get an update to a high resolution, Retina-syle display.

The latest rumors suggest that the iPad mini will indeed get a Retina upgrade, doubling pixel density (which will in fact make it even sharper than the Retina iPad 4th generation, thanks to the smaller screen). To make up for that, the small iPad is reportedly going to gain some weight: around 0.3 mm, according to the latest. That would be about half the extra weight the third-generation iPad had to put on over the iPad 2 when it gained Retina powers, and in both cases, the reason for any increase would be to cram a larger battery within the shell.

New iPad minis might not just come in Retina flavor, and we’ve heard some suggestion that Retina models will be in extremely short supply at launch and into next year. Either way, I’d still expect a high density display iPad mini to make its inaugural appearance next week, possibly with a fingerprint sensor like the one on the iPhone 5s included.

The full-size iPad is looking to get an update, too, per reports. This one could actually lose weight and girth compared to its predecessor, as it takes on an appearance more like the iPad mini (with narrower bezels). Leaked photos have claimed to show space grey and even gold versions of all of the new iPads, and again, fingerprint sensors are a possibility for the upscale 9.7-inch version.

New iPads will probably retain the price points of their predecessors, and go on sale around a week after the event, potentially with pre-orders beginning on the Friday of next week.

New MacBook Pros

The MacBook Pro is due for an upgrade, and the Retina versions of those notebooks are supposedly in line to get one. The key feature being discussed around these new models is Intel’s Haswell generation of processors, which were added to the MacBook Air earlier this year. Haswell offers considerable benefits in terms of power consumption, which should help any new MacBook Pros we see stretch their battery life into the 10-12 hour range.

Most reports agree that when these MacBook Pros get their updates, we won’t see the non-Retina versions also updated; those will instead continue to be made available, but it’s possible Apple is looking towards phasing them out eventually in favour of the higher-res versions. If that’s the case, we could see further price cuts on the base level Retina Pros, and I’d also expect graphics card improvements, full HD webcams and 802.11ac Wi-Fi support, based on additions made to the recently refreshed iMacs and MacBook Airs.

These are also almost a shoe-in, and might even go on sale immediately after or shortly following their announcement.

New Mac Pro

Apple’s new Mac Pro isn’t a secret, since Apple made the unusual move of announcing it well before its release back in June at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. But the professional-level desktop OS X computer that replaces the aging aluminum model still hasn’t received an official release date or price.

The redesigned Mac Pro bears little resemblance to the machine it’s replacing: a smooth black cylinder, taking up about 1/4 of the space of the old version, is all that remains. But that diminutive canister belies impressive specs under the hood, as Apple has put dual workstation GPUs capable of supporting multiple 4K displays, an Intel Xeon E5 processor with up to 12 cores available, much faster RAM and more inside. It’s all designed around a heat-dissipating center with a single fan, and the focus is on external expansion via Thunderbolt 2, USB 3, Ethernet and HDMI, rather than on internal customizability like with the old model.

Apple has said only that it would ship in “fall,” while also revealing it would be manufactured in the U.S. We’ve heard that it could start selling in November, according to the latest reports. No word yet on price, but expect it to be expensive, as this is definitely aimed at those with professional-level demands.

OS X Mavericks

Apple’s latest OS is just about ready to ship, having hit GM status in the pre-release developer builds recently. We’ve also heard that Apple has asked developers to start submitting apps for Mavericks. Expect it to ship in time for the arrival of new Retina MacBook Pros, if not before, and as always, look for Apple to offer no-charge upgrade offers for people who’ve just recently bought new Macs, including the refreshed iMac.

The price on OS X updates dropped from $29.99 for OS X Lion, to $19.99 for OS X Mountain Lion, so it’s possible we could see another drop, but Snow Leopard and Lion retained the same pricing, so Apple could easily keep the $20 fee, since it’s already quite low as it is.

Apple TV

There’s talk of an Apple TV refresh, but the rumors suggest this will be an evolutionary change to the streaming media box Apple currently offers, not the mythical Apple television that’s been discussed for ages. There’s no word on what exactly that might entail, beyond the usual processor upgrade, but our own contributor MG Siegler has suggested there will be reason for excitement from updated hardware in the Apple TV product line sometime this month.

As always, expect at least some surprises, and join us next week as we cover the action live.

Yahoo managed to beat low investor expectations by a slim margin yesterday and was rewarded with a short bump this morning that has already burned off.

Yahoo’s non-GAAP earnings per share totaled $0.38 during the quarter on revenue of $1.08 billion. For all the media scrutiny that Yahoo receives, its financial performance feels almost uninvestigated.

Each of its key listed metrics at the start of its earnings report listed a negative year-over-year percentage decline:

And, on those results, Yahoo beat street expectations.

The simple retort to the negative view of Yahoo’s financial performance is that its mobile strategy has yet to bear fruit – that once mature, its bets on mobile will drive the company’s revenue forward. The issue with that reasoning – aside from it being all too polite, please – is that I think we are seeing signs that Yahoo’s mobile strategy is working, but not as well as the company, or perhaps we externally, had hoped or expected.

As part of its earnings, Yahoo announced that it now has 390 million monthly active mobile users. That’s up from the 350 million figure that its CEO Marissa Mayer quoted at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Yahoo was at the 300 million monthly active mobile user mark in the first quarter of this year, so in less than a year, it’s picked up nearly 100 million monthly active mobile users.

This is to the credit of both Mayer and her staff. Mayer’s mobile focus and wildly aggressive acquisition strategy, combined with corporate refocus, have allowed for the growth. Yahoo mobile products pre-Mayer weren’t very good. There has been much improvement.

Now, what you would expect to see following a large run-up in usership is that Yahoo would sell more ads. More users mean more usage which means more sessions which means more ads, right? Correct! The massive expansion of Yahoo’s mobile user base has coincided with a decline in the rate of decline of its total ads served per quarter. In its most recent quarter, Yahoo managed to grow the number of ads that it served for the first time in recent memory.

As you can see, through 2013, Yahoo has stanched what was a double-digit quarterly decline in its sold ads per quarter. This is, of course, good news. The kicker is that a pillar of Yahoo earnings durability has been lost: Price-per-ad strength.

What could cause that sort of decline in the per-ad price that Yahoo commands? Well, if there were a large influx of lower-priced ad inventory into Yahoo’s larger ad sell-through, that would do the trick. Say, a truckload of new mobile advertisements.

You might be thinking at this point that we’ve made a mistake: If Yahoo’s goal was to drive mobile usage, and sell more ads, then how has it failed? Well, we need to be reminded that Yahoo’s mobile incomes must replace declines in its larger display and search businesses.

From its earnings:

GAAP display revenue was $470 million for the third quarter of 2013, a 7-percent decrease compared to $506 million for the third quarter of 2012.

Display revenue ex-TAC was $421 million for the third quarter of 2013, a 7-percent decrease compared to $452 million for the third quarter of 2012.

Even with the first-in-eight-quarters increase in total ads sold, Yahoo saw declining year-over-year income from its ad business on a GAAP basis.

Therefore, if we judge as we have that Yahoo has managed to execute its mobile strategy of using growing mobile usership to expand its sold ads base, we can also come to the conclusion that it will have to reach a scale far greater than its current tally to stop, let alone reverse, its current revenue declines.

As I wrote recently, concerning the recently reported quarter:

If revenue doesn’t beat expectations, and things are middling, we’ll hear the usual miasma of “we remain optimistic” and “our metrics are on par with our expectations” and something close to “stay the course.” But what would be encouraging would be a revenue beat on the back of rising mobile usage. Such a result would be the strongest possible validation of CEO Mayer’s strategy for the company as sound and operational.

With the new metrics of 390 million monthly active mobile users, and the fact that ad sales are growing at last, it would be incorrect to say that Mayer’s bet for Yahoo is wrong. But I think that it is also fair to say that it’s a gambit that will play out over years, and not quarters.

Happily for the company’s sake, investors appear mostly content with its flat performance. How much patience they have, however, remains to be seen.

Microsoft is finally ending all extended support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014, five years after it ended mainstream support. After that, the 12-year-old operating system will not receive any new security updates and its users will be left to fend for themselves. As Google announced today, however, it will provide support for Chrome users on XP until at least a year after Microsoft’s own support ends.

Browser bugs, Google argues, are often an easy way for malware to infect computers and with XP not getting any security updates anymore after next April, chances are it will become an even larger playground for hackers who want to exploit its vulnerabilities.

Millions of Chrome users and plenty of large organizations, Google says, are still using XP today “and may have trouble migrating.” That number continues to slowly shrink, but there is no reason to believe that XP’s 31% global market share is going to start dropping rapidly after next April.

Microsoft itself, it’s worth noting, decided to cut support for Internet Explorer on Windows XP after the launch of IE8. None of the more modern versions of IE run on XP (and there are a variety of technical reasons for this) and because of this, IE8 remains one of the most popular browsers on the market today.

The carrier-backed mobile payments service Isis, a joint effort from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless here in the U.S., thinks getting consumers to change their purchasing behaviors is as easy as tempting them with freebies. In Isis’ case, its latest marketing gimmick is free smoothies – in partnership with Isis, restaurant retailer Jamba Juice is announcing today that it will give away a million free smoothies to consumers who pay with their Isis mobile wallet application.

Isis, which has been running trials in Salt Lake City, Utah and Austin, Texas, is preparing to launch nationwide later this year. Originally, the service was going to take a cut of the transactions crossing its network, but now charges service fees to companies using the Isis platform instead. American Express, Chase, and Barclayscard are issuers supporting Isis, which lets consumers load Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Discover cards into a virtual wallet app running on smartphones. But last month, Isis lost one of its early partners, when Capital One pulled out of pilot tests  – a hint that all is not well with the platform.

The Isis mobile wallet is an NFC-based technology, which means it’s limited to specific, supported smartphone models – for example, the Samsung Galaxy S4 supports NFC, as do several other Android devices. However, Apple remains an NFC holdout, and unfortunately for the technology, that will dampen its appeal and retailer adoption. Without ubiquitous buy-in from all industry players and OEMs, there will continue to be consumer confusion around NFC, with regard to which phones work, what apps to use, and frankly, why tapping a phone is significantly easier or more secure than using a credit or debit card.

Consumers today who are even vaguely aware of NFC technology – it’s also being adopted by Google Wallet’s mobile app, an Isis competitor – aren’t likely to understand the immediate benefits of changing their old behaviors and patterns without ongoing educational efforts. And while in time, an NFC-based payments service provider like Google could crunch consumer data to better target deals or offer rewards, at first blush, such tracking could feel more “creepy” than productive to privacy conscious consumers.

Plus, the benefit to adopting Isis, a mobile payments service from companies who have historically chosen to nickel and dime consumers instead of investing their profits into innovations and increased bandwidth, is even less clear.

Meanwhile, a variety of other mobile payments plays are underway from companies with fresh ideas, like Square, or with a deeper understanding of the space, like PayPal, or large merchant bases to lean on, like Visa, MasterCard and Amex. And still everyone is waiting for Apple’s other shoe to drop: the iOS “Passbook” app for tickets, loyalty cards, and coupons, feels like the beginnings of mobile wallet destined to expand, and one from a company actually capable of moving the needle.

But Jamba Juice is buying into Isis, right? Well, sure. But Jamba Juice likes to glom on to any payment trial to get its name into the press. In the past, the company has supported Facebook’s efforts with its own branded cards sold through the social network, it has worked with Google Wallet, and it has tested order-ahead pickup with PayPal, as well as added support PayPal Here and at point-of-sale.

But hey, feel free to grab a smoothie on the mobile carriers, right? They owe you that, at least.

Last Friday, 40 people gathered at an apartment in lower Manhattan to take a look at a series of works by the artist Alexandra Posen. The pieces — colored wax on paper worked into abstract forms — sat informally against the window, and the group tossed out questions as Posen talked the group through her process.

This isn’t what you think of when someone says “tech startup.”

But a young company called Gertrude is hoping to change that, by turning art experiences into a commodity and becoming a worldwide meetup platform for art salons. It’s named for Gertrude Stein, whose salons drove art discussion in the 1920s.

Founded by ex-Googler Kenneth Schlenker, Gertrude has been hosting private meetups for the last year with curators ranging from the head curator of the Whitney Museum to well-known Chelsea gallerists, and today it opens its event listings to the public.

The site allows curators to post salon listings, which anyone can then peruse and join. The salons are meant to be an open atmosphere for discussion, and the curators might range from major gallerists to the art afficionado next door, although there is an application process to host.

There are a few rules: the salon lasts one hour, only 40 people may attend, and it is led by a curator who has hand-selected a range of ten pieces to discuss.

While other art-oriented startups like Art.sy, Artspace, and Paddle8 deal with the high-end commercial side of the industry, Gertrude is built on the idea that the experience of art is not only more scalable but also holds a wider appeal. Part social, part educational, Gertrude is a meetup platform for people to enjoy visual art at a low cost. And it’s monetizing on that experience.

Referencing the Rain Room that had visitors flocking to MoMA this summer and Jay-Z’s “Picasso Baby” performance at the Pace Gallery in New York, Schlenker posits that art, like music, is increasingly becoming a live, interactive experience.

“A lot of people wanted to create startups in the art world but missed out on the fact that it’s an experience, not a product,” Schlenker said.

Curators have the option to invite select guests before the event opens to the public, but the site requires that at least five slots be left open to prevent it from becoming too exclusive. The host sets the ticket price, which might range from $0 to $175 or $10,000.

Gertrude then takes cut of the sales, which varies based on the ticket price but on average sits at about 25%. If a work of art is sold through the salon, Gertrude takes a cut there as well, although it’s less than the 50% that most galleries take.

Because Schlenker’s strong point is technology, not art, Astrid de Maismont heads up curation for Gertrude, bringing on board curators and art advisors.

In the coming months, Gertrude may add other event formats, including performances, private viewings, studio visits, and dinners with artists.

If the proposition comes off as simultaneously highbrow and plebian, that’s kind of the point. Down the line, the goal is to have the head curator of the Whitney showing well-established artists on the same day that someone in Bushwick shows works from their favorite local artists. While the art world has in many ways been built on opacity and exclusivity, major galleries and auction houses are beginning to realize that that model isn’t sustainable, Schlenker said. Whether big-name curators continue to gravitate to it in an effort to reach a broader audience remains to be seen — not that it’s inherently a good or bad thing.

A few months after raising its $23 million Series B, mobile shopping companion Slice is receiving its first major update. The app, whose overall mission involves leveraging the email inbox as a source for commerce data, already offers the ability to track your order confirmations, shipments, online spending and price drops. Today, it adds another notable feature as well: recall alerts. In addition, the app is getting a redesign on iOS, Android and web, which includes a revamped interface, improved navigation, and an added tracking section for keeping an eye on price adjustments.

Obviously, that latter feature is arriving just in time – that is, right as the holiday shopping season kicks off, and item pricing fluctuates more heavily as retailers compete for consumers’ dollars with a variety of sales and discounts.

According to Thad Hwang, VP of Product at Slice, the redesign is meant to give consumers an increased sense of confidence that Slice is looking out for them, even if they don’t get an alert today or tomorrow. “We realized our users didn’t know about price drops, for example, until they got one,” he says. “We felt that ensuring people knew that the app was actively working on their behalf was especially important with the introduction of product recall alerts, so it made sense to schedule the redesign along with this feature.”

The recall alerts may be the more important feature with regard to this particular app update. The company explains that the idea for recall alerts came about because there are hundreds of safety-related recalls issued every year, but manufacturers often don’t have an easy way to identify consumers in connection with a specific product. Slice’s tracking capabilities change that, by cross-checking product recall information from the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the U.S., Slice’s target audience, with actual purchase data.

In the case that a match is found, Slice will send out a push notification in the app and/or email, depending on your settings. These will also link directly to the CPSC.gov recall page for access to the details of the product hazard in question as well as the list of steps to take next, and they include customer service phone numbers.

Slice Bets On Paper-Free World

Tracking recalls is something that’s especially important for new parents, who have to keep an eye on baby product recalls, for things like car seats, cribs, strollers and more. But Slice is also limited in tracking everything you buy, since it can’t account for gifts (via barcode scanning, for example), or items bought with cash or at point-of-sale when no e-receipt is provided.

Slice only syncs up with your email inbox. That means it’s able to easily keep an eye on your online purchases where order confirmations arrive via email, mobile payments, as well as purchases from brick-and-mortar stores which offer e-receipts. Unfortunately, this isn’t the majority of most consumers’ purchases today, and Slice doesn’t offer any way for you to snap a photo of a paper receipt for import into its system, nor can it watch your bank account transactions more passively for tracking your broader purchasing behaviors.

However, Hwang argues that the nature of commerce, even in the offline world, is changing quickly. “We are seeing a fast adoption of e-receipts for offline purchases by major stores including Macy’s, Nordstrom and Gap. Purchases made with mobile payment systems are also showing up as e-receipts,” he says. “These two major trends are enabling us to show users more of their spend.”

The company has no plans to include OCR receipt support, Hwang adds, though Slice has not ruled out bank account integrations. At the end of the day, Slice is a big bet on a future where e-commerce, e-receipts and mobile payments dominate. It’s not even aiming for backward compatibility with the way consumers still largely shop today: with a swipe of a debit or credit card at checkout, then a paper receipt stuffed into a wallet and forgotten.

But what is interesting about Slice’s shopping app is that it’s different from many of the peskier apps that live on our smartphones today. These apps constantly send us almost spammy alerts about new friends, follows, sales, and other begs for attention. Slice, meanwhile, is content to run in the background like a smart assistant, only alerting you when there’s something worth noticing taking place. Slice is one of two apps the company has in production. Another, Slice Bookshelf, is a Goodreads competitor that uses both inbox and Facebook data to create a social community of readers.

Slice doesn’t currently offer details on its user numbers, actives, or app downloads, but the company says that it has now parsed 90 million transactions to date, equating to a total purchase value of $3 billion. For what it’s worth, those are the same figures provided by Slice back in August. At the time, the company had also hinted an updated version of its flagship product was in the works.

Javelin Venture Partners has raised $125 million for the firm’s third fund. The firm, which focuses on early stage, seed and Series A investments, has also promoted principal Alex Gurevich to partner.

Javelin was founded by Noah Doyle and Jed Katz, both of whom have experience as serial entrepreneurs. Doyle founded online loyalty program MyPoints.com and was an executive at Keyhole (which was acquired by Google and became Google Earth). Katz founded Rent.net and Move.com. The firm initially got its start in May 2008, and then relaunched in April 2009 with a fund size of $75 million. In 2011, Javelin raised $105 million for its second fund.

Katz, Doyle and Gurevich are part of a growing number of smaller, micro VC funds that takes a hands-on approach to seed investing. As Doyle and Katz explain, the duo decided to found Javelin because they wanted to create a firm that was run by entrepreneurs who had been through scaling, and the myriad of challenges founders face in building companies. They both saw the opportunity to being entrepreneurial and operational perspective from their own experiences to other founders. And Doyle and Katz were on to something in 2008, because in this climate, there is certainly a rise in operator VCs.

Gurevich has been on both sides of the table, being a founder and a former principal at DFJ Aurora, where he helped establish one of the first venture capital funds focused on high tech investments in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to DFJ, Alex was the first employee at ooma and was also a co-founder of dating site Say-Hey-Hey.com.

The firm decided to raise slightly more in this fund to put a little more into each company. The extra amount also gives the firm more flexibility to do follow-ons. Generally, Javelin invests in around 20 companies per year, and this number will remain consistent. Javelin makes seed and Series A investments ranging from $500,000 to $4 million across the areas of digital media, software/SaaS, marketplaces, advertising platforms, big data/machine learning, and mobile.

Recent Javelin investments include BoostCTR, Engrade, and Famo.us. The firm declined to reveal what the returns were for the last fund, but Doyle says “we have a number winners in our portfolio that we are excited about and don’t plan to sell equity in them anytime soon.”

Katz explains that he feels there is a craving from founders for helpful investors.”There’s desire for empathy from investors, and fellow entrepreneurs can add value from being in the trenches and facing the same challenges. We think founders value and appreciate that,” he says.

[Image: Javelin Venture Partners]

Part glorified go-kart, part mutant tricycle, the $62,000 Campagna T-Rex 16S is a freakish cross-breed of seemingly incongruous bits born on Doctor Moreau’s Island of Lost Mechanical Misfits.

The rugged M-KOPA solar lighting and charging systems come with an innovative payment plan. Too bad they’re only available in Kenya.

If your camera and gear go everywhere you do, you’ll need a commuter bag that’s up to the task. We put three of them to the test on the hot asphalt during the spring and early summer.

In its new generation of tablet hybrid hardware, Microsoft renamed its lower-end, ARM-based Surface device, calling it the Surface 2. It kept its prior Surface Pro branding in place. Why ditch the original Surface RT name? As you expected, consumers didn’t get what it meant.

Speaking recently with ARN, an Australian publication, Jack Cowett – a Microsoft employee who works on Surface marketing – stated that there was “some confusion in the market last year on the difference between Surface RT and Surface Pro.” That’s correct.

To combat that issue, the Surface RT has been rebranded as the Surface 2. Frankly, I wonder why Microsoft didn’t just call it the Surface. There isn’t, so far as I can tell, any ‘connection’ between the phrases ‘Surface 2′ and ‘Surface Pro.’

It can be said that Surface 2 is a more consumer-friendly name that Surface RT, given that the public is very accustomed to sequentially numbered products (films, albums, etc). And, Microsoft had done reasonably well with its Surface Pro set of devices, meaning that it likely didn’t want to disturb a working brand. Calling the Surface 2 just the Surface would negate the RT entirely, which – as it continues to sell old Surface RT stock – might have been even more confusing.

As you can read between the above, the core confusion is that the Surface 2 depends on Office, and the Windows Store for all its applications, while the Surface Pro does not. You can’t bridge that gap in a name, I don’t think. So the tension will remain.

The Windows Store has improved, the core set of Windows applications has been extended, and Windows 8.1 brings with it an expanded set of Office products. Is that enough for the average consumers is the remaining ARM-based Surface question. And let’s be frank ,’RT’ was an ugly sounding creation.

Microsoft’s candor in this is nice – we knew that the Surface RT had branding issues, but it remains slightly refreshing to hear a company cop to past errors.

As Tom Warren of The Verge notes, Windows RT has been essentially abandoned by every OEM that isn’t Microsoft. This means that if Microsoft can’t make the Surface 2 work, Windows RT is essentially over. So the name change, and the new hardware come as package to save a large slice of Microsoft’s vision for what Windows should look like over the next half decade and beyond. Those are large stakes indeed.

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer and the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are. You can follow him on Twitter here.

There are three kinds of articles that regularly get written about Nintendo.

The first article says Nintendo’s hardware business is doomed and talks about how impossible it is becoming for the company to survive in the modern world. The reasons for the doom are several (a few years ago it was the encroachment of HD, now it’s the rise of mobile). Either way, its author says, there’s no room for Nintendo in the New Order of Devices. It better start making games for other platforms.

The second article is similar, but rather than focus on devices, it laments the state of the company’s games. How long, the author asks, can Nintendo get away with pumping out sequels and rehashes year after year? How much life do those old tired characters have? Mario will surely die any day now. It needs some new games or else.

The third article, including this one, says that only a fool bets against Nintendo. Nintendo, it says, is different. Because it is.

This week we saw two pieces of evidence that show Nintendo’s still got its groove. The first was the news that the release of an HD’d version of The Wind Waker caused sales of the Wii U to rise by nearly 700 percent in the U.K. And the second was the release of the 2DS. It’s very cheap and I reckon it’s going to sell well.

Nintendo is uniquely positioned. There are a few companies that attract legions of fans who live or die with its successes or failures (Blizzard and Valve for instance) and equally few that have the financial muscle to make games machines. Only Nintendo has both. In the games industry it’s the one platform maker whose strategy is to make machines that fit the kind of games it wants to make. It trusts that the market will buy in.

Nintendo isn’t trying to be a platform business in the way that most tech companies are. It doesn’t tend to aim for the cutting edge or be too bothered about how much extra functionality is included in its platforms. It doesn’t seek to impress through power. Instead its consoles and handless are frequently plasticky and cheap rather than svelte and expensive. However they’re usually innovative, and fans love them for it.

Another key difference is Nintendo’s games. While game reviewers have always bemoaned the slow pace at which Mario, Kirby, Zelda, Pokemon, Metroid and a bunch of other games actually develop, these franchises continue to find an audience. Almost every game developer I know buys a Nintendo system despite themselves because they want to play one of those new releases. A recent example is Animal Crossing: New Leaf which, over the summer, filled my Twitter feed. Everybody had something to say about the comings and goings of Tom Nook.

At the same time “The Nintendo Difference” is somewhat divisive. The company’s games can be chalk and cheese and its platforms often don’t show the same breadth of content as others and its third-party dealings have always been a bit iffy. In some ways its marketing story boxes the company in. While it has had some huge hits in the last decade, most notably the Wii, it has done so at a cost. A lot of true fans felt that the company had turned its back on them in search of the casual gaming dollar, and so when it came time to buy into the sequel they paused. But that doesn’t mean they’d gone for good.

The reason this formula keeps working is that Nintendo understands franchises. The games business likes to act like the movie business sometimes (see David Cage’s Beyond: Two Souls) but really it’s more like the comics industry. Games journalists may like to think there should be an overall narrative to the medium where new faces are supposed to replace the old, like Hollywood, but historically that’s not supportable.

Rather than find a ton of new faces, the industry keeps updating old faces year after year, just as comic companies do with their characters. And, again just like comics, fans respond with undying loyalty. The plain fact is people buy Zelda after Zelda after Zelda.

Ultimately the Nintendo difference is about patience. Because the company has zillions of true fans it is not in a position where it has to rush. It may come across as dorky, and its products may fail to find market fit on first release. Yet over time it wends its way through those issues and finds the right game and price point to make its platforms attractive.

It sits, waits, evaluates and patiently prods until it gets to where it wants to be. It relies on the quality of its software product to eventually persuade people to come around. It takes the time to make its games right. It knows that the physical quality of its hardware is not a deal breaker. And even when it diverges from what the fans believe in, Nintendo has the patience to win them back.

And that’s why Nintendo survives and usually thrives. In the short term it’s obvious that it has some issues to deal with, and in the medium term yes there are threats. Mobile gaming is a big deal. Yet as long as Nintendo continues to satisfy those fans who’ll go out and buy whole game systems just to get their hands on rehashed versions of The Wind Waker, Nintendo’s going to be okay.

Nearly a year after Peter Thiel, Matrix Partners and others put an extra $49 million into Xero, the online accounting software company is adding yet more capital to its coffers. Today the New Zealand-based startup announced that it has raised $150 million (NZ$180m), led again by Peter Thiel-backed Valar Ventures and Matrix Partners. Xero says it will use the funds to continue building out its business targeting small and medium businesses, and their accountants, with its cloud-based software globally. This brings the total amount raised by the company to over $230 million.

Prior to today’s funding announcement, the company was valued at over $2.07 billion. But it is not yet profitable, reporting a net loss of US$12 million (NZ$14.443m) for the last fiscal year.

Xero’s unique selling point is its slick and simple user interface, or “beautiful cloud accounting making business enjoyable,” as Xero describes it. Into this the company adds functionality that SMBs are increasingly coming to demand: integration with payment services like PayPal, for example; and the ability to add CRM apps, general online invoices and and manage it all from a smartphone — all sold under an SaaS pricing model.

“Xero has had seven years to build the best global accounting platform,” said Rod Drury, Xero’s CEO, in a statement. “That investment puts us in a strong position as the cloud market accelerates. The calibre of our investors and our strong cash position sends a clear signal of our aspirations to serve millions of small businesses around the world.”

Indeed, Xero hopes to use this funding injection to overtake dominant players in the SMB market like Intuit’s QuickBooks, and it is driving especially aggressively into countries like the U.S. to do it. (That’s because the U.S. represents “29 million potential customers.”) Tellingly, some $123 million of the $150 million announced today comes from investors in the U.S. the company notes.

“Xero is emerging as the definitive software platform for small business worldwide. Capturing the power and affordability of cloud-based computing, Xero has democratized accounting, payroll, and other business software that was once the privilege of only the largest companies,” noted David E. Goel, Managing Member of Matrix Capital Management, in a statement. “Having empowered hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom, Xero is poised to do the same for its 29 million potential customers in the United States. We are adding to our investment to help facilitate and accelerate this goal.”

Xero’s longer-term aim, as laid out in its last annual report from May, is to reach 1 million paying customers. As of September 30, it had 211,300, with annualised committed monthly revenues are NZ$70.6 million (US$58.7 million). This new funding, along with Xero’s existing US$45.8m in cash, in will go some way to potentially driving up that number.

The news comes after Xero — publicly traded in New Zealand and Australia — halted trading in its shares on Friday pending a funding announcement.

Xero has been pushing especially hard into new markets outside of its traditional base of New Zealand, Australia and the UK. In the year that ended September 30, 2013, the company says its user base grew by 89%, but the growth outside of NZ, Australia and the UK was 141%, with revenues up 84% in the previous six months. Right now, New Zealand remains its biggest base of users, with 85,500.

As for why public Xero is raising funding from VCs, it’s an interesting predicament that seems unique to markets like New Zealand. Ben Kepes, an investor, tech commentator and “long-time Xero-watcher” tells me that Xero had no choice but to list at launch in 2007 — “a function of limited capital in New Zealand and the fact that they had no credibility with their target market.” That also drove the company to dual-list in Australia as well; and CEO Drury “has already flagged a likely U.S. cross listing.” Nevertheless, “given the fact their original IPO was relatively modest and they’re not yet profitable, further equity funding is necessary,” he notes.

Other investors in Xero include Craig Winkler and Sam Morgan.

While iPhone launch days and big gadget reveals represent some of my most anticipated events because I’m a tech blogger, a day like today can still awaken just as much excitement. Today is the launch day of a new Pokemon game, you see – the newest installment of the “Catch ‘Em All” franchise, Pokemon X/Y for the Nintendo 3DS, hits store shelves and is being delivered to pre-order customers everywhere. Kids are choosing from three new starter Pokemon, and beginning a familiar adventure all over again. And a fair amount of adults like me are, too.

I’ve played every single Western-release Pokemon title in the main franchise (not all of the spin-offs, sadly) since Pokemon Red and Blue were introduced back in 1998. When those games made their North American debuts, I was 15 years old – probably a little above the target age group of the games, but a lot closer to them than I am now, starting Pokemon Y at the ripe old age of 31.

To prepare for this new Pokemon arrival, I did two things: I bought a Nintendo 3DS XL, and I picked up a copy of Pokemon Black 2, the one main franchise title I hadn’t played so far. Did I buy the 3DS console only because of the impending Pokemon release? Yes. Am I alone in finally getting on board with Nintendo’s most recent mobile gaming console specifically to roam a virtual world capturing strange, often adorable little creatures to complete some kind of grand and tedious menagerie? Definitely not. Pokemon is a killer franchise for Nintendo, one that has the power to ship hardware as well as sell games.

Recently, I’ve been asked why I like Pokemon, and continue to play the games, including by many of my coworkers on our weekly gadgets podcast. I’ve seldom stopped to think about what parts of the Pokemon experience I actually find enjoyable. Surprised with the request to be self-reflexive about a game I’ve been playing for well over a decade, I surprised myself by coming up with some fanciful crap about how playing each successive generation of Pokemon — and replaying the games through all of their minor variations — is a little like a classical musician playing through symphonies that have been played by countless other artists, and themselves, time and time again. Each play is a variation, and enjoyable to fans and appreciators, no matter how small or subtle the differences.

Pokemon has a basic recipe, a set of notes on paper that make it identifiable for what it is, but it also offers a lot of variety in terms of how it can be played. For instance, I’ve never battled or traded with others, despite that being a core component of Pokemon gameplay. Sometimes I feel religious about having to stick with starter Pokemon; other times I ditch them quickly and never look back. Each playthrough can focus on using a different kind of team, which completely changes how you battle and how you collect and train.

But ultimately, Pokemon is a game for those who find routine comforting, and who enjoy obsessive tabulation, statistics and strategy analysis. Its proponents could just as easily be avid baseball fans, huge Settlers of Catan enthusiasts or even coin collectors. It’s a game that manages to scratch a number of those itches at once, too: If you’re soothed by repetitive action, but also want to flex your brain with something slightly more involved (but not terribly different from) Sudoku, you’re probably a Pokemaniac, whether or not you realize it.

In the time I’ve been playing Pokemon, I could’ve had a child and raised them to young adulthood; I could’ve built a matchstick model of a North Sea offshore oil rig; I could’ve built a nation’s fighting force into a professional standing army; instead, I’ve been trying to catch them all. I never have, and I don’t even think it’s possible without superhuman effort, but I imagine there’s still another 15 years at least left in my Pokemon infatuation.

Samsung’s third generation phablet is here. If you haven’t met her already, say hello to the Galaxy Note 3, a barge of a phone with incredible processing power and no fashion sense whatsoever.

There’s no question that the Galaxy Note 3 is a powerful device. It’s the first smartphone to come with 3GB of RAM under the hood, and it also packs a 2.3GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor. The phone is noticeably snappy, and even though Samsung sadly felt the need to inflate the phone’s speed, rest assured that this mammoth phone will be able to handle anything you throw at it.

But will you be able to handle the GalNote? That’s the real question.

See, the phone sports a 5.7-inch (gorgeous) 1080p AMOLED display, making it characteristically large in the hand and pocket. As the Galaxy Note and Galaxy Note 2 have proven, there are people in the world who don’t mind (and actually enjoy) this size phone, but personally, I’m not attracted to it.

That said, those who have previously enjoyed a Galaxy Note-sized phone should seriously consider an upgrade to this generation. The S pen is better, the battery life is longer with a 3200mAh battery, and it’s just plain faster.

However, it does feel like the GalNote 3 got hit with the ugly stick a few too many times. The leather back is ghastly, and the shiny silver bezel looks a bit cheap. It’s not awful, but it could be way better.

In the end, John and I cancel each other out with one unenthusiastic Fly and one unconvinced Die. Sales will inevitably show that the Galaxy Note 3, and more importantly the GalNote line as a whole, is in good shape for the future.

In other words, it comes down to you. Fly or die? You tell me.