Category: Tech news

The editorial beauty website Into The Gloss has raised $2 million in venture capital funding led by Forerunner and Lerer Ventures, along with several angel investors. Since it was founded in September of 2010, the site has been making waves in the style space for its insider access-type interviews with editors, designers, writers, models, and other creatives about their beauty routines.

Into The Gloss founder and creative director Emily Weiss said that since site’s founding it has been bootstrapped and profitable, mainly from advertising partnerships (the site runs both sidebar ads and sponsored content).

The team currently comprises five people, and this infusion of cash will largely go toward making eight to ten hires across editorial, tech, and design, Weiss said.

Although it may not be well known to most TechCrunch readers, Into The Gloss has been making waves in the fashion space for its sophisticated approach to beauty coverage that in many ways translates print aesthetics and taste into an effective online format. Unsurprising given that Weiss and Editorial Director Nick Axelrod came to the venture from Vogue and Elle, respectively.

What began as three or four posts a week has become roughly three per day — not exactly a high volume site, but Weiss has said before that quality over quantity has always been the aim. Unlike editorial sites that run on a blogger’s news cycle, Into The Gloss focuses more on original, evergreen content that usually involves a photo shoot and an interview. A rundown of model Arizona Muse’s favorite products, or a liquid liner how-to from Nasty Gal’s Makeup Artist in Chief, Stacey Nishimoto.

When the site Refinery29 raised venture capital funding, they were en route to becoming a major media company. Refinery is now ranked by Inc. as the fastest growing media company in the United States, having done $16.6 million in revenue in 2012.

I asked Weiss if Into The Gloss was going in a similar direction.

“Though Into The Gloss began as a blog, we’ve always seen it as a multi-dimensional brand. We have ambitious plans for the future capitalizing on our unique positioning in the beauty landscape.”

The site has been gradually ramping up its volume and range of posts in the last few years. We’ll be watching to see what moves they make in the coming months.

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.

Since microconsoles first surfaced, I’ve always been a big advocate. Why? Some of my reasons are to do with finally seeing digital-native distribution come to the TV, which is long overdue. Others are to do with watching how the world of apps has transformed the pricing structure of games, resulting in more games for more players. Some are to do with interesting game design challenges that they present, the possibilities of the new and the strange.

My primary reason, however, is the sense of developer democracy.

History

I am old enough to remember how designing and developing games used to be. I remember just how awkward working for consoles was, how there were endless hoops to jump through, and how it was universally accepted at the time that you had to personally deal with platforms to get your game to the public. You needed a publisher who knew a guy at SCEE and that was that.

At that time games had become a messy business of concept approvals, publisher milestones and licensed properties. Each platform used its own custom tech, which meant getting them to work properly was an exercise in dealing with provided tools that were often tortuous. More importantly there was the sense of lock-in and shut-out. It was impossible to get development kits unless you already knew people, and they cost $30,000 each. Even on the PC you still needed a lot of publisher help because there just weren’t many options for selling directly to the public.

It was a closed, complex and pretty corrupt business back in those days largely because of all the gatekeeping. It left many would-be indies out in the cold and discouraged innovation while breeding terrible working practises. “You should consider yourself lucky to work in games” was the overriding mantra while you worked 90 hour weeks on tatty versions of games that supported equally tatty movies. It was just how life was.

However cracks started to emerge. Many studios who were simply unable to function in the console business shut down, and this led to greater startup climates. Starting with venues like Steam and certain Flash sites, some on-the-ground momentum started to build. Then Facebook happened. iPhone happened. Steam got good, then great. And in the process a lot of power transferred over to developers.

Gaming became more chaotic and democratic, more innovative and far more investable. Where it had been the case for a generation that venture capital would never invest in games, suddenly it would. As the gatekeeping fell by the wayside we saw large studios emerge and excitement in the air. It was the age of Zynga and Mojang. And while there are certain signs that the cost of doing business in new channels is becoming more challenging, that sense of can-do still prevails. We’ve seen how changing the power relationship over to developers results in great companies, great innovation and the expansion of games as an art form.

Everywhere except in TV gaming, that is.

Console games largely remain a closed shop of mega-studios and expensive ambitions. Talking with people who work in that AAA world often feels a bit like stepping back in time. They’re still having the fight to be the biggest and the baddest, and spending $265 million on a single game to get there. The sense of you-should-be-so-lucky is alive and well. The reward for working on such mass teams is usually a pink slip, or failing that a small raise.

TV gaming is yet to be disrupted, to empower developers to run their own businesses direct with their customers as has happened everywhere else. So you would think that, for the legions of indies who want to make the next Canabalt but feel shut out by The Man, there would be overwhelming positivity for projects like the OUYA.

Not so much.

Where Microconsoles Fit

Consider the recent brouhaha over OUYA’s “Free The Games” project. It’s a fund that the company has established to match any Kickstarter game projects that opt to publish exclusively on OUYA for a time. If you raise $50k then OUYA will give you another $50k in exchange for a temporary lock-in. OUYA wins by gaining some cool exclusives and developers win by obtaining funding and making a game that will easily port to other formats over time. Implicitly the OUYA team would also probably talk up the game as a part of their platform story, which is essentially free marketing. Free money, high-profile marketing, a non-proprietary platform to develop for that could launch your business. Win-win right?

Well in fact the reaction to the FTG fund has been very negative in both the gaming press and developer community. The words “scam” and “controversial” appear in many headlines or copy covering it. The reaction has been so huge in fact that it caught up several developers, some of who had applied to the fund, others who had worked with OUYA directly. Most especially the story of Ryan Green’s game That Dragon, Cancer. He had to take to the pages of Gamasutra to patiently explain that, no, his game is not a cynical exploitation. It’s actually about his son who is dying of the big C.

My point is that there is a tendency to overreact when it comes to microconsoles. OUYA most especially because it tends to be at the forefront, trying a lot of experiments etc, but also in general. The world is falling down in people who want to believe the worst of these tiny little machines, and their reasons perplexing. Of course there are mistakes. And yes, it seems a couple of developers tried to massage their Kickstarters a bit to get access to the FTG fund. But still. Several mid-to-high profile indie devs have taken to Twitter demanding that public apologies and whatnot for amounts to an excellent way for indie projects to get funded. The horror.

Move Fast And Break Things

When people ask me about how microconsoles are doing so far, or declare them as dead, or how they feel betrayed, I always give the same answer: “You try funding, launching and building out a platform in 12 months with a tiny team, and see how perfectly you do it.” Set against watching vastly better funded companies like Microsoft with its campuses and its giant facilities, any new platform has to be scrappy. Or as Zuck said it, moving fast and breaking things.

Take one look at Facebook today and Facebook back when and you see exactly what it means. Microconsoles are young, weird and trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. They’ve moved very quickly to latch onto an opportunity enabled by affordable low-powered hardware. This means that some parts of that program will come out half-baked at first and then iterate, as happens with all new technology businesses.

But the gaming world doesn’t seem to understand that, and it’s a key difference between tech and gaming communities. Tech journalists are used to the new idea that shows promise, the device or service that might one day become something. They tend to be very forgiving of things being a bit broken as long as they have optimistic ambitions for the future. Sometimes perhaps they are too wide-eyed, but still.

The gaming community, on the other hand, operates by a totally different set of criteria. Certain influential sites that lead tribes of players and build a community of fans (like Giant Bomb, Penny Arcade, Rock Paper Shotgun) in a way that is fundamentally different to the tech model. It’s mostly extended fandom, media critique, sometimes gossip and cheerleading. Games journalism is often obsessed with legitimacy and trying to establish a narrative of the medium. The community tends to look backward fondly and forward skeptically. It takes a lot to wow them, and it’s not just a matter of features.

While working on PS2 was very painful, for players it was arguably the greatest console ever. It had a huge catalog of diverse games and established many modern classics, such as Ico. The sense of polish, production values and a premium experience has long been the secret to the console industry (as compared to the PC, which has often been rougher) and it’s treasured. Gamers still rankle heavily about the need for patches in modern games, for example, remembering a better time when cartridges just worked.

With some exceptions, most of the gaming community is not used to “move fast and break things”. It remembers the platforms that failed, of which there were many. Systems like the Saturn, the 3DO, the CDi, the CD32 and many more only ever managed a handful games before dying. Failures have tended to fall into either the “principled end” model or the “shady bastard” model. In the former we see projects like the Dreamcast or the Indrema. In the latter it’s slapped-together formats like the Gizmondo (complete with links to the Swedish Mafia). There are many examples of both.

The memory of platform failures is strong, enough to make the gaming community wary of any newcomers. It doesn’t give its loyalty easily because it has been disappointed many times. Nobody wants to buy into a platform that will end up as a Dreamcast or a Gizmondo. So a key part of the reason why any platform gets short shrift unless it comes from a Sony or an Apple is that sense of reliability. And this (to me at least) explains why indie game developers in particular have reacted so curiously to microconsoles.

Indies Gamed

Both Sony and Microsoft have mixed histories when it comes to dealing with independent developers. That version of Xbox Live as seen in Indie Game: The Movie (for example) hasn’t been around for quite some time and the Xbox 360 felt like an indie ghost town for everyone bar Minecraft. Meanwhile Nintendo has almost no history with indies at all.

All three have recently started to change their tunes. They’ve worked to bring indie developers into their folds and – for Sony especially – this seems to be working. Between execs like Shahid Ahmad saying things will be better and indie heroes like Jonathan Blow bigging up the PS4, the mood for console is positive. Indies now consider platforms like the PS Vita to be desirable venues even though Sony has sold very few actual units.

An informal system has sprung up where console platforms look at what’s hot on Steam and then tap successful developers from there to publish with them. Platforms now offer increased support to these developers and are removing many of the old roadblocks, such as lowering the prices of dev kits. Consoles have become cool once more and the community has responded in kind. But I ‘m dubious.

A lot of the new generation of game makers are too young to know what a full console cycle feels like. The hype may be exciting but, historically at least, the troughs of disillusionment have been very deep. Young guns often don’t understand that the point of having a few Journeys is not to effect a big change in the platform, but to just have a few arty games that win awards. Also mobile is scary and full of people who want to talk monetization. Tablet is scary. Facebook is scary. Microconsole is scary. But everybody thinks Nintendo is cool, so it must be good to be on Wii U yeah? It’s like that.

Ahead of new console launches the industry tends to become exuberant even though the financial argument rarely makes sense. Consoles don’t sell a giant number of units (in their 8 years of operation Microsoft and Sony combined sold less consoles than Android phones now sell per quarter) and so their games tend to experience a lot of short-head downward pressure.

While the early phase may seem like virgin territory and breed a few key successes it’s usually only 2-3 years after that when conditions flip. Execs in charge feel they have enough arty games to tick that box and seem legitimate to journalists. They back away from support, refocusing their digital divisions to become profitable. They steward. They constrain. It doesn’t make sense to run an Apple-sized curation operation when they don’t sell Apple-sized numbers of units, so they rationalize.

It’s a similar story on Steam. Greenlight is flooded with wannabe games trying to get onto the Steam platform, and PC gaming has become such that if you’re not on Steam you’re probably screwed. Developers rarely have the power to chop and change their distribution to other PC stores (and Microsoft’s failure to make the Windows 8 Store work is a big problem here). Yet developers remain emotionally attached to those older paradigms, as do many players.

Overcoming The Skepticism

Some people can’t see past the fact that most microconsoles are built on Android and may in some former life have had similar guts to some mobile phones. It’s been a weird couple of years for the gaming community between tablets and Zynga and gestural controllers and TV TV TV. The community wants gaming to make sense again, like it used to. Microconsoles seem to be just one more thing that’s piling on some unspecified destruction of gaming as they know it.

The microconsole idea is fundamentally different to many of the failed platforms of yesteryear, but much of the gaming community does not yet see that. It’s seeing the past, the Gizmondos and the Dreamcasts, and assuming that the new is the same as the old. That kind of skepticism can be overcome but it takes time. I mean, sure, the first generation OUYA is a beachhead product (I say again, you see how well you’d do in that timeframe), but it was supposed to be. “Move fast and break things” means built to mess around with, to find the fun and help steer. So is the fund and the idea that the hardware will update every year so rather than every seven years. In a sense the whole platform is currently a big project between many companies trying to figure out this big new idea.

The community’s reaction is valid. It can’t be wished away, but it can be addressed. Yes there are some snafus to be resolved. But trust is earned over the long term by watching games like That Dragon, Cancer come out and more and more like them. With continued demonstration of good intent and ambition the gaming community will eventually be won around. As Valve showed with Steam, skepticism can be beaten by continuing to push and adapt, to listen and respond, game after game.

Over time the community will shift from saying “not as bad as I thought” to “quite good” to “actually pretty cool” if microconsoles’ course holds true. It may take a couple of years, but eventually the people will come around.

Fingerprint scanners have always been vulnerable to hackers who are willing to go the extra mile to bypass them. Over the years, we’ve seen everything from people using Gummy Bears, Play-Doh and more sophisticated techniques to bypass these biometric scanners. It’s not really a surprise then, that Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner on the new iPhone 5s is vulnerable to these kinds of hacks as well. As Germany’s Chaos Computer Club (CCC) announced today, it has managed to bypass TouchID by creating a fake finger that uses lifted prints to fool the scanner into believing it’s dealing with its rightful owner.

But let’s put this hack into perspective. Getting this to work isn’t quite as easy as the CCC hackers make you think it is in their press release or this video:

First you need some kind of colored powder or superglue to lift the fingerprint. Then you have to scan the fingerprint, invert it and print it with a resolution of 1200dpi or more onto a transparent sheet. After that, you build your fake finger by smearing pink latex milk or white wood glue into the pattern that the toner created onto the transparent sheet and wait for it to set. Finally, the CCC writes, “the thin latex sheet is lifted from the sheet, breathed on to make it a tiny bit moist and then placed onto the sensor to unlock the phone.” This method should work for virtually every fingerprint scanner on the market today.

If somebody is willing to go through all of this to break into your phone, chances are you have bigger issues than fingerprint security. Also, given that most iPhone users probably don’t even use a PIN code to secure their devices today, Touch ID still marks a massive step forward in smartphone security — even given the remote chance that somebody would lift your fingerprint and go through the trouble of bypassing it.

If people are making latex replicas of your fingerprints, you have bigger problems than your iPhone's security. ccc.de/en/updates/201…—
Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) September 22, 2013

Breaking: you can also access someone's phone if you kidnap them and torture them until they give up their password and/or fingerprint.—
MG Siegler (@parislemon) September 22, 2013

London-based startup Dattch is a dating app with a difference. I don’t mean the fact that it’s exclusively for lesbians, bisexual and/or bi-curious women — though that certainly makes it stand out from the ranks of straight dating apps. What really sets it apart is its mostly female team who set out to design a dating app specifically for gay women.

Dattch is currently one of 17 startups in the Wayra London incubator cohort, and has just closed a £100,000/$160,000 angel/small seed round, with three angel investors — including Yannick Pons and Andy Phillips. That investment bolsters the €40,000 invested by Wayra as part of its incubator program, where Dattch will remain until January.

Being a dating app specifically designed for gay women may not sound too remarkable — but in fact the gay female dating scene is spectacularly badly served, says founder and CEO Robyn Exton. “Every single dating product that’s been produced for gay women is horrific,” she tells TechCrunch. ”The biggest problem [with rivals’ products] is they don’t have any consideration of how these women are different.”

Other apps apparently targeting lesbians and bisexual females typically reskin a gay male offering and slap a femme-friendly name on it (Bender to Brenda, for instance. Or GaydarGirls). ”There’s no consideration of how a female user might differ,” she argues.

Exton points out that lazy reskins of gay male platforms have resulted in lesbian dating apps that ask incongruous questions like ‘how much body hair do you have?’ — because they’re just reusing the same gay male templates. Not exactly tailor made for a female target audience then.

Add to that, another big problem is fake profiles — created by (straight) men who are pretending to be female so they can pitch for a threesome with their ‘boyfriend.’ Or angling to ‘convert’ lesbians. Which makes the whole online dating game a tedious minefield for gay women who have to spend time figuring out who’s fake and who’s for real before they can start thinking about whom they fancy.

“It doesn’t happen super often, but the fact that it does happen means you don’t trust the messages that come through,” she adds. “It’s just a really bad experience all in all.”

Exton, who has prior experience in the online dating space, including building a (straight) dating product, decided there had to be a better way to serve a community of users who absolutely have an appetite to meet each other, but probably don’t have the same appetites as gay men (especially when it comes to body hair). And certainly don’t want to waste time weeding out straight men. And so Dattch was born.

Click to view slideshow.

“The actual trigger for me doing Dattch was hanging out with some of my girl mates, and a friend had broken up with her girlfriend and we were like ‘come on, you’re just going to have to sign up to a site’ and she was really reticent to do it because they are and were all utterly shit,” says Exton.

The business opportunity she saw for Dattch was to take the exact opposite approach to cynical reskins, and build something that reflects what gay women actually want from a dating app. “Nobody was thinking about a female user, and actually how do women behave? What kind of triggers are they looking for?” she tells TechCrunch.

So what are gay women looking for? Firstly, lots and lots of photos. “The key behaviours that we saw and that we’re now focusing on is that they like to browse for hours. They will look at every single photo, every single image, and it’s not just what you look like; women want to know the small things about you. But not in an awkward text description — they want to be able to absorb this content,” says Exton.

Not just photos of potential dates, then, but photos of where you live, what you wear, things you like, places you want to go. “Women will be just as interested to see what your living room looks like, and what your favourite drink is,” she says. “What we’ve done now is to allow people to import these images that show who you are, rather than describing it. So it gives all the content for women to browse through.”

“Women want to look at tonnes and tonnes of profiles, and then decide who they want to talk to,” she adds.

Dattch is taking its design inspiration from female-friendly image curation site Pinterest. ”Our profiles are these Pinterest-style boards that just give you tumbling images… It’s the idea that girls are creating these mood boards of themselves — so you look at it and you can take on board a lot of information, quite quickly, about the kind of person this person is.”

The app’s other focus is on enabling its users to chat with each other via a text-based messaging feature. But even there the photos come into play — providing context and conversation starter topics for users.

“Women want to chat a lot but they’re also not very good at starting the conversation — which I think is also symptomatic of the kind of profiles that exist. So when you’re on a platform like Grindr it’s fairly clear why you’re talking to each other. You don’t really need to have the softer entry stuff — it’s like ‘hey, what’s up. Wanna meet?’. It’s literally that kind of platform. But with girls they are actually looking to have a conversation,” says Exton.

“The idea [with Dattch] was to start allowing people to pull in [contextual photo-based] content and then it’s easier to start a conversation. And you actually get a gist of who someone is and what you can start talking to them about.”

They will look at every single photo, every single image, and it’s not just what you look like; women want to know the small things about you.

Another Grindr factor that Exton argues doesn’t apply well to the gay female scene is proximity-based social networking. “In private beta we were showing you the closest user to you. And that’s basically not relevant for women. It’s like 1 percent of the time women are going to meet up within 30 minutes. Like gay guys often will. For women you’re probably looking at about a week before someone goes on a date, so seeing the closest person to you doesn’t add to that experience.

“Now you just see generally women in your area… It doesn’t have to be that closest person. Then you’ll be able to customise it — in two builds from now — where you’ll be able to pick the distance you want to see people within, and then you’ll probably be able to pick an age range.”

On the fake profiles issue, weeding out the men has been, and continues to be, a key priority for Dattch. Initially it was via a manual “profile validation” process that relied on cross-referencing with users’ Facebook profiles. It has since incorporated Facebook Connect to make the process easier, but it is also erring on the cautious side, as it tries to establish a trusted platform for female users, so it is also currently doing phone calls to verify gender (which sounds like a delicate balancing act, between building that user trust and being off-putting).

It won’t be making calls forever, though. “Our first few thousand users are critical so it’s really important to us that we make this work — we can work out a way that will scale it once we’ve got it cracked. But the next version gets closer to automating it. Facebook Connect automates it for us but for the people who don’t want to use Facebook we’re working out how to automate it,” says Exton.

Dattch ran in private beta for six months from last December, capped at 1,000 users. It’s since opened up as a public beta, targeting London initially and launching a redesigned app earlier this month (in which it’s still ironing out a few bugs). User numbers now are in the “thousands” — with the aim being to grow to tens or hundreds of thousands by year’s end. ”In the U.K. Grindr has 180,000 users in London so eventually we want to [reach] that many users in London as well,” says Exton.

For now, although anyone in the U.K. can download Dattch, it’s targeting the majority of its user acquisition efforts on London, with some small marketing efforts planned for a few other U.K. cities this year (namely Brighton, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow). Launching in the U.S. is on the cards for next year, where it will opt for a geofenced city-by-city rollout. Australia is also on its roadmap. After that Exton believes there’s also potential to enter China, where she argues that because there isn’t the same LGBT infrastructure — in terms of gay bars — “apps become really relevant.”

Discussing the angel round Dattch has just closed, Exton says that targeting a less well-served market has sometimes counted against it in conversations with investors. “It’s not been the simplest to raise for a lesbian app,” she says. “Some people have been quite uncomfortable with what we do.

“No one has done this before, no one has created an app for this market, so I think it’s a new market so possibly there’s a bit more caution around it,” she adds.

San Francisco-based cult clothing retailer Betabrand is debuting a new way for customers to engage in developing new products — an online think tank.

The online-only clothing retailer, which launched in August 2010 and has raised funding from Foundry Group and others, already allows its customers and fans to participate in the creation and promotion of its products. For example with its Disco Open Source Project, users can create their own specialty clothing using its disco fabric. With its Model Citizen program, customers can submit their own photos modeling the clothing they’ve bought on Betabrand. In both cases, Betabrand allows its customers and fans to act as pro bono designers and also its biggest advocates.

Betabrand’s Think Tank allows customers to vote on what ideas should become prototypes. Once these are protyped, then other customers can actually choose to fund that clothing by committing to buying the piece if and when it meets the funding goal to manufacture. Basically, each piece of clothing needs to reach a tipping point in buying commitments to then be funded by Betabrand to develop and manufacture. If and when you choose to commit to buying an item (literally funding the project), you’ll receive up to 30 percent off the item for committing early.

Here’s an example of a hoodie submitted and created by one of Betabrand’s community members. Another example is this Pinstripe Fleece Blazer, created by Betabrand founder Chris Lindland, is at 84 percent funding to goal, with six days left to fund. The blazer would normally cost $188 but any backers would pay $150. Lindland tells us that in the three weeks of launching the Think Tank, four to six new products are actually being funded per week.

As he explains, the Think Tank is the perfect way to prototype and create buzz around ideas, including ones submitted by users. It’s also a valuable data play, he adds, because the company is able to see what buyers are interested in before putting resources toward designing and manufacturing new clothing and products.

While some of Betabrand’s products (i.e. TSA-thwarting scanner-proof underwear) have bordered on wacky, the company is truly advancing the concept of blending crowdsourcing, customer demand and manufacturing. Not only is Betabrand building a community around its products, but it’s attempting to create engagement that most online retailers are unable to attain. Lindland is attempting to hack the manufacturing process for clothing to create products that his customers actually want. It’s similar in some ways to what Quirky is trying to do. Will it work? Early results are good, he says, with a growing number of customers committing to buying items.

BlackBerry trumpeted its intention to deliver the long-awaited Android and iOS versions of its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service this weekend, and so fans around the world eagerly awaited the mobile software’s debut. But debut the apps didn’t, at least not as intended and not for the vast majority of expectant fans.

As of right now, BlackBerry’s BBM apps for iOS and Android are nowhere to be seen, after the iOS version’s staged rollout of midnight local time at each country around the world got put on hold somewhere around India, and the Android version was a no-show altogether. The Android BBM app was originally slated for a Saturday launch, but the iOS version beat it out of the gate, and both got “paused” after a leaked version of the official Android .apk decimated BlackBerry’s servers.

Late yesterday BlackBerry was forced to put its rollout on hold, which it says is due to overwhelming demand.

“Prior to launching BBM for Android, an unreleased version of the BBM for Android app was posted online,” reads a statement from its official blog. “The interest and enthusiasm we have seen already – more than 1.1 million active users in the first eight hours without even launching the official Android app – is incredible.”

After that original post, those waiting for the official apps had nothing to go on for roughly 15 hours, followed by the most recent official word on the situation via BBM’s verified Twitter account. The most recent news is no news, however, with simply a restatement of its message from earlier that the company is working hard to restore the rollout.

We will provide you an update on timing as soon as we can. Teams are working non-stop. Sign up for launch alerts at BBM.com—
  (@BBM) September 22, 2013

I’ve been eager to get on board with either the Android or the iPhone version, because it means I can finally talk to my father again after so many years of silence. I’ll be able to BBM him for the two months it’ll take for his new iPhone to ship to him, and then I can safely delete the app again.

I asked my sister’s boyfriend, who just got an iPhone 5s, whether he’s excited about being able to take his BBM network with him as he switches. Here’s what he had to say:

I only have 3 people on BBM now. 2 are [your sister, work and personal ] and the other is your dad. I used to have 30 BBM contacts.

The launch of BBM for iPhone and Android, should it ever actually happen, will be a nice escape raft for people still clinging to the sinking ship, but that’s about it. The other ship BlackBerry is conceivably aiming to float here, the one where it builds a competitive cross-platform messaging platform to rival WhatsApp and others, has already sailed long, long ago.

Apple could learn a lot from the fall of Burberry. The once-exclusive fashion brand became associated with trashy youth by greedily licensing out its signature tan chequered pattern for use on baseball caps and other cheap clothes. Suddenly, the rich clientele it had catered to for a century wanted nothing to do with Burberry. Could Apple’s iPhone brand have the same trouble after selling the cheaper, color-splashed iPhone 5c?

Obviously there are a lot of differences between Burberry and Apple. Apple isn’t licensing the iPhone name to be shoddily produced by another company. And people buy iPhones for their utility, not just their fashion. But by selling cheaper (than the 5s), loudly-colored phones, there’s a chance it could negatively impact the perception of the status of the iPhone brand to more sophisticated luxury consumers.

Burberry was once the height of upper-class British fashion, with Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn donning its iconic trench coats which retail for thousands and thousands of pounds. Owning a piece of Burberry-cheqed clothing was aspirational, a sign of success.

Yet in the 1980′s and 1990′s the brand began juicing short-term profits by licensing its pattern and logo to manufacturers of everything from cut-rate clothes to liquor to dog toilet paper. Burberry became the uniform of the “chav” – British slang for trashy people trying to appear classier than they are through gaudy fashion. Soccer hooligans, sketchy streetpeople, and a C-list celebrities causing trouble became associated with Burberry.

The brand reached its low when a washed up British soap opera actress who’d had her septum removed due to cocaine abuse hit the front of the tabloids with her child, both covered head-to-toe in the Burberry chequered print.

While cheap licensed products and counterfeits flooded the streets, tarnishing the brand’s image, sales of the expensive fashion-wear that’s the foundation of Burberry’s business took a nosedive. Burberry was no longer a sign of high-status, and fashion mavens began to look elsewhere.

Enter the iPhone 5c.

“Unapologetically plastic” is how its designer Sir Jonny Ive describes the new iPhone 5c that debuted last week. “Those cheap-y, plastic-y phones” is how a less tech-conscious friend of mine described the 5c to me last weekend over brunch.

“I don’t like the new iPhone (meaning the premium 5s) because they made those cheap-y, plastic-y phones too”.

This sure as hell isn’t an expansive empirical study or representative sample of opinions of the 5c. It’s a one-off anecdote. But I doubt my friend is the only one who feels this way, consciously or sub-consciously, and it’s a perception Apple should be concerned with.

There are lots of reasons to sell a plastic iPhone. It gives consumers a choice beyond just an older model. It’s more durable than a glass iPhone 4S. It could help Apple expand its marketshare, thereby keeping iOS the first choice of platforms for developers. Its bright colors and price point could appeal to kids as they transition from iPods to smartphones. Apple’s colored iMacs and iPods certainly sold well. And it keeps Apple from having to sell the pricey industrial design that went into the iPhone 5 (now taken off the market) at a discount.

Done tactfully, the iPhone 5c could be a huge short and long-term win for Apple. It might become the best-selling iPhone ever.

But being “unapologetic” about the plastic iPhone has its pitfalls. Even if the phone is well made (check out our iPhone 5c review), and the $99 on contract price point doesn’t actually put a “cheaper” phone in Apple’s lineup, just the fact that it costs less than the 5s causes some people to perceive the iPhone 5c as “cheap”, and perception matters.

Again, the $99 on contract iPhone 5c is not cheaper than buying a year old iPhone like Apple used to sell, but it may be perceived as cheap.

The colors it comes in don’t do it any favors. They scream PlaySkool souvenir kid’s toy — the opposite of sophistication. Considering Apple has become one of the world’s most valuable companies by selling sophistication to those who can afford to pay a high margin, this is risky business.

But rather than try to mitigate the perception of the iPhone 5c as cheap, Apple’s $29 colored rubber cases make it even worse. They’ve been promoted in eye-bleed color combinations like a green phone with a pink case.

The sight of those highlighter iPhone 5c’s in the hands of kids and others who couldn’t afford a 5s could leave wealthier consumers less enamored with the iPhone brand as a whole. Is this judgement and classism terrible? Yes, but that won’t stop people.

Burberry was able to save itself by hiring a new CEO, Angela Ahrendts, who led an effort to buy back 23 of its licenses and fight counterfeiters. Ahrendts also scaled back its signature plaid so it appeared on just 5% of Burberry clothing instead of 20%. It signed on new faces for the brand like Emma Watson, and sued people who used its trademark illegally. Burberry is even working with Apple and the 5s to capture photos of its new fashion line.

Soon, Burberry regained its image as a sought-after upscale brand, and sales of its pricier items soared, and Burberry revenue has more than doubled to ?1.9 billion. However, the chav image still haunts Burberry to this day.

Still, Apple should heed these lessons as it promotes the iPhone 5c. It’s fine to appeal to a larger swath of the market and give people choice in pricing. But it must strive to maintain the iPhone’s image as the classiest handset on the market. That might mean toning down the color clashing when it promotes the 5c cases, carefully choosing where it promotes what model, and realizing it can be proud of its plastic without unapologetically alienating high-end buyers. Otherwise, a few years down the road it might be the one saying sorry to investors.

On Friday, Apple launched its 6.0 software update for its Apple TV set-top box, but soon after, some users reported that the update bricked their devices while others were a bit luckier and just lost their connection to the Internet or had to restore their machines. Some users are also reporting extremely slow download speeds and many seem to have lost some or all of the movies and TV shows they downloaded from Apple’s servers. Now, it looks like Apple has pulled the update, which was the first to introduce its new iTunes Radio service to the set-top box.

Apple’s own support forums are currently full of complaints about these issues.

For some users with multiple Apple TVs at home, the update seems to work on some and fail on others. It’s unclear what exactly causes these issues, which seem to affect both the Apple TV 2 and 3.

While the Apple TV is typically a standalone device, getting it back to work may mean that you have to connect it to your PC or Mac to restore it. To do so, you need a micro USB cable, connect the box to the PC, bring up iTunes, select the Apple TV in the Devices list and click ‘restore.’ That’s not very complicated (and easy for anybody who has ever tried an Apple TV jailbreak), but it’s also not something most users would even think about doing. For some, however, even this procedure doesn’t work.

So far, we haven’t heard anything official from Apple, but it’s clear that the 6.0 update has been pulled for the time being (it’s currently not available for my personal Apple TV either). We will update this post once we hear more.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah works on product for Swell, is a TechCrunch columnist, and an investor. He blogs at Haywire, and you can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

This is a post about “cards” as an interface in mobile apps. I am not a designer. I am also unable to mention every single app that uses cards — feel free to mention others in the comments. Additionally, I don’t know which apps should be credited with popularizing cards, or when that happened. For this post, it doesn’t matter. I’m also going to be talking about cards in the context of iOS, because that’s what I know, though it applies to any mobile device.

With those disclaimers out of the way, I want to share why I believe “cards” are becoming more prevalent as a mobile interface. As I was tweeting about cards over the last few weeks, a friend pointed me to a great blog post by noted mobile expert Luke Wroblewski, in which he demonstrates his design thinking in designing the app Polar in an age when mobile users look at their phones hundreds of times per day, often for only a few minutes at a time. Wroblewski’s post is worth reading and includes a short, insightful video on users’ “finger behavior.”

The essence of all of this boils down to the following, which we all intuitively understand: We use our phones most often with one hand, and more specifically, we navigate with one finger — the thumb. It’s all in the thumb, says Wroblewski, and I would bet scores of other designers agree. This may be why we see navigation buttons on the bottom of apps (Instagram), or anticipatory cards that push relevant information to users (Google Now), or drawers or “hamburger” icons to reveal settings or menus (Facebook), or radial buttons that open up a series of possible actions (Path), or advanced left-to-right swiping gestures in email apps (Mailbox), or why photo-sharing network apps use the “flick up and down” gestures to scroll through images (Frontback). The list goes on and on.

All of this thumb-swiping makes me wonder: Should nearly every mobile app be rethought of in this “thumb-dominant” context? Surely some apps require more digits for interaction, and some require that users type more (maybe both thumbs, or some eccentric combination), but beyond those, if the thumb is essentially the mouse for touch-enabled mobile devices, the “card” on a mobile device becomes more and more important as a digestible unit of information on a small screen for users who are on the go and mostly glancing through their apps before settling into the ones that truly engage them.

I have been thinking about cards because the company I work for (Swell) uses them. As an audio/news player, the app uses a cards interface to let users swipe left-to-right to skip tracks, to swipe upward to bookmark, and to swipe down to reveal advanced controls. This isn’t to say every app should use cards, of course, but users do seem to like the simplicity of the dimensions and seem to intuitively understand the physics of turning a card over for more information and controls. And, well before mobile devices, cards were always all around us — business cards, playing cards, and so forth. In fact, one of the reasons I got interested in this concept, not being a designer, of course, is the memory of baseball cards, that most everything I needed to know about a player could be contained on both sides of a small playing card.

A two-sided card seems to fit nicely in this mobile age. Perhaps that’s why Tinder’s user interface is so popular as its users quickly flick through picture tiles, or why Apple’s Passbook and Reminders apps use a cards interface with information and controls on both sides, or why a NYC-based entrepreneur named Jordan Cooper is trying to rebuild mobile web pages into cards as the focus of his new startup, Wildcard.

Going back to some of the pre-iPhone iPods, even back then we could scroll through album art. Perhaps that was the beginning of cards. Perhaps we’ve been trained to swipe cards on mobile devices for over a decade now, and that interaction appears to be here to stay. Whatever the origin, it may be moot — the snacking, on-the-go, one-handed behaviors of mobile users today seem to indicate that, for now, a one-thumb navigable card is the interface of choice, and until the next designer invents that new atomic unit and corresponding gestures to go along with it, we will have to sit tight and keep shuffling the deck.

Photo Credit: Sarah Reid / Creative Commons Flickr

The Makerbot Digitizer looked too good to be true. It was a solid, compact 3D scanner that could replicate a solid object without much fuss and had a level of detail unparalleled in the home scanning market. Now it’s clear that this is much more than a compelling idea.

I saw the Makerbot in action yesterday and spoke with Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis about his experience building the entire system – from PCBs to case – in America and how it felt to be a manufacturer in the heart of Brooklyn. “It feels great,” he said.

The whole system is surprisingly light and uses Class 1 lasers and a special camera to gather a point cloud based on the object you’re scanning. You tell the system how light or dark the object is and then click a button. A few minutes later you have a complete object that you can modify, edit, or augment digitally and then print using almost any printer. It also exports files into Makerbot compatible .thing files.

A turntable rotates the object slowly so every surface is scanned.

The Digitizer will ship in October and sell for $1,400. Pettis promised that they would have enough on hand to meet demand and that his factory was working overtime to get the devices ready.

Apple has finally take steps to better cater to the children who have adopted its devices, and especially family favorite the iPad, with the launch of a Kids App Store. Arriving this week alongside the launch of iOS 7, the Kids App Store store is not a separate mobile application, to be clear, but is rather a new section within the Apple App Store itself, which now features an added “Kids” category where apps are broken down by age range.

This section of the store separates the apps into three age ranges, spanning those 5 and under, those between 6 and 8, and finally, those for kids between 9 and 11.

The company first revealed this “Kids” section at its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this summer when the revamped iOS 7 mobile operating system was first revealed.  The updated mobile App Store app also saw a number of other changes, including the removal of “Genius” from the bottom menu in favor of apps “Near Me” for example, support for automatic app updates, and more.

In addition to better organizing the mobile apps targeting children for ease-of-use, the Kids App Store also comes at a time when Apple has begun to allow children under 13 to sign up for and hold iTunes user accounts, as long as they’re funneled through an “approved educational institution.” As TechCrunch previously noted, Apple will face a lot more scrutiny now that it’s making mobile apps available directly to younger children.

A SAFER HOME FOR KIDS APPS

Apps aimed at the under-13 set, for example, will need to follow the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requirements. These state that developers can’t ask for personal info from kids, expect for “the purpose of complying with applicable children’s privacy statues” – that is, not in order to gather information for targeting ads. The apps can’t transmit or share personal information without parental consent, either.

And in addition to now being required to have clear privacy policies, apps in this section can’t use ads that ask kids to complete some sort of in-app activity and have to ask for parents’ permissions before they link outside the app to the web or other software, for the purpose of commerce. That’s right: no more spammy pop-ups, or tricks and nags to get kids to buy…at least not in this section.

For many reputable kids’ app developers, compliance with the new policies was not a serious issue. “The changes were minor,” says Mindshapes Joint CEO Chris Michaels, whose company has three applications in the Kids category upon launch. “We have included a privacy policy within the app, per Apple’s requirements. We had already implemented other features for compliance, notably parent gating on any transactional or outbound link-based content, earlier in 2013,” he said.

Toca Boca’s CEO Björn Jeffery added that while many kids app developers, like his company, had complied with most of Apple’s rules much earlier, “a few of the more shady developers probably had no intention of even trying to comply.” And as word gets out that the “safe” apps for children are found in the Kids section of iTunes, those still trying to monetize via children’s in-app actions and purchases may see their businesses affected negatively.

“Apple is clearly doing the right things and trying to stamp out some of the abuse that has happened in this sector with unscrupulous app developers tricking kids into making in-app purchases,” said Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder at JibJab, noting also that his company only had to make minor tweaks to become compliant with the new policies.

In the case of a large publisher, like Disney, its apps were already COPPA-compliant as of this summer, and it added an “age gate” for anything related to in-app purchasing, registering, or email capture. Basically, this is a pop-up window that features a code generator where you have to read and enter a code before you can proceed. Other apps use special actions, like a press and hold gesture, or require parents to have a separate in-app account.

Across the board, most of the well-known kids brands told us similar stories about the changes – that they involved minimal efforts on their parts, and these “new” policies are things they were doing anyway. Only now there’s more structure to the system, and they’re no longer lumped in with apps that don’t play by the rules.

BROWSING THE KIDS SECTION

In both the mobile iOS 7 App Store and updated iTunes desktop software,  the Kids section breaks out the specially vetted applications separately from the more general “Education” section, which still remains. Though there’s a lot of crossover between the two categories, the Kids section is really a curated subset of the Education section, where apps can extend beyond the early learning crowd to include those aimed also at adults and “lifelong learners.”

At launch, the Kids store includes thematic app collections, including “Create & Play,” “Shapes & Colors,” “Explore the World,” “First Words & Numbers,” “Musical Apps,” “Learning Made Fun,” “Interactive Kids Stories,” and more.

Big name kids brands are also given their own collections, like Disney, Toca Boca, Duck Duck Moose, SagoSago (a Toca Boca brand, actually), Sesame Street, PBS Kids, and others, giving them a higher profile as a kids’ app maker than in the past. While the majority of the apps have an educational bent to them, some of the games showcased are more entertainment-focused – like the ones where your child can “Facetime” Elmo or Cookie Monster, for example.

But as noted above, these apps don’t continually pester children to tap on ads or buy additional items (like those Talking character apps at Out Fit7 do). Not only are the purchases hidden away in a gated “parent’s area,” as noted above, many of the apps in this section are paid apps, indicating their increased quality.

As a parent trying out many of the featured apps over the past few days with my preschool-aged daughter, it has been smooth sailing. Instead of the continual frustration that accompanies the low-quality, advertising-filled free apps we’ve tried in the past, she’s able to just enjoy the storytelling and interactivity without being pushed and tricked into purchase behaviors she can’t yet understand.

I’ve cleared out the iPad of those older apps, and have filled it only with newly vetted ones from the Kids store. It’s a weekend project I’d recommend to any parent with a little free time this Sunday, too.

DOWNLOADS ALREADY GROWING

Though it’s still early days, Alan Shusterman, CEO at Duck Duck Moose, whose apps were featured by Apple in 14 collections, says he’s already seeing a positive impact on sales. Sara DeWitt, Vice President, PBS KIDS Digital, said they are too, and expect that trend to continue. And Yves Saada, Vice President, Digital Media at Disney Publishing, says that Kids category aids in discoverability, and the company is already seeing an increase in downloads.

Others, like Toca Boca, say there haven’t been major spikes yet, but over time they expect the category to continuously get a visible spot in Apple’s store, leading to more sales for developers in the long run.

To access the new children’s app store in iTunes, click on the list of Categories and choose “Kids.”

GIFs are the hot new thing. News organization BuzzFeed.com, which has staked its future on dozens of GIF and listicle posts a day, now has a staggering 85 million unique visitors a month. Attention-starved politicians want in on the action. So last week, Republicans published out a GIF-filled attack article against Democratic opposition to an oil pipeline.

It was an instant success; the post snagged headlines from a dozen tech and mainstream outlets. The Internet went bananas:

Here’s a sample of what the Energy and Commerce Committee put out (full post here):

“On September 19, 2008, five years ago, when TransCanada first submitted its application to the U.S. State Department to build the Keystone XL pipeline, a $7 billion private infrastructure project that would create thousands of jobs and advance America’s energy security:”

“In April 2010, when the State Department issued its Draft Environmental Impact Statement, which said the pipeline “would result in limited adverse environmental impacts during both construction and operation”

“Today, after five years, when the president has still not approved Keystone XL, keeping America waiting for thousands of jobs and greater energy security:”

When I first saw mentions of the article fill up my Twitter feed, I couldn’t understand why everyone was drinking the Kool-Aid:

I was all like, “No, I’m not going to click on this transparent click-bait piece of propaganda. Democracy deserves better.”

Then, at some point in the day, I was burnt out from work.

In a moment of weakness, I decided to see what all the fuss what about. I clicked and was instantly all like:

It was addicting. Ordinarily I fill my downtime with a mix of New Girl episodes and cat videos. Instead, I was learning.

Ten minutes later, I awoke from my daze with the full (if biased) history of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Despite my knee-jerk belief that GIF posts were devolving news into an adolescent version of itself, I’m now convinced that these playful little guys deserve a seat at the big boys’ table.

Let’s face it, we’re all on information overload, and we can’t read every piece of serious news out there.

It’s okay to laugh and learn at the same time, especially when we would otherwise just choose to laugh.

Ben Smith of BuzzFeed crafted an eloquent defense of this new type of journalism, arguing “Once you stop laughing and start thinking, the extreme virulence of the social web just might revolutionize the way you think about the world too.”

In the end, I don’t care how people share important nuggets of information, just so long as they do, especially if it reaches a demographic that never would have read it in the first place. So, kudos Republicans. May we all enjoy many more GIFS.

[Image Credit: Reactiongifs.com, Giphy.com]

Blippar, the AR-advertising company that lets users scan real-world objects to bring up extended augmented reality content, has today released a huge update that not only increases the speed of the technology, but allows for enhanced social sharing features for users.

Blippar was launched in 2011 in the UK, and has since expanded to the U.S. as well. The technology works by letting users scan things like a magazine page, a ketchup bottle, or anything that has the Blippar tag to see all kinds of extra content, like promotions, suggested recipes, coupons, and more. In fact, it’s entirely up to the brand what kind of Blippable content they’ll include in their campaign.

According to founder and CEO Rish Mitra, the update has made the image recognition technology ten percent faster. But perhaps more important to the brands Blippar is working with, the app now allows users to share Blippar content.

Before, Blippar users were only able to like or follow a brand’s social media pages on Twitter or Facebook. With the udpate, users can sign in to their own Facebook and Twitter accounts to spread the Blippar content virally.

The update also includes an in-app catalog, allowing users to browse through Blippable content that is trending, but may not be accessible at the moment without access to that Blip tag on the real-world object.

On the brand side, Blippar is offering more in-depth analytics. Alongside location, dwell time, overall blips, and in-app interactions, brands will now receive analytics on anonymized demographic data thanks to the new integration with Facebook and Twitter.

Blippar has been cash-positive since three month’s after its 2010 launch, but Mitra tells TechCrunch that Blippar has “a strong lead velocity and over 70 percent client retention as a business proving value of the medium.”

The UI has also gotten a revamp, allowing for 3D modeling, which will be identical across all platforms, including iOS, Android, and BlackBerry Z10.

The human body wasn’t meant to sit. Chairs are an invention of our own laziness.

That said, UpDesk is here to swoop in and give you a nice, comfortable desk to both sit and stand at without a whole lot of extra effort on your part. The UpWrite is quite similar to UpDesk’s Standing Desk, which has an electronic lifting system and three preset heights, ranging from 25 inches to 50 inches.

However, the UpWrite also comes with a nice white surface, which just so happens to play nice with dry erase markers. Artists, obsessive planners and list lovers should get a kick out of this thing.

But what do John and I think?

John has previous experience with UpDesk, and believes that this is possibly the smoothest running and best looking model yet. Still, he’s not convinced that the dry erase surface is quite necessary.

I have to side with him, knowing in my heart of hearts that my drawings would soon end up on my forearms and shirt sleeves.

The UpWrite costs $1,149, plus $129 shipping within the U.S., but it’s simple to assemble and get cracking. It’s a high price to pay, but it should pay off in the long run. Using a standing desk has made me feel generally more energized throughout the day, and if possible, my posture might even be improving.

It’s a long-term investment, and that’s why we both give the UpDesk UpWrite a fly.

Montreal-based Lagoa has acquired in-browser 3D editor 3DTin. The company announced its acquisition on its blog. 3DTin is used for 3D model and 3D printing.

3DTin, like competitors TinkerCAD and Sketchfab, allows you to make 3D models inside your browser window. These models can then be exported for 3D printing or further editing. The service will remain a separate entity and complement Lagoa’s photorealistic rendering solution.

The details of the acquisition are undisclosed. 3DTin founder Jayesh Salvi started the company in 2010. The 3D modeling space is heating up and these browser-based solutions – which rely on backend processing that many home computers may not be able to handle – are some of the most interesting tools in this market.