Category: Tech news

Apple is about to introduce an iPhone trade-in program that will allow users to walk into a Retail store and trade up from an old model to a new one. We’ve heard some interesting details about the way that the program will work, and indeed, is working right now in some pilot Apple Stores.

The program, has gotten a bit of press today, with Macrumors‘ Eric Slivka reporting that the training for the program is underway and Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac quoting a start date sometime in September.

But the trade-in program is actually already being piloted in some Apple stores, we’ve discovered. Those stores aren’t just preparing internally for an eventual program, they’ve been offering trade-ins to customers for several weeks. According to a source, this program was presented to them as something that may not be available at every Retail Store.  Some of these pilot stores have been processing ‘multiple’ trade-ins a day at this point.

The program works like this. A customer brings a working, non-liquid-damaged iPhone into an Apple Retail Store. It’s then evaluated by an employee with the help of an online site that an employee can access using the store’s iMacs or iPads. The customer then answers a series of questions about the condition of the device in order to determine a value.

This procedure is similar to the way that Apple handles its iPhone recycling program now, but that is by mail only, covers a wide variety of products and is not offered in-store. If a customer wishes to trade in an old broken device for which there is no monetary value, they can do so as a simple recycle.

Values can range depending on a variety of factors, including device color, physical damage and liquid damage. Though the prices could very well be tweaked before the program goes wide, the range is said to be around $120-200 for 16GB iPhone 4 and 4S models. A 16GB iPhone 5 in good condition could go for around $250,  less than is being offered by some of the other trade-in sites like Gazelle, Glyde or NextWorth.

Still the in-store convenience of the program could definitely offer the advantage here. Being able to walk in and get the deal done instead of mailing it off and waiting is powerful.

Once the paperwork is done, the value is added to a gift card. The balance is applied to a new device, and the customer keeps the gift card if there’s money left over. The store keeps the old phone. The trade-in program is only applicable if you’re in the store to get a new phone, so you can’t just trade it for a gift card.

That value can be used in credit for a new device but only if the customer has an upgrade credit available. So there is a carrier check involved. If a user does not have an upgrade credit, they could presumably pay the early termination fee of their carrier and use the credit towards a new device on another carrier.

Currently, the devices are dropped into a bag and presumably shipped off elsewhere, likely emerging markets, for refurbishment and resale. They are not resold at the store where the trade-ins are being offered. So far, customers have been pretty excited that this option is now available at Apple Retail stores.

Obviously, this is how the pilot program is working, there could be some details that change between now and when it’s set to go live. We’ll let you know if anything material changes. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the new program, but have not heard back.

There ain’t no party like a TechCrunch party. And with that bit of trivia, I’m excited to announce that this year, tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt SF after parties will be available to the general public.

These parties are mostly reserved for Disrupt attendees. Buy a Disrupt general admission ticket and you’re granted access to the three day conference and all the parties listed below. But we’re trying something new for Disrupt SF 2013 and are making a very limited number of tickets available for purchase.

There are three parties. Tickets are available for each and include drinks. And of course tickets are available for the full conference and all the parties.

For many Disrupt attendees, the parties are the most exciting part of the conference. It’s where founders, VCs, and developers let loose. While the conference itself is massive and pitches are flying from every which way, these parties are often the best place to actually do a little schmoozing.

Sure, the parties are loud. And boozy. And that’s why they’re great.

September 9th @ Mighty hosted by New Relic
September 10th @ Temple hosted by SAP
September 11th @ 1015 Folsom hosted by Auction.com

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Pastebin officially announced that they’ve surpassed 1 million registered members since the introduction of the login service two and a half years ago. The service allowed users to log in using social media tools and control the pastes they uploaded to the site. Members can also edit and delete pieces of information they post to the site. Users can still paste items anonymously.

Like many popular “paste” sites, Pastebin started out as a repository for code, snippets of text, and chat logs. Now, however, it has become a sort of clearinghouse for Anonymous, the group, and other groups intent on maintaining anonymity.

“About a year ago we added the option to create new Pastebin accounts via social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google which greatly increased the number of daily signups. Month over month we are seeing more traffic records, and we are currently serving about 17 million visitors per month,” said Jeroen Vader, owner of the site.

The site hosts 36 million active pastes and adds about 40,000 every day. “We have had some issues/headaches storing all this information, and at the same time making sure that the website stays lightning fast for our users,” said Vader. “For our developers it has been a huge learning curve, but we’ve got a pretty solid platform now that allows for a lot of future growth. Also we’ve had to deal a lot with DDOS attacks over the years, but with the help of some of our users, we’ve got a pretty solid system now to fight those kinda attacks.”

Vader is also working on what he is calling Pastebin 4.0 which will include a comment system, friends lists, a favoriting system, and a new layout. “That and some other ‘still secret’ features,” he said. “Those will be revealed once the new site is online.”

In the post-Snowden era, Vader is seeing more and more activity on the site.

“Every time something really controversial gets posted on Pastebin, it often results in a lot of media attention, which can result in a temporary boost in traffic. In the case of the Edward Snowden related items there were also a few days where traffic was noticeably higher than normal,” he said.

Google’s primary search domain for Palestine has seemingly been hacked, with the standard Google search interface for the region being replaced by a political message from its hackers.

From the information available so far, it doesn’t appear that Google’s own servers were hacked — instead, it seems that Google’s Palestinian domain was hijacked and redirected to another server altogether. How that was done, exactly, is unclear. One current theory is that Google’s top-level domain provider for the region was compromised, allowing hackers to point the domain somewhere else.

“uncle google we say hi from palestine” taunts the defaced page, “to remember you that the country in google map not called israel. its called Palestine”

Google’s Palestine domain launched back in 2009, and drew in its fair share of controversy when the header of the page was changed from “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine” earlier this year.

(Note that we’re intentionally omitting any links to the hacked site in case the defaced site contains any malware. The page attempts to run at least one bit of embedded media. Visiting the defaced site is not recommended.)

Here’s a screenshot of the defaced page as it appeared this morning:

The lives of new parents are fraught with stress but now the weight of knowing whether or not your wee one is breathing can be lifted. Owlet is a small bootie that the baby wears while sleeping. It signals heartrate and respiration and you can check in on the little shaver via a mobile device. As a parent of three, I remember a few rough moments spent peeking in on the quiet little ones out of fear or curiosity.

The company is asking for pledges of $159 to get an early-bird unit (the price will go up to $199 once they sell out). They are looking for funding of $100,000. They’ve reached $25,000 so far.

The sensor measures heart rate, oxygen levels, breathing, and sends sleep alerts when baby rolls over while asleep. It also takes temperature measurements. It runs on Bluetooth LTE so you can check on your baby when it’s nearby using your smartphone or remotely via an Internet-connected computer.

There are definitely similar tools that you can use but none fit so snugly in a wearable device. While baby bed sensors are nothing new, the fact that this gives a full complement of important information that can help parents and pediatricians both is pretty important.

You can preorder here and they plan on shipping in November.

Facebook is rolling out shared photo albums, as first reported by Mashable. Users can share access to an album with up to 50 contributors, who can each add up to 200 photos.

For those of you who aren’t math whizzes, that means shared albums can be as large as 10,000 photos. Previously, albums were limited to 1,000 total photos and users could only add pictures to their own albums.

This new feature should be good for user engagement in groups of friends and with larger albums. Facebook has done a good job of focusing its browser-based photo section around albums and larger batches of photos, while leaving (Facebook-owned) Instagram to dominate single photos. Users can beautify and share quick snaps in time with their friends via Instagram, but for larger life events (weddings, graduations, even just cool vacations), they can share much larger batches of photos on Facebook.

This is a bit of a blow to apps like Albumatic and Flock, which are also trying to crack group photo albums. But many have tried and failed before in this space, so it’s far from a foregone conclusion that Facebook’s feature will crush these smaller competitors. The feature is also similar to Google+’s Party Mode, in which users can share all of their photos and videos in real time with the guests of an associated event.

Facebook users can share these new group albums with the public, friends of the contributors, or just contributors to the album. The prototype for shared picture albums was reportedly built by a dozen engineers at one of Facebook’s company-wide hackathons.

Facebook has begun rolling out the feature to a small number of users today. It will be available at first only as a desktop option, and will expand to all English users first before the social network rolls it out internationally.

Image via Mashable

RingCentral, a company offering cloud-based phone and communication systems, has filed for an initial public offering of up to $100 million.

Incorporated back in 1999, San Mateo, Calif.-based RingCentral says it saw revenue of $50.2 million in 2010, $78.9 million in 2011, and $114.5 million in 2012. However, it’s also experiencing growing losses, with net losses of $7.3 million, $13.9 million, and $35.4 million respectively.

Among the competitive advantages that RingCentral lists in the filing are its core technology, its mobile-centric approach, and its rapid release cycle. Risk factors, meanwhile, include the aforementioned losses, the reliance on third parties for network connectivity and data centers, and threats to the company’s security or IP.

RingCentral raised about $44 million in equity funding. CEO and founder Vladimir Shmumis remains the largest shareholder, with 19.6 percent of the company’s stock, followed by investors Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures, which have 17.2 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively.

In the filing overview, the company writes:

We believe that there is a significant opportunity to leverage the benefits of cloud computing to provide next-generation, cloud-based business communications solutions that address the new realities of workforce mobility, multi-device environments and multi-channel communications, thereby enabling people to communicate the way they do business.

Google today announced that Android developers can now make their free apps available in Iran, one of the few countries where app downloads through Google’s store were completely unavailable until now. Paid apps and apps that use in-app billing, Google notes, will still remain unavailable in Iran for the time being.

For developers, this move opens up an interesting new market, though given Iran’s tendency to shut down access to Google’s services, it remains to be seen how long these apps will remain available. Google and Iran, after all, have a pretty tumultuous relationship. Just this June, Google announced that it had uncovered an Iranian spy campaign that, ahead of Iran’s last election, targeted Iranian citizens through phishing emails.

YouTube also remains unavailable in Iran and the country has regularly blocked access to other Google services, including Search and Gmail (though Iranians, it seems, can get around most of these filters by using standard VPN software).

When those services are available in Iran, however, they do tend to be very popular. In 2012 when access to Gmail was cut off, Iranian legislator Hossein Garousi “threatened to summon Telecommunications Minister Reza Taqipour to parliament for questioning if it was not unblocked,” according to Reuters.

We have asked Google to clarify why it decided to change its policy now and will update this post once we hear back from them.

The annals of bad Microsoft advertising have a new member today — a short clip that attempts to paint Google as evil because its services contain advertising. Contrast this with Bing’s educational offering, which does not. So, use Bing in your classroom! Because Google is bad! Credit score!

The ad is stilted, poorly written, and mostly annoying. The Scroogled campaign continues, much as it always has.

Why, you might ask? Most point to the hiring of Mark Penn, who previously worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. So why would he be in favor of sustaining the Scroogled efforts? Because it’s how he communicates with the competition during political campaigns, and because it worked so well last time (Hillary Clinton, is, of course, our current president). And so, as long as Penn is at Microsoft, I think that Scroogled will be, too.

Oh well. Instead of competing on real features or the quality of search results, Microsoft is touting the removal of mostly innocuous ads from its search results. This is odd, as Bing’s educational program has a cool component worth advertising: Students can earn Surface tablets for their schools if they participate. That’s neat. Trying to mock Google for having small advertising on its search product is just banal.

Anyway, watch the thing, laugh, and get on with your day:

Top Image Credit: Robert Scoble

Quinn Li is the managing director at Qualcomm Ventures, one of the top wireless investment firms in the world since 2000, with portfolio companies including PayPal, Waze, and Fitbit.

He also happens to be a resident of San Diego, where Qualcomm was founded and the site of our latest TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-off, where he was kind enough to grace us with a fireside chat on stage.

As far as his city, Li finds many of the San Diego-based companies exciting, even naming EcoATM as a team of unique and smart founders with a special idea for trading in old phones at kiosks. But more than any other company, Li mentioned Fitbit a number of times.

Qualcomm has made a major investment in Fitbit, the wearable quantified self device that tracks your fitness. But Li sees a greater opportunity in this space than the devices themselves: data.

In the interview, Li remarks that there is a huge convergence right now in the data space around the devices we use and the way we crowdsource. Of course, smartphones are already collecting large amounts of data that, when stitched together, can paint a comprehensive picture around certain verticals.

Qualcomm Ventures and Li have some experience in this space considering the map crowdsourcing startup Waze, which was just purchased by Google for around $1.3 billion, was one of the QV portfolio companies.

Li sees wearable devices as another extension of this kind of data crowdsourcing, as long as the folks creating these devices can appeal to the mainstream.

With every new iPhone, most of the discussion centers around its look and not what comes inside. But, according to reports, Apple has designed a new dual-core A7 system on a chip for the iPhone 5S. If rumors are true, the A7 could supposedly be 31 percent faster, representing a serious slowdown in spec improvement. It could indicate that the smartphone market may have matured and that existing smartphone owners won’t feel the urge to upgrade to a new model anymore.

When it comes to smartphone chips, Apple is a lone ranger. It has been designing its own ARM-based chips for a couple of years. It outsources production to Samsung and other manufacturers. But the important part is that only Apple devices use Apple chips. So far, this strategy has proven to be successful.

The iPhone 4S was twice as powerful as the iPhone 4, and had nine times the graphics processing capabilities. The iPhone 5 was once again twice as fast as the iPhone 4S, with twice the graphics performance. That’s why this year’s 31 percent performance boost is lackluster, it it turns out to be true. If the new iPhone is indeed called the iPhone 5S, the ‘S’ will probably not stand for ‘speed’.

A 31% CPU speed increase sounds like a huge failure to me, specially considering previous generations showed ~100% improvements.—
Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) August 26, 2013

On paper, Android phones are more powerful. Right now, the Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 both come with at least 4 cores and more raw power. But Apple doesn’t want to compete in the spec game.

The main advantage is that Apple can optimize the A7 for its own set of APIs, making it feel faster than it actually is. Even though Snapdragons have more GHz, iPhone apps are still fast because Apple takes advantage of its chip architecture like no one else. That’s why the gap isn’t as wide as expected. Moreover, Apple’s custom design strategy improves battery performance.

Apple needs to reduce both component costs and R&D costs

Yet, why were the A6 and the A5 much faster than their predecessors? Because smartphones were not as fast as Apple wanted them to be. If you want to use Siri or play nice games, you need the iPhone 4S. If you want to use the upcoming AirDrop feature, you need the iPhone 5. Today’s rumors could tell another story. Apple could think that the iPhone 5 can run everything perfectly fine, and there is no need to put more raw power. In other words, smartphones could have matured.

As smartphones get more widespread, Apple needs to reduce both component costs and R&D costs. The company can’t invest as much money in developing its new chips if smartphones become more and more commoditized products. The company wants to avoid hurting its margin more than it needs.

The A7 needs to be future-proof. While the iPhone 5C will not receive the A7 at first, entry-level iPhones will eventually get those rumored chips. It needs to be powerful enough and cheap enough so that Apple doesn’t have to develop yet another chip next year for its cheap iPhones.

If Apple judges that current chips are becoming fast enough to power iOS for years, iPhone users shouldn’t expect speed increases. Instead, the company will bet on new features and software updates. With market maturation coming soon, Apple faces a difficult challenge as well. How do you convince your customers to upgrade their phones?

The same thing happened for the iPod — they got lighter and lighter. In 2001, the original 5GB iPod was 6.5 ounces (184 grams). In 2004, the iPod mini was 3.6 ounces (102 grams). In 2005, the iPod nano was only 1.5 oz (42 grams). At this point, if you already had an iPod and used it as a portable music player, there was no real incentive to upgrade to a new one, except more gigabytes. The same thing is true for your microwave — you only buy a new one if your old one breaks.

Yet, there is one last thing that can be improved again and again on the iPhone — the camera. Everybody uses their phone as their primary camera. It’s the camera that you always have in your pocket. While it has greatly improved over the years, there’s still room for improvement — especially now that HiDPI displays are getting more popular. This single spec upgrade will make people upgrade.

That’s why the most interesting news of the day isn’t the A7 rumors, but the new dedicated chip for video capturing rumors. In addition to helping for image stabilization, it could allow you to take 120 fps videos.

If the iPhone 5S can shoot smooth slow-motion videos, it could be the feature that stands out and steals the show at Apple’s event. In fact, the ‘S’ could stand for ‘slow motion’.

The article was slightly edited to reflect the fact that the A7 specs are still unconfirmed.

(Image credits: Ascii.jp, Wikimedia Commons)

VMware announced its network virtualization platform today based upon its own internal technology with Nicira, which it acquired last year.

NSX is a network hypervisor that abstracts the server. It exposes virtual networks, but they have the capability to be programmed, similar to virtual machines. But it’s also still very new. In 2009 and 2010, there were more virtual loads than physical workloads running inside data centers. Now the number of virtual ports is scaling in comparison to physical ports.

The advent of network virtualization comes as more companies face unprecedented volumes of data on its networks. To manage that rush of data, companies need to program their infrastructure. Physical networks are a bottleneck to that capability.

Network virtualization is a new concept for IT. Customers onstage at VMworld, VMware’s annual user conference in San Francisco, said today that it can’t be treated as something that a company just does — the focus instead needs to be on the problem the customer is trying to solve.

The news is noteworthy for, if nothing else, how a company like VMware has split to some degree with Cisco, its long-time networking technology partner.

But the move is inevitable to some degree as the world gets eaten by software. Still, VMware faces deep competition in this space, especially from the likes of Cisco, which is becoming a server vendor, as well as Microsoft, which, in addition to being a Cisco partner, has been very aggressive in reducing the cost of its Hyper-V virtualization technology.

Personalization seems to be the name of the game in e-commerce right now, and to that end, the luxury flash sales site Gilt has just added a user-specific sales page to their offerings. The algorithm-powered feature, aptly called “Your Personal Sale,” culls and presents the best sales for each user based on factors like their purchase history, geographic location, and browsing behavior.

It’s a step beyond the daily emails that Gilt shoppers receive, which already tailor content to the user. It also represents a continued investment in the flash sale model, which other sites like Fab have not been able to sustain.

“We’re fully invested in flash. Flash is all about the daily visit,” Gilt CIO Steve Jacobs told us. “We’re investing more in the flash model by creating an every day sale that’s new. People are coming back more frequently, and they’re excited to see what’s in their sale tomorrow.”

For users who do check the site daily, a personalized sale roster could be helpful as a way to assess their options quickly, especially given how easy it is to miss a flash sale. And, of course, showing people items that they’re predisposed to like is an easy way to get them buying and coming back for more.

E-commerce personalization often blends into the woodwork, taking the form of sidebar recommendations and ads on Facebook showing items similar to the one I bought one from that retailer last week. Gilt’s “Your Personal Sale” turns it into the main event and a destination.

“Your Personal Sale” is launching for womenswear and menswear today, with home and kids categories to follow. Gilt is also at work on another personalized sale feature, which will likely go live in a few months’ time.

Earlier this month, Google Reader replacement Feedly began offering a paid version of its service, but only in limited quantities. Barely a day after the paid tier became available, the company sold out of the introductory 5,000 Pro accounts it had initially offered. Today, the startup is making Feedly Pro generally available to anyone interested, as previously promised.

The premium tier offers in-demand features like search, one-click Evernote and Pocket integration, plus premium customer support, and the company says that more Pro features will be added regularly in the future.

Search has been one of the features serious RSS subscribers have felt was worth paying for, as it’s something that a majority of the feed-reading apps today still neglect to include or haven’t yet built. (Feedspot being one of the more prominent exceptions currently. Competitor Digg Reader has also said that search would eventually be considered part of its forthcoming premium product, too.)

That being said, our initial experiences with search have found the integration still in need of having some of its kinks worked out. Sometimes, search would fail to produce results we knew were there (and found via Googling), other times it was just too slow to be effective. Certainly, its capabilities will vary depending on the size of your own database of feeds – or, as they say, your mileage may vary. It’s still far more convenient to have the option, buggy as it may be, than not.

When Feedly first introduced its Pro tier in August, it found traction in countries all over the world, including not just the U.S., but also Brazil, France, Spain, Germany, the U.K., and parts of Asia. However, the $99 lifetime account being offered at that time will no longer be an option going forward. As the company explained then, the lifetime account was meant to be a one-time reward for Feedly’s early adopters. Today’s launch of Pro sees instead the previous price points of $5 per month or $45 per year as the only two plans now offered.

The launch of premium pricing should help to quell some people’s fears that Feedly was not building a sustainable business. The company, which has been bootstrapping until now, hasn’t discounted the idea of raising funding eventually, but has not yet done so, co-founders Edwin Khodabakchian and Cyril Moutran recently told us. But at least now with Feedly Pro, the startup will have some revenues.

Feedly has grown to over 13 million users since Google Reader’s shutdown, and has 30 API partners live on its Feedly Cloud platform, which is what allows other news-reading services to utilize Feedly’s backend for their own purposes. And more API partners are on the way, we hear.

The option to purchase a Feedly Pro subscription is live now here.

Since being founded in 2007, DocStoc has been best known for its platform for sharing professional documents. But over the years, it’s worked to morph into a one-stop shop for small businesses, providing them with premium services and resources that go above and beyond just document sharing. Now it’s making its first acquisition to bring another tool into the Docstoc family of products, professional services and software recommendation platform BestVendor.

The acquisition follows Docstoc’s expansion of its product set with the release of License123, which provides a database of licenses and permits needed to start a business, as well as its ExpertCircle platform for sharing recommendations of the best online and offline vendors for small businesses.

Just as those two platforms operate as independent products, BestVendor will continue to be an independent platform following the acquisition, Docstoc co-founder and CEO Jason Nazar told me. The platform operates as a kind of “Yelp for small businesses,” providing them with tools and recommendations for choosing between different SaaS and software services. In that respect, Nazar sees an opportunity to integrate it with premium subscription service ExpertCircle under the BestVendor brand.

The deal is primarily an asset purchase, as Docstoc acquired all of BestVendor’s code and database, but not necessarily the team behind it. As a result, all future development for the product will move to Docstoc’s Santa Monica, Calif., headquarters. Otherwise, terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Running profitably for years after raising just $4 million, Docstoc has been looking for acquisition targets over the past year. The company is hoping to find businesses that are complementary to its current small business offerings. BestVendor fit the bill, but Nazar reckons there are other similar opportunities out there.

Using its 35 million registered users, Docstoc can help drive new users to businesses like BestVendor, which had a great platform but wasn’t growing as quickly as it could have been. Docstoc has more than 17 million unique visitors a month, as well as another 5 million who see its documents embedded on other sites. And it gets another 30,000 new registered users per day.

“One of the advantages we have is distribution,” Nazar said. “We can get this in front of people.”