Category: Tech news

Turns out Instagram isn’t kingmaking among the third-party developer community on Windows Phone.

Today the Windows Phone community is buzzing with the news of a meeting between developer Rudy Huyn and Instagram that has led some to believe his forthcoming application for Microsoft’s smartphone platform will carry some sort of blessing from the photo sharing social network.

Here’s WPCentral on the forthcoming app, called #6tagram:

The app won’t be “official” but it will get to wear the title “Supported by Instagram” on its sleeve, making this app the first fully featured Instagram client for Windows Phone that has Instagram’s blessing.

That almost sounds like a wink-wink sort of endorsement. I reached out to Instagram, and was told via a spokesperson that the company has “not selected a third-party developer to build an official or unofficial Windows Phone app.” So, whatever sort of meeting took place, it has not led to Huyn’s upcoming application landing any sort of special treatment, or status.

The spokesperson continued: “Third–party apps wishing to use our platform must do so within the terms of our public API.” Screenshots of the app that Huyn is working on do appear quite nice, and if you are on Windows Phone and wish to use Instagram, it could be a viable option for you.

However, it will have to live on its own merits, and not with extra updraft from Instagram itself. This matters because if Instagram started to pick favorites on platforms that it doesn’t formally support, it could chill developer activity. There are shared overtones there with Twitter and its choice to later impose its own clients as official, crowding out third-party talent. This is precisely what Instagram is not doing on Windows Phone, at least not yet.

Though, I suspect that whenever Instagram does make the hop to Windows Phone, third-party clients will be effectively over. How about tomorrow, Instagram?

Update: And, just as I published the above, Huyn himself tweeted that indeed, his application will not be any sort of official app. Consider this case closed.

Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan

Here comes the Moto X, the fanciest phone out of Motorola in a long time and here already came the Nexus 7, a device that may beat out the iPad Mini. We talk about both of them. Then we move on to how 3D printing is killing us all and how that’s pretty terrible.

We discuss all this and more on this week’s TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast. The show features John Biggs, Matt Burns, Natasha Lomas, Chris Velazco, and Darrell Etherington as Uncle Jesse.

So sit back, relax, and listen to us make fun of each other while discussing this week’s developments in gadgetry.

Enjoy!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Google has quietly launched a new program called Google City Experts to encourage more high-quality local business ratings and reviews on Google+. The program is currently limited to select cities in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Japan, and will reward users who have left at least 50 reviews to date, and who produce at least five new reviews each month.

Those who meet these guidelines will be provided with perks, like exclusive access to local events, “custom swag” (meaning free, Google-branded items), and “special online recognition.” Participants will also receive monthly newsletters including a variety of offers, plus be alerted to local contests and events they can get involved in, a company representative explains.

In addition, we’re told that Google City Experts will be invited to an exclusive Google+ Community, where they can meet other nearby Experts to discuss tips and tricks for using Google+ Local and Google Maps.

The 50 reviews required as a starting point to join this program can include those members have left in the past, or can be written after signing up. But in order to maintain an active membership, City Experts have to create at least five good reviews per month – meaning well-written posts with added photos.

These requirements are meant to guard against spammers, and others who may be encouraged to write a few reviews in return for free stuff. “Quality reviews” must be three or four sentences long as a minimum, while also being helpful and balanced reviews, explains Google, rather than the astro-turfing and fawning praise that’s often surreptitiously left by business owners, their friends and employees on review sites, or the attacking and negative reviews left by angry customers, or sometimes, even a business’s own competitors.

The program takes advantage of an old Internet rule which states that only a small group of so-called “creators” generate most of the content on the web, while the larger majority just consumes what others have produced. By asking that the Experts have at least 50 reviews under their belt to start, Google is limiting the program’s reach to target that smaller group of heavy, regular reviewers.

Announced to little fanfare on Google Local New York’s Google+ Page earlier this week, the program is currently offered in the United States (Austin, Chicago, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, San Francisco), the United Kingdom (Bristol, Edinburgh, London, Manchester), Australia (Sydney), and Japan (Tokyo and Osaka). However, Google intends to expand City Experts over time to new areas.

Even if you’re not in one of the preferred cities, you can still sign up with your Google account by selecting “other” from the City Experts homepage here.

All Roads Lead To Google+

Google has been consolidating its efforts in bringing local business ratings and reviews under the Google+ branding and roof for some time now, having already transitioned businesses from Google Places to Google+, and later merging Google+ Business pages with Google+ Local pages. More recently, it upgraded business dashboards for Google+ page owners, letting them manage search, social, maps and AdWords from one interface. It also debuted an interactive carousel of business search results at the top of Google.com for relevant business searches. And it shuttered its Google+ Local iOS app, to keep users in Google Maps instead.

The only exception to the “everything Google+” push so far appears to be the relaunch of the now Google-owned Zagat apps which is notable mainly for the fact that Google is still holding onto the Zagat brand for now.

Combined, these efforts are clearly about competing with other reviewing services, like Yelp for example, which has been pushing forward with initiatives of its own, having recently launched Yelp Platform as a way to transact directly on Yelp itself, added partnerships with Eat24 and Delivery.com, not to mention the it acquired OpenTable competitor SeatMe. But despite solid earnings from Yelp lately, Google still holds a much larger portion of today’s local advertising pie. Pushing reviewers to beef up the quality of the ratings on its service, then rolling that program out at a worldwide scale will be another challenge for Yelp to overcome.

Apple users have long been able to use iOS’s built-in device locator and remote wiping features, but Android users had to resort to third-party applications. That’s changing soon. Google today announced that it’ll launch a new Android Device Manager later this month that will allow you to locate and ring your misplaced (or stolen) device and perform a remote wipe so your data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands.

The service, Google says, will be available on devices running Android 2.2 or up and judging from today’s announcement, the Android Device Manager site will feature a dedicated area for pinging your lost device. It’s not clear what else users will be able to do on the new Device Manager site, however.

Overall, of course, this new service looks a lot like Apple’s Find My iPhone feature. You’ll be able to make your phone ring at maximum volume (just in case it’s stuck between your couch cushions), for example. The locator feature will highlight your phone’s location on a map (no surprise there) and remote wiping just takes a few clicks. Unlike on Apple’s platform, though, it doesn’t look like users will be able to send messages to their lost phones or use something akin to Apple’s remote lock tool.

There is nothing really new here, of course, and some OEMs already offered some of these features on their Android phone, but Android users will sure be happy to hear that Google is finally making its own tool available to its users.

Cloud Cannon is a CMS designed specifically for designers who know how to work with HTML, JavaScript, CSS and any static content. Instead of having to turn your beautiful designs into a dynamic CMS, you just have to put your files into a Dropbox folder — Cloud Cannon will take care of the rest in seconds. Clients can then edit paragraphs in the browser, insert images and more, as if it were an editable CMS.

There isn’t much else to say about this beautiful use case of the Dropbox API, because it’s as simple as that. Many have already hosted static content on their Dropbox accounts, but George Phillips and Mike Neumegen take it a step further by allowing administrators to edit the site directly in the browser, similarly to what you would do on a Squarespace website.

And if the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t suit your needs, you can always edit the source files in the web-based text editor (or in your Dropbox, of course). You can manage client accounts to restrict the editing parts if you are working with a client.

Only the content area will be editable as you need to add a class=”editable” div to any part of your HTML. If you need to host a blog, you can use static blog engine Jekyll.

Cloud Cannon works with custom domain names or free .cloudvent.net subdomains. The service isn’t free — subscriptions range from $5 a month for a site to $49 a month for 20 sites.

The startup doesn’t actually use Dropbox’s server infrastructure because there are some bandwidth restrictions for public folders. Cloud Cannon uses the Dropbox API to sync everything to its own servers, much like Marco Arment’s blogging engine. Dropbox only acts as an interface between the user and the hosting server. Yet, because it only supports static content, the startup doesn’t actually need big servers if they are configured properly with Varnish-style accelerators.

One of Cloud Cannon’s main advantages is that users don’t need to turn into system admins and manage their own hosting solution. But even if you need a little more flexibility, this product is a very cool, well-designed hack that is worth checking out.

Were you starting to feel like Yahoo maybe hadn’t bought enough stuff this week? Surprise! Yahoo has just acquired Rockmelt, the social browsing startup.

According to a blog post on Rockmelt’s site, the Rockmelt apps and web product will be shutdown on August 31, 2013. Rockmelt is encouraging their users to export all of their data through each app’s built-in export button before that day comes.

Rockmelt began its life in 2010 as a browser with a social twist; it was essentially Chromium (the same open source engine that powers Chrome), with all sorts of social sharing stuff built in. You could easily share content with your friends over Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately for Rockmelt, most people seemed to prefer to share stuff over Twitter and Facebook … over Twitter and Facebook.

In April of 2011, the company shut down the browser to refocus as more of a content-aggregator. Their news app would present popular content from around the web and provide basic browsing functionally; it was sort of a weird mash-up of Flipboard and Digg and a light-weight browser. Alas, they never really found a massive audience — and those who did come, didn’t stay. Of the one million-or-so users who’d tried Rockmelt’s iOS App by June (many months after its launch), only 50% were ever coming back the next day.

No acquisition price was given, though AllThingsD reports that it came in somewhere between $60M and $70M.

Given that Yahoo is already planning to kill off Rockmelt’s wares right out of the gate, it’s safe to say that this one was very much a talent acquisition. (And given that the original blog post announcing the acquisition was quietly co-signed by Adam Cahan, Yahoo’s senior vice president of Mobile, it’s safe to say that it was largely a mobile talent acquisition.)

TechCrunch Disrupt SF is only about a month away! This September we will be taking over San Francisco with the brightest and smartest startups, hackers, influential guests, speakers, and entrepreneurs. We have already announced a few of our special guests and speakers, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ John Doerr, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Sequoia Capital’s Douglas Leone, and Pebble’s Eric Migicovsky to name a few. More exciting announcements to come, a lot more, so stay tuned.

Want to join us? Want a chance to win something special? This week, we are giving away one free ticket to Disrupt SF (valued at $1,995) and one new 32GB Nexus 7 tablet (valued at $269). The Nexus 7 has the best screen of any tablet available, making it perfect for reading our sweet, sweet TechCrunch articles.

One lucky reader will win both. If you want to enter, just follow the steps below.

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

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BeRecruited, the LinkedIn of college athletic recruiting, has become the official recruiting provider for IMG Academy, a training center and school in Florida that has turned out athletes like Maria Sharapova and Eli Manning. After 15 months of development, the site is also launching its newly revamped website today.

BeRecruited CEO Vishwas Prabhakara told us that IMGA approached the company out of a desire to provide recruiting advice and networking to its campers. Between its seasonal camps and academic year program, the Florida based academy trains over 35,000 high school athletes each year. While coaches know to watch full-time IMGA students, pairing with beRecruited closes the loop for students at other schools who attend shorter term camps there.

IMGA coaches will receive training from beRecruited on how to answer questions about the recruitment process, and students will now get a badge on their beRecruited profiles indicating their participation at a camp or event. This will help coaches pick out students who are particularly serious and motivated, Prabhakara said.

The site now has over 1.5 million registered student athletes from over 20,000 high schools across the country, along with 25,000 college recruiters of an estimated 40-45,000 in the nation. While beRecruited is already the most prominent site of its kind, this endorsement by IMGA adds weight to its place in the recruiting world. According to IMGA, 60% of their graduates are recruited to Division 1 schools, with 38% going to DII and DIII, versus a national 2% of high school athletes playing D1.

Prabhakara could not provide specific numbers on how many recruitments are currently closed by way of beRecruited as it is self-reported information, but he did say that tens of thousands of students have written in to say that they were recruited through the site. And that number is vastly underreported, he added.

BeRecruited follows a freemium model, giving more proactive students the option to upgrade (IMGA students will likely receive discounts). The site is free to coaches, simply to avoid the hassle of navigating university expense accounts.

Although other recruiting sites have come and gone, Prabhakara said that beRecruited’s biggest competition is the mom and pop advisers of the world: Division 1 college athletes who have moved back home and use their firsthand expertise to help high schoolers with the process.

BeRecruited has been under the leadership of Prabhakara, Art Chang, and Joe Pestro since the site acquired Fanvibe two years ago, which Prabhakara was CEO of at the time. This offline partnership brings with it the marked presence of the nation’s top high school athletes, which should help incentivize that remaining 20,000 college coaches to join the network. Regardless, the advantages of having a universal database for potential recruits are obvious, and beRecruited is in a good position to become that source.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added some support that will make it a bit easier for developers to better track visitor traffic to their apps when an IP address is served and connected through the AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB).

The cloud service has added support for what is known as “Proxy Protocol Version 1,” which is used to safely send data over TCP without getting lost in transit.

Requests, such as client connection information, IP address and port information are usually lost when processed through ELB, which is used to distribute traffic across AWS clusters. As AWS states, when requests are sent, the load balancer appears as though it is the requesting client and the originating IP address is not recognized. With the new proxy protocol, the IP address can be tracked. That means a developer can get connection statistics, analyze traffic logs, or manage white lists of IP addresses that they normally could not access.

The advantage of Proxy Protocol is that it can be used with any protocol layer above TCP, since it has no knowledge of the higher-level protocol that is used on top of the connection. Proxy Protocol is useful when you are serving non-HTTP traffic. Alternatively, you can use it if you are sending HTTPS requests and do not want to terminate the SSL connection on the load balancer.

See the AWS blog post for more about how to take advantage of the new service.

The news is a reminder that AWS is a feature-adding machine. No other cloud service adds features at the pace that AWS does. Windows Azure is getting close as is Google. But still, they will have to outpace AWS and create their own specific niches to succeed. For Azure that means an enterprise focus. With Google, the difference is in its compute and analytics capabilities.

Post-PC, indeed. Today Microsoft released its yearly SEC filing, detailing its financial performance on a per-division basis with decent granular breakdown. In addition to the news that the Surface line of tablets brought in a lower-than-expected $853 million in fiscal-year revenue, Microsoft explained its declining incomes from the sale of Windows to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

In the year, Microsoft recognized $540 million in deferred revenue stemming from the conclusion of the Windows Upgrade Offer. OEM revenue for Microsoft declined 3 percent in the year. However, if you take out the Windows Upgrade Offer, OEM revenue for Microsoft fell 10 percent in the year.

Selling copies of Windows to Dell, Lenovo and others to ship on their personal computers is the quintessential Microsoft activity, and the company is simply doing less of it. The larger PC market has been in decline, slipping around 10.6 percent in the most recent quarter. And that loss was an improvement on the first quarter’s decline of more than 14 percent.

Microsoft has a dry telling of this fact: “This decrease [in OEM revenue] primarily reflects the impact on revenue of the decline in the x86 PC market, which we estimate declined approximately 9%.” The x86 PC market is the PC market, essentially. Yes, some tablets run on x86 architecture, but that’s a minor quibble.

The 9 percent figure is interesting, as it describes the contraction of the PC market for part of 2012 and part of 2013, given Microsoft’s annoying fiscal calendar. Estimates for the past two quarters describe accelerating decline. I believe our new favorite parlor game shall be entitled: “How Hosed Is The PC Market This Year?”

OEM revenue remains a key income and profit source for Microsoft, but one that is certainly soft. The larger Windows division, however, remains a financial rock: $19.2 billion in fiscal 2013 revenue leading to $9.5 billion in operating income. That’s a damn fine profit margin.

Still, as Microsoft’s new products, such as Azure and Office 365 and Lync begin to post-billion-dollar revenue figures, the center of the company’s gravity continues to slowly drift.

Top Image Credit: Motohiko Tokuriki

Glossi, the maker of the digital magazine platform of the same name, is announcing that CEO Matt Edelman is stepping down from his current position and taking an advisory role with the company.

Edelman first took the reins of the company in 2010, back when it was called ThisNext and focused on social commerce. The company launched Glossi at the end of last year, pitching it as an easy way for both consumers and professional publishers to build slick-looking digital magazines.

To explain Edelman’s departure, Glossi sent me the following statement from investor Sumant Mandal, managing director at Clearstone Ventures:

Glossi, the DIY digital magazine platform, continues to shine with 30-40% month-to-month growth since its December launch. Matt Edelman and his team have done a phenomenal job building upon the pioneering social shopping platforms, ThisNext and StyleHive, to create a new and exciting rich media self-publishing platform for content creators including bloggers, marketers, publishers, small businesses, agencies and most importantly, individual users.

As the company heads into the next stage of its evolution, Matt Edelman will transition from CEO to being an advisor to the company where he will continue to remain engaged in the business well into the future. All shareholders, investors and team members, including Matt, are excited to see the continued growth of the Glossi product and remain committed to its success. More news around senior team additions to follow.

Glossi isn’t announcing a new CEO right now — presumably, that’s what the “more news” part of the email is referring to.

So is the departure voluntary? Well, we were initially tipped off by someone saying that Edelman had been fired. The fact that we’re hearing the news from an investor, rather than Edelman himself, seems suggestive, as does the fact that the announcement is coming before a replacement has been found. On the other hand, the statement itself is a little cryptic on this point, and it does emphasize that Edelman isn’t departing entirely.

A group of engineers from the Mars Curiosity Rover mission answered questions in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session today. In addition to questions about the mission and Mars, the Curiosity Rover team responded to numerous comments about how to intern or work at NASA and what the process is like, but did not respond to several questions about SpaceX, Elon Musk’s privatized space exploration company.

The team did an AMA last August, shortly after the Rover landed on Mars, and returned this year a week before the one year anniversary of the Curiosity landing. The team gained more positive sentiment for Curiosity on the thread–at the time of posting, it is at the very top of Reddit, with over 2,350 comments.

As my colleague Sarah Perez pointed out earlier today, there are a lot of talented people in tech right now with the ability to solve big problems that are choosing not to. It’s refreshing to read about the Curiosity team’s efforts to explore Mars.

Here are five of the most interesting responses from the team:

The Most Significant Discovery So Far

“The results from our first rock drilling told us that the past environment, when that mudstone rock formed, was suitable for life. The mudstone formed in an ancient river system or an intermittently wet lake bed that could have provided the chemical energy and other favorable conditions for microbial life, if life existed then. This ancient wet environment was not harshly oxidizing, acidic or extremely salty. All the necessary chemical building blocks were available.”

Why Haven’t We Found Evidence That Life Existed On Mars In The Past?

“Over millions of years the water evaporated because the atmosphere got too thin to support it in liquid form. Mars does not have a global magnetic field the way Earth does, which helps shield the atmosphere from stripped away by the sun’s damaging radiation. So while there is plenty of CO2 and H20 ice, no liquid is possible. If life arose on Mars, it would have been millions or even billions of years ago, and preserving evidence of life for billions of years is very hard. So the evidence could be there and we haven’t found it, or life didn’t arise. We have to find out!”

What does the team hope to accomplish by getting Curiosity to the top of Mount Sharp, the central peak of Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed?

“It is doubtful Curiosity will make it all the way to the top of Mount Sharp, although it would be great if it did. What we’re really hoping for is to drive up the rock layers near the lower flank of Mount Sharp to look for clues to what the past environment was like and how environmental conditions changed with time from older rocks at the base to younger rocks higher up.”

The most intense moments

“For me landing was the most intense moment. We all gathered together with all the team members who had put so much into this mission that we were on the edge of our seats waiting to hear how the 7 minutes of terror would end. The feeling when we got that first photo back of the wheel on the ground was one of the greatest feelings in the world.”

You can read the entire AMA here.

The California Public Utilities Commission issued its proposed framework for the regulation of ride-sharing services today, granting a huge victory for companies like Uber, Lyft and SideCar.

The proposal follows months of discussions between the regulator and the startups, which seek to connect passengers with drivers who haven’t been licensed for commercial driving. The PUC is calling those operators Transportation Network Companies (TNC) and has built a new regulatory framework for them. The key portions of the proposal revolve around public safety and ensuring that drivers have had background checks and are covered by insurance in the case of an accident.

The proposal requires that TNCs:

• Obtain a license from the CPUC to operate in California;
• Require each driver to undergo a criminal background check;
• Establish a driver training program;
• Implement a zero-tolerance policy on drugs and alcohol; and,
• Hold an insurance policy that is more stringent than the CPUC’s current requirement for limousines, requiring a minimum of $1 million per-incident coverage for incidents involving TNC vehicles and drivers in transit to or during a TNC trip. Limousines with a seating capacity of seven passengers or less requires $750,000 in insurance coverage.

Discussions between the PUC and the affected startups have been ongoing since last summer when Uber, Lyft and SideCar received cease-and-desist orders from the regulator for operating unlicensed charter party services. While each of the three have individually reached interim agreements with the PUC, the regulator has also been working on a new framework for regulation that falls outside the existing rules for taxi or limo services in the state.

The new regulations, if adopted, should clear up uncertainty for the companies in major cities, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. They could also set a precedent for the adoption of ride-sharing rules that those startups could propose in other states and jurisdictions.

At the same time, the PUC has been lobbied hard by taxi and limo organizations opposed to the new rules. In San Francisco today, taxi drivers gathered outside government buildings to show opposition to the acceptance of unlicensed drivers roaming the streets. In the past month, officials at the San Francisco International Airport have been citing and arresting drivers from Uber, Lyft, and SideCar.

Safety remains the key issue facing these companies, as opponents argue that they’re not subject to the same requirements of taxi and limo services.

At the same time, Uber, Lyft and SideCar maintain that their community drivers are subject to more stringent background checks than taxi or limo drivers. The existence of an identity layer for both drivers and passengers also ensures that the companies will know who was in the car in the case of any incident.

The PUC proposal also is happening as venture money is pouring into local transportation startups. Uber is close to raising a new round of funding from TPG that will value it at $3.5 billion. Earlier this spring, Lyft raised a $60 million round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Billy Gallagher also contributed to this article.

The U.K.’s Streetlife.com, a local social network that lets residents connect and converse with their neighbours and foster a stronger sense of community, has raised £600,000 in a new round of funding.

The investment comes from existing backer Archant Digital Ventures, the incubator and investment arm of regional U.K. media company Archant, and new investor Shohet & Cie.

The additional capital will be used to give Streetlife a marketing push, rolling out the brand across more of the U.K., and in what looks like a case of stepping on the gas, the startup says it plans to raise a further £3 million by year’s end, with the aim being to “fully capture the U.K. market”.

The perceived lack of local community, particularly in highly populated urban areas in the U.K. (and I suspect in other developed countries), is arguably a major a problem in a post-industrial era where people frequently move, commute quite far to work, and, rather strangely, don’t actually talk to their neighbours. That’s the problem that Streetlife has set out to solve, at least on the consumer end.

To achieve this, the site provides a platform for local residents, community groups, local authorities and businesses to “exchange practical information, advice, opinions and resources”; users sign up using their postcode to start and join conversations with others in their locality, and declare what local topics they are interested in and how much of their profile they want to share and with whom — a sort of ‘local Facebook’, if you will. It’s a proposition that is seeing Streetlife boast close to 100,000 users in more than 500 “communities”, says the company.

Of course, with a laser-focus on local social networking comes an obvious business model in the form of local advertising, which also points to Archant Digital Ventures’ financial interest in the startup. The regional media company’s incubator/investment arm, run by Serge Taborin, is charged with finding new opportunities in the digital space that build on Archant’s legacy as a local newspaper publisher and provider of other local media and advertising-funded ventures. The idea is that the startups it incubates and/or invests in can exploit the media company’s significant regional reach to gain traction and monetize through local advertising.

Unsurprisingly, when I met with Taborin a few months back he made quite a convincing case for why U.K. startups with a heavy local focus might want to consider Archant Digital Ventures as an alternative or complementary partner to early-stage VC or competing accelerators/incubators. Doing so also potentially opens the doors to be acquired by Archant itself — the latest example being the majority stake it acquired in Planningfinder.com just last week.

Interestingly, however, not only is Streetlife able to benefit from Archant’s longstanding relationship with local advertisers and its existing consumer base, but content on the site is also feeding some of the stories picked up by local journalists writing for various Archant properties. That’s a nice symbiotic relationship, and reminds me of the way Twitter helps generate story leads (and low hanging fruit) for national media.

Along with Archant, Streetlife’s previous backers include Paul Ettinger, one of the founding team behind coffee chain Caffè Nero, Steve Pankhurst, founder of Friends Reunited, and Gi Fernando and Ankur Shah, co-founders of Techlightenment. Today’s new round of funding brings the total raised by the startup to £1.4 million.

Today in an SEC filing, Microsoft revealed a very interesting fact: Its Surface tablet hybrid line brought in revenue of $853 million in the company’s fiscal 2013. However, the Surface line didn’t become available for sale until October 26, giving it 247 days in the market during the financial period.

That places Surface revenue on a per-day basis at $3.45 million. Extrapolated for a one-year period, that financial rate puts the Surface line on a $1.26 billion per-year run rate. However, I would wager that revenues for Surface were highest at launch of the Surface RT and Pro, and lower in between, so the per-day and per-year estimates could vary.

Reviews of the figure have been decidedly negative. The Next Web’s Josh Ong flatly stated that the revenue figure confirmed that the tablet line is a “financial failure.” Tom Warren over at The Verge noted that the total revenue for the devices is less than the $900 million writedown that Microsoft took during its last quarter. And Todd Bishop of GeekWire underlined that the $853 million in revenue is again less than the $898 million in new costs that Microsoft called “primarily with Windows 8 and Surface.”

If Surface were a standalone business, it would be dead. However, as a Microsoft division, it is anything but.

Microsoft as a company has tectonic financial wealth in the form of past profits stored as cash. It has decided to enter the OEM world, and has, to my knowledge, continued with the Surface project, slow initial sales be damned.

There is a firm, recent precedent for the company to continue to invest in this way: Windows Phone. It took two full years of hard scrabble work to get Windows Phone to a point in which it was healthy enough to walk a bit on its own. Put another way, until Windows Phone 8 and the recent Nokia handsets, the smartphone line was sucking air.

Perhaps not as much as Surface, given that the line of tablets has caused material damage to Microsoft’s short-term profits — the $900 million charge was $0.07 in lost EPS for the company in the last quarter.

However, Microsoft has the money, and if it wants to can continue to pour it into Surface, as it did with Windows Phone, and Bing, and other properties that it finds to be strategically important. Does Microsoft want to cede complete hardware primacy to its OEM partners that have failed for so long to demonstrate innovation and forward-looking thought?

I don’t think so, no. Naturally, Microsoft would prefer if Surface lost less money, but I don’t think that Microsoft is done with this project yet. A decent test: If the rollout of the next-generation Surface line is muted, we could be watching the door close.

Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan