Category: Tech news

While Facebook Home hasn’t proven to be a smash success so far, it picked up a handful of features today that might just coax a few more users to hop on board.

Amongst other things, the new Home allows you to pin your favorite apps to a dock — a basic feature, certainly, but something that’s been sorely missed since launch. Before, opening any of your apps (even those that you use all day, every day) required a bunch of extra taps.

While Facebook had previously suggested that such a dock might be able to automatically import the favorites from your previous homescreen of choice, that feature doesn’t seem to be in place here.

The Home tweaks come by way of an update to the core Facebook app, and it brings a few new tricks to that app, as well: you can now tweak the privacy settings for shared posts after the fact (in the not-so-rare occurrence that you’ve shared something with more people than you actually intended), and can now send multiple photos in one message.

You can find this latest build of the Facebook app here.

Here’s the full change log:

What’s in this version:
• Easily change who can see something you’ve shared
• Send multiple photos in a single message—just tap the +
• Stability and memory improvements
New if you’re using Facebook Home:
• Customize your app launcher by dragging the apps you use most to a new favorites tray
• Bug fixes
Learn more about getting Facebook Home updates in our Help Center: http://bit.ly/ZofWN4

Indian housing marketplace, Housing.co.in has expanded out of its home base of Mumbai into another major Indian city, Bangalore—its fifth city in the country.

The company, which operates similarly to Trulia and Zillow, provides a real estate search site which displays a visual map of available housing for rent or sale. The search results are filtered by how many rooms are available per property, and there are photos for each listing as well.

Housing.co.in just received $2.5 million from Nexus Venture Partners from the latter’s newly-raised, India-focused fund of $270 million.

Co-founder Advitiya Sharma said the team plans to use its new funding to expand its data science teams. The eventual goal is for its teams to use the housing data collected to display new metrics like area-based pricing, listing decay rates and ratings on neighborhoods, to name some.

This round of financing is its fourth in the past year since its birth. The company has never canvassed for funding since it was started in June 2012, Sharma said.

Besides Bangalore and Mumbai, the site also serves Gurgaon, Pune and Hyderabad.

In spite of its age, Housing.co.in has already crossed 200 employees. The tech team is just 13 people-strong, however, but it will add 21 more engineers from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) within the month. These will add to about 30 IIT-educated engineers already employed, said Sharma.

Apple is said to be looking into an iPhone trade-in program on used devices in order to “add sales,” according to a tweet from Bloomberg today. Bloomberg says that this would be the “first time” Apple has attempted something like this on its homepage, but that’s not entirely true – the company started a program to accept iPhone trade-ins back in August of 2012, and would offer up to $345 in Apple Store credit in exchange for a used iPhone 4 or 4S leading up to the iPhone 5 launch in September.

Apple partnered with a company called PowerOn to run that program, which was dubbed the “Apple Recycling Program.” This time around, Bloomberg says that according to its sources, these trade-ins would be handled by Brightstar Corp., a “mobile-phone” distributor, to offer the program. Buy-backs would allow users to defray the cost of brand new hardware, which means more new device sales for Apple, and would also supply Apple with a healthy stock of devices to refurbish, should it decide to go that route and offer reconditioned models at a lower cost of entry. That could also help it achieve broader reach in developing markets, the report suggests.

The difference in this case from existing plans would be that this trade-in program would be available only at Apple retail locations, allowing for in-person trade-ins of devices that would happen on the spot, allowing them to walk right out with a new device after “receiving payments” for their older devices. The report doesn’t specify whether buyers would receive store credit that can be used generally, or a rebate specifically applicable to a new iPhone device.

The current going rate for a used iPhone 5 on popular gadget trade-in sites like Gazelle and uSell range from around $100 to about $350. With its partner PowerOn, Apple’s own prices for used iPhones fell somewhere in the middle-top of buy back estimates, though Amazon’s own trade-in program beat its prices in every case, according to ZDNet.

We’ve reached out to Apple for more information, and will update this story with any additional details.

Developing…

Panzura has raised $25 million for its global file system that stores and moves data in a fast, secure manner. Meritech Capital Partners led the D round. The company has now raised $58 million and expects to pursue an initial public offering.

Panzura is one of those plays that appeals to the enterprise CIO who looks askance at the cloud but loves saving money and helping the company use the network without employees going nuts in customer support calls about that FILE THAT TAKES FOREVER TO OPEN. Of course security is a big plus, too. But the real story here is about speed: getting that data from those files somewhere fast without having to wait for it on the other end.

Panzura does this by leveraging the Internet and the speed it can get by using SSDs in the hardware it sells. This helps move the data far faster than with mechanical disks. Snapshots of the data get replicated so documents do not need to get made again when sent to a physical server in a  different location. It just gets passed across the network using the power of the Internet and its LAN environment so people can share files easily in a secure manner.

Panzura builds all of this capability into its controllers that act as replacements for traditional network attached storage, particularly from NetApp.

The service can connect to third-party cloud services for companies that are using Amazon Web Services or other providers for cloud storage.

As for its security capabilities, the Department of Justice uses it to share files from all of its 265 sites.

But the real value here is the speed. Lawyers expect security, but people just don’t tolerate the laggard ways of the old networks anymore. We live in the age of data. If that data is not moving fast then you are losing to the ones that have better mastered the art of velocity. They are just operating on another strata of the data economy that can’t be achieved with legacy systems.

AVOS Systems, the company founded by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has just launched a new app that appears to be a Chinese version of Twitter’s popular six-second video-sharing app, Vine. I hate to use the word clone, but… clone.

The app is called Wan-Pai, (or Wanpai, we’re not really sure due to complexities in the translation from Mandarin) which seems to mean “Beat” based on the various translations Google is giving me. (It could also mean Play Racket, Play Shoot, or “to play Mahjong”.) The app lets you record video in the same manner as Vine, by holding a finger to the screen to record, and letting go to pause.

Here’s the official wording from the site (as translated by Google):

Press and hold anywhere on the screen to start shooting, let go pause, then press and hold to continue shooting, it’s that simple. Shooting clips simultaneously, easy magic effect!

It gets even more intense with the ability to add filters, choose to include or mute audio, and decide the direction the video will play in (forward only, backward only, or in a forward and backward loop).

The camera itself is very similar to Vine, boxing off the camera window against a grey background, and showing your progress bar (on the top instead of the bottom, but still). And the most offensive rip-off would be the six second limit, which is present on both apps (even if a 16-year old can get around it).

The content stream is also very Vine-like, except for the salmon theme color instead of Vine green. It shows an Instagram-style vertical feed of one clip after the other. Unlike Vine, users must tap each clip to get it to play, but things like comments and likes are all in the same place.

In fact, the animations (such as the clip floating under the user name and avatar bar) are even similar. Wan-pai, which is available for both iOS and Android, also lets you share to various social networks, Sina microblogging, or email clips from the feed to your friends.

You can check out the Wan-Pai app here.

This one is just for fun:

New York-based Hullabalu is launching today with a new take on children’s storytelling. Instead of digital books containing interactive bits, as is now common on iPad, this new tablet app itself is the story where the action progresses as children engage with the magical world Hullabalu introduces.

The startup was founded mid-2012 by Suzanne Xie, whose first company, Weardrobe, was acquired by iLike.com in 2009, then later sold to Google with iLike where it became Google Boutiques. She more recently launched subscription-based snacks via Lollihop, which closed in early 2012.

With Hullabalu, Xie has leveraged her industry experience and connections to fund her new creation, raising $1.8 million from investors including SV Angel, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Rothenberg Ventures, Liberty City Ventures, as well as angels like Gokul Rajaram (head of ads at Facebook), Garry Tan (YC partner, Posterous co-founder), Chris McCann (President of 1-800 Flowers), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder), Brian Sugar (founder of Popsugar), Mike Greenfield (Circle of Moms founder); Fran Hauser (President of Time, Inc. Digital); Andy McLouglin (Huddle founder); Michael Levit (partner at Founders Den); Scott Tannen, Josh Spear, Soraya Darabi (Foodspotting co-founder), and others.

Xie says she was inspired to enter the world of children’s entertainment because of her own fond memories of reading sci-fi and fantasy when she was a kid — and her team feels the same way.

“But there’s not much of that that’s being told to younger kids,” she explains. “There’s obviously many reasons behind it, but obviously one of the biggest is that, traditionally, stories have always been told through text and with worlds that are rich. It’s often very hard to get that across to a young child. There’s too much text and vocabulary for them to understand,” Xie says.

“With how kids are picking up the iPad and learning how to interact with apps, we thought this was the perfect time for us to create a fantastical story,” she adds.

Hullabalu is launching as a paid iPad application ($3.99), introducing the child to an adorably crafted purple panda bear called Pan, who has adventures alongside a cast of characters in the magical world of Hullabalu.

One of the most noticeable things about the application is that it offers high-quality design and animation, the likes of which aren’t often seen in early-stage startups unless they’ve licensed content from bigger companies. There are a few exceptions, of course: Leo’s Pad from Kidaptive comes to mind, but that one has the benefit of having the president of a 3D animation studio as its CEO.

Hullabalu, meanwhile, has only a team of six, many of them young and relatively new to the industry. Xie is the sole founder, and serves as the lead writer and editor of these Hullabalu “stories.”

It should also be noted that Hullabalu isn’t purely educational in nature the way many of today’s children’s apps are — that is, it’s not core curriculum-based, though it does teach logical thinking in the sense that actions have consequences. While there is some text that appears at the bottom of the screens, it’s narrated and can be hidden from view. Simply put, the app is less about learning to read, and more about sparking children’s creativity and imagination, Xie says.

In addition to the story itself, kids can also launch a photo booth app from the homescreen for a little bit of extra fun. Going forward, Hullabalu plans to expand its lineup to include additional applications that continue the story, the first of which is due out this summer, and the next arriving later this year.

Initially, the plan is to generate revenue by charging for the app, but the eventual goal is to introduce merchandise like stuffed animals (some of which already decorate the startup’s offices), stickers, stationery, and more.

Hullabalu is available for download here in iTunes.

Microsoft today launched its Bing Translator app for Windows (including Windows RT). We don’t usually write all that much about Windows apps, and translation apps aren’t exactly new, either, but it’s nice to see that Microsoft has finally brought virtually all of the features of its mobile translator app for Windows Phone, including camera-based translations for seven input languages, to the desktop. Bing Translator, which is only available in Windows’ Modern UI/Metro mode, supports a total of 40 languages and also allows you to download language packs for offline use.

This is par for the course for language translation apps these days. Google’s Translate for Android app also features all of these tools and supports 70 languages.

Here are the languages the Bing app currently supports:

• The seven camera input languages include Chinese (Simplified), English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
• The app can translate to Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong Daw, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Klingon, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Microsoft’s implementation of the camera-based “augmented reality” translation mode is a bit smoother, however, as it will just overlay a translation over the camera image (and you can tap to save the caption). Google Translate, on the other hand, makes you tap on the words you want to translate. Admittedly, that’s not exactly hard, but Microsoft’s approach feels a bit easier and more like what iPhone users are accustomed to from tools like Word Lens.

Heavy Windows 8 users (there must be some…) will also appreciate that the app integrates with the Windows 8 “Share” charm to give you easy access to the translation tools.

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) today officially hit general availability and now offers a Service Level Agreement with a 99.95 percent uptime promise for multi-availability zone deployments.

RDS has already been on the market for three and a half years, but Amazon never considered it to be “generally available” because the company continued to add new features and hadn’t provided a Service Level Agreement for it yet.

As Amazon notes, organizations ranging from NASA’s JPL to Unilever, Flipboard and Airbnb are already using its service, and the company is processing “trillions of I/O requests every month” for what it says are “tens of thousands of businesses” that rely on the service.

For developers and organizations that rely on RDS, the big news here is obviously not the fact that Amazon now essentially considers the service to be out of beta, but that the Service Level Agreement ensures that they will receive service credits when their databases become unavailable. A 99.95 percent uptime means Amazon expects about 22 minutes per instance per month. Should that level fall under the guaranteed update, Amazon will refund 10 percent of the charges paid and 25 percent of it falls under 99 percent. It’s worth noting that this only holds for multi-availability zone deployments, however, which cost up to 50 percent more than Amazon’s standard deployments.

RDS is now one of four database solutions that Amazon offers and is probably the most traditional one, with support for MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server. It’s also an area where Google’s cloud offerings are relatively competitive, thanks to its recently updated Cloud SQL service and where Microsoft, too, is making some inroads with its own cloud-based database and big data services.

After it was revealed that the National Security Administration was collecting phone records of every single U.S. call on the Verizon network, even President Obama’s most ardent supporters are losing faith that he would usher in a more transparent government. Loyal Democrat, former Vice President and Internet inventor, Al Gore called the NSA’s massive spying program ”obscenely outrageous”.

Americans have always accepted the necessary evil of secrecy to protect citizens, but a disturbing trend in politically motivated security scandals has eroded the trust that justifies secrecy in the democracy. As a result, there hasn’t been enough public support for Congress to update our badly antiquated cybersecurity laws.

Secrecy is not an unlimited free pass for wanton privacy invasion: the government has to prove, at least somewhat regularly, that the good outweighs the bad. Unfortunately, we have been presented with little evidence that massive spying operations are producing the intended effects.

Last year, in a rare freak-everyone-out Wall Street Journal OpEd in support of improved cybersecurity legislation, President Obama resorted to an imaginary example to prove his point.

“Last month I convened an emergency meeting of my cabinet and top homeland security, intelligence and defense officials…Unknown hackers, perhaps a world away, had inserted malicious software into the computer networks of private-sector companies that operate most of our transportation, water and other critical infrastructure systems. Fortunately, last month’s scenario was just a simulation,” he wrote.

Yet, there appears to be more evidence that the harm to a free media has been greater than the alleged benefits of intrusion. There has been a baffling level of secrecy around the trail of Wikileaks source, Bradley Manning‘s trial: most journalists have been denied access to the proceedings, there’s no transcript, and even the judge’s name was redacted in one government report.

“I can’t think of a reason for it,” says Eugene Fidell, an expert in military legal history at Yale Law School.

Fidell tells me he doesn’t suspect malicious intent, but does think the military brass involved don’t understand the value of public opinion or the need for reporters to do their job. “It is utterly inimical to daily journalism.”

Nor is that the only case: after it was revealed the AP had been wiretapped for weeks to uncover who had leaked information about a foiled Al-Qaeda bomb plot, President Obama issued new orders to protect journalists, saying he was “troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.”

While we may not know the intent or the full scope of these scandals, it is clear that there’s a culture within the security apparatus that doesn’t respect journalistic or independent oversight.

And, the lack of trust is getting in the way of badly needed cybersecurity reform. The national still doesn’t have an up-to-date, comprehensive plan to protect critical infrastructure (water plants, electrical systems, and nuclear facilities, etc). One audit discovered porn-watching employees unintentionally downloading malicious software onto vulnerable missile sites.

Like this year’s failed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), each time Congress attempts to pass security reform, it gets muddled in a privacy-versus-safety debate and we go another year without important protections.

The Senate’s resident tech wonk, Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade: A), has called for increased transparency and oversight into the nation’s spying programs, but the NSA has apparently denied his request to even estimate how many innocent Americans are being targeted.

National security is important, but not infallible. If there is no evidence that intrusive spying is necessary, than its constitutionality will be as imaginary as the examples used to justify it.

[Image Credit: Flicker user aussiegall]

It may seem counter-intuitive for an apparel and accessories company to encourage women to buy fewer things, but that’s exactly what a new startup called Cuyana is doing.

Cuyana, a San Francisco startup that makes responsibly sourced, high-end apparel and accessories sold only online, is announcing today that it’s closed on $1.7 million in seed funding from Canaan Partners to scale out its company. Cuyana currently has a full-time staff of five along with 10 part-timers, which will likely grow in the months ahead.

Also today, Cuyana is kicking off what it’s calling the “Lean Closet” movement: Customers who buy Cuyana items will also receive a bag in which to put unwanted items from their own closets to send back to the company in exchange for store credit. Cuyana will then donate those items to nonprofits.

The idea, Cuyana co-founders Karla Gallardo and Shilpa Shah told me in an interview this week, is to encourage women to pare down their closets to only include well-made things that they actually love — such as the things Cuyana makes (of course.) “We create premium quality collections from around the world with a minimalist design that will last forever, and pieces you can wear every day,” Gallardo said. “The result is having a lean closet, which allows you to have a life free of clutter.”

It’s an idea that is not exactly new — wealthy women have stocked their closets with timeless classics from the likes of Alaia and The Row and Celine for years — but Cuyana says it’s bringing well-made ethically produced items from places like Peru and Argentina to a new price point, with bags that cost around $160 instead of around $900.

That’s enabled by, you guessed it, technology — Cuyana is online only, and has structured its own supply chain to be much faster than typical luxury retail brands. “We are able to pass those savings on to the customer,” Gallardo says.

The strategy so far is working quite well. Since launching last year, Cuyana has seen 30 percent of its customers return for a second or third purchase, with only a one percent rate of returning items. Pinterest has been a huge marketing channel for the brand. “Often when you see a beautiful product on Pinterest, you click through and you end up on a really expensive luxury brand,” Gallardo said. “With us, people click through and see a price they can actually afford.”

Another nice thing is how Cuyana focuses on the story behind where each product is made. The company’s website can be browsed by region, and the visitor can really delve into the process behind the manufacturing of each object, whether it’s a pair of earrings in Turkey or a scarf made in Peru. It’s refreshing to see this kind of transparency from e-commerce brands such as Cuyana and Everlane, after years of traditional retailers often trying their best to hide the often shameful details on how their products are made.

Segment.io, a Y Combinator-backed startup making it easier for developers to integrate APIs from multiple analytics providers into their applications, is today expanding its service to include support for mobile. The company is introducing mobile software development kits for both iOS and Android which will allow developers to toggle on or off 25 different analytics services without resubmitting their app to the various app stores.

At launch, Segment.io’s iOS and Android libraries will support sending data to a number of mobile analytics services, including Countly, Mixpanel, Localytics, Flurry, Google Analytics and others. Co-founder Peter Reinhardt explains that the new libraries will give mobile developers flexibility, because they’ll now be able to deploy the Segment.io analytics library just once, then switch or or off the services inside Segment.io that they want to work with.

In addition, by proxying the data through Segment.io’s servers, the libraries also provide mobile developers for the first time with access to Marketo, HubSpot, Customer.io, Vero, Klaviyo, Pardot, Woopra, Help Scout, Librato, Outbound.io and Salesforce. In the months ahead, the company will add support of dozens of analytics services, including USERcycle, Userfox, Web Trends, and Omniture, for example.

Launched this January by former MIT roommates Reinhardt, Ilya Volodarsky, and Calvin French-Owen with designer Ian Storm Taylor, Segment.io grew out of the team’s earlier efforts in building a library called analytics.js, an open source tool still available on GitHub. Though they had originally been focused on building a KISSmetrics or Google Analytics competitor, after watching the open source version take off, the founders decided meet demand by focusing on a simple analytics API for developers instead.

With Segment.io, the idea is to offer a single API that works across all providers. The service supports integrations with Chartbeat, comScore, Customer.io, Foxmetrics, Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, mixpanel, Quantcast, Perfect Audience, Uservoice, and many more for free, plus access to premium (paid) integrations including HubSpot, Marketo, Omniture, Pardot, Totango, and Salesforce to drastically cut down on development time.

As Reinhardt explained to us earlier this year, each API out there is slightly different, so businesses want to use them for different things – one for tracking referrals, another for custom event tracking, and a third for targeted emails, for example. Developers then get stuck trying to figure out all these APIs, which is time that could be better spent working on product.

Since January, Segment.io has grown from 60 sites using its service, to thousands today, and Reinhardt says during that time API call volume has grown from 60 million per month to now over a billion in May. “We processed as many events today, as we did in all of January,” he tells us.

Like Segment.io’s previously launched analytics API, pricing for mobile is freemium-based, with access to a number of free integrations up to 1 million API calls for free, then tiered access afterwards for more calls and/or business integrations. Interested developers can sign up here.

Segment.io backed by $600,000 in seed funding from NEA, General Catalyst, and other angel investors.

Vine has over 13 million users now. And with this morning’s launch on Android, chances are that number is climbing rapidly.

But of all the Vines, from all the millions of users, across all of the world, this is the best one. Period. Trust me.

16-year-old Will Smidlein might have used a technique that seems to have been discovered about a month ago, wherein users can upload videos longer than six seconds to Vine as long as they follow a detailed set of steps and use a jailbroken device.

Apparently Twitter’s API doesn’t check for how long the video is while it’s being uploaded on the server side. We originally believed Smidlein used the method above, which requires a jailbroken device. However, he has declined to comment though does specify that his device isn’t jailbroken.

In either case, the API let it live as a looping RickRoll hell.

Update: Obviously, the Vine is down now.

It was fun while it lasted.

In less than a month, Google Reader will shut down for good, according to the countdown timer on Digg.com, a company now in the process of building a replacement. For end users, the loss is one of a simple, fast and powerful front-end for browsing news feeds, but for developers working on apps in the RSS ecosystem, it means something even worse: the end of access to the Reader API. Today, Feedly is offering an alternative.

Having recently emerged as one of the more serious contenders to pick up where Google Reader left off, the company has announced partnerships with several RSS app developers, including Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader, which will move to support the Feedly API before the Google Reader API is deprecated. What that means for end users relying on these apps is that the app makers will be able to seamlessly transition their users to a new backend ahead of Google Reader’s impending shutdown.

The API is part of Feedly’s “Normandy” project, which is focused on cloning the Reader API and is now running on Google’s App Engine platform. The Normandy backend will also power Feedly’s own app ecosystem, including its apps for iOS, Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox. When Normandy was first revealed, the company fielded more than 100 developer requests, but only those app makers listed above were offered the initial invites. A second batch is now in the works.

In addition to news of the API partners, Feedly also offered a brief update on progress, detailing the top requests coming from users on its support forum. The company says it has new dev and operations staff on hand to help it focus on improvements to Feedly’s speed, which is a top request. Users are also asking for better search, a web-only version, support for Windows 8 and Windows Phone, improved group sharing, and more.

The company also touted its tools for publishers, and Feedly button for websites – other indications of the startup’s intent to build more than an online Reader replacement, but rather help re-seed the RSS ecosystem with the necessary tools.

Since the Google announcement, several alternatives have stepped up to fill the void, including startups like NewsBlur, NetNewsWire, “The Old Reader,” Feedbin, Digg and more. Many, however, only have an online interface, not a lineup of apps, an API and the other tools that make for a viable alternative to what Google Reader once provided. Digg, however, is now backed by betaworks, and may have the resources to deliver. It has now moved code to production servers ahead of wider testing. But Feedly has been at this game for much longer, so it has a big head start.

Several weeks ago, Feedly announced that 3 million users had joined since the Reader shutdown announcement from Google. It says now that 68 percent of users who try the service now convert to weekly actives.

According to Twitter’s status blog and all of Facebook, the service appears to be experiencing site-wide issues, including errors on just about every single feature of the site.

So far, I’ve only been able to send and receive DMs without error; however you can still tweet. You just won’t see it. Along with the timeline refresh issue, you aren’t able to view anyone’s profile at the moment, which is a big problem, considering that a lot of traffic comes to the site via these pages popping up in Google search results.

Here’s the page of empty sadness that you’ll see when you click on someone’s beautiful avatar:

These issues have been going on for about 15 minutes, with Twitter’s engineering staff posting about it seven minutes ago. The issues are also affecting mobile apps, as you’ll get a similar error message when trying to update your timelines. Here’s what the status blog says as of right now:

Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter.

Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.

Twitter has actually done quite well with its uptime over the past few years, having very few major events that bring every feature down like this. It is, however, interesting to see the company always say that “some users” are experiencing issues, when it’s quite clear that more than “some” of them are.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for more information, but have yet to hear back. We don’t usually hear about why issues happen, just that they’ve been resolved, so don’t expect anything in-depth.

So Twitter's Director of Platform @rsarver says he's leaving company Friday, Monday it goes down. Don't leave, Ryan.

—
Craig Kanalley (@ckanal) June 03, 2013

UPDATE: It appears that Twitter is bringing all of its features back. Feel free to tweet about how that was the worst 41 minutes or so of your life.

UPDATE 2: According to the status blog, Twitter is back to normal. Also, I take back what I said about Twitter not providing any reasons as to why this happened:

Update: This issue has been resolved.

Due to an error in a routine change, Twitter was not available from 1:08pm PDT to 1:33pm PDT. We rolled back the erroneous change as soon as we identified the issue. Additionally, some users may have experienced Tweet delivery delay from 1:33pm PDT and 1:53pm PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience.

[Unnecessary Disclosure: I’ll be moving on to Yahoo! soon]

Microsoft has acquired InCycle’s release management solution InRelease, a tool for automatically deploying application components to target services in different environments. InCycle is a Canadian company that specializes in application lifecycle management (ALM) and release management solutions on Microsoft’s .NET platform.

As Microsoft is only acquiring the InRelease business unit, the rest of the company will continue to operate independently and focus on ALM consulting. InCycle was founded in 2002 and, last year, the company merged with Sirk Technologies, another ALM-focused Microsoft partner with offices in San Francisco and Seattle.

InRelease enables agile .NET teams to automate the release cycles of their apps. It automates deployments directly from Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server, Microsoft’s own ALM and DevOps solution, to all environments, including production. This ensures all deployments are done the same way. It also automates the approval workflow and auditing support.

“DevOps is an increasingly important part of ALM and a growing area of interest to chief information officers as businesses are pressured to develop and deploy quality applications at an increasingly faster pace,” said S. Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for its developer division, in a statement today. “The InRelease continuous delivery solution will automate the development-to-production release process from Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, helping enable faster and simpler delivery of applications.”

InRelease was already integrated directly with Team Foundation Server, and InCycle hopes that this acquisition will help it to add release management capabilities to Team Foundation Server. Microsoft did not specify how exactly it plans to do so beyond noting that “this acquisition will extend Microsoft’s offerings in the ALM and DevOps space” and that it plans to integrate it “from TFS through to production, all in one solution, and all integrated with TFS.”