Category: Tech news

Microsoft is satiating customers’ appetites for affordable pricing with news today of per-minute billing, no charge for stopping virtual machines (VM) and discounted developer and test rates.

In a blog post this morning, Microsoft announced:

• No charge for stopped VMs
• Pay by the minute billing
• MSDN use rights now supported on Windows Azure
• Discounted MSDN dev/test rates
• MSDN monetary credits
• Added portal support for tracking MSDN monetary credit usage

Paying by the minute allows a customer to run a VM, cloud service, website or mobile service for only the minutes used in an hour. Previously a customer would be charged for the full hour even if the customer used only a few minutes. Google offers per-minute billing on Google Compute Engine. Amazon Web Services charge by the hour. ProfitBricks was the first infrastructure as a service provider to offer per-minute billing.

Microsoft is in essence dropping prices again by not charging for halting virtual machines. It makes sense when considering the barriers it had placed for adoption. Scott Guthrie explains on his blog that Azure used to keep a reserved instance running unless the customer explicitly deleted the deployment. That can inhibit adoption, especially with Microsoft pushing its cloud and on-premise story, which it says differentiates it from other providers.

Now, developers can use Azure to test and run apps in production on the cloud. Now Microsoft preserves the deployment state and configuration when customers turn off the VM free of charge, thus reducing the friction for the end-user. This makes it useful for development and test teams that want to save some money by cycling down environments during low times such as nights and weekends. Granted, you can essentially do this already on Amazon Web Services, but Microsoft is trying to make the process a bit easier by doing more of the leg work.

For MSDN subscribers, Microsoft is now reducing the cost to “spin up any number of Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and BizTalk Server VMs for testing scenarios using Windows Azure and pay only 6 cents per hour when running them (or, if you run them for less than an hour, the pro-rated per-minute equivalent).

I have heard the argument that only Google and Microsoft can compete in the IaaS market with such steep price drops. Even AWS, it has been argued, will have difficulty in this race to the bottom. You have to wonder with these constant drops in pricing by IaaS providers.

Update: Zynga has confirmed the layoffs via press release, as well as the numbers (520 layoffs or 18 percent of the workforce) reported by AllThingsD.

The company says this was result in $70 million to $80 million in annualized pre-tax savings. Despite those savings, its guidance for its second quarter earnings is a loss between $39 million and $28.5 million.

In a note to employees, CEO Mark Pincus described this as a “proactive” move that will “offer our teams the runway they need to take risks and develop these breakthrough new social experiences” on mobile and touchscreen devices.

My original post, which went up before the company confirmed the news, follows.

It looks like Zynga is in the midst of laying off one-fifth of its workforce.

At the end of last week, we heard that the company would be laying off 20 percent of its worldwide staff today, and that a number of Zynga’s global offices would be affected. A Zynga spokesperson declined to comment, but we’ve seen the first public sign that the layoffs are underway: A Zynga UI designer just tweeted that Zynga L.A. will be closing, with about 55 employees let go.

This isn’t the first time Zynga has had significant cuts. Last fall, CEO Mark Pincus said the company would be reducing costs, and it subsequently laid off 5 percent of its staff. The company has also eliminated some of its less successful titles (and even some unreleased ones), though executives have also said that the number of new game launches should pick up again later this year.

As of its last quarter, Zynga had 2,902 full-time employees. That’s probably slightly off by now, but if the 20 percent number that we’ve been hearing is accurate, then around 580 employees will be affected.

Zynga’s revenue and usage statistics continued to decline in its most recent earnings report, with Pincus describing this as a “transition year” as the company shifts its focus to mobile.

Generally we seem content to be rudely shocked out of sleep, with alarms that blare at us and beep violently, rendering continued sleep impossible. New Android app Warmly, from the Seattle-based Chaos Collective, thinks it might be better if an app wakes you up with gradually mounting sounds that not only aren’t alien and frightening, but are actually comforting and familiar.

It’s a project that’s characteristic of what The Chaos Collective hopes to achieve, according to co-founder Adam Kumpf, who I spoke to about the new project. We’ve previously covered another project of the Seattle-based group, the depth-of-field camera hack that mimics the effects of the Lytro using any camera with manually adjustable focus. Kumpf says that both Warmly and that camera hack fit a loose product strategy that The Chaos Collective takes as its guiding light.

“The Chaos Collective is about working on projects that excite us and sharing that excitement with the world,” he said. “Admittedly, it’s a pretty unconventional business plan, but we believe that working on things we love is the best way to create things that aren’t just clutter. The world is a huge place, but the Internet bring us all together; we hope that the passion we have for each project, hack and experiment translates into others loving them, too.”

Warmly is something that has come from experimenting with concepts and technical elements that the team was interested in. And in many ways, it’s about giving them something to help them kickstart their own creative efforts, in a way that’s generative of more interesting results, since a good start is as important as anything to a good finish.

“Warmly is a product that has grown out of much experimentation,” Kumpf explains. “We’ve worked on a lot of collaborative, real-time systems, but have come to realize that getting started can be as much of a barrier to productivity as the tools you use. So we started looking into alarm clocks and had many of the same criticisms.”

The concept behind Warmly is that pleasing sounds are just as effective at waking you up as unpleasant ones, and the Collective played around with a few different sound combinations before coming up with the ones that are built into the app, including things like the sounds of breakfast being cooked. The app went from experiment to shipping product based on its success with beta testers and Collective members, Kumpf says, which is how all products make their way through the company’s pipeline.

The Warmly app costs $1.99, which Kumpf says they believe is justified, since “if it’s not worth the price of a cup of coffee, [they] aren’t doing their jobs.” He says that while the Collective’s general preference is to embrace open source as much as possible, at some point, projects must become products in order to generate revenue and fuel further efforts. While Warmly is debuting on Android, owing to its generally more positive attitude toward experimentation, an iOS version is definitely in the queue if reaction is positive enough.

The following is my fictionalized story based on a stranger-than-fiction, real life op-ed by Julian Assange, wherein he accuses Google of conspiring with the State Department to dominate the world.  Assange’s quotes are real.

“General Schmidt, Julian is on to us,” said President Obama, as he sauntered through the steel doors of the Google Bunker, Secret Service in tow. The President wore his mandatory “I’m A Googler” t-shirt over his dress shirt. As always, he had stopped first at one of Google’s rainbow-colored snack stations to grab a bottle of fresh celery juice and some kale chips.

“Let me stop you right there, Agent Obama,” said Schmidt. “I’m aware of Assange’s Op-Ed, but he couldn’t stop Google+ even if he wanted to. No one can.”

However, Schmidt was still visibly shaken. The Wikileaks author and merchandise enthusiast had broken open the search giant’s meticulously calculated plot to realize the perfect technocratic vision of 1984. Their goal – to destroy humanity’s will to resist by making it easier to look up pizza recipes – was nearly complete.

“They have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy,” Assange had written in a New York Times column — words that echoed over and over in Schmidt’s mind.

Assange couldn’t understand Google’s role in history, Schmidt thought. Caesar, Napoleon, Mao–giving free access to information had always been the secret of the world’s great authoritarians.   Why else spend billions uniting all of humanity’s data into one cohesive mess of Reddit posts and Pokemon strategy videos? They couldn’t let the white-haired rabble-rouser ruin their plan.

In strode Agent Justin Bieber. He was out of breath from dancing.

“The journalists, Sir, they’re refusing an off-the-record meeting with Attorney General Holder. We thought spying would frighten them into submission, but the unthinkable happened: Arianna Huffington called for Holder’s resignation. It’s out of control,” said the shaken boy.

“I know we were saving this option for an emergency but I think it may be time,” said Agent Mayer, who had been sitting near a workstation trying out different permutations of the words “Free Terabyte.” She still had a hand in the Great Destruction Of Humanity, even though she had already rolled her 401K over to Yahoo!

Eric and Barack’s eyes widened simultaneously. “We can’t use the Biden offense,” said the President.

“Yes, according to the analytics team he needs to conduct another Google Hangout,” said Mayer.

Obama, calm as ever, relaxed into his executive beanbag; with a nod of his head, the order was given to dispatch the folksy pacifier of the masses.

“Democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as ‘participation,’” Assange had explained. How right he was.

People were participating all over the world. They were sending emails that were read by robots who placed advertising on the screen. Humans were chatting endlessly and downloading Angry Birds. Their enslavement was nearly complete.

Just before Bieber had finished moonwalking out of the office, Obama’s chin rose.

“Bieber, before you go,” he said. The boy stopped mid-pop-and-lock.

“I didn’t want to have to do this, Eric, but I think we must. Agent Bieber, release the Biden announcement with a Google Doodle. Also, if you could Tweet it…”

“Can’t do it,” said Bieber. “My Twitter feed is run by Monsanto.”

“That’s fine. I’ll put it on the front page of Flickr. Now, what can we do with Asia?” asked Double-Agent Mayer.

“Well, as Assange wrote, I ‘proselytize the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower…It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances,’” said Schmidt, reciting the OpEd from his New York Times Google Glass app. “My favorite tactic, in this case, is by entertaining the public into an anti-democratic, cat-video stupor. This is a perfect opportunity to forge our alliances in the East.”

Schmidt reached for his low-cost, low-resale-value Android phone from HTC.

“Lieutenant Psy, sorry to wake you,” Schmidt said. “I’ve updated your Google Spreadsheet with new orders for Bieber. All their mind will belong to us.”

A moment later, Schmidt pounded the hang-up button. Then he pounded it again. One more time and the phone turned off.

“Psy?” huffed a surprised Obama. “He’s one of ours?”

“There are no coincidences, Agent Obama.” Schmidt said, with his back turned. “After those meddling kids from Invisible Children created the most viral video of all time, we worried that it would inspire citizens to see our free media platform as a tool of civic engagement. Naturally, we couldn’t have that kind of unpredictability. So, we made the decision to expand our popstar assets abroad. One billion views later, I think we’ve quelled that little insurrection.”

“And what about Assange’s comments on Android?” asked Agent Mayer.

“Remember, Assange wrote: ‘Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire,’” said Schmidt.

“I would love to point him to the many impoverished citizens around the world that Google’s products have helped, which, of course, hides the nefarious conspiracy to connect them all on the same phone operating system, so we can track their every maneuver and send them Zagat recommendations. However, we can show no weakness in the eyes of the Android-buying public.”

“Fortunately, the code base of our low-cost open-source mobile operating system, Android, was completely transparent to the world’s developers – which meant that no one would ever – ever – uncover hidden features,” added Obama.

And then, just before his meeting concluded, Schmidt had a stroke of evil genius.

“Agent Obama,” commanded Schmidt. “One more thing: shut down Google Reader. We need to repair our relationship with journalists and we don’t want to know what news people are reading.”

[Thanks to our editor John Biggs for his invaluable help and Wired for inspiration]

Google today announced the launch of its Mobile Backend Starter that allows Android developers to deploy a basic cloud infrastructure for their apps that runs on Google’s App Engine. Mobile Backend Starter provides developers with a one-click deployable mobile backend and a client-side framework for Android that provides them with storage services, access to Google Cloud Messaging, continuous queries and Google’s authentication and authorization features.

Google argues that most successful mobile apps now use some kind of server infrastructure to power their services, but for most mobile developers, that’s a distraction and often not something they are comfortable with. This new tool essentially provides developers with most of the infrastructure services they need for their apps without the need to write any backend code themselves. Because it runs on top of App Engine, the backend should also easily scale to handle virtually any load a mobile app can throw at it.

To get started, developers simply have to select the Mobile Backend sample app when they start a new App Engine project and follow the instructions here. While Google describes the process as “one-click,” it’s worth noting that while that’s true for deploying the backend, it does take a little bit more effort than that to get everything up and running.

Google first announced this tool at its I/O developer conference last month, but it looks like it only released it today. The project’s source code is available on GitHub, and you can watch the full I/O session about it below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v5u_Owtbfew

Stephen Wolfram, the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research, may well be the smartest and most interesting guy in tech. A PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech at the age of 20, the youngest ever recipient of the MacArthur “genius” fellowship, the inventor of both Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram’s life has been dedicated to the capture and organization of all the knowledge in the world.

He told me we are getting close (somewhere between five and 20 years) to being able to organize all the knowledge ever known to human beings in a way that will make this information automatically accessible to all of us at the click of a mouse. Indeed, Wolfram believes that this “data science” represents the most exciting opportunities now for startup entrepreneurs.

But he isn’t only interested in the organization of public scientific data. Describing himself as the most quantified person on the planet, Wolfram is also a pioneer of analyzing personal data. So why does Wolfram capture so much data about himself? What’s the point, I asked him, of measuring all of his daily activities down to even recording the number of keystrokes he makes on his computer each day.

Makerbot, the hardware darling that closed on a $10 million round of funding in 2011, has just announced that they will open their new factory and warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on Friday. The space is part of the old Brooklyn Navy Yard and will be set up in a complex of older warehouses that dot the waterfront.

The company is looking to hire 50 new employees at the Sunset Park location to work alongside the current staff of more than 100 “productors” who assemble and ship Makerbots in Brooklyn. They also recently hired an office manager for the space.

The company has also shown new shots of their Digitizer 3D scanner at work. They were, for example, able to scan an old statuette and reprint and paint it, creating a nearly perfect replica of an oddly shaped, if endearing, panda.

The company, run by Bre Pettis, has been the poster child for the “Made in Brooklyn” movement and did most of its assembly in Downtown Brooklyn for years prior to the move. You can watch our visit to the factory here.

Google today updated Chrome for iOS to version 27, which introduces a couple of new features that should make using voice search on iOS a bit easier. Just like on the desktop and Android, as well as the Google Search app for iOS, Chrome for iOS now allows you to speak your search query and — assuming Google’s natural language algorithms understand it and its Knowledge Graph knows the answer — it will also speak your results back to you.

Here is what this looks like in the Google Search app for iOS. You can use the same queries and get the same results in Chrome for iOS:

With this update, Chrome for iOS now also gets the new Google voice search interface with the pulsating microphone that you’ve probably seen on other platforms already. This means the voice recognition is now also significantly faster than before, and the application — just like all the other voice-enabled Google services — will now stream the text back to you as it understands it in real time.

Google also says that Chrome for iOS can now reload pages faster, “even when the network is slow or unavailable.” I can only assume that this means the app now tries to keep more assets in its cache, but Google hasn’t detailed how exactly it manages to speed up reload times in this version.

 

Fracture, a digital “maker” startup offering an on-demand system for printing your photos on glass, has raised an additional $500,000 on top of its previous $1.5 million in outside funding, following a year that saw the company’s revenue double.

Though photo printing on glass is not new, the company has developed a proprietary UV-based digital photo-to-glass manufacturing process, which, as we’ve detailed before, allows the photos to last for at least three years in direct sunlight, or up to a decade with careful handling before any fading.

Based in Gainesville, Fla., (also home to Grooveshark), Fracture was founded in 2009 by University of Florida graduates, Abhi Lokesh and Alex Theodore. Lokesh’s background is in biology, but his passion for technology later found him working in an undergrad lab at the university focused on building calibration technology for the Mars Phoenix Lander mission. Theodore, meanwhile (who Lokesh calls the “MacGyver of our times”), has been an avid photographer since his pre-teen years and has a degree in chemical engineering.

Both founders had a desire to modernize photo-printing, drawn to the science and the technology behind building up their own manufacturing process from scratch. Explains Lokesh, “[photo printing on] glass had always been something that was very specialized, meant just for large-scale industrial purposes, and we looked at this giant vacuum that had left as far as a consumer photo opportunity — which is that printing framing has not changed in decades.”

Fracture didn’t really begin shipping product until later in 2010, says Lokesh. But while the startup has done very little marketing during this ramp-up period while it has been stress testing its manufacturing process, it pulled in $86,000 in gross revenue during its first year shipping, and this past year, it has grown that number to $700,000. The company ships on average 30-40 orders per day worldwide, at margins around 40 to 50 percent.

Fracture raised over half a million from friends and family in 2011, then in September 2011, received a $1 million commitment (convertible debt) with $530,000 as the initial disbursement from the Florida Opportunity Fund. Last May, the state’s Tamiami Angel Fund (TAFI) committed to $750,000 in funding, which the startup received $410,000 of initially.

Now, as of April 2013, TAFI upped its second half from $340,000 to $500,000, based on Fracture’s performance. Though TAFI tipped a couple of local papers about its investment, the company itself never officially confirmed TAFI’s new funding until now.

Fracture glass prints are available as portraits, landscapes or squares (which work well for Instagram photos) in a range of sizes, and they’re available as either wall or stand mounts. Pricing ranges from as low as $12 up to $125 for large portraits, and custom sizes are also available.

The company now has a team of 11 working at its 5,300-square-foot manufacturing, packaging and sales facility in downtown Gainesville. Now that Fracture has stabilized its production process, it’s ready to start pushing demand by using the new funding mainly for marketing purposes. Further down the road, the company will work on bringing its service to mobile via an app, and then later expanding to new materials, as well as offering different displaying techniques.

If you’re using Google Analytics, chances are you have already customized a dashboard for your specific needs. But now, when you develop a new dashboard that may be useful to others, you can share both the dashboard itself or a template for it with others in your profile. Sharing templates was previously available in Google Analytics, but as Google notes, being able to share the dashboard itself is a “nice complement” to this.

This new feature will roll out over the next few weeks. Once it’s enabled for your account, you will be able to find it in the “Share” menu. Shared dashboards will then appear in the navigation menu on the left side of Google Analytics.

What this enables, Google notes, is the ability to collaborate with your team on a single shared dashboard. This should make keeping tabs on analytics for large sites quite a bit easier, especially if you’re working on a larger team. It’ll also allow somebody on the analytics team to easily prepare a dashboard for the rest of the company.

As Google Analytics team member Matt Matyas notes in today’s announcement, “this marks another enhancement in Google Analytics asset sharing, complementing the sharing capabilities of assets like annotations, advanced segments and custom reports.” Additional sharing features, he says, are on the roadmap.

Earlier this year, it’s worth noting, Google also launched its Solution Gallery for Analytics dashboards, which allows users to select a number of pre-made dashboards, reports and advanced segments from a curated list and import them to their own accounts.

It seems all you tech people are obsessed with making conferences work better, perhaps because you seem to go to a lot? Thus there are numerous “conference startups.” There are apps to schmooze at the event itself, like Bizzabo, Presdo, Oleapark, Shpare, Schmooze, CrowdVine, Eventasaur and Omyconf, not to mention generic location-based networking apps like Highlig.ht, Sonar, Ban.jo and Intro. And there are platforms for the conference organisers to get the word out, like ConferenceHound, AllConferences, Cvent, ConferenceAlerts and Lanyrd. Today Conferize joins them, claiming to be a full service content marketing platform for the conference industry.

Its Conferize Highlight Player is designed to enable event organizers to easily present an interactive version of their event by finding the relevant multimedia content from sites like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Slideshare and more. It’s like an About.me for conferences, I guess.

It then displays everything related to the conference or event in one central place without the need for the user to jump around. Sounds quite like Lanyrd then.

Supported content formats include YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Instagram, Twitpic, Yfrog, Twitter, Slideshare, SpeakerDeck and Prezi, as well as any live-stream service available.

Conferize monetises by offering a Highlight Player on a freemium basis to event organizers, speakers, venues and members of the press. It can then be shared to a site.

Conferize was founded by Martin Ferro-Thomsen, and launched at DEMO.

Ferro-Thomsen says “the idea for the new Conferize came from watching the flood of tweets from TC Disrupt last fall. We wanted to follow the best and most engaging stuff in a visual and fluid way that was more true to the conference format, and not just a gazillion tweets organized with a timestamp.”

Taking a look at the service it does seem pretty comprehensive. However, we feel Lanyrd has the platform head of steam right now, while Bizzabo and Shpare look like the ones to watch in the apps space. That said Conferize looks slick and probably serves a slightly different purpose, and it runs automatically whereas Lanyrd is much more manual and only presents links — no previews.

Stamplia, launching today from French startup Kiwup, is an email templates marketplace where web designers can sell HTML templates for newsletters, transactional emails and signup forms, and in turn let companies focus on the messaging of their email campaigns rather than design.

“The current problem is that customers know what they want to tell in their message, but don’t know how to design it,” says Kiwup co-founder and CEO Vincent Martinet. “With Stamplia we can finally say goodbye to all those ugly designed newsletters which are available online or from an email provider and increase the profitability of email campaigns.”

It’s an idea that’s attracted investment, too. Kiwup tells TechCrunch that’s it closed $130,000 in seed funding from Jeremie Berrebi and Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures — capital it’s using to publicly launch the service.

There’s no doubting that the bar for design has been raised in recent years — consumers expect a minimum quality of branding — so it follows that this should apply to email newsletters and other email-based campaigns. “Any company knows that having an email strategy is vital for business promotion; therefore a good newsletter strategy is mandatory,” says Martinet. “Readers are extremely sensible, and they need just a few seconds to see and assess a commercial layout. If the design is ugly or not interesting, then all your work and emails will be useless, so it’s important to carefully create your newsletters before starting the campaign.”

With Stamplia, Kiwup is responding to a trend that has businesses outsourcing as much of their non-core operations as possible — either via companies that focus on a single problem or online marketplaces that efficiently match service providers with clients.

Stamplia therefore aims to reduce the friction for web designers who spend too much time acquiring clients, producing estimates, invoicing and chasing payments. They simply upload their HTML/Photoshop designs, along with picking a category and including some metadata to help with search, and set a price between $4-15 depending on the type and flexibility of the template.

All templates are manually vetted by Stamplia and a preview is generated of what the email will look like on 25+ email clients/devices, using technology from Litmus, as well as conducting a spam test to ensure it will get through spam filters.

Designers earn a commission of between 50 percent and 70 percent dependent on volume of sales. In addition, Stamplia will offer an API so that email providers or any app developer can include an email template catalog in their wares, providing another revenue stream for the startup.

In terms of competition, there are a ton of sites that offer web design templates and themes for sale. However, Martinet says that Stamplia is the first to focus purely on the email template problem and to include transactional email templates (welcome messages, shipping instructions, service updates, invoices, receipts etc.) which, he notes, are the emails that companies send most.

LinkedIn has been busy upgrading pieces to its business social network in recent weeks, with updates to its contacts, the release of a new mobile contacts app for iPhone, revamped user profiles, the addition of channels to its news site LinkedIn Today and, most recently, added security via two-step authentication. Now, the company is rolling out improved analytics and a new look for its “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” feature, which tracks the number of times your name has appeared in LinkedIn Search, and how that has changed over time.

With some 225 million users, the company has been working to launch more features that keep people engaged with the site, returning to it more often, and staying with it longer. By appealing to humans’ natural curiosity, the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” feature is a regular draw for those interested in their popularity or “findability” on the network, but it can also help you seek out new connections, discover mutual friends, or simply provide better insight into what people are searching for across LinkedIn.

For free users, the feature now showcases a recent list of those viewing your profile, with some basic analytics to the right. At the bottom, it also suggests users upgrade their free accounts for access to historical data.

Premium users, meanwhile, can see who’s been looking at their profile over the past 90 days, as well as which industries or geographies those searches are coming from. And in addition to the trend graphs and search result counts, it also shows you what keywords people are querying which then led them to find you. This feature is most helpful for those who are hoping to have their LinkedIn resume found by potential employers or those looking to heavily network on the site for other reasons, as the keyword tracking can help you understand what people are looking for when searching across LinkedIn.

Next to each member’s profile in the results list is a button that lets you message or connect with the searcher, depending on whether or not you’re already connected.

This upgraded section will roll out beginning today to users worldwide.

Windows 8.1, which will launch in preview on June 26th, isn’t just about bringing the Start button back. For Microsoft, it’s also an opportunity to get businesses of all sizes to take another look at an operating system they have mostly ignored. Today, at its TechEd conference in New Orleans, the company provided new details about the features it is adding to Windows 8.1 to make it more attractive for businesses and enterprise IT departments.

Microsoft says it built Windows 8 “to bring the most powerful and modern computing experience to businesses and to help professionals stay connected to their colleagues and clients from anywhere, anytime.” The next version will build on this and add a number of new “manageability, mobility, security, user experience and networking capabilities.”

BYOD, NFC Tap-To-Pair Printing, Selective Remote Wipe And More

One area Microsoft is especially addressing with this update is the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement. Microsoft is making it easier for users to join their workplace domains with their own devices, for example. With this, IT administrators can grant registered users access to some resources while enforcing their own rules, for example. Also new in Windows 8.1 will be easier ways to allow users to sync folders with their corporate data centers, which is possible because syncing will be integrated natively into the file system. Windows 8.1 also adds a number of device-management tools to the operating system that should help IT administrators manage all of these devices.

One feature IT administrators will definitely appreciate in Windows 8.1 is the ability to selectively wipe corporate content from devices. Corporate data, Microsoft writes, “can now be identified as corporate vs. user, encrypted, and wiped on command using EAS or EAS + OMA-DM protocol.”

For those who still need to print documents, Microsoft is adding NFC tap-to-pair printing, which should make setting up new printers and devices a bit easier (and companies can also just put an NFC sticker on a printer that isn’t already NFC-enabled). Windows 8.1. will also allow users to print directly to Wi-Fi Direct printers without the need to install drivers.

Windows 8.1 will also now support embedded wireless radios and mobile broadband-enabled PCs or tablets can now be turned into Wi-Fi hotspots.

Other improvements include improved biometrics, pervasive device encryption and, of course, the return of the Start button and boot to desktop. You can read more about all of the details here and here.

Apple’s dedicated app for its Worldwide Developers Conference arrived today, and it offers a look at some of the sessions happening during the event next week, but it also shows off a dramatically different UI compared to past iterations of the app. The changes sound a lot like what’s said to be on tap for a visual refresh in iOS 7. It also might be a good early indication of what Apple will be bringing not only to its own apps, but also what it will expect from those from the developer community, as well.

9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman retweteeted the tweet below, which shows pretty clearly the evolution of the WWDC app over the past few years, spanning 2011 to 2013. As you can see, there’s a fairly different design language at play. What started out with textures meant to mimic 3D effects, more use of contrasting colors and shaded buttons, has now become a much flatter design. The changes are mostly subtle, but from what we’ve heard recently, that’s what’s in store for iOS 7, too; sweeping, system-wide changes, but ones that tweak the interfaces rather than overhaul them completely.

Check the buttons on the top bar “@yuize: WWDC iOS App Side by Side 2011 – 2013 http://t.co/IS40msv9Tw”—
Mark Gurman (@markgurman) June 03, 2013

Even the icon itself is much simpler and cleaner than most of the ones Apple puts out for its own mobile software. But both the icon and in-app elements still retain a slight gradient, which is not technically representative of perfectly “flat” design. Still, it’s a definite toning down of what we’ve seen before. Viewing the WWDC app itself as emblematic of the overall changes the company is planning for its mobile OS might be reaching, but at the very least it’s probably a cue of where Apple might be headed with changes to stock elements across the OS.

That means a new look for app developers trying to achieve a “native” look on the platform, which could actually result in a lot of work for some to bring their apps up to spec. Lately, it seems like a lot of app developers have deviated from strictly copying Apple’s iOS design principles, however, and offered their own take, which seems to involve more and more flattening of visual components. But even slight changes can result in big headaches for designers trying to achieve a certain effect. Still, the changes overall look like improvements to me, so hopefully more third-party apps follow suit with this subtle but refreshing new look.