Category: Tech news

The Startup Battlefield competition at our Disrupt events is like a mini startup school. The dozens of chosen startups that go through the Battlefield training process end up with solid presentation skills, hard-earned pitching prowess and newfound courage.

And also, lots of public visibility, which is great for getting users, hiring top employees and luring clients and investors.

The Battlefield has gone so well that our current staff has been getting overwhelmed by the record number of applications. We need help, so we’re creating a new position called the Battlefield Editor.

We’re looking for a bright, talented person to help manage the entire process, from bringing in applicants to picking the 30 finalists and getting them ready for the Disrupt stages in San Francisco, New York and, this year’s addition, Berlin. In this position, you’ll also get to give out a huge trophy and a big cardboard check for $50,000 to one lucky startup, as they debut to the media and the investor world. Battlefield winners and finalists have included huge success stories like Mint and Yammer among others.

Are you already in the Startup Whisperer role at a popular accelerator and think you can take your show on the road? Read TC every day, just finished your MBA and want a more meaningful job than McKinsey? Can you find the Next Big Thing? Send your resume and a letter explaining your interest here.

Job Description

TechCrunch is looking for someone to oversee the Startup Battlefield process in all its phases — including applicant recruitment, applicant review and final selection (working under the direction of TC’s co-editors), finalist training and rehearsals, and finally stage management at Disrupt. The role’s title is Battlefield Editor. In addition to those responsibilities, the role will focus on expanding our network of angels, incubators, VCs and accelerators to recruit a stronger pool of Battlefield applicants, strengthening our rehearsal program, and developing the Battlefield franchise, both online and offline, for applicants and alums.

The role requires a strong writer who can post on TechCrunch about Battlefield matters, as well as manage many threads of communication with the many parties who make up the Battlefield. The core of the job is a strong ability to work with relatively green, unlaunched startups and prepare them to present brilliantly on the TC Disrupt stage before a group of highly distinguished judges. That preparation process takes enormous focus and commitment. Beyond that core requirement, the role will also work to help expand the Battlefield franchise in a variety of ways, including improved ties with Battlefield alums.

Candidates should have deep experience in the Silicon Valley startup world and direct experience working with startups and investors to help shape new ideas and prepare them to pitch investors. They should possess very strong personal and written communication skills, outstanding organizational skills, a high capacity for detail work, and a very patient and winning attitude.

After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone’s Businessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone’s story, the team will join Google X. Google invested $10 million in the Alameda, Calif.-based company in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. As far as we can see, this also marks the first time Google has acquired a company specifically for its Google X skunkworks.

Stone reports that Google CEO Larry Page approved the acquisition, but as Google X’s director Astro Teller notes, Page said that X “could have the budget and the people to go do this, but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.”

The company was founded by Saul Griffith and Don Montague, a former World Cup windsurfer. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Google has confirmed this acquisition and provided us with the following statement from Astro Teller, Google X’s “Captain of Moonshots”:

Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem.  Makani Power’s technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy.  They’ve turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software.  We’re looking forward to bringing them into Google[x].

Makani says it hopes that this acquisition will provide it with “the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.” The acquisition comes just a week after the company completed the first autonomous flight of its Wing 7 prototype.

Here is how TechCrunch columnist Matylda Czarnecka described the project back in 2012:

The Makani Airborne Wind Turbines, which resemble mini airplanes, are launched when wind speeds reach 3.5 meters per second. Rotors on each blade help propel it into orbit, and double as turbines once airborne. The blades are tethered to the ground with a cord that delivers power to throw them into the sky and receives energy generated by the turbines to be sent to the grid-connected ground station.

Some of the Internet’s most notable personalities are bringing attention to the need for immigration reform in a 36-hour social media marathon, The March for Innovation. It’s an issue we know our readers care about, so we’re thrilled to give you the opportunity to join part-time superhero, full-time mayor of Newark, definitely-maybe Senate candidate, and one of The Most Innovative People In Democracy, Cory Booker, in a rousing town hall. Mayor Booker and I will be answering questions on Twitter and responding to a few reader questions in our comments (officially begins Noon PT).

Background

As I’ve written about before, the United States definitely has a costly tech-talent shortage, which can only be filled by attracting the best and brightest from around the world. Despite near unanimous support for more high-skilled immigrants, the United States Congress could not move forward without a comprehensive package that included all foreign-born workers.

A set of proposed drafts that will eventually become a single comprehensive bill is currently winding its way through both chambers of the Congress; sticky issues on agriculture workers, border security, gay rights, and an abusive high-skilled visa system threaten to derail any progress at all.

How To Influence

As Senator Jerry Moran (CrunchGov Grade: A) told me, policymakers really do respond to public pressure, especially social media. The March For Immigration isn’t about advocating a particular position, but about letting Congress know that the electoral consequences of failing to pass a bill will be greater than passing an imperfect one.

To participate in the discussion, comment below and/or tweet Booker (use hashtag #iNewark).

Talk Amongst Yourselves

Here are a few very important questions that citizens should be asking

1. Is immigration reform a voting issue for you? If so, why? If you have a personal story, please tell us on Twitter or in the comments.
2. Do you believe that high-skilled immigrants create or take jobs from Americans? One large union, the AFL-CIO, has supported a 90-day hiring wait period to force employers to seek out Americans first (calling the tech industry “greedy” for opposing it). This waiting period has consequences; for the first time in decades, the U.S. is bleeding high-skilled talent because immigrants don’t feel welcome. Immigrants, over the long run, have founded extraordinarily profitable companies, such as Google and PayPal, so the question is complex.
3. Should rights for foreign-born same-sex couples be included? Recently, the Senate rejected a provision to grant the right for same-sex couples to petition for citizenship, on the fear immigration reform would not pass. Is it worth risking the bill to include equal protection?
4. We know the current visa system is prone to abuse. What can we do to prevent such abuse and make an immigration bill more appealing to concerned lawmakers?

We look forward to your insightful ideas.

Have you ever wished that you could navigate through the apps on the phone as easy as clicking links on the web? Such a thing may now become a real possibility thanks to a new service from Cellogic, called Deeplink.me. In a nutshell, it’s a bit.ly for mobile app deep linking – meaning not necessarily just linking to the app itself, but to a specific page, section or  – in the case of a mobile game – a specific level, within an application.

The link (deeplink.me/yourname), meanwhile, works from anywhere, whether web, mobile web, or any other native mobile application.

It can automatically detect where an end user is coming from and whether or not they have the necessary mobile app installed on their device. If the link is clicked on the web, it would simply point the user to the developer or publisher’s web version of that same content. If on mobile with no app installed, it could be configured to point to the app store or mobile website instead. And if the app is present, it could take you right to the relevant screen.

All of this is configurable, of course.

The idea came about as an offshoot of what Celllogic is currently building with Nextap, a content discovery network for mobile applications. Nextap is a much bigger product built on top of this deeplink technology, and, even pre-launch, it has paying customers. These include several large news publishers and a few big-name app and game developers.

During the development process for Nextap, the team decided to spin off the Deeplink tool, which will allow end users to move horizontally through apps.

As Cellogic CEO Itamar Weisbrod explains, Nextap’s customers wanted to use the technology as something of a “bit.ly for deep linking” so they could tweet out links, share them on Facebook, email and elsewhere.

“One of their biggest issues is that they’ve invested so much in these native apps, but they’re still silos,” says Weisbrod. “So we said, well, we have the analytics, we have this platform, we could just give you this one URL and you can generate the links for your apps, and you could then link to specific parts in your apps.”

The implementation requires minimal configuration on the app developer’s side since the function the link is calling is already present. Developers only have to add a few lines of code, Weisbrod says. And on Android, the company offers a sample “Intent” filter, as well, to help developers get started. (Intentions let Android apps kick off a specific action. They’re a part of the Android operating system, which handles deep linking fairly well, in comparison with iOS).

As you may know, the technology which enables app deep linking itself is not new.

In terms of simply opening up apps for you, Facebook has long since pointed its mobile users to apps on their phone from its own mobile application. It has now turned its ability to connect users to apps into a potentially strong revenue stream, as well. And with the debut of new Twitter “Card” types, it, too, has begun to explore how it can move users more seamlessly between Twitter apps and and content found in the broader mobile app universe, including products, photos, videos, articles, and more.

These are only the more recent efforts, however. A lesser-known example called PhotoAppLink, is an older open source initiative aiming to simplify photo editing by tying multiple photo-editing apps together using similar app-linking technology. Plus, an even earlier example came from a company called Zwapp, which tried to solve the problem by launcing OneMillionAppSchemes.com, a database that tried to open source the unpublished custom URL schemes for iOS applications.

Facebook and Twitter’s moves are still somewhat limited, however, and none of those earlier efforts really took off.

Weisbrod says the reason why those initial efforts failed is because there was no impetus for developers to use them. ”This is an actual service,” he says of Deeplink.me. “There’s value on top of just being database.”

With Deeplink.me, developers will have access to analytics, which details things like clicks per platform, the click-through rates, where users are coming from and more. This analytics feature will be improved in time, and the service will support plugging into other app analytics platforms in the future, too, like Flurry or HasOffers, for example.

Pricing for Deeplink.me has also yet to be set, but it will be a freemium service after the beta period completes.

A handful of Nextap’s customers are already using the platform, after joining a private test a few months ago. Now the beta is opening up a bit further: 100 beta accounts have been reserved for TechCrunch readers who sign up using this link.

This service could help solve some of the problems facing the ecosystem today – namely app engagement and usage rapidly declines after install, as apps are tucked away off of users’ homescreens in forgotten folders. Developers in turn, have to use increasingly spammy push notifications to encourage re-opens. Frustrated, users simply delete the apps bothering them. Having specific, deeplinked app content appearing when users click links they actually wanted to follow could instead be a more natural way to draw users back in to apps.

Though the details of how all this works is technical, if the company can spur adoption – still an unknown – the end result could be something which would allow a more natural way to move through apps on our phones and tablets, as well as from the mobile web to apps. Using apps could even begin to feel more like the web itself – that is, less isolated, more connected.

A brain drain at a big tech company is never a good thing, and when a lot of that departing talent consists of high-level execs moving on in rapid succession it’s bound to look like curtains to outside observers. That appears to be the case at HTC, which is losing a lot of senior execs according to multiple reports today from The Verge, CNET and Engadget, and a source has pointed us to yet another recent high profile departure.

We’ve learned at TechCrunch that HTC Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Greg Fisher departed the company just a few short months ago to Amazon. Fisher is among a growing list of known execs leaving HTC, including people on both the product and marketing sides of the equation. What we’re hearing suggests that the company is facing a lot of internal turmoil and politics, which is frustrating employees across the board.

The Verge reported earlier today that HTC’s Chief Product Office Kouji Kodera has departed as of last week, which is a considerable staff shift given that Kodera probably spearheaded HTC’s recent line of critically well-received devices, including the HTC One X and this year’s HTC One. The company has also seen the departure of Global Communications VP Jason Gordon, Global Retail Marketing Manager Rebecca Rowland, digital marketing chief John Starkweather and Eric Lin, manager of product strategy with the past three months.

And when it rains it pours, as HTC Asia CEO Lennard Hoornik confirmed to have left today, and Elizabeth Griffin, the Head of Global Digital Service for the Taiwan-based smartphone maker also reportedly hopping into the lifeboat in favor of a position at Nintendo (out of the frying pan and into the fire?).

This sizeable outpouring of talent comes at a crucial juncture for HTC, as it has just launched the HTC One, a flagship that CEO Peter Chou has literally staked his job upon. Chou so far seems to be secure in his position at the company, but if this trend of executive departures, he could soon wind up on his own at the top. Chou is apparently not the man people would like to have in charge, however, as The Verge reports that he and his tendency to make snap decisions are what’s behind this outbound tide of senior staff.

The HTC One is reportedly selling at a decent pace after a slow start, but HTC’s other sizeable bet, the First which comes pre-loaded with Facebook Home, looks to be on life support at best, if not entirely discontinued already.

If HTC is bleeding from the head, it’s possible it’s bleeding from the body, too. We’ve seen evidence to suggest that could be the case in the past, and we’ve also heard that it’s not just senior people who are looking towards greener pastures. It’s unlikely that we’ve seen the end of these leavings, either, so in the meantime we’ll be watching to see who’s next into the lifeboats.

Amazon has reportedly submitted plans for a new futuristic headquarters in Seattle that combines a skyscraper and a tri-sphere, bio-dome-like structure. According to the plans, the structure will be able to hold various forms of plant life and become a place where employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.”

Because, God forbid, employees walk to the park that’s three blocks away.

Here’s an excerpt from the plans (also, hat tip to GeekWire for the find):

While the form of the building will be visually reminiscent of a greenhouse or conservatory, plant material will be selected for its ability to co-exist in a microclimate that also suits people. To encourage growth and maintain the health of the plants, the building’s interior will include high bay spaces on five floors totaling approximately 65,000 SF and capable of accommodating mature trees. The exterior enclosure will be highly transparent and be composed primarily of multiple layers of glass supported by a metal framework. In addition to a variety of workplace environments, the facility will incorporate dining, meeting and lounge spaces, as well as a variety of botanical zonesmodeled on montane ecologies found around the globe. The building will be anchored at either end by publically accessible retail spaces entered from 6th and 7th Avenues.

Generally, it all sounds very cool and very futuristic and very trendy (read: Apple did the whole “plans for a spaceship” thing ages ago). However, it’s interesting to see how the biggest companies in tech are tackling the issue of working in an office or with a more loose structure.

Remember, everyone made a pretty big deal out of Marissa Mayer’s recent policy change that requires all Yahoo employees to work in an office. And just recently she announced that Yahoo would be taking up space in the Times building in New York’s Times Square, which is capable of housing up to 700 employees.

As it stands now, all of the big four tech companies — Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon — favor keeping employees in the office.

Google has one of the best campuses you could dream of, both in Mountain View and in New York, feeding employees free lunch from world-renowned chefs. Apple is working to build out one of Steve Jobs’ final projects, a new spaceship office. Facebook has the same diversions: chess boards, and video games, and basketball courts, and free lunch.

So of course, the fourth horseman in the race, Amazon is devising its own tricks to keep employees at the office as long as possible. It’s a win-win: Employees do more and better work due to a pleasing and comfortable work environment, and employers get more, and better work, out of their employees.

Also, there’s a perfectly good park just three blocks from the new campus.

Here’s the full set of plans:

Amazon’s new HQ design by John Cook

[Biodome rendering via NBBJ]

Runscope launched at the Glue conference today with $1.1 million in seed funding from True Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz for its tools that monitor API traffic and address the problems with broken APIs. Also participating were Lerer Ventures, and a group of prominent angel investors.

The Runscope tools come as software is scaling everywhere. And with software comes APIs, which are just a natural way to connect services. When web services ruled back in the IT glory age, software integrations were complex and expensive. Today REST-based APIs make it easy to connect apps. The problem is in the complexity of the distributed nature of building them.

Distributed apps have their own code. It may work across on-premise servers and a cloud provider’s network and servers. It will also use the API providers’ set of code and servers of their own.

It’s from this premise that Runscope built its tools. Designed initially for test and development, the tools will be offered for use in production in the coming months.

“The first thing we want to do is to start to give visibility into the conversations an app is having with other services,” said John Sheehan, Runscope’s CEO. This means building a tool that watches the API traffic and makes problems really visible.

“The real true promise is an app that has multiple distributed pieces but acts as one coherent application,” Sheehan said. “We are starting to realize it but the tools are geared toward building old style applications. For example, performance monitoring tools expect thart code issues are happening on your own servers.”

Runscope is built on Amazon Web Services EC2 and programmed in Python. The CTO, Frank Statton, was lead engineer at Twilio. The system is fault tolerant and was built by Ryan Park who comes from Pinterest. Sheehan worked at IFTTT before co-founding the company with Statton. Prior to IFTTT, Sheehan also worked at Twilio as the company’s developer evangelist.

The business model will in part stem from Runscope’s runtime, which generates data about API traffic. That data can be used for business intelligence. There is also the resilience the service can offer for customers and the assurance that mission-critical apps and their APIs can be watched and issues resolved before they become a major issue.

New Relic looks at the issues that Rusncope addresses from a performance standpoint, especially with a mobile SDK. API management providers such as Apigee and Layer7 are also playing in the space.

For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’

It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience.

But that’s a stereotype that isn’t exactly true anymore.

A small group of companies — both small, bootstrapped app startups and multi-billion dollar giants like Tencent — are showing that they can design apps or higher-end hardware with international appeal.

Tencent, one of the country’s gargantuan Internet powers with a market cap of $72 billion dollars, often likes to point out the international reach of its messaging app Weixin or WeChat. That app has blossomed to more than 190 million monthly active users over the past year and with about 40 million of registered users outside of China.

“I’m very glad to see the internationalization of Tencent,” said the company’s CEO Pony Ma this month at the GMIC conference in Beijing. He later added, “The manufacturing sector in China went globalized and the service industry can be internationalized as well…. It’s difficult, but if we can make it, it would be a revolution.”

Interestingly enough, WeChat’s growth abroad is being fueled by the Chinese diaspora — immigrants are taking WeChat with them to stay in touch with their families back home, according to app-tracking services like Onavo. They base this hypothesis on the correlation of WeChat active usage with that of other Chinese-language apps.

Younger Chinese startups are also building internationally as well. I met a Shanghai-based startup called Intsig two weeks ago that has a business card scanning app called Camcard with 50 million registered users and 10 million monthly actives, with half of them outside of China.

“A lot of people are surprised when they find out we’re a Chinese company,” said Louisa Cao, who heads marketing for the company. It helps that exchanging business cards is much more ritualized and formal in China and Japan than it is in the West, so that gives startups in Asia a competitive edge on understanding what consumers want in a product in this area. Similarly, messaging apps out of Asia like Line, Kakao and WeChat are leading the way, with Western startups like Path arguably borrowing some of their strategies like stickers.

Blux, another company out of Xian, the second-tier Chinese city that’s home to the famous army of Terra Cotta warriors, has built a higher-end photo app called Blux Camera that’s been featured by Apple more than 100 times on the iTunes homepage for global audiences. As the cost advantages that China has over Western markets narrows, the co-founder Jo Yin told me that it now can make economic sense to run global market-facing startups outside of the traditional hubs of Beijing and Shanghai (as they’ve become too expensive).

One of the reasons that all of these startups can built products for foreign audiences is because they’ve been trained either at Western universities or through working for multi-nationals. Some are run by “sea turtles” or Chinese who have returned home after years of working or studying abroad. Intsig’s CEO Michael Zhen spent years at Motorola where he picked up ideas on how to manage teams and think globally.

It’s also helped that the Chinese government has gone far in protecting and nurturing domestic technology companies and startups, a trend which continues with the government’s recent investment into a GPS alternative called Beidou and an Ubuntu-based OS that would help Chinese firms move off Western software platforms. Now that companies like Tencent have reached a certain prowess in domestic markets, they can look outwards.

To be fair, achieving global reach is something only a small fraction of local Chinese startups can do. It requires an international fluency; founders have to understand what kind of design and marketing attracts foreigners. Chinese web services can seem noisy and busy; they can be filled with more links and text as Mandarin characters are complicated to create on QWERTY keyboards.

There are even a few U.S. growth-stage companies that haven’t been dissuaded by Google’s very public about-face on the Chinese market and are hiring design and developer talent locally. Evernote recently launched a China-focused version of its enterprise service and they very intentionally took on local hires to develop product.

“It’s easy to sell your products everywhere. But when we say we want to be a global company, it’s because we want to make our products everywhere,” said Evernote CEO Phil Libin, when he launched Evernote for Business locally in China.

He went on to say that China’s copycat reputation is unfair.

“Chinese companies don’t have a good reputation for innovation in the West. The reputation that Chinese companies have is that they don’t really innovate. They just copy and I don’t think this reputation is right. It’s not a problem that Chinese companies copy. It’s that everyone copies. Chinese companies don’t just copy. They copy and improve. Copy and improve is what everyone does everywhere. That’s what Apple does. That’s what Microsoft does. That’s what Facebook does. Very few companies start with a first-of-a-kind idea.”

Indeed, probably the most interesting company to watch as it expands globally is Xiaomi, which did just that. They took Android and improved upon it.

They’re probably the best example of how China is moving up the value-chain from low-cost manufacturing into high-end design.

Just three years afters being founded, the company is on track to do $4.5 billion in handset and accessory sales. Some have made the metaphor that Xiaomi is the “Apple of Android” in that it’s an integrated hardware and software maker that has built its own special skin of Android and sells high-end hardware at or around the cost of materials. They compete head-to-head against Samsung in mainland China, and according to third-party mobile app analytic services like Umeng, they’re in second place.

Although Xiaomi will only publicly talk about its plans to sell handsets in Hong Kong and Taiwan, a source close to the company says it’s been on the lookout for a general manager that could bring their Android skin, the MIUI, to North American audiences.

They’ve been able to develop a rabid fan base locally in China because they allow people to participate in the designing of the phone by requesting features. Internally, they have small teams of engineers, product managers and designers that work alongside each other on a very fast cycle. They release a new version of the MIUI every week.  

But they don’t know if the model will translate abroad yet. Chinese consumers are very comfortable with paying for the full-cost of the phones upfront and buying devices online instead of through brick-and-mortar stores.

“We don’t know how developed regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong will accept products like Xiaomi,” said co-founder Lin Bin in an interview. “Greater China is just one step beyond mainland China.”

Another photo sharing app bites the dust? Or is something with promise getting another chance? Either way you look at it, betaworks is adding more technology and team members to its arsenal, as photo sharing app Piictu has announced that the team will “join forces” with a betaworks company that has yet to launch.

Piictu had raised $1.73 million in seed funding, yet never really took off. The app allowed you to share photos with captions, but Piictu wanted to focus on letting photos start conversations, rather than sit in a stream waiting for likes. The app’s approach was to get you to share photos in context of what you were doing.

Here’s what the Piictu team shared today, including instructions on how to get your photos out of the service. You’ll have until June 7th to do so:

Piictu is joining Kandu (a Betaworks company)!

We’re excited to announce that Piictu is joining forces with Kandu – “a Betaworks company” that shares our vision and ideals of how technology is a catalyst for a better and richer world. Together we will continue to build and bring users great products and experiences for a brighter future.

Obviously, this news doesn’t come without hardship. Unfortunately, the Piictu app will no longer be available. The important thing: You will not lose any of your photos and we trust you will reconnect with all your piictu-friends on other networks like tumblr, kik, twitter and instagram – some of our fave.

Over the past two years we’ve had the opportunity of supporting and sharing unique moments of our lives in pictures. Piictu was built on the idea that “the change in use of photography” is opening new opportunities to communicate and interact as humans. We’ve seen this stand true and flourish not only on piictu, but on other networks as well.

On Friday May 31st, the piictu app will no longer be available. You’ll be able to download your photos until Friday June 7th by following the instructions here

From the entire team we want to thank you for the great energy, trust and support you have brought to the community and we look forward to bringing you more fun, exciting and heartfelt products in the future.

No terms were made available, but we’ve reached out to betaworks for comment. However, this does feel like a stay of execution for an app that never took off.

Again, it’s not known what Kandu is exactly, but we assume that it will have something to do with photography. Another betaworks product, Giphy, has been moving along quickly to provide a home for all of those awesome animated GIFs that we like to share.

During TechCrunch Disrupt, betaworks CEO John Borthwick discussed his vision for the company, calling it a “puzzle.” What Borthwick and team are doing is bringing together the most useful parts of services, be it Digg or an eventual Google Reader replacement, and creating a suite with them. How it will all look once it fits together is unknown, but betaworks is on a bit of a roll after launching its game Dots recently.

Google’s Drive app for Android just got a major redesign that brings the Google Now-like card-style look the company introduced with Google Now to its mobile productivity app.

This new look, which Google says is cleaner and simpler than the previews design, will likely be the first thing users notice, but the company has also added a number of new features to the app. Most of these are small, such as the ability to download copies of your files to your Android device, but the new document-scanning features open up a whole new range of use cases for Drive.

The scanner tool, for example, which you can now find under the “Add New” menu, allows you to easily turn paper documents like receipts, letter and billing statements into PDFs. Thanks to Google’s advanced optical character-recognition technology, you can also easily search them later on. This definitely feels a bit like Evernote and it’ll be interesting to see if Google will continue to go down this path in the future updates to the app.

Also new in this version is an updated editing experience for Google Sheets spreadsheets. Users can now adjust font types and sizes for their spreadsheets and change cell text colors and cell alignment right from the application. The app now also finally supports Google’s Cloud Print.

Shashi Seth, whose résumé includes management and executive roles at Yahoo, Aol, and Google, is joining the Tribune Company as the president of a new unit called Tribune Digital Ventures.

Seth’s role was first reported yesterday at AllThingsD, and the company is now confirming the news. It says Tribune Digital Ventures will operate as an independent unit based in Silicon Valley.

Seth told me that his job will be to develop new products around Tribune content, making sure that it “gets used appropriately on the Internet and mobile side.” A big part of that is finding new ways to circulate traffic between Tribune’s different properties, whether they’re in print (it publishes newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times), broadcast or digital. The goal, he said, is to create “a network effect across these disparate mediums and build a bridge between them.”

It sounds like partnering with startups is going to be a part of that mission. As for whether that will involve making startup investments, Seth said, “It is within the realm of possibility, but I think first and foremost we have to come up with a strategy.”

Seth left Yahoo in January, where he was most recently the senior vice president of its Connections business unit, which included products like Yahoo Search and Mail. He has also been the senior vice president of global ad products at Aol (which owns TechCrunch), head of monetization at YouTube, and search product lead at Google. He has startup experience as well, founding and serving as CEO of a wireless startup called Conexo and chief revenue officer at Cooliris.

“I’m fascinated and disappointed at the same time with what the traditional media world is going through,” Seth said when asked why he joined the Tribune Company. “I know and feel it in my heart that the content itself is amazingly valuable. … I think newspapers and broadcasters have given up the ownership of that space to the new Internet world. What I’d love to do is find a way to actually reclaim it.”

The new Phorus speaker system provides multi-room wireless audio streaming over Wi-Fi. It uses the new Android-based Play-Fi lossless streaming protocol.

The new Phorus speaker system provides multi-room wireless audio streaming over Wi-Fi. It uses the new Android-based Play-Fi lossless streaming protocol.

Your cat gets to do whatever it wants everywhere else in the house, so why not give it control of the iPad, too?

Your cat gets to do whatever it wants everywhere else in the house, so why not give it control of the iPad, too?