Category: Tech news

If you’re attending Google I/O this week, you will be a part of an experiment from the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team. On its blog today, the team outlined its plan to gather a bunch of environmental information happening around you as you meander around the Moscone Center.

In the blog post, Michael Manoochehri, Developer Programs Engineer, outlines his team’s plan to place hundreds of Arduino-based environmental sensors around the conference space to track things like temperature, noise levels, humidity and air quality in real-time. This was spawned due to a fascination with wanting to know which areas of the conference were the most popular, so it will be interesting to see what the information the team gathers actually tells us.

At first glance, this seems a little bit creepy, but it’s no different than a venue adjusting the cooling system based on the temperature inside at any given moment. As with anything that Google does, this could have implications for tracking indoor events or businesses in the future, as Manoochehri shared:

Networked sensor technology is in the early stages of revolutionizing business logistics, city planning, and consumer products. We are looking forward to sharing the Data Sensing Lab with Google I/O attendees, because we want to show how using open hardware together with the Google Cloud Platform can make this technology accessible to anyone.

Notice the wrap-up of wanting to show people how open hardware combined with Google’s Cloud Platform benefits everyone. Ok, sure. What could data like this mean for businesses, though? Well, a clothing store would be able to track how many people came in and browsed, which areas of the store were hot-spots for interest and then figure out how their displays converted. It’s like real-world ad-tracking. It makes sense, but still seems a long way off.

What will be interesting is not each dataset that is collected, but what all of them tied together tell us about our surroundings:

Our motes will be able to detect fluctuations in noise level, and some will be attached to footstep counters, to understand collective movement around the conference floor.

Of course, none of this information is personally identifiable, but the thought of our collective steps, movements and other ambient output being turned into something usable by Google is intriguing to say the least…and yes, kind of creepy.

If this particular team can share all of the data it collects in an easy to digest way, then businesses will be clamoring to toss sensors all over their stores and drop the data on whatever cloud platform that will host it the cheapest. Google would like to be that platform.

During the event, the team will hold a workshop on what it calls the “Data Sensing Lab,” so if you’re interested on learning more about what the team is gathering as you walk around, this would be the place to go. You’ll also be able to see some of the real-time visualizations on screens set up throughout the conference floor.

We’ll be covering all of the action as we’re being covered by Google.

Larry Yu, the public relations executive who has headed up Facebook’s corporate communications operation for five years and helped steer the company through the publicity blitz surrounding its IPO, is leaving the social networking company. He announced his departure this morning in a post on Facebook, writing:

“Nearly five years ago, I joined some friends at a privately-held company called Facebook to help a small team scale and expand upon the company’s story. That journey was, in a word, crazy. And fun. Terrifying. And gratifying. So I’m off to do it again. I’m joining my friends Brandee, Brian and Sean to help build The Pramana Collective, a project-focused communications consultancy that works with cool companies.”

Yu is not the only tech PR big wig on the roster at the Pramana Collective, which first emerged earlier this spring. The Brandee he refers to above is of course Brandee Barker, who headed up Facebook PR from 2006 to 2010; Brian is Brian O’Shaughnessy, who previously led communications at Skype after four years at Google; and Sean is Sean Garrett, who previously headed up PR at Twitter.

Sean Garrett wrote in a post on his personal blog that Yu will be joining Pramana as a partner next month, and added a few details on the specialties he’ll be bringing to the firm:

“Brian, Brandee and I have all worked with Larry in the past, and we know that his close-to-20 years of experience is a perfect fit for The Pramana Collective and our clients. Beyond being a thoughtful guy who is universally liked and respected, Larry knows how to navigate companies through chaotic growth stages with confidence and calm. And we all admire how he makes financials, process and operations look easy, maybe even fun (well, almost).”

It’s a loss for Facebook, to be sure, but a big gain for the startup world. We’ll certainly be watching to see how Pramana shapes the conversation as it takes on clients.

Zapier, a service that automates tasks between online services, has launched a tool that monitors 200 APIs, sometimes catching an outage before the provider does.

The new tool monitors the uptime and downtime of every API on Zapier. It is designed to monitor the realtime status of popular web APIs and their impact on customers that use the Zapier service or just want a good resource to monitor how APIs are behaving. Each API can be monitored via SMS, instant message, email or any number of methods that are supported by Zapier’s core product.

Zapier Co-Founder Wade Foster said they developed the monitoring service, because, while vendors often provide performance dashboards for their main products, they don’t do so for their APIs. This is true for such services as Amazon, Desk.com and 37Signals. This can be a problem as APIs are now the glue for connecting apps. The shortcoming leaves consumers in the dark when APIs go down, Foster said in a recent email discussion. For example, the Google APIs had an outage, which Zapier discovered almost instantly.

Here’s the Hacker News thread documenting the outage. “My co-founder is the top commenter there,” Foster said. “The subsequent comments were what encouraged us to release this publicly.”

He said the dashboard has been public for about a week. Almost everything is always up which speaks to the quality of applications that are being built these days.

This is a pretty cool service. It’s important, too, especially for app developers who will often monitor multiple APIs that integrate with their apps.

Q: Why does a to do list application need $3.5 million in funding? A: Because it’s becoming more than a simple to do app. Today, Any.DO one of the more popular to do list applications for web and mobile, announced a seed round of funding led by existing investor Genesis Partners, with participation from both current and new investors Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt’s fund), Joe Lonsdale, Blumberg Capital, Joe Greenstein and others.

The company had previously announced $1 million in angel funding in late 2011 from Innovation Endeavors, Blumberg Capital, Genesis Partners, Palantir (Joe Lonsdale), Felicis Ventures (Aydin Senkut) and Brian Koo.

For those unfamiliar, Any.DO got its start on the Android platform after the success of the team’s first app, Taskos, which proved the market was ripe for such a concept. That app had grown to 1.3 million users by the time Any.DO arrived in November 2011, and today has more than doubled its install base.

Any.DO, however, has since surpassed it. The company says its flagship application now has more than 5 million users across iOS, Android and web. Referencing data from Onavo Insights, Any.DO claims to be the market leader in the to do list app space. (Its nearest competitor, Wunderlist, announced earlier this month having more than 4 million users.)

Unlike many apps, Any.DO has more Android users than iOS, having initially taken advantage of that platform’s popularity, its need for well-built apps, and the potential built-in install base coming from Taskos, who were encouraged to switch over to Any.DO when it first debuted.

Any.DO is beautifully designed, which has the side effect of making the app appear deceptively simple. But in reality, there’s some heavy lifting going on under the hood.

“We believe the tools you have on your homescreen are going to be smarter and smarter over time,” explains Any.DO founder and CEO Omer Perchik. “In terms of the to do list…it will help you accomplish the things you have on your list, and we’ve developed a semantic engine that extracts intents and tries to find the relevant action,” he says. “And on the other hand, it’s basically predicting what you’ll be interested in doing.”

So for example, if you tell the app today that you want to plan a trip or workout at the gym more often, it will recommend other applications that will help you complete those tasks, including things like Kayak, TripAdvisor, MyFitnessPal, and many others. Also, if you tell the app you need to do something like “pay taxes,” it’s smart enough to start reminding you about that task in advance of tax day, even though you never provided an exact date or time.

In some cases, Any.DO has affiliate relationships with the dozens of apps it points users to, but in other cases it does not. Perchik says that conversion rates are high – more than three times above the market average of 1 to 5 percent, in general.

Asked whether or not the company had the intention of using the funding to further develop Any.DO or to expand its lineup by launching more apps in the personal productivity space, Perchik says “possibly both.” However, the company isn’t heading into other spaces like email or calendaring just yet, he adds.

That being said, Perchik did cite the recent trend in startups developing alternatives to the core applications on users’ homescreens – things like email (Mailbox, Triage, e.g.), calendaring (Sunrise, Tempo, e.g.), and messaging, etc. “There’s a lot of things in the day-to-day personal productivity space that are relevant [to us], but we’re less working towards building something like Google Docs or Office for mobile – we’re focusing more on the individual,” he says, defining Any.DO’s interests.

The company will have some announcements around what its future plans may be in about a month’s time, Perchik also notes.

In the meantime, the 12-person startup is using the funding to staff its new San Francisco-based office where Perchik now works. The R&D and product team remains in Israel, but the new office will hire those on the marketing and business development side of things.

In addition, an update to the Android version of Any.DO is rolling out now which will allow Astrid app users (one of Yahoo’s many recent acquisitions) to import their data in advance of the app’s shutdown.

The PROplus iPad Keyboard from Zagg is perfect for traveling typists, as long as they can handle a little extra weight.

Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and his wife Princess Mette-Marit were in Silicon Valley this week, and I asked them about their hopes to bring more startups and innovation to their home country.

I interviewed Haakon and Mette-Marit at Norway’s Innovation House Silicon Valley, a co-working space in Palo Alto for Norwegian startups looking to enter the US market. The couple saw demos from several startups — the prince even tried on some Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles — it was part of Making View‘s demo of its technology for capturing and exploring 360-degree video footage. (He said it was “pretty awesome.”)

Haakon actually lived in the Bay Area a decade ago, when he was attending UC Berkeley. He told me that he also attended the opening of the Innovation House 18 months earlier — since then, it has been used by more than 25 companies. Norway is “constantly trying to foster a culture of innovation,” he said.

When I asked what kind of relationship they would like to see between Norway and Silicon Valley, Mette-Marit said:

I think it’s important that we have this house as a starting point. But obviously, we also have examples of companies that have been doing very good here before this house came … I think that’s important that you have some companies that have done well and are willing to take on a sort of mentoring role for the other companies coming after.

I didn’t get a chance to go into too much depth with the couple, but I though it was interesting to see them discussing these issues at all. The video concludes with a short interview and demo of technology from Elliptic Labs, one of the companies at the Innovation House. It’s developing gesture-based controls, sort of like Leap Motion, but designed to integrate with tablets and smartphones.

By the way, you might notice that I usually refer to the crown prince and princess in the third person. That’s because I was told that’s the polite way to address royalty, though I suspect I still messed it up somehow.

The technology industry’s newest high-powered political lobby, FWD.us, is unraveling just a month after it launched, as two of its biggest partners, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Yammer’s David Sacks, leave the organization. Begun with a reported $20 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s own money, and rare op-ed by the politically shy Facebook founder, FWD.us has faced a torrent of criticism over funding advertisements that praise Republicans who support the controversial Keystone pipeline (below).

Environmental groups were up in arms and circulated a boycott of FWD.us that had, ironically, had more supporters than FWD.us’s call to action. The Sierra Club, Progressives United and MoveOn.org were among a littany of progressive groups that are now boycotting Facebook avertisements. “Immigration reform – fine. Oil expansion and pipelines? NOT fine. Where’s the transparency here, rich dudes? Or does FWD actually stand for Fine With Drilling?,” wrote one angry commenter on the FWD.us Facebook page.

Elon Musk, as founder of Tesla Motors, prides himself on a sterling environmental record, so it’s easy to see why he couldn’t tolerate being associated with a group indirectly funding pro-Keystone pipeline ads. But, David Sacks doesn’t have as much to lose publically as Musk, which means that Musk is likely hooking more high-level partners with his departure.

Nor is this the group’s first PR disaster. Even before the group began, FWD.us director and Zuckerberg’s old Harvard roommate, Joe Green, had to issue a statement of regret for a leaked perspectus. “Given the status of our funders and quality of our team, we will drive national and local narratives to properly frame our agenda,” read the brash strategy note.

As we’ve written about before, FWD.us has kept a tight lid on their funding and tactics. We do know that FWD.us splits its organization into Democratic and Republican teams, offering quid pro quo cash in exchange for support of its key initiative — immigration. This kind of back-door compromising may work in D.C., but it’s evidently not as well tolerated in the Valley.

In my own off-the-record conversations with supporters, no one is happy with FWD.us right now.

It’s going to become a political landmine to stay on board, let alone join the group. FWD.us is unraveling, and we predict it won’t be around much longer unless it becomes a lot more transparent and ditches the D.C. tactics. Stay tuned for more.

One interesting thing to watch is how social networking platforms mature divergently as businesses around the world.

Sina Weibo, the public microblogging platform that has had a huge impact on online discourse in China, is veering down a path toward e-commerce and transactions after Alibaba took a stake worth $586 million in it last month. The platform is one of the two more influential social networks in China today, with the other being Tencent’s messaging app WeChat.

But unlike WeChat, Sina Weibo’s growth has slowed over the last year and its parent company Sina has had visible issues in monetizing the platform. (It feels a little bit like the heat Twitter had a few years ago for taking longer to bring in revenue-making products like promoted tweets and in-stream ads.)

“Weibo is pretty mature right now,” said Alibaba CTO Wang Jian in an interview. “It’s not in a fast growth period.”

In the Sina’s last earnings report, the company said Weibo made just under $50 million in revenue, or about 12 percent of overall advertising revenue. But investments in the company contributed to an $8.5 million operating loss for Sina last year.

Now with Alibaba’s investment, it looks like Weibo will take a different money-making path than its Western counterparts, which are more dependent on sponsored stories or in-stream ads.

“I think the best way to monetize Weibo is through e-commerce, not by ads,” Jian said. “That’s what I believe. That’s my personal thought. Weibo has a very good chance to integrate with the Alibaba business.”

It’s a win-win deal. Alibaba, which is veering toward an IPO, is China’s dominant e-commerce company and has an extremely data-driven culture. But it hasn’t been as successful with its own homegrown social networking efforts. At the same time, Sina isn’t widely considered to have the same caliber of technical talent as China’s other flagship Internet companies.

While Jian didn’t give a lot of detail on how they would integrate the two platforms, one could imagine that users could get targeted offers on goods and services related to things they’ve posted status updates about.  

“We just need time to find out how to have a synergy of data between the two companies,” Jian said. “Weibo just gave us a new challenge for that.”

As for Aliyun, the smartphone OS that Jian is overseeing, Jian says that he doesn’t think the platform will fit Weibo — which is sort of hard to believe considering that Weibo is a mobile-centric product.

“I don’t think Aliyun really fits the Weibo deal,” he said.  

While Tencent’s WeChat, which has surged to 190 million monthly active users over the past year, isn’t a direct competitor, Jian says it is in terms of other metrics.

“If you’re thinking about time that people spend on their devices, then you can say it’s a direct competitor. If you look at it from just a media perspective, I don’t think it’s direct competition. Two years ago, everyone spent time on Weibo, and now Weixin (WeChat) is becoming that app. It’s really a time spending problem.”

I’ve spent a little over three weeks with Google Glass, and I’ve noted that the utility aspect of the device is strong, but the fun isn’t there yet. It feels a lot like the original iPhone did, before it had the App Store.

In this video, we discuss some of the quick assumptions about Glass, warranted or otherwise, and give you a look through the eyes of the device in action. Stepping outside, pulling up an address, replying to an email and listening to the latest NYTimes headlines is a pretty seamless experience. Google calls the technology “calm,” since it doesn’t require you to pull a device out of your pocket, unlock a screen or tap any buttons.

The power of Glass will be unleashed once developers start building apps that consumers will love. Until then, have a look at some of the things I’ve been doing since I got the device. For those following along, I hope to have my recipe app available soon. It’s been a fun learning experience for me.

The boy geniuses of Formlabs, David Cranor, Maxim Lobovsky, and Natan Linder have posted a video detailing their Form One 3D printer, one of the most well-put-together 3D printing devices we’ve seen in a while. The Form One uses a form of stereolithography that prints the objects “upside down” by activating polymers with laser light. The resulting objects come out of a bath of plastic looking like Neo tumbling out of his oozing cocoon in The Matrix.

The team at Formlabs is testing the first 15 units and will begin shipping their devices to Kickstarter supporters over the next few weeks. They’ve also launched a support forum for beginning users, a must-have for such a nascent technology.

Beta users are testing the Form One as we speak and the team is gathering test data.

The company launched a successful Kickstarter campaign last August and they’ve been showing prototypes of the high-tech Form One for a few months now. It looks like the system is finally coming to fruition.

Yahoo has been gobbling up startups. In the last week or so, it has announced the acquisition of Astrid, GoPollGo, and Milewise. In fact, in a tweet today, Yahoo said that it has “added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team,” thanks to the three aforementioned companies — plus a mobile gaming startup called Loki Studios.

I’ve reached out to both Yahoo and Loki Studios for details about the deal, but the news seems to be confirmed on the Loki website, where the front page currently announces that the team is joining Yahoo:

It has been a difficult but immensely rewarding journey. We collaborated closely with an incredibly supportive community to continuously iterate and improve upon [Loki Sutdios’ game] Geomon. We were fortunate to have been advised by some of the best mentors in the industry and befriended many of our peers along the way. We surmounted immense obstacles, formed tightknit bonds, and worked through a few too many sunrises.

Now, our journey continues. We are thrilled to be joining the exceptional folks at Yahoo!. We believe fully in their commitment to creating outstanding mobile products. We are excited to learn from, work with, and contribute to one of the most well-known pioneers of the tech industry.

The note is signed by seven Loki team members, so it sounds like they’re all joining Yahoo.

The startup had backing from DCM’s Android-focused fund and it was also <a target="_blank" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-why-youll-be-jealous-you-didnt-go-to-stanford-inside-startx-2012-1?op=1“>part of the inaugural class at the StartX incubator for the Stanford community.

It’s not clear whether Yahoo will actually be doing anything with Loki’s technology, but in case you’re curious, the company says it was working on location-based games, starting with its title Geomon. The idea is to incorporate data about the user’s location — “including the weather, temperature, time of day, season, and geographic region” — into the game: “Therefore, playing our game on the beach on a warm, sunny day provides a different game experience from playing at home in the city on a cold, winter’s night.”

Update: Yahoo just sent me a statement announcing the deal.

Today we welcomed Loki Studios to the Yahoo! mobile team. Their experience in community and location-based mobile services is impressive and we’re excited to have them on the team.

The company said that it’s not disclosing the terms of the deal, and that Geomon will be shut down.

I’d been hearing whispers as of late that Twilio is meeting with VCs to raise another round, and I just got the good word from a very, very solid source.

I’m told that Twilio is in the process of raising a Series D, with a goal of raising around $50 million.

The talks are still rather early on. In fact, when I first got wind of the round last week, the first folks I asked were shocked that we’d already heard about it. At this point, it sounds like Twilio is aiming to close the round within the next 2 to 3 weeks. The total amount raised might change by then, but $50M is the current target.

Wondering what the heck a Twilio is? Twilio lets developers easily build things that require phone functionality. Want to build a customer service line with menus narrated by Morgan Freeman? Sure (note: bring your own Morgan Freeman. Also, someone please do this. I’ll totally write about it.) Want to build a tool that’ll text you the second Netflix’s Arrested Development revival season goes live? Already done. If you need to programmatically do something that goes down over the phone — be it SMS, voice calls, or VoIP — Twilio can probably do most of the leg work with just a few lines of code.

Twilio is actually one of my favorite companies in the valley right now, for at least two reasons: they make a damned cool product that in turn enables other damned cool products to be made, and very few people seem to realize how well they’re doing. While their CEO Jeff Lawson seems to prefer keeping their financials hush, every whisper I hear about the company suggests that they’re quietly kicking ass.

Amongst other good signs: the company is hiring like mad, to the point that they just (as in, this week) had to move into a much bigger office. They actually couldn’t find a ready-to-go office in SOMA with enough space for their growing team, so they spent the better part of the last year retrofitting a spot on Harrison Street that once served as a paper/textile factory.

Twilio has raised $33.5M to date, having most recently closed a $17M Series C at the end of 2011. If they successfully raise $50M, it’d be an injection roughly 1.5x larger than everything they’ve raised so far.

When I first started digging around this story, no one I spoke to could seem to agree on which VC firms were involved. Turns out, Twilio is just talking to a lot of firms. Two names that seem quite certain to be in talks at this point are Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners — which makes sense, as USV has been re-upping with Twilio since their Series A, and Bessemer has supported them since their Series B.

Keep an eye on these guys, if you’re not already. If things keep going as they are, I’d bet on them going public within the next year.

After Bing and its Scroogled campaign, Microsoft is now taking aim at Google Docs. Jake Zborowski, Microsoft’s senior product manager for Office, actually published two anti-Docs blog posts today: one homes in on document fidelity, and the other, which includes a number of user testimonials, argues that Google Docs isn’t quite ready for primetime.

If it took me a little while to get Michael Atalla, the director of product marketing for Office 365, to actually say “Google” in my chat with him about Microsoft’s productivity tools earlier this week, Zborowski doesn’t beat around the bush for even a second. “Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble,” he writes. “Why take the gamble on converting your Office files to Google Docs when you can use Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Web Apps to create, share and edit your Office files with your content intact?”

That, Microsoft says, is true on the web, but also on the tablet, where Google’s Quickoffice usually does a pretty good job at converting documents (though not in Microsoft’s example, of course).

So what about the new Chrome document viewer? Also too much of a gamble for Zborowski: “The last gamble with Google is how the company helps you view Microsoft Office documents using their file viewers. Even this is a gamble that may be too risky to take.”

There is, of course, also a video that accompanies the post, which reminds folks that they could lose their promotion if they decide to switch to Docs:

In his second post (“Office is a team player”), Zborowski also argues that Google Docs is missing too many features, though in this case, a number of Microsoft customers make the argument for him. Here is an example:

As we continue to improve Office, we look for changes big and small that help people do more with less effort. Some improvements are small, like the new paste options we introduced in Office 2010. Other features reduce the amount of time it takes to accomplish a task like Flash Fill and Quick Analysis in Excel. The breadth of capabilities Office can lead to significant gains in what people can accomplish. With Google Docs, on the other hand, people have to find ways to overcome feature gaps by working harder, spending their time finding workarounds, or potentially using third-party tools to overcome the gaps.

“When we switched from Google Apps to Office 365, we freed our people to work together in synergy, and it has produced good results in every area of our business.” Read more

– Andy Springer, Director, Rookie Recruits

To back all of this up, Microsoft also launched whymicrosoft.com, which includes more testimonials, screenshots and other resources for those who haven’t been scared straight yet and are still considering the switch to Google Docs.

And here is the video that goes with that post:

All of this anti-Google Docs/Drive rhetoric just before Google I/O probably isn’t accidental. With Quickoffice, Google now has the basis to offer a pretty compelling alternative to the Microsoft Web Apps (which, and Microsoft has a point there, are generally more fully-featured than Google’s tools) and I would expect the company to launch more Quickoffice-based products next Wednesday.

Facebook is not the only company to invest in development of products that take better advantage of the Android homescreen. South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk also recently announced its intentions to release a rival Android launcher. And now,  Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others have invested $1.8 million into Aviate, an ex-Googler backed intelligent homescreen for Android devices.

The round also included participation from Freestyle Capital, Draper Associates, and other angels, most notably Dan Rose, Facebook VP of Business Development and Monetization, and Keval Desai. The company actually closed on the funding in December, but is only announcing now. The funds will be used to grow the team quickly, and further develop the product.

The company behind Aviate, Palo Alto-based ThumbsUp Labs, was founded in November 2011 by a team with backgrounds in computer science, search and OS development. Co-founder Mark Daiss majored in Cognitive Science at the University of California, and previously founded Pupil, an image based Q&A app, where he also focused on the problem of bringing relevant information to smartphone users when it was most useful.

Meanwhile, Stanford grad Will Choi worked for Google on its front-end search team; and Paul Montoy-Wilson, also a Stanford grad, worked as a Product Manager for the Android Marketplace (now Google Play), and had previously co-founded customer feedback app HaveASec.

Each founder had his own take on how to make mobile phones more effective – Daiss having seen the app discovery and engagement challenges firsthand; Montoy-Wilson with insight into the Android ecosystem itself; and Choi coming at the problem from the search perspective – he wanted to rebuild mobile search from the ground up.

What Aviate Does

With the Aviate, the goal is to help mobile users de-clutter their Android homescreens, and instead view relevant information adapted to their surroundings, rather than a grid of apps. Where Facebook Home has taken over the Android environment as something of an “apperating system,” to use the term coined by Wired (referring to something in between an app and operating system), the team at Aviate believes there’s more that can be done with such technology, beyond simply optimizing your social networking experiences.

Users today have a number of mobile applications on their devices which they access regularly, and that serve a wide variety of functions. It may not make much sense to give over complete control to just one, such as is the case with Facebook Home. (Early adopters of Facebook Home seem to agree, ranking and reviewing the new app poorly.)

Other means to view app information comes in the form of push notifications and homescreen widgets – neither of which tend to be personalized or contextually aware, outside of location-aware weather widgets, perhaps. In addition, app notifications these days are borderline spam, as developers feel increased pressure to get their app’s users to return and re-engage.

How It Will Work

Aviate wants to be different by working with your favorite applications to pull in information and surface it when you need it. (The app is not yet available for testing, so we can only speak of the company’s intentions here, rather than the real-world results.)

What we do know – and the team is being cagey so far – is that the app will be downloadable from Google Play, and after installation, it will integrate deeply with the phone to upgrade the overall experience. Like Facebook Home, it’s more than an Android launcher. Aviate will organize all your applications for you, and then based on context (time, location, etc.), it will begin to adapt to you individually as it learns what apps you need, when and where.

For example, Aviate will know that when you’re at work, you may need one subset of apps, but when you’re at the gym, you might use another. It also learns what information you need at your fingertips, and surfaces that more proactively, and in a more personalized manner over time. Details on that aspect are still sparse.

Frankly, it sounds a lot like the Google Now concept, but applied to the broader world of mobile applications. Already, it seems like something Google would want to snap up for itself, but it remains to be seen how well it all really works. The company is in the process of filing several patents around the technology now, however, and if granted, those could make the company more valuable in time.

Though obviously Android is where such innovation can take place, Aviate says it has plans for an iOS version in the future.

The app will launch into private beta in the next couple of months. Users can join the waiting list here.

“House Of Cards” proved that great, exclusive content can create loyal customers. While Facebook isn’t about to produce TV shows, it tells me that it plans to ramp up production of its Facebook Live original programming starting with a talk with Star Trek celebrities today at 5:15 p.m. PST. Comedian Andy Samberg will interview film director JJ Abrams and classic cast member and social media maven George Takei.

Randi Zuckerberg, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, started Facebook Live in 2010. A website and Facebook app powered by Livestream, Facebook Live streams talks and offers an archive of past video clips. Users can discuss the videos in real time with other users and ask questions. Facebook Live moderators then pick from submitted questions, name-check the people who ask them, and pose them to the celebrities.

It featured Randi’s interviews with celebrities, as well as instructional talks on Facebook’s products and marketing tools. Later it would host Facebook’s election coverage, including Barack Obama’s town hall talk at Facebook headquarters in 2011. Over the years, Oprah Winfrey, Vin Diesel, Madonna, astronaut Ron Garan, and Israeli President Shimon Peres all came on the air.

For the last six months, though, Facebook Live has been pretty quiet. Since Bravo’s Andy Cohen interviewed Rihanna in November, the only video it’s added was from the Facebook Home launch event. While fascinating to tech insiders, there wasn’t much wide appeal.

But now, the social network is putting Facebook Live back in gear. A Facebook spokesperson for the project tells me “Facebook Live is something we’ll be utilizing more.” While more shoots haven’t been lined up, they should come at a brisker pace.

Why invest in original programming? “The purpose of Facebook Live is to give fans an opportunity to interact with public figures and give the public figures a global platform to present how they are using Facebook [or are engaged in conversations happening on Facebook] in an authentic way,” is the rather dry answer I got from the spokesperson.

But digging a bit deeper, Facebook Live accomplishes several strategic goals for the team at 1 Hacker Way. First, it can turn fans of the stars that Live brings on air into more frequent Facebook users. On the flip side, it can turn celebrities into more hard-core Facebook content creators. Facebook wants to be the place where people follow their favorite public figures, but it needs them posting frequently.

Most importantly, though, it demonstrates Facebook’s potential as a live events discussion platform. Becoming the second screen to important global events can generate tons of time-on-site and engagement. This has historically been Twitter’s domain thanks to its unfiltered, real-time feed, but Facebook wants a piece of the pie.

If you have a great time chatting with other Star Trek fans today, maybe you’ll choose Facebook to discuss the next Star Trek TV show premiere rather than on its 140-character competitor. With the potential to promote them to a billion people, Facebook shouldn’t have much trouble getting the world’s VIPs into the revamped Facebook Live studio.