Category: Tech news

This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we talk about Snapchat, DAS Keyboard, and the wild Amazon phone. This time we’re joined by Matt Burns, Darrell Etherington, Greg Kumparak, and Jordan Crook as Michelle Tanner. Enjoy!

These are the wild iPad and iPhone concepts Jordan was talking about during the podcast.

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

OpenKit, an open-source social platform for mobile games, is now open to all developers, according to co-founder Peter Relan. The service, first announced in December, has been in private beta since earlier this year. There are apparently 1,500 developers already testing the service.

Relan previously told me that he started OpenKit in response to the shutdown of OpenFeint, the GREE-acquired social platform for mobile games that he co-founded. Developers still need something like this, Relan said, and he wants to build it in a way that’s both “good business and developer friendly.”

OpenKit’s current features include cloud storage (allowing a player to save their game on one device and load it on another), leaderboards and achievements, user authentication (for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter), and plug-ins that connect games with the Unity engine. Plus, it works on both iOS and Android, and it’s being developed as an open-source project, so developers can always take their data elsewhere or use the code to build their own backend service.

OpenKit isn’t live for players yet. Relan told me today that that’s coming in a couple of months. There are more social features planned, but he said he’s specifically waiting to integrate with the Google Games service that’s rumored for the Google I/O conference next week.

At last year’s I/O, Google launched its Cloud Messaging push notification service for Android. This week, it extended this service to Chrome and Chrome OS, which, Google says, allows Chrome apps and extension developers to wake up their apps remotely and/or send alerts to users.

While mobile app developers have long been familiar with the concept of push notifications, this is a pretty novel service for web developers. Unless a Chrome app or extension is running in the background and pulling down information from the service, after all, users can’t usually receive alerts like news updates or stock ticker notifications from the developers’ servers.

Google product manager Mark Scott writes in his announcement that ”event pages keep apps and extensions efficient by allowing them to respond to a variety of events, such as timers or navigation to a particular site, without having to remain running persistently.” This works, but it does consume bandwidth and reduce battery life if you are on a laptop or Chromebook.

Cloud Messaging for Chrome, on the other hand, allows developers to push messages directly to signed-in users. As long as the user is signed in and on a machine where the app or extension is installed, the alerts should automatically start appearing.

To get developers started with this service, the Chrome team has published a couple of sample apps, as well as a pretty in-depth tutorial.

Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too.

This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before.

It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon.

Personally, I’ve never found these social search results all that useful. Microsoft, however, clearly believes that this, in combination with what they are doing around semantic search, will allow it to continue to compete with Google, which seems to have de-emphasized social search over the last few months.

With its Scroogled campaign and “Bing It On” challenge, Microsoft has obviously been taking a far more aggressive stance against Google in recent months and it’s slowly adding new users. Currently, Google has a market share of about 67 percent in the U.S., and Bing is close to reaching 17 percent.

There have been some recent rumors, however, that Yahoo is looking to drop Bing as its search provider (Yahoo currently commands just under 12 percent of the U.S. search market with its Bing-powered search), but given the long-term deal between the two companies, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

Yes, we do need high-skilled immigrants because we don’t have enough qualified workers. Contrary to a widely publicized report claiming that a tech-talent shortage is a myth, A new Brookings Institution study confirms our argument that there is a shortage and businesses need immigrants to fill the innovation vacuum.

“This report matters because accurate facts about h1B and STEM shortage is important as congressional debate moves forward about increasing the number of h1B visa and allowing more foreign STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] workers to stay in the US,” author Neil Ruiz tells me in an email, which is a not-so-subtle jab at the controversial Economic Policy Institute report claiming the opposite.

Conclusions bolded for your scanning convenience.

The Debate, In Brief

Earlier this month, the Economic Policy Institute made national headlines for a study claiming that there was no technology talent shortage, and the foreign worker visa program (H1-B) was largely a ruse to exploit cheap immigrants at the cost of natives. They argued:

1. There is a surplus of American graduates with Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) degrees
2. Wages for STEM careers are stagnant; if there was a dearth of applicants, wages would rise to attract more workers

Because of the EPI’s famously anti-H1-B stance and the fact they didn’t use common statistical techniques to control for worker demographics (like age), a lot of experts in the field wigged out. Now, a Brookings Institute study aims to quantify the wigging outage, for ammo against EPI and in support of the technology community, which has cried for a long time that the U.S. needs more foreign talent.

1. Employers Wait Months To Fill Positions

As our own technology sources have been telling us, we know there’s a shortage in qualified STEM workers because positions can go months unfulfilled. 43% of jobs in areas that commonly seek H1-B employees are unfilled after at least a month.

2. High-skilled Immigrants Earn 20% More

Rothwell and Ruiz find that H1-B workers earn, on average, 20% more than their native counterparts, which jives with previous research comparing immigrants by age, education level, and English-proficiency. In part, this finding still exposes a dark side of high-skilled immigrants: they inject a fresh pool of young applicants who are willing to work for less pay than their older, mid-career counterparts.

3. Wages Are Growing

Contrary to the Economic Policy Institute’s conclusions, the researchers find that wages in STEM fields are growing, adjusted for inflation ( 8% vs. 0% for all workers, from 2000 to 2012). At our request, they looked at data from the Department of Labor’s Current Population Survey, finding “In the three major STEM categories (Computer and Math Occupations; Architecture and Engineering; and Life, Physical, and Social Sciences), inflation adjusted median wage growth was both positive and higher than all workers 16 and over,” Rothwell tells me in an email.

(Since this was data they shared with me in an email, I’ve included it in a public Google Doc, for you wonks out there).

Ugh, Economists Debating. Who Should I believe?

When economists debate over numbers, it’s hardly fun for the American public, since they don’t have the mathematical chops to evaluate the facts for themselves. Here’s why I’m gung-ho about the Brookings piece (aside from the fact that I think it’s methodologically superior): you’d have to quite a conspiracy theorist to believe that hundreds of technology leaders could effectively coordinate a lie about immigration reform.

They’re not lying about the fact that they can’t fill positions.

Now, before our critical readers freak out, yes, the H1-B system is rotten with abuse and exploitation. Also, yes, we should be doing a better job of educating Americans. It’s an important debate to have, but let’s get the facts straight first.

Serial entrepreneur with too many ideas rattling around in your head? Then you’re going to like this one: a new mobile app called Elevatr will help you keep track of your inspirations, as well as develop a business model, in order to turn your passing thoughts into plans actually worth pursuing some day.

The beautifully designed app was dreamt up by New York-based David Spiro, a recent college of engineering and business school grad from the University of Michigan. He had spent time working with the standard tools for business model development, including the Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas, while in school.

“It became very clear that entrepreneurship – and people inspired by the startup revolution – is more than those actually studying entrepreneurship,” Spiro explains. “I was really inspired to take those tools that I was taught to use, and create a mobile-first product that could apply to more than just those people who were in my classes,” he says.

Having shelved the startup idea he had been working on in college, Spiro finally decided to commit himself to the creation of Elevatr full-time, after first doing some consulting for a local angel following graduation in spring 2012. By the end of the year, he had an MVP ready to go after contracting with Fueled, a mobile app development agency in Soho that had previously built apps for JackThreads and Urban Daddy. Spiro now works out of Fueled’s offices, and has hired a small team (with help from AngelList), including CTO Rafael Amorim.

The product itself is simple. Elevatr is essentially a note-taking app that takes the structure of a traditional business plan and makes it more accessible to design and develop on the smaller screen of mobile devices. After tapping the button to add your idea, the app prompts you to describe the idea in 140 characters or fewer, just like Twitter.

That’s actually a challenge for some entrepreneurs, who can’t seem to condense their business’ idea to a single sentence, as we’ve discovered in the past, much less 140 characters. But Spiro thinks it’s a good first step, noting “if you can’t explain it in less than 140 characters, you probably don’t know what you’re doing.”

On the following screens, you’re walked through the other standard pieces to business-model creation, filling out details as to the target market, market size, competition, differentiation, features and uses, and so on. There’s also plenty of room for free-form note making in Elevatr, so you can really flesh out your ideas and plans.

At launch, the app is designed for personal use, but the team already has the intention to expand its capabilities in the near future. Next week, an option to export your ideas to a responsive website will be introduced, essentially turning your notes into a more fully developed online deck of sorts that you can share with others in order to get feedback. In addition, collaboration will be built into the app, which will allow you to invite others to view or comment on the content, given their permission levels.

Another idea for future expansion is to partner with other companies – agencies like Fueled, for example – giving them access to an administrative interface that would allow them to leverage the service to sort through a larger group of startup ideas, like those submitted as part of a contest, for instance.

That, and some other advanced features, may be paid options in the future, but currently the app itself is a free download here on iTunes.

Elevatr has a small amount of friends and family funding, but is now raising an angel round upwards of $500,000.

This week, Bloomberg sparked a number of headlines with reports that iPad mini demand was failing based on supplier Pegatron’s earnings numbers as revealed at an investor conference. Those claims were later refuted by Pegatron CEO Jason Cheng, who argued that Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan had misquoted him to reach his conclusion about iPad mini numbers.

The problem here is one that comes up repeatedly for Apple watchers, namely that of trying to divine from scattered sources what the future holds for the iPhone maker. Reports of slowdowns, layoffs or weak fiscal results from any number of supplier companies, including Pegatron, Foxconn and Sharp have bloggers feverishly pounding keys, predicting dire straits for Apple to come. The problem is, these have never been a very strong indicator of what’s actually going on with Cupertino and its products, and for good reason.

As Fortune’s Phillip Elmer-DeWitt learned from Cheng via email, Pegatron has a wide customer base and never breaks out how each of those are affecting its bottom line or its quarterly financial outlook. Pegatron has its fingers in all kinds of pies, including home video game consoles and e-readers, both of which are currently suffering badly in terms of consumer sales.

Here’s a look back at some equally dire reports from recent memory that also turned out not to have any relation whatsoever to anything Apple was doing, performance-wise.

Video discovery startup Boxfish wants to help people find out what’s new and trending on TV, by scouring broadcast and cable networks to find out what people are talking about. After making its second-screen discovery application available for iOS, the startup has just released an Android version, and is opening up to allow other developers to take advantage of the technology it’s built.

To recap: Boxfish works by scanning network satellite signals for captions and figuring out which words or topics or phrases are being talked about across a wide number of TV programs. It started with a real-time TV search engine, letting its users say where and when certain topics are being mentioned. But it’s expanded to enable users to see which topics are most popular.

The result was an app for the iPad providing a “Live Video Guide” to what’s new and important on TV. That app, not surprisingly, was also designed with the idea of connecting to users’ set-top boxes or TVs and allowing them to control the TV and switch the channel to things that they find interesting on the app.

With the launch on Android, Boxfish will be available to even more phones and tablets and users, bringing all the same trending and favorites options that iPad users had. One big new feature that it added with Android, though, was the ability to use Google’s voice recognition technology to talk to the app and search for shows or whatever without having to type them out.

But Boxfish isn’t looking to just be another consumer-facing app. It’s realized that the data it collects could also be useful to third parties. So it’s making its real-time TV API available to some partners and allowing them to use it in their own apps. That includes big consumer electronics manufacturers which may seek to provide a real-time data or trending layer on top of their existing TV guides.

The data is also being made available to universities — like the University of California, Berkeley or Columbia University — for their media schools to better understand the topics that are being discussed on 24-hour news networks, for instance. Other applications include real-time fact checking and sentiment analysis.

Boxfish was founded in 2011, and has raised $3 million in funding led by T-Venture, the Venture Capital arm of Deutsche Telekom.

Who wants to see some boobs?

Thanks to a new feature from Brayola, the startup looking to pair your boobs with the right bra, you can not only check out an endless stream of breasts but perhaps you can even find a bra that fits correctly.

According to the company, 80 percent of women are wearing the wrong size bra. Shocking, no? But the new Fit or Not feature from Brayola aims to change all that, and not in the most traditional way you might imagine.

Brayola already helps women find the right bra by asking them to give information on their favorite bras that they already own. Tell the service about the make, model and size of your favorite bras, and its engine will help you find more bras that will fit in a similar way.

With Fit or Not, the company is trying to help educate users on sizing, as that’s the most important factor in purchasing a bra that you’ll love and be comfortable in.

To start out with Fit or Not, you try on a bra and (prepare yourself for this) take a picture of your boobs. Brayola monitors all pictures uploaded to the service to ensure that no one’s face is ever pictured. Obviously, a tattoo or incriminating birthmark will blow all that anonymity to shreds if shown to the right person, so it’s understandable if the idea is a bit panic-inducing.

However, founder Orit Hashay believes that since the photos don’t show anyone’s face, are uploaded under usernames or handles (as opposed to being attached to your real name) and are uploaded to a community of fellow bra-wearing women, it’s not quite as risky as one might think.

Once the photo is uploaded, users of the service instantly have the option to say yes, no, or pass. Then, a “bra expert” steps in and makes the final call.

I know what you’re thinking — if 80 percent of women are wearing the wrong size bra, why would I care what they think about the fit of my bra. They’re clearly misinformed.

But hold up just one second. In reality, the polling is more for those voting than for the woman trying on a bra. According to Hashay, women want to know whether or not they guessed right on the fit of a bra, and are many times surprised when a bra expert steps in and says that the majority of voters were actually wrong.

To Hashay, it’s a feature centered around education.

To use Fit or Not or Brayola in general, head on over to the website and sign up.

As a parent of three technically savvy kids I find it disturbing that we haven’t even “scratched” the surface of Scratch, an amazing, object-oriented programming language from the MIT Media Lab’sLifelong Kindergarten Group. That may change, however, as it’s much easier to get started in Scratch thanks to a new release of the platform that lives entirely in the browser.

You can try the programming language here and the new version allows for webcam interaction with the on-screen sprites and you can now add vector-based graphics that will scale without losing resolution. You can also create your own programming “blocks” and add new logic to your programs or games.

The new interface is similar to the old, desktop-based system except it’s a bit simpler and you can store your programs on your computer and then upload them anywhere. A “backpack” will hold objects from one project to the next so you can bring sprites and backgrounds with you to new games. Everything runs smoothly right in the browser. You can see a Scratch-generated tour of 2.0 here or you can just start playing.

The platform is great for kids of all ages and it’s a far sight better than most early computer education which consists mostly of typing tutorials and Microsoft Office lessons. If you’re looking for a STEM star and not a cubicle drone, this is the platform for you.

The Archos Bluetooth Keyboard is a nearly weightless addition to your iPad, but you’ll have to put your fingers through boot camp to use it.

The Clek Foonf child car seat is expensive, but it addresses numerous safety issues and legal requirements, and has the design flourishes to please your inner retro sci-fi geek.

The Razer Edge makes a lousy tablet, but it’s a great gaming machine — as long as you have an outlet nearby.

LinkedIn, now at 225 million users, continues to introduce more features to its site to keep people returning to the it and staying there for longer. Today it’s the turn of LinkedIn Today, its social news page, which is getting a new feature called Channels. The feature is rolling out starting today to English-speaking users. LinkedIn says that it plans to announce the service formally on Wednesday.

Channels bring together curated content around general subjects like technology, marketing strategies, retail and healthcare — 20 in all, with more getting added soon — with each one combining popular posts from news sources with those from selected influencers in the given topic.

Channels will be replacing “industries,” a feature that has been around since LinkedIn first launched LinkedIn Today in 2011. Industries were both more specific in terms of what they covered, and also more geared at news that was trending on the site, and specifically among your contacts.

Channels, on the other hand, attempts to be more interdisciplinary, making use of the idea that there will be people interested in “social media” who are not social media professionals. It also gives some more mileage to the list of 250+ influencers that LinkedIn introduced in October 2012, with their posts also getting rolled into the news mix. It looks like over time, this could also include added multimedia such as presentations using SlideShare and more.

“We believe Channels better represents the content and topical conversations professionals are discussing and sharing on LinkedIn, which go beyond specific industries,” said spokesperson Julie Inouye. “Topics like Entrepreneurship and Your Career are applicable to more than just one industry.”

Last week’s quarterly earnings showed LinkedIn still beating sales targets and earnings estimates, but the company’s stock still took a hit on evidence that revenue growth is slowing down. In that sense, the move to enhance LinkedIn today is more about improving the time its audience spends on the site, and the subsequent knock-on positive effect this could have on advertising, rather than as a direct route to revenue itself.

“Our influencers are not compensated to share their unique insights on LinkedIn and we do not have plans at this time to monetize our Channels pages or our Influencer platform,” Inouye said.

In the last several months LinkedIn has introduced a number of changes. They’ve included upgraded, more media-enhanced profiles; a Contacts update to add in more “personal assistant” life organizing features; new iPhone and Android apps; an expanded search engine; @mentions in status updates; Klout-style endorsements; and a Recruiter homepage redesign for the site’s most dedicated user vertical. As with many of these other enhancements, LinkedIn Today, and its new channels feature, offer a more slick look and more functionality.

Product manager Kevin Gu notes that among the new features that will come along with the new channels will be the ability to see the updates from channels on your own homepage stream; the ability to sort content either by most recent news or most popular features; and a look at the top influencer posts on a given day. On top of this, users will also see channels making their way to their LinkedIn email digests, which will now include influencer posts, trending professional news as well as Slideshare content.

Cisco Meraki has launched a new service called Presence that provides data about mobile behavior across location and automatic log-in to wireless hotspots using a person’s Facebook account.

Presence additionally provides an API that allows integration with real-time location data into CRM and other business systems. Presence also allows for third-party data integration that can be analyzed with location-based information.

Merak was acquired by Cisco last November for $1.2 billion. According to Josh Constine’s post, Meraki began as a research project at MIT in 2006. It provides mid to large-size companies, schools, and organizations with on-premise mesh Wi-Fi networking and security devices plus the software to manage them. Its technology is now integrated into Cisco access points. According to the blog, with Presence, customers get an analytics dashboard that displays real-time metrics such as capture rate, median visit length, and visitor repeat rate for mobile devices in proximity to Meraki access points.

The service has uses in retail to give a marketing manager access to data that may show how long they look at a window display or if an in-store promotion drew them to the store. That data can then be correlated to revenue data and third-party CRM data.

Cisco and Facebook have also partnered to let guests log-in to Wi-Fi networks with their Facebook account. This seems pretty unique and an example of how Facebook is becoming a universal identity provider. It benefits the client who can use the Facebook login to make it simpler for their customers to get wireless access.

Now just think of what all this additional data provides to Facebook. They get data to target ads for the retail customer or perhaps a coffee shop down the street that wants to draw traffic with a special drink offer for a dry latte with extra foam.

Privacy. Well, this is the elephant in the room, isn’t it? The Meraki blog makes a point of saying they do not collect personal data. That it’s nothing more than understanding customer behavior.

In summary, Meraki collects no personally identifiable information (e.g., we don’t see or store a user’s Facebook credentials). Clients’ MAC addresses, used to construct location analytics dashboards, are hashed and truncated before being stored in Meraki’s cloud so they cannot be associated with an individual device (i.e. there’s no data stored that can show that a given device was at a specific location.) Users can also opt-out of Meraki’s Presence data collection across all Meraki networks; we won’t store MAC addresses — hashed or otherwise — and Presence events will not be passed through the API.

But here’s the thing. Data analytics is about correlating information. A retailer may not need to know who you are with one set of data. But they can always cross-reference it with other information to know exactly who the customer is, how they got there, what they did in the store and where they went after leaving.

So sure, everyone takes privacy seriously. But it’s up to the vendor and the client to be responsible in how to handle the power that they gain from all that information.