Category: Tech news

Even if you’ve got no idea what the Havok engine is, you’ve probably seen it in use before. Name a best-selling video game, and the odds that it’s using Havok in one way or another are pretty huge. Halo 4? Check. Assassins Creed? Check. Skyrim, Uncharted, or Call Of Duty? Check, check, check.

This morning at GDC, Havok announced Project Anarchy, a 3D engine for mobile games that they plan to release this spring. The twist? They don’t want your money.

If you’ve never dabbled with 3D gaming engines before, here’s all you’ve gotta know: the licensing can be… sticky. While most of them offer up evaluation licenses of some sort, they generally expect you to cough up a chunk of change once you start making any significant amount of money. There are definitely exceptions to this trend (see: the fantastic Unity3D, which has a free product but charges by developer seat for Pro features, and Irrlicht or Ogre3D, both of which are free and open-source), but most of the big-name engines (Source, Unreal, CryENGINE) have stuck to this licensing model for years.

So why would Havok just give away its new mobile engine? Out of the kindness of their hearts? Perhaps. But remember: Intel bought Havok in 2007. Intel is making a hard push into mobile. People love mobile games. If Intel can make sure Intel-powered phones run a few hugely popular games better than anyone else’s phones, it works out to more OEMs stuffing Intel chips in their handsets moving forward.

Interested developers can sign up for news on the project here, with initial availability expected sometime this Spring.

Facebook stood loud and tall at today’s Gaming Developers Conference, revealing that around 200 games on Facebook.com boast more than 1 million active users. Plus, more than $2 billion was paid out to game developers over the course of 2012. That’s an increase of 30% over 2011 levels.

The number of Facebook gamers has steadily risen over the last two years, from 205 million in August of 2011 to 235 million in August 2012. Now, Facebook has surpassed the 250 million mark.

However, Facebook has yet to hit the same level of gamers it saw in 2010 as the percentage of Facebook users who are gaming on the platform is actually decreasing. In 2010 around 50 percent of Facebook’s users were gamers, which would roughly amount to 250 million gamers.

Still, Facebook is clearly generating growth where it matters: engagement and revenue. The total number of payers on Facebook has increased 24 percent in the past year, and 20 percent of Facebook’s daily users play games on the social network.

The social network also announced that 55 percent of the top 400 iOS apps are integrated with Facebook. In fact, Facebook drove 263 million clicks to Apple’s App Store and Google Play from mobile.

The increase in activity has apparently played out well for developers, too, who received $2 billion in payouts from Facebook in 2012. According to Facebook’s own report, more than 100 developers generated more than $1 million from Facebook in 2012. Of course, this same report fails to mention the number of unsuccessful development ventures, too.

Facebook’s gaming heyday might be behind it, but it’s still growing the business and funding a large number of developers’ yacht funds.

Build is Microsoft’s developer conference for its Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Server and Azure platforms, and the company just announced that Build 2013 will take place June 26-28 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Registration will open Tuesday, April 2, at 9am PT, and early-bird pricing for the first 500 registrants starts at $1,595.

As Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and chief evangelist, notes in today’s announcement, “it’s been a while since our last developer event in the Bay Area.” The last Build, which happened last October, right after the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 launch, took place in Redmond, where the company erected a massive tent on its sprawling campus to host a few thousand developers. Build 2011 was held in Anaheim California.

Guggenheimer, of course, didn’t reveal anything about the company’s plans for Build besides saying that Microsoft will “have updates and talk about what’s next for Windows, Windows Server, Windows Azure, Visual Studio and more. Build is the path to creating and implementing your great ideas, and then differentiating them in the market.”

Blue

Earlier today, however, Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of corporate communications, publicly acknowledged that “product leaders across Microsoft are working together on plans to advance our devices and services, a set of plans referred to internally as ‘Blue.’” This, as far as I can see, marks the first time the company has publicly acknowledged this project, and chances are we will hear quite a bit more about it come June 26.

As is tradition at Microsoft now, Shaw also took a less-than-subtle swipe at Google in an earlier post today. “While some folks were out doing ‘spring cleaning,’ we used the opportunity to look back a bit at what has happened in the past season, and to look ahead at what we have coming,” he wrote in the post, which recapped some of Microsoft’s product releases over the last year.

The Jambox (or its many equivalents) is fine, but I much prefer the experience of visiting second-hand shops around the city in hopes of finding a tower speaker relic that smells musty but still has a richness of sound and vintage appeal. Now a new Kickstarter project wants to help make sure proper speakers (the kind with removable cloth covers built strictly for sound first and style second) can easily take advantage of Bluetooth.

The Vamp is a little cube that has old-school positive and negative speaker cable connectors, along with 3.5mm audio input in case your device doesn’t have Bluetooth, a micro USB port for power and an on-off switch. It offers an internal rechargeable battery good for over 10 hours of use, and can be plugged in for continuous power as well. One of its most impressive tricks is a built-in magnet that pairs with a supplied metallic disc to attach to any vertical surface for convenient placement.

The problems the Vamp addresses that other Bluetooth stereo receivers don’t include style, affordability and sound. It offers high-quality mono audio, which is intended to be used with speakers made for high-quality sound output. It’s expected to retail for £45 (and is available via Kickstarter pre-order for £35), and maybe best of all, it doesn’t require a constant external power source, unlike a lot of similar options. You could actually take it with you to a friend’s house and wire their existing setup for Bluetooth sound, without an electrical engineering degree or access to the back of their home audio receiver.

The Vamp is created by UK-based product designer Paul Cocksedge, who has worked on products for BMW, Swarovski, Sony and Hermes. Some of his past work is exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in London. Cocksedge and his studio have worked on sound amplification projects in the past, include gadgets that naturally enhance sound from mobile devices like iPhones. The Vamp looks to be their first proper electronic device, but working prototypes have already found favor with early reviewers.

The Vamp claims to have sound quality that’s “richer and more textured” than the standard Bluetooth portable speaker available, and it looks to go quite a bit louder as well. Quality concerns aside, it’s a nice, relatively inexpensive way to upcycle speakers that in many cases have only gotten better with age, and are being rudely pushed out by younger models.

Jelli, the radio startup offering local stations tools that allow their listener base to control the music selection and playlists, has just been awarded a patent on the concept of user-controlled broadcasting. The patent (U.S. Patent No. 8,392,206) is dubbed “Social Broadcasting User Experience,” and refers to a range of methods related to audience participation with a one-to-many transmission, regardless of the transmission method.

According to Jelli CEO Michael Dougherty, the patent was filed a long time ago – back in 2007, as a provisional patent – before the startup had even launched. In 2008, Jelli submitted a full patent filing, which was actually part of several patents the company filed around this and similar concepts the team has invented.

“We always thought it was a big idea to combine the reach of broadcast with the engagement of the web,” says Dougherty.

The patent broadly covers “the concepts and user interaction methods around audiences engaging with one-to-many ‘broadcasts,’ whether they be defined as radio, TV, in-venue, etc., or delivered via streaming, terrestrial, caching, cable, satellite, etc.,” Dougherty tells us. “It also covers many methods and UI examples of how the audiences can socially engage,” he adds. This includes playlist voting, algorithms to determine what is chosen next, a rock meter, Jelli’s own “rocket” design, game mechanics, social attribution, and various access methods.

For background, Jelli first launched its service in 2009, calling itself a “Digg for streaming music,” which referenced the way it allowed users to vote up or down the tracks they wanted to hear. Unlike Pandora, which focuses on delivering personalized radio stations for individuals, Jelli brings a listener base together to collaboratively vote on the music they want to hear using crowdsourcing techniques.

The company raised an additional $9 million in funding this past October, in a round led by new investors Intel Capital and Relay Ventures, and which saw participation from existing investor First Round Capital, as well as individuals like Roger Ames, former Chairman of EMI Music. At the time, the company reported that 70 radio stations across the U.S. were now using its technology to crowdsource their music selections, which was up from the 20 partnerships it had as of March 2012.

Jelli then announced this February that it had signed a deal with Entercom, bringing its total platform reach to 23.5 million weekly listeners across 175+ radio stations and 80+ cities. It now reports serving more than 2 billion ad impressions annually. (The startup had previously reported 60 million terrestrial radio spot impressions per month as of last fall). Also for comparison’s sake, the 23.5 million listeners metric was a big jump up from the 650,000 it had previously announced in May 2012.

Dougherty declined to comment on how Jelli would proceed with licensing or enforcing the patent now that it’s been granted, but it’s worth noting that the company is not alone in building out tools for listener-controlled radio. LDR Interactive, for example, offers a white-labelled solution of sorts, which Cox Media recently began experimenting with here in the U.S. LDR has also built similar “crowdcasting” solutions for more than 150 stations worldwide.

Simpler, a new startup that wants to disrupt employee onboarding, is launching today and announcing $1.25 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, Data Collective, AngelPool, Kenny Van Zant, Alex Bard, Gary Benitt, Elad Gil, Sid Henderson and Formation8. Simpler is in private beta, and companies can sign up here.

The startup, which is the brainchild of gaming startup TinyCo co-founder (who left the company two years ago) Ian Spivey, and Ivan Kim and Bo Shi, is a solution for the new-hire paperwork problem. As Spivey explains, when he hired people at TinyCo there was always the requisite huge stack of papers that new employees had to fill out on the first day, including tax forms, health care forms, employee agreements and more. He said he wished he had an easy onboarding tool. He adds that the process is the same for startups or for Fortune 500 companies.

So when he left TinyCo he set about trying to create a cloud-based tool that managed new-hire paperwork without the paper, essentially creating paperless onboarding. Simpler, digitizes all the forms that companies need for employee onboarding.

The customer sends Simpler their current on-boarding packet and Simpler digitizes it. HR admins can then enter a new employee’s name, start date and email, and select the type of packet they’ll get (e.g. full time vs. contractor), and the employee will receive an e-mail with a link to their employee portal, which contains all the docs they need to fill out.

Employees then review the documents and sign the forms via an e-signature feature. The documents are submitted for approval, and the HR reps can see what areas where action is required or fields are missing. Administrators can also track employee progress.

Finally, completed documents are sent to third-party service providers like payroll and benefits brokers. The eventual output is a set of documents in a PDF that can be emailed, as well. The workflow as a whole is simple and easy, and doesn’t waste employee or HR time.

As Spivey explains, the company is focusing on a specific part of human capital management, which is a multi-billion dollar opportunity.

Pricing is still being determined, we’re told.

Google just announced that it will send out invitations in the next few days to those who participated in its #ifihadglass campaign. Later this week, it will contact those who had the best ideas through Google+ and Twitter and invite them to purchase Glass for $1,500 and then pick up their devices at a number of events that the company is planning in San Francisco, New York and L.A. later this year. It’s not clear when exactly Google plans to ship these Glass Explorer Editions.

During I/O last year, Google allowed developers to pre-register for Glass, but it’s been very quiet about the program ever since. Given that it is about to make its selection for the #ifihadglass program public (and with the next I/O kicking off just a few weeks from now), chances are the company will also provide an update to these pre-registered developers soon.

For now, Google stressed in today’s Google+ post, the program is only open to individuals. “We also want to call out that we received great applications from businesses. At the moment, our Explorer Program is only for individuals. However, we are working on connecting with businesses in other ways,” the Google+ team writes.

@lavr_mvlno You’re invited to join our #glassexplorers program. Woohoo! Make sure to follow us – we’ll DM in the coming weeks.—
Project Glass (@projectglass) March 26, 2013

Like the lighthearted side of the web? Take the laughs offline by downloading these dedicated apps from entertainment websites.

It’s tax season, and you know what that means: it’s time to shred everything.

Startup founders just getting their projects off the ground can be so focused on finding money, period, that they don’t think about being choosy about who it comes from. But according to August Capital partner David Hornik, founders should think just as much about the “who” as they do about the “how much” before inking a VC deal: Finding compatible investors personality-wise is just as important to the success of a startup as the dollar figures on the check, he says.

We had the pleasure of spending some time talking to Hornik earlier this month at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas about what it means to find the proverbial “smart money” and how entrepreneurs can go about doing it. Watch the video embedded above to hear about that, why he disagrees with Vinod Khosla on whether entrepreneurs and investors should be friends, the founder personalities he finds himself gravitating towards, whether the pool of startup founders he’s seen has become more diverse in Hornik’s 13 year career as a VC, and more.

“We’re going to have more visibility and less privacy. I don’t see how you stop that,” admitted New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a surprisingly candid interview about the future of the surveillance state in the Big Apple.

While admitting that increased surveillance was “scary” and that governments will have to be thoughtful with their laws, he seemed to side with prioritizing radical transparency, especially through the use of automated drones, “but what’s the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building? I mean intellectually I have trouble making a distinction.”

This puts Bloomberg squarely at odds with the growing number of states and congress members either enacting or proposing moratoriums on the use of drones.

Indeed, he went on to imply that the fears against drones were somewhat unjustified, especially since security cameras already exist:

“The argument against using automation, it’s this craziness– oh, it’s Big Brother. Get used to it. When there’s a murder, a shooting, a robbery of something the first thing the police do is go to every single building in the neighborhood and say let’s see your security camera.”

The NY Daily news notes that the New York Civil Liberties union has identified roughly 2,4000 cameras already affixed on Manhattan buildings–a presence that is likely to increase if Bloomberg’s most recent interview is to be believed.

Lest Bloomberg be labeled as a surveillience hawk, the interview took on a tone of inevitability, rather than advocacy: “Everybody wants their privacy, but I don’t know how you’re going to maintain it.”

Listen to part of the interview with WOR-AM host John Gambling, below. We’ll have more analysis soon.

If there is one sliver lining in the Google Reader shutdown that has enraged the blogosphere (OK fine, the tech blogosphere), it’s the fact that Google offers a way for Reader users to export their RSS subscriptions using its Google Takeout service. Actually, Google Takeout lets users of most major Google services remove their data from the Google ecosystem at any time. This is how it should be done.

As I sat through the demo for yet another mobile/social/data-hungry app this week – one that probably won’t make it a year before quietly slinking off into the ether of the deadpool – it struck me how radically the web has changed the disposability of our tools; the tools that allow us to create, interact with and share our data.

We’ve become a bit too naive, blind and trusting in terms of where we’ve been putting our data lately. Though for all its faults, at least Google has committed to making our RSS subscriptions and other data portable. And Twitter now allows for archive exports.

But everyone else? Who knows?

Our data, our personal data, is what all of today’s consumer-facing services are building themselves on top of. They’re our thoughts du jour, our photographs and videos, our daily habits, the places we go or plan to go, our real-world interpersonal connections, our hobbies and interests, our news-reading preferences, each step we take, each emoji-filled message we send, each game we play, our scores, our kids our pets, and so on.

It’s good and fine and right that the tools we use to interact with all the above change regularly. That we’re allowed to go through phases and trends with one eye on the horizon for what’s next.

Maybe we’re too caught up in ever-changing trends to have a moment to stop and think about the digital wake we create or what responsibility it is of anyone to manage it.

For instance, maybe we won’t always be into photo filters, and will rather look back at pictures from the 2010′s the way a Gen Xer looks back on stirrup pants and jelly bracelets and popped collars on jean jackets. Or how a Gen Yer looks back on overalls and Blossom hats and t-shirts, knotted to the side.

Oh, a photo-filtered picture, we’ll laugh at our younger selves, shaking our heads. I know when that one’s from.

Maybe we’ll also laugh about that phase we went through where we hung out in private hidey-holes on mobile like Path, WhatsApp, Viber, Tango and SnapChat, eschewing the drama of lives lived in public on the social backbone that is Facebook.

Or maybe not.

Maybe we’re too caught up in ever-changing trends to have a moment to stop and think about the digital wake we create or what responsibility it is of anyone to manage it. Maybe all we care about is the new new thing, even as servers shut down, deleting our terabytes of virtual creations. Who needs them anyway? The Library of Congress has our tweets. What else matters?

I kid, I kid.

But here’s the thing: It’s a given that almost all apps will come to the end of their independent lives at some point, and often they will come to the end of their actual lives – whether through “declining usage,” as cited by Google regarding the Reader shutdown, or because they failed to live up to the hype (see: 95 percent of startups), or because they did live up to the hype, and that hype happened to have a price tag attached that can’t be resisted.

And there are just so many startups now. So many seed-funded. So many apps. So many platforms – web, mobile, tablet, TV, car, body…brain?

Should we be okay with the fact that with a thousand tiny little deaths, our data trails die, too?

Users who fawned over an app’s creation, contributing their time and energy into making New-Fangled SOLOMO Photo Sharing InstaBot Checkin Whatnot the “next big thing,” don’t get a portion of the final paycheck when the exit is good. And when things go badly, they sometimes don’t even get to say goodbye. The app just disappears.

Should we be okay with the fact that with a thousand tiny little deaths, our data trails die, too? Because that’s what’s happening. Even Google’s Takeout solution is not perfect. We might have our subscriptions, but what of our tags, our stars, our custom RSS-based search engines that can pull up blog posts from sites that have long since disappeared from the face of the public Internet?

Gone, gone, gone for as much as Google cares.

Startups like Feedly and others at least are playing the role of digital EMT – zapping our dying data back to life. (Pro tip: re-create your exact, case-sensitive Reader tags in Feedly’s preferences to save your Reader tag history. You’re welcome.) Similarly, Posthaven recently launched as a paid service to store Posterous data forever, following its Twitter acquisition.

These kinds of rescue attempts are still rare, though. And for smaller services getting shut down, no one bothers.

Our (web) castles are made of sand, and the tides are regular. Can we start taking data portability more seriously please?

P.S. From this point forward, and with a nod to Google for the inspiration, I will ask your startup this: What happens to my data when you die?

Have an answer ready.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Our beds used to be finite. A limited range of activities took place there. We’d sleep, or try to, make love, eat, and maybe read a paperback. But we could only hide from the world for so long. The nagging puppet strings of our desire to learn and experience would pull taught. Eventually we had to rise. Then we found someone to cuddle with.

She filled our squinting eyes with wonder. Endless possibility could suddenly curl up in the comforters with us.

Our friends, in our bed.

A library, in our bed.

An office, even, one we could attend naked or hungover or asocial, confined in the cosy confines of where we rest our heads.

The alarm clock’s red face has turned green with envy. Her function just another replaced by our new mistress. But why even set it when there’s no place left to go. If I can be anywhere and learn everything whilst luxuriating in linen, reasons to emerge get sparse.

Secretly our beds always long for more of our attention. Those cold mornings when you were sure you could feel the cling of its embrace, tempting you to stay. Now they have our time, even if our affection must be shared.

Meanwhile we slowly wither / legs we’d stand upon grow thinner / When does seeking turn to sloth? / As we fear to turn them off. The only thing that could convince us to escape our quilted prison? / Percentage points tick down and light goes dark within our prisms.

But if our outlets are located / within reach of where we’re laying / electrons will continue filling / in the data we keep swilling / So there’s still a steady stream of infotainment overfed…

My phone and I are never, ever getting out of bed.

It’s been said that there aren’t many apps available for Windows 8. I’ve said that on occasion. But that’s not entirely true. According to the MetroStoreScanner.com, there are now more than 50,000 apps available for Windows 8 and Windows RT, effectively making me a liar.

The site aggregates applications available to the Windows Store. If it’s available on the Windows Store, you can find it listed with pertinent details here. The site also provides basic data for application uploads.

According to the site, there are now 50,304 applications available for Windows 8 but uploads have slowed since Windows 8′s November launch. In fact, until just this month, the average number of new applications hitting the Store, at least per this source, has declined each month.

Ignoring the inherent differences of targeting different markets, Windows 8′s cloud application distribution service is growing much more rapidly than Apple’s counterpart. Apple’s own Mac App Store launched in 2010 and currently lists only 14,000 apps, according to AppShopper.com. Of course, since Windows 8′s store also serves tablets, it’s a little unfair to compare the two (there are 376,144 iPad apps).

But even with a healthy 50K apps, as a Windows 8 user myself, I have yet to find many compelling applications. There’s Netflix, Plex, and Xbox SmartGlass — all the rest I’ve tried are pathetic ports of iOS applications. I tend to stick to traditional applications that run in Desktop.

It’s clear that Microsoft has succeeded to some degree. 50,000 applications available four months after launch is impressive, but Redmond still needs to incentivize developers to produce compelling applications designed for Windows 8 first and not last.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — convened with Gillmor in Boston and the Gang in California. We took another cut at the Google Reader damage, with @dannysullivan hating on notifications and @scobleizer hating on Android’s notifications. Did I say I told him so? Yes I did.

But the mere fact we spent so much time on the stream’s destruction of Windows and RSS proved the point all along (for me since 2009). Namely, that the new platform is the stream, and the resulting multiplexed meritocracy of the combined social and messaging networks is where the developers will go. As Dylan said, “even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”

@stevegillmor, @dannysullivan, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

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