Category: Tech news

Samsung’s S Band and updated S Health app are brand new features added to the Galaxy S 4. The updated S Health app improves upon the S Health design debuted in the Galaxy S III. It takes advantage of a new built-in pedometer for tracking steps, as well as ambient temperature and humidity, and the app also tracks food nutrition information from a database.

The S Band is a brand new accessory that has its own pedometer, to keep you tracking your steps even when you don’t have the phone on you. Everything also plays nice with third-party accessories and devices, meaning it’ll connect to heart rate monitors and more to give you a much more comprehensive view of your overall health picture.

Developing…

As if it could be any other way, the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S 4 is Samsung’s, and perhaps even Android’s, best phone yet. In fact, it very well may be the best smartphone on the market, period.

We’ve been through months of speculation, hype, rumors, and leaks, but the truth is out, and the Galaxy S 4 still has much more up its sleeve than the leaks suggested. More than any other Galaxy before it, the Galaxy S 4 is proof that the company can build a central brand the way Apple has with the iPhone. Both the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S series have been selling in the millions, and the Galaxy S 4 looks like it will hold up that trend.

Even with loads of new software, like an enhanced camera application, hover-style gesture features, and a slew of baked-in apps and services from Samsung, the Galaxy S 4 still brings the heat in the hardware/spec department. Here are the specifics:

The Galaxy S 4 clearly has a small ring of competition in the spec department. The only phones that are on this level are the Xperia Z (1080p 5-inch display, 13mp camera, quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU) and the HTC One (4.7-inch 1080p display, 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600 quad-core CPU, and an “Ultrapixel” camera) and LG’s Optimus G Pro (1080p 5.5-inch display, quad-core Snapdragon 600, 13-megapixel camera).

Of course, they each have their own pros and cons, but the Galaxy S 4 seems to be the most compact, lightest, and fastest among them. Samsung hasn’t been clear about the exact brand of the processor for the U.S. version, but it did say that it was a quad-core Snapdragon CPU clocked at 1.9GHz, which we believe may be the Snapdragon 600.

However, “processors vary by region,” says Samsung, and the Asian and European version will sport the long-awaited Samsung Exynos 5 Octa eight-core processor.

The Galaxy S 4 design manages to both fit in with the Galaxy S family and stand on its own as a unique breed. For one, Samsung packed a bigger display (5-inches diagonal) into a package that’s actually smaller than before. The GS4 is the same width, slightly shorter, and .7mm thinner than its predecessor.

As such, the bezels on the Galaxy S 4 are slightly thinner on all four sides, which means it’s all screen, all the time. And what a screen it is. The Galaxy S 4 display is 5 inches of unadulterated Super AMOLED 1080p brilliance. Surrounding it, the Galaxy S 4 takes a hybrid shape, something between the straight lines of the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II with the curved tops, bottoms, and corners of the Galaxy S III. The elongated home button is unmistakably GSIII-style.

The Galaxy S 4 also sticks with familiar materials, and unfortunately that still means a whole lot of plastic. Both the front panel and back panel (which is removable) are made of brushed plastic, but with a textured pattern of tiny circles laid over it. It gives the phone an industrial, textured look, but in reality all you feel is smooth plastic.

Around the edge, you’ll notice a new embellishment to the S series: a metallic bar that runs along the edge of the device. Though it looks a lot like metal, it’s actually polycarbonate and meant to protect the sensitive corners of the device.

It would be nice to see some more premium materials in this generation of the Galaxy S, but the plastic and polycarbonate construction let Samsung fit many components into a very compact, light package, according to Director of Product Planning Drew Blackard.

The Galaxy S 4 uses a new 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, bumped up from the 8-megapixel shooter on the Galaxy S III. It’s still centrally placed on the upper back half of the device, complete with LED flash, autofocus, and 1080p video recording. On the front, the Galaxy S 4 sports a 2-megapixel camera.

The higher megapixel sensor is nice, and will surely make a slight difference, but where the Galaxy S 4 camera really evolves from past generations is in the software.

For one thing, the camera app now uses the same UI as the Galaxy Camera, with a brushed silver finish to the buttons and much simpler navigation. Clicking the mode button along the bottom will bring up a simple scroll wheel full of various modes. When one is highlighted, the menu gives the name as well as a description. More sophisticated users can also see these mode options in a grid view for quick changes.

Along with some of the same modes we’ve seen on both the Galaxy Camera and newer Galaxy smartphones like Beauty Shot, Samsung has added way more modes into the mix. One is called Eraser, and it lets you remove unwanted people from a shot. Samsung says it comes in handy for shots that have been photo-bombed, or tourist shots at busy places. The camera senses any motion that goes through the frame and lets you choose to remove it, as if that person had never walked through your shot of the Eiffel Tower.

The Galaxy S 4 also has a dual-shot mode, which is just a button press away from the main camera interface. This lets you use both the front-facing camera and the rear-facing camera at the same time, for both recording and still captures. There are various filters, such as Oval Blur, Postage Stamp, Cubism, and Split, which give you different options for the theme of your dual-shot creation. You can resize the pop-up picture, and move it around the screen using simple drag and drop tools. It’s pretty amazing.

Some other modes include Drama Shot, which lets you take a succession of photos of some action (like someone skiing down a mountain) and turn them into a composite of the entire sequence, and Sound and Shot, which lets you record up to 9 seconds of audio to pair along with a picture.

Samsung even jumped on the GIF train with the likes of Cinemagraph and Vine to create a gif-making mode, called Cinema Shot. It lets you take a short recording, and then determine which parts of the shot stay still and which parts remain animated. In fact, it’s almost exactly like Cinemagraph.

But Samsung took one step past capture and even built an app called Story Album which lets you create photo albums of special events or trips through templates, and use TripAdvisor to add extra location data to your story. You can even print your album through a partnership with Blurb’s print distribution network.

There’s a lot going on here, so try to keep up. We had recently heard that the GS4′s “wow” factor would be all in the software, and that’s exactly right. Most of TouchWiz is the same, though it seems to get lighter and lighter as the phones get faster. The one very noticeable edition was a set of extra toggle buttons available in the pull-down notifications menu.

Other than those particulars, let’s start with the gesture-based head-tracking stuff.

The most useful new feature of the Galaxy S 4 is Air View. It lets you hover over something on the screen to get an extended pop-up view of what’s inside. For example, if you hover over an email in your inbox, Air View will bring up the first few sentences of that email’s contents. If you hover over an album within the photo gallery, you’ll see nine thumbnails of the contents of that gallery. In fact, if you hover over an image while inside the folder, that particular thumbnail will expand to give you a better view of the particular picture. It’s all very reminiscent of what can be done with recent entries in the Galaxy Note line, except without requiring users to keep track of an S-Pen.

Air View is embedded in the email client, photo gallery, calendar, and a Galaxy S 4-edition of Flipboard, which lets you view and select headlines by hovering over a single tile.

Samsung also added an Air Gesture feature, which lets you control the phone without having to hold it — I could see this being used while driving. You can swipe left and right to switch between web pages, songs, photos in the gallery, etc. and swipe up and down to scroll. You can even accept calls by waving at the phone.

Rumors suggested that Samsung had developed some sort of magic-scroll eye-tracking technology, when in reality the Galaxy S 4 can actually only track your head, very much like the Galaxy S III’s Smart stay feature. The front-facing camera can detect that your head is facing the phone directly, which stops the display from dimming.

In the Galaxy S 4, that technology evolves to automatically pause videos when you turn away from the phone with Smart Pause. As far as scrolling is concerned, if you’re on a page that requires reading or scrolling, the Galaxy S 4 will let you tip the phone forward or backward to scroll (as long as the ff-camera senses that you’re paying attention).

Samsung said that using tilt-gestures as well as “head-tracking” technology to streamline browsing a page was “the most intuitive and natural to the end-consumer.”

As far as NFC is concerned, the GS4 includes S Beam and TecTile integration, but Samsung also lets you pair with up to eight other NFC-devices to run a feature called GroupPlay, which lets you play the same song across eight different devices… to create a party on the go.

Samsung also included an IR blaster on the Galaxy S 4 so that you can use it as a remote for just about any modern television. Called WatchON, it also includes rich information proved by an electronic programming guide.

Along with an updated camera and Story Album, the Galaxy S 4 brings a handful of brand new applications to the Galaxy S family. The first, and possibly most important, is S Translator. S Translator is available in nine languages at launch, including Chinese, English U.S., English British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.

It is a standalone app that automatically translates information that is typed or copy/pasted into it. S Translator is also embedded in ChatOn, Messaging, and email.

The Galaxy S 4 also has an optical reader which turns analog information into digital, by reading business cards and turning them into address book contacts. S Translator is also embedded into the optical reader, which scans QR codes as well.

ChatOn, Samsung’s own-branded VoIP application, has been updated to include three-way video calls, screen share, and annotations. You can even use the new dual-camera mode to enjoy ChatOn calls.

Samsung has been making a big push in the health department with the new Galaxy S 4, and has thus preloaded the S Health app on the device. The app originally made its debut last July and seemed to focus mainly on linking up with existing health gadgets like fancy scales and blood glucose monitors. This time around, using the Galaxy S 4′s built-in pedometer, S Health tracks your activity throughout the day and knows when you’re running, walking or climbing stairs. The S Health app also lets you input your consumption activities to track caloric intake and get suggestions.

Speaking of S Health, Samsung is selling a few health-related accessories to tackle the ever-growing quantified self products like the Jawbone Up, Nike Fuelband, and FitBit. That said, Samsung has introduced the wrist-worn S Band that tracks activity, temperature and humidity.

Samsung is even going so far as to sell a heart-rate monitor which you can strap on for your daily workouts, and a body scale. All of the accessories come with Bluetooth so they can pair back to your device and be recorded by the S Health app.

And since Samsung loves making special cases for its big-name phones, the Galaxy S 4 had to go big even with its case. It’s called the S View cover, and it has a little screen on the front that reads information from the phone. That way, even though the phone is locked, you can still see the time, SMS notifications, battery status, and choose to accept or ignore incoming calls.

Samsung didn’t specify which technology they used for the cover’s display, or whether or not it needs a charge or takes battery from the S 4, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear they took a page out of the YotaPhone playbook and are using low-power e-ink here.

Samsung didn’t clarify exact pricing, but said it would go for the same price as a “Samsung premium smartphone”. The Galaxy S III launched in the US at $199 with a 2 year contact.

In terms of availability, they didn’t give a specific release date but did say it would be on store shelves in 2013Q2, at AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Cricket and U.S. Cellular.

Samsung is riding high on the success of the Galaxy S III and from what I’ve seen, the Galaxy S 4 is a worthy successor with innovative features packed into a familiar housing. It’s a bit of a shame that Samsung announced the phone without giving a price or release date, but at this point, with Samsung the global sales and innovation leader in smartphones, it can do pretty much whatever it wants.

Samsung is launching its Galaxy S 4 device (better known as the worst kept secret of all time) in New York today at a special event. The event is live streaming via YouTube, but we’re also there covering the action, and will bring you updates live right here as the show progresses.

The Galaxy S 4 is upon us and this is the official Samsung webcast. Of course you can follow along with our liveblog, or, if it floats your boat, watch the live video stream embedded here.

The Samsung Galaxy S 4 is hardly a secret at this point. Most everything has leaked including a comprehensive review earlier today. But still, this is Samsung’s latest flagship, the phone designed as the company’s answer to the iPhone 5, HTC One, and all the rest. Tune in; Samsung likely has a good show planned

Andy Forssell will take over the position of CEO at online video company Hulu later this month, following the long-expected departure of the company’s current chief executive Jason Kilar which will occur later this month.

The succession plan was announced today in an internal memo from Kilar to Hulu staffers that was subsequently made public on Hulu’s official blog.

Forssell has worked at Hulu since 2007, and currently serves as the company’s Senior Vice President of Content. According to his official bio, Forssell earned a BS with honors in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, a BS in Russian studies from the United States Military Academy, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. His career began with the United States Army.

The memo indicates that Forssell will serve as Hulu’s “acting” CEO, and has not yet finalized who will fill in the role permanently. TechCrunch is hearing that the person who ultimately gets that position could very well be an outsider, depending on the ongoing News Corp. discussions.

We’ll update this with more detail, but for now here is the memo from Kilar announcing Forssell’s appointment in full:

Team –

As you all know, I will be departing Hulu at the end of this quarter. I wanted to share the news that Andy Forssell will be stepping up to lead Hulu as acting CEO after I depart later this month. You know Andy well; he’s been a critical senior executive and has been here from the start of this great adventure. Andy exemplifies the Hulu culture and has been central to Hulu’s journey, helping to grow this company from 2 content partners and no revenue to over 450 content partners and approximately $700 million revenue in 2012. In his role, Andy has built strong relationships with many of our Board members. Andy has the Board’s strong support in leading the team during this important time.

Disney and News Corporation are currently finalizing their forward-looking plans with Hulu, and the senior team has been working closely with them in that process. Once the plans are finalized, a permanent decision will be made regarding the CEO position.

As I mentioned to you all at the beginning of this year, Hulu’s focus remains on delivering a fantastic 2013 for customers and shareholders. Hulu is well on its way, with new records being set in Q1 across both revenue and subscriber additions. The unwavering focus on delighting Hulu’s customers is clearly showing up in the outputs of the business.

Jason’

The hashtag (#), which is a hallmark of Twitter’s userbase wanting to categorize content, is rumored to become a part of Facebook’s Graph Search. The company is tinkering around with the notion, but not much is known about how far along the social network is with it. 

While the hashtag isn’t a concept owned entirely by Twitter, the company has helped to make them popular with mainstream users. The most important usage of the hashtag hasn’t been for branding though, its been to bring uncategorized information together into a discoverable and scannable way.

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

—
Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

Our sources tell us that it’s too early to know if the feature will end up making it into Facebook’s user experience or whether it will hit the chopping block. But with the company’s focus on slicing up information into feeds with its News Feed makeover, the incorporation of linked hashtags makes sense. Currently, Graph Search doesn’t crawl all of our posts, so it would seem like the hashtag feature would have to wait until that gets rolled out.

However, Facebook has seen the power of the hashtag firsthand; it’s a wildly popular behavior on Instagram. With a completely different demographic hashtagging their photos, Facebook is able to see how much extra engagement and traction is stirred up for photos based on bored users tapping the highlighted words.

As I’ve been using Graph Search, I find that typing into an open box isn’t something that comes naturally on a social network. I would much prefer queues like links or hashtags to drive my exploration. This is a phenomenon that is prevalent on sites like Wikipedia. You can get lost for hours clicking around from one article to the next based on the terms that are linked. In that way, links are the glue that make a massive social network feel smaller, which is what Twitter has experienced since properly incorporating hashtags.

If Facebook were to adopt linked hashtags, of course even more commercials during your favorite TV shows would be plastered with #things to “engage” you in conversation. But mostly, the hashtag is there to engage you in wasting tons of time with tappable and clickable discovery. Oh, and Twitter would benefit from this adoption greatly, so don’t start singing the blues for them.

We all know that LeVar Burton has famously played a space traveler in the hugely successful Star Trek: The Next Generation series, but nowadays he is spreading the word that human travel beyond our solar system may actually become a near-term reality for people who aren’t actors — or even astronauts.

As a member of the advisory council of the 100 Year Starship project, Burton is a champion of the idea that we can make human interstellar travel capabilities a reality within the next century.

We had the chance to catch up with Burton this week at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas and talk to him about 100 Year Starship, which he discussed in a panel at the festival. It was also great to be brought up to speed on his other initiatives, such as the Reading Rainbow iPad app. In the video embedded above, you can hear Burton tell us how tech concepts that were purely fictional back in the TNG days are now realities, why it’s important for technology and art to be brought together, what he really thinks of Google Glass (and how it compares to what Geordi La Forge wore), and more.

Google Translate just added a cool new feature that allows you to easily create a personalized phrasebook with the phrases and sentences you want to memorize and/or find yourself translating repeatedly. As the Google Translate team notes in today’s announcement, the idea here is to allow you to jumpstart the process of committing the translation to memory by “allowing you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them.”

Revisiting these phrases regularly, Google argues, will help you turn these translations “into lasting knowledge” (just like those rote drills from your Latin classes back in the day).

The new phrasebook is now enabled by default, and you can access it through the little book icon in the top right corner of the Google Translate screen. To save a phrase, simply press the new star icon underneath the translations.

The phrasebook itself is pretty straightforward, with one language on the left and the translation on the right. You can filter phrases by language pairs and – just like across the rest of Google Translate – there is a text-to-speech feature that allows you to listen to each phrase.

So the market for private jet startups sure is heating up!* So far, we’ve written about BlackJet and Arrow, both of which are seeking to become a kind of “Uber for private flights.” So it probably comes as no surprise that there’s someone out there with a kind of Airbnb, peer-to-peer offering to make private flights cheaper for everyone. A new startup called JumpSeat has emerged to help make it easier for the private jet set to make unused seats on flights they’ve chartered available to others, and to help them save some money in the process.

The idea behind JumpSeat is simple: There are a lot of people who want to fly private, but don’t necessarily want to do so on a half-empty jet. (I’m sure there are just as many people who relish the idea of only flying with their posh loved ones, but JumpSeat is not for them!) Rather than pay for the whole jet themselves, they can instead lower the cost of flying by making seats available to other jet-setting ballers looking to save a little money on their private jet experience.

So you basically get all the same advantages of flying private — like faster take off and landing and no security lines — but you might have to share a jet with some randoms. That’s a tradeoff JumpSeat believes a lot of private fliers will be willing to make.

The company breaks down customers into “flyers” and “buyers,” according to JumpSeat founder Justin Sullivan. Flyers are JumpSeat users who have already booked a private jet and want to make unused seats on their flights available to others. And buyers are users who show up for what are essentially discounted tickets on private flights booked by other people. All in all, the idea is to lower the amount of unused seats on private jets, making the whole thing cheaper for everyone.

Today, there are a number of people who book private jets for $25,000 or more, just to travel with three to five people. But most private jets hold eight to 15 passengers, so there are usually seats to go around. Just as importantly, charter and private jet operators frequently end up flying empty jets between destinations where their clients have booked travel. Individual seat prices vary significantly based on the popularity of the route and number of seats available on the flight, but tend to be thousands of dollars per seat, rather than tens of thousands for the whole jet.

To start, JumpSeat’s inventory will primarily be made up of those latter types of flights, where charter operators will make unused seats available at a lower price just to recoup the cost of otherwise flying an empty plane. But as more flyers sign up, Sullivan expects a whole lot more of the company’s inventory being part of travel between high-density corridors — for instance, Florida or New York to Aspen during ski season, or typical business flights between New York and Chicago or L.A.

JumpSeat is an extension of Sullivan’s existing legacy charter jet business, Private FLITE. Over the past several years, he’s operated that business the same way that most private jet services have — by connecting his Private FLITE clients with charter operators. And he’s grown that business to more than $6 million in revenue per year.

With that in mind, the team decided to add some technology and build a web app that could grow the overall charter business by making it cheaper to fly and reduce the number of unused seats. The JumpSeat peer-to-peer model could grow the pie of private jet fliers, thus boosting the number of seats it sells overall and the amount of money it makes. JumpSeat charges a 10 percent commission on initial flights booked through the platform, and then another 5 percent on seats that are unused seats that are booked in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Currently available only on the web, the JumpSeat team is working on a mobile app, which it expects to launch on iPhone in the next few months. And Android will come soon after that. The idea is to make booking seats on a private jet easier than ever, by lowering the cost and making available inventory more transparent.

While the six-person, Boston-based team still operates the legacy Private FLITE business, it’s strongly suggesting to its existing clients that they become JumpSeat users and participate in that marketplace. JumpSeat was bootstrapped by the Private FLIGHT guys, but the company is currently looking for outside investment to help grow its business.

==
* And somehow, I’ve become the private jet writer for TechCrunch.

Thomson Reuter’s Deputy Editor of Social Media, Matthew Keys, has been indicted for allegedly conspiring with hacktivist group, “Anonymous.” According to the Department of Justice, “Keys provided members of the hacker group Anonymous with log-in credentials for a computer server belonging to KTXL FOX 40’s corporate parent, the Tribune Company.”

The indictment includes allegations of aiding hackers in defacing the Los Angeles Times websites. “That was such a buzz having my edit on the LA Times,” wrote a co-conspirator to Keys in a conversation intercepted by the Justice Department [PDF].

“If convicted, Keys faces up to 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000 for each count,” concludes the Justice Department memo.

As of this writing, Keys’ Twitter account was active an hour ago and still includes his credentials as a Reuters employee in the bio. More as this story develops.

Game streaming might be a common feature of ISP packages for bundled Internet, if Agawi has anything to say about it. The cloud gaming startup has outlasted rival OnLive, which still exists in name after a nasty bankruptcy, and Gaikai, which was picked up by Sony to power its upcoming PS4 cloud-based features, and now it wants to give ISPs and carrier networks a chance to regain their place as providers of content.

Internet providers have been demoted to dumb tubes with the advent of services like Netflix, iTunes, Spotify and others, which is not where they want to be. Serving up piping hot content to customers is the way to own a more complete relationship, one that’s likely to result in longer-term commitment and deeper revenue pockets. If you control both the channel and what’s on it, you’re winning both ways, after all. Agawi, which has spent the past few years building its cloud gaming infrastructure, is now pursuing its plans of making that tech, code named VG36, commercially available to ISPs, with a ready-to-roll white label solution they can pass on to their customers.

Agawi is partnering with NVIDIA to make this happen, after the two worked together on building their “True Cloud” gaming architecture in February. The combination of Agawi’s existing tech with servers based on Nvidia’s Grid processors is designed to help stream multiple games at the same time from a single server, thereby bypassing or at least minimizing the upfront equipment costs that proved extremely troublesome to OnLive.

I spoke to Agawi executive chairman Peter Relan about the launch of the new platform, which will be opening up to general availability in July. It’s being announced now because of the long lead times a lot of Agawi’s target customers have when implementing services like this one, Relan said. The point is to make potential partners aware that Agawi is ready do deploy this tech as soon as the second half of this year, with data center partners lined up around the globe.

“Everybody has been waiting for MNVOs, MSOs, the telecom guys, the cable guys, to bring new services to market,” he said. “They offer voice, they offer Internet, they offer television, so what’s the next big content area? Gaming. Almost all the major telecom operators and cable operators want to do trials this year with introducing gaming services, and the easiest way to bring them to market is through cloud gaming, because the alternative is to put the equivalent of an iPad inside their set-top box.”

Once Agawi begins deployments in earnest, any service provider that participates should be able to offer games direct to existing subscribers through the hardware they already have it – be it computers, mobile devices or even connected TVs. Reland says it can also help with licensing of specific content, and will offer three tiers (casual, mid-core and AAA) to appeal to all types of gamers.

Targeting the folks who manage the pipes is a good strategy for Agawi, not only because providers are looking around for content opportunities, but because cloud gaming has the potential to be very bandwidth-intensive for consumers. If carriers are providing the service, however, they can presumably also offer some way of making sure that bandwidth used to stream games doesn’t count across their monthly totals, the way Comcast’s video service doesn’t count against its caps. Whatever the arrangement between providers and clients ends up being, Agawi still has to sell its offering to telcos and ISPs first.

Hot Studio, a design firm based in San Francisco and New York City, just announced that its team will be joining Facebook.

Facebook has confirmed the news in a post of its own, writing:

We began working with Hot Studio on a few projects several months ago. Immediately, we recognized the synergy between our teams and their remarkable talents. Hot Studio has a sixteen-year history working with some of the world’s biggest and best brands. They have an intricate understanding of what businesses need and a flair for building tools and resources to help meet those needs. And this is what we’re bringing them here to do – build amazing tools that help the brands and businesses that use Facebook.

Noteworthy-but-unsurprising is the emphasis on “brands and businesses” — i.e., the advertisers who pay Facebook’s bills. That’s a group that Facebook has been trying to convince to embrace non-traditional ad units, and that Hot Studio should have plenty of experience dealing with.

Apparently the transition period will take a few months, while Hot Studio fulfills all of its remaining commitments. According to its LinkedIn page, Hot Studio customers include Cisco, Warner Music Group, Charles Schwab, Zinio, Ancestry, SFMOMA, and the California Academy of Sciences. And here’s a portfolio of sample projects.

An employee at Hot Studio has tweeted saying he’s been told that this is Facebook’s largest talent acquisition ever. A profile page in Inc. says that the company had 67 employees in 2012 and saw revenue of $14.5 million 2011.

We’ve emailed Facebook for details and will update if we hear back. (Update: Facebook says it can’t comment on the talent acquisition tweet.)

Facebook already has tagging for people, Pages, and location, and could soon allow users to tag their posts with hashtags so they could be more easily indexed and surfaced by Graph Search. A source told TechCrunch that Facebook was working on the project, and soon after The Wall Street Journal reported similar news.

However, this feature may be a ways from fruition. It will likely require Facebook to add posts to what’s searchable with Graph Search. Right now Facebook’s internal search engine only returns people, places, Pages, apps, media, and interests. Facebook did say that search for posts would launch eventually though, and hashtags could make the feature even more useful.

Without them, finding posts about a popular topic could require people to deduce the exact terms used to describe it. By implementing hashtags, anyone who wanted their posts surfaced better by Graph Search could add a hashtag to their post, and Facebook could help searchers find the tag related to what they’re looking for. When clicked from a post in news feed, the hashtag would presumably open a page of Graph Search results of mentions of the hashtag, similar to Twitter.

Hashtags would also allows brands and events to better coordinate buzz on Facebook. They could ask people to include the hashtag when referring to a brand’s event or marketing campaign. Facebook could then display in the news feed any hashtags mentioned by multiple people in your network. Advertisers might be happy to pay to appear in search results for hashtags related to their businesses as many do on Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that sponsored search results would be a natural way to monetize Graph Search.

Along with hashtags, a trending topics list could potentially come along with post search for Graph Search.

There’s a big issue with hashtags on Facebook, though. Unlike Twitter where most posts are public, on Facebook most have some level of privacy. Clicking a hashtag would therefore only be able to show you public posts and those set to be visible to you that mention the tag. One option would be showing the content of private posts but not their authors, though this would likely be met with backlash.

Figuring out how to operate hashtags and trending topics will be a sociological challenge for the world’s most popular social network. Done right, they could reveal the zeitgeist of opinion on Facebook. Done wrong they could make people wary of adding that little pound sign to posts. But until Facebook launches Graph Search for posts, hashtags have no power on Facebook.

[Image Credits: LeaveYourHashtagOnTwitter, People who make memes]

As web-based learning platforms proliferate, and education increasingly happens in formal and informal settings and in both real and virtual classrooms, there is a growing need for a new form of credentialing that reflects these changes. Traditional, paper-based diplomas and certificates are no longer enough, but designing a meaningful, universal replacement for the old standard doesn’t happen over night. Luckily, Mozilla is on the case.

Mozilla Launches Open Badges 1.0, A New Standard to Recognize and Verify Online Learning and Education

Back in September 2011, Mozilla announced that it was setting out on a mission to create an easy way for to both issue and share digital learning badges on the Web. The “Open Badges Infrastructure Project,” as it was called at the time, grew out of Mozilla’s own development of badges for its School of Webcraft, but it soon realized that it wasn’t alone in its plans to design and implement digital badges.

So, Mozilla decided to do the Web (and online education) a solid, with the long-term goal of allowing anyone and everyone to “gather badges from any site on the Internet, combining them into a story about what you know and what you’ve achieved … There’s a real chance to create learning that works more like the Web,” Mozilla said in the announcement. Pathbrite and Degreed in particular have been nodding their heads in agreement.

Open Badges have been in beta since, but today Mozilla officially announced v1.0 of its open source, free software, which any organization can now use to create, issue and verify digital badges. The platform essentially looks to create an educational currency with Open Badges, allowing students (and really any learner) to display these badges, which, in sum, aim to tell the “full story of your skills and achievement.”

In turn, Open Badges enables anyone and everyone to collect these badges from a multitude of sources — offline or virtual — into its digital backpack, which you can then use to display your skillz on social networks, job sites, personal sites and so on.

As part of its new release, Mozilla also now offers “issuer insignia,” which allow organizations to display that they offer Open Badges (Mozilla says it will be making these embeddable in the near future).

As to who’s offering the opportunity to earn badges? Well, once you sign on to the platform, you have the option to earn a Webmaker Badge from Mozilla (and set up your backpack) and then peruse the Open Badge community. There are over 600 organizations that have either implemented the standard already or are in the process of doing so — a roster that includes organizations like the Smithsonian American Art Museum, NYC Department of Education, University of Illinois, EDUCAUSE, Gogo Lab and so on that will offer Badges at launch, while names like NASA, Microsoft, Pixar, and a host of others that have Badges in development.

For those looking to offer Open Badges, a la the companies above, you’ll have to go through Mozilla’s documentation, but the parameters are pretty broad. As Mozilla says therein, issuers determine the “content and criteria” behind their own bade system, and they do not need to “register with the OBI, they simply send badges to earners backpacks.” Other than that, it’s simply a matter of arranging compatibility with Open Badges’ APIs, servers, and so on.

Naturally, Mozilla wants to keep this as broad and open-ended as possible. While it may seem a little short-sighted not to put more structure or requirements around use cases and best practices, this is designed to be as universal and frictionless as possible. It’s up to your school or organization to decide what customers/users will have to do to earn a badge, and you can be as regimented or as flexible as you want.

For those who earn Badges, Mozilla allows users to display (and manage) them in their backpack, or show them off on WordPress blogs and websites via plug-in and through Twitter — with more on the way.

Still confused? Asking yourself, “but wait, what is this thing that Mozilla is building — and why is it open?” Its documentation provides a terrific answer:

The Open Badges framework is designed to allow any learner to collect badges from multiple sites, tied to a single identity, and then share them out across various sites, including personal blogs to social networking channels. It is critical for this infrastructure to be open to give learners control over their own learning and credentials, allow anyone to issue badges, and for each learner to carry their badges with them across the Web and other contexts.

Its goals further elucidate Mozilla’s mission, which is simply to provide a system “for alternative accreditation, credentialing, and recognition” and help those alternative credentials “expand beyond siloed environments to be broadly shareable” and to “truly support learners learning everywhere.”

At the risk of breaking the fourth wall, losing objectivity, etc. etc., I will say that, generally speaking, I avoid badges wherever possible and have on more than one occasion cursed Foursquare for its part in popularizing badges. However, this is just about the best use of the “badges” model that I could imagine, admittedly, with the way being paved by Khan Academy (which already issues badges).

The more incidences of an “unaffiliated” (term used loosely) third-party creating web standards for credential sharing, or data sharing (just as inBloom is trying to do for performance data, never mind the the lily-livered objectors), or whatever the case may be, the better off education will be. No two ways about it.

Find more on Mozilla’s blog here.

In case you can’t get enough of the folksy musings of “America’s Happy Warrior,” the White House has launched the Being Joe Biden Portal. “If you want to keep people away during an earthquake, buy some shotgun shells,” said Vice President Biden, in response to a question about assault weapons bans during a Google+ hangout last January. If Biden’s first broadcast is any indication, the audio series will surely bring weekly smiles from the Veep’s lovable down-home charm.

“Hey folks, I want to tell you about this picture you’re looking at,” says Biden. “These are a couple of guys in their hunting shirts that I’m serving a meal to.”

Biden’s adorable mix of brash honesty and middle-America anecdotes has made him something of a curious icon, as the man second in line to the world’s most powerful position.

To his credit, he’s has been a great sport with the Internet’s prodding over his deflection of regality. Early last year, one of the Veep’s tweets went viral, after he referenced The Onion’s TransAm parody of him.

Q for @reddit AMA with my @TheOnion pal: A Trans-Am? Ever look under the hood of a Corvette? #imavetteguy –VP http://t.co/xPGMBBYl

—
Office of VP Biden (@VP) January 18, 2013

You can get your timely giggles and/or inspiration at his portal, here.

[Image: Diesel Sweeties]