Category: Tech news

It was something of a black eye for BlackBerry when it came out that Sprint wouldn’t be carrying the all-touch Z10 BB10 smartphone. A huge relaunch, integral to the company’s future success, and one of the four major U.S. carriers was taking a pass on the first hardware. But the carrier is going to sell the keyboard-toting Q10, and will also sell what could be a Z10 successor, complete with touch-only interface, later in 2013.

AllThingsD reported earlier today that Sprint would have an all-touch device, which it described as not just a slightly modified Z10. This new phone is being launched in the second half of the year, according to AllThingsD’s sources, likely well after the launch of the upcoming Q10 with its hardware keyboard. The Verge followed up this earlier report with a supporting claim that describes the Sprint handset as a “version 2.0″ of the Z1o, according to its sources.

Sprint’s decision to pass on the Z10 while all its competitors look poised to offer both that handset and the Q10 makes a little more sense in light of this rumor. The device may be a carrier-exclusive variant, which is something BlackBerry has been known to do in the past in its former guise as RIM. But both sources of these new reports seem to indicate that what we’ll see won’t be simply a refreshed Z10 with some different specs, but a different all-touch device. No word on where it might fit in term of appealing to upscale or more budget-minded consumers.

A Z10 follow-up might actually be worth waiting for those interested in BB10, since the Z10 itself was impressive, but nonetheless a little rough around the edges. Some more time to bake might be just what the doctor ordered for an all-touch BlackBerry 10 device, and Sprint might be banking on that to help it become the carrier of choice for RIM’s next-gen mobile OS. We’ve contacted BlackBerry to see if there’s any official comment about device release plans for Sprint, and will update if any is forthcoming.

When OUYA launched the enormously successful Kickstarter campaign for its Android-based gaming console, CEO Julie Uhrman said she had “no idea” whether it would succeed.

“I was scared shitless,” she said.

Uhrman, who gave a keynote interview this afternoon at South by Southwest Interactive, admitted, “our path to market was unique” (though thanks to Kickstarter it’s becoming less unique). After all, when the campaign launched, there was no product — just an idea and a team. There wasn’t even really a website, but instead a URL that redirected to the OUYA kickstarter campaign.

On the first day of the campaign, Uhrman said she was awake at 5:45 in the morning to hit the button for the Kickstarter page to go live. That, she said, was “the moment where we no longer had control.” The team had no way to know how people would respond to the idea, or even if someone might decide to copy it: “There is no special sauce here.”

For the next few hours, Uhrman said she was busy sending out emails. Her family and close friends came over a few hours later, and they all called in sick as they kept refreshing the page to get the latest numbers. By lunchtime, she said they knew that “this was something” and there was “a void in the marketplace” for a more open, affordable game console supporting a broader ecosystem of games. Eight hours and 22 minutes after launching, OUYA had raised $1 million, shooting past its $950,000 goal. In the end, it raised $8.6 million.

Uhrman said that amount is enough to run the company and to deliver the first big wave of consoles to Kickstarter backers (shipments are supposed to start on March 28). However, she said that the real key was enlisting the support of 63,416 Kickstarter backers — if she’d raised the money from a single investor, it wouldn’t have been enough to get OUYA to where it is today. In fact, Uhrman said that she’d tried to raise money through more traditional avenues, but no one wanted to invest in a hardware startup.

Not that the response to the campaign was entirely positive. For the first two or three months after it launched, Uhrman said the top Google result was a PCMag article titled “Why Kickstarter’s Ouya Looks Like A Scam.” The skepticism, Uhrman said, came from that aforementioned non-traditional path. So why didn’t she even bother with the website?

“The reality is, I just focused on one thing, which was the campaign,” she said.

The Verge’s Josh Topolsky, who was conducting the interview, followed up by joking asking, “Is OUYA a scam?” To show that it’s not, Uhrman called out for anyone who had already tried out the developer units (the company said it shipped 1,200 of those units). One audience member said that they had, and that it definitely wasn’t a scam. (Whew.)

Uhrman said that what OUYA has already accomplished in terms of creating the console was hard, but the real challenge is building an ecosystem of game developers. There are 481 titles announced so far, she said — they include some notable wins, including the console exclusive for Double Fine Adventure, Tim Schaefer’s Kickstarter-financed game.

Beyond recounting OUYA’s history so far, Uhrman also talked about her broader vision for the company, which we covered in a separate post.

Unicorn Apocalypse, the mobile game Samsung promoted in its TV ads that began airing at the beginning of the year, isn’t fictional after all – it’s a real, playable game live now in the Google Play app store. Generally speaking, the Samsung ads, designed by an agency called 72andSunny, were both relevant and memorable – they even featured cameos from Tim Burton, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd at times.

For those unfamiliar, the commercials took aim at BlackBerry in particular, by touting the enterprise-friendliness of Samsung’s devices. An ongoing series, they feature the team at a generic startup shop, where a group of young people is working to put out a mobile game called “Unicorn Apocalypse.”

As it turns out, Samsung held a contest to create the game which was used in the TV commercials, and the winning entry game from the developers at Liquid Gameworks. The plot, apparently, has to do with a unicorn described as the “harbinger of the apocalypse.” Players will run the unicorn across an urban landscape, jumping over rooftops and avoiding the “deadly unicorn traps” that soldiers from the Anti Unicorn Force has deployed. There are also three “boss” levels to beat, and metal soundtrack to accompany said unicorn’s spree.

Or something.

But as much fun as that sounds, as it turns out, the game is actually…well…it’s rather bad. The app currently has a 2.1 star rating in Google Play, where 228 users out of 375 have given it the lowliest 1-star review. The game appears to be buggy, according to users’ comments, who also point out that it feels like a rip-off of the more popular Robot Unicorn Attack.

“After a minute of playing the unicorn just runs off an edge into an endless pit of fire. Points are still collected, but the unicorn isnt [sic] even on the screen,” reads one review from user Darshan Mand.

“Thought It would be good when I saw the commercial but the game is like it was made by a 5 year old,” says another, Michael Robb.

“I wish it was possible to give this game negative stars,” says Maurice Coleman, “It’s THAT bad!”

The general sentiment here is that Samsung squandered its opportunity to impress, after touting the game so much in its TV commercials. But Samsung has also played a risky game with its brand here by making a low-quality game whose development was outsourced to others. Obviously people are going to download and try this thing. And the whole point of the commercial series was that Samsung devices helped the Unicorn Apocalypse team work better together to make the game a success.

So is the lasting takeaway from the actual game’s launch, and subsequent suckiness is…what?

That maybe they should have used iPhones?

Today, Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8′s Metro/Modern UI mode and on Windows RT blocks Flash by default and only allows sites on Microsoft’s curated Compatibility View (CV) lists to play Flash content. Tomorrow, that’s changing: all Flash content will run by default and the CV list will now be used to block sites from playing Flash content.

Windows 8 users previously had to switch to the desktop mode to view Flash-enabled site. Now, however, Microsoft says only about 4 percent of the “thousands of domains tested” are still incompatible, so the team has decided that switching the policy around was the right thing to do.

That’s a pretty unexpected change, but Microsoft argues that after thorough “testing over the past several months, the vast majority of sites with Flash content are now compatible with the Windows experience for touch, performance, and battery life.” More sites should “just work” in IE10, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer group manager Rob Mauceri writes, and “the primary device you walk around with should give you access to all the Web content on the sites you rely on. Otherwise, the device is just a companion to a PC.”

Before the launch of Windows 8 and RT, Microsoft worked with Adobe to develop a version of Flash that is optimized for touch – obviously one of the central features of Windows 8. Microsoft, however, worried that Flash would degrade battery life, security and reliability, so the first version of IE10 in Metro mode for Windows 8 and RT relied on the CV list to just allow sites that were touch-enabled and didn’t have any obvious negative effects on other aspects of the experience.

Starting tomorrow, Microsoft’s modern.IE site, which it launched last month to help developers ensure their sites work on Internet Explorer 10, will also feature a tool that allows developers to check whether their sites are on the new Flash block list.

Amazon Web Services will now offer the option for everyone to have their own virtual private cloud (VPC), another sign of the company’s intent to push into the enterprise market. The service means that every customer using EC2 will see the option for a VPC as an instance type. Until now, the VPC was a separate service.

A VPC lets customers create what AWS calls a “virtual network of logically isolated EC2 instances and an optional VPN connection to your own datacenter.” That development has implications for customers who are weighing the benefits of a data-center centric approach that virtualizes a network of physical centers to create their own elastic infrastructure. The problem comes down to the cost of licensing, new hardware and the IT staff to manage it all. It’s a model promoted by companies like VMware, which are looking to extend the reach of their virtualization technology.

AWS takes a different approach. It gives customers the capability to take advantage of the low-cost and flexibility of AWS while leveraging the infrastructure that they already own.

Instances will launch into what AWS calls the “EC2-VPC” platform. AWS will roll out the feature by region, starting with the Asia-Pacific (Sydney) and South America (São Paulo) regions. The rollouts will begin in the next several weeks.

The process is automated so customers won’t need to create a VPC beforehand. Instead, according to AWS, a customer would launch EC2 instances or provision Elastic Load Balancers, RDS databases, or ElastiCache clusters like they would in EC2-Classic and a VPC is created with no extra charge.

At that point, customers can take advantage of features, such as assigning multiple IP addresses to an instance, changing security group membership on the fly, and adding egress filters to security groups.

According to AWS, VPCs are compatible with existing shell scripts, CloudFormation templates, AWS Elastic Beanstalk applications, and Auto Scaling configurations.

The new VPC features are available to new AWS customers and existing customers launching instances in a region for the first time.

The enterprise market has shifted in the past 12 to 18 months as CIOs have come to accept cloud computing, said Scott Sandell, a general partner with NEA Ventures in a conversation here at SXSW. He said it means all enterprise technology in a data center is obsolete. AWS’ move points to the shift in the market and the higher value on services that leverage the cloud as opposed to significant investments in new and existing infrastructure.

Bonobos. Dodocase. Warby Parker. A generation of e-commerce companies is growing up using a vertically integrated strategy where they take more ownership of the design, production, marketing and branding of their products. But how do you know very early on if you have a hit?

With a purely web-based or mobile product, startups can watch how well they retain users after a week or a month. With e-commerce companies, repeat purchases is an obvious metric, but there are also ways to track the virality of an e-commerce product.

A YC-backed startup called Curebit has built a business around tracking word-of-mouth referrals for companies like Bonobos. Based on that, the company says it’s able to not only drive sales but predict hits. What they do is create referral campaigns for e-commerce companies — like those landing pages that say you’ll get 25 percent off or $25 off your next purchase if you send a friend by e-mail, Facebook or Twitter.

Curebit will optimize the landing pages, copy, art direction and then track how many people convert to making a purchase after they’ve seen the page. On that strategy, the 12-person startup has grown to about 3,000 clients and a break-even run rate. Their customers include Bonobos, Restaurant.com and Jawbone.

“We still have a lot of cash in the bank,” said the company’s CEO Allan Grant.

Since creating landing pages for referrals isn’t technically that difficult, the base version of Curebit is free. The startup makes money off custom services like testing hundreds of variants for the highest-performing campaigns. For that, they’ll charge $10,000 for the first $100,000 in extra sales generated by the campaigns, then they’ll take a 10 percent after that.

“Just having a basic feature set is not enough,” Grant said. “We engineer virality the way that social gaming companies measure and optimize their K-factor, viral loops and every step of the funnel.”

Here what’s the funnel might look like for a client –

Curebit drove 25 percent of Bonobos’ new customers last year, which helped double the New York-based company’s customer base in 2012. Over time, Bonobos had to change its referral strategy. It was centered on Facebook sharing at first, but Curebit found that e-mail converted better for the company. That’s unusual since Facebook is a stronger channel in 93 percent of Curebit’s cases, Grant says.

He says the average lift in sales from referrals on e-mail, Facebook or Twitter is about 7 percent. But after watching lots of companies on the platform, the rate you really want to have is around 15 percent.

“If somebody’s lift is over 15 percent, then that company is going to explode really fast,” he said.

One example is Diamond Candles, which sells giant votive candles that have a ring hidden inside of them. Those rings are worth anywhere from $10 to $5,000 and the candles, for whatever reason, seem to be a great gift for women of all age groups.

“From their early days, we could tell they had some magic element,” he said. “We can’t always tell why somebody is going to explode, though.”

He did offer some common-sense advice, though: companies that break out either have a) a “fantastic product” or b) a “fantastic experience.” For example, Zappos (which is not a Curebit client) sells shoes that other retailers have as well, but they focus on giving customers a great experience. Bonobos, on the other hand, has a great product in pants that fit well.

Curebit isn’t looking at raising a Series A round at the moment. “We want to continue to grow a profitable business and if we were to do one, we wouldn’t start looking for another three to six months.”

The company last announced funding in January of last year with a $1.2 million round involving 25 investors, including 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker, Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures and others. They’ll be focusing on growing the customer base and on new areas like mobile referrals in the next few months.

Julie Uhrman, the CEO/Founder of the smash Kickstarter-project-turned-gaming-console known as OUYA, was the third keynote speaker at SXSW Interactive 2013. Interviewed by The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky, the two dove in the intricacies and challenges of crowd funding and creating a new hardware startup.

For the uninformed, OUYA is a $99 gaming platform/console — based on Android OS — that is an alternative to major gaming platforms by Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony.

As the conversation began, Julie and Joshua discussed how games and gaming are changing and that OUYA wants to make it possible for developers to bring many more kinds of games to the living room.

To that point, and as an entertainment lover, Julie found that they she was playing games on her mobile phone all the time. Then she and the team asked “Why not bring that mobile gaming experience back to the television?” People can have a great experience on a touch device, but its not the same experience as playing on TV. Additionally, games shouldn’t be as expensive as they are.

The company actually began before the Kickstarter campaign but money was difficult to raise. They turned to crowdsourcing and actually raised $1 million in 8 hours 22 min. It was a great start, and now have reached more than $8 million.

As to the difficulties of being a hardware startup, Julie noted that before jumping in they really did a massive amount of research with users first to see if there was adequate demand for a platform like the one they created.

Once they found out there was demand, it was very important to focus on the product design. And again, user feedback was super important. She flew to Taiwan. She researched competitors. The thing to take away is that they did an enormous amount of research before trying to bring the product to market.

To that end, Kickstarter backers get their units at the end of March, but the company plans to keep the relationship strong with audience and listening to what they like and don’t like in order to fuel needed changes in the platform.

Furthermore, Julie also mentioned that the hardware is not unique. The goal wasn’t to create specific hardware but to build a unique experience.

Toward the end of the conversation, Topolsky noted that Halo and Call of Duty are vast, immersive experiences and wondered how Ouya will be able to deliver similar experience on lesser hardware – Tegra 3.

Julie’s response, was that they are not going to try to have the exact same experiences, they are aiming for different, creative, exclusive content. The experience can still be awesome and you have the benefit of try-it-before-you-buy-it, she said.

But at the end of the day, Julie would like OUYA to be on every Television. “I would love it to be built into televisions and I am talking to everyone about that.” It’s a bit easier, obviously, to offer a bit of software than a hardware project – a fact that Ouya may soon discover as they begin shipping and supporting their hardware.

Spoiler: The video above shows SpaceX’s 100-foot-tall Grasshopper rocket blasting off, hovering in the air for about 30 seconds and then descending back to terra firma. And it’s set to Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire. That’s it. There’s no drama, fireworks or anything shocking, but it’s still absurdly important and totally worth watching.

This launch marks the reusable rocket’s most significant flight yet. It reached a record 262.8 feet before lowering itself back down on its own launch pad. Elon Musk called it the Johnny Cash hover slam.

Designed to launch and land vertically on its metal legs, the Grasshopper is part of SpaceX’s long-term roadmap. The company has yet to reveal when it intends to use the model — or its successors — for space flight. The rocket has been in testing since September 2012, with each test launch reaching a bit closer to the stars above.

“The US is a country of explorers,” stated Musk at his SXSWi keynote adding “People need to believe that [space travel] is not going to bankrupt them.”

For several years Musk has championed the idea that humans must be a multi-planet species and a reusable rocket, like the Grasshopper here, is a big part of his grand vision.

Google just announced that it is rolling out a new design for its Gmail mobile web app for Android, iOS, Blackberry and Kindle Fire. The new design looks very similar to Gmail’s recently relaunched iOS apps, with a generous amount of whitespace and larger fonts and icons.

The web app now also features Gmail for iOS’s improved search tool and calendar integration. This means the mobile web app now also offers auto-complete predictions for your searches, and it’s much easier to RSVP to Calendar invites than before.

The Gmail Offline app for Chrome, which is essentially a widescreen version of the mobile app that gives you a two-pane view of your inbox, will also get the same design update.

Here is Google’s full update:

A refreshed look for Gmail on mobile web and Gmail Offline

Since launching the rebooted Gmail app for iPhone and iPad in December (http://goo.gl/2m7pd), we’ve heard from many of you that you like the redesigned UI, along with new features such as improved search and integration with Google Calendar. Today we’re rolling out a similar refreshed look to the Gmail mobile web app as well as Gmail Offline (http://goo.gl/0f1ae) that includes many of these same changes. Try it out at gmail.com in the browser of your Android, iOS, Blackberry or Kindle Fire device. #MobileMonday

Startupi, a site covering the Brazilian startup scene, has raised a $300,000 seed round of its own.

The team was pitched to me as the “TechCrunch of Brazil,” and in fact it has attracted the backing of Roi Carthy, who covers Israeli startups for TechCrunch. (Carthy invested through his firm Initial Capital, which backs early-stage Israeli and Brazilian companies.) Other investors in the round include Redpoint eVentures, a partnership between Redpoint Ventures and BV Capital’s eVentures.

“Covering Israeli startups at TechCrunch for five and a half years, I can attest to the importance of having a leading force and voice in a startup ecosystem,” Carthy told me via email. “In Brazil, no one embodies this more than the tireless and passionate team of Startupi.”

The site was founded in 2008 by journalist Diego Remus and New York angel investor Michael Nicklas to make up for the lack of media coverage on Brazilian startups. There’s now a four-person team, including Remus, entrepreneur Bob Wollheim, tech journalist Amanda Demetrio, and former coworking space owner/multimedia consultant Ricardo Lima. (Demetrio and Lima are both recent hires, thanks to the new round.)

Wollheim said that Startupi currently sees about 100,000 unique visitors per month, and that it has plans to triple that number. The company also runs its own events like Startupi Camp and Startupi Con. (Like the rest of Startupi, those events pages are in Portuguese.)

Here’s the full list of investors:

• Redpoint e.ventures,
• Initial Capital
• Trindade Investimentos,
• Mountain do Brasil,
• e.Bricks,
• Demiurgus,
• Aceleratech,
• Kravla Partners,
• In Hsieh, co-founder of Baby.com.br,
• Cassio Spina, founder of Anjos do Brasil association, and other angels of this group.

A lot of people might think of Foursquare as that checkin app with badges and leader boards and finding out where your friends are. But it’s a lot more than that now, thanks to all the map data and information that they know about places people are going to.

In a conversation onstage at SXSW with Anil Dash, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley discussed the company’s evolution from an app that was primarily focused around helping people to find their friends, to finding out more about the world that they live in.

Crowley said that one of the underreported stories is the number of companies that rely on Foursquare’s map data and what developers can potentially do with that. The place database has more than 50 million places of interest in it, and it changes frequently. Users enter new places as soon as they open up, and signal places that have closed down.

When talking about the map data that it has, Crowley compared Foursquare’s check-ins to Google’s web crawlers scanning the Internet for new websites. “People tell us about the places that are interesting, the places that are no longer interesting,” he said.

More importantly, the company isn’t entirely dependent on just its users anymore for a lot of its data. Thanks to the Foursquare API, the company gets location data from lots of different apps. For instance, every Instagram picture that has a location attached to it sends a data signal to Foursquare about that place of interest.

In that respect, the relationship between Foursquare and its API partners is kind of symbiotic: Foursquare has one of the best map data sets out there and makes it available. In exchange, it finds out more about the places that its partners’ users go to.

At the end of the day, the data that Foursquare has is the ability to provide more personalized maps than what is available today. Crowley said that maps haven’t really changed that much since people started making them, but now that we have certain amounts of trending data or interest data, Foursquare could help make the places that people see more meaningful to them.

Crowley likened that to Harry Potter’s “Marauders Map” and how it provides Harry with details about the people and places around them. “There is enough data that we should be able to make that Harry Potter map and give it to everyone in the room,” Crowley said.

In a statement on its blog today, Bitly has announced that CEO Peter Stern has stepped down as CEO. The reason is that Stern is to “pursue other interests”; further details aren’t known at this time.

The NYC-based company has raised $28.5 close to $23 million to date, with the last round being a monster $15 million one by O’Reilly, RRE and Khosla last July.

Stern was the CEO for a little over a year, after founding Zenbe, a mobile collaboration company with mail, shareflow and list services.

Bitly was in the driver’s seat for link-tracking analytics with its popular short-URL service, and the definition of a hot startup. Once the social web took off, marketers and advertisers everywhere clamored for ways to see how their campaigns were doing in real-time. Bitly has since cooled off since services like Twitter have started handling their own short URLs. In January, the company announced a new set of social-tracking APIs for developers in the hopes that its service would be included in other hot metric products.

Regardless, this definitely seems like an odd time for a CEO to get bored and move on, so we’re digging for more details:

Bitly is announcing today that Peter Stern has resigned to pursue other interests.

“Peter has been a key leader and contributor to the Company,” said Bitly Board member Sam Mandel. “In particular he has been instrumental in transforming Bitly into a successful business while growing its unparalleled data set. We are very happy that he will remain a shareholder and supporter.”

We’ve reached out to Bitly for more information and will update as soon as we hear back.

Sources tell us that the overall health and direction of the company is in question, which might explain why the short blog post announcement had a quote from a board member via betaworks. If you’ve heard anything, do reach out to us on the tip line.

Something smells fish.ly.

UPDATE: While we haven’t been able to dig up too many specific details on the exit of its CEO, we’re told that the company is transitioning away from being an Ad Tech company, which is one potential reason for the change. Currently, Chief Scientist Hilary Mason and VP of Engineering Peter Miron are steering the ship until a replacement is found, along with guidance from betaworks’ Sam Mandel.

For the last few months now, Netflix regularly published a list of the fastest ISPs for streaming video. Today, the company launched a dedicated site for this data, the Netflix ISP Speed Index. The Speed Index includes data from many of the countries the service is currently available in, including the U.S., Mexico, Ireland, U.K.,Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Unsurprisingly, Google Fiber, with an average speed of 3.35Mbps, offer the highest average bitrate for Netflix streaming, followed by Sweden’s Ownite (2.99Mbps).

The data on the site, Netflix says, is based on data from more than 33 million Netflix members ” who view over 1 billion hours of TV shows and movies streaming from Netflix per month.” The historical data on the site goes back to last November (and according to these stats, Google Fiber has only gotten faster since then) and the index will be updated on a monthly basis.

Netflix notes that the average performance will always be below the ISPs peak performance. The way Netflix encodes the videos, as well as the various devices its viewers use and the condition of their home networks ultimately lead to lower performance. These factors, however, “cancel out when comparing across ISPs,” Netflix argues, and the speeds are “are an indicator of the performance typically experienced across all users on an ISP network.”

While this index is clearly meant to highlight the best ISPs for streaming and shame those who don’t provide a lot of bandwidth to its users, Netflix is also closely working with a number of ISPs to improve its users’ streaming experience. Its Open Connect content delivery network, for example, lets ISP peer directly with Netflix to save transit costs. Netflix also offers a storage appliance to ISPs. This server, which sits in the ISPs data center, effectively works as a local cache for popular Netflix content. Thanks to this, Netflix can now offer higher a higher bitrate for its 1080p HD streams and 3D titles to users whose ISPs have installed these appliances (which includes many of the higher-rated ISP in its Index, too).

After months of teasing, the Hopper With Sling is finally here. And, fortunately, it’s worth the wait.

DirecTV’s new set-top box does a great job of auto-recording shows you might like, giving you more viewing options. But it lacks the killer place-shifting features offered by DISH.