Category: Tech news

Earlier this week, Path launched the 3.0 version of its privacy-focused and mobile-centric social networking app. It was an update that was important for two key reasons: It debuted private messaging, and rolled out Path’s first real revenue-generating feature with a shop for premium emoji-like “stickers.”

Off-camera on the sidelines of a TechCrunch TV interview today at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, Path founder and CEO Dave Morin told me that 3.0 has made a bigger impact on the company than even the team had expected.

In fact, in the first 24 hours after the 3.0 launch, Path made more money than it had in its entire lifetime as a company, total (starting with its 2.0 version, Path has collected affiliate revenue from media sales generated in the app.) And messaging has proved extremely popular, with more than 1 million messages sent by users within the first 24 hours of 3.0′s debut. I’m told he’s now announcing those figures publicly in an ongoing on-stage SXSW interview following our chat.

It’s good news from the social networking app, which is universally lauded as beautifully designed and thoughtful, but has been criticized for possibly not quite making a big enough dent outside of the early adopter crowd. This is an example of Path being more forthcoming with numbers that might prove those naysayers wrong — similar to how the company recently announced that its user base numbers 6 million people — and could be an indication of more confidence from the company.

We’re still processing that on-camera TCTV interview with Morin, in which we discussed 3.0 in detail as well as Path’s new hires. We’ll post that as soon as it comes through.

“Teleportation is the transfer of matter from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them, similar to the concept apport, an earlier word used in the context of spiritualism.”

The concept of moving throughout the world freely without actually having to “physically” travel is the Holy Grail for many. Being able to explore a physical space that is thousands of miles away without having to deal with the rigors of travel seems like something out of a science fiction novel. With Street View, Google has brought us as close as we could possibly get to teleportation – without the actual physical matter transference, of course.

The project started as research at Stanford and then hopped into Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page’s car. Snapping photos of every nook and cranny of the planet so that people could travel the world from the comfort of their own homes or mobile devices is the hallmark of Google’s approach to the world around it and the evolution of technology.

I spent the day with the founding members of the Street View team to learn about how it went from a gimmick in someone’s mind to a utility that we use without thinking, and in some cases, wouldn’t want to live without.

Starting out as a camera strapped to Page’s car, Street View technology has been added to vans, cars, tripods, backpacks, bikes and even a snow mobile. It has become the eyes of all of Google’s vision for how we view the world after launching on May 25, 2007. While the product has had its fair share of controversy, Google has forged ahead.

Going somewhere before you actually get there

It was a Frankenstein-looking car.

Before I spoke with Luc Vincent, engineering director, and Daniel Filip, engineering manager, at Google Maps, I had done quite a bit of research into the history of the Google Maps product as a whole. What I didn’t know is how “pie in the sky” the concept of Street View actually was, which is an easy misconception to have once a technology has become so ubiquitous.

Vincent told me a bit about the first concept of Street View, which was hatched at Google based on some experiments being done at Stanford, led by Marc Levoy. Levoy and one of his students had come up with a way to shoot video and paste it together into one picture, and Google decided to invest a little money into more experiments to see if it was feasible to take photos of every street in San Francisco. By parsing out this video frame by frame, it could make a really “long” image, or a facade of an entire street. It was distorted, of course, but this was the building block that Google needed to prove its Street View theory.

On these long, wiggly, very early street-wide images, Vincent said, “That was interesting to us.” Pretty to the point, and that was the moment that Street View was born.

After this testing, Larry Page strapped a camera onto his car and snapped shots throughout San Francisco. These images, along with some very basic cross-street data, would be patched together into something that wasn’t quite useful, but was even more “interesting,” as Vincent put it.

From Page’s car, the very early Street View team, which was comprised of a few random Googlers using their 20 percent time, threw some cameras into a van with a GPS and some lasers. The lasers were to grab data so that the team could know what the distance was between the camera and the facades of the buildings. That spacial recognition is what helps Google patch all of its images together and give it that 3D feel. The camera took a lot of pictures, the devices, hooked up to a raid of computers in the back of the van, and then this very unique dataset that is what makes Street View Street View, was amassed. It wasn’t pretty, though, as Vincent said:

It was a Frankenstein-looking car, but it let us capture enough data in the Bay Area. We had a van that we borrowed from the security team. It would go into the city, do some driving, and things would stop working and the computer gave us errors.

Getting buy-in

It was going to have to be expensive to be comprehensive.

Working on a project at Google with your 20 percent time is only part of the battle. Getting other people to join your team and getting it approved is a whole separate hurdle. Vincent told me that once they collected all of this data, people started piecing it together, and the demos made sense.

In Q3 of 2005, Vincent and his team gave a tech talk at Google, one that takes place every Friday, and was able to get more 20 percenters to join the team, including a key engineering VP. In October of 2005, Street View was approved and had the go-ahead to expand. There was no turning back. The world would be mapped out pixel by pixel by a bunch of moonshot thinkers that were trying to figure out how many devices they could bolt onto a car without it failing every five miles. While Street View was still under the radar at this point, Vincent could start hiring people – Filip being the first. The fact that these two are still working on the product today is a testament to how far it’s come and how much is still left to do.

In early 2006, there was seven Googlers working on Street View full time, with the goal of making it a “real product.” Vincent had this to say on the transition:

There were a few things at that time that we were really interested in. Perspective panoramas were cool but really hard to make. We only had one UI/UX guy to figure out how to integrate it into maps, but there was no compelling way to show it, because there was no “Google Maps” when we started.

Yes, all of the infrastructure that you see today in the Google Maps product didn’t even exist at that time, so the Street View team at Google had even passed Google’s current plans and trajectory. Vincent shared:

What we did was built a new platform, we wanted to build something reliable and scalable and put it in a car. Something with high-speed cameras to take pictures, so we had 8 SLRs in a rosette configuration to take images all around the vehicle. Our thought at this time was “it was going to have to be expensive to be comprehensive.”

This “rosette design,” which originally consisted of five lenses and one main fisheye called the L2, has become the core to every Street View Vehicle. Once this approach to photography and information gathering was set in stone, Google knew that this would work.

The Data

Collect as much data as possible and figure it out.

Google Street View, and everything Google does pretty much, is all about the data it collects. In many ways, Google is extremely obsessed about collecting all types of data. This approach has ruffled feathers of those who feel like their privacy is being invaded, but the company takes the approach of “collect as much as you can, make sense of it later, display it in a way that helps people.” Take that approach, then rinse and repeat.

Street View collects quite a bit of data, and Vincent’s team had to figure out a way to scale these original vans to grab as much of its as possible so that they wouldn’t have to drive the same routes more than once. The team threw lasers onto the vans, 4 on each side, to get distance information, more GPS, collected wind velocity and everything in between. He said that the approach was simple: “Collect as much data as possible and figure it out.”

How was this going to work outside of San Francisco though? There is now Street View data in over 3,000 cities and 47 countries all over the world, so there was a lot of work ahead before this project ever saw the light of day.

Vincent said:

We had a rack of 4 or 5 machines in the back of the vehicles, but something was always breaking. We built 3 or 4 of these, and took images in mostly in California. The cars were always failing, so we couldn’t scale this.

Five million unique miles driven later, the failures are now few and far between.

Making sense of the data

All of this sounds fantastic, collecting data and photos just by driving around a city, but to make it actually useful, the team had to come up with a way to visualize it and tweak it from a user experience perspective. One’s and Zero’s make uber mathematical geeks happy, but there’s no way that our parents could ever make sense of any of that. To fully experience Google Maps and Street View, the design had to be nearly perfect, as if you just stepped into a foreign city for the first time and had your head on a swivel.

To do this, the Street View team built itself an internal tool that churned through all of the geographical information, smacked layers of photos on top of it, used all of the spacial details picked up by the lasers bouncing off of buildings and landmarks and then see if it was actually usable. With quite a bit of work, it finally was:

All of this data was collected by drivers who would fill up hard drives and ship them back to Google. The drivers wouldn’t send them in until they had five disks completely full. The disks would get shipped to a data center, the information uploaded and then everything would get fed into its core database and go through a few processing steps.

One of those processing steps is the blurring of people’s faces and license plates. These are seemingly obvious privacy issues that nobody thought of before this product existed, so Google had to invent the technology to do it systematically. Additionally, there are fifteen images taken for each finished shot and angle that you see on Street View today, and Google’s software takes all of these images and mashes them together, adjusts the exposure for sun, shadows, color differences and brightness. That’s the processing that goes into making the “perfect” panoramic images, by chopping all of these images into squares and morphing them together into one mega image.

All the while, Google is detecting and extracting information from objects like street signs to feed back into the main Google Maps product. That’s quite a load.

As each of the cameras on top of the vehicle would snap pictures, the location information could be associated with it, along with that spacial information from the layers, thus allowing the Street View team to stitch together all of the angles necessary to create this beautiful panoramic imagery.

A photo from the front, sides, behind and then eventually from the fisheye looking upwards at buildings, would turn into the 3D views that we enjoy today:

One cool thing that I learned was that since the cameras looking in front of and behind the vehicle were partially obstructed, Google invented a technology to smooth those images out using shots from other angles, and that’s why the 3D images seem as if a photo-taking vehicle never existed:

The launch and Street View today

We saw traffic go through the roof.

Google Street View launched officially in 2007 and was only available for San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver. The cameras at that time were 5 megapixels, which is barely what we have on our phones today. Today, the cameras are 75 megapixels, try to wrap your brain around that one.

It was an immediate success, even though the Street View team, and Google, didn’t know how well it would be received. Of course, Google was ready to burn a few machines to the ground by serving up this imagery and Vincent recalled what that day felt like:

We saw traffic go through the roof and about as high as we could serve, well we hit that limit immediately. What’s great about being at Google, is you get to observe traffic and interest. The launch showed the interest, and a bunch of websites starting popping up and sites popped up showing funny images captured by us.

Those funny, and sometimes disturbing, images have since caused a stir, with Google having to defend itself in some cases.

The original vans weren’t scalable, so fitting this technology, which now consists of “ladybug” cameras with those same 8 lenses and a fisheye, had to be put into cars that could be driven everywhere in the world. You’ve probably seen one driving around your neighborhood at this point.

“It took some time to get there,” Vincent says of Street View, as all of its contraptions have gone through multiple iterations, building up to Google eventually building its own cameras and custom rigs. Once the core technology was solid, Street View was being asked for in smaller cities and towns in other countries, so the team scaled down the rigs to fit onto other vehicles like bikes. The Street View Trike can maneuver its way in and out of alleyways, around big landmarks and down streets that aren’t wide enough for a car or van.

Then, a member of the team decided that it wanted to do the Street View treatment on the mountains during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Why not, right? The Street View technology was then adapted to be driven around by a snow mobile. It was too cold out for the camera, so Vincent said that the engineer had to take off his jacket to keep it warm. As more data was collected and more imagery was displayed online, the ideas came faster and faster.

We wanted to connect people.

Why would you stop with outside imagery? Why not get panoramic imagery indoors, especially in famous museums? The Street View Trolley was born. On indoor Street View, Vincent said:

We made a new mini computer and shrunk everything and put it onto a pushcart to go into large indoor spaces. A tripod would be too time consuming. The challenge is that there is no GPS indoors, so we worked on complex algorithms that extracts locations of the Trolley without GPS, with lasers and positional data. This Trolley has now helped launched 50 museums.

You’re starting to get the picture. If it doesn’t exist, that doesn’t stop forward-thinking Googlers. Once something works just a little bit and it seems cool and useful for consumers, the money and resources are allocated and things are built on the fly, by any means necessary.

The current Street View cameras currently has 15 cameras and one fisheye, because Vincent felt like Street View wasn’t getting enough photos. The envelope continues to be pushed for quality and accuracy, and that’s one of the reasons why Apple had such a hard time launching its own Map product. You see, Google has been doing all of this since 2005, and not only that, it has been doing it at a huge scale since 2007. All of those lessons learned, all of that data and all of those man-hours mean that Google has not only a head-start, but also a perennial edge moving forward. Basically, catch them if you can.

At the end of my day with the Street View crew, I asked Vincent the very simple question of “Why did you start all of this?” His answer, straight faced, serious and yet wide-eyed and empathetic…”We wanted to connect people.”

Making complex things common

Yes, a lot of Google’s technology runs in the background of our desktops and phones, without any of us knowing how all of it works. That’s the magic, though, you don’t really want to know how the sausage is made, and you just want to know that it tastes really good. When something tastes good, you’ll come back and eat more and even tell your friends about it. Vincent likes that Google products are taken for granted, because it allows them to innovate more, and faster.

There are a lot of things that Street View can accomplish in the future. With its Trekker backpack, wooded areas can be charted out to help crews look for missing people, as well as allow you to discover the Grand Canyon without ever actually getting on a plane or bus.

Even though the early days of Street View weren’t pretty, be it the devices that were cobbled together or the artifact-full images that were post, people got the concept, embraced the concept and asked for more. As long as Google keeps trekking along to gather as much data as it can and figure out how to display it later, we’ll continuously be introduced to more products that just work.

While you might not be able to physically teleport just yet, your mind can wander wherever you like, making the world feel like a smaller place. That connects us to people in a way that no other technology has ever accomplished.

The best part about all of Street View’s historical body of work is that a lot of these approaches have been open-sourced, as if to say “come and get us.” Can you catch up to Google? When it comes to Maps, you better have a pretty sophisticated and fast vehicle, because they’re literally everywhere, just look for the big iconic camera.

Also, when you use your smartphone to scope out an area of interest, remember everything that went into displaying that smooth imagery so quickly. Who knows, you might be able to participate in the project one day. With Google Glass, you might be able to take shots of the world around you and have them included in Street View imagery.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? About as crazy as strapping a digital camera onto a founder’s car.

Facebook’s no blogging platform, but Tumblr is and it’s eating the social network’s young. If Facebook wants to host our digital lives, it needs richer sharing. That’s Storylane’s specialty, so Facebook’s acqhire of its team sounds like a smart staff-up. The startup’s Chief Executive Story Teller Jonathan Gheller and crew could convince us to share our quick memes and long opinions on Facebook.

You see the kids, they love Tumblr. Internet savvy folks do, too. Customization, big images, animated GIFs, and the option to write something longer if necessary. It all makes Facebook’s status update box seem a bit confining. Timeline may your life history, but most people don’t splay their scrapbook all over their coffee table. Facebook needs a better home for people who care a little bit more about what and how they share.

Wait wait wait. What about Facebook Notes? Well, when was the last time you saw someone share a note? That’s because Facebook buried them when it switched to Timeline 18 months ago and the product has been growing moldy in the dark ever since.

Storylane and Gheller could bring fresh life to Facebook’s blogging intentions. Storylane launched in October 2012, and our own Anthony Ha’s coverage explains that Gheller wanted it to be “the home for personal thoughts and stories that go deeper than a quick Facebook or Twitter update.” It’s great place for memories, poetry, and personal manifestos. Storylane would even try to inspire you with prompts like “What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in life?” or “What hobbies do you enjoy the most?”

You know who else started trying to creatively (or creepily) prompt you to share? Facebook. “How are you feeling, Josh?”, “What did you learn today?”, “What’s your favorite Halloween memory?”. No wonder Gheller and his four employees were keen to join forces with Facebook, who’s picking up just Storylane’s talent, not its product or data.

Tumblr’s success won’t be easy to create inside Facebook’s walled garden. Most Tumblr posts are public and it’s heavy on re-blogging — both which are not Facebook’s forte. It’s also about sharing to people who want to subscribe specifically to your blog or come find you, not about blasting posts to everyone you’ve ever met. Facebook and the Storylaners (terrible band name) would need to find the right distribution scheme for Facebook blog posts.

If it can make it work, though, it’d add a powerful publishing style to its repertoire. And it could win back some of the youth it admits are slipping elsewhere.

First thing’s first, Facebook has to start rendering animated GIFs. The Tumblr kids (and adults) can’t get enough of ‘em.

[Image Credits: Hendertaker/Newgrounds, HavocReaper/Wikia, Pokemon]

AskYourTargetMarket, a market research firm which got its start in the demo pit at TechCrunch50 (in the pre-Disrupt days), is rolling out its biggest update ever to its service. According to CEO Lev Mazin, the company has made several improvements across all fronts, which include an expanded consumer reach, the addition of market research experts available, better pricing, a redesigned website, and more.

The last time AYTM (as it’s known for short) provided details to its audience reach, the company was saying that it had access to 4.5 million respondents. Today, the company reaches 20 million users worldwide – a metric it grew by expanding its own proprietary panels, but also through closing less than a half-dozen strategic partnerships with panel providers through API integrations. Due to NDA agreements, however, Mazin can’t provide those names.

He explains, though, that this increased reach is important because the larger AYTM grows, the more use cases it can offer to potential customers. They can now drill down further into customer demographics in order to carve up more precise segments of a user population – for example, not just smartphone owners, but Android owners who are male, who are in a specific age range, and who are also gamers.

The company has also now brought in its own market research experts to aid those who either don’t know how to or don’t have time to use the service’s still free DIY tools. Instead, starting at $995 and up, AYTM offers a turn-key service with a seven-day turnaround time. Mazin says that 80 percent of its research assistance is handled by its own in-house staff, while another 20 percent is outsourced to external experts, given the subject of the customer’s questionnaire. Depending on how AYTM’s customer base adopts this feature, he says the firm can quickly scale up either side of the expertise offered – internal or external – as the case may be.

There are a handful of other features that have been introduced as well with this new release, including support for video questionnaires and video responses, which is a fairly unique way to add a little jazz to what might otherwise be sometimes boring data presentations. The company also adjusted pricing – before you could only get three completed questions per questionnaire for 95 cents each; now you can get 10. And you don’t have to blow through those asking the demographic info (gender, age, etc.) – you also get up to 10 of those on top of the actual questions you want to ask. Delivery times are also now no longer estimated, but guaranteed, and can be viewed in advance using a tool found here.

To date, AYTM has worked with thousands of companies and has run 150 million questions through its service. The 15-person company hit profitability last year, Mazin adds. All the new features and services are live now on the redesigned version of the AYTM website here.

Intel Capital, the venture arm of Intel, boasts over 120 portfolio companies to have listed publicly on the NASDAQ alone. In celebration of that, President Arvind Sodhani rang yesterday’s closing bell, and we caught up with him to chat about the future of the Ultrabook platform, wearable computing, and advancements in voice and gesture technology.

Intel Capital has actually invested in two of our most recent Disrupt alumni, Ark and Expect Labs, which focuses on predictive voice transcription to help you out as a digital assistant while you’re on the phone.

Sodhani hinted quite strongly that Expect Labs could potentially be the company to bring voice support to the Ultrabook platform, a promise Intel made in October of 2012.

“Our platforms, ultrabooks, tablets and laptops, will have a digital personal assistant on them in the next several years,” said Sodhani. “They’ll anticipate what you want to do next, what you need, and they’ll be context-aware.”

“Expect Labs fits into that very nicely,” said Sodhani. He also mentioned that Intel is looking at other companies for both speech and gesture recognition, but Expect Labs is clearly in the running.

Along with the rapid expansion of the cloud, Sodhani believes that 2012′s onslaught of voice-powered technology will only continue to grow alongside gesture-recognition technology.

As will wearables. Though Intel Capital hasn’t yet invested in wearable computing hardware, Sodhani admits that they’re certainly open to it should the right opportunity arise.

Bre Pettis, founder of 3D-printer manufacturer MakerBot, announced their first desktop 3D scanner, the Digitizer, at a SXSWi keynote today. Pettis was coy about availability or final design but instead was focused on making a splash at the event.

“We’re excited to put ourselves out there with the announcement. I have a tradition of announcing things at SXSW. I don’t think there are many actual physical products announced at SXSW, so it’s special,” he said.

Officially called the MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner, the device will work in concert with the MakerBot printer to complete the constellation of services MakerBot offers. For example, you will be able to scan an object and print it immediately on a MakerBot printer.

According to today’s release, the design shown at SXSW is a prototype and there is no launch date slated although Pettis said it would be available “this Fall.”

Pettis, for one, is excited.

“It’s a natural progression for us to create a product that makes 3D printing even easier. With the MakerBot Digitizer, now everyone will be able to scan a physical item, digitize it, and print it in 3D – with little or no design experience.”

“It’s going to be another pathway for people to make 3D models,” he said.

UPDATE – I’ll be posting live photos from the event. The scanner uses two lasers to map small, breadbox-sized objects and a webcam to create a digital model of any object.

Google Research just launched its Wikilinks corpus, a massive new data set for developers and researchers that could make it easier to add smart disambiguation and cross-referencing to their applications. The data could, for example, make it easier to find out if two web sites are talking about the same person or concept, Google says. In total, the corpus features 40 million disambiguated mentions found within 10 million web pages. This, Google notes, makes it “over 100 times bigger than the next largest corpus,” which features fewer than 100,000 mentions.

For Google, of course, disambiguation is something that is a core feature of the Knowledge Graph project, which allows you to tell Google whether you are looking for links related to the planet, car or chemical element when you search for ‘mercury,’ for example. It takes a large corpus like this one and the ability to understand what each web page is really about to make this happen.

To construct this data set, Google looked at links to Wikipedia pages “where the anchor text of the link closely matches the title of the target Wikipedia page.” There is a high probability that this anchor text is a mention of the corresponding entity that’s the focus of the entity that’s discussed in the Wikipedia entry.

The 10 million annotated web pages, sadly, aren’t part of the corpus because of copyright issues, but the UMass Wikilinks project features all the necessary tools to create this data from scratch. The UMass team also published a paper that explains the process that was used to create this data set in more detail (PDF).

Last year, Google released a similar data set when it launched a database with over 7.5 million concepts and 175 million unique text strings, which is similar to what Google itself uses to suggest targeted keywords for advertisers. That set, too, was built by looking at Wikipedia articles to identify concepts and the anchor links that other websites used to link to them.

Wrike has added a type of chart that most seasoned project managers depend on for their work. It’s called a Gantt chart and it’s used to visualize projects in a way that a standard calendar lacks.

Wrike is built on top of a real-time collaboration platform with syncing capability, allowing updates to the Gantt chart across the browser or mobile app, or via one of the company’s email plugins.

The Gantt chart lets people visualize the schedule, change it and create and assign tasks from there, said Andrew Filev, CEO and founder, in an interview yesterday. By default it only shows the active tasks on the chart.

Wrike’s differentiation is in the flexibility of the service. The Gantt chart can dynamically update not just tagged items or those organized hierarchically but both. This is to accommodate the overlapping nature of any organization for any number of things, such as a product launch that requires coordination across product groups, marketing and engineering. If your engineering teams delay it, you want all your dependent schedules across all other projects to be updated automatically. People also want to slice and dice their work in different ways at the same time. For example, a manager may want to see things organized by different products, offices or activities.

The other capability that Wrike has is in its scaling capability.

“A lot of task-management tools have never seen a user with 5,000 tasks,” Filev tells me. “Our customers start with a 10 tasks, grow to 10,000 tasks and keep growing. Our largest customer has more than 200,000 tasks in their company’s account, and continues to grow rapidly.”

Wrike competes in a heated space. Its challenge is not in providing relevant features but competing with healthy competitors such as Asana.

Procrastination is a hell of a drug. Don’t let it ruin your life. And, for the purpose of this post, don’t let procrastination cost you money. Today, Friday, March 8th, is the last day for the Disrupt NY early bird tickets. Today is the last day that you can score tickets at a hefty discount. Today!

With the extra early bird discount, the tickets are $1,795, which nets buyers an all-inclusive general admission conference pass. That pass gets you into all three days of the conference and each night’s after party. The price jumps to $1,999 tomorrow and $2,999 on April 11th.

Of course you could score the same ticket for free.

If you’re the adventurous type, participate in the Disrupt NY 24 hour Hackathon (shown below). Not only are you competing for some serious cash prizes, but all participants earn a ticket to Disrupt. Plus, you get to present your creation on the Disrupt stage in front of a panel of judges. It worked out well for GroupMe.

With a brand new venue and the largest number of Disrupt Battlefield applications of any Disrupt, this year’s New York City show is shaping up nicely. Save some money and get tickets early.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected].

Facebook announced a number of new common actions today for Facebook activity, joining the “watch video” and other existing ones available to developers. These include actions in the Fitness, Books and Movies & TV categories that help users better express their interaction with media and their world. Of course, they also help developers mining the Open Graph for data get a more accurate picture of user intent and habits.

The new common actions include “run, walk and bike” for the fitness category, “read, rate, quote, and want to read” for books, and “rate, plus want to watch” for movies and TV. In the fitness category, the new actions help differentiate between specific types of actions for lifestyle apps. Facebook uses Nike to demonstrate the “run” action in, well, action, showing a user’s distance traveled, as well as time of run and NikeFuel accumulated in a sample Facebook post. Users familiar with Path’s Nike+ integration may find this type of post familiar.

As for the new common actions for books, movies and TV, they help identify not only what a user has actively been consuming, but also what they intend to buy, and to what degree they enjoyed something with a quantifiable score. The value of gathering intent data, as well as qualitative information on exactly what kind of media people like for marketers and others who use Open Graph information to customize their consumer interaction should be apparent. It’s also a play for higher engagement, as Facebook outlines in its blog post:

For example, the new fitness stories dynamically update when someone finishes their workout, and early data shows that average likes per story have increased by more than 2x. As we move more apps to use a common set of actions, we’ll be able to further optimize the performance of these stories and the user experience.

Previously, developers could’ve created these actions on their own via Facebook’s Custom Actions tool, but now they’re normalized and offered up to all developers on Facebook’s platform, which makes the information gathered via them more generally useful. Facebook announced that a number of top-tier brands are already employing the new common actions, including Jawbone UP, Runkeeper, Endomondo, Kobo, GoodReads, Rotten Tomatoes and Hulu, and also let developers know that it will be forcing a transition from similar custom actions to the new common versions by July 10, 2013.

For end users, the surface effect of this change might not be instantly apparent, but it will definitely have an impact for Facebook’s developer and advertiser partners.

More changing of the guard among the leadership ranks at VMware. CMO Rick Jackson is on his way out of the enterprise software company. He’s stepping down as CMO moving into SVP role, although he’ll remain CMO until a replacement is found. According to an internal note provided to TechCrunch, “Rick Jackson will be transitioning to a new role as SVP of Global Enablement. Rick remains CMO until a replacement is hired and transition completed.”

We’d been hearing other details this week that we weren’t able to confirm, although this latest development shows that they were not entirely off the mark, either. Jackson had told some staff earlier in the week that he would be leaving his role because the new CEO — Pat Gelsinger, who joined in September 2012 to replace Paul Maritz — wanted his CMO to be ”10 feet down the hall”. Jackson recently moved from the Bay Area — VMware is headquartered in Palo Alto — to Austin, Texas.

These two aren’t the only c-level executives to leave VMware. The virtualization giant also lost its CTO Steve Herrod, who left to join General Catalyst in January 2013. Further back, in April 2012, VMware’s CFO Mark Peek left for Workday.

Jackson, who has been in IT for 25 years, has been with VMware since 2009 and has also had roles at BEA Systems and Borland Software.

We’ve reached out to the company and will update this post with more details as we learn them.

Photo: Flickr

Dynamic Signal, the social marketing company led by Adify co-founder Russ Fradin, is launching a new product today called VoiceStorm, which encourages, manages and measures employees’ efforts to promote a company on social networks.

Fradin told me that VoiceStorm is functionally similar to Dynamic Signal’s existing platform, which helps companies run word-of-mouth marketing campaigns — it’s just built for employees rather than customers or fans. Basically, Fradin aims to replace all those team emails and in-person encounters where someone is nudging everyone else into tweeting something, posting it on Facebook, and so on.

“One of our first clients said to us, ‘Hey, can we get our employees to join this community as well?’” Fradin said. “Our employees are really our best advocates. We want to be able to send content to them and make it super easy for them to be able to get that content.”

VoiceStorm can automatically pull content from a company’s RSS feeds, and users can also upload content that they find elsewhere for approval. So when an employee logs into their dashboard, they might see the latest job listings, or a press release about a big product launch, or a TechCrunch article about their latest venture funding. Then they can select the content that seems worth sharing, write their own message, and push it to all of their connected social accounts.

Management, meanwhile, can see who’s doing the most sharing and getting the most clicks. The site even includes a leaderboard of the most successful employee advocates. Fradin argued that this allows companies to quantify the value of that promotion, and to reward employees accordingly. For example, if someone’s sharing eventually leads to the hiring of an important team member, that could save the company tens of thousands of dollars in recruiting fees.

There are other companies, including Addvocate, trying to help employees promote the company on social media. Fradin said that with VoiceStorm, the key ingredient is mobile messaging. Managers can not only add content to the system, but they can also send it as a push notification to specific groups within the company. So if TechCrunch had a big scoop that we wanted to promote immediately, VoiceStorm could actually send alerts asking all the writers to tweet it right away.

On the flip side, if employees just want to visit the VoiceStorm site once a day, they can also queue up a number of social media updates, then the service will automatically space them out so that they don’t all post at once. Fradin said there’s not much technical intelligence in the scheduling. It’s less about optimizing the timing and more about making it convenient for the employee.

Oh, and it isn’t just for employees. You can invite other company supporters, as well — for startups, that would probably include their investors and advisors. VoiceStorm is free for up to 40 users, with final pricing to be announced later.

After initially missing the boat on mobile-photo sharing and then having to turn around and plunk down nearly $1 billion for Instagram, Facebook wasn’t going to let a hot app (and potential existential threat) emerge too quickly again.

Although Facebook is more than 1 billion users strong, the company still has a paranoia and mortal fear that the next social network could emerge out of a distant dorm room.

With promising engagement and growth metrics, Snapchat had quietly piqued some interest about a year ago before entering a hyper-growth phase with about 5 billion photos sent in a year plus $13.5 million in funding led by Benchmark Capital. By late last year, Snapchat was sending 50 million photos a day compared to 300 million photos posted on Facebook per day.

Facebook responded much faster this time with an app called Poke, which it built in about 12 days. It had extras like the ability to send simple text messages, in addition to video and photos. It also allowed group conversations.

But for many reasons, a Facebook clone does not a startup-killer make.

Data on the active usage for both apps showed that Snapchat actually grew in market share from December to January after Facebook Poke’s launch. It then leveled off into February, while Facebook Poke has declined from a 2 percent market share down to less than 0.25 percent among iPhone users in the U.S.

A Sequoia-backed startup called Onavo has a panel of a few million users that it samples active usage data for apps from. Because the company’s products track data compression, they can actually see the “market share” of different apps — or what percentage of iPhone owners in the U.S. used them in the last month. So as you can see below, their data suggests that 12 percent of U.S. iPhone users opened up Snapchat in February.

Facebook has a mixed track record of competing against what it considers emerging threats. It has had successes like Messenger, which the company launched after buying Beluga.

But on the other hand, it bought Instagram after it looked like a Facebook Camera app was going to come out too late in the market to be competitive. It shut down Quora-competitor Questions after about two years. It shut down a “Deals” product after exploring the super-competitive group-buying space, and Foursquare didn’t decline after Facebook launched its own “check-in” product. After very tentative discussions to acquire Twitter fell apart way back in 2008, Facebook started aggressively pushing pages, fans, followers and more public status updates.

All of these products — Quora, Instagram, Groupon, Foursquare, Twitter — are still very much alive as their own brands because they accumulated strong enough network effects and their own very specific behaviors. Although Facebook has the clout, trying to compete as a Swiss army knife against a much more precise array of tools doesn’t always work out.

So as Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel said earlier, “Welcome, Facebook. Seriously.”

A Bitcoin brokerage, Bitinstant was hit by hackers who used a bit of social engineering to take control of the company’s DNS servers and ultimately funnel out $12,000 worth of Bitcoins.

Hackers first took over the Bitinstant’s DNS domains and then the company’s email servers. They used these to log into another Bitcoin exchange, VirWox, and pull out $12,480 worth of Bitcoin out of a Bitinstant account.

The company detailed the hack in a blog post last week, noting that no “personal or transactional information has been leaked.”

The unique nature of the hack and the number of blinds used to hide the attacker’s identity was fairly clever but Bitinstant notes that the exploit was focused mostly on faking passwords and a failure to use multi-factor authentication. As Bitcoin use grows online, it will only be a matter of time before we add a few more zeros to that $12,000 sum.

via Wired

This is the first Android device I would feel comfortable using on a regular basis.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to, but I would be just fine with it.

If I had to boil down my thoughts about the Nexus 4 into two sentences, those would be them.

Of course, I don’t have to boil down my thoughts and I will elaborate below. But I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked as much about a device as I have about the Nexus 4. Maybe it’s because of the limited availability. Maybe it’s because it’s supposed to be the best “clean” Android phone yet. Or maybe it’s the growing sentiment that Android itself is finally getting closer to iOS/iPhone and maybe even surpassing it in some ways.

Of course, with the latter, we seem to hear that every year. Gingerbread was going to be the version of Android that was better than iOS. Then it was going to be Honeycomb (Android tablets were finally going to take off!). Then Ice Cream Sandwich. Now Jelly Bean. Later this year, we’ll hear the same about Key Lime Pie (or whatever it will be called).

Here’s the thing: the most recent versions of Android almost remind me of something developed by Apple. Not necessarily in the fit and finish, but in the methodical way in which they are improving. It used to be that new versions of Android brought sweeping changes to the entire OS. Recent versions seem to be more about refinement — which I think is a good thing for both users and developers.

With the underlying layer of Android now up to snuff, Google can and has focused on getting more of the little things right. And I think that’s why I’m finally getting comfortable with Android: it’s both familiar (as I’ve tested many Android devices now) yet distinctive and fairly polished.

There’s been quite a bit of talk recently about some prominent iPhone users making the move over to Android. I don’t think this is purely coincidental — there’s a lot to like about Android now and it does seem to be evolving at a faster pace than iOS.

But I’m not going to make that move. And I won’t even say “yet” because that implies that I’m waiting for it to happen. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t. I want to be using what I consider to be the best device, and I still consider that to be the iPhone.

But in a world without iPhone, I could definitely see myself using the Nexus 4 as my smartphone. It is a really good device — one that Google should be proud of. Beyond the aforementioned Android software evolution, the Android hardware is also evolving nicely — even just the Nexus line of products.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Nexus 4 is that it’s not really anything like an iPhone. Unlike some of the Samsung-built phones, LG and Google went in another direction. It’s significantly wider than the iPhone 5 and a little taller too. I’m not a huge fan of the form-factor, but plenty of people will be. The larger screen enabled by these larger dimensions is obviously nice.

If the iPhone 5 feels like holding a precious item, the Nexus 4 feels like holding a solid one. Previous versions of Nexus devices have always felt a little bit cheap to me — I actually think the Nexus One was my favorite from a pure built-quality perspective. The Nexus 4 does not feel cheap, but it doesn’t feel as high quality as the iPhone 5 either. Maybe I like it simply because they finally got rid of that silly tear-off backing that Google seemed to be so fond of for a while there. God I hated that “feature”.

The Nexus 4 is the first Android device I can remember where it’s distinctive enough for me to recall what it feels like when I’m not holding it. The iPhone has always been this way. Again, I think this is a testament to Google and LG. It’s not just some plastic-y black slab crammed with specs, it’s designed.

And I fucking love the wireless charging orb that Google just released. Pardon my French. Actually, don’t. I fucking love that thing. Apple needs to copy that pronto. It’s by far the best smartphone “dock” I’ve ever used. And it’s a billion times better than Apple’s current iPhone 5 dock — because no such dock exists. I know it’s a little thing, but coming home and just slapping the Nexus 4 down on a magnetic charger is such a nice touch. And yes, I know there was a similar dock for the Palm Pre, I had one — sadly, it seems the 20 other people who bought one weren’t enough to keep that company afloat.

Yes, it sucks that the Nexus 4 doesn’t support LTE. The reasons seem to be extremely lame — okay, bullshit — but I don’t necessarily consider it a total deal-breaker either. Perhaps due to network saturation, Verizon LTE speeds in San Francisco have fallen back to earth from their initial highs. I notice a difference between LTE and “high speed” 3G, but not a huge one.

The bigger factor for me has been the T-Mobile network coverage itself, which seems far less reliable than Verizon (again, in the Bay Area). Because the phone is unlocked, you can use it on AT&T as well, but still not at LTE speeds.

Other spec-y stuff: the battery life seems solid — on par with the newest iPhone. The internals are clearly quite fast — by far the fastest Android unit I’ve tried yet. The screen looks great — though not iPhone great, and it is noticeably worse in direct sunlight. The camera is decent as well — though, again, not iPhone 5 great (Google has finally improved the camera software too).

Nice hardware aside, the true reason to go with Android — if you’re going to go with Android — has to be the software. Aside from the core Android layer getting more polish, the Google services keep getting better. Specifically, Google Now is great. You may not realize it at first, but over time, it keeps getting better.

One example: I was on a trip to Germany recently and opened Google Now on the Nexus 4. Suddenly, everything I had been searching for on my computer — a venue, a restaurant, the weather, a train — were all right there with up-to-date information. When it works — and there is still a ways to go — it’s magical.

Google’s built-in voice search also destroys Siri. There’s no pussyfooting around that. It’s not even close. The good news is that you can access Google Voice search from the Google app for iOS as well. And rumor has it that Google Now is coming to iOS shortly also — and maybe as a part of the Chrome app?!

Google Field Trip is another fun — yet unrefined — Google service. Of course, that just launched on iOS yesterday.

The main things I miss when using the Nexus 4 remain my favorite iOS apps. Mailbox, Albumatic, Vine, Moves, Clear, Applauze — all nowhere to be found. Yes, a lot of those are companies I’ve invested in — killing it! — but the point is that a lot of young startups still choose to launch iOS-first for whatever reason. For some apps, that’s changing, for some it’s not. It remains an issue for Android.

I do like — and find it interesting — that some more established services are using Android as a testing ground for new app functionality. Tumblr and Foursquare are two that jump to mind here.

When using the same apps on iOS and Android side-by-side, you still notice that the iOS apps still run a bit more smoothly and seem to perform better. Each new version of Android seems to fix this a bit, but we’re not at parity yet. People will try to debate me on this, but there is no debate. We’re not there yet. I don’t know if that’s an Android issue or a developer issue, but it remains an annoyance. The good news is that if you aren’t using iOS on a daily basis, you’re less likely than ever to notice.

Probably the biggest thing I miss about my iPhone when using the Nexus 4 is iMessage. A few years ago, I would have never expected that text messaging would be a key lock-in feature — well played, Apple.

It’s impossible to deny that Google is getting closer to iOS/iPhone in terms of quality with Android, and with these Nexus devices in particular. Maybe that’s bad news for Apple, or maybe it will push them to innovate faster. Either way, I see this as a win for consumers.

John Gruber wrote something recently that came to mind when writing this review:

Windows 95 was vastly improved over Windows 3; the classic Mac OS had barely evolved in a decade…

To be clear, I don’t think it’s fair to say that’s happening here yet, but it’s something to think about. It has been said before, and it rings true: Google is getting better at doing the things Apple is good at faster than Apple is getting better at doing the things that Google is good at. We’ll see what the shakeup at the top of the iOS and iCloud teams yields…

At the end of the day, I’m still firmly rooted in the iPhone camp. And it’s still difficult — though less difficult than ever — to see that changing. One reason that it took me so long to get this review out there is that I was trying to use the Nexus 4 as my only device, but just couldn’t. iMessage, iCal, the apps I needed to test, etc, made it very hard. Again, I’m not sure I see that changing. But I look forward to whatever Google is working on with Motorola. And I look forward to Key Lime Pie. And I’m sure more Apple diehards than ever will be watching closely to see what exactly iOS 7 will entail.

For now, the iPhone still wins the debate in my mind. But I’m finally ready to acknowledge that there is a debate — and a healthy one at that.