Category: Tech news

About 40 minutes ago hackers took over the official Burger King Twitter account, changing the branding to feature McDonald’s fish nuggets prominently on the top and noting that Burger King “just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped =[ FREDOM IS FAILURE?.”

I would recommend checking it out now before it’s taken down.

The last official tweet happened at 12pm on February 17 while the hack began at 12:01 on the 18th.

The account also points to a missing press release that seems to have been placed on Burger King’s official website, suggesting a fairly bold and sweeping hack. The hack seems to be the work of an Anonymous group and is called #OPMadCow.

Users are jumping and and posting responses while the hackers are posting things like “Try our new BK(?) Bath Salt! 99% Pure MDPV! Buy a Big Mac, get a gram free! @dfnctsc @tshyne @mcdonalds.” TShyne is a musician and “innovator.”

Yo @burgerking I tried ordering a Bic Mac at the drive through and got laughed at #specialsauce—
(sub,con) sequence (@sub_space) February 18, 2013

#LulzSec #iThug #Skinflute—
McDonalds (@BurgerKing) February 18, 2013

I have a line in to Burger King PR but I can assume that they are not, in fact, lovin’ it.

Google is facing a privacy policy probe in Europe. Last year Google consolidated more than 60 separate product privacy notices into one unified policy — combining the breadcrumbs of personal data left by users of different services so it could stockpile joined-up personal data as a strategy to rival Facebook’s walled garden. The move drew criticism from European privacy regulators – which last October called for Google to give users more control over their data.

The regulators stopped short of saying Google was acting illegally but published a list of privacy recommendations for Google, including suggesting the company should make it clearer to users how their personal information may be used, and how it is collected and collated from different services. The regulators also wanted Google to offer users an opt-out. At the time, Google told TechCrunch it was reviewing the report, adding: “We are confident that our privacy notices respect European law.”

The 27 regulators, led by France’s CNIL, gave Google three to four months to make changes to its privacy policy — or face “more contentious” action. In a statement on its website today, the CNIL said that four months on from that report Google has failed “to come into compliance” so will now face additional action.

“On 18 February, the European authorities find that Google does not give a precise answer and operational recommendations. Under these circumstances, they are determined to act and pursue their investigations,” the CNIL said in its statement (translated from French with Google Translate).

According to the statement, the European regulators intend to set up a working group, led by CNIL, to “coordinate their enforcement action” against Google — with the working group due to be established before the summer. An action plan for tackling the issue was drawn up at a meeting of the regulators late last month, and will be “submitted for validation” later this month, they added.

Responding to the CNIL’s statement, Google emailed the following comment: “Our privacy policy respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services. We have engaged fully with the CNIL throughout this process, and we’ll continue to do so going forward.”

Separately, the European Commission is in the process of reforming European privacy rules – with proposals to harmonize regulation across all member states, and strengthen independent national data protection authorities, including giving them the ability to fine companies up to €1 million ($1.27 million) or up to 2 percent of their global annual turnover. As part of this reform the EC is proposing European Internet users should be able to exercise a right to be forgotten by requesting that companies delete any personal data held on them — so long as there are no legitimate grounds to retain it.

At the opposite end of the privacy spectrum to a right to be forgotten is, arguably, Google Now: a mobile product introduced by Google in Android 4.1 which gathers data on the phone’s user via a variety of data points — such as a synced Gmail account and the phone’s physical location — in order to proactively push relevant information back out to the user, such as how long it will take to commute back home from your work.

Google Now can only function by having intimate access to multiple personal data points — but by being useful to the user, Google can sell this is a savvy feature, rather than an intrusion — justifying the gathering of a wealth of private data which it can also (of course) use for its own business ends by improving its targeted advertising.

Tutorspree has been quiet of late, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still plugging away on its mission to make high-quality, local tutors in any subject accessible to any student — or finding continued interest from investors along the way. According to its Form D filing with SEC, Tutorspree recently closed on a new round of financing that appears to add an additional $1.9 million to its coffers. Co-founder Aaron Harris tells us that, in fact, the startup has closed on a new $800K in financing.

According to Harris, the new round was led by Mike Hirschland at Resolute.VC and includes participation from Tutorspree’s existing investors, and will bring the startup’s total capital to $2.2 million. Tutorspree raised $1 million in December 2011 from an impressive list of investors, which includes Sequoia Capital, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Thrive Capital, Paul Buchheit, Geoff Ralston, Tim Brady, Alexis Ohanian and Adam d’Angelo — to name a few.

For those unfamiliar, the Y Combinator grad wants to disrupt incumbents and tutoring giants like Sylvan Learning by providing students of all ages with a way to find high-quality private tutors online without having to turn to Craigslist or costly private networks. Since launching in 2011, Tutorspree has recruited over 7,000 tutors across the country. After privately screening each tutor (including a background check), tutors can create profiles to describe their credentials and experience, where students can also rate them based on their experience.

Students and parents can then visit the startup’s homepage and enter their ZIP code to view a list of tutors in their area. Tutorspree has also developed a proprietary matching system, which it uses to not only pair students with the best tutors close by, but to ensure that they’re matched with teachers based on their particular search criterion, background and tutoring needs.

If users find a tutor they’re interested in working with, they can fill out the startup’s online form to begin the process, working with the startup’s representatives to set up appointments and process payments. In spite of the growth of purely online classes, these tutoring sessions happen live, one-on-one, in 3D. The benefit for tutors, on the other hand, is that Tutorspree takes care of scheduling and payment processing so they can just focus on their business and the education at hand.

While Tutorspree continues to grow its national networks of tutors, the increased interest in online education over the past two years means that Tutorspree is far from being without competition in this space. Music lessons marketplace TakeLessons recently announced that it will be expanding its scope beyond music to a variety of subjects. TakeLessons is already operating a significant national (yet local) network itself and is based on a similar model, which will likely put pressure on Tutorspree down the road as it expands into similar territories.

Furthermore, Tutor.com now has the financial backing (and resources) of IAC to help accelerate its traction in this space, and Tutorspree also (to some degree) will have to contend with the rapid growth of project-based and collaborative online education platforms like Skillshare and study aids and “digital backpacks” like the fast-growing StudyBlue, WyzAnt — and the continuously evolving Chegg.

Nonetheless, Harris sees all the activity happening in this market and is encouraged by all the changes that are happening in tutoring, local marketplaces and the way people and software interact in service-based relationships. The co-founders aren’t saying much more about what’s ahead at the moment, but expect that to change in the next couple of months.

For now, the startup will use its new capital to build out its growth and engineering teams and continue to recruit new, quality tutors. More to come.

Editor’s note: Adam Rifkin is co-founder and CEO of PandaWhale, an online network of interesting things and people. You can follow him on Twitter @ifindkarma.

Pop quiz: what is the favorite social networking site of Americans under age 25? If you guessed Facebook you are way behind the eight-ball, because Tumblr now enjoys more regular visits from the youth of America. That figure struck me while reading Garry Tan’s January 2013 survey and I wondered why? So I delved deeper; this article describes what I discovered while exploring the Tumblr network.

What are the young and restless doing on Tumblr all day? The answer is more complicated than it first appears and speaks to the continuing importance of the public web in the era of the walled garden.

For a long time, I thought of Tumblr as topic-based image blogging: In other words, self-expression through collecting pictures of a particular type of thing. Hence I thought that the iconic Tumblrs were Things Organized Neatly, Girls in Yoga Pants (NSFW) and Food on my Dog. Tumblr itself gives the impression that this is the main use-case for its service by highlighting almost exclusively this type of Tumblog in The Tumblr Directory.

ALL WRONG. Or rather, some of these Tumblrs are necessary for the system to work but, surprisingly, only a small percentage of them.

Tumblr actually became huge because it is the anti-blog. What is the No. 1 reason that people quit blogging? Because they can’t find and develop an audience. This has been true of every blogging platform ever made. Conversely, blogs that do find an audience tend to keep adding that type of content. This simple philosophy boils down to the equation: Mo’ pageviews = mo’ pages.

But Tumblr does not conform to this calculus, and the reason is that a large percentage of Tumblr users actually don’t WANT an audience. They do not want to be found, except by a few close friends who they explicitly share one of their tumblogs with. Therefore Tumblr’s notoriously weak search functionality is A-OK with most of its user base.

Tumblr provides its users with the oldest privacy-control strategy on the Internet: security through obscurity and multiple pseudonymity. Its users prefer a coarse-grained scheme they can easily understand over a sophisticated fine-grained privacy control — such as Facebook provides — that requires a lot of time and patience. To quote Sweet Brown, Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Tumblr proves that the issue is less about public vs. private and more about whether you are findable and identifiable by people who actually know you in real life.

Most Tumblr content falls into three categories:

1. Photos of young people’s daily lives: studying, buying things, hanging out with friends. Many of these photos are from Instagram or the Tumblr mobile app, which is now quite good.
2. Entertaining memes and gifs they find on Tumblr and re-share with their friends. A teenage friend of mine told me recently that he tries to post something to his Tumblog on an hourly basis — which requires endless scouring of other Tumblogs for re-bloggable content. Fortunately, the Tumblr Dashboard is designed specifically with this goal in mind: consume lots of things and “reblog” easily. This is where the topic-based photobloggers add value to the ecosystem; it’s why we see Tumblr encouraging the seeding of “rebloggable” content — such as live-Tumbling The Grammys.
3. Porn and near-porn collections for personal use, usually under a different pseudonym.  (Protip: searches on many keywords at 11 p.m. yield VERY different results than the same searches at 11 a.m. And there’s a NSFW setting if you truly don’t want to see any of it.)

For the latter two, the fact that Tumblr offers full animated gif support is crucial as a differentiator from the static environs of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even Pinterest. Ten seconds of reaction shot — or sex act — make a big difference in expressive power. Also, gifs are far easier to view on mobile devices than video, and so far the big content owners have made little effort to stamp them out via DMCA.

Does this sound familar? Teenagers, amusing images, sharing only with trusted friends? In some ways, Tumblr is actually Facebook 2.0! As Facebook has become a real-life social network infested with parents, co-workers, ex-friends, and people you barely know, Tumblr has become the place where young people express themselves and their ACTUAL INTERESTS with their ACTUAL FRIENDS.

And Tumblr is growing — it’s now one of the top 10 websites in the United States, with 20 billion pageviews a month. The tremendous user engagement is enabling the company to quietly and discreetly build a powerful Interest Graph of things its users actually like and want to share. Tumblr still has a long road ahead with monetization, but the Interest Graph will be crucial to making sure anything Tumblr does is targeted and relevant to its users.

It’s important to note that Tumblr is not replacing Facebook; it’s merely siphoning off some authentic liking and sharing, especially among young Americans. Facebook needs to exist because it’s holding down the Mom, siblings, and lame friends part of a person’s social life — the “public-private” life, if you will. As long as Mom sees you on Facebook occasionally, she isn’t going to think to look for you on another site… which paradoxically frees young users to act out on a stage that seems more private to them despite being on the open web.

[Image via]

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster on his Startup Advice blog: Both Sides of the Table

By now many of you know the Harlem Shake.

It is a YouTube phenomenon that in just two weeks has gone from nothing to on air on both Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert and collectively the Harlem Shake has been viewed around 200 million times. Two weeks. 200 million views. Suck it traditional TV.

But there is a much broader trend to be aware of and what we have seen on YouTube has mirrored my general views on how TV will work in the future.

Summary Version
Global audiences of prosumer video producers will create content that is viewed by global audiences in numbers far in excess of traditional TV. TV will enter the era of “participation” which is a much more important trend than “social video” even if it seems less sexy or less fundable.

It means the “torso TV” consumption patterns will be more important than the head or the long tail for the next era of media companies.

TV of the future will not always have linear stories. I know that’s hard for many people to accept but when the medium changes from one-way broadcast to the millions to the ability to interact with each other through video it is unlikely that the future will resemble the past. Why would it?

I have started thinking about what the future might look like and I’ve started imagining what I call, “MMOV” or massive multiplayer online video.

Sure, the revenue & margin will be significantly lower than traditional TV.  You should only worry about this if you’re a large, traditional media company with fat margins. The future of TV will follow the rule of Deflationary Economics as I outline influenced by the book The Innovator’s Dilemma.

It will enable the naturally creative but geographically and socially disenfranchised to make money doing what they love – participating. Maybe small amounts of money for what founders reading these pages dream of but life-changing for many.

Gangnam Style Meets Torso TV
Of course you know Gangnam Style, which is now the most viewed video in history at 1.3 billion views. Before this South Korean wonder spread across the globe I had written about a trend in global audiences that exists when the costs of production are nearly zero and the costs of distribution are also nearly free. I called this trend “Torso TV” because the “head” of consumption (largest number of views) was dominated by platforms that had massive distribution (think TV stations, radio or retail outlets that sell CDs and DVDs. think Apple. think Amazon) and therefore hits with high production costs were more suited to the medium.

The problem with the “long tail” content is that only the platform provider (ie YouTube) makes money. So if you want to be a content producer and want to make money you can develop content for global “niches” of watchers who might like: Japanese Anime, South Korean drama, Bollywood productions, reality TV on any topic – fashion, cooking, travel.

I saw this trend with the growth of companies such as Viki, Drama Fever, Crunchyroll and the like. Global niches that turn out to be much larger than you’d imagine.

Gangnam Style is the manifestation of this trend which turned what should have likely been a medium size global audience into an global phenomenon like we’ve never seen. The Macarena on steroids. Every now and again you can strike lightning in a bottle. Who knows why hits turn into memes? But it shows that when content is unleashed we can all appreciate it no matter of the country of origin.

Harlem Shake
For those who still don’t know the origins, the Harlem Shake started as a small skit from a YouTuber named Filthy Frank (10 million views as of this writing) on January 30, 2013. It was then popularized into an Internet meme 3 days later by text an Australian group of guys called Sunny Coast Shake  in what garnered about 300,000 views in a short period of time (now at 11.3 million views).

But then the Harlem Shake went batshit crazy when Vernon Shaw of Maker Studios saw the video on Reddit and suggested that Maker should, well, make a video of the Harlem Shake in an office environment. That video is the most viewed Harlem Shake (with more than 15 million views as of today). It was loaded on the channel of Hi I’m Rawn, a long-time YouTuber.

At 12.30pm in the afternoon the idea to create the video was hatched. They taped it at 3.30pm for 2 minutes. 1 take. Then back to work, people!

It was uploaded at around 4pm.

Maker’s talent started commenting on it and sharing it. ShayCarl (a Maker Studios co-founder) in particular. And then …

Boom.

It made national news. Maker was contacted by every major news outlet. And suddenly every office in the country was doing their own version of the Harlem Shake.

And here’s the thing. This is not Gangnam Style, a catchy tune consumed by billions.

This is Harlem Shake, a catchy tune produced by tens of thousands. As of this writing nearly 50,000 versions have been created and uploaded and watched by some 200,000,000 people. Yes. Two followed by eight zeros.

It is the production angle that is most fascinating to me and the biggest unspotted trend by most venture capitalists and traditional media executives.

I have been talking about the battle for the living room for years and then followed up with Why the TV Market is Ready for Disruption with a more recent discussion about Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley here (the video version with an LA interview that can be viewed here and then a subsequent session in NYC with Jon Miller which can be viewed here).

And I’ve opined on why the traditional media companies aren’t well poised to win at this new TV world. and again here.

So here’s the thing

The Broader Trend
While way too many startup companies (and investors) are focused on “social TV” or on “Instagram for TV” I believe they are missing the more fundamental shift in our industry.

There is a world filled with professional producers of video content who are extraordinarily talented but lack access to Hollywood. In fact, that’s how Maker Studios got started in the first place.

I first wanted to invest in this trend by backing a company called Filmaka. I didn’t end up investing but I always loved the concept. They help find talented film makers globally, enter them into competitions and advance the best of them toward winners that get to produce full-length films. Filmaka is the creation of Deepak Nayar who is the producer of films such as Buena Vista Social Club and Bend it Like Beckham.

But when you think about the movement we once called “Web 2.0″ it was the recognition of the fact that media doesn’t only want to flow one way.

Media in an age of:

• low-cost capture from mobile devices
• cheap post-production process by tools (think Pro Tools for audio, Instagram filters)
• cheap local storage (without which media creation is not possible)
• available bandwidth for uploading (which is assumed away as easy but only in recent years has been solved. most Internet connections have been asymmetric & optimized for downloads)
• cheap or free cloud storage (YouTube, DropBox, Facebook)
• easy sharing (through social networks or platforms like YouTube)
• social amplification (from which memes are spread) by Twitter and the like; and …
• commenting

means specifically one thing. People are going to want to participate. Participation. We are the media. We want to be in it. Create it. Take part in it. Have a say, a vote. Think American Idol voting, where the audience gets to feel like they’re participating. And where they’re willing to pay by dialing a paid number to feel like they’re, well, participating.

And the end of the Maker Studios show, Epic Rap Battles of History, the end the show ways “Who won, you decide?” where the audience gets to weigh in. Participation. At whatever level.

Serialized TV with Audience Participation
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to fund in the video creation world. One idea I’ve been searching for is a platform that enables the creation of serialized programs with audience participation.

And this is a concept that has been at work since at least the 17th century. An example of a great serialist was Charles Dickens in which Oliver Twist & Nicholas Nickleby and others were written and distributed serially.

From Wikipedia on Charles Dickens

“The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience’s reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback”

I have talked to several YouTuber’s about my idea but haven’t yet gotten any takers.

Here’s what I imagine. You create a narrative episodic show and do the first four episodes to get the story arc and characters going. On the fifth episode the audience gets to create it’s version of the next show. You look at submissions and pick the best one. You reshoot that episode with a higher budget and your original cast but that producer now gets a financial take in the show or gets to participate in the production or whatever. Then you move on to the sixth show with new submissions.

You need to build a platform that allows submissions, workflow, multiple story flows, awards, producer profiles and the like. It can’t just be videos on YouTube but I’ll be that YouTube is the distribution platform.

Here’s the thing – if well done I think you could see the Harlem Shake effect where many people want to have a go at participating on the production. Most won’t be of the quality that you want but you now have tons of material and inspiration for your show and you own all of the submitted IP. You share financial results and/or fame as the incentive to participate. It’s American Idol for makers.

The first time you do it the participation will be light. The next time you’ll get more. And the fan producers all help market your show because they too want the attention. Whether they are selected or not! I repeat – free marketing. Done by the masses.

And finally you could stitch together multiple narratives or versions of shows for people who WANT to watch all of the derivative shows. Your costs of production of these additional versions – zero.

To all of the traditional TV people who keep telling me this “low cost, low quality YouTube content will eventually go away. The production quality is terrible” I say, “Please study The Innovator’s Dilemma because it predicts the disruption of your industry presciently.” Let me remind you of the math: Gangnam Style = 1.3 billion views. Each episode of Epic Rap Battles of History gets between 30,000,000 – 75,000,000 views.

And to those who keep telling me that the CPMs are too low to make a business please stop thinking about two-way entertainment in only CPM terms.  There are many more ways to monetize an audience of fans that simply pre-roll ads.

Think creatively. Study the video game industry. The music industry. Your world is changing, too. And you have so many examples from which to build your future that you have no excuse to put your head in the sand.

MMOV
The other theme I’ve been playing around with in my head (and in the numerous debates with media execs who aspire to do startups) I’ve started calling MMOV.

It’s a play on MMOG (massive multiplayer online games, think World of Warcraft).

What exactly is World of Warcraft?

It’s entertainment. With rich graphics and characters. It has a story, a world, that unfolds. It has interaction with other players. It is – by definition – participation. It exists precisely because there is a network. I grew up in the era where we got to play video games alone. I was inspired by Zork. It was a computer challenging my imagination and crying out for logic and participation. It was text-based. And anything but MM or O. But it scratched the same need – participation. Engagement.

And when the O is attached and thus other humans are on the other end of your game and when graphics are professional it is the ultimate in computer entertainment with other human beings letting young people all over the world who feel disconnected from other human beings form friendships.

I once heard a father describe how his son played World of Warcraft. He said this to me, which formed an impression, “My son leaves World of Warcraft to play other video games with his friends. But then they always come back to World of Warcraft to talk about it with their friends. WoW is their home base.”

So WoW in a way is his son’s social network.

I imagine MMOV this way.

You start out watching video. And this might be humans but it might also be animation. It might feel like TV or might feel like an animated video game or maybe there is no difference? You start watching with friends, peers or strangers – who might become friends or peers in the future (think that’s weird? check your Twitter stream. It’s filled with people like this. Aren’t all online communities like this?).

You watch the first “episode” together. Then you discuss it with those in the room with you. They are watching it synchronously. It is your job to get them watch the next video based on plot or character development you want to see. Which way do you go next? The audience decides.

And the show develops like this. No linearity. Only the evolution through a video game board with other players trying to agree how the story unfolds. Maybe for a fee you get to choose your own direction without the crowd?

Don’t like how Homeland has become a total farce like 24? Chart a different path. Don’t like that a characters in Downton Abbey gets killed or another might get banished from employment? Chart a different course.

In an online world, why wouldn’t we?

Television today is being charted by those who grew up in a one-way world of: we decide, we write, we broadcast. Doesn’t that sound like the websites of yore that implored us to read their stories?

We have too much evidence from the text-based Internet that this model doesn’t hold in an online world.

Think Zork. It’s how things were. Then think World of Warcraft. It’s how things will be. It’s why we use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. To be part of a conversation. And even if it’s only very occasionally that you want to chime in, it’s why UGC works. 1/9/90.

And read this MG Siegler piece on TechCrunch. He’s one step ahead of the rest of the market. And he’s spot on with this analysis about how Apple will enter the TV market. Spoiler – video games.

Online Events
Finally, I’m fascinated with the future of live events. We’ve only just scratched the surface. As you now know 8 million people tuned in to watch Felix Baumgartner jump from 24 miles above the Earth in a Red Bull capsule.

It will always be a milestone in the Internet, YouTube, Twitter, Mobile world etched in my memory. And that of my two boys.

Like many of you we were laying around watching NFL football games. And also paying attention to the Twitter. Watching only is so one-way. With our second screen we suddenly have … participation.

And that’s where I first saw it. I know many of you knew the Felix was going to jump. I hadn’t been paying attention.

But Twitter cried out that I MUST! Tune in. NOW. As only Twitter can dictate.

So on my iPhone I clicked on a link and saw Felix going up. WTF? What is that guy doing?

I called my boys over. We sat transfixed to my iPhone. Was he really jumping from outer space? Is this real? Is this really live? Did I just click on a button and watch a man prepared to jump from that little capsule watching real-time streaming from my mobile device that I only knew about because random people (some of whom I’ve never met in real life) demanded that I do so on Twitter?

I was sincerely amazed by all of those things. And we watched. And watched. And watched. And the NFL seemed so uninteresting at that moment. I’ll never remember who was playing or who won (probably not the Eagles).

But along with 8 million people globally we shared a moment. And then another 32 million people (at least) watched on YouTube afterward.

That fascinates me. Twitter. YouTube. Mobile. Live. Watch this space. It’s going to form a larger part of our future.

Oh. And it won’t be brought to you by Comcast. That interests me, too.

HotelTonight, the startup that lets users make same-day reservations at nearby hotels, just launched a version of its app that’s optimized for Android tablets.

When they’re thinking about tablets, startups are usually focused on the iPad, and indeed, HotelTonight launched its iPad app nearly a year ago. However, HotelTonight said that it’s responding to customer demand, and that the Android side of things is “a significant growth market,” pointing to a Gartner report last year saying that there will be 665 million tablets in use by 2016, and that Android will account for 37 percent of them.

The Android tablet app is based in part on the iPad app, and on what the company has learned about how people use it. Tablet users tend to spend more time browsing the app (particularly the larger pictures), browse more hotels, and return to the app more frequently. When I asked about how the iPad and Android tablet versions are different, a company spokesperson told me that while the Android version also places a big emphasis on photos, it adds the ability to view them in either landscape or portrait mode. The interface is also designed to take advantage of Android’s 7-inch and 10-inch screens, they said.

“Many hours and cups of Blue Bottle went into building it in a way that preserves the beauty and simplicity of HotelTonight while adhering to Google’s tablet design guidelines, and we’re thrilled with the outcome,” said HotelTongiht’s lead Android engineer Justin Schultz in the announcement press release.

HotelTonight deals become available at noon local time every day, with hotels in the Basic, Hip, or Luxe categories, as well as personalized recommendations. The company said it now supports more than 80 destinations worldwide, and the app has been downloaded more than 4 million times.

You can download the Android version of HotelTonight here.

Last August, Affectiva, developer of a new way to track facial responses to online content, raised $12 million from KPCB, Horizon and others to take its tech to a wider market. Today comes one of the fruits of that effort: the company is announcing a deal with the Ebuzzing Social video advertising platform for the company to integrate Affectiva’s Affdex facial coding software into the Ebuzzing Social platform.

Financial terms of the licensing deal were not disclosed.

The agreement will cover content in Ebuzzing Social’s ad network — Ebuzzing says that network includes some 40,000 blogs, social games, mobile apps and Facebook in UK, US, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Luxembourg. Ebuzzing works with companies like Toyota, Acer, Kia, Adidas, and their media agencies including Havas, Mediacom Starvest, Group M and Zenith Optimedia. ”There has been a lot of excitement generated around the new tech and we will certainly be offering this to our current clients,” said Rebecca Mahony, VP of global marketing for Ebuzzing Social.

Consumers who come across one of the Affectiva-enabled ads get a pop-up window, before the ad runs, asking users to turn on their webcams to measure their response to the ad and see how it compares against others. An example of that pop-up is illustrated here.

The deal will mean that companies like Heineken and Red Bull will be able to track in real time how users are responding to their advertisements in the wild. That will not only mean taking away the need to run special market research sessions on limited groups of users, but potentially introduces new ways of measuring how effective a video has been, moving away from more traditional online ad metrics like page views and dwell time.

We wrote about Affectiva and Affdex back in August but here is a little refresher: the technology, first developed at MIT’s Media Lab, uses webcams or user-facing cameras on mobile devices to track head gestures and facial expressions. It runs these through an algorithm that links into a larger database of some 300 million face frames, compiled by Affectiva, to produce an analysis on how engaged a user is by a particular video, and what sort of emotion he/she is feeling. Mahony notes that using Affectiva’s technology will mean that its customers “will have a deeper visibility into the statistical correlations of human emotions and video interactions.”

One of Affectiva’s early investors, WPP, has been among those using and providing feedback for the technology. Now, working this into Ebuzzing Social’s platform allows the brands to track other metrics like interactions, shares, click-through rates and the rest; the thinking is that the Affdex measurement will give Ebuzzing’s platform a more “human” aspect.

Nick Langeveld, VP of business development for Affectiva, says that among the brands already using the service are Coca-Cola and Unilever, although this is the company’s first partnership in the social video ad space, integrating the tech with other social media monitoring tools. It’s part of Affectiva’s wider business strategy to partner with third parties “in whatever framework makes sense to their users and clients.”

In November, mobile app services company Flurry announced that China was on track to top the U.S. and Android install base at some point in the first quarter of 2013. Today, Flurry says that has happened. China has passed the U.S. to become the world’s top country for active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, a year after the country became the fastest-growing smart device market in the world.

For its report, Flurry sourced from its entire data set of over 2.4 billion anonymous, aggregated app session daily across over 275,000 applications around the world. The company says it reliably measures activity in over 90 percent of the world’s smart devices.

In January of this year, the U.S. and China were neck-and-neck in terms of their active smart device installed base, at 222 million and 221 million, respectively. By the end of this month, Flurry estimates that will change to 230 million in the U.S. and 246 million in China.

More importantly, the U.S. will not regain the lead after this shift occurs, due the size of China’s population (over 1.3 billion people vs. 310 million in the U.S.). In fact, the report notes, the only other country that could eventually challenge China is India, which has just over 1.2 billion people. But China’s smart device installed base is significantly larger than India’s, where today there are only 19 million active devices.

Of the top 10 countries leading in terms of active iOS and Android devices, the U.S. and China are by far in the lead – each has over 5 times more the active installed base than the third largest market, the U.K. Both also continue to see rapid active device adoption, says Flurry. The U.S. adding 55 million devices from January 2012 to January 2013. But during that time, China added 150 million. If it wasn’t for the holidays, which generally brings a surge of new activations to the U.S. market, China would have actually passed the U.S. sooner.

Flurry also revealed an updated look at the fastest-growing smart devices markets, year-over-year from January 2012 to last month. China’s 209 percent growth rate on top of a base of 71 devices last January is no longer the leader in terms of growth.

Countries now growing faster than China this past year included Columbia, Vietnam, Turkey, Ukraine and Egypt.

While Brazil, Russia, India and China may not be the fastest-growing, they have still added a significant number of new devices year-over-year: Brazil +11.5 million, Russia +12.0 million, India +12.4 million, China +149.5 million.

China’s growing significance has the potential to really shake up the mobile industry. Apple notably broke out China as a standalone region on its balance sheet after years of lumping it in the “Asia-Pacific” group. China’s revenues were up 67 percent over the previous quarter, Apple said in January, having contributed $6.8 billion in revenue last quarter. That’s more than the $4.4 billion Japan did. But Android is leading over iOS in China, in terms of sales. According to some reports, it has nearly three-quarters of the market by smartphone sales, 23 percent of which can be attributed to Samsung.

 

Moment.me, a startup that debuted its automatic, social albums application for iPhone this past fall, has made its way to Android. The app allows users to combine not only photos, but also video, as well as updates from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and Google+, into one album. These albums are also augmented with content shared by friends and others who posted content at that same place and time.

It’s still somewhat up in the air whether or not people want personal diary-like collections of multimedia instead of more standard photo albums, but the part of Moment.me’s app that has legs is where it does the work of creating albums for you. Using its proprietary matching technology, the app organizes content shared across social media, while still respecting users’ original privacy settings on the networks it pulls from. This content ends up in albums auto-titled things like “Friday with Sarah Perez,” “Wednesday with 29 ppl,” or “Thursday with 54 ppl @ place/location….”, e.g.

The Android app includes all  the same features that were previously introduced on iPhone. For example, users can view their own personal feeds, friends’ “moments” (as these feeds are called), nearby moments, and popular moments trending worldwide. However, the Android app also introduces some new features, too, including “Start a Moment,” which lets users have more control over their albums. Using this option, you can start and title the album yourself, invite friends to contribute, apply photo filters, and upload photos directly from Android’s photo gallery.

These features will come to the iPhone version soon, the company says. It also notes that over the past six months, Moment.me has scanned 1.6 billion images from 200 million people and 7 million locations worldwide. 150 million moments have been created, and hundreds of thousands are added daily.

The Auto-Album Challenge

That being said, the Tel Aviv-based app is not ranking highly in the U.S. Apple App Store, where it’s not currently in the Top 400 for either “Photo & Video” or “Social,” according to Distimo. It has a presence in a number of markets worldwide, and is currently the top 100 “social networking” in 3 countries, but none are key regions in terms of scale (Malta, Philippines, Bermuda), per App Annie.

Moment.me, while clever, is up against several competitors in this newly forming, and challenging, “automatic album” space. In recent months, this niche has included startups like SnapJoy (exited to Dropbox in December), Everpix, ThisLife (exited to Shutterfly in January), PictureLife, Woven, Tracks, PhotoSocial and Bump’s Flock, to name a few. Each of these are (or were) attacking the challenge of having too many photos in their own way.

Flock is doing fairly well here, ranking in the top 100 in 24 markets for “photo and video” – which actually speaks a bit to the issues that Moment.me faces. Because it’s doing all the work for users, who only have to sit back and browse through the end product and optionally share the album back out to their social networks, Moment.me hasn’t had the engagement levels needed to boost its traction. That’s clearly why the company prioritized album creation in this release – it needs some activity that will draw users in. Flock, meanwhile, builds albums for you, but continually prompts you to share more and add friends. (Surprisingly, it does this without the usual icky app spam feel, too).

But getting users to start albums in an app, and then invite friends to join, is a challenge that hasn’t easily been solved in the past, no matter how much money you throw at the problem. At the end of the day, these type of companies/technologies may do better serving as features added to users’ already massive photo archives in the cloud. That’s why it makes sense that they’re being acquired by Dropbox and Shutterfly, and why Facebook, Flickr, and Google should be interested, as well.

Moment.me for Android is available here in Google Play.

Did you happen to get an email from LinkedIn recently, which congratulated you on having one of the most popular profiles on the site? Then, good news – you’re special. Just like millions of others. The campaign, which ran this month in celebration of LinkedIn’s 200-million-users milestone, involved these ego-boosting emails sent to the network’s “top” users, which urged them to share the good news on Facebook and Twitter. You might be surprised how many took the bait.

For those of you who were sadly not LinkedIn-famous enough (like me, ha) to get on the special list, here’s an example (below) of what the email looked like.

When you clicked through to “Read More,” the resulting web page included a brief message about the network’s milestone and then provided a social sharing box which suggested that “a stat this delightful deserves to be shared.” Users could then post the message to Twitter, Facebook, or, of course LinkedIn.

Typically, when companies urge users to post to social networks, it’s to participate in some sort of contest. Pin-to-win. Twitter sweepstakes. Facebook giveaway. Etc, etc. But LinkedIn tried a different tactic to get its message out there – instead of offering some sort of tangible reward, it offered something that perhaps makes even more sense in today’s navel-gazing, selfie-posting, retweet-begging, Klout accumulating, social media era.

LinkedIn offered social capital.

I mean really, who can resist posting that they’re in the top 1 percent of LinkedIn users? Even had they paused for a breath – or, I don’t know, actually read the email – they would have realized that they share that accolade with some 2 million others.

After seeing these tweets in my Twitter feeds, lists searches, and even discussed internally among TechCrunch staff, I was curious – did this silly, self-involved email campaign actually work?

It did.

And the way it works is not all that different from how spam works, either:

1) Send email

2) A handful of people click

3) Profit!

LinkedIn tells us that the contest began on February 7, 2013, and it wrapped up February 14. From the network’s 200 million members, the company looked at those who have active accounts, and were within the first million to register, who have more than 100 profile views (excluding self-profile views), have more than 100 connections, and have the most endorsements for popular skills in their country.

The congratulatory emails were apparently not sent all at the same time, which is good because otherwise, the campaign could have turned ugly. Given the ensuing tweet volume, people might have actually noticed how effectively LinkedIn was “spamming” Twitter.

We asked the company if it would share the results of the campaign, but it declined. Instead, we reached out to the social analytics company Topsy, one of the few that has access to Twitter’s “firehose” API. Using tweets as a gauge of success is a good indicator, because unlike on the more personal network of Facebook, it’s a place where people might be included to do a little bragging.

As it turned out, LinkedIn actually sent out several variations of its email message. It targeted those who are among the top 1 percent, top 5 percent and top 10 percent, Topsy found.

During the month of February up until the end-of-day Friday, there were 82,607 tweets about the campaign. Peak chatter, likely coinciding with the emails, occurred on:

• Feb 7^th – 3,164 tweets
• Feb 8^th – 3,770 tweets
• Feb 11^th – 4,432 tweets
• Feb 12^th – 6,667 tweets

With 200 million users, even emailing the top percentage constitutes a significant outreach effort on LinkedIn’s part. While the number of those who clicked “share” was small in comparison to those who were emailed, it still resulted in a fairly successful Twitter campaign. And LinkedIn never had to promise users anything in return.

A little ego boost goes a long way.

Image credit: top, GearDiary; chart, Topsy

We’re now about a week away from the start of the Mobile World Congress, the large, annual European mobile event put on by the GSM Association that has served as a barometer of the progress of the wireless industry. In planning out what TechCrunch will be doing and seeing during the week in Barcelona, we’ve noticed a gap: Google, and specifically its mobile OS Android, is largely absent.

In years past, the Android area of MWC stole the show: a large space that simply didn’t fit into the word “stand”, it was filled with dot-com bells and whistles like smoothie machines, a slide, and robots. But it was also a place where Google got to show off the multitude of ways that Android was wending its way into the mobile industry through handsets, tablets and more. We have heard that the effort took about $5 million of investment from Google to put up and run. The messaging was big and clear: we’re here; we’re bringing something different to this sluggish, incumbent-led world; and we’re not going away.

And yet, this year, it has. A search on MWC’s exhibitor list finds no results for Google or Android; a spokesperson confirmed as much to TechCrunch; and others have heard the same message: Google will not have a stand at the event and will instead support its partners. These include companies like Samsung, HTC, Huawei, LG and other big and small device makers developing Android-based handsets and tablets. (That’s not counting those who are not official partners but develop devices based on forked versions of the OS.)

It’s not just the Android stand, it’s about the statement Google is making with its (lack of) people as well.

Eric Schmidt delivered a keynote at the last three years of MWC (2010, 2011, 2012), each time taking over an hour to deliver his latest thoughts and then field questions from the packed audience, chosen at random. More big ideas than hard Google/mobile strategy, it was still impressive to see him command the room and be the human face of Google’s all-present persona. (The impressiveness played out in other ways, too. Last year, I sneaked into the hall early to get a good seat and ended up sitting in the front alongside a throng of smiling Googlers. Dozens of them, it seemed, had made their way to Barcelona for this and the bigger MWC confab.)

This year — unless there is going to be a surprise, unscheduled appearance — Schmidt is not on the public schedule. According to the GSMA’s list of speaker profiles, the company is sending out two people to the official conference, to speak on panels: Peter Hazlehurst, director of product management for Google Wallet (who was also at CES); and Ian Carrington, Google’s mobile and social advertising sales director for northern and central Europe; no one specific to the Android effort. Google, we understand, will have people there, but just in a less public way than before.

So what’s the reason for this? There appear to be a few.

We’ve heard from sources that Google these days is less keen on emphasizing the Android brand — witness the Android Market getting rebranded almost a year ago (after the last MWC) as Google Play. Pulling away from having a strong a presence may fold into that. “Nexus and Galaxy are brands; Android is not,” is how the thinking goes here. It’s a far cry from years past, when Google had a dedicated site to its efforts at the conference, and gave out its popular array of Android pins to fans and those hoping for a neat profit someday on eBay (even making a video about them).

You could also argue that part of the reason why Google does not need to make as big of a push at MWC is because it has already achieved market dominance. In the latest smartphone market share reports from the analysts, IDC, Gartner and Canalys all pegged Android’s share of smartphone shipments as pushing 70% in Q4. With a plethora of handset makers building apps, led by currently the world’s most popular smartphone maker, Samsung, this isn’t too much of a surprise, but could be a sign that Google doesn’t need to toot its own horn quite as much. In this sense, absence is power, not weakness.

There is also the perennial debate of whether hulking conferences like MWC (ditto CES) are simply all that relevant these days, with companies preferring instead to run their own events and better control the message accordingly.

We don’t have Google, but we don’t have others, either: Samsung is also among those refraining from spilling the beans at MWC; HTC is holding a handset event this week, pre-Barcelona — although both will still have executives speaking in the conference and stands at the event to show off their wares; Facebook has two execs appearing on the public conference agenda, VP of partnerships Dan Rose, and VP of mobile partnerships, Vaughan Smith.

Facebook will have a stand this year — the first time, we think — which will set some people wondering, again, whether this more stirrings for a fabled Facebook phone.

It goes without saying that Apple will not doing anything big at MWC — but has it ever?

Nokia will be holding a press conference, however, as will Mozilla and others. Given that Mozilla is launching a big effort into mobile now, and using MWC to spearhead that, it may be that this will end up fuelling some of the buzz at the event instead.

The fact that this year’s event is taking place in a new, larger venue (annoyingly) miles away from the center of town is perhaps also spurring the creation of more off-site fringe events and pushing some to forge more direct contacts with people in the form of smaller meetings, private briefings and smaller events. Perhaps the focus is changing for more than just Google.

Browser-maker Opera has been making a lot of headlines of late — with last week’s announcement of its big strategic shift to WebKit. Followed hard on the heels by the news of its $155 million purchase of Skyfire. But the Norwegian software maker’s decision to abandon its own web-rendering engine in favour of the defacto WebKit standard, has had another, less visible impact: the company has reportedly dismantled a core technology developer team, according to Norwegian publication digi.no, letting some very long serving employees go.

Update: Opera has now confirmed the downsizing to TechCrunch. See below for CEO Lars Boilesen’s comments.

Digi.no reports that a team of around 100 Opera developers in its Core Technology division has shrunk by more than 90 positions, with “a large contingent” taking a severance package before Christmas — “including veterans Yngve Pettersen, André Shultz and Lasse Magnussen” — and a further 50 to 70 taking redundancy in January. (Magnussen’s LinkedIn profile indicates he left Opera last month, after 14 years and eight months with the company — with his last role listed as being in the “core dept.”.)

Asked about his move, Magnussen told TechCrunch: “The process, from Opera’s side, was done, IMO, very professionally and the severance package we were offered was voluntary as well as substantial.” He added that package was “just what [he] needed to take the plunge”, noting that Opera hasn’t “been the same” since founder Jon S von Tetzchner left.

Some of the Core developers have moved on to other departments within Opera, according to Digi.no — although it is not clear exactly how many have stayed on in new roles. The publication notes that Opera’s last quarterly report included a line stating it had reduced staff from 931 to 840 employees, but says the company has refrained from discussing the specifics of the downsizing.

Digi.no quotes Opera HR Director Tove Selnes confirming certain aspects of the downsizing. “This reorganization has been resolved in cooperation with the individual,” she is quoted as saying (via Google Translate). “We’ve come to terms with about 90 people, both in development and not development-related departments.”

She goes on to add that the move to WebKit will create more new “final product” roles within Opera than the company has ever had.

At the time of writing Opera had not responded to requests for comment. We’ll be updating this story with any additional information. Update: Opera CEO, Lars Boilesen, confirmed the cuts are linked to its switch to WebKit. “We will still have a Core team but it will be less people going forward,” he told TechCrunch.

Boilesen was unable to confirm the exact size of the post-switch Core team, as he said developers will work on other activities in addition to Core roles. But he said that overall, the size of the developer team at Opera now numbers “around 600?. Of the around 90 jobs that have gone in the Core team, around half were developer roles — with many other less technical roles such as checking website compatibility something Opera has been freed up from by moving to WebKit.

“Today we are living in a world where there are very few platforms for mobile, very few platforms for Windows, very few platforms on tablets… We think WebKit’s good enough, to switch, and by doing that we free up a lot of resources,” he said.

As Opera reduces its Core team, it is ramping up its product focus, said Boilesen — and that’s what redeployed Core engineers who have not left the company are likely to be focusing on. “We tried to take our best Core people and move them to product lines so we can get really exciting new stuff out… We have now double the amount of people on desktop. We’re coming out with a brand new UI, brand new product in Q3. We’re coming out with a new beta version for smartphones with a new native look and feel. We’re coming out with a new tablet product… so we’re pretty excited about this but the unfortunate thing is we don’t need so many engineers,” he added.

Last week Opera said it now has 300 million users of all its browser products, across mobile, tablets, PCs and TVs.

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