Category: Tech news

OLO, the New York-based online and mobile ordering platform for restaurants, has raised a $5 million Series B round of funding from PayPal and existing investors, David Frankel, RRE Ventures, and Core Capital Partners. The company had previously raised $8.75 million in outside funding. Exactly a year ago today, as it turns out, the company announced reaching the milestone of 1 million customers, and now that number is nearly 2.25 million, according to CEO Noah Glass.

“We started in June 2005, so it took us six and a half years to go from zero to a million users,” Glass says. “It’s incredible in less than 12 months we’ve gone from 1 million to 2 million, but it’s indicative that the market is really heating up and customers are excited about ordering from their mobile devices,” he explains.

That trend has PayPal excited, too. The company has been expanding its payments platform into the offline world in recent months. Also a year ago, PayPal made its first foray into in-store payments through a pilot program with Home Depot which saw its technology integrated into Home Depot’s point-of-sale systems. That program expanded in spring 2012, when PayPal added 15 more brick-and-mortar retail chains, and by the end of the year, it had signed up 23 national retailers and had gone live in some 18,000 stores across the U.S. It also established a partnership with point-of-sale hardware manufacturer NCR just this month, too.

But with PayPal’s strategic investment into OLO, it now has the capability to expand into yet another offline vertical: dining.

This includes both sit-down restaurants and quick-serve restaurants, as OLO counts both among its partners, which, combined, is now around 3,000 individual restaurants. This year, however, that number is about to explode. Glass tells us that OLO has four large quick-serve chains in various stages of closing deals with his company, each with over 5,000 locations domestically, and combined, totaling 27,000 units across the U.S.

“Our pipeline is crazy. We’re looking at a year where we could very easily multiply that [3,000] by five or 10,” he says. “With these very big chains, we have the potential of just massive scale.”

These new, larger QSR partners will have another effect on OLO’s business as well – no, not profitability; OLO hit that milestone mid-2012. Instead, the QSRs will help push OLO even further into mobile than before, and help establish it as a major player in the customer loyalty and rewards space, too. Glass explains that’s because online ordering doesn’t make sense for quick-serve chains, but mobile does.

2012 was already a big year for mobile adoption at OLO, he adds. For example, Five Guys Burgers, which has just over 1,000 stores here in the U.S., saw its OLO-powered mobile app downloaded over 625,000 times. Starbucks-owned bakery La Boulange also debuted an OLO-backed mobile app during the year. “Mobile used to be 10 percent of our total order volume,” says Glass, “and now, for hundreds of the restaurants we work with, it’s more than 50 percent of the order volume.”

On mobile, OLO’s restaurant partners will soon be able to better target customers with offers, discounts, and rewards that can be even more personalized than those from loyalty card startups which track transactions alone. Because OLO is an end-to-end ordering solution, it can know not just when, how often and what a customer buys, but it can also help identify their favorite dishes and preferred menu customizations, as well. For example, Glass explains, if a customer always adds bacon to their burger, the restaurant could set up a promotion that would tell them about the new BLT when the customer was within a five-mile radius and offer them a coupon to try it.

As for PayPal’s involvement, obviously OLO will now be adding it as a payment option that its restaurants can choose to integrate, alongside credit, debit, gift cards, and, more recently, Google Wallet. But, as noted above, PayPal’s investment speaks to more than just another partnership – it’s about changing the way customers think about its brand in the offline world.

“Since June 2005, I thought that mobile commerce was a huge and compelling idea, but for it to really gain mainstream adoption, we had to find the right application for it. It had to be an everyday use case. It had to be high frequency to really change user behavior,” says Glass. “PayPal’s thinking is about being an online-plus-mobile account…it’s become clear to me that the thinking with PayPal is incredibly aligned,” he says.

Glass couldn’t disclose the portion of the new investment that was PayPal’s, but did confirm that the investment didn’t involve any new board members. The funding will be used to expand OLO’s current team of a dozen to 20, if possible – mainly engineers.

Advertising technology companies are not exactly the most well-known names to the average web user, but they can certainly garner serious attention from those inside the industry — particularly investors. Case in point: AppNexus, the New York City-based company that runs a real-time bidding platform for ad networks, said today it has closed on $75 million in funding.

The round, which serves as AppNexus’ Series D, was led by Technology Crossover Ventures with the participation of Venrock and Tribeca Venture Partners. This brings the total venture capital investment in the six-year-old AppNexus to $140.5 million; the company’s other investors include Microsoft, Kodiak Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Ron Conway and Khosla Ventures.

These big-name backers likely see AppNexus as a good bet partly because of the pedigree of its co-founder and CEO Brian O’Kelley. Before AppNexus, the Princeton-educated O’Kelley created the first successful ad exchange platform as the CTO of Right Media, which went on to be acquired by Yahoo for a cool $850 million back in July 2007.

AppNexus says that the new funding comes after the close of a successful year. In 2012, the company says it managed some $700 million of advertising spend and nearly tripled its revenues. AppNexus’ staff now numbers more than 400 employees across nine offices worldwide.

Facebook founder and business celebrity Mark Zuckerberg will be hosting a high-profile fundraiser at his Palo Alto home for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a.k.a “The Boss.” The two allegedly became political BFFs after appearing on Oprah together with Newark Mayor, Cory Booker, who received an extraordinary $100M donation from Zuckerberg to improve the city’s schools. The fundraiser is especially notable since Christie has gone on some some epic rants against his own party, meaning that the fundraiser is not a clear win for the Republican establishment as a whole, which historically hasn’t gotten much financial love from Silicon Valley.

Facebook spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg explained to Buzzfeed:

Mark and [his wife] Priscilla have worked closely with Gov. Christie on education reform in the Newark school system. They admire his leadership on education reform and other issues and look forward to continuing their important work together on behalf of Newark’s school children. Mark and Priscilla are happy to host him at their home to support his re-election.

While there are some hotshot conservative supporters, such as PayPal Co-Founder, Peter Thiel, during the last election, Silicon Valley become a money-making machine for Obama.

The Bay Area contributed more than the geographic areas of Hollywood and Wall Street, with noted supporters such as Google Chairman, Eric Schmidt. Top-tier web talent have also largely favored Democrats, giving them an important digital edge. Our own Facebook expert, Josh Constine, noticed that when Obama spoke at Facebook headquarters a few years back, employees gave big cheers for his policy stances, but fell silent or even jeered when he mentioned republicans.

Zuckerberg’s support for Christie is notable, since he hasn’t been afraid to fiercely criticize his own party. After Congress initially failed ratify aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy, Christie went ballistic, “There is only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these innocent victims: the House majority and their speaker John Boehner,” he said, “For me, it was disappointing and disgusting to watch.”

The press conference had so much political force, he nearly caused a last-minute coup to overthrow House Speaker Boehner. Politicians criticize their own parties all the time, but Christie’s veracity was unique, and so was the huge popularity boost he got as a result.

As Republicans scramble to find their way back into power, it appears that members who aren’t afraid to be outspoken critics of their own party may emerge as leaders.

President Obama will reportedly name former attorney general for the Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White, to the top spot at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Technology startups have been eager for the SEC to approval rules for “crowdfunding” (raising capital from family, friends, and other non-accredited investors) but the process was stalled by a mini-scandal with the former SEC boss and her subsequent departure.

As the lead prosecutor of mob boss John Gotti, White breaks tradition with predecessors as a financial outsider, perhaps making her more likely to aggressively pursue Wall Street misconduct. Unfortunately, it also means we don’t know much about her views on crowdfunding.

Early last year, it was revealed that former SEC chairman, Mary Schapiro, stalled the implementation of crowdfunding, as mandated by the overwhelmingly popular JOBs Act, for fear that it would harm her legacy.

In an email to Corporation Finance Director Meredith Cross related to a last-minute lobbying effort to derail crowdfunding rules, Schapiro wrote “I don’t want to be tagged with an anti-investor legacy.” The email included the incriminating subject line, “Please don’t forward.” She continued: “In light of all that’s been accomplished, that wouldn’t be fair, but it is what will be said …”

Now that Schapiro is gone, startups might finally be able to raise capital from outside the traditional deep-pocketed circles of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and banks.

Of course, the operative word here is “may.” We’ll keep readers updated as this story develops.

It’s no secret that Intel is gunning to gain some mobile traction in emerging markets, and the chipmaker doesn’t seem to be wasting any time in 2013. Kenyan wireless operator (and Intel partner) Safaricom has just officially revealed Africa’s first Intel smartphone, the Android-powered Yolo at an event in Nairobi.

Yeah, you read that right: the Yolo.

Now despite what you make of its name, the phone isn’t actually encouraging young, tech-savvy Africans make poorly-considered life decisions. Instead, it seems more like the continuation of some weird existing naming practices — Intel’s first Atom-powered Android smartphone for instance was dubbed the XOLO X900 when it made its debut in India in April 2012.

The announcement doesn’t come as much of a surprise since Intel’s Mobile and Communications VP Mike Bell pointed out at CES that Safaricom (among other carriers in developing regions) would release smartphones based on the company’s value-oriented smartphone reference design in Q1 2013. That focus on highly cost-sensitive markets means that the Yolo and its ilk don’t exactly have a spec sheet that will set your world on fire — the Yolo sports a 3.5-inch touch display, and its Atom Z2420 processor can hit speeds of up to 1.2GHz, encode and decode 1080p video, and support HSPA+ data speeds. Naturally, that sort of performance is reminiscent of the sorts of devices you can find on domestic store shelves a few years ago (a sentiment Engadget echoed when they got some brief hands-on time at CES), but it’s still a pretty compelling package considering the competition in Kenya.

Of course, there’s always the issue of cost to deal with. Safaricom will soon begin selling the Yolo (and 500MB of free data access) for Kshs. 10,999 (roughly $126) — sounds like a pretty sweet deal, but companies like Huawei have already waging a price war with devices like the $80 IDEOS smartphone on the front line. Really, with the explosion of even less expensive smartphones in Kenya and beyond, one has to wonder how much of a market Intel will actually be able to carve out in Africa.

For the latest episode of my Foundation series, I headed over to the Path office to sit down with founder Dave Morin.

Dave talks about getting his start in student marketing at Apple, and reflects that focus is one of the most important things he learned there. He goes on to describe his time at Facebook, where an intense focus on product utility set the product up for long-term growth. Dave also dives into the moments that inspired Path, and the different ways their team thinks about the social graph.

Dave on defining success, and what success looks like for Path:

For us it’s about growing along the curve in a way that is authentic to our values. For us it’s about design. It’s about quality. It’s about people being themselves. It’s about maintaining trust. It’s about doing all those things, and staying focused on humans. How do we have an honest relationship with you? That’s what success maybe looks like for us.

Kevin Rose is a general partner at Google Ventures. You can watch Kevin’s prior Foundation episode, an interview with Tony Tseih, CEO of Zappos, here.

Tell me what a server is these days. Applied Micro Circuit CEO Paramesh Gopi says that it’s on an ARM chip that needs far less room and eats up less power than the Intel and AMD x86 servers that now dominate data centers.

But now with data generated at unprecedented scale, efficiency is the new order of business. And because of that, ARM is getting noticed.

“For companies like Facebook and Google, the P&L is a function of electricity cost,” Gopi said.

Applied Micro, Calxeda, Dell, Rackspace, Red Hat, HP — the list of companies talking about ARM will only increase.

For its part, Applied Micro unveiled its 64-bit server last week at the Open Compute Summit where I caught up with Gopi about the company’s new server-on-a-chip design.

In the video above, we cover the genesis of the project, the battles Applied Micro has chosen to fight and what’s to come as the demands for efficiency only become more pronounced.

I used to say that the only problem with skiing up mountains was that you had to ski back down them. With the rise of splitboards — snowboards made of two long halves that unfasten from each other to form a pair of skis — that’s not the case anymore.

Powder is like an addiction for many of us. We’re willing to drive or hike way too long to reach it. And once we’re in it, the rest of the world disappears.

It’s easy to guess what The Hovercraft was built for just by looking at it: the short swallowtail and the big blunted nose all scream, “powder hound.” But it’s not afraid of the crud, either.

A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project looks at the future of libraries. The study, titled “Library services in the digital age,” doesn’t include anything particularly shocking or revelatory, but it suggests that many people still value the role of libraries, and that librarians are thinking about how their services can evolve.

Pew found that in the past 12 months, 53 percent of Americans who are 16 or older visited a library or bookmobile, 25 percent visited a library website, and 13 percent visited a library website using a smartphone or tablet. Of those “recent library users,” 26 percent said their usage has gone up in the past five years; the most commonly given reasons were the enjoyment of taking children and grandchildren; the need to do research and use reference materials; and plain old borrowing books more. Meanwhile, 22 percent said their usage had gone down, and the biggest reason by far was the Internet.

The study also mentions a bunch of additional tech-related services that libraries could provide, including an online research service for asking questions of librarians (37 percent of respondents said they’re “very likely” to use this); app-based access to library materials and programs (28 percent); GPS-style apps for navigating libraries (34 percent); Redbox-style lending machines (33 percent); and Amazon-style recommendations for books/audios/videos (29 percent).

At the same time, there was a lot of support for traditional library services. For example, of the people who have visited libraries in the past 12 months, 73 percent said they did so to borrow print books. And when asked if libraries should move some of their printed books and stacks away from public locations to make room for tech centers, reading rooms, and cultural events, 20 percent said definitely, 39 percent said maybe, and 36 percent said definitely not.

The study also includes a number of ideas from librarians about what else they could offer. It sounds like there’s plenty of interest around mobile apps, “makerspaces”/workshops, and RFID-tracking of books, though there’s some resistance too, as well as concern about funding. Here’s one of the more interesting responses:

We recently began circulating Rokus with HuluPlus, Netflix and Amazon Prime loaded onto them. As far as I know we are the first library in the world to do this. This type of out-of-the-box technologies are making a huge difference to the demographics we are reaching. I would like to further those types of technological innovations and push the envelope on the public’s perception of what libraries offer. These types of initiatives do cost money and staff time to develop the program—but if it is important enough, the money can be found.

The survey was conducted from October 15 through November 10, through landline and cellphone interviews conducted with 2,252 people. You can read the full study here.

[image from Paramount Pictures’ Hugo]

Editor’s note: Andrew Auernheimer, also known by his pseudonym weev, is an American grey hat hacker and self-described Internet troll. Follow him on Twitter @rabite.

In June of 2010 there was an AT&T webserver on the open Internet. There was an API on this server, a URL with a number at the end. If you incremented this number, you saw the next iPad 3G user email address. I thought it was egregiously negligent for AT&T to be publishing a complete target list of iPad 3G owners, and I took a sample of the API output to a journalist at Gawker.

I did this because I despised people I think are unjustly wealthy and wanted to embarass them. I thought this is the United States of America where we have the right to do basic arithmetic and query public webservers.

I was convicted of two consecutive five-year felonies, and am now awaiting sentencing.

I left the Aaron Swartz memorial tonight emotionally exhausted. Here is a guy who was beloved by many of my close friends, whose suffering and miseries I have shared in kind. I’ll never forget when the Secret Service started following me. My lover at the time and I treated it like a game, spending our days ditching surveillance in the best ways possible: speedboats, helicopters, club bouncers.

Over time, this has become less and less of a game. It soon became clear that I could not be both an activist and a capitalist. I quit my six figure job at the time because the former was more important to me. Then one day, everything changed. FBI agents tried to frame me for terrorism in 2008. Twice. They ruined my career, my relationship, my life. Nobody believed that I could be a terrorist so now they try to libel me as an identity thief.

Lawrence Lessig said of Aaron’s indictment that the prosecutor Ortiz was “either an idiot, or a liar.” I know this feeling all too well.

One of my prosecutors, Michael Martinez, claimed that our querying a public webserver was criminal because “it isn’t like going to ESPN and checking your sports team’s scores.”

The facts: AT&T admitted, at trial, that they “published” this data. Their words. Public-facing, programmatic accesses of APIs happen upwards of a trillion times per day. Twitter broke 13 billion on their API ages ago. This is something that happens more than the entire population of Earth, daily. The government has no problem with this up until you transform the output into something offensive to important people. People with “disruptive” startups, this is your fair warning: They are coming for you next.

The other one of my prosecutors, Zach Intrater, said that a comment I made about Goatse Security, my information security working group, starting a certification process to declare systems “goatse tight” was evidence of my intent to personally profit. For those not in on the joke: Goatse is an Internet meme referencing a man holding open his anus very widely. The mind reels.

I can’t survive like this. I am happy to be hitting a prison cell soon. They ruined my business. The feds get approval of who I can work for or with: they rejected one company because the CEO had a social network profile with an occupation listed as “hacker.” They prohibit me from touching any computer that isn’t federally monitored. I do my best to slang Perl code on an Android device to comply with my bail conditions. It isn’t pretty.

Ivy league educated and wealthy, Aaron dealt with his indictment so badly because he thought he was part of a special class of people that this didn’t happen to. I am from a rundown shack in Arkansas. I spent many years thinking people from families like his got better treatment than me. Now I realize the truth: The beast is so monstrous it will devour us all. None will be spared.

So now I stare at a form that the government wants me to fill out before sentencing labelled “acceptance of responsibility” and wonder what I can possibly fill in this slot. This letter is it.

I accept my responsibility, and hope you do too, of dismantling this terrible empire so that this can’t happen to anyone.

This is the difference between the prosecutors and FBI agents and I. They wish me utterly destroyed, and have been hounding me for years of my life. They have been surveilling me, by their own admission, since I was 15. You know what I wish for? A world where no man may abridge the liberty of another. Not me, not you, not the FBI, not federal prosecutors. I actually hope they have fulfilling lives, and come to realize the mistake of treating our Constitution like toilet paper.

This is a country where if you express ideas that federal agents don’t like you, you will be beaten, imprisoned, or killed. I accept my responsibility for offending seditious thugs, liars and tyrants. I say this is the duty of all decent citizens left.

God bless.

Andrew Auernheimer

(*Those who assert our right to access public web APIs can donate to the effort to overturn the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. More info at cfaadefensefund.com. – Andrew Auernheimer)

With unemployment and “under-employment” rampant among grads, many college students are facing the unpleasant reality of a less-than-appealing job market. As a result, students have begun turning to alternative resources to help them prep for life after college, whether that be through skill-focused online platforms like Skillshare or online educational resources like Modern Guild.

Founder Adrien Fraise decided to launch Modern Guild to address the fact that college students tend to be less-focused on academic paths that can lead to post-college employment than they should be — and employers struggle to find appealing candidates, when many are in fact eager to hire. In an attempt to help bridge this perceived gulf, Modern Guild offers college and college-bound students online career prep courses that are taught by real professionals and trained career coaches in live, one-on-one learning sessions.

After a pilot program last year in which 100 students at 10 campuses participated, attracting over 200 mentors, the startup is ready to launch its first “semester” and has just closed its application period, in which 4,000 students applied. Based on this early interest, Modern Guild announced today that it has raised $500K in seed funding from a handful of angel investors, including Jawbone Co-founder Alex Asseily.

The new funding will allow Modern Guild to build out its platform and prepare for its first round of classes, which are set to get underway this spring. While companies like Thinkful are trying to help veteran technical folks get hired at startups, and AfterCollege and MyEdu offer LinkedIn-like networking experiences and opportunities to connect with employers, Fraise thinks that there’s room for a more intensive, online educational experience that can help give students a “stamp of approval” heading into the job market.

Students are looking for anything that will give them an edge in a crowded post-collegiate market, so Modern Guild offers the opportunity for students to participate in a new kind of digital apprenticeship, with the platform matching participants with a personal mentor in their career field of choice. The courses run for eight to ten weeks and require students to meet with their mentors for at least one eight-hour-long class, interacting directly in a one-on-one setting with these mentors, who are either professors, professional recruiters, or might lead their college’s career center.

Through Modern Guild’s platform, students can videoconference with their mentors, connect with other guidance counselors or career coaches, learn about available opportunities, talk to other students who are looking for jobs in similar fields, and take preparatory interviews, to name a few. Along with completing the assignments from their mentors, of course.

However, as GigaOm reported this afternoon, the one potential drawback for Modern Guild is its high price point. Courses cost about $1,500 so, although part of this cost goes towards paying the mentors for participating, it could price out a significant demographic, i.e. anyone not already suffering from loads of student debt.

Certainly, many students, regardless of where they fall on the debt spectrum, are willing to fork over tons of money for tutoring, counseling or coaching, if they feel it will help them stand out in the job market. Modern Guild certainly hopes to appeal to those with a little more disposable income, or parents who are looking to help their students take their career paths by the reins, justifying a higher price point by providing more value — particularly in its live, hands-on, one-on-one approach to mentoring.

As sites like Udacity, Treehouse, Instructure, Coursera and dozens of others ramp up career service offerings around free course and learning platforms (and MOOCs), it will be more difficult for those in the old world of educational content pricing (like Princeton Review and Modern Guild) to stay above the rush of the more modestly priced. Especially when services like SoFi allow would-be mentors to actually invest in students to help them alleviate their debt and connect with with post-collegiate employment opportunities.

That being said, Modern Guild has already shown that there’s a willing audience, as it’s already able to host up to 2,000 students. As to the value proposition, Fraise says, “by offering an intensive curriculum and staying selective, we think that our ‘stamp of approval’ can help give students a valuable edge for even those positions that are in high demand.” With the role of accreditation changing, it employers agree that Modern Guild is up to snuff as a new, alternative to traditional apprenticeships or internships, then there’s a lot of room left to grow.

Huawei is considering an IPO after disclosing sales figures that may once again put it ahead of Ericsson AB in the race to become the world’s biggest telecom equipment maker by revenue. Huawei CFO Cathy Meng said yesterday her company is open to a listing (link via Google Translate) after disclosing details of its 2012 performance.

Huawei’s sales last year rose 8 percent year-on-year to 220 billion yuan ($35.4 billion), boosting net income 33 percent to 15.4 billion yuan, said Meng. In comparison, Ericsson, which will report earnings at the end of this month, is expected by analysts to post 2012 sales of 226.9 billion Swedish kroner ($34.8 billion), about the same as its 2011 results. Huawei first beat Ericsson in July 2012, when the Chinese company reported that its first-half revenue was $16.1 billion, or $850 million more than Ericsson’s first-half sales.

Meng said that she disclosed the figures as part of ongoing efforts to “honor our commitment to transparency.” She also expressed frustrations with U.S. investigations into Huawei’s alleged connections to Chinese espionage: “These measures using trade protectionism to interfere with free competition will ultimately harm the benefits of end users and consumers.”

The Chinese company has been considering an IPO for years, but progress has been stymied by the company’s complicated share structure, as well as concerns that a listing would not allay U.S. lawmakers’ suspicions that the Huawei is involved in espionage. As an alternative, analysts have speculated that Huawei might look at an IPO in Hong Kong or London instead. Last October, reports that Huawei had asked investment banks for advice on an IPO came at the end of a 18-month-long investigation by U.S. lawmakers into whether or not Huawei had engaged in espionage for the Chinese government. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Huawei saw the IPO as a way to win contracts in the U.S. and other lucrative markets by becoming more transparent.

In the meantime, Huawei has focused on boosting its presence in emerging economies and raising sales in Europe. Meng said that R&D spending last year rose 26 percent to 29.9 billion yuan ($4.7 billion), and that Europe, the Middle East and Africa made up 35 percent of its sales, while 17 percent were in other Asia-Pacific markets and 15 percent from the Americas.

The company has been repeatedly criticized for its opacity, as well founder Ren Zheng-fei’s alleged ties with the Chinese army. Ren once worked as a military technology, a fact that has been cited by U.S. lawmakers when raising concerns that Huawei might be involved in cyber espionage.

Back in October, however, a White House review reportedly found no evidence of spying by Huawei, though it did note vulnerabilities in equipment that could potentially be exploited by hackers (though it was unclear whether or not they had been placed there deliberately). Around the same time, the U.S. House intelligence committee concluded that Huawei and ZTE both pose security risks to the U.S. government because their equipment could be used for espionage, in part because both Chinese companies would be required to comply with requests for access to their systems by the Chinese government.

According to a beta tester listing on OnlineBeta.com, Logitech is finally preparing to support OS X gamers. At long last, the company is working to release its “Gaming Software” for Mac OS X that lets users configure their Logitech gaming mice and keyboards to optimize performance and play.

It’s unclear what this type of software will do specifically, as the listing is kept very vague, but the most obvious conclusion is that the OS X software will configure the lights and controls of various gaming mice and keyboards sold by Logitech.

Here’s the official wording from the listing:

We all know that in computer gaming you must have the right tools to claim victory. The more flexible and configurable your keyboard and mouse are, the more likely you can come out on top in your favorite game. We are now starting a public software beta test that is open to anyone who meets the requirements below!

To participate in this test you need to regularly use one of the following Logitech gaming products: G300, G400, G600 gaming mice and/or G103, G105, G110, G510, G11, G13, G15, G19, G710 gaming keyboards. Also, this test is for Mac users only who spend lots of time playing games each week.

If you are a gaming jockey and want to enhance your experience, you will want to try out this new software. So log in, download this exciting update and share your feedback! Logitech is listening and they want to know what you think about the new enhancements!

To confirm that the beta test is in fact underway, a tipster also sent us a screengrab of an email he/she got as part of Logitech’s beta program.

Some of Logitech’s hardware already plays nice with Mac OS X thanks to the company’s GamePanel keyboard software. But for the most part, Logitech focuses its software products on Windows users, and rightfully so. PC games are made for Windows machines.

Still, it’s nice to see that Mac gamers will be able to enjoy their gaming tools to the same extent their Microsoft-friendly counterparts do.