Category: Tech news

Editor’s note: Lucas Dailey is the founder and CEO of political social network Our Ballot Box, a designer, and a local politico. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

Regardless of your views on our recent election, one thing that we can generally agree on is that our political system is broken. There are myriad contributors to our malaise, not the least of which is the voting system on which it’s all based. But apart from the intractable structural problems, there is one area that we in the web world are tantalizingly close to ameliorating: constituent opinion.

An Old Problem We Take For Granted

In the middle of February in Wisconsin, nearly 100,000 people, some driving hundreds of miles, all converged on the same location at the same time simply to convey information. These people didn’t want to be there, but they felt, rightly, that this extreme effort was the only means available to convey their opinions effectively.

Protests are a unique method of communication, because they combine three essential components of effective civic speech: participants are publicly counted in them; they publicly convey a message; and they give reasonable evidence that participants are constituents. But soon we’ll have better ways of conveying that information without having to brave the Wisconsin winter.

Americans have an embarrassment of sites on which one can voice an opinion. Yet none of them meet the requirements necessary for people to actually voice these opinions in a way that maximizes their political impact.

My startup, Our Ballot Box, spent four years in Madison identifying these requirements, testing their effectiveness, and building a web app that began to satisfy those requirements. We failed as a business, but our product has had some success and someone will pick up our torch. The market is ready and the political value is too great for it to remain unbuilt. Ten years from now an effective constituent communication site will serve as a central component of the political process that none of us can imagine living without.

You’re Doing It Wrong: How Our Startup Failed

Our vision was very well received by regular citizens, activists, politicians, and news organizations, but we still failed as a business. That was my failure. As a first-time entrepreneur and CEO, I’d like to think I at least made some novel mistakes, but the reality is that they were mostly pedestrian.

Our talented developers had little time left to power a startup in addition to their demanding day jobs and young families. I should have expanded our team before launching with insufficient wind under sail. Our business models relied on long-term mass adoption, a big swing and tough sell that relies on more at-bats with investors than usual. And while Madison has a burgeoning web industry, it still lacks the number of investors of Silicon Valley, and I’m the only team member able to relocate.

I should have developed better business models and shaped our product to fit. Lastly, and most personally painful, I restrained my design passion by limiting myself to a first-draft approach to the UX and UI that resulted in a substandard experience. I did this to ensure I stayed focused on the business, marketing and fundraising parts of the startup. Ultimately, I simply didn’t execute well enough.

A Vision To Transform Political Speech

The good news is that there are startups close to successfully building such a space. My goal is to offer a direction to anyone else excited to address one of the most pernicious problems in our society. There are five basic components necessary for a political social network to effectively solve the constituent communication problem:

1. User-generated opinions
2. Single units of opinion
3. User verification
4. Surfacing and sorting
5. Open, demographically indexed data

User-generated opinions. Users must be able to write opinions in their own words, uncensored and unmoderated. Yes, it means dealing with a host of issues such as griefing, hate speech, and duplication. But a site must allow for the full and unrestricted expression of political opinion if it is to reach broad public acceptance. To users, speech must be free, and damn the consequences for developers. The site must allow users to quickly and easily express an opinion that is immediately accessible, so when others are presented with opinions that don’t quite match their own, they can speak for themselves on an issue instead of being pressured to vote on something they are uncomfortable with.

Single units of opinion. It may seem counterintuitive but single units of opinion for users to endorse or oppose are far more persuasive than compounded opinions. Whether it’s something as complex and packaged as “I am pro-life” or as granular as “Williamson St. should have a two-way connection to Winnebago St.” these are the data points that sculpt public policy, shape political platforms and guide the selection of political candidates. The multiple-choice questions on many political opinion sites fail this test because the limited number of answer options necessarily excludes other opinions and pressures people into selecting the least bad option. When single units of opinion are coupled with easy, user-generated opinions, users will have the freedom to fully express themselves through either their own words or an endorsement of another’s words.

User verification. In an age when astroturfing is becoming increasingly sophisticated, proving your identity in a political social network is essential. Many social media products offer different means of user verification. They range from methods as weak as providing a unique email or algorithms that spot fake accounts to methods as strong as requiring driver’s license or credit card information. To balance user acquisition with political strength, the ideal political social network will allow for multiple methods of identity verification across the confidence spectrum.

Surfacing and sorting. Getting the right opinions in front of the right users at the right time for their votes is delicate but essential, not only in terms of user engagement but also for political relevance. If an opinion is only voted on by a particular subset of constituents — such as, say, the followers of a particular radio host — then that opinion won’t reflect the full support or opposition of that constituency. Careful exposure is essential both to ensure opinion conveys a representative picture of overall public support, as well as to ensure that users have the opportunity to easily voice their opinions on the most politically valuable issues. Though partisans will always cry bias of all but their supporters, if the system is entirely algorithmic with no opportunity for organizational bias, it will gradually become accepted and treated as a neutral platform.

Ease of use and speed of creating and voting on existing opinions are also important factors for surfacing and political relevance. When people can vote on 10 issues a minute in a leanback experience that has political value, they’ll never stop.

Open, demographically indexed data. Finally, the potential of the opinion data must be unlocked by indexing it with users’ demographic and location data and making it publicly available. Then the general public, news organizations and all 10 (yes, 10!) political bodies that represent each citizen will be able to fully interpret the clear preferences of each constituency. Researchers and pollsters will also gain even greater insight by analyzing and modeling the data to compensate for the underrepresented constituencies.

Internet users have become more conscious of the amount of personal information they release. While that trend will continue, users will gladly volunteer their information when they realize it will give them greater political power: By aligning themselves with a particular group, they can then speak more effectively on behalf of that group. However, that depth of personal information must be used carefully to allow users to enjoy their desired level of privacy and be confident that their information won’t be misused. Successful political social networks must protect users’ identities while they speak at whichever hue of the anonymity-advocacy spectrum they so choose.

Political Social Networks In The Wings

There are a number of companies that competed against Our Ballot Box that are well on their way to providing a truly effective way for constituents to communicate. They have great products that they can expand to execute this vision:

• Votizen was moving in this direction with its publicly endorsable, user created Letters. Lately they seem to have tacked away from constituent communication in favor of political candidate promotion through social pressure, though that could be a momentary change to take advantage of the elections. With the elections now over they may retool again to focus more on problems of governance.
• Change.org has a great petition platform that could increase its political relevance by adding the parts of this vision it lacks, noteably adding open demographics and allowing votes against petitions. If they combined the brute force of large absolute numbers with the tools necessary to show percent support and evidence that their public response is relatively representative of the constituency, they could have a much more politically powerful tool.
• POPVOX is doing a lot right, and while focusing on public opinion for H.R. 2526 Amendment 4 has a lot of value (particularly to Congressional staffers), it’s unlikely to have the popular reach and political strength of stating “70% of Americans believe National Forests shouldn’t host private logging roads.” Their political strength could be tremendous if they had a simple opinion layer on top of their excellent legislative depth, so casual users can easily sound off at a high level while power users can drill down further.
• Votifi is an excellent opinion platform with a promising analytics focus. Plus their “Simplifi, Quantifi, Amplifi” nearly matches our “Verify, Quantify, Amplify!” If they were to successfully incorporate user-generated questions and statements they could go a long way toward becoming a central voice of the people.

Apart from current players in the space, this vision could be produced by a new small startup that grew organically to be recognized as the primary venue for political opinion. It would be easiest to build by a company that already has strong brand identity as a relatively trusted and politically impartial repository of personal profiles such as a Google, Facebook, AOL or Yahoo. Nonpartisan nonprofits (particularly Pew) may be the best home for such a product from the public’s perspective, but even the most responsible use of the data will have business-model potential sufficient to motivate a larger company to compete eventually if not soon (or already, quietly).

Effect Change

To paraphrase T.S. Elliot and Clay Shirky: one of the most momentous things to happen to a culture is that it acquires a new form of arguing. The Internet has already given us a new form of individual argumentation, but it now has the potential for the next, much greater form: collective argumentation. As a society and country, when we can definitively say “this is who we are, and this is what we think,” we will fundamentally reshape the political process by speaking for ourselves in an undeniable voice that is impossible to ignore. When we put the lie to claims from talking heads that they speak for us, we will have more focused and productive public debate.

But the greatest change will come in how politicians operate. The one thing more important than money to a politician is votes, and when politicians know their constituents hold a clear, undeniable position on an issue, they almost always listen. Because their challengers are.

Our small startup took an important step but stumbled. Take the next step in our place and finally realize the dream of indirect democracy.

[Images via Flickr]

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Most of the talk around games tends to focus on climate. It’s about finding the right customers, funding, platform, business model, partnerships, metric and discovery solutions, technology, route to market and so on. How we play the Game of Games, as it were.

In this context, we often think of the product as something that needs to fit into a mold. We think of them as television executives think of shows: They need to fill certain slots, address certain markets, encourage specific behaviours, and so on. To borrow a TV term, we think of them in terms of format first and content second.

By format I mean that the game has to conform to some conventions. Perhaps it needs to be free-to-play and support dual currencies because that works in many other games. Perhaps a session needs to be playable in two minutes because research has shown that many mobile games work better when they can be played in this way. Perhaps it needs to be filled with friendly graphics because the target market of yummy mummies (has that phrase gone stateside yet?) is generally believed to find realism, violence, and gore turnoffs.

There are two sides to this format argument. The nays say that these kinds of restriction prevent innovation and creativity. In part this might explain why indie game developers have mostly not engaged with new platforms like the iPad and Facebook, preferring the more awkward but liberal canvas of the PC. The yays, on the other hand, say that innovation and creativity are important, but at the end of the day games is a business. And metrics show that the market behaves in semi-predictable patterns, so the job of game development is to match those patterns.

Of course, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If you reject format thinking entirely, you may make something fantastically creative (such as Proteus) but which may not be viable in the long term. On the other hand if format is entirely your master then you’ll become trapped in that commoditised space where your games look and act the same as everyone else’s (such as the bulk of casual, social, and casino games). Then scale will be your master.

What’s interesting is that those from both sides of the aisle will almost always say that the first rule of making games is to make sure that the game is fun. Without a fun game there’s no rule two. What neither side will do, however, is elaborate on that statement.

This is because “fun” is traditionally thought to be difficult to define. It is a very general term that can mean enjoyment, excitement, delight, learning, amusement, adventure, the thrill of the new, the mastery of things or just simply laughter. It is also easily co-opted, such as when studios “prove” that the energy mechanic in their game is “fun” because it drives a lot of repeat visits (which is a bit like saying that because people watch television shows with breaks, this must mean they love commercials).

Some game designers have attempted to square this circle by sub-dividing fun. Nicole Lazarro developed a popular model which separates fun into four “keys” (hard, soft, people and serious fun) as a way of explaining different ways to approach game design. Others (such as one by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek) break fun down into eight or more types, such as fantasy, discovery, expression, etc.

The problem with such systems is that they become justification tools. If fun is breakable into various sub-types, then it follows that you could mix-and-match those types with equal success. This is just not true. Games that do this often show large drops in users, generate reviews where players will say the story was enjoyable, but the game wasn’t fun, and so on. Successful game design always eventually comes back to realising that one of the kinds of fun is more important than the others. In Lazarro’s system it would be “hard fun.” In Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek’s, it would be “challenge.” The others are joys which emerge when the fun factor is sound.

So, fun is: the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics. And if we accept that the first rule is that a game must be fun, then it’s a hard limit. For many innovative game developers who want to push boundaries, this is very difficult to admit or accept. Nonetheless, it’s a universal law (a “creative constant“), which applies to all games. Whether you are in social, casino, gamification, casual, console or indie the gameplay is the gameplay, and it’s always driven by fun. It has been so ever since the first sports and Senet (the oldest known board game) were invented.

But the good news is that understanding that fun is a constant frees us up from thinking that format is, too. In fact the rules of format change all the time. We are all very busy trying to understand what shape the games business will have in any given year, what devices people will play on, and where the money can be made. Many games conferences are filled with talks and panels that are all about market opportunities, distribution and all those other climatological concerns. And yet none of that matters as much as it appears to.

Format wisdom has a short shelf life and is often over-interpreted. The recent success of Supercell is one example. Right now that studio is in the same blessed space that Rovio occupied a couple of years ago, where analysts are whirring around them trying to decode the magic of their success. Many other studios are picking Clash of Clans apart as we speak and trying to figure out the magic of its business model or distribution. There will be some  valuable insights derived from so doing, but in the main it’s just a fixed data point in a dynamic system. Clash of Clans is fun, and its release is well timed. Its success is not likely to be any more mystical to understand than that.

Just because players wilfully engaged in a format one year does not mean that pattern will repeat for all time (as Zynga has discovered to its cost). Just because it seems as though they will buy Christmas trees in games does not mean that every game needs them. As with interpreting the movements of the real-world climate, the pro-format types are over inclined to over-interpret the significance of runes and draw too-narrow conclusions. This inevitably leads them to making clones of successful games and be unable to think creatively.

Those indies who understand that fun is more important than format invent successful new games every year. Those iPad developers who are willing to experiment with format to create fun are the ones who catch Apple’s attention and become successful. The guy who invented Minecraft (Markus “Notch” Persson) didn’t just create a giant virtual world in which you could make stuff, he made it challenging. When Will Wright created the Sims, he didn’t just make a game about living in a virtual house. He made it difficult to live successfully. That’s why both of those franchises have sold millions of copies.

The fun factor is about more than making a game is amusing or full of pretty rewards. If your game is a dynamic system to be mastered and won, then you can go nuts. If you can give the player real fun then you can afford to break some of those format rules, and that’s how you get to lead rather than follow the market. If not then be prepared to pay through the nose to acquire and retain players. Your format strategy won’t matter as your game will lose users regardless of what you do.

And the climate is only going to get hotter.

“In the early days we gave employees iPhones primarily”, a Facebook spokesperson tells me. That decision and the rise of Android has left Facebook scrambling to get employees dogfooding its apps for Google’s OS. Now the company’s headquarters is plastered with these eye-popping posters asking Facebookers to “switch today”, and fix Android flaws with its secret bug reporting tool “Rage Shake”.

Facebook is making a shift. Not just to mobile, but to a balanced focus across mobile through an informal program to nudge employees to Android. It was first mentioned by Business Insider’s Owen Thomas in August and I’ve since investigated. The campaign casually known as “Droidfooding”, a portmanteau of Android and dogfooding — eating your own dogfood aka testing your own products.

I’ve attained some photos of the vaguely propagandistic posters found around Facebook’s Menlo Park campus. The most telling one is a graph of the International Data Corporation’s projection for shipments of Androids vs iPhones. It shows Google’s OS getting bundled with twice as many devices as Apple’s by 2016. If Facebook can’t even out the ratio of iOS to Android-toting employees soon, it could end up neglecting the vast majority of its smartphone app users.

The problem started because the first iPhone was just a heck of a lot better than initial Android handsets. Apple’s integrated OS and device plus early traction made it much more attractive to Facebook employees. Sure it cost more, but why not take the most advanced phone on the market if they weren’t footing the bill?

That caused a disconnect, though. Most people do have to think about the cost of their mobile handset. They might not be perfect or have micron-precision industrial design, but Androids get the job done. They surf the web, manage email, provide maps, and offer access to Facebook. If the social network wants to give Android users the best experience, it needs a fair portion of the company testing its Android apps and brainstorming what could be done next with the operating system’s flexibility.

That’s the goal of Droidfooding. While the default choice for what phone employees got used to be an iPhone, a Facebook spokesperson tells me that now “We don’t encorage one device over another. We let employees choose.” When I asked what the breakdown of iOS to Android users is in the company, Facebook’s spokesperson admitted “I don’t have a ratio but with the early focus on our iPhone app and the multi-year cycle of carrier contracts we do have more iPhones deployed.”

The campaign is starting to take hold, though. “We’ve created more awareness that Android devices are available” Facebook says. Now, “there’s plenty of people here carrying around both devices, and not just engineers and not just mobile people.” So while the posters ask employees to “switch”, it seems they’re pretty attached to their Apple products. At least there are more Androids in pockets at 1 Hacker Way.

Once they’re there, the company tries to make it as easy as possible to test the next generation of its Android apps. During my digging I found out Facebook forcibly updates employees to the most recent beta version of apps like Facebook For Android and Facebook Messenger. If they run across a problem in one of the Android (or iOS) apps, they can take advantage of a bug reporting feature Facebook builds into its internal betas.

It’s called “Rage Shake” and the name is spot-on. Employees just violently shake their phone and it automatically logs its current state and sends in details to Facebook’s mobile bug-squashers. The Google+ team apparently also has a “Rage Shake” feature and even gave access to it to end users, though it’s unclear which company had if first.

By avoiding a more complicated manual reporting process, Facebook maximizes the number of bugs it hears about from its 4,000 employee-testers. If Facebookers like the taste of Droidfood, they could make sure it’s not their actual users shaking their phones in fits of anger.

[Image Credit: TalkAndroid, Techno18]

How much money have mobile apps made? By the end of the year the cumulative revenues of the global mobile app market will have exceeded $30 billion, says analyst ABI Research. This figure includes money from pay-per-download apps, in-app purchases, subscriptions and in-app advertisements — the whole app kit-and-caboodle if you will.

The figure, which comes from ABI Research’s Mobile Application Markets Research Service, is nearly double the amount of money apps had generated by the end of 2011, according to the analyst.

“Consumers’ high interest in apps has for a long time been obvious from download volumes, but it’s 2012 that will go down in history as the year when the economic side of the business finally took off,” said senior analyst Aapo Markkanen in a statement. ”We’re no longer talking only about a short-term gold rush. Apps have become a major digital industry.”

While ABI gives a nod to Apple’s role in catalysing this global app money-making machine, the analyst says the firm that has “stood out the most in 2012″ is Google — noting how the rather flea-market-esque Android Market has been overhauled and transformed into the much more polished Google Play.

Google is bringing the Nexus 4 to another carrier in the UK, expanding availability to Three after debuting the device with O2 as its initial partner in that country. The Android 4.2-powered smartphone will be available starting December 13 on Three, either on a £35 per month contract with an upfront cost of just £29 on the One Plan (unlimited data and high on-network text and talk limits, but with a two-year contract), or pre-paid for £399.99.

The added carrier partner comes just one month after the Nexus 4′s official launch, which saw quick sell-outs in the UK and the rest of the world. Google’s latest smartphone seems to be experiencing either very high demand, very short supply, or a combination of both (although new reports claim shipping times have improved), so it’s interesting to see Google expand availability so quickly.

The Nexus 4 should offer fairly good speeds on Three’s DS-HSDPA network, but the hack revealed this morning that allows users to manually enable LTE on the device will do Three customers no good. Even when Three’s planned 1800MHz LTE network begins to roll out, it won’t be compatible with the Nexus 4′s AWS LTE band support. Of course, that feature’s still not technically even official, and the phone is still among the best options for Android devices out there. The interesting thing will be to see how many people opt to buy through carriers, versus getting cheaper outright prices direct through Google and bringing it to the network of their choice.

Some consolidation is afoot in the world of enterprise cloud services in Europe: Claranet, a managed service provider, is paying $88 million (£55 million) to acquire Star, a provider of cloud-based managed technology services. The move is a sign of how, while enterprise cloud services continue to grow in popularity, there is increasing consolidation as companies look for better service margins through scale and value-added services. Claranet says the deal will make it the largest provider of integrated hosting and network services to the mid market in the UK and continental Europe, with some 4,500 customers on its books.

The deal will see STH Limited, owners of Star Technology Services, become wholly owned by Claranet.

This is a consolidation move to build up Claranet’s service portfolio, as well as to pick up more customers. Those that will get added to Claranet as a result of the acquisition include Airbus, Amnesty International, Care UK, Channel 5, IRIS and De Vere Hotels.

“From a market and customer perspective, this is a great opportunity to bring together the experience and resources of two great companies to deliver a broader service portfolio to benefit our customers. It’s our mission to help our customers make the most of Internet-enabled technology, and the acquisition of Star will enable us to continue to deliver on this promise,” said Charles Nasser, CEO and Founder of the Claranet Group, in a statement.

Claranet says the combined company will have revenues of over £120 million, and it will have 700 staff across the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

Services in the combined group will include managed hosting and network services, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, virtual data centers and managed application hosting services. Star brings business in unified communications, combining mobile and desktop services, as well as security services.

But scale will also play a role: “In addition, Star’s customers will be able to take advantage of Claranet’s European operations and benefit from the knowledge that the enlarged company is on a strong financial footing, with far greater purchasing power in the market,” says the release.

Notion Capital, a VC set up by Stephen Chandler with Star’s founders Ben and Jos White, acquired Star for £20 million in 2007 and then rolled it into its first investment fund. Notion says that the sale to Claranet represents a return on equity of over 12 times in the company  – but it is not revealing the actual amount of equity invested. The 2007 deal was mainly financed through debt with a smaller equity component, TechCrunch understands.

Apple has reportedly changed its battery suppliers for the iPad and MacBook lines to Amperex Technology Limited and Tianjin Lishen Battery, both Chinese firms, after Samsung SDI (Samsung’s battery-producing subsidiary) stopped supplying Apple, the China Business News reports. If accurate, this would be just the latest in a series of rifts between the two companies.

Samsung is a crucial component partner for Apple and will remain so at least in the near future, according to CEO Tim Cook on Apple’s most recent quarterly conference call. But recently, rumors have been swirling that the supplier relationship between Samsung and Apple is in the process of eroding. In the past couple of months, we’ve seen reports that Samsung had increased processor prices for Apple (which the company denied) and also claims that Apple was terminating the display supply relationship with the Korean company (also later denied).

The two companies are locked in a global patent battle and are each other’s primary competition in the global smartphone race. In light of the strained relationship, it’s natural that people should expect their supply chain arrangements to suffer, too. And there has been tangible proof; Apple did indeed remove crucial design components for its A-series processors out of Samsung’s hands and in-house, which reduces Samsung to just a manufactory partner. Apple has also reportedly been grooming TSMC and others to take over chip production in the future.

But for all the reports, there seems to be little hard evidence that the relationship is indeed collapsing. Put simply, Samsung has capacity that Apple can’t find elsewhere, and Apple has a very lucrative contract with Samsung, meaning changing their relationship quickly isn’t easy or beneficial to either.

This battery supplier report is just the latest in a series of indicators that the relationship between the two could be undergoing a slow but inevitable shift, but don’t expect to see Apple and Samsung walk away from each other entirely for quite a while yet.

In the widest possible interpretation, this job ad (now removed) could be UK government bureaucratic-speak for an operations efficiency expert (zzzzzz), but a closer look at the text — for the UK’s “Secret Intelligence Service” seeking a “Target Elimination Specialist” — and it looks like someone has managed to post a spoof employment opportunity on DirectGov, the UK government’s official online interface with the public.

To be clear, this does not appear to be a full hack of the site. Government sites get shut down time and again by hackers, for example by worming their way through firewalls or via DDoS attacks. Today’s oddity could be someone’s idea of a joke, or a warning that the system is not exactly secure.

Reader Ryan Kennedy, CEO at back-up storage providers Flirble, points out that, in fact, it’s “pretty easy” to post whatever job you want on the site. “Sign up as an employer to use Universal Jobmatch and you can then post jobs,” he says. Not exactly watertight measures, then.

We are reaching out to Gov.uk to ask what is going on, and are looking to see whether anything else was affected.

So far, no one is claiming responsibility as the page makes its way through the viral Twitterverse.

Groups like Anonymous — or people who connect themselves to them, at least — have in the past been linked with government site takedowns in connection with protests over other issues, such as SOPA, Wikileaks and more.

We’ll update this post as we learn more. Here’s the text of the post:

“From time to time the UK government has a need to remove people whose continued existence poses a risk to the effective conduct of public order. So we require particularly skilled professionals who are prepared to work on a non-attributable basis to deal with these problems.

The role will involve international travel to a number of countries where individuals need to be removed.

The ideal candidate will need to have no particular distinguishing features so as to blend in and be able to take on new identities as required. They will need to be resourceful in finding ways to accomplish their missions and, in some cases, to leave foreign countries by non-conventional means. The role would suit candidates with prior military experience, particularly in the use of sniper rifles.

The job holder will receive all necessary equipment, including passports, special watches, jet packs, mini-submarines and a Walther PPK.

This role is particularly appropriate for those who like their martinis shaken and not stirred.

To apply for this role, please express your interest somewhere in the vicinity of the large and rather fake-looking rock in Regent’s Park.”

Reports surfaced this morning that the Nexus 4, Google’s latest flagship Android smartphone, supports LTE via a relatively easy software hack. After testing, it turns out that’s definitely true, so I’ll show you exactly how to enable it on your device. Fair warning: the Nexus 4 only supports LTE on the AWS band (1700 or 2100MHz), which is currently used for LTE networks in Canada, and for some areas served by T-Mobile’s fledgling 4G network.

Step 1: Access Phone Testing Settings

Your phone’s dialer is the key to getting entry to the system menu where you can switch your radio preferences. Just open your phone app, and type in *#*#4636#*#*, which will instantly take you to the necessary preference panel seen below. You can also download and install the Phone Info app from Google Play if you’d rather not have to re-enter that sequence every time you want to change these settings (the app also stays open, so you can recall it via Android’s app switcher so long as it has been active recently).

Step 2: Change Your Phone’s Cellular Network Type

From this screen you can switch which networks your phone connects to under the “Preferred Network Type” drop-down menu. There are options for various combinations of CDMA, GSM, LTE and more.

In my testing, I found that the only sure way to get LTE to actually kick in and take over is to set your preferred network to “LTE only.” Using the options that auto-select between LTE, GSM and CDMA seemed to just cause the phone to default back to HSDPA+ speeds where available, although I’m seeing other users are having success with any option that includes LTE.

Step 3: Change Your APN Settings

Dig down through Settings, Mobile Networks, Access Point Names and change your APN Settings. The XDA Developer forums show you a number of ways and which values you need to change to make it work, depending on your carrier. You just change the APN name for Rogers users, to “lteinternet.apn.”

Step 4: Enjoy The Speed Boost

It may seem like there should be more to this, but there isn’t. After you’ve changed that radio setting, your phone should disconnect from the network, and then reconnect with LTE speeds. I immediately jumped into Speedtest to check out the difference, and lo and behold, download speeds exploded, as did upload rates.

HSPA+ Speeds

LTE Speeds

Caveats

This is great, and I’ll be using my Nexus 4 hard-switched to LTE bands for the foreseeable future, but there are some things to keep in mind. First, this is technically a back door trick, even though it’s relatively simple and doesn’t require any hardcore hacking. That means Google could potentially shut down the loophole if it has reason to. Second, there’s no telling how enabling LTE on a phone which ostensibly isn’t designed for it will affect device battery life. The Nexus 4 wasn’t the strongest performer in that regard to begin with, so I’m a little worried about the ultimate effect there, but not enough to stop me using those sweet, sweet LTE speeds.

If, for any reason, you want to turn this off after enabling, just follow the same steps above and choose a preferred connection speed that’s compatible with your carrier’s network but doesn’t include LTE as an option.

Everlane, one of the wave of vertically-integrated sites that is changing the way that fashion is made and sold, is today disrupting something else. In protest against the over-the-top consumerism that is Black Friday — where smartphone-equipped shoppers look for incremental sales/parking/stock advantages over those less savvy — Everlane is opting out. The site is going dark on one of the busiest retail days of the year.

In a post that is now on the home page of the site called “Buy Less, Buy Better,” Everlane makes the case that closing shop on Black Friday is a way of expressing its general principles. Everlane, as background, sources products from the ground up, thereby making the process totally transparent to buyers and cutting out some of the fat (and cost) in the process. The focus is on fewer, better quality things:

Because we want to help people consume less by creating fewer, longer lasting products,
we decided to shut down the site today. Have a wonderful holiday and we’ll be back tomorrow.

Everlane’s founder, Michael Preysman, further elaborates:

“As a business, we appreciate the importance of holiday shopping, but feel that the excess around Black Friday has shifted to a focus on quantity over quality. We believe there is too much noise. If we can help contribute in reducing that noise, we’ve helped move the world forward,” he said in a statement.

It’s a calculated risk for Everlane. If the company is going to make a statement like this, today is probably the best day to do it. Black Friday is evolving to be a big day for online sales — Apple and Amazon being just two of the big online sites offering Black Friday deals — but the day’s mainstay is the traditional retailer opening its doors to customers for the first big day of holiday shopping. (And as this NYT article points out, traditional retailers are increasingly using the tools of the tech trade to make sure that they continue to stay in the game.) In contrast, IBM data shows that Thanksgiving Thursday, in fact, is rapidly shaping up to be the big day for online shopping.

So a statement made at just the right time, but probably with less harm done to Everlane’s bottom line than an extended holiday black out would be.

Meanwhile, Everlane remains an online-only shop but it, too, is making little moves into physical sales via a pop-up shop in Manhattan. “Not A Shop,” it says, will offer classes in tie-making, belt making and suede patches. “This popup will ultimately serve to educate consumers about the origin and manufacturing of Everlane’s products in a salute towards Preysman’s commitment to maintain transparency with his customers,” the company says.

Google’s Nexus 4 smartphones have been selling like hotcakes, despite one big criticism being that the device does not support super-fast wireless broadband on LTE networks. But a video has emerged that apparently refutes that fact: You can turn on LTE on the device by way of a simple shortcode that you enter on the dial pad.

According to a video posted on YouTube by the Canadian blog Tekgadg (and embedded below), a user can type in *#*#4636#*#* as a phone number, which then brings up a menu of the phone’s settings. There, you can switch the phone from its default WCDMA-preferred mode to one that supports LTE. If the network that you are on offers LTE in the supported LTE band, it then comes up on the device.

This further speed test posted by user a1jatt on the XDA Developers forum appears to demonstrate his LTE-enabled Nexus 4 picking up speeds of up to 21Mbps on the Telus LTE network.

As Android Authority points out, the LTE, as demonstrated in the video, seems only to work on two LTE-enabled bands, 1700MHz and 2100MHz. These happen to be the frequencies used by carriers in Tekgadg’s home market of Canada: Rogers Wireless, Telus and Bell Canada.

That, and the fact that you need to work a little hack to get LTE working, are two possible setbacks. Some believe that this kind of a hack shouldn’t count as proper LTE support.

But for those looking for a workaround, or for thinking about what might be on the roadmap ahead, it’s a tweak of hope. We’re still trying to figure out if (a) this is really accurate and (b) whether the LTE will work on other frequencies.

We have reached out to Google about this, and a spokesperson has referred us to LG. So we are now reaching out to LG for comment and will update this post as we learn more.

For now, here is a list from Wikipedia of all LTE networks worldwide and what bands they work on. You can see that there are others markets where the 1700/2100 bands are used at the moment, including Japan, and some of the U.S. operators, including AT&T. And, as a commenter below reminds us, T-Mobile’s future LTE network in the U.S. will also run on 1700MHz.

(h/t Steve)

It’s another first for legendary game designer Peter Molyneux, who earlier this month launched his first mobile game Curiosity: he’s kicked off his first Kickstarter campaign — with project GODUS, “an innovative reinvention of Populous“. Populous, for those of you who didn’t grow up in the 1980s, was THE classic god game in which you nurtured a civilization from mud huts to castles, battling against a rival people controlled by a computer opponent. Drowning the computer’s civilization by flooding the lands was a classic winning tactic in my experience.

For GODUS, Molyneux is continuing to work with 22can, his Guildford-based independent games studio that came together in March of this year to build Curiosity. Molyneux talks about wanting to “recreate the entire god game genre” more than two decades on from Populous by adding a rich, multiplayer experience, a good or evil element (inspired by Black & White) and a kick-ass, modern interface and graphics:

Populous was created over 22 years ago, and we believe that to date, nothing has come close to emulating its powerfully godlike experience. It’s this experience we aim to reimagine. GODUS blends the power, growth and scope of Populous with the detailed construction and multiplayer excitement of Dungeon Keeper and the intuitive interface and technical innovation of Black & White. The original Populous hailed from the 8-bit era but GODUS will use the most modern technology the world has to offer.

“What I would love to do is go back to those glory days of Bullfrog, go back to those days when we focused ultimately on the gameplay,” says Molyneux in the Kickstarter video (below).

At the time of writing, GODUS already has close to 4,000 backers, with more than £95,000 pledged — out of a goal of £450,000 — with 28 days left. If it gets funded, the game will be developed for PC and mobile devices, with other platforms potentially added if the funding goal is exceeded.

Development for PC and mobile is expected to take seven to nine months to complete — longer if enough money is raised to support additional platforms.

Why is Molyneux turning to crowdfunding platform Kickstarter for GODUS rather than, say, approaching a big games studio to fund Populous redux? It’s all about ensuring the creative good of being a small studio — small enough to listen to individual gamers’ hopes and dreams — wins out against the corporate, creativity-crushing evil might of the big games publishers…

With GODUS we want to make a game in a culture of openness, co-operation and honesty. Creating a game involves imagination and passion, and we’re keen to share the experience. So we want to make GODUS with you watching and, we hope, participating. Funding it via Kickstarter allows us to stay a small independent team with unlimited freedom in our creativity. It’ll just be you, us and our unbridled dedication (no publishers).

You see, although GODUS is a new idea, we’re keen to return to the spirit which started it all. In 1989, in a small, cramped office in Guildford, England, a hard-working and enthusiastic duo experimented, collaborated, took risks and came up with Populous, a game which would become a legend and which would launch the god game genre.

We’re going to make GODUS in that same spirit. And your support will enable you to be involved at every stage as we share everything we do and learn with you. We’ll produce video diaries, blogs, live streams, developer chats and a great deal more. We aim to end up with a truly delightful game and as you play it, you’ll be able to say that you also played your part in its very creation.

Last week, Priceline.com acquired Kayak for $1.8 billion. That’s more than twice what Google paid for ITA back in 2010. Why did Priceline make this move? And why now?

Priceline acquired Kayak for $40 a share, about $500 million in cash, $1 billion in Priceline equity, and about $300 million in stock options. Kayak got a premium price — a 29 percent premium, to be exact — from Priceline considering that, on the day of its acquisition, Kayak closed at roughly $31 a share. That’s about 54 percent higher than where Kayak was on IPO day, at $26 a share. This no doubt added to Priceline’s impression that Kayak was on the way up and that it was worth paying the big bucks to save it from having to deal with a strong competitor down the road.

While the big numbers are eye-catching, Kayak hasn’t always been in such an enviable position. The company first filed to go public in late 2010 and went public in July of this year — a long road to the public markets by any standard — and one that saw Kayak posting a net loss as recently as a year ago. It finally turned that around in the first quarter of this year, posting a Q1 net income of $4.1 million and grew revenue by 39 percent to $73.3 million.

Those numbers have been on the rise ever since, as Kayak posted its Q3 earnings on the same day that it was acquired by Priceline, with net income rising to $8 million, up from 14 percent from $7 million in Q3 2011. As we wrote in July after the company’s IPO, a big part of Kayak’s resurgence has been its focus on mobile. In its Q3 report, Kayak showed that its mobile revenue per thousand queries (RPM) had increased 63 percent compared to the same quarter in 2011.

So having seen 56 million mobile queries during the quarter, Kayak saw approximately $3.5 million in mobile revenue, which may not seem like a lot but is a large share of the company’s overall revenues.

On November 15th, Kayak announced that it had reached one billion queries in the first ten months of this year. This was significant for the company, because it first reached the billion-queries milestone in 2008 — after four years. It then took the company another three years to compile two billion more. In 2012, it took 10 months. As you can see, the time is telescoping significantly.

Additionally, as part of reaching this milestone, Kayak said that, as of October, its mobile apps had been downloaded over 20 million times. In Q3, Kayak saw 302 million queries across its web and mobile properties, a 31 percent increase from 231 million in Q3 2011 and saw a 95 percent increase over the year prior in its mobile downloads to 3.1 million.

This starts to paint a picture of why Priceline was so eager to snatch up Kayak, believing that catching Kayak in the early stages of what could be huge (and perhaps threatening) growth would save it some pain in the years to come. But this is really just part of it.

What really seems to be attractive to Priceline is the growth of Kayak’s direct booking option. The company first launched it as a white label service in May 2011 to improve its user experience, working with Travelocity and then Air Canada. Later this summer, it expanded that to include Expedia, Getaroom, Hertz/Advantage and Avis/Budget, etc.

In doing so, Kayak started to show the initial signs of moving beyond being a metasearch site, one that lives based on lead-generation and pushing users off-site to book their hotels, tickets and so on at the third-party sites it aggregates. With its direct bookings, users could stay on Kayak.com rather than being transferred to third-party sites, entering their credit card and personal info and finishing the transaction that way.

As many eCommerce companies know, this can be a huge boon for Kayak thanks to the improved booking experience. If users don’t have to leave the site, there’s a much stronger likelihood that they’ll actually complete the transaction. The more friction there is between intent and purchase, the better. And third-party sites get to reap the benefits as well.

And the best part for Kayak is that the bookings actually get processed through the reservation systems of their third-party players, so that Kayak doesn’t have to worry about that being on their servers. Nor do they have to deal with customer service or fulfillment.

On acquisition day, Kayak’s Book Path business represented 11 percent of its overall revenue (for Q3), up from 5 percent the year prior. Although Kayak would deflect such accusations, the company has really started to look more and more like an Online Travel Agency (OTA) than ever before, with hotels representing an increasing share of those bookings — the reason why Priceline had been intently paying attention to its progress.

Priceline represents a huge repository of hotels, working with more than 245K properties. Bringing Kayak under its wing allows it potentially to gain much wider distribution, while in turn helping Kayak speed up its push into hotels and international markets. Kayak already partners with Expedia, Travelocity, Getaroom and others, driving bookings for these affiliates, but Priceline arguably has the deepest hotel supply line to offer Kayak, so it makes sense, especially as it seems that the company has been looking to make a strategic shift to hotels.

On its conference call after its acquisition, Priceline and Kayak wouldn’t say too much about the deal other than the fact that it would help Kayak’s hotel business (and international expansion), along with improving Kayak’s marketing efficiencies. While citing marketing efficiencies initially strikes one as being a boring result or perhaps just a throwaway line as part of the deflective stance executives take on conference calls of that sort, it does mean something for Kayak.

The company spent 54 percent of its revenue on sales and marketing in the first half of 2012, with half of that going to offline branding and half spent online. Teaming up with Priceline means a better hotel supply for Kayak and getting access to the marketing machine that is William Shatner, i.e. the Priceline Negotiator. Said another way, Priceline has become pretty good at driving search traffic and its branding and marketing (especially in old media) are far more mature.

The other consideration, of course, is what becoming part of the Priceline brand means for Kayak’s partnership with Expedia and Priceline’s partnership with TripAdvisor. Expedia brands made up about 24 percent of Kayak’s revenue in the first half of 2012. If Kayak becomes stronger as a result of the acquisition, it might be smart business for Expedia to continue on course, but it also wouldn’t be surprising to see it looking to avoid sending cash to its biggest competitor. This choice may also be taken out of the equation if Priceline becomes more of a headliner in Kayak’s Booking Path, which would force Expedia to reduce its distribution.

On the other side, it would make sense for Priceline to move its spending from TripAdvisor to Kayak, in which case Expedia and TripAdvisor might be snuggling up.

In fact, some shuffling of the deck wouldn’t be all that surprising when you consider that the founding team at Kayak hailed from the bigs in the industry before they came together to launch Kayak. The company was founded in 2004 by veterans including Steve Hafner (CEO) a co-founder of Orbitz, Paul English (CTO) a former VP of technology at Intuit, Terrell Jones (Chairman), founder of Travelocity, and Greg Slyngstad (Director), founder of Expedia.

After the acquisition, the founders will be making out pretty well, as one can see from the company’s final S-1 filing. Paul English, as a result of his 7.8 percent stake, could make up to $122 million and co-founder Steve Hafner stands to see $94 million based on a 6 percent share of ownership.

And to that point, it’s worth taking a look at who really wins big from Kayak’s sale: Its investors. All told, investors had put in about $229 million in Kayak since its founding in 2004. Starting with General Catalyst, which helped incubate Kayak in the beginning, which had about 10.4 million shares after IPO, after which the firm bought up another 300K shares. So, as Bizjournals first noted, this means that General Catalyst holds a 26.7 percent stake in Kayak, which is valued at about $417 million — that’s close to the firm’s entire sixth fund at $500 million.

Furthermore, Sequoia owns roughly 16 percent of Kayak, which is worth some $251 million, Accel owns 12 percent at $195 million and Oak Investment Partners owns 10.5 percent, at $166 million.

Not bad for a few days work.

Induction charging seems ready for its time in the spotlight, with the Nexus 4, Droid DNA and Lumia 920 all shipping with wireless charging based on the Qi standard built-in. Now a concept design that offers solar-powered wireless charging cleverly hidden inside a futuristic looking bonsai tree hopes to become a reality with the help of Kickstarter.

The electree+ began life as a concept by French designer Vivien Muller, which he originally unveiled in 2008. Then, three years later, Muller tried to bring the device to market, kicking off pre-orders for the device beginning at $370. She was aiming for 400 pre-sales, but the device eventually shipped to just a small group of 200 pre-order customers.

Now, the electree+ has been redesigned to maximize its solar efficiency, and to be manufactured in the USA at much larger volume, and for less money. The redesigned electree+ boasts a 14,000mAh internal battery, which when fully charged can fill an iPhone 5 up to and over nine times. It features 27 solar panels at the tips of branches, which are adjustable to capture maximum light. It requires 36 hours in sunlight to build up a full charge, but it also only needs around 4 hours to build up enough juice to fully recharge your standard smartphone.

Other features, like an optional built-in- NFC chip, mean that it can trigger an action when a smartphone is placed on its surface, in order to put it into dock mood or manage smart home connected devices, like light fixtures and curtains. It also has changeable faceplates, if you’re feeling bored by a particular color. Plus, the electree+ is environmentally friendly, since it’s just sipping sunlight to deliver charges to your devices.

The electree+ has two USB ports, including one designed for devices with lower power requirements like smartphones, and one for tablets which feature faster charging powers. As mentioned, because it uses Qi, it’ll work out of the box with the Nexus 4 and other smartphones with Qi inductive charging coils built-in, but it should also work with iPhones so long as they have a wireless charging case.

Pre-orders begin at $199, depending on what kind of options you want, and the team behind the redesigned electree+ wants to hit at least 1,000 pre-sales, or a total funding amount of $200,000 in order to go to production. It’s an ambitious project, but unlike with a lot of products on Kickstarter, this is one that’s actually been made and shipped, so hopefully the team stands a better chance than most of hitting their May 2013 target ship date.

It’s Thanksgiving for us here in the U.S. of Gorging On Turkey and we wanted to give thanks for you, our dear audience. It’s your constant readership and semi-trollish comments that keep us waking up in the morning and keep us from going to sleep at night. To thank you, we want to give you a $100 and a $50 ThinkGeek gift card to two lucky winners.

What will you buy with your winnings? Star Trek underwear? A Dr. Who T-shirt? Something that will amuse your co-workers for a few minutes and then collect dust on your cubicle shelf? The choice, as they say, is yours.

To win, please comment below describing the dark carnival of familial pain you’re currently attending with or without your loved ones this holiday. Non-US readers please describe how much fun you’re having in your own milieu, whether you’re going to work tomorrow or hoisting a tankard of your local ale in the warm companionship of your local meadery.

We’ll close the contest on Saturday and pick two winners then. Thanks to ThinkGeek for the cards and happy Thanksgiving!