Category: Tech news

It took a bit, but the first Lightning-enabled accessories are finally hitting the market. JBL just announced a pair of speaker docks that works exclusively with the Dock Connector’s replacement. The iPhone 4S need not apply. These docks work only with the iPhone 5, new iPods and the new new iPad.

The JBL Venue LT ($200) is a familiar unit. It’s essentially a Lightning-ified version of JBL’s Venue speaker dock. With the Lightning connector placed on a retractable tray, anything from the 4th gen iPad to the new iPod nano can pump out the tunes. Or, simply push the tray back into the unit, and stream audio over Bluetooth.

The JBL Micro ($100) is a small, desk-style speaker with a built-in battery and USB port for charging other devices. It lacks the wireless chops of the Venue LT, and due to its recessed dock, it does not work with an iPad.

Engadget tested both options and found the Venue LT to be a solid choice while the Micro a bit underwhelming. They also note that neither dock works with an iPhone wrapped in a case — a likely common trait to Lightning docks since the tiny connector offers little support.

Both models are available now from JBL.com and select retailers.

Accessory makers have so far been slow to release accessories that use the Lightning connector. Apple is reportedly a lot more guarded with the new connector over the outgoing Dock Connector. The holiday spending spree is just kicking off and there are little options available — good news for JBL and others like Scosche which managed to get some products on the market.

You’ve heard this story before: Person sets out to find an apartment or buy their first home. Person struggles to navigate the noise of Craigslist, manage applications, impressions, notes, scheduling open house times, and find quality, searchable recommendations on apartments, houses, landlords and real estate agents. Person becomes frustrated and either moves to Canada, blogs about it, or begins developing a solution.

HomeLight, a San Francisco-based startup which launched on Thursday, was born out of those very same frustrations. Co-founder Drew Uher chose the latter route after he and his wife set out to buy their first home. The couple found the process of finding the right real estate agent to be painful, specifically that there was no easy (or refined) online resource for researching agents by credentials, location, experience or transaction history.

So, Uher and team created HomeLight, which aims to provide a solution by becoming a sort of Match.com for homebuyers and real estate agents. Using its proprietary algorithms, the platform creates personalized recommendations for both buyers and sellers by analyzing transactional data and licensing records of more than two million real estate agents.

On the front end, HomeLight offers a simple real estate agent search engine which users can filter based on city, specific ‘hoods, property type, price range and areas of expertise. Once they’ve personalized their search criteria, the platform serves a list of agents based on their actual skill and experience in hopes of removing the guesswork from finding and discovering the best fit.

At launch, the startup is already live in 34 U.S. markets, including San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington D.C. and Boston, to name a few. Based on its promising early reach and growing dataset on agents, the startup announced that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Innovation Endeavors and a number of private angel investors.

With its new funding in tow, the company will look to continue its expansion into new U.S. markets and ramp up its investments in hiring and marketing in the hopes of driving consumer adoption. The startup needs this kind of early capital to accelerate expansion, as it’s far from being the only tech company out there focusing on the real estate market.

There are umpteen startups and companies already at work tackling various parts of the chain, from managing and finding rentals to improving listings and search and discovery for apartments, homes, brokers and agents. Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, RentLingo, Zumper, Nestio, Padmapper are just a few of the names that come to mind.

The first three companies in particular are veterans (and two of them are public) and, even if they don’t already offer similar solutions, better agent search is a natural extension of their extant models. Redfin, for one, is definitely already thinking about this problem.

However, if HomeLight can really nail homebuyer/seller and seller matching (and hit scale) it could potentially become attractive acquisition bait. Real estate is an enormous (if not depressed) industry and the startup may be helping its cause by bringing some transparency to transactional data, while giving agents a way to showcase their expertise and providing buyers and sellers with objective recommendations.

In the big picture, HomeLight thinks that this kind of matching platform has the potential to be far more valuable than, say, a social approach to recommendations (the likelihood is that friends have a limited data set and experience) or good old-fashioned search. While search engines may serve results from local firms, users are likely to run into the same problem — a limited data set that likely doesn’t inform you whether an agent focuses on first-time buyers or short-sales, how much experience they have, etc.

Going forward, one of the keys for HomeLight will be how it manages relationships with its agents. While some may be eager to share their expertise with buyers and sellers in kind of a LinkedIn-style professional profile, the more stats it provides on their selling history and efficacy, the more potential there is to run into privacy concerns. Obviously, compliance with data licensing regulations and guidelines is not only important but data sharing can be tricky, especially as the industry is still in the process of adjusting to digital services and user experiences.

Scale is, as always, the other critical factor. While there’s a huge need for more transparency in the transactional process as well as on data on brokers and agents, from an end user perspective, this value only goes so far if, say, you happen to search for agents in Kentucky and only find one option. It’s nice that HomeLight potentially can tell you way more about that person than the next service, but if it’s not the right fit and there are no other options, the value diminishes. Positioning itself in smaller markets will be key.

Either way, there’s no doubt that buying or selling a home is one of the most important financial transactions one can make, so any service that can improve visibility into data and experience and help one and all find the right agent stands to make a valuable contribution to the industry.

For more, find HomeLight here.

Go Daddy has for a while been building out its domain registering and hosting business into business services to create new revenue streams to compete against the likes of Google and Amazon in serving the small/medium business sector, and today that strategy took a mobile turn, with the launch of a new mobile component to its Website Builder service. Go Daddy customers can now optimize websites for the mobile web, or create new ones altogether, and they can also now add in mobile commerce services as part of that process.

Jason Rosenthal, the operating executive at investor Silver Lake Partners who now also serves as Go Daddy’s president of products and technology, tells TechCrunch that the new product is part of a longer-term strategy to work a lot more mobile services into Go Daddy’s business.

“The way we think about it is, where is the market today and where is it going?” he asks. “We’re hearing loud and clear that mobile is becoming a huge channel for our small and medium business customers, so we want to be there.” This could also lead the company into some acquisitions in the future: Go Daddy earlier this year acquired Outright, a cloud-based financial management company, and at the time the company noted that it was looking to build out its services business with more strategic acquisitions.

For now, adding in the mobile component to its Website Builder is also a sign of how strong mobile has already become for Go Daddy and the businesses that it hosts.

Rosenthal says that traffic from mobile devices to those sites is up by more than 350% in the last two years. For GoDaddy.com itself, which gets 30 million visitors per month, he says that about 11% of its traffic comes from mobile devices, and he adds that this is a typical traffic proportion for the millions of other sites hosted by Go Daddy. That traffic is also an answer for why Go Daddy has chosen to tackle the mobile web first before apps, even though research seems to show that apps are generally getting more traffic these days.

The other big opportunity, however, is that only some 93% of websites at the moment do not have sites that are optimized for mobile devices — meaning that when people visit them they don’t get the best experience on their handsets or tablets, with buttons possibly too small, or navigation impossible across the small screen. An example of what that might mean in practice and the tools that Go Daddy is offering as part of its basic service to improve the experience:

Most of the small businesses that look to Go Daddy for registrar, hosting and other services are not necessarily going to be tech-minded, or interested in learning to code, so Go Daddy is trying to make the process as simple as possible particularly at the lower tier of service. “What we’ve found for our small business customers is that what’s most effective is for us to make things simple and easy for them,” says Rosenthal. “If you’re a landscaping business, you are thinking, how can I provide the best landscaping, not the best website.”

Go Daddy is not building its mobile web optimization service from scratch. Rosenthal says it is partnering with DudaMobile to provide the optimization. It’s a service that DudaMobile is also providing to Google for its GoMo initiative to get more businesses mobilized, and that also points to where the opportunity and competition lies for these large cloud-based companies.

On the other hand, the mobile shopping component is something that Go Daddy itself has built as an extension of the Quick Shopping Cart service that it already offers to its customers. This is still a relatively small business for the company. Although Go Daddy hosts millions of websites and is registrar to many more, it only has about 56,000 accounts on its Quick Shopping Cart books at the moment — although even that small number are already generating $1 billion in transactions annually.

Pricing. Go Daddy is going easy on the pricing for these mobile services at the moment, and they are largely being marketed, it seems, as a way of driving more business to their Website Builder tool as a whole. The Website builder is priced at three tiers of $5.69, $8.54 and $12.74, and the basic mobile builder, for site optimization, is free with all of them. The premium service, where site owners can build more customized sites for users and track email, calendar, online storage and account management, comes free with only the two higher tiers.

Similarly, the Mobile Shopping Cart is priced at tiers of $9.99, $29.99 and $49.99 and a basic mobile commerce service comes free with all of those, but a more customized product (for example to charge at different prices for different items or provide more accounting back-end services) is only free at the two higher tiers.

I asked Rosenthal if Go Daddy’s move into more services like these are a sign of how the company may be seeing a slowdown in its core business of domain registration and hosting — a business which took a massive PR hit in September when the company experienced a mass outage, taking out thousands of sites and raising questions around security and hacking (allegations that were later denied by Go Daddy). Quite the contrary, he answered. That business has never been busier.

The fact of the matter is, though, is that as the world of tech continues to mature, people come to expect more out of their experience, and with companies like Google and Amazon also offering it to them, Go Daddy, which already has a relationship with the sites, is stepping up to make sure that others don’t eat its lunch.

Tradeshift, the free invoicing platform which seems to be making quite a bit of headway lately, has landed a very large client. Normally we wouldn’t note such events, but this one is big. Vestas Wind Systems is the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines and generates enough electricity to provide for over 21m people in 70 countries and on six continents. It has 20,000 employees, 10,000 suppliers across the world and handles 300,000 exchanged invoices a year. As you can imagine, electronic invoicing would make sense.

We’re told the thing that swung it for them was Tradeshift’s new feature called CloudScan. This means that any invoice emailed to Vestas is automatically converted via OCR and bounced back to the supplier to validate it. That means that the process is 100% electronic and happens in a few seconds.

Tradeshift’s model, where it’s free to get suppliers onto the platform, also helped. Often electronic invoicing system require suppliers to pay to start using the service.

Competitors to Tradeshift include Ariba, OB10, Coupa and Maventa.

Another bit of news to add to the ‘tech is now mainstream‘ pile: U.K. carrier Vodafone has launched a mobile tariff aimed at perpetual early adopters — which enables gadget lovers to own the latest high end smartphone without actually owning it at all. That’s right: you’re renting network access and the actual hardware with this plan. The only commitment on the hardware side it to 12 months of handset rental before you switch to a younger, shinier model.

And this year’s most desirable smartphones according to Vodafone are: the Apple iPhone 5, the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the Galaxy Note II.

Announcing the new tariff, which is called Red Hot, Vodafone underlines the problem posed by early adopters for carriers: they are both excellent customers, because they spend a lot, but also problematic customers because they are the ones most likely to complain loudly and bitterly about carrier lock-ins preventing them from getting their hands on the next big thing.

Here’s how Vodafone explains its thinking

Red Hot is our way of acknowledging that everyone’s mobile needs have evolved. “For some people, being up to date with the latest new tech is a big part of who they are,” says Vodafone’s Mark Howe, “and that’s certainly the case where new smartphones are concerned. But the tech comes with quite a large price tag attached to it and many people take 24-month price plans to spread their expenditure out.”

“On the flip side, the speed of development in the smartphone space – let’s not forget it’s only three and a half years since Vodafone launched the HTC Magic, our first Android device – is such that some people feel their phone is effectively old tech with a large chunk of their contract still remaining.”

Of course there are some catches with this plan — aren’t there always? Specifically Red Hot is pretty expensive: the monthly toll costs between £47 ($74) and £69 ($109), depending on handset. And despite all the fanfare about not committing to buy handset hardware there are some upfront fees to pay for certain handsets — of up to £50 ($79) (for a 64GB iPhone 5). Other handsets are indeed unfront-fee-less though.

Commenting on the Red Hot prices, CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood noted in a tweet:”Vodafone Red Hot looks pricey to me. From £47 to £69 /month. Big price to have latest smartphone. Some will pay though!”

Data on these plans is also capped at 2GB (with some extra Wi-Fi data caps). And oddly enough the Red Hot tariff is only available in Vodafone stores — because early adopter types are obviously happiest trudging around the high street, rather than buying online (not). Presumably Vodafone wants these big spenders in store where it can upsell other gizmos and services.

Here’s the full breakdown of this year’s tariffs

Urban Remedy, the latest startup incubated by LA accelerator Science, launching today as an e-commerce destination for healthy juices, gluten-free snacks, meal replacements and more.

Urban Remedy is the brainchild of Chinese nutritionist and acupuncturist Neka Pasquale, who founded the company after years of studying the medicinal qualities of foods and creating cleanses for herself as well as friends and clients. The sites juices and snacks want to be the elixer for anyone who is lacking weekly nutrition, or feeling tired, ill, run-down, stressed, lethargic, overweight or overloaded with rich foods and alcohol.

Each 16oz juice serving is packed with hand-pressed, raw, and organic fruits and veggies. Snacks are gluten/grain/white sugar/dairy free. Users can visit the website purchase juices, meals, and snacks, which are all delivered nationwide. Users can also see which items best suit their daily health needs.

BlueGlass Interactive, an online marketing agency headquartered in Tampa, Florida, is expanding its global footprint yet again with the acquisition of the London, U.K.-based firm Quaturo in an all-equity deal. The company did not reveal additional acquisition terms, but it did say that all Quaturo employees will stay on to join BlueGlass as a part of deal, including Managing Director Kevin Gibbons.

This is the third acquisition for BlueGlass, which previously snapped up search marketing company 3 Dog Media in 2010, and digital agency Voltier this January. BlueGlass CEO Richard Zwicky characterizes the deal as “larger than the Voltier deal” because bootstrapped Quaturo is a “revenue-positive, cash flow-positive entity that has much higher revenue per head than Voltier did.”

Following the acquisition, the Quaturo offices will be rebranded BlueGlass, and the team in London will be staffed up over the next 12 months, quadrupling the current five-person team.

Zwicky explains that BlueGlass customers have been asking the company to take on more and more global business over the years, and BlueGlass has quickly been ramping up through both acquisitions and hiring to oblige them. The company, whose more than 100 customers include big-name brands like Disney, Home Shopping Network, Allstate, eBay, Macy’s, the NFL, Masco, Thomson Reuters, Condé Nast, and others, was just an office in Tampa and a smaller one in L.A. a year ago. Today, it has a large office in L.A., one in New York, one in Australia, one in South America, and, as of Thursday evening, one in London.

For BlueGlass, the appeal of Quaturo was mainly for its local expertise developed over the past eight years, which will help the company address the growing demand in the U.K. “Only 38 percent of U.K. companies have any sort of content marketing strategy, let alone any other form of strategy,” Zwicky says. “And two-thirds have no budget for anything content-related….it’s a huge opportunity,” he adds. “The local market isn’t able to support when [brands] want to roll out a comprehensive strategy, because the few companies that can fulfill the U.K. are going to be overwhelmed by the demand.”

Zwicky also notes that over the summer WPP acquired AKQA for $550 million, and now the big five holding companies (WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic, and Hava) own most of the largest firms. “We’re filling the gap between what the big holding companies are offering,” says Zwicky, “and the capacity of the traditional digital marketing agency…that has a limited scale and potential for growing with customers.”

With Quaturo’s team joining BlueGlass, the company now has a presence in the region, but also the savvy, technology and expertise of BlueGlass, too. The company has historically set itself apart from competitors in the space by not relying on third parties for its data, but rather on building out its own proprietary tool set for accessing data, analysis and reporting.

First, Magisto launched a cloud-based video-editing platform for the web, which allowed users to upload their content and have it automatically stitched together into wonderful, watchable videos. Then it brought that capability to iOS and Android devices, which helped users make viewable content out of usually crappy mobile videos.

But to use the Magisto platform, you had to download the Magisto app or go to the Magisto site. At least, until now.

Magisto is opening up its API, which will allow third-party developers to be able to take advantage of its cloud-based video editing service in their own applications. By connecting to Magisto, these apps can introduce a way for end users to create mashups of user-generated content or content that they own or have licensed, without building out their own video-editing services.

Interested developers will need to contact Magisto to get set up with an API key. Once they have it, they will also get 50 free editing sessions to play with the service. After that, they’ll pay $1 for each standard-quality video and $2 for each HD video made with the app. If you’re a huge developer, it’ll also work on some bulk packages. Anyway, if the plan works, that’s a tidy new revenue stream for Magisto.

The company has already struck a deal with European digitization firm Forever, which allows users to send in old VHS, 8MM, and slides to be made digital. Now Forever customers will be able to automatically edit those videos using Magisto’s tools, making them more watchable (and shareable). I could see a company like US-based digitization firm YesVideo doing something similar, especially now that it’s betting big on the cloud.

Magisto was founded in 2011 and raised a $5.5 million funding round led by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s private investment arm, Horizons Ventures, last September. Previous investor Magma Venture Partners also participated in the round.

Flatshare finder, SmoovUp, has expanded beyond its native France to launch the service in 6 new countries: UK, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxemburg, and Australia — and says that the U.S. and Canada should follow soon.

Self-funded, and two years in operation, SmoovUp differentiates itself from other room-for-rent or flatshare marketplaces by putting an emphasis on matching people to each other rather than simply matching people to accommodation.

One way to think of the service is more like an online dating site. Upon sign-up, users take a quiz – the “SmoovTest” – that lists all of the points of agreement which SmoovUp has determined are required for a successful flatshare. This then forms the basis for each user’s profile, which is supposed to reflect their own “lifestyle and values”. Then, just like a dating site, SmoovUp calculates a matching score in relation to other members to help find the perfect match.

In addition, SmoovUp is targeting landlords and real-estate agencies who can post ads on the site for free so that flatmates — after successfully being matched — can easily find a place to rent.

In fact, almost all of the functionality of SmoovUp is free for both flatmate seekers and landlords, with the company offering premium memberships for users who want greater visibility for their ad. Premium memberships range from £7 for a 7 day highlight to £18 for a month.

Click A Taxi, one of the many apps in the increasingly congested car-service apps market, is today announcing a couple of key developments that it hopes will help it zoom past the competition in the months ahead. It’s picked up $1.5 million round of angel funding from serial entrepreneur Tommy Ahlers; and it is expanding to Spain, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, taking the total number of markets it’s covering to nine, including also the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, and its home market of Denmark. In all, it now covers some 230 million people.

While companies like Uber have used their technology to bring users high-end vehicles; Hailo and GetTaxi focus on ordering cars from established Black and Yellow firms; and Lyft, SideCar and Carpoooling are more focused on ride sharing, Click A Taxi is taking a different approach. It has developed a platform to to work as an aggregator for everyone else, adding in options like mini cab firms (popular in Europe) and other smaller fleets into the mix.

The service is pretty simple at the front end: users have their location identified by the app (iPhone, Android or Windows Phone), or they can choose another location, and then note whether they want the cab now or for a specific time. They select “go” and the car options get presented to them.

It’s at the back end that things gets interesting. Click A Taxi integrates with the car-ordering software that the firms use to manage their own fleets, but it also offers them its own fleet management software. Køster says that so far the cab companies it has approached have been very receptive to the idea: “Local taxi companies are hungry to go to cloud-based scalable software solutions and we provide everything from lifting their call center work to the upcoming launch of of a brand new SaaS dispatch system,” he says.

Click A Taxi takes a fixed pay-as-you-go fee of less than £ 0.50 for sending bookings to the preferred partners it works with. (Those fees may sound low but as an aggregator, it’s model is built on scale.)

And just as it’s not tied to any one car service, Click A Taxi is not tied to its own app: Today it’s offering its service directly to consumers, but eventually it hopes to release an API so that the cab ordering option can be embedded elsewhere. Nikolaj Køster, co-founder, tells me that early discussions have involved airline firms, who could put the services into their apps or on their own website. And Søren Halskov Nissen, the other co-founder and Click A Taxi’s CEO, has shown me a test it’s running with another large third party that is increasingly getting involved in local recommendation and commerce services and is considering adding car services into the mix.

The company is still in its early days but so far has been showing some promise. Køster says that Click A Taxi enables a booking “every minute” somewhere in Northern Europe, where it has been in operation for the last 12 months. It is not yet giving out any user numbers or revenue figures.

And while the founders have been putting some of their own money into the project, they have also attracted some interesting angel investors: their newest, Ahlers, earlier this year sold Podio to Citrix for $50 million+ and prior to that sold ZYB to Vodafone for $50 million. And existing backer Claus Moseholm co-founded goviral in 2003 and sold it to AOL (TC’s owner) in 2011 for $96.7 million.

The attraction is in that category of “innovation at the edges of the forest”, technology disrupting spaces that might not be perceived as “technological”, which Yammer’s David Sacks has described. “My experience from building ZYB and Podio taught me just how important it is to have a great idea, for a big market with a team that can do it – fast,” says Ahlers. “Click A Taxi ticks these boxes and is a great example of applying clever digital solutions to an old industry.”

Image: Flickr

TechCrunch’s Kim Mai Cutler and I are in the Land of the Rising Sun this week, completing a series of startup interviews and talks, and guest moderating TechCrunch Disrupt Tokyo 2012.

Earlier today, amidst the breaking news that the California Public Utilities Commission had issued a series of citations and fines to a gaggle of transportation apps including Uber, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick also took the stage here to make the case for the black car and taxi dispatch app’s Asian ambitions.

Spending the last part of his talk trying to recruit a team of twenty “very smart [Tokyo-based] people” for Uber Tokyo, Kalanick revealed that the city was likely in the crosshairs for Uber’s first Asian launch. The launch could take place in as little as three weeks if timing was right, he said onstage.

When asked directly whether or not Tokyo was absolutely the company’s first choice for an Asian launch, he said “possibly,” explaining that Uber’s Asian launch strategy was contingent on getting the right people involved. He also mentioned that the startup, which has raised a total of $49.5 million in funding thus far, had someone on the ground in Hong Kong, but Japan was the first city he personally had visited.

If the company does choose to launch in Tokyo first, it faces, just like it’s faced everywhere else, challenges from all sides. The city of Tokyo is glutted with taxis since Japan’s economic downturn eliminated many other forms of gainful employment, around 58k licensed cabs at last count. It’s unclear whether the startup, which doesn’t own any black cars itself, would require a license of transportation from either the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism or the Tokyo Metropolitan Transportation department to operate here.

It’s also unclear whether Hong Kong, which already boasts a few taxi apps, would be a better market for Uber than Tokyo with regards to regulation and demand. Despite the influx of cabs in Tokyo, it’s still an incredibly laborious trek to the Narita International Airport, which is about a two-hour bus or train ride away from Tokyo’s city center. A taxi to Narita costs a prohibitive $300 and might even be slower than a bus, because taxis have to clear a series of tolls to leave Tokyo proper.

What is clear is that, despite increasing setbacks and criticism, Kalanick remains singularly focused on expanding the Uber platform and is full speed ahead as far international plans are concerned. The CEO, who ended up taking a bus to and from the airport during his stay in Nihon, was rumored to be headed to Australia next.

Chipmaker Texas Instruments has announced it’s cutting 1,700 jobs as part of a business restructuring move. The company says it’s shifting its historical focus away from mobile chips because it’s become too resource and investment intensive to play in this space, blaming large customers “increasingly” developing their own custom chips. Apple and Samsung both develop their own mobile processors for products such as the iPhone and iPad, and the Galaxy SIII smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet.

Reuters reports that TI is expected to continue selling existing tablet and phone processors for products already using its chips, such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, for as long as demand remains but that it will stop developing new chips. Last month there were rumours Amazon was in advanced talks to buy TI’s mobile chip business – however today’s restructuring indicates any talks that took place failed to come to an agreement.

TI’s move away from mobile chips is not a surprise as the chipmaker has previously said it plans to focus its OMAP processors and wireless chips on a “broader set of embedded applications with long life cycles” and “greater potential for sustainable growth” — applications such as cars and home appliances, according to Reuters. TI also previously provided the following statement to TechCrunch flagging up areas where it believes its processors are “a perfect fit”

o   OMAP: automotive (rich visual displays for infotainment systems and rear-seat displays), industrial (fluid, responsive touchscreens for human-machine interfaces and home automation), enterprise communications (high-definition video experiences for video IP phones and video conferencing) and robotics (cutting-edge vision analytics technology for intelligent home and industrial robots).

o   Connectivity: in-building (connected smart meters, intelligent appliances that automatically place a service call, electronic shelf labels at retail where pricing can be updated instantly across all stores), portable (smart bandages that sense body temperature, blood glucose meter, health and fitness monitor), automotive (tire pressure sensors, wireless rear view cameras, wireless seat adjustment systems to eliminate cost and weight)

As a result of the job cuts, which Reuters notes is around five percent of TI’s global workforce, the company said it expects to make annualized savings of around $450 million by the end of 2013. It will take a hit of around $325 million in total charges — most of which will be accounted for in the current quarter, it said.

“We have a great opportunity to reshape our OMAP processor and wireless connectivity product lines to concentrate on embedded markets. Momentum is already building with new embedded applications and a broad set of customers, and we are accelerating our efforts in these areas,” said Greg Delagi, senior vice president of Embedded Processing, in a statement. “These job reductions are something we do with a heavy heart because they impact people we care deeply about. We will work closely with all employees affected by these changes to provide a range of assistance related to compensation, benefits and job search.”

According to recent Strategy Analytics report, TI was fourth in the smartphone market chipmaker rankings — trailing far behind market leader Qualcomm, which grabbed a whopping 48 percent revenue share in the first half of the year. Intel has also entered the mobile market recently, albeit taking only a fractional portion so far with only around half a dozen smartphones launching with its Atom x86 Medfield chips inside this year. Intel is lining up the next generation of its mobile chipset — which will include LTE support — and appears committed to its second crack at the smarphone market, so the arrival of additional competition into an already difficult market may also have contributed to TI’s decision to focus elsewhere.

TI’s release follows below

First Gagnam Style. Now Webtoons. Both are Korean phenomenons, and now both are available for U.S. audiences. The latter comes thanks to a new platform called Tapastic, which aims to help artists share and find an audience for their bite-sized web comics.

According to Tapastic founder Chang Kim, Webtoons are a particularly Korean obsession. The cartoons, which are created and distributed by famous artists and amateurs alike through online platforms like Naver Webtoons in Korea, are viewed by about one-third of the total Internet audience there, he told me.

Most of the famous comic brands here are of the superhero genre, while Korean webtoons typically focus on more mundane subjects like dating, or pets, or travel. A fan of the art form himself, Kim hoped to introduce U.S. audiences to webtoons. There was just one problem: There was no really good aggregators or distribution platforms for the particular type of comic in the U.S. market. So he built Tapastic.

On the consumer side, Tapastic is similar to existing webtoons aggregators in the Korean market — it provides a list of serially updated comics in a variety of genres. The startup has lined up between 50 and 60 different English-language webtoons that span from comedy to drama to horror, among other things. The comics are updated weekly and fall under a set schedule, so that readers always know when to expect them. That said, Tapastic has built a notification system which will allow users to mark their favorite webtoons and get updated whenever a new one is available.

But the real magic might be what Tapastic has built for the artists and writers themselves. Today, most U.S.-based Webtoons artists have cobbled together their content through platforms that weren’t meant for distribution of their art. Some posted on Tumblr, while others used text-based content management systems to upload their art to the web. The Tapastic platform offers those artists a purpose-built distribution engine for webtoons. And since it aggregates content from multiple artists, Tapastic provides an opportunity for artists to find new audiences that might not have stumbled across their work on other platforms.

Tapastic is available on the web at Tapastic.com, as well as through an app available for Android devices. An iOS app is also in the works and coming soon, Kim told me. Tapastic has raised $750,000 from investors that include SK Planet, 500 Startups, Strong Ventures, and other angels. The company has 12 employees and is based in San Jose, Calif.

A deterioration in the global economic outlook this year is leading to scant overall growth in enterprise IT spending, according to Gartner. However the analyst says its third quarter outlook points to “more substantial growth” next year — assuming what it calls “significant fiscal crises” are avoided in the U.S. and Europe. Its view is that enterprises have cut IT spending so much they have little room to reduce it further. It’s forecasting a 2.5 percent increase on projected 2012 spending of $2.603 trillion next year — taking enterprise IT spending to a total of $2.679 trillion in 2013.

“The global economic outlook has deteriorated in 2012, leading to scant overall growth in enterprise IT spending,” said Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner in a statement. “However, our third-quarter outlook points to more substantial growth in 2013, if significant fiscal crises are avoided in the US and Europe, and in subsequent years. Most organisations have already significantly cut discretionary IT spending growth over the past several years and, barring a global economic catastrophe and significant contraction of operations, they have little room to reduce IT spending further over the long run.”

Gartner expects the largest proportion of enterprise IT spending to fall in the banking, communications, media and services (CMS), and manufacturing sectors through 2016.

In 2013, manufacturing and natural resources will lead the vertical markets with total spending expected to reach $478 billion, up 2.3 percent from 2012′s projected spend of $467 billion. Banking and securities is also expected to have strong growth — with Gartner forecasting a $460 billion spend in 2013, up 3.5 per cent from $445 billion in 2012.  The CMS sector is projected to grow 3 percent next year, to $426 billion, up from $414 billion in 2012.

On CMS Gartner noted several subsectors will need to continue to invest in IT, owing to bandwidth demands. “Several subsectors within CMS are heavily IT-intensive. Professional and IT services firms, communications service providers, software and internet services, and media companies invest considerably in IT across hardware, software, IT services, internal services and telecommunications,” noted Brant in a statement. “With demands for a secure Internet connected backbone and faster wireless data services, coupled with the pervasiveness of social media and video, these industries will need to continue to invest in IT.”

Gartner also expects short term high growth in the transportation and insurance sectors with both projected to achieve more than 4 percent growth in 2013. IT spending in the transportation sector is expected to total $126 billion in 2013, up from $121 billion in 2012, while IT spending in insurance is projected to reach $187 billion in 2013, up from $179 billion in 2012.

This year Gartner expects government IT spending to decline 2 percent — and projects that decline will continue through 2013, with spending forecast to total $445 billion, down from $447 billion in 2012. Despite that decline — attributed to austerity measures and budgetary reductions — the analyst also notes IT budgets are being “decoupled” from overall operating pressures on governments as IT is being seen as a way to drive efficiencies, reduce costs of service delivery and cut future costs.

“Government organisations recognise that new technology investments may help reduce the cost of service delivery, improve operational efficiency or reduce future expenditure. Consequently, government IT spending intensity is beginning to diverge from traditional operational spending trends,” Brant added in a statement.

 

Glitch, the online, multiplayer gaming world created by Tiny Speck, is closing down December 9 after failing to get enough user traction, and then failing to find a buyer for the product. Right now Tiny Speck’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, is working at finding new jobs for the 30 or so people who are getting laid off as a result, and winding down the project, including the forums and issuing refunds for players still in credit. But! Butterfield, who you may best know as one of the co-founders of that hugely popular, early-mover online photo storage/sharing service Flickr (sold to Yahoo for a song — $35 million — in 2005), is also cooking something else up.

To be clear: Tiny Speck is not closing, just Glitch. There will be more to say about that in the future, but: you will know it well. Well.

—
Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) November 15, 2012

It’s a cryptic note from a guy who is somewhat famous for his odd riddle-talk. (See: Butterfield’s Yahoo resignation letter to Brad Garlinghouse, in which he takes the role of a tin smith in the face of the Industrial Revolution, and never drops character through the whole letter.)

Going back to the tweet, could this be a hint that Butterfield and Tiny Speck are planning to delve back into the world of photo sharing? This is, after all, how we know Butterfield best — “well.” And given how central photos have become to the evolution of mobile and the web in the years since Flickr was founded, all of us, in a sense, “know it well.”

With services like Instagram selling to Facebook for hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s a testament to how popular and important imaging services are today. Also with the departure from Yahoo, you have to wonder if Butterfield felt that he had some more work to do in photos (that resignation letter seems to imply some kind of lost opportunity).

In the Glitch closure announcement, Butterfield also writes about how Tiny Speck is working on future products.

Whether or not the next venture is based around imaging services, it looks like it will have a social element: “We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products,” he writes.

As a side-note, TechCrunch had actually had an anonyous tip about Glitch being in trouble at the beginning of October — so maybe this news was not as abrupt as Business Insider seems to imply. Even as far back as August, we’d also been told — again, through our anonymous tip service – that Glitch people were spotted over at Google. When I asked Butterfield outright if this was a sign of a partnership or sale, his response was: “I can honestly tell you I know nothing about it, so I think your tipster was wrong in this case .” Make of that what you will.

These details may all turn out to be another glitch — no, not a game that fails, but just the hustling that you see time and again among entrepreneurs as they continue to scratch that itch that drives them time and again to make new projects — but when you are dealing with a tin smith who has had his Carnegie spells now and then, you never know.