Category: Tech news

Recovering from Hurricane Sandy is no small feat as most of Lower Manhattan is still in the dark without power. I talked with a couple of people working in startups who had to find a place to get back work. But the most difficult part was probably to set aside the devastation and get the businesses back on track. Those companies are fragile and can’t risk a companywide blackout for a week.

At WeWork‘s coworking space right next to the Empire State Building, I met Ryan Charles, CEO and co-founder of mobile product review startup Consmr. His company is located in West SoHo at WeWork Labs. Other coworking spaces offer a desk to work and #SandyCoworking can help you find a company to take you in.

On Monday, the office lost power. The company had to figure out a way to continue working.

“It was important for us to get back next to each other, being able to communicate more freely, even just for sharing stories,” Charles said. “Startup is a type of company in which relationships are important — you don’t have a lot of employees,” he continued.

The first challenge was actually communicating with the team, as half of them lost power. Fortunately, everyone was OK. “We even had a new hire this week who we couldn’t train,” he said. Then, they decided what to do on a day-by-day basis. First, everyone crashed at Charles’ apartment because he didn’t experience any power outages. Two other friends working in other startups even joined them and stayed there overnight. The week wasn’t as productive as a normal week.

“Business isn’t a priority. On the phone with one of our partners, Pepsi who was equally displaced, you don’t want to talk about business. The most important concern is that everyone is safe and doing well,” Charles said.

Opening his home was important for him. “Every day seems to be getting worse as you get a better picture of what happened. How do I get my business back on track when people are suffering, even only several blocks from me?” he said.

Then I met Ben Kempe, VP of engineering at Sonar, a Disrupt runner-up. On Friday, they visited their new office on Madison for the first time. But the building was affected by the power outage. After having only spent two hours in the office, they couldn’t start working there.

“Everyone is well on the team but some don’t have power,” Kempe said. Sonar had a similar story and encountered the same difficulties as Consmr. On Tuesday, they didn’t get significant work done. “Tuesday was basically impossible. We weren’t even able to contact each other,” he said.

On Thursday, they chose to relocate here at WeWork, with people living in Staten Island and Brooklyn on Google Hangouts.

“Hopefully, we’ll get to go back to our office on Madison on Monday,” Kempe said. Dislocated companies spent some time today talking about their respective experiences over the past few days.

Two blocks away from WeWork, power is still down. With no traffic light, cell coverage and stores open, New York has yet to recover from Sandy, and everyone is still thinking about people affected by the hurricane. But there is light not far away.

Digital marketing company Kenshoo has raised $12 million in new funding.

The round was led by late-stage investment firm Tenaya Capital, with participation from all past investors, including Sequoia Capital, Sequoia Growth Fund, and Arts Alliance. A Kenshoo spokesperson told me this brings the company’s total funding to $30 million, and that the company’s valuation has tripled since its last round in 2010.

The company has three main products — Kenshoo Enterprise (a tool for managing search advertising campaigns), Kenshoo Local (ditto), and Kenshoo Social. It says it’s managing more than $3 billion annually in search engine marketing, with more than 1.5 billion search marketing and 1 billion social marketing impressions delivered per day. Clients include Expedia, Facebook, Hitwise, Kayak, LendingTree, Omnicom Media Group, Sears, Starcom MediaVest Group, Tesco, Travelocity, Walgreens, and Zappos.

According to the funding press release, Kenshoo will use the new cash to fund continued growth, to expand in “key geographic markets,” and to create new products that address “the entire purchase funnel.” Kenshoo also sent me one of the best investor quotes that I’ve seen in a while, from Sequoia chairman Michael Moritz:

Any marketer who doesn’t use Kenshoo is burning hundred dollar bills. Kenshoo is the only internet company that provides advertisers with a neutral, unbiased way for shrewdly deploying budgets on the world’s largest search engines and social networks.

The new Google Nexus 4. This time, the hardware is made by LG. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Android has a new champion. The Nexus 4, built by LG in collaboration with Google, is the best overall Android handset currently available, and it’s one of the best phones to be released this year.

It’s a truly exemplary piece of hardware that showcases the best of what Google can offer in a smartphone when crufty user interface skins from hardware makers and bloatware from carriers are cut out of the equation.

It’s as close to perfect as I’ve seen any Android smartphone get. But the Nexus 4 falls just short of perfection due to one major omission: It’s not compatible with any LTE networks. The Nexus 4 will run on just about any other cellular network outside of LTE (GSM, UMTS, Edge, GPRS, 3G and HSPA+), which means you can take the handset with you all over the world, swapping SIM cards as needed. It also means Google can sell one device in multiple markets all over the world, since Europe, Asia and other continents are still largely without LTE service. This is likely a big reason why Google can charge so little for the Nexus 4 — $300 with 8GB and $350 with 16GB, unlocked and off-contract. For comparison’s sake, an unlocked iPhone 4S from Apple sells for about $650 to $850. An unlocked Samsung Galaxy S III runs $800.

The lack of LTE connectivity will spoil the Nexus 4 for some. But if you don’t mind living without LTE — and you likely currently are, given AT&T and Sprint’s small LTE footprint, and the fact T-Mobile has yet to begin building its LTE network — then the Nexus 4 is a good buy. And you’ll also be freed from taking on a two-year carrier contract, though T-Mobile is selling the Nexus 4 at $200 on-contract if you’re into that too. If you do take the Nexus 4 plunge, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Living with the Nexus 4 and using it over the last week has been a joy. The first thing you notice when you pick up the handset is just how sturdy and luxurious it feels. The front and back of the device are coated in Gorilla Glass 2. I took a set of keys, a fork and a pocket knife to the front and back glass panels of the Nexus 4 and couldn’t get a scratch to show up anywhere. I also slipped and dropped the phone while pulling it out of my pocket this week, and it showed no signs of my fumble.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

I can’t blame the design of the Nexus 4 for my clumsiness. It’s quite grippy thanks to a rubberized band of plastic that runs in a ring around the whole device. This band is where you’ll find your buttons and ports — a volume rocker and a SIM card tray on the left, a sleep/wake button on the right, a headphone jack up top and a micro USB port for charging on the bottom. There’s also a strip of chromed plastic that skirts the edge of the face. It’s a handsome touch that doesn’t distract from the massive 4.7-inch 1280 x 768 display. The strip smoothly meets the curved edges of the phone’s touchscreen, which glides into the sides of the phone — it’s somewhat reminiscent of the display treatment on HTC’s One X. It’s a fantastic design choice, as it makes the Nexus 4 comfortable to hold and makes it more satisfying to swipe your hand across. There’s no resistance here, no hard edges. Just silky glass on a 0.35-inch thick device that weighs just 4.9 ounces.

The display on the Nexus 4, which packs a density of 320 pixels per inch, is one of the best I’ve seen on a smartphone handset. I wouldn’t say it’s the absolute best, as I still prefer the color reproduction of the One X and the sharpness of the iPhone’s Retina display, but it’s very close. While colors do lean toward the cool side, LG’s True HD IPS LCD display is flat-out gorgeous. The level of detail and definition seen here is worthy of a flagship phone. Everything looks spectacular: apps, e-books, magazines, comics, websites, videos and photos.

Beneath the glass back panel, there’s a sparkly, textured inlay that shimmers when the light catches it just right. It’s very subtle. The back appears to be just plain black glass, but when the light hits it, you see sparkles. While it’s purely cosmetic, it’s a detail that, along with the top-notch fit and finish, shows some thoughtful design.

It not only looks great, it runs like the wind. I couldn’t find a single stutter or hiccup during my week with the phone. Even graphically intensive apps like Google Earth, or fast-paced games like Nova 3 loaded quickly and ran smoothly. This can be attributed to Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, Adreno 320 graphics processor, and 2GB of RAM. The rear-facing 8-megapixel camera is also very nice, but falls just shy of greatness. The photos it takes aren’t quite as clear or detailed as the ones we’ve seen from the cameras on the HTC One X and iPhone 5. When it comes to battery life, the Nexus 4 is also performs just below the One X and the iPhone. Under normal use, I could go a day before having to charge it. If I was using the handset non-stop, I’d have to charge the Nexus 4 before I left work. This is good battery life, but not exceptional.

Carrying on the Nexus tradition, it packs an NFC chip, so you can use it with Google Wallet for mobile payments, or you can use Android Beam to transfer files (like homebrew porn, for example) to other NFC-enabled phones. It also supports wireless charging, and since it uses the Qi wireless charging standard, you can use a charging pad from another manufacturer (like Nokia) until you get Google’s official orb-shaped charging accessory. You can read more about the hardware in my initial hands-on report I wrote when the phone was first announced.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Google and Samsung have teamed up to create the new Nexus 10 tablet. Play with it for a few minutes and it becomes obvious the two companies have exercised their many powers to get everything right.

The new device is very, very fast. It has the highest resolution display of any 10-incher on the market. The styling is restrained, but attractive. The case is lightweight and thin. The camera and the front-facing speakers are solid. The user interface is mature and polished, and the Nexus 10 provides the most pleasant experience I’ve ever seen on a big-screen Android tablet.

But, unfortunately, the same dark cloud hovering over all larger Android tablets also pains the Nexus 10: a lack of apps. There simply aren’t enough tablet-specific apps available on Android, and no matter how swift or shiny or sexy your hardware is, that really stings. It’s the apps that make the tablet.

Apple’s iPad, which on paper is outmatched by the Nexus 10 in nearly every way, is still a more compelling product because it has 275,000 iPad-specific apps sitting in Apple’s App Store just waiting to be downloaded, touched, tapped and swiped.

It makes the Nexus 10′s primary mission — jump-starting Android’s 10-inch tablet ecosystem — seem all the more daunting. While there are more than 700,000 apps built for Android, most of them were built with phones — not tablets — in mind. Google has been diven to publicly pleading with developers to build the tablet-optimized apps everyone with a Transformer Pad or Galaxy tablet has been dreaming about.

The Nexus 7, Google’s phenomenal 7-inch device, has set a high bar for the Nexus 10. Asus has already sold millions of units and is expecting to see monthly sales top 1 million. While it faces the same lack-of-tablet-app problem as the Nexus 10, its $200 price tag, gorgeous display and monstrous power make it a more compelling buy. Also consider the Nexus 7′s diminutive size, which not only makes it better for using with one hand, reading, and for keeping nearby at all times, but also makes using stretched-out phone apps less painful. But on a 10-inch tablet, stretched phone apps are non-starters, and the software drought is much tougher to ignore.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

There are dozens of examples of why this is a problem, but just take a look at Twitter. On the iPad, it’s beautiful. A series of sliding panels display tweets, user profiles and trending topics. On the Nexus 10 (and any Android tablet for that matter), you get a stretched-out phone app with tons of wasted white space. Text is small and tough to read, and the overall user experience can generously be described as unimpressive.

Google knows how to make compelling tablet apps. Look at the Google+ app on both the iPad and any Android tablet. It’s a superior experience, with large, high-resolution photos and slick side-scrolling navigation that feels more like an interactive magazine than a regular old social network. It’s a beacon to the developer world: This Is What’s Possible.

If consumers buy the Nexus 10 in droves, developers will have clear incentive to make more tablet-tailored Android apps. If more exciting apps are made, more consumers will buy large Android tablets. Chicken, meet egg.

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

If you’ve happened to venture into an independent bookstore in the past few years, you may have noticed an e-reader for sale that isn’t produced by an online retailer or a giant bookstore chain. Those e-readers are made by Kobo, a Canadian company that prides itself on being the unofficial e-reader of independent bookstores. And like those very bookstores, the new Kobo Glo is a delightful surprise waiting to be discovered.

The Kobo Glo e-reader is the company’s answer to the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight and the Kindle Paperwhite. Like both of those devices, the Kobo Glo lets you read in the dark. Unlike the Nook and Kindle, however, the Glo has nearly eliminated the lighting inconsistencies that plague the other two devices.

It does the screen illumination trick the same way the others do, via front-lighting and a “light guide.” Five LEDs sit at the bottom of the screen and fire across reading surface through a nano-printed fiber-optic film. The film, which is transparent and covers the entire screen, has microscopic scores in it that carry the light waves, evenly spreading the light around and illuminating the whole surface. Your eyes don’t notice the scores, you just see the text beneath.

Kobo’s diffusion mechanism is more impressive than the Kindle Paperwhite’s nano-imprinted light guide. The screen isn’t perfect — it’s a little inconsistent, with some extra-bright areas at the edges. But that’s a small annoyance compared to the irregular light blossoms found on the other e-readers.

The Kobo Glo is so good at lighting, it suffers from a different problem: It doesn’t get dark enough. In a dark room, the light from the Glo can be harsh compared to the Paperwhite and GlowLight. The e-reader gets dark enough for rooms with dim lights, but in a completely dark room — like your bedroom — it’s annoyingly bright. To be fair, I have sensitive eyes, but I’ve talked with other e-reader owners about the settings they use on their devices while reading in a dark room, and they use about the same level of brightness as I do. Your eyeballs may vary.

Beyond the dazzling world of glowing screens, the Glo’s 1024×758 e-ink Pearl XGA screen, while slightly darker than the Nook and Kindle, delivers crisp text that in many cases looks better than the text on the major players. To prove Kobo is serious about text, the company added a set of controls called Type Genius to the reader, which allows readers to fine-tune the weight and sharpness of the fonts.

Most users won’t take the time to adjust the font of a book, but for hard-core e-reader enthusiasts looking for the best reading experience, Type Genius is amazing. While adjusting, the before-and-after window displays what you’re doing to the selected typeface. If you lose your mind and end up with something worse than Comic Sans, you can tap the Reset button and start over. Design nerds will surely celebrate. (Which, for them, means adding an extra 0.25 grams of honey to their artisanal herbal tea, and maybe stirring four times instead of three.)

The fine-tuning of the reading experience doesn’t stop with fonts. Most e-reader page turns are the quick and dirty kind, and residual artifacts end up sticking around on the screen for five or six page flips. Then, there’s that magical page flip where the screen is fully refreshed, and all those residual artifacts are wiped away. It takes a little longer to make that “cleaning” flip, but the screen is fresher and crisper, so it’s worth it.

The Kobo Glo features the ability to manually set the amount of pages you want to flip before that full refresh happens. You can set it to refresh every page, every six pages, or anywhere in between, depending on how much you hate artifacts. Set to the max of six, the artifacts were only noticeable if a settings menu or graphic had been onscreen since the last refresh. At one, the Kobo Glo is always fresh and clean. It’s probably overkill, but it’s there and you can use it.

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

All of these settings are great, but it takes more than a few crisp fonts that glow in the dark to make a stellar e-book experience. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are retail powerhouses. Kobo? Not so much. That doesn’t mean that the company doesn’t have a robust library. I did a quick check, asking the other Wired staffers to pick their most-adored books. Of my list of about 20 books, there were only two not available for Kobo that were available in the Kindle Store. The missing books were The Monkey Wrench Gang and The Left Hand of Darkness. I also noticed that about 5 percent of the books were $1 or $2 more expensive in the Kobo store. That’s a minus.

LAST YEAR’S MODEL

Don’t care about the light-up screen? Check out Kobo’s previous-generation e-reader, the Kobo Touch. You can get one for around $100, or even cheaper if you can find a refurbished unit.

Like Barnes & Noble, Kobo can’t compete with Amazon’s exclusive serials and short-form Singles program. It’s hard to keep pace with the Amazon retail juggernaut when it comes to pricing and depth. Still, the Kobo’s bookstore has all the major books you would expect, though navigating the bookstore on the e-reader is a bit kludgey. It seems that a lot of screen real estate hasn’t been utilized to its fullest potential. Too much of the navigation is done with drop-down menus.

The biggest flaw was when I would select a book via a search. The price of the book was not displayed. Instead, a “Buy Now” button just lingered there, taunting me. I finally tapped the button and was taken to page where the price is displayed next to my payment method. Having to tap another button to uncover the price of a book is a bad user experience, and it’s something a company in Kobo’s position should be working hard to fix.

The Kobo Glo sticks to its indy roots. It supports ePub, so all those free books you “found” on the internet will work. You’ll have to download Adobe’s Digital Editions app to sync the reader with any books you grab from the internet or borrow from your local library. It’s a drag-and-drop affair, but I had hoped Kobo had gone the way of Sony and figured out how to check out and sync library books directly on the device.

Finally, the physical e-reader is similar to The Paperwhite and Sony Reader, with a slightly tacky back. It’s nice, but the Nook still rules in the field of ergonomics. One design win is the physical button to activate the screen illumination; it’s at the top of the e-reader next to the power/sleep button. It’s really nice to be able to light the Kobo up without having to mess with on-screen menus.

Like the Paperwhite, however, Kobo’s Glo has no page-turn buttons. The Nook does, and it’s one of the device’s best features. It’s something I personally want on all e-readers, whether they light up or not.

WIRED Best-looking light-up screen. High-level font and page-refresh management. Physical light switch will have you all aglow. Support for ePub format. Kobo offers the Glo with four differently colored backs.

TIRED Navigating the on-device bookstore is wonky. Kobo has most books you want, but not all of them — Amazon is still the ecosystem king. Light is too bright for really dark rooms.

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

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The chef’s knife is the indispensable multi-tool of the kitchen. It slices, it dices. It minces, juliennes and de-bones. But it also goes well beyond its intended uses. Need to open a bag of spinach? Break the seal on your sous vide salmon? Pop the cap off a beer? You’re covered.

We tested eight knives over three weeks, selecting the most popular models and pinging chef friends for their personal recommendations. We stuck mostly with 8-inch blades, the sweet spot for the classic chef’s knife. Testing involved the stuff you’d do in your own kitchen — peeling, filleting, dicing, chopping, cubing, slicing and all the other standard prep work for meats and vegetables.

Like all great designs, the chef’s knife is simple, and its wide-ranging utility might account for its basic shape remaining relatively unchanged over the years. There have been small innovations: new metals, better handle design, some blades roll a bit more, some are thicker, others thinner. But the standard prevails: a slim, 8-inch triangular blade with a curved cutting edge and a heel tall enough to pinch tightly.

There’s no best knife for everyone. The size of your hands, how you hold the knife, and what you tend to do most in the kitchen determine things like which handle type is preferable, and what weight you’ll need. The less-obvious traits, like upkeep requirements and how well the knife holds an edge over time, set the great knives apart from the mediocre, and should be considered by every buyer.

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Photos by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

Those looking to shift their Netflix addiction from the touchscreen to the big screen — and get some other web-connected staples in the process — will find D-Link’s MovieNite Plus video streamer a worthy purchase at a very palatable price of $80.

Though it’s just as capable and easy to use as the Roku XD, which is also $80, the MovieNite Plus doesn’t have the depth of content options available on the Roku. For that reason alone, the Roku is the superior device, and the one we’d recommend for most people. However, the MovieNite Plus is still a sensible buy for somebody who only cares about accessing one or two key streaming services (like Netflix and YouTube) and who doesn’t already have a way to get them, like a smart TV, console, or streaming box.

Setting up the 4.6-inch square hockey puck is dead simple — just plug the (included!) HDMI cable into an available port on the television and connect the device to your network via either Wi-Fi or Ethernet. The MovieNite player comes packaged with five services: Netflix, YouTube, Pandora, Picasa, and Vudu. The mydlink app is a sixth option on the menu, which you can use for integrating your set-top box with one of the mydlink products like wireless network cameras and routers.

The MovieNite Plus’ interface is a familiar and Roku-like sideways-scrolling array of these app icons. You navigate it with the directional thumb-pad on the remote. The remote also has your standard play/pause, stop, and fast-forward buttons, plus buttons for Back, Home, and Options. All of these buttons are comfortably large, and the layout is intuitive if you’re thumbing around in the dark. But D-Link makes jumping directly to one of the major services even easier — at the bottom of the remote are four plasticky logo buttons for Vudu, Netflix, Pandora, and YouTube.

In the performance department, the MovieNite Plus provides an entirely satisfactory experience for a sub-$100 media streamer. Pre-load buffering times on videos are minimal, though you’ll wait a little longer for HD content. 1080p videos stream with nary a stutter and virtually no artifacting — but of course, your results will vary depending on the quality of your home wireless connection. I had one issue with a firmware upgrade that left me stuck on an infinite loading screen, but a subsequent upgrade went without a hitch, and brought with it nice UI improvements such as a more PS3-like Netflix experience (a definite plus).

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

This box is actually an upgrade from D-Link’s original $48 MovieNite, and one of the big differences in the new hardware is the better selection of apps. In the main menu are selections for MovieNite apps and Vudu apps. The former offers a wide range of video content from sources like Etsy, NASA, and College Humor. Although labeled as “apps,” they’re really more like channels — and, oddly, you can’t add one of these sources to the main home screen interface. Within Vudu apps, you’ve got more traditional offerings like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and The New York Times. The apps aren’t necessarily fully fleshed out — with Twitter, for instance, you can view your stream, favorites, list, or search topics or hashtags, but there’s no option to craft tweets or view or respond to @ replies or direct messages. Not that you’d want to using the onscreen keyboard, anyway.

Although D-Link provides a handful of streaming staples and a number of apps on the MovieNite Plus, it doesn’t look like it’ll be getting other key services any time soon. The remote has those four quick navigation buttons, but if D-Link were to gain another major player like Hulu Plus, Vimeo or Amazon Instant, the remote would suddenly take one step away from relevance. There’s also a D-Link Remote app available for iOS and Android. It’s a nice thought, but the app frustratingly lacks an onscreen keyboard for typing search terms.

For comparison, the $100 Apple TV provides a handful of sports app channels and video content options, integrates with your other iOS products, and streams locally from screen to screen via AirPlay. Apple’s remote is even more simplistic in design, but it’s iOS app alternative is far better than D-Link’s. On the $80 Roku XD, you’ve got much of the same functionality as the D-Link, plus a ton of content choices, ranging from Disney and HBO Go to Facebook.

If you don’t subscribe to the Apple way of life, and you aren’t really looking for a hundred different things to do on your television, you’ll be more than happy with what you get out of D-Link’s premium set-top box. The content choices may be limited, but the video quality is great, and it’s as easy to use as something this simple should be.

WIRED Easy to set up and straightforward to use. Price is right. Quick navigation buttons on remote make it easy to jump from Netflix, to Pandora, to YouTube on a whim. Comes with an HDMI cable.

TIRED Too few streaming services on offer. Some of the interfaces, like Vudu’s, are a bit convoluted and initially a bit overwhelming to navigate. D-Link Remote mobile app less useful than the actual remote control. No option for viewing content from your computer.

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

Last year, we reviewed Hitachi’s Touro Desk Pro, an inexpensive desktop hard drive. We liked it, especially because it performed about as well as competing drives, and yet it was priced significantly lower than other drives of similar capacity.

There’s no telling whether that low price was a fluke — remember, the Thailand floods of 2011 caused hard drive prices to go coo-coo-ca-choo for six to nine months — but I’m particularly happy it caused me to picked up that Hitachi drive, if for no other reason than it introduced me to the company’s line.

Now Hitachi’s storage division is owned by hard drive powerhouse Western Digital, and the Hitachi line has been revamped. This year, the company’s hottest product is the Touro Mobile Pro.

It’s a mobile drive, so the case is svelte and the available capacities aren’t gigantic — 500GB and 750GB. However, it draws its power over the USB 3.0 port, so you won’t need to plug it into a wall. The drive is fast (7,200rpm) and in my testing, it was faster writing files than reading them. But overall speeds were comparable to other USB 3.0 test units from Western Digital and G-Drive, and significantly faster than an iOmega Mac Companion. Not crushing speeds, but impressive nonetheless. Most importantly, it always fast enough, and never frustrating.

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

Hitachi has included some smart extras, too — you get a pre-loaded cloud backup suite with the drive and 3GB of free storage to try it out. Paid accounts ($50 a year) get a full 250GB of Memopal-powered cloud storage that’s accessible via your PC, your mobile devices, and the web. Backups can be scheduled, specific files and folders can be targeted, and bandwidth can be throttled. In a nice touch, you can share your files stored in the cloud by just sending a web link to somebody and inviting them to download it. It works as easily as Dropbox or other competing services.

The drive is also loaded with some automated backup software that lets you encrypt the drive with a 256-bit, password-protected system. However, I didn’t test this — I simply reformatted the drive to work with my Mac (it ships as an NTFS volume, so Mac users will have to zap it and make it an HFS+ disk) and set it up to run Time Machine.

The hardware itself is simple and, at about 0.6 inches thick, not as elegant or portable as smaller, truly compact mobile drives. But the price is nice — around $70 for the 500GB and around $90 for the 750GB — and considering the extra features you get on-board, I can recommend it.

WIRED Performance is fast, and satisfying enough for everyday use. USB 3.0, and it’s bus-powered. Not dirt cheap, but relatively inexpensive. 2-year warranty. OMG it looks like an iPhone.

TIRED Not the most compact case design. Heavy, too. A 3-year warranty would be nicer.

Google France could be ordered to pay $1.3 billion to France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction générale des finances) due to tax noncompliance in 2011. The agency has been investigating Google’s revenue in France for months. With only 138 million euros of revenue in France in 2011, the company has used tax-optimization strategies, but has always stated that they comply with the law. It denies the accusation.

The French weekly Le Canard enchaîné (which has an excellent track record for investigations) first obtained a letter that the Direction générale des finances sent to Google France asking it to pay $1.3 billion (€1 billion) in tax penalties. Most of Google France’s revenue could go directly to Google’s European headquarters in Ireland where the corporate tax is only 12.5 percent. French news website Owni obtained Google Ireland’s 125-page financial statements for 2011, certified by Ernst & Young, in order to corroborate Le Canard enchaîné’s investigation.

Here are the important numbers:

• Revenue in France in 2011: €138 million
• Revenue in Ireland in 2011: €12.4 billion
• Profit in Ireland in 2011: €9 billion
• Tax in France in 2011: €5.5 million
• Estimated tax in France for 2011 according to the DGF: €150 million

Right now, Google France has a few hundred employees. According to Google, they only handle support and don’t sign contracts. Yet, salespeople are based in France. The company doesn’t report that activity, which is why the DGF is asking for the gigantic fine.

According to a document from the investigation obtained by BFM TV, Google has posted job openings for salespeople in France. According to the document: “Google France doesn’t seem to only provide support, but seems to handle all the sales and client relationships of Google Ireland, including the closing of advertising contracts, and without declaring that revenue in France.”*

Later in the document, they say that “the receipts and contracts of Google Ireland are written in French, and have a clause conferring jurisdiction to the French courts.”* It is therefore considered a French contract by French laws.

French authorities asked advertisers about those contracts. They found out that “advertising contracts with French advertisers are written by Google Ireland, but handled by employees of Google France.”*

Google Ireland Limited didn’t follow France’s taxation rules. After that accusation, a Google France spokesperson told the French news agency AFP the following statement:

Google didn’t receive a notification of tax adjustment from the French taxation agency. We will continue to cooperate with French authorities, as we’ve done until now. Google complies with all the laws of the country in which the company operates, and with the European legislation.*

On October 29, Google Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt met French President François Hollande to talk about the disagreement with French news websites on Google News. According to Le Canard enchaîné, Hollande mentioned the tax issue, as well.

Once again, the problem isn’t that most of the revenue is going to Ireland. It is that French contracts are recorded and taxed by Irish authorities.

Google’s European Tax Scheme

But France isn’t the only European country in which Google only reports a fraction of their revenue. Supposedly, Google operates in many European countries and proceeds exactly the same way. It’s the only way to justify the incredible revenue in Ireland.

And Google isn’t the only company. Apple, Amazon, Facebook and others have all been accused of tax noncompliance in France.

As Google is the current target of French authorities, it offers a glimpse into the tax scheme those companies have to follow in order to lower their tax rates.

Google’s European HQ is called Google Ireland Holdings. It is the owner of Google Ireland Limited. Google Ireland Limited receives the revenue from European subsidaries. But, in order to lower the tax rate, Google Ireland Limited pays billions of royalties to Google Ireland Holdings. In 2011, it was $4.6 billion. It drastically lowers the profit of Google Ireland Limited.

Despite the name, Google Ireland Holdings’ cost center is in Bermuda and is called Google Bermuda Unlimited. In Bermuda, corporate tax doesn’t even exist. But there is a tax if you want to transfer big sums from Ireland to Bermuda. That’s where the Netherlands are needed.

If you transfer money from Ireland to the Netherlands, then to Bermuda, there is no tax. Google Netherlands Holdings BV, you guessed it, is a subsidiary that has the sole function of transferring money from Ireland to Bermuda.

There is another tax to transfer to the U.S. Currently, Google and other big Internet companies keep the money in Bermuda. $1,400 billion are stuck there according to the Win America Campaign, a lobbying action to remove the tax between Bermuda and the U.S.

Google France is just an example to illustrate a greater issue involving other countries with a high corporate tax and other companies. Learning about their sophisticated tax noncompliance plans is always mind-boggling.

* Translated from French.

(Image credit: Flickr/Images_of_Money)

HyperFair, a startup with a platform for running online trade shows, says it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding.

The idea of a virtual trade show isn’t new, but the practice hasn’t exactly taken off. Perhaps that’s what you’d expect, since it’s hard to imagine an online experience taking the place of a real-world show.

However, I was impressed by the demo that COO Andrea Ballarini gave me last week. He said competitors tend to offer a much more static experience, and that’s true of the other services I’ve seen. HyperFair, on the other hand, promises more interactivity, and it allows you to move your avatar around a three-dimensional space. There’s also a simple, intuitive interface focused on the key tasks — chatting with other attendees (either via text, Skype integration, or voice), browsing products, and exchanging business cards.

Ballarini also showed me the process of creating a virtual booth, which just takes a few minutes of uploading media to customize the look. Exhibitors can also upload multiple photos of their products to create a 3D model for display.

The demo was good enough, at least, that I can imagine interacting on HyperFair without feeling totally weird. It’s hardly a replacement for in-person interaction, but then, Ballarini said that’s not the goal: “We’re definitely not trying to replace any physical event. We’re trying to expand the physical event.” For example, an organizer could hold a pre-show virtual event where attendees can get connected before meeting up in person, or a biennial conference could use HyperFair to keep attendees connected during the off years.

HyperFair was launched in Italy, that’s where most of its current events are held (you can see a list here), but it’s looking to expand in the United States. In fact, Ballarini works with a small team out of RocketSpace in San Francisco.

The funding comes from European angel investors. Ballarini said the round was actually raised earlier this year, but wasn’t announced in the U.S. until now. The company’s advisors include Lorenzo Thione, co-founder of Microsoft-acquired search company Powerset.

Despite the efforts of many different organizers over the years software developers have resisted unionization. The relatively high pay and good working conditions of developers, the stereotype of geeks as loners and the general decline of unions in the U.S. are all commonly cited reasons. But maybe unions are failing in tech because they’re not addressing the real issue: giving developers more control over their work life.

Moving Up Maslow’s Pyramid

Developers want autonomy. They don’t want to be jerked around by stupid managers who impose unrealistic deadlines, make impossible promises to clients and just generally disrespect their employees. Historically developers have had two options for dealing with bad management: find a better job or found a startup. But worker self-management would offer a third options — give the developers control over their own work.

Companies like Valve prove that self-management can work in the software industry. Unionization could potentially provide a path to that sort of workplace structure, if organizers can move up Maslow’s pyramid a bit.

Today workers tend to think of unions merely as organizations that negotiate salaries and benefits with big corporations. Workers who make decent salaries — as developers tend to — have less incentive to try collective bargaining at the risk of getting shit-canned. Workers have also come to distrust unions. They also tend to think of a union as something that takes away their workplace freedom, not something that gives them the ability to have more control over their day to day work life.

But The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), today a more “fringe” union in the shadow of the AFL-CIO, has long promoted workplace democracy as a value. The union started out in 1905 and was prominent throughout the early 20th centur. After a series of unfortunate events its membership declined, but the organization has been staging a come back. It’s probably known best known in recent years for its efforts to organize Starbucks in New York City.

The IWW has a decentralized model that it seems that developers could get behind. Members don’t have a to have a contract with their employers — in other words, you can be a member of the IWW even if your company isn’t officially unionized. And you can actually be a member of both the IWW and another union. Most importantly, the union emphasizes worker self-management over just cutting deals with the bosses.

The Case For a Developers Union

I’m not saying that worker self-management is the only reason to unionize. Most workers will have more immediately compensation and security concerns. And even developers can benefit from wage and benefits negotiations.

Some engineers’ salaries have passed the six figure mark, and companies are offering signing bonuses and perks such as island vacations. Offshoring has become less of a concern, and our own Jon Evans thinks it will be at least 10 until U.S. developer wages are driven down by international competition.

Yet in pretty much any discussion thread about the developer shortage you’ll find people who claim the real issue is that companies are demanding too much experience for too little pay. This comment on Hacker News is typical: “We’ve gotten plenty of good candidates in our doors that turn us down because our pay is barely competitive and our health insurance is terrible. Pay more money and you can attract more tech workers.”

And that’s not to mention the long hours many programmers are asked or required to work, despite research indicating that overtime may be counter productive.

Meanwhile, large companies still hire hordes of contract workers who don’t get the same benefits as full-time employees. The term “precarity” in labor lingo means temporary and/or intermittent work. It usually refers to lower paying work than the typical tech contract, but many developers could be getting short changed.

Making It Happen

But these issues don’t seem to be the ones that will rally developers into action. Various groups have tired to organize developers and other tech workers over the years. The most notable is WashTech, an Communications Workers Of America (CWA) which is itself affiliated with the AFL-CIO. WashTech was founded in 1998 in response to Microsoft’spervasive use of permatemps.

In 2003 the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers started the seemingly now defunct CyberLodge. Its founder, Ian Lurie,, told The Register that the idea was to create something more like an open source trade guild than a union.

And then there’s Communications and Computer Workers Industrial Union 560 (iu560), which is part of the IWW. Like the CWA, the iu560 is open not just to developers but to technical and telecommunications workers.

Steve Ayers, a programmer and IWW member, says that the stereotype of developers as loners is not entirely accurate. He cites, for example, open source development, which is a type of collaborative endeavor meant to bring about a collective good. Ayers describes open source as communism with a lowercase “c.”

And even in cases where the stereotype fits, there’s a history of workers banding together. “Timber Workers were stereotyped as lone ‘Paul Bunyan’ types, but the Timber Workers became one of the largest Industrial Unions in the IWW and one of it’s most successful,” he says.

“I have found that workers will be receptive or not receptive to organizing largely on how its presented to them,” he says. “If one walks up to a worker and asks ‘Would you like to form a Union?’ they’re not going to be receptive. But, if you talk to them about their job and the problems they face, and then ask them if they want to do something about it they are much more receptive. I think this speaks more to the labor movement in the US then the tech industry.”

It could be that union’s just have an insurmountable branding problem, having been vilified for so long. And the IWW’s position on the leftist fringe may turn off many more right leaning workers. But there’s a model there that could be emulated. It’s a starting point at least.

After a brief hiatus from any official tech role, former Tumblr president John Maloney will be joining the board of custom store platform Storenvy this week. A combination of a custom storefront builder and an eCommerce discovery platform like Wanelo or TheFancy, Storenvy allows sellers to build their own custom marketplaces and scale those marketplaces as part of the Storenvy network, like this and this.

“We’re the only company that is doing both custom storefronts and a central network that connects everything,” says Storenvy founder Jon Crawford. ”The network (including the Storenvy Facebook app) becomes the thing that people use the product for.”

Maloney’s prior experience could be a boon in his new role, as Crawford compares competing products like Yahoo Stores and Shopify to WordPress (with emphasis on power and features), and offers that, in contrast, Storenvy is more like Tumblr with its emphasis on being easy and fun and accessible.

“Very much like Tumblr, the strategy of the business here is ‘Get to scale,’” he says. “We’re the next generation of the white-label storefront, attracting young, creative and visually driven people — basically the Tumblr generation.”

The company monetizes by offering premium features like upgrades for storefronts, custom domains for $4.99/month and advanced discount features for $2.99/month. He mentions that the startup has 23k stores to Shopify’s 30k, an accomplishment when you consider Storenvy has nine employees to Shopify’s 150 employees. He also reveals that the startup is seeing 400 percent annual growth in transaction volume and is currently bringing in over $1 million a month in sales across the network.

So what are the future plans for the self-proclaimed “Tumblr for eCommerce”? Currently consisting of just Maloney and Crawford, the board will be adding new members in the coming months in order to further guide its ambitious plans. “We want to be the default answer to the question, ‘Where do I set up my online store?’” Crawford says. When I mention that the answer to that question is usually (as of right now) eBay, Crawford balks, “Well how nice is that?”

Storenvy (Angelist profile here) has raised $1.53 million in funding from Spark Capital, First Round Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Charles River Ventures and more. They are also hiring.

As a scientist practicing actual, bonafide science, I have often found myself in need of immediate g-force readings or barometric pressure analyses for my scientific problems. Whereas before I had to use my sextant and trident and thermowhozzit, I can instead use the Node.

The Node, originally a Kickstarter project, is basically a tube of sensors. Most of the sensors are built into the tips of the tube and they include accelerometers, barometers, thermometers, and gyroscopes. You can then connect the Node to a smartphone via low-power Bluetooth 4.0 and take and record readings.

Initially created as a Kickstarter project, the Node blossomed into a fairly complete sensor array. The iPhone app, for example, offers readouts for all major sensor inputs and the readouts change dynamically as the sensors receive input. You can even record sensor inputs for a time, allowing you to see data changes in real time. They also offer an Android app.

The entry-level model is called the Kore and costs $149. Additional modules, including a thermometer and flashlight, start at $25. The platform is open source as are the apps and there is a full developer site. You can see some example measurements of me futzing around with it below. For example, I took temperature readings of stuff around me and then of my body.

Click to view slideshow.

Who needs this? Well, with the thermometer built in you have an extremely handy way to spot measure temperatures in machinery and the flashlight is bright and really cool. The Kore features themselves are great for hobbyists and the barometric measurements could be helpful to those who are into barometry. Sadly, I’m not smart enough to figure out all of the potential uses but each module has a helpful description. For example, the Kore can be used for:

Obviously this takes a bit of hacking, but that’s the fun, right? I could personally see this as being useful in, say, a model rocket launch to sense the forces applied by rapid acceleration in a physics classroom or as a method to alarm my refrigerator door so my kids don’t steal my beer. Either way, it’s pretty darn cool.

The Node is available now.

Professionally-minded social network LinkedIn once again beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations this afternoon when it announced the financial results for the third quarter of 2012.

LinkedIn announced that it made $252 million in revenue during the third quarter, up 10 percent sequentially from its Q2 revenue of $228.2 million and up 81 percent year-over-year from its Q3 2011 revenues of $140 million.

At the bottom line, LinkedIn posted GAAP earnings per share (EPS) of two cents per share, down from its second quarter GAAP earnings of 3 cents per share and its net loss of 2 cents per share in Q3 2011. On a non-GAAP basis, which is where analysts generally focus when evaluating LinkedIn’s performance, the company’s EPS was 22 cents, up from Q2′s non-GAAP EPS of 16 cents and Q3 2011′s non-GAAP EPS of 6 cents per share.

This means that LinkedIn easily surpassed Wall Street’s expectations at both the top and bottom lines. According to FactSet, analysts projected LinkedIn to post $244.61 in revenue and non-GAAP earnings per share of 11 cents for Q3 2012.

Here’s a snazzy graphic from TechCrunch’s Bryce Durbin to help see just how this quarter compares to LinkedIn’s prior ones:

In a press release, LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner had this to say about the quarter:

“LinkedIn had a strong third quarter with all of our key operating and financial metrics showing solid growth. The last few months mark the most significant period of product development in the company’s history. This accelerated pace of innovation is fundamental to our goal of driving greater engagement on the LinkedIn platform.”

Looking ahead, LinkedIn also gave new guidance on how it expects to perform in the upcoming quarter. The company now expects its Q4 revenue to be between $270 million to $275 million, with adjusted EBITDA ranging between $58 million and $60 million. It’s also boosted its full-year guidance: LinkedIn says its 2012 revenue is now expected to be between $939 million to $944 million — that’s significantly higher than LinkedIn’s previous projection of $915 million to $925 million. Its full-year EBITDA is now projected to be between $202 million to $204 million, up from the prior range of $185 million to $190 million.

LinkedIn has been in the stock market’s good graces ever since its May 2011 initial public offering. While other new web stocks such as Facebook and Zynga have foundered a bit since their IPOs, LinkedIn’s share price has performed well — its stock closed today at $106.85, more than double its $45 IPO price.

Today’s results have continued to impress those public market investors, it looks like: In the first half hour after LinkedIn announced its Q3 earnings, the company’s stock price was nearly six percent in after-hours trading.

Updating.

If you don’t live in New York City, you may not have heard of LocalVox. But the startup, which aims to simplify local marketing for small businesses and publishers, is beginning to take off. Headquartered in the Big Apple, the startup initially focused its efforts in its own backyard, but thanks to the $7.5 million series A it closed two weeks ago, it is now setting its sights on a more national audience.

As part of increasing that scope, LocalVox is today announcing the acquisition of Postling, also an NYC-based startup, which makes a social media dashboard that helps small business owners monitor their social streams, get notified when someone posts to their social pages, and discover who their most influential followers and customers are on social media.

Basically, Postling has been trying to take HootSuite and simplify and streamline it by presenting social media management in a Gmail-style interface. The idea being that most management tools out there right now favor the stream approach and are far too bloated and noisy for most small business owners to use effectively.

While LocalVox isn’t sharing the financial terms of the deal, it has acquired Postling’s technology and platform with the acquisition, however, the startup’s Social Inbox will continue to be offered as a standalone app on Postling.com. LocalVox president and co-founder Trevor Sumner tells us that, while most of Postling’s staff has “moved on to other opportunities,” Postling CTO Haim Schoppik will be joining LocalVox, an addition the company is excited about given Schoppik’s role in not only building Postling but as a co-founder and one of the chief architects of Etsy.

With the acquisition, LocalVox now has access to Postling’s 20K small business customers and has integrated its product into LocalVox 2.0. LocalVox 2.0 includes a unified social media inbox that enables small business owners to publish content across their social media channels, as well as a new feature called MobileCast, which gives SMBs access to a mobile, geo-targeted deals platform.

The suite gives small businesses a redesigned dashboard that allows them to easily track the visibility of their brand on social media channels, how many people are reading their content, and how many people they can reach through LocalVox through its new Klout-like “findability score.” It also includes tools for automatic emails to customers; Facebook and website updates; the ability to publish content across a network of publishers; and the option of updating listing information on 100 different directories.

Sumner says that LocalVox is currently seeing double-digit, month-over-month revenue growth and had its best sales day to date on Wednesday. When we first covered the company’s launch last November, it had a few hundred SMB customers, but has since grown its customer base to “several thousand,” which now includes names like Whole Foods, Chelsea Piers, Buffalo Wild Wings and Sushi Samba.

It’s been able to do this by sticking to its core mission: Bringing simple, affordable local marketing to mom-and-pop shops and giving them access to tools and channels normally reserved for big, multinational brands. Increasingly, Sumner says, the key to doing that starts with leveraging mobile, as mobile marketing allows businesses to more effectively measure the ROI of marketing by more easily tracking the number of people that claim deals, for example.

While a lot of SMBs feel pressure to create mobile applications for their businesses, the truth is for some local restaurants or hardware stores, there’s really no need — it’s a distraction. Instead, it’s more valuable for SMBs to focus on creating a mobile-optimized website. Yet, in the big picture, the LocalVox President says, while small business owners know they need to take advantage of mobile marketing and are asking for it, they don’t really know what that means.

LocalVox’s technology makes it easier for small businesses to have their locations and websites be discovered by mobile search engines and found on a hundred different local directories. This can be huge for SMBs, who rely on being able to stand out from the crowd of local Chinese restaurants or barber shops by optimizing their placement on search engines. While Sumner says that they aren’t yet building mobile websites for their customers, they already have access to their profile information, Facebook, Twitter and Yelp pages, events, announcements, photos, videos, etc., so it won’t be a huge leap if and when they do.

Really, the most important value-add for LocalVox is education. Today, many small businesses fail to understand that the simple difference between a 3 star and a 3.5 star rating on Yelp can have a huge effect on traffic — especially when potential customers are reading these Yelp reviews on mobile phones, where the visual scope is more compact, and focused — on the score and top reviews.

So, while Google has become very active in the local space and has obviously been making investments in its mobile wallet, marketing and local business search and discovery, Sumner contends that Google struggles to see the broader picture beyond its own properties — that small businesses are using Twitter, Facebook and Yelp to expand their digital presence and their marketing footprints. Plus, they don’t want to build local sales forces. Local businesses require a lot of education, and a lot of companies aren’t focused on solving that part of the equation.

Again, that’s where LocalVox thinks it can have a big impact — by providing an integrated marketing platform for local businesses that includes service as well as support. For example, LocalVox assigns each client their own dedicated support rep to help walk them through how to best leverage local marketing and SEO.

In today’s world, social media has become the central distribution and feedback mechanism for SMBs’ local, online marketing efforts. Yet, while business owners know they need to be in as many places at once as possible, web, search and mobile, they don’t know how to best leverage these channels, or manage their properties once they do. By integrating Postling’s tech into its service, LocalVox is becoming a real integrated, cross-channel marketing platform for SMBs.

It’s a worthwhile mission to help businesses simplify the complexities of social media monitoring and drive social conversations online. It still has a long way to go, but there are some 27 million SMBs in the U.S., so the opportunity is a big one.

More on LocalVox at home here, and Postling’s blog post on its acquisition here.