Category: Tech news

Bonfires in the street, people dancing on cars, body-armored cops, and…tablet computers? Last night was not your typical riot. Only one thing distracted people from the celebratory carnage caused by the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series. It wasn’t the fear of arrest or bodily harm. It was the desire to document and share the beauty of the chaos with mobile devices. And here’s what it looked like.

The bars of San Francisco erupted at at 8:50pm when the Giants struck out the final Detroit Tigers batter to sweep the World Series. Thousands poured into the streets in districts across the city, setting mattresses ablaze alongside couches and cardboard boxes. But amongst the wild instigators was another demographic: well-to-do twenty-somethings carefully lining up camera phone photos of their friends beside the bonfires and police.

One minute someone would be jumping and cheering — a true participant in the riots. The next, they’d stand motionless, applying filters and adding tags to shots before sending them off to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In one of the weirdest scenes of the night, I saw guy surrounded by a swirling crowd wield a full-sized iPad to take a photo of his girlfriend in front of a dumpster fire.

They just couldn’t remain in the moment. While action roared all around them, their eyes were not enough to capture the scenes. Social networks have become just too alluring. In our quest for Likes, retweets, epic profile pics and fifteen seconds of fame, we can completely tune out where we are, even if we’re literally in the middle of a riot.

There was one point when people pocketed their phones. Several peaceful revelers were enjoying a riot cop photo op in front of the assembled line of officers when some drunks started pelting police with bottles. The billy club-wielding cops suddenly charged the crowd and we had to full-sprint to escape.

Those who used the anonymity of the chaos to commit serious crimes should be ashamed. There were some gunshots and graffiti taggers. Worst might have been those who crossed the line from cardboard blazes in the street to actually setting property and vehicles on fire.

But those who rioted respectfully shouldn’t be lumped in with them. There were plenty of people just there to take photos, dance to pop-up marching bands, watch ad-hoc fireworks shows, and have sing-a-longs to “Don’t Stop Believin’” like this guy.

In general, the police and fire departments did a solid job of protecting the city and citizens while allowing us all to have a little fun.

And that little fun will live on. Our newfound instinct to unsheathe our smartphones might steal us away from being here now. But at least they save some stunning content so others can experience these momements vicariously. Just watch this collage of #SFGiantsRiot video set to the soothing sounds of Al Green.

[Featured image via ThePersk. Thanks to Sucka Free City  via Uptown Almanac for the video. I’m the guy in the orange hat at 0:56.]

And here’s a few more of my shots for added color:

Riot police line up at 24th and Mission. Minutes later they charged the crowds at 22nd and 19th streets, sending thousands of fans running for their safety.

Mattresses and cardboard burn in a giant blaze at 19th and Mission.

By the morning, that same fire at 19th proved to have done little damage other than leaving some soot on the street and fumes in the air. For the joy it brought, that seems like a small price to pay.

A brass band wails as smoke pours out of a dumpster fire at 24th & Mission.

An ‘unidentified’ Giants fan cheers on the bonfire crowd from atop a light post at 19th & Mission.

The Samsung ATIV S is a whopper of a Windows Phone. Indeed it looks like Samsung has repurposed the Samsung GSIII’s generous form to accomodate Microsoft’s latest WP8 OS. The phone is very thin and light which certainly helps keep the heft down, and it felt polished rather than plasticky — the back sports a brushed metallic effect, locked under lashings of varnish. But if you’re not a fan of reflective surfaces then its blinged-up silvery form and all-over glossy sheen might get tiresome/distracting.

With a 4.8-inch screen slapped on the front there’s no denying the ATIV S is a paid up member of the enormo-phone club — small-handed folk may prefer to cling onto something a little more modest. The Super AMOLED HD screen is certainly bright, colourful and clear, although, in the brightly spotlight test area where I was poking and prodding it,  it suffered from the same blue sheen that afflicts the GSIII — suggesting it may not offer a great viewing experience in bright sunlight.

The touchscreen felt nice and responsive during my brief hands on, although it did fail to move on cue a few times as I swiped — possibly down to me trying to use it with one hand (and a small hand at that). Pinch to zoom was smooth and fast, and scrolling looked pretty slick. When browsing and fully zoomed in on text, the lettering is as smooth as a baby’s behind – just as Microsoft promised.

In terms of software, being a Windows Phone there is no OEM skin sitting atop the ATIV S (Microsoft does not allow skins) so if you’re used to Samsung’s Android phones you’ll need to reset your expectations for WP8. The UI is all Microsoft — with a homescreen comprised of varying sized Live Tiles that pump personal info (like Facebook) updates right to the surface to personalise the look and feel.

Samsung has added a few of its own apps to the phone in an effort to differentiate the device from other Windows Phones, although these look a little lightweight when compared to the mapping, navigation and traffic apps Nokia preloads on its Windows Phones. You get a WhatsApp-style messaging app called ChatOn, a journal app called Mini Diary, a news aggregator called Now and an NFC wallet app. Samsung is also preloading some of its own lenses (i.e. filters) on the camera app — although these were not loaded on the device I saw.

The rear camera is 8MP (and supports 1080p video recording); the front camera is 1.9MP (720p). It wasn’t possible to ascertain the quality of the shots that either lens can take during my brief hands on but the rear camera snapped shots without any noticeable lag.

Under the hood there’s a dual-core 1.5GHz chip and 1GB of RAM. The UI transitions, menus and apps I opened materialised without any major delays.

There are four physical keys on the phone — a power key/lock key, a dedicated camera key, a volume rocker and on the front a home key (alongside touch-keys: back and Bing search, to make up the standard Windows Phone trio of nav keys). All these felt responsive, albeit I did accidentally knock the Bing search key a couple of times — which, again, could get annoying (unless you enjoy being unexpectedly catapulted into Bing).

The back of the ATIV S can be removed to get at the battery. There’s also a Micro SD card slot to expand on board storage (either 16GB or 32GB).

Most companies tend to test new features and product designs in the wild with a small subset of people. The great thing about that is that on the Internet, the world is a tiny place. A few tipsters have sent in some screenshots and a video of a new design that YouTube is testing out, and we’ve confirmed that it’s legitimate.

Here’s what a YouTube spokesperson said to us:

With more videos coming to YouTube every minute we’re always experimenting with ways to help people more easily find, watch and share the videos that matter most to them. As always, we’ll consider rolling changes out more broadly based on feedback on these experiments.

First, let’s take a look at the screenshot and then we’ll see what’s new. I really like it and I hope that it’s something that sees the light of day for the entire userbase:

What you’ll notice on this video page is that it has a navigation bar on the left-hand side, which drives you to interact with more of your playlists and subscriptions. This is a direction that YouTube has been going in for quite a while, as its current homepage is heavily focused on the channels that you’re subscribed to.

Here’s what I see for a video page right now, sans left-hand navigation:

(I love that YouTube suggests videos about baldness. They know me well…)

The great part about the design that YouTube is testing is that you don’t get “lost” when someone sends you a link to a one-off video. Right now, you can click through similar videos of course, but by bringing all of your subscriptions to the navigation, the site makes sure that you can start digging right in. It’s smart.

Here’s a video walkthrough from another tipster with a differently designed homepage:

What can we learn from this? Google’s video unit is not standing pat on simply owning the space that it’s in, and its designers are given the freedom to play around with different things and get some real-world reaction. Clearly, these things aren’t turned on for me, but I really like what I’m seeing.

There are elements that one could say feel like “Google+”, but you have to remember that Google is working on unifying all of its products, and all of these properties sit under the same company. Basically, Google+ is Google, as I’ve stated time and time again. More importantly, Google has been consistent with this messaging as well.

Are you seeing this design test? Either way, what are your thoughts?

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Apple has just announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple as of early next year, ending his tenure as SVP of iOS Software. As part of the management change, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will take on new responsibilities. Forstall will remain on as an advisor to Tim Cook between now and next year, but appears to be departing the SVP role immediately, according to an official Apple press release.

In addition to Forstall, John Browett will also be leaving Apple. Browett was brought on board as Apple’s head of retail back in January, having served previously as CEO of UK retail chain Dixons. Apple recently reported on its retail progress, having done $4.2 billion of sales through that channel in Q4 2012, beating its Q3 earnings. It’s unclear from the release what exactly was behind Browett’s departure, but it seems like he was likely not a good fit, and his hiring was criticized by a lot of people who didn’t find the Dixons shopping experience particularly compelling.

While Apple says a search is on for Browett’s replacement, it seems to be spreading out Forstall’s duties among existing executive team members. Jony Ive will add Human Interface leadership to his existing design role, Eddy Cue will take on Siri and the nebulous cloud of Maps in addition to iTunes and App Stores, as well as iCloud, and Craig Federighi will fold iOS into his OS X supervision as Apple “brings together the OS teams.”

Bob Mansfield, who had previously been on the way out at Apple, will now head a new group called Technologies covering all of Apple’s wireless and semiconductor teams. That’s an interesting new department, and one that could have significant control over Apple’s future given its deepening emphasis on semiconductor design in-house.

Forstall’s departure is the biggest shakeup by far, however. Forstall joined Apple in 1997, having worked for Jobs at NeXT before that. Many had pegged him as a CEO-in-waiting, both before and after the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs last year. Some on Twitter are suggesting that perhaps Forstall took the brunt of the blame for Apple’s problems with Maps, but it’s also reasonable to hypothesize that with little or no chance of attaining the top spot, Forstall himself wanted to seek out other opportunities where he might take more of a leadership role.

This is definitely the most significant shift in Apple’s make up since Tim Cook took over the CEO role, and even though Forstall leaving is the flashiest aspect, the redistribution of duties shows a very different approach to the way Apple thinks about its products and product lines internally than what we’ve seen the past. The unification of iOS and OS X under one umbrella is, I think, particularly telling, and might signal increasing unity across Apple’s desktop and mobile software.

Pandora is one of the older and more established internet radio services out there, with 150 million registered users, 58.3 million active listeners and 115 million registered users on mobile. Now, with a lot of competition crowding its space from Spotify, (possibly) Apple, I Heart Radio and more, Pandora is looking to that mobile base for growth. Today, it is releasing new apps for iOS and Android devices with extensive social features, improved navigation and deeper integration with Pandora’s music and artist database.

Pandora says these updates are the biggest it’s made since first launching an iOS app in 2008 and Android app in 2009 (the Android app, however, did already get a partial update with a redesign in August).

Pandora CTO Tom Conrad says the purpose of the new apps is to give the mobile apps “parity” with the company’s desktop experience, where features like social integration already exist. They come after a period in which the company has put more focus on “ubiquity.” “We are on over 700 different consumer electronics brands — TVs, Blu Ray players — even a fridge,” Conrad says, adding that Pandora is also available on 75 different car models, too. “But a year ago we came back to mobile and said, as proud as we are with ubiquity, there is all this great stuff not available in the mobile environment. So we set out to bring the mobile experience in line with the web experience.”

But although Conrad didn’t spell it out, there is another force at work here, too: competition. Namely, Spotify — which has a radio service of its own — continues to gain momentum not only in the U.S. but in other parts of the world, too. (Pandora is still only fully available in the U.S., although it recently started a beta test in New Zealand and Australia and remains “patiently opportunistic” that it will move to other markets soon.)

And Apple may also be planning a radio service for early next year (depending on what sources you believe) or won’t.

In both of these cases, the companies are squarely focused on mobile as their engine of growth — the reports on Apple specifically point to iOS devices for its radio service, and Spotify has long had its mobile app as a key driver of usage. Therefore, mobile an area that Pandora has to continue updating and improving for users to keep an edge.

Given how much Spotify has done to integrate Facebook’s social graph into its platform, it’s not really a surprise that Pandora is now putting social features into its mobile app that put a very heavy emphasis furthering the concept of Pandora as social network and, again, follow much of what it has already laid down in its desktop-internet version:

Want others to know what you’ve been listening to? That comes up in your personal music profile, which notes what stations you’ve created, what you’ve listened to and bookmarked, and more. While you were able to access this before on the web, now you can see it in action on your handset. Pandora notes that as with the web app, users can choose whether to make this information public or private.

Want to know what others in your network, or those who have the same tastes as you, are tuning into on Pandora? You can now access a Music Feed to tell you. This works not just as Pandora’s music-focused equivalent of Facebook’s News Feed, but it also gives Pandora a better way of improving discovery on mobile handsets — in general one of those areas that the mobile world hasn’t really perfected yet so always good to see more attempts at trying to get it right.

Want to tell others who are not on Pandora about a certain track or station you’ve heard? You can now share those to Twitter, Facebook (and of course Pandora) straight from your iPhone or Android handset. Again, given that people are Tweeting and Facebooking a lot more on the go these days, and listening to music on their handsets, having this feature on the Pandora apps is really essential.

In addition to these, Pandora has finally put its huge artist and music database to better use on the mobile app. Users can now not only learn more about an artist, album, track and station, but they have access to biographies, discographies, Pandora’s “genome” traits of the current track spinning and lyrics. These are features that Spotify offers in its web app — by way of its App Center — but has yet to incorporate into its mobile app, although we’ve seen and heard of signs that this could be coming soon (yet another reason for Pandora to get these updates out the door).

You could argue that given important mobile is to Pandora, it’s a wonder that it hasn’t tried to enhance these apps before now.

Already, more than 75% of total listening hours come from mobile and other “non-traditional” sources (although 75% sounds pretty mainstream to me, traditional or not). That works out to 700 million listening hours per month on iOS and Android alone.

And it’s not just in terms of consumer popularity that mobile is important for Pandora: more than half (55%) of its ad sales — Pandora’s primary revenue driver — are attributed to mobile and device revenues. That worked out to $100 million in 2012, putting it second to Google in terms of mobile ads. It’s also in the pantheon of most-popular apps: in the U.S., Pandora’s main market, the apps are downloaded on 1 of every 3 smartphones, the company says. (And although you will not see any advertising in the screenshots here — “to better focus us on the new features,” Conrad says — he notes that “all of our advertising features will be there,” including in-stream ads and display units.

Part of the slowness seems to come from a reluctance to mess with a good thing (as the saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). In Conrad’s words, it’s about a desire to retain “simplicity” in the mobile experience — because, indeed, when you have a small screen, sometimes the last thing you want is a lot of business.

These days, as we get more savvy with what we can do and what we expect out of mobile devices, perhaps simplicity is less of a gating factor than it used to be.

Notably, what isn’t getting updated today is Pandora’s iPad app, where Pandora sees “great engagement” already, and ironically was the inspiration for the Pandora web update that kicked off all the changes we’re seeing today. That looks like it will be next in line. “Without saying too much it’s reasonable to infer that we’d like to have a consistent user experience across all the major platforms,” says Conrad. “It’s safe to assume we’ll take it full circle to the iPad.”

One of the coolest (and most useful) features of Google’s Android Jelly Been 4.2 update is multiple user account switching, offering up the option to have several users share access to a device, while keeping their settings and content walled off from each other. It’s something we’ve been used to on PCs forever, so it’s bound to be welcomed by Android users. However, we’ve learned that the new feature will likely only apply to tablets, certainly as far as Google’s Nexus range is concerned. Phones need not apply. The reason — and this is purely an educated guess on my part — could well be that back in the day Nokia already patented the idea (via its involvement with Symbian).

Here we go again.

The patent ‘Multi-user mobile telephone’, whose inventor is Tim Ocock, an ex-Symbian employee, is described as follows:

A mobile telephone is designed to be used by several different end-users at different times. A first end-user can alter the mobile telephone so that it operates in a manner specific to that first end-user and a subsequent end-user can alter the mobile telephone so that it operates in a manner specific to that subsequent end-user; each end-user has only to respond to prompts displayed on a screen in order to alter the mobile telephone so that it operates in a manner specific to that end-user.

In contrast, here’s how Google’s marketing material describes the new tablet-only Android feature (my emphasis):

With support for multiple users, you can give each person their own space. Everyone can have their own homescreen, background, widgets, apps and games – even individual high scores and levels! And since Android is built with multitasking at its core, it’s a snap to switch between users – no need to log in and out. Available only on tablets.

As I understand it, the use-case that Nokia had in mind was emerging markets where the prohibitive cost of a mobile phone might mean that family members shared the device. But clearly, the patent is more widespread than that. And whilst it might be a more relevant and useful feature on a post-PC tablet device, the fact that Nokia appears to hold a patent for multiple user switching on a phone, might well explain why Google is limiting the feature to tablets only and not phones.

More from that Symbian/Nokia patent:

The present invention therefore moves away from the established assumption that a mobile telephone is personal to a single end-user and instead readily allows the mobile telephone to be used by several end-users through appropriate on-screen prompts. Such a device may be especially relevant to communities where few individuals can afford the cost of their own personal telephone. More generally, it is useful for any entity to whom there are benefits from being able to easily share mobile telephones across multiple end-users (e.g. large corporation may have a pool of such mobile telephones; any employee can then simply pick up one of these telephones and be able to use it like a personal device).

An interesting new study released today by venture capital and angel investment-focused research firm CB Insights found that, in a shocking twist, graduates of Stanford University do not actually dominate when it comes to building startups that nab top VC dollars.

LOL, just kidding. Of course Stanford alumni dominate the VC-funded tech startup space.

Indeed, anyone who’s spent any amount of time in Silicon Valley notices the prevalence of Stanford graduates at every level of the tech industry, from the engineers who build web startups to the financiers who fund them. Even the blog world is not immune from the Cardinal’s reach — TechCrunch counts a number of Stanford grads as staffers, including our co-editor Eric Eldon, who was actually the editor-in-chief of the Stanford Daily back in his free-wheeling college days. The Stanford alumni network certainly feels like a real, palpable thing around these parts.

And CB Insights’ study, dubbed its first-ever University Entrepreneurship Report, found that Stanford’s power is not just something that seems big anecdotally — it can actually be quantified.

The report looked at the alumni from six universities that are generally considered part of the “top-tier” in terms of technology and business to evaluate how they stood in the venture capital space. The research identified $12.6 billion invested in 559 deals from 2007 to 2011, and found that Stanford was the top university in terms of its alumni receiving venture capital. Stanford alums raised $4.1 billion across 203 financings, the study found, “handily beating” the other schools in terms of deals.

Harvard came in a close second in terms of all deals, thanks in large part to the role of Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (CB included dropouts in the study.) Once that was removed, Stanford was far and away the top school when it comes to its alumni making waves in the VC world.

However, it bears mention that Stanford shouldn’t be resting on its laurels (or, I guess, its palm trees.) Stanford’s power over the Bay Area and the tech industry has been criticized at high levels recently, so the school needs to be a bit sensitive in wielding its strength. And in terms of growth, CB’s study showed that East Coast schools NYU and Harvard are exhibiting the fastest growth rates of all six schools monitored on a percentage growth basis.

As in almost all research, you can quibble with some details of this study. CB only looked at six universities (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, NYU, UC Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania) so some people might feel like not all schools got a fair shake at showing how strong they can be in tech and VC. And of course, counting successful dropouts as alums is not always smiled upon by the people who put in the work and tuition to finish their studies.

But in all it seems like a pretty realistic take. A separate recent study released by Stanford showed that in 2006, the University was the top employer in all of Silicon Valley, so it makes sense that that kind of impact is going to be felt beyond the campus’ walls. Now that the interest in tech spans so far beyond Silicon Valley, the question is how long Stanford will remain so clearly on top.

SeatGeek, the ticketing startup that launched at the TechCrunch50 conference back in 2009, tells that it had its first profitable month in August.

That wasn’t just a temporary blip either, said co-founder Russell D’Souza. September was profitable too, and he expects the company to maintain its profitability into the future: “Revenue drivers are just growing so much faster than any sort of expense that we have.”

What kind of growth are we talking about? Well, the company said it brought in $2.5 million in gross ticket sales in September, compared to $1.1 million in September 2011, and $550,000 in September 2010. Traffic is growing too, with 1.6 million visits to the SeatGeek site in September, up from 490,000 in 2011 and 260,000 in 2010.

D’Souza argued that his company provides a compelling counter-example to all the overnight success stories of startups that are celebrated for their explosive user growth. That didn’t happen with SeatGeek — instead, it grew steadily and focused on revenue rather than “a more hazy metric like user accounts,” he said.

SeatGeek’s ticket search engine is best known for aggregating listings from resale sites like StubHub. It’s also moving into primary ticket sales, thanks to a partnership with Ticketfly.

The company recently raised a $1.65 million round of funding. D’Souza noted, “We have never been in a position where we’ve had a very high burn rate,” so SeatGeek hasn’t had to raise much venture money.

Google likes to skate to where the puck might be next game. They were first in the U.S. with a viable NFC payments solution (that isn’t very popular) and they’ve been at the forefront of AR with Glass (which is too expensive for the average consumer) and now they’re one of the first to market with a wireless charging solution for the Nexus 4.

Wireless charging has been far too slow on the uptake, but that’s to be expected. Beyond a very few very specific situations, the technology is slow, and in the case of Google’s Qi-based solution, the device has to be statically placed at a certain position on the charging pad. The Qi standard has some ways around that particularly onerous requirement – if you have to stick it in a certain place, why not just plug in a cable – but to complain about it is to miss the point.

Every port, dock, and transformer requires resources and real estate. Apple reduced the 30-pin port not because it wanted to piss off the millions of iPod dock owners out there. In order to reduce size and footprint they had to abandon the arguably huge 30-pin solution for the arguably more elegant Lightning port.

Imagine, then, what could happen if there were no ports at all? The headphone jack could free up a few millimeters in thickness and the wireless charging solution could save an additional bit of electronics. It’s not much, but it adds up.

I find it quite odd that Google is actually backing a standard other than Qi with Starbucks but I suspect, in the Powermat case, this is more a question of branding and cash payouts than anything else. I’ve found Powermat to be surprisingly shortsighted and inelegant over the past few years and it’s obviously not Duracell’s wish to completely move away from battery sales so I’m loath to trust them to be a good partner in the wireless power world.

I, for one, am glad that Google pushes things forward with these little technical tricks. They’re usually the first to the party but showing up early only counts for so much. They need to put cash into partnerships with points of sale in the case of NFC and some sort of public charging solution for Nexus users in order to convince the rest of the world that wireless charging is actually cool. Then they’ll really be creating a brave new world built mostly in Mountain View rather than Cupertino.

I’ll admit it — when those first leaked images of the Verizon-bound Nokia Lumia 822 started making the rounds, I hastily decided that the device was a bit too thick to be worth using in this age of super-svelte smartphones. Now that I’ve gotten a chance to play with the device in person during the aftermath of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, I find myself rethinking that judgment.

Don’t get me wrong — at 11.2mm thick, the 822 is awfully plump compared to some of the Windows Phone 8 handsets on display here, but its curved back and glossy finish means that it’ll never resist as you attempt to pull it out of your pocket. If anything, the version I played with was even thicker than normal because someone had swapped the stock backplate with the wireless charging plate, but the end result was a device that was still very comfortable to hold. As you can probably tell from the photos, I played with the white variant, though Verizon was quick to note in its release this morning that a (duller) grey version would also launch later this fall.

That said, looks aren’t everything. The 822 allowed me to gracefully scroll though Windows Phone’s long app lists and fired up apps with aplomb, thanks to both the 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor and Windows Phone’s general snappiness. From what I could tell, the 8-megapixel camera fared nicely on the strangely-lit stage, but I suspect it’s neat little features like Nokia Cinemagraph that will really drive usage of the device as a point-and-shoot.

The kindly Nokia rep I sat with for a few moments was eager to show off some of the technical enhancements (particularly those found in the camera, like the shake-resisting floating lens), but was quick to note that most of them were absent in the 822. A bummer for sure, but it makes sense — Nokia has always been very careful with how it positions its handsets (remember the days when it used arbitrarily chosen letters to define the intended target market for their phones? Fun stuff.)

At $99, the Lumia 822 is an interesting little beast. Simply calling it a “respectable” or “above-average” device isn’t quite giving it the credit it deserves — though a solid chunk of the device’s appeal is thanks to Windows Phone 8. Those of you who haven’t yet taken the plunge on a smartphone yet and are stuck with Verizon should keep this little guy in mind… at least until we figure out what the ATIV Odyssey is.

Google just announced that it is taking its Chrome Remote Desktop screen sharing service out of beta. As the name implies, the Chrome Remote Desktop app runs in Chrome and allows you to share your desktop with others or control theirs to see presentations — or, as Google notes, become the family hero by “adjusting printer settings on your mom’s computer to finding a lost file on your dad’s laptop.”

In addition to taking the service out of beta, Google also added a few new features to the tool. Most interestingly, Windows users can now share a real-time audio feed using the tool. This new version also brings the ability to copy and paste between your local machine and the remote computer you control. Google promises that it will continue to work on the Chrome Remote Desktop service and make it “even more powerful” in the future.

While the service runs in Chrome, you actually have to download and install a helper app to get things to work. The install process of the Chrome app will automatically prompt you to download these applications, which run on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Once installed, using the tools is about as easy as using applications like TeamViewer and other comparable services. If you want to share your own screen, you get a code to give to your family member or colleague to initiate the connection. In our brief tests, the image quality was quite good and comparable to similar services.

Cedexis, a company that specializes in helping companies use multiple cloud services to improve availability and load times, just announced that it is adding Amazon Web Services to its Openmix platform. With this, Cedexis says, its users will be able to avoid the kind of downtimes Amazon experienced in the last few weeks by hosting their data in multiple AWS regions and on other clouds.

Cedexis’ multi-region load balancer solution for AWS is now available in the AWS Marketplace and pricing starts at $200 per month. After that, the overall costs are based on the number of requests on Cedexis’ infrastructure.

The company, through its free and crowd-sourced Radar Community, constantly measures the availability and performance of virtually every cloud service and CDN worldwide. Whenever Cedexis detects performance degradations, its Openmix service can automatically direct traffic to more performant services.

According to Cedexis co-founder Julien Coulon, the company noticed issues with Amazon’s US-East EC2 area just before the service experienced a major outage on October 22nd, for example. Cedexis will offer a month of free service to any new customer who was affected by AWS’s last outage.

Cedexis, which has offices in Portland, OR, San Francisco and Paris, currently has about 250 clients, including major entertainment, media and eCommerce companies like Dailymotion, Dior, Canal+, L’Occitane en Provence, Volkswagen and Mozilla. This July, Cedexis also added video content delivery to Openmix, making it a more attractive option for video services.

Short version: Livescribe is refining its smartpen once again. The two major changes are the addition of WiFi and Evernote integration. Now, the pen uses and depends on Evernote for syncing and archiving notes.

Features:

• A ball pen
• Microphone
• WiFi
• 2, 4 or 8 GB
• $169.95, $199.95 or $249.95
• Product page

Pros:

• Record and take notes at the same time
• No USB syncing needed
• See your notes on your computer, phone and tablet

Cons:

• Large and tiring pen body
• Evernote is mandatory
• Expensive

Long version:

Like or hate it, the new Livescribe pen is all about Evernote. When CEO Gilles Bouchard came to work for Livescribe, the company was already working on a WiFi version of its smartpen. He met Evernote CEO Phil Libin ten days after starting his new job. It was the best way to bring Livescribe to a tablet.

“Tablet is the best thing that has happened to us. What was missing was filling the gap between paper and tablet,” Bouchard said.

Yet, the Oakland-based company’s focus hasn’t changed. The core idea remains using the qualities of paper to take notes and bringing them to a computer, a tablet or a phone. It’s just now easier to take advantage of Livescribe’s key feature.

As a writer, I’m a natural user for this kind of device. When I do an interview, I usually take notes and record the audio with my iPhone. Listening to the audio file is the most painful process when it comes to writing a post afterwards.

The Livescribe pen, the notes and the recording are not only handled by the pen, but are synced together. When playing back your notes on your computer or tablet (the player uses HTML5), you can click or tap on a certain sentence to jump instantly to the corresponding audio part of the interview. It’s a timesaver.

For avid Evernote users, it will be the perfect evolution. After receiving the new Livescribe pen, I tried using Evernote as my main note taking app for about two weeks. A few days ago, I switched back to Simplenote and Justnotes, because I couldn’t handle Evernote’s bulkiness and slowness.

Livescribe notes don’t count toward your Evernote quota as you can upload 500 MB of Livescribe content before starting eating up your quota. It represents around 50 hours of audio and written notes. The most expensive Sky WiFi comes with one year of Evernote Premium — a $50 value.

Evernote is now only my Livescribe repository. Those who deal with hundreds of notes and tags in Evernote will be glad to find their Livescribe notes in it. But it won’t be the case for me.

More integrations and services will be released in the coming weeks, such as Dropbox and Google Drive integration. The company will release an SDK so that mobile app developers will be able to take advantage of the pen’s data. Bouchard was excited by the possibilities and evolutions that will become available to Sky WiFi owners.

The battery is quite good. As an occasional user, I only had to plug the pen every couple of days.

Finally, you still have to use Livescribe’s paper. The pen comes with an A5 notebook and new notebooks aren’t expensive. But I like to be able to use whatever paper I want with my pen without having to look for my “device” (in this case, a notebook and a pen). I usually keep my pen in my pocket, an inexpensive Pilot Hi-Tec-C that I throw away when there is no ink left. I wouldn’t do that with a Livescribe pen. The simplicity of pen and paper is lost along the way.

Heavy note takers and/or Evernote users should consider using a Livescribe pen, because it’s a great device. I may continue using it occasionally for interviews, but for my personal notes, I’ll keep using a simple pen.

If you do a lot of interviews without your computer, attend math classes or like the novelty of a digital pen, then you are a potential customer. The initial investment is high, but the flexibility of paper brought to the digital environment is impressive and actually useful. I look forward to seeing the potential third-party apps and services that will pop up in the coming months.

Click to view slideshow.

We’ve all been inundated with political back and forth over the past few weeks. Curse you, social networks! And you too, Internet! And yet, what’s really frustrating isn’t the political back and forth, but the content that is being volleyed back and forth. More specifically, the lack of content. Watch 9 seconds of any recent episode of the Daily Show and you’ll see that networks, pundits, experts, you-name-its are all happily willing to spend their days blowing an out-of-context sentence completely out of proportion and make said sentence seem like the biggest offense to politics since Watergate.

As I sat at dinner one night, trying to zone out a completely nonsensical argument between a Romney-fanatic and an Obama-fanatic about which candidate was stupidest (actual word used in the argument), it came to me: this is the same type of  nonsensical arguing that goes on between iOS-fanatics and Android-fanatics. In fact, the tech community even names its scandals after political scandals.

But, this is good news! It means that there’s a way to relate politics (zZzZz…) to technology (!!!). Don’t believe me? Here’s a breakdown of the similarities the two share:

One Sided Opinions: Check.

One sided opinions are rampant in both debates. You’re either for iOS or against iOS (see what I did there?). People are quick to share their opinions and loath to listen to others. I’ve heard people go on for hours about all the awesome things you can do on Android that you simply can’t do on iOS. Or about the all the great things Obama will be able to finally accomplish if he’s re-elected.

The problem with one sided monologues (which is how they tend to come across, especially thanks to Twitter and Facebook, et. al) is that they are anything but comprehensive. Sure, you can talk all you want about Romney’s plan for letting in high-skill immigrants, but that’s only 1% of what he will do while he’s president.

Note, these are especially useless because they don’t help anyone: it doesn’t help the firm believers because they don’t need any more convincing in the first place, it doesn’t help the firm opposers because it just pisses them off, and it doesn’t help anyone in the middle because it’s too one sided to provide any actionable information.

One Size Fits All: Yup

It took me less than 3 seconds to find this:

Here’s a good check to see if you’re well informed and thinking rationally: If you are able to determine when someone else (e.g. a friend or family member) should vote for the other candidate or opt for the other operating system based on their needs, you pass! If you think that one choice is unequivocally better than another, be it Android or Romney, iOS or Obama, Windows Phone 8 or whatever the heck the name is of the Libertarian candidate¹, then you fail. Miserably.

Blowing Things Out of Proportion: You Betcha

At some level this is understandable. How do news networks or tech blogs fill all that white space and generate revenue? By making everything they talk about seem incredibly important. There’s an important distinction to be made here though: it’s one thing if news networks or blogs do this, but it is an entirely more egregious offense for consumers to partake in this sort of nonsense. Just because something is presented to you via a media channel does not mean you have to accept its importance at face value. Reviews and opinions may be helpful, but keep in mind that they aren’t always  infallible.

You may be thinking, “Okay, so what?” Well here’s where the kicker comes in: Politics actually matter. Sure, you use your phone every day and what mobile OS you opt for can (arguably) have a significant impact on your quality of life. But, it won’t make it into the history books. It won’t affect the next generation’s quality of life. Or our competitiveness as a country. Or our immigration policy. Politics, on the other hand, do. Keep that in mind as election day approaches.

So how did I decide on iOS vs. Android, Obama vs. Romney? Simple, I made my decision like any good (mechanical) engineer would: I collected facts, weighted the issues most important in my eyes, tallied the results, did a gut/reality check, and marked my ballot/bought my phone. Done. No petty arguments, no bugging everyone with my obviously superior decision, and no pressuring other people to follow my lead.

By the way, if you’re wondering who I am, the answer is: nobody, really. I’m mostly an outsider to the programming-centric startup environment that TechCrunch focuses on, although I do have a pretty sweet job (I may or may not work on designing and building the most lethal aircraft  currently flying). If my lack of a Klout score discredits my opinion, just know that I didn’t like you either.

¹Side note: the comparison of Windows Phone 8 to the Libertarian candidate is pretty apt. Nobody is willing to vote for them because (as of this writing), neither stands a chance to do more than crawl home with a laughable 3^rd place share. That’s not to say that no one likes them or that it’s good for the general public that they don’t stand a chance, but just calling it how it is (for now, at least).

A memory leak and a failed monitoring system caused the Amazon Web Services outage on Monday that took out Reddit and other major services.

According to a post Friday night, AWS explained that the problem arose after a simple replacement of a data collection server. After installation, the server did not propagate its DNS address correctly and so a fraction of servers did not get the message. Those servers kept trying to reach the server, which led to a memory leak that then went out of control due to the failure of an internal monitoring alarm. Eventually the system ground to a virtual stop and millions of customers felt the pain.

AWS:

By Monday morning, the rate of memory loss became quite high and consumed enough memory on the affected storage servers that they were unable to keep up with normal request handling processes.

The failure in its North Virginia region eventually interrupted Reddit, Foursquare, Minecraft,  Heroku, GitHub, imgur, Pocket, HipChat, Coursera and a number of others.

In the past, Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS) servers have proved troublesome. This outage proved not much different. The EBS servers, feeling the memory leak, began losing the ability to process customer requests, causing the number of stuck volumes to increase quickly. The server degradation came all at once, causing a tax on the system as not enough healthy servers could be found to replace them all.

The outage started at 10 a.m. PST. Five hours later  AWS discovered the root of the problem. An hour later things got back to normal.

AWS says it is taking a number of steps to prevent similar issues going forward. The group plans to  deploy monitoring that will alarm if this specific memory leak problem arises again in any of its production EBS servers. Next week it will begin deploying a fix for the memory leak issue.

AWS has had its share of outages over the past several months. Its problems are magnified by an increasingly competitive market that is seeking to slow AWS momentum by casting doubt on its infrastructure.

I get the competitive issues in play here. But customers should not overlook AWS uniqueness in providing a service that allows startups to use elastic computing, network and storage to compete on the world stage.  It may have outages but no other service comes even close to what AWS offers its customers.