Category: Tech news

There’s a ton of stuff happening this weekend in San Francisco. There’s the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. There’s Fleet Week. There’s the America’s Cup. There are San Francisco Giants playoff games. There’s a San Francisco 49ers matchup. There’s the Italian Heritage Parade in North Beach and the Castro Street Fair. There’s Burning Man’s Decompression Fair.

Altogether, some estimate San Francisco will have more than a million visitors entering the city this weekend for all these events. That’s a huge amount, considering that on a good day San Francisco has a native population of about 800,000 residents.

For residents here, that means a lot of crowding and traffic and a dearth of parking in a city where many people already have problems finding spots for their vehicles. While residents could lean heavily on transportation options like taxis, Uber (with surge pricing!), and Lyft, the problem of parking is, well, a problem. God isn’t making any more parking spaces, and so if you don’t have a spot in one of the neighborhoods affected by these events, you could have a problem finding some.

Enter ParkPlease, a new marketplace for parking spots. Like Airbnb for parking, the startup lets people who have spare room in their driveways to rent that out to others who need a place to park. The startup made a bit of a splash around Outside Lands, which is another music festival like Hardly Strictly that takes place in Golden Gate Park. It parked more than 1,000 vehicles during that event and ever since, it’s been busy adding parking inventory all over the city, including some areas that will be affected by this weekend’s events.

But for those who are going to the America’s Cup viewing area or checking out Fleet Week activities over the weekend, it’s got another option: ParkPlease has partnered up with Limos.com to provide relatively low-cost parking and party bus shuttles to and from those events. On Saturday and Sunday, users will be able to park at a lot in SOMA for $40 and get complementary shuttle service to and from the Marina. Shuttles will be running every 20 minutes to drop people off and pick them up throughout the day, so they won’t have to drive to find parking along with the other hundreds of thousands of people who plan to attend.

The promotion fits in with ParkPlease’s mission, which co-founder Charlie Ansanelli says is to “make parking stress-free.” That means helping users find parking even when there aren’t major events happening. The goal is to connect demand with supplies. And like other marketplaces, the company takes a small fee for all transactions that happen on its system. But in a weekend like this, it’s a good option to have, regardless.

Anyway, go out, get parking, and try not to sweat all the annoying tourists visitors everywhere, people.

Windows 8 will launch on October 26, but since it’s already available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers, as well as through a free trial, it almost feels as though it’s out already. Before it officially puts its latest masterpiece into the hands of mainstream users, however, Microsoft will update virtually all of the built-in Metro-style apps that ship with the new operating system. These include SkyDrive, Mail, Calendar, People, Photos, Bing, Maps, News, Weather, Travel, Video, Music, Games and Finance (yes – Microsoft ships a lot of built-in apps with Windows 8).

The first app to be updated is the Bing app. That update is coming tomorrow and will bring richer search results for local content to the app, as well as Bing rewards integration and the ability to use the file picker to “select an image from Bing to use on your lock screen or in your other apps.”

The SkyDrive app, for example, will now allow users to search within SkyDrive and rename and move folders and files. The Mail app will get better IMAP support and the ability to accept or decline invitations in emails. The Maps app will get support for Microsoft’s Bird’s eye view and indoor maps and the Music app will now feature a SmartDJ tool.

The update to the News app is especially interesting, as it will now feature “additional news content from partners such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.” Content from these two newspapers, of course, generally resides behind a paywall and it’s not clear if Microsoft has struck a deal with them to allow its users to access this content without a paid account, through in-app purchases, or if this is just a limited selection of content.

You can find a full run-down of all the updates here.

All of these apps will be updated within the next three weeks before the official Windows 8 launch and will be available through the Windows Store. According to today’s update,

After cutting its full-year projections for bookings and earnings, Zynga’s shares fell more than 20 percent to an all-time low in after-hours trading. The company’s shares are trading at $2.22, down more than 21 percent from today’s close of $2.82.

It’s been a hard road for the company since its IPO last December. Not only have numerous executives left (many of them brought over from EA), but several games like The Ville have not performed up to expectations. Zynga also said that it has had to write off between $85 million and $95 million of the $180 million it paid for OMGPOP this spring. The company bought the New York-based and YC-backed developer earlier this year for its surprise hit “Draw Something.”

If you look at the cash, short-term and long-term investments Zynga has on its balance sheet (which add up to just over $1.6 billion), the market is giving the company an enterprise value of between $100 million to $200 million beyond. Scary times indeed!

“The third quarter of 2012 continued to be challenging and, while many of our games performed to plan, as a whole we did not execute to our satisfaction,” said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in as statement.

The company said that games in its “invest and express” category, which are about decorating and collecting like Dream Heights and Dream Zoo, have not performed up to expectations. Pincus added that there will be “targeted cost reductions” in many areas.

Zynga cut its bookings projections (or how much it expects consumers to spend on virtual goods this year) to be in the range of $1.085 billion to $1.100 billion, down from $1.150 billion to $1.225 billion. Adjusted EBITDA (or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) got lowered to $147 million to $162 million from a range of $180 million to $250 million.

The decline of the stock may fuel more of a vicious cycle that sees a deeper loss of talent to other gaming companies or tech startups.

“At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve spent a good part of this morning defending two blog posts that hit the TechCrunch homepage last night. No it wasn’t “Jumio’s Credit Card Scanning Technology Pops Up in Travelocity’s Hotel Deals App” or even “Flayvr, A Mobile App That Automatically Creates Photo Albums, Raises $450K Seed Round.” Nope, instead, it was two posts that used the F-word* in the headline.

Quelle surprise.

Okay, for the record, F-word to F-word TechCrunch headlines is an aberration and not a habit: The total number of TechCrunch posts ever with the F-word in the title (including the two from yesterday) has been five — not counting URLs, stories about F*cked Company, or posts where people actually said the word F*ck, such as when then Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said FU to Michael Arrington onstage. Several hundred have used the four letter word actually in the article text.

It’s sad, but perhaps the biggest and most straw man argument in the avalanche of calls and emails and debates we got into about this is that there were two F-word headlines in a row — because one would have totally been okay somehow? Two!

“We should have spaced it out with some boring embargoed story about an app that will clearly die in 6 months,” writer Ryan Lawler pointed out cynically. Because we’re damned if we’re cynical and we’re damned if we’re cheerleaders.

The truth is that even one F-word isn’t okay when people are looking to get up in arms about something, and I know because I’ve published one F-word-headlined post (one in my whole life) and it was received in exactly the same fashion as these two, with a barrage of phone calls and emails and tweets: “That’s crazy! You’re crazy!” I still have to hear about it at parties.

The other bit of feedback I heard was that these posts weren’t thoughtful, or smart or somehow damaged the TechCrunch brand because they used swearing or weren’t 100% positive. Bollocks!

What I hate about these kinds of arguments is that they always end up in some version of “You don’t need to use cursing/snark/whatever for shock value” and imply that swearing (or being a fanboy, or being snarky) somehow means that the (usually negative) content of the post wasn’t good enough to stand on its own. Often these arguments come from people personally invested somehow, i.e. people who work for a given company, actual investors, or PR: People who have a stake in controlling the message.

Posting with a strong opinion on topics you care about, with little regard for the party line, has happened since the beginning of TechCrunch, and we have always incorporated and supported a diverse set of opinions. It is a collaborative blog with a flat editorial structure, and this unique set up is what makes it compelling and successful. We have to let all of our writers take risks, because despite the mistakes and flops, there will be a few big wins.

And if you mess up at TC, you’ll definitely be taking it in the comments, which can get nasty. I’ve never seen people rage more than in our comments section.

While at times messy and human, this kind of community-fueled process journalism ensures winners eventually become clear through, well, a process (look at the first comment on this Arrington Twttr post, for example).

What has changed between then and our current time is that it’s becoming more acceptable for journalists (or bloggers or writers what have you) to be friends or otherwise related to industry professionals, and thus feel more pressure and more likely to kowtow to their expectations.

The perils of kowtowing is press release re-writes versus something that was actually chewed up and processed and spat out by a human brain. And embargo culture only reinforces this press release hamster wheel, making people feel rushed and pressured and scaring the sense out of them.

The antidote for a young writer, in tech and beyond, is honesty: You’re not getting paid to be played by PR, you’re getting paid to serve your readers and stay true to yourself. As in, as much as you want to make somebody’s day or get off of work early, you should try to call it like you see it. People will hate you for it, but oh well, because some will also secretly love you for telling the truth.

As many entrepreneurs know, what happens when you do anything that challenges the status quo is that you’ll get to listen to people who don’t agree with you tell you you’re nuts, or a shill or lame and heap all sorts of FUD on top of you to get you to fit nicely within their own definition of what’s safe. People will hate your blog post.

But succumbing to this FUD is not the modus operandi here, as it shouldn’t be at any media organization or startup. As Obama’s vanilla performance during yesterday’s debates showed: The price you pay for being afraid to be controversial is irrelevance. And losing.

Additional research by Jon Orlin.

*In case you didn’t notice, the F-word is not used in this article, not even in the URL, for effect.

For Oracle, it’s about the machine, not the user; this became abundantly clear this week at Oracle Open World. Oracle talks the cloud talk but what the company is really doing is protecting its base and building engineered systems that, by all accounts, is extraordinary technology.

But its principles are wrong. I see little proof of humanity. What I do see are calibrated machines – homogenous and stacked in Oracle’s shiny red brand. But maybe that’s what people want in the end. For me, that is depressing as hell and counter to the swell of innovation that pushes me back every day like some gale force wind that picks me up and drops me into a new world.  At every level of this altered place a creature pops up to remind me that the reality is not all that we see in a subterranean conference hall on the Bay.

I don’t get that sense of delight or fantasy with Oracle. The people there act like “serious” adults without the endless fascination of what really keeps people young. I don’t see that curiosity about the fellow in the the jeans and the t-shirt who looks at you through the mirror of another world, quizzically wondering about what joy comes from perpetuating old software stacks in new worlds.

I just don’t get it when I read Jack Clark’s post about Oracle being the Apple of the enterprise. Perhaps because I find proprietary IP companies a real danger to customers. It’s a bad idea to take them at their word. Good luck getting your data out of an Oracle system or an Oracle cloud. Get stuck in that trap and the world is more of a nightmare than anything else.

Yes, Oracle has developed an impressive infrastructure. Vinnie Mirchandani, one of the most respected analysts you will find, says he has “waited for over a decade to see an enterprise vendor – IBM, HP, SunGard, EMC, etc. – detail how they would deliver their promises of on-demand, utility cloud computing.” He says Oracle is shooting for the moon, bringing the real promise of utility computing.

Ray Wang  of Constellation Research tells me that Oracle is meeting the needs of all its customers with cloud, hosting, and some form of quasi-multi-tenancy. I can accept that.

But even if it is all about the “system” and serving the thick middle, the price may be too much when the innovators can give you so much more than what it would cost a SaaS company to upgrade to Exadata.

Analyst Curt Monash puts it this way by saying that Oracle may get its way with some customers who just feel they have no other choice while others will move on. He made this remark on Twitter just a bit ago:

Oracle hasn’t announced features that actually have to do with multi-tenancy. Quite the contrary, actually.

I see that as saying Oracle is full of it. They use the term multi-tenancy simply to pull more customers into this belief that things can be so simple when you just buy their hardware. It’s a subtle form of cloud washing.

And that brings me to Podio, which represents a view that comes from the user. Podio provides building blocks so users can create their own apps for their particular style of work. It’s about the people more so than the machines.

I asked Podio Co-Founder Kasper Hulthin if perhaps Oracle is right and that people just don’t care.

“Nope,” he said. “There will always be a segment that want to do things the way they are told. But we are seeing people complain.” He cited Dropbox and its explosive growth and the number of other refreshing new services we see emerging.

And there you go. Podio and all the apps of another reality give me hope that all those creatures popping up are really our looking glass into a new world.

It’s a world of a new kind of work that you can’t get with an Oracle suite and big hardware.

I know it’s about business and systems and all. But I will fight that trapped view every day if it does not embrace that creativity that makes life so dynamic in the tech world. A world you can only find by entering a new reality.

Over the past several years, Los Angeles-based ZEFR (f.k.a. Movieclips) has been focused on getting Hollywood studios to let it license their movies and create clips of their films to put on YouTube. But it’s recently added a new business focused on helping content creators across a number of verticals to monetize content that gets posted on YouTube. Now, it’s going beyond just its home U.S. market and taking on the world, with a key international hire to expand overseas.

ZEFR has hired Daniel Adams as its VP of international biz dev, which will make him responsible for the company’s partnerships with media companies in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Adams has a ton of experience working with content providers through his previous gig at Dailymotion, where he was VP of international content. He’ll be opening up ZEFR’s London office, which is the company’s first international outpost.

For ZEFR, going international makes a whole lot of sense. For now, the company is all about YouTube, and 70 percent of YouTube’s traffic comes from outside the U.S. In addition to licensing movie content from major film studios — which was the legacy Movieclips business — ZEFR has been working with content producers to identify and monetize videos submitted by other users. It’s that second part of the business that Adams will be mostly focusing on building out, striking deals with media companies internationally to help them cash in on videos submitted by their biggest fans.

Founder Zach James told me by phone that ZEFR’s product is for big content owners, and “it doesn’t matter where they are.” The company wants to aggressively move into the music, tv, and sports segments in major European markets, which is why it’s launching the new London office.

But Adams wasn’t the only interesting hire ZEFR has made recently: The company has also been building out its engineering team, recently nabbing a few individuals from the old BetterWorks team. Office perks startup BetterWorks was known in the L.A. community for hiring very talented engineers scouted by Silicon Valley founders George Ishii, formerly of Geni, and Farmville co-creator Sizhao Yang. The company apparently had a very competitive process for hiring, and brought on employees from tech companies like Twitter and Salesforce.

When it became known that BetterWorks was shutting down, there was a lot of interest in employees there, according to James. But ZEFR was able to recruit two top engineers and a product manager from the now-defunct startup.

In total, ZEFR has 13 engineers on staff and is looking to staff up more. To help with that, it’s hired Rebecca Stillman, a recruiter out of Zynga who is tasked with helping to attract some Silicon Valley engineering talent to move to Southern California. “We’re focused on finding great engineers that want to be in nice weather,” James said. Other perks come from working with a startup that is growing, but has already overcome many of its early-stage hurdles. And working at the convergence of where media meets technology, which few folks outside of L.A. get to do.

ZEFR has raised about $29 million since being founded in late 2009, including an $18.5 million round led by U.S. Venture Partners, with participation from MK Capital, Shasta Ventures, SoftTech VC, First Round Capital, Richmond Park Partners, and Machinima CEO Allen DeBevoise. The company has about 100 employees now, and is located in sunny Venice, Calif.

Here’s a neat, well-deserved win for a startup company: Paper, the critically acclaimed drawing application for iPad is now being featured by Apple on iPad demo units in its retail stores, and is passing the love on to its users, having selected five Paper creators and their journals to share on the demo iPads. Paper developer FiftyThree co-founder Georg Petschnigg also shared in an interview that the app now has over 3.3 million downloads, with over 25 million pages created and representing over 190 years of total time spent in-app by users.

The featured journals Paper selected cover a range of topics, including Architecture, Cartoons, Illustration, Design and Cars, contributed by users Joaquim Mera, Bas van den Broek, Candykiller, Andrew Kim and René Lee, respectively. Petschnigg says that FiftyThree is very diligent about watching Tumblr and Twitter for creations originating from Paper, in order to help some of their most promising users get featured in exactly this kind of scenario. I asked whether he thought this featured spot at Apple Retail might lead to more user attention for Paper itself, but Petschnigg said this is more about drawing attention to what its users are accomplishing through the app.

“For us, the real excitement is that we get to showcase the work people are doing on Paper and really shift people’s perceptions,” he said. “Most people say ‘iPads are only for consumption,’ and that’s just not the case. The first thing we had to do is demonstrate that iPads are for creation, and the second piece is that a lot of people think they’re not creative, and that surprises us.” Being able to showcase this kind of work on a national stage helps with that goal, by reminding users what they’re capable of.

As for the product’s traction and engagement, Petschnigg says he’s very happy with Paper’s progress. The app is consistently in the top 50 or 60, but the engagement numbers are what he says the company really values. The fact that people spend that time within the app on creative activities rather than engaging in more mindless pursuits is very encouraging to the team, Petschnigg said.

Paper’s revenue model is based on a freemium model, and user reviews (which are consistently high) indicate that users are after more premium content, like additional colors, a good sign for a business based on in-app purchase. Color is also supporting the upcoming Pogo Connect pressure-sensitive stylus by Ten One Design, which, if it works well, could help in convincing even more users that the iPad is indeed a powerful creative tool.

The 3D printer craze shows no signs of stopping and Kickstarter is full of exciting examples of new printing hardware. Today’s entrant in the 3D race? The devilishly cute PandaBot, a “fur white” 3D printer with an 11x11x11-inch build area and a smooth, seamless design.

The bot prints in ABS plastic and has one enclosed print head. All of the major machinery is hidden behind white metal panels and the aforementioned “Panda” styling means this doesn’t look like a junk yard mated with the thing E.T. built in the woods.

Founded by Torontoans Kelly John Rose and Felix Tang, the project is looking for $50,000; PandaBots cost $800 for the basic model, which is quite reasonable. Like flowers in the meadow, 3D printers are beautiful and manifold, and this one is more attractive than most.

Project Page

Entrepreneurship is one of the few non-partisan issues these days. As a potential engine of job creation, both sides tend to idealize startups and SMBs as the cure-all for a laconic economy and unemployment. Of course, to grow and create those jobs, startups need capital. And traditionally, the businesses that can’t or won’t raise venture capital turn to banks, commercial lenders, and other sources to fund their operations. However, with the credit crunch, SMBs were forced to turn to other alternatives. Namely, crowdfunding sites.

The passage of the JOBS Act earlier this year cemented that not just in practice, but in policy. As a result, it’s been a huge year for crowdfunding platforms — especially Kickstarter, which has raised $50 million for games alone in 2012. But with the increased attention, we’ve started to spy potential holes in the crowdfunding model.

Two problems in particular stand out and two startups are trying to solve them: Crowdfunding platform Rock The Post limits its projects to those created by legitimate entrepreneurs and SMBs to reduce risk for backers and provides tons of hands-on help during the funding process to help project creators increase their chances of being funded. And CrowdHut is, among other things, helping entrepreneurs tackle the challenge of what to do once they’ve been funded and have 10,000 orders staring them in the face.

They’re two equally significant problems for crowdfunding platforms, and while the two startups may not be the next Google, they represent an important and necessary step forward for the space in terms of how it handles both those who seek funding for their ideas, and those who dish it out.

Rock The Post

Two big complaints often hurled at Kickstarter are that it’s not doing enough to protect the backers (or the customers) of its projects and that it lacks a deep toolset that would allow, for example, creators to manage and gather information on their backers or offer advice/educational info on how to improve the chances of success. At this point, if you actually want to fulfill your orders, you’re going to have to collect the data on your customers yourself. Everything from analytics to processing should be provided to creators to help them optimize the process.

Launched in November last year and backed by $700K in seed funding, Rock The Post takes a page from Fundly’s book and accepts projects for nonprofits and charities that are charged a special fee to participate alongside founders’ projects.

To add a layer of protection for backers, Rock The Post monitors every project submitted to its site, conducting due diligence on creators to verify that they’re nonprofit organizations and ensure that any pledge money goes toward a real cause, for example.

The crowdfunding platform also focuses aggressively on customer service, with its staff personally assisting each project creator (once approved) in the curation and crafting of their campaign. The team offers one-on-one consulting sessions, weekly, personalized email tips, and a variety of educational info, such as tips, guidelines, webinars, and tutorials to increase the potential for success. The platform charges a 5 percent fee for successfully funded projects, which is lower than if one were to use CrowdHut’s services (and the majority of crowdfunding portals).

Rock The Post offers an integrated payments option, so that users can make transactions on the site itself, rather than being directed to a third-party website. Again, the startup’s main value proposition is the degree to which it’s willing to help its project creators reach their funding goals, trying to remove that impersonal air that can infect larger platforms.

As soon as they’re approved, project creators get a call from Rock The Post to ensure they understand and are following the guidelines. The platform also now has editing features built-in so that users can personalize their pages (it also includes “team page management”) and receive tips tailored to where the project is in the fundraising process. On top of that, the startup has a feedback rating system (a la eBay) so that users can learn more about the background of individual project creators.

The goal of Rock The Post is really to only fund the products and ideas that actually have a chance to make a difference in the world, rather than approving any idea that hits their radar. With its “focus on entrepreneurs, not dreamers,” the startup is trying to keep its platform legitimate and help eliminate some of the barriers that typically stand between startups and growth capital.

By closely involving itself in project development and marketing, Rock The Post begins to slip into Quirky territory — the social networking/collaboration suite recently raised $68 million from Andreessen and Kleiner. It’s got Wahooly and Fundable to compete against in the rewards-by-equity space, and it really needs to do more to differentiate its design and user experience. At least superficially, it sure feels a lot like Kickstarter.

In terms of how it will reward its customers, the startup will decide — once the SEC releases its rules and regulations  – whether or not it wants to be a purely rewards-based platform, an equity platform, or a hybrid. My guess would be hybrid. Check out the Rock The Post profile below:

CrowdHut

Another related criticism of Kickstarter that’s begun to surface this year is that the company is not taking a strong enough position on accountability. I think that’s a little short-sighted and Kickstarter is between a rock and a hard place on that one, but this fulfillment or follow-through issue is a real problem.

For example, you set out as an entrepreneur to get a few people interested in your next-gen watch, hoping to get funded, build, and take it to market. Then, like Pebble, you raise over $10 million. It’s part joyous, part oh shit.

Now you have to fulfill 70K orders, when only two weeks earlier you may have been flipping burgers. By Kickstarter’s TOU, project creators are legally obligated to follow through, but, a year later, some are still waiting for their shipments to arrive.

In July, we took a deep look at what makes the most successful Kickstarter projects successful and asked what they did wrong, or what they’d change if they did it again. The most common trend to surface: A lack of preparedness among entrepreneurs in terms of hosting, customer interaction, outreach, and CRM — all the way to manufacturing and fulfillment demands.

Philip Reicherz, founder of Magnolia Ventures and the first employee (and later partner) at SecondMarket, Sell Your Stuff founder David Borish, and consultant/entrepreneur Eric Koenig started CrowdHut in May to bring a steadier stream of income to product founders by tackling the distribution side of crowdfunding with an e-commerce platform and affiliate marketing program.

Since then, CrowdHut has expanded its scope to include this specific use case I mentioned before. Co-founder and CTO David Borish explains to Crowdsourcing.org:

One of the things we learned over the last three months, since we started this venture, was that there is a much bigger need [to help] those entrepreneurs that are funded, but prior to actually having the product being sold … There are a number of concerns in the crowdfunding industry about products that have not been able to make their projected deadlines. Our focus is building the advisory team to [also] help those products that are funded and need assistance prior to actually having a product that’s ready for market.

So, CrowdHut is addressing this problem by offering a searchable e-commerce platform (which launched with 50 vendors and 100 products), product fulfillment and marketing services, and a team of eight expert advisors who specialize in everything from retail and direct response advertising to patents. The idea is to help entrepreneurs (who have their projects funded but no go-to-market strategy) find supplementary forms of distribution for their products and go to market in style.

In addition, CrowdHut also launched today an affiliate marketing platform, which allows bloggers, media types, influencers, etc. to earn a 10 percent commission for promoting the products. Bloggers love revenue shares.

CrowdHut, which provides payment processing, return and restock, affiliate marketing, advertising, and distribution, takes 30 percent of successful sales. It may seem steep for first-time crowdfunding entrepreneurs, but there’s plenty of benefit for those with small teams that don’t have the resources to handle the ins and outs of marketing, distribution, and processing.

It’s easy to see the value of a services layer emerging around crowdfunding sites. However, at this point, CrowdHut is just in stage one. Entrepreneurs may be looking for a use case in which they get all the stuff mentioned above, while also being able to rely on the platform to take care of every link in the product fulfillment chain. CrowdHut isn’t doing this yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this made it into a future iteration.

Photo (CC-BY): James Cridland

Holy cow AT&T, another announcement? While most of the other national wireless carriers have opted to save some news for later on, AT&T keeps pushing out releases like it’s going out of style.

Anyway, in addition to heavily pushing Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 handsets, the carrier has also announced that it will carry a pair of Windows 8 tablets — the Asus VivoTab RT and Samsung’s ATIV Smart PC — in time for the holiday rush.

Samsung’s ATIV Smart PC is the more familiar of the two since the Korean company made a point of showing it off at its big London press event earlier this year, but here’s a quick recap in case you missed Samsung’s spectacle. The ATIV sports a 11.6-inch HD display, while a 1.5GHz Intel Clover Trail processor and 64GB of internal storage help keep things ticking along. Interestingly, AT&T doesn’t specify whether or not the ATIV is set up for LTE, though it does play the availability of a keyboard-toting docking system to please those productivity fiends among you.

That said, AT&T is quick to crown Asus’ VivoTab the “first quad-core Windows RT 4G LTE tablet,” and it’s (perhaps obviously) the less hefty of the two. Smaller though it may be, the VivoTab (ugh, really?) runs with a more standard 10.1-inch Super IPS display, only 32 GB of storage, and one of NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 chipsets.

As usual, there’s no word yet on pricing, but AT&T stopped subsidizing its tablets back in August so don’t expect to be able to sign a contract and walk out with the cheap tablet. AT&T is playing the availability card close to its chest as well, but the smart money is on seeing them sooner rather than later.

Gaming company Zynga has just released preliminary financial results for the third quarter of 2012, lowering its outlook for the year. The company expects to report full Q3 results October 24.

Zynga expects to report revenue in the range of $300 million to $305 million and bookings in the range of $250 million to $255 million for the third quarter. The company also says it will report a net loss of between $90 million and $105 million, non-GAAP net loss between $2 million and $5 million and adjusted EBITDA between $10 million and $15 million for the third quarter.

In addition, Zynga expects to report diluted EPS between ($0.12) and ($0.14) and non-GAAP EPS between $0.00 and ($0.01) for the third quarter.

This is more bad news for Zynga, which missed earnings in Q2. At the time, Zynga lowered its outlook. And a few months later, Zynga is cutting its outlook once again. For basis of comparison, Zynga reported Q3 2011 revenue (when it was a private company still) of $306.8 million for the quarter, which was up 80 percent from Q3 2010. Net income was $12.5 million, down 50 percent from the third quarter 2010 ($27.2 million).

These losses are attributed to certain games in the company’s web “invest and express” category, and also includes an estimated impairment charge between $85 million and $95 million (excluding any income tax impact) related to the intangible assets previously acquired in connection with the company’s purchase of OMGPOP.

“The third quarter of 2012 continued to be challenging and, while many of our games performed to plan, as a whole we did not execute to our satisfaction,” said Mark Pincus, CEO and Founder of Zynga in a release.

“We’re addressing these near-term challenges by implementing targeted cost reductions in the fourth quarter and rationalizing our product R&D pipeline to reflect our strategic priorities. At the same time, we are continuing to invest in our mobile business where we have one of the strongest positions in the industry. These actions support our strategy to transition from being a first party web game developer to a multiplatform game network. We remain optimistic about the opportunity for social gaming and the power of our player network of 311 million monthly active users. When we offer our players highly engaging content, they respond. FarmVille2 has been our most successful launch since CastleVille in terms of daily bookings, and we now offer 3 of the top 5 most popular mobile games in the U.S. in terms of time spent according to Nielsen.”

Zynga is also lowering its outlook for full year 2012 to reflect preliminary third quarter results and revised expectations for the remainder of 2012. The change in outlook is primarily due to reduced expectations for certain web games including The Ville, and delays in launching several new games.

The company’s updated outlook for full year 2012 includes: Bookings projected to be in the range of $1.085 billion to $1.1 billion (compared to previous expectations of between $1.150 billion to $1.225 billion). Adjusted EBITDA projected to be in the range of $147 million to $162 million (compared to previous expectations of between $180 million to $250 million).

This dismal news adds to the reports of a mass exodus from the company, as well as a steadily declining stock price. The company’s stock closed today at $2.82.

We’ve already seen that the new Facebook Exchange for retargeted ads is delivering impressive results for advertisers. Now a startup called Perfect Audience aims to make those campaigns accessible to a broad range of startups, small ad agencies, and other advertisers.

Co-founder and President Brad Flora says the current batch of ad companies offering access to Facebook Exchange are serving large advertisers — it usually takes a few days to learn how to use the product, and there’s often a minimum ad buy. With Perfect Audience, on the other hand, anyone can run a campaign of any size. You just create or upload the ad, fill out a form with the basic campaign information, provide a credit card, and you’re good to go. And if you still have trouble, the website includes pointers explaining each component of the campaign.

Like other forms of retargeting, Facebook Exchange offers a way for business to deliver ads to people who visited their site but didn’t convert (whether they’re looking for a sign up, a purchase, or whatever) — in this case, of course, those retargeted ads are appearing on Facebook.

Lots of ad companies, especially those offering products for small businesses, like to say that they’re easy to use, but Flora illustrated the point by asking me to create a campaign of my own. It really did only take a few minutes to set things up, with a minimal amount of hand-holding (basically, I just needed Flora to reassure me that my credit card wouldn’t actually be charged).

So after you read this post, if you visit Facebook, you may see an ad pointing you to more Facebook-related coverage in TechCrunch. That’s the magic of retargeting. (And if you don’t like retargeted ads, uh, my apologies.)

Perfect Audience was actually part of the summer 2011 class at incubator Y Combinator. It has also raised a $1.1 in seed funding from SVAngel, Start Fund, New World Ventures, YC, The Knight Foundation, WGI Group, and various angels including YC partner Paul Buchheit, Stuart Larkins of the I2A Fund, Northwestern Business School lecturer Andrew Razeghi, ShopLocal founder Brian Hand, Lon Chow of Apex Venture Partners, and Kevin Willer, president of the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center.

Flora, who previously worked as a journalist (he went to grad school with TechCrunch’s Leena Rao), says Perfect Audience has been working on a broader suite of retargeting products, but it decided to focus on Facebook for now because there is “a huge hunger” for it. More than 250 advertisers, including tech companies New Relic and Tagstand, have already signed up, and Perfect Audience says it’s seeing 30 new sign ups per day.

Those campaigns are delivering a great return, the company says. One customer normally pays $1.65 for clicks on Adwords and $1 for clicks through Perfect Audience’s web retargeting, but they only paid a 19 cent CPC for Facebook retargeting.

The Fitbit Zip tells you how many steps you’ve taken each day and how many calories you’ve burned, among other data. Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

When the original Fitbit came out a few years ago, there was very little else like it on the market. Wearable movement trackers were a novelty, and the Fitbit had no equal, thanks to its seamless data transfers and delightfully user-friendly software interface. But time moves on, and now there are plenty of excellent options — like the monitors from BodyMedia and Nike — to track your movements, sleep and calories burned. That’s the market the Fitbit Zip, one of two new offerings from the company, waddles into.

The Zip is a key-fob-sized, er, fob with a clip on one side to hook to your clothes. On the other side is a wee (0.75 x 0.5-inch) monochrome LCD screen. You slip it in your pocket, on your collar, or pretty much anywhere, and it begins tracking your movements each day.

To see where you stand, just tap the monochrome screen — itself an improvement over the original Fitbit, which offered no live feedback. Keep tapping to scroll through calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, time, plus a little Tamagotchi-style emoticon who smiles, grins or sasses you depending on how much you’ve shaken your booty on any given day.

Even better, it’s got built-in Bluetooth. By harnessing the ancient power of radio, the Zip will send updates to either an app on your phone (iOS only, with Android on the way. Sorry, all 12 of you Windows Phone users), or a web dashboard via a small app that runs in the background on your desktop. The Zip comes with a little USB key that plugs into your computer to receive data. It’s a fantastic feature. You never have to sync anything, but your steps are just there.

Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired

There is some sort of promise of easy fitness with the Zip and products like it, a hint that by simply wearing it, you’re going to shed pounds via ambient awareness of your movements and activity level. That’s just not true. Having spent several years now with some sort of monitor hooked up to my body, tracking is only one small part of getting into shape. For example, there is a Nike+ GPS Sport Watch on my counter that asks me the same question every day via a message on its screen: “Time for a Run Today?” The answer is always no.

Having said that, there are some really great things about the Zip that will encourage you to exercise if you are open to it. It awards little badges — taking 10,000 steps in a day, logging your first 50 miles walked — and I found myself checking in to see if I’d earned more.

It counted my steps like a choreographer, right out of the box. Although you can set your stride length in the web dashboard, I never found reason to do so. Counting was consistently accurate enough: within three to seven steps for every 100 I took. The calories burned counter is useful as well, especially when you use it with the app’s food-tracking feature (see below).

Other manual inputs in the smartphone app also help make Fitbit more of a total fitness-tracking utility. Ride your bike to work this morning? Great. Add that as an activity, and it will include the calories you burned on your ride to your day’s total, even if you never took the Zip out of your bag. Suck down a couple of Big Macs at lunch? Just enter that into the app on your phone, fattie, and Fitbit will automatically add in the calories. Its database knows the caloric value of all the common foods, and you can manually add in the calorie counts from foods it doesn’t know.

Fitbit’s app lets you view your data in a dashboard using nice, clean charts and graphs.

But that manual inputting is, well, a chore. The Fitbit’s killer feature has always been its ability to provide a fully automated experience. Pulling your phone out and manually inputting meals and activities is a nice touch, but it’s not why you’ll buy this. Plenty of other apps already pull this off, while tracking other metrics like location to boot.

But if this product has a weak point, it’s the clip. Not that it doesn’t hold fast (it does!) but because you have to remember to clip it to your clothes each day. Twice, I left the house without it and missed full days of step-counting. I was also perpetually worried that I would forget to take it out of my pocket and have it end up in the wash. I really prefer devices that are body-wearable, like the Nike FuelBand.

And then there is the battery. It uses a 3V watch battery. This is great, in that just as you don’t have to connect the Zip to anything to transfer data, you don’t have to dock it to any sort of base station to charge it. And battery life is quite good — after more than two weeks, I’m still at a “high” battery level. But I’m guessing that when it comes time to swap the battery, a lot of these Zips will simply wink out in sock drawers of sadness like a cheap watch.

Still, overall, this is a great little pedometer and activity tracker. It’s fun to use, easy to setup and understand, and just plain works.

WIRED Tap-to-view stats are wonderful and motivating. Goals and badges give you something to work towards. Syncs better than the kitchen section at Home Depot. Comes in multiple colors so you can express your individuality in one of five ways.

TIRED You snooze, you lose: This Fitbit doesn’t do sleep tracking. You are so going to lose this sucker harder than a Pac 12 team playing in an SEC home game.

King of Opera

Mobile devices are not, generally, considered great ice-breakers. If anything, pulling out your tablet or smartphone at a social gathering tells the world “I do not care to interact with you flesh-beings.”

However, a growing number of games invite you to set your device in the middle of the table and let your friends get their grubby little fingers on it in pursuit of multiplayer party action. Here are a few of the best table games out there.

King of Opera

Rotund tenors may never take the place of space marines and orc warlords in hardcore games, but they’re perfect in this party-action offering. Up to four players gather ’round the tablet — or phone, if you have small fingers and sharp eyesight — and attempt to belly-bounce their competitors out of the spotlight. The gameplay is simple: There’s just one button, and it sends your ever-spinning singer charging across the stage — or off the edge. The simplicity makes it ideal for a mixed group of kids and adults, or drunk people and sober people.

WIRED Lots of clever touches, like the different singing voices for each character, and wind-up keys in the backs of the AI characters. Bonus “Phantom” and “Fat Lady” modes keep things interesting.

TIRED Lots of laughs, but not much strategy.

$1, iOS, Tuokio

Party Chicken

This startlingly original game can be played by up to six competitors on one tablet. There are nine mini-games, each a variation on the game of “chicken” — as made famous by James Dean or Kevin Bacon, depending on your generation. For instance, one game has an unseen gunslinger taking shots at a picture of a cowboy. The longer you keep your finger down on your egg-shaped button, the more points you get. But if the cowboy bites it, you lose all your points. In another game, you get points while cards are revealed, but go bust if the total is over 21, and in a third game a spinner awards points until the pointer stops on the skull and crossbones. Each game has its own twist, but overall the best strategy is to hang on just a moment longer than your opponents.

WIRED Gorgeous vintage-style board game graphics. Nice balance between fun and intense gameplay. You can turn off any mini-games that don’t grab you.

TIRED New players will be lost for the first couple rounds until they get the hang of it. Finger detection is occasionally dodgy.

$3, iPad, Frybread Software

Raiding Company

Raiding Company

Reminiscent of cooperative games like Gauntlet, Raiding Company lets up to four players on a single iPad or iPhone run around some sort of underground temple in search of carnage and loot. The gameplay could be described as “classic.” It could also be described as “uninventive.” Using the on-screen virtual joysticks, you run, you shoot, you gather power-ups and gold, you argue over who took the food. But if you want to re-kill some zombies while out and about with pals, it fills the bill.

WIRED Cute, block-headed characters include a commando lady, a kung-fu dude, and a robot. Auto-aim option for newbs and cowards.

TIRED Smartphone-sized version is insanely tiny. You’ve played this game before, just not on a mobile device. Auto-aim sometimes makes baffling choices.

$3, iOS, Tuokio

SketchBook Pro on the Mac OS X desktop. By Simon Lutrin/Wired

If you know any illustrators, visual designers or comic book artists working in the digital domain (they’re easy to find, just follow the empty cans of Diet Dr. Pepper) chances are, they’re using SketchBook Pro. It’s a professional-grade drawing and painting application specifically designed for artists, and it’s optimized for use with those big, pressure-sensitive, pen-based drawing tablets, like the Cintiq or Intuos tablets made by Wacom.

I’m the illustrator and artist-in-residence here at Wired, so when the time came to test the new version of SketchBook Pro, the task fell on me. While it’s possible to use the software with a mouse or a trackpad, SketchBook pro really shines when you pair it with a pen-based input device. I used my trusty Wacom Intuos4 during my tests (not the newer Intuos5 or Cintiq 24HD), although any of the Wacom series would work. The newer input devices with support for multitouch navigation will especially appreciate the new SketchBook, however, since the software has been tuned to recognize multitouch gestures.

Having used SketchBook Pro 2011, as well as the iOS version of the app, version 6 of software was familiar and easy for me to jump into. The interface has been streamlined, and the underlying code has been re-engineered from the ground up. When drawing and sketching, lines appear faster, with absolutely no discernable latency.

The revamped interface is more intuitive. There’s a new brush palette, a new color editor, a layer editor, and a new toolbar. The layout is more efficient, making it easier to find the tools you want or swap between tools. There are more than 100 preset brushes included in the update, and some great additions like the new French curve tool. And of course, the parameters of every brush and tool can be finely tuned, and you can build your own custom brushes.

One of the most useful additions is the smudge brush. It does a fantastic job of blending lines and colors in a natural way. You can see it in action in my demo video:

Autodesk makes a wide range of software — from SketchBook, to the 3-D animation tools used by Hollywood, to the massive AutoCAD suites used to design bridges and skyscrapers. The company has a clear goal for SketchBook pro: to open up digital drawing to anyone.

Though it still can’t match the accuracy and feel of paper and pen, SketchBook does present the most natural digital drawing experience I’ve used. Also, the new interface has been tuned to appeal users of all skill levels. If you’re just starting out in the digital art world, it’s extremely accessible. Anyone can jump in and begin drawing. But it still has the horsepower and flexibility to enable artists who are facing tight deadlines and need to get polished, high-resolution work out quickly.

Some people just can’t give up paper, and I understand that. (I still consider my scanner indispensable.) But like it or not, this is the future of digital art. And many professional artists have jumped on board, including vacuum designer Sir James Dyson, German-born architect Helmut Jahn, Nike designer Tinker Hatfield and creature designer Bobby Chiu.

If you have never used the software and are interested in checking it out, I would highly recommend downloading the 15-day, full-feature trial. If you’re an old pro and you’re considering updating, the enhancements are worth the $30 upgrade cost.

WIRED Natural, latency-free drawing experience. New brushes and tools, new, easier-to-use interface. Smudge brush works beautifully.

TIRED Still a little dehumanizing to move to a 100-percent-digital workflow. I found it more useful for applying finishing touches — starting by hand, scanning, and finish digitally — than creating something from scratch.