Category: Tech news

While Apple continues to weather very bad press (and embarrassing photographic evidence) over its fumble on Maps in iOS 6, here’s another development in the mapping world, also related to an Apple service. MapBox, which contributes to the open-source OpenStreetMap, used in Apple’s iPhoto service, is getting an injection of cash. Today MapBox announced a grant of $575,000 from the Knight Foundation, which it says it will use to help improve the core infrastructure of OpenStreetMap — a boost for open data.

OpenStreetMap, you may recall, is used by Apple for location data for iPhoto for iPhone — something it took a while for Apple to acknowledge. Apple picking up OpenStreetMap data, and dropping Google in the process, seemed to prefigure what it would do in its bigger mapping efforts in a move away from the search giant. But rather than taking all of its products over to its own maps solution, it’s still using other data for certain services, like iPhoto. OpenStreetMap is still included in the acknowledgements for iPhoto in the most current version.

“Our goal is to use this investment to make it easier to add data to OpenStreetMap, make OpenStreetMap.org more social to support the community as it continues its rapid growth, and make it easier for people to get data out of OpenStreetMap to make their own maps,” Alex Barth, who leads the data team at MapBox, noted in a blog post announcing the news.

He notes that the tools will continue to remain open source with data stored on platforms like GitHub.

The company has been working with the Knight Foundation for the past few months, with the basis of that being the commitment to open data.

Given all the hullaballoo over Apple’s Maps and what Google may or may not do in response to the news, and the fact that Nokia is also ramping up massively in this space — Nokia’s mapping data is one of the key assets that it is managing to leverage in third party deals, at a time when its handset business continues to remain massively challenged; and it’s also pushing hard present its own handsets as unique and special because of its strength in map data — this is a key moment for the space.

In that sense, this can help the OpenStreetMap project continue to keep its hat in the ring amidst all of these other proprietary endeavors.

Barth notes, “We think the work [this funding] allows will make our biggest impact yet.”

Others that use OpenStreetMap data include Foursquare, NPR and Wikipedia.

Investment fund Grishin Robotics just poured $250,000 into Double Robotics, a telepresence system that uses an iPad and self-righting wheeled base to allow remote users to survey a scene.

Grishin is a Moscow-based fund aimed at making personal robots part of the home and office. The company did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Double is a Y Combinator company and they’ve already raised 600 pre-orders at $1,999 each. The investment will help the company with its manufacturing and staffing needs.

Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin founded Grishin Robotics to invest in small, early-stage robotics start-ups. This is their first investment.

“Double Robotics’ investment perfectly aligns to our strategy”, said Grishin. “It is a very consumer-oriented product with potential to fit a very wide range of applications and has already proven a strong consumer demand.”

We got a chance to test Double at Disrupt in San Francisco where the team led remote viewers around the show floor. It’s a clever, compact product and it’s surprisingly easy to use. In short, we’re looking at democratized telepresence as a real thing, not just a weird pipe dream. Ain’t the future grand?

It’s the big day. iPhone 5 day.

The fanbois — not the 2 million that pre-ordered within the first 24 hours, but the rest of them — have only recently showed up to Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York City. Romain’s here. Still.

And of course, the same group of brand ambassadors and OccupyApple protestors are still at the head of the line, some pushing their app/cases/services and others trying to sell off their valuable spot in line.

And then there’s us.

We arrived around 6am, and it’s pretty chilly, but that doesn’t seem to bother those waiting in line. We now have about an hour left until a bunch of so-called Geniuses have some sort of pow-wow before forming a line and clapping, as the first new iPhone 5 owners make their way into the store.

We’ll try and interview the first guy out with a phone, who, if I recall correctly, is from Vibe.

Make sure to tweet and follow along with us on Twitter using the hashtag #crunchphone. We will do our best to answer questions as we wander around.

We hope you enjoy the show.

A network outage has struck BlackBerry users in Europe and Africa this morning — on, irony of ironies, iPhone 5 launch day — affecting BBM, email and internet but not voice or text.  Fall is a troublesome season for the company which experienced the largest outage in its network’s history last October, causing then co-CEO Mike Lazaridis to appear on YouTube in person to present an excruciating autocue apology for letting customers down.

RIM confirmed the outage in a tweet this morning, noting: “Some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa are experiencing issues with their BlackBerry service”. A follow up tweet added: “We are investigating and apologise for any inconvenience.”

At the time of writing RIM was unable to provide specific details of the cause of the outage, which TechCrunch understands is still ongoing, or details of how many BlackBerry users are affected. Last year’s week-long worldwide BlackBerry network outage was initially caused by the failure of a core switch at a UK datacenter which in turn triggered a wider “cascade failure” – as then co-CEO Lazaridis put it – with backlogs of data building up in EMEA and overloading RIM’s systems in other regions.

“We are currently experiencing a BlackBerry service issue impacting some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa. All relevant support teams are working to resolve the issue. We apologize to any customers who may be affected,” RIM said in a statement on the current outage.

U.K. newspaper, The Telegraph, reported the outage as affecting only Vodafone customers — but the carrier was unable to confirm this.

Vodafone did confirm the outage started around 6AM (BST). It also provided the following statement:  ”We are aware that some customers are experiencing problems using BlackBerry services such as email, internet and BBM in Europe, Middle East and Africa.  RIM are working on fixing this as a priority and we are in regular communication with them.  We expect updates shortly.”

After last year’s network blackout RIM said it would be performing “root cause analysis” to determine why its back-up didn’t perform as expected, and auditing its network infrastructure to find out why it took so long to recover.

Developing…

Update: A spokeswoman for RIM has told TechCrunch that BlackBerry services have been restored — and provided the following statement: “Our apologies to any customers impacted by the BlackBerry service issue today. We can confirm that services have been restored and are now operating normally.”

Update: RIM CEO and President, Thorsten Heins, has now issued the following statement — including details on the scope of the outage: “I want to apologize to those BlackBerry customers in Europe and Africa who experienced an impact in their quality of service earlier this morning. The BlackBerry service is now fully restored and I can report that no data or messages were lost. Up to 6 per cent of our user base may have been impacted. Preliminary analysis suggests that those customers may have experienced a maximum delay of 3 hours in the delivery and reception of their messages. We are conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue and will report as soon as it concludes. I again want to apologize to those customers who were impacted today.”

With VCs like Sequoia and Nexus Ventures pouring money into India’s startup scene, it was only a matter of time before those focused on early-stage funding would follow. Today, GSF India, in partnership with some 30 other investors including Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, announced a new initiative called GSF Accelerator. Set to take off this October, GSF Accelerator will be mentoring and offering seed funding of up to $30,000 each to 12 tech startups across Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore — four in each city.

“There is no reason that Indian entrepreneurs cannot create the next Instagram, or the next Twitter, or the next Inmobi,” says Rajesh Sawhney, the founder of GSF India and former president of Reliance Entertainment. GSF also operates GSF Superangels, an existing network of Indian entrepreneurs who mentor startups and will also be involved in this effort. Superangels itself has funded three companies so far this year: Biosense, Autowale, and Chhotu.

GSF Accelerator looks to be modeled on the kind of intensive incubation structure forged by Seedcamp and many U.S.-based outfits like TechStars — which also focuses its efforts around individual cities — and Y Combinator. These have proven to be fertile grounds for VCs hungry to jump on the next big thing, and for the entrepreneurs to focus their minds and pick up essential early help for getting their ideas off the ground. That concept is now getting a lot more international.

In the case of the GSF Accelerator, the program will take place over seven weeks. It says it will tap the resources of some 200 “leading co-founders and digital masterminds from across the world.” The group is reportedly going to dole out between $185,000 and $555,000 to each of the 12 startups selected for the process — making it the biggest-yet effort to fund early-stage tech startups in India. Update: I’ve heard directly from Rajesh Sawhney, who tells me that in fact the funding for the Accelerator program is $30,000 per startup for the Accelerator project. A selection of the 12 may get further seed funding from Superangels after the program finishes, and this is likely where the $185,000-$555,000 amounts kick in.

This is a big deal for India. There have been a lot of great companies coming out of India for years already, but within that there’s been a dearth of early funding opportunities for them, with some looking further afield, not just for money but for exits (example: Pinpuff getting bought by Science, as well as Cloud.com acquired by Citrix, Gluster acquired by Red Hat, DimDim acquired by Salesforce, OLX acquired by Naspers, and Netmagic acquired by NTT).

At the same time, the Indian economy is booming and there is a rising middle class of consumers ready to be the primary targets for all that tech and innovation. (The online clothing company Freecultr is one such company already working to target that market.)

In addition to GSF Superangels, the 30 other backers of GSF Accelerator include Kae Capital; Blume Venture; 500 Startups; Seedcamp; Singapore based fund, Ruvento, which manages investment money across India, Singapore and Russia; Matrix Capital and Naveen Tewari co-founder of mobile advertising company Inmobi.

Image courtesy Last Day of Work

When you get down to it, we all want the same things: love, comfort, and ultimate power over life, death and the basic forces of the universe. Luckily, videogames are up to the challenge, providing petabytes of ways to nurture and direct helpless virtual beings, at least until they displease you and you wipe them all out with a storm of fire or the uninstall button.

God games on mobile devices have taken it to the next level, allowing us to take entire universes with us wherever we go, and leaving us to wonder whether we, ourselves, are but virtual beings living in the cosmic smartphone of some extradimensional nerd-god.

Virtual Villagers: Origins

Tiny villagers have washed up on a mysterious island (shown above) with only their wits, perseverance, and the assistance of a giant finger to survive on. It’s up to you to drag the villagers around like infant kittens and direct their energies, pushing them to pick berries, research scientific advances, or head on down to the Love Shack to produce the next generation. Once they get the hang of their tasks, you might wake up to find your primitive charges have planted crops and built houses overnight… or all died of old age.

WIRED Sixteen island mysteries to solve. Amusingly addled virtual worshippers are like an less-icky ant farm.

TIRED Graphics reminiscent of a 1998 CD-ROM title. Tiny little typefaces (and teeny-tiny buttons) on the iPhone version. On the iPad, everything’s much bigger and easier to read.

Free, iOS universal
Last Day of Work

Image courtesy Bulkypix

The Sandbox

Dispense pixels representing dozens of substances and watch them interact, kind of like a Lego set crossed with a junior chemistry kit. You can use fire pixels to burn oil pixels, for instance, which melt stone pixels into lava pixels. However, unlocking each element costs “mana,” and the game is stingy about handing it out, instead pushing you to buy it with real money. This, combined with often unfulfilled promises of free mana, eats away at the game’s charm faster than antivirus pixels eat virus pixels.

WIRED User gallery features creations from elaborate cities to pictures of Mario.

TIRED Constantly asks to be rated.

Free, iOS universal
Bulkypix

Image courtesy Stormy Productions

Artificial Life HD

You’re the god of exceedingly small things: little virtual bacteria, each of which has a genetically-encoded to-do list. For instance, the first instruction on the list might be “if hungry, find food,” which could be quite helpful. But if the second instruction is “If there’s a predator nearby, move towards it,” the beastie probably won’t live long enough to reproduce. In one game mode, you create your own animalcule and see how long it survives. In the other, you set the parameters for the universe and watch over it like a distant Deist god.

WIRED Minute control over cosmic parameters from food sources to gravity. Absorbing opportunities for experimentation.

TIRED Single-pixel organisms lack personality. Gameplay is too limited in scope.

$1, iPhone or iPad
Stormy Productions

Vizio’s All-in-One desktop computer has stunning looks, but it fails to impress as an everyday workstation. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Vizio is well known as a producer of affordable televisions with acceptable quality. The question now is, can the company do the same thing with computers?

The straightforwardly named Vizio All-in-One PC, part of the first wave of Vizio-branded computers, is exactly what you’d expect from something designed to be a budget knockoff of an iMac. It’s sleek and futuristic, and it even includes a large, wireless, external touchpad instead of a mouse.

Aesthetics are where the similarities end, however. Under the hood and in actual use, Vizio’s all-in-one is a decidedly somber experience.

First there’s one big caveat: This isn’t a Windows 8 machine but rather a standard Windows 7 computer, so don’t expect to be swiping your way around tiles on that touchpad until you upgrade. And that Cupertino-inspired touchpad is where you’ll be doing all of your swiping — the screen, 24 inches and 1920 x 1080 pixels, is not touch-enabled.

Internal specs are modest but acceptable: 2.5GHz Core i5 CPU (3rd generation), 4GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. There’s no optical drive on the unit, and the ports, all lined up on the base of the machine, not on the back of the display, include 2 HDMI inputs, wired Ethernet, 2 USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port (for real, y’all), and an SD card reader. 802.11n wireless and Bluetooth are of course included, too. There’s no discrete graphics on the system we reviewed, just Intel’s integrated GPU. (An Nvidia GT 640M LE is available as an option for extra cash.)

Performance is decidedly lackluster. General apps and graphically heavy tasks both dragged noticeably. Benchmarks on all fronts were in line with low-end laptops, and apps were deathly slow to load. You’ll really feel the sluggishness at boot time. For a new computer to take over a minute to boot is almost unconscionable today.

Vizio’s definition of “all-in-one” also involves some liberties, as the box includes not one but a full five components. Sure, Vizio gets a pass for the keyboard, aforementioned touchpad, and remote control. But what are we supposed to make of the big honking subwoofer that you have to daisy-chain between the computer and the wall? The subwoofer does boost audio quality, but it also serves as a hiding place for the computer’s power brick… and that’s not something I want sitting on my desk. You can stash it underneath the desk, but the length of the proprietary cable that connects the two pieces limits flexibility. It’s telling that on its website, Vizio doesn’t show you the subwoofer component at all.

The subwoofer. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Aside from performance issues, my only other complaint with the machine is the touchpad, which is functionally useless. The tracking is poor, it misses taps, and physically depressing the pad to click requires so much force that your cursor invariably moves off of whatever you’re clicking. (Don’t even think about multitouch gestures.) Compounding problems is the fact that the touchpad turns itself off periodically and has to be physically clicked to “wake up,” wasting time and creating nothing but aggravation. If you purchase this machine, do yourself a favor and invest in a wireless mouse.

The dual HDMI inputs are a nice touch, and they belie Vizio’s origins as a TV manufacturer. Plug in your Xbox and Blu-ray player and you’ve no need for a television in a small room, although bear in mind there is no TV tuner included in the system.

The Vizio AIO starts at $898 (with a Core i3 and 500GB hard drive). Though this machine is cheap at $950, it strangely feels surprisingly expensive when you put it next to competitive offerings that look just as good and work substantially better.

WIRED Pretty. Nicely bright screen, fitting for a TV company. Compact and versatile in smallish environments.

TIRED With its limited travel, keyboard could stand an upgrade. External subwoofer design doesn’t quite work. Rotten performance. Even worse touchpad.

The touchpad. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Founders Den, the “clubhouse for entrepreneurs” (it’s like a co-working space, but classier) based in San Francisco’s startup-heavy Soma neighborhood, just kicked off its third demo day.

Ten startups are giving presentations to impress reporters and investors. As with other demo days, several of the startups have already launched — this even isn’t the first demo day for couple of them, since they’re graduates of Y Combinator. But it still seems worthwhile to bring everything together in one post. I’m starting out with the information that’s already available online, then I’ll update with anything interesting from their presentations. Here they are (I stuck with the order used in the demo day program):

Screenleap — A Y Combinator graduate that wants to improve the often frustrating and crazy-making world of screensharing. If you want to view someone else’s screen, you just click on a link and you’re up-and-running a few seconds later. It’s a little bit more challenging if you want to share — you have to install a Java applet. And yes, it works on mobile. (Random factoid: Two of Screenleap’s four co-founders created a site at Stanford 13 years ago called Steamtunnels, which was a predecessor of Facebook.) Read TechCrunch’s coverage of Screenleap here.

AnyPerk — Another Y Combinator graduate, this time giving startups and other companies an easy way to offer additional benefits to employees. The AnyPerks platform connects benefits its customers with discounts and other perks. In addition to Y Combinator, backers include SV Angels and Andreessen Horowitz. Read TechCrunch’s coverage of AnyPerks here.

DrawChat — As the name implies, it’s an app for drawing and chatting. Given the limited screen size of mobile phones, the drawings apparently look pretty terrible (no surprise if you’ve seen Draw Something), but they still create an interesting visual record of a conversation. but DrawChat isn’t a Y Combinator company, but it was co-founded by Y Combinator graduate Gabor Cselle, who said he wanted to create something “quick and fun.” Read more of TechCrunch’s coverage of DrawChat here.

BitDeli — A developer platform for real-time data. The company says it tracks “things that are meaningful to your business – including the things only you care about.” Customers write Bitdeli scripts for custom analytics, visualizations and dashboards, then the company handles all the data collection and processing. You can see sample scripts here.

GameFace.me — A platform for creating personalized games using social network data and photos. Some examples from the GameFace site: Instead of rescuing a random princess, you could rescue your girlfriend. Or, instead of fighting random zombies, you can fight your coworkers and friends. Here’s some coverage from InsideSocialGames.

SocialPandas — Social tools for salespeople, who the company says have been left behind in the business world. SocialPandas converts connections and activity on social networks into sales leads. The company recently raised a $1.5 million seed round from True Ventures, as covered in TechCrunch.

Streak — Simple CRM for Gmail. It offers a customer relationship management extension for Chrome, allowing you to move emails into you workflow. It comes with templates for use cases like Sales, Hiring, Dealflow, Fundraising, Email Support and Bug Tracking, but TechCrunch’s Eric Eldon also used a template for Journalism and seemed pretty happy with the results. Here’s his coverage of Streak. Oh, and it’s another Y Combinator company.

The content of the final three presentations are off-the-record, but the fact that they’re presenting isn’t, so here are some bare-bones descriptions provided by the companies:

Rescale —  A cloud simulation platform.

MeCommerce — Trying to build “the next generation apparel brand.

Peek — Travel startup promising to help “discover and book amazing travel experiences.”

Last July, TeliportMe launched an Android app that allows users to capture and share panoramic images. The app, appropriately called 360, is gives users the ability to not only capture high-res 360 panoramic views, but share their images on Facebook and Twitter and view, comment on, and “fav” images captured by their friends. Essentially, it’s Instagram in 360-degree mode.

Earlier this year, the team joined 500 Startups accelerator, where they continued cranking away on the difficult problem of OEM compatibility. Because Android relies on so many different device manufacturers, building a quality 360-degree app for the platform ain’t easy, especially considering that panoramic apps are so hardware-centric. Given this uphill battle, most give up and opt to build for iOS. But, seeing as the iPhone 5 launched with a native panorama app, their masochism now seems like a stroke of genius.

Thanks to their work on fragmentation, 360 has become one of the more popular (and OEM agnostic) panoramic apps on Android, and today has a community of 700,000 users, who hail from 150 countries. After bootstrapping their operations while they built and launched 360, the team is excited that it now has a little bit of financial cushion, officially announcing that it has raised a seed round from Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Bill Gross of Idealab, Vedanta Capital’s Alessandro Piol, Great Oaks Venture, and number of angel investors.

In his blog post announcing the raise, TeliportMe founder Vineet Devaiah said that they will use the capital to expand the team, finally allowing it to begin work on projects that had been sidelined due to lack of that precious human capital.

The team has been updating the app along the way, but with its new capital in tow, they will be looking to push a big update to their Android app in October as well as to launch its first app for iOS. Devaiah’s post also teases the fact that they are working on several partnerships with big-name websites in an effort to “enhance their offerings” to small business, hotels and real estate.

What does that mean? Well, I’m glad you asked. Look no further than Google’s announcement today, which introduced a way for users to view “indoor panoramic imagery from businesses.” This also has particular relevance given that TeliportMe and Google have some history based on this very feature Google introduced to Google Maps.

Although Devaiah refused to comment, after some digging, we learned that, in fact, Google actually tried to acquire the startup last year, for what a source tells me is in $15 to $20 million range. Google, as you may have guessed, seemed to be interested in TeliportMe’s technology that would enable indoor panoramas.

What’s more, and we’re trying to confirm this, but we hear that two other OEMs have shown interest in the tech behind 360. The fact that the iPhone 5 has a native panorama apps probably has absolutely nothing to do with that interest, although that is purely sarcastic speculation.

Whatever the case, the startup is developing a pretty nifty app, which is worth checking out. The team still has a long way to go, as it still wrestles with glitchy rendering, although 360 has managed to average a 4.1 star-rating on Google Play. Not too shabby.

As TeliportMe adds partnerships and continues to scale, I imagine it won’t be the last time hardware companies come sniffing around. With the integration of AR, higher-res cameras, better stitching and all manners of data integration, it certainly seems like 360 has the potential to be part of some fascinating (and potentially) futuristic technology in the not-so-distant future.

More on TeliportMe here.

Today, the Google+ team shared some insight into a few tweaks that it’s made to the Hangouts experience over the last couple of months, as well as some new initiatives.

In a post on Google+, Chee Chew of Google discussed these improvements, which include the ability to block people, set a Hangout to 18+, and change a Hangout to public while it’s in progress. All of these features give you more awareness of your surroundings during any given chat on the platform.

This is about safety, Chew explains.

Here’s a bit of a breakdown of these features, some of which have already been rolled out:

Google+ Hangouts now inform you when extended circles have been invited to a Hangout or when the Hangout has been switched to public:

Also, you now will know when someone in your Hangout has blocked someone for being annoying, and you can then do the same if you wish:

Finally, if you want to hang out with just adults, not necessarily doing “adult things” that are against Google TOS, you can now set a Hangout to 18+ mode:

These are nice additions to a platform that many are using for business and personal purposes. Of course, Google has signed a deal with the NFL, and Hangouts are being used for fantasy football junkies everywhere.

Bonus points — Chew ended his post with this:

ps. a math joke for you:
q: why did the chicken cross the road?
a: to find a vector orthogonal to itself and the road.

Okily doke, then.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Correctly anticipating that Twitter’s API crackdown would reach photo sharing services, Twitpic is actively talking to at least two potential acquirers and has received offers over the past few weeks, said one source familiar with the discussions. Founder Noah Everett is said to have wanted to sell and move on to new projects.

Twitpic may have hoped to get a sale brokered before the hammer dropped, but today The Next Web noticed that Twitter removed the option from its apps to select a third-party image sharing service, killing off  Twitpic’s main distribution channel.

Now that Twitpic won’t be hosting nearly as many photos tweeted from mobile just as Buzzfeed heard, you can expect a traffic drop. That means fewer views of the ads Twitpic places next to user photos. It likely saw this coming and got acquisition talks started, but now that it’s been ejected from Twitter Mobile, it may be more difficult to find a buyer, or the price it could command may be reduced.

Details about who’s made offers, the potential price, and what assets would be sold are scarce. We have heard Everett was in discussions with two different companies regarding the sale and may have pitched others. My source says Everett would not necessarily come along with a sold Twitpic, as the founder hopes to explore fresh ideas. We’re waiting to hear back from Twitpic about these questions.

An acquisition could be lucrative for Everett, as his company is bootstrapped and did $1.5 million in ad sales in 2009, keeping $1.05 million of that. One report from 2010 said he was looking to sell the service for $10 million.

One potential acquirer could be Twitter itself. The microblogging platform partnered with Photobucket in June last year to host photos posted directly to Twitter.com so users didn’t have to upload them offsite and paste in links. Photobucket helped it launch Twitter Galleries last August.

Still many think Twitter’s image service could be a lot better. Our hardcore Twitterer Drew Olanoff noted that discovery, image quality, tagging, hashtagging could all improve. Meanwhile, Twitter could offer photos for direct messages (aka private photos), filters, effects, watermarks, or slideshows too. Buying the startup that handles these features better could give Twitter a jumpstart. Plus Twitter clearly has lots of leverage since it shut Twitpic out of its mobile apps today.

Other possible buyers include media companies, like Say Media which could add it to its network of properties, or CNN which could be attracted to Twitpic as a citizen journalism tool: Twitpic hosted the famous and extremely popular early photo of the the plane that emergency landed in the Hudson River in 2009. UberMedia or Hootsuite could buy Twitpic to beef up their Twitter tools.

In any case, Twitpic would be disadvantaged in negotiations after a tough year. A study by analytics firm Sysomos found that in May 2011 Twitpic was hosting 45.7 percent of the photos tweeted, compared to Yfrog with 29.3 percent and Lockerz with 17.4 percent. But then Twitter partnered with Photobucket. By November, Twitter/Photobucket had become the No. 1 photo-sharing service, handling 36 percent of shares, with Twitpic slipping to 30 percent, according to Skylines.

Since then, Instagram usage has skyrocketed, meaning more photos are being published from other apps rather than being uploaded and tweeted right through Twitter where some users defaulted to Twitpic hosting until today. While it may be a hard time for the company to convince acquirers to pay a high price, things might only get worse once data comes in on just how hard Twitter’s platform tightening squeezes Twitpic.

Expect more companies scorned by Twitter’s API changes to pivot or sell. Twitpic might be one of the first, but it won’t be the last.

As startups, mega-corporations, and governments strain to promote women leaders in technology, new evidence suggests that the relative timidity of women may simply be a function of voting procedure. When men outnumber women, groups who strive towards consensus decisions, rather than majority rule, see greater female participation. “Unanimous rule protects minority women, and under this decision rule they take up their equal share of the conversation,” explains a new study in Political Science’s preeminent, journal, The American Political Science Review. For those organizations that have bought into the premise that females add valuable perspectives, this new research is a simple way to solve a perennial issue.

The experiment randomly assigned different proportions of men and women into deliberative groups, charged with figuring out how to allocate financial rewards to each member based on hypothetical work tasks [pdf]. The researchers coded how often women spoke compared to men and whether their peers judged them as “influential” in post-activity surveys.

When groups decide how to allocate money by majority rule, and there’s only one woman in the group, the one woman contributes less than half of her share of the conversation, compared to the men. Under consensus rule-making, that proportion jumps about 50 percent, garnering near equal participation from men and women.

“Under unanimity, no voice can be overlooked because every vote is pivotal,” they write. “This rule helps minorities by elevating their level of participation.”

But the gender disparity is not entirely a function of being outnumbered. Women, by genetic or cultural factors, behave differently in groups. “In small group discussion, on average men tend toward individual agency, women toward cooperation…Therefore, women in a numerical minority may interpret unanimous rule to mean that they should make at least a minimal contribution, more than they do in majority rule, but avoid dominating the discussion.

Interestingly, under more female influence, the allocation of money is also more egalitarian, offering more money to the least among their peers. The study’s results seem to have analogues in the real world: After Norway adopted gender quota laws for public companies, one study found that greater female leadership resulted in less workforce reductions [pdf].

I suspect not all of our readers agree with the premise that women should be proactively included in decision-making. But, for those who do, this research could have immediate benefits.

Google officially launched its Google Business Photos (a.k.a. Indoor Streetview) initiative in April 2010, but this indoor imagery was often hard to find and only appeared on Google+ Local and in the Google Search sidebar. On Google Maps, however, it was virtually impossible to find these panoramic indoor images. Starting today, Google will highlight indoor imagery with a yellow circle whenever you drag the orange pegman onto a map.

These images, says Google, give you “the feeling of being there, and the comfort of knowing what to expect when you arrive.” One issue with this approach, though, is that it’s often hard to figure out what business you are actually looking at, as the name often doesn’t appear on the map or inside the Street View interface.

When Business Photos launch, Google only focused on a few countries, but it has since expanded the reach of this program. In a number of select cities the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Canada and the UK, businesses can now hire Google-approved photographers to take these 360-degree panoramic images for them. In addition, business owners can also upload their own images through Google+ Local.

In May, Google also started highlighting these business photos in Google Maps on Android.

Apple’s latest mobile operating system gets released tomorrow, a few days ahead of the iPhone 5′s launch on Friday. iOS 6 brings a lot of new stuff, and we’ve covered that in detail in previous posts. Here’s the skinny on what’s important to remember ahead of the iOS 6 launch tomorrow beyond the added features, which we’ll let you know about as soon as it’s live and ready for download.

1. iOS 6 will be available over-the-air. According to Apple’s site, you won’t have to plug your iDevice in to download and install iOS 6, so long as you’re on iOS 5. That’s possible thanks to the decision to move to delta updates in iOS 5, meaning that only recently changed system elements are delivered, instead of having to start from scratch. That means its easier to upgrade, which is why iOS 5′s updates generally enjoy wide adoption among the iOS device user base (Chitika found that more than 57 percent of iOS users were on 5.1.1 just a month after its release).
2. You’ll need iTunes 10.7. Apple put out the 10.7 update for iTunes a full week ahead of the iOS 6 launch date to try and lessen the blow to its servers at launch and to make sure users have plenty of time to get prepared. If you’ve waited this long, don’t worry; I just updated myself. But it is a good idea to get it done now so you don’t need to worry about it tomorrow, unless you never connect your iTunes anyway, in which case you should be fine.
3. Backing up prior to updating is always a good idea. Make sure you backup, either via sync cable to your computer, or wirelessly to iCloud, before you run this update. Invariably, a small group of users runs into issues, and if you’re part of that group you’ll want a recovery strategy.
4. You may run into server errors or delays. Be prepared to wait for your update to come through. Apple generally runs into some traffic issues when pushing these updates out, which is understandable given the rush to download new versions of iOS. If you’re encountering errors, waiting things out is usually the best possible course of action — better than, say, trusting your hardware to questionable mirrors of reported direct download links for iOS 6 update files that you can install manually. All those new features? They’re not going anywhere. One thing to note: Apple’s iPhone pre-orders went relatively smoothly this year, so it’s possible things like the company’s massive new server farm in North Carolina are helping to make sure that launches like this one go more smoothly.
5. Some apps might be buggy. Apple is apparently pushing hard to get apps updated in time for iOS 6 and the iPhone 5, but that doesn’t mean all your favorites will be ready to work on the lastest OS. With each major change, the possibility of incompatibility issues and quirks arises, so get ready to be patient with some you really love, or else prepare to look around for better-maintained replacements.
6. Have a power source handy. You should have your iPhone ready to connect to power if you’re looking to update. Running out of juice in the middle of an update could potentially be a big problem, and there’s no real reason not to exercise caution here.
7. 10 AM PST/1 PM EST is the most likely arrival time. This is the time that Apple released the update last year with iOS 5, and the year before that with iOS 4. Short of Apple telling us in advance when it’ll arrive, this is your best possible bet.

That’s what’s essential in terms of preparing for iOS 6 (though users may also want to note the differences in one significant feature — Maps). Tune in tomorrow to see when it arrives, along with more details about what it brings to the table.

I spoke to Square today about some of its latest moving and shaking in recruiting and learned that the company has nabbed a 5,000 square foot office space in the Atlantic Station section in Atlanta. This was first reported by the Atlanta Business Chronicle earlier this month, but we’ve learned what Square is up to.

It seems like the company is upping its game when it comes to infrastructure, because most of the Atlanta office is full of engineers with that focus. Additionally, Square says that the following skills are currently housed in Atlanta:

Their experience with various developer tools – like Google Web Toolkit, Google App Engine, Collide, and Dart – will be valuable in improving our products, services, and infrastructure as we continue to grow.

Here’s the team based in Atlanta:

Square will be able to find a wealth of talent in the area, as it is close to Georgia Tech. I’m also told that Android developers are increasingly hard to find, since apps must be made pixel perfect for each major handset and versions of the Android OS. It’s no small task, but Square is preparing itself by opening the office and making a push to hire the best Android developers available, San Francisco-based or otherwise.

By simply visiting Square’s job page, you can find all sorts of available positions for the platform:

Expanding to Atlanta shows what most of us already thought, which is that Square is a company with a massive footprint. As more offices pop up over time in the both the U.S., and perhaps one day internationally, Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s vision will start to spread to all corners of the planet.

[Photo credit: flickr]