Category: Tech news

Following earlier moves which saw Dropbox’s cloud storage service integrated into devices like the big-screened Galaxy Note 10.1, Galaxy S III, Galaxy tablets, and even some Sony Ericsson Android phones, for example, Dropbox is today is announcing integration with newer Samsung devices: the recently launched Samsung Galaxy Camera and the Galaxy Note II. For Samsung fans who buy into the whole ecosystem, that means that Dropbox is now an option for syncing data across all your devices, including desktop, tablet, mobile and camera.

Dropbox says the integrations will ask users when they first start their device if they have a Dropbox account to sync their photos to. The Galaxy Note II will also include a deeper type of integration which will allow the photos and videos stored in the default Android Gallery app the ability to automatically sync to the user’s Dropbox’s folders. Whenever the Gallery app is opened, users will see all their photos from across Dropbox, even if those weren’t originally taken on their phones themselves. It’s setting Dropbox up to be more of a universal photo gallery of sorts – a third-party alternative to something like Apple’s Photostream, perhaps.

In addition to the preloaded applications, Galaxy Camera and Note II users will also receive 50 GB of free space for two years, which is about as long as most people hang on to their phones these days.

This news comes shortly after Dropbox rival Yandex scored a deal to get its competing service Yandex.Disk preloaded on Samsung Ultrabooks in Russia, and announced English language support and plans to expand – possibly through device partnerships – to other markets. Cloud storage partnerships with OEMs are nothing new – HTC also works with Dropbox while Box has deals with LG, but Yandex’s announcement stood out for offering a lifetime account instead of a one or two-year deal, which is typical.

Photos by Peter McCollough/Wired

The Savannah Fund is an African seed investment fund that aims to “bridge the early stage/angel and venture capital investment gap” in the region. A big part of that strategy is the fund’s startup accelerator — and the deadline to apply is Sunday evening.

The fund says each session will run for three months and operate out of the iHub in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s looking to select five startups and invest $25,000 each in exchange for a 15 percent equity stake.

Manager partner Mbwana Alliy tells me that the accelerator has received 120 applications so far. Startups from around the world can apply, as long as they plan to serve the Sub-Saharan market, but Alliy says that most of the applications come from Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and Egypt.

The Savannah Fund was first announced in June. Since then, it also revealed its first investment (not part of the accelerator) in biNu, a startup offering a cloud-based app platform for feature phones and low-end smartphones.

In addition to Alliy, the fund’s managing partners include Erik Hersman, co-founder of Ushahidi and founder of iHub, and i/o ventures managing partner Paul Bragiel.

As for that deadline, one day might not seem like enough time, but the application is pretty simple — you just need to enter some basic info, like interesting projects you’ve been involved with and products that you plan to build. Plus, given the slight vagueness of the wording (“Sunday evening”), there’s a little bit of flexibility as to timing.

Activity streams and social networks now represent a fundamental aspect of the modern application. We use activity streams on Twitter to converse in 140 characters or less. We use the “like” gesture on Facebook to show approval for an update to a friend’s activity stream.

In the enterprise, Salesforce.com Chatter uses activity streams to show application updates. Enterprise social network Tibco Tibbr users may create data hubs by geotagging places. For instance, an airport gate can be tagged to give agents, pilots and flight attendants relevant information as they approach it.

These services represent what is to come as social networking becomes a way for humans and machines to orchestrate complex adaptive systems. To make these systems work we will have to provide machines with social networks so they may gain identity, develop relationships and make friends.

At VMworld this week, VMware’s Tim Young showed me how the company’s R&D department is using Socialcast’s enterprise social network to give hosts and virtual machines ways to communicate with each other. What they created demonstrates how social media technologies can be applied to a corporate data center environment.

In the VMware model, an IT administrator can populate a social network by mapping the hosts and its virtual machines. The company directory in Socialcast then shows the hosts and its relationships. People ar listed along with the virtualized infrastructure.

Social networks serve people as ways to communicate the way we live and work. A machine’s social network can serve similar purposes. The machines can have friends or even families that live in “clusters.” Each machine can learn from the individuals or communities in the collective group. They know when one is sick. They can relate to other machines and the way they feel.

At VMworld,in Monday’s keynote, the attendees saw a demo for how this might work. It shows how a social network populated with machines can spread word to each other. When one host finds an issue, it updates its activity stream. Other hosts and virtual machines will “like,” the update if they are having similar issues.

The VMware example points to an inevitable future. The machines will have a voice. They will communicate in increasingly human-like ways. In the near term, the advancements in the use of social technologies will provide contextual ways to manage data centers. Activity streams serve as the language that people understand. They help translate the interactions between machines so problems can be diagnosed faster.

By treating machines as individuals we can better provide visualizations to orchestrate complex provisioning and management tasks. That is inevitable in a world which requires more simple ways to orchestrate the increasingly dynamic nature for the ways we humans live and work with the machines among us.

Editor’s Note: Charles Moldow is a general partner at Foundation Capital, focusing on consumer Internet companies. He was previously a founding executive at TellMe Networks and at @Home.

Friends and family can be an essential source of funding for fledgling entrepreneurs. Sometimes, they are the only source. But before you ask for funding, you have to ask yourself some tough questions, and one in particular:

“What happens if I lose their money?”

It happens all the time. It happened to me, and it forced me to learn hard lessons that can hopefully prevent other entrepreneurs from making the same mistakes. Before I became a venture capitalist, I was an entrepreneur with a new endeavor that I firmly believed in. I was wildly optimistic about the future and was eager to bring in friends and family to help get the company off the ground. I dreamed of the day when the company would become successful and make a big profit for those closest to me.

And then I lost their money. All of their money.

Years later, I ended up on the flip side of the equation, investing in a company run by my child’s godfather. The investment was strategic from a business perspective, but the decision to invest was also motivated by my personal relationship with the CEO. Later, with the company struggling, I had to lead the board in the incredibly difficult decision to shut down the company. To make matters worse, the company’s closure was announced while the CEO and I were vacationing together with our families. Needless to say, there were some very awkward silences around the dinner table.

Of course, just because I had a few bad experiences with the friends and family financing plan doesn’t mean that you will too. There is still great value in soliciting support from the people who you know and trust the most. Let’s face it: early-stage financings are the most challenging to secure, and friends and family money is usually the easiest to find.

But before making the leap, it is worth following a few simple guidelines:

• Not all capital is created equal.

True friends and family money is what I call “love money.” It’s money that they invest because they support and love you, with any possible future return seen merely as a nice bonus. It’s important for everyone involved to understand that there is a reasonably high likelihood that their money is gone for good. If this is the construct, the dynamic is healthy. But, when a friend or family member’s primary reason for investing is to see a return, things can become problematic.

• Less is more.

Giving any investor an overly large stake in the company for an inconsequential amount of money could cost you down the line, especially when you are trying to raise new funds in later rounds. But this applies especially to relatives who are often unsophisticated investors. In these cases, owning a large chunk of stock may put them on shaky and unfamiliar ground where they will be required to vote on future financings, etc. Make sure you only sell them what they can handle responsibly.

• Don’t ask for money they can’t afford to lose.

If your uncle offers to give you $50,000, and he can afford to lose it, take it. But if that $50,000 is half of his 401(k), and will drastically affect his savings, leave it on the table. When asking for money, don’t take anything that can materially impact someone’s lifestyle if it’s lost.

• Educate your friends and family on the investment cycle.

You’ll likely need to educate those close to you on how follow-on financing works so no one is surprised when their stake is diluted in later rounds. For exceptionally committed friends who want to invest in follow-on rounds, let them know that they’ll need to hold money in reserve to maintain their stake in the company as new money comes in. You don’t want an investor win feeling like a loss when the company gets sold and their return is reduced due to dilution.

Although it’s not for everyone, taking money from friends and family is an integral – and often necessary – step in the fundraising process, especially early on.

Having sat at both sides of the table, I’ve seen the toll it can take on personal relationships. While in my cases our relationships endured – largely because the failure wasn’t for lack of execution and empathy was the prevailing emotion – money can have a way of ruining friendships and straining family bonds, sometimes to extreme levels.

If you do decide to ask your dear Aunt Hilda to invest in your idea, do so wisely and be certain she knows the risks involved. You don’t want to jeopardize your most meaningful relationships because of shattered hopes and misunderstandings about money.

After all, if your venture flops, you’ll still want to be invited home for Thanksgiving and to your nephew’s next birthday party.

Or on your close friend’s next vacation.

Ready your grocery list for Labor Day: the White House has released the recipe for its official home brew, The White House Honey Ale. In a pun-tastic blog, Assistant Chef, Sam Kass, buckled to overwhelming demand from the White House online petition platform, We The People, “with public excitement about White House beer fermenting such a buzz, we decided we better hop right to it.”

We The People was designed by Obama’s digital team to unearth latent issues that escaped the eye of traditional media. Apparently, it worked, because news of the recipe’s release now sits atop Google News. (Of course, if We The People was truly ruled by an online audience, the recipe would likely have been for pot brownies).

The home brewing experiment was apparently inspired by the Commander-in-Chief himself, who bought a home brewing kit for the White House kitchen.

To be honest, we were surprised that the beer turned out so well since none of us had brewed beer before. As far as we know the White House Honey Brown Ale is the first alcohol brewed or distilled on the White House grounds. George Washington brewed beer and distilled whiskey at Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson made wine but there’s no evidence that any beer has been brewed in the White House. (Although we do know there was some drinking during prohibition…)

There’s real movement behind the democratization of space. Not in the form of sending more people into space, but in giving more people access to satellites.

Nano-satellites are getting cheap enough now that groups can raise enough money on Kickstarter to buy and launch them. That’s only a slightly interesting development on its own, but what fascinates me is that some of these groups are promising amateur scientists to opportunity to write software for these satellites and essentially rent time on the satellites the way you might have rented time on a mainframe back in the day.

That kind of blows my mind.

William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and several other books, wrote a while back about the idea of future fatigue. He starts off by describing the feeling of reading about real life quantum teleportation:

In quantum teleportation, no matter is transferred, but information may be conveyed across a distance, without resorting to a signal in any traditional sense. Still, it’s the word “teleportation”, used seriously, in a headline. My “no kidding” module was activated: “No kidding,” I said to myself, “teleportation.” A slight amazement.

I suffer from a bad case of future fatigue myself. I read about stuff like this all the time, and just forget about it. “Quantum teleportation? Did I read about that? Yeah, maybe. Seems familiar.” My hypothesis is that we feel this way because it’s taking a long time for our technology to catch up to our imaginations. Siri may be pretty cutting edge voice recognition software, but it’s no HAL.

What gives me a real “future buzz” are the things that haven’t been science fiction tropes for decades. Like electric cigarettes. The whole idea weirds me out. And if someone had told me in the 2000 that my friends would be smoking electronic cigarettes in 2012, I’d have told them they were full of it. At first I only saw them advertised on torrent trackers and the like, advertised along with penis enlargement pills and services that would connect me with “adult friends.” I thought electronic cigarettes were just a scam. But now I regularly see people I know smoking them.

Electric cigarettes seem like a true novelty. More so than quantum teleportation or iPhones or the Large Hadron Collider, electronic cigarettes make me feel like I’m living in the future.

The thing is electronic cigarettes are actually pretty low tech. According to sources cited by Wikipedia, the first electronic cigarette was invented back in the 60s but never commercialized. I can imagine them showing up in ads in the back of comic books, along side x-ray specs, the 60s equivalent of advertising on torrent sites. It apparently took until 2000 for someone else to take the idea seriously. Realistically the 60s version would probably have been much larger, and I’m not sure the components would have been cheap enough in the 60s to make it economical and you wouldn’t be able to charge it over USB. But we’re just talking about freebasing drugs here, not quantum teleportation.

These citizen space satellites feel the same way. When it comes to space, the science fiction I’m versed in focuses almost exclusively on human space travel. If there’s any sort of democratization of space, it’s some sort of cheap space travel. Satellites don’t get much attention. The idea of everyone being able to rent time on a satellite seems truly novel. The fact that, even though I probably never will, I could learn to write apps for satellites and actually pay to have them run on a real satellite in space is much more amazing to me than being able to tell my phone to book an appointment on my calendar.

Although Android phones and Arduino boards are newish, and the cost of electronics has gone down, I don’t see a big reason why some sort of citizen satellites wouldn’t have been possible years ago. What it really took was a small leap of imagination, and that’s something I don’t take for granted anymore.

Photo: NASA Ames Research Center

Editor’s Note: Benjamin Joffe is the founder of the Asia-focused digital research & strategy consultancy +8* | Plus Eight Star and has been living in Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia) since 2000. Benjamin has spoken at over 100 conferences (SxSW, TEDx, LeWeb, GamesBeat, etc.) on innovation, Asia, gaming and his keynotes gathered over 250,000 views on Slideshare.

I was a resident mentor at 500 Startups during the last intake and all sorts of interesting visitors come through the door. Among them came journalists from Japan and South Korea who were asking: “Can our country be the next Silicon Valley?”

The topic is not new (see here articles on China, Japan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Singapore) and investors are also pretty excited about it (see Sequoia’s latest round).

As I was answering by drawing from my 12 years across Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia), I had a sort of epiphany and started to write down the criteria I thought composed an ecosystem. I then proceeded to score several markets using those, which brought interesting comparisons. The initial draft expanded into this column. It is far from perfect and comments to improve it are welcome!

ECOSYSTEM CRITERIA

While both the selection of criteria and scoring are highly subjective, they can provide a useful framework and basis for comparison to evaluate other digital ecosystems, and measure their progress.

After listing the various criteria, 6 categories emerged:

1. Market
2. Capital
3. People
4. Culture
5. Infrastructure
6. Regulations

MARKET gives a sense of the market size and its dynamism. A large, growing and rich market is more motivating for entrepreneurs and investors. If a market is growing but not large enough for a tech startup, investors and entrepreneurs might stick to real estate and traditional industries. After trying various criteria, the one that seemed to matter the most was simply GDP, enhanced by access to other markets.

CAPITAL is about the availability of funding at different stages, from angels, VCs, government. Investment also requires potential for exits in the form of IPO or M&As. Without good exit opportunities, entrepreneurs and funding will turn away from the opening of the funnel.

PEOPLE cover the individuals starting, joining and guiding startup companies. Even the most amazing entrepreneur needs a team and guidance. Without support, risk-takers might gradually abandon their pursuits. After a few exchanges and reviews, I decided to add a criterion that might be controversial: English communication skills. While it might not matter for local business, it is massively important for global expansion. There is no arguing that English is today the lingua franca of international business. It is also the language used in Silicon Valley where many technologies and best practices are pioneered.

CULTURE focuses on “Entrepreneurial Culture”. It includes the image and general acceptance of risk and failure. Self-promotion skills and general “hunger” are also included there, as founders are often the first salespeople to investors and clients. Very few countries can rival the US regarding those. Countries with fast growth offer more opportunities, while stable or declining economies tend to favor safe options.

INFRASTRUCTURE refers to networks of people and internet/mobile infra. It also takes into account the infrastructure in terms of logistics / transportation / traffic. This is massively important for e-commerce but also to conduct regular business as it impacts the movement of goods and people. Good infrastructure helps get things done faster.

REGULATIONS are the realm of government action. Ease of incorporation and low cost of compliance help getting started, skilled immigration can balance a limited local talent pool; flexible labor laws make it easier to deal with the uncertainty of startups.

To keep things simple, each criterion was scored from 1 (bad) to 4 (great). Zero would be “non-existent”.

MARKET

Unsurprisingly, the US is leading followed by China and Japan.

Our scale is not linear so Singapore still scores 1 point and Korea 2 despite having economies respectively 13.5 and 58 times smaller than the US. A linear scale would give US: 4, China/Japan: 2, Korea: 0, Singapore: 0

I assumed that Singapore was not a market in itself for a startup based there, and could access larger markets. Several Korean online game companies, for instance, are doing very well in Japan, China and more recently even in the US.

Chris Evdemon, Innovation Works

CAPITAL

The US tops the chart regarding exits and every investment phase. China comes in second thanks to private money at early stages and wide availability of VC & growth capital. Overall, exit opportunities are much better in the US.

About VC/angel ratios in US vs. China:

About Asian vs. US presence in Singapore:

Steven Goh, Mig33

About acq-hires in Asia:

PEOPLE

Despite its wide availability of talent, mentors and serial entrepreneurs, the US suffers from its high costs, making it harder for startups that do not have highly skilled, wealthy or connected founders.

About costs increasing in Singapore and Japan:

While some Silicon Valley kids might be learning Chinese today (ask Dave McClure), we are still far from Mandarin learners to outnumber English ones in third-culture countries… unless Africa switches to Chinese in the coming years adding a billion more calligraphers to the global pool.

The downside is that low starting costs in a large market have made China the most ferociously competitive market in the world. So lower cost, yes, but better be fast and furious.

About English skills: Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Japan’s largest e-commerce player Rakuten (who acquired Buy.com, e-reader Kobo and invested $100m in Pinterest’s latest round) decided in 2010 to make English the official language at Rakuten within 2 years and coined the term “Englishnization” for the book he wrote on the topic.

About the advantage of English being the work & industry language:

About English in Japan:

“Entrepreneurial Culture” is probably the most lacking when considering Japan, Korea and Singapore. A lack of role models in the media to inspire entrepreneurs and overall risk-aversion are holding back the development of entrepreneurial types.

One might remember the media treatment in Japan of the CEO of Internet portal Livedoor Takafumi Horie, which alone might have downgraded the image of tech entrepreneurs by 1 or 2 notches.

About risk-taking in Japan:

Steven Goh, Mig33

While the US enjoys the best community of people and strong legal/admin service providers, connecting people and computers is pretty good in both Japan and Singapore. Unfortunately, having the world’s fastest Internet in Korea is not enough to compensate for a general lack of grassroots support.

I spent quite a bit of time in Malaysia and heard that so far there are more event organizers than startups there. It’s a first step!

REGULATIONS

This category is the only one where the US is not an overall winner, mostly due to immigration policies. Singapore shines with startup-friendly regulations. China scores fairly well overall.

OVERALL RATING

This rating is done using the average score of each country for each criterion. This is rather imperfect, as obviously, the “GDP” criterion within MARKET should probably be weighted differently to reflect its actual importance.

While scores might not look dramatically different, gaining one whole point implies changes that might take years to happen.

USA

CHINA

JAPAN

KOREA

SINGAPORE

If we remove the baseline and count US as the reference, the differences become striking:

Some takeaway ideas

a. The US and Silicon Valley are but one of many possible digital ecosystems. While they enjoy many strong points, they are not perfect notably due to talent costs and immigration policies.

b. China is the second strongest ecosystem thanks to its market size, access to capital, entrepreneurial spirit and talent.

c. Japan and Singapore, despite their large difference in scale, are somewhat comparable in terms of environment. Singapore leads in most things regulatory.

d. While Korea is improving rapidly, it is still bogged down by its limited access to capital.

e. Japan, Korea and Singapore are afflicted by their lack of experienced entrepreneurs, role models, poor acceptance of failure and risk-aversion.

The only criterion not easily fixable within a few years is GDP. The example of Singapore showed that capital, people, infrastructure and regulations could all be improved fairly rapidly. What is missing is stronger entrepreneurial culture!

IN CONCLUSION

There is more to ecosystems than Silicon Valley.

No ecosystem in the world is perfect: if there is a lot of capital, talent gets expensive.

If the market is large, the market becomes very competitive.

While entrepreneurs are born everywhere, they will not be nurtured and thrive without the right ecosystem, which might require them to relocate to better latitudes.

So far, Silicon Valley proved the most nurturing if you can enter the country and afford to live there, but it is by no means the only place where entrepreneurs can succeed.

I believe this opens two interesting possibilities:

–        Creating local ecosystem champions. China, Japan, Korea but also Russia and Brazil have strong enough ecosystems to support the emergence of local giants. Just to name a few: Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Sina, in China; DeNA, GREE and Rakuten in Japan; Nexon, NHN in Korea; Mail.ru, Yandex in Russia are all dominating their local market. In some cases, foreign investors succeed there too: the discreet MIH (South Africa) and DST (Russia) have fared particularly well in emerging markets.

–        Creating global companies or “micro-multinationals” from anywhere. Skype was made in Estonia, Spotify in Sweden, Angry Birds in Finland and UberStrike in China (#1 free-to-play first-person shooter on Facebook and Mac App Store with over 6 million registered players. Note: I am a founding partner of Cmune, makers of UberStrike).

I hope this article will help understand ecosystems in a more granular manner, and lead governments, community organizers, investors and of course entrepreneurs to realize that ecosystems are built from the combined efforts of all.

The flaws in this column are numerous and comments are very welcome, as well as input regarding other. Score your own country or city!

Additional comments

About ecosystem dynamics:

Steven Goh, Mig33

Chang Kim, CEO of Tapas Media (for Korea), Steven Goh, CEO of Mig33 (for Singapore), Chris Evdemon, Partner at Innovation Works (for China) and Masaru Ikeda, Co-Founder of Startup Dating (for Japan) contributed to this article.

 

Editor’s Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur and product designer who created Onesheet, Webbygram, TipList, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. You can find him on Twitter at @mulligan.

QR codes are everywhere. Frustratingly everywhere in my opinion. Countless companies put them on marketing materials, but not a single person I know actually scans them. I’m friends with lots of smartphone owners, and I’ve literally never, ever seen someone pull out their phone and scan a QR code.

There are even a handful of startups that consider QR codes part of their core offering to small businesses. They’re relying on people actually scanning these stupid things for their products to work. Silly.

However, as negative as I am about them, QR codes actually make a lot of sense. One of the most challenging things about the gluttony of digital offerings is bridging the gap between the digital and physical world. Mobile devices present the opportunity to do this better than ever. If I’m standing at a store, and they want me to follow them on Twitter, mobile devices allow me to follow them immediately, as opposed to waiting until I get home to do it.

QR codes simplify it even more. It’s much easier for me to scan a code and have it take me directly to their Twitter page than have to type in their username. Or even better, if I get a reward for taking a digital action, like filling out a survey, it’s easier to get me to the survey with a scanned code than giving me a URL to enter.

But in my opinion, up to this point QR codes have been an overall failure mostly because I don’t feel like the majority of people use them.

When asking around about why friends don’t use QR codes they claim they don’t have a way to scan them, even though doing a search for “QR scan” in Apple’s app store returns over 500 results.

If the problem is that people don’t have scanners installed, one straightforward solution would be for Apple and Google to include a standalone QR Code app with iOS and Android. Then at least most people with smartphones could scan the code without having to download another app. But I’m not convinced this would solve the problem. Asking someone to launch a specialized app to complete a task is asking for a change in behavior that most users probably aren’t willing to do.

Another solution is to fix the problem by using another technology, like location gating or NFC. But implementation of both of these would be costly and difficult. It would obviously never make sense for a business to embed NFC chips in every coffee cup they sell, and marketing materials are not always associated with just one location.

So what’s the ideal solution, assuming the goal is to get people to actually use these codes? My suggestion would be to make the camera software just a little bit smarter.

To truly take QR codes to the mainstream, Apple and Google should actually build a scanner into the camera logic. Similar to how the camera senses how much light there is, or if a picture is in focus, it could scan whether or not a QR code was in the frame. This would essentially turn your camera into a constant QR scanner.

If a QR code happens to be in the frame, a message would pop up asking if you’d like to follow the link. If you hit ignore, QR codes would be ignored until the next time you launch the app. No separate app, no new behavior. Just an extension of existing behavior. And of course, you could always turn this off in settings.

Probably not as simple to implement as it seems, but think of the implications.

Imagine how different this experience would be for consumers. Instead being told “Scan this code with a QR Code Scanner app on your phone”, the user would be told “Take a photo of this!” That experience would make so much more sense to 90% of users. Open camera, point phone at code, get sent where you need to go.

Simple. It might make having these codes all over the place actually worthwhile.

Amazon is holding a press event in Los Angeles on Thursday, in which it’s likely to announce new versions of its Kindle tablets. You know, now that the Kindle Fire is all sold out. There have even been some leaks about what that product will look like, and the fact that it could be ad-supported. But the location of the press event in Santa Monica could also mean that Amazon will be making a big announcement around new video content that’s available through those new products.

As Seth Porges astutely points out at Forbes, when a big tech company does an announcement in Los Angeles, that usually means there’s some sort of Hollywood studio connection. That isn’t always the case — check out Microsoft’s L.A. announcement of the Surface tablet for proof — but usually if a company like Amazon is gonna make a trip to Southern California for a product release, you can probably expect some studio execs in the room.

Now, Porges believes that means Amazon is likely to announce a major deal that will bring thousands of new titles to its Amazon Prime subscription video-on-demand service. Maybe that’s true, but somehow I don’t think so. Amazon has gradually been announcing new titles for the service over the past 18 months and is now up to about 22,000 pieces of content. Moreover, it’s more or less worked its way through most of the major media companies already, and is now working on expanded content deals with partners — see its recent re-up with NBC Universal, for instance. So an expanded Amazon Prime library doesn’t make much sense — it’s just seems too incremental, not “big” enough to announce alongside a new product like this.

But what if Amazon announced a way for users to have access to a wide range of movies on its new Kindle devices that they might have purchased on other online services, like Vudu or Flixster? This is pure speculation, but here’s my bet: When Amazon announces the newest versions of its tablets on Thursday, it’ll also be announcing wide support for Hollywood’s UltraViolet initiative, which is aimed at allowing users to buy once and watch anywhere.

Amazon is already an UltraViolet partner, having announced a deal with one UltraViolet studio (presumed to be Warner Bros.) at CES in January. But it’s yet to come out with an UltraViolet-compliant digital storefront of its own, or support UV titles purchased from other retailers, like Vudu.

While UltraViolet holds some promise for consumers, by giving them the ability to transfer digital rights to content across a wide range of apps and devices, most retailers haven’t been as keen on the service. After all, why would one company agree to pay the cost of streaming a title that was purchased from another retailer’s online store? There’s not a big advantage for most to join in.

For Amazon, though, joining UltraViolet means opening up more content that can be viewed on its new Kindle Fire devices. That includes movies that they’ve already bought in older formats: Earlier this year, Walmart’s Vudu unveiled a disc-to-digital program that allows users to take their DVDs to Walmart and add them to their digital lockers for a nominal fee. ($2 for DVDs to SD digital and $5 to upgrade to HD, or $2 for Blu-ray discs to digital) For those who care to take their DVDs and Blu-rays into a physical store, that could mean a lot more movies to watch on the new Kindle Fire.

So Amazon could very well announce full UltraViolet support for all the major studios participating. That would let Kindle owners to link their Video app with their UltraViolet digital lockers, and presto! instantly have more movies to watch. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing came with some small credit to incentivize users to sign up and “purchase” their first UV title that way. If so, there will likely be a way for Amazon users to instantly “upgrade” or add their existing video purchases to their UltraViolet locker for a small nominal fee.

But what if Amazon took that a step further? It already has DVD purchase information for millions of users. What if those users could simply “convert” those DVD purchases to digital — again, for a small, nominal fee?

There are no guarantees, of course. And maybe launching product in L.A. is just the hip new thing for tech companies from the Pacific Northwest to do. I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon announces support for UltraViolet on Thursday — and if it does, it’ll probably do so in a big way.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — laughed all the way to the bank, if the bank was the burgeoning integration of the push notification bus. Amid the usual technical glitches (Skype noise cancellation meets ComCast bandwidth blockages) the Gang nonetheless persevered into an ahead of the curve consensus.

Google + remains an inordinate locus of interest, as Google continues to blur the Apps/Docs/Gmail/GDrive services together. On the iOS side of the fence, AirPlay and iMessage retain an edge in differentiation, with Microsoft and Amazon bringing up the rear. Those (@kteare) who predict third party bridging of the unification services may be waiting for Clint Eastwood to ride to the rescue. Bring on the Obamacrats.

@stevegillmor, @kteare, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

We’ve seen quite a few startups try to disrupt relationships lately. There’s Dejamor, which sends you a box of romance each month, Boink Box, which sends you a box of sex toys, and I seem to remember a somewhat embarrassing interview with OhMiBod at CES.

And today, yet another sexy startup joins the space. It’s called Vibease, and it’s a “massager” as they say, that hooks up to your smartphone via Bluetooth. You can text chat, a bit like Pair, while your lover can control your massager from across the country, and vice versa.

The app offers text and picture messaging, along with the ability to create custom vibrations. You can also set a nickname instead of using your real name (God forbid some friend or mom see your name flash across the screen next to “Vibease”).

For the moment, Vibease doesn’t quite have their Bluetooth massager ready for market. “It won’t take long,” they say. But in the mean time, the Vibease app will use the phone’s vibrator “as a tease.” Plus, there’s a “Solo Mode” with ambient noise like Rain or Deep Breathing, which lets you drop it like it’s hot all on your own.

Vibease is only launching on Google Play today, with iOS coming in the near future. The team wants to get traction and feedback on the app before shipping the Bluetooth bunny.

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Editor’s note: Rob May is the CEO and co-founder of Backupify, the leading provider of backup and recovery solutions for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.

Google recently announced that it will begin offering corporate control features for its Google+ social network to businesses for free — at least for a while. If you run a Google Apps domain, you can set up domain-wide restrictions on how your users interact with Google+. Your users can also make “restricted” posts to Google+ which are visible only to members of your domain. It’s social networking, but with corporate oversight.

That’s sounds a lot like Yammer (which Microsoft recently bought for $1.2 billion) and Salesforce Chatter: Sharing streams designed for employee collaboration rather than personal socialization. It sounds less like Facebook, the undisputed heavyweight in social networking that Google+ was supposedly intended to depose.

That Google is choosing to make the same bet on corporate social networks that heavyweights like Microsoft and Salesforce are making isn’t surprising. What’s interesting is that Google isn’t segregating private Google+ from public Google+.

That suggests Google’s move into corporate social-nets is as much a flanking maneuver against Facebook as it is a direct challenge to Yammer and Chatter.

The restricted, company-only posts that Google Apps users make to Google+ will appear alongside the same public, personal posts everyone else is making on Google+. What better way to get a few million Google Apps domain users comfortable with Google+ than to have their employers require (or at least encourage) them to use it? This is the same tactic Microsoft employed to dominate the desktop operating system market for decades: Get users familiar with the product at the office so they prefer it when they make a purchase decision at home.

You don’t pay for social networks — though Google Apps domain administrators will apparently pay for the corporate control features come 2013 — but you do make a choice in where to invest most or all of your online social activity. Google is likely betting that a successful battle for the social network at the office will help it win back some territory in the war for social networking at home.

The only downside of this tactic is that it blurs the line between personal and professional social sharing. While Google probably relishes the idea of getting a holistic view of its customers’ social data, this cross-pollination of online social activities could have a number of unforeseen data security implications. User error is the leading cause of data loss for Google Apps domains, and adding Google+ to the roster of approved corporate applications gives users a whole new set of features they must learn to use safely.

Google’s move to merge professional and personal social networking is a bold one. It remains to be seen what the impact will be on Google+ or it users.