Category: Tech news

As many of you know, TechCrunch’s startup database, CrunchBase, makes a lot of its data freely available through an easy-to-use REST API, which launched about four years ago. We make much of the data accessible, including all entity listings (companies, people, financial orgs, and products), individual profile information, and a blog post endpoint which returns all posts written by TechCrunch on any given entity. In addition, a search query endpoint helps you to sift through data as well. Below is a sample of some of the API calls currently supported:

http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/people.js
http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/company/twitter.js
http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/financial-organization/union-square-ventures.js
http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/search.js?query=reddit
http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/people/posts?first_name=Ron&last_name=Conway

The CrunchBase API has been open, free, and without rate limits, which probably explains its success. As Fred Wilson points out here, the value of CrunchBase stems from being open and peer-produced. TechCrunch has made this data easily available so developers can create interesting apps, mashups, and analysis. Currently, there are about 150 million data calls per month, which suggests to us that CrunchBase is working well, so well in fact that we have to think carefully about the future of CrunchBase and its ecosystem.

As a result, we’ve decided to collect information to help us understand the API’s usage and plan for the future of the API. We want to cultivate relationships with our third-party developers and provide improved documentation and developer support. Simultaneously, we see the need to track the API’s growth so we make sure we can scale with the demand.

With that in mind, we are partnering with Mashery to use their API management solution. Mashery will help us migrate the CrunchBase API to its proxy infrastructure so we can measure call volumes and make the API scale better. On Friday, 8/31, we will cutover to Mashery’s servers. To end users, this cutover will have no visible impact.

Three weeks following this cutover, on September 21st, 2012, TechCrunch and Mashery will also launch a developer portal where developers can register and publish their their apps, find documentation and IO Docs, and participate in a forum with CrunchBase team.

The API will remain open and free throughout these changes, but we are also going to nudge and eventually require developers to adopt access keys to use the API. We will move through this transition cautiously with clear cut goals in mind: 1) not break existing applications and uses of the API and 2) ensure uninterrupted service of any applications. We will not mandate use of access keys at the outset and will give developers ample time (on the order of months) to bake access keys into applications. We will share more as we iron out the details.

To recap, on 8/31, all API calls will be routed through Mashery’s proxy servers but there will be no impact to existing applications. The migration should be completely transparent. Please continue using the API as you were. If for any reason, your application is adversely impacted, let us know at [email protected] and we will look into it immediately.

Chicago’s local incubator, Excelerate Labs, held its demo day yesterday, with the program’s ten startups set to graduate. Excelerate, which offers startups $50,000 in convertible debt from New World Ventures (similar to The Start Fund model), counts Lightbank, New World, DFJ Mercury, OCA Ventures, Tim Draper, Sam Yagan and Troy Henikoff as limited partners.

Here’s a brief look at the startups that are graduating from the incubator.

71lbs: 71lbs is a “set-and-forget” system that allows SMBs to easily collect refunds from FedEx and UPS shipments delivered late – even by 60 seconds.

Whimseybox: Whimseybox is a subscription commerce startup that offers a monthly subscription box for crafts. The box also incudes online DIY tips, techniques and full project tutorials.

Cureeo: Cureeo helps you find artwork online. The startup will learn your preferences and find the perfect original or limited edition artwork that suits your tastes.

Fibroblast: Fibroblast closes the loop in healthcare by automating the patient referral process. The startup help patients get the follow up care they need and doctors get referral revenue.

frintit: frintit lets you print and mail your photos for free.

Lasso: Lasso is a communication platform for coordinating plans with friends.

MoxieJean: Moxie Jean is an online consignment sale that makes it easy for moms to buy and sell high-quality, brand-name kids’ clothes.

Orbeus: Orbeus provides an all-in-one solution for cloud-based image processing, including facial, scene, and object recognition, to make visual content searchable and interpretable like text.

Pictarine: Pictarine lets you view the latest photos of people you follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and Tumblr.

SpotHero: SpotHero removes the hassle of getting a parking spot by allowing drivers to compare and reserve spots from their mobile phone and the web.

Pokki announced today that it is coming out of beta and adding a notification center and new apps for Angry Birds, Pandora and Pinterest. The company also said it has surpassed 1 million monthly active users.

Pokki says the new apps are made possible by a new app packaging technology, which they’ll be providing to developers in the future, to turn a web app or game into a Pokki desktop app.

The update includes an apps menu for centralized launch and discovery and real-time sliding notifications. The new apps add to Pokki’s existing collection, which includes PC desktop apps for Facebook, Gmail, Instagram (called Instagrille), and Twitter (Tweeki).

Chester Ng, co-founder of Sweetlabs, the startup behind Pokki, tells me Pokki has seen “tremendous” growth over the last six months, as the user base has roughly doubled every month.

“Your PC doesn’t have to suck,” Ng says. “You can have this modern experience”

Ng says Sweetlabs tries to bring the “fun and convenience” of iOS and Android to keyboards and mice. He adds that Pokki will release a beta version for Mac OS soon before turning its attention to Windows 8.

Mountain Lion, the latest version of Apple’s OS X desktop operating system, launched just over a month ago and according to the latest data from ad network Chitika, it already runs on over 10% of Macs. Following the obvious spike in installs right after launch — the OS was already running on 3.2% of Macs just 48 hours after its release — Mountain Lion’s share of web traffic to Chitika’s partner network continued to increase steadily, with no sign of letting up even a month later.

Mountain Lion’s adoption rate, says Chitika, is on track to outperform OS X Lion, its predecessor. It took Lion three months to reach 14% of total OS X traffic on the company’s network. There is, of course, a chance that Mountain Lion’s growth will plateau over the next two months, but if the current momentum continues, the new OS will pass 14% within the next three weeks. Reviews for Mountain Lion were generally more positive than for Lion and, as Chitika’s analysts point out, the new large number of new features make the new OS feels a bit more like a real upgrade than moving from Snow Leopard to Lion.

As for OS X in general, Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) continues to dominate with just over 43% of all traffic to Chitika’s network, followed by Lion (31.5%) and Leopard (13%). Among TechCrunch readers, by the way, Mountain Lion already accounts for 30% of all traffic and Lion is still the most popular version of OS X among our readers (41%) and just 25% of you still use Snow Leopard.

Payvia, which just launched its new mobile payment platform for carrier billing this July, has been selected as the exclusive vendor to power the campaign contributions for Obama for America (OFA). This will allow supporters to send in donations to the campaign via text message, and those charges will later appear on the user’s monthly cell phone bill. The company says it first presented its service to the Federal Election Commission earlier this spring (before its public debut), and then was approved unanimously by FEC members votes. This is the first time politicians have been able to receive donations this way – something that was made possible by the FEC’s ruling in June that authorized this grassroots method for political fundraising.

The Obama Campaign announced that it would begin accepting donations via text messages earlier this month, allowing supporters text “GIVE” to 62262 for those on Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, with AT&T planned for the “near future,” according to a press release put out by the campaign. Donations were capped at $50 per month, and $10 per text, per FEC rules.  Mitt Romney’s campaign is expected to do the same, with supporters texting “GOMITT” or 466488.

Although it may seem surprising that payvia was chosen for this effort, given it was only just launched, the company it comes from has been operating in this space for some time. Payvia is from  m-Qube, which started a transaction and carrier billing network in North America in 2004 – in other words, it knows the ropes. m-Qube had originally focused on entertainment services (ringtones, wallpaper, etc.) back in mobile’s earlier days. As payvia, it’s now competing with a number of others, including Boku, Zong (now eBay-owned), Bango, Netsize, Fortumo, boxPAY, and more.

According to payvia President, Darcy Wedd, his company was chosen for a number of reasons. “We demonstrated leadership in this space with the payvia group authoring multiple Federal Election Commission (FEC) Advisory Opinion requests,” he explains. “We worked through a series of these requests with the FEC in June and August, each approved by unprecedented unanimous Commission votes. As a result, payvia’s approved proposal will permit political committees to accept contributions via carrier billing. payvia’s core technology platform addressed all of the requirements necessary to garner the support of the FEC,” he adds.

For the company, the impact to payvia’s bottom line are “significant,” says Wedd. “One of the FEC requirements is that the payvia must charge the political committees normal commercial rates for these contribution programs,” he tells us. Asked if he could estimate the number of donations expected, Wedd deferred, saying that the marketing plans for the campaigns remain confidential, but the potential reach is in the tens of millions.

The importance of the FEC’s ruling to allow text message donations cannot be overstated. As the influence of affluent donors and super PACs grows, the ability to raise small amounts via SMS could help shift power back to the general public. Text messaging could tap into impulsivity – reaching those who wouldn’t normally bother to donate, but are fine with sending a quick text. It’s a method that’s proved successful for non-political fundraisers, like when SMS was used following the earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010. There’s also the possibility for further virality, since text message users could quickly share word of the SMS donation via friends.

This isn’t the Obama’s campaign first embrace of SMS by any means. The campaign also texted users who Obama chose for his VP back in 2008.

And the Spotify announcements just keep coming. The folks behind the popular streaming music service called attention to a new deal with Deutsche Telekom earlier this morning, and now the company has revealed that it’s bringing physical gift cards to the United States.

The cards come in $10, $30, and $60 denominations, which translates to one, three, and six months of premium streaming music access, respectively. They’re a Target-exclusive (for the time being, anyway) and the move comes just ahead of the holiday buying rush — music-lovers shouldn’t be surprised to find one of these nestled in their stockings.

Yeah, this may not seem like earth-shattering news, but it’s a big deal for domestic Spotify customers who would rather purchase their access in chunks ahead of time.

You see, U.S. users have tended to get the short end of the stick when it came to purchasing prepaid subscriptions to Spotify’s premium service. There was a time (last year, mostly) when U.S. customers were able to purchase 1, 3, 6, and 12 month chunks of music streaming goodness in the form of virtual gift cards, but Spotify quietly killed that functionality towards the end of 2011. As far I can tell, Spotify never offered an official reason for the move, though the members of the Spotify community were quick to offer up their own theories.

The prevailing notion? It was thought that European customers wanted to take advantage of favorable exchange rates by having friends in the U.S. buy those e-cards for them. It was only last month that Spotify brought that feature back to the States, though only time will tell if it sticks around for good.

Walmart is today unveiling a new search engine named “Polaris” which now powers Walmart.com, as well as the company’s mobile web and mobile apps, and offers a 10%-15% increased likelihood that a customer will complete their purchase, the company claims. The engine was built by a small team of fifteen engineers within Walmart’s @WalmartLabs division, an internal group of technologists which has grown in recent years through the acquisition of startups like Kosmix, OneRiot, Grabble, Small Society, and others.

Specifically, Polaris takes advantage of Kosmix’s semantic technology, which includes something it once called the “Social Genome” – a way of enabling discovery using algorithms that rank results via social signals from around the web.

Kosmix’s Social Genome technology was used in an earlier @WalmartLabs creation known as “Shopycat,” a social-gifting platform that debuted just before the 2011 holiday season as a Facebook application. With Polaris, that same technology has been expanded upon in order to help return better search results on Walmart.com’s e-commerce and m-commerce destinations. Algorithms take into consideration the number of “Likes” a Walmart product it has on Facebook, and it will soon also look at the number of pins it has on Pinterest, as well as user ratings and reviews when ranking results. For now, reviews are sourced from Walmart itself, but further down the road, Polaris may pull in reviews from external properties through partnerships with review providers.

It’s a notable development for Walmart to even consider using the “signals” from the young and still unproven social network Pinterest, which is often seen to drive traffic, but is increasingly questioned on its ability to convert clicks to sales. In fact, Amazon-owned Zappos.com recently found that Pinterest failed to impact sales following its launch of a feature which suggested products based on Pinterest posts. But in that case, there may have been too much emphasis on only Pinterest, whereas in Walmart’s engine, Pinterest would be just one of many signals – similar to how Google’s PageRank looks at many signals to return its list of blue links.

In addition to social signals, another key area of focus for Polaris is on the semantic technology Kosmix had developed as a part of the Social Genome. This allows Polaris to understand how items are related. “It’s a term that encompasses the connections between people, events, places, and products most importantly,” explains Sri Subramaniam VP of Engineering at @WalmartLabs. “And we analyze the relationships between all these different nodes and entities. So not only are these concepts formalized in a hierarchy, the relationships between them are gleamed.”

What that means, in layman’s terms, is that when a user searches for “garden furniture” on Walmart.com, the engine knows that equates to the category “patio furniture,” and can display results from that product group as well. It also helps to categorize product descriptions in order to extract more meaning out of the text provided. For example, it can pull out an attribute “14 Karat” from a description of a gold necklace, and then that attribute becomes searchable.

The third key piece to Polaris is what Walmart calls “engagement scoring.” This was not built using the technology acquired from Kosmix, but was rather designed in-house using Walmart’s own internal metrics. The scoring is related to what Walmart shoppers actually do following a search query – that is, what they click on, add to cart, and what they purchase. This helps train the system to know that a customer searching for “house” is more likely looking for something related to the TV show “House,” as opposed to “dog house” or “doll house,” for example, or that the word “flats” shouldn’t have the “s” removed in order to return results about “flat screen TVs” but should rather present a selection of shoes.

Although the announcement is being made today, Polaris has actually been up-and-running for about a month. The rollout originally began with a small bucket test where small portions (5%-10%) of Walmart.com traffic was directed over to the next engine. Now the engine is live on all Walmart’s e-commerce and m-commerce offerings in the U.S. The metric related to the increased purchase likelihood (the 10%-15% increase reported above) was made after rollout was at 100%, to be clear. Going forward, Walmart is working to roll out Polaris to international markets, starting first with Brazil then slowly to the 26 other countries Walmart reaches worldwide. One to two of these countries should be live within the next 12 months or so.

Walmart may be the world’s largest retailer when it comes to physical stores, but it has struggled to compete against Amazon.com when it comes to Internet sales. While Subramaniam can’t talk in specifics about the impact Polaris will have on revenue, he could say that it was having a impact in terms of Walmart’s culture. “It’s a physical retailer, the first company to actually demonstrate a very quick, rapid entry into advanced technology for e-commerce,” he says, “and directionally it points to the fact that Walmart is really, really serious about e-commerce and isn’t resting.”

Early numbers for Facebook’s Sponsored Results, the ads launched last week that run alongside Facebook searches, could be an encouraging sign that Facebook’s strategy of building new ways of advertising to its users is working.

Nanigans, one of the Facebook performance-based marketers selling against the new unit, says that click-through rates on the ads so far have been about 23 times higher than regular marketplace ads, with some click-through-rates actually exceeding 3%, and cost per click (CPCs), at this point at least, some 78% lower than they are for Marketplace Ads.

On top of that they appear to be driving more actions, with a 14% higher install rate compared to Marketplace Ads.

That 3% CTR figure, it turns out, was the average that online ads were getting in the 1990s, a great heyday for ad-funded dot-coms.

Those numbers for the wider internet, of course, are now down to 0.1%-0.3%.

The question is whether Facebook over time will follow the same curve, and if it does, if it can keep enough scale in its operation to sustain a strong business anyway.

On the other hand, if they sustain, the numbers point to Facebook’s growing ads business, and perhaps a greater focus on its search window in the future.

There are already a number of features in Facebook’s search window: in addition to links to people and pages in Facebook, a Microsoft Bing integration gives Facebook users results from the wider web as well.

Sponsored results look similar to organic search results on Facebook, with the exception of being flagged as “Sponsored.”

As with other ads on Facebook, and as with search ads on other sites like Google, advertisers are able to buy against specific keywords. Early looks showed companies already using this to effect to appear when people searched for their competitors. The extra twist with Facebook is that advertisers can also buy against the profiles of people that will be viewing the ads, with the ads coming up based on a person’s demographic group or Facebook interests.

Nanigans says its network gets some 2 billion impressions per day and drives 2 million “performance events” like installs, registrations and purchases per day.

The Linux kernel is the world’s largest collaborative development project. Almost 3,000 individual contributors work together to create and maintain an operating system kernel that works on everything from wristwatches and mobile phones to mainframes, along with all the peripherals imaginable for each platform. Linux creator Linus Torvalds sits at the top of a loose hierarchy of kernel maintainers and acts as final arbiter for what does or does not get included.

So how does one go about contributing a substantially new technology to the kernel?

Sage Weil was working on a distributed file system for Linux as part of his PhD research at University of California, Santa Cruz. This was before the advent of the buzzword “big data”, and therefore before things like Hadoop or Amazon’s S3. His research into distributed fault tolerance led him to the conclusion that the best way to manage a clustered filesystem was at the kernel layer, rather than higher up in userspace. He called his filesystem “Ceph” — a shortened version of Cephalopod — as a nod to the “highly parallel behavior of an octopus.”

Weil was no stranger to open source or the Linux community. In 1996 he was one of the founders of the web hosting company Dreamhost. As his research progressed, he knew he’d need to get his kernel components integrated upstream if they were to have any real chance of practical application: no one was likely to compile a custom kernel just for a clustered file system.

So Weil did what any good hacker would do: he joined a couple of kernel-related mailing lists and started watching how things work. He participated in small ways to slowly establish his name and reputation. He attended a couple of kernel workshops, and met kernel hackers in real life.

When the fruits of his research were ready for the public kernel, he followed the same patch submission processes that every other kernel hacker did. His patches were rejected the first couple of times, as seasoned kernel maintainers looked over the work. Weil reviewed their remarks, made suggested improvements, and submitted again.

While Weil was improving his clustered file system, Amazon rolled out their S3 storage offering. Hadoop rolled out their HDFS distributed storage. Other players came and went, mostly working in isolation and in userspace, above the kernel.

Finally, in March of 2010, Linus Torvalds merged the Ceph filesystem into the mainline kernel, making it almost immediately available to any Linux user who wanted to explore distributed file systems.

Weil hasn’t been sitting idle since that merge. He’s shepherded a group of Ceph developers together, while still working full-time at Dreamhost, and spun off a new company called Inktank to provide long-term support and consultation services to Ceph users. I spoke with Weil, and a few other Inktank employees about their short and long-term plans.

Bryan Bogensberger, President and COO, and Ross Turk, VP of Community, both expressed excitement about what was to come. The Inktank developers are very cognizant that the Ceph technology is a stepping stone for other cool things — many of which they can’t even fathom yet. They are very intentional about nurturing future developments through Ceph, though.

How can a distributed file system spur new, unexpected developments you might be asking yourself? For one, the Ceph filesystem can be used as a drop-in replacement for HDFS in Hadoop clusters. This can, in the right circumstances, allow folks to concentrate less on the storage aspects of a cluster and more on the usage of that cluster. Ceph storage nodes are also fairly intelligent, and can run code against their locally stored objects independent of any kind of master control process. As an example, image files stored in a Ceph node can have thumbnails created by the node itself, rather than from a central batch processor. This means that those thumbnails could be created at the time the object is injected into the storage node, automatically. That’s a subtly powerful change to the standard storage workflow.

Ceph also implements full Amazon S3 API compatibility. Apps written for Amazon S3 should be fully functional with Ceph by simply updating the storage endpoint URL. Whether you’re looking to compete with Amazon S3, avoid the Amazon cloud hegemony, or push for open cloud standards, Ceph can help you out.

In many ways the story of Ceph is similar to the story of Linux: one guy scratching his own itch, mostly for academic purposes — and because he clearly saw a better way to do it. Neither was the direct result of corporate R&D investment, and both gained traction by embracing a community of like-minded developers based on the merits of the work itself. Ceph has a lot of potential to shake up the storage world, just as Linux shook up computing.

Inktank is currently hiring. If you’re interested in disrupting the traditional storage market in the way that Linux itself disrupted traditional UNIX computing, check them out.

Based on downloads, Facebook’s iPhone app was no longer the most popular mobile social networking app in many Asian countries and elsewhere from July 2011 to June 2012. This, according to the latest report from app store analytics firm Distimo, which took a look at trends surrounding mobile social networking applications over the past two years. Distimo found that apps like LINE, WeChat and Viber took over the leading position of Facebook in some countries, and Instagram become the second most popular app on iPhone within one year, after examining data aggregated over the 20 largest countries.

In addition, in July 2012, Instagram had more downloads than Facebook, and apps like Twitter, Skype and Whatsapp were also popular.

Before getting into these results (and I’m putting this at the top because it’s critical to understand the below data):

• Downloads, which is what Distimo is using to measure popularity, do not equate to users.
• Distimo is looking at mobile apps, and specifically iPhone apps, not the networks’ overall user base and reach.
• Facebook’s app has been around for several years, so adoption is already high. Users don’t need to continue to download an app they already own and use.
• Distimo did not look at every country worldwide for this report. The countries selected cover all regions and were chosen based on market size – that is, the largest markets were taken into account. The countries examined in the report include: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Korea, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States.

During the period of July 2010 through June 2011, Distimo found that Facebook was more dominant than it is now. In only five of the researched countries, it was not the most popular social networking app. But in three of those five, it was still in the top 5 most popular apps. It hadn’t cracked the top 5 in China and South Korea during that time. Among paid apps, Whatsapp Messenger was the number one app in all countries except Japan, where it was number two.

However, from July 2011 to June 2012, Facebook’s dominance was not as apparent. While it was still the most popular social networking app by far, other social networking apps had taken over in some countries. LINE was the most popular app based on downloads in Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, while Viber took off to become the most popular app in Spain and Australia. In China and Hong Kong, WeChat was downloaded the most, and in South Korea, KakaoTalk was the most popular, as it was the year before.

The top 10 aggregated over these countries were (in order): Facebook, Instagram, Viber, Skype, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LINE, Google+, WeChat and Windows Live Messenger. You’ll notice that Facebook actually owns several slots in the top 10 there: it offers Facebook Messenger and it acquired Instagram as well.

Among paid apps, Whatsapp, again, was the most popular, but as a paid application, it can’t grow all that large. On average, paid apps have between 14x and 40x fewer downloads, the report notes. However, whenever Whatsapp goes on sale, it tends to end up in the top 25 list in many countries.

Looking at just the past month (July 2012), Distimo benchmarked the download figures of other social networking apps with Facebook in ten major countries. This chart (below) uses Facebook as an index, and all the social networking apps that generated more downloads in July were plotted.

The chart shows the popularity of Instagram in several countries, like the U.S., U.K., Canada, Mexico, France and Italy, for example. But it was not popular in China, Japan and Korea. Skype and Whatsapp were also doing better than Facebook in some of these countries. (Note that Whatsapp  was on sale during the month). LINE is doing better than Facebook in Japan and Korea, while Kakao Story is most popular in Korea. In China, Facebook saw fewer downloads than QQ and WeChat, which had 5x-6x more during the month.

Again, and because this data could be misinterpreted: Distimo is measuring iPhone app downloads, not total users, active users, engagement, or the social networks’ total user base. This does not show that Facebook is losing its overall popularity – in some markets, it’s about reaching saturation and seeing its growth slow. For example, in July, Twitter, Skype and Pinterest saw more downloads than Facebook did in the U.S.

Social networking is a popular app category, especially in the U.S. Over the past two years, as the download volumes among the top 100 most popular apps grew by 43%, the volume among social networking apps grew by 193%.

However, social networking is not as popular in other countries as it stateside. The volume among the top 100 most popular social networking apps compared to the top 100 most popular apps in general (across countries) varies between 7% and 20%. The U.S. is at the top there (20%), while Europe and South East Asia are the least socially-minded.

More data can be found in the full report here.

Virgin America is one of my favorite airlines to fly on — it’s kind of like the airline of the future, with interactive displays in every headrest, cool lighting, an animated safety video, and there’s almost always WiFi on board.

But Virgin is looking to be even more futuristic, promising the customer with the most miles at the end of the year a chance to upgrade to Galactic status.

That’s right, the person who flew the most on Virgin Airlines will win a ride to space courtesy of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

Starting now through August 7, 2013, the contest will allow the most frequent flier to take a trip on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, a carbon composite commercial space craft.

The SpaceShipTwo rides along with WhiteKnightTwo before launching into space — it takes far less energy to launch from 50,000 ft than it does from the ground.

A ticket on a commercial space craft is running people between $100,000 (the going rate over at Space Expedition Corporation (SXC)) and $200,000. But the winner will enjoy a galactic trip for free (aside from all the airline tickets). The second-place frequent flier will get a free zero-gravity flight at the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, but sadly will not enter space.

In other words, expect to see George Clooney in space in about a year.

[via USNews]

Always Be Gaming. That’s the first rule of sales under ePrize’s Sales Contest Builder which can turn any Salesforce task into a game. Best yet, ePrize, a Detroit-based startup fresh off its acquisition by private equity firm Catterton Partners, this morning is announcing  the app is gaining major traction, most notable deployed within the Detroit Pistons organization and Comcast.

The tool is available through Salesforce’s AppExchange and allows for the gamification of nearly any aspect of the sales process. This enables organizations to better incentivize their sales team while providing real-time feedback and analytics on the behavior. This tool was born within ePrize’s own sales force, showing that it’s often best to look within an organization for great ideas.. After all, ePrize itself is all about incentivizing behaviors.

“The beauty of Sales Contest Builder lies in its simplicity,” said Bob Marsh, Sales Contest Builder general manager, in a released statement to TechCrunch. “Salespeople are competitive by nature, and our app allows sales managers to tap into that competitive culture by creating competitions around whatever behavior they want to motivate. It’s big win for sales managers, enabling them to automatically monitor and motivate their teams to do everything from filling in needed fields in Salesforce to meeting daily sales call goals to scoring big sales.”

ePrize announced this morning the app is being used by Comcast, Federal Signal, InsideView, Dominion Enterprises and Palace Sports and Entertainment (the Detroit Pistons). The app exited beta last year and ePrize is seeing significant growth since it went public.

Click to view slideshow.

The latest figures out from IDC confirm that this is the year that China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s biggest smartphone market, with its 25.5% share a significant lead over the U.S.’s 17.8%. The tipping point has been a long time coming: China is the world’s most-populated country, so it was only a matter of time before it would overtake the U.S. But the trend has been accelerated in the last couple of years with the rise of cheap sub-$200 devices built on Android.

But when it comes to growth, it’s another booming Eastern economy that is leading the pack: India, which this year will only account for 2.5% of all smartphones shipped and sold, is growing at a rate of over 57% in the next several years: but that still will only give it an 8.5% share by 2016. IDC notes that India has one of the lowest smartphone penetration rates in the region.

The trend for cheap, Android-based devices will continue to drive growth at China, too, which will see its share expand at a rate of 26.2%.

If anything the price is going to come down ever more: “Near-term prices in the low-end segment will come down to US$100 and below as competition for market share intensifies among smartphone vendors,” writes Wong Teck-Zhung, senior market analyst, Client Devices, IDC Asia/Pacific.

He believes that carrier subsidies and strong domestic vendors will continue to persist as trends in the market, too, and he believes 4G will be “another growth catalyst.”

Those cheap Chinese handsets are not just for Chinese, though. They are also making their way to other emerging markets like Brazil, which will see a much higher rate of growth than China, at 44% — although like India its share is just above 2% of all shipments at the moment.

In contrast, developed markets like the U.S. and UK will see growth at under 12%. In markets like these, the main trend will continue to be current feature phone handset owners upgrading to smartphones, but these countries are also much closer to smartphone saturation — which smartphones already in many cases outnumbering feature devices in current sales. Many analysts already note that the U.S. and UK are tipping into a smartphone majority. In the UK, the eventual launch of LTE will also be a driving force for sales. The first LTE services could launch as early as this year.

Another market that gets a mention by IDC, but which still doesn’t make it beyond the “rest of the world” category, is Mother Russia. IDC, in fact, believes it might be, along with Brazil, among the most hotly contested markets of all in the next five years.

The United Kingdom has been one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in Western Europe, driven by the high operator subsidies and long-term post-paid contracts. Over the forecast period, smartphone shipments will continue to increase due to the introduction of LTE and a new range of services that will appeal to heavy smartphone users. In addition, price erosion on HSPA devices will also attract feature phones users. Growth rates will slow in the later years of the forecast as penetration plateaus and operators seek out alternative subsidy models.

Top Five Smartphone Markets and Market Share for 2011, 2012, and 2016 (based on shipments)

Country	2011 Market Share	2012 Market Share	2016 Market Share	2011 – 2016 CAGR
PRC	18.3%	26.5%	23.0%	26.2%
USA	21.3%	17.8%	14.5%	11.6%
India	2.2%	2.5%	8.5%	57.5%
Brazil	1.8%	2.3%	4.4%	44.0%
United Kingdom	5.3%	4.5%	3.6%	11.5%
Rest of World	51.1%	46.4%	46.0%	18.1%
Total	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	20.5%

Source: IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, 2012 Q2 Forecast Release, August 30 2012

New Kindles are coming! New Kindles are coming! And Amazon is trying its hardest to build up hype.

The Kindle Fire was the retailer’s hottest product since its launch. The replacement is set be announced next week, but Amazon just took to the wires to announce the original Kindle Fire is sold out. OMGNOWAY!

It’s nearly guaranteed that Amazon will launch new Kindle models next week at its LA-based press conference. New ereader Kindles are expected alongside new Fire models. It should be a good showing by Amazon, but there is a lot of noise in this space now. A boat load of tablets launched at IFA the last few days and Apple is expected to release a Kindle Fire competitor in the coming weeks as well.

Amazon is clearly desperate for attention. And so, just like the, days before the announcement of the next model, Amazon is suddenly out of stock of its best selling item — and quickly issued a press release bragging as such.

SEATTLE—August 30, 2012—(NASDAQ: AMZN)—Less than one year ago, Amazon introduced Kindle Fire —combining 15 years of innovation into a single, fully-integrated, end-to-end service for customers. Kindle Fire quickly became the most successful product launch in the history of Amazon.com, earning over 10,000 5-star customer reviews, and is the #1 best-selling product across the millions of items available on Amazon since its introduction 48 weeks ago. Today, Amazon announced that Kindle Fire is sold out, and that in just nine months, Kindle Fire has captured 22% of tablet sales in the U.S.

“We’re grateful to the millions of customers who have made Kindle Fire the most successful product launch in the history of Amazon,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “This has been a big year for digital products on Amazon—all of the top 10 sellers on Amazon.com since Kindle Fire launched just less than a year ago are digital products. Kindle Fire is sold out, but we have an exciting roadmap ahead—we will continue to offer our customers the best hardware, the best prices, the best customer service, the best cross-platform interoperability, and the best content ecosystem.”

Kindle Fire offers customers a vast selection of digital content—over 22 million movies, TV shows, apps, games, books, magazines and more—in one seamless, end-to-end experience, making it easy for customers to browse, discover and purchase. Since Kindle Fire launched last September, all of the top 10 products on Amazon—across all products—are digital products.

Today, AT&T opened up its 10,000 square foot flagship retail store on Michigan Ave. in Chicago. It’s a bit of a beast, with an 18-foot Connect Wall that displays news and product info to everyone in the store and in the street.

But despite all the cool technology (and trust me, there’s plenty), AT&T is really looking to have more of connection with its consumers. When you walk into any carrier store, the phone usually comes first. Samsung, Apple, and Motorola come to mind — not AT&T. But the blue carrier is looking to remedy that.

The store has a Microsoft Surface table so that consumers can familiarize themselves with various apps. There’s also a Street Smart section, complete with a Nissan Leaf, which makes customers aware of AT&T’s safe driving products, along with an in-store retail demo area of AT&T’s home automation services and products.

But the tech isn’t just for the consumers. Employees will use biometric technology to open cabinet locks for cash drawers and IT systems using their fingerprints.

Check out the video below for a better look:

Click to view slideshow.