Category: Tech news

Senzari, the Pandora competitor backed by $1 million in funding from 500 Startups and others, has just debuted a brand-new recommendation engine called AMP³, which steps up the competition quite a bit between it and other streaming radio providers. The new engine (which we’ll just call “AMP” for short) isn’t like the basic “artist radio” option found in Pandora, or the radio features in other streaming music apps, either. Those, at best, may just include a “more/less like this” slider option for customization purposes. Instead, with AMP, listeners can customize their music by a number of factors, including popularity, tempo, similarity, and discovery.

And, says Senzari, this is just the beginning.

“We looked at solutions for recommendation of music and found that pretty much all were similar to what has been done over the last half a decade or more in music,” says Senzari COO Demian Bellumio. “It started with Pandora with the Music Genome, and the solutions out there are just looking at the music itself…we felt that it was an opportunity to innovate in that space,” he says. Bellumio notes that several technology developments have made this type of deeper customization possible, like the advance of tools that help with the crunching of big data, for example, as well as Facebook’s Open Graph, which offers another source to analyze the meaning and the relationships between data points.

“What we decided to do is build a platform that could connect all those dots and go beyond just creating new set of experiences based on the music, but really understand  how the music qualities, plus the social layer, plus anything else that could give meaning to the music, like context, could all come together,” he says.

The initial version of the recommendation engine, nine months in development, is the first step to achieving that goal of building a truly personalized radio. Today, you can use AMP to say, for instance, that you want to hear songs like Pearl Jam’s slower music, but only less popular songs, and those you probably have not heard. Popularity and discovery are different settings, to be clear – just because music is “popular,” that doesn’t mean you’ve actually heard it. And Senzari knows what you’ve heard, to some extent, by mining your “likes” and those of your friends on Facebook. It also knows things like the age of your friends, location, what apps people use and who you chat with the most in the Senzari Facebook chat sidebar. All these signals combined help to influence its ability to know what you may or may not have yet heard.

Senzari thinks of itself as not a music company, but a technology company which is focused for now on music. But that being said, it has ideas as to how it can take on the  music radio incumbent Pandora. Its “recommendable” catalog encompass some 18-19 million songs (up from 11 million in May) and far more than Pandora’s 900,000. And it’s also targeting worldwide markets, while Pandora remains U.S.-only. Senzari is now available not only in the U.S., but also Spain, Brazil, and just recently, the U.K. It’s rolling out to Italy and parts of Latin America next, and expects to arrive on mobile by October.

In the meantime, users in supported regions can try the new AMP recommendation engine here on the web.

Now you can check-in to a location on Facebook through facial recognition scanning. The Redpepper ad agency claims to be beta testing a camera on the outside of a “Nashville business” that automatically checks patrons in to a location and offers them deals, after users have given the company access to their Facebook data (note: this was developed independently from Facebook). A video explanation of the technology, Facedeals, is below.

Facebook has come under intense congressional scrutiny for taking steps toward facial recognition, with the purchase of Face.com. However, after only a month, it ceased using the technology to automatically suggest which friends to tag in photos.

As Redpepper explains in a blog post, the alleged technology is done completely through a voluntary app:

The Facedeals app must be authorized via your Facebook account. With your help, the app verifies your most recent photo tags, using those to map the physical appearance of your face. Our custom-developed cameras then simply use this existing data to identify you in the real world. Personalized deals can now be delivered to your Smartphone from all participating locations—all you have to do is show your face.

Redpepper argues that the technology will help both consumers and businesses use the magic of Facebook to more efficiently dole out deals. What do you think? Creepy or awesome?

Our Facebook specialist Josh Constine wanted it be clear that Facedeals is not approved or endorsed by Facebook. It merely uses the social network as an easy way for people to upload photos for Facedeals to do its own facial recognition processing.

In fact, considering the name and coloring, Facedeals could get slapped with a trademark infringement lawsuit. Facebook is trying to downplay its use of facial recog technology, and probably won’t take kindly to this confusion and possibly fear-inducing employment of its platform.

On the heels of Google buying Wildfire and Salesforce nabbing Buddy Media, we have heard from two very reliable sources, plus a third anonymous source, that Gannett Co., the media giant that owns USA Today and other properties, is buying BLiNQ Media. The price for the Facebook advertising software and service is up to $92 million over a period of three to four years, with a quarter of that amount, $23 million, coming up front.

We hear the purchase agreement has been signed and the pair are now marching towards a close at the end of this month. The rationale behind the deal is clear: when brands buy ad placements on Gannett properties, it could use BLiNQ to also sell them ads on social sites and collect a solid margin.

Gannett is looking to BLiNQ, which has built up a profitable Facebook ads API business, to become G’s equivalent of the Washington Post Company’s SocialCode, its social media marketing and analytics agency (which picked up 15 Digg engineers in May). Gannett and BLiNQ, TechCrunch understands, have already been working together for about a year on ad campaigns for advertising clients, primarily via those brands’ agencies. This will bring more of that expertise in house.

Digital was one of the bright spots for Gannett in its Q2 earnings, reported in the middle of July. With overall revenues of $1.3 billion down 2% on print advertising pressures, in its publishing segment, digital revenues were up by 29.3%; in its U.S. Community Publishing division they were up 33%; at USA Today they were up by 37%; and at the company’s Newsquest UK division they were up by 10%.

BLiNQ has only taken in about $3 million in funding, none from VCs, since launching in 2008. It was profitable in its Facebook marketing business from early on, and so it hasn’t needed to seek outside investment. More recently, it has been expanding into marketing on LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as Facebook’s mobile advertising efforts.

Among Gannett’s assets are digital marketing agency PointRoll and online circular company ShopLocal. You can see where a BLiNQ Media acquisition could position it very well to offer social ad buying services and tools to its advertiser and local business clients.

TechCrunch understands that in addition to David Nicol Williams, the co-founder and CEO of BLiNQ, Gannett was also interested in startup’s engineering team, led by CTO, Luis Caballero, who had also built up the engineering team at Vitrue. (Both companies are based in Atlanta, Georgia, which it turns out is something of a hotbed for social media marketing. Who knew?) TechCrunch understands that like Vitrue, Blinq has some IP that it is patenting. Blinq’s is centered around media optimization algorithms.

There is still “tons of innovation” that Blinq has left to roll out, we understand, so this could be the start of something interesting. With big media properties and advertising clients to test its products, it could crack the social code before Social Code, and help Gannett stay profitable as paper print media ends up in the wood chipper.

Facebook and the FTC today finalized their earlier announced settlement over charges that Facebook had “deceived” its customers by “telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.” Unlike this week’s earlier $22.5 million FTC settlement with Google, Facebook does not face any financial penalties. Instead, the company will have to promise that it will give its users “clear and prominent notice” and get their consent before sharing their information beyond their privacy settings. In addition, Facebook will have to submit itself to biennial privacy audits for the next 20 years and maintain a “comprehensive privacy program.”

The FTC launched its investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices in 2011 and the two organizations first announced that they had settled the charges last November. Today’s announcement marks the end of the public comment period and finalizes the settlement agreement.

Here are the details of the settlement. Facebook is:

• barred from making misrepresentations about the privacy or security of consumers’ personal information;
• required to obtain consumers’ affirmative express consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences;
• required to prevent anyone from accessing a user’s material more than 30 days after the user has deleted his or her account;
• required to establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program designed to address privacy risks associated with the development and management of new and existing products and services, and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of consumers’ information; and
• required, within 180 days, and every two years after that for the next 20 years, to obtain independent, third-party audits certifying that it has a privacy program in place that meets or exceeds the requirements of the FTC order, and to ensure that the privacy of consumers’ information is protected.

Just like with Google’s earlier settlement, Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch dissented from the 3-1-1 decision because he questions whether “Facebook’s express denial of liability provided ‘a reason to believe’ that the settlement was ‘in the interest of the public’ and expressing concern that the final consent order may not unequivocally cover all representations made in the Facebook environment.”

You can read the full settlement order here.

Backed by Y Combinator, 500 Startups and SV Angel, Scoutzie launches today to give people looking for great mobile designers an online place to find the best of the best.

Because good design comes through a series of quality checks, the Scoutzie community vets all potential designers, either through a formal portfolio review or through a members-only invite process. This review process has resulted in 500 top notch members of the Scoutzie community and around 1,500 applicants who didn’t make the cut. 

Some of the more prominent members of Scoutzie include the designer behind the Instagram icon, the Pair app and the Airbnb logo. Like everybody else in the world right now, the site is focused on mobile design, but founders Kirill Zubovsky and Jennifer Toda tell me that most designers’ efforts can be rerouted to web if need be.

To use Scoutzie as a consumer, visit the site and submit a design proposal, providing a product description, budget and deadline. Designers view the bid on the Scoutzie backend and contact you if it seems like a fit.

Zubovsky and Toda insist that Scoutzie is more like a traditional design agency like FJORD or Happy Cog than its most obvious competitor 99Designs, and hold that the curation of the community and emphasis on quality versus getting the cheapest possible option is what sets them apart from the aforementioned.

“In the past, when companies needed design, they would hire a big firm that would come in on site and charge you a lot of money. Thanks to the Internet, clients and individual designers can now connect directly,” says Zubosky. “It’s our goal to build a set of tools that make it really efficient for designers to connect with clients directly, in such way that designers and the end-customers could retain the money otherwise spent on the overhead.”

The startup, which monetizes by taking a 10% cut of all projects arranged via the site (versus an agency’s traditional 50% cut), is currently focused on building community feedback tools to encourage its members to feel at home and valued — which even further sets it apart from 99Designs.

TechCrunch readers interested in trying out Scoutzie can get 10% off their next project by typing in “ScoutzieTC” as a referral code here.

Attention (TechCrunch Product Manager) Christine Ying and Ned Desmond: Maybe we should use this to redesign? Right? Please?

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I’ve been in the process of quitting smoking for nearly two years. It’s been an uphill battle of false starts, nicotine withdrawals, elephantine levels of caffeine and an angry spouse.

I want to quit. Desperately. It’s just too damn bad I love tobacco and its wonderfully stimulating effects. So since I gave up the cigarette habit, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the world of vaporizers.

Primarily used as an alternative form of smoking various herbs (yes, that one too), vaporizers heat up dried plant material to a level just below the point of combustion. The plant matter gets hot enough that the active ingredients are extracted in a vapor, but there’s no smoke and no fire. You inhale just like you would off a cigarette or pipe. The only evidence that you’ve taken in anything other than warm air is a barely noticeable puff of thin vapor when you exhale. No visual particulates, no acrid smoke.

Most vaporizers are big and bulky — table-top appliances to be left in the home. There are portable models available, but they are imperfect, delicate, and often very expensive.

Then there’s the Pax, a pocket-sized, rechargeable vaporizer that costs $250. It’s designed in San Francisco by Ploom and manufactured in China. It’s more attractive and more user-friendly than any other vaporizer I’ve seen. After a few weeks of using it, I believe it could do for alternative smoking methods what the iPod did for MP3s — take an existing, but nascent, technology and propel it into the mainstream.

The Pax measures a little over four inches long and about an inch and a half wide, with a subtly curved aluminum frame. The materials and the quality of the finish equal what’s found on a premium mobile device. On the bottom is a removable, magnetized lid that covers the stainless steel “oven” and keeps your smokeables in place. At the top is a mouthpiece that, when depressed, pops out and activates the heating element.

Ploom recommends grinding your herbs into relatively fine pieces and lightly tamping them down into the bowl with the magnetized lid. After loading it, you push the mouthpiece down to switch it on. The mouthpiece pops back out and a star-shaped light on the body begins glowing purple as the oven begins to heat.

It takes about 20 to 30 seconds for the Pax to get up to operating (and vaporizing) temperature. When the Pax is ready for puffing, the star-shaped light glows green.

I tried a few different blends of tobacco, including a strong pipe mixture and a more traditional rolling tobacco. Materials with more moisture provide a thicker vapor, while drier blends force you to suck harder to get a deep drag. Ploom takes this moisture variation into account and allows you to change the temperature setting by simply pulling off the mouthpiece and pressing down on a lighted button to cycle through three different temperature modes: low, medium and high heat. The highest heat setting worked best for rolling tobacco.

Even set to its hottest setting, the Pax never gets uncomfortable to the touch — just warm, like a laptop playing a video. And while the vapor delivers the same punch, it lacks the smoke-filled exhale, which makes it slightly less gratifying than a cigarette, cigar or pipe (or even an e-cigarette). But such is the price of progress.

Further refining the concept, the Pax has a motion sensor which recognizes when it’s been put down and automatically lowers the heat level. As soon as you pick it up, the oven clicks back on and your blend is ready to go in a matter of seconds. That same motion sensor allows you to check the battery’s charge between smoking sessions by shaking it, with the light blinking green when topped up and red when it’s almost out of juice. Over the course of several days using the Pax a half dozen times, I found a single charge on the 2,600 mAh battery would last the majority of the day. To recharge it, you place it in the included charging stand, which plugs into the wall.

The Pax is a trick little package that takes the nasty habit of smoking and brings it into the 21st century with high-end materials, consumer-level simplicity and supreme portability. And because it doesn’t rely on proprietary pods or liquids, you don’t have to search around for suitable materials to vaporize. Even better, since no smoke is produced, the Pax could conceivably be used indoors and in public settings, assuming you’re OK with explaining what it is, what it does and how it works it to confused on-lookers.

WIRED A compact, portable alternative to smoking that fits in your pocket. Attractive, easy-to-use design. No cartridges or liquids needed, simply throw in your herb of choice and get cooking. Replaceable screen makes cleaning relatively easy.

TIRED There’s surprisingly little research on the medical effects of vaporizing, so use at your own risk. You don’t get that same satisfying exhale as a traditional smoke. As discreet and small as it is, you’ll still look positively bizarre when puffing on a Pax outside your local coffee shop.

Whether your runs take place in the city, in the woods, or in between episodes of The Walking Dead, you’ve now got three fewer excuses for not getting in a workout.

RunKeeper

If you think a workout counts only when there’s data to show for it, this is your app. It tracks metrics like time, distance, calories, and heart rate, then uploads them to your RunKeeper.com profile, where you can trade results with Facebook friends and in-app connections.

WIRED Verbal updates keep you on pace. Simple layout for checking data on the run.

TIRED Have to pay $4.99 per month to unlock most of the tracking features.
RunKeeper | Free, (iOS, Android)

TrimbleOutdoors AllSport GPS Pro

Running is more fun in the wilderness than in the street. But unmarked trails make it tough to hit specific mileage targets—or get home before dark. TrimbleOutdoors.com lets you create a route and sync it with your phone, where an onscreen dot will then keep you on course.

WIRED Tracks 26 metrics, including elevation gain and max speed.

TIRED Web interface is a mess. Forget marathons; this is a battery killer.
TrimbleOutdoors AllSport GPS Pro | $4.99 (iOS, Android)

Zombies, Run!

Take the rote out of your route by jogging through a zombie apoca- lypse. The app interrupts your playlist with commands from base to pick up supplies, which you do by hitting certain time targets. Outrun zombie hordes with prescribed bursts of speed. Use the supplies you picked up to fortify your base in-app.

WIRED It’s all in the headphones; no need to check your screen during runs. Brains!

TIRED Limited fitness tracking. Occasionally muddy audio.
Zombies, Run! | $7.99, (iOS, Android)

Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

I love clichés as much as the next guy, but in a world inhabited by snazzy tech enhancements like Speedo LZR Racer Suits, slow and steady rarely wins the race anymore.

That’s a problem in the ultraverse these days: as ultrabook manufacturers are waging a cutthroat price war, and you’ll face compromises aplenty if you’re shopping for a unit in the sub-$800 space. The Acer TimelineUltra M5 has both good and bad going for it, including a nagging speed issue.

Like the Dell Inspiron 14z, the TimelineU is technically a bit over-thick (23mm) for an ultrabook classification, but it ties the Dell at 4.2 pounds for the lightest 14-inch laptop I’ve tested. (Both come with optical drives.)

Specs include a 1.7GHz Core i5, 4GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GT 640M LE graphics card, and a 500GB hybrid hard drive backed up with 20GB of SSD storage. The 14-inch screen offers the usual 1366 x 768 pixels of resolution. Ports include dual USB 3.0 connectors, Ethernet, HDMI, and an SD card slot.

The ports. It also has an SD card slot, which is not pictured. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

This all works out a bit haphazardly. On graphics and games, the TimelineUltra is one of the more capable machines on the market, thanks to that Nvidia card. Games in the range of Far Cry 2 or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat are surprisingly playable, and the Nvidia GPU outperforms the AMD model that comes with the Inspiron 14z. Altogether it turns in some of the best video benchmark scores I’ve seen on an ultrabook.

That comes, bizarrely, at the cost of general performance capabilities. Here the TimelineUltra runs dog-slow, and its general productivity app numbers are just plain bad. I’m not sure if this is due to components — the TimelineU doesn’t stray far from the industry standards, though the 5400rpm hard drive may bog things down — or the vast amount of pre-installed software on this machine. Based on the configuration, the TimelineUltra should perform better, but it is noticeably slow to respond, with lots more whirring and grinding during boot time than it ought to have.

That said, for many users this performance gap won’t be readily noticeable. For the type of casual user that’s only running a web browser and Word, the TimelineU will probably suffice, even if apps do take an extra second or two to load. One of the other big pluses of the TimelineU is battery life: At 4 hours, 50 minutes of DVD playback (and nearly 6 hours of MPEG playback), it’s got one of the longest lives of any ultrabook I’ve tested to date.

As for the rest of the package, the keyboard and clickpad are both about average. Key travel is limited, but the keys are large enough to let you stretch your fingers. The backlighting is a plus, but it’s a bit leaky with lots light coming through the spaces between the keys. The clickpad is prone to a touch of jerkiness when you’re depressing it, too. Audio is very loud (and Dolby-powered) but quite mushy.

What this all amounts to in the should-you-buy-it department is a big maybe that depends on what you value the most. If you’re a gamer who travels a lot but never wants to plug his laptop in, consider the TimelineUltra your baby. Those who quickly tire of waiting may want to look elsewhere.

WIRED Impressive graphics performance for an ultrabook-class machine. Outstanding battery life. Price is low.

TIRED General performance is uninspired. Lots of bloatware. Front-mounted power button prone to being accidentally pressed while in your bag.

Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

What do you get when a team of Emmy winning children’s TV producers are introduced to the iPad? You get a company that has a whole new vision for the future of television. That company, PlaySquare, is working on something they’re calling “touchable TV.” It’s the idea that the child shouldn’t just be watching television, they should be interacting with it. And it’s not a second screen experience, where the iPad app serves to complement the show a child is viewing. It’s a television network on the iPad, where the show itself becomes personalized to the child, growing with them the more they play, and even “leveling up” as they learn new things.

Before delving into the details of what PlaySquare actually does, it’s important to highlight who’s behind this thing. The CEO, Alex Kay, founded the three-time Emmy award-winning PBS TV show WordWorld. Creative Director Scott Webb was EVP and Worldwide Creative Director at Nickelodeon for 17 years. CTO Tinsley Galyean has a Ph.D. in interactive media from MIT Media Lab, and has built multi-touch experiences for Disney, Discovery Kids, Scholastic, and MOMA. PlaySquare Exec Producer Tina Peel has over thirty years in television, including 15 at Sesame Workshop. She also produced Max and Ruby for Nickelodeon.

So when Alex Kay refers to this group as a “dream team,” he’s not really exaggerating. Kay says that he started working on the idea about a year ago, and apparently, it wasn’t hard to attract talent to the project. “Everybody in the television industry has been feeling like something like this was necessary, and also right around the corner,”  he says. ”The concept of interactive television has been around for 20-plus years,” Kay adds, “but we never had the technology platform to do it.”

Sesame Street, of course, was a leader in bringing forth the idea that kids’ TV wasn’t something presented to the child, but something which engaged the child directly. Puppets looked into the camera. It was groundbreaking. Now it’s almost par for the course to see “interactive” TV programs, like Dora the Explorer who blinks and goes quiet after asking the child questions like “where do we go next?” and “what was your favorite part of the day?” But this is nothing compared with what could happen on the iPad.

“We think the next children’s network is going to be on a tablet or a smart device,” says Kay. “Because these devices are smart, we can have more interactive content. But we can also have a totally different relationship between the parent and the child. It’s no longer broadcasting to the masses. It’s very personal, it’s on demand, it’s interactive, and it’s leveled. It will know what the child likes so it can make suggestions, so it can be a curator of content.”

In PlaySquare, whose name derives from the square shape a child draws on the screen to enter the interactive episode, characters don’t just ask questions, they engage the child to participate in the episode itself. This in and of itself, isn’t hugely divergent from some of the interactive kids’ iPad games on the market now. (Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Road Rally’s “appisode” comes to mind). But the difference here is that while eventually the child will master Road Rally and become bored with it, PlaySquare’s TV appisodes could adapt as the child learns.

“What we’re doing is that, over time, we’re actually building a ‘play world.’ What that means is that each episode will have a land – a panorama – where the child will play, discover and find things,” explains Kay. “And the panoramas will be additive.” For example, in the first episode, a character walk by a cave which he doesn’t go into until the second episode. But after watching the second episode, the cave in the first episode comes alive and can be interacted with.

PlaySquare will also set up a backchannel for parents, through a second app, which will allow them to keep up with what the child is learning.

Much of this – the leveling up, the parent-facing app, and the full lineup of shows, is not yet available. The plan is to have many of these things ready by year-end. Today, the PlaySquare app is just introducing the concept of “touchable TV.” Pricing for future episodes and “season” discounts are still in the works. Talks with other children’s’ TV producers are underway.

In the app that’s out now, children (ages 3-6) can only interact with WordWorld. (Kay has the rights to those assets, so it was the easiest to get started with, he says). But the vision is much bigger than what you’ll see today.

The company is currently bootstrapped, and is talking to investors now.

You’ve seen this Rich Kids Of Instagram website, right? The Tumblr blog that aggregates Instagram photos from the site’s most annoyingly wealthy young globe-trotters? It’s pretty spot-on, as Instagram is of course one of the top mobile apps in general, but it especially appeals to those blessed with disposable income to spend on some of the things are so often photographed and shared in Instagram’s sepia tones — cappuccinos, fancy desserts, designer shoes, cocktails, exotic vacation destinations, and the like.

So it’s not too surprising that more and more brands are signing up to be there, too. A handy new study out of a company called Simply Measured found that now 40 percent of the brands in the Interbrand 100 are on Instagram. And the brands that cater to the “rich kid” demographic are really taking to the service: Burberry, Tiffany & Co. Hermès, Gucci, and Armani are getting some solid engagement.

Here’s a good table from the study that represents the brand activity:

Instagram has a ways to go before it gets to Twitter and Facebook levels of brand attention — both services have more than 90 percent of the Interbrand 100 — but it’s not a bad start for a two year old mobile-only app.

It’s also kind of interesting to see what the most popular filters have been for these brands. Looks like Earlybird doesn’t get much love:

It’ll be interesting to see whether Instagram will start catering more to these brands in the months ahead, in the way that Facebook and Twitter have. After it’s fully absorbed into Facebook and some integration starts to take place, it may make sense as part of Facebook’s mobile monetization push to make Instagram even more deliberately brand friendly — in a way that doesn’t alienate its clearly valuable consumer user base.

Feature photo by Instagram user peter_brantii via RichKidsOfInstagram

Hey, here are some personalized search results that I might actually like.

Google has been expanding its Universal Search feature for a while, adding images, news stories, and more to its search results. Today the company announced that it’s starting a field trial that will experiment with adding your personal Gmail results as well.

After all, a lot of useful personal information is now piling up in your inbox, so Google plans to make that information available in your web searches (assuming you’re signed in to your account). For example, if you need to access your flight information while you’re checking in, you don’t need to open up Gmail — you can just search for “my flights” from Google, and you’ll get a list of relevant information from your email appearing on the right side of the screen.

Google’s Sagar Kamdar also demonstrated using this feature to check on his Amazon orders to see if a package has shipped yet, and he talked about other services that might be integrated in the future. Imagine not just searching for your OpenTable reservations, but also connecting that information with other data that Google has access to, such as getting reminders of when you need to leave if you want to arrive at a restaurant in time for your reservation.

In the current test, Gmail results are collapsible, and, along with Google’s other personalized results, they can be turned on and off. Google also demonstrated a mobile interface, but cautioned that there will be challenges to making this work on phones while maintaining SSL security.

This comes at a time when Google has been adding a lot of personalized and social features to search, usually tied to Google+, and often meeting with a mixed response from users (or at least from me). While it’s hard to judge the results without playing with the feature for myself, but this sounds like an example of how using other Google services to personalize search can be genuinely useful.

Senior Vice President Amit Singhal said the field trial will be open to 1 million users initially. He said Google would consider integrating this with other email services, too.

You can sign up for the field trial here.

Google just announced two updates coming tomorrow to the Knowledge Graph feature that it launched in May.

The Knowledge Graph is the summary that now appears to the right of the results for US searchers. This allows users to see factual summaries related to their search queries (biographies of notable figures, tour dates for musicians, the cast of movies, etc.) and disambiguate their searches (focus their search on Rio the movie, Rio the casino, or Rio de Janeiro the city). Senior Vice President of Engineering Amit Singhal says that since launching Knowledge Graph, Google has been “able to get users to get users to the right query much faster,” adding that “whenever peopel are able to get to their results faster … they search more.”

So naturally, Google wants to expand the feature. Starting tomorrow, Googler Shashi Thakur says the Knowledge Graph will expand beyond the United States and become available to users across the world, as long as they’re searching in English. Under the hood, Thakur says Knowledge Graph results are now being localized for different regions. For example, if you search for “chiefs” in the United States, the Knowledge Graph will give you information about the football team the Kansas City Chiefs. If you search in Australia, you’ll get information about the Chiefs rugby union team.

In addition, Thakur says the Knowledge Graph results are now being added to the auto-complete box that appears when you type in Google searches. In other words, if you start to type a search for “rio”, then, going back to the earlier example, you can select Rio the film, Rio the casino, or Rio de Janiero the city, directly from the auto-complete box. If the Knowledge Graph is supposed to “get users to the right query much faster”, adding the feature to auto-complete is an important step in that direction, because it allows them to focus their results even before the first page of search results actually appears.

Google also demonstrated a carousel interface for the Knowledge Graph that will appear tomorrow. That should make it easier to scroll, slideshow-style, through a bunch of items related to a Knowledge Graph entry. For example, if you decide to focus your search on a specific amusement park, the Knowledge Graph can give you a carousel of pictures of all the different rides.

With assault weapons drawn, members of New Zealand’s elite anti-terror group rushed from a helicopter and stormed Kim Dotcom’s mansion. Another special squad arrived moments later by a helicopter. Police dogs and vans of additional law enforcement followed in a highly orchestrated raid that looked straight out of the movies — all to arrest one man on several non-violent charges.

This video from New Zealand’s 3NEWS shows the raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion that took place earlier this year. It confirms earlier eyewitness accounts that police used extreme measures in apprehending Kim Dotcom, the over-the-top leader of the Megaupload empire. But the whole event was apparently an elaborate show of force and completely unnecessary.

The video also shows Kim Dotcom testifying in a three-day court hearing about what happened during the raid last January. He revealed on the stand that the FBI had already seized and locked-down Megaupload’s servers prior to the raid. This fact effectively invalidates the previous argument that the police needed to raid Dotcom’s compound to prevent him from deleting evidence against himself and his companies.

It’s hard to watch the video and not feel that the raid was extremely overdone. The only thing missing from the video is the Call of Duty soundtrack.

Popular wisdom has it that tablets are great for consuming content but aren’t that useful for creating it. Don’t tell that to Josh Leong, though. His Y Combinator-backed startup, Grid, is based around the idea that a tablet should be a great place for spreadsheets. Indeed, as Leong told me earlier this week, his idea is to reinvent the spreadsheet around touch, all the tools and sensors available on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, and the way normal people (as opposed to Excel power users) actually use them.

Grid is launching in beta for iPhone and iPad today and you can sign up for an invite here. There are still some features missing in this beta, but you can already use Grid’s collaboration tools and get a feel for its ingenious “Maestro” user interface.

From Excel To Grid

The fact that Leong, Grid’s CEO and designer, is interested in spreadsheets and knows a lot about how people use them is no coincidence. He was the designer of Microsoft’s upcoming Excel 2013, after all. Most people, Leong told me, use spreadsheets like Excel for just about everything, whether that’s to keep track of their investment accounts or their wedding plans. The tools in Excel are built around power users, however, who write their own VBA scripts and juggle massive spreadsheets. The fact that people can do all of these different things using the same tool, Leong said, is a testament to the flexibility of the original idea of the spreadsheet.

Once you get to a mobile device, spreadsheets can be about a lot more than just numbers. By using a mobile device, after all, you now have access to location data, can add photos and movies and access contacts from your phone (or Facebook) with just a few clicks. This allows you, as the company puts it, “to organize and work with them in a whole new intuitive way.” By giving Grid local access to your contacts, for example, you can add so-called “people tiles” to your spreadsheets (useful when you’re using it to organize your wedding party, for example) and using its location feature allows you to quickly add an annotated map to your spreadsheets. Grid also allows you to draw sketches and put them into a cell. In addition, you can also invite others to work on a project with you in real time.

One feature that’s still missing, though, is actually running spreadsheet-style calculations on your numbers in Grid. The Grid team promises that this feature is coming in one of the next versions.

For a spreadsheet app, by the way, Grid is surprisingly visual, so to get a good idea for what it’s all about, take a look at the company’s demo video below:

One feature that really stands out here is Grid’s Maestro input system (“simply the best way to put things into the Grid”). Just touch a square and swipe left to bring up Grid’s input options and right to bring up more advanced options. While Microsoft is moving toward radial menus for its new Office apps, Leong believes that using his system based on swipe gestures makes you feel more connected with your data and is a more natural way to interact with the app. This system also scales very well and, for example, allows you to select multiple cells at the same time.

Here is what this looks like in practice:

As Leong told me, his vision is for Grid to “build something that gets more awesome because of the things that people are creating with it.” The current version of the app is still very basic, but it already shows a clear vision of what a modern spreadsheet app can look like on a mobile device.

A designer’s eye can change the world, but some don’t know how to build a company. So today, veteran Facebook designer Ben Blumenfeld revealed to me that he’s moving on to co-direct Designer Fund, a community of angels and mentors who support designer-led startups with a positive influence. Blumenfeld’s departure follows a string of other high-level post-IPO exits from Facebook, as employees seek to apply their learnings to projects where they have more control.

Blumenfeld becomes the new co-director of Designer Fund, whose sponsors include Andreessen Horowitz and 500 Startups. In a special interview he tells me how he’ll be helping designers raise money, find co-founders, learn entrepreneurship, and turn their sketches into social good.

Communicating Complexity

Blumenfeld has been on a quest for purpose since he graduated in design from UCLA a decade ago. He hit a wall while designing sites for CBS TV shows like Survivor and Big Brother. Ben tells me he realized “the better I did at my job, the more people I drove to watch television. I wanted to make a meaningful impact.”

His next gig was as a design lead at Magento, a commerce platform later acquired by eBay / PayPal. That’s when he got the big call from Facebook. He knew the company had potential because the Magento interns “would not get off” the social network. But after talking to Facebook’s designers, Ben says “I had this epiphany. [Facebook’s] mission was to change the way we communicate, the fundamental human need.”

He joined Facebook in early 2007 as a product designer, joining a squad of just five. Blumenfeld worked on growth and platform before becoming manager of the communications design team, confronting one of Facebook’s greatest challenges. “We were building great products, but not doing a great job of guiding people through the changes, or telling them why they were important.” Communication failures were leading to mass protests, misused features, and a sentiment amongst mainstream users that Facebook was too complicated and unstable.

Blumenfeld set out to make Facebook feel sympathetic to the pains of behavior change. After a stint as a manager he moved back to designing full time with the product team. His last project was critical to the future of Facebook: walking users through the switch to Timeline, Facebook’s most drastic redesign since the launch of the news feed. He succeeded. Rather than being afraid, most users flocked to it. There’s been little unrest, no major flareups from people misunderstanding their new privacy controls.

A Designer’s Destiny

After five years at Facebook, Blumenfeld had to ask himself, “It’s been amazing, but am I going to be here for five more?” He took a six month sabbatical to travel and mentor, discovering how rewarding it was to pass his knowledge on to startups. Then he was asked a critical question by his friend Enrique Allen who founded Designer Fund as an offshoot of 500 Startups and the Stanford d.School in April 2011: “How do we get more designers to become entrepreneurs?”

They realized there were meaningful opportunities education, healthcare, the environment, city planning and more, and plenty of talented designers, and that “we’d be able to make a much bigger dent in these problems if designers went at them.” But design school teachers come from the world of agencies, not entrepreneurship, so their students didn’t consider the path of starting a company.

So Blumenfeld decided to leave Facebook, join Enrique as a co-director, and show young designers the way. Together the two have assembled a community of designers and mentors from companies including YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Path, Flipboard, Pinterest, Cooper, IDEO, and Frog. Along with a16z, and 500 Startups they’ve secured financial support and more from partner firms including Khosla Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, KKLD, Venture51 and Quest Venture Partners.

The all-star crew has identified three missing elements that create a major roadblock to designers becoming entrepreneurs:

1. Funding to strike out on their own
2. Business and technical skills to build a company
3. Silicon Valley connections to make that company thrive

When Blumenfeld and Allen asked designers if they’d start companies if given money, mentorship, and connection, “9 times out of 10 we’d hear a huge, emphatic ‘YES!’”

Funding What’s Right

Designer Fund aims to offer these services to their portfolio, operating like a philanthropic angel fund that’s complementary to seed funds, accelerators, later-stage VC firms. It now takes referrals and accepts applications from of designers out to create positive social change through world-scaling technology. It’s first round saw hundreds apply.

Those accepted get folded into Designer Fund’s network and hooked up with the mentors and money they need. Then it offers to make investments in a range including mentorship alone, $5,000+ non-equity grants or equity investments in exchange for .5% of a startup, and larger $50,000 to $100,000+ investments for 5% to 10% or based on existing terms.

Designer Fund is now rolling out investments every six months to companies in Silicon Valley and beyond. Meanwhile it’s hosting educational events, Designer Fair, and meetups as it watches its startups sprout. Outside mentors to its startups and successful founders who go through the program are invited to join become formal Designer Fund advisors, creating a virtuous cycle.

With Blumenfeld and Allen as its only full-time employees, the non-profit’s portfolio is already having an impact. It’s backed Neighborland, helping citizens connect and make good things happen in the community. Solar Mosaic lets people kickstart solar energy projects but see a return on their investment. Launchpad Toys is now an App Store hall of famer that educates children. And Angaza Design is bringing affordable solar energy to Africa so people have light to work and learn at night.

Some of these companies might not earn as much money as an enterprise marketing platform, but they deliver social ROI by benefitting the world. And Blumenfeld says the founders his fund backs are perfect to tackle social issues because “Design is all about empathy; about making something that works beautifully, that delights. Having it work is not good enough, it has to make things better.”