Category: Tech news

Here’s an innovative, simple, and exciting application to Google Glasses: foreign language augmented reality that translates text like real-life subtitles. Technology MacGyver Will Powell assembled a working concept of the product from a list of consumer electronics, and demonstrated it in a video of himself in conversation with his sister. Check out the video below. We’ve also pasted his description of the convoluted process the product takes to translate, below the video.

“The individual using the glasses be wears the Vuzix 1200 Star glasses which are connected to the s-video connector on the first raspberry pi and the Jawbone bluetooth microphone that connects to a device such as smartphone or tablet to provide a clean noise cancelled audio feed. The bluetooth microphone streams across the network of what I say and what it picks up around me. This is then recognised and passed through Microsoft’s translation API with a caching layer to improve performance of regularly used statements. Passing through this API service is the biggest delay in the subtitles. Once translated the server passes back the text and translations that are picked up by the raspberry pi driving the TV and glasses displays. Elizabeth uses a headset mic but could user her own raspberry pi, glasses and jawbone microphone to have the same experience as I do.”

Why did Zynga generate revenue of $332 million versus the analyst-projected $344 million, earning 3 cents per share instead of 5 (and sending the stock off 40% in after-hour trading)? Three big factors, the company said today on the earnings call, in the following order: Facebook platform changes, game launches late in the quarter, and Draw Something’s weakening mobile traffic.

The Facebook Factor

Facebook began emphasizing new games in its news feed, notifications, bookmarks and other communication channels at the expense of existing games, chief operating officer John Schappert said. This sent existing games down 15% across the platform (not just Zynga games) and live-action genre games down 34%. Because so many users engaged less often, they bought fewer virtual goods, driving down gross bookings by 9% for the quarter.

Zynga did benefit from the changes, to some degree. Bubble Safari launched this quarter and hit the top of the arcade category, and CastleVille set a company (and possibly industry-wide) record of 4.5 million installs on the first day. As he said: ”Facebook is always making changes for the betterment of its platform, hopefully.”

The issue for Zynga is that it has so far used its existing portfolio to help drive the growth of new games. This asset could continue to lose relative value, forcing it to rely more heavily on new launches, its $1.6 billion in cash, and its users outside of Facebook to boost numbers.

On to Zynga’s second point, which is kinda part of the first. The company said its launches last quarter happened so late that the benefits aren’t showing up here. So we’ll see for Q3.

The OMGPOP Slump

The third factor is Draw Something, the iconic mobile game from OMGPOP, which Zynga bought for $180 million in March. The company now has 3.4 million daily active users, according to AppData, a fraction of the 14.6 million DAU it had at the time of the acquisition. Chief executive Mark Pincus said that the company still believed that the game’s “evergreen” promise, for what it’s worth.

Overall, Zynga continues to see its audience shift towards mobile — 33 million DAU versus 77 million DAU — and continues to monetize mobile users at less than half the value of its web users. Pincus said that mobile and its own cross-platform platform are going to be the biggest sources of growth.

Incidentally, our CrunchUp event happening in Silicon Valley next week will feature Facebook discussing how its developer ecosystem is changing, and in particular adapting to mobile. You can bet we’ll be talking about Zynga and these issues in detail.

[Top image via herewegocombatboots.]

Google’s Project Glass made quite a splash at I/O last month. Besides stunning the audience with a skydiving demo of Glass, Google also allowed those developers who attended the company’s annual developer conference to exclusively pre-order the $1,500 Google Glass Explorer Edition. These first alpha versions of Glass are only scheduled to ship early next year, but according to an email the Project Glass team just sent to everybody who pre-ordered the devices, the company plans to involve this early tester community before the devices ship as well. Google, the email says, will post exclusive content for those with pre-orders on Google+ and also invite them to special events and Google+ Hangouts with the Glass Team.

Here is the email:

In the first of these private posts on Google+, Google co-founder Sergey Brin notes that he looks forward to ” to hearing about your magical moments with Glass.” He also shared that he is currently testing “a new mode of Glass which automatically takes a picture every 10 seconds without any distraction or disruption.” The idea behind Glass, Brin reiterated, is to let you “enjoy and share life’s moments without being tied down by technology.”

So far, the only Glass features Google has shared publicly involve taking pictures and streaming video. Except for its simulated demo video, Google hasn’t shared any information about what this experience will look like. Our own Peter Ha got to wear Brin’s set of Google Glass at I/O and saw what Brin admitted was an old demo of an AR application running on Glass.

Despite the fact that we still know very little about Glass, it’s good to see that Google is already actively looking for input from its developer and early adopter community even before the first batch of devices is ready to ship.

Real-money gaming (i.e., online gambling) could provide a big boost to Zynga’s faltering bottom line, and the company has talked about making a move into that market in the past. Today CEO Mark Pincus offered a timetable, of sorts — subject to licensing approvals, he said we should see Zynga’s first products in this field in the first half of 2013.

“What we’ve said, and what we have to announce today, is that we have our first products in development and that we intend to release them in markets that are regulated and open, subject to our getting licensing,” said Pincus, who was speaking on the analyst conference call discussing Zynga’s disappointing second quarter earnings. Those markets don’t include the United States: “The US is obviously an attractive market, but it’s not an open, regulated environment today.”

One of the analysts asked for details about how Zynga would pursue licensing, but Pincus declined to get any more specific.

When he spoke at the Fortune Brainstorm conference last week, Pincus pointed to real-money gaming (along with mobile and advertising) as one of the main areas where he expects to see revenue growth. He added that there was “a good chance” that online gambling will be legalized in the United States in some form, while also cautioning that he’s “not a good predictor of politics.”

As others have noted, moving into the gambling market will present some big challenges, given the headaches of legal compliance, the existence of already-dominant companies, and the fact that Zynga would have to attract a new audience.

Last month, Roku sent an email out to its developers, informing them that an exclusive deal with DISH meant it would be taking down independent apps for international content. [Hat tip to Zatz Not Funny!] With the launch of the satellite provider’s DISHWorld international channels, which are available for $19.99 a month, some 25 apps were taken off the Roku Channel Store. While a number of Roku developers are upset with the takedown and have begun questioning the open nature of the platform, Roku CEO Anthony Wood said the decision will mean more, and higher-quality content available to users through the DISHWorld channel.

“In general, we still want Roku to be a super-open platform,” Wood told me by phone today. But he said that in the case of international content, he said Dish is the largest provider of those channels both by satellite and, with its over-the-top channels on Roku, online.

Wood said that the channels taken down in aggregate didn’t provide as much content as the satellite provider’s comparable DishWorld offerings. That includes a lot of overlapping content with third-party developers who had built channels for the Roku platform, as well as a lot of exclusive content that its subscribers wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.

But that’s not the only reason Roku sided with Dish in making it the exclusive provider of channels on its streaming boxes. There’s also the problem of international content licensing, which could cause headaches due to some independent developers not paying for or licensing the video they were streaming to Roku users. Wood said it received multiple DMCA takedown notices from content owners who weren’t being properly paid for videos that appeared on some international Roku channels.

“We’re taking all that into consideration,” Wood said. “Dish provides better-quality content and a much bigger selection, all of which is properly licensed.”

While that might be true, Roku also seems to be cozying up to a lot more premium content providers, cable networks, and operators recently. In addition to DISHWorld content, it’s also recently gotten apps for HBO Go, as well as Fox News and others. That doesn’t mean that it’s abandoning its independent roots, but it definitely sees the value in offering up high-quality content from traditional providers.

If you’ve ever had to think about whether Uncle Phil (the one with the ear hair) should be sitting next to Aunt Clara (the one with the walker) or with the other guys at Frank’s table (“Drunk” Frank), SocialTables has you covered. The site, recently relaunched with an entirely new UI and design, allows party planners to create mockups of their space, plop guests at different tables, and then organize the whole party via an iPad in real time. Never again will you have to cut out little circles and put little scraps of paper on the dining room table with each guest’s name: this thing can do it for you.

The platform is built in HTML5, which makes it easy to use in the browser, and the system pulls social data from each guest in the guest list, allowing party planners to seat like-minded people together or, barring that, create a little frisson by sticking cat lovers with stoat fans. It’s completely collaborative and non-linear so multiple users can work on the same floorplan.

Founded by Dan Berger at Fortify Ventures in DC, the app is live now and received $500,000 in seed funding. They’ve already served up 3,500 events to over 100,000 guests, which suggests they have a heck of a lot of traction.

“A few years ago I was going to a wedding and thought ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if I saw the seating chart so I could know where the cute girls were?’ said Berger. “I added this idea to my list of ideas (like every startup dude has) and didn’t do anything about it. I started working on it early last year.”

What struck me when I first saw it in DC was the smooth interface and sexy graphics. It looks like something you could put in front of a stressed out bride and groom and they could spend a few short minutes dragging folks around the dance floor so Paul “Pervo” Carson doesn’t sit next to the bride’s religious roommate from college.

“This wasn’t about making just another app,” said Lead Designer Brian Pensinger. “Events are beautiful and unique. The software used to plan them should be beautiful as well.”

One of the company’s advisers is the inimitable Gary Vaynerchuk, the dude who looks at wine on the Internet.

The service is available now and is free to try. Enterprise versions are available based on customer requirements but start at $500 per event.

If I were getting married or hosting a huge gathering of the North American Buffalo Society again, I’d totally rock out with this service. It’s an interesting way to disrupt the events space and quite attractive to boot.

Tesla Motors, the electric car company led by PayPal founder Elon Musk, today announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2012. As we’ve written before, car companies aren’t typically on TechCrunch’s radar, but Tesla is unique. It has Silicon Valley headquarters, techie leadership, startup roots, and a completely fresh approach to making automobiles. In a way, Tesla’s vehicles are essentially very big, very expensive new gadgets.

The announcement today encompassed the standard earnings information — revenue, spending, profits, and the like — which we’ll get to in a minute. But the real news most Tesla watchers wanted to get from the Q2 results was an update on the rollout of the Model S, Tesla’s new all-electric sedan that started shipping last month.

But as far as the Model S production goes, there was no real news — which, as they say, is good news. There has been a bit of skepticism about whether Tesla would hit its targets for producing the Model S, but according to the company’s release today, everything is still on target. The company said it is maintaining its previous projections of making 5,000 Model S units during 2012, with a steep ramp up in production. In June, the company said, it was making about 5 Model S cars per week. In the third quarter, Tesla expects to ramp up the speed to ship a total of 500 cars. The balance of the 2012 production — some 4480 cars — will be made during the final three months of the fiscal year.

On the financial side, top-line revenues were $27 million, $22 million of which came from auto sales, which represents a 15 percent boost from the first quarter. Those sales were split between its flagship sports car, the Roadster, and reservations for the new Model S. Tesla is sunsetting its Roadster vehicle — it’s no longer for sale in the US, and it is selling off the remainder of its Roadster fleet in Europe. Tesla said it expects to sell completely out of Roadsters by the end of 2012, and to shift its sales focus to the Model S worldwide in the months ahead. Tesla also makes money by selling powertrain components to Toyota for its electric RAV4.

The future for Tesla’s revenue supposedly looks much brighter. The company said it expects its full year sales for 2012 to be between $500 million to $600 million.

Meanwhile, making an automotive company from the ground up is not cheap. Tesla’s net loss for the quarter was $105.6 million — owing to R&D expenses of $74.8 million, selling, general and administration expenses of $36 million, and capital expenditures of $61 million. Tesla as a company is not in the red, however: Tesla had $266 million in cash resources at the second quarter’s end. $233 million of that was cash on hand, including Tesla’s Department of Energy (DoE) dedicated accounts. Tesla drew on $71 million from its DoE loan during the second quarter, leaving it with $33 million left in the loan facility.

I had the chance to test drive the new Model S earlier this month for TechCrunch TV, and I have to say, it was pretty sweet. Check out my review here, and I’ve embedded the video below:

Both graphs made (with amazing speed, I may add) by TechCrunch’s graphic designer and illustrator Bryce Durbin.

Zynga didn’t meet analysts’ already-low estimates in its just-released earnings for the second quarter of its fiscal year, in which it showed revenue of $332 million and lost $22.8 million, or 3 cents per share (according to GAAP measures). Analysts had predicted the company would earn 5 cents per share on revenue of $344 million.

Zynga says it now has 72 million daily active users, up from 59 million in the previous quarter, and 306 million monthly active users, up from 228 million. Bookings, meanwhile, were $302 million, up 12 percent from the same period last year, but a sequential decline of about 9 percent from the previous quarter.

The company also says it’s lowering its outlook for the rest of the year based on “delays in launching new games, a faster decline in existing web games due in part to a more challenging environment on the Facebook web platform, and reduced expectations for Draw Something.” It’s now projecting $1.15 billion to $1.225 billion in bookings for the year.

In the earnings press release, CEO Mark Pincus says:

“The company achieved some significant milestones in the quarter including the launch of Bubble Safari, which is now the number one arcade game on Facebook, and the launch of The Ville, now the number two game behind Zynga Poker. Our advertising business continued to show strong growth with revenue up 170% year-over-year. Our games reached record audiences, achieving over 300 million monthly active users. We grew our mobile footprint five-fold in the year to 33 million daily active users making Zynga the largest mobile gaming network. We also faced new short-term challenges which led to a sequential decline in bookings. Despite this, we’re optimistic about the long-term growth prospects on mobile where we have a window of opportunity to drive the same kind of social gaming revolution that we enabled on the web.”

This is only Zynga’s third earnings report as a public company. Last quarter, it beat expectations, with revenue of $321 million and a loss of 12 cents per share (again, according to GAAP measures).

Recently, the company also announced Zynga With Friends, a cross-platform “social lobby” for its own games, as well as those from other developers. If successful, it could alleviate critics’ concerns that the social gaming giant is too dependent on Facebook.

As of 2:14pm Pacific, Zynga down 37 percent, to $3.18, in after-hours trading. The analyst conference call with analysts is scheduled for 2pm Pacific today.

Western Digital just reported its earnings for its fourth financial quarter of 2012. The company reported revenue of 4.8$ billions and earnings per share of $2.87. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $872 million, or $3.35 per share. That’s far better than what most analysts expected and also better than the company’s own guidance of $4.2 billion to $4.4 billion in revenue. The consensus was that Western Digital would report revenue around $4.25 billion and earnings of $2.47 per share. In the year-ago-quarter, the company reported earnings of $0.67 per share.

For the full fiscal year, Western Digital reported revenue of $12.5 billion and net income of $1.6 billion, or $6.58 per share for fiscal year 2012, compared to fiscal 2011 revenue of $9.5 billion and net income of $726 million, or $3.09 per share.

The company’s fortunes over the last few quarter were, of course, closely linked to the flooding in Thailand last year. In April, when the company announced its last quarterly earnings, the company’s CEO John Coyne announced that Western Digital had mostly recovered from the Thailand floods. The company restarted production at its first factory in Thailand last December, but the effects of the disaster on the industry continue to linger. Besides the flooding, the overall weakness in the PC market that a number of other companies cited in their earnings releases this month also directly affected hard drive sales, but the company still shipped 71 million hard drives in the last quarter (54 million of those were for laptops and 8 million went to enterprise customers).

“Fiscal 2012 was one of the most challenging and exciting years in our 42-year history,” said John Coyne, chief executive officer. “While responding to two major natural disasters and completing the largest acquisition in the history of the industry, we achieved year-over-year revenue growth of 31 percent and more than doubled earnings per share.”

Disrupt has long been the birthplace of software startups – but that’s changing. With the launch of Hardware Alley at Disrupt NY, we’ve inaugurated a very cool opportunity for hardware startups to grab a little Disrupt floor space and we’re doing it again in San Francisco.

Hardware Alley happens on the last day of Disrupt and lets you get into the event at a discounted rate for one or all three days. Smaller startups should contact me directly at [email protected] but if you’re funded, ready to rock, and interested in holding court with some of SF’s preeminent VCs and thinkers, head over here to buy tickets.

Here’s the fine print and we hope to see you there.

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham tweeted today that YC’s 380 companies (prior to the current batch) have raised $1,048,274,000. Y Combinator, which launched in 2005, takes on two classes of startups per year into their three month program, during which they mentor and connect the founders and invest in the companies.

The total amount of funding raised by the 380 companies prior to the current YC batch is $1,048,274,000.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) July 25, 2012

Even the simplest of mathematicians can look at the two numbers and divide the larger by the smaller and infer that, on average, Y Combinator companies raise more than $2,759,000. But not all YC companies are created equal. Two of Y Combinator’s most notable alums, Dropbox ($257 million) and Airbnb ($120 million), account for almost 36% of the impressive funding total.

When you add in other well-funded companies, like Scribd ($25.8 million), Disqus ($10.5 million), and Posterous ($10.1 million), the total for the remaining 375 Y Combinator companies is still an enormous, but significantly diminished, $624.9 million.

This is the latest eye-popping number from Y Combinator, following Forbes’ report in April that Y Combinator companies were worth a total of $7.78 billion.

Veteran journalists who sing the praises of objective reporting have steadily lost ground to the media’s new guard of proudly opinionated voices, from broadcasters such as MSNBC and Fox News, to the growing menu of online news blogs. There’s been endless theorizing over whether objectivity should dominate reporting in the 21st century, but what does the evidence say? A new experimental study [pdf] finds that opinionated reporting is better at motivating the politically unengaged than objective reporting.

For years, much of the media has assumed that objective education, alone, was enough to promote a healthy democracy. What traditional media failed to realize is that a good chunk of the population needs a reason to care in the first place. “News articles that are written through the eyes of a mere observer, without a perspective or slant, can foster political disaffection among citizens,” explains author Minha Kim of Sungkyunkwan University (note: for the highly politically engaged, objectivity is better, which is explained below).

The experimental study treated two groups of students to either an objective report or a “reinforcing” article with a political slant. The article was about a candlelight vigil to protest Korean imports of U.S. Beef thought to carry Mad Cow disease. The study found that students who did not talk about the issue with others, a good indication of political disengagement, were better motivated to protest after reading the opinionated article. Since the politically unengaged were not “sufficiently politically equipped to guide their judgments and actions by self-organized mature knowledge, the news article reinforcing political participation exerted profound pervasive impact on their behavioral intent,” the research concluded.

Now, the study isn’t all rainbows and ponies for opinionated journalism: objective reporting was more influential in motivating politically engaged students. Thus, traditional journalism still does have a vital role to play for readers who are knowledgeable and politically engaged, a relatively smaller portion of the electorate.

Thus, the 21st century landscape of proud, opinionated journalists could have a democratizing effect on the large swath of readers who need a good reason to become active citizens.

Hat tip to Tiago Peixoto on the study

We’ve seen a few telepresence devices in our day, including the incredible AnyBot, but this little guy looks like it may make life at the office a little less weird and a little more bearable. It’s essentially a little telepresence platform for your Android phone (if the creator, Claire Delaunay, nets $100,000 she’ll make an iPhone version) that roams around and lets you chat with people in the vicinity. Think of it as a little robotic dog wearing your face.

The early bird robot price is $199. To interact with the bot, you simply call it via Skype after downloading the proper software. Motion controls allow you to move Botiful around the office, room, or under and around obstacles. Delaunay recommends using it to play remotely with pets and/or kids and to visit hard to reach places like a crawlspace or dungeon.

Interestingly, $399 gets you a Botiful dinner with Claire herself. You’d call in remotely, of course, and you guys could chat about Botiful in Silicon Valley from the comfort of your home desk chair.

The robot will come in red, white, and blue and she’s looking for $90,000 to tool up and start shipping. I, for one, welcome our dinner-having, small-motor-powered, Android-based overlords.

Project Page

Commerce Sciences, the stealthy Israeli and Palo Alto-based e-commerce startup, is launching into open beta today, and is finally revealing what it has built. It’s a Meebo Bar for e-commerce! The company made waves earlier this month when it announced $1.8 million in seed funding from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Israeli VC firm Genesis Partners, T5 Capital, and a number of angel investors, including Backplane board chairman and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

The Meebo comparison might not be exactly right. The Meebo Bar focused on social media and ad integrations, alongside other personalization features, meanwhile, the Commerce Sciences toolbar integrates more retailer-specific tools, like chat/feedback, site search, checkout, coupons and…oh, social media integrations. OK, so that is a bit like Meebo, I suppose. Commerce Sciences calls their bar the “Personal Bar,” and it’s made available to retailers as an add-on which floats at the bottom of the website, on all the retailers’ pages. The idea here is that the bar brings focus to some of the most important parts of an e-commerce site, and keeps those consistently available from page to page, making it easier for shoppers to interact, engage with the brand, and find buttons, tools and links for common tasks.

“The main advantage of it is the fact that it’s always-on – floating at the bottom of all site’s pages and can contain all of the store’s key assets,” explains co-founder and CEO Aviv Revach in an interview. “We see it as an integral part of any store website. Practically a ‘must have for any e-commerce store,’ as one of our customers says.” He also teases that the beta launch today is only the beginning of its efforts in e-commerce. “We have big plans,” he says, describing the bar as being only the company’s “first product” in this space.

For what it’s worth, Revach didn’t care for the Meebo comparison. His suggestion for a hook: they’re “raising the bar for online retailers.” (Umm. Maybe we had better do the blogging here, and you can build the amazing things. Sorry!). But seriously, though, he further explained: “Meebo is only relevant for content publishers. As Meebo incorporates external banner ads within their bar – it doesn’t make any sense for any online retailer. This is one of the key reasons they practically don’t exist in the e-commerce space,” he says. “Online retailers have many specific needs which we address and will continue to answer as we move forward.”

One of the more notable features in the Personal Bar – maybe even the standout feature –  is how the couponing system works. Retailers can customize their bar to offer their customers immediate rewards for actions such as a Facebook “like,” pinning to Pinterest, +1′ing on Google+, and more. After clicking, a personalized coupon pops up in the bar, reminding them they have a discount available as they move around the website. And when the shopper reaches checkout, the coupon is automatically applied to their purchase, eliminating the need to manually enter a coupon code to receive the discount.

A handful of sites have been using the bar prior to its public release, including weeDECOR, Koffler Sales, Canaflora.ca, DUCKCO, BestOfferBuy, and others. The bar is free to those with up to 400,000 visitors to month, and then is available as a paid Enterprise edition. It works with all major platforms, including Magento, osCommerce, Zen-cart, X-Cart, Demandware and others. It also supports in-site search from third parties like SLI Systems and Endeca, as well as chat from providers like Zopim and Olark, and feedback from services like Kampyle, Get Satisfaction and others.

Commerce Sciences was founded in late 2011 by Revach (CEO) and Eyal Brosh (COO), both with prior experience in technology and entrepreneurship. Revach was the co-founder & VP Business Development of Mominis, a company offering solutions for digital publishing of mobile games, whose hundreds of titles now reach over 20 million users. Brosh was previously VP of R&D at Flash Networks, which offers mobile web solutions. Both were officers in the Israeli Intelligence corps. Their mobile backgrounds are promising here, as e-commerce is quickly moving into m-commerce.

It’s also interesting that Commerce Sciences is backed by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, the company that just so happened to acquire Meebo last month. No new Google+ toolbar has yet to debut from that exit yet, but who knows where Google is taking the technology (besides Google+ of course). An e-commerce-focused bar that serves personalized deals for +1′ing things may one day make a good fit for Google too.

Safari 6 brings improved performance and many new features to OS X, including offline reading lists, a unified search field and support for Do Not Track. What seems to be completely gone from Apple’s site now, though, is any mention of the Windows version of Safari. Indeed, it looks like Apple has removed all download links for Safari from its site for the time being. This could be because Apple is currently highlighting Safari’s new features in Mountain Lion (which pre-installs Safari 6), or because Apple has indeed ended development of Safari for Windows. Windows users can still download the old version from Apple, but the link is hidden on the company’s support page.

Apple launched the first preview version of Safari for Windows in 2007 and the first stable version arrived in 2008. Despite some innovative features, Safari never caught on with Windows users. Google’s Chrome, which is based on the same WebKit browser engine as Safari, on the other hand, quickly became one of the most popular browsers on the market. As MG noted last year, it only took Chrome a year to surpass Safari’s market share.

It was always obvious, though, that Safari for Windows was not a priority for Apple and users often complained that Safari (just like Apple’s other Windows applications) felt unnecessarily bloated and slow. Maybe Apple decided to put Safari for Windows on the back burner for now and focus on getting it right on OS X, but it’s curious that every reference of the Windows version is now gone from the site (with the exception of a number of support articles).

We have reached out to Apple and will update this post once we find out more.