Category: Tech news

Pro tip: Don’t let the following happen to your PR pitch/intern.

So I know this is a particularly egregious case of “pot calling the kettle black” (I personally am a Black Belt in typos) but, instead of being psyched up to “Party Our Apps Off!” at Google i/o next week, our team has been discussing the simple grammar mistake in the subject line of the below email for at least 30 minutes this morning.

I thought I would share the thread with you guys, if anything to remind you again that there’s a crucial difference between “your” and “you’re” (“its” and “it’s” are also tricky).

Okay, I think I’ve filled my “huge bitch” quota for today. À tout à l’heure!

Ever since Google introduced limits to how often developers could ping its popular Maps API for free and started charging developers for usage above these limits, we’ve seen a slew of prominent developers like Foursquare switch over to other platforms, including the open-source project OpenStreetMap. Now, it looks like Google has noticed that it couldn’t keep charging up to $4 for 1,000 map loads above its free allowance. Instead, the company just announced that it is massively lowering its pricing to just $0.50 per 1,000 map loads.

As before, Google will start charging developers once they exceed the free usage limit of 25,000 map loads per day for 90 consecutive days. According to Google, only about 0.35% of sites currently exceed these limits regularly. Also just like before, Google doesn’t automatically enforce these limits but will contact developers who regularly exceed them to discuss their options. This, says Google, ensures that your site will not stop working “due to a sudden surge in popularity.”

In addition to these price cuts, Google is eliminating the distinction it used to make between styled maps and unstyled maps. Styled maps, which developers can tweak according to their preferences, previously had lower free usage limits (2,500 loads per day) and higher prices for users who went beyond 25,000 map loads per day.

It’s probably no surprise that Google is making this announcement just a few days before its annual Google I/O developers conference is about to start. The original pricing changes, after all, created quite a bit of unease in the Google developer community and with this topic out of the way, the company won’t have to face uneasy questions about this topic.

There’s a “Recommend Me” feature on LinkedIn which I’m sure many readers of TechCrunch will be aware of, having been asked multiple times for references by their contacts. But what if you took that concept and created a data-oriented approach? That’s the angle the bootstrapped startup ViewsOnYou is taking, and it’s aiming it at companies that want to find out much more about you, beyond what your CV might say.

The problem with recruitment these days is that recruiters need more than paper credentials, and now often rely more on people’s “soft skills,” such as creativity, ingenuity, and resilience. So to address this, ViewsOnYou consists of 23 sliding scales covering a broad spectrum of the kinds of things employers and headhunters look for.

Admittedly this has been tried in different ways. TalentBin (formally Honestly.com) is a startup that aggregates a person’s social profile to build up a picture of them, and already has corporate customers including Intuit, Groupon, and Yahoo. And BranchOut and BraveNewTalent are attacking this from different angles.

But unlike an app like BranchOut, which is about networking and displaying a CV, ViewsOnYou more about displaying what you are like. You can try it out on me.

The ability for a user to match their ViewsOnYou 360 profile with the culture of an organisation lets them see how well they fit. The idea is you find out what your top traits are, and whether you are a better match with Google or Facebook, HSBC or Goldman Sachs, KPMG or McKinsey.

Heaven forbid that we end up seeing how Google compares to Facebook as an employer – but that’s ViewsOnYou’s potential.

The business model is employer branding (advertising). And there is an incentive for employers to get their employees onto the platform so they can work out where they are strong and weak, and also benchmark what they do.

The startup was founded by tech entrepreneur Ab Banerjee, a non-exec director of PeerIndex and a former Founder and CEO of RAW Communications.

A month ago, mobile delivery startup Postmates publicly launched its ‘Get It Now’ on-demand courier service in San Francisco, allowing its users to order pretty much anything from various stores and restaurants around the city. When it introduced the plan, it charged a flat $7.99 fee for all deliveries made within an hour. Now it’s changing things up just a bit, with a new dynamic pricing plan that will range anywhere from $5-$12, based on how difficult the delivery is.

The dynamic pricing plan is based on an algorithm which calculates the fee based on the amount of time spent traveling and distance traveled, how long its couriers spend shopping or waiting in line to pick up an item, and the type of store that the user ordered from. Prices are based on historical data from the last month of operations, and will continue to be adjusted as new deliveries provide more data.

The new pricing recognizes that not all deliveries are created equal: For instance, ordering smoothies from the Jamba Juice down the street — as one Vungle co-founder does pretty much every day — is different from ordering Postmates to pick up some animal style fries from In-N-Out at Fisherman’s Wharf and having them delivered to the Outer Sunset. The former delivery would probably cost $5, while the latter would probably run $12.

Postmates is really trying to incentivize users to keep using it for really easy local deliveries. And really, it’s about “giving customers the best price possible,” co-founder Bastian Lehmann told me by email.

Another reason it’s willing to move to this model is that, based on its historical data, Postmates is able to forecast the cost of these deliveries before they happen. The new model is also more fair to its couriers, who, you know, actually do the work of delivering things. That said, the new pricing won’t affect early adopters, who will remain at the flat-rate $7.99 model.

In addition to dynamic pricing, Postmates is also pushing its startup discount program, which reduces the cost of deliveries for companies that offer the service to their employees. So far, it’s quietly signed up about 50 startups to the program, including Twitter, Square, Groupon, Yelp, Getaround, Dropbox, Github, and InMobi.

The more employees sign up, the steeper the discount — with average discount running around 25 percent currently. In addition to cheaper deliveries, companies that sign up get tailored newsletters, special offers, and exclusive events through the program.

CloudCar, a startup still in stealth mode that was the subject of rumors earlier this month when Robert Scoble reported that Andy Rubin would leave his job at Google to join it, has filed a Form D with the SEC indicating that it has raised $11.5 million in a Series A round.

The startup may not be Rubin’s next place of employment, but he is connected to it: after the rumor hit, and then he denied it on Twitter, he further clarified in a Google+ post that CloudCar “are a group of friends who I give free office space to in my incubator in Los Altos.”

The Series A, the Form D notes, comes in Series A Preferred Stock; Warrants to Purchase Series A-1 Preferred Stock; Series A-1 Preferred Stock issuable upon exercise of Warrants; Common Stock issuable upon conversion of Series A and Series A-1 Stock, with the only stated purposes of the funding being “Proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes including, but not limited to, executive salaries.” (Not atypical for a stealth-mode fundraising.)

While there were some questions over what exactly CloudCar was doing when the Rubin rumor hit, it actually has a website with more detail on the company.

It looks like it will be doing something in the area of bridging in-car services with the kind of wireless content that we are now getting on smartphones and tablets — using cloud-based storage to do it: “The explosive growth of smart phones has raised consumer expectations for the connected in-car experience,” the site says on its jobs page. It notes that ABI predicts that within five years, 90 percent of new cars will ship with connected car features. “Yet market penetration for Connected Cars is in single digits because the current industry technology base prevents rapid innovation.”

Its CEO is Konstantin Othmer, who had previously been the CEO and founder of Core Mobility, a wireless enterprise service that worked with device manufacturers and wireless operators on visual voicemail, voice SMS, wireless backup, and push-to-talk services that shipped on 40 million mobile devices in four countries, according to the site. Core Mobility was purchased by Smith Micro Software. Prior to that he founded CRM startup ePeople, and before that had been an engineer at Apple.

The COO, Brue Leak, and CTO, Peter Barrett, both have experience in web TV services: Leak at WebTV and Barrett at Microsoft TV. Jim Wickett, head of business partnerships, also has extensive experience in media technology companies, most recently at Macrovision/Rovi as EVP.

The company is currently hiring engineers for “new consumer experiences that broaden the scope of current market leading mobile platforms.”

We are contacting CloudCar to see if it can provide some more detail on this funding round and what we might expect next from the company — and whether Rubin has increased his involvement in any way.

We’ve seen a lot of innovation in the education technology space lately, but we haven’t seen many new learning platforms that give developers the tools to build their own apps yet. With Cerego Labs, though, developers can now access a platform that, as the company itself puts it, is somewhat akin to a “Heroku of learning.” What’s interesting here is that Cerego Labs offers both an API for developers who want to incorporate the service into their own apps, as well as an easy to use editor that non-technical users can implement to build their own learning apps without the need to touch any code.

The platform is now in beta and developers can sign up here. Invites will come in waves and the company expects that the service will become generally available in the Fall.

Cerego uses a “spaced rehearsal” approach that’s been shown to enhance factual learning by regularly circling back to items that users learned in previous sessions. When users don’t get a question right, the software repeats it more frequently and questions that were answered right will still be repeated, but not as frequently. This technique is probably most often used in the context of learning new vocabulary, but it can obviously be used in virtually any context where a learner has to acquire and remember a new set of items. In the end, the idea here is to help learners acquire a new set of knowledge faster and remember it longer.

The idea behind launching Cerego Labs, says the company, is to “enable a new ecosystem of smarter learning applications that meet the World’s fast-evolving learning needs, targeting high-value verticals like finance, law and medicine.”

The company itself, by the way, isn’t actually new. Cerego is based in Japan, where it has 35 employees. Until now, though, the Cerego team has mostly focused on the Asian market under the iKnow.jp brand. It’s only now, though, that the company is making a push for the U.S. market.

If you want to give it a try yourself, Cerego offers a number of demos here (and if you want to brush up on your knowledge of Silicon Valley luminaries, here is another good demo).

Beintoo, which has a loyalty rewards and monetization platform for mobile games, apps, and sites, has secured $5 million in Series A funding led by Italian VC firm Innogest Capital. The startup won the startup competition at Le Web in Paris last year.

Beintoo has managed to get itself onto – it claims – 10 million direct users spanning 100 million devices in less than a year by offering a simple way to effectively put gamification into any app.

On Beintoo, users’ activities and time spent in games, apps, and on the web can be translated to “Bedollars” loyalty points which can then be redeemed in online and offline stores says Antonio Tomarchio, CEO. “We find that transforming time spent in an app to real benefits results in high conversion rates.”

Split between Milan and Palo Alto, the company now plans to expand further in North America and Asia, with an emphasis on sales, and partnerships with brands and developers.

Other competitors in the mobile loyalty sector include venture-backed Belly Inc., Facebook’s Tagtile, Stampt, GetPerka, and Punchd, which was acquired by Google.

ThisLife quietly launched in 2010 as a cloud-based platform for storing and organizing all of a family’s photos in a single place. But after two years of working to refine the service, husband-and-wife team Matt and Andrea Johnson are just about ready to open it up to the public, and have raised a seed round of $2.75 million to do so.

ThisLife is built on the idea of having a single place to store and organize your photos. Not happy with current public photo-sharing offerings (the Facebooks and Flickrs of the world) or the photo capabilities of cloud storage services like Dropbox, the Johnsons set out to build a better environment to keep all their family memories.

The site itself is pretty visually stunning — you pretty much have to see it for yourself — but the real beauty is in what ThisLife has built behind the scenes to allow users to organize and search photos based on the people in them, where they were taken, and what those people are doing. To start, users can upload photos from their PCs, but they can also import photos they’ve already uploaded online from a number of different online services, including Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram. ThisLife then organizes those photos into a library and allows users to create a timeline out of their favorites, as well as combine duplicates that might appear from various places.

Once photos are uploaded, ThisLife has a very robust facial recognition technology to identify people in various photos. That’s critical for families using the service. CEO Andrea Johnson told me that one of the most difficult problems for that technology is differentiating between young siblings, not to mention adapting to changes as children grow older. In a demo, for instance, she showed a timeline of one of her kids from eight weeks to eight years old.

With facial recognition, as well as GPS location data attached to photos and tags that can be added to photos and videos to provide more context, ThisLife users have a good set of tools to search through and organize their media assets. For instance, you can drill down and find only pictures that include two family members in the same photo, or one family member on vacation or participating in a certain activity. On the location front, there’s also a map function so you can see flags of photos from wherever you might have taken them.

In addition to its awesome web experience, ThisLife also has pretty awesome iPhone and iPad apps (just released!) that duplicate much of the same functionality and let you take all your photos with you on the go. Even better, it pre-caches photos so that you can access them, even when you’re not connected to the Internet.

ThisLife has a freemium subscription model for its service, allowing users to sign up and upload photos to start. Once they’ve uploaded more than 1,000 photos or an hour of video, it asks them to upgrade to other plans. There’s the Adventure Plan, which lets them store up to 20,000 photos or 10 hours of video for $7.99 a month or $79.99 a year. Or there’s the Family Plan, which costs $14.99 a month or $149.99 a year. In both cases, Matt Johnson told me most people who sign up pay for a year in advance, rather than paying month-to-month.

The service is currently in private beta, but the ThisLife founders soon hope to open the service up to the general public soon. (In the meantime, TechCrunch readers can sign up by clicking on this link.)

Anyway, to reach a bigger audience, ThisLife has raised a $2.75 million seed round led by Madrona Venture Group, with Madrona Managing Director Greg Gottesman joining its board. The round also included participation from Morado Ventures, Rogers Venture Partners, Animoto co-founder Brad Jefferson, Isilon co-founder Sujal Patel, and YouSendIt CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

ThisLife currently has 10 employees squeezed into a tiny 183-square foot office in Palo Alto, Calif. In addition to finding new office space, the startup plans to use some of the funding to increase marketing spend and let even more families know what it’s capable of.

Zynga.com is now running Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories, a revenue split partnership the two companies outlined in Facebook and Zynga’s S-1s over the last year. The ads appear in the Zynga right sidebar, and use the same personalized targeting exhibited by ads on Facebook.com. This agreement allows Zynga to better monetize its standalone site without the need for expanding its sales force, and meanwhile Facebook essentially gets free money. The exact percentages of the revenue split have not been disclosed.

The set up gives the world a look into what a Facebook ad network could look like across the web — a move that could allow Facebook to leverage its vast store of biographical data and the social graph to boost revenues. Facebook and Zynga shares responded positively this morning, with Facebook up 4.5 percent to $33.28 and Zynga up 4.6 percent to $5.99.

For years, we’ve expected that Facebook will eventually launch a full-fledged offsite ad network, but the company has moved extremely cautiously. It has preferred to optimize and test the inventory on Facebook.com before moving offsite, although it has an enviable network of like buttons and widgets strewn across the web. Facebook has refused to comment on the situation, but it did make a change in its governing documents recently that gives it the freedom to show standard Facebook ads offsite. Before, only Sponsored Stories were permitted.

Here are the important parts of what S-1 Developer Agreement says about the ad partnership, written from Facebook’s perspective (bolded emphasis added). Notice that the percentages of the revenue split were redacted, and appear as [*]:

b. Conditions and Restrictions Relating to Facebook Ad Units. The following conditions and restrictions apply to Facebook Ad Units on Properties:

(i) Each Facebook Ad Unit you implement shall:

(1) appear on the right hand side of the web page of all Properties [of Zynga.com] so the user is not required to scroll horizontally to see the Facebook Ad Unit, and

(2) be subject to and comply with the same dimension and substantially the same position and placement requirements that we use for and apply to third party advertisements placed on Canvas Pages as of the Effective Date, as such dimension, positioning and placement requirements are depicted and described in Exhibit F. You acknowledge and agree that we will be the “executive producer” of all Facebook Ad Units. Accordingly, and subject to Section 2.b (vii) below, you agree that we will have sole control over the appearance, design, layout, look-and-feel, Content (including adding, changing or removing Content), advertisers whose Content appear within, features, and functionality of all Facebook Ad Units and the methods and means used to monetize Facebook Ad Units.

3. Fees.

a. Within 15 days of the end of each month of the Term you shall send us a report that (1) identifies the specific Properties on which you implemented the Facebook Ad Unit during the previous month and (2) the number of Page Views generated during the previous month of all Zynga Game Pages on which a Facebook Ad Unit was not implemented (“Monthly Page View Count”).

b. Each month during the Term, for all Properties on which you implemented, during the previous month, the Facebook Ad Unit, we will pay you a percentage of Net Revenue (“Ad Share”) arising from such Properties for the previous month. Such Ad Share will be [*].

The ads look exactly the same as the ones on Facebook.com except they show a small Facebook logo and the word “Sponsored”. When these are clicked the direct to Facebook’s Help Center that explains the integration as such:

Facebook Advertising on Zynga.com

When you connect with Facebook on Zynga.com, you’ll see personalized ads and sponsored stories. The Facebook ads you see on Zynga are the same ads you see on Facebook.com.

• You’ll only see sponsored stories about activity that has been shared with you
• You can remove ads that don’t interest you by clicking the X
• Facebook doesn’t sell information that tells advertisers who you are

Last night I went to a magical party. There was food, which is always good, and booze, better still, but neither of these integral ingredients played a part in the magic. Nerf’s new N-Strike Elite line of dart blasters did.

The company unveiled the latest in their line of N-Strike blasters, the farthest-shooting toy guns in the company’s entire product portfolio, boasting a 75-foot trajectory. The Elite line includes three separate blasters, the Hail-Fire, the Rampage, and the Retaliator (by the way, is it just me, or are these super angry names?).

We should just start with the Hail-Fire, since it’s the bad mamma jamma of the trio. It features a revolving clip carousel fitting up to eight clips of any size, allowing it to hold up to 144 darts. Of course, it only comes with 24 darts, but you can certainly purchase more if you hate reloading as much as I (or this kid) do. The Hail-Fire can shoot darts up to 75 feet, thanks to a battery-powered motor. This one goes for $39.99 and will be available on September 9.

The Rampage also brings a new form-factor to the game, with a 25-dart drum that attaches to the side of the barrel. Rampagers can reload and fire as usual, or hold the trigger and continuously reload for a more rapid-fire approach. It doesn’t quite shoot as far as the Hail-Fire, nor is it as threatening in appearance, but it does win points for being noticeably lighter and more agile in the field. The Rampage is available on August 1 for $32.99.

The Retaliator is a sheep that can be dressed in wolves’ clothing. It appears small without the attachable stock, barrel, and drop-down handle locked and in place, but it shoots just as far as the Hail-Fire in any one of its potential configurations. Unfortunately, the little guy only comes with 12 darts, so you’ll almost certainly need to buy an extra pack, but the good news is that the Retaliator is the cheapest of the bunch at $26.99, also available August 1.

You can kindly thank John Biggs for the video above demoing the Retaliator, and Milla for picking up darts that weren’t in the street.

The author testing the G3 wheels in California’s Sonoma County. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

CycleOps Power unveiled its newest line of PowerTap power meters last year. Like previous PowerTap models, the G3 unit is built inside a rear hub. But the G3 is thinner and lighter yet has wider flanges, which, in theory, would make any wheels built up with the hub stiffer and more durable.

And for the first time, CycleOps is offering not just standalone hubs but also prebuilt wheelsets. I’ve spent two months on a the company’s 45mm G3 Carbon Wheelset, and even in the incredibly windy and hilly San Francisco Bay Area, I prefer them in most conditions to all of the other wheels I own. But the rims’ more traditional wedge profile struggles with strong sidewinds, much more than rims with the bulging profiles that have become so popular on aero wheels over the past two years.

CycleOps hasn’t actually hopped into the wheel game. The company has partnered with ENVE, an American manufacturer of stiff, ultralight wheels and other carbon-fiber bike components. Though Enve isn’t a huge name, its products are highly coveted among the race set for not only their stiffness and weight but also their durability.

The handbuilt G3 wheels don’t have the bulging profiles or wide rims of aero wheels like the Zipp’s Firecrest line, Bontrager’s D3, or even Enve’s own SES wheels. Those exaggerated dimensions aid performance in both headwinds and crosswinds. But even with the power-meter hub, the 45mm wheelset weighs 1,540 grams in the clincher version, right in line with other high-end 45mm wheels built on standard hubs. There are really only two arguments against using a power meter: weight and expense. The G3 puts one of those arguments to rest.

Unfortunately, the badging makes it clear that CycleOps wasn’t planning on selling wheels when it first created its logo. The thin white lettering and yellow circle of the company’s logo might look fine on indoor trainers, but here it looks like someone slapped a bumper sticker on a McLaren. These wheels want something much bolder.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Aesthetic shortcomings aside, the G3 hub functions like PowerTap’s earlier models. Strain gauges and other sensors in the hub measure torque and RPMs, cram the data, and spit out the result in watts—current, average, max, lap, etc. But the redesigned shell and internals drop the weight from 412 grams in the company’s previous top-end hub to just 325 grams here.

The new design puts most of the electronics in the removable cap, rather than the body of the hub. Where repairs on the old design often involved sending your entire wheel back to CycleOps, now you can just mail them the Oreo-sized cap, which takes all of 10 seconds to remove.

CycleOps has redesigned its Joule computer, and the new $169 unit is much smaller and way better looking than the old Joule 2.0 while retaining features like a customizable dashboard and fields that let users dive deep into their power data. But PowerTap hubs work on the common ANT+ protocol, which lets them sync up with other ANT+ computers, like my Garmin 800 GPS unit. I reconfigured the main screen on my 800 to show power, speed, and distance, and left the Joule at home. The Joule can definitely get more granular with the data out on the road, but I prefer the familiar interface of my Garmin while I’m riding.

So my bike got lighter, on wheels that were stiffer and more aerodynamic, plus I was able to add power data to my workouts and post-ride analyses while using existing hardware. There’s nothing about my riding experience that didn’t get better with these wheels.

WIRED Full power-meter training in a package lighter than a lot of standard race wheels. Insanely stiff, responsive wheels. Easy-to-service hub design. ANT+ compatibility means unit will talk to a wide range of devices.

TIRED Slightly last-gen shape to the deep-dish rims. Tricky in strong side winds. Would be tough to create a more boring logo for such an exciting set of wheels. Breaking performance isn’t the greatest.

The optional Joule computer. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone will be available on five major U.S. carriers, starting June 21. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

Samsung rightfully enjoys pointing out that it ships more Android smartphones than anyone else. And, with its new Galaxy S III, the South Korean electronics giant has accomplished something only Apple has been able to do so far: sell the same exact phone at the same price across major U.S. carriers without letting them slap their logos on the front of the device.

This is truly an achievement, and a win for consumers, who can just shop for the hardware they want instead of merely settling for the best hardware available on their carrier.

It’s a coup I wish HTC would have been able to make happen with its stellar One X handset. But Samsung beat HTC in that race, and starting this month, the Galaxy S III will roll out to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and U.S. Cellular for $200 with 16GB of storage — the same price as the iPhone and the One X.

The Galaxy S III is Samsung’s most ambitious smartphone yet, and it serves as a testament to the company’s growing stature as a premium handset maker. However, the S III isn’t quite an iPhone killer, nor does it dethrone the One X as the best Android handset. While it’s a fine smartphone, it’s not the unqualified success it aspires to be, and it’s regrettably held back by software that never works as well or as easily as it should.

First, the hardware. The American version of the S III packs Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor. This seems odd, since the phone is available with a quad-core processor outside the U.S. (just like HTC’s One X). But stateside consumers actually aren’t getting shorted that hard. Chances are, you won’t miss those extra cores, as the dual-core S III is still a mighty phone. Launching apps, watching high-definition video, loading websites, multitasking — everything I threw at the new Samsung was handled with no sluggishness or hesitation.

The S III also features 2GB of RAM, unlike the 1GB RAM setup found in the One X. But, while the S III clearly had plenty of horsepower, I saw no discernible power advantage over the One X. Both are fantastic performers and equally top-of-class in this regard.

When it comes to size, the S III barely undercuts the One X and the iPhone 4S with its 0.34-inch thickness. And at just 4.7 ounces, it’s plenty lightweight, too. The 4.8-inch, 1280 x 720 pixel, Super HD AMOLED display is massive. A thin bezel around the display keeps the phone from feeling oversized, but this is still about as big as I’d want a smartphone to be. Using the S III with one hand isn’t easy, and many apps simply require the attention of two hands.

The display is sharp and bright, with colors that feel a bit over-amped. Reds, greens and blues often pop brighter on the S III than on other handsets — if you’ve regularly used the Galaxy S II, you’re probably used to this. Contrast on the display is great, with deep blacks that make the handset a solid choice for watching video.

The screen uses a PenTile subpixel arrangement that unfortunately results in discernible pixels and a jagged look that falls short of the screens found on the iPhone 4S and the One X.

I’m also not a fan of the S III’s physical styling. The Pebble Blue and Ceramic White colors the S III is offered in look sharp — the blue especially, which is closer to purple. And the phone’s plastic chassis feels solid, as though it would withstand enough abuse to survive a 2-year contract. But the tooling is all slopes and rounded edges, leaving the handset looking more like a forgettable blob than the flashy flagship phone for the most popular Android maker.

But hardware is just one half of the story here. The major differentiator between the S III and its competitors really lies in the software.

Samsung’s add-on software concentrates heavily on file sharing, but the apps are difficult to use. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

The Galaxy S III ships with Google’s Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) operating system with Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface. On top of that, Samsung has added a special lock screen that simulates water ripples when you swipe it, and water-themed sound effects are dribbled throughout the phone.

It has a voice-recognition system Samsung calls S Voice, which is the company’s challenger to Apple’s Siri. While S Voice is advertised as being able to do a few things Siri can’t do, such as launch a camera app or a voice recording app, I couldn’t get it to do much of anything. S Voice was a dud for me on two different review units Samsung sent me: a blue S III running on T-Mobile and a white S III running on AT&T.

The most I could get S Voice to do was say, “Hi, nice to meet you,” when I said, “Hi, Galaxy,” to either phone. If I said, “Hello, Galaxy,” it would respond with, “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘Hello Galaxy.’” Every other request or command I spoke to S Voice was met with, “Network error. Please try again,” on both handsets, despite seeing full service bars and being connected to Wi-Fi. Maybe it’s just a problem limited to my two S III’s — I brought this issue up with a Samsung representative, and I’m waiting for them to get back to me. But at this time, I can’t say that S Voice looks ready for prime time, and it’s not coming close to matching Siri’s performance.

The other software features worked. Pop Up Play allows video stored on the S III to play in a pop-up window (just like picture-in-picture on a TV) so you can watch a video and perform other tasks at the same time. It works well, but I didn’t find the feature terribly useful on the handheld screen of a smartphone. This idea seems more at home to me on a larger screen device, such as a tablet, where you could watch a video and email or tweet at the same time. Hopefully, Samsung is thinking the same thing.

Facial recognition on the S III works well. Whenever I shot a photo, the S III prompted me to identify faces based on contacts from my address book. Once a person is tagged, it’s easy enough to share the photo with them using a feature Samsung calls Buddy Photo Share. Just tap on the person’s face, and the S III presents you with the option of calling that person, or sharing the particular photo via text message, email, or by way of social networks such as Facebook or Google+.

A couple of hits and a miss so far, but when I dove into the sharing features, the software experience got stickier.

Take AllShare, a feature that allows you to share photos and videos with as many as six other S III’s that are nearby. But when you send out the invitation to set up a sharing group, it requires each person in the group to accept your invitation one by one. Also, in AllShare, while users can see the files you’re sharing, they can’t save them.

If you want to share photos with other Galaxy S III owners and let them keep the files, you have to use a different feature called Share Shot, which automatically distributes the photos you’re taking by sending them over Wi-Fi to other S III handsets on your local Wi-Fi network.

But Share Shot is a pain, because invitations to join the sharing group are sent to other users one at a time. Each user in the group is prompted in turn to accept or decline the invitation, and each must respond before the next user is invited. It’s easy to imagine a scenario at a party where users are standing, phones at the ready, to join a sharing session, but everyone’s being held up by a single individual who received the invitation before them and isn’t paying attention to their phone.

It’d be easier if each user could accept an invitation independent of the others — which is what Samsung allows users to do in another feature called Group Cast. This sharing app allows S IIIs to share photos, PDFs, and PowerPoint presentations between phones. But once again, you can’t save documents in this feature.

Each of the sharing features comes with its own rules and limitations, and each requires the user to learn a completely new set of behaviors. They feel like they were all developed in isolation, rather than in concert. While Buddy Photo Share, Share Shot, Group Cast, and AllShare are cool features to have, the whole sharing scheme is far, far more complicated than it needs to be. Samsung should really just give us one easy way to share anything we want. But instead, we have more sharing options than most users will probably be willing to keep track of.

It looks more like a forgettable blob than a flashy flagship phone. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

Samsung has also needlessly altered Google’s built-in Android features. Google has developed an Android-to-Android sharing system called Android Beam that allows two NFC-equipped Android phones to share files when the two devices are tapped together. The S III arrives with that feature intact, but Samsung also has added its own NFC sharing system called S Beam, which does the same thing, but only works with Galaxy S III phones.

The ability to create folders on the S III is also needlessly complicated. In Google’s unaltered version of Android 4, a folder is created whenever two app icons are dragged on top of one another. On the S III, you have to hold your finger on the screen, tap “Add to Home screen” from a pop-up menu, select the “Folder” option, then drag your apps in.

But not all the software stuff is inscrutable — some things are really helpful. When you’re composing a text message on the S III and then bring the phone to your ear, it automatically dials the person you were messaging. Another feature called Smart Stay uses the S III’s 1.9-megapixel front camera to detect when you’re looking at the phone or not. When the S III sees you looking at it, the screen remains active. If you look away, the screen will time out and go dim as usual.

Last week, I reported on another of Samsung’s NFC strategies: TecTiles, which are tiny stickers with chips inside of them. Using an Android app, you program them to perform specific actions, like send a text message or set a reminder. Place the stickers in physical locations like on your desk or refrigerator, and you can just tap your phone against one to initiate the pre-programmed action. Unlike S Beam, TecTiles work with any NFC-capable Android phone, even though TecTiles’ launch was timed to coincide with the debut of the S III.

There are also a number of slick photo modes built into the S III’s camera. The rear shooter is a very capable 8-megapixel unit that’s paired with an LED flash. Photos aren’t as sharp or as detailed as those I took with the One X, but they comes close. The Camera app has built-in face detection, a burst shot mode, and modes for HDR pics, macro shots and panoramas. There’s even a slick mode called Smile Shot, which takes a photo anytime somebody in the frame flashes a grin.

The bottom line is that while all of Samsung’s software features on the S III aim to impress, and several display great ambition, too many of them suffer from frustratingly poor execution. Thankfully, you can just skip this stuff and enjoy the hardware. Samsung is still offering top-of-the-line performance here, and the Galaxy S III is more capable than many of the other phones on the market, even if it’s a bit clumsy.

But as a whole package, the S III simply doesn’t feel like a finished product. It could use more polish, more thought, and a more elegant user experience.

WIRED A blazing fast beast of a phone with 2GB of RAM and a 1.5GHz dual-core processor. The display is a beauty, just short of the iPhone and One X screens. Handset is thin and light. The same hardware is sold across five U.S. carriers at the same price point.

TIRED Samsung’s TouchWiz software includes a lot of half-baked features that aim for innovation but miss the mark — sharing apps in particular. Styling is boring, and not exciting enough for a flagship phone.

The MacBook Pro with Retina display. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

When Apple introduced the MacBook Air in 2008, it shook up the entire PC industry. In just a few years, “the world’s thinnest notebook” evolved from a super-slim novelty into a viable computing solution, sending other manufacturers on a mad rush to issue their own supremely portable ultrabooks. We’re now surrounded by a bunch of PC notebooks that looks remarkably similar to Apple’s Air.

And now we get to watch that same game play out at the top end of the notebook space.

With its newest MacBook Pro, Apple has drafted another set of design standards and build philosophies for PC makers to follow, this time for high-performance machines. The next wave of portable computers will become even slimmer. They will lose their optical drives. Their serviceability will be limited. And the screens will get better — much better.

Whether you’re a fan of Apple hardware or not, it’s difficult to deny that the new Pro’s stunningly crisp, high-resolution Retina display is a significant jump forward in the notebook space. We’ve seen phones and tablets with screens this clear and sharp, but this display is the first of its kind in a notebook computer. Over the next few years, we’ll undoubtedly see the Asuses and Toshibas of the world scrambling to add competitive, high-resolution displays into their own thin, unibody machines.

Of course, frontline tech like this is costly: The base model starts at a whopping $2,200 — $400 more than the 15-inch, entry-level non-Retina MacBook Pro, and $1,000 more than a 13-inch Pro or MacBook Air.

It weighs in at 4.46 pounds, 1.1 pounds less than the previous MacBook Pro, and it’s light enough for me to confidently pick up and carry with only one hand. The machine measures 0.71 inches, only 0.03 inches thicker than the MacBook Air. Unlike the Air, which has a patented wedge-shaped design, the Pro is uniformly thick all the way from back to front, save for a small curved taper around the bottom edges of the base. For long-time users of the regular 15-inch MacBook Pro, the shaved frame and 20 percent weight loss on this new machine are pleasant and welcome upgrades. But anyone used to the MacBook Air may still find the larger 15.4-inch display and thicker body a bit unwieldy and, dare I say, chunky.

The new MacBook Pro has a 0.71-inch, uniformly thick frame. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

Still, fence-sitters will be swayed by the device’s extremely sharp and detailed display, which is truly jaw-dropping.

Before setting eyes on the new display, I thought, “Considering the distance I sit from my monitor, the current display must be close to Retina level, right?”

Wrong. The MacBook Pro’s Retina display has a resolution of 2880×1800 pixels. That’s four times as many pixels as its predecessor (5,184,000 total). And thanks to a new manufacturing method that builds the glossy display right into the unibody housing, it ditches the extra layer of cover glass. The pixels thus seem closer to you, like they’re sitting just ever-so-slightly beneath the surface instead of buried somewhere within the notebook’s lid.

Apple’s 2880 x 1800 pixel Retina display is the centerpiece of its newest laptop, and serves as a roadmap the future of PC design. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

The Retina display provides the same rich colors you’re used to, but with a greater contrast ratio (29 percent higher than a standard Pro, according to Apple) and up to 75 percent less glare. Based on my experiences using a previous-generation MacBook Pro alongside the Retina-equipped machine for a week, I’d say these contrast and glare-reduction claims are accurate.

Apple has undoubtedly created the best notebook display on the market. Onscreen text looks impeccably sharp, as do any vector graphics. High-resolution images are pixel-perfect. Watching 4K video on YouTube is brilliant — it’s a testament to the power of this machine that my Wi-Fi connection, and not the MacBook Pro’s display or processor, was the bottleneck when watching 4K video. If your job requires you to examine each and every pixel in a frame or photograph, this is the display you want to work on.

Inside the base model is a 2.3GHz quad-core Intel i7 processor with an integrated graphics card, plus a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics chip that supports up to 2560×1600 resolution on up to two external displays as well as the full 2880×1800 resolution of the built-in display. Memory-wise, the MacBook Pro with Retina Display comes standard with 8GB of solid-state onboard memory (upgradable to 16GB for $200, but only at the time of purchase — more on that later) and 256MB of SSD flash storage.

Compare that with the 2012 13-inch Air’s 1.8GHz i5 processor, 4GB of memory, and 128GB SSD, and it’s clear: The Retina display Pro is a significantly more powerful machine for only a fraction more of the footprint.

The device’s speed is apparent in every resource-intensive task: boot-up time is under 20 seconds from the chime to the login screen, launching apps and switching between them is remarkably swift, and scrolling on webpages is smooth and natural. During very high-intensity operations, like watching 4K video or multitasking between a multitude of open browser tabs and programs, the machine can get warm to the touch, but it doesn’t throw off more heat than the current MacBook Pro.

In Geekbench benchmarks, the new Pro scores comparably with the 15-inch 2011 model Macbook Pro and 2012 non-Retina display MacBook Pro, proving that paring down the size has done nothing to diminish performance.

The battery power hasn’t been reduced, either. Apple promises up to seven hours of battery life on the Retina display MacBook Pro, which you can achieve with casual usage with display brightness at half power. In a normal work day spent browsing the web, typing docs in a word processor, playing music, editing photos, and watching the occasional YouTube clip at about 80 percent brightness, I got just over four hours of battery life. Watching the HD download of Star Trek from iTunes at near full-brightness similarly drained the battery to just over 50 percent by the time the two-hour film finished.

Just like when the third-generation iPad was released earlier this year, there’s a dearth of Retina-ready apps available from the App Store at the moment. This is unfortunate, but hopefully it’s only a temporary issue. For now, Apple has the basics covered: built-in standbys like Mail, Calendar, Safari, iMovie, and iTunes, as well as professional options like Aperture and Final Cut Pro. Titles from Adobe and Autodesk are currently in the works, and we should be seeing Retina-ready Mac app updates trickling in over the next few weeks.

Some people go through life without writing anything down, keeping all their appointments, obligations and ideas in their head through sheer mnemonic prowess.

These people are weird. For the rest of us, there are lists. For some of us, there are lots of lists.

If you’re the sort to keep a list for everything from movies you want to see to good names for the bearded dragon lizard you might get someday — I suggest “General Burnside” — you’re going to want a handy general-purpose list app.

• 

  Paperless

  

  If your needs are as meager as your income, Paperless offers an elegant interface at a relatively cheap price. The customization is largely limited to choosing a nifty icon and deciding if you want checkboxes next to each item, but it it’s nice to look at, easy to use, and offers features like Dropbox sync, backup to email and a passcode lock for your secret lists, like your favorite Dora the Explorer episodes.

  WIRED Pretty to look at, simple to use.

  TIRED So simple to use you might be just as well off with Notes.

  $3 (free demo available), iOS | Crush Apps

  
  
  
  
  

• 

  List Master

  

  It isn’t the prettiest app out there, but it works almost precisely the way you expect an iOS app to work, and it’s jam-packed with features that leave it balancing lightly on the line between a powerful list app and a simple database. Custom fields range from simple text and numbers to timestamps, three-way selectors and even pop-up fields based on other lists. And yet, with all these complexities, the lists themselves are easy to use, easy to organize, and easy to update.

  WIRED Customization out the wazoo, or nearest wazoo-equivalent. Very nice interface for such a full-featured app.

  TIRED Unlovely. If you’re not going to use all that power, seven bucks might be a bit steep.

  $7, iOS | List Logic

  
  
  
  
  
  

• 

  Daily Tracker

  

  You can use Daily Tracker to create your basic to-do list, grocery list or enemies list, but it’s designed especially to track information over time, which can be handy for self-improvement regimes ranging from tracking time spent jogging to cigarettes smoked. It automatically groups your entries by date, and can provide simple charts showing progress over time. But with an unusual interface, no iPad version, and no free trial, dropping ten bucks on Daily Tracker is a gamble.

  WIRED If you want to track, tally or time things by the day, it might fit your needs perfectly.

  TIRED Quirky interface, high price, no demo.

  $10, iPhone and iPod | Lumen Spark

  
  

The savage whine of the city streets. The gasping protestations of the petulant child at Starbucks. The incessant nattering of the nabobs back there in coach.

These are all common annoyances that would drive an otherwise sane person to unspeakable acts of ultraviolence. They’re also why noise-canceling technology was invented.

Active noise-cancellation — which uses microphones on the outside of the headphones to pick up ambient noise, then produces opposing sound waves inside the headphones to neutralize it — has its drawbacks. It introduces hiss and other artifacts into the signal, and it requires batteries to work, which means you have to keep your headphones charged up. Also, I’ve found I can comfortably achieve world-shunning silence with a really good pair of isolating earbuds.

But there’s great love among consumers for the fit and feel of a full-sized pair of headphones that magically blocks out the din of the rat race. I can understand the attraction, as the best pairs of noise-canceling cans are comfortable and stylish, and provide a fuller, more rich sound than most of the tiny, in-ear options.

So with open ears and an open mind, I took a look at three new models.

AKG K495 NC

If you demand near-absolute silence from your noise-canceling headphones, these are the ones for you. The AKG K495 NCs get closer to dead silence than any other pair I tried.

In a nice design touch, you activate the noise-canceling feature by twisting the metal ring that runs around the left earcup. And when you turn it on, it’s actually shocking because all the noise around you just completely shuts off.

The sound overall is excellent — full and rich with surprisingly good bass. I noticed the AKGs provide tight, crisp details, so I found myself listening to a lot of classical music, acoustic rock and modern jazz while wearing them. This is where they really excel. Surprisingly, there’s almost no crunchiness or hiss present with the noise-canceling switched on.

Keep in mind these aren’t wireless — they have a cable that plugs into your phone with an in-line remote for adjusting the volume and answering calls. You also get a USB cable for charging them up. When the battery runs out, you can keep listening with the noise-canceling turned off, and they still sound great without it.

The pads are an on-the-ear design, not over-the-ear, so they aren’t quite as comfortable as the other headphones I tested. Also, the metal headband has some sharp corners, and my hair tended to get snagged in the angular hinges. But the pads are made of really nice, soft leather, and the clamping force isn’t too tight, so they aren’t torture machines or anything.

AKG’s design is attractive and compact. Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

Here’s the kicker — they’re only $350. Yes, I know, “ONLY $350?” But that’s actually a very good price for noise-canceling travel headphones this nice. It’s the same price as the mega-popular Bose QuietComfort 3s, but these sound better and have a sturdier build.

WIRED Handsome design. Strong noise canceling with only a dribble of audio artifacts. Two lengths of detachable braided cable, one with an in-line remote. Fantastic sound in passive mode, too.

TIRED On-ear design leads to fatigue after a couple of hours, and plastic parts inside the earcups can dig into your ears. Metal headband is sharp and snaggy. They don’t stay on your head as well as over-the-ears.

Sennheiser’s headphones allow for both wireless and wired operation. They sound great and they travel well. Photo by Jim Merithew/Wired

Sennheiser MM 550-X

You may recognize these Sennheisers, since we reviewed the previous model about a year ago. But they’ve been updated recently with some new firmware that gives them better audio. They look exactly the same, but there’s a new model number: They’re now called the MM 550-X.

They’re Bluetooth-compatible and they can be used wirelessly — an important distinction over the other two models in this review. The MM 550-Xs pair with a phone easily, they charge over USB, and they fold up into a highly portable bundle. The controls are all on the right earcup, and they’re pretty simple to operate. There’s also a pass-through feature — just press a button on the earcup and you can hear what’s going on around you without taking the headphones off.

The enhancement here over last year’s model is added support for the Apt-X codec, a form of lossless compression that lets you transmit hi-fi audio wirelessly over Bluetooth. You’ll need an Apt-X-compatible device to take advantage of this better-sounding wireless connection, but I got it to work on a MacBook Air and an HTC One X (Sennheiser lists compatible devices on its website). Unlike most forms of audio compression I’ve heard in wireless gear, Apt-X is very forgiving and gentle. The audio suffers from no discernible degradation before it reaches your ears. If your source isn’t Apt-X compatible (like my iPhone 4), the default of SBC Bluetooth 2.1 is used, which sounds fine.

This all adds up to an awesome pair of headphones. They’re very light, super compact, and the over-the-ear design is really comfortable for long periods. The noise-canceling technology isn’t super-silent, so you hear some ambient noise in the background while you’re walking around listening to music. But if you’re a purist, that’s a good thing — it means your music will still sound very close to what the artist intended. So, these are the headphones I’d recommend to people who typically dislike noise-canceling, or for those skeptical about wireless audio.

They’re really pricey though, about $500. You can find them cheaper if you shop around, but that’s still a lot of money, even for wireless noise-canceling travel headphones. One other thing: They’re too quiet for truly noisy situations. I wore them on a belching diesel-powered bus and I couldn’t get them to turn up loud enough.

WIRED Stellar sound, even with noise-canceling activated. Support for hi-fi Apt-X codec. Super-portable, wireless design makes them perfect for all kinds of travel. Over-the-ear design stays put, keeps a good seal and feels great all day.

TIRED A whole lotta drachmas. Controls can be confusing — RTFM before use. Could definitely do with some more headroom.

Rocketfish Atmos

You might think it’s crazy to spend $500 (or even $350) on a pair of headphones, so here’s a pair for you — the Atmos noise-canceling headphones from Rocketfish. The MSRP is $130, but you can find them online for around $80.

They’re over-the-ear headphones with a strong skull-clamp factor, so you get a good seal around your ear. There’s a battery inside that charges over USB.

When it comes to audio quality, you won’t find me raving. But I was surprised at how well they performed, given their budget-minded build. Subtler, intricate tracks, like Aphex Twin’s ambient classics and Sean Hayes’ soulful ballads, were rather muddy and undefined. But classic rock and anything with a punchier, modern sheen — Tennis, Sleigh Bells, Talking Heads, Rush — sounded pretty good.

The noise-canceling tech inside is provided by Wolfson, and it performs well enough. Street noises were mostly squashed, with only the lowest and loudest engine rumbles leaking in. Noise-canceling can be switched on and off, so you can keep listening to music after the headphones’ batteries are exhausted.

The Rocketfishes aren’t as comfortable as pricer cans, but they are very lightweight, given their mostly plastic construction.

About that: If you read the reviews on Amazon and in headphone forums, you’ll see complaints about how the headband snapped or one of the earpieces broke. That didn’t happen to me, but I only used them for a week, and I treated them pretty gently. But keep in mind: they don’t fold, they aren’t very compact, and the plastic is flimsy. And while the Atmos cans come with a molded case, they aren’t as well-suited for travel. This is odd for a pair of noise-canceling headphones, which are usually geared toward travelers, commuters, and those who traditionally want the ultimate in portability.

Sure, Rocketfish had to cut a few corners, but the company managed to keep these around $100 without sacrificing much in the way of sound.

WIRED A good budget pick. Plenty loud, so even with the NC switched off, they still provide good isolation. Over-the-ear design is comfortable enough for a few hours of use.

TIRED Audio is loud, but lacks subtlety and liveliness. Cheap construction. Noise-canceling is a bit crunchy with noticeable artifacts.