Category: Tech news

Short Version

The Samsung Galaxy S III is the Android phone of the moment and in many ways it lives up to the hype. Plenty of folks are excited to see this thing hit store shelves. Our take? They won’t be disappointed.

Stellar software features paired with a beautiful display and specs that can compete with anything else on the market makes the Galaxy S III nothing short of a total delight. Physically it’s not much of a looker – the plastic case feels a bit chintzy – but generally you’re looking at the best of the best.

Features:

• 4.8-inch 720×1280 Super AMOLED display
• Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich
• Samsung’s TouchWiz overlay
• S-Beam/NFC
• 2GB of RAM
• 1.5GHz dual-core processor
• 8MP rear camera (1080p video capture)
• 1.9MP front camera
• 4G LTE at available carriers
• MSRP: 16GB is $199 on-contract, 32GB is $249 on-contract

Pros:

• Tons of cool software like S-Beam and Buddy Photo Share
• Beautiful, large display
• Solid battery life

Cons:

• The plastic feels cheap and grabs prints
• TouchWiz is heavy and ugly

Long Version

Hardware/Design:

As I briefly mentioned, the Galaxy S III is made almost entirely of plastic, save for the Gorilla glass coating its face. The design is meant to be inspired by nature, which seems silly considering all the plastic. There isn’t a straight line in sight, with rounded corners and tapered edges.

The plastic along the back has a brushed look to it, but it feels slick and grabs up prints. The blue version is worse than the white, though, with the white version simply clinging to dirt, dust and other unsightly particles while the blue just loves the smudge.

The phone is incredibly thin (.34-inches), considering the size of the display, and with a weight of 4.3 ounces it feels a little too light. You know — the cheap kind of light. Again, we come back to the plastic.

Now, I understand that building this phone out of metal or some other (more premium) materials would have made ease-of-use a bit more difficult. There are multiple radios in this guy, along with an NFC chip, and almost everything runs smoothly. With a metal frame, the same smooth ease-of-use would be far more difficult to achieve.

An elongated home button sits just below the display, with a volume rocker on the left edge, lock button on the right, and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top left corner. The camera is square on the back of the phone with a speaker grill on the right and LED flash on the left. MicroUSB access is on the bottom.

Software:

The Samsung Galaxy S III is packed with software features. To start, the phone runs Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI slapped on top. I’m not a huge fan of TouchWiz in terms of aesthetic (I much prefer pure Android ICS), but at least the custom overlay comes with a few helpful tidbits like resizeable widgets and navigational shortcuts in contacts.

But that’s nothing compared to the things Samsung has done with NFC and WiDi (WiFi Direct).

For one, Samsung has introduced a new way to make some money, called TecTiles. TecTiles are essentially stamp-sized NFC stickers, and work with any of Samsung’s NFC-equipped phones, allowing users to program specific tiles to do various actions when tapped. So a TecTile on my night stand may set an alarm and lower the ringer volume (in preparation for sleepy time), while a TecTile on my front door may connect me to my home WiFi network. The service works well, and the only real complaint I have about TecTiles is the fact that they cost $14.99 per a pack of five.

Another NFC-friendly feature is Samsung’s S Beam. It works similarly to Android Beam but functions over a greater distance, letting users share content in seconds without a WiFi or cell signal. This includes the sharing of photos, videos, music, web pages, etc.

In my experience S Beam worked well and transferred content rather quickly between devices. The main concern is just how much use S Beam will get. Sure, the Galaxy S III will be a popular phone, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in a given group of friends is going to go buy one.

The GSIII also comes loaded with Samsung’s new GroupCast feature, which syncs Galaxy S III devices so you can share a PDF, PowerPoint, or photo gallery presentation. The feature seems like it would be helpful for workers in the field or out of the office, especially considering that Samsung is offering an enterprise-friendly version of the device. It even lets users make marks on the presentation, though I wouldn’t consider this a collaboration tool since the marks disappear relatively quickly and can’t be saved.

The phone features Samsung’s cloud-syncing/sharing service AllShare Play, letting users share content on any AllShare-connected devices like Galaxy tablets, DLNA-capable TVs, set-top boxes and Blu-Ray players, as well as Samsung’s Smart TVs and Windows PCs running the AllShare Play app. This lets users pull files that are stored on home devices and throw a movie from their Galaxy S III to the TV.

Along with these major features, the Galaxy S III also has some small touches that make it a much easier device to use. Things like motion controls (tilting the phone to zoom in on images, or panning the phone to move icons from one home screen to the next) seem a bit arbitrary, as it’s just as fast and seamless to tap to zoom or slide my finger across the screen to rearrange icons. However, features like the ability to lift the phone to your face while in a text message conversation to initiate a call makes sense. The phone also dims brightness when it’s set down, saving you battery, and gives a little extra alert when you’ve been away from your phone if you’ve missed a call or message.

The biggest disappointment in software (and let it be known, I’m seriously impressed with the feature set offered here) is S Voice. It’s essentially a Siri competitor, allowing you to make commands with your voice. To start, it’s not as smart as Siri when it comes to hearing natural language (“show me the nearest burger joint” confused the heck out of it). Second, it has less functionality than Siri. It’s a fine feature yet it just seems like a copy that isn’t done quite as well. (And trust me, that’s not to say that Siri works well by any means).

Pop Up Player, which lets you continue playing a video in a smaller window above some other task, is also a smart feature as multi-tasking becomes ever-important to us. Flipboard is pre-loaded on the device, as are plenty of carrier apps.

Camera:

The camera on the Galaxy S III is lightning fast, though I can’t say I’m totally blown away by picture quality. Compared to photos taken with my iPhone 4S, everything shot with the Galaxy S III seems washed out and drab. Luckily, there are plenty of different scene modes, focus settings, exposure, ISO, white balance, and various effects that should help you find your way to the image you want.

But perhaps to make up for the less-than-impressive picture quality, the Samsung Galaxy S III camera has a few software surprises that are sure to delight. There is burst shot, which takes up to 20 photos at a rate of 3 pics per second and best shot, which snaps eight images and automatically offers you the best one based on criteria like blinking, smiling, lighting, etc. The Galaxy S III will also let you take still images as you record 1080p video, and has an HDR mode.

More importantly, the GSIII camera has a shooting mode called Buddy Photo Share. It recognizes faces in images and lets you tag them with the contact’s name. From there, the phone will always recognize the difference between John Biggs and Matt Burns and let me share photos with them straight from their name-tag.

Share Shot is another important camera feature, as it allows you to share photos as you take them with up to five GSIII devices through WiFi Direct. So let’s say you’re at a birthday party with your friends and want to make sure everyone can enjoy the pictures later. Simply open up Share Shot and connect with the devices you want to share with. From there, every photo you take will appear in their galleries too until you choose a different shooting mode.

All in all the GSIII camera has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, but if it’s simply a beautiful image you’re looking for, you may need to keep looking.

Comparison shot between the Samsung Galaxy S III (left) and the iPhone 4S (right):

Display:

You really can’t go wrong with this display. Samsung’s HD Super AMOLED screens are the best out there, and at 4.8 inches there’s plenty of super crisp content to enjoy. Blacks are deep, colors are bright, and there’s really no differentiation between pixels. In fact, the 4.8-inch display has 306 pixels per inch, making it one of the largest pixel-dense displays I’ve ever seen.

Past that, there’s the size of the display to consider. Nudging up against the 5-inch mark, the Galaxy S III display is much bigger than I’m comfortable with. But the key to slapping giant screen on a phone and keeping it comfortable is device and bezel thickness. The phone is already super thin, allowing even smaller hands to grip the device solidly.

But the bezels of the Galaxy S III is what really saves the day. They take up less than half a centimeter on each side, allowing a huge screen to fit on a relatively comfortable phone. The rounded corners and curved edges also help with grip and performing one-handed actions.

Performance:

HTC has been kicking ass lately when it comes to benchmark testing, but there’s a new sheriff in town. The Samsung Galaxy S III beats out every Android phone I’ve ever tested in all three tests we run. In Quadrant, which tests everything from CPU to memory to graphics, the Galaxy S III scored an impressive 4911. The HTC One S comes in second with 4371, while most other phones (including the Galaxy Note) stay well below the 3000 mark.

Where browsing is concerned, the Galaxy S III pulled in a score of 103,780 compared to the One S’s 100,662. Compared to most phones, however, the GSIII wins by a long shot as we usually see scores around the 60,000 mark.

And as a testament to both the phone and the power of AT&T’s 4G LTE network, I can safely say that this phone is fast. We saw an average of 9.6Mbps down and 8.39Mbps up, which is excellent. I have yet to see the Galaxy S III have any issues in terms of performance, which says a lot considering that this phone is going above and beyond in terms of both hardware and software. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that second GB of RAM.

Battery:

Here’s the deal with battery life. The Samsung Galaxy S III has a 2100mAh battery, which is fairly large compared to other phones on the market. Be that as it may, all the extra features that make the Galaxy S III amazing (like the NFC and WiFi Direct stuff) end up tugging pretty vigorously at the battery. Pair that with a 4G LTE radio and there’s bound to be some trouble.

That said, the Galaxy S III lasted a full five hours and fifteen minutes in our battery test. That’s pretty damn good, considering that the screen is never off during a constant Google Image search. In real-world scenarios, it should at least make it through dinner time, and depending on your usage, it might even hang with you through those late night parties.

To give you a little context, the Droid 4 only hung in there for three hours and forty-five minutes while the Droid RAZR Maxx (Motorola’s battery beast) stayed with me for a staggering eight hours and fifteen minutes. The HTC One S lasted just under five hours.

Another plus is that the battery is removable, so if you’re a serious power-user you can always purchase another battery and swap them out throughout the day.

Head-To-Head With The One X And iPhone 4S:

Conclusion

In the end, the Samsung Galaxy S III is the phone you’ve been waiting for. It’s generally well-built, it has an incredible display, solid battery life, plenty of interesting features and it just works well. That’s not something I find myself saying very often of Android phones.

When people ask me what phone they should buy, or if they should wait for this or that (and trust me, I get asked this a lot), I always say, “No, never wait. Just buy the best phone available today, and don’t worry about spending a little more than you’d want to because you’ll use it every day for about two years.”

But over the past few months, when phandroids come at me asking for phone recommendations, I’ve been telling them to wait. And you know what, I’m glad I did. Just like the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy S that came before it, this is the Android phone to beat.

It’s the phone you’ve been waiting for.

NBC Universal is making a big push to bring a lot more of its cable content online, with plans to make shows from USA Network, Syfy, and Oxygen available to cable subscribers with access on PCs, as well as on mobile phones, tablets, and other connected devices. To help it get there, it’s chosen thePlatform to manage distribution to all of those platforms.

The selection of thePlatform shouldn’t come as a huge surprise — after all, NBC Universal is majority-owned by Comcast and thePlatform is a wholly owned subsidiary of the cableco. And NBCU already uses thePlatform for distribution of video from a number of its other networks, including E!, NBC Local Media, NBC Sports Regional Networks, Sprout, Style, and the Golf Channel. Previously the networks had relied on their own internal systems for distribution.

But the bigger news here is that USA, Syfy, and Oxygen could soon be bringing their full-length programming online as part of independent TV Everywhere initiatives. Under TV Everywhere, cable subscribers “authenticate” or log in with their cable or satellite credentials to prove that they pay for certain cable networks, and then get access to additional on-demand — and in some cases, live — content online and on additional connected devices.

So far, the TV Everywhere charge has been led by HBO and its numerous mobile and connected TV apps, with a few other networks slowly following. ESPN, Disney, Showtime, and a few others have introduced their own TV Everywhere apps, but all-in-all, it’s been pretty slow going. On the distributor side, we’ve seen some major moves, most notably Comcast’s Xfinity TV apps and availability of its video on-demand service through Xbox Live.

It’s not clear how much content the NBCU properties will be bringing online, or if they’ll be launching their own apps or just riding on the apps of their distribution partners. While those decisions will be made on a network-by-network basis, thePlatform said that it will give them the capability to distribute both full-length and promotional material to subscribers and fans.

While thePlatform is best known for its big media and cable customers — including Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications, Liberty Global, PBS, Rogers, Shaw Media, and Time Warner Cable — it recently made a push to expand beyond the high-end video distribution market. With the launch of mpx Essentials last week, thePlatform is now offering video management services to mid-market customers, with an offering priced at $499 a month.

As an investor, Peter Thiel may be best known for his angel investments, most notably, his legendary call with Facebook. But now he’s got something for companies that sit just on the cusp between public and private markets. He’s launching a $402 million growth fund called Mithril for late-stage, privately-held companies.

Yes, it’s named after Mithril from the Lord of the Rings. (Bilbo Baggins gave Frodo a shirt made of Mithril chain mail once.) “It’s the choice form of silver from the deepest mines. It’s the toughest substance there is,” said Jim O’Neill, a partner in the fund who is also the former managing director of Clarium, and co-founder of the 20 under 20 Thiel Fellowship. “Peter and I are fans of Tolkien.”

Mithril won’t participate as early as Thiel’s venture firm Founders Fund does and it doesn’t handle publicly-traded assets like his hedge fund Clarium Capital. It invests across the entire technology industry and the fund doesn’t seem to have any preferences between consumer and enterprise companies.

Nor will it shy away from investments in the clean energy and biotech space, not unlike its early-stage peer Founders Fund, which is known for bolder and riskier bets in gene sequencing and cancer treatment companies. That fund just raised $625 million last year.

“This completes the whole geological picture,” O’Neill said. “Founders Fund is focused on startups and they do a great job at that. Clarium is global macro and focused on commodities, currencies and typically much more liquid investments. This fills in the final gap, which is growth-stage.”

Joining O’Neill, is Ajay Royan, who has also been a managing director at Clarium. Clarium isn’t quite as storied as Founders Fund, though. It managed $7.2 billion at its peak but then shrunk to under $1 billion after the 2008 financial crisis — not unlike many other hedge funds, which also suffered losses or faced redemptions during the downturn.

O’Neill says Mithril won’t be biased to co-invest or follow on with Founders Fund’s deals. ”Mithril is a very separate organization with different teams and different decision processes,” O’Neill said. “It will take a more economic perspective on what potential exists in various industries.”

As for the possibility of a late-stage correction following Facebook’s lackluster post-IPO performance, O’Neill remains pretty bullish.

“We’re very willing to be patient with a growth cycle that might take years to become apparent to other counter parties,” he said. ”We think in the long run this space makes sense for investors at all stages, even though there might be peaks, valleys, twists and turns in the short run.”

Viralheat is probably best-known for its social media analytics and publishing tools, but it also offers some free APIs. And at least one of those APIs, the one that analyzes sentiment, is taking off, according to CEO Raj Kadam.

He tells me that Viralheat originally intended to use another company’s sentiment API, except he wasn’t satisfied with what he found — everything focused on keywords, rather than using natural language processing to glean the true meaning of a tweet or comment. So the company decided to build sentiment analysis tools of its own, and to make those tools available to other businesses through an API. One example: “sick” means different things in different contexts, and Viralheat can supposedly understand that someone talking about “sick jeans” has a different meaning than someone talking about being “sick at the hospital”.

Now Viralheat says that the API is being used 1,500 organizations and developers in industries like finance and academia, and that it’s receiving 300 million calls per week. (Each call represents a single piece of text, such as a tweet, that gets analyzed.) All of that usage is making Viralheat’s sentiment analysis smarter, because companies can correct the analysis, say if the API declares that a tweet is neutral in sentiment but it turns out to be positive.

One company making extensive use of the API is Zuberance, a startup that helps businesses turn their fans into brand advocates. Kadam notes that for Zuberance, it’s not enough to find people who are tweeting a lot about your company. You specifically want to find the ones who are saying good things, and will be amenable to spreading positive messages about the company.

And yes, Viralheat is providing a lot of this analysis for free. Kadam says he isn’t interested in turning the APIs into a big part of the company’s revenue, but some of the heavier users (like Zuberance) are paying.

Recruiting startup Interview Street is making a move onto college campuses (virtually speaking).

The company helps employers recruit programmers by holding online coding contests to test their skills. Right now, co-founder Vivek Ravisankar says the average CodeSprint coder has between zero and 3.5 years of work experience — in other words, they’re pretty fresh out of college. Still, a lot of recruiting starts even earlier. So why not try to find the most talented programmers while they’re still in school?

To that end, Interview Street has launched a Summer Games feature, giving college students a chance to prove their programming mettle while they’re on summer vacation. Basically, students complete different coding changes, then they’re ranked individually and by school. Right now, the games are in their “warm up” phase, then on June 24 they’ll start the trials, where contestants can win up to $500, and in July the games will move into finals, with a prize of up to $1,000. (Anyone can try to complete the challenges, but only college students can win the prizes.)

Ravisankar says the current site focuses on artificial intelligence tests, namely programming computer players to win at games like tic tac toe and anti-chess (where the goal is to lose your pieces as quickly as possible). Eventually, he plans to add other types of programming challenges. Still, it seems appropriate that he started with tasks that match the Summer Games theme.

“I don’t want to talk about whether ads are good or bad. I just want to make good ads. Good for apps, good for users.” That’s from Kiran Belubbi, founder and CEO of 955 Dreams which today added the most gorgeous mobile ads I’ve ever seen to its app Band Of The Day. Now the startup is working on a licensable ad platform so other apps can replace obtrusive, overlaid, “still loading” ads with glossy, full-screen interstitials that can actually complement their experiences.

As web-first services stumble into smaller screens and non-game app developers struggle to pull in revenue, 955 Dreams might have the answer to mobile monetization woes: Art. If there’s someone to usher in age of ads not just as content, but as art, it could be the team behind Band Of The Day. With 2 million active users, it was named to Apple’s Hall of Fame and was Runner up for the Apple App of the Year 2011 (only beaten by Instagram).

From its dazzling calendar view to the smooth page turns in artist bios, all while a music player introduces you to new songs, Band Of The Day is a simple app made extraordinary through design. It even launched some new viral features recently, including Open Graph auto-sharing when you listen to songs, and the ability to share full-length songs that can be listened to by friends without having to download the app.

One of the only problems was that multi-page band interviews could look a little text heavy. Meanwhile 955 Dreams wanted to ditch the $1 price tag and make Band Of The Day free for everyone to explore. It saw ads as the route to sustainability, but didn’t want to disturb the app’s aesthetic. TJ Zark, 955 Dreams co-founder and Chief Design Officer (they have one of those), tells me “Here you have the most beautiful screen displays in history and they’re being used to deliver recycled, pixilated web ads at the bottom of mobile apps.” So the team set out to build an ad format that wouldn’t just blend in, but enhance Band Of The Day by breaking up the text pages with full-screen photos. To keep things classy, it recruited high-end advertisers like Burberry.

Belubbi tells me “These are brands that haven’t done any extensive spend on mobile advertising. That’s because forcing themselves into a 350 x 50 pixel block is something upscale brands are never going to do.”

But in 955 Dreams’ ad platform, companies that create art for use as ads have a home. Belubbi says luxury companies “will spend millions of dollars on a photo shoot, and then it ends up pixelated” in some crummy little box on the average ad network. 955 Dreams isn’t a normal ad network, though.

On iPhone, and especially on iPad, the ads are stunning. As you swipe to reveal one, the previous page smoothly dims to gray and the full-screen photo snaps into place, before fading away itself as you swipe past to reveal the music player and next page.

You can see the flow of swiping through a Burberry ad above or in this short video. Meanwhile 955 Dreams also has vertical-relevant ad like the one above from Red Bull’s record label, as shown below. Or you can check it out live by downloading Band Of The Day for iPhone or iPad Today 955 Dreams puts out the call for partner apps who want the same ad experience and are willing split revenue. While Belubbi’s company is quite lean now, even smaller app developers who want to offer beautiful ads without hiring a sales force could team up with 955 Dreams.

The end-to-end ad engine will come with built-in analytics. And since everything is being dogfooded in 955 Dreams’ baby Band Of The Day, clients can be sure things are tip top before they hit their users. The market is surprisingly open as those like Flipboard who’ve developed design-focused ad engines are keeping them to themselves.

Now, the 955 Dreams ad engine won’t be perfect for every app. Endless scrolling content feeds will require a different design (like Facebook’s Sponsored Stories which data shows have great click through rates), but for screen-by-screen apps, 955 Dreams could fit nicely. Apps aimed at demographics like kids that aren’t the targets for glossy ad-producing marketers may also find it hard to fill inventory…for now. But the shift from ads as commercials to content is happening, and I see more and more companies discovering subtlety and beauty sell better than overt pitches.

Band Of The Day is great, but as I’ve seen with countless startups, 955 Dreams has realized that the internal tool its built could generate more revenue than what they built it for. If the ad engine takes off 955 Dreams will have to hire more sales people compared to music editor, an undertake the pitfall-laden challenge of becoming a different company. And it will take time for it to build up enough ad clients to fill inventory if it signs any popular apps. Luckily it has $3.25 million in seed funding from 500 Startups and several others investors.

If it endures this process it could give more developers a way to support their creations, and make mobile ads into something truly different — something we want to look at.

Every once in a while, I’ll stumble on the Twitter account of a celebrity I admire. Once I get past my moment of “OMG, it’s Neil Gaiman!” (or whoever), I try to browse their tweets. Sometimes, the browsing ends with, “Awesome! Follow!” Other times, I’m left thinking, “God, I have no idea what’s going,” because their tweet stream is dominated by incomprehensible conversations with people I don’t know or care about.

To be fair, the scenario I described above could happen on Twitter account, not just celebrities, but it’s exacerbated on celebrity accounts, because more people are tweeting at them, and more random users are browsing their tweets. So Twitter just announced a solution — simplified profiles that hide “@” replies when you look at the profile, the same way they’re already hidden from your general stream of tweets. Apparently you’ll be able to turn this feature on and off. Judging from the screenshot above, when you’re looking at a profile, you just choose whether you want to see “all” tweets” or “no replies.”

The company says these new profiles will be rolling out to Verified Accounts (which are mostly celebrities and brands) over the next few weeks.

This could be especially important for Twitter’s more casual users. CEO Dick Costolo has said in the past that 40 percent of the service’s users don’t tweet, and he argues that’s a good thing, because it’s a sign that Twitter isn’t just for power users, but is also attracting a mainstream audience. That audience is probably going to be interested in following celebrities, but it might not have the patience to decipher their’ conversations with other users — they just want to see the updates meant for the general public.

Meanwhile, brands may also like this because they can present their messages to consumers and fans without having it interspersed with random customer service-type tweets.

PayPal, the eBay-owned online payments service that is making significant inroads into mobile, is giving its website an overhaul to make it easier for its 100 million+ users to pay and get paid, find help, and potentially start using some of the newer services that PayPal is pushing hard to grow. The redesign also happens to look a lot more touch-friendly, perhaps a sign of how much tablets, smartphones and the mobile web figure today in the company’s strategy.

Some users are starting to see the new look already, and one of them, a TechCrunch reader, sent some screenshots our way. A PayPal spokesperson confirmed that these are indeed shots of the new site, and that it is planning to announce the changes officially tomorrow, and presumably turn them on for the rest of its user base.

So what do we know about the new PayPal? The home page is significantly less busy, with PayPal simplifying how many options it gives users. Gone, for instance, are the two levels of navigation bars at the top (home, personal, business; and “get to know PayPal”, pay online, send money, get paid, products & services). Now these have been replaced with three tabs: buy, sell and transfer.

There is now also a new button, off to the right, that encourages people to “explore” — a new way for PayPal specifically to market its newer services. “We are always creating new ways to use your PayPal account,” it writes. “Explore some innovations that could make your life a little easier.”

It also looks like PayPal has put some attention into improving the help pages but again it’s hard to say whether the changes are significant overhauls or skin-deep: “You can spend less time looking for help and more time getting answers,” PayPal writes in its online tour. The help topics are now at the bottom of the page, rather than the top as they were before.

At this point, it’s hard to tell whether the design will extend through the whole of the site, or whether it’s just for the top level of pages. PayPal says more details will come tomorrow. “Once you log in [past the home screen], everything appears to be the same design,” says our reader, Michael Konen, who uses a Premier account with PayPal. “Maybe those pieces haven’t been turned on yet.”

The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman wrote an open letter to the lawyer who has been harassing him for most of two weeks, Charles Carreon. Carreon just sued Inman as well as the National Wildlife Fund and the American Cancer Society. You can see some background here but this is all as crazy as it sounds.

I’ll avoid giving much context (you can read previous posts here) because Inman deserves a break and Carreon seems so oddly earnest and naive that it is worthless judging either party.

Inman wrote:

Ideally this will end this whole sordid tale and Carreon will take the advice. The Streisand Effect is strong and unceasing and those who raise the ire of the Internet mob rarely win anywhere, let alone court. If the Internet is good at anything it’s understanding when petty injustices have passed from the realm of wrong to outrageous.

Q&A site Formspring is today announcing what the company says is its biggest news since its original launch back in 2009. Yes, Formspring has been overhauled. The company is shifting its focus from social Q&A, to a site that’s more focused on conversations built around interests. To complement this change, Formspring is also rolling out a completely redesigned website to highlight the company’s new direction. A mobile web version will soon follow.

CEO Ade Olonoh says the decision to shift Formspring’s focus is reflective of what’s been happening organically on the site over the past six months leading up to today. “It’s a pretty fundamental shift in the product,” he admits, but one that followed user behavior. “We took a step back, talked to our most engaged users to understand why they’re using the site, looked at their activity, and it was clear that this was happening, even though it was very difficult on the old Formspring to do.”

Users were creating accounts that were geared only towards asking questions around a particular interest, he says, and were participating in communities that weren’t necessarily tied to their social graph.

Over 50% of the user base was participating in interest-based Q&A, he says, but exact numbers were hard to pinpoint because there was so much overlap between social questions and interest-based questions. In other words, users weren’t 100% on one side of the fence or the other. However, enough users were building up their interest graph through Formspring that it made sense to adapt the online experience to follow suit.

On the revamped website, you’ll notice that there’s a now a new top navigation bar with a prominent search box for finding topics you care about.  And while you can still connect with your social graph when posting a question (there are buttons for sharing to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, e.g.), the bigger focus is on getting your question seen by the right community. For now, this is done via tagging. Tags are user-generated, can be both broad (music) or small (Adele), and can be applied to both questions and responses. In time, Olonoh says the site will offer more structure around the tags with high-level categorization features, but for now, tags are it.

On the right-side navigation, users can browse the top questions of the day, click into the top tags, check their inbox, and access their profile. A Twitter-like following/follower friend structure is in place, allowing people to follow those who post about things they’re interested in.

The shift puts Formspring in a gray area between between being a purely social-focused online experience and one that’s meant to enable discovery of interests. And moving to community-based Q&A makes it seem as if Formspring is now competing with sites like Quora. But Olonoh says that’s not the case. “The key differentiator between Formspring and Quora, Stack Overflow, or traditional Q&A is that Formspring has always been about your opinion and personal questions. We’ve always seen questions as conversation starters more so than fact-based stuff,” he says. “Formspring is not the place you’re look to find the right answer to a particular question. It’s more about reading people’s opinions.”

Oh, so it’s like Twitter now, but with more room to respond? Hmm.

Formspring currently has 29.5 million registered users, and sees 19-20 million active uniques per month. Active users repsond to 9 questions per day on average, the company says.

The updated website is live now, and the mobile site will arrive in a couple of weeks.

After a late start we arrived in Philly and talked to a number of cool folks at Office Hours. Now it’s time to party.

Josh Zelman, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, and myself will be at the Field House at 6pm and we’re ready to talk startups, tech, and all things in between. We’re excited to head out to the city of brotherly love and we’re also excited to announce a new sponsor, Uber, who is offering a special gift to our Philly readers.

Uber would like to help you get to and from the event so if you enter the coupon code TechCrunchPhilly before requesting a ride you’ll get 20% off of 2 trips.

The Philly Meetup will begin promptly at 6pm and go until 10pm, and will be held in The Fieldhouse on June 19. If you’d like to RSVP, head on over to our Plancast page. Specific questions can be directed to [email protected]. Oh, and if you want to tweet us, it’s @johnbiggs and @jordanrcrook.

Special thanks to our excellent sponsors who helped get this thing off the ground as well as Anthony Coombs who was our man on the ground. We’ll also be hunting for Disrupt Battlefield companies, so get your pitch down cold.

Uber would like to help you get to and from the event so if you enter the coupon code TechCrunchPhilly before requesting a ride you’ll get 20% off of 2 trips.

Sponsors

appRenaissance

Interact

Monetate

Novotorium

OneTwoSee

Seed Philly

Uber

Next week, Google is holding its annual I/O developers conference in San Francisco, but that’s apparently not stopping the company from making some developer-focused announcements now. With Google Developers Live, which is launching today, the company plans to “bring you the excitement of Google I/O year-round.” As Louis Gray, a program manager on Google’s developer relations team notes (and here we thought he was working on Google+), Google plans to use this new site to “feature live, interactive broadcasts ranging from developer-focused game shows to Office Hours where you can connect with the engineers who created and work on your favorite Google product.”

Most of these programs, it seems, will also feature interactive Q&A sessions. The service, Google says, will use streaming video and Google+ hangouts to connect Google’s engineers with the developers that use their products. The site currently lists upcoming office hours for a number of Google products, including YouTube, Google TV and Google’s Ads and Maps APIs. Google also plans to host code labs and let developers “listen to Google employees review new applications.”

The whole effort feels a bit similar to what Microsoft is doing with its developer-focused video site Channel 9. Just like Google aims to extend the experience of Google I/O with Developers Live, Microsoft also often talks about Channel 9 as an extension to its developer conferences like PDC and Build.

Facebook is adding subscription billing for app developers, in what should help gaming and media companies earn more revenue from their most loyal users. Starting next month, developers will be able to offer premium plans or special content from a monthly fee.

Kixeye, a mid-core game developer, for example, is going to give exclusive items for $9.95 per month. Since they target a smaller core of users that are more inclined to spend, this might produce a pretty interesting revenue stream for the company. Kixeye already said it was going to break $100 million this year in annualized revenue.

Facebook is keeping the same 30-70 percent revenue share that it has with in-app purchases. The company hinted in its road show video that it might lower its 30 percent take for other verticals, but it hasn’t officially announced plans to do so. The lowest price point a developer can set for a monthly subscription is $1.

The other thing that Facebook is changing is that it’s backing away from having Facebook Credits be the primary way items are priced. Two or three years ago, Facebook had pushed Credits more as a primary currency. That would have given Credits more mindshare with consumers and made it easier for them to associate spending online with Facebook.

However, game developers preferred to price things in their own virtual currencies. It was easier manage a virtual economy this way and also lock-in consumers to a single title or portfolio of games. “Most games on Facebook have implemented their own virtual currencies, reducing the need for a platform-wide virtual currency,” the company said in a blog post.

Now items will be priced in the local currency, whether that’s the U.S. dollar, the British pound or Japanese yen.

This mirrors what Apple and Google do in both of their app stores. There’s no single Apple virtual currency, for example. But developers can charge anywhere from 99 cents to $99.95 for packs of their own virtual currency. Facebook says it will convert any Credit balances into the equivalent amount of value in local currency. Google’s app store also recently added subscription billing.

Zynga said in a statement that subscription billing might affect some of the company’s accounting methods. Right now, Zynga using a metric called ABPU or average bookings per user. There is a difference between the way they report revenues and bookings. Bookings are what the user pays for upfront while revenues are acknowledged when the consumer actually uses the item.

“Today’s announcement doesn’t change the economic relationship between the two companies,” Zynga said in a statement. “We’ll be working with Facebook over the coming months as they phase out Facebook credits and will be sharing more details on this when we report our Q2 earnings.”

For a while now, Gmail users have been able to choose between various themes to personalize their inboxes. Starting today, you will be able to add even more of a personal touch to Gmail, as Google now allows you to set your own background images in Gmail. Google actually offered a similar option for Gmail before it launched its redesign last year, but this time around, Google – of course – also offers a deeper Google+ integration and allows you to upload your own photos directly or select your backgrounds from your Google+ photos.

Google is rolling this new feature out slowly, so it may be a few days before you get to choose your favorite cat picture as a background image in Gmail.

For the rest of your interface, you get to choose between a light and a dark theme when you use your own photos. This will hopefully allow you to still see the rest of the interface, but given that Google is apparently using a lot of transparency here, you’ll probably have to try a few different images to find the right combination.

Google will also select a number of images to feature in its redesigned Gmail themes tab. It’s not clear how the company plans to select these, but it looks like these are images from Google+.

(Photos by John Ha for TechCrunch)

New York is an interesting place for startups. Not because they’re technologically driven or that they’re chasing after the Valley but because New York has something to offer everyone. It’s a town filled with over eight million people across every industry known to man. And it’s in that spirit that General Assembly has grown over the last year and morphed into what it is today, an education driven startup looking to impact the local startup community and help them grow.

Having outgrown the previous space at 902 Broadway, which is sandwiched between the Flatiron and Union Square, the team at GA has moved up the block to a larger campus at 915 Broadway. (902 will remain open for classes and shared workspaces.) The new space is 12,000 square feet with five classrooms, a dedicated event space and studio space for students to work on projects. It even includes wooden bleachers for students to interact. (Unfortunately, you won’t be able to sneak underneath to smoke your pack of Marlboro Reds.)

“We set out to build this community and one of the things the community asked for were classrooms. So we built one classroom on what we called a campus and then we learned that there was a lot more demand for that,” Adam Pritzker, Co-founder and chief product officer at General Assembly told me. “This is a continuation of what we’ve been doing. When we initially started it was a grass roots community building effort. We wanted to build a community for technologists, designers, and entrepreneurs.”

Beyond the opening of a second space in New York, General Assembly has a two pronged plan for this year. First, it’s looking to create a global network of campuses for individuals seeking opportunities in education, technology, business and design. They’re well on there way having opened up the London campus in March and opening the doors to Berlin later this summer. Secondly, they’re looking to move their educational content online having experimented with live streaming and catalogued courses.

“We really believe the future of education is blended and converging the offline and online experience is what we’re trying to do,” said Pritzker.

Walking around the new campus, you get the sense that GA wants you to co-op with others. Every classroom is filled with tools to collaborate like whiteboards and chalkboards with every room emptying out into common areas where students from different classes can meet and mingle.

The fact that something like General Assembly exists in a place like Manhattan is a testament to how important it is to work with others in person rather than online. There’s a special kind of serendipity that comes from direct contact that you can’t achieve over IM, conference calls or even video chats.

“New York represents a lot of different stakeholders and a lot of different types of businesses. There are a lot of startups where technologists are working with people from other industries that have had careers with different core competencies,” said Pritzker. “GA represents the convergence of all those things. We see ourselves as that larger community of people who are trying to get together to make things. The informal piece [common areas] are as important as the formal piece [workshops] and it’s the combination of those two things that can lead to something amazing.”

An exchange program between campuses is on the horizon, too. While each campus caters their curriculum to the needs of the community, there are basic courses like front end web development, user experience design and an intro to Ruby on Rails that will be taught at every campus.

“What happens when we start to connect students with other students across the global network? That’s what we’re thinking about next.”

Click to view slideshow.