Category: Tech news

Earlier this morning, Google critic and Nextag CEO Jeffrey Katz used an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal to accuse Google of behaving like a monopoly. Google quickly responded with a line-by-line criticism of Katz’s arguments. I had a chance to talk to Katz about his piece a little while ago and while he argued that he wasn’t so much interested in engaging in yet another back-and-forth argument with Google, we obviously did touch upon Google’s reaction to his piece.

Starting our discussion, Katz noted how Google faces “undeniable issues,” especially now that the U.S. government and the European Union are looking into the company’s practices. Nextag, among others, has been subpoenaed by He also said that he wasn’t surprised by Google’s swift reaction given that the company has obviously been preparing to face these issues.

After reading his WSJ piece, one of his arguments continued to confuse me: Google, he said, needs to become more transparent when advertisers get better placement in its organic search results. Katz, it turns out (and some SEO experts agree with him here), argues that by buying lots of ads, big advertisers drive more traffic to their sites. The more traffic your site has, the higher up on the page it will likely appear on Google’s search results pages.

Katz also argues that Google, especially now that it launched its product listing ads in conjunction with Google Shopping, is pushing other results further down the page. While Google argues that it’s making all of its changes for the benefit of its users, Katz argues that users generally only look at the top of a search results page and by highlighting its own products, Google is pushing everything else out of its users’ sight.

The paid placement of these Google Shopping ad units, says Katz, also unfairly excludes Nextag and companies like it from advertising in this space. In his WSJ piece, Katz said that Google “should grant all companies equal access to advertising opportunities regardless of whether they are considered a competitor.” At the time, I wasn’t sure what he meant with that, but after my discussion with him, it’s clear that he feels that Google isn’t providing a level playing field here. The only way Nextag could participate, he said, “is if we changed our business model.” One could, of course, argue that just as these ad unites aren’t useful for musicians, they aren’t meant to be useful for Nextag, either.

If the only way to appear at the top of the search results is to advertise, though, he said, “then let everybody advertise.” “It’s like owning Interstate 5,” Katz said to illustrate this point, “and all the billboards – and then saying you can’t advertise here because you own competing rest stops.”

Katz dismissed the argument that users and advertisers could just move to other search engines. The world of advertising, he said, pretty much belongs to Google. Globally, Bing and other competitors just don’t matter.

Overall, Katz feels that Google (even though he calls them a “great company”) has an obligation to be more transparent and to provide equal access and a level playing field for sites and advertisers. Google, of course, argues that this is exactly what it is doing.

The iPad is a wonderful device to watch videos on, and a number of startups are aiming to provide users with interesting new ways to discover the best videos to watch. Most of these apps — like Showyou, or Squrl, or Fanhattan, or Shelby.tv — have some sort of a social discovery component, which allows users to see what their friends are watching, and conversely, share other videos with them. Most of them also tap into freely available videos on the Internet, although they occasionally partner to surface videos from major content players like Hulu or Netflix.

There’s another app maker that is taking a stab at powering social video discovery — but it’s doing so a little differently. For one thing, the new Ringz.TV iPad app, from RingGuides, is designed a little like an old-school electronic programming guide, but on the iPad. It provides a concentric ring of videos and content providers, which users can drill down into to discover more granular pieces of content.

The top level interface, for instance, is a list of content companies, which include both online-only producers like Machinima, as well as cable TV networks like truTV. Once you click through, the ring of content providers is replaced by a list of content choices, which are curated and include intermittent “featured clips,” which are basically just ads. Users can then create their own curated “rings” of content, which can be watched as a continuous channel or shared with friends.

The interface is based on the Ikonic Navigator EPG, which it owns the patent to, and is the product of many hours of customer research at CBS Television’s testing lab. It’s built to leverage the kind of channel surfing that is enabled by a touchscreen device like the iPad.

Part of the reason that the Ringz.TV app operates in the way it does is that CEO Robert May believes all the videos that the app showcases should be monetized, and partners should get a share of revenues. The EPG, therefore, is designed to support that business model. There are also a number of ways that Ringz.TV can highlight new content — by using using trending topics and allowing content partners to buy hashtags to promote their videos.

Launch partners include AnyClip, BAMM, MetaCafe, and Turner Broadcasting’s truTV, but the app will also allow users to highlight their own videos that are uploaded to Facebook or available in their iTunes libraries. For now, most videos are short-form promotional material. But as time goes on, May wants to bring more long-form video onto the app.

While the Ringz.TV iPad app is a cool way to watch video on that device, the company isn’t stopping there. It wants to enable crossplatform viewing on other devices as well. So it’s working on building apps for other devices — like iOS and Android mobile phones, and you could maybe even find the EPG on connected TVs and other devices in the future.

Everything is in readiness for our upcoming Philly meet-up where we’ll imbibe fine beverages, eat some DiNics, and talk about what you’re working on. The goal of this meet-up is networking and pitches so come prepared with a thirty second pitch and please, please, please no paper. We want to talk to as many of you as possible and in the our goal is to energize and assess the start-up arena in Philly (and everywhere we hold these things.)

The event is on June 19 at the Field House, 1150 Filbert St. from 6-10pm. We will have drink tickets for you so look for us at the event. If you want to tweet us, it’s @johnbiggs and @jordanrcrook. If you have specific questions, email me at [email protected].

Please RSVP here.

As is our wont, we like to hold these on neutral ground and we’d love to sit down with you to chat about what you’re working on during the day. The official office hours reservations are closed, but if you want to stop by and wait for an opening, feel free. We’re holding office hours at Caribou Cafe near the venue, also on June 19, beginning at 12 noon.

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

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Seed Philly

[Image: David W. Leindecker/Shutterstock]

Gillmor Gang – Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

Here’s a bit of Friday eye-candy for you. It was almost one year ago to the day that Steve Jobs appeared in front of the Cupertino City Council, pitching his vision of a visually striking, spaceship-esque Apple campus that would accomodate 12,000 employees.

Apple’s original set of plans for their new campus tore around the internet last August, and the city of Cupertino has just released the company’s fourth set of revised files that dive into a bit more detail than those that have already made the rounds.

Truth be told, not a whole lot has changed since the last time Apple submitted an updated set of documents back in March — more visual flourishes have been added to their floor plans, and the levels on their rendered images seem to have been tweaked — but Apple seems to have refined the approach they want to take with their sizable auditorium.

In the previous revision, Apple’s underground auditorium seemed to be housed in a large circular room connected to an adjoining circular room meant for hands-on product demos and general milling around:

That plan seems to have changed somewhat, as the auditorium now appears to be housed in a more conventional rectangular room on the campus’s Basement 2 level:

If everything goes according to schedule, Apple plans to move into the new facility in 2015 though they still plan keep their Infinite Loop complex as their corporate headquarters. That said, there’s no indication as to when their construction efforts will finally begin — they’ve got quite a bit to clear out as it happens — but there’s little question that Apple’s Campus 2 is going to be a sight to behold once it’s all done.

In the meantime though, feel free to pore through the rest of Apple’s architectural minutiae right here, but be warned — they’re PDFs, and large ones at that.

Icenium is a brand-new integrated cloud environment (get it? i-c-e not i-d-e = Icenium) for mobile application development. The service, which is a spin-off product division at Telerik, is just now entering its private beta stage and is in search of developers willing to kick the tires. Initially, Icenium will focus on the iOS and Android development platforms, and will later expand to other mobile platforms, and eventually, to server and desktop.

Doug Seven is leading the Icenium division at Waltham, Massachusetts-based Telerik, after previously serving as the Director of Product Management for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework at Microsoft. Telerik, for those unfamiliar, makes developer tools for .NET and other Microsoft technology platforms (e.g., WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, etc.) Seven says that he’s been so quiet about what he’s been working on over the past year since he left Microsoft that the running joke is that he’s “VP of Black Ops.”

But what he’s been working on sounds pretty cool. With Icenium, the company is introducing an “ICE” that will allow web developers to use technologies they already know like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to build applications that run natively on mobile devices and can be distributed through app stores. And because it’s in the cloud, you’ll be able to work from anywhere, without having to worry about the various native SDKs. Plus, you’ll also be able to see the app in action without having to deploy it to a mobile device, and see your changes to the app in real-time. The end result, of course, is the ability to iterate much faster.

Icenium is a lot like PhoneGap in that it’s leveraging web developers’ current skill set to help them create mobile applications, but unlike PhoneGap, which still requires an IDE of some kind (and, to reach multiple platforms, multiple IDEs), Icenium abstracts away the platform dependencies, explains Seven. It allows the developer to “focus on their ideas, not managing multiple development environments,” he says.

Icenium leverages Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) and all Icenium apps are, for now, Cordova apps, says Seven. However, “with Icenium we are eliminating the complexity that exists even when using Cordova,” he adds. “No downloading and installing xCode, or Eclipse, or the Android SDK. All the platform dependencies have been turned into cloud services that the clients, Icenium Graphite and Icenium Mist, can use. This enables cross-platform mobile development from any platform.”

TechCrunch readers (developers, that is) are being offered the very first chance to try out Icenium for free. Just sign up at icenium.com/techcrunch to get on the list.

Comparison shopping engine Nextag and its CEO Jeffrey Katz have been at the forefront of accusing Google of being a monopoly and abusing its position to crush smaller competitors. Today, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece by Katz that accuses Google of not just promoting its own services and products on its search results pages, but also selling out its users because many of “the most prominent results are displayed because companies paid Google for that privilege.” Google, in what’s becoming an increasingly common tactic for the company, just published a detailed (and rather aggressive) response to Katz’s accusations. In it, the company’s senior vice president of engineering Amit Singhal argues that “there has never been as much choice online as there is today.”

Google gave Katz an opening for his attack when it launched Google Shopping and its new paid product listing ads last month. These are basically ads that also feature prices and product images and which will appear right underneath the standard AdWords text ads that often adorn the top of your search results pages today. Katz doesn’t specifically mention this new service, but it seems likely that this is what he’s hinting at when he argues that “Google should disclose, clearly and in plain English, when advertisers receive better placement in search results and when a result is a Google-owned property.”

In response to this, Google notes that advertising never influences its “natural” search results and that it clearly marks any ads on its site as such.

Katz also argues that “it’s easy to see when Google makes changes to its algorithms that effectively punish its competitors, including us.” Google’s response to this: “We built search to help users, not websites.” In his response, Singhal stresses that Google doesn’t make changes to its algorithm to hurt competitors. Katz, of course, doesn’t believe this for a second and argues that Google “has shifted from a true search site into a commerce site—a commerce site whose search algorithm favors products and services from Google and those from companies able to spend the most on advertising.”

Katz also gives some advise to European Union Commissioner Joaquín Almunia, who is responsible for Competition and who is expecting a response to his anti-trust concerns regarding Google next month. The Nextag CEO argues that Google needs to become more transparent about when advertisers get better placement in search results and when a result is a Google-owned property” (Google, interestingly, doesn’t answer this charge).

Google: “If users don’t like our results, they can try Bing,Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or even Google Minus Google.”

In addition, he says that Google needs to be less biased and “should also allow users to reduce the number of ads shown or incorporate a user’s preferred services in search results.” Google’s answer to this is pretty straightforward: “If users don’t like our results, they can try Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or even Google Minus Google.”

Katz’s last recommendation may just be the strangest of the bunch, though. He says that Google “should grant all companies equal access to advertising opportunities regardless of whether they are considered a competitor.” Given that Google’s advertising system is based on an auction-system, I’m not sure what Katz is hinting at here (feel free to let me know in the comments if you have an idea).

Maybe a discussion about whether Google behaves like a monopoly and is treating its competitors unfairly is worth having. I’m not sure Katz’s arguments today really add much to this discussion, though. Katz obviously wants his old search engine rankings back. His issues, it feels to me, are more about that than about whether Google is a monopoly or not.

Microsoft Hotmail is getting a makeover. At least, that’s what some leaked screenshots are showing. The service, which today is still branded under the “Windows Live” umbrella, is going to be slimmed down and simplified, giving it a  Metro-style look and feel.

The details were obtained yesterday via Microsoft enthusiast site LiveSide, and they’ve now amassed a whole collection of screenshots showing the new Hotmail in action. In the photos, the service is oddly branded “Newmail.” (“Get a Newmail email address for your new inbox…” reads the welcome message, for example.)

What, “Newmail?” Not not to worry – Microsoft isn’t attempting to rename its webmail service yet again. (That whole “Windows Live Mail” thing never really panned out, you know). “Newmail” is just a placeholder, we’re hearing, so you won’t be signing up for @newmail.com email addresses anytime soon. WHEW.

The folks at LiveSide note that Metro UI is clearly apparent at the top of the screen, in new Hotmail/Newmail’s nav bar. When you tap on the “Newmail” logo, you can then navigate between People, Calendar and SkyDrive, as well. (Maybe they’re all getting makeovers, then?)

Also of note, in a screenshot they’ve obtained, the service’s new look is described as having a “simple, fluid and interactive design,” which is “faster and cleaner” whether you’re on a “desktop, phone or tablet,” – the latter hinting at new Hotmail’s purported touch-friendliness.

Below, a few screenshots from the update, via LiveSide. (Head over there to see the rest). But first, the horror that is Hotmail today, for comparison purposes (admittedly, the theme selection was my fault):

Newmail/New Hotmail:

From Fab to Netflix to Amazon, the eCommerce world is starting to warm up to the future of online shopping: Social curation. Call it the “Pinterest-effect” — People are embracing the idea that bookmarking and social sharing slowly are replacing search with regards to product discovery. And this is leaving many investors salivating at the prospect of Pinterest’s eventual revenue model.

Taking this idea one iteration further, Wanelo, like OpenSky and other Pinterest-offshoots, is a site that allows users to bookmark and share their favorite products via a grid layout and high-res imagery. Ostensibly the startup wants to find a quicker path to profitability by focusing only on the curation of things that bring in revenue. Makes sense.

Unlike OpenSky, the startup allows you to follow your Facebook friends in addition to top site users — resulting in a more personalized product feed than that of just celebrity selections. To post an item to Wanelo enter a product URL, tag the item with categories, and add price and other details. Users can browse through Wanelo items by popularity, recency, or by people and stores that they follow.

Site founder Deena Varshavskaya (who is seriously from Siberia) tells me that the most remarkable part of Wanelo is its user engagement, with 1.3 million products from 24,000 different stores posted since its launch in 2010, and over 100,000 products saved daily. The average user spends 16 minutes on the site according to Varshavskaya, and the startup has more than 100K fans on Facebook.

Investors like First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman, Naval Ravikant, Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko, Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green, Roger Dickey, Aayush Phumbhra, Andy Dunn and other angels made a $2 million dollar bet this week that curating products around a social graph will succeed. And Varshavskaya says that Wanelo user engagement is proof that it does.

“Pinterest is a great product and it solves the curation problem for images,” Varshavskaya tells me, ”It contains products as well, but that’s not their focus, so users don’t go to Pinterest to shop. They go there to collect things like recipes. Wanelo has nothing but products and users know that, so they come to Wanelo to shop. Users on Wanelo have much more purchase intent,” she says, citing user tweets she’s meticulously favorited, like the one below.

i want to buy everything off of wanelo #obsessed #broke—
Alexandra Redden (@alexandraredden) June 07, 2012

By narrowing user sharing activity to just one category (product), you inevitably lose the users who were just visiting your site to upload images of pretty sunsets or flowers, thus sacrificing at least one form of user scale. But Varshavskaya, who rules out affiliate links as a business model (she declined to comment on what Wanelo’s inevitable business model will be), insists that eliminating the noise surrounding social sharing will ultimately be a better business.

“Imagine that you went to Amazon.com and started seeing images mixed in with products you can buy,” she explains, “I don’t think you would like that as a shopper or that it would make a good shopping experience.” Fair enough, but we’ll have to wait until either Pinterest and/or Wanelo come up with a business model and bring in significant revenue in order to truly find out what’s a better strategy.

OverBlog, a leading blog platform in Europe with 3 million registered users and over 34 million uniques (according to comScore), has just arrived in the U.S. And it’s kind of awesome. The entire platform has been totally re-developed from scratch over the past 18 months, and, ironically, it’s the U.S. audience who’s the first to have access to the new platform. (Current European users will get the new version on Monday).

So what makes OverBlog so interesting? In addition to serving as a traditional blog, it aggregates your content from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, etc. all in one place. Plus, you’ll soon be able to livestream directly from your mobile phone to your blog. And all of this takes place in real-time.

You may remember that the OverBlog acquired an early stage Palo Alto-based startup called  Timekiwi back in January of this year. Timekiwi was developing a way for users to create Facebook-esque timelines of content, also by aggregating your social media activity. Explains OverBlog founder Frederic Montagnon (also the Director of Strategy at ebuzzing, the company that owns OverBlog), “we acquired Timekiwi because they were working on the same concept, and we wanted to secure we were alone on the market with this concept.”

With the relaunch, the timeline-esque theme is just one of over hundred free themes that OverBlog offers, however, so you can choose a different look if you prefer. But if you’re curious, you can see what it looks like now – Social Media Explorer CEO Jason Falls has set up his Over-Blog presence here.) Robert Scoble also just announced he’s switching.

There are a ton of other features, too, including analytics, built-in tools for revenue generation, support for multiple users or blogs, cross-platform optimization (i.e., mobile, tablet, TV) via responsive design, and migration support. But one of the cooler features has yet to launch: livestreaming.

The company will soon launch an iPhone application that will allow you to instantly stream video from your phone to your blog, no need to go through a third-party like Ustream or Livestream. You’ll launch the OverBlog app on your phone, press a button and it will automatically create a post on your blog with the livestream. Plus, it will automatically tweet and post to Facebook with your livestream link, too. When you’re finished livestreaming, the video can still be made available as a YouTube video. The feature is still in alpha, but is expected to launch in July.

OverBlog just launched in the U.S. at BlogWorld yesterday, but you can sign up for its private beta here.

It’s not often that we come across startups that focus on seniors, but according to a new report by analyst firm Forrester Research, seniors ages 65 and up are probably more connected and tech-savvy than you think. Forrester found that about 60% of U.S. seniors are online. That’s about 20 million people and while this obviously means that 40% don’t care much about the Internet, those 60% who are online are tech-savvy and happily use technology to connect to their friends and family.

Online seniors, says Forrester analyst Gina Sverdlov, also highly value their mobile phones, but mostly for making calls. Only 22% of online seniors use their phones to access the Internet and only 7% of those who are online and own a mobile phone use mobile apps on a regular basis.

So what do those seniors who are online do on the Web? Turns out, it’s not really that different from what you are doing. Just over 90%, for example, use email. 59% have purchased something online in the past three months, 49% have a Facebook account, 46% send and receive photos (mostly by email) and 44% play online games. Almost 60% of online seniors own a digital camera and 76% own printers.

It’s pretty obvious then, that there is still a wide open market for startups that focus on making photo sharing easy for seniors, for example.

At the same time, though, it’s also worth noting that there is still a massive divide between those seniors who are online and those who decide to remain offline. Here, the demographics are similar to what we’ve long seen among the general U.S. population as well: the higher your income and the longer you went to school, the more likely you are to be online.

Since raising $32 million last December, Uber has been on an expansion spree over the last several months, placing cars and dialing up service in cities all over the world. It was just a few days ago, after all, that Uber’s on-demand car service launched in Philadelphia. But it’s just added another U.S. launch city Friday: San Diego.

Uber has been testing out the market for the last month, so it’s not a huge surprise that the service is now up and running. But why San Diego?

With 1.3 million people in the city and 3.1 million in San Diego County, there’s a pretty big population for Uber to go after. And the population there is pretty well off, with about 30 percent of households having an annual income of $30,000 or more. That means plenty of potential riders with cash to spend on a premium car service.

Now for the downside: Everyone drives in San Diego. Frigging everyone. About 85 percent of San Diego residents drive to work, according to Uber’s analysis of the market. The good news is that as a result of this, there’s a dearth of cabs in the city. There’s just 0.55 taxis per 1,000 people in San Diego — that’s half the level of San Francisco, which also happens to have a fair amount of bicyclists and a decent, if not great, public transportation system.

But Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick said not to worry — driving cities actually do a ton of business for the company. He used Los Angeles as an example: “We launched in L.A. not too long ago and it’s blowing up,” he said. “We haven’t seen any other cities grow this fast… It’s already in the top tier of cities we’ve launched in.”

So what drives (no pun intended) a person to take an Uber in a driving city? Kalanick said people use the service on date nights, when they find themselves stranded, and when they don’t want to search for parking. Also, when they’re drunk and need to get home after a long night and shouldn’t get behind the wheel. There were 600 (!!!) DUIs in Pacific Beach alone last year, according to Uber. So there’s an opportunity to make some money while also maybe increasing public safety in the city.

Oh, and what else are people in Southern California using Uber for? “Surfing,” says Kalanick. “People are calling Ubers and strapping their boards to the top of SUVs.”

Uber is now in 12 cities, including 10 in the U.S. and two — Paris and Toronto — in international markets. According to Kalanick, it’s next big challenge is getting up and running in London, where it plans to launch before the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

Hey, Ice Cream Sandwich users — if you’re a Dropbox user and somehow haven’t gotten the latest (2.1.4) update, do yourself a favor and get on it.

The update is sure to please those who find the Dropbox experience to be woefully light on Hangul, as it introduces Korean language support, but there’s something even better to play with. This release sees the addition of a nifty, Ice Cream Sandwich-exclusive feature — the ability to stream videos stored within a Dropbox account.

As something of a digital media hoarder, I threw a handful of big miscellaneous video files (a 500MB .avi and a 400MB .mkv, specifically) into my Dropbox account to see how well things actually worked. Thankfully just waiting for them to be stored in the cloud was the most odious part of the process — once everything was in place, it was a simple enough process to select the file from within the Dropbox app and kick back momentarily with an old episode of Top Gear.

Quality, it should be noted, can sometimes take a hit in the process. The video never got to the point where I wanted to give up entirely, but those hoping that their videos will be pixel-perfect should probably just download the file(s) onto their devices instead. It goes also without saying that this probably isn’t the best thing to use if you’re on a capped data plan, though for the record, the LTE connection on my Galaxy Nexus managed to keep up just fine.

TechCrunch Disrupt New York was a huge success this past May, but we’re not resting on our laurels. We’re planning a few great surprises for our San Francisco event in September — but first, the Startup Battlefield applications are now open.

You saw some of the finalists in action on stage last month. Gtar, the iPhone guitar, has become a cultural sensation and blown through its ambitious Kickstarter campaign. UberConference, which promises to change how conference calls are done, convinced the judges that it has the best shot at building a big, disruptive business. Meanwhile, some of the other members of the Battlefield found themselves the subject of mainstream print media and even Jay Leno’s Tonight Show monologue.

So are you ready to launch your company on the biggest startup launch stage? Tell us about it.

Disrupt SF will be take place on September 10th through the 12th at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse. Last year, Shaker was the breakout star of the San Francisco Battlefield companies and walked away with $50,000, the coveted Disrupt Cup, and more press and headlines than they could have ever imagined. Many Battlefield companies have raised millions of dollars in funding and some have gone on to be acquired by notable companies.

Are you a disruptor? Do you think your company could be the breakout star at this year’s Disrupt SF?

Apply now for the Disrupt Startup Battlefield here. Applications are open until 11:59pm PDT, Monday night, July 9, 2012.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Disrupt event without our Hackathon kicking it all off on September 8th – 9th. We hope to have hundreds of hackers from all around the world come join us to code, hack, drink, eat, and create something memorable in the 24 hour time period. Who knows, you might just be as big as these guys.

Our Disrupt conference is one of the biggest conferences of the year, and we killed it last year in San Francisco. We’re back and ready to do it again.

If you’d like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our partnership team for more information.

Get your tickets now!

It looks unassuming, but the sound is big and brash. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Audyssey Laboratories has been around for a decade, making audio hardware and signal-processing software for a wide range of consumer goods — phones, TVs, anything with speakers.

You’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard the name before, as the Los Angeles-based company mostly operates behind the scenes, developing audio tech for big-name partners like Marantz, Toshiba, IMAX, Sharp and Volvo.

But the company recently moved into the daylight by releasing several inexpensive home audio devices for consumers, each bearing the Audyssey name.

Its latest creation is the Audyssey Audio Dock Air. The “Air” in the name is a tip-off that it supports AirPlay, Apple’s platform for streaming audio over your home Wi-Fi connection. AirPlay speakers like this one can be controlled from any computer or iOS device on your network. Browsing your iTunes library and cueing up tracks is dead simple. And while AirPlay devices tend to be more costly than other wireless speakers that use Bluetooth or DLNA, the platform has produced some attractive wireless speaker options.

An austere, black, five-pound square, the Audio Dock Air doesn’t immediately betray itself as a speaker. It fits on shelves and dressers, and even tables if can hide the power supply brick. Speaker cloth on both sides hide an array of active speakers — two 3-inch woofers and two 0.75-inch tweeters — as well as dual 4-inch passive radiators. The speakers fire in both directions, so while the room will fill with sound, the stereo image isn’t as strong as a set of speakers that fire directly toward you. There’s an aux-in jack for Android phones (or whatever) and a headphone out. On top, there’s a big volume knob and a pair of LEDs that flash to alert you to changes in your network status.

The sound overall is pretty good, with clear details and surprisingly ample bass, even at lower volumes. It’s a speaker with personality — up-front and not at all subtle.

How you feel about this will depend entirely on where you rank yourself on the Linn-Genelec Scale of Audio Snobbery. If you’re at the high end — the type of person who owns seven pairs of headphones and can identify vintage McIntosh equipment at 20 paces, complete with model numbers and eBay resale value estimates — then this is not the speaker for you.

There’s quite a bit of digital signal processing going on. This is Audyssey’s bread and butter, and the company isn’t shy about showing it off. The resulting audio isn’t natural or transparent. At moderate volumes, it’s slightly compressed, and displays kind of brash, punchy character that may not suit your chosen playlist. Turn it up past about 60 percent and it gets even more compressed. It was too much for my tastes. It really does kick out some huge low end with very little distortion, thanks in part to the DSP and in part to the passive radiators.

If you’re on the other end of the scale, however — in the not-snobby, not-picky group, which is a full two-thirds of the population — then it’s a fine piece of equipment. It sounded great in the office, where I kept it turned down to background-music levels, but it was also loud and clear enough to fill the room during a small gathering of chatty beer-drinkers.

On the top are two LEDs and a volume knob — simple. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

That bass really is something else, so while you’d be tempted to stick it on a shelf sitting parallel to a wall, it sounds much better if it sits perpendicular to the wall, speakers facing sideways, and at least a foot of clearance on all sides.

While the sound can’t compete with higher-end AirPlay devices like the B&W Zeppelin Air ($600), or the receiver units from Denon and Pioneer that let you hook up your own speakers, it’s an attractive mid-level option, especially if you can find it for sale under the $350 street price.

The weak point in the chain here isn’t the price or the sound, it’s AirPlay.

We’re well over a year into the AirPlay game now, and I’d expect Apple’s streaming ecosystem to have all the kinks ironed out. But getting the Audyssey set up on my network was an ordeal filled with frustrating, inexplicable errors. And once the speaker was connected, it wouldn’t stay connected for long. I experienced drop-outs at least once every couple of hours. Sometimes my iOS apps would freeze, causing either dead silence or, worse, a stuttering, sputtering audio stream that I was powerless to pause or shut off without walking over to the speaker and pulling the plug.

Setup appears to be mostly painless when you study the included Quick Start guide — Click the “Pair” button, connect any computer or phone to the Audyssey’s ad hoc Wi-Fi network and point your browser to its web-based configuration tool. Tell it how to join your network, give it a minute to connect, then crank up the Purple Rain.

In reality, I had to do this routine several times to get it to stick. I tried three different mobiles and two notebooks before finding success (on a Chromebook, no less). Including wait times, flashing LEDs, and device resets, it took around 45 minutes. And once set up, the Audyssey only made it halfway through the new Walkmen album before crashing and requiring a restart.

The next few days were filled with “is it or isn’t it?” hiccups and dropouts. Rely on this thing to rock a party? You may as well piss in the punchbowl.

I doubt this is purely a hardware issue (based on the flakiness of other AirPlay devices I’ve tested, this is par for the course), but for a device that promises a seamless, easy-to-use solution for multi-room wireless audio, the holes need to be plugged quickly. Network instability is something that can probably be fixed with firmware updates and AirPlay updates, but I’d recommend approaching with caution.

WIRED Great design — clean lines, quality materials, impressive finish. Sound is big. Punchy mids and bass for days. AirPlay offers wireless access to your iTunes library and various streaming apps from any iOS device on your Wi-Fi network. Looks hot on a shelf or a dresser.

TIRED Sound is processed and aggressive. Too big for a kitchen or smaller room. AirPlay weaknesses are still a bother — your mileage may vary based on network strength, interference, location, hardware type, eye color and birth sign.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired