Category: Tech news

By now nearly everyone knows that China has emerged as an increasingly massive and very lucrative market — it’s not for nothing that Apple is doubling down its sales efforts in the country, Facebook is said to be very keen to establish a foothold there, and Evernote has gone so far as to rebuild its entire system from the ground up to offer a totally standalone China-specific version of its service.

But because of major differences in culture, language, business practices, and the like, it is incredibly challenging for even the most well-capitalized of U.S.-based technology companies to break into the Chinese market. And for small U.S.-based startups, it’s nearly impossible. The same is true in reverse: Chinese startups have a very tough time entering into the U.S. market and gaining traction here.

That’s where a new startup incubator called Innospring is looking to help. Touting itself as the first U.S.-China startup incubator in Silicon Valley, Innospring opened its doors on April 11 with the goal of helping technology startups with roots in the United States expand into the Chinese market, and vice versa — to give China-based startups the tools and connections to expand into the U.S.

Startups that participate in Innospring receive the typical incubator perks — funding, mentoring, workshops, access to VCs and angel investors, and physical space — and most importantly, special referrals to help foster cross-border development. Right now, there are fewer than 20 startups in the program, and the current space it is in has room to house some 40 more.

The whole program is backed by some big names in both countries: Tsinghua University Science Park, Shui On Group, Northern Light Venture Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank are all founding partners, and people such as Kleiner Perkins investment partner Wei Zhou have stopped by to provide mentorship and advice to the entrepreneurs there.

So, TechCrunch TV stopped by to check out how things are going so far at Innospring’s office in Santa Clara, California. In the video above, you can watch its founder Eugene Zhang discuss the idea behind starting Innospring, why the US and China have such a gap between them right now, the incubator’s plans for the future, and more.

And in the video below, you can watch the pitches from a number of startups who are in the Innospring program today — a wide variety of companies are there already, from a semiconductor maker, to a health app developer, to a food sample delivery service, to a super innovative Facebook gaming company, and others.

We’re about to launch a new video series called Makers here at TechCrunch and we’d love to hear from any and all hardware based startups. I want to hear about robots, toys, and railguns. I want to hear about new distilling methods, winemakers, and electric vehicles. I want to hear about anything that whirrs, chops, grates, goes, or crashes into a fireball.

Over the next few months Jordan Crook, Josh Zelman, and I will try to cover every hardware startup we come across. If you think you’re worthy of inclusion, please drop us a line at [email protected] with the subject line “MAKER WANTED.” Describe your product and maybe send a photo of your facility? Are you building in the US or Europe? Asia or Mexico? Let us know.

We’re accepting submissions for the next few weeks, so there is plenty of time. Just let us know where you are and what’s up and we’ll try to do the rest.

Last month, mobile marketing company Velti reported that iOS had pulled slightly of Android in mobile ad impressions, after being tied at the end of last year. Now, apparently, iOS has taken widened that lead, if not by much — it accounted for 55 percent of mobile ad impressions in April, compared to 45 percent for Android.

The data is based on data from Velti’s Mobclix Exchange, which serves ads to more than 33,500 apps, the company says.

The iOS lead is also evident when you look at the top devices. 20 percent of impressions happen on the iPhone, 15 percent on the iPod Touch, 13 percent on iPad — only then do you get to the top Android contender, the Samsung Galaxy S2, with 2.3 percent. (That also reflects the device fragmentation within Android.)

But not everything looks rosy for Apple. The report also says that impressions from the new iPad, which exploded out of the gate in March, had also slowed compared to the growth of the iPad 2 after its launch. The new iPad currently accounts for 8 percent of all impressions, while the iPad 2 had 13 percent at the same point in its release cycle.

Or if you want things broken down by carrier, AT&T is dominant, with 53 percent of impressions, compared to 24 percent for Verizon and 19 percent for sprint.

Finally, the report breaks down CPMs by advertising category. Women/mothers was the most lucrative category, with CPMs of $15.15, followed by finance ($10.21) and automotive ($9.51).

You can read more about the report here.

Instagram, Schminstagram. While flashy consumer deals keep getting all the headlines, it was actually cloud computing, enterprise and video that fueled the biggest deals of last quarter’s $25.1 billion in mergers and acquisitions, according to top-tier accounting firm Ernst & Young.

The total value of all deals fell by 12 percent from the year before while the number of deals was about the same, according to a report the firm published today. While that’s not too huge a drop, the firm attributes it to “ongoing economic uncertainty.” (Thanks Greece.) Quarterly deal volume has apparently reached a plateau after two years of growth and is being restrained by concerns about the macroeconomic climate.

If you’re curious what the biggest deals of last quarter were, here are they below. The leaderboard is topped by enterprise deals like Cisco’s $5 billion agreement to buy NDS Group and Oracle’s $2 billion deal to buy Taleo, which helps companies manage recruiting. There is also a consumer-facing deal in there with Youku, China’s version of YouTube, merging with its rival Tudou Holdings Ltd. for $1.1 billion in a pending acquisition. Instagram’s $1 billion deal doesn’t count because it happened after the quarter ended. If it was here, it would show up in seventh place.

Ernst & Young says there are five megatrends driving deal-making. Basically, they include smart mobility, cloud computing, social networking and “big data” analytics. Shocker. Then there is one extra one, which Ernst calls “blur” or ”convergence, as technology sectors come together and the technology industry enters other industries as enabling innovation.” (Yes, “blur” is a big trend these days. Haven’t you heard?)

Cloud computing and software-as-a-service deals had both the biggest number of deals and the biggest transaction sizes. The biggest deal of the quarter looped in both trends. Cisco’s $5 billion deal to get NDS will give the Silicon Valley networking giant a video software and content security solutions provider that’s a backbone of pay TV industry. The Tudou-Youku deal also skews the size of video and online gaming transactions.

The Americas led most of the acquisitions, with 75 percent of global deal volume and 87 percent of global deal value. Buyers in Asia also tended to buy targets in other parts of the world. M&A activity dropped off dramatically in Europe thanks to continuing economic malaise there.

Joe Steger, who leads global technology industry transaction advisory services, says the overall economic climate will keep M&A activity flat or slow this year.

So here are a few more charts from the report:

Again, here’s another way to look at how software-as-a-service is leading deals, representing $11.5 billion of all the target companies.

Overall, there were were a few really large deals in the $1 billion-plus range that drove overall transactions up. There were also many more deals that didn’t have disclosed prices this quarter.

Something that should keep things exciting for the rest of the year is the huge pile of cash the world’s biggest technology companies are accumulating. Ernst & Young estimates that the top 25 tech companies in the world have $668 billion in cash between them, up from $571 billion the year before. (Thanks Apple.) That should give bigger companies room to write checks for interesting targets.

Europe actually was a net seller as many U.S. buyers picked up companies from across the pond. NDS, for example, originally was founded in Israel.

There’s currently a heated battle being waged between three of the biggest on-demand music streaming services — MOG, Spotify, and Rdio — each of which is trying to capture our hearts and ears by offering the best mobile experience for tunes on-the-go. You can check out Josh’s in-depth comparison of the battle for mobile supremacy here. While it wasn’t Josh’s top pick for music streaming on the tablet, Rdio is today taking a big step forward, launching a completely redesigned music listening and discovery experience, starting with the web and its desktop apps.

While the company initially unveiled its plans for its new listening experience at SXSW, today marks the first time the new Rdio will be available to all. Beginning right this very moment, Rdio says in a blog post, the new look is live for you to test, poke, and prod. The new look and feel, the company believes, will make it faster, more social, and easier to use, with notable features and upgrades including better “Collections,” drag and drop playlist creation, personalized “Heavy Rotation” functionality, and private playlists.

The company has been busy extending its service across Europe, launching in Spain and Portugal in February, but all the while, it’s been focused on creating a new, better user experience to keep users engaged in the face of the heightened competition and growing popularity of MOG and Spotify. As Rdio says in its blog post, the site’s new look is meant to transform it into something “more than just a boring spreadsheet of songs.”

That starts with making browsing and discovery in one place — i.e. making navigation something that isn’t quite so time consuming. In the new design, music, playlists, and a user’s network are all now under one view. And, speaking of playlists, one of the most requested features, Rdio says, has been the ability to add whole albums to playlists, so today the startup will begin offering this functionality on both the Web and in its desktop apps.

The new Rdio also allows users to browse a continuous stream of albums, and easily return to the place where they left off. What’s more, a la Facebook and Spotify, users can now access a “People Sidebar” to see what their network is listening to in realtime, with one-click listening. If you want to know why an album or song is appearing in top charts, or why it’s showing up in the new “Heavy Rotation” category, you can find out simply by hovering over photos to see which of your friends listened to the song, and inspired its being served up for you to see. The new People Sidebar also lets users easily find and follow Rdio’s influencers, like top artists, critics, record labels and brands.

Another highlight is Rdio’s new drag and drop functionality, which lets users drop music into playlists or share with their friends on the fly. Of course, with sharing overload becoming the norm, people want to have options beyond their public and collaborative playlists, which is why Rdio is now offering the ability to create private playlists with a few drag-and-drops. And if you feel the need to share those private playlists, you can do that now, too.

As on-demand, streaming music options battle for our ears, staying even with competitors is paramount — just as it is to continue iterating on the experience of social listening. We’re only just beginning to play around with Rdio’s new features, but at first look, this is a big step forward for the Rdio experience.

For more, check out the new look here, and take a peek at the video below:

It looks like customer support via Facebook is about to get more useful, thanks to a new feature from startup Freshdesk.

Freshdesk helps businesses manage their customer service through traditional channels like email and phone, as well as social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now it’s integrating with the messaging feature that was part of the new Brand Pages that Facebook launched in February. In the new Pages, users can send a private message to a brand the first time, and brands can respond.

That’s pretty appealing from a customer service perspective, because it means you can offer details that you wouldn’t want to share in a public Facebook or Twitter posting — such as your password or your credit card number. Companies are probably using those private messages for customer service already, but Freshdesk says it’s the first customer support platform to offer this kind of integration, allowing businesses to manage these messages in the same interface as all of their other customer communication. I suspect competitors will be following suit.

Earlier this year, FreshDesk raised a $5 million round from Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners.

On June 1, Founder Swap aims to take six different startups and get them to exchange founders, in an effort to get a fresh set of eyes on whatever they’re working on and foster new ideas. The New York City-based project was dreamed up by ScrollKit founders Kate Ray and Cody Brown, along with Jonathan Basker, VP of People at BetaWorks.

The team started thinking about Founder Swap in the context of Rhizome’s Seven On Seven conference, which pairs up artists and technologists of different disciplines and asks them to “create something new” — whether that be a piece of art, an application, or anything else they can imagine. Participating artists and technologists meet on a Thursday and are given a little more than a day and a half to get to know each other and build something together, before presenting the results at the conference on Saturday.

In the same way, Founder Swap hopes to mix and match founders for one day, basing the swap in part on the strengths and weaknesses of the founding teams. It’s aimed at very early-stage startups, those with just two or three people working together, and is designed to provide a fresh perspective on the things they’re building.

After working 18-hour days working together, founders often develop similar views on what their product should be, Basker told me in a phone interview. So like the TV show Wife Swap, Founder Swap is designed to break founders out of the habits that they’ve become accustomed to while working together and to foster new ideas.

So a startup with two technical founders might swap with one that has two founders who are stronger from the business side of things, for instance. Or a startup without a strong UX person might get a designer to take a look at its product, etc. etc.

In an email, Ray wrote: “We expect that founder swap will help people exchange specific knowledge and experience with those who can benefit from it, but what we’re hoping is that the new interactions will spark ideas that otherwise would never have come into being.”

There’s another side benefit that could come of the project, which might benefit not just individual startups, but could improve the entire New York tech ecosystem. Since most “small tech companies often have crappy or non-existent APIs,” Brown believes that the Founder Swap project could help make startups more open. “This is a way to get them thinking about how their startup can exist in a broader network of startups forming in NYC,” he wrote.

As all the major search engines continue to add social search features to their feature line-up, it can often look as if there isn’t any space left for startups in this space. Wajam begs to differ. The Montreal-based company is probably one of the most ambitious players in the social search market right now and after launching its latest efforts for Google last month, it is now ready to bring its enhanced social search results to Bing and Yahoo as well.

Wajam is a browser plugin (as well as a standalone social search engine) that automatically integrates the company’s own social search results from your network on the search result pages of Google, Bing and Yahoo. It also works on a number of other popular sites, including Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor and YouTube.

Wajam creates its own index of everything your friends share on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. It’s worth noting that it looks at your friends’ status updates, as well as the sites they link to. It then applies its own PageRank-like algorithms to rank these status updates and sites depending on what you are searching for and displays its results alongside your standard search results.

As Wajam’s founder and CEO Martin-Luc Archambault told me earlier today, the service currently has over 2 billion pieces of content in its index. Archambault stressed that Wajam’s algorithms are also able to categorize the items in its index (think pictures, restaurants, hotels, videos etc.). The company’s latest data shows that it is currently able to show social search results for around 44% of its users’ queries.

With this update, Wajam is bringing its redesigned interface to Bing and Yahoo. The update, of course, comes at an interesting time, given that Bing announced its social search updates just a few days ago. Wajam, however, argues that it offers a far more complete social search experience than Bing because it also includes results from private updates your friends have shared with you (assuming you opt-in to this feature) and because it also highlights photos and videos, as well as product recommendations.

Wajam also notes that while Bing lets you ask your friends questions right from its search result pages, Wajam gives you results immediately. Unlike Bing, Wajam also lets you filter results by date, relevancy, links, photos and videos.

The Wajam team also put together this little infographic that explains how its approach to social search differs from Bing’s, Yahoo’s and Google’s.

Remember last week when Foxconn president Terry Gou said that he was working hard at building the new Apple TV? The rumor was, as you might suspect, patently false. But just how false is the surprising part.

Welcome to the magical world of Apple rumors.

Before we begin, take a look at this delightful Fortune piece that shows us the truth behind the big Apple rumor mill. It’s well-written and cogent and takes us all to task, including our own Matt Burns for jumping into the morass.

The iTV story trickled out at the end of last week. In short, it said that Foxconn president Terry Gou explicitly announced that Foxconn was “making preparations for iTV,” suggesting that the company was ready to build a flat panel TV for Apple at any moment. The statement appeared in a short piece on ChinaDaily.com and said:

Now Terry Gou would have to be suicidal to say this. He would have to literally have most of his brain eaten by bacteria before he would announce a single Apple product. What’s more, no other press picked up this gem. It was apparently a misunderstanding because the day Terry Gou announces an Apple product is the day an asteroid scores a direct hit on the St. Louis Arch. There is, in short, no way he would risk all of Apple’s lucrative business just to score points with the press.

Had anyone – ourselves included – stopped for a moment and considered the ramifications of what Gou was allegedly saying, they’d understand the ridiculousness of the statements. However the idea – that the president of a major electronics manufacturer decides to go off the rails and let fly with a ridiculous rumor – is wildly compelling news. The piece spawned ancillary pieces about the possibilities of the iTV and what exciting features the non-existent product could have.

Foxconn, for their part, told TheNextWeb that:

They closed with a forceful line: “Any reports that Foxconn confirmed that it is preparing to produce a specific product for any customer are not accurate.”

So what happened here? I think most Apple rumors are a combination of genuine interest and schadenfreude. For most journalists (read “bloggers”), Apple is a black box. They have no view inside and they often get short shrift when it comes to actual launched hardware. They know people love Apple, but Apple refuses to talk to them. So they – and we are equally guilty – ride Apple rumors into the shoals of fabulism. After all, if Apple PR doesn’t tell you the news ahead of time, then why even bother confirming it?

Second, you have the sense that Apple sometimes deserves these leaks. The flip side to interest in Apple news is a sense that Apple is so stingy with its news that it’s only right to upbraid the organization by essentially playing click games with the news. Who does it hurt if the iTV is talk of the blogosphere for most of the week? What does it matter if every tiny news station from here to Jakarta is running a brief on this “leak.” Apple deserves what it gets.

I’d say both those stances are valid yet it still doesn’t excuse the loss of levelheadedness. While I agree that the concept of an iTV is cool at best and newsworthy at worst, it’s up to us to separate rumor from ridiculousness. We didn’t do a good job this time.

EyeTrackShop, a startup that develops eye-tracking technology for measuring ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Northzone.

The company says its technology works through a regular webcam, allowing market researchers to gather data quickly and affordably. You can run the test before you spend money on a campaign, or test how well the advertising works once it’s live, and how it performed in different formats and sites. Customers include big tech companies such as Google, AOL, and Microsoft, as well as P&G and JCDeacaux.

One of the other features touted on the EyeTrackShop site is the ability to test advertising in multiple countries simultaneously. The company says it will use the new money on international expansion, and on product development, too.

EyeTrackShop spun out of eye-tracking company Tobii Technologies in 2010.

A Y Combinator-backed startup called GazeHawk was trying to accomplish something similar, but its team was acquired by Facebook in March, and it looks like the GazeHawk product (which was not acquired) remains in limbo.

For awhile now “gamification” has largely existed as a buzz word. It’s felt just as ridiculous to write the word as it is to read it. However, as Tim Chang pointed out this weekend, although it’s important to avoid thinking of “gamification as the panacea,” it’s real, it’s moving beyond media and fitness, and it needs to be taken seriously. When it comes to educational tools, gamification has real value in its ability to make learning more fun and engaging. But as with all emerging trends, it can’t be applied willy-nilly.

BenchPrep, a young edtech startup backed by $2.2 million from Lightbank, launched last year to convert content from big educational publishers, like McGraw-Hill, into interactive web and mobile courses. While the startup expanded beyond college admission test prep in January, today it’s announcing that it is teaming up with Princeton Review to contemporize test prep for students, using game mechanics, leaderboards, and social features to make the tedious and teeth-grinding process of test prep more engaging and, hopefully, more effective.

BenchPrep CEO and co-founder Ashish Rangnekar tells us the startup’s core mission is to take the multitude of quality educational content out there — on a host of subjects — and transform it from static, linear material, into an experience that’s engaging, and personalized. Gamification of education is severely undercooked — like entertainment was 15 years ago, the CEO says, as the big publishers are, by and large, hesitant to experiment.

The high cost of education is just one of the industry’s many problems, but the real problem, he says, comes from a dearth of sticky, engaging experiences. Long term, the co-founder tells us, BenchPrep wants to become a platform where any student can go to study for an exam, using material from any publisher on any device. The content is out there, but the rest isn’t.

BenchPrep is already working with Princeton Review, Jon Wiley, McGraw-Hill and others, and the CEO believes it’s among the first to focus on building an interactive learning platform in which students can study on the Web, iOS, Android, and tablets.

So, the startup has teamed up with Princeton Review to launch GRE ScoreQuest, an iOS app that gamifies the study process for students taking the GRE. Obviously, the target audience is fairly limited, as it is intended for those studying to take the standardized test to get into grad school.

But the BenchPrep CEO calls the app “a bold experiment,” which takes the reputable content-heavy world of the Princeton Review and attempts to stretch the boundaries of test prep by bringing in social analytics and gamification. The company wants to use the app to prove that the model works, to validate the idea, and then apply this model to the content from all the big publishers, for all forms of test prep.

And so far, the experiment is showing positive results. In the two weeks since launch, 300+ students signed up, and 99 percent have downloaded the app and are spending more than 30 minutes a day in the app. Those students who used the app regularly over those two weeks have seen a 20 percent rise in performance.

So, how does the app work? Rangnekar, although he hesitates to use the analogy given the implications, likens the experience to that of Angry Birds. The app presents the test prep content through storyboards, like Angry Birds, there are a series of rooms in which there are 9 or 10 quizzes, ordered in level of difficulty.

The average number of questions per quiz is about five, with each quiz taking about 10 minutes to complete. If the student answers four questions correctly, they move onto the next quiz. If they fail to answer four correctly, the app explains the answers, including each part of the multiple choice answers, why each was incorrect, and so on.

Besides this process of leveling-up, BenchPrep wants to give context — something that’s extremely important for a sticky experience. So, the app allows students to see how their test results compare to all those studying for the GRE, as well as to break it down to compare only to those studying for their specific test, like Arts & Humanities, for example.

So the app offers tests in a bunch of different categories, from text completions and sentence equivalence to Algebra and Geometry, with more than 300 practice problems. Students unlock new problems, levels, and boards based on their performance, with this intelligent report card that analyzes each test.

For a free app, the GRE ScoreQuest is off to a great start. There are a huge amount of explanations so that students can understand what they’re getting wrong, they have a valid score card, and then get to compare to local and national leaderboards, which makes the experience that much more engaging. It’s the kind of experience you react to with, “I wish they had this when I was studying for the SATs.” I’m not even studying for the GREs, but I found myself taking the quizzes nonetheless.

Typically, the BenchPrep CEO says, students are opening the app at least twice a day, which he says has been great early validation on this model. Going forward, BenchPrep wants to focus on being the tool, or platform that enables these mobile and web experiences for educational publishers. It’s a complementary gamification service to the approach Inkling and Boundless Learning are taking to eTextbooks, for example.

There’s plenty of opportunity for tools like this in higher education, especially in test prep, and BenchPrep obviously hopes that this is just the beginning.

For more, find the app here, and BenchPrep at home here.

What do you think?

In its first-ever earnings report as a publicly traded company, mobile advertising network Millennial Media said its net loss for the first quarter widened to $4 million on increased costs. Revenues were up 53 percent year-over-year to $32.9 million.

Millennial’s shares fell by 7.7 percent in after-hours trading, as the company’s annual forecast missed estimates.  For the year, Millennial is looking at $173 million and 176 million in annual revenues, which would be up by 68 percent from the year before. But that’s actually lower than the $202.8 million analysts were expecting on average, according to a Bloomberg survey. When the company went public two months ago, its shares popped more than 100% on the first day and gave the company a nearly $2 billion valuation. Since then, they’ve settled and fallen by 67 percent, giving the company a market cap of $1.16 billion.

Millennial didn’t share much about eCPMs, a key metric that shows how much the company is earning per 1,000 ad impressions. It’s worth noting because many other consumer web giants including Google and Facebook are facing downward pressure on their average ad prices because mobile rates are so much lower than their desktop equivalents. Google’s cost-per-click growth (or the amount it earns every time a user clicks through on an ad) was down 12 percent year-over-year and down 6 percent quarter-over-quarter — largely because of the difference between mobile and web ads. Facebook similarly had to change its IPO filing last week to say that mobile usage was growing so fast that the company is not able to keep up with the pace in terms of how many ads it serves. Many Facebook pages on the web have as many as seven ads on them, while the mobile app just shows sponsored stories occasionally in the feed.

Millennial didn’t share any numbers that would help us understand how the company is coping with these issues, except to say that better targeting is helping.

“Overall, there is a mix and a shift toware more targeting and engaging ads, which have driven prices up for us,” the chief executive Paul Palmieri said on the call.

As for the quarter itself, about $20.1 million of Millennial’s revenue came from existing clients, while the rest came from new customers. Millennial Media’s footprint is still very U.S. based. Only 12 percent of revenues come from abroad, although they’re growing with help from European markets. The company said fill rates are up as the company expands abroad. Before, those impressions would go unfilled because Millennial didn’t have a large sales team outside of the U.S.

This shouldn’t be the first time you’ve seen Skullcandy’s Hesh headphones appear on TechCrunch, but I’ll forgive you if it is. As a refresh, I reviewed the cans last week and found that it really came down to like vs. love. They’re fine, but I can’t necessarily justify a $60-$70 purchase.

John felt the same way when we sat down to chat about the Hesh headphones in this latest episode of Fly or Die. But it extends far beyond that. As John would say, “friends don’t let friends buy bad headphones.”

There should really only be two choices: get yourself a cheap pair of earbuds that will last you six months, or if you really enjoy high quality sound, make a solid investment in a set of Grado or Sennheisers or “the upper echelon of headphones” and really enjoy yourself.

Either way, mid-range headphones shouldn’t even exist in our book. They offer very little in sound quality and try to make up for it with style and brand cache, like Beats.

Beats by Dr. Dre headphones certainly aren’t the best headphones on the market, but the following behind them is huge, based mainly on the fact that Dre’s name is behind them and they look cool. Beats is about status, and the very worst part is that Skullcandy doesn’t even have that going for it.

We both give them a die.

Remember Jitterbug, the big-buttoned phones for seniors that made using those confusing, new-fangled cellphone thingies so much easier to handle? Well it looks like someone has gone out and built the equivalent for the iPad. Which literally made me laugh out loud when I read the news, because the iPad is the first computer I’ve ever seen seniors adopt in droves. But hello anyway, Family Ribbon.

Everything about this app is funny. From the touted “health benefits” (apparently, a May 2012 Mayo Clinic study confirmed that a combination of exercising and using a computer may protect seniors against mild cognitive impairment!!!) to the stock photos of granny on iPad in the “how it works” section of the website.

I’ll spare you the gory details. Here’s the pitch in a nutshell: the app, which is “officially” launching on May 30th but is live now in the iTunes App Store, is “an easy-to-use app for the iPad which features an easy-to-use interface that helps seniors and kids stay connected to their families online.”

In case you missed that, it’s “easy to use.”

Because really, the iPad is so hard. And this UI is clearly better:

I’m sure the iPad’s complexity is why my 2-year has completely stolen mine, knows how to slide to unlock, flip through screens, launch and close apps, navigate within apps, and I’m pretty sure she’s already better than me at Angry Birds.

Let’s get real here, kids are not the issue with adopting new technology. Seniors, however, often struggle. And while I do understand the need to offer them assistance, I’m not sure that, of all things, it’s the iPad that’s so confusing. Computers, yes. Windows, yes. Mac OS X, yes. But iPad? No.

Sure, grandma and gramps might need a demo at the Apple Store or from you before they get it. But I’m not convinced they need something like this.

I will give the app one shout out as its saving grace – it offers a remote administration feature which could come in handy. The confused user can push the “call back request” app for assistance which sends a text, email and phone call (wait…omg, it’s this, WUPHF lives!) and can then tap a button to share their screen. It’s a screenshot-snapping feature, to be clear, not true remote administration.

Oh, and there’s an “easy Facebook” mode too:

I’m sorry, I just fell out of my chair.

Honestly, this may be the best thing I’ve seen on the Internet all day.

The app was co-created by two ex-McKinsey consultants, CEO Ivan Osadchiy and Mykola Komarvsky. I was just going to decline to cover (Osadchiy wanted to talk about the “many health benefits” that this application will bring), but I found I couldn’t help but share this news. Back to your regularly scheduled Facebook IPO-salivating now.

The design of Altec Lansing’s inAir 5000 speaker is rather cutting-edge. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Freed of the 30-pin connectors, buttons and recessed charging ports required on traditional smartphone speaker docks, AirPlay device manufacturers are given the liberty to pursue more creative designs. We’ve seen some oddball shapes as the result.

This AirPlay speaker, the Altec Lansing inAir 5000, is one of the more striking specimens — it’s shaped like a giant axe head, with the “blade” pointing toward the sky.

The iOS-friendly music streamer doesn’t just look cool, it also happens to sound great as long as you keep it at moderate volumes. But it underperforms at higher volumes, and it suffers from the same network connectivity problems common in other AirPlay devices, making an otherwise solid product a bit of a disappointment.

The $500 inAir is some high-end hardware: The plain mesh-over-grill exterior hides two 3-inch Kevlar drivers, two 1-inch tweeters, and a 4-inch subwoofer. Volume controls are tucked away on one side, with AUX and headphone jacks on the opposite side. Two ports — an Ethernet port for wired networking and a USB port for setup/iOS devices — are located on the back, along with power, reset, and Wi-Fi syncing buttons. Since the streamlined inAir doesn’t have any kind of display, your only status indicator is a multicolored LED that flashes from the bottom of the unit.

There’s a handsome remote included, too. But since your iOS device controls it just fine, the ridiculously stylish brushed-aluminum clicker is one of the best-looking accessories you’ll never need.

Connecting the inAir to a Wi-Fi network is easy if you have an iOS device. I plugged an iPod Touch into the USB port, downloaded Altec’s free app, and then hopped straight into the setup. This app-driven express lane saves a great deal of time and eliminates the tedium of setting up wireless networking. Old-school browser-based setup is also an option too, but it’s really more of a backstop — more AirPlay manufacturers are turning to app-based setup, which is a good thing, as the early days of AirPlay were messy in that department.

I breezed through the essentials, (network passwords, device names) in just a few minutes, and then started streaming from iTunes immediately.

At its core, the inAir is an iOS companion device. Even though it pairs with a Windows PC running iTunes just fine, most of the wireless DJing perks are reserved for an iOS experience.

The inAir is a small step forward in terms of AirPlay connectivity. My review unit only dropped its connection a couple times a day while testing in my RF quagmire of an apartment. (Believe it or not, this is actually an improvement, given the relatively poor AirPlay experiences we’ve been dealing with over the past year.) But after a week of use, I noticed the inAir’s status LED had started flashing purple — it had dropped the network connection entirely. A hard reset and a quick re-run through the setup app got things cooking again. It’s a small hassle, but given the stability I enjoy with other wireless speakers, even one weekly instance like this is more than I’d prefer.

It’s too difficult to say whether these hiccups are due to the inAir device or the AirPlay platform, but it definitely has a negative impact on the convenience of wireless streaming.

So how does it sound? At mid-to-moderate volume level, the 8.5-pound speaker can deliver neighbor-waking bass. Thanks to some baked-in signal processing, the inAir produces that booming bass with virtually no distortion. The catch is that the DSP wizardry gets a little heavy-handed once you really pump up the volume.

Although the inAir gives you even more distortion-free volume once you crank it from “moderate” to “loud,” it does so at the cost of a lot of dynamic range. Basshounds will feel cheated with this duality, and hardcore audiophiles will undoubtedly take issue when the pleasantly sharp-edged highs, fully present at moderate volumes, grow flat and dull at higher volumes.

Warm mids across the board help sweeten an otherwise uneven package, but the issue is less about power and more about sophistication. At even moderate volume the inAir is great for blasting a room with the sounds of Hollywood explosions, bassy Skrillex warbles, or electric organ solos from The Black Keys. Concertos and Buddy Rich drum solos just sound loud and lack presence.

Good-but-not-great audio and wireless chops aren’t that uncommon these days, so it’s hard to say whether the inAir is a progression in the overall speaker space. However, as an AirPlay device it’s undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

The inAir doesn’t absolve AirPlay of its “work in progress” feel, but it does offer more in the way of stability than some of its first-gen competitors. If you don’t mind the occasional mid-playlist hiccup, aren’t too picky about EQing and are itching to burn $500, the inAir is a good investment. If you crave absolute wireless stability or a truly transparent audio experience, skip it.

WIRED Room rockin’ volume and bass. Great mid-range performance. Digital signal processing quashes distortion. Fast and nimble wireless music streaming. AUX port offers non-iOS versatility in a pinch.

TIRED Good sound at a not-so-good price. Randomly dropped connections are instant party-killers. Aggressive signal processing at high volumes. No battery = stationary tunes. No iOS cable included.