Category: Tech news

Every day companies are spending gobs of money to earn and keep your attention. Advertisers are collecting heaps of information about you in the hopes of presenting you with more targeted advertisements: advertisements on which you’ll want to click. Yet despite all of this information, advertising still pretty much sucks. It doesn’t have to be this way.

While marketers and advertising agencies strive to command your decisions in the “attention economy“, long-time open source advocate Doc Searls puts forward a better idea in his new book, The Intention Economy. Rather than continue to allow vendors to blindly guess as to what we want, we should all be moving toward a new market equilibrium in which we consciously and directly signal our intentions to the market. Companies that respond to our intentions will reap larger profit, waste less money on dubious advertising initiatives, and enjoy real customer loyalty.

In the era of Big Data and hyperscale web services, the consumer is often an afterthought. We’re subjected to exploitative, one-sided one-size-fits-all contracts (contracts of adhesion) for the privilege of using various sites and services. Customer Relationship Management solutions treat all customers essentially the same: as the target of aggressive sales tactics with little to no regard of the customer of an individual. Long-term customer satisfaction is hardly ever discussed.

Consider the issue of customer loyalty. Chances are that, like me, you have one or more loyalty cards for various stores you frequent. These loyalty cards give you some nominal reward, right? Are those really rewards for your patronage, or are they subtle bribes to keep you coming back? Searls explores this concept in detail in The Intention Economy.

Obviously, it’s fair to assume that the programs work pretty well or are at least rationalized well enough to continue justifying them. But so far, I’ve seen no research on the customer side that starts from the premise that maybe we don’t need these programs at all — or that it makes sense to base our understanding of loyalty on what customers actually feel.

Another substantial topic of the book is just how incorrect most of the information collected about us actually is. And still this factually wrong data is used to select which advertisements are presented to you, in the hope that you’ll click through. Aside from how intrusive advertising is, is it any surprise that click-through rates are so low when the data used to target ads to viewers is so wildly off-base?

Searls also advocates strongly for Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) solutions to give to consumers the same kind of tracking and information collection about vendors that the vendors use against us. The point of VRM is not adversarial, according to Searls. Instead, it restores balance to the overall market and seeks to actively reward those companies that pay attention to individual intentions. There’s already a lot of work going on to create VRM tools. You can follow along or — better still — get involved at project-vrm.org

Rather than Big Data, Searls posits the notion of “small data” and “fourth parties”:

We need ways of gathering, organizing, and controlling the data that we generate and that others suck in from our digital crumb trails. We also need new understandings about how personal data might be used. None of this is easy, yet it must be done. Fortunately, it’s still early.

Fourth parties would be trusted repositories that act as brokers on our behalf for our personal data. There are examples of fourth parties today — banks, buyer’s agent realtors, travel agents — but Searls’ vision of fourth parties expands to include those offering “personal data store” services. We would tell our fourth party which of our data is available for public consumption, and what terms and conditions might apply to non-public data. Companies with which we do business would obtain our data from our fourth party only if they agreed to the terms and conditions we had established. There’s little preventing this from happening today — read/write APIs and the global Internet are pretty much all the plumbing we need. It’s a culture and business shift on which we’re waiting.

I asked Searls about fourth parties, observing that those providing “personal data store” services seemed like prime candidates for attack. His reply is insightful:

I’ve been working with VRM developers for nearly six years, and in that time the subject of threats has hardly ever come up. I think that’s because VRM is for individuals. It’s here to fill in a market hole — the need for individual empowerment through new tools and services that serve demand, rather than supply. So we identify with ourselves, and most of us are — as individuals — not out to do harm in the world. Likewise, fourth parties also work for you and me. So, for example, insurance companies, brokers, travel agents, lawyers, banks and buyers agents in real estate are all fourth parties already. Are they subject to attack? Sure, but that doesn’t define them.

I suppose personal data stores, vaults, lockers and personal clouds (all different names for roughly the same thing) could be attacked if they hold stores of personal data in some unprotected way. But personal data isn’t gold, and personal data stores aren’t Fort Knox. As of today, the only actors in the marketplace that seem to want all the personal data they can grab — often in sneaky ways — are advertising companies, and they are currently using an abundance of that data to get sub-1% click-through rates on ads.

Most VRM work proceeds from faith that actual intentions of customers are worth far more than any amount of guesswork by sellers. Put simply, fourth parties will help us buy. They will help move more money, and frame better relationships, than sellers alone make possible, no matter how good their CRM systems or loyalty programs might be. For that reason it makes much more sense to care about opportunities than threats. The market is bigger.

I also asked how the intention economy would react to bad actors (on either side of a transaction), and about the likelihood of malicious fourth parties: someone sneakily providing some kind of personal data store only to misuse the data collected.

Worrying about bad actors with VRM today is like worrying about bad actors with PCs in 1984 or about bad actors with email and the Web in 1995. We got plenty of bad actors in both cases, but what mattered far more were the good actors and the good new things they brought to market.

Bad actors are always around. I remember Reed Hastings telling me, many years ago, about the trouble PayPal had with bad actors shortly after the company started doing business. A “sneaky or malicious fourth party” would have to represent sneaky or malicious people. I don’t know anybody developing intentionally for that market, so I can’t say. Also, fourth party services, such as insurance providers, financial advisors, and banks, could act in a fiduciary role for their clients, thus having a legal responsibility for protecting customer information. Fourth party services, in all their shapes and flavors, will provide a huge new category of business opportunities.

On the whole, I’m actually very excited about the possibilities implied by the intention economy, but this reply really worries me. Yes, we didn’t worry about spam or malware when the core Internet protocols were forming. But we’ve learned an awful lot since then, and it seems to me a glaring omission that reasonable safeguards not be considered at the beginnings of any new Internet construction project.

Finally, I wanted to know if Searls had any gut feeling about which current big companies might be the first early adopters of the intention economy.

When I put this question out to the ProjectVRM list, I got many answers. My favorite comes from one start-up CEO, who says, “None. VRM unbundles the incumbent.” That’s well-aligned with the VRM development spirit, which looks to create the means by which many new companies will come to market, rather than to bet on which old company will “win.”

But you asked, so here are some of the other answers:

• An already trusted or neutral brand
• Not currently massively invested in customer data assets and call-centre style CRM.
• Not currently making lots of money from selling customer data out the back door.
• Not the dominant or #1 player in in their sector/ category (i.e. more to gain/ less to lose than from bold moves).
• A surviving #1 in a threatened category. (e.g. BestBuy)
• Already kitted out with API’s, and accustomed to living in that world. (See ProgrammableWeb.com for examples.)
• In an industry with few good options in its current model. (For example, newspapers and publishers — the Guardian is a good example, with its mix of high ethical aspirations, tech capability, commitment to open platforms and data, and the need to evolve its business model. Pearson Group, publisher of Financial Times and many educational titles, is another.).
• With a product and services portfolio already digital or intangible (e.g. some online movies, financial services), but not in a regulated or sensitive market area (e.g. banking, telco, health). Companies here will be fast followers, but not leaders.
• Profitable enough to throw some money at R & D, Innovation and prototyping without worrying too much about it. (e.g. IBM, which is already pushing Big Data and analytics, so why not Small Data as well.)
• In an industry that benefits from The Quantified Self movement.
• CRM companies looking to embrace customer-side capabilities. (We’ve been talking to SugarCRM, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce and others.)
• Big corporate consulting companies (e.g. Accenture, Bain)
• A category where purchase decisions have benign consequences and therefore a low trust hurdle to overcome — and where interest in new discovery is high, for example with entertainment (e.g. Amazon).
• Companies that seem to already love customers — or should (e.g. Apple, Zappos, Dell, HP)

For contributing to the above I’d like to thank Iain Henderson, William Heath, Katherine Warman Kern, Devon Loffreto, Brian Behlendorf, Cameron Lewis, Carlton Jefferis and William Heath.

The book is easy to read, written in Searls’ first-person voice. He explains in the opening that he’s used to writing online and furnishing lots of links. While he can’t directly link from the content of the book, each chapter contains numerous footnotes with additional information and URLs to further reading. Searls uses plenty of personal anecdotes and examples, and quotes an astonishing number of conversations he’s had with people through the years.

I’m not an economist, so I was marginally worried that the book would be heavy on economic theory. There is some, as well as historical analysis of the evolution of markets and their effects, but all of this is done in a very accessible way. Searls does a great job presenting complex (and often crushingly boring) economic theory in ways that make sense to casual readers.

I purposefully read the book slowly, to allow the concepts to penetrate my thoughts. It didn’t take long for me to start looking much more critically at all the business transactions in which I participate every day and wonder how VRM and the intention economy might change them.

The Intention Economy represents the fruition of several years of lively discussion on this subject. The book is far from definitive, though: the groundwork for the intention economy is only just now being laid, and it’ll be a long time before it becomes an everyday reality.

Samsung doesn’t break out actual unit sales figures for its mobile handset business, but many analyst houses are estimating that it is the brand to beat anyway. The latest tip comes from ComScore, which today released the results of its regular poll of 30,000 U.S. consumers to gauge the state of the mobile market. It found that Samsung accounted for 26 percent of all handsets — smartphone or otherwise — used in the U.S. in the last three months. LG came in second position at 19.3 percent.

And smartphone use continues to grow: comScore found that there are now 106 million smartphones in use in the U.S., a nine percent increase over the previous quarter. Likewise, the services associated with them also continue to become more ubiquitous: a full 50 percent of consumers have now downloaded and used mobile apps.

Samsung’s 26 percent share of the overall mobile market, on the back of popular models like the Galaxy SII (pictured) represents a wider lead than Samsung had in the previous quarter. In the last three months that ended December 2011, Samsung’s share was 25.3 percent and LG’s was 20 percent. Apple increased its share over the period and now has 14 percent of the market (compared to 12.4 percent the quarter before).

And because we are seeing a gradual consolidation as the mobile market continues to mature, others declined. Specifically, Motorola was down to 12.8 percent and HTC to six percent. HTC sells only smartphones so that will impact its overall standing among handset makers making both those and feature devices. RIM, currently showing off its BB10 at its big conference in Florida, didn’t make the top five.

In the battle for platform dominance, Android also increased its lead over iOS as the leading smartphone OS. Google’s mobile OS now has a 51 percent share of the market, compared to Apple’s 30.7 percent and RIM’s 12.3 percent. While both Apple and Google increased, RIM and Windows Phone declined, and Symbian stayed final position with a stable 1.4 percent.

As for mobile content, we love to read about apps and there have definitely been some crazy best-sellers but the most-used feature — again, considering the full range of phones in the market today — is still text messaging, used by 74.3 percent of all U.S. consumers and stable in its usage over the previous quarter.

Apps usage increased slightly and apps are now used by half of all consumers, while the use of mobile web browsers also grew, but not by as much. Still, mobile web remained nearly at parity, with apps usage, with mobile web browsing 49.3 percent compared to apps usage at a full 50 percent. Social networking, gaming and music consumption also increased in usage.

I recently wrote about news gamification app Scoople, and today, the company is releasing a new version with improved social interaction.

When you use Scoople, you read news stories (usually aggregated by Scoople from multiple articles) then fill out an associated poll. You can enter your own opinion and also predict the opinion of the larger community — people who do the best are recognized on Scoople’s leaderboard. (Currently you need to be accurate 70 percent of the time to get on the leaderboard.) The model seems to be really addictive for some people — the company says the average Scoople user has now filled out 45 surveys. However, with a new “Ask Your Friends” feature, the company is hoping to broaden its reach beyond the serious news junkies.

As the name implies, if you run across a poll that your friend would be particularly well-suited for, or where you’re just curious about their opinion, you can now send them a message in Scoople or (if they don’t have a Scoople account) in Facebook. As with any social app, this could become annoying quickly if you have the friends who don’t know when to stop. The good thing is, these requests are tied to a very clear purpose. It’s not about, “Hey, you should play this game that I’m playing,” but rather, “I want to know your answer on this specific question.” Over time, you accumulate a record of all the questions that you’ve answered for each other. (I also thought it’d be nice to include a way to argue and talk trash about those answers, and the Scoople team says it’s thinking about it.)

Scoople is also announcing a deal with Fans of Apple, a Facebook fan page that’s been Liked by more than 775,00 people. Sometime in the next month, Fans of Apple should gain the capability to poll its members, courtesy of Scoople. This also a taste of one of Scoople’s next big goals — to expand its platform into Facebook.

You can download the app here.

Recently I tried to do a Google search for a wine to pair with swordfish, and it was pretty much a disaster (first world problems, I know, but still.) The problem is, web search results for certain topics are just overloaded with “search engine optimized” (SEO) content, which is very often just spam meant to attract people to dummy websites overloaded with ads. Of course, search engines work overtime to stay one step ahead of the SEO spammers, but sometimes the bad guys just win out.

There’s also the issue of discovering new content. Say you’re looking for a new recipe for a dish you’ve made lots of times before. The top 20 search results are going to be from very popular food sites, of recipes you’ve probably already seen What if you want something fresh?

That’s what a neat hack called MillionShort aims to help with. The website is a search engine that lets you remove the top million (or 100,000, or 10,000, or whatever) hits from the results list. It’s a lot like pruning a plant, or skimming the film off the top of a stew: MillionShort lets you remove the old or non-useful stuff from traditional web search to find new or interesting content.

The website, which is apparently built on top of Google search (we’ve reached out for an interview and more details and will update this post when we hear back), describes itself like this:

“We thought might be somewhat interesting to see what we’d find if we just removed an entire slice of the web.

The thinking was the same popular sites (we’re not saying popular equals irrelevant) show up again and again, Million Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don’t make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason (poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, competitive keyword(s) etc.). Most people don’t look beyond page 1 when doing a search and now they don’t have to.”

Technically it seems pretty basic, but the idea is pretty powerful. The community at developer-centric news aggregator and discussion site HackerNews has had a pretty big response to MillionShort: The post about the site has garnered nearly 200 comments in less than 24 hours. As one commenter, jaems33, noted: “It reminds me of why I first moved to Google from Yahoo/Webcrawler/Altavista/etc in the first place.”

Social search and dedicated apps may be great and all, but it seems there is still an appetite for discovering fresh new things from the world wide web at large. If the search powers-that-be stop focusing on that, it’s good to see that there are still enterprising developers keen to hack out their own solutions to the problem.

This morning, Facebook announced a new feature which lets users post to their Facebook timeline that they’ve chosen to be an organ donor. The idea is that friends will choose to share the story of their decision with friends, hopefully tapping into Facebook’s natural virality to encourage others to do the same. (Hey, it’s worth a shot.) Facebook is also helpfully linking to state and national organ donation registries, where appropriate.

While obviously a move worthy of mention given Facebook’s size and scale, the story has been overhyped by Facebook and media as a new feature that “will save lives.” That’s going a bit far. It is one thing to post on Facebook, it’s quite another to actually impact change.

Far be it from me to call out Facebook’s move as a pre-IPO publicity stunt (am I really that cynical? sigh), but the truth is that organ donations have traditionally struggled for a number of reasons, none of which is because sharing your opinion on Facebook was too hard. The Mayo Clinic, for example, has a handy Q&A about donations which addresses what are, frankly, very human fears about the process – namely, things like “if I agree to donate my organs, the hospital staff won’t work as hard to save my life,” and “maybe I won’t really be dead…”

Fear of being alive, but not really alive enough to stop a donation, is a deep-rooted, intrinsically human fear. Will reading a Facebook status update from a friend change any that? This is a country, after all, where we entertain ourselves with trifles like Grey’s Anatomy, for example, where hot, young surgeons treat patients’ bodies like pieces of meat they just want to get their scalpels into. Is it shocking that we now fear this is how doctors actually operate – that the lure of the potential organ donation trumps that of life-saving? They may be irrational myths, and highly offensive to doctors, but there they are. Facebook thinks it can overpower TV and movies’ influence on popular opinion? Well, I’ll grab my popcorn for that. That’s a battle worth watching, at least.

In addition to the above fears, there are other concerns about organ donations that the Mayo Clinic addresses as myths. There are mistaken religious concerns, worries over whether you can have an open-casket funeral (you can), and health and age-related issues (I’m too sick/old/unhealthy to donate), which stop people from marking “yes” when making this critical decision. (A decision we traditionally are forced to consider while at the DMV, for what it’s worth.)

What will the actual impact be, then, of this whole “post your organ donation status to Facebook” feature? Raising awareness, increasing organ donation sign-ups? Sure, it has that potential mainly because Facebook is large enough that even if a very small fraction of the user base jumps on board, it can have an effect.

Plus, Facebook isn’t entirely new to the area of trying to impact social change. It supports Amber Alerts, for example…although it hasn’t provided info on child recovery from doing so. In Japan, it lets users share their blood type…but then again, that’s because doing so is popular in Japanese culture.

The concern here is that real-world activism and “social activism” are not one and the same. Posting to Facebook that you are a donor and actually following through with a donation, whether living or deceased, takes a bit more effort. Like actually clicking through on the links to the organ donation registries, for example. Then actually filling out the online forms. Actually clicking submit on said forms. Actually telling your family members about those forms. Etc. Etc.

Simply shouting out your opinion on your Facebook profile is not enough, legally speaking, to turn one into a donor…although it could be used to convince by doctors to convince wary family members of your wishes’, or assist in legal battles.

At the end of the day, this is an awareness-raising effort – it can be effective the way that wearing ribbons pinned to your lapel is effective, perhaps. It paints Facebook as the social engineer, starting a conversation between friends. That’s good stuff. But at what scale will a feature update impact actual change? We can’t possibly know yet – for starters, the feature is tucked away under “life events,” an under-utilized part of the status update box, which many don’t know exist. Plus, Facebook usually serves at the platform for communication – it doesn’t typically try to put words and thoughts in users’ mouths. But really, the question about the potential for actual “life saving” comes down to whether or not Facebook users can make the leap from posting an update, to clicking a link, to actually doing something.

I’m hopeful that it can, because imagine the impact when Facebook uses its power for good. But will Facebook users actually follow through? It’s too soon to say.

One of the core features of Twitter’s redesign last year was the addition of the Discover tab in the web and mobile interface. Today, the company is launching its first major update to this feature. The new and improved Discover tab, says Twitter, will now begin to surface more personalized content. Starting today, the algorithm that populates this feature with stories will put a stronger emphasis on the tweets that are popular among the people you follow and their friends. This should make for a more personalized experience and highlight content that is more relevant to the individual user.

When it first launched the Discover tab last year, its users’ reactions were somewhat mixed. As our own Eric Eldon noted at that time, the stories Twitter included in this section were often not that interesting and Twitter didn’t want to really talk about how it picked these stories in the first place. In January, though, Twitter acquired personalized social news startup Summify and it looks like at least some of that company’s expertise is now flowing into Twitter’s own products.

This updated design for the Discover Tab will now also highlight who tweeted a particular story. This, says Twitter, will help users understand why each story it highlights matters to them. This will also make it easier for users to join into their friends’ conversation, as the new Discover tab also lets you reply, retweet and favorite these tweets.

Twitter will start rolling out this update today and plans to bring it to Twitter.com and its iOS and Android apps in the “coming weeks.” The company promises that it “will continue to work to make discover on Twitter a magical experience that brings you instantly closer to the information that matters most to you at the right time, any time.”

When John and I first chatted out the idea of an NYC-based TC meet-up, we expected around 500 attendees. Last week we hit the 700 mark, and today we’ve surpassed 1,000 RSVPs. Luckily, our fine sponsors have made sure that there’ll be enough beer and pizza for everyone.

But, we’re still going to need a little help.

Sure, John Biggs, myself, Chris Velazco, Matt Burns, Eric Eldon, Peter Ha, and Josh Zelman will be there to coordinate and run the event.

But we’ll also be busy hearing hundreds (or I guess thousands) of pitches, singing Karaoke, and throwing back beers. Which is why we need you! Four of you, to be specific.

Duties include handling the door, making sure the Pizza Party doesn’t get out of hand, helping set up the venue with banners and tables and such, and also drinking plenty of beer. That said, volunteers must be 21 or older. Oh, and the positions are unpaid. (I know, this makes us monsters. Monsters, Inc. if you will.)

If a night of tech startup Tom-foolery sounds like the perfect Tuesday evening, these are your instructions:

• Send an email to jordan (at) techcrunch (dot) com about why you should be part of our staff for the TC NYC Meet-Up
• Subject line of the email should read: TC MEETUP VOLUNTEER
• Your pitch should be no more than five sentences
• Jokes help

Here’s a refresh on the deets:

You can RSVP on our PlanCast page for the Meet-Up, which will go down on Tuesday, May 8 from 6pm-10pm at Bar 13 on 13th St. and University Pl.

And another look at our sponsors:

Yext helps provide amazing local search results with PowerListings, a local information hub that syncs listings across a network of premium sites and mobile apps. With Yext PowerListings, small and large businesses can quickly and easily update their business information, photos and specials from one central location. Today, Yext PowerListings syncs information for over 45,000 locations.

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With Traducto users can leverage human translation to translate documents, emails, newsletters, social postings, marketing materials and more. TraductoPro allows developers to convert iOS or Mac apps, into a multilingual application, making the app available to a wider global audience. By making it simple to localize your application and offering 16 different language translations, TraductoPro is designed to reduce the pain typically associated with localization. Our integrated approach combines automating app localization through direct Xcode integration, with a high quality human translation service all within a single application. TraductoPro offers support for content translations, app store metadata and Xcode projects localization.

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Parlor® is the creator of unique branded communication applications: GroupCall™, TopicTalk™ and MobiCast™. Our goal is to make useful tools to communicate globally, both efficiently and for free. We will be unleashing these three awesome applications on iOS and Android at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Follow us at http://Parlor.fm for news and updates.

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Return on Change (RoC) connects innovative startups and investors who are looking to change tomorrow’s world today. Entrepreneurs with great ideas need capital funding to jumpstart their businesses, and investors are looking to help fund the next big idea. RoC provides the online medium through which startup companies and entrepreneurs will be able to pool capital through crowdsourcing. For more information about Return on Change, please visit www.returnonchange.com or contact RoC at [email protected].

PeoplePerHour is Europe’s leading marketplace connecting startups and entrepreneurs to freelance talent worldwide and we’ve just landed in NYC! Project by project we’re awakening an enormous latent workforce, from the stay at home mom and the retiree to the moonlighter and the hobbyist, removing the constraints of the traditional 9-5 office. Be it for a quick logo design, building a website, copywriting or a small translation… we’re helping businesses keep their core lean and to get the job done fast. Our vision is for this to be the defining factor in the future of work.

TouchTunes Interactive Networks is the largest interactive out-of-home entertainment network in North America. TouchTunes provides entertainment and marketing solutions to 52,000 bars and restaurants. Founded in 1998, the network has become the largest of its kind with 54M monthly users who played more than 900 million songs in 2011. The TouchTunes mobile app allows consumers in bars, restaurants, hotels, retail and arenas to play any song from our catalog without having to leave their seat and is socially integrated. TouchTunes network is the largest digital out-of-home advertising network in the US (Nielsen) and includes TouchTunesTV, a unique screen-within-a-screen interactive television experience that provides custom advertising capabilities, venue promotions and social networking opportunities. TouchTunes is a privately held U.S. corporation with offices in New York City, Arlington Heights, Illinois and Montreal, Canada. For further information, please visit us at touchtunes.com.

CareZone has been busy discovering a few key markets since launching in February, chief executive Jonathan Schwartz tells me. And the results are good enough to warrant a big round of funding: nearly $13 million from New Enterprise Associates, Catamount Ventures, and Schwartz himself.

Founded as an intranet for people who are taking care of aging parents, children, or anyone else in need of special attention, it has connected with communities around autism, Parkinson’s disease, and other illnesses.

But the service, which includes user profiles, a message board, and features for tracking medicine consumption, is getting used in different ways by each group — that’s resulting in new directions for the product. “Each community we talk to gives us input about what’s unique. Those with Parkinson’s tend to take the same medicine and step up dosage over time. That’ll fold into medication tracking.”

Meanwhile, he says, “The autism community is much more subjective. It’s been vocal about wanting journal entries that can be tagged, to allow caregivers to note diet, behavior changes and other trends in a more subjective way.”

Usage patterns are also changing as the product matures. The average number of Beloveds [those being cared for] climbs over time, he says. “Now that you’re taking care of a child, you might as well use it to take care of dad.” The ratio of caregiver to beloveds starts off close to 1, but then goes up as the caregiver begins using it for more beloveds, or adds others to help them out. The communities themselves are also helping to drive new users, Schwartz adds, like Autism Speaks talking about it on its Facebook page.

So, the new funding. This first venture round is going towards engineer hiring in San Francisco and Seattle, and product and partner development. New features are coming, that include more granular security for managing your parent(s) bank accounts/passwords, and Spanish-language translation.

Also as a result of the funding, Schwartz (the former CEO of Sun Microsystems) is bringing on his old CTO, current NEA partner Greg Papadopolous. Catamount, meanwhile, is adding partner James Joaquin, who met Carezone’s other cofounder, Walter Smith, back when they both worked at Apple. So, an old crew is getting back together to go after a big problem — but something a little closer to home.

The HTC Titan II is a symbol for an excellent partnership. I love HTC hardware and I love Windows Phone. It should be a match made in heaven, but unfortunately it’s not.

John and I sat down in the studio yesterday with the giant 4.7-inch hunk of glass and plastic, and we came away with pretty negative sentiments toward the device.

John thinks it’s too big, which seems to be his usual complaint these days.

My argument is a bit more geeky. To start, the Titan II is made of soft-touch plastic, rather than the aluminum unibody frame we saw on the original Titan. This is actually not that big of a deal. Sure, I’d prefer aluminum, but HTC always finds a way to make sure its hardware feels premium, so that’s no biggie.

What I’m really perturbed by is the way that Windows Phone and HTC came together. First of all, Windows Phone requires its partners to build hardware with a 480×800 resolution. On the 4.3-inch Lumia 900, this is tolerable. On a 4.7-inch display like the Titan II, it’s not.

HTC busted out one of the first-ever double-digit MP phone cameras, at 16-megapixels. This is wonderful, and the camera works just fine, but I never found myself snapping a pic and saying, “Whoa!”. I had expected the doubling of our standard 8-megapixels to be immediately noticeable, but it wasn’t. Images didn’t look any crisper, and while the phone did a tad better in low-light settings, it simply didn’t live up to my expectations.

In short, we both give the Titan II a die.

Look for a full review later this week.

Social enterprise software maker Socialtext is today announcing having received strategic investment from Bedford Funding that will now see the service joining the Peoplefluent family of products. Bedford Funding, for those unaware, is a $1.4 billion tech investment fund and owner of Peoplefluent, the maker of Talent Management software for business customers.

Following the investment, Socialtext will be integrated into Peoplefluent’s own Human Capital Management (HCM) Suite, which focuses on offering tools to help companies recruit better. With the Socialtext integration, employees on the suite will be able to collaborate with each other and their greater enterprise, the company says.

Eugene Lee, Socialtext CEO, will remain CEO of Socialtext but will now report directly to Peoplefluent Chairman and CEO Charles S. Jones.

Founded in 2002, Socialtext was an early player in the social enterprise space, offering a number of products including a Yammer-like microblogging service, blogs, wikis, social profiles and spreadsheets. The company’s software has been offered both as a cloud service as well as an on-site appliance-based solution, and supports integration with traditional systems in the CRM and ERP space. To date, over 6,500 businesses have signed up for Socialtext, including Egon Zehnder, Getty Images, Symantec, Meredith Corporation, NYU Stern, OSIsoft, and Epitaph Records.

Peoplefluent, meanwhile, now supports over 5,100 organizations ranging from SMB shops to global corporations. The company today has 5 million users in 214 countries worldwide.

Since Socialtext is a private company, it chose to not disclose the terms of the deal. The company, however, had previously raised $19.4 million in funding from angels and VCs, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

As for why Socialtext is making the shift to join forces with Peoplefluent? The company says it was the right move in terms of being able to further grow the business. And for Peoplefluent, the investment was just a fit, says Mr. Jones. “We are investing in Socialtext to help solidify its leadership position in enterprise social software. Our recent strategies have focused on creating solutions for our customers that enable greater employee engagement and collaboration across the enterprise,” he says.

Both companies say they share a vision for a fully connected internal knowledge sharing network, and Bedford Funding saw this as a strategic investment that will help Peoplefluent fulfill its mobile social collaboration strategy in particular.

Socialtext will continue to operate under its brand name, and existing customers should not be impacted by the deal, the company reports.

Even though we still don’t know when RIM will get around to launching it, CEO Thorsten Heins gave us a few brief glimpses at what BlackBerry 10 would be able to do during his keynote address at the BlackBerry World conference.

But what’s that? You missed the keynote? Well, just for you, here’s the video that Heins played during his time on stage that shows off what the company’s forthcoming mobile operating system could look like when it officially launches later this year.

Now, there’s plenty of time for RIM to change things before the operating system officially debuts on a BlackBerry smartphone, but the teaser video shows off a handsome, simple UI that I hope makes it into the final builds.

How close the video actually comes to accurately depicting the current state of BlackBerry 10 is still up in the air though — the pre-release Dev Alpha device runs on a modified (not to mention stripped down) version of the PlayBook OS, and RIM’s Vivek Bhardwaj wouldn’t show off the newer software build on his own testing device when we visited RIM in Waterloo last week.

We’ve explored some of the features spotted in the video (like the keyboard) in a bit more depth too, so take a peek if you haven’t yet had your fill of BlackBerry 10′s new tricks.

Electronic Freedom Fighters and knee-jerk reactionaries: prepare your big drums because here comes the cause of the week. We learned about Gatekeeper, Apple’s app signing solution that ensures “rogue” apps can’t infect your computer, a few months ago when the company announced the coming of a new OS, Mountain Lion. Developers recently received a note reminding them to begin implementing Gatekeeper features or, well, nothing bad will happen:

There are two ways to think about this. As an IT guy, I see this as a golden ticket to malware-free machines. If my fleet of iMacs or Macbooks is protected – ostensibly – by Gatekeeper, I can rest easy knowing that no unsigned applications can run and ruin my machines. This obviously ignores the fact that there is very little malware for OSX anyway and that it’s trivial, provided you know the password, to bypass Gatekeeper. However, for the vast majority of my users it is a boon.

The “It’s My Machine” crowd will be up in arms because this now suggests there will be a time – maybe soon, maybe not so soon – that Apple will require everything to be signed. Imagine having to jailbreak your laptop and you get what they’re on about. It’s inconvenient, insulting, and patently silly.

Increased control over app installation is an acquired taste. If you weren’t actively using computers in the late 1990s and early aughts, you’d probably never see the horrors that much malware wreaked on Windows machines. The horrors of out-of-control DirectX extensions, nagging adware, and poorly-written spyware essentially forced programmers to ask permission for everything in later versions of Windows and OS X. And that’s fine. I’d rather be able to drop into the Terminal and futz around with my OSes core files while simultaneously being protected from junk apps that may try to steal or break my computer.

Computer users need to pick their battles wisely. It can be argued that Apple’s decision not to allow “homebrew” iOS apps has stifled innovation and you can also argue that the vast majority of iOS users neither care nor are aware of the homebrew scene. Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, homebrew finds a way. If past experience is evidential, the possibility that Apple will be able to totally lock down what you can and can’t install on your Macs is scant at best.

Windows 8 also has controls in place to ostensibly improve the experience. Although they aren’t signing apps – yet – it’s bound to happen.

Gatekeeper, like cod liver oil and Brussels sprouts, may go down rough but, in the end, I think it’s good for us.

Whether you have $10,000 or $10 million, trying to find help to manage your investments can be a minefield.

Mid-level financial advisory firms have come under scrutiny for somewhat shady practices — so even though you can certainly find very good advisers there, it can be a crap shoot. Meanwhile, many of the industry’s top-notch advisers deal only with the accounts of super wealthy people — and even then, it can be difficult to trust that they really know what they’re doing, and have your best interests in mind (as Mark Cuban has written, “If the broker had a clue, he/she wouldn’t be a broker, they would be on a beach somewhere.” Cheeky, but it kind of makes sense.) And each person’s financial situation is unique, so one-size-fits-all advice from books and websites on investing just don’t quite cut it.

Enter SigFig. Launching in public beta mode today, SigFig is a web application that tracks all of your various investments — bank accounts, 401k plans, IRAs, stock holdings, and the like — and gives tailored recommendations about your portfolio’s performance and changes that you could make. The software is really powerful, and the user interface design is super slick.

It’s a very visual product, so SigFig’s co-founders Mike Sha and Parker Conrad came to TechCrunch TV to give a detailed walk-through, which you can watch in full in the video embedded above (you can also click on the images embedded in this post to enlarge them.)

The Run-Down

Here’s how it works: You plug your brokerage accounts into SigFig, by giving it your usernames and passwords, a blind verification process during which SigFig never actually sees your personal sign-in data. SigFig also says it is encrypted by 256-bit SSL security, “the same level banks and brokerages use,” and is verified by three separate independent security firms.

For users, SigFig is completely free. The company makes money by taking a commission on new investments you decide to make through the site’s recommendations, but that’s not on a pay-to-play model. SigFig only surfaces what the best investments are based on their value, and funds can’t pay SigFig to have privileged ranking in recommendations.

Disrupting The Middlemen

In a way, it seems to me that SigFig is doing to the financial planning industry what airline and hotel booking websites such as Orbitz did to the travel planning industry back in the 1990s, and what property search sites such as Zillow and Trulia did to the real estate industry in the 2000s. It’s a space where individual gatekeepers — in this case, financial advisers and brokers — have held the information and power for far too long. The data itself should be free, and now that we have software that can help parse it, it can now go directly to consumers who can make their own decisions.

The thing is, SigFig does not completely want to rid the world of financial advisers. The site will refer you to local financial advisers that it has vetted, and it plans to add more to its network going forward.

In this way, it is more like Trulia and Zillow (which try to work with real estate agents, rather than replace them) than it is like flight and hotel search sites (which were pretty much the death knell of travel agents.) SigFig is a dashboard that lets you personally monitor your portfolio, whether or not you have a financial planner also managing it. It isn’t an either/or solution.

Timing Is Everything

The SigFig product is new, but the company has been around for a while: It’s the same team that made the financial Q&A site and portfolio tracker Wikinvest. The company, based in San Francisco, has raised $8 million in venture capital and has 40 full-time employees.

SigFig’s launch comes at a good time. Right now as tech IPOs abound, there are a good number of data-driven people who are coming into money. They’re no doubt being pitched by financial planners, and if they use them that’s great — but they may also want to use a tool like SigFig to keep a handle on their financial situation themselves.

SigFig provided TechCrunch with a number of invites to its beta mode, so go here if you want to check it out.

EXCLUSIVE-Startup Newvem, which offers a SaaS based service for Amazon/AWS customers that aims to help businesses spend less money and gain more value from Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, has raised $4 million in funding from Greylock Partners with participation from Index Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, as well as angel investors, including David Strohm, George Kadifa, and Maurice Werdegar. As part of this financing round, Greylock’s Erez Ofer is joining the Newvem board of directors.

Basically, Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics is a free SaaS solution for Amazon AWS customers, that provides a 360-degree view of AWS cloud usage, revealing issues and anomalies in their cloud, and recommending actionable insights that help solve not just cost efficiency, but security, availability, and utilization issues.

Newvem will analyze and determine whether a user’s environment is meeting expectations from a cost, availability and security perspective and detect and notify where it is not up to par. The app is built for Business Managers, IT Managers and Dev Ops to “get to know” their clouds, so they can better see what resources are being used and not used.

Cloud spending can be expensive and Newvem aims to help users pinpoint where to optimize their resource usage and budget consumption. Integrated with AWS, Newvem tracks down-to-the-minute resource usage, learns the behavior of every resource, and identifies service level variations and life-cycle events.

You can see some of the common mistakes that companies make when spending on Amazon Web Services here. These include picking oversized instances, provisioning too many instances, failing to make the right trade-offs when selecting instance types and leaving instances running idle.

In the future, Newvem will continuously and automatically gather numerous streams of cloud operational data, analyze and learn the usage patterns, automatically detecting potential problems, pinpointing anomalies, and identifying trends in cloud deployment. Basically, the startup analyzes all of this data from a multitude of sources and recommends where you can allocate or not allocate resources to optimize spending.

Newvem was founded by Zev Laderman, who has sold two IT companies, including Aduva to Sun Microsystems and Tradeum to VerticalNet; and Ilan Naslavsky; a former Lead Engineer at Sun.

Laderman tells us that since the launch of its free products, 300 customers are using KnowYourCloud Analytics, which is currently in private beta. The new funding will be used to build out the SaaS’ analytics engine to provide additional insights in what provides value for customers.

In the future, Newvem will be expanding to other public cloud services including Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, HP Openstack and others. “The plans are to take current service to to other public services but we still see so much growth in Amazon and are focused on becoming deeper and broader in analyzing AWS data,” Laderman explains. He adds that Newvem also want to tackle hybrid cloud platforms.

There are a number of startups that want to help companies save money on AWS and other cloud services. But Newvem has a compelling take on optimizing cloud spend, considering the data analysis angle. And the company calls their approach “analytics-driven cloud management.”

Get Satisfaction was built around the importance of community to businesses. Now, with the launch of a new product called Get Satisfaction Engage, it wants to make those communities embeddable anywhere.

Basically, Engage is a new architecture for Get Satisfaction widgets, turning them into customizable versions of a company’s Get Satisfaction community. People can browse the new widgets without leaving whatever web page they’re on. That means all the discussion among a company’s customers, users, and fans will become more useful to people who aren’t a part of that community — including in several contexts outside the customer support arena where Get Satisfaction first made its name.

“You can infuse conversation into all of your web assets,” says CEO Wendy Lea.

Lea walked me through a couple of use cases last week. For one, community can become a marketing tool, so that when people visit your website, they can browse through all the discussions about your brand and your products. Or it can become useful in e-commerce — where, at the moment if someone is thinking about buying a product, they can actually ask the community any lingering questions, and browse the questions that have been asked and answered already.

The Get Satisfaction team also showed me the new widget creation process. One of the goals, they said, was to make it possible to create the widget without going to your IT department for help. You choose from six different widget templates, select which community components to include, and customize the look to match your company’s branding. You can also hide certain types of content, so that, for example, visitors to your website don’t see complaints. The whole process should only take a few minutes, resulting in a few lines of code that you add to your site.

Engage is part of a larger strategy called Get Satisfaction Anywhere, which aims to bring customer engagement to, yes, anywhere on the Web. One of the next steps, Lea says, is build more integration with CRM products.

Get Satisfaction says there are now more than 4 million people participating in 65,000 communities. For existing customers, Get Satisfaction plans to support the existing widget architecture for another six months while companies migrate to the new system.