Category: Tech news

Tumblr President John Maloney just posted (on his Tumblr, natch) that he’s stepping down from a day-to-day operational role at the company.

“It’s the right time for me and a good time for Tumblr,” Maloney writes. “We’re in great hands with David and the excellent leadership team we’ve built.”

However, he says he will stay involved in what sounds like an advisory role: “The transition from running ops is effective immediately, but I’m sticking close w/ [founder and CEO David Karp], the team and company. There’s more work to do and I want to help see it thru”.

Maloney became president of Tumblr in 2008, but his history with Karp goes back further — before starting Tumblr, Karp worked at Maloney’s startup UrbanBaby.

Oh, and Maloney also says that “the team will ship some awesome new stuff next week.” He doesn’t say what that will be, but he could be referring to the new paid promotional units that Karp mentioned would launch on May 2. (Random note: A Tumblr spokesperson previously told me that it’s not an “ad unit per se” but rather “a package of native promotion for the Tumblr post.”)

Spanning, which already offers a backup service for Google Apps, is now riding the coattails of Google Drive, promising to help people see, “What’s in your Google Drive?”

Two days after the Drive announcement, Spanning released a free tool called Spanning Stats that analyzes your Google Drive account. The company says its report provides data including the percentage documents in your Google Drive by type, the 10 newest and oldest files, how much of the total storage quota you’re using by file type, the 10 biggest files, and the 10 users using the most storage space.

It sounds like there were people who really wanted to see those charts and graphs. The company now says that people have used Spanning Stats to scan 25,000 Google Drives. The app is now listed as one of the top installs in the Google Apps Marketplace and the number one install in the Document Management category.

That probably also reflects the initial excitement about Google Drive. In fact, after the announcement, the the data uploaded to Google Docs by Spanning users exploded — before the announcement, the average amount per day was 5 megabytes, but on the day Google Drive launched it went up to 36.8 megabytes, and then 22.6 megabytes the next day.

It’s a Friday afternoon (in some parts of the world, at least), so go ahead — take a nice long drink of your favorite alcoholic beverage. If you’re like me, you’ll need it to make it through the CNBC interview with the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss that aired today. It is embedded above for your viewing pleasure, complete with CNBC reporters asking for the Winklevii’s autographs and all. Really, drink up.

Anyway. On air today, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin talked with everyone’s favorite Harvard grads cum Olympic athletes cum Mark Zuckerberg nemeses about their latest foray into the tech startup space as individuals with significant financial reserves and no apparent engineering credentials. They’re becoming venture capitalists.

The VC Gold Rush

As PandoDaily’s Paul Carr has quite humorously written, this is just one example of the larger VC boom that’s happening: “In the coming weeks and months, I look forward to headlines about: An infant who has decided to call herself a VC. A robot that has decided to call itself a VC. A duck that has decided to call itself a VC. An infant robot duck that has decided to call itself a VC.” The Next Web’s Drew Olanoff had a good point about their prospects as well: “Personally, I’d rather take money from the guy who played them [in The Social Network movie], Armie Hammer.”

But we really shouldn’t take away from the Winklevii’s vision preemptively. It’s entirely possible they have deeper insights into this whole space than many realize. “We think the cloud is going to be huge,” Tyler Winklevoss told Sorkin today, after all. They’re focusing on “early stage disruptive startups” who are “shifting the paradigm.” I mean, Marc Andreessen, watch your back.

It’s Not Actually All Bad

OK, all snark aside. Like it or not, this really is just the beginning. The Winklevii have actually had their hands in the web world in one way or another for years — so if Silicon Valley peeps are feeling appalled at them jumping into the scene full time, they should really brace themselves for what’s coming in the future.

Wall Street isn’t as lucrative as it once was– and for many years, the most ambitious, savvy, money-oriented people from top universities just went straight into investment banking. Now that those jobs have dwindled and seem unlikely to make a resurgence anytime soon, those same people are now heading west and hitching their wagons to the tech industry’s star.

I actually think that this shift away from Wall Street and into Silicon Valley is a good thing, on the whole. The best and brightest young people in our society have been going into the finance world for far too long. And whatever we think of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in particular, they are part of a larger class of people who have made the business world go around for many years: They’re well-educated, quite intelligent, and clearly don’t give up without a fight. It’ll be interesting to see how much more the tech industry goes into turbo-drive as more of these types enter the fray.

Google Glass isn’t the only game in town.

Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, just raised $7.6 million in a round co-led by Founders Fund. The other notable firm in the deal isn’t disclosed, but we hear through a source that it’s Khosla Ventures.

Misfit isn’t saying too much about what it’s working on, except to say that the next generation of wearable devices shouldn’t compete with fashion, has to be ambient and has to have functions outside of sensing. It has to be the kind of thing a consumer wouldn’t need to remember to wear and ideally, it would be something that’s so critical that a person would go back home if they left it there.

“Wearables from the 1.0 era make people look like Iron Man,” said chief executive Sonny Vu.

The name of the company has a super-interesting backstory. Up until last fall, Vu, Sculley and his Agamatrix co-founder Sridhar Iyengar, were tossing around some pretty lackluster name ideas like Etherware. He, Iyengar and Sculley were sitting around at a table at the Rosewood on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, having trouble deciding when news flashed that Steve Jobs had passed away.

“It was a real shame we never got them together after John’s departure from Apple, so we decided to name the company in honor of Steve,” Vu said.

The name Misfit Wearables is inspired by the opening line in the famous 1997 Apple commercial that launched the “Think Different” slogan: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.”

The other thing that’s notable about the company is the team. Vu and Iyengar co-founded Agamatrix. It isn’t a household name in Silicon Valley, but it made the first medical device add-on that Apple approved for the iPhone. It’s a glucose meter that diabetes patients use to test their blood sugar levels regularly.

Over 10 years, Vu and Iyengar built it into a business that makes between $50 and 100 million per year through the sale of glucose test strips. The two of them started tinkering with glucose sensing technology, and found a way that was twice as accurate as the leading technology on the market purely through better math. Vu said since most research and development teams working on glucose sensing were led by biologists, his team could fix inefficiencies that experts from other disciplines couldn’t see. When Agamatrix originally entered the market, there were more than 30 competing products. Yet they managed to gain a foothold.

Then when the iPhone came out, they dreamed up a new concept: a glucose meter that would upload and track a patient’s blood sugar levels through an app. It took nine months of back-and-forth with Apple to get approved it for the iPhone. It also took a few years for them to get insurance companies and Medicare to cover the cost of glucose meters for diabetes patients. The FDA cleared it last December and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis now markets it under the name iBG Star.

So for all of you who might complain about how hard it is start a mobile or Facebook app company, this was crazy hard!

Vu says he’s using the new round of funding to grow his team. He’s relocating to San Francisco from Boston where he’ll build a hardware and industrial design team locally. Then, interestingly enough, Misfit’s software team is located in Vietnam, because Vu found some world-class machine learning experts there that were trained in good U.S. technical Ph.D. programs like the one at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. (Honestly, this isn’t so crazy though. I run into companies every week that have serious development studios in Eastern Europe, Pakistan and East Asia.)

“We’re doing algorithms (machine learning) and app development in Vietnam because of speed, not just cost,” Vu said. “There’s lots of this kind of talent in Silicon Valley but they’re just not readily available, at least not to newcomers like us.”

MLOVE is a European mobile conference with a difference. If a mobile conference was crossed with TED and a music festival, that’s vaguely like MLove. Its big annual event is in an old East German castle 200 miles outside of Berlin. Yes, it’s as exotic as it sounds. But this week it took the plunge and brought its special atmosphere to Monterey.

Amid the excellent speeches about the future of mobile, and the future generally, organiser Harald Neidhardt throws together a diverse range of speakers, from Grammy Award winning Musician Chamillionaire to “CameraGirl”, who runs tech at Burning Man. As one delegate, Dr. Robert Daubner of billiger, put it to me, “mobile is poised to disrupt the world.” Never were truer words spoken…

Amid the high concept presentations from the likes of the Singularity University and others were a number of startup pitches from U.S.-based startups. Here’s a run-down on those:

House of Mikko
They say: Only 9% of women are completely happy with their looks, thus, $98 billion is spent annually on beauty. House of Mikko wants to be a “social beauty” store, selling curated beauty items based on physical features and the wisdom of the crowd. Via an app which incorporates barcode Scanning and the Face.com API. The app is designed to personalise a woman’s look, and make beauty products more social.
We say: It’s early days for this app but it sounds like it’s on the right track. But there’s a lot of noise out there in this space.

ArtKollect
They say: ArtKollect has developed a mobile framework that connects new collectors and art enthusiasts with galleries, museums, and art fairs. The idea is that galleries, or developers attached to them use this platform to create their own unique app for the gallery. There’s a one-time set-up fee $800 – $1600 and monthly license and storage fee, plus they take 2.5% of sales made via the app. Wow.
We say: Nice idea, but this would be better off disrupting the galleries first.

Marvin
They say: This makes malware detection quicker, more effective, and is scalable on Android with automated analysis of apps as they are downloaded to a handset. Very much aimed at the enterprise. So, an employee downloads a new app, the app is locked on the device by Marvin and sent to the Marvin cloud for analysis. Then the App is unlocked or removed based on Marvin analysis results.
We say: Very much in the Bring Your Own Device trend, this looked like a convincing enterprise play.

HereOnBiz
They say: Think Highlig.ht or Banjo, but this time for LinkedIn business networking professionals. It’s location based it’s all about .biz! Definitely one to try out at your next conference in Atlanta.
We say: There will be lots of ‘Highlight for business” apps right about… now. However, they have a chance if they get out early and the design it good.

Embee mobile
They say: It’s about earning free mobile minutes through marketing. Blyk Mobile tried this and failed, but Embee reckons it can crack this sucker. Embee Mobile connects brands, operators and mobile users in a way that allows phone owners to get minutes for free by participating in marketing… all through a Facebook application. The mobile app is on its way.
We say: Blyk failed because it needs lots more users. But then again, it was pre-social media. Embee has a chance if it can create a good viral loop, and also not come across as too spammy.

Google TV, the company’s first serious foray into the living room, hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. That doesn’t mean Google has given up, though. Far from it. While there hasn’t been much news about Google TV itself lately, the YouTube app for Google TV is getting an update today. Google says that its developers have “been working like it’s a 24/7 hackathon over here to bring all of YouTube to your Google TV.” With this update, the developers have added recommendations, a Google+ button and the ability to search for channels. The new version now also handles suddenly drops in bandwidth more gracefully.

For users who previously had to suffer from constantly buffering video, this update should be a welcome relief. YouTube for Google TV now automatically detects when there is suddenly less bandwidth available for it and switched to a lower resolution instead of rebuffing.

Given that Google is building Google+ into each one of its products, it doesn’t come as a surprise that this app is getting some Google+ love, too. You can now +1 videos from the app, though it doesn’t look like you can actually share videos from the app (+1′s appear on your profile and in search results, but not in your main Google+ stream).

Adding recommendations and channel search to the app is a logical next step for Google. YouTube put a very strong emphasis on channels in the latest version of its desktop service, so making these channels easier to find on the TV makes sense.

It’s an interesting story.

One day, Dave Carroll was taking a flight with his band-mates on United Airlines. When he landed at his destination, he noticed that United staff were throwing his $3,500 Taylor guitar around, and ultimately, damaging it pretty badly.

When United did nothing to help, Carroll took matters into his own hands with the help of a little video sharing site called YouTube.

His music video, “United Breaks Guitars,” took off like a rocket, and after realizing the power of social media, he joined up with his other co-founders to build Gripevine.

The service basically connects customers with businesses when they have customer service issues. Businesses can sign up to hear complaints and resolve them in an open, transparent fashion. Not only does the consumer get a chance to voice their issue to the company and the world, but the company gets the chance to make it up to the user publicly.

It’s a win-win.

Restaurants just love to put Flash intros with auto-playing music and animations on their front pages. If you are trying to look at one of these sites on your mobile browser without Flash, chances are there is no way to bypass the animation and get to the information you want because the complete site was designed in Flash.

It’s not just these obnoxious animations that make accessing restaurant websites on the go a hassle, though. According to a new study by Restaurant Science, a restaurant industry information and analytics provider, only one out of eight full service restaurant chains and a depressing one out of twenty independent restaurants have a mobile website. What makes this even worse is that according to some reports, half of all visits to restaurant websites are from mobile devices.

Not having a mobile site may be forgivable for some small family businesses (though restaurant chains really should know better at this point), but the bad news doesn’t end there. More than half of the restaurants surveyed in this study didn’t even have a website to begin with (the researchers actually called all these restaurants to make sure they really weren’t online).

What most users – mobile or not – really want from a restaurants site is probably to look at a menu. According to this study, though, fewer than 40% of independent restaurants actually display their menus on their website.

Compared to other businesses, the study argues, restaurants still have a long way to go in using the potential of the Internet. That doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody who has ever tried to use restaurant websites on a mobile phone, but it’s still rather shocking that so many restaurateurs just don’t get how important their websites are for their businesses.

With the announcement that the Kindle Fire has grabbed 54.4% of the Android Tablet market, it’s clear to see that Amazon’s Trojan Horse strategy paid off. As I wrote back in December, the Fire is Amazon’s way of making all of their offerings “real.” Movies, books, and games were Amazon’s core competency back when all of that stuff was on disks and on paper and that core competency is repurposed now for the Information Age.

That’s what all of the other Android tablet makers missed: people don’t want general-purpose devices anymore or at least general-purpose devices in tablet form. There is little need to be “productive” on a tablet when consumption is why most people buy them. Sure someone out there is SSHing into their servers and editing documents in Pages, but the average user plops down on the couch with the iPad and calls up some IMDB or some NSFW Reddit, not a text editor.

The laptop is the last general-purpose mobile device left out there and unless you’re a full bore Open Source user, your laptop is barely your own to begin with. With more and more data migrating to the cloud, the vision of ChromeOS’ refusal to acknowledge local storage may soon be ubiquitous.

What Amazon knew is that nobody cares about tablets. They care about the things they represent. The iPad represents iTunes and its attendant media sources. The Kindle represents books. The GalTab? The Transformer? What do those represent? Angry Birds?

There are plenty who will disagree, citing all of the exciting things they’re doing with their tablets. But what is the tablet you’re going to give for someone’s birthday or a holiday? It’s not the latest from Asus unless that’s definitely on your list. Instead, the use case will trump speeds and feeds and the price will win the day: “______ likes to read, so I’ll get her this Kindle Fire. We can maybe watch a movie on it.”

Once Amazon has all that hardware in the wild, then the real change happens. The Fire gets an upgrade – maybe adds some sharing features, maybe a better screen – and all of a sudden we have a two horse race where once there was a herd. Considering no other Android tablet can touch Amazon’s market share, it won’t be long before Google will be pointing to the Kindle as their Android success story.

Sony’s Android-powered Xperia Play debuted to mixed reviews last year, but according to a newly published patent, Sony was apparently toying with the idea of making something much more interesting before settling on the design they ran with.

Not content with a single physical keypad meant strictly for gaming, the images associated with the patent depict a Sony smartphone with two of them — one with the game controls we’ve become familiar with, and another with a full QWERTY keyboard that would slide down over the game pad.

The company first filed for the patent back in October 2010 (back when they were still Sony Ericsson), just days before Engadget first published their spy shots of what we now know as the Xperia Play. There’s no way of knowing how close a device like this got to actual production, but I’d wager it didn’t last too long before Sony Ericsson’s design and production team passed it over because of the problems it could potentially raise.

On a basic level, more moving parts means more things that could potentially break, but there’s an even more pressing issue than that. Practically speaking, this thing would’ve been a chubby little beast — the Xperia Play isn’t a particularly thin device as it is, so who knows how hefty a device with two slide-out keyboards would have been had it ever seen the light of day.

Still, I can’t help but love the concept — though developers are crafting amazing experiences that are well-suited for touchscreens, some games just work better when a physical control scheme is part of the mix (anyone who’s tried playing the recently released Marvel vs. Capcom 2 on their iPhone would probably agree with me). The chances of Sony Mobile bringing a device like this to market aren’t nil though — after all, they already seem set on delivering phones with some wacky features.

Photos by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

As more athletes embrace the ethos of good-form running, the trend of barefoot-inspired footwear is spilling over into new areas. The craze that started on the beach soon moved to the streets and sidewalks, then the trails and mountains. Now, it’s landed on the sofa.

The NewSky is an everyday, around-the-house barefoot shoe from New Balance — a company that already makes a raft of barefoot shoes for running on the pavement and in the hills. The NewSky is designed to be worn as a minimalist recovery shoe, not a running shoe. You change into them when you get home from your run — presumably one you just completed while wearing some other minimalist model.

It’s minimalist in another sense, too, since it makes extensive use of post-consumer recycled materials. The shoe’s upper is fabricated using 95 percent post-consumer recycled PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, and the outsole is held in place with a layer of water-based glue. On average, each pair of NewSkys uses the equivalent of eight 20-ounce PET bottles.

The NewSky also uses the absolute minimum amount of material necessary to craft a piece of footwear, and ends up using 73 percent less material than the average New Balance running shoe. You can see this in how slender the NewSky is, and you can feel it when you pick it up. It’s extremely lightweight — the women’s size 7 weighs in at 4.1 ounces.

The design is stylish almost to the point of being elegant, at least for a sneaker. The PET fabric resembles dark grey felt. Unlike felt, it has a stiffness that wears well and shows great stain resistance. My tester shoes have remained new-looking for the past month, and I’ve worn them more frequently than any other shoe in my closet. The fabric seems to fold or crease rather than wrinkle. Laces are either black, or a contrasting color that provides a visual pop when matched with the color of the outsole and sole. While wearing these around, I’ve received compliments from people as varied as twenty-something hipsters to my 90-year-old grandfather.

The shoe earns as many points for comfort as it does for style. The foam sole has a 4mm drop from heel to toe, similar to the New Balance Minimus and many other barefoot-style running shoes. Prior to receiving this pair of NewSkys, not having seen the design in person but knowing it’s meant to be worn as a recovery shoe, I was expecting the sole to resemble the Nike Free. The sole is actually much different in that it is very minimal and just padded enough for wearing as an everyday shoe. The parts of the shoe that contact the ground are made of EVA nubs.

The end result is something that just feels really good. And not only are they supremely comfy to wear, they’re smart-looking and sustainable. An all-around winner.

WIRED Eco-minded construction uses recycled materials. 4mm drop makes them a perfect after-run shoe for barefoot enthusiasts. Extremely comfortable. Subtle, minimal styling. So much the bomb, I wrapped a pair up and gave them to my Pop as a gift. ‘Nuff said.

TIRED It’s hard to rag on these shoes, but the color selection could be better — the post-consumer PET construction limits choices to a few subdued grays.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Homescool’s With Teeth jacket. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Given the warm winter most of us have been suffering through on the west coast, it’s a miracle we got the chance to test any snowboard equipment at all this year.

But the powder finally arrived (however late), and even though it’s deep into April, we’ve got at least a month of rideable backcountry stuff here in California and desinations north. So I took to the trees to test a clothing system from Homeschool Snowboarding. The company will have some new clothing arriving for the 2013 season, but it’s keeping these pieces I rode — a jacket, a pair of pants, a fleece hoodie and a two-piece base layer — in the line for next year.

Homeschool is based in Oregon, which is known for its particularly wet mountain conditions — the slopes can get socked with fog and pelted with rain even in the depths of winter. You can buy its gear in places where the weather isn’t as harsh, but Homeschool sticks to its hometown roots by making clothes tuned for optimal breathability in any conditions.

Homeschool’s line of snowboarding-specific winter wear uses Cocona, a material that infuses cloth fibers with active carbon particles derived from recycled coconut shells. This is used in lieu of supposedly less-breathable fabrics like Gore-Tex. Homeschool’s Continuum Trifecta, a combination of Cocona-based outer shell, base layer, and mid layer, is designed to keep riders warm, dry, and comfortable on any mountain, regardless of how crappy the forecast is.

Base Layers: Airbreather Moto Top and Airbreather Pant

Designed to insulate, wick away sweat, and stay odor-free, the Airbreather top ($65) and pant ($60) base layers represent the first part of the Continuum Trifecta. As the against-the-skin layer, the four-way stretch material felt nice and soft, and it did breathe well. The waffle-pattern inner layer was effective at keeping me sweat-free where it made contact, but the Airbreather’s loose fit hampered the fabric’s ability to wick away sweat efficiently. The odor-resistance was underwhelming as well — the bases needed a wash after their second use.

WIRED Soft to the touch. Breathable. Colorful print is pretty sweet.

TIRED Too loose to effectively wick sweat. Odor resistance is not so… resistant.

Mid Layer: Shevil Full-zip Cocona Fleece

Level two of the Trifecta, the Shevil full-zip fleece hoody ($85) keeps flying the breathability flag; the Cocona polyester and stretch-poly mid layer is extremely comfortable and, yes, it breathes very well. The hood is big enough to fit over a helmet or make you look like a badass, and the cut is slim enough to let it fit underneath an outer shell with no problem. It’s fairly thin as far as insulating layers go, so if you’re riding in extremely cold conditions or you’ve just got thin blood, you may want to look for a thicker layer. The Shevil also represents a leap above the Airbreathers base layer clothes when it comes to odor-resistance — the fleece went through weeks of wear before it needed a wash. Hey, someone’s gotta test it.

WIRED Breathable. Very odor-resistant. Large hood is comfortable.

TIRED Too thin for frigid weather. Lacking a chest pocket, or zippered pockets.

Outerwear: With Teeth jacket and Revolve pant

HomeSchool’s most impressive offerings are its outerwear pieces. The With Teeth 2.5-layer jacket ($325) and the Revolve 2.5-layer pant ($275) are both made of Cocona Xcelerator material, which is breathable while staying fully waterproof. Both the jacket and pants have a much softer feel than you’d expect from a shell, and an inner mesh layer helps retain some warmth. Beneath a simple, low-profile outer design lies a wealth of details riders will appreciate: magnetic pocket closures, elastic cuff bands that are easy to use with gloves on, and a hood with a wind-blocking faceguard, which kept my lips from going numb on the mountain. The Xcelerator material was weatherproof, and combined with taped seams, powder skirt and Riri Aquazip zippers, the jacket and pants shed snow and the occasional rainfall with no problems. The big story, though, is how breathable this stuff is — this may be the most breathable set of snowboarding shells I’ve ever worn. Excess heat was never an issue, even on snowshoe hikes up in the backcountry. Whatever the material couldn’t breathe, the shells’ wide zip vents did. The Revolve and With Teeth felt phenomenal in conditions ranging from whiteout to bluebird.

WIRED Extremely breathable. Soft touch. Excellent styling with smart design features inside.

TIRED Waterproof zippers tend to stick before they’re broken in.

Homescool’s Airbreather base layer system. Photos by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Photo: Greg Broom

Photos by Greg Broom

Photo by Greg Broom/Wired

The deliberate ritual of single-serving, hand-poured coffee works great for a lazy Sunday. But come Monday, most of us reach for a machine.

The Bodum Bistro offers artisan-quality brew to the convenience-seeking masses with a shower-head top that sprays the water slowly and evenly. The coffee seeps through a stainless-steel mesh filter and into a 40-ounce carafe that’s double walled for insulation. (Aficionados say hot plates add bitterness.)

In our blind taste tests, the benefits were fairly modest: The Bistro beat traditional drip makers for light- and medium-roast coffees, but we couldn’t tell the difference with dark roasts.

WIRED Minimalist design. Faster than most drip makers. Carafe stays cool to the touch.

TIRED No timer. Nearly 16 inches tall — a tight fit under kitchen cabinets. Better than traditional drip, but not two Benjamins better.