Category: Tech news

The most interesting part of Amazon’s move to provide an in-app payments flow is that they’re ceding pricing control to mobile developers.

Amazon has been testing a new in-app payments system with several top-tier mobile developers for several months. It’s a big deal because there has been a huge shift over the last 18 months toward giving away apps for free instead of selling them for a dollar or more. This move would bring Amazon’s Android appstore closer to parity with Google and Apple’s stores for developers.

But the part worth noting isn’t that Amazon will offer an in-app purchases flow. It’s obvious that they would do that, given their experience in online payments and commerce and need to compete with Google’s app store. In fact, I have no idea why Bloomberg decided to report this story now, since top-tier game developers have been using Amazon to process in-app purchases since last fall. I even discussed this on-stage with developers at a conference in February. So this story is actually several months old. (Weird.)

The part worth pointing out is that Amazon is letting developers set their own prices for virtual currency and digital content. Developers set the prices and Amazon takes a 30 percent revenue share, a split that seems benchmarked off the precedent Apple set, according to conversations I’ve had with developers in the beta.

It’s a departure from the strategy the e-commerce giant tried to pursue last year. The Seattle-based company has historically fought to control the prices at which it sells both physical and digital goods as a way to undercut online and brick-and-mortar rivals.

When Amazon opened the developer portal about a year ago, it set a very unusual pricing policy for paid apps. Mobile developers couldn’t set the final prices of their apps. They would either earn 70 percent of the sale price (what Amazon actually sold the app for) or 20 percent of the developer’s desired price (whichever was higher).

Needless to say, this pissed off many developers. The International Game Developers Association lambasted Amazon’s policy a year ago, saying that “Amazon has little incentive not to use a developer’s content as a weapon with which to capture marketshare from competing app stores.”

Now it looks like Amazon is giving developers a little bit more control.

So why do in-app purchases get a special exception?

Because in-game economies are very painstakingly designed and calibrated to make sure there is an even balance between currency sources and sinks. Developers have to make sure a user’s progression through a game seems natural and addictive at the same time.

Letting someone else discount your in-app purchases at will would destroy this delicate balance. It would basically be unpalatable to game developers, who would forgo Amazon and just stick to Google Play or iTunes. It would mean that Amazon would forfeit the most lucrative part of the app economy — gaming.

Amazon hasn’t formally confirmed the beta or the revenue share. The store’s terms of service for developers still have no mention of in-app purchases, unlike Apple and Google which both issue restrictions. On iOS, developers have to use Apple for in-app purchases of digital content. Google has a list of “authorized payment processors,” which really means Google Checkout (er, Wallet) although the company hasn’t appeared to start enforcing it until this year.

The next interesting policy question for Amazon is whether this flat revenue share and pricing control extends to other types of in-app purchases. Like media subscriptions. (Cough.)

Google has rolled out a great number of small changes to the search engine and UI over the last month, and now they have rolled them all into a big blog post for your consecutive enjoyment.

We’ve highlighted a few that seemed more relevant, but there isn’t much here that’s life-changing. All the same, it’s good to stay up on changes like this, just in case you happen to do SEO for a living (scoundrel).

• “+” is now treated as a normal character when that seems to be the intent, along with %, $, \, ., @, and #. Its days as an operator are probably over, though, except when you’re using it in an equation.
• Changing your password now logs you out from all your Google stuff, including Search.
• Better answers and live scores for Tennis, Russian Hockey, and UEFA Champions League games.
• Platform-specific results for app search – so if you search for Angry Birds, you’ll get different results on Android, iOS, and so on. Results are also richer, with stars, download buttons, and so on.
• The “Freshness” update that brought recent and differently-organized results to News searches has been rolled out more generally, apparently as a result of having acquired the “machine resources” to do so.
• Image search has gotten a handful up updates, including relevancy, better ratings for the quality of the source page (fewer trash pages google-bombing with popular images, presumably), and Safesearch changes.
• The +1 button will show in search results in more countries and domains.

The rest of the list can be found at Google’s Inside Search blog.

[image source]

Now that 9pm has rolled around and the awkwardly timed embargo has lifted, I can finally talk to you guys about the phone I’ve been playing with for the past week: the Nokia Lumia 900.

I’m not going to get too detailed, as a full review and a head-to-head battle will go live in the coming days, but I wanted to hit you guys with initial impressions as early as possible. To put it plainly, I think this is a swell phone.

The Lumia 900 has a fresh look that we’re really not seeing anywhere else, with a matte finish and rounded edges. I found the hardware to be bulkier than usual, but it’s also really comfortable and feels solid and sturdy in the hand. I also can’t get enough of this matte finish. Phones these days are growing increasingly plastic-y and that soft-touch matte puts the Lumia 900 a step ahead in terms of premium feel.

Windows Phone, as per usual, is a joy. Nokia has thrown some fun apps into the mix to make sure that your transition over to WP7 is smooth, including a Contacts Transfer app. Of course, AT&T has also thrown in some bloatware including AT&T Navigator, U-Verse Mobile, and Radio.

The camera is pretty quick to snap pictures, and I really appreciate the physical shutter button, but I definitely wouldn’t call this the best camera in the world. Color reproduction is the biggest issue I have — things just end up looking a bit yellow. On the other hand, I love the UI for the camera app with swipe-to-gallery functionality and a clean, navigable interface.

When all is said and done, I think the display will be the deciding factor for many. Microsoft and Nokia are aiming this phone squarely at smartphone noobs, who really won’t give a damn if the 480×800 resolution is a bit skimpy for a 4.3-inch display. And even people who bought the Galaxy S II a few months ago (or anything released around the same time) probably won’t take issue with the pixel density as it’s exactly the same between the two handsets.

However, if you just bought a Rezound or Galaxy Nexus (both 720p displays) and want to swap it out for a Lumia 900 for whatever reason, prepare your eyes for something a bit more pixelated.

All in all, I think this phone has great potential. It’s quick, elegant, brings something fresh to the table by way of Windows Phone, and is going for a ridiculously cheap price point. So if this sounds like it may float your boat, get ready to hand over $100 in exchange for a Lumia 900 and two years of marriage to AT&T once April 8 rolls around.

In the hullabaloo over Mike Daisey lying about meeting injured workers, the spotlight turned from actual employment problems in Asia onto the face of the orotund and penitent former colonialist. Now that the news cycle has passed, we’re no longer interested in the topic of Chinese manufacturing and, judging by the positive response to my April Fools’ post on Sunday, the world now understands assembly work to be a good if tedious form of employment.

But the problems Daisey seemed to fabricate do exist. He just didn’t do the legwork to see them. I’ve personally been to factories where OSHA is just a four-letter word and ISO standards are paid little more than lip service. And the factories I saw were relatively good and considered reputable suppliers by Westerners in town. After seeing these I wondered “If these are the good ones, what are the bad ones like?”

We’re slowly finding out, with or without Daisey’s histrionics.

Arguably the process of making anything isn’t very glamorous, but compared to what could be in China, other parts of Asia and, in fact the rest of the developed and undeveloped world, Foxconn is a relative paradise. Workers are given room and board, a stipend to live off-campus if they want, and workers often want more work, not less. Foxconn is on par with any manufacturing center anywhere else in the world, including the U.S. The only difference, obviously, is the pittance workers are paid.

Then there’s everything else. Consider this excellent series on China’s Bloody Factories where much of the junk we consume is made and a number of the workers are injured and poisoned. Many of these factories are in the same district as Foxconn’s factories and, as Adam Matthews notes, many of these factories are shanzai – literally “bandit or warlord village” workshops – and unregistered. There is little expectation in terms of safety and comfort at these factories.

So there’s your smoking gun. There’s your crab-clawed worker tapping at the iPad. A woman who was poisoned because her employers ignored or didn’t understand the dangers of various chemicals. It happens, it will continue to happen, but it won’t happen under the bright spotlight of world attention that is being shone on Foxconn specifically.

It is worse on the margins, where capitalistic urges encourage playing fast and loose with human life. I remember my grandmother telling me a story about how she used to work at the glove factory near Wheeling, West Virginia. The ladies there sewed glove after glove, hour after hour, making a pittance. It was summer and the bosses, prepping for fall, wanted as many gloves as they could get. And so they made the women work in sweltering conditions. They gave out salt pills to help avoid heat exhaustion, but the women fainted anyway, succumbing to the season.

That’s all over now. That sort of manufacturing is gone, wiped out by legislation, unions, and common sense. Sadly, China is far from the time when workers can unite and fight back. That time is coming, and Daisey probably did more to hinder its coming than any other activist, here or abroad.

Well, we’ve said it before: Technology is changing education. It’s flipping the classroom, bringing instructional videos to the masses, and dragging online higher education into legitimacy. Investors have begun to hear the call, as was evidenced today when Benchmark Capital made its largest seed investment to date — $25 million — in a startup/university called The Minerva Project.

Sure, it’s not quite the $41 million Color raised pre-launch, but it’s certainly head-turning for an education startup. Hopefully it can avoid the rough early start and crushing expectations that come along with big seed rounds. To help it take flight, the startup is announcing that Larry Summers, former Harvard President and U.S. Secretary of Treasury will chair its advisory board.

At first blush, with this kind of big, early funding, well-known names, and outsized ambition, the project is intriguing to say the least, if not full of bravado. What do I mean? Well, describing itself as “the first elite American University to be launched in more than a century,” The Minerva Project is aiming to rethink the role of colleges and universities, taking into account the ways in which the Web has completely altered the distribution of and access to information.

Minerva Founder and CEO Ben Nelson (who is also the former CEO of Snapfish) points out the fact that the resources of the country’s elite universities are already constrained, as he cites the example of Yale, which recently made the decision to add 250 students to its incoming class. Doing so cost the top university a quarter of a billion dollars. Albeit just one example, the tuition rates at both colleges and universities is rising, saddling students with debt that often takes years, if not decades, to pay off.

By creating an educational experience that is built from online resources, Nelson says that Minerva won’t be subject to the same scarcity of resources that besets institutions today. Of course, it’s always easier to be the metaphorical new kid in school and stand on the shoulders of giants, even if those giants are getting old. An online approach to education also means that Minerva will be offering a tuition that the CEO says “is half of what it is for top colleges.”

What else is it about this new project that has attracted the attention of investors and financial gurus like Larry Summers? The Minerva Project aims to offer a liberal arts education that is defined by an “extraordinarily rigorous” learning and admissions process. Not only does Minerva want to attract the same bright young minds that attend Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, it wants a global student body, both at home and abroad.

Nelson says that he envisions it like this: Just like traditional institutions, Minerva will be a four-year university, with two semesters, and four classes per semester. But, for the first year, Minerva students will live in their home countries, learning the core curriculum, so that by their sophomore year, in spite of language differences, all the students will have the same basics.

Then, from the start of their sophomore year through graduation, students will be encouraged to live in a new country (or at the very least, a new city) every semester. In this way, Minerva wants its education to be informed by experience and by the resources available online: “We’re not going to offer a single foreign language class, but if you’re not trilingual by the end of your four years, you won’t graduate,” Nelson says.

When I asked Nelson whether or not the institution will have a physical campus, he said that it very definitely will have as many campuses as students require. Much of that obviously depends on demand, if the school’s student body has a bunch of kids from Germany, they might establish a campus in Berlin. Much of that will be determined by the students themselves, who will be encouraged to live together as they move through their four years, but won’t be living in dorms, at least not in the traditional sense.

And speaking of those students, Minerva is designing its admissions project so that it does not consider factors such as lineage, athletic ability, state or country of origin, or capacity to donate. So, don’t expect Minerva to have classes that demonstrate “perfectly curated” diversity, don’t expect it to have an NCAA Championship-winning football team, and don’t expect to find any classmates who are there because their parents donated a new building. It’s all based on intellectual ability. If you have a big brain, are creative, curious, and willing to work hard, you just may make the cut.

In terms of the day to day, classes will consist of 10-25 kids, and will be delivered online, likely in the same mobile/web live, synchronous model employed by 2tor in its degree-focused online ed programs. And thanks to the growing quality of educational content on the Web from startups like Udacity, Udemy, and ShowMe, for example, students will be expected to supplement their four curriculum-based classes with online learning. From the sound of it, some of it will be “encouraged,” and some of it may become part of the curriculum. No doubt Minerva will be looking to partner with many of these growing edtech companies to build its online platform.

In terms of faculty, the startup is creating what Nelson calls a “Nobel Prize for teaching” that will award the best existing professors (currently teaching at top universities) presumably with some financial incentive to help it create the content for its courses, in turn allowing those professors to “preserve the most challenging courses of their careers.” To support the content created by these Lords of Academia, Minerva will be looking to hire Ph.D graduates whose strength is in teaching — not in research.

From all this, you can see that a somewhat unique educational experience is starting to take shape, but, aside from the significantly lower cost, one of the things I like the most about the project is the so-called social contract (although this may end up in writing, who knows) the institution will strike with its students. “If we actually want to accelerate the life trajectory of these students,” the founder says, “our job can’t be over at the moment they graduate.” Upon graduation, rather than thinking of students as alumni whose job is to support them with donations, Nelson wants it to be the other way around.

This doesn’t mean it will be sending students a check in the mail every month, but the school actually wants to help students thrive after graduation by finding them like-minded collaborators, hunting down grant money, and fellowships — actively, not passively. For those who graduated from institutions without strong alumni networks or had to deal with indolent career counseling, this probably sounds pretty good. Of course, this all sounds good in theory, if not a little nebulous, but if the school plans to grow beyond classes of 250 kids, and in doing so, cultivate lifelong (as it claims) symbiotic and supportive relationship that facilitates Genius Grants, Nobel Prizes and placement in management positions. It’s going to need a real network, real counseling — not just ambitious self-starters.

Of course, this is where Minerva reserves the right to be meritorious in the support it gives post-graduation. “The more you push the world forward, the more you really buckle down and work hard, the more we will promote you — find funding for your startup, connect you with career opportunities,” the former RedBeacon Chairman says. Minerva wants to create an ethos of creating, so if students’ self-promotion is inversely proportional to the work they put in and what they accomplish, the less Minerva supports them. And vice versa. Now that is a contract I can get behind.

Right now, this all sounds pretty audacious, in both the right ways, and perhaps in slightly delusional ways as well. And to that point, the cherry on top? Minerva will begin accepting its first class in 2014. Yup. Audacity of hope aside, Minerva is building on principles that will resonate with many people, young and old.

Regardless of whether or not Minerva becomes the next Harvard, higher education (and beyond) is broken, and these experiments are imperative to finding a workable, sustainable solution that creates a new, better way of learning over the long-term — and doesn’t ignore the underlying, institutional problems.

For more on The Minerva Project, check it out at home here.

With many magazine publishers look at tablets (especially the iPad) as their salvation, five of the big ones (Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc.) banded together to create a joint venture called Next Issue Media. Today the company is launching its Android app.

CEO Morgan Guenther (formerly president of Tivo) says that despite all the excitement about bringing magazines to tablets, the current system has problems — specifically, the need to download a new app for every magazine. Gone is the “newsstand” feeling of walking into a store and browsing a rack of titles.

“It’s like if I walked into Barnes & Noble and wanted to browse magazines, and I was led into a room with you windows where I can read Fortune.” Guenther says. “And then I say, ‘Okay, I want to read Wired,’ and they send me to another room. When I walk in, there’s a big sign on the front door saying, ‘Here are your instructions for reading the magazine.’”

So Next Issue offers a single newsstand app where, eventually, you may be able to subscribe and read all your favorite magazines. Right now, it has 32 titles. Even though it’s a relatively short list, it’s an impressive one, including Better Homes & Gardens, ELLE, Esquire, Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, TIME, and Vanity Fair. You can purchase individual issues or subscriptions, and there’s also a free 30-day trial for each subscribers. The catalog begins with January of this year.

Guenther demonstrated the app for me earlier this week. There’s a nice 3D carousel for quickly flipping the pages, and publishers can add extra content like bonus photos, videos, and interactive features. Te interface is consistent between each magazine, so you don’t have to learn how to read different magazines.

But what I’m really excited about is the price. Individual subscriptions range from $1.99 to $9.99 per month, but there are also two unlimited options — you can pay $9.99 for every monthly and biweekly title, or $14.99 for everything, including the weeklies like TIME and The New Yorker. You probably won’t read every issue of every title, but you can follow your favorites, and dip in and out of others as specific stories and issues interest you. It’s almost like a Netflix plan for magazines.

Revenue from the all-you-can-read subscriptions is then distributed among the publishers based on readership. As for advertising, for now the digital magazines just include ads from the physical copies. Guenther says there’s not yet a big enough audience to justify tablet-specific ad programs — but not surprisingly, he wants to get there.

Within the constraints of the Next Issue interface, the publishers have complete control over their content, and they decide what extra content to include, Guenther says — and he wants to add social sharing and discovery features next.

Oh, and if you don’t own an Android tablet (who does?), the company plans to submit its iPad app to Apple soon.

In 2006, former Yahoo employee Thyagarajapuram S. Ramakrishnan was working for Facebook when he filed a patent for the news feed. Today in a sweet piece of irony, Facebook is using that same patent to sue Yahoo. Facebook claims that Yahoo’s Flickr Photostream and Activity Feeds infringe on “Generating a Feed of Stories Personalized for Members of a Social Network”.

This U.S. Patent 7,827,208 for “generating dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a web-based social network [with] weighting by affinity” and nine others could help Facebook escape a costly settlement over the original patent lawsuit Yahoo’s filed against it last month. See kids, trolling doesn’t always pay.

Ramakrishnan, then working for Facebook, teamed up with Andrew Bosworth (Director of Engineering), Chris Cox (VP of Product), Ruchi Sanghvi (news feed product manager, now at Dropbox), Adam D’Angelo (Former CTO, now at Quora) to file the news feed patent on August 11th, 2006. A month later, the feature launched causing mass protest by the Facebook user base. Soon, though, the highly relevant content feed sorted via the ’208 patent technology became a popular and defining feature of the social network.

It wasn’t until over two years after the Facebook news feed launch that both Yahoo’s Flickr and Profiles added similar feeds of the recent activity of one’s contacts. The copying was so obvious that Facebook made its news feed patent the first of the 10 patents exhibited in its infringement counter-claim against Yahoo.

So, either Yahoo didn’t do its homework, or it must have expected Ramakrishnan’s ’208 patent to come back and bite it in the ass. The patent could help Facebook negotiate its way out paying huge amounts of cash or stock to license the 10 patents Yahoo is suing it with.

A legal stalemate would actually turn out to be a huge fail for Yahoo. It’s received a ton of hate from entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the public for trolling Facebook with vague patents rather than actually innovating. Other former employees have chastised it for “weaponizing” their inventions.

The whole debacle could make recruiting tough, and retaining employees tougher for Yahoo. So by going on the offensive while vulnerable itself, Yahoo may have ensured that when its employees have brilliant ideas, they’ll already be working for somebody else.

[Image Credit: 20th Century Fox]

I have to confess that when I think about GE, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t radical innovation. But, as usual, I might be wrong. As GE’s Chief Marketing Officer, Beth Comstock, told me when we met at The Economist‘s stimulating Innovation event last week, GE is actually totally committed to creating radically new structures of organization. As what Comstock calls the “world’s oldest start-up,” the 130 year-old company has the scale, she says, to be both nimble and agile. Indeed, she even boasts of GE doing away with traditional organizational hierarchy in some of its many manufacturing businesses so that it can generate more innovation.

But why should TechCrunch readers care about GE? According to Comstock, partnership is a “big theme” and GE is not only committed to working with high-tech startups in everything from healthcare to education, but also into embracing the Internet. Paradoxically, then, it may be America’s oldest companies like GE which are most suited to pivoting and pirouetting amidst the creative destruction of our innovation economy.

In some of the old science fiction stories I remember from Weird Tales and Ray Bradbury and the like, robots always figured. But they always came the way you might expect a new dryer or hot water heater to arrive. In a big box, packed in straw or foam, heavy and metal of course as they always were back in the day. But the world of robots is different from the way they imagined it then: the metallic golems of yore have given way to a sort of Cambrian explosion of potential robot types, imitating everything from worm to dog to bird.

A team of researchers hopes to both expand that robodiversity and change the way our future companions are delivered. Funded by the NSF, they’ve begun a 5-year-long project exploring the idea of on-demand robots.

MIT is leading the effort, specifically Professor Daniela Rus from CSAIL. They have researchers from University of Pennsylvania and Harvard on the team, and the object is to “make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours.”

Imagine, just for a domestic example, that you have a crawl space that’s difficult to get into and possibly dangerous. You could hop online or go to your local robot shop and have them create an ambulatory, four-legged robot with a couple pincers in it, so you could easily get any tools or toys that happen to go under there, or check for mice, or inspect wiring and construction for damage.

A standard robot might do, but you might need it bigger or smaller, or with or without a camera, or with a magnet or insecticide dispenser instead of a gripper. Or maybe the robot you need is outdated or expensive, or requires assembly, or must be shipped from Korea. Why should replicating a copy of a product with the end user apply only to media? Have it made right in your neighborhood, ready for pickup in the afternoon after the resin body has solidified and the stock boards have been updated with the latest control firmware.

The project leaders sum up its scope thusly:

The capability to customize cyber-physical systems on-demand would change how we plan for contingencies. Rescuers engaged in humanitarian aid and disaster reliefs in remote locations could minimize their logistic needs on-site. Warehouses of spare and replacement parts that may never be used could be replaced by storing only their designs digitally, not the physical parts themselves.

Fundamental problems in computer science about what is computable by digital machines will change. The problems will be reframed in a larger context as what functional hybrid machines are constructable from cyber-physical primitives.

As for the research itself, it will encompass more or less the entire ecosystem: supportive tools and materials for design and engineering of the “mechanical, electrical, computing, and software aspects of the device,” algorithms for production and assembly, programming and operational environments, and more. A few prototypes show how functional robots can be created from a few parts and an “origami” type structure.

They intend to include K-12 students in the process as well and establish sub-programs at the universities participating in the project. The $10M in NSF funding could end up going rather quickly when all these things are considered.

Needless to say, the potential revolutionizing of product engineering and delivery could have enormous implications down the line, although at the moment it is mostly speculative. Notably, this is fully orientated towards consumer applications, not military, where one might reasonably expect on-demand robotics to be sought after. The results of this program’s research are sure to be interesting and influential, as anything with a pedigree like this with fabrication and decentralized design and engineering as a starting point is certain to bear fruit.

Last year, Alexia covered a funny Chrome web browser extension called “Defaceable” that allowed you to comment anonymously on Facebook and on other websites using Facebook Comments. Instead of having to associate your comment with your real name and identity, the Defaceable extension let you once again post your troll-isms to friends’ walls and blogs like TechCrunch (which uses Facebook Comments) using the names of fruits. For example, instead of “John Smith,” your comments would identify you as “Peach” or “Watermelon.” Oh ha ha.

As it turns out, Facebook didn’t think it was so funny, and has since taken legal action against the company for violating its Terms of Service. But it hasn’t stopped there. Facebook also went after one of the commenters on that blog post, too – a guy named Rick Stratton, who gleefully discovered he made it into the screenshot used to accompany the post. Stratton doesn’t work at Defaceable, to be clear, he was just commenting on the post. Apparently, posting “Hey! I made TechCrunch!” is now worthy of legal action.

Stratton tells us he received a four-page letter via FedEx on April 2nd which came from Facebook’s lawyers, the Seattle-based firm Perkins Coie. Stratton, who’s actually the founder of Feed.Us, says he’s in “no way related to this Defaceable company,” but confirms he made a comment on the TechCrunch article about Defaceable’s software.

“My face appears in the image uploaded to the article,” Stratton tells us. “And I made a comment on the story. And so now these dumb lawyers are coming after me,” he says.

What happened was that a screenshot of Defaceable in action was used to illustrate the post. It was a screenshot taken from an older Facebook comment thread where a user named “Peach” was poised to troll the discussion. Above “Peach” was Stratton’s profile pic and comment, and that of another user. Neither of these comments were what set Facebook’s lawyers into action, however. They were fairly innocuous, even somewhat generic examples of blog commenting.

But after TechCrunch’s Defaceable post went live, Stratton says he received nearly a dozen tweets and DM’s telling him that he “made it” onto to TechCrunch. That is, he was in the screenshot.

“It was completely ironic – Feed.Us is a great software service that TechCrunch should write about but the only way we make it on TC is when Alexis [sic] takes a screengrab of my face,” explains Stratton. “So I replied to the story with a new comment ‘Hey I finally made it onto TechCrunch.’”

He was being funny.

Get it? He made it onto TechCrunch…as a screenshot.

Stratton tells me that he understands how the law firm might have made the initial mistake.

“I could see how they would think I was somehow involved from the text of my comment, but I was only commenting on the fact that Alexis [sic] used a screenshot in the article that had my picture in it,” he says.

After contacting the firm, he was told he will need to hire a lawyer to prove he’s not involved with Defaceable. “She [the lawyer from Perkins Coie] basically grilled me and became irate and told me to get a lawyer to prove that I’m not involved with this ‘Defaceable’ company…I don’t know what to do other than to hire a lawyer on this. She seems pretty adamant about coming after me.”

We reached out to the law firm ourselves to confirm, and they’ve directed us to Facebook’s public relations department. After multiple inquires, a Facebook spokesperson told us “the company’s legal team will be following up with the commenter.”

Stratton says that the social networking firm hadn’t disabled his Facebook account, though, so maybe there’s hope yet.

Below, the original letter sent to Stratton via email in March. After getting no response, the firm sent it via FedEx:

Justin Kan is a busy guy. The serial entrepreneur is best known as the founder of Justin.tv, the online community that lets users broadcast, watch, and interact around video. Last year, he and team spun-off Twitch.tv, a gaming-focused version of the video streaming site, and the fast-growing Socialcam, which is on a mission to bring mobile video creation to the mainstream. Not one to sit still, Kan jumped into yet another venture in January, launching Exec, a task-management service in the vein of TaskRabbit and Zaarly that lets people post errands on-demand for $25/hour.

Today, Kan and Exec announced via blog post that they are now getting into the founder-renting business. That is to say: Exec is offering a one-day-only special which allows anyone and everyone to book time with the founders of companies like Parse, Reddit, Hipmunk, Sincerely, and even Exec itself.

If you’ve ever wanted to get some personal time with a founder from one of the fast-growing companies in Silicon Valley, without resorting to kidnapping them, now is your chance. This upcoming Saturday, April 7th, founders will make themselves available for calls, Skype chats, and more to offer advice, act as a sounding board, or just chat about the zeitgeist and such.

To book time with founders, those interested are being asked to enter a short description of what is to be discussed, along with a phone number here, or on Exec’s iPhone app. One of the founders will then be in touch, according to the blog post. (Users are also asked to include “#execfounders” in their job description.) The team said that it will be doing its best to accomodate requests for specific founders, but likely won’t be able to meet the demands of everyone.

Those looking to book time aren’t required to be in San Francisco, you can chat with the founders from anywhere in the world. The Founder Hotline, as I’m calling it, will cost $100/hour, with minimum half-hour increments. All proceeds to will go to benefit classrooms through the startup’s “favorite charity,” DonorsChoose.org.

For more, check out Exec’s blog post here.

Sprint still hasn’t launched their new LTE network yet, but if a new announcement about a LTE-capable handset is any indication, they’re getting pretty close. Though the existence of a Sprint-bound Galaxy Nexus probably overshadowed it a bit, Sprint has announced that LG’s eco-friendly Viper handset will be available for pre-order beginning on April 12 with a release soon to follow.

There’s no word yet on when the Viper will actually hit Sprint’s sale’s channels, though recent rumors point to an April 15 launch date.

In case the Viper has slipped your mind since January (something I can’t really blame you for), it features a solid if unremarkable spec sheet. We’re looking at 4-inch WVGA NOVA display, a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, NFC/Google Wallet support, a 5-megapixel rear camera and a VGA front-facer. Sadly, the Viper will only be giving users a taste of Gingerbread, though some of the preloaded apps make the package a bit more compelling — who couldn’t use 50GB of free cloud storage from Box?

The Viper seems destined to occupy that rung below the Galaxy Nexus and the not-yet-confirmed-but-probably-real EVO One, but for $100 (after a $50 mail-in rebate, yuck), it’s a small price to pay for the first crack at Sprint LTE. Or is it? That distinction aside, the Viper reminds me an awful lot of Verizon’s Lucid, another LG device. Both appear to be completely respectable devices sitting at a compelling price point, albeit with a lack of star power.

It’s still too early to pass judgment on the Viper, but with the Galaxy Nexus on the horizon and HTC’s own device getting ready to be officially unveiled, Sprint customers are best off sitting tight for now.

At the end of October, Urban Airship, the startup that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, acquired SimpleGeo for a reported $3.5 million. At the time, it was unclear what Urban Airship would be doing with the terabyte-plus of SimpleGeo location data, but in January, Urban Airship announced that it would be shutting down the startup’s Places, Context, and Storage services by April 1st. Though both SimpleGeo co-founders have left the company, the rest of the team stayed on board and has been heads down, plugging away on a big new product.

Today, at O’Reilly’s Where Conference, in its biggest announcement since its acquisition of SimpleGeo, Urban Airship is unveiling that product — which combines its push notification platform with the ability to segment audiences by location, time, context, and preferences in an effort to improve relevancy and targeting of both messages and offers.

The startup, which hired Skype’s former strategy boss and hit 10 billion notifications pushed in January (and is now at 17 billion), will be using SimpleGeo’s searchable geo-spatial data to allow developers and organizations to access “frequently updated” latitudinal and longitudinal data from opted-in users. And that’s an important point to make, and one that the startup’s CEO Scott Kveton stressed when we spoke yesterday, given the nature of Urban Airship’s new location product — that “Segments” will be strictly opt-in.

That being said, the product will enable organizations to build and save audience segments for messaging, so that a national retailer could, for example, offload excess inventory from stores in San Francisco by targeting its offers to people who live in the Bay Area. This also includes the ability to target offers by multiple zip codes, really any audience segment that may have a preference for that product. Or, as another example, a concert hall with a bunch of extra tickets for a show on a slow night, could send push notifications offering deals to all users who happen to be near the venue.

Media sites could use Urban Airship’s Segments to define custom segments, like Travelers or Movers, identifying them based on their change of location over time and pushing local news content only to those who would find it contextually relevant, i.e. the people actually living there.

As Kveton pointed out when we spoke, push notifications and messages that only take into account location data are blunt instruments that have more potential to become an annoyance and a deterrent from whatever service or content they’re hawking. Adding further context to the location data, like layering in preference and behavior, should presumably allow developers to be more targeted in their push messaging. Bombarding someone with push notifications is obnoxious, regardless of how “targeted” those messages are, and so Kveton said that the startup is working with their customers (and brands) to ensure that they’re pursuing best practices when it comes to this relatively new mobile capability.

And, on that note, all Urban Airship customers will be able to leverage Segments. Specifically, the startup will be giving developers that want to boost app functionality based on location and time-based data will access to its API, while offering a web-based tool for marketers looking to segment their audience. Users will also be able join location information with tags that include in-app behaviors, preferences, and device profiles, so that they can, say, target iPad users in a particular location at a given time who have expressed preferences for specific content or product categories.

Urban Airship will make its iOS and Android device libraries available today, while Premium Plan members will be able to add location segmentation, like “designated marketing areas” in the near future.

In addition to launching Segments, the startup is also today announcing a strategic partnership with Meridian, a venture-backed startup that has built a location-based software platform for places. The partnership will allow Urban Airship’s users to leverage Meridian’s indoor targeting capabilities to, for example, reach people at a supermarket at the point of decision. Together with Segments, the startup now enables users to identify audiences based on preferences to delivering targeted messages inside buildings.

Meridian recently partnered with Cisco to offer the first “indoor GPS” app for the American Museum of Natural History, and has focused its efforts on providing venues and companies with building-specific mapping, search functionality, multimedia, and directions. With Meridian’s indoor location mapping, companies can now push multimedia content to users when they’re inside a particular venue, giving them information, say, on a particular exhibit as well as walking directions on how to get there.

Kveton tells us that the startup believes that the future of mobile messaging, marketing, and notifications is all about presence — not just using location or behavior individually — but having information pushed to you based on the specific tablet, phone, or device you’re using. That would mean that I wouldn’t receive a notification on all the devices I own, only the one I happen to be using at the current time.

There are obviously privacy and battery life issues attached to this next generation of messaging, which is why the startup is providing its service strictly on an opt-in basis, and it is hoping that as segmentation and contextual identification evolves, the targeting will be such that notifications aren’t sprayed willy nilly at all customers at all times, potentially preserving battery life. This double announcement from Urban Airship today signals the brave new world mobile messaging is entering, but obviously it’s imperative that the application of these hybrid technologies improve user experience, rather than overwhelm.

For more on Urban Airship, check them out at home here. Meridian here.

What do you think?

In response to being sued by Yahoo for patent infringement last month, Facebook today filed counter-claims against Yahoo for infringing 10 of its own patents. Facebook says the following Yahoo features and properties violate its intellectual property: Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo’s Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (“C.O.R.E.”), the Yahoo Flickr photo sharing service, and advertisements displayed throughout Yahoo. Facebook also denied the original claims against it from Yahoo, seeks damages for Yahoo’s infringement, and requests a trial by jury.

The two lawsuits could effectively end up causing a stalemate between the companies that could prevent Facebook from having to pay exorbitant patent licensing fees to Yahoo or having to shut down some of its services. Facebook’s legal response and full counter-claim can be seen here and below.

Facebook shared a statement from its General Counsel Ted Ullyot explaining, “From the outset, we said we would defend ourselves vigorously against Yahoo’s lawsuit, and today we filed our answer as well as counter-claims against Yahoo for infringing ten of Facebook’s patents.  While we are asserting patent claims of our own, we do so in response to Yahoo’s short-sighted decision to attack one of its partners and prioritize litigation over innovation.”

Facebook’s response asks that Yahoo’s suit against it be dismissed with prejudice, claims it does not infringe on Yahoo’s patents, says Yahoo’s claims are invalid and/or unenforceable, says Yahoo has infringed on Facebook’s patents, asks damages be awarded for this infringement, asks that Yahoo pay for all costs of the lawsuits, and that Yahoo be prevented from suing over the same patents in the future.

Yahoo’s response to the New York Times Dealbook regarding Facebook’s counter-claims was “A Yahoo representative said in a statement: “We have only just received Facebook’s answer and counterclaims, but on their face we believe they are without merit and nothing more than a cynical attempt to distract from the weakness of its defense.”

So here’s the story so far. On February 27th, Yahoo announced claims that Facebook was infringing on 10 of its patents. On March 13th, Yahoo formally began suing Facebook, leading many in the tech industry to criticize Yahoo for patent trolling rather than innovating. The move was especially dastardly considering Facebook’s viral channels have led to huge referral traffic boosts for Yahoo’s news properties over the last few months.

Many of the patents Yahoo is suing Facebook for are vague, and could be interpreted to cover social technology found in wide variety of popular websites (though one patent for unified messaging was more specific and possibly more enforceable). Facebook purchased 750 patents from IBM on March 22nd, seemingly to defend itself. However, most and possibly all of the patents from Facebook’s countersuit come from its own employees or elsewhere, not IBM. Facebook filed an amendment to its S-1 to IPO to note the threat of Yahoo’s suit to its business.

Now the legal teams of the two companies will have to analyze each other’s claims and consider whether to negotiate and settle the dispute or let it go to trial.

Here’s the list of patents Facebook is suing Yahoo for infringing:

• U.S. Patent No. 7,827,208: “Generating a Feed of Stories Personalized for Members of a Social Network”
• U.S. Patent No. 7,945,653: “Tagging Digital Media”
• U.S. Patent No. 6,288,717: “Headline Posting Algorithm”
• U.S. Patent No. 6,216,133: “Method for Enabling a User to Fetch a Specific Information Item from a Set of Information Items and a System for Carrying Out Such a Method”
• U.S. Patent No. 6,411,949: “Customizing Database Information for Presentation with Media Selections”
• U.S. Patent No. 6,236,978: “System and Method for Dynamic Profiling of Users in One-to-One Applications”
• U.S. Patent No. 7,603,331: “System and Method for Dynamic Profiling of Users in One-to-One
• Applications and for Validating User Rules”
• U.S. Patent No. 8,103,611: “Architectures, Systems, Apparatus, Methods, and Computer- Readable Medium for Providing Recommendations to Users and Applications Using Multidimensional Data”
• U.S. Patent No. 8,005,896: “System for Controlled Distribution of User Profiles Over a Network”
• U.S. Patent No. 8,150,913: “System for Controlled Distribution of User Profiles Over a Network”

Facebook’s Answer and Counter-Claims

Facebook’s Exhibits Of Its Patents

There are some big challenges ahead for mobile advertising, as the industry faces increasing scrutiny from the federal regulators, and as Apple phases out the UDIDs used by advertisers and publishers to identify users. Now privacy company TRUSTe is offering a new way for advertisers to address some of these concerns.

The program is called TRUSTe Mobile Ads, and it allows consumers to opt-out of both targeted advertising and data collection. When an ad is shown by one of TRUSTe’s partners, it includes a small AdChoices icon. If someone taps on the icon, they’re taken to a page where they can opt-out of collection and targeting from an individual network, or from all of TRUSTe’s partners. Those preferences are then remembered through a system called the Trusted Preference Identifier.

The program also aligns with the AdChoices principles laid out by the Digital Advertising Alliance, TRUSTe says.

The company announced the program at today’s ad:tech conference in San Francisco. The initial partners are ad networks Greystripe, HasOffers, Human Demand, InMobi, Medialets, Nexage, and (on the publishing side) Electronics Arts.

TRUSTe set the stage for today’s announcement by releasing a study on consumer privacy, which found that among the top 50 Android apps and top 50 iOS apps, only one-third had a privacy policy. It also found that nearly three-fourths of the population worries about privacy when using mobile apps.

“The need for a standardized cross-platform approach to mobile privacy is essential to maximize mobile advertising opportunities, address growing regulatory concerns and build trust for consumers,” said TRUSTe CEO Chris Babel in a press release.