Category: Tech news

Slowly but surely Ice Cream Sandwich will hit last year’s flagship Android phones. Motorola just updated its ICS schedule that details the expected timetable for each device. The biggest change is that ICS is now scheduled for non-US RAZR models. But that’s seemingly the case for most Moto devices. For the most part ICS will hit Moto devices starting in the second quarter — but only for non-Verizon devices in the US. Here in the States the status of ICS for the majority of Motorola’s devices is still listed as “Evaluation & Planning” with “Further details to follow”.

The updated ICS rollout schedule lists 13 US devices: three are WiFi-only tablets, two are AT&T-only, one is for Sprint, one is for U.S. Cellular and the rest are Verizon devices. Wanna guess which devices do not have an expected rollout date?

Take the US-only XYBoard for example: ICS is scheduled to hit the WiFi-only model in the third quarter. The 3G/VZW model is in the Evaluation & Planning stage. The RAZR devices in Asia Pacific, Canada, China, EMEA, Japan, Korea & LATAM will get Ice Cream Sandwich in the second quarter. ICS isn’t scheduled for the US RAZR nor any of the Droid devices — all which are exclusive to Verizon.

The odd ball device here is the Motorola Electrify, which is basically a U.S. Cellular-badged version of Sprint’s Photon 4G without a WiMax radio. The Sprint version is set to get the update in Q3 2012 where the U.S. Cellular version is still listed as “Evaluation & Planning” with “Further details to follow”.

Several things could be going on here but it all likely loops back to the carrier. It’s possible that each carrier has their own set of stringent evaluation processes and requirements for major system updates, and Motorola of course has to play nice with their carrier partners. In Verizon’s case a number of things could be going on. Verizon might want to set the schedule itself. Or Verizon could just be playing it safe. The carrier’s early history with the Gingerbread update was buggy and left many owners (including me) with bricked devices.

But don’t fret, Verizon subs. Motorola reiterated previous statements saying, “DROID RAZR, DROID RAZR MAXX, DROID 4, DROID BIONIC, DROID XYBOARD 8.2 and 10.1, and MOTOROLA XOOM WiFI + 3G/4G will be upgraded to ICS.” It would just be nice if Moto could communicate the expected timetable with its loyal supporters.

Maintaining Android updates must be a huge task for Motorola and others. Google is holding to a yearly release schedule, but manufacturers are seemingly marching to a different beat. By the time the RAZR, XYBOARDs and Moto’s other flagship devices finally get Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean will be only several months away from launching. Once Google officially absorbs Motorola, the two will work to solve this strange delayed rollout scheme but that will not help Samsung, LG and others. Speaking as a Droid X owner, the practice is frustrating and very anti-consumer. Google often talks down Android’s system fragmentation but the problem is only getting worse.

[image via flickr/Eric Hauser]

With real-time translation of text common on the web and instantaneous speech-to-text gaining popularity, it seems that transliteration is cool again. But less obvious, and more difficult, methods of input are yet to be implemented. Case in point: sign language. The complicated and often contextual gestures form a vast visual vocabulary that isn’t easily captured or interpreted.

A team of British researchers, however, is making the attempt, creating a tool that translates a set of standard signs into readable text, in real time. It’s called the Portable Sign language Translator, and it should be out next year.

The signer would gesture as normal towards a camera on a phone or PC, and it would instantly translate based on a database of signs. Right now they are planning to support British Sign Language, but the system is perfectly capable of handling ASL, Makaton, and international languages and alphabets.

It is possible, however, that the static set of known symbols may still be limiting to signers, so the app will also allow the user to create their own signs for more complicated or personal objects.

The obvious application is for day-to-day communication between someone who cannot speak and someone who cannot understand sign language. But a visual, gestural language could be useful in other situations as well, and not just to people with disabilities. Multimodal communication is becoming the standard for interacting with our technology, and while heretofore we have communicated largely with inorganic tools, so to speak, such as the mouse and keyboard. Directly interacting with a machine that understands our voice, gestures, and position is going to produce extremely rich interaction methods in the future.

In the mean time, the app is being developed by Technabling, a company spun off from the University of Aberdeen. They plan to release it as a product next year, though there is no word of platforms or price. It is being funded by the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Small Business Research Initiative.

It’s hard to believe we’re not stuck in some strange time warp, as it’s beginning to feel (again) like TV is the next hot thing. Well, really, web TV. For one, The Wall Street Journal today reported that Intel is rumored to be developing a web-based, pay-TV service and reportedly has been pitching media companies on creating a “virtual cable operator” that would offer TV channels to U.S. consumers in a “bundle similar to subscriptions sold by cable and satellite TV operators.” According to these reports, Intel will be offering its own set-top box to carry the service.

Regardless of the fact that the chip company has struggled with consumer-facing (and set-top) offerings, Intel’s purported service would join GoogleTV, AppleTV, and a host of other companies already offering set-top boxes like Roku and Boxee. Of course, as much as everyone ever many want a disruption of the current pay-TV model, Alex Cocotas’ chart shows that current cord-cutting attempts aren’t really having the desired effect.

Aereo, the New York-based startup backed by $20 million+ from IAC recently entered the fray with big plans to actually make a dent in this problem with a cloud-based service that streams over-the-air channels for just $12 a month. (You can read more background on the service here.) Of course, just like so many that have come before it, Aereo seems inherently subject to having to change its DVR-in-the-cloud model or to fighting it out with the networks in court. And now it’s countersuing.

Last week, a group of broadcasters, which includes Fox, Univision, and PBS filed two separate lawsuits against Aereo (with those two groups collectively representing most of the major media outlets in New York City), as well as an injunction based on the grounds of Copyright Act infringements, which if granted, would prevent Aereo from releasing its product on the market.

Shortly thereafter, Aereo released a statement saying, in short, that the broadcasters’ case did not have “any merit.” (Statement and more background here.) The interest in this case also prompted me to take a lengthy look at whether or not Aereo actually has any shot at winning this case. Despite many indications otherwise, I was hopeful.

Speaking at SXSW this weekend, Barry Diller, the Chairman and CEO of IAC (the principal investor in Aereo), made it clear that both he and Aereo expected the broadcast networks to resist, and that the issue would likely be resolved in court. (Obviously it would have been a huge mistake not to prepare for this end.) As reported by CNET, Diller said, “This is not some evil thing … This is absolutely predictable. Media companies have hegemony over broadcast TV and they want to protect it.”

Diller and Aereo are both of the mind that what they’re doing is completely legal — and not only that — they shouldn’t have to pay retransmission fees either. (Under their conception, this is because each customer would own their own antenna and thus have rights to free, publicly transmitted broadcasts of network TV.) Diller said that he’d recently met with reps from the networks in New York and told them:

I said to the broadcasters, ‘One thing that might happen is you’ll get more audience.’ They said, ‘That’s fine. Now pay us retransmission money.’ I said, ‘When you get Radio Shack to pay you some slice of their profit when they sell an aerial, we’ll pay you anything you like, but we’re not transmitting anything.’

Given the trajectory of this back-and-forth with the networks, the news today that Aereo has officially countersued is expected, but it’s further evidence that neither Diller nor Aereo will be backing down from the battle anytime soon. And given Diller’s penchant for mixing it up with traditional media, and his own cloud as a long-time media exec himself, there aren’t a whole lot of people better suited for this battle.

After all, with the growing interest among big tech companies (and the public) in this issue, it was either Aereo or someone else. Hey, maybe it could be Ora.tv and Larry King! (Probably not.) After writing this post, we heard from Carlos Nicholas Fernandes, the CEO of RecordTV.com, which launched a similar service in Singapore back in 2007. They were taken to court, lost at first, but eventually won against the state-owned broadcaster, MediaCorp in a landmark ruling.

That ruling formed the basis of Optus’ landmark victory in Australia, as it is referenced extensively in the judgement. (No idea what I’m talking about? More here.) The point is that Aereo’s case stands to be a big one. Given what’s at stake, this will probably take a long time to resolve, and could travel all the way up the high courts in appeals, etc. But, given the RecordTV and Optus decisions, there are certainly precedents working in favor of Aereo.

Aereo only filed one suit today, but a company spokesman said that the “second filing will happen in due course.” So, again, it’s clear, this battle is just heating up. Well, not only that, Diller and company want swift resolution, as the IAC CEO is already saying that he expects the service to be in 75 to 100 cities within a year. A bold statement even if it’s not likely to hold true; either way, all those wanna-be cord cutters out there should be paying attention.

Here’s Aereo’s official statement:

Aereo’s business rests on three very well established legal principles: the consumers’ right to access broadcast television, their right to record unique copies of broadcasts for personal use and their right to use remotely located equipment to make their private copies. We firmly believe that Aereo’s technology is lawful. We are confident in the legal process, and we look forward to a prompt resolution of these meritless lawsuits.

Lawsuit below:

Keith Teare, co-founder of TechCrunch and partner at incubator Archimedes Labs, isn’t thinking small when it comes to his new project Just.me — he says that it’s “asking and answering the question of what would happen if the phone was upgraded to be truly social.”

The app hasn’t launched yet, but Teare previewed it today at the South by Southwest Startup Accelerator, and I got a few more details from him afterward. Right now, he says that if you want to share something from your phone, you have to open a different app depending on whether you want to share a text update, a photo, or a video, and depending on who you want to share it with.

Teare’s goal is for users to open Just.me whenever they want to capture a moment, and then to share that content with whoever they want, on multiple social networks. You tap a button to create a “message” on Just.me, and that message can be a photo, a video, an audio recording, or plain text. Then you can keep it completely private, share it with a limited group of people, or post it publicly (in the last case, you can also post it to Facebook or Twitter).

The ultimate result should be a fairly comprehensive record of your life, some of which has been shared, some of which is just for yourself. It’s similar to the Google Circles model of sharing, except with the option to keep things completely private, and designed specifically for the mobile experience. (I also know people who use Path as their “default” social app, sharing everything with a close circle on Path and then deciding what’s worth pushing more broadly on other apps —  but on Path itself, everything is shared with the same group of people, without the solo option or the ability pick-and-choose recipients).

It looks easy to create collaborative threads or albums — once someone shares a message with you, say a photo at an event, you could respond with photos of your own. At the same time, you retain control over every message you create, so you can stop sharing it with someone whenever you want — if I created a thread with a coworker and they left TechCrunch, I can hide that content from them.

Just.me also implements some of the ideas that Teare has been presenting in guest columns at TechCrunch, specifically that “the address book was stolen by web 2.0,” and that the smartphone creates the possibility for users to take back control. So you share Just.me messages using your address book (for example, you could email them a link to a video), but that contact information is never uploaded onto Just.me’s servers.

As for the business model, Just.me will be including brands in the mix — users can add brands to their address book, thereby enabling private offers; and brands can also push public messages into the update stream.

Just.me plans to release its apps later this year. It has raised funding from Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, Google Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks, CrunchFund (which is of course tied up with TechCrunch in several ways, including the fact that our parent company AOL is an investor), and individuals including Don Dodge and Michael Parekh.

Whatever you think about Dropbox‘s place in the future of communication, the company has been on a roll this year. Following up on a big redesign last week, which cleaned up navigation, search, and photos, chief executive Drew Houston got on stage last night at South By Southwest to talk about its early days, and where it’s going next.

First, the newsy bits. The company was profitable last year, he said yesterday, even though 96% of its 50 million-some users are on the free version. And, he confirmed that it had been valued at the $4 billion valuation that Arrington had heard around when it closed its massive $250 million round last fall. While he didn’t talk revenue, he said that more and more of its free users were moving to larger storage plans and starting to pay.

“Some service like ours is going to tie it all together,” he said on stage, and become a core part of how people share information across the web and mobile devices. While other companies offer their own types of cloud storage services for consumers, no one else has built an easy-to-use, platform-agnostic system. Each of these companies also has their own turf to protect – iOS, etc. — he said during the talk, and has their best engineers focused on other, more core products.

The redesign may just feel like a nice polish, but it’s a key part of the plans going forward. With each little gain in engagement, and in the amount of data stored (like a bunch of big photo files), any of its millions of free users might suddenly decide to start paying

The new action toolbar at the top shows you a simple menu for sorting files by name, date, size and type. If you’ve selected a document, you’ll see options for doing things like downloading, deleting, renaming, moving, copying or checking the previous versions of it. A right-click menu includes these same options for those who prefer navigation via mouse — and  the addition of a drag-and-drop interface and multiple file selection makes bulk actions faster than the previous checkbox version. For hardcore users, there’s also hotkeys (just hit “?” to see the menu).

Photos helped Facebook get all sorts of new usage, and Dropbox is heading in that direction, too, in its own way. A new Lightbox-style photo viewer lets you enjoy all the image files you’ve saved from everywhere else, and a thumbnail preview version lets you see what’s what before bothering to open them.

Meanwhile, a search box is now built into the homepage, and updates in real-time as you type in the file name you’re looking for.

“We’re always trying to make people’s lives simpler,” product head Jeff Bartelma tells us in a separate discussion on the changes. “With this redesign, we wanted to make Dropbox as easy to use from the web as from your own computer. Millions of people need better ways to view, browse, and share their stuff from anywhere, and this is just one step of many you can expect from us this year.”

So what’s next? Houston didn’t get into it too much last night, but I’d talked to him last month and got a little bit more about the plans for this year. He’d told me that 2011 was about building up the company — bringing in the funding, expanding the headcount (including some top engineers), setting up its offices, winning the top Crunchies award, making a big recent acquisition, etc. — and this year is going to be about the product. Things like the redesign, and, intriguingly, its developer platform. There’s a few ways for developers to use Dropbox now, but look for it to offer more tight integrations for how web and mobile applications work. Ways to save and share media like photos and music. Think of the automated photo-sharing service it rolled out for desktop and Android devices (including this HTC integration) as some early examples.

All this is a long way from just a few years ago, as Houston related to interviewer Kara Swisher. We’ve covered his story in detail before. The previous startup, the move from Boston, the fundraising process with Silicon Valley angel investors — check out the links to the video interviews below. But there was one anecdote that jumped out when he was talking yesterday. The now-legendary meeting with Steve Jobs.

“There were no numbers with Apple,” he said last night, shooting down a rumor about a nine-digit purchase price. “We get to the headquarters, they take us up to the board room, and Steve is there. We talk casually, he says we have a great product and he tells us how Apple is like a giant startup. So we make it really clear that the company is not for sale, and that we’re having a really great experience. I was really flattered, I mean, we’re huge Apple fans, obviously. But we wanted to build the company, it’s a unique thing to do in your life.”

“We’d heard you either get the Chill Steve or the Asshole Steve. So we tell him that and we suck in our breath waiting for the switch. He rocks back and forth quietly on his heels, and then started trolling us a little bit — ‘you guys are a feature, not a product. You don’t have deep access.’”

“He still respected us. I think he was just trying to mess with us.”

On Pitching Dropbox: “Tom Cruise In Minority Report Is Not Carrying Around A Thumb Drive”

Drew Houston: “Dropbox Users Save A Billion Files Every Three Days”

How Dropbox Got Its First 10 Million Users

Houston: “In 18 Months, You Are Going To See Little Dropbox Buttons Everywhere”

You might not often think of Al Gore and Sean Parker in the same room, but the pair took the stage together this afternoon at South by Southwest, and they made similar points — that the democratic system has been broken by a flood of special interest money, and that the Internet could be the way to fix it.

“To the extent that these new mediums and new media are going to have a role in reforming politics, it’s going to happen because … those systems will make politics more efficient,” said Parker (who, in addition to his more famous roles at Napster and Facebook, is the co-founder of Causes, and who also invested in political startups Votizen and NationBuilder). Specifically, he says the Internet could lower the barrier to entry into politics, so people could run effective campaigns without raising vast amounts of money.

Gore was, if anything, even more excited about the Internet’s potential, calling its transformative potential one the “most exciting” things he’s seen in the politics in a long time. But he also mentioned the criticism from writer Malcolm Gladwell that getting someone to “like” a candidate or a cause on Facebook results i connections that are, in Gore’s words, “much weaker and less durable” than those formed by old-fashioned organizing. Parker admitted that Causes and other organizations have been “much too focused on short-term viral acquisitions without building the deeper interactions that are necessary.” Still, he added that these trends make up the “first step in the growth of any platform.”

One of the biggest challenges to reforming the system is overcoming apathy, Parker said. People need “to feel like they’re a part of the process” and “to realize that they have incredible power and that that power is multiplicative, is exponential.” In other words, people need to understand that through social media, they are not just a single, isolated vote. To make that clear, Parker said, “We need a set of wins.” The defeat of SOPA and PIPA was one such win, which “first awakened” the Internet community to the power that it has. He called it the “Nerd Spring” — like the Arab Spring, but “the South by Southwest version of it.”

As for concrete steps for reform, Parker said the biggest short-term potential comes at the local level.

“I don’t think change comes in the obvious ways,” Parker said. “Changing the way senators get elected, changing the way these big-budget, top-down, mass media, TV-dominated elections get run, I think is an important but long-term task.”

He cited a recent study showing that there are 800,000 elected positions in the United States, and that one out of every six people will hold political office at some point in their lives. Most of those positions are things like city controller and water board member — races that you usually vote on with little knowledge. (And are more easily won than a race for senator or president.) That’s the kind of “information inefficiency” that the Internet can fix.

[photo of Parker at Le Web via flickr/LeWEB 11]

Today brings some rather high-profile recruiting from Google: the director of DARPA, the Department of Defense’s research arm, is leaving after three years of heading the agency to join Google at a “senior executive position.”

The news comes from a DARPA spokesman, who reports that Dugan felt she couldn’t refuse an offer from such an “innovative company.” She has worked at the agency on and off since 1996, and most recently has brought its budget and resources to bear on more practical problems like securing military networks. What role she will play at Google is unknown, but it is probably at least partially security-related.

Dugan was originally a researcher and program manager, and ascended to director status in 2009. Although she has encouraged innovation and some so-called “blue sky” projects (research that may stall or never see the light of day), she has also made efforts to fund what are, by DARPA standards, much more grounded projects. She has a few patents of her own in various areas of engineering and has published a book on engineering thermodynamics.

In November, she appealed to hackers and security experts to consider the problem of the military’s outdated data-protection methods. She seems to have intuited that while robot cheetahs, cornea displays, and hummingbird UAVs are all well and good, the physical battlefield isn’t the only real one. Cybersecurity is increasingly important even in real-world security; NASA just recently said it had been hacked thousands of times, possibly losing valuable and sensitive data to hackers in China.

Dugan is the subject of an investigation (described as one of many “regular audits” but an investigation nonetheless) related to contracts being awarded to a firm for which she was a co-founder, but the DARPA spokesman said the departure for Google was unrelated.

She is expected to make the final switch in the next few weeks, by which time we will perhaps have more information on her new role at Google.

[image: Annette Polan]

Turns out, Forest Whitaker isn’t just an Academy Award winning actor and accomplished producer and director — he’s also really into technology and social media. He brings together both worlds as a co-chair of JuntoBox Films, a brand new kind of movie studio that brings together its own social media platform with a traditional film production process.

Whitaker was at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas this past weekend, where JuntoBox announced it has greenlit its first film, a movie called Passenger — the first of five films the studio plans to produce in 2012. Watch his interview with TechCrunch TV to see him discuss how technology is democratizing the filmmaking process, how Hollywood is slowly getting over its fear of the web, and how many apps he has on his iPhone (spoiler alert: it’s a lot!)

To publish a “review” of the Lytro as it is today is, in a way, very premature. But it’s also only fair. The product is shipping and, to an extent, complete. But given the number of features and planned improvements in the pipes, a review today will be obsolete in a few months. Nevertheless, an initial judgment on the device must be made.

So here is what can be said of the Lytro in a form that can only really be called a public beta.

Pros

• Camera is well-built and extremely easy to operate
• Uniqueness of the imaging technique makes you think differently about photography
• Could be good for kids

Cons

• Image quality isn’t particularly good
• Composition options are, in some ways, extremely limited
• Many desirable ways to manage and adjust your photos are absent

A quick explanation is probably in order for people who have not handled the camera. The Lytro Light Field Camera lets you take pictures in which you can adjust the focus after the fact. It has two modes: everyday, in which you only control the zoom and shutter release, and creative, which lets you zoom more, focus closer, and control the depth of field more — but you have to manually tell it where to focus, which is kind of backwards for a device meant to remove the process of focusing from the equation.

The photos, or “living photos” as they call them, can then be transferred to your computer and uploaded to Lytro’s website, where you can then embed or share them elsewhere online.

We recently got to talk with Lytro founder Ren Ng and their director of photography, Eric Cheng, at an event in San Francisco. I cornered them for a few minutes to talk about the product and their plans for the future.

Hardware and design

The designers of the Lytro camera itself should be congratulated for creating a device that is unique, functional, and attractive all at once. That’s not easy to do. The square-prism shape is strange at first, being unlike almost any camera on the market, but once you think of it more as a kind of telescope than a camera as far as handling is concerned, it’s quite natural.

The shutter button is easy to find and pleasant to activate; the touch-sensitive zoom area is responsive; the textured rubber finish is grippy and attractive; overall the feeling of the device is one of solidity and simplicity. It’ll survive a fall or a splash of coffee and look good doing it.

My main criticism hardware-wise is the screen. It’s extremely small and the resolution (hence sharpness and ability to display your photos properly) is poor. It’s responsive to touch, but it can’t display much and getting the focus point right in creative mode can be a pain. It’s also difficult to tell how your pictures turned out in playback mode: the screen often just isn’t good enough to display the nuances of the focus shift. Many times I thought I’d captured a good one only to be disappointed, though sometimes I was pleasantly surprised with the opposite, as well.

One other minor potential concern is that the grid in the rubber might fill with grit and grime over time, but it’s hard to say for sure, only having had the camera for short while.

Shooting with the Lytro

Note: you can click on the pictures below to change the focus.

Creating multi-depth pictures is a totally new and interesting experience. The closest thing I can think of to how it feels is when I was using the Casio Exilim FC100 to shoot super-slow-motion video. Described on paper, both light field pictures and high framerates don’t really pique the imagination. But once you do it, you’re curious to find out how it would work in this or that situation, or from up here, or over here, and you begin to think differently about how the world around you can be captured.

The thing is that, as DP Review concisely puts it, this type of photography “tends to require contrived compositions.” Lytro’s primary strength is also its greatest weakness.

First it should be noted that the lens on the camera really isn’t very wide. They put it at ~36mm, but I found it had only a slightly wider field of view than my 1.6x crop DSLR with a 35mm lens – in other words, around 45mm, which is far from wide-angle. At all events, it could be wider. For composition with multiple subjects, which is really the only reason a picture should be taken with a Lytro camera and not a traditional one, you need as wide an angle as possible. A portrait lens means you’ll always be struggling to fit two subjects in the frame. And the square aspect ratio makes it harder still; you’d think you’d want a widescreen format so a foreground subject can be left or centered and the other subject off-center or opposed.

When shooting, you can be in either everyday or creative mode. In everyday mode, it is difficult to get the refocus effect without a specific kind of composition: very close to one object, with another distant object in the other part of the frame. In creative mode, you have much more latitude, and can do interesting things like shots with a long zoom (the constant f/2 lens helps with this) or super-macro stuff.

This last application, I have to say, is really astonishing — I was told that the device can essentially focus on things touching the lens, which is extraordinary and has produced some really interesting pictures almost effortlessly.

The catch with creative mode is that you can’t just fire away: you have to tap on the tiny screen to pick a region to “focus” on, and the resulting focus process is long and slow. You’ll want to use creative for action shots, but it’s impossible; you have to use everyday, and then you wish you’d just shot it with a normal camera.

As far as acting as a camera that simply requires no focusing, it certainly can do that, but the sharpness and image quality aren’t stellar, so you won’t want to print it big or anything like that. They’re experimenting with larger sensors and suggested that it may be possible to derive a larger static image from the raw light field data, but for now, the 1080×1080 image with questionable noise and sharpness levels is all you’re getting. Not that it’s really meant to be a replacement for a normal point and shoot camera, but one would hope it could at least fill that role.

The lack of tools to affect the photo after the fact is also frustrating. The Lytro software allows you to browse, rotate, and share, but that’s it right now. No adjustment of color or exposure, no expansion or contraction of the focus area, no cool effects that only a Lytro camera can do. This will change, but as it is, you’re very restricted in how you handle your images.

I do want to point out, though, that the simplicity of operation means that a child can use it, and it may actually be an interesting way for a young photographer to learn the rudiments of framing, depth of field, and so on. It’s hard to make a mistake in everyday mode, though the results probably won’t be breathtaking.

Despite the simplicity of the process, there’s still a learning curve to actually getting a photo right. As you can see, I was only partially successful.

Software and sharing

The Lytro software is limited to browsing your photos and grouping them into “stories,” and you can upload them directly to (and only to) Lytro, which will serve them for… eternity, you hope. Not much of a choice there.

Bafflingly, you can’t look at your photos in full resolution in the app; you’re limited to a half-size preview, fully interactive of course, but it’s only once you’ve uploaded them that you can see them in the full-size mode. A truly strange omission.

There is precious little information available about the picture for the interested shooter. You can’t see how many focal points will be preserved for the compressed web version, you can’t view a depth map or any metadata other than basic exposure info. Sharing online works fine, and interacting with the pictures is easy and can be fun.

Potential

I realize that this review may seem overly critical. That’s because I’m reviewing the product, not the technology. The technology is absolutely fascinating to me and some the potential applications (as verified with the device’s inventor, Ren Ng, and others) are mind-blowing. The problem is simply that none of the killer features is shipping with the camera. The primary usage scenario is limited to a certain type of framing and range, something a casual user will tire of quickly. And the extended usage scenarios forfeit the simplicity promised by the camera.

The stuff they have coming down the line over the rest of the year might make this camera a much more exciting proposition: control over depth of field, adjustment of color and exposure, a more versatile client app (and a Windows version), more ways to share your photos, 3D and perspective shifting… the list goes on.

But those features will be rolled out who knows when. Right now the camera is shipping, for $400, with a feature set that, aside from the initial blush of curiosity and experimentation, doesn’t really excite.

The fact is that the people who would be interested by the Lytro are already buying it in droves, with the faith that it will improve — and it will. But will a group of early adopters, even a fairly large one, give Lytro enough legitimacy to continue their improvements, maybe put out a new device? Right now the Lytro is kind of a hard sell. As a photographer, and as an evaluator of popular products, my doubts remain. The people at Lytro are extremely smart, the technology is truly fascinating, and the potential is off the charts. But as a debut, the Lytro camera is just too limited in its current form to recommend to anyone but an enthusiast with money to burn. A year from now it might be different.

Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the Y Combinator-backed blogging and sharing platform that competed early on with Tumblr.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Posterous had raised $10.1 million in two venture rounds plus early seed funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Jafco Ventures. I’d suspect it’s a similar outcome to what happened with Gowalla’s deal with Facebook, where talented employees find a soft landing at an acquirer with a shared mission. There were already some ties between the two companies. Chris Sacca, an early investor in Twitter, was also an advisor to Posterous.

Posterous says its service Spaces will stay up and running and that the company will give plenty of notice to users if they start to change the service.

An early competitor to Tumblr, Posterous was known for the savvy way it combined e-mail and other channels to allow users to post content from any type of web application. But it didn’t have quite the same traction as New York-based rival Tumblr and early founders like Garry Tan departed for greener pastures at places like Y Combinator, where he eventually became a partner. It evolved and late last year, the company released Spaces, a way to privately share photos with friends or family.

Here’s Posterous’ statement:

March 12, 2012 Posterous is Joining the Flock at Twitter
Big news: Posterous has been acquired by Twitter!
The opportunities in front of Twitter are exciting, and we couldn’t be happier about bringing our team’s expertise to a product that reaches hundreds of millions of users around the globe. Plus, the people at Twitter are genuinely nice folks who share our vision for making sharing simpler.

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.

You can find more information answers to other questions you may have here.

Finally, we’d like to offer thanks to all of our users, especially those who have been with Posterous since day one. The last four years have been an amazing journey. Your encouragement, praise and criticism have made us better. Thanks for that. We look forward to building great things for you over at Twitter.

And here’s Twitter’s statement:

Today we are welcoming a very talented group from Posterous to Twitter. This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple—a goal we share. Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.

We’re always looking for talented people who have the passion and personality to join Twitter. Acquisitions have given us people and technology that have enabled us to more quickly build a better Twitter for you.

Legendary scientist, inventor, futurist, and all-around tech icon Ray Kurzweil is at the ongoing South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, where today he headlined one of the event’s most highly anticipated keynote sessions. So we were very, very excited to be able to meet Kurzweil yesterday afternoon for an interview with TechCrunch TV.

I don’t know about you, but when I get the opportunity to sit down and chat with someone like Ray Kurzweil in his hotel suite, I basically stay and continue to ask questions until he or she kicks me out. We ended up with such a wide-ranging talk that we’re breaking it down into two segments. In this first half of our interview, watch Kurzweil discuss why we need more young entrepreneurs, how today’s consumer app landscape proves his Law of Accelerating Returns, how education is stuck in the 19th century, why privacy isn’t as big of a problem as we think, and lots more.

Make sure to check back tomorrow for part two of our interview, where we get Kurzweil’s insights on why it’s important for entrepreneurs to get some sleep once in a while, what neuroscience research he’s particularly obsessed with these days, and his favorite web applications, among many other things.

Ray Kurzweil portrait photo credited to Michael Lutch via SXSW.com

If your company doesn’t have a Facebook Timeline app yet, you’re late to the party. 3,000 Timeline apps have spawned since Facebook launched the platform 3 months ago, and today Foursquare, VEVO, The Onion, Fandango, BandPage, and more big companies are unveiling theirs to cash in on the free virality. Pinterest and others have already seen wild growth from the platform’s ability to automatically publish to the Facebook Ticker, news feed, and Timeline when users take action.

These new launches, and especially Nike’s, are likely to convince more brands and startups that Timeline app development is worth the investment. That means soon there will be even more apps feeding user behaviors into Facebook’s content feeds and ad targeting engine.

The Onion definitely wins for most the ridiculous integration I’ve ever seen Facebook promote. It’s website now explains “Shove The Onion down your friends’ throats. Log in to Facebook now to see what your so-called friends are reading and watching, and to let them see every fucking thing you’re reading and watching.” Kudos to Facebook for being chill enough to approve this.

Facebook notes that Pinterest has seen its Facebook user base grow 60% since it launched its Timeline app in January when Facebook opened the platform to all developers. Meanwhile Goodreads has boosted daily traffic by 77% and Pose has had 5X growth of web and mobile signups. Facebook has previously announced big growth stats for news readers and music apps.

Today’s announcement could be the tipping point where the rest of the world’s companies realize, “Hey, we can get buckets of free traffic and exposure through a Timeline app.” Facebook sure hopes so. Since Open Graph Timeline apps contribute user behavior data in a structured way, it can use that data to let advertisers target them based on where they check in, whether they work out, or what movies they’ve actually seen — not just Liked.

Here’s what Facebook says the new apps do (I’ve deleted the unnecessary pep talk and added some growth stats I’ve pulled from the companies):

Foursquare: Foursquare uses many of the new features announced last week to bring its location app to Timeline. People can now add their Foursquare check-ins to their timelines and maps, share their badges and see the top places they’ve checked into.

Nike: As of last week, people can use the Nike FuelBand iPhone app to find friends and see a leader board of how much Fuel they’ve earned versus their friends. Soon, people will be able to post their achievements and milestones directly to their timeline. Extra: FuelBand users can now see the fuel scores of their friends through the mobile app, and starting Thursday they’ll be able to post to Timeline.

VEVO: Vevo introduced a new integration that lets people sign into Vevo.com with their Facebook account, get personalized video playlists based on the artists they’ve liked, discover new music through friends, and post any music video from Vevo’s massive library directly to their timeline.

RootMusic: The new RootMusic timeline app lets people mark their favorite songs and artists and the concerts they plan on attending from the Facebook Pages of bands, like The Stone Foxes. As people click “favorite”, “going to go” and “wants to go” on a RootMusic app, their picks will be added to their timeline.

The Onion: “Laugh alone no more.” People can now log into TheOnion.com with their Facebook account to add The Onion content directly to their timeline and share articles and videos as they read and watch. Friends can discover articles in News Feed, and get personalized recommendations on TheOnion.com.

Endomondo: Endomondo brought its fitness app to timeline so people can share their workouts, progress and favorite routes with friends on Facebook. Sharing fitness activities with friends makes it easier to coordinate workouts and cheer each other on to new fitness goals.

Fandango: The new Fandango timeline app lets people add the clips they watch, the movies they rate and any films they want to see.

Viddy: Viddy, the mobile app for creating quick videos and adding filters, now lets people add clips to their timelines as they shoot. Now when people film videos from a vacation or everyday life, they can share them to Facebook and collect their clips on the Viddy app for timeline. Extra: In two and a half weeks, Viddy’s Timeline app has gone from 50,000 monthly active users to 900,000 MAU. An Android version of its iOS app will be available in a few months.

Word of the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G first broke around the time Team TechCrunch was roaming the cavernous halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center at CES, but at the time T-Mobile wasn’t feeling very talkative about release dates.

The mangenta-hued carrier seems to have opened up a bit during the intervening months though, as they’ve taken to Twitter earlier today to announce that their latest Samsung handset will hit their sales channels on March 28. If you’re really lucky (or willing to hop in a car and take some chances), you could snag a Blaze 4G even earlier than that, as some stores will be selling the device a week early.

You’d be forgiven for not remembering the Galaxy S Blaze 4G — between all of the nifty new gadgets on display at CES and MWC, a mid-range T-Mobile handset like the Blaze can slip though the cracks pretty easily. Still, while a Galaxy S III this thing ain’t, one could certainly do worse than eye up a device with a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S3 processor, 3.97-inch Super AMOLED display, and support for T-Mobile’s 42Mbps HSPA+ network.

For better or worse you’ll still have to deal with Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread and Samsung’s hallmark TouchWiz UI but hey, it’s not like the market is swimming in Android 4.0 devices yet. At $150 (after a $50 mail-in rebate, ugh) the Blaze 4G runs squarely in the middle of the T-Mobile pack, and while it looks to be a solid choice for anyone sitting on an upgrade, pulling the trigger on a phone like this still takes some consideration.

A few more bucks nets you a proper Galaxy S II (in white even!), while a few dollars less yields up some solid-if-dated hardware like the HTC Sensation. It’s a perpetually tough call for prospective phone shoppers — should they take a plunge on a mid-range handset now, or wait for prices on high-end devices to drop?

I usually trash any email that comes my way pitching an iPad case and/or stand. Sorry, but there are just so many of them that they really need to stand out. The Mogul, a Kickstarter project, certainly stands out and just so happens to solve a bit of a pain point, too.

See, the Mogul isn’t your average iPad stand. It’s actually meant to be used as a point-of-sale module in conjunction with Square and (yep, you guessed it) the iPad.

Ever since launching, Square has been picked up by companies of all shapes and sizes, as the add-on snaps seamlessly into anything with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Square on the iPad tends to be the most pleasurable experience in a POS situation, except for one small problem.

No one wants to hand a $500+ piece of gadgetry back and forth to customers. It just takes one greedy customer hauling ass out of the store, iPad in hand, to learn that lesson the hard way. The Mogul solves that problem elegantly.

Made of aluminum, the Mogul holds your iPad in either portrait or landscape and easily tilts back and forth to face either the cashier or the customer. Of course, this solves the problem of having iPads stolen out of stores, but I think it extends beyond that.

We’re living in the future. These days you can walk into a Burger King and check out an electronic menu on massive LCD displays, or you can tap your phone on a register at Jack In The Box to buy some fries. Times are a’changin. That said, seeing a line of Mogul + iPad combos in a check-out section would get me excited to be in such a forward-thinking, technologically advanced store.

Unfortunately, this Kickstarter project only has a few short hours left, so if you actually want to see it in stores like I do, take the time to share this post and/or pledge here.

Swedish gaming company King.com just acquired Stockholm-based developer Fabrication Games in a big push to expand onto Android and iOS this year.

With the deal, King.com picks up Fabrication’s talent, games and developer tools. Terms weren’t disclosed, but I would assume the acquisition is priced in the talent-range. Fabrication had titles that cropped up on certain game category rankings like Sprinkle (which was developed by Mediocre AB) and Ionocraft Racing, but it lacked an enduring chart-topper. Fabrication had 12 employees and was founded as a spin-off of Jadestone Mobile.

King.com is following a slew of other casual and social gaming companies onto mobile, and the Fabrication acquisition should boost its ability build new titles quickly. Companies like Zynga, Crowdstar, OMGPOP and Funzio have all found some success in crossing over to iOS and Android from Facebook in the last year.

But King.com is doing the transition only now, after accumulating a footprint on Facebook with its hit Bubble Witch Saga, which has 16.7 million monthly active users, according to tracking service AppData. After running a destination site for years, the company made a serious push onto Facebook last year. Now it is the fourth largest game developer on Facebook after Zynga, Berlin-based Wooga and EA in terms of monthly active users. When King.com finally does make a serious debut on mobile, it will be an interesting test to see whether Facebook is an effective platform for driving downloads of mobile games.

On the back of this traction on Facebook, we’re hearing that the company is looking at a potential initial public offering next year on the NASDAQ, depending on market conditions. Chief executive Riccardo Zacconi is hunting around the West Coast for a Silicon Valley-based board member and is changing internal financial reporting to meet generally accepted accounting principles.

The company last raised funding seven years ago with a $43 million round from Apax Partners and Index Ventures.