Category: Tech news

Is Charlie Kaufman making apps? How else to explain this videogame about making videogames? Build your studio, hire developers, and come up with new products. You’ll have to figure out what types of games the market wants and assemble teams capable of pulling them off.

WIRED Narrative incorporates real-world scenarios like platform licensing, marketing, and conferences.

TIRED You can’t compete against other players’ companies.

Game Dev Story

A clean layout plus thousands of free downloadable puzzles — from New York Times stumpers to People’s self-esteem boosters — make this the best crossword app for the iPad. Uncertain players will appreciate the ability to “pencil in” guesses, and the faux-paper background will make traditionalists feel at home.

WIRED NYT subscribers can download current crosswords in-app. Can check answers for single clues or entire puzzles.

TIRED No landscape mode. Can’t sort puzzles by difficulty.

Crux Crosswords

Continuing the iPhone’s legacy of addictive games with avian protagonists, Tiny Wings pits you against the celestial clock as you dive-bomb into and launch out of various hills and valleys, covering as much ground as possible before the day ends. It could be the most frustrating game in the App Store.

WIRED Simple controls+a cute character=iPhone sweet spot. Hand-drawn look sets it apart visually from other casual games.

TIRED Can cross the line from challenging to too damned hard.

Tiny Wings

Chalk up for eight-ball, nine-ball, or snooker against computer or online opponents. Though the rich graphics are nice, in-game physics are overly ideal: The cue connects so cleanly and the balls roll so smoothly that it gets tedious.

WIRED Smooth multitouch gestures. Shake things up with hexagonal tables.

TIRED Deciphering setup options (“cue/object ball mass ratio”?) is more challenging than actual gameplay. A rule book would help, especially for less familiar games like Crokinole.

Pool Break Pro

Lightbank-backed oBaz,, a crowdsourced haggling service that launched in August, is shifting its focus towards product discovery today with the launch of a new Aisle-system on the site.

As we reported previously, oBaz, short for online bazaar, lets anyone create their own group of like-minded buyers looking to get a good price on the same product or service. You simply post the item you’d like on oBaz, wait for people to join the group (a minimum of 25 people have to be in a group to haggle for a product), and then let oBaz work its magic. oBaz hagglers will reach out to merchants or manufacturers and leverage the group and their own negotiating expertise to get the best possible deal.

With oBaz Aisles, users join groups based on their product interests (i.e. Parents, Musicians, Chefs, Gamers, Dog Lovers). oBaz experts in these aireas will curate interesting buys, make product recommendations for their respective Aisles and will get deals on these products for oBaz users.

Once in an Aisle, users can participate in daily discussion questions, vote for upcoming products, or purchase exclusive deals. Additionally, users must submit answers to lifestyle questions before being granted access to an Aisle. For example, Photographers may be asked about their favorite lens while Hackers are asked a question using binary code, and Chefs must come up with an impromptu recipe when given three ingredients. oBaz members can join any number of Aisles for free and there’s no limit on the number of Aisles that can be created.

By sourcing unique products, oBaz seeks to bring visibility to lesser-known brands. Recent deals include a high-quality guitar stand for $125 (Retail: $200) and a gaming iPad accessory for $56 (Retail: $99) from relatively unknown manufacturers.

If you have more money than sense, I have an iPhone case for you. Watchmaker De Bethune has created the DW4 aka the Dream Watch 4, an iPhone case made of bead-blasted titanium with an embedded mechanical watch in the back. Why? Because the poor can suck it is why.

Only twelve of the limited edition cases will be made, with one given to John Corzine as a retirement gift. The rest will be flaunted on the streets of various famine-torn nations by impossibly thin Russian models who will order huge plates of food that they won’t eat.

No pricing, but seriously?

via Ablogtoread

Chicago-based startup Sprout Social, the developer of a comprehensive social relationship management platform for businesses, has rebuilt its offering from the ground up, adding support for personalized dashboards multi-users, full iPhone functionality, and more.

For background, the startup’s platform, which launched to the public last year, allows businesses to connect to customers and monitor key metrics and the overall competitive landscape using social media tools. Sprout Social integrates with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, and LinkedIn and includes lead generation, business intelligence, offer and promotion distribution services, as well as brand monitoring and analytics.

Business users can aggregate all of an organization’s social media messaging into a single activity stream, automate cross-network posting of promotional messages, conduct targeted searches for new customers and more.

Because the new version supports multiple users, teams and groups, users can now have personalized dashboards that display the streams and modules that they need to be effective. Sales, marketing, product development and customer service departments can have different profiles and permissions while community managers or others can be assigned administrative roles.

A new assignment capability allows tasks to be placed in user task queues, and the entire platform has been redesigned with a new UI. Sprout Social users can now access the application via an iPhone app, and can monitor their social media inbox, send replies, create and schedule new messages, view assignments on the go. Android is coming soon, says founder Justyn Howard.

Pricing starts at $9 per month. As Howard explains, the new version aims to go beyond just monitoring to measuring and creating engagement for brands, helping them grow their social media presence and find who they should be listening to.

Sprout Social has raised $1 million in new funding from Lightbank.

Storage memory solutions company Fusion-io this morning announced that it has filed a registration statement with the SEC for a proposed follow-on public offering of shares of its common stock.

The company proposes to sell, from time to time, up to $350 million of its common stock, approximately $100 million of which would be sold by Fusion-io and the rest by its shareholders.

Fusion-io says the remaining shares will be sold by existing stockholders, including any shares issued to the underwriters to cover over-allotments.

According to the filing, Fusion-io will not receive proceeds from the sale by shareholders.

Founded in 2005, Fusion-io combines hardware and software to develop a storage memory platform, giving servers native access to data to accelerate enterprise databases and applications while reducing energy consumption. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is its Chief Scientist.

The company’s share price closed at $37.61 yesterday, but is down roughly 10 percent in pre-market trading. At present, Fusion-io’s market cap stands at $3.2 billion.

Online outsourcer oDesk is reporting today that its contractors earned a record $22.3 million through the oDesk platform in October. This represents 90% growth from 2010. oDesk offers a “marketplace for talent” that makes it easy for companies to hire workers remotely.

Last month, contractors worked a record 2.1 million hours through the oDesk website (up from one million hours per month a year ago) while businesses posted an a record 109,718 jobs to the service. The company expects the overall market for online work to grow to an estimated $1 billion in 2012.

oDesk is also announcing a number of hired at the company. Jeff Jackson has joined as vice president of engineering and was previously senior vice president of engineering at Sun Microsystems. Jaleh Bisharat, a former marketing exec at OpenTable and Amazon, has been named vice president of marketing. And Bank Of America’s former CFO, Bob Frick, has joined the company’s board of directors.

As brands increasingly turn to Facebook to host their online presence and their ads, they’ll seek platforms that handle management of both owned and paid marketing. Today, Facebook ecommerce storefront platform Zibaba is providing such a solution with the launch of an Ads API feature. It allows merchants to automatically generate and buy ads based on their most popular products so they can efficiently promote their storefronts.

Zibaba is the first to bring ads buying capabilities into a Facebook ecommerce platform. However, the important point here is that developers are beginning to take advantage of Facebook recently opening up its Ads API. Namely, they’re integrating ads buying systems into services for a variety of verticals.

Expect this trend to continue, with more developers of management platforms for brands, bands, and small businesses charging clients a percentage of spend or a premium on cost per acquisition to advertise through them. For example, ReverbNation augmented its musician marketing platform with an Ads API tool in August. As its impossible to properly A/B test or manage bids through Facebook’s self-serve tool, businesses can significantly improve the performance of their campaigns through tools built on the Ads API.

While most brands have set up Facebook Pages, their objectives now are to gain more fans and monetize those fans. Zibaba’s Ads API-integrated ecommerce platform lets brands do both if they have products to sell directly.

Brands can use Zibaba to set up a storefront hosted as a tab application on their Facebook Page and import their catalog of products. They can then turn the images and titles of their best selling products into ads that draw Facebook users to their stores. Finally, they can monitor analytics to determine what ad campaigns are driving the most sales.

This is the real strength of integrating the Ads API into ecommerce and content management platforms. When run off the same system, downstream conversions are easier to track. With brands seeking to measure their return on investment on social, developers will join Zibaba in helping their clients optimize for conversions and not just clicks.

On the heels of inking a deal with DailyMotion, AnyClip is today announcing a content licensing agreement with Warner Bros. Digital Distribution. Full movies from the movie studio, including the Harry Potter and Batman franchise, will be fully searchable for any object, character, location, scene or emotion.

Other titles covered by the agreement include Ocean’s Eleven, 300, Superman, The Wizard of Oz, Lethal Weapon, Dirty Harry, Casablanca, Se7en and The Shining.

AnyClip’s online library now includes access to over 12,000 films and over 50,000 live clips, including titles from the likes of Universal Pictures, Vivendi Entertainment, and Indie distribution firms such as First Look and Virgil Films.

In addition, AnyClip is today launching a completely revamped consumer site, featuring the option to purchase full length films via Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes (see screenshot below).

The new site will also include special features, such as targeted advertising and a call-to-action to purchase the songs featured in each clip (think Shazam for online video).

If there’s one thing missing from modern watches it’s color. The 70s and 80s brought us things like Doxa’s orange and Breitling’s baby blue but no one, lately, has strayed from the old leathers and grey chromes of modern fashion watcher. Thankfully, the ZIIRO Celeste adds a bit of the old mix-a-lot to some staid steel quartzes.

These watches use two overlapping disks to either mix two shades of gray or two shades of blue/green. These watches are called “mystery dials” and they were fairly common a few decades ago. However, with the improvements in translucent plastic and metal casing, these are a far cry from the watches worn by proto-sci-fi writers on the town in 1960s Connecticut.

You can pre-order the watch for $205 and receive for shipment on November 18.

Product Page via engadget

Recently we’ve seen reports flying around claiming that Apple has plans to put Siri on older generation devices, and may even be testing out the personal assistant on the iPhone 4. The news seemed more than a bit unexpected, so we decided to wait for Apple’s confirmation. Lo and behold, Apple has responded just as we thought they would: Siri is an iPhone 4S exclusive, at least in any official sense.

In the past few days, we’ve seen Siri running on an iPhone 4, a 4th Gen iPod Touch, and an iPhone 3GS, but Apple played no part in that. As the word spread, rumors began to circulate that Apple was indeed planning on bringing the personal assistant to older devices, but that hope has been effectively killed. An iOS developer by the name of Michael Steeber reached out to Apple asking whether or not Siri might be part of a special, paid update to iOS 5.

Just like they’ve said before, Apple responded with this:

Engineering has provided the following feedback regarding this issue:

Siri only works on iPhone 4S and we currently have no plans to support older devices.

When it comes down to it, it simply doesn’t make business sense for Apple to move Siri onto older devices. The company disappointed many by bringing the exact same design to the table this year, and Siri is the number one defense against that. Especially considering just how little the mass majority of consumers care about specs, much less understand them.

Putting Siri on older handsets severely depreciates the iPhone 4S’s value, and we wouldn’t want that would we?

Home services marketplace and TechCrunch50 winner Redbeacon is debuting its first mobile offering today—an iPhone app. The app essentially allows homeowners to be able to get quotes for services on the go without having to make service professionals visit their homes.

Redbeacon lets users search, browse and book local service providers – from plumbers to bakers – on its website. Service providers pay a fee to Redbeacon for new paying customers, or in some categories, like lawyers, for a lead. The company has expanded from San Francisco to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Atlanta, Seattle, and Houston.

With the mobile app, people can shoot a video, take a photo or record a voice memo to show and describe the home care need. For example, homeowners can quickly show the window that needs to be fixed, the roof that is leaking or the room they want painted. Service professionals can then give users accurate quotes without having to schedule a home visit.

Redbeacon’s iPhone app lets users select from common home service providers like Handyman, Electrician, House Cleaner, Plumber and Yard Worker to make a request for services. It uses the phone’s GPS to locate the job and matches the request with quality pros in the area, who then compete for the job and provide quotes.

Users can then browse through all the quotes received, review home service providers’ Redbeacon score, profiles, prices and user reviews, and book an appointment to get the job done from their phone while on the go.

Founded by former Googlers Aaron Lee, Ethan Anderson and Yaron Binur, Redbeacon has raised $7.4 million in funding led by Mayfield Fund and Venrock.

We just can’t get away from the social recommendations space, can we? Just this past month, we’ve seen new startups like Oink and Wikets arrive, and even a hilarious spoof of the trend via the fake startup Jotly. Well, now you can add another startup to the list, because today, a new social recommendations service for small businesses called BestVendor is opening its doors, too. And it already has $600,000 in seed funding from Peter Thiel, SVAngel, SoftBank Capital and Lerer Ventures to get things going.

Now launching into public beta, what BestVendor offers is a free, online directory of Web services, online applications and software specially designed for startups or other small businesses. Eventually, the site wants to become the go-to resource to find everything you need for your company.

What’s interesting about the way BestVendor operates, however, is its social component. The service requires that you sign in with your LinkedIn ID, so it automatically knows who’s in your network. Further down the road, it will add support for Facebook and Twitter, too, we’re told.

BestVendor requires that you recommend three products at sign up, in order to kick start its database of recommendations. In its pre-launch state, the service already has 3,500 products on hand and allows you to add others as need be. While browsing the site, you can continue to click on products you’ve used to build your list of recommended apps and services.

You can filter through the community’s recommended applications by category (design, development, finance, sales, etc.) or by people or company. By default, BestVendor shows you all the recommendations from its user base either as a list of users (the People tab) or businesses (the Companies tab), but for a more personal slice of the aggregated data, you can choose to filter this list so it only shows recommendations from your LinkedIn network. And you can further refine the recommendations by industry (e.g., Finance, Government, Health, etc.) using the left-hand navigation.

There are dozens of other little features that make the site pleasurable to use and instantly addictive, like the “cool fact” sidebar that shows the top 5 recommended apps for any given industry list, the “request a note” feature that lets you initiate conversations around the products in question, and the little “I use this buttons” that like you both like an item and see how many others use that app, too.

There’s no gimmick here, like on BestVendor’s consumer-focused counterparts, Oink and Wikets, for example, which respectively promise either “cred” or gift cards for your participation. Instead, the reward in using BestVendor comes from the value the site itself delivers – being able to see what your colleagues use, have used and recommend in terms of work-related apps. That’s kind of a reward in and of itself. Even as a heavy Web service user myself, BestVendor was able to recommend a thing or two I’d now like to try, which surprised me.

The only drawback to the site is the manual labor required to fill the database. But those “I use this buttons” are just so darned clickable. The recommendations come easily.

BestVendor’s business model will eventually encompass affiliate listings, referrals, product reselling and enhanced vendor listings that offer videos and screenshots.

Along with Jeff Giesea, BestVendor’s other co-founders include Ben Zhuk and Magnus von Koeller. The team began work on the product in January 2011, but didn’t start on it full time until May, when Zhuk and von Koeller completed their classes at Columbia Business School. By June, BestVendor had their first round of seed funding, and the company plans to close its Series A next March.