Category: Tech news

PicPlum is a new photo-sharing startup which aims to make the curation, printing and mailing of physical photos easier than before. The service, founded by Paul Stamatiou and Akshay Dodeja, is targeted towards parents who want to send out printed photos of their children to friends and family. However, unlike the photo-printing powerhouses, Shutterfly and Snapfish, the idea isn’t to print out all your digital photos as cheaply as possible. With PicPlum, it’s about enhancing the overall experience of sending and receiving photos by mail.

PicPlum encourages its users to select only their best photos, which are then printed using a high quality chemical process and packaged into attractive envelopes prior to shipping. The end result is something more beautiful and more engaging than anything you would receive from a traditional print shop.

Subscription Services for Printed Photos

The service has another key benefit, too – it’s automated. Every month, a new batch of photos is sent out for you through the service, without any effort on your part.

Although there is a pay-as-you-go option for those who don’t care for subscription services, the monthly option is the better deal. For $7 per month, you can choose 15 photos sent to one address. For another $7, you can choose a second recipient. And if you want to add extra photos to the batch, it’s $0.50 each.

Pay-as-you-go users, meanwhile, pay $0.50 per photo plus shipping ($1.50 in the U.S, and rates may vary for international orders).

PicPlum is offering a special to TechCrunch readers which gives you a 2nd recipient for free, in addition to the one-month free trial.  Click here to use the TechCrunch promo code. 

To be fair, this service is 5 times more expensive than those from larger companies, like Shutterfly or Snapfish, which typically charge 9-cents per photo. Either of those companies could easily launch something similar, and undercut PicPlum on price.

But what sets PicPlum apart at present is the automation. Throughout the month, you selectively email in your best photos, or upload them directly to the site. You don’t have to remember to do anything else – which, as any parent will tell you, is a huge plus.

Curation is Key

There’s also something to this idea of curation. Thanks to the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones, it’s easy to accumulate large collections of photos, containing hundreds of photos, if not thousands. Family and friends (as much as they love your little one!), don’t really have the time to sift through those online photos to select those they wish to print. So instead, you select the best photos and the rest is handled for you.

In a way, PicPlum is like the analog counterpart to my current favorite photo-sharing application Photogram, which asks you to pick 4 photos to sent out via an email decorated with a pretty theme.  In PicPlum’s case, the “theme” is an attractive envelope and the digital photos are physical prints.  (But if you still prefer email, PicPlum also supports unlimited email recipients for free.)

About the Founders & Company

The company’s founders have previous startup experience. Stamatiou co-founded mobile notifier platform Notifo, and Dodja co-founded music startup Mugasha. PicPlum acquired the assets of a previous Y-Combinator company PicWing, and took over its printer relationship and initial user base. The company currently has $150,000 in funding offered by SV Angel and Yuri Miller to all Y-Combinator startups earlier this year. The founders say they are beginning their fundraising now, and will be looking to hire soon.

I’m a vinyl guy. I’ve been a vinyl guy ever since I started DJing on the radio and at local parties when I was 19.

I’m not anti-digital, it’s just that vinyl was the only choice in the mid-1990s when MP3s weren’t yet commonplace and those CD-DJ decks were still prohibitively expensive. Vinyl was king, and the king’s word was law.

Of course, laptops finally conquered the DJ booth. With them came dozens of software apps and USB devices made for digital mixing. I dipped my toe in. I played around with Traktor through a Kontrol interface. I tried Scratch Pro 2. I used a Vestax Typhoon at one of my gigs when the other DJ left it connected for me to try out. It all leaves me cold. The addition of hefty technology never made DJing more fun for me, just more complicated.

So when the Gemini FirstMix showed up on my desk, I felt like it was some sort of personal challenge, a hurdle I needed to clear. Call it a growth exercise. My terabyte drive runneth over with MP3s, so why not?

Besides, this thing makes it easy. Being an entry-level, $100 device, the Gemini is dead simple — there are two plastic platters that spin like records for cueing your tracks, and a mixer in the middle with the absolute minimum of knobs and controls. Gemini has been making solid DJ equipment for eons (and has some higher-end offerings) so it’s designed to closely resemble the real deal.

The FirstMix comes with MixVibes Cross LE — the “LE” always signals you’re getting something less than the big business, which is to be expected at this price point.

I loaded up the software with a bunch of different tracks and had at it. You do all of your selecting on the FirstMix with the big “Browse” knob in the middle, and you assign tracks to deck A or B (left or right) by pressing one of the buttons right under the big knob. Each bank has a gain control, a two-band EQ and a knob for dialing in effects like phasing and echo. The only problem I had with the hardware is that the jog wheels spin too easily — since all the controls are so close together, it’s too easy to knock one of them with a pinky-knuckle and cause your song to skip forward or back a couple of seconds.

No, my problem wasn’t with the hardware, it was with the software. MixVibes Cross LE was fine while I was in “selector” mode and just fading between tracks as each one ran out. But as soon as I started trying to match beats, sync tracks and do longer fades, the app had trouble guessing the BPM and finding the “one.” I was feeding it funk, soul and R&B with some clean four-on-the-floor stomping, but it didn’t know what to do with any of it. Glitchy techno? Afro-beat? Forget it. Reggae and Dub? Oh, honey. The only tunes it could analyze accurately were disco and house tracks. Sorry, but that makes for a pretty boring set. I had to resort to using my instincts, and I fumbled quite a bit trying to beatmatch with the 5-inch plastic jog wheels.

Luckily, the FirstMix works with several popular DJing apps. I hooked it up to Traktor and things suddenly got easier.

So the hardware is legit. Be aware that it’s cheap, lightweight plastic (about one and a half pounds), but that’s fine because it doesn’t require coddling. I spilled half a Tecate on it and just wiped it clean with no issues. Also, it’s only $100 in a game where the pro gear can run as high as $1,000. But after you spend that $100, you’ll have to pony up another stack of bills on some better software.

WIRED Great entry-level hardware device for budding laptop DJs. Intuitive and easy enough for vinyl snobs to grasp. Price is right. USB-powered, no batteries. Minimal controls light up so you can party in the dark.

TIRED Bundled beginner’s software causes headaches. Knobs are a little too close to the platters, bumps and knocks result. Cheap plastic construction makes Baby Ford cry.

Photo by Jim Merithew/Wired.com

The warm summer breeze, the starry night sky, the relative privacy of your own backyard. Time to wake the neighbors with a raucous outdoor screening of True Grit.

Actually, just try keeping them away when they peep your bitchin’ CineBox Home setup. This soup-to-nuts kit provides everything you need to recreate the drive-in right on your lawn: speakers, projector, Blu-ray player, even a big inflatable screen. Weather permitting, the results are nothing short of spectacular — but you’ll need a movie-studio budget to afford it.

Open Air Cinema makes the CineBox as portable as possible, packing a Samsung BD-C8000 Blu-ray player and Rolls MX122 MiniMix Pro audio mixer — prewired together, conveniently, so they’re ready for action — into a plastic carrying case. Optoma’s blazingly bright TX615 projector comes in a case as well, no different than if you’d purchased it separately.

Everything else, well, you’ll need a wheelbarrow. A big drawstring bag stows the towering inflatable, which provides 12 by 7 feet of widescreen viewing goodness. As for the bundled Behringer Eurolive B208D speakers, they have no case, only a pair of cardboard boxes. Open Air Cinema also supplies four heavy-duty metal stakes for the screen, a pair of heavy-gauge cords for connecting the speakers to the mixer, and various other accessories. Again: wheelbarrow.

Power is this rig’s problem. You’ll need a six-outlet strip, with one extension cord long enough to reach your house, one long enough to reach the blower, and two for each of the speakers. All these items: not included. So much for everything plus the kitchen sink.

No matter. Once it’s up and running, the CineBox rocks. Watching Gnomeo and Juliet with the kids and The King’s Speech with the grown-ups, I thought sure my eyes were seeing 1080p. Only later did I learn that Optoma’s projector tops out at 1,600 by 1,200. I guess Blu-ray shines even at lower resolutions, though, because the movies looked razor-sharp. They sounded even better; Behringer’s boom-boxes were loud enough to fill an open field, let alone a backyard. The whole experience was simply exquisite.

Movies under the stars are one of the joys of summer. If you can swing it, the CineBox Home will make your backyard a joyful place indeed.

WIRED Ultrabright projector lets you start the show at dusk instead of waiting for dark. Ultraloud speakers will blow your hair back at five on the mixer dial, let alone 11. Bundled mini-flashlight helps you break down the gear after dark — and eject rowdy teens during the show.

TIRED No setup instructions, a potential problem for those not handy with A/V gear. Inflatable screen gets ripply when the wind blows. You could buy most of the same components separately for less. Power strip and extension cords not included.

Photo courtesy Open Air Cinema

The economy is a mess. And while venture capital is still flowing like whiskey during the Prohibition, it’s not right for every business. A year ago we wrote about the birth of a new type of investment fund, Revenue Loan. The experiment has worked, says founder Andy Sack. They’re expanding it, changing their name, and offering $500,000 to the right type of startup.

First, the basics. Revenue Loan is now Lighter Capital. They’ve completed eight revenue loans in the last year. The companies received $100k – $500k each in a loan. They then pay a small (3ish) percent of their monthly revenue to Lighter Capital until the initial capital has been paid off 3x-5x. Sound expensive? It can be a lot cheaper than equity venture rounds in the long run for the right companies.

Usually Lighter is looking for startups with real revenue and growth. But in at least one case they invested pre-launch. Check out Tomato Battle, where thousands of people are paying $50 to have a massive tomato fight. You’ll probably see me at the next one throwing tomatoes along with everyone else.

Tomato Battle was a new type of deal for Lighter Capital. They were pre-revenue, so it wouldn’t normally qualify. But The Lighter team got comfortable based on the team behind the events as well as the early buzz on Facebook. So, they made the jump.

Lighter says they’re going to invest up to $500k in a new company this month. If you think you can win, details are here.

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This almost sounds too good to be true: a Japanese company called TIS&Partners [JP] has developed a new kind of construction material that’s supposedly “better” than concrete (by some measures, at least). Dubbed “CO2 Structure”, the material hardens in about a day, as opposed to the 28 days it takes for concrete to cure to 100% of its strength.

TIS&Partners says bricks consisting of the material can be formed in about a minute. After adding organic substances, CO2 Structure’s tensile strength is said to be “at least” 2.5 higher than that of concrete. In other words, the material not only hardens quickly, it’s also more “stable” than concrete.

TIS&Partners says that their material could be used to reinforce structures in buildings in a quick manner, for example those that were damaged by the earthquake that hit Japan back in March.

This video, shot by Diginfonews in Tokyo, provides more insight on CO2 Structure:

Sony Japan announced [JP] the ESSP-2000, a storage battery for professional use that serves as a backup power supply unit in the case of emergencies and blackouts. The lithium ion battery stores 2.4kwh, can be charged to 95% in about 2 hours (using conventional power plugs), and it boasts an impressive life span of over 10 years, according to Sony.

The ESSP-2000 has six AC100V power outlets, is sized at 490x610x750mm and weighs 90kg. Sony says that in the case of an outage, it can, for example, power ten 100W desktop PCs for about 2.4 hours.

The company plans to start rolling out the battery in Japan next month (price: $26,000). Sony expects to sell 300 units in the current fiscal year but hasn’t said anything yet regarding international sales plans.

Every once in a while, we interrupt our regular live coverage of breaking news about Internet companies from around the world to highlight amazing photography. In 2009, we featured the world’s largest spherical photo, and earlier this year, the world’s largest photo ever taken indoors.

Today, 360Cities published a series of historical 360° photos of Hiroshima, taken six months after the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb codenamed “Little Boy” on the Japanese city (on August 6, 1945). It was the first time an atomic bomb was used as a weapon.

According to Wikipedia, “Little Boy” directly killed an estimated 80,000 people, and by the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000–166,000. Approximately 69 percent of the city’s buildings were completely destroyed, and about 7 percent severely damaged.

You can see the chillingly devastating effect of the bombing in 5 panoramic photos (one, two, three, four, five), courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Museum. The images were shot by three different American photographers, and one Japanese photographer.

Bonus link: 2011 “The Peace Declaration”, penned by Matsui Kazumi, Mayor of Hiroshima

(Thanks to Jeffrey Martin from 360Cities for the heads up)

Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets stories:

Progress of 3D TVs May Not Be Quite As Bleak A Picture As Imagined
Bevy Of Apple Patents Granted, From Visual Voicemail To PCI Card Brackets
Review: The HP Palm TouchPad
Apple’s Trade-In Program Just Got So Much Better
Shots Leak Of Acer’s New Ultrabook, The Aspire 3951

Much has been made about Apple’s recent changes to the iOS terms. At first, everyone was sure that many big players, would be forced to pull their apps, such as Amazon’s popular Kindle app. But then Apple relaxed the rules a bit, and simply said that Amazon and others couldn’t link to their own stores from their iOS apps. Amazon complied. But at the same time, they were also working on an alternative.

While Amazon hasn’t said anything about it yet, Kindle Cloud Reader is already live. It’s a web-based version of their Kindle eBook reader app. It allows you to read your books from the cloud or to download your books for offline reading thanks to the magic of HTML 5 (or a Chrome browser extension). It looks and works great.

Amazon says that the app officially supports Chrome and Safari. This means it works on PCs, Macs, Linux, and even Chromebooks. This also means that it works on the iPad. In fact, Amazon plays that up on their site. Bullet point three on the Kindle Cloud Reader page reads:

Optimized for iPad: shop the integrated Kindle Store for Tablets

Again, that’s something you cannot do within the iOS apps due to the new terms.

However, while the iPad is supported, the iPhone currently is not. Amazon recommends you check out their free Kindle reader native app in order to read on the iPhone. Something tells me that a browser version for the iPhone is in the works as well.

The iPad version is especially good because the store is fully optimized for the device. And you can easily switch back and forth between the store and your own library. It feels like a native app, but it’s not. You can even swipe back and forth to move between pages (though it is a bit slow).

One thing to note is that the cloud versions (and obviously the downloaded versions) of the Kindle books are still limited to a set number of devices. So if you have your books downloaded to your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, etc, you may be over the limit and will not be able to read them in the cloud.

A few weeks ago, after Apple began enforcing the new iOS terms, one eBook reader, Kobo, came out and said that they would work on a web app to bypass the restrictions. But again, others like Amazon and Barnes & Noble remained mum, and changed their apps to remove links to their stores. Turns out, Amazon was quietly doing the same thing. And now it’s ready to go. And it’s very good.

“We are not trying to redefine the textbook,” Kno CEO Osman Rashid tells me, “we are trying to redefine how you learn.” Today, Kno is taking a big steps towards making digital textbooks more social by making 100,000 college textbooks available both on its Website and on Facebook. The Textbooks for Facebook app and site will present the books via an HTML5 reader. So students who buy a book via Kno’s iPad app, can now read them online or on Facebook. They can post study questions and comments to their news feeds, with an eye towards creating full-fledged study groups down the line.

Kno is also adding new study features into its iPad app. In the video above, VP of marketing Ousama Haffar demos QuizMe and Journal. QuizMe creates a test out of any labeled diagram in a digital textbook. It blacks out the labels and lets you test yourself with multiple choice answers, which works well with biology or anatomy diagrams. The Journal is a digital notebook in the form of an activity stream.

Kno’s iPad app already lets students take notes or highlight passages. Now it collects all of those notes in the Journal, which organizes all the notes for each textbook into an Evernote-like stream of notes. The notes can include highlights, text notes, textbook images, audio notes, and even photos taken with the iPad. “You will use the journal to prepare for an exam, not the book,” predicts Rashid. And while the Journal will be a collection of private notes at launch, Rashid suggests that eventually students will be able to share their Journals with friends.

It is not too hard to imagine how the stream of notes in the Journal could become the basis for a study group stream in the Facebook app at some point down the line. The complicated part will be navigating all the different DRM requirements from all the various textbook publishers, but Rashid believes that the industry will come to a consensus around how much of a textbook can be freely shared. (AFter all, it’s free marketing).

It was only last April when Kno finally gave up on its own tablet and embraced the iPad instead. The app has been well-received, with an average of four stars in iTunes across 205 ratings and only 3 percent of Kno’s digital textbooks have been returned (the service honors a 15-day return policy for purchased books). Speaking with Rashid, he seems almost liberated. Focussing on software only certainly appears to be accelerating the pace of new feature introductions.

Silicon Valley survivor Jay Adelson has worn many hats in his two decades in the technology space: Equinix co-founder, Digg CEO, Simple Geo CEO and Revision 3 Co-Founder among others. His latest hat? Talk show host.

Yes, Jay will be starring twice a week in Ask Jay, a show on the network he co-founded, where he’ll attempt to answer all sorts of entrepreneurship related questions like “How much money do I raise for my new company?,””What happens once I have a business idea?” and “When do I quit my day job?.” The show is formatted in 4-5 minute episodes and draws on Adelson’s many failures and successes —  he bestows pearls of wisdom like “If you’re distracted [at a your current job], just quit, you’re being a douche.” Love.

Internet television network Revision 3 produces Adelson’s former colleague Kevin Rose’s Diggnation and Foundation shows as well as geek fare like Techzilla and cult favorites like Epic Meal Time, with a focus on primarily appealing to an 18-34 male demographic.

And succeeding. Aside from being profitable, Revision 3 co-founder David Prager tells me that the network is averaging north of 80 million monthly views across its 23 shows and is interested in bringing on more content that could do well online with Revision 3′s “Sponsored by” or “Brought to you by” model.

“We call ourselves a next generation media company,” says Prager “As business models solidify around our type of content, Revision 3 would be remiss not to start looking at what a media company would look like in 2020.”

If you’re going to go through all the trouble of streamlining your Topic pages and creating Topic Groups, you might as well develop an over-arching way to get your users psyched about Topics. Quora Browse, a beautifully redesigned browse page that is once again an effort to prevent this type of user confusion surrounding ways to get to the content they care about.

Quora designer Rebekah Cox tells me that this is the first time the Quora browse page has been available to logged out users.

In addition to the Quora newsfeed and Topic Groups as a way to discover relevant content, Quora Browse consists of a grid of images corresponding to recently upvoted Topics — relating to Topics you follow. Underneath the image gallery users can see currently popular Quora Questions. To the right of these you can see my favorite Quora feature, Quora Shuffle, which previously was hidden on a link at the bottom of a user’s homepage page.

The UI design itself, as Quora power user Semil Shah points out, is similar to Namesake’s recently launched Discover function which gives you a visual grid-like display of topics and conversations. While clicking on an image in Namesake’s Discover takes you to that given Topic or Conversation’s page — clicking on an image in Quora Browse drops down select content from its Topic Page seamlessly, without having to leave the page.

Coming after the Wikipedia-like Topics Groups and the Credits Beta, it seems like Quora is iterating on a lot of product tests this summer in its attempt to live out its motto  ”continually improving.” Which begs the question, improving towards what specifically?

As is befitting a global technology empire, Apple seems to always have a great number of patents in moderation. The latest batch is an interesting mix, with the standout patents hailing from as far back as 2007 or as recently as 2010. The current ruckus surrounding the patent system isn’t going to die down any time soon, so I’ll try not to editorialize too much here, but some of these do seem a bit more legitimate than others.

The biggest win for Apple is probably the visual voicemail interface patent. Opponents of software patents in general, gird yourselves for battle.

Patent 7,996,792 was submitted on June 28, 2007, the day before the iPhone was made available. It covers “A computer-implemented method for management of voicemail messages” and associated playback controls. While the visual playback and selection of voice messages certainly predates the iPhone, this patent is much more closely allied to the rest of Apple’s multi-touch and initial iPhone patents, the conceptual legitimacy of which as unique inventions may be a matter for discussion, but the legal legitimacy of which is not worth disputing at this time. The UI is very minutely described in this patent, making it nearly impossible to abuse and mooting any patent-war criticisms directly solely at 7,996,792. Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall are given prime billing for credit on this item.

More troubling is the method for affecting boot item order, which is not very specific at all, and amounts to a patent on real-time prioritizing of boot items. During startup, if a user selects iTunes or Photos before other things are finished loading in the background, it then loads the associated libraries and data for that item first on the next boot. Startup and BIOS managers have allowed for this kind of reordering for a long time, and although I don’t know the specifics of how it’s handled, I have to guess that starting an application before Windows has finished loading all its background services (for example) changes the immediate priority in real time, though it doesn’t save that information for later.

On a far less contentious note, Apple also was granted two fairly substantial hardware patents. The first is a manufacturing method that could result in a thinner touchscreen-display sandwich, the details of which are quite technical. The second is part of a component mounting system for a desktop PC — a minor item for making the locking and unlocking of PCI and other components easier. It was filed for way back in 2008, though, so it seems about as likely now as then that they have a new desktop enclosure in the works. Still, it’s nice to think about.

There’s more info (and links to the other 16 patents just granted to Apple) over at Patently Apple.

Facebook did a strange thing today: they released a mobile application separate from their main app. They’ve never done this before. But it’s genius. And it’s yet another long-term thorn in the side of SMS.

Facebook Messenger is a stand-alone app for iOS and Android. It essentially merges the Beluga product that Facebook acquired in February with their revamped Messages product. Now it makes sense why Facebook wanted to make it clear that the Beluga deal was for both talent and technology (Facebook almost always does just talent acquisition deals).

Shortly after the deal, Jason Kincaid and I talked about the ramifications of the acquisition on our OMG/JK show for TechCrunch TV (video below). We were both in agreement that while it would be out-of-character for Facebook to do so, they absolutely should release a new stand-alone messaging app. The reason? Speed and simplicity are key in the space. The Messages product inside of the current Facebook apps offered neither.

Now, with Messenger, Facebook is ready to roll into this space. Should competitors like GroupMe and Kik be worried? Maybe, but they’re iterating quickly and adding new features to try and stand out. They’ll have to do that a bit faster now as a player with 750 million built-in potential users just entered the space.

But the service that should be perhaps more worried about Messenger is the still-unlaunched iMessage. Announced by Apple at WWDC in June, iMessage is a new messaging platform that will be a part of the default SMS application in iOS 5. That gives it a huge leg up, obviously. But it’s also potentially going to be harder to use than Facebook’s new Messenger.

The reason is that iMessage, like FaceTime, relies on user email addresses to work (or phone number if they have an iPhone, but only if they have an iPhone). Developers with access to the iOS 5 beta that I’ve spoken with complain that they often run into problems trying to send iMessages because they have no idea what email address their friends’ accounts are tied to. This is the same problem that FaceTime has faced.

Apple does this because email addresses are also how they define identity for Apple ID. But plenty of people have multiple email addresses, and may use a strange one for their Apple ID. For example, I do. You can add other email addresses where people can find you in the settings of iOS, but most users are never going to do this. The system is not ideal.

Much more ideal is using your Facebook connections and actual name look-ups — which Messenger obviously does. Or, if the person you’re trying to reach doesn’t use Facebook, or you’re not connected, you can use a phone number to connect. Yes, you could also do this through iMessage, but whereas Messenger will likely use SMS to bring users into the app, iMessage SMS connections are more likely to continue as SMS communications. While there are some differences between an iMessage and an SMS, they basically look the same, and again, reside in the same app.

Facebook Messenger will also clearly handle group messaging better than iMessage. Whereas iMessage seems like system to circumvent SMS — and for good reason, SMS remains one of the biggest rip-offs out there — Messenger feels like something that goes well beyond it.

Code found today within Messenger by 9to5 Mac suggests that Facebook will soon add video chat capabilities to the app as well. This makes sense, given Facebook’s recent tie-up with Skype for such functionality.

There’s one other big reason why Messenger is likely to out-iMessage iMessage: cross-platform compatibility. iMessage will only work for iOS users. Facebook Messenger works on both iOS and Android devices. And there is one other massive place Messenger messages work: Facebook.com.

Using it today, it’s clear that this is the true power of Facebook Messenger. Someone messages me, and I get it sent to my phone and the message pops up in Facebook on the web, if I have it open. If I don’t, the message goes into my Messages area and I can access it later. It’s seamless.

This iOS/Android/Web compatibility is a big reason why Beluga was my favorite group messaging app. With Facebook.com now the web component of this system, things just got kicked up a notch.

One thing is more clear than ever before: between iMessages, Beluga, GroupMe, Kik, Google’s new Huddle feature of Google+, and now Facebook Messenger, SMS is under complete and utter assault. Yes, most of those service are compatible with SMS, but only so they can be parasitic off of it.

As a standard that works across all mobile devices, SMS isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But with the rise of tablets and the continued use of other computing devices, cross-device messaging is going to come into its own one way or another. And SMS, which is more or less a racket that has been run by the carriers for far too long, is not the way forward.

Good riddance.

We’ve heard our share of app store woes in recent weeks, but here’s one that’s unfortunately still in progress. A number of Android app developers have been claiming on the Android Market support forum that the amount of money they’re being paid doesn’t match up with the number of apps they have actually sold.

The problem began on July 26, when a beleaguered dev posted the following:

something I noticed the last 2 days: the list of orders in the payout doesn’t match the list of charged orders. And I don’t mean that I miss one or two orders… no I’m getting payed out for less than the half of all orders!

From what the developers were able to piece together, the thread that connected their uncounted purchases was that they were all made through the Android Market’s web store. Customers’ credit cards were apparently charged and marked as shipped through Google Checkout, but with no corresponding payout to the developers.

Much discussion ensued during the next nine days, until Google finally made their official response:

Thanks for posting and for your patience. We’re aware of the issue, and we’re working on fixing it. Once the fix goes out (soon!), orders should be moved to the correct state, which will enable disbursement amounts to be recovered. So if your July activity payouts were underpaid, you will be notified, and your September 1 payout will contain the missing amounts.

According to Google, there is no official ETA for a fix, but they have been proactive in contacting the affected developers by email notifying them of the situation.

While we have every confidence that Google will eventually make things right, a little transparency could have gone a long way here, especially considering how valuable independent developers are to the success of the platform. The devs affected have been more than patient, but it never hurts to call attention to ground-level problems like this just to keep big companies like Google honest. It’s also possible there are more out there who haven’t heard from Google at all, and are simply baffled by their low receipts (you might want to check yours, just in case). Help should be on the way; be sure to voice your support concerns officially with Google and hopefully things will be resolved soon.