Category: Tech news

The vision of an endless, always-on tablet that is designed for simple note-taking has always haunted me. Call it a Celestial Trapper Keeper, if you will. To be able to write on a screen and then press a button to erase the notes would be a dream and this $52 device does just that: you can write on the LCD screen with the included stylus and it just shows up, like on regular note paper. Then you press a button and poof. The pad lasts for 50,000 iterations and the battery can remain charged for five years. In short, it’s the world’s most high-tech whiteboard.

But do you see the fatal flaw? The thing that burns before my eyes like a great grey god of technological progress? This thing can’t record what you’ve written and play it back. You can’t even download pages. It’s enough to break a man’s heart.

I’m sure that functionality is coming soon and if you want to set this up as a quick to-do and grocery list storage system, you’re probably good to go. However, I still wait for the day when these tablets replace the reams and reams of paper kids go through each school year.

UPDATE – Looks like these guys will have a storage-capable version this year. And, mea culpa, this can be had for $40 at Brookstone.

Product Page

The cloud is the future, we’ve all heard it said. Ballmer’s all in, Jobs said it’s all in the cloud, and Schmidt made it the centerpiece of Google’s strategy in 2010. But we’ve also seen the danger of cloud outages, thanks to Amazon. So, in true rebel form, in spite the dazzling prospects of the cloud, Nimble Storage is quietly offering an alternative — and investors are buying in.

Today, Nimble Storage, the developer of converged storage and backup solutions, announced that it has closed a $25 million series D round, adding to the $16 million series C it closed in November of last year. The round was led by Artis Capital Management, with contribution from existing investors, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital. The infusion of capital will be employed to expand into international markets, support existing growth, and is expected to bring the company to profitability.

Founded by former Data Domain and NetApp executives Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari, Nimble Storage has been selling its data storage and backup appliances like hot cakes, primarily because it is offering enterprise storage to small and medium sized enterprises that may not be able to afford IT teams — and those who don’t want to deal with a giant mess of servers. Nimble’s suite of four appliances combine storage, backup and disaster-recovery into a single solution, with each box offering different levels of raw storage capacity (up to 24 terabytes), flash capacity and connectivity speed.

Nimble’s solutions offer flash-accelerated primary storage performance, instant backup and restores, application-integrated data protection, and offsite disaster recovery — all from a single iSCI system — effectively lowering equipment costs and streamlining storage management.

And what’s more? In March, Nimble Storage was named to The Wall Street Journal’s list of “The Next Big Thing”, so you know it has to be good. $41 million raised in the last 7 months doesn’t hurt either, even though that’s exactly how much Color raised. Look out!

For more on Nimble Storage’s backup and storage solutions, click here.

This guitarist was messing around with his nylon string guitar and decided to drop his iPhone inside it to record the strings from the other side. As he played, he noticed that the strings seemed to vibrate in patterns that approximately resembled the waveforms for various notes and sounds – whole notes seemed to square off while harmonics rolled in a soft, hilly pattern. While, as many will point out, this is not a true representation of a string’s motion, it is nonetheless quite nice to look at.

The effect is caused by the iPhone’s rolling shutter image acquisition system and, in reality, the entire string is vibrating back and forth. However, with a little ingenuity, the guitarist has created a haunting way to represent a short snippet of Tears in Heaven along with a few other excellent musical renditions.

If you’re curious, here’s how guitar strings really vibrate.

via reddit

Here are some of yesterday’s Gadget stories:

This Wild Machine “Grows” Electronics
New Heartbeats In-Ear Headphones Are The Gaga Version Of Dre’s Beats
Microsoft Ready To Take On Apple Stores With 75 More Retail Stores
Incase Expands Into Headphones And We Go Ears On
Not So Crazy Rumor: Amazon To Release An Android Tablet And Two New Kindles This Fall

Exclusive – WordWatch, which provides automated pay-per-click keyword bidding solutions to small businesses, has raised $1.4 million in Series A financing in a round led by Prague?based Credo Ventures.

The startup, which boasts offices in Silicon Valley, Poland and The Netherlands, will use the funds to boost marketing and sales efforts in the US and Europe, and to expand its algorithm operations.

WordWatch basically enables companies to more effectively monitor and optimize their Google AdWords campaigns, which often involve thousands of keywords, by automating the PPC bidding process.

The company’s bidding engine is powered by proprietary algorithms that automatically find the best bid prices for clicks and conversions 24/7, the underlying idea being that business owners should be able to “set and forget” and focus on other things once their AdWords campaigns start.

WordWatch is free to try, with subscriptions starting at $24 per month.

This is a bit silly, but OK. Tokyo-based accessory maker Thanko has developed a very special gadget that’s supposed to help you fight the summer heat: a necktie clip [JP] that’s attached to a mini fan, which is powered via USB.

The clip weighs 28g. You can cool off yourself by either connecting the device directly to a USB port of a computer (when you’re sitting at your desk) or by plugging it into a battery unit (see below).

Thanko is selling the USB necktie clip cooler in their Japanese online store for $35 (battery unit included). If you’re interested but live outside Japan, wait for the Japan Trend Shop to (maybe) list it – alternatively you can browse their store for other unique cooling gadgets.

MyFlickbooks is a Swiss company dedicated to converting 15 second videos shot on your iOS device into “high-quality” paper flickbooks. For about $20 you can have you flickbook sent anywhere in the world. While I find my money would be better spent on things like beer and gas, if you are truly a flickbook lover (as so many of us are these days) you may find this to your liking.

If you don’t have an iOS device you can just pop over to the actual website and upload a video file from almost any source. It is then processed by MyFlickbook’s Swiss flickbook elves, printed on rich, corinthian paper, and bound into a wee little book that you may then flip at your leisure. Why you would want to do this is beyond the scope of this argument, but MyFlickbook would like to encourage you to consider it as a low-cost, low-effort gift for a loved one who may not be worth the expense or effort of a real present.

You can download the app here.

Like so many digital-to-print plays on the iPhone (Postagram and Lifecards come to mind), I think the central problem with these apps is the disconnect between shooting the video and then buying the artifact. Just as we always walk by the Build-A-Bear-Workshop thinking “Now there’s somewhere I should take the kids,” the same goes for making a little flickbook: the impetus is there, but we all need that push.

The shooting interface is fairly clean and well-organized but I’d worry that unless your mission was to produce a flickbook for a very important event (a goodbye wave from friends, your wife giving birth, your first trash can fire) you’d probably just take some video and call it a day. Buying a flickbook is one extra, difficult step, especially one that costs 20 smackers. Heck, for $3.99 you can buy a small photo book through iPhoto and painstakingly build your own flickbook. Not the same thing, to be sure, but perhaps MyFlickbook is aiming a bit too high?

But there is hope. As Bill Cosby would say, “This is the flick flick for the books of the flickbooks for flickbook fans” or, to put it more concisely, “Behold, the pale rider! Flickbook fans arise from your slumber and accept your birthright for MyFlickbook is nigh!”

Yesterday, at the MobileBeat Conference in San Francisco, Google Ventures Managing Partner and Co-founder of Android Rich Miner announced that Crittercism, a startup that provides support infrastructure for mobile apps, had raised an undisclosed seed funding round from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures, among others. GigaOM was the first to report on the startup’s mystery raise, but we’ve since learned from sources close to the deal what the actual amount was: $1.2 million.

Our sources also indicated that those leading the charge were Ellen Pao at Kleiner Perkins, Wesley Chan at Google Ventures, Bob Borchers of Opus Capital, who was part of the original iPhone team and is former director of worldwide marketing for the iPhone, Rob Coneybeer at Shasta Ventures (who also invested in Gowalla), and Adam Smith at AOL Ventures. Early Facebook engineer Lucas Nealson also participated.

While $1.2 million may not seem like a deal-size that is cause for a big fuss, considering EA’s $650 million acquisition of PopCap and Jawbone’s $70 million round yesterday, we’re hearing that the deal was pretty competitive and Crittercism had to turn investors away to make room in this round.

The impressive list of investors, combined with the fact that more money and investors may have been on the table — not to mention research2guidance’s recent report that the mobile application development services market is projected to grow to $100 billion by 2015 — seem to be confirmation of the serious growth happening (and coming to) mobile app development, and the potential of startups like Crittercism that provide support systems for these app developers.

Crittercism is an alum of the AngelPad accelerator program and raised this round shortly after its demo day in March. The startup’s Co-founder and CEO Andrew Levy is a former Y Combinator alum, but he decided to join AngelPad, because he said that AngelPad offered more of a “focus on product market fit” and offered “lots of industry connections” since many of the partners are former LinkedIn and Facebook employees.

Interestingly, while Levy said that he recommends both programs to aspiring entrepreneurs, he found that AngelPad attracted founders with more startup experience, compared to Y Combinator, which has more of a “startup bootcamp” feel. Different strokes for different folks, but interesting experiential info for those founders looking for the right accelerator.

As to Crittercism itself, the startup has built a platform that enables developers to diagnose mobile app crashes and to easily provide customer support to an app’s users. Crittercism’s iOS library (previously in beta) was yesterday made available to all mobile app developers and has also made its Android SDK available for limited release.

While most of the growth in the mobile apps space has been among startups offering tools for speedy or custom development, there is ample room for those providing customer support and services that help developers diagnose and solve mobile app crashes and outages. Troubleshooting errors and customer support is an extremely important part of customer satisfaction and engagement, but it also eats up time and resources for developers.

The startup’s solution, then, provides businesses with a library that can be added to any app and connects to a SaaS platform that monitors those apps. The solution prioritizes the most nefarious bugs as they occur, while gathering diagnostic data on hardware and software, so that developers can see what was happening on the device when it crashed.

And, perhaps most importantly, developers are able to notify users when an issue has been fixed and can “specifically target users that ceased to use the application as a result of a crash or bug in the software”, according to Crittercism’s release. This feature may prove to be very important for user retention, a problem that has long beset app developers, as users often download an app once, use it a few times until a bug is spotted before dropping it.

For more, check out Crittercism’s home page here and let us know what you think.

A couple weeks ago, a stealthy startup called Prism SkyLabs was formed in San Francisco. Already it’s creating buzz among angel investors. It’s site is not much more than a place holder right now with this vague description:

We are pioneering ways to bring physical spaces online, creating new places for people and businesses to understand and engage each other.

A few more clues can be uncovered by looking at the two co-founders: CEO Steve Russell and president Ron Palmeri. Russell previously founded 3VR, a digital video security company where he is currently chairman. But Prism Skylabs is his new full-time gig.

Palmeri was Halsey Minor’s right-hand man at Minor Ventures, where he backed and incubated GrandCentral (now Google Voice), OpenDNS, and Scout Labs, a social CRM and brand-monitoring service sold to Lithium Technologies (which turned into a lawsuit)

So you’ve got a video surveillance expert and a Silicon Valley investor with a background in the consumer Web and social media analytics, and they want to “bring physical places online.” My bet is that they do that through video. Beyond that, we’ll have to keep digging. But it sounds like this startup is aiming squarely for the ever-expanding online-to-offline market.

We’ll keep our own video cameras trained on this one.

Disclosure: Michael Arrington has committed to invest in Prism Skylabs.

Leica’s CEO, Alfred Schopf, has abruptly and rather casually announced a new line of compact cameras being planned for a Photokina debut. The new system will have “at least” an APS-C sensor and will “do things differently” from the rest of the EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder, Interchangeable Lens) cameras — serious competition like the NEX, PEN, and G series.

The unnamed camera would presumably be a non-rangefinder camera and would likely be placed above the X1 but below the M series in price and capabilities. Whether it would use existing Leica lenses or a new mount was not mentioned, but as Photokina is coming right up in September, we don’t have long to wait.

[via DP Review]

I hope you’re not getting tired of daily deals, because I’ve got more daily deal news for you, dear reader. Among the latest trends in the evolving daily deal model is the so-called “deal wallet” and “deal resale marketplace”, which quite a few startups have begun implementing, like City Pockets and DealsGoRound, to name a few.

Another area of the deal model that seems to be going through a redux is the consumer driven deals (CDD) approach, in which sites are letting consumers determine what deals they want to see offered by their favorite local merchants. Ringleadr recently launched a service to put consumers in the cockpit, as did Loopt with its new “U-Deals”.

The consumer driven deal (or reverse deal, if you prefer) has been poked at by startups before, without prodigious success, but that is not to say that there isn’t room left for iteration and disruption, as the space on a whole is still relatively young. While Ringleadr and Loopt are both offering great services, one of the potential drawbacks to the structure of their models is that consumers have to wait for 15 days (in the case of Ringleadr) for the merchant to approve the deal. This is after the consumer has gotten a crowd of friends excited about the deal, enough so to get past the tipping point, and then has to wait over two weeks for the merchant to maybe decide to approve.

SoBiz10, a Colorado-based startup, is attempting to turn the CDD screw even further by shortening the time it takes for merchants to approve a deal. The startup is taking a “consumers get the deals they want, at the price they want, when they want” approach, not to mention it’s all completely automated. Of course, this immediacy may sound like tyranny of the consumer, but SoBiz wants to offset this potential by giving businesses the ability to generate and retain new customers for a smaller revenue share (25 percent) than is typical among group coupon sites. (The average is about 50 percent.)

But, before going any further, here’s how SoBiz works: Users get 10 of their friends together to decide on a deal they want and the merchant they want to patronize. A user then posts that deal on SoBiz, at which point the merchant receives an email, text, and voicemail, alerting them of the deal. The merchant has 48 hours to accept, deny, or counteroffer. If the deal is accepted, the 10 users are immediately sent their coupons in an email and can pay for them using the startup’s secure payment system.

From there, merchants have the ability to display the deal more broadly in the SoBiz marketplace, with the option to control the availability, and SoBiz in turn alerts members of the community that the deal is more broadly available.

Another selling point for the SoBiz take is that 25-cents per coupon is donated to a charity of the deal-creator’s choice, adding a non-profit and feel-good element to the service, a la CauseOn.

The other interesting part of the SoBiz platform comes from the fact that Founder and CEO Marion Mariathasan and team had originally built the service to be a social network, with a daily deal component as an add-on. As you can see from the image above, users and merchants can create profiles, just as one would on Facebook, write reviews of prior deals, connect with friends and merchants, and so on.

Merchants also can take advantage of a dashboard the startup provides, where they can easily manage their pending deals, approve, reject, etc. In addition, the service includes search functionality as well as deal categorization, so that consumers can request deals by category. If a user doen’t know who the best merchant is for, say, a new pair of reading glasses, they can go into the “Vision Category” to search for eyewear merchants. Categorization is an added bonus in comparison to Groupon and other deal sites — it adds a much-needed level of organization to the frantic world of coupons.

Mariathasan compares the service to a kind of reverse Priceline.com, except in the case of Priceline, consumers are just reacting to the deals that Priceline has already negotiated, whereas automated consumer-driven deals puts the customer in the driver’s seat.

SoBiz10 has been testing its model in Denver and Kansas City, with more than 17,000 consumers and 2,000 merchants participating. The startup recently forged its first big partnership with a national coupon-ing company, but is not yet sharing the terms, or the name of company, though two more are in talks with SoBiz. More to come on that. SoBiz is currently bootstrapped and seeking venture-backing to help bring its service to other cities.

Lastly, the startup is providing TechCrunch readers with 100 free keys to the private beta, which you can take advantage of by emailing the team at [email protected]. Mariathasan said that SoBiz plans to launch its public beta later this summer.

More on SoBiz in the video below:

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt sat down and talked to reporters at the Sun Valley conference in Idaho last week, dropping all sorts of science about Google +, Google China and whether or not we are in a tech bubble, among other things. One of the most interesting nuggets of info relayed was the fact that Schmidt could envision startups wanting to build on top of the Google+ platform, which now has 10 million users in its beta but no API in sight.

“You could image the scenario where the social platform is so successful that you’ve got startups that are building on top of Google + that are so incredibly sexy and exciting that we would pay top dollar very fast … That’s a great scenario because then you know you’re winning,” he said.

According to Schmidt, Google M&A made the decision last year to accelerate the acquisitions of companies below the HSR threshold, or the amount that is subject to FTC notification requirements and a waiting period (currently $66 million). Companies like Punchd are being acquired for $10 million, $20 million and $30 million (versus AdMeld’s $400 million) in order to fill out gaps in Google’s strategy, which now includes social.

Earlier in the talk Schmidt also outlined how Google calculated the amount of money it was willing to pay for the company; Namely, the value of a deal equals the value of the team plus the value of the year it would spend a Google team to create the same product. He emphasized that M&A at Google was very bottoms up, “A product manager that has a problem and [needs to] solve that problem” is the raison d’être of a potential acquisition.

You can listen to all of Schmidt’s commentary on Google M&A during the interview in the sound bites clipped together above.

Last September, we got a tip from a source that Amazon was preparing a tablet that would run Google’s Android operating system. The source was a good one — they had also correctly called Amazon releasing their own Android app store. It took a while, but it looks like they nailed this news as well. Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon plans to release an Android-based tablet by October.

Of course, this news has been rumored for much of this year. No less than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has hinted at the possibility in recent months. But today’s report brings some tangible details for the first time. And that’s why the conclusion (and title) WSJ has drawn is surprising. “Amazon to Battle Apple iPad With Tablet”, is the headline. But as I read it, this tablet — at least the first iteration — won’t be much competition for the iPad at all. Instead, it could step in and own a market that Google has failed to secure: Android tablets.

Let’s consider the information out there. Amazon will enter this space for the first time this fall. Their tablet will apparently have a 9-inch screen (comparable to the iPad’s 9.7-inch one) and will run an un-specified version of Android. It apparently won’t have a camera. And it won’t be designed by Amazon. Instead, they’ll outsource both the design and manufacturing. In other words, it’s probably going to be cheap — at least in build quality, if not in price.

Why is Amazon outsourcing the entire development? Likely because they wanted to get the tablet done as quickly as possible. WSJ also reports that Amazon is working on another version that they’re designing themselves, but that will not be ready until next year. So this first version will be a sort of placeholder until their own version is ready.

The only way this sounds like it can compete with the iPad in any way is if it’s extremely cheap. Like $299 or less cheap. But can Amazon really make a 9-inch multi-touch screen color tablet for that cheap? Unless it’s an absolute piece of crap, that seems unlikely. There’s a reason why all other tablet manufacturers are having problems getting their tablets down to even the key $499 price point. Apple can do this because they have years of experience — and most importantly, component deals — thanks to the iPod, iPhone and other devices. Others do not. Amazon does not. Sure, they have the Kindle. But a full-fledged tablet is a whole different ballgame.

So either Amazon releases a tablet that is around the same price as the iPad — and potentially more expensive — or they sell each one at a huge loss. As they’ve proven with their digital content stores, such as the MP3 one, they’re willing to do this. But in hardware, they haven’t done this with the Kindle. Margins are thin, but the device still generates revenue. To beat the iPad in price, I have to believe that Amazon would have to take a large loss on each device sold.

Maybe they are willing to do that. After all, Apple and Amazon are in many ways the opposite. Apple pushes digital content in order to sell devices. Amazon could now be pushing devices to sell digital content. But if that really is the battle, Apple has the winning hand there. The margins are much better on Apple’s hardware sales than on Amazon’s content sales. Amazon would not be able to afford subsidizing their hardware indefinitely.

But even if Amazon is able to release a relatively cheap tablet this fall, the major question will remain: why would I buy this instead of an iPad? Amazon’s tablet will have access to the same apps that current Android tablets do — and very few of those are optimized for, or work well on tablet devices. And what happens if Apple surprises everyone with a “Retina” display iPad before the end of the year? We first reported on this being Apple’s plan back in February. The latest word is that such a device may be delayed a bit by manufacturing issues, but it’s still in the plans for this year. We’ll see.

They key point is that Amazon’s first tablet, any way you slice it, sounds like just as much of a threat to the iPad as all the other Android tablets have been so far. That is to say, no threat at all. Instead, it will likely be more of a threat to their own Kindle device (it’s hard to make the “this device is no good for reading” argument out of one side of your mouth while saying the opposite out of the other). And much more so, it will be a huge threat to Google.

Back in March, when Amazon released their own Android Appstore, I made the case for why Amazon now had to release their own Android-powered devices. Simply put, the process to install the Android appstore is way too complicated, Amazon needs devices they can ship with the store pre-installed. And more importantly, their stores pre-installed. As in, any device they ship is going to be filled with Amazon to the brim. That includes the ability to sign in to your Amazon Prime account the buy things with one click.

When that happens, Amazon will have an Android tablet that is more compelling than any other Android tablet on the market on day one. There are plenty of whispers of Google planning their own “Nexus” tablet for later this year when the Ice Cream Sandwich variety of Android is ready to go, but the consumer ease-of-use that Amazon can offer will likely trump anything Google puts out there.

That’s why Google should be scared shitless of this Amazon tablet. Thanks to the “openness” of Android, Google has handed Amazon the keys to the Android kingdom. Amazon is going to launch a tablet that runs Android, but it will be fully Amazon’d. It will use Amazon’s Appstore, it will use Amazon movies, it will use Amazon books, it will use Amazon music, etc. Google will have no control over this, even though it will be the seminal Android tablet. That would be terrifying for any brand.

Sure, you could argue that an Amazon Android tablet will still benefit Google because it will lead to more Google searches. But who says that will be the case? If I were Microsoft, I’d go all-in when negotiating with my Seattle technology neighbor to get a Bing search deal done for this new tablet.

Google has been able to control Android so far while keeping it “open” because they offer carrots to partners to stay with them for most services. Those carrots are Google apps, Google branding, early access to new Android builds, etc. But Amazon likely won’t care about those things. They could be the first major player to use Android that Google has absolutely no control over.

This is going to be fascinating to watch. All I know is that if I were Apple, I wouldn’t be too concerned by this Amazon tablet. Next year, maybe. But not now. But if I were Google, I’d put down those Android carrots I’ve been offering up and go find my stick.

A new software as a service company Domo is formally launching tonight at a party in Salt Lake City. I have no idea how opulent or bare-bones this party will be, but theoretically the company would have plenty to spend on drinks, T-shirts and canapes. It just raised a massive $33 million series A from Benchmark Capital. Actually, counting the angel investments that were closed earlier but rolled into the same round, the company has raised $43 million.

But before you cry “COLOR!” it’s worth noting Domo has a few unique things going for it. It is founded by Josh James, the founder and 10-year CEO of Omniture, one of the very few SaaS companies out of thousands funded in the late 1990s/early 2000s that actually managed to build a $1 billion-plus company. (He’s to the left enjoying his Nasdaq moment.)

He’s not a household name, because he’s not in the consumer space. But Benchmark partner Matt Cohler — who’s worked with some of the best entrepreneurs as an early executive at Facebook and LinkedIn– was salivating at the thought of backing the next Josh James company. In fact, after Omniture went public and subsequently sold to Adobe for $1.8 billion, Cohler told James, “I know you are not finished and you are going to do this again. When you do please give me a call.” When James called, Cohler dropped everything and flew to Utah. “I don’t say this about many people, but he is one of the best entrepreneurs in the world,” Cohler said.

Bromances aside, Domo is also building a product for a very defined, large market space: Business intelligence is a $10 billion industry today and expected to become a $14 billion industry by 2014, according to Gartner. And although companies spend loads of money on the basic problem of trying to figure out what is going on with their business at a glance, nearly everyone is unhappy with current market solutions. In other words, it’s a classic enterprise software market opportunity.

There’s a good and a bad to that. The good is people are hungry for something that works. The bad is that after decades of promises– everything from Tom Siebel saying his software could “see around corners” just before his own business tanked to the early SaaS obsession with dashboards– companies just don’t believe vendor promises anymore.

In truth, this is one of those hard problems that there’s probably no single, silver-bullet solution to. Certainly the early waves of enterprise and SaaS systems have made things better, even if they aren’t great. But Cohler points out that the problem itself and the expectations for what software should be able to do also keep changing dramatically.

I’m about as sick of people saying “consumerization of enterprise” as I am of “gamification,” but in truth, people are considerably more Web savvy today and they have higher expectations of how any software they interact with should function. “If you add it up Facebook and Twitter’s active users are almost $1 billion people,” Cohler says. “150 million people use Amazon in the US alone.” Humanity en masse is just more tech savvy. On top of that SaaS has continued to gain acceptance within large companies, and of course data is just exploding at a rate that makes the business intelligence problem exponentially bigger and the pain exponentially worse. Even if past solutions worked back then, they’re increasingly getting obsolete.

Domo isn’t talking much about its product yet aside from these broad brushstrokes, but the company is pretty far along. Part of this series A went to purchasing a company called Corda that has helped accelerate some of the back-end development, and there are already several customers in beta.

Benchmark is the only VC firm that invested, although some other VCs invested as individual angels, including powerhouse enterprise software guru Ben Horowitz. (I asked Cohler if Benchmark muscled Andreessen Horowitz out of the deal and got a “no comment.”)

It’s hard out there for a tablet. Not just because consumers aren’t quite sure they want to buy in just yet, but because the shelves are so crowded that it’s difficult to stand out. At CES this year, having an Android tablet seemed to be a prerequisite to reserving booth space; few major companies didn’t announce some sort of plans.

I suppose they all thought they were all getting in on a gold rush of sorts. But the sameness of the various offerings has caused many a consumer’s eyes to glaze over in the aisles of Best Buy. It’s no wonder they end up going with an iPad when the other options try so pathetically to get consumers to care about trivial differences in hardware, and make vague promises of improvements coming down the line, over which they have no real control.

At the same time, a few companies have been bold enough to depart from the pattern enough that you can distinguish their product without squinting. But are these non-traditional designs going to galvanize an indifferent market or are they too much, too early?

Convertible Tablets

I just read a fairly reasonable article suggesting that these convertibles, like Asus’ Transformer, are going to be a big hit. The main points, for those too busy to look: they’re getting slim enough to be worth a look, the software is maturing to the point where it doesn’t feel sloppy, and there is an increasing number of people who can’t decide between a tablet and a laptop. Naturally they’ll choose the hybrid.

While there’s something to this, I don’t think it points to adoption at large. If you look at usage patterns of things like the iPad, you see a huge amount of browsing, video-watching, casual gaming. Email, too, but as typing on touch-keyboards is a pain, it’s mainly checking, nothing serious. The point is that even the early adopters (and make no mistake, even the 20 million iPads sold are to early adopters) are interested in consumption, not creation. The tablet is a window to content, but it’s one-way glass.

True, convertible tablets make it easier to type. But compared to any $500 laptop, a tablet isn’t going to perform nearly as many tasks that make the keyboard necessary. You’ll be able to do email better, and type web addresses more quickly, but is there enterprise software, financial management stuff, serious word processing and editing to be done on them? Not yet, and I suspect not for some time.

Windows 8 is the biggest arrow in the convertibles’ quiver. A lot depends on Microsoft making that extremely promising start turn into something people really want to use. A rich interface with the ease of use of a tablet plus the power of a full-on PC isn’t an easy task, but Microsoft realizes they need this one to be a hit or they’re out of the tablet game forever. If convertibles become popular, it won’t be because of the reasons suggested above, but because Microsoft made them popular. Because Apple, Google, Asus, Acer, and the rest sure as hell aren’t going to do it.

Dual-screen Tablets

Courier, Courier, where art thou, Courier? O most promising of pre-iPad devices. If you’re reading this, you probably remember Microsoft’s star-cross’d Courier project, which broke out of its incubator early and was the darling of the blogging world for a few months. It showed imagination, good design, and a willingness to take risks. So it came as no surprise when it was peremptorily buried by Ballmer. Since then, we haven’t really had a dual-screen tablet to get excited about — but that doesn’t mean the form factor is fundamentally barren.

The Kno springs to mind as an example of something done partially right. Intended as a replacement for bulky, heavy, expensive textbooks, the Kno is a bulky, heavy, expensive tablet. But I don’t do it justice: it really is a very savvy piece of work and, though its size and cost ended up killing it, shows that a ground-up approach and unique brand can do wonders for product visibility. An on-stage demo at TechCrunch Disrupt helps as well. But if anything, it was always type of device that sells units in the tens of thousands, not the tens of millions.

More recently we’ve seen some rather strange designs like the Iconia Touchbook, which end up being more like the worst of both worlds. Sony’s S2, which we just had a hands-on with today, seems more promising, but we’ll look more closely at it in the gaming tablets section below.

The issue here seems to be a technical one rather than a design one. The bezel width, weight, and cost of two separate displays mean that the tablet wouldn’t be able to compete in form or price. Plus, the lack of optimized apps for two screens means the benefits are extremely limited. When the technical issues are solved and a thin, foldable device no longer makes unacceptable compromises, then the software will follow. Until then, no chance.

Gaming Tablets

Companies have been going out of their way to laud the gaming prowess of their particular brand. Never mind that they’re all just shilling for Nvidia’s Tegra team (with the exception of Apple, whose A5 seems to be a genuine departure from the norm). And to tell the truth, the last year or so has seen these low-power chips in phones and tablets go from anemic weaklings to true modern 3D powerhouses. The poster child for this would be the Unreal Engine and Infinity Blade.

But can a tablet get away with truly focusing on a gaming experience? Sony is making that bet with the Playstation-branded S1 and S2 tablets, which will have exclusive access to certain Sony content, though the quality of that content is far from guaranteed (think PS1 titles at first). And the serious gamers, to whom this tablet would presumably be marketed, are not easy to woo away from their platform of choice. The Vita and 3DS are more on their minds.

The problem of control rears its head immediately. While tablets are great for certain types of games, they’re just awful for others. The most popular “real” games in the world right now are shooters, and despite what fanboys will tell you, they control terribly on tablets. Accessories like the Fling joystick help, but there is no standard control overlay and settings vary greatly between titles.

The thing is that any gaming experience exclusive to a tablet isn’t likely to be exclusive to a gaming tablet. It’s just going to be something like Plants vs. Zombies or Angry Birds: best played on a tablet but not limited to some sort of special gaming setup. That may change in the future as gaming leaves the casual sector on tablets and we start seeing more tablets in the hands of mainstream gamers, but in the meantime the benefits of a so-called gaming tablet are illusory.

Rugged/Field Tablets

We’ve written a few times about how the iPad has gained a following in the medical and education establishments, among others. This is primarily the result of being first to market, and a magnet for specialized apps. But there has always been a market for hardened devices, the Panasonic Toughbook line being perhaps the most familiar. The military has been making noises recently regarding the need for a good standard smartphone or tablet, as well, and you better believe they need more than brushed aluminum and Gorilla Glass. My Otterbox is nice, but it’s no flak jacket.

Once things have leveled out a bit, I expect that iOS will lose favor in these situations — Google is pushing extensibility on Android for just this purpose, and of course Windows 8 includes Microsoft’s famous/infamous backwards compatibility. Laugh it up, but when your hospital has records going back to Windows 3.1 days and you just want things to work without hiring a team to modernize your whole operation, Windows starts looking more attractive.

Unfortunately, ruggedness comes at a cost, and although consumers might like the idea of a waterproof phone like the Defy, there’s no way they’ll pay the premium for Mil-spec hardening of their around-the-house tablet.

Stylus-powered Tablets

Steve Jobs’ disdain for the stylus was wise in that it led to a very focused finger-optimized phone OS, but unwise in that it summarily dismisses the benefits of pen input. It’s true that you lose them, they’re kind of weird to hold, and they disconnect you from the interface. But it’s also true that they provide far greater precision, they allow for quick and complicated gestures, multiple “click” types, and a number of other things — things which were admittedly totally inapplicable to the iPhone.

I recently reviewed the HTC Flyer. Spoiler alert: I didn’t like it. Or rather, I felt like it was an interesting evolutionary step that should probably have just been kept in the labs. I felt the potential, but I also felt the extreme difficulty in designing an interface that’s accessible to both touch and pen. Yet the Courier (at least in its demo videos) seemed to show that if you worked at it enough, you could make it work.

If tablets are to be used by the creative and enterprise class of users (as opposed to the consuming class), they will likely need stylus support. Fingertips are great for touching icons, but they’re not so good for circling individual words, editing photos and video, and so on. There’s a huge amount of sophisticated interpretation that goes into determining where your blob of a thumb is touching the screen, and the stylus changes the whole interface metaphor.

I’d expect a well-done niche product before a consumer breakout — a creation-oriented tablet, perhaps a collaboration between two big names like Wacom and Sony, or even Adobe. It could double as a stylus surface for another computer (like a Bamboo), but work independently as well, and be provided with a few powerful tools for interfacing with standard MIDI, video, tethering, and paint programs.

Windows 8 shows up again here: a stylus is a tolerable replacement for a mouse when the interface is done right. Windows 7 integrated some touch controls, but they were more concessions than true tools. Microsoft’s handwriting recognition is excellent, though, and if they’re able to combine their Surface, Metro, and Windows IP successfully, you could see a seriously versatile piece of hardware come out in mid-2012.

The time is not yet right

The conclusion here seems to be that large-scale market penetration and hardware limitations are the most serious barriers to variant tablets gaining traction. Demand isn’t great enough that you can make a successful niche product. There’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem here, since you can’t make a niche product without a niche, but the niche won’t exist until you make a product for it — but all that’s needed to solve that is a little time. As tablets grow from a 20-30 million unit market to a 100 million unit market, you’ll start seeing natural fragmentation in the user base, and not just in who wants 3G or 64 gigs.

The difference will be like the difference you see in computers and laptops: people who just want a laptop, and people who want a laptop that does X and not necessarily Y. The stratification of that market is well-known and prices have solidified around the $500, $750, $1000, and $1600-2000 marks. Pricing won’t have nearly such a large spread with tablets, but in a year or two, $250 will buy you a basic Android tablet, $500 will buy you a deluxe one or an iPad, and $750 will buy you a specialty device like a stylus, dual-screen, high-res screen, and so on. Professionals will gladly pay good money for a full-HD screen, real stylus interface, and enough power to use as an on-site editing device for photos or video.

Timing is anybody’s guess, and it depends on a lot of things. Will Amazon push Android over the top for e-readers? Will Apple release a super-high-resolution iPad Pro? Or will Samsung? Will OEMs grow some dignity and stop making chintzy tablets with identical specs? Or will Apple diversify and proliferate? Whatever the case is, until people get their heads around what a tablet is for and how it fits into the existing ecosystem, you’re not going to see these interesting but immature form factors do anything but sit on shelves and excite idle praise from tech writers. You can expect quite a few dead-end launches, but you can also expect (if you’re charitable) that companies like HTC and Sony just might learn something from them and reuse those ideas when the time is right.

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