Category: Tech news

If you’re a fan of reading long-form content online, you probably already know what Longreads is. If not, you should. It’s the best way to find content between 1,500 and 30,000 words on the web. And today they’ve upped the discovery element a bit by making it more social.

“Community Picks” is a new area of the Longreads website which scans Twitter for the most tweeted (and retweeted) Longreads articles. It then displays these on the website ranked by either most popular or newest. This adds another layer of stories on top of the traditional stock of Longreads editors’ picks.

“This is a new breed of community-powered curation,” founder Mark Armstrong says. “We thought it was important to give the community new ways to share their own personal picks. We feature 3-5 story recommendations per day, and roughly 80 percent of them are generated by the community on the #longreads hashtag. And thousands of stories have been shared on #longreads over the past two years,” he continues.

With this new feature also comes profiles for members. If a member has ever tweeted out a #longreads link, they will show up and be compiled on this page. In other words, this is a sort of Longreads reading list.

“Everyone is a curator now — and just like we enjoy looking through at other people’s bookshelves when we go to their house, there’s something wonderful about getting a sense of a person’s personality through their #longreads #lists. We hope to feature these individual tastes and continue to serve as a discovery engine for great storytelling and outstanding curators,” Armstrong says.

Longreads has another feature they’re unveiling today as well: a subscription model. For $3 a month or $30 a year, users of the service will be able to get early access to new features while supporting the service they love. And if you subscribe for a year, you get a Longreads mug too. Armstrong is quick to note that these subscriptions are totally optional and the service will always remain free. This is just a way to help ensure the service is sustainable as well.

This idea follows what partner Instapaper has been trying out. Partner Readability also uses a subscription model.

Armstrong notes that Longreads has come a long way in its two years of existence, when it started out as a Twitter account. Last October, when the website was unveiled, that account had roughly 7,000 followers. Now it has over 23,000 and support from publishers like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, GQ, Time, and ProPublica.

The deal buzzards are swirling around Skype, and Microsoft may end up with the prize. Om first reported the rumor, which is now getting major play by the WSJ. Microsoft is in final negotiations to buy Skype for $7 billion, according to the WSJ report. The final price might go closer to $8 billion.

Google and Facebook were also sniffing around Skype, which put off its IPO earlier this year to buy more negotiating time. Microsoft will certainly be overpaying for Skype, which is a better fit for Google or Facebook. But Microsoft is desperate for a legitimate Internet business beyond Bing.

@parislemon
MG Siegler

So Microsoft is paying $7 billion to lose even more money online each quarter. Makes perfect sense.

42 minutes ago via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

Skype would fit into Microsoft’s enterprise business as a communications hub for telephony, video conferencing, and online meetings. But is it worth 8 times revenue and 26 times operating profits (Skype had no net income to speak of last year—it lost $7 million)? Maybe, if Microsoft doesn’t screw it up.

The chances that it does screw it up if the deal goes through, however, are large. To make Skype work financially, Microsoft would have to turn it into more of an enterprise play to go up against Cisco’s WebEx, for instance. Skype is already making money from businesses to some extent, but it’s roots are with consumers who want to bypass the traditional phone companies and their outrageous bills.

When you think of Microsoft, you don’t exactly think about voice communications. You think about productivity, and to some extent collaboration (although I find its products to be designed more for solitary use). Skype is not a natural fit. Just like it wasn’t a natural fit for eBay, which bought it and then spun it off.

But what about Windows Phone, Microsoft’s mobile OS? Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Skype baked into Windows Phone would be a powerful combination, exactly the type of tight integration that could give it a fighting chance. Except that Skype on iPhone and Android is already pretty good.

So yes, there is logic to the deal. But $7 billion to $8 billion for a company still hasn’t figured out how to turn 663 million users into a profit machine is a stretch. But then, Microsoft was never any good at making money on the Internet either. It feels like Skype really wanted to sell to another company like Google or Facebook, but when the bankers started to shop it around, Ballmer bit and now he won’t let go. Could Google or Facebook have done the deal for less? I think so.

“It’s probably something that Don Draper would come up with if Larry and Sergey were his clients.”

– Steven Levy “Google’s Sophie’s Choice”

By now you’ve probably seen or read about Google’s warm and fuzzy ‘Dear Sophie’ commercial, which debuted last week and aired during a coveted spot on Saturday Night Live this weekend. In the commercial, which was inspired by a true story, Sophie’s dad Daniel sends her emails about the special moments in her life like her first birthday, Father’s Day and the birth of her sister, as well as general dad silliness like clips titled “Giggles.mov.”

While the emails are addressed to Sophie, and the author refers to her in the 2nd person, (“You wanted to name her ‘Salt.’”) it is actually against Google’s TOS to create a Google account for your kid, or anyone who is not over thirteen years old.

One frustrated Dad emails:

“After finally deciding on a name for our unborn girl, I wanted to create a Google account for her even though I know that she’ll laugh at me 12 years from now that she has some outdated email account. I sent a Gmail invitation to myself since I couldn’t figure out how to create an account otherwise. I found an available email and filled the whole form out with our girl’s info. There was a field for birth date that I found to be odd, but I just filled in the current date to keep going. I received an error and I thought it had something to do with another field. I tried submitting a couple of more times when I finally received the attached message (the hyperlink sends you here).

That’s when I realized it had to do with the birth date. I tried going back and using an acceptable birth date, but i was already screwed. I’ve tried a couple of times since (my original attempt was a week ago), but I get the same message. apparently I’ve made it on the Google pedophile blacklist.”

When I asked Google about whether the “Dear Sophie” ad is actually against the Google TOS, a representative explained why it was exempt as follows, “This story is about a father who opens a Gmail account and uses the web to communicate with his daughter from birth into the future. This story is not about a parent opening a Gmail account for his child to use; our system will block users identified as under 13 years of age from opening an account.”

Okay there you have it web savvy parents, as long as you open a Gmail account in order to “use the web to communicate with [your kid] from birth into the future” you’re fine. So set the age on the Gmail account to a hundred or something, capisce?

As online video advertising continues to grow, and expands to mobile, brands are looking for ways to get more bang for their advertising buck, and viewers continue to yearn for and expect video advertising that is more personalized, targeted, and relevant. And obviously the same is true for brands and advertisers — they, too, want to be able to customize their ad experience to reach consumers that they know will care about their products. So, as technology and the web tools we use on a daily basis continue to get smarter, so should advertising, right?

AdGenesis, a New York-based video advertising startup, wants use the dating, or match-making game, to make the serving of video advertising a more intelligent arrangement. It hopes that its service will bring consumers and brands together for a rewarding, lifetime relationship of loyalty and happiness — not just in a marriage of convenience. In other words, the startup is a white label video advertising platform that partners with publishers to match branded content to a large network of eager, opt-in customers.

And, today, the startup today announced that it is launching a new API that will enable Web and mobile publishers to deliver stand-alone video advertising service to their perfect user. As we all want to be rewarded for having to sit through advertising, the service naturally incorporates a points, badges, and rewards into a program that gives viewers incentive to watch the video, and, in turn, giving advertisers the satisfaction of knowing that they are reaching their target consumer — and that those consumers are actually watching their videos.

So, how does this all work? In the case of publishers, they tell AdGenesis what type of consumer they want to view their video, based on demographics, future purchase intentions, interests, hobbies, and so on prompted by AdGenesis once a publisher joins the service. They then provide AdGenesis with a video, be it 15 seconds to 10 minutes-long, which then loads the video into their system. Based on the data AdGenesis has gathered from its 4 million registered users, it then notifies consumers with corresponding interests via SMS or email that they’ve been “matched”.

Let the swooning begin. These viewers then watch the video, on-demand on mobile or desktop, and confirm that they’ve watched the video in its entirety by entering 2 digits that are overlaid in the video’s content. If the viewer doesn’t enter those digits, the advertiser doesn’t pay. If they do, then the brand pays once for that unique view, but only once, even if the viewer watches the video 80 times.

The advertisers are then asked to present some kind of reward to the viewer for watching the video. This can be credits on AdGenesis, which viewers can later redeem for gift cards, etc, or the brand can enter the viewer in a contest to win a trip to Hawaii, or offer discounted coupons, and so on.

For the consumer, AdGenesis is totally free to join, it’s opt-in, so you’re not forced to do or see anything you don’t want to, and the more you tell AdGenesis about yourself, the more targeted the ads it serves you become, and the more videos you watch, the more rewards you earn.

It sounds a bit like being in a focus group or being paid to do medical testing on a new line of shaving cream, but AdGenesis has become very popular among coupon clippers and aggressive savers. Four months from its launch, AdGenesis has served 1.6 million viewed-videos and generated more than 150K click-throughs to advertiser websites, Facebook pages, etc.

Online video has not been a particularly successful source of click-through rates, and many advertisers have become wary of it, because it’s hard to measure the ROI of video advertising. (Same as it ever was.) AdGenesis, on the other hand, has been demonstrating a fairly impressive click-through rate (an average of 11 percent), which is much higher than the average of about 1 or 2 percent, according to AdGenesis CEO Richard Smullen.

AdGenesis has also announced a partnership with PARADE Magazine, the first publisher to launch with the full array of AdGenesis’ functionality, and Smullen tells me the startup has several big partnerships in the pipeline, both on the publishing side and the rewards/points side.

With many, many advertisers struggling to come to terms with significant spend on advertising campaigns without tried-and-true measures of customer retention, click-through, etc., advertising loyalty solutions are popping up across the Web. AdGenesis is an interesting take, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the match-making, brand-dating game proves to have some traction. After all, I’ve always wanted to date Nike.

Check it out.

Evernote rival Springpad is announcing support for Android Honeycomb tablets and is also debuting offline access via its popular chrome web app.

Similar to Evernote, Springpad serves as a multi-platform digital notebook. The service allows you to jot down notes, save websites, images and more. Springpad will then categorizes your saved content, and allows you to share your notes, set reminders and more. The app goes a step farther to analyze your content and then serve you alerts to relevant news, offers and deals. The app’s semantic data technology allows you to save products, books, movies, recipes and more, and automatically get enhanced information, including price drops, local availability and coupons.

The support for Honeycomb includes features such as optimized display for the larger screen size and configurable widgets to create, save and view their notes for immediate access on the tablet homescreen. The app delivers cross browser and app sharing making it easy to save information from other sites and apps. Springpad’s Chrome web app, which is ranked as one of the top 20 most popular apps in the Chrome Web Store, allows users instant and universal access to their Springpad account, even when offline.

Honeycomb tablet support is significant for Springpad because the app’s growth has been fueled by mobile adoption. Nearly half of its users are using its Android app and a third are using Springpad via an iOS device.

Evernote has around 9 million users now and SpringPad just passed the million mark so the startup definitely has a ways to go. But the company’s ability to add intelligence to notetaking and possibly monetize off of users with personalized deals, content and more could help boost usage.

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — inaugurated a new kind of Gillmor Gang. To the undisclosed, it looks the same: silly chat, mangled technology disruptions, and dead air. To the more clueful, who recognize we’re entering a new age of social media, the intersection of social monitoring and proactive brand creation tools spells big trouble for old media and their thin-skinned attacks on the realtime enterprise.

As @scobleizer describes Rackspace’s move to Chatter, you get the idea that social media is not just the province of the Ashton’s and Lady Gaga’s, but a million personal clouds that resonate with accumulated authority and credibility. Mainstream media can play a role here; @borthwick describes the velocity with which a New York Times reporter validated the Bin Laden story as it broke on Twitter. @jtaschek reminisces about the speeds and feeds days of recognizable software giving way to micro-authority and pushrank.

Back in March location-based game SCVNGR launched a spinoff venture called LevelUp — a direct competitor to Groupon, Living Social, and other daily deal sites. LevelUp’s key twist is that it has a heavy focus on generating repeat visitors, as opposed to customers who only stop by a venue once to redeem their deal. And today it has some significant news: it’s partnered with American Express to start allowing LevelUp users to redeem their coupons simply by swiping their credit cards — a feat that they say is the first in the daily deal space.

To use the new feature, users connect their AmEx cards with their LevelUp account (a process that you only need to do once). Then, once they purchase a deal from a merchant that accepts American Express, they’ll see a button that prompts them to ‘load’ their card with the deal. When the card is swiped at the merchant, the user receives an immediate push notification and email notification informing them that the coupon was applied successfully, and they don’t have to bother pulling out a printout or showing their phone to an employee.

This steup may sound familiar. That’s because Foursquare had a similar pilot program at SXSW, which used the same American Express ‘Smart Offers API’ (you could check-in at specific venues and have deals loaded onto your card). That pilot program is over for now, but don’t be surprised if you see it make a return down the line at a broader scale. LevelUp’s arrangement with American Express is also considered a pilot, but it doesn’t sound like there’s any finite time limit established (in other words, expect the feature to stick around).

In conjunction with the news, LevelUp is also announcing that it’s landed Levis as its first national brand to use the service. Levis is  offering ‘$10 for $20′ at Level One, ‘$10 for $30′ at Level Two, and ‘$10 for $50′ at Level Three. LevelUp is currently only available in Philadelphia and Boston (the service plans to open in more cities this summer), but Levis is temporarily offering the deal in San Francisco as well.

For those that haven’t used it, LevelUp’s model works as follows: first, customers are offered a special deal that’s very similar to what they’d receive from Groupon. They’re also informed that if they return to the same venue a second time down the line, they’ll be able to receive an even better deal (the same is true for the third trip). The model is designed to build customer loyalty — businesses have to offer some pretty steep discounts at Levels Two and Three to keep users coming back, but SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch says that results from the first 6-8 weeks of the service have been very promising.

When people talk about near-field communications (NFC) chips in phones, they usually bring up mobile payments. But NFC chips, which are already in some Android phones, can be used by other apps besides payments (which won’t take off as quickly as people expect anyway).

At Google I/O this week, NFC apps will be highlighted. Foursquare will allow Android users to check in by swiping their phones near posters with NFC chips. Also just in time for I/O, Hashable’s Android app now supports NFC features as well. Android users can swap contact info via NFC, and also check into the same activity with someone, like #dinner or #drinks.

Hashable is a lightweight way to track the people you meet and exchange contact info. It’s completely replaced business cards for me. But on my iPhone, I still have to enter the person’s email or Twitter handle. With the Android app, if you meet someone else with an NFC-powered phone, you can just hold the phones next to each other and contact info will be exchanged via the app. It’s like Bump, without the fist-bump.

If the other person is a new contact, Hashable will add that person as one. If it is an existing contact, it will trigger the check-in feature, which on Hashable allows you to check into people instead of to places. It’s a way of noting that you are doing an activity with someone to remember later or broadcast it out to your network. The Android app also now includes a QR-code reader incase someone hands you a card with one of those. Scan it, and throw it away.

Google’s annual I/O conference kicks off tomorrow and it will likely bring a range of big announcements. But one of the cooler things that will be on display at the event was actually pre-announced today by Foursquare: NFC-based check-ins at the event.

Google and Foursquare are teaming up to make this a reality at the conference over the next few days. Around the conference center, you’ll see Foursquare posters that will actually have NFC chips embedded in them. This means you simply need to bring your phone close to these posters in order to check in via Foursquare. Very cool.

And when you do, you’ll get a Google I/O Foursquare badge, naturally.

Of course there’s one big caveat: you’ll need an NFC-enabled phone for this to work. Foursquare notes that many of the newer Android devices have NFC chips in them, but these devices still aren’t too widely used yet — the biggest one is the Nexus S. But if any place will have a big group of people with new Android devices, it will be I/O. Those without NFC-ready phones can still check-in regularly or scan QR codes on these posters.

Foursquare notes that they’ve been testing check-ins via NFC for some time now in their own offices. Here’s a tweet to prove it from February.

This partnership is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, Google has their own location-based service, Latitude, which just this year finally began doing check-ins. No word on if you’ll be able to check-in to Latitude in a similar fashion at I/O. Second, as some may recall, Google actually bought the predecessor to Foursquare, Dodgeball, and then proceeded to do nothing with it, which led to some bad blood and the founders leaving Google (both of which are now back with Foursquare). I guess the wounds have been mended.

Facebook did something similar last year with Presence (check-ins via RFID) at their f8 conference. But that was also with a special chip you received when you got to the conference, and not via your phone.

While this is clearly just a test of the technology, the stake are high for NFC check-ins. This is likely the future of these services, as NFC will make it much easier and more convenient for mainstream users to check-in to venues.

We’ll be at Google I/O covering it live all week.

One of the main limitations on touchscreen interfaces these days is that all you can do is poke at them. We do all kinds of things with our hands, but when it comes to screens, we just poke at them all day. UIs are doing all right, since our phone OSes still mimic mouse-based desktop OSes to some extent, but Microsoft is looking to ways to integrate more natural hand gestures incorporating more than just a “click” derived from a fingertip.

Hrvoje Benko, a researcher at Microsoft, is working on methods of recognizing shapes formed by hands and equating those with spatially-consistent gestures.

Continue reading…

In January of this year, DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based VC firm and startup accelerator, announced that it would be expanding to the Big Apple, creating a startup accelerator program based in New York City.

The program offers $25,000 in seed funding to its portfolio companies, along with coaching, exclusive speaking engagements, a chance to pitch at a Demo Day to affiliated angel and venture investors, and a collaborative workspace.

After reviewing hundreds of applications over the first quarter of this year, today DreamIt is officially announcing its final NYC roster. The program will include 15 startups that hail from all over the U.S. The selected companies include students and alumni from Harvard Business School, Wharton, Yale, and Carnegie Mellon, and its founders boast prior experience at companies including Yahoo!, Microsoft, American Express, and McKinsey. Like DreamIt’s Philly program, 5 of the 15 startups are digital education businesses and were selected in partnership with Startl — a social enterprise dedicated to accelerating digital innovations for learning.

All 15 companies will spend the summer working out of 6,000 square-foot of shared office space at 28 West 27th Street in downtown NYC. The program is set to run through mid-August, at which point DreamIt will host a Demo Day to showcase each company’s summer progress.

The advisors for the accelerator program’s summer class includes Gil Beyda, founder of RealMedia (acquired by WPP), Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, founders of FutureNow and both New York Times bestselling authors, Jonathan Shapiro, the CEO of MediaWhiz and former Chief Strategy Officer at Doubleclick, Jonah Goodhart, co-founder of Colonize.com and board member of Right Media, and Michael Yavondite, current CEO of Hashable and former CEO of Quigo, which was acquired by AOL.

So, without further ado, here is a brief introduction to the 15 startups participating in DreamIt’s inaugural NYC program:

1DocWay, St Louis, MO: video-chat based doctor’s office with back-end automation
Admitly, New York, NY: Admission pipeline to US schools
AfterSteps, Boston, MA: Online end-of-life planning platform. Store your wishes and important information securely in the cloud, and access expert advice on how and why to prepare for the worst-case scenario in
advance. Experts include estate, financial and funeral planners.
Class.io, Honduras: Online classroom communication, helps teachers share assignments with students
Clothes Horse, New York, NY: Data-driven platform that makes fashion fit
Cognection, New Haven, CT: Online retail optimization
CustomCoup, Philadlephia, PA: Demand-driven deals, focusing on local, aiming to give the user the power to determine prices on the things they want
Hoot.me, Austin, TX: Interactive knowledge network; put Facebook into study mode by connecting you with friends for homework and projects.
KeepRecipes, New York, NY: iTunes for all-star chef’s recipes
LearnBop, Pittsburgh, PA: Online adaptive learning platform
LetsGiftIt, New York, NY: Social gifting platform; a way for friends, family, and coworkers to contribute towards the purchase of a gift for someone special
ListenVoice, Boston, MA: App creation and distribution platform, allowing individuals and organizations to launch any form of content using mobile and web applications without prior programming knowledge
New Quill, Los Angeles, CA: Mobile publishing and collaborative learning
SocialAdMX, New York, NY: Social and mobile app publishing and advertising
TakeTheInterview, Boston, MA: Cloud-based video interviewing platform for employers to more efficiently screen candidates

Google confirmed the existence of its YouTube Movies service earlier today and has just released more details on which studios and movies will provide the 3,000 titles in its repertoire. YouTube has partnered up with Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros and others to offer full length feature films on YouTube.com/movies. Fox, which we mistakenly reported had joined the brood earlier, is noticeably absent.

From the YouTube blog:

“Today, we’re announcing another step in our goal to bring more of the video you love to YouTube: the addition of thousands of full-length feature films from major Hollywood studios available to rent in the US at youtube.com/movies. In addition to the hundreds of free movies available on the site since 2009, you will be able to find and rent some of your favorite films.

From memorable hits and cult classics like Caddyshack, Goodfellas, Scarface, and Taxi Driver to blockbuster new releases like Inception, The King’s Speech, Little Fockers, The Green Hornet and Despicable Me. Movies are available to rent at industry standard pricing, and can be watched with your YouTube account on any computer. The new titles will begin appearing later today and over the coming weeks to www.youtube.com/movies, so keep checking back.”

Google also sent us a helpful YouTube Movies FAQ, which I’m including below.

Q. What are some of the new studios you’re partnering with?
A. Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers.

Q. How many films have you added and how many total movies are now available on YouTube?
A. We have added a total of approximately 3,000 new titles including catalog and new releases from Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, Universal, Lionsgate Films and many great independent studios. This brings the total number of movie titles available to rent on YouTube to over 6,000.

Q. Where and when will the additional movie titles begin appearing on YouTube?
A. Movies for rent will be available at www.youtube.com/movies and new titles will begin appearing to users today and be added throughout the week.

Q. Where are the new movies located and when will they be available on the site?
A. The new movies are located at www.youtube.com/movies and will start appearing at that destination throughout the day.

Q. How many total studios are now represented at YouTube.com/movies and what are they?
A. Studio partners include Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate Films, Starz, The Weinstein Company, and Magnolia Pictures, among others.

Q. How much will the movies for rent cost?
A. Movies are set at industry standard pricing (i.e. most new releases start at $3.99 and library start at $2.99).

Q. How long will a consumer have a movie once he or she has purchased it?
A. For most movies, viewers will have 30 days to begin watching their rental. Once they start watching the movie they will typically have 24 hours to finish.

Q. What transaction service are you using?
A. The service accepts all major credit cards.

Q. Will movies for rent be available at the same time as DVD releases?
A. It’s always up to the content owner, however, many movies will be available at the same time as DVD releases.

Q. Is this a subscription service?
A. No, this is a transaction offering.

Q. Are the movies downloaded, or streamed?
A. Streamed.

Q. Is this global?
A. No. This service is available to US YouTube users only.

Q. Do you need a YouTube account to purchase a movie for rent?
A. Yes.

Q. Will YouTube movies for rent be available on Google TV?
A. Yes, these will be available via the browser (www.youtube.com) on Google TV.

Q. Can rented movies be shared or embedded into other sites including blogs, Facebook and Twitter?
A. Users can embed movies on other sites. If a user who has not rented the movie views the embedded video, the embedded player will show the movie’s trailer along with an overlay that users can click on to rent the full movie.

Q. Is the content in HD?
A. YouTube supports video in up to 4k resolution, however, it is up to our partners to specify what video quality they provide. Most movies for rent will be available in standard definition.

Q. What is unique about the YouTube Movie experience?
A. Movies on YouTube are about providing a complete movie experience. With YouTube Movie Extras movie fans can get more into their favorite films through cast interviews, clips, alternate movie endings and other highly produced content from talented YouTube partners. YouTube reaches one of the largest and most engaged online audiences in the world, with hundreds of millions of views a day in the US alone.

Last Friday, we posted about the negotiations between Apple and voice recognition company Nuance. While these talks have been going on for months, sources told us that it wasn’t yet entirely clear what the outcome would be — either a broad strategic partnership or, less likely, an acquisition. Things are looking a bit more clear now.

In digging into the information about the relationship between the two companies, we had heard that Apple might actually already be using Nuance technology in their new (but yet to be officially opened) massive data center in North Carolina. Since then, we’ve gotten multiple independent confirmations that this is indeed the case. And yes, this is said to be the keystone of a partnership that Apple is likely to announce with Nuance at WWDC next month.

More specifically, we’re hearing that Apple is running Nuance software — and possibly some of their hardware — in this new data center. Why? A few reasons. First, Apple will be able to process this voice information for iOS users faster. Second, it will prevent this data from going through third-party servers. And third, by running it on their own stack, Apple can build on top of the technology, and improve upon it as they see fit.

Obviously, Nuance, which owns the technology, would have to sign off on all of this. And we now believe that they have. Hence, the big time partnership that should be formally announced soon.

All of this plays in nicely with our report that Siri would be a big part of the upcoming iOS 5 software. Apple is expected to show off iOS 5 at WWDC, but it would be launched this fall, as we previously reported. In order to work, Siri requires Nuance. When Apple bought Siri last year, they immediately began negotiations with Nuance to ensure that Siri was able to keep running. But it now appears that after months of tense negotiations, the two companies have decided that it was best to take the relationship a step farther.

Why would Apple go to all of this trouble to use a third-party technology? Probably because it’s well known that Nuance holds and strictly enforces a wide range of patents in this space. And there are only a handful of experts who really understand this stuff enough to build such a system from scratch — and those people mainly now work at Nuance or Google, is our understanding. In other words, even if they wanted to, Apple probably couldn’t build up such a system themselves without being sued. And Nuance knows this, so they likely have no problem striking a huge deal with Apple to use (and expand upon) their technology as they see fit.

As for why Apple wouldn’t simply buy Nuance, again, it’s probably because it just would not be a very smart deal. Nuance is a public company with a market cap over $6 billion (the stock is surging today due to our report last week and has hit a 52-week high, adding some $500 million to their cap). This means that Apple would have to spend upwards of $10 billion to acquire the company, and immediately after they did, the value would plunge since much of it is based on their partnerships with other companies not named Apple. It would be a straight-up strategic acquisition that would be a very expensive one for Apple. Nuance, naturally, knows all of this.

So yes, it appears very likely at this point that a Nuance/Apple partnership is a big part of Apple’s cloud initiative. The next question is what this will mean, if anything, for developers at WWDC? Will they get access to this advanced voice recognition technology through iOS APIs right off the bat? Or will this technology mainly serve Apple’s own applications at first?

Oh and one more thing: one anonymous tipster who correctly knew other information about the two companies tells us that Microsoft had been pushing Apple hard to use their own voice recognition technology in iOS. That attempt was rebuffed, apparently. It will be Nuance all the way.

If you have been watching TechCrunch TV interviews lately, you may have noticed the videos are much sharper, crisper and much higher quality. The reason: we’ve gone HD. We are now using a new workflow with HD cameras and HD video switcher. Our shows from New York (Fly or Die and Founder Stories) have always been produced in HD at AOL Studios. But, now our San Francisco studio has gotten the upgrade.

You might be saying, “Wait a minute, high definition today means 720 or 1080 lines of resolution. I’m only watching the videos on a smaller-than-HD window on the TechCrunch website or smartphone. That’s not HD, so what’s the point.” Well, there is a big point.

It’s true most of our viewers don’t watch on HD size displays. You can watch in HD resolution on a monitor by clicking the fullscreen button in the player. But even on smaller displays, the image quality is much better. It’s partly a case of GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. Starting with the highest quality images will get the best end result after all the encodings, decodings, and scaling – which also needs to be kept to the minimum.

For cameras, we use 3 robotic Panasonic AW-HE50′s. These cameras, introduced last summer, look like those security cameras in the ceiling. But, we have them mounted on tripods at eye level. They are not very intimidating to guests. We control them with a robotic camera controller, which allows us to store shots and make changes remotely.

We’ve chosen to use the cameras in 720p mode (for you video techies, the cameras output this via HD-SDI). Our programming is mostly viewed on computers or mobile devices with progressive displays so this mode works well. The cameras also offers 1080i and 480i outputs. Before getting our HD switcher, we used the 480i output in a DV timeline and the image quality was poor. But, shooting, switching and editing in HD mode has solved this.

Below is a screenshot using the SD 480i and DV timeline

And here’s a screenshot using 720p mode, HD switcher and HD timeline

Our production switcher is Newtek’s TriCaster TCXD850. The same model, launched last year, was used to produce the Facebook Live townhall with President Obama, MTV’s MVA red carpet show, ESPN’s X Games and many other sporting events. We bring in our HD camera inputs, add name or other graphics, and can do double-box graphic effects to put multiple sources on the screen at once.

We also input multiple Skype video sources into the switcher, so we can do multi-box interviews with anyone with a Skype connection and a webcam. Many cameras used for Skype output a 4:3 image. But, we can use the switcher to keep the image at 4:3, and put it over a background using the ‘virtual input feature’ that fills our 16:9 screen, so guests don’t get stretched.

The TriCaster also runs Adobe’s Flash Media Live Encoder, so with one button we can launch a live stream to our Ustream channel.

We record our studio segments on the TriCaster’s hard drive. From there, we render it in a format that works in Final Cut Pro, then transfer the file over our network to another computer for editing. After editing, we encode and upload a h.264 file to Ooyala, which makes multiple versions of the file for different bandwidths and player size. For playback, Ooyala uses adaptive bit rate streaming to dynamically select the highest quality stream to send to each viewer. You won’t get the highest quality feed if you don’t have the bandwidth for it.

While we’ve gone HD, the most important thing for us is our editorial content. If we have something our readers and viewers would be interested in, as long as you can see it, hear it, and aren’t distracted by the technical issues, we’ll bring it to you no matter what it’s captured with.

Much of our field shoots are done with Panasonic HVX200a cameras. We’ve also used iPhone cameras, Skype webcams, point-and-shoot digital cameras that record video, and DSLRs like the Canon 7Ds to capture our videos. Arrington even bought us some Barbie Video Girl cameras, which shoot with an impressive 320×240 image. That might have been called very high definition in the 1930s, when television systems used as few as 30 lines of resolution. Watch this fun video on how the Barbie-cam stacks up to the 7D.

Shoefitr allows you to find a shoe that is similar in size and shape to a pair of shoes you already own. For example, say you’re into Nike Free Runs but they discontinued the model you like. You tell Shoefittr and using the site’s 3D scanning system it finds a pair that matches the size and shape of the shoe you like. The 3D scanning system is based on the same systems used to scan feet for orthotics.

Read more…