Category: Tech news

Photos by Jim Merithew and Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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Marin calls its 2011 Hamilton 29er an “urban commuter,” and at $485 without the optional Sturmey Archer two-speed kick-back rear hub (more on that later) it’s a sharp-looking ride that won’t set you back too much dough.

It’s a big-boned beast that’s been dressed up in city clothes and instructed to hit all the proper buzzwords at cocktail parties: urban, street, double butted, sealed cartridge and especially 29er.

Almost every single bike manufacturer has delved into the large-wheel phenomenon. These machines have become really hot in the mountain-bike market, as the benefits of the larger wheels appeal to trail riders: the ability to roll over obstacles easier, a larger contact patch for better cornering, and less sinkage on soft surfaces.

So at first look, the Hamilton appears to be a commuter–urban explorer for the mountain biker who has embraced the large-wheel world and is now looking for something to throw a leg over and bolt to the coffee shop or across town. Unfortunately, in the case of this steed, looks are deceiving. You won’t want to roll over any obstacles or attack any rough stuff on this bike.

Because the fancy tube shapes Marin has applied to the Hamilton’s design do nothing to keep the weight down, getting the front up high enough to hop a curb is not a feat for those with a weak abdominal fascia. And because of the limited gearing selection (a flip-flop single-speed hub is standard) this ride is meant to go straight ahead on smooth roads or trails.

Marin seems to have countered the slower steering by employing an exceptionally wide bar. This made the Hamilton seem fun at first, but in the long haul made me crave something a little less twitchy.

If you are looking for sharp-looking cruiser that your kids won’t be embarrassed to see you ride, this might just be the ticket. But if you are looking for a street-wise stand-in for your dirty mud-thumper, you’d better look elsewhere.

Now about that Sturmey Archer S2 Duomatic hub. It’s equal parts glorious invention and absurd annoyance.

There are two speeds in play — a 1:1 direct drive, and a second gear that gives you a 38 percent boost — and no cables or shift levers. You just to kick back about a quarter turn on your cranks to switch between gears. When you’re cooking down an avenue and you want a little extra go-power, it’s awesome. Or when you find yourself running out of steam, you can just kick back the cranks and enjoy a less painful gear selection.

It takes a bit of getting used to, but no matter how hard I tried, I still found myself inadvertently changing gears. I couldn’t break the habit of backpedaling while coasting. Worse, I’d be prepping a pedal stroke at a red light and hear that click from down below.

In the end, I decided the Sturmey Archer was like a good marriage. You stick it out in good times and in bad, and just deal with the annoyances as best you can.

WIRED Dig the stealth looks. The price is right for what you get. Good choice if you want something more badass than a beach cruiser, but less Euro-dorky than a carbon monocoque. It’s fun to say “29er.”

TIRED It may have off-road styling, but this ain’t no Jekyll. Keep those wheels down. Steering can be touchy. Stay out of traffic: Heavy frame and wide bars are tough in tight situations.

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Like an overstuffed Swiss Army knife, the Eton Raptor is positively bursting with survival-minded tech, making it an essential gadget for trips into the backwoods, or even just a camp out in the backyard.

Just get a load of all the save-your-ass features that come built in: a compass, an altimeter, a barometer and thermometer, a chronograph with an alarm clock, a speaker fed by either a multiband radio (AM, FM, shortwave, NOAA weather alert) or an audio line input, and an LED flashlight. There’s even a bottle opener for crackin’ your brewskis. Finally — and this is key — it’s all powered by a 1800-mAh lithium ion battery that recharges using the built-in monocrystal solar panel, and you can transfer that charge to a phone or any other gadget that accepts a USB cable.

With the sheer multitude of functions packed into this 11-ounce, 8-inch-long hunk of plastic and rubber, you would think it was one of those gizmos hawked on late night TV infomercials. “It slices, it dices! It does everything — and more!”

Getting all these functions to work takes a little bit more brain power than mastering a SaladShooter or a Flowbee, however. There are nine buttons on the face, and these buttons are used to access every task. And unfortunately, there’s little about the Raptor’s button array that’s particularly intuitive. The 12-page user manual isn’t much of a help.

The power button is only for turning on the radio. The instructions don’t tell you that, and it took me about 20 minutes of trial and error to figure that out. It doesn’t help that the rest of the buttons are terribly named. “Volume –” and “Volume +” are no-brainers, but what’s the difference between “M” and “MEM”? There’s a complicated button-pressing pattern involved when you want to access certain functions, and you have to press everything in the right order or else you end up somewhere else, at which point you’re forced to start again.

However, once mastered, the Raptor is a truly useful and versatile tool. Throw it in your bag and leave all the other stuff — the compass, the radio, the flashlight — at home. And really, the most attractive function here is that you can charge your phone using the solar panels when you’re off on walkabout, and that’s sort of a set-it-forget-it situation.

The Raptor can be fully charged under solar power, but it can take up to 18 hours to fully juice it up. With the included USB cable plugged into a computer or AC adapter, it charges in just four hours.

While you get a lot of functionality for the $150 price tag, there is one key wilderness survival feature it’s missing: GPS. It would be nice, especially for when you’re stuck in the bush after losing your smartphone in the river — though I shudder to think how many buttons I’d have to press to get it working.

WIRED Versatile device comes loaded with life-saving functions for hiking, biking and outdoor frolicking. Charges your phone using the power of the sun. Lightweight, splash resistant. Solar panels mean it can go the distance without conking out.

TIRED Somewhat high learning curve to master all the functions. They should fire the whiz kid who designed the interface. Full solar recharge can take up to 18 hours — is there even that much sun in a day?

Photo courtesy Eton

Photos by Jim Merithew and Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Your iPhone tracks you everywhere you go, and so do most phones these days. You knew that already. The reason this is a big story now is because it turns out that for the past 10 months Apple has been keeping your location data on a file in your iPhone itself where someone who knows how to get it, and has possession of your phone, could find it and figure out where you’ve been. For most people this is never going to be an issue, but for anyone involved in a lawsuit or nasty divorce, it is one more thing lawyers will be getting a subpoena for. It’s bad data retention policy and Apple could and should change it with the next update to iOS.

But what is Apple doing with your location data anyway? It needs your data to build its own location database for use with geo-location apps and for diagnostics (it helps analyze where dropped calls happen the most, for instance). Apple already explained all of this back in July, 2010 when general counsel Bruce Sewell responded to questions from Congress about its location-tracking policies (letter embedded below). In that letter, Apple revealed that it had replaced the location databases it was using previously from Google and SkyHook Wireless with its own. Apple noted in the letter:

These databases must be updated continuously to account for, among other things, the ever-changing physical landscape, more innovative uses of mobile technology, and the increasing number of Apple’s customers. Apple has always taken great care to protect the privacy of its customers.

And in fact, Apple doesn’t track a person’s location if they turn Location Services off in settings, and it takes care to remove personally identifying information and encrypts the data before transmitting it from your phone to its servers. All that is fine. But the letter doesn’t say anything about the data staying on your phone. Certainly, you should have access to that data if you want it. A growing number of people actually consider having an archive of all their movements to be a feature not a flaw (see Foursquare, Google Latitude, etc.). They should be able to choose to keep the location data on their phone (after all, it is their data), but it should not be stored there by default. Once it becomes opt-in, consumers can choose to track themselves as long as they accept the risks of doing so.

Have no doubt that Apple will keep tracking your movements as well. You do get some benefit from this in the form of wondrous geo-aware apps that open up the world around you. But you are also helping Apple build up its location database, which is an increasingly valuable asset. You are contributing to that database every time you walk out of your house with your iPhone.

Mobile gaming startup OpenFeint, has been acquired by Japanese mobile gaming company GREE for $104 million in cash plus additional capital for growth of the OpenFeint platform. OpenFeint and its team will remain with long-term incentives, including CEO and founder Jason Citron, says the company.

OpenFeint provides a comprehensive mobile social gaming platform for the iPhone and Android platforms. OpenFeint’s plug and play mobile social platform and application for smartphones includes a set of online game services such as leaderboards, virtual currencies and achievements running in a cloud-based Web environment.

The platform first launched on the iPhone and iPad and more recently adding Android game developers to its rapidly growing community. In fact, the company has been growing like gangbusters on the Android platform, adding 215 Android games in the past six months.

OpenFeint raised $12 million in funding from Intel Capital, Chinese gaming company The9, and Gree rival DeNa.

GREE, which has a market cap of $3 billion, as an acquirer makes sense as the company is Japan’s largest mobile gaming social network. The company’s games have over 25 million users. In fact, GREE just partnered with DCM, Tencent and KDDI to launch the A-Fund, to support early-stage Android entrepreneurs. GREE also recently announced a partnership with mobile community MIG33 and Tencent. And GREE has launched an American entity, GREE International, as an effort to enter the American gaming market. In fact, GREE International was the acquirer of OpenFeint in this transaction.

Combined, the GREE and OpenFeint gaming ecosystem will reach 100 million users worldwide and Gree will uses its own resources to accelerate OpenFeint’s growth. The joint company will soon opening offices in Beijing, Singapore and London and plans to double OpenFeint in size in 2011.

This isn’t the first gaming company to be acquired by a Japanese gaming giant. DeNa bought social gaming startup Ngmoco for $400 million last year.

This story of how the iPhone and iPad are tracking the every movement of their users keeps growing. Now DC Policymakers Ed Markey and Al Franken have gotten into the act, calling on Steve Jobs for an answer to this potentially massively embarrassing story.

While I haven’t had the opportunity to chat today with Steve about the situation, I did talk earlier to Robert Vamosi, a cybersleuth at Mocana and the author of the excellent new book When Gadgets Betray Us. And what Vamosi told me was pretty scary. According to him, it’s not just Apple gadgets that are betraying us.

So guess who else is watching you as you watch this TechcrunchTV clip?

We’ll have more from Vamosi’s interview next week.

It’s been a big month in the Marino-Choy household. No sooner did Lisa Marino get promoted to CEO of the would-be comeback-kid RockYou, than did her husband Ro Choy get named COO of the surging Q&A site Formspring.

Choy’s roots go back to RockYou as well where he was chief revenue officer, before leaving in 2010 to become CEO of Peerpong. Peerpong didn’t last, primarily because its question and answer product failed to delight users, Choy says.

His new employer doesn’t have that problem. For all the hype and attention Quora gets thanks to its Valley-centric audience, high-quality responses, sky-high valuation and Facebook mafia pedigree, Formspring is way bigger. The site has more than 20 million monthly uniques and 3.5 million unique visitors per day. About three billion questions have been answered on Formspring to date, and about one million people respond to a question every day. That’s a lot of engagement.

The only thing that puts Formspring and Quora in the same category is the fact that people ask and answer questions on their sites. While Quora is a quintessential example of a site championed by Valley insiders, Formspring has a very mainstream, college kid audience, reflective of its Indiana-founding roots. (The company has since moved to the Valley and is flush with $14 million in Valley cash.)

And the questions and answers are totally different: Quora doesn’t allow users to poll each others’ opinions, it is seeking actual demonstrable answers to questions. And it prizes that ultimate answer more than the rights of the person asking. Formspring on the other hand is like those emails that used to go around where your friends filled out personal questionnaires and them routed them to more friends. They were annoying, but there was also an element of discovering more about a person you thought you knew that made them infectious. Formspring takes away the spammy chain letter element, and just leaves the infectious part.

After stints at two companies that didn’t live up to their promise, Choy says he’s excited to join such a strong product team. His goals will be on the business and operations side, starting to experiment with revenue models this year. Sponsored questions that allow brands to interact with users is an obvious direction. But the big thrust is keeping users growing. 20 million users may be bigger than the competition, but to really prove Q&A is a mainstream social media product, someone needs to hit the 100 million user milestone.

That’s right. Even bloggers can get hired at Google. Caroline McCarthy, a social media writer at CNET, announced through her blog today that she will soon be joining the Google ranks in New York as a member of its incipient “Trends and Insights Team”. Sounds investigative. McCarthy tells me that the details of her employment are still being worked out, (like what her title will actually be), but she does know that she’s going to be doing quite a bit of writing, editing, and data analysis.

Score one for Google. “In my time covering Facebook, Google, Twitter, and countless start-ups, I’ve learned so much from so many people and am incredibly grateful to you all. Though I’m a bit wistful about checking out of the fourth estate (at least for now), I hope that we can stay in touch as I move into a whole new side of the business”, McCarthy wrote on her blog this morning.

McCarthy has been a writer at CNET for 5 years, since she started at the media outlet as a 21-year-old. Fresh out of college, she began working at CNET as an entry-level general assignment reporter. She was then formally assigned to cover social media and Web 2.0 about a year later, and began her column “The Social” at the same time.

May 6 will be McCarthy’s last day at CNET, and she’s slated to start at Google on the 16th. As to what she’ll do before heading to the Googleplex? A trip into the California wilderness. (Presumably to prepare herself for the data-mining ahead.)

You can read the rest of McCarthy’s announcement on her blog here.

Xtify, a mobile app platform that provides publishers with custom tools for push notifications (even when the app is closed), is launching its Retain product today.

If you’re like me you probably have about 20 to 30 apps on your phone you never use. According to Localytics, 55% of new users use an application less than four times, 26% using that application just once. The Xtify Retain platform attempt to solve this problem by giving app developers the ability to create their own retention messaging plan for free, pushing notifications like “We miss you!” based on certain user behaviors like when the app was last installed and opened.

Now while the original purpose of Retain was to send a push notification to customers who haven’t used an app in a while in order to keep them sucked in, I’m thinking this could be used benevolently, like “Hey, we notice you never use ‘Pimple Popper for the iPhone’ (yes it exists), would you like us to delete it?”

It also would be extremely useful in the case of app updates. For example, I initially missed the existence of Tilt Shift on Instagram because I had no idea the app had new features. I should probably just read TechCrunch more.

Xtify, which has other products that allow customers to drill down into their notifications (for example, pushing a message to people with 1.5 miles of the TechCrunch office or who have achieved a certain level in a game), also provides users with deep app analytics. In the case of Retain it will provide data as to how well the retention notifications work. The company plans on monetizing by offering premium analytics features to power users.

Helmed by Josh Rochlin, the New York-based Xtify has more than $3.6 million in funding from Acadia Woods, SeventySixCapital and others. The platform supports iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

We’ve all got iPhone mania in the Valley, never mind that Apple tracks our every move and won’t explain why or that AT&T users can’t actually make calls.

But in Asia– and much of the rest of the developing world– the anticipated mobile giant is Android. Android phones are just starting to hit Japan and China, and a flood of cheap new models are expected to come on the market within the next year. Expect a flood of new apps to follow that, particularly in China where venture capital is flowing like water.

The rise of Android is as close to a no-brainer prediction as you can make with always volatile and uncertain emerging markets. Combine the market size of countries like Japan, China, Indonesia and India with cheap, increasingly-sophisticated devices and a massive base of gamemakers and hackers and someone’s going to make a lot of money.

Silicon Valley companies have a long track record of screwing up in Asia, especially China. But Google would have to screw up so monumentally badly to blow Android’s Asian future. It would have to screw up worse than eBay, MySpace, Amazon, AOL, and, ahem, Google already screwed up in China, combined.

So it’s not a surprise that DCM has launched a $100 million Asian A-Fund to support early-stage Android entrepreneurs. The surprise is that more firms haven’t been creating funds like these. Android development has already been a huge thrust of Innovation Works, the incubator started by former head of Google China, Kaifu Lee, for about six months. (Innovation Works is also our partner in producing TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing, so expect to see a lot of Android innovation at the conference this October. More news on Beijing Disrupt is coming soon.)

DCM general partner David Chao says the idea developed over dinner in Beijing with DCM, GREE and KDDI about three months ago where the group couldn’t stop talking about Android’s opportunity in their requisite countries. “There’s this explosion of freedom coming,” Chao says. “It’s probably the first time people all around the world feel like they can do something simple on mobile and unleash their talent. If we just did this in the US, it’d be incredibly restricting.”

DCM’s fund will focus on startups in Silicon Valley, Beijing and Tokyo and investment decisions will be jointly made by partners in all three locations. Mostly, that will be DCM’s existing staff, with a few extra hires. That may sound inefficient, but DCM has long been an outlier with its China strategy, making all its investment decisions as a single firm, not a Valley firm with international franchise offices. And, so far, it’s worked well for the firm.

DCM has partnered with some big Asian heavyweights including gaming giant Tencent, Japan’s largest mobile gaming social network GREE and Japan’s second largest mobile operator KDDI. DCM has additional partners in the United States that it will be announcing in coming weeks.

Chao described the role of the strategic partners as an advantage startups could chose to take advantage of if they wanted distribution help in China and Japan, or refuse if they were worried about those bigger competitors squashing them in the market.

Worries about competition are just one of the headaches with an undertaking like this. While Android is undoubtably a huge opportunity, there are a lot of cooks in this $100 million kitchen– not only across different time zones and cultures, but across different industries. Already, there was a dispute on the part of the various partners on when the news would be released. I woke up to DCM moving the news release up by about five hours, thanks to a promise a Japanese partner made to the Japanese media. Let’s hope the coordination gets better once investments start, because it’s a huge opportunity for startups to leverage these massive markets at once.

Googler and fellow Greek Margo Georgiadis will be leaving her job as Vice President of Global Sales and Planning at Google Chicago to join daily deals site Groupon as Chief Operating Officer, Chicago Business is reporting. She will be replacing former COO Rob Solomon, who left the company in March.

At Google Georgiadis led a sales group comprised of over 1600 employees. Prior to Google, Georgiadis was a partner at McKinsey and Company, a CMO at Discover Card and Principal at Synetro Capital.

While Groupon declined to comment to Chicago Business, Senior Google VP Nikesh Arora expressed his congrats, “I’m grateful for all that Margo has done for our team over the past two years. We will miss her, but we’re also very excited that she’s joining a terrific company and a great partner for Google.”

Georgiadis’ position is a crucial one as the company prepares to IPO at a reported $15 billion dollar valuation in the spring and Groupon CEO Andrew Mason needs a Sheryl Sandberg to his Mark Zuckerberg. The company made $760 million in revenue last year, a number that Mason wants to increase to “billions” in 2011.

As it’s already technically spring I’m guessing Georgiadis’ schedule will be pretty tight in the coming weeks.

Image: LinkedIn

It appears that Google’s coupon service Offers, is live, starting in in Portland, Oregon. You also have the ability to subscribe to deals in areas within New York City, Oakland and San Francisco. The sign-up is live but the service is launching “soon.”

On the landing page of the Offers site, you are greeted with this “Google Offers BETA is starting in Portland, Oregon. Get 50% off or more at places you’ll love.” You can then subscribe to the offers with your email.

Update: Google issued this statement about Offers: Today we launched a marketing campaign inviting Portlanders to sign up for a test of Google Offers — to get great deals delivered right to their inboxes. Offers is part of an ongoing effort at Google to make new services that give consumers great deals while helping connect businesses with customers in new ways.

Google tells us that this part of a marketing campaign to publicize offers andusers can sign up for future launch of Offers beta, with Portland as first city you’ll be able to access Google Offers. Google is also starting to push radio advertisements on Pandora to users in Portland.

Here’s a newly uploaded video advertisement for Offers.

As we reported in late January, Googlewas preparing to launch a pre-paid offers product called Google Offers which is supposed to more Groupon-like in that the deal must be paid for in advance in order to redeem it. From the sounds of it, it looks like this could be Google’s Groupon competitor. Considering that you have to subscribe to the emails, get 50 percent-plus discounts, it sounds like the two could be the same.

Sometimes being a TechCrunch editor can actually be vaguely useful. Honest. Because we cover European startups from London, I’ve ended up being invited to join the London Mayor’s Digital Advisory Board as well as attending roundtable sessions at Number 10 Downing Street. But it’s not just to chat over coffee and biscuits. Both the local London government and the national one is serious about trying to enliven and nurture the growing tech scene here. I wouldn’t say they ‘get it’ all of the time – but they are trying, and I’ve seen the enthusiasm. While there are sceptics about the whole ‘East London Tech City‘ project, I do know that there is a big appetite to nurture this industry. Nothing happens over night, but at least we’ve started.

However, one thing I have been banging the table about – increasingly angrily as the weeks and months have past – is the provision for broadband to startups in London.

Social and mobile gaming startup Playmatics attained a $1 million investment from several Swiss-based angel investors to develop a “real world game” franchise calledShadow Government the company revealed today. Initially a Facebook platform game, Shadow Government will use economic and sustainability data, and government-modeling software from the Millennium Institute to give players a chance to build and run, or destroy their own virtual countries.

The Millennium Institute is best known as the creator of Threshold 21 (T21) and other government modeling software, research and algorithms. Its tools are used by policy-makers and development organizations to test and plan responses for a range of real-world events. The Millennium Institute’s overall mission is to “empower people and governments to build societies that are peaceful, equitable and sustainable,” according to their website.

Dr. Hans Herren, president of The Millennium Institute — also a fan of SimCity, SimAnt and A-Train — wrote about his organizations’ goals through the media of games, via an email interview with TechCrunch:

Since joining the Millennium Institute, I thought [we could] drive high-quality, fun and educational games with a twofold objective: teach players…about the inter-connectivity of everything around them; and harness global intelligence and wisdom to help build a better world.

Our models are all developed with a System Dynamics paradigm. They allow for the integration of the environment, society and economy into a single interactive and dynamic framework, [which] is unique in allowing inter-connectivity to play out synergies while highlighting unintended consequences so often ignored in policy decisions.

If “real world games” can reach the youth of today, and the leaders of tomorrow, and encourage them to think in this manner about issues, and design realistic solutions, we will have gone a long way in transitioning towards sustainability.

[Shadow Government] will also raise awareness about the services that Millennium Institute offers to governments, the private sector and civil society as well as individuals to better inform their green and fair growth policies and responsible behavior.

Millennium Institute wants the Shadow Government games to be incorporated into curriculum from primary schools through universities. Chief executive of Playmatics, Margaret Wallace noted that the game should be entertaining above all, though it is also educational. She explained:

We see Shadow Government advancing a future genre in gaming. It’s not a ‘serious game,’ really, because we aim to design an entertainment experience. People can use Shadow Government to destroy their own little country, or to wreak havoc where they can. We won’t impose ideas like you have to clean up the environment to advance a level. We want to see an array of behavior and ideas.

We will be able to incorporate real world news and data, sometimes in real-time. We could take a different world-focus [with the game content] depending on what is going on in the world, asking players to create scenarios around the crisis in Japan, or the conflict in Libya, for example.

Seeing how people play, in aggregate, will be one way of crowd sourcing ideas to help or predict systemic issues.

Playmatics was co-founded by game industry veterans Margaret Wallace, Nick Fortugno and Phillipe Trawinka. The company, which currently has 15 full time employees, has designed social and mobile games for the AMC television show Breaking Bad, and more recently for the New York Public Library (with Jane McGonigal).