Category: Tech news

While Apple has spent much of the latter part of this year ramping up their iAd platform for iOS devices, they have not yet focused on one key area: the iPad. That will change in early 2011, when the company will begin a full-on advertising assault within apps made for the popular tablet device. And today they’re offering a glimpse of that future. And they’re wisely doing it with Tron.

Apple and Disney have teamed up to show off what iAds for the iPad will look like with a Tron Legacy unit that begin to appear today in some iPad apps, we’re told. “Disney and Apple are excited to debut the ‘Tron Legacy’ iAd today as a special preview of iAd for iPad, which launches next year. iAd brings ‘Tron’s’ pulsing energy and vivid graphic style to iPad’s stunning display, creating a truly immersive ad experience,” the joint statement between the two companies reads.

Much like iAds for the iPhone, iAds for the iPad will be heavily based around a rich media experience that makes it seem almost as if you’re in an app within an app. You click on the Tron Legacy banner ad and you’re taken into an ad that takes up the entire large screen of the iPad and shows you options to view Tron videos, see photo galleries, look at character bios, and get music previews (from the popular Daft Punk-scored soundtrack).

Of course, like iAds for the iPhone, the real key will be getting attractive advertisers to sign up for the platform as well. While Apple had some big names to share when they unveiled iAds, since they launched, the reviews from developers and advertisers have been mixed. Developers seem to complain about not enough inventory, while advertisers complain that Apple is too strict on how they should make their ads.

Disney is an obvious test case for Apple as the two have had tight partnerships in recent years. Undoubtedly, this is helped by the fact that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder and sits on their Board of Directors.

As mobile advertising begins to ramp up, advertising on devices like the iPad will be interesting to watch. Will advertisers choose to create new kinds of ads specifically for tablets? Apple’s bet is clearly “yes”. And it’s hard to blame Apple for getting Tron fever, we have it too!

AdAge has a couple glimpses at what the Tron iAds look like.

Update: And we snagged a high resolution glimpse of the ad as well.

Obvious accents or impediments aside, everyone’s speech is a little bit different. I, for example, tend to not pronounce the “t” in “exactly”; as a result, Google Voice Search will occasionally assume I’m instead saying the incredibly common phrase, “eggs acting”.

Eggs, act no more! This morning, Google is announcing an optional “Personalized Recognition” mode for Voice Search on Android.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

It’s not over till it’s over huh. Wikileaks head Julian Assange has been granted bail. However, an immediate appeal lodged by Swedish prosecutors trying to have him extradited to Sweden to face rape allegations means that he must now stay in custody until the appeal is heard at some time in the next 48 hours. It’s not known when, as yet.

Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens, best known for defending human rights cases, told reporters outside court that “they want to put Mr Assange through more hurdles and expense,” and that the case was turning into a “a show trial.” Conditional bail had been set at £200,000, put up by a host of celebrities who are backing Assange, including U.S. filmmaker Michael Moore. Crowds of protesters have been surrounding every episode outside court, some dressed in Assange masks.

The full list of the charges which the Swedish court hopes to bring at a trial in Stockholm are here. Best put your TMZ hat on.

As tablets and phones with touch screens proliferate, more and more people are watching videos on mobile devices. But any website with video must decide which devices to support and encode their video to play on different phones and tablets. According to Encoding.com, which encodes about a million videos a month for everyone from MTV to PBS, nearly 78 percent of its customers encode their mobile video to play on Apple iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches), whereas only 4 percent encode specifically for Android devices. The remaining 18 percent encode for the 3GP format, which is used by feature phones.

This data is based on which preset options Encoding’s customers choose. It doesn’t mean that only 4 percent of videos will play on Android devices (which after all support Flash, MPEG-4, and 3GP), but that only 4 percent of Encoding’s customers bother to select the Android preset, which provides the optimal viewing experience on those devices. Whereas choosing the Apple presets is pretty much the default right now, and as noted earlier, iOS was embraced rather quickly. Encoding’s 1,400 customers are fairly representative of video producers across the Web, spanning media, advertising, retailers, and developers.

Encoding CEO Jeff Malkin suspects that the Android numbers will go up with its recent market share gains, and cautions that these numbers are usually a lagging indicator of consumer usage. Generally video creators want to see major traction before targeting a specific set of devices. On mobile, iOS rules right now, but Android is rising quickly.

Across the Web as a whole (not just mobile), the H.264 format continues to make gains, while Windows Media (WMV) has dwindled down to 1.2 percent of all encodes. Malkin sees “a mass migration away from WMV occurring.”

Almost two years to the day that Mozilla acq-hired him, Firefox Creative Lead Aza Raskin will be leaving Mozilla on January 1 to found a new startup called Massive Health. Raskin started out as head of user experience at Mozilla Labs where he spearheaded projects such as Tab Candy, Ubiquity, Jetpack, new mobile interfaces, and geolocation specifications.

Now, at Massive Health, he wants to bring better interface design to help people take control of their health, specifically people with weight-related health problems such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Massive Health will present people with better data and tighter feedback loops so they can assess how the actions they take today will impact their weight and overall health.

His co-founder is Sutha Kamal. Atul Varma—another Mozilla colleague and his former CTO at Humanized (the startup he sold to Mozilla)—will be also be joining him. Better health through better information is a huge, mostly-untapped opportunity. We’ll be following Massive Health closely once it launches. Here is Aza’s post on his departure.

Photo credit: Flickr/Gen Kanai

You may remember the Humble Indie Bundle from May, which was a sort of experiment in payment, trends, and distribution. It was extremely successful, raising quite a lot of money for the EFF, Child’s Play, and of course the developers themselves. Now, just in time for the holidays, a new bundle is being offered with similar terms, and it’s just as tempting.

One new wrinkle is that the sale is now being run by Humble Bundle, Inc., a Y Combinator startup. With downloadable games becoming an almost disturbingly large business, the company could have carved itself out quite a comfortable little niche. The independent games and apps scene is quite active and prolific, and projects like this one are an excellent way to reward developers who often create these things in their spare time.

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Have you ever lost an expensive phone? Hurts, doesn’t it?

I’ve experienced it, and it’s only when it happens when you realize you’ve not only lost a costly device that you’ll need to replace with another one soon, but that losing it also means someone might stand to gain access to your photos, emails, bank accounts and so forth.

Mobile security software maker TekTrak thinks it has a solid solution for that problem, and the startup has just raised a seed funding round from some notable angels to prove it can turn it into a profitable business, too.

Tektrak has developed an iPhone app dubbed TekTrak Pro ($2.99) that allows users to monitor the precise location of their device at all times and secure sensitive or private information stored on the phone. The TekTrak application uses 3 hardware components already built into most smartphones (cellular, GPS, and WiFi) to pinpoint the location of the phone, in the background of iOS.

Obviously, this only works when the phone is turned on, but users can always see where the phone was last located (which might help them retrieve it on the spot).

Location tracking and history aside, the TekTrak app also comes with a remote ringer feature that gives users the ability to locate their device once they’ve narrowed down its whereabouts and are located in close proximity of the phone. Evidently, this is only useful when sound is turned on.

Obviously, TekTrak has tough competition in Apple, which has just made its similar Find my iPhone/iPad application free of charge in the just-released iOS 4.2. TekTrak posits that it also allows users check the last known location and location history of phones, something Apple’s MobileMe does not support.

The company also points out TekTrak provides support for the vast majority of iPhone users, including iPhone 3GS devices, and not only iPhone 4.

The fresh capital will also allow TekTrak to expand to more mobile operating systems and platforms, starting with Android, and to enhance its existing iPhone application with more features.

Investors in the seed round – the size of which remains undisclosed – include Cyan and Scott Banister, Kima Ventures, Sergey Grishin, Wasabi Ventures, BCITL Ventures, Barney Pell and Yoni Saban, among others.

As we wrote a month ago, Google Voice finally arrived for the iPhone after Apple waited 16 months to approve the application. And as expected, the app was a hit with Google Voice and iPhone users. Unfortunately, at the time of launch, Google Voice for the iPhone didn’t support the iPod Touch or the iPad. So today, Google is announcing a new version of Google Voice that will work on both iOS devices.

The new version of the app essentially allows you to use all the features of its iPhone cousin, including the ability to read your voicemail and send and receive text messages. Of course, you cannot make cell calls from the iPad and the iPod Touch. But you can use Google Voice’s Click2Call feature to initiate Google Voice calls with one of your phones.

When you click a “Call button” in the new app on an iPod or iPad, you can select which of your registered phones you want to use to connect the call. Google Voice will call your phone and then connect your call to the contact’s phone number.

Other features of the app include the ability to send callers straight to voicemail via a Do Not Disturb button. And Google has added a “Contacts” button to the Dialer tab to allow you to find your contacts in your address book more seamlessly. Also when you enable Push Notifications within the app, Google will disable Text forwarding for you.

The ability to actually initiate a call from the iPod or iPad is kind of cool, and surely something that could be useful for Google Voice users. Of course, you will have to put down your device and pick up your phone to actually participate in the call.

Like Uncle Eddie said, “Clark, that’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year.” And so, kind readers, in that spirit today’s daily giveaway is a Roku XDS. Cut the cord, stream Netflix, and keep your hard earned money instead of paying for the power bill on Comcast’s massive 2100-foot HD wall. Or don’t cut the cord. We don’t care. We just want to give a reader this Roku XDS for the holidays so click through for the instructions and rules.

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Soladigm raised a $30 million series C investment the company announced this morning. Founded in 2007, the company makes smart glass for green buildings that can change from clear to tinted automatically, in response to changes in light or temperature. Windows using this “electro-chromic” technology help building owners and operators reduce their heat, cooling and lighting costs, and energy consumption.

The market for green buildings is growing rapidly. According to research by McGraw Hill Construction:

Today, a third of all new nonresidential construction is green— a $54 billion market opportunity. In five years, nonresidential green building activity is expected to triple, representing $120 billion to $145 billion in new construction (40 to 48 percent of the nonresidential market) and $14 billion to $18 billion in major retrofit and renovation projects.

DBL Investors and Nano Dimension led the series C round in Soladigm, joined by General Electric (GE) Energy Financial Services, as well as earlier investors Khosla Ventures and Sigma Partners. Cynthia Ringo, Managing Partner at DBL Investors, joined Soladigm’s Board of Directors with the investment.

Last month, GE named Soladigm one of the first 12 winners of its Ecomagination Challenge, a $200 million innovation competition inviting entrepreneurs and students to share their best ideas on how to build the next-generation power grid.

In August 2010, the company announced plans to locate its primary manufacturing operations in Olive Branch, Mississippi, where it expects to create several hundred clean tech jobs. To facilitate the expensive factory build, the State of Mississippi provided the company a $40 million loan.

The series C round will help Soladigm build and launch its high-volume commercial operations and develop sales and marketing channels, according to a company statement.

Earlier this month, another maker of smart glass, Sage Electrochromics, drew an $80 million investment from Saint-Gobain, a construction materials manufacturer.

GNU creator Richard Stallman is back on the old “cloud computing is evil” kick again, and this time he’s speaking out against ChromeOS. His basic premise, that cloud computing is dangerous because it places your data in the hands of companies that neither care about you or your data, is sound. As is his threat that when the police come knocking on your cloud provider’s door asking for your data, Google is far more likely to give it up than you are. These are fine and good reactions to the slow erosion of privacy that comes from the rise of cloud computing.

“I think that marketers like cloud computing because it is devoid of substantive meaning. The term’s meaning is not substance, it’s an attitude: ‘Let any Tom, Dick and Harry hold your data, let any Tom, Dick and Harry do your computing for you (and control it).’ Perhaps the term ‘careless computing’ would suit it better.

To paraphrase Raymond Carver, Stallman is talking and Stallman invented GNU so sometimes that gives him the right. But I worry his FUD in regard to the cloud is misplaced. The obvious issues aside, given the current state of most people’s computer security and back-up practices, will not disregard the cloud as a good alternative to those who can’t maintain their own PCs. Stallman comes from a culture where everything is in one place. The Linux architecture itself is, to an extent, monolithic (not in the computing sense but in the metaphorical sense), and every action you perform on data within it is self-contained on the disk. Copies of copies are propagated through the network, ensuring that important data is replicated and not linked.

You would be a fool to trust your entire video or photo collection to Google or Yahoo or Microsoft, yet millions do. You would be a fool to trust your email records to a bunch of privileged uber-nerds in Palo Alto, but I, myself, do just that. These are compromises we make to create a centralized information jukebox and I, as a responsible computing citizen, keep copies of my important stuff locally.

However, ChromeOS, like many mobile phone OSes, isn’t about being a responsible computing citizen. It’s about getting things done. You put music on your phone or start up Pandora – it’s essentially the same thing. You edit a document in Pages or in Google Docs on the iPad – it’s essentially the same thing. You drag a photo off of your Droid or upload it onto Flickr – it’s essentially the same thing. The primary examples are the movement of bits from and to your own realm while the secondary examples are the movement of bits from and to a password protected “alien” realm. Either way, you’re doing the same thing with the same bits.

When it comes time for me to perform some sort of civil disobedience or when I get it into my head to do something illegal, I will keep that data off the cloud. But I do not consider sharing a photo on Posterous “careless computing.”

ChromeOS is Google’s way of showing us the desktop is dead. It’s also Google’s way of grabbing more eyeballs and insinuating itself into the fabric of our information age lives. None of this is done with any particular malice but it is definitely not done with our best interests at heart. However, for the vast majority of us, letting Google do the heavy lifting when it comes to data storage and maintenance is probably the best way to go.

The question is not whether I should trust Google or Microsoft or Apple with my data in the cloud. The question is, rather, whether it is worth my time, attention, and resources not to.

via Guardian

Google publicly unveiled the Chrome Web Store a week ago. Looking at the most popular apps in the U.S. by weekly install numbers, it looks like TweetDeck has fast risen to the most prominent spot on the list, as relayed by the startup’s founder Iain Dodsworth earlier today.

With about 102,500 weekly installs at the time of writing, TweetDeck thus beats NYTimes, whose app has seen approximately 87,700 weekly installs to date, roughly seven days in.

So where are the Google services? Right behind the TweetDeck and the NY Times, it appears.

The list of top 10 most popular apps on the Chrome Web Store includes Google Calendar, Google Books, Google Docs, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube.

Granted, most of Google’s ‘apps’ are mere links to the respective Web-based services, whereas ‘ChromeDeck’ is an actual app, but still.

Springpad rounds out the list of the ten most popular apps on the store as the third non-Google service to make the list after TweetDeck and NY Times, with about 35,000 weekly installs (almost a third of TweetDeck’s install numbers).

Obviously, it’s far too soon to draw any conclusions, but it’s certainly a testament to TweetDeck’s huge popularity to see it leading the most popular Chrome apps list, considering the company is primarily regarded as a desktop and mobile client software developer.

For your information, rivals HootSuite (16,000 weekly installs), eBuddy Web Messenger (13,9200 weekly installs) and Seesmic (5,442 weekly installs) are trailing far behind.

Infochimps, a marketplace for data sets, is announcing the acquisition of Y Combinator-incubated startup and competitor Data Marketplace. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we understand it was an all-cash deal.

As we wrote in our initial review of Data Marketplace earlier this year, the startup served as a middleman in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users could submit requests to Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and essentially transferring it into a readable format.

Providers then post data resources to Data Marketplace, provide descriptive metadata, and also set a price. The stored metadata is used to help consumers find relevant data through traditional search engines and when browsing Data Marketplace. Data can also be posted on the site without a request, that users can search for.

Infochimps, which recently closed a $1.2 million financing round from DFJ Mercury, focused on providing smaller data sets for developers. Data ranges from content around academia, the enterprise, and more. The startup is also working on building a large-scale data stack capable of ingesting, analyzing and distributing TB scale databases.

Infochimps’ CEO Nick Ducoff tells us that the funding has been used for both the acquisition of Data Marketplace as well as for new hires, which include Kurt Bollacker, previously Chief Scientist at Metaweb (which was acquired by Google). Data Marketplace’s founders Steve DeWald and Matt Hodan will not be joining Infochimps as part of the acquisition but Data Marketplace will continue to operate as a standalone destination.

Giant retail electronic payments network operator Visa has released a free iPhone app in the United States, giving users access to over 50 merchant offers ranging from clothing and dining to entertainment, just in time for the holiday shopping season.

The app will allow retailers such as New York & Company, Planet Hollywood, Holiday Inn, Hard Rock Café and Zales to automatically deliver exclusive offers to Visa account holders.

Account holders with Visa Signature cards will receive special Visa Signature offers in addition to the standard offers.

Offers are stored in the application, can be tailored to users’ preferences, and can be redeemed either online or at physical retail locations.

Furthermore, the app boasts location-based technology that provides consumers with a map and directions to a nearby retailer where they can redeem offers, as well as the nearest ATM.

Visa says it is working closely with handset makers, carriers and technology providers worldwide to bring Visa payment facilities to the mobile channel. The Visa Mobile application for the iPhone was developed in partnership with Monitise, a UK-based mobile banking and payments platform company.

Visa signed a global alliance with Monitise in June 2009 to custom-develop mobile services for Visa across a variety of handsets.

In addition, Visa last week announced the commercial availability of mobile contactless payments enabled by DeviceFidelity’s In2Pay microSD solution (more about that here).

Visa has also developed an Android application, but participation in the program for the platform is currently limited to select U.S. Bank debit cardholders.

There’s no shortage of mobile ad networks; and unsurprisingly there’s been a lot of consolidation in the space marked by the acquisitions of AdMob by Google and Quattro Wireless by Apple. Today, Moolah Media is throwing its hat into the mobile advertising network ring.

Moolah Media, which has been in stealth for the past few months, is basing its network of mobile ads around a cost-per-action and cost-per-lead model. So the network’s ad formats allow advertisers to drive inbound calls directly to their call center, collect signups and registration leads, while also tracking conversions.

In a private beta period, Moolah claims that the platform generated 250,000 quality leads from 100 million impressions per month. The network also promises higher payouts and 100 percent fill rates for publishers. Ads can be placed within apps, on the mobile web or within text messages.

While advertisers pay more for CPA or CPL ad formats, Moolah Media will no doubt face competition from Google’s AdMob if the network turns on this type of advertising on mobile phones (which seems likely).