Category: Tech news

Vodafone has launched Mobile Clicks 2010, a competition to identify and reward innovative mobile Internet startups. Now in its third year, the competition will be open to any fledgling mobile Web startup – provided your market is The Netherlands, Portugal or the UK.

Vodafone has set aside a prize fund of €150,000 (2/3 of which will go to the overall winner, the remaining €50,000 to the runner-up), based on these five criteria: originality, creativity and innovation; technical and operational feasibility; economic and financial viability; value to end-users; and the quality of the management team.

Startups can apply here until midnight, August 22nd, 2010.

The importation, sale, or advertising of the R4 card, used to pirate Nintendo DS games, is now illegal in the UK. Defendants tried to argue that the R4 shouldn’t be demonized, much less made illegal, because it can also be used to play homebrew software. The High Court disagreed.

Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps anyone develop and create iPhone and Android apps, has launched a more customizable version of their app builder today, called Mobile Roadie Pro.

The idea Mobile Roadie Pro is to offers clients more creative control over the development of their app, offering customization of menu layout, colors, buttons, and fonts. Pro also supports multiple categories of content, a global search for users, and newly designed landscape views. And the functionality that is included in Mobile Roadie’s basic app creator is also available. For example, the apps can feature integration with YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Twitpic, Ustream, Topspin, Google News, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook.

Mobile Roadie has been testing the Pro version of the platform with a number of branded apps, including one for the hotel Wynn in Las Vegas. The app allows users to explore the rooms in the hotel, make reservations, read the restaurant menus and reserve a table, and learn more about nightlife, shopping, and entertainment options in the area.

Mobile Roadie’s pricing starts at $499 to setup and $29 per month. The company says that using the platform requires no tech knowledge, and apps can be created in about 30 minutes. And another bonus of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that its CMS allows users to simultaneously make updates to both their iPhone and Android Apps. And using push notifications, customers can send alerts that appear on users’ screens, geo targeting messages down to a one-mile radius.

For a fledgling startup, Mobile Roadie has been able to attract a number of high profile brands and celebrities using its platform, including Taylor Swift, Madonna, Live Nation, Levi’s, Twilight, and Vera Wang. Mobile Roadie also developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. The app was a huge hit at the conference. Mobile Roadie also recently struck a deal with Random House to power iPhone apps for authors.

The future, as William Gibson once said, is already here. It is just unevenly distributed. You can find the future in new technologies and the people who wade into them early on—people like Nick Bilton, the chief blogger for the New York Times. (His official title is lead technology writer because the New York Times doesn’t like to admit it employs bloggers, I guess). Bilton, who previously worked in the R&D department of the New York Times, has a book coming out titled, appropriately enough, I Live In The Future & Here Is How It Works.

Apparently, that future does not include Apple’s iBooks, the digital books Apple sells on the iPad. The book will be available in September in print, digital editions for the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s eBooks, but not for the iBook. Bilton’s publisher, as a division of Random House, does not make its titles available in Apple’s iBook store. But no matter. There will be an accompanying iPad app, iPhone app, and mobile website.

I caught up with Bilton a couple weeks ago, and he showed me a preview of the mobile website, which he explains in the video above. Each chapter has a 2-D barcode that can be scanned with a camera phone to bring up a corresponding Webpage with all of the links referenced in that chapter, videos, and the ability to comment. In that way, each chapter will become like a blog post with reader comments and discussion. I am not sure you can do any of that stuff with an iBook anyway. In the future, everything is an app.

Part of the book tries to answer the question of what effect the Internet is having on our brains. Unlike another author named Nick (Carr), Bilton does not think the Internet is a making us stupid. I concur (you can watch Carr interviewed on TechCrunchTV by Andrew Keen). When Bilton looks at the brain research, he finds evidence that people can process information just fine when skipping from text to video to links, as long as all the different bits are related.

Fresh off the heels of launching a slew of new products yesterday, Apple this morning debuted Safari 5.0.1, switching the flip on Safari Extensions and formally introducing the Safari Extensions Gallery, a directory of available extensions across categories.

The company had introduced extensions support in Safari 5 last June, giving developers the opportunity to start creating browser add-ons using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript standards.

Perhaps surprisingly, two fierce Apple competitors were given the opportunity to tout their extensions first and foremost, namely Amazon.com with their Wish List extension and Microsoft with their Bing Extension for Safari. Also featured in the press release: MLB.com, The New York Times and Twitter (eBay also gets featured on the Gallery site).

The new Safari Extensions Gallery is accessible straight from the browser menu or at extensions.apple.com. Users can download and install extensions from the gallery with a single click, and there’s no need to restart the browser (much like Google Chrome, and unlike Firefox).

I did a quick count and came out at above one hundred extensions already.

Add-ons can be automatically updated and are managed within Safari. Users can enable or disable individual extensions, or turn off all extensions with one click.

Every Safari Extension comes signed with a digital certificate from Apple to “prevent tampering” and to verify that updates to the extension are from the original developer. Safari Extensions are also sandboxed, which prevents them from accessing information on a user’s system or communicate with websites aside from those specified by the developer.

As Apple had made clear earlier, Safari Extensions run solely in the browser.

Not so tiny after all: Tinychat, a simple text, video and audio communication platform, is growing by leaps and bounds.

First launched in February 2009 as a simple way to create Web-based chat rooms, Tinychat today is a full-blown chat system with lots of bells and whistles.

And the service is gaining traction, fast.

Founder Dan Blake tells me they’ve reached a point where they’re gaining 10,000 new users on a daily basis (or roughly 300k per month), which is a lot considering registration isn’t even required to use Tinychat, and that they’re seeing 500 million minutes of usage per month.

Blake adds that Tinychat, which won the award for best bootstrapped startup at our most recent Crunchies show, has over 50 servers in production to keep the service up and running 24/7, and that they’re seeing 11% week over week growth in page views these days.

He also stresses that, unlike sites like Chatroulette, there’s a moderation team working around the clock to make sure no nudity, other offensive and illegal content shows up.

To make the service more appealing for users around the world, Tinychat is today introducing a new feature: real-time chat translation. Basically, users can now select in which language they want to read messages, regardless the native tongue of their conversation partner(s). The feature was built using Google’s Translate API, which means dozens of languages are supported and sometimes comprehensible translations are even served up.

In all seriousness, the translations are actually pretty decent, and I think it’s a really cool feature. It reminds me a lot of XIHA Life, a social network that is also banking on real-time chat translations to position itself in a unique way.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Look at me. Now look at the kitchen wall. Now look at me again. I’m on a horse. Look again? Look at the iPad on the wall!

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to present to you the Wallee, a thingamabob for your iPad that lets you attach it to your wall. That’s right: you’ve just made your own 10-inch Apple TV.

Read more…

Several years ago, it seems like just about everyone saw the film Titanic. This past year, it seems the same was true for Avatar. And this past Summer, it seems as if everyone is seeing Inception. All three films share something in common: their use of Autodesk Maya, a piece of visual effects software. Now that technology has been ported to the iPhone and iPad.

Obviously, Autodesk Fluid FX isn’t going to be as powerful as Maya running on a hardcore system. But Fluid FX is nonetheless impressive. And it’s pretty amazing that these kind of effects can be done on these relatively cheap consumer devices, whereas a just a few years ago systems costing thousands of dollars were required to render this stuff.

The best way to describe what the app can do is to show it to you. For that, watch the video below. But basically, it’s an app that lets you manipulate pictures with a range of effects. And it has other natural elements like smoke and fire that you can manipulate on your iPad or iPhone.

The use of these devices’ multi-touch capabilities is the key to all of this. The app can recognize up to 10 simultaneous multi-touch inputs, we’re told.

The resulting work you make can saved to your devices. Or you can output any of this to a larger screen, like a television. There’s also a way to cycle through various effects and put them on display. But to me Fluid FX is just as interesting as a technological demonstration of what these devices are now capable of. And perhaps even more so, as a way to show was the other software Autodesk offers is capable of.

Autodesk’s Joe Stam, who has won two Oscars for his work effect work on films, created this app. Previously, Autodesk has released Sketchbook Mobile for the iPhone and iPad, which was a top-selling app.

Autodesk Fluid FX will be out in the App Store tomorrow. It will cost $1.99.

Earlier this week, ABC News launched a new iPad application that adds a twist to the way most apps present the news: a third dimension. Fire up the app and you’re immediately faced with a nifty-looking globe that’s covered in headlines and photographs depicting the day’s top stories; tap one and you’ll be linked to the relevant video clip or news article. It’s quite snazzy, at least from a looks perspective (more on that later), and it’s quickly risen to become the #1 free application on the App Store.

To learn more about the app, our own Lora Kolodny ventured over the ABC News headquarters, where she interviewed anchor George Stephanopoulos and a pair of execs who helped create the application.

Stephanopoulos says that he was quickly enamored of the application’s globe, which is a running theme in the interviews (though he said that he hadn’t had a chance to play around with it too much at the time of the interview). On a related note, when guaging his affinity for gadgets on a scale of 1-10, he gives himself a 4.5 (he does own an iPad, but his family has issues getting the cable box to behave properly).

Andrew Morse, Executive Producer of Integration and Innovation at ABC News Digital, says that the globe is meant to be a “meandering experience”. He explains that on traditional sites, people complain that you only get what you’re looking for, and that there isn’t the discovery factor you get from a newspaper.

Isaac Josephson, VP Product Development for ABC News Digital, says that the team has been working on the app for a solid three months, and that it stirred up more excitement among traditional broadcasters than any previous product they’d developed.

My take on the app? Looks aren’t everything — if you want to catch up on the day’s top headlines at a glance, this might not be what you’re looking for. The globe may be fun, but in my experience it also has a habit of obscuring most of the app’s available content (only two or three stories are legible at once). You can flick the globe around a few times and be pretty confident that you’ve seen everything, but it’s hard to kick the nagging feeling that you may have inadvertently skipped over the day’s top story.

That said, the ABC team may be right: if you’re just looking to kill some time discovering random highlights from the day’s news, this may be exactly what you’re looking for. And if you just want the headlines, you can venture over to the ABC News HTML5 site, which is integrated into the app.

Finding parking in near concerts or sports events can be an incredibly frustrating task. Because of the event, the cost to park in lots near the stadium or venue can be exorbitant. Plus, lots can fill up fast. Enter ParkWhiz, a Chicago-based startup that allows customers to reserve parking on the fly.

Via a web app and a newly launched mobile HTML5 website, ParkWhiz allows you to reserve parking near concert and event venues in the U.S. ParkWhiz partners with parking lot owners, which range from people who own a single space to large parking management companies, across the country to list their inventory on ParkWhiz.

So far, ParkWhiz has partnered with 300 participating parking locations in over 25 cities in the U.S. Currently, ParkWhiz currently offers parking reservations near Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, AT&T Park, Cowboys Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Busch Stadium, US Cellular Field, Orpheum Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Beacon Theater, plus 17 airports around the country.

For example, ParkWhiz just helped park over 400 cars (who paid on average of $40 per parking spot) for the Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park last week in San Francisco. ParkWhiz’s CEO and co-founder Aashish Dalal says the startup has also started to serve coupons for restaurants and bars (in neighborhoods nearby the event space) with parking reservations.

In terms of pricing, there is no fee to list a parking space on the site; ParkWhiz collects a fee only if a reservation is made and handles payment processing for the parking vendors. Generally, the user has to pay 10 percent customer convenience fee to ParkWhiz in addition to parking price, and ParkWhiz will also take a 15 percent cut from the base rate from the parking vendors. In a year, the site has already taken 50,000 reservations, with the goal of hittig 100,000 resetvations by the end of the year.

Of course, ParkWhiz isn’t the first company to use technology to try to solve the problem of finding parking. Car Harbor allows you to rent your parking space, and there are a number of iPhone apps to aim to solve the same problem including Spotswitch and Primospot. Even Google is getting into the parking game, recently launching Open Spot, an Android app that shows you a map with nearby open parking spots marked with colored dots.

Did you know you can buy uranium ore on Amazon? Well you can. It’s actually been on sale for a while — BoingBoing pointed it out back in 2007. But talk of it has recently started popping up around the Internet once again this past week. Our sister site CrunchGear did a quick post pointing it out last week. Since then, a whole new batch of great customer reviews have been flowing in, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out today.

Some of the negative reviews note that uranium is “bad for you.” Another says that it killed a pet gorilla. But some positive reviews mark is as a “great gift for a hostile dictator.“

As Vogels points out, the best reviews are highlighted on reviews-only page. The most helpful positive review reads: “So glad I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore.” Meanwhile, the most helpful negative review reads: ”I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.”

Overall, uranium ore has earned 4 out of 5 stars after 221 customer reviews — with the majority of them giving it a 5-star rating. It’s largely seen as a good deal for $29.99. You may recall that these are the same users who love to review milk.

The discussions on the uranium page are good as well. One person wants to know, “Does this product put you on the CIA watch list?” Another person wants to know: “This is a joke, right?“

Unrelated, it’s worth noting that people who viewing uranium on Amazon also viewed items such as wolf urine, fresh whole rabbits, and yes, milk.

This guest post was written by Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net. Box.net was founded in 2005 with the goal of helping people and businesses easily access and share information from anywhere. Box.net is now used by millions of individuals, small businesses, and Fortune 500 enterprises worldwide.

When we think of sexy technologies, enterprise software usually ranks somewhere between the fax machine and a Zune. With prohibitive pricing, long product cycles and user interfaces only a mother could love, the enterprise offerings of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and other big vendors are about as appealing as Steve Ballmer in a bikini. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have been turned off by these unappealing traits, the near-monopolies held by big players, and the suspicion that problems being solved for the enterprise are less exciting. After all, if you want to rapidly develop and release technology to millions of users, build an agile and innovative company culture, and perhaps break a few rules along the way, you certainly don’t build software for the enterprise. You build Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, YouTube or Blippy.

Given all this, why have I decided to go down the road of building a hard-core enterprise software company? It’s simple. Enterprise software is sexy again. Just ask consumer tech guru Marc Andreessen, who recently confessed to being attracted to the new wave of enterprise software companies, or Peter Thiel, who thinks Palantir is hot to the tune of a $750M valuation.

Palantir is like the Jack Bauer of business software, helping to prevent terrorism and predict the spread of infectious diseases. Fortune 500 companies use Box.net to collaborate on billions of dollars in transactions, streamline national advertising campaigns, and help build new space shuttles (seriously, space shuttles). Cloudera is helping big businesses solve their biggest data challenges. Jive is building a meaningfully large business by bringing social into the enterprise, and just raised another $30M to do so. Zuora is reinventing customer subscriptions and payments, and has quickly grown to manage more than $1 billion in subscription revenue. These companies – along with Workday, PBWorks, Asana, Rypple, Salesforce, and dozens of others – are tackling big problems and even bigger markets, placing a premium on innovation, and building cultures around product execution rather than pure sales. And by doing so, they’re making enterprise software sexy (yes, I’m going to use this word a lot in this post, prepare yourself).

Big Problems, Large Markets, New Scale

Enterprises today have massive amounts of information to analyze and manage, disparate employees to connect, prospective customers across the world to market to, and business problems that need to be solved in real-time. Buyers across businesses of all sizes are on the prowl for better, sexier technologies to address these challenges, and collectively they have hundreds of billions of dollars in budget. The US government alone will spend nearly $80 billion next year on information technology. Compare that to a $24.2 billion pie for all of US internet advertising, the revenue stream for a large portion of web companies. New enterprise software companies are emerging to address problems that didn’t exist (or couldn’t be solved) a decade ago, and those with the most efficient and effective solution are being rewarded greatly.

These newcomers wouldn’t have stood a chance against the behemoths in the client-server paradigm, but the cloud is an inherently democratizing force, removing any unnatural channel, sales, or distribution advantages from providers. With the cloud, every user within an organization is a potential buyer – not just because their usage of your service determines your success, but because more and more we’re seeing bottom-up adoption of technology displacing top-down deployments. New enterprise services that leverage a freemium business model can operate at internet-scale, growing to millions of users as rapidly as the latest hip consumer application. Just look at Yammer, which is doubling revenue every quarter. Startups now have an unprecedented opportunity to disrupt traditional enterprise vendors.

Massive Innovation in the Enterprise

The latest crop of enterprise software companies are approaching business problems with the agility, speed and mindset of consumer startups, bringing explosive innovation to a traditionally stagnant, slow-moving market. To retain customers in this incredibly competitive landscape, you’re forced to build better technology – technology that customers love, is easy to implement and available across devices. It’s Moore’s Law on steroids, forcing you to constantly innovate and improve your technology at an unprecedented pace. At Box, we push updates that are incremental and sometimes monumental every week without interruption to our users or their IT departments, unlike SharePoint’s three-year release cycles and occasional patches that place the burden on the IT staff.

How is all this innovation translating to how users and businesses operate? Enterprises are now getting a real-time, holistic view of content and conversations within their business through activity feeds from Salesforce, Yammer, Jive and others. They’re experiencing more seamless interaction between the desktop and browser with HTML5-powered content viewing and editing, and drag and drop uploading from Google, Scribd, and more. They’re realizing the long overdue promise of the “mobile workforce,” thanks to sophisticated business applications that let them collaborate and communicate from mobile devices and the iPad. There’s more ground-breaking innovation going on in enterprise startups today than most of the consumer web; we just don’t see it because we’re conditioned to think enterprise software is dull.

Culture and Execution Matter More Than Size

Not surprisingly, company culture at these new enterprise software contenders looks a lot more like their consumer counterparts than the enterprise behemoths they’re attempting to disrupt. Rather than trying to build aggressive sales teams, many enterprise software startups are focusing on product execution as the best means of acquiring customers. The days of “elephant hunting” are quickly disappearing (it always seemed strange to associate customer relationships with killing large and mostly-friendly mammals, but what do I know?). Consumption and subscription-based billing, in contrast to the traditional licensing model, forces vendors to build amazing software that your customers need and use, not just software that you can sell better than anyone else. In today’s world, you only get paid if people are using your product.

Furthermore, without the hooks of costly infrastructure and rigid licensing, scaling in size is no longer an excuse for slowing down. In the highly democratized, competitive world of the Web, companies that let their bulk get in the way of innovation and user experience will quickly see a customer and employee exodus. Salesforce is sexier today having passed the $1B annual revenue mark than it was a decade ago because it has continued to innovate and build a culture around its core mission: “The End of Software.” SuccessFactors has aged gracefully to become one of the leading SaaS cloud companies by executing against five founding principles that include “No Jerks!” NetSuite, Taleo, LogMeIn and SolarWinds have also managed to maintain their sex appeal through recent successful IPOs. Others like Cast Iron and Greenplum have been snapped up in a recent wave of acquisitions as giants like IBM and EMC try to spice up their images and offerings.

So how can today’s business software vendors, as they grow, see similar success?

1. Make customers feel like they’re a part of your company — all enterprise vendors could all learn a little from Zappos
2. Align revenue with customer success and consumption — your product isn’t worth anything to someone who isn’t using it
3. Build usable technology that people are excited to experience every time — this is hard to do and easy to forget
4. Move quickly, stay youthful in approach, and innovate — complacency is the surest way to lose great talent and your best customers
5. Solve an enterprise’s big problems — the bigger the problem, generally the bigger the reward.

We’re going through a major shift in the technology landscape. Yes, photo sharing is fun, but the upside of creating the eighth service that lets you post photos of yourself to the web is becoming smaller than solving massive problems for enterprises. Organizations have unprecedented amounts of data, global and virtual workforces, and markets that change in real-time. It’s easier and more compelling than ever before to build, launch, and sell scalable enterprise solutions. There are billions of dollars to be made just by keeping it (don’t hate me) sexy.

GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has hit a major milestone tonight: the site is now hosting one million projects, confirmed Scott Chacon, VP of Research and Development at GitHub. Approximately 60 percent of these projects are full repositories – that is, shared folders with code spread across multiple files – while the remaining 40 percent are “gists”, or short code snippets contained in a single file, like this one, for example.

GitHub has seen rapid growth since it launched in February 2008, all despite the fact that the company has eschewed the traditional venture capital funding route. In an exchange that took place, appropriately enough, via the messaging system built into GitHub, Chacon stated that the company is still “funding free and very profitable” and that they are seeing “incredible growth for GitHub and Git usage in general.” In January 2009 they won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup.

The profit comes from the paid plans that GitHub offers for those developers and companies who want to host their repositories privately. GitHub offers essentially unlimited hosting to anyone who is willing to make their code open source, but charges based on the number of private repositories and the number of contributors for other projects. This profitability has spurred the launch of a number of new features of late, such as Organizations, which offers more advanced workflow tools for projects with multiple contributors and varying permissions, and support for fifteen new languages.

GitHub is a key part of the software development ecosystem, hosting a number of notable code bases, including Ruby on Rails, the jQuery JavaScript library and the Linux kernel. Git, the distributed version control software that GitHub is based on, was in fact built by Linus Torvalds, the lead developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, and the source code for Git itself is also hosted on GitHub. TechCrunch hosts a number of repositories using the service, including some that are open source, and Twitter has recently been publishing the source for several of their gems and other code, using GitHub to do so. Ruby and JavaScript are the most popular languages on GitHub, with 19 and 17 percent of the hosted code respectively, but there are currently projects in over 50 languages on the service: everything from Visual Basic to Go.

Since its public beta launch in April, fabulis has been growing quickly. The gay mens’ social network now has over 51,000 members — up 40 percent in the last 30 days alone. And they’re taking that growth mobile, with the launch of a new iPhone app today.

The app offers all the best parts of the website, but extends upon them by utilizing the location element that the iPhone offers. The default view of the app is the “nearby” tab which shows fabulius members, known as “fabbits,” that are close to your actual location. If you find someone nearby that you want to engage with, you can chat with the click of a button.

There’s also a “shake-it” functionality, which launches a fabulis slot machine. This returns you a random fabulis member nearby who you may or may not know, and allows you to view their profile and chat with them.

The other major functionality of the app is the Plans area. This gives you access to what fabulis says is the largest directory of gay-related events in the world — over 71,000 events, with thousands more being added each day. And again, thanks to the use of the iPhone’s GPS, you can sort by events that are close to your location.

And, of course, there is a way to view your messages, and look at other fabbits’ profiles in the app.

Some other stats from fabulis:

• Registered users spend 10 minutes per visit to the site currently
• There have been over 300 million fabulis bits (their virtual currency) spent by members so far
• 67 percent of members are in the U.S., with the UK coming in second with 9%

It’s hard to top CEO Jason Goldberg’s quote that fabulis for the iPhone “is like carrying the big gay world around in your pocket,” so I won’t even try.

You can find the fabulis iPhone app in the App Store here. It’s a free download.