Category: Tech news

Word is breaking that Apple is calling a special press conference on this coming Friday to talk about the iPhone 4. Yes, you can probably guess what this is about.

Apple blog The Loop has the (basically non-existent) details right now — that it will be in California on Friday morning and about iPhone 4. A small group of press are reportedly getting the invites right now. Update: We just got the call, we’ll be there at 10 AM PT on Friday to cover it live.

The big question that everyone must be wondering is if Apple will announce a recall of the iPhone 4 based on the antenna problems — which are very real. We still believe that’s pretty unlikely. That said, it’s very, very, very rare (in fact, I don’t think it has ever happened) that Apple would call a special press conference at the last second. If they didn’t have something very major to say, they’d much more likely issue a release.

But with all the talk and speculation flying around out there, perhaps Apple (and CEO Steve Jobs in particular) just wants to sit people down to talk about the issue. Apple has been widely criticized for saying basically nothing about the issue beyond Jobs’ quotes that users should buy a case or hold the phone different.

Apple released the first beta of the iOS 4.1 software today. As our sister site MobileCrunch noted, it does not fix the antenna issue. Instead, it simply does what Apple said it was going to do: make the signal strength indicator more accurate.

SolarCity today announced that it is taking a $21.5 million round of funding led by Mayfield Fund, and the company’s previous investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DBL Investors and Generation Capital. The company’s prior funding totaled approximately $134 million, and included investors First Solar, JP Morgan and Elon Musk.

SolarCity helps businesses, home owners and government agencies adopt solar power and save money using clean energy versus electricity generated from non-renewables. It designs, installs and provides finance options for the development of solar projects. In 2008, it provided and installed the thousands of solar panels that grace the roof of eBay Inc.’s green building (pictured) in San Jose.

Earlier this week, SolarCity signed a new partnership deal with Rabobank, the international private bank with a triple A credit rating. The bank has agreed to provide solar project financing for its commercial clients via SolarCity. Rabobank N.A. in California also installed solar power generating rooftops at six of its retail locations.

The shiny new Rabobank-SolarCity rooftops provide power not just for the banks themselves, but for customers of another Elon Musk concern — Tesla Motors. AutoBlogGreen gushes that any of Tesla’s electric vehicles making a pit stop along California’s “clean corridor,” or Highway 101 Rabobank locations can get recharged renewably.

SolarCity plans to use its latest round of venture funding to expand into new geographic markets, and entertain acquisitions. Its solar projects, so far, are in five states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon and Texas.

In California and Arizona, SolarCity faces direct competition from SunRun, another venture-backed firm with investments totaling about $140 million, with its most recent round led by Sequoia Capital.

The question that is on many people’s minds as the iPhone 4 antenna drama plays itself out is “why didn’t any of the reviewers notice this?” After all, we had reviews of the iPhone from the heavy hitters quite a bit ahead of time — seasoned tech journalists who were ostensibly on the lookout for issues like this. Yet I don’t recall reading a single word about sudden signal drops, proximity sensor issues, screen discoloration, or any of the other launch issues. This may be explained by the fact that a sample size of a dozen or two may easily have avoided the launch issues, which clearly do not affect all units.

But it’s also worth considering that a phone, or media player, or game console, or operating system, really isn’t something you can review over a week or two. A restaurant you can review after a meal. A movie you can review after a viewing. A blog post, apparently, you can review just from the headline. But a device that’s going to be a part of your life for a year, two years, or more? Any review posted before, at, or within a few days of launch should properly be considered a first impression.

Flagship devices like mobile phones and media players remain on sale for such a long time, and are used by so many people, that a serious, comprehensive, real-life review really is necessary.

Continue reading…

Green data geeks now have another tool for controlling their energy consumption. Enphase Energy‘s new Environ Smart Thermostat lets you control your home’s temperature and monitor your solar installations remotely.

The company is known for its microinverter system, which turns solar-generated DC power into home energy friendly AC power. A microinverter is attached to every solar module, and the unit also monitors the module’s performance and sends out an alert if there is a problem with the module, be it debris or a tree branch that grew large enough to shade the solar panel.

All of the data is transmitted to a website where you can analyze your energy consumption and, with the new thermostat, control your home’s temperature from afar. Want to turn on the AC before your commute home so you can step into a cold house? No problem. You can also turn over control to Enphase, which can help you program your thermostat to meet your energy goals, like letting the temperature rise a few degrees during peak times to save on your energy bill.

“What we want to do is plug a hole on the energy consumption side,” says CEO Paul Nahi.

The thermostat works with Enphase installations and sells for $349. The company began selling solar installations in 2008, and currently has customers in 49 states and all Canadian provinces. Enphase has raised $100 million in funding and although the company won’t release specific figures, Nahi said the company is “financially sound.”

Remember those awesome iPhone 4 versus EVO 4G videos? Hopefully you do, it has only been a few weeks since we posted both of them. You know, the ones that almost got the Best Buy employee fired? The ones that made him rethink his career path? Yeah, those videos. Well, they just got potentially a lot more interesting.

Paramount Pictures has just contacted us, asking if we can put them in contact with the creator of the videos, Brian Maupin. Indeed we can. We’ve been talking to him since the videos went up. Sure, we could email him, but this post just seems easier.

So Brian Maupin of Kansas City, Missouri, come on down! It may be time for your close-up. Here’s the email from Paramount:

Hi!

Do you have contact info for Brian Maupin who did the EVO vs iPhone bit?  Ever since we saw it on TechCrunch, we at Paramount are obsessed with it – and wanted to get in touch.

Thanks so much in advance.
Alison

When Maupin is directing Mission: Impossible 5, I just hope he remembers how it all began…

Power Assure, a Santa Clara green IT company, today announced that it scored $11.25 million in venture funding. The round was led by energy efficiency-focused investors Good Energies, and joined by Point Judith Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Power Assure’s chief technology officer Clemens Pfeiffer said the company will use this capital to take its technology to a broader market. Its software cuts data centers’ power consumption by half, on average, the company claims.

Palo Alto Research Center (formerly known as Xerox PARC) uses Power Assure, but Pfeiffer declined to name other major customers.

Founded in 2007, Power Assure took a $2.5 million series A round from DFJ in 2009. It also previously won non-dilutive grant funding including a $5 million grant from the Department of Energy, and a $50,000 cash prize at the 2008 California Clean Tech Open. (In total, the company has raised $18.75 million.)

Power Assure’s software works like “automatic lights out” in homes, Pfeiffer says. “If you have a lot of traffic on your site or a lot of users on your app, then you need to keep a lot of servers in your data center running. During low utilization times  you don’t need them all running. You can use them for other purposes, or in an extreme case sleep or shut them down to save energy and money. That’s just as long as you can adjust the capacity dynamically.”

Companies that have expressed the most interest in using Power Assure’s solutions in 2010 have been government organizations “trying to follow the mandates of the Obama administration,” financial services companies “because of the pressure that they are under to cut costs,” and companies that operate “data centers in the ten- to two-hundred-thousand square feet range,” but may not have achieved the efficiencies of an Amazon or Google yet, according to Pfeiffer.

Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford University whose research focuses in part on the growth and environmental impact of data centers, said it’s a good time to be in the business of green IT services:

“Climate change is becoming a bigger more important part of companies’ risk profiles and planning. And the cost of IT has gone up a lot in the last five years. Computers have gotten cheaper, but things like cooling and power distribution have gotten more expensive to the point where the cost of buying the cooling and backup power is comparable to the cost of a data center’s IT equipment itself. Companies like [Power Assure] can save a lot of money for businesses that use data centers while reducing emissions. That’s a good thing, and a reminder that the net effect of using data centers in a rational, sustainable way — moving bits not atoms — is actually a positive for the environment.”

Dennis Crowley didn’t get the big personal payday he would have if he had sold Foursquare to Facebook, which he almost did. But Crowley and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai did okay with the $20 million Series B funding they raised from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square, and O’Reilly AlphaTech. According to an SEC filing (first spotted by Dan Frommer at SAI), the two founders personally took home $4,636,688 from that round, or 23 percent of the total amount raised.

Under a part of the filing titled “Use of Proceeds,” the company had to disclose “the amount of the gross proceeds of the offering that has been or is proposed to be used for payments to any of the persons required to be named as executive officers, directors or promoters in response to Item 3 above.” There are only three people listed as “executive officers, directors or promoters”: Crowley, Selvadurai, and board director Albert Wenger of Union Square. It would be highly unusual for one of the VCs on the board to take personal liquidity out of a deal before his firm does. And Union Square put more money into this round.

No wonder Crowley flew to South Africa to watch some of the World Cup games right after the round closed. (To be fair, it was also his first vacation after 18 months “of straight up hustling,” he says. Might as well do it in style).

With the IPO markets not as attractive as they once were and companies staying private longer, it is becoming increasingly common for founders to take some money off the table during later venture rounds. (Other recent venture rounds saw much bigger sums going to founders). As long as the company does well, nobody will blame them. But if the company hits on hard times when that cash could be helpful, well . . . then a different story will be told.

Update: Foursquare says the founders sold shares essentially so that investors could buy more. Spokesperson Erin Gleason sent me the following statement:

As is common in Series B financings, Dennis and Naveen sold a small portion of their personal equity as a secondary offering to allow our investors to achieve their ownership objectives.

The first software update for iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 is here!

And now, to answer the question that seems to be on just about everyone’s mind: Does it fix the iPhone 4′s death grip issue — or at least make an effort to appear to?

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Shopkick, a startup that’s focused on bridging the real world shopping experience with mobile, just closed a rather large $15 million round of funding from Greylock Partners. Partner Reid Hoffman, who is also an individual investor in the company, is already on the board of directors.

The company had previously raised $5 million from Hoffman and Kleiner Perkins Kaufield & Byers. Kleiner participated in this round of financing as well.

We first covered Shopkick a year ago when it was deep in stealth. In December 2009 they launched a mobile application that let people check in to certain retailers for points that could be used for donations to worthy causes.

But the “real” product of the company is yet to launch, says CEO Cyriac Roeding. It’s been promised sometime this summer.

I spoke to Hoffman about the company earlier today. He’s been a big believer in the team since it was in its earliest idea stage. This large financing round will let the company move through launch to, hopefully, its inflection point of growth without needed to raise more money.

This is a crowded space, but no one has won it yet. And now Shopkick has $15 million more to go for the win.

Barnes & Noble continues to makes inroads into the education, um, space. It just announced that it has teamed up with Blackboard, the Web site/software suite that is used in colleges all over the U.S. (Lord knows I had to use it all the time.) The deal should ensure that college students, starting with the upcoming fall semester, have easy access to electronic textbooks.

It’ll work like this. You log into Blackboard and click over to your literature class. There you’ll find links to all (if any) electronic versions of the books you need to read for the semester, making it easy to purchase and download a semester’s worth of books in no time at all.

Foursquare, freshly flush with cash, is in the process of altering its service. They realize that the check-in model can only go so far, and they have to build utility on top of it. Part of that is changing the game aspect. Another part is the user-generated “Tips.” Today, those have been made a clear area of emphasis on Foursquare’s website.

On the newly redesigned venue pages (here’s TechCrunch, for example), there is now a big text input box for Tips. You type in what you want, and hit the share button and the tip immediately appears. This is much more seamless (and obvious) than the previous process.

And tips are hugely important to Foursquare. They’re the things that pop up every time a contact checks-in to a place. You can also mark tips so you remember to do them later (and note what you have done). This is all about adding value on top of Foursquare’s fast growing social and place graph.

These new pages also make it more obvious how the owner of a venue can claim the place as theirs (something Foursquare hinted was coming soon). And it more prominently shows “Total check-ins,” “Total people,” and “Your check-ins.” And, of course, the Mayor of the venue is displayed prominently.

Foursquare, which is a mobile application, is in the process of gearing up for the launch of the 2.0 release of its service. You can bet that tips will be a big part of that as well.

Online gamers received quite the scare last week when Blizzard announced it would require message board posters to use their real names. This was to be done in order to fight the scourge of online anonymity. The Internet freaked out, of course, so much so that Blizzard eventually changed its mind. I mention this up to not open old wounds, but to take the time to remind you of this: there are other MMOs in the world besides World of Warcraft. In fact, I’ve been playing one such MMO, the outer space-themed Eve Online (developed by Iceland’s CCP Games), for several days now. Come, let us enter a world (universe, really) of spaceships, cross-galaxy pirate raids, and Astronomical Units!

“It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I’m okay with that.“

That was Microsoft COO Kevin Turner during his keynote speech at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington today. I’m going to go out on a (not very big) limb and predict that this comment is going to come back to bite Microsoft in the ass.

Microsoft has a long, illustrious history of putting its foot in its own mouth with comments like this. But usually it’s CEO Steve Ballmer making the comments. Ballmer’s most famous remarks are also about the iPhone. After it was announced in 2007 (but before it launched) Ballmer seemed willing to tell anyone who would listen that the device would fail. Who can forget this video?

And then there’s his comment to USA Today: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” He went on, “But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.“

The iPhone is now Apple’s most successful product in its history. Microsoft, meanwhile, is in the process of completely pivoting its mobile product offering after bleeding market share in the years after the iPhone’s release.

Of course, this comment by Turner is a bit different. He’s commenting on the antenna issues with the iPhone 4 — a problem which is very real. But comparing the problem to Windows Vista, Microsoft’s operating system in between Windows XP and Windows 7 that is generally considered to be a failure (even by many inside Microsoft), and a massive misstep by Microsoft, is foolish.

The iPhone 4 antenna issue is a scar on a beautiful woman. You don’t break up with the woman because of it, you work around it because of her other attributes. She might even put on some coverup (the bumper) so you don’t even notice it. And some may not even notice it at all.

Windows Vista is Kathy Bates in Misery.

Turner’s assumption is that the antenna issue is going to damage Apple’s brand to the point where people start jumping ship. And he hopes to have Windows Phone 7 waiting with open arms. “One of the things I want to make sure you know today is that you’re going to be able to use a Windows Phone 7 and not have to worry about how you’re holding it to make a phone call,” Turner said.

But all indications right now is that this exodus is not and will not happen. Engadget did a nice roundup of writers and experts all around the country to get their reaction to the iPhone 4 antenna issue. The consensus? No big deal.

Either all of them are brainwashed fanboys on Apple’s payroll — see, I saved you a comment right there, commenters — or they’re just giving their honest assessment. An assessment that happens to exactly match mine.

More importantly, there are still no reports of widespread returns of the product — despite flashy headlines suggesting that a recall is a certainty. I think Turner, like many people, has gotten too caught up in those headlines.

So I’m making the prediction that Turner’s comment will be one of those that gets repeated over and over again when he’s proven wrong. It’s not as bad as Palm investor Roger McNamee’s comments about the iPhone, but it could go down with some of Ballmer’s greatest hits:

Re: iPhone in 2007: There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

Re: Google in 2004 (alleged comment): “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.”

Re: social networking in 2004: “There’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”

The Chevy Volt is finally coming together. GM just went public with the details surrounding its battery warranty and it’s on the same level as the Prius’s. The auto maker will cover the Volt’s LG Chem lithium-manganese pack for eight years or 100,000 miles. This comes after extensive testing over a three-year period in which testers logged over 1 million miles of driving and 4 million hours on the battery packs. Needless to say that GM tested the entire system thoroughly.

Today at a special event in San Francisco, Evernote CEO Phil Libin unveiled Trunk, a new showcase of products, services, and hardware devices that have integrated Evernote. The idea is to help users enchance their Evernote experience with features they may want but that Evernote doesn’t offer by default, like Voice Transcription (via services like Dial2Do, pliq.me, and QuickTate), PDF annotation, and business card scanning. Libin says that at launch there are over 100 items available to users; some are brand new, and others have featured Evernote for a while.

The Trunk breaks up these integrations by category, including mobile (iPhone, Android, etc), hardware, and web service-based apps. One focus for the Trunk is to help your memories “bridge to the social web”. Libin says that historically, Evernote has been inherently anti-social, but that in some cases you may want to remember elements from social applications. To address that, Seesmic took the stage to detail a feature that allows users to send items from their streams to their Evernote accounts, creating so-called “social memories”.

In the future Libin says there will be “a lot more functionality” to the Trunk (it’s clear that Evernote is looking to become a platform for memory services and programs). One area Evernote is excited is games — memory and braintraining games are in the works. And he says there are plenty of new upcoming hardware and software implementations as well.

In terms of monetization, Libin says many of the apps and services in the Trunk are free. In the future there will be “in-trunk commerce” where you can click a button to add certain functionality for Evernote (and pay the third party developer). There will be an affiliate program and an integrated rev-share program as well. Monetization features will be coming this winter.