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Okay, the iPhone 4 death grip fiasco has official hit a new level now that it’s a late night punch line. There’s no turning back after both Letterman here in the states and Top Gear across the pond have both done bits on it. Apple’s PR machine better be warming up because it’s going to be running overtime to recover from this. Click through for the video.
[Thanks for the tip, Nate!]
It is not often that a company’s first round of venture funding comes in at $60 million and eight years after it was founded with $10,000 worth of credit card debt. But Atlassian, which was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2002, is taking its first venture money today from Accel Partners. The company pulled in $59 million in revenues in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2010, and has been “profitable from Year One,” says co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes.
The money will be used to give some liquidity to the founders and employees, expand its product portfolio, and possibly acquire other startups. In order to get a return on its minority stake, Accel is expecting Atlassian to one day have a very successful IPO. But Accel partner Richard Wong is in no rush. He thinks an IPO is likely once the company passes $100 million in revenue. And if revenues continue to grow 30 percent a year, that will be only a few years away.
Atlassian makes product development software (for making software) that is used by 20,000 customers around the world, including Facebook, Zynga, Cisco, and Adobe. “In our belief,” says Wong, “these guys are the standard in product development software—20,000 customers can’t be wrong.” Its products include the Jira bug tracker, Confluence wiki and collaboration suite, and a host of software project development tools.
Wong compares Atlassian to Salesforce, except without the sales people. Atlassian has 225 employees, but hardly any in sales. The company spreads virally within organizations. “In the same way that Salesforec.com is about streamlining collaboration, this is about streamlining the product development process.” Atlassian offers its products both behind the firewall on a company’s own servers and as a software service, and its pricing is an order of magnitude below what something like IBM’s Rational Software would cost.
Atlassian’s products bring a familiar interface to enterprise software. “It is a little more modern in thought,” says Cannon-Brookes, “a bridge between enterprise software and the consumer world.” The interface bring in elements like activity streams and avatars familiar to engineers and product managers from applications like Facebook.
Barnes & Noble has developed NOOKstudy, a free (as in beer) software suite that could make the average college student’s life a little easier. The software, which will be available for the PC and Mac, gives students the ability to download and organize electronic textbooks, as well as keep all of their notes, syllabuses, and so on in one safe place. Handy. And no, you don’t need a nook to use NOOKstudy.
During its annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft introduced (a limited production release of) the Windows Azure platform appliance, the company’s cloud services platform for deployment in customer and service provider datacenters.
The company is touting partnerships with some big-name early adopters of the appliance, namely Dell, eBay, HP and Fujitsu.
Late last week, mobile communication services provider fring released an updated iPhone app that enabled iPhone 4 owners to engage in unrestricted 2-way video calling over Wi-Fi or 3G internet with other iPhone, Android or Symbian devices. This garnered a lot of attention, mainly because Apple’s native FaceTime application works only over Wi-Fi and between iPhone users.
Hours after its release, the company said it saw a huge spike in video calling that it was forced to “temporarily reduce support” to Skype, a third-party provider it has long supported.
Now, they no longer have to worry about that extra network strain, as Skype has apparently outright blocked fring and threatened legal action against the startup.
In a press release issued moments ago, fring says that it is thus being forced to stop its 4 years of Skype interconnectivity, referring to the move as an anti-competitive ambush. They go further than that in the complementary blog post, calling them out for being ‘cowards’:
They are afraid of open mobile communication. Cowards.
Needless to say, we are very disappointed that Skype, who once championed the cause of openness is now trying to muzzle competition, even at the expense of its own users.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience Skype has caused you.
We’ve contacted Skype and are awaiting an official response from the company.
Update: a Skype spokesperson tells us that they’ve been debating with fring about whether they operate in accordance with its terms of use and license agreements for some time now, and that these discussions were ongoing.
Surprisingly, Skype also claims the decision to no longer offer Skype interconnectivity was entirely made by fring and that they had nothing to do with it. Fring disputes this and say Skype demanded them not to restore access.
The company’s spokesperson emphasized that they encourage developers to build products that work with Skype so long as they’re in accordance with its various licenses, and that they are keen on enforcing its terms when developers do not comply with them.
Something tells me this won’t be the end of this particular story.
I’ve always believed that computers, in a general sense, are not a panacea for developing nations. By slapping a laptop down on the desk of every student in Africa or Brazil you’re doing little more than forcing that kid to learn to type and then offering him or her the opportunity to look at porn. Without proper supervision and education, the Internet and, to some extent, computing itself is a timesink and an educational black hole.
Well now we have a modicum of proof.
Some folks at Columbia University did a study in 2009 on a Romanian project designed to offer vouchers to families for computers. This kids who didn’t get a computer complained that they wanted a computer but little else changed. But the kids who got a computer:
In a draft of an article that the Quarterly Journal of Economics will publish early next year, the professors report finding “strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian.” The principal positive effect on the students was improved computer skills.
Gaming is 3D’s only hope in reaching mainstream adaption. Hollywood has yet to put out any 3D movie that sells besides Avatar and that title alone is not going to cut it. However, even without a wide range of content, Ubisoft feels that most households will have a 3D TV by 2013 anyway. I’m doubtful.
Location-based social network Gowalla is teaming up with CNNMoney for Money magazine’s annual “Best Places To Live” list. The top towns on the list have their own Gowalla hot spots, which are linked to from each city profile. For instance, the top Gowalla hot spots in McKinney, Texas (No. 5) include the Landon Winery, Pub McKinney, and Coffee N Cream. If you are within 25 miles of the top 25 cities, a notification will pop up on your Gowalla mobile app directing you to the “Best Places” page.
Partnerships such as this one with big media and brands are a good way to get more exposure for geo apps like Gowalla and Foursquare (which also pursues such high-profile partnerships vigorously). The partnership also adds a mobile component to an otherwise staid—albeit popular—list of best cities.
CNNMoney is also incorporating housing data from Trulia on the Best Cities part of the site, as well as job listings from SimplyHired. People use these lists for research when they are thinking of moving, so bringing all of this data into one place is very helpful
We are still in the landgrab phase of geo-social networks. These deals raise awareness of the apps and bring in new potential users. And for media properties looking to tap into the mobile geo phenomenon, it is much faster and smarter to put up co-branded sites powered by companies like Gowalla and Trulia than to try to build their own.
http://gowalla.com/bestplaces
This is a guest post by Richard Leyland, an entrepreneur and writer with a particular focus on the future of work. Richard is also the founder of WorkSnug, the location-based service for mobile workers.
Last year I founded a tech company in the augmented reality space. We’re doing pretty well. What began as me, an idea and a laptop is now a company with five people, plus a small army of freelancers and contractors. From roots in London we’ve now launched in sixteen cities across nine countries and two continents. We can reasonably claim to be global.
But we don’t fly. More than that, our founding principles make a public commitment that we won’t fly in the course of our business.
Good morning – depending on what timezone you’re in, of course. It’s Monday morning (already), but in case you hadn’t noticed, the past weekend wasn’t really much of a doozy on the technology business news front.
Did you step away from your computer for the weekend, or did the clash between The Netherlands and Spain at the World Cup divert your attention away from the technology industry (too)?
Spain won the cup, by the way.
Here’s some other things we think you would like to know:
– After Google had already told the world that its license to operate its search engine in China was renewed by the government, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology confirmed the news over the weekend.
– A federal judge has certified a class action accusing Apple and AT&T of monopolizing the aftermarket for iPhone voice and data services, but dismissed some of the plaintiffs’ allegations that a software update ruined consumer-modified iPhones. The class action suit consolidates several suits filed by iPhone buyers starting in 2007, a few months after the first generation of the device hit the market.
– We had a big scoop as well, with multiple sources confirming to us that Google has secretly invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga. The company plans to launch Google Games, for which the partnership with Zynga will prove to be an important cornerstone, later this year.
– Facebook is set to launch a child safety ‘panic button’, reports the BBC. The button will allow young Facebook users to report suspicious online behaviour and access an Internet safety advice center from their homepage. A dedicated facility for reporting suspected grooming or inappropriate sexual behavior is being set up by Facebook in partnership with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre.
– The Android Market is growing up. Watch for Google’s mobile application store to hit the 100,000 apps milestone some time this month.
– A U.S. judge slashed the penalty levied by a jury against Joel Tenenbaum, the student who was found guilty of illegally downloading and sharing songs published by Big Music in 2009. The judge ruled on Friday that it would violate the constitutional rights of Tenenbaum to require him to pay the full $675,000 in penalties, and cut the award down to $67,500.
(Image courtesy of Flickr user Louis Argerich)
Spotify has been released for Linux. As of today, a Penguin-friendly version of the streaming music service is available as a preview, although we still don’t seem any closer to the much-rumored U.S. launch.
According to an official blog post, the Linux version was built by developers at the company “during hack days and late nights”, and shares most of the same features as the Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. That said, due to issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform, Spotify hasn’t been able to include support for local files in this version.
We’ve been following MP3Tunes, an online music locker, since it launched in late 2005. It’s come a long way since then. Today the service has 500,000 users, and has released a variety of new products to help those users get access to their music from almost any Internet connected device.
The core of the service is a music locker. It finds music on your hard drive and then backs it up online over a period of days. You can then log in and stream that music from a browser.
But the service is a lot more interesting than that. It will also sync your music across devices, making sure, for example, that iTunes has the same song library on each of your computers. It will also grab those iTunes playlists and make them available elsewhere as well.
They’ve recently inked a deal with Roku and are in beta. MP3Tunes users can stream music that they previously only had on their hard drive through their television on the Roku device. Logitech has also built MP3Tunes into a variety of devices, including this Wifi Internet radio. More devices are coming shortly, says MP3Tunes.
But the best part of MP3Tunes are the mobile apps. The Android application in particular is extremely useful. If you buy a song on the Android via the built in Amazon store, for example, you can easily upload that song quickly to MP3Tunes, and then have it available on, say your iPhone or iPod touch (as well as your desktop and everywhere else). MP3Tunes is calling the syncing behavior behind these application “Buy Anywhere, Listen Everywhere” – see the video below:
A number of other third parties have built MP3Tunes into their software and devices as well via a robust open API. I’m a big fan of music services on my mobile devices since getting actual song files onto the device is usually cumbersome and requires at least a purchase or a tethering. I use MOG on my android device and am quite happy with it.
But I also like the idea of just having access to my entire music collection – all 60 GB of it – on any device at any time. I’m a long time user of MP3Tunes, and I’ve recently upgraded from the free version to the 100 GB of storage.
Soon we’ll all have a variety of music streaming services to choose from – from Apple and Google’s upcoming products to the MOGs and Spotifys of the world. But all will likely have a hefty monthly subscription fee of $10/month or so for any kind of mobile access. I already have my core music collection on my hard drive, bought and paid for (for the most part). I really don’t see a need to pay $120/year to keep paying for that music. MP3Tunes gives me a viable reason to keep just buying music outright and downloading it.
All this assume, of course, that MP3Tunes wins the longstanding EMI Group lawsuit against them. In the meantime, though, I like the service.
MP3Tunes is free for 2 GB of storage. They are moving to 10 GB free in the near term, and 50 GB is $40/year. 25% of active users upgrade to a paid version, says the company.
Viola Private Equity, an Israeli buyout and growth capital technology fund, is injecting $17 million into Adsmarket, a global performance-based advertising network based in Tel Aviv.
An affiliate of Viola Group, an investment consortium with nearly $2 billion under management, the PE fund will hold 21% of Adsmarket’s shares, valuing the company at $80 million pre-money.
When you first look at Google App Inventor for Android, it may not look like much. That is to say, it’s ugly. But as with many Google services, beneath a layer of homeliness, there appears to be much more under the surface. In this case, it could be a very big gateway drug for Android app development. Or is it a Doomsday device that will muck up native app development on the platform?
The service, unveiled tonight in the New York Times, is basically a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) tool for app development on the Android platform. Instead of having to learn code (in Android’s case, Java), App Inventor is a piece of software that allows you to drag and drop certain elements common to many apps to build a mobile app from scratch.
Says Google:
To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.
That sounds great — on paper. As NYT notes, it has been tested with kids as young as sixth graders who were able to easily make their own apps. It also makes it easy for “regular” people to make apps. But as many web developers will tell you, the rise of WYSIWYG editors in their field led to an explosion of shitty websites.
Tools like Dreamweaver and eventually online WYSIWYG HTML editors from the likes of Geocities, made it so easy for anyone to create webpages that the web quickly filled up with garbage. Thankfully (and appropriately), Google popped up to restore a sense of order to the madness with Pagerank and its search engine. This allowed people to wade through the junk and still be able to find the quality sites.
So is that what App Inventor is going to do for Android? Create a flood of crappy apps?
Maybe. But there’s a flip-side to this as well.
Because this new tool makes it easy for anyone to make their own apps, it makes the idea of trying to create your own app a much less daunting one. And that’s the powerful thing here. If this tool can get some kid to start messing around with app creation, maybe they’ll get more interested and start learning actual Java. And then maybe one day they’ll create the next killer app.
Yes, this tool could be a gateway drug, of sorts.
A lot of software developers haven’t liked the idea of this movement towards native mobile apps because some feel they’re pushing people towards devices that aren’t as open to tinkering as PCs are. That’s especially true with Apple’s devices. But Android is a pretty open system, and it seems that a tool like this could inspire people to want to learn how to make great apps.
While WYSIWYG HTML editors led to an abundance of junk web pages, those tools also opened the door for a lot of people to learn HTML who may not have done so otherwise. With App Inventor, just as with those tools, it would seem that no one is going to be able to make a truly remarkable app without digging into the code eventually. And that may be Google’s ultimate goal with this.
But still, they have to hope it doesn’t backfire and simply flood the Android Market with more junk apps than already exist. Google already has a problem with surfacing good apps in their market—interesting, given that they are the ones that surface good webpages as mentioned earlier—the problem could get worse if this tool is a success.
Still, I’m going to be cautiously optimistic that this tool is a good thing. Potentially a very good thing. And it’s something Apple should be taking very seriously.
Yesterday, I broke down Apple’s minute-long FaceTime commercial for iPhone 4, noting how it seemed almost as if Don Draper from the hit AMC show Mad Men had created it. Now Apple has four other 30-second spots for the iPhone 4 that it has just put into rotation on national television. And yes, they’re all about FaceTime too.
The four spots are titled, “Smile,” “Meet Her,” “Haircut,” and “Big News.” Each revolve around situations where FaceTime can dramatically improve what would normally be more traditional phone calls. They’re not quite as dramatic as the overall package of the longer original commercial (nor are they as good). But two of them still go straight for the heart strings. While the other two are more everyday conversations made better by video.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that Apple is playing up FaceTime in each of its first five commercials — it is the easiest new feature to show off on the device. Apple’s new Retina display for the iPhone 4 is arguably more impressive, but it would be hard to show that off in a commercial without explaining it (and Apple seems to prefer to show rather than tell in these types of commercials).
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if in future iPhone 4 commercials, Apple figures out a way to show off the screen (something like, “wow, it’s like looking at a picture”), as well as show off the impressive build quality of the device, and perhaps the HD video taking capabilities.
Find each of the new spots below.
[thanks aaalison]
