Category: Tech news

Earlier this month, Apple unveiled a new site to showcase HTML5. On it, Apple showed off a number of impressive web demos coded using only HTML5 technologies. However, at least on the main page, these demos were restricted to working on only Apple’s Safari web browser. So now Google is countering with its own HTML5 site — called, get this, HTML5Rocks.

Google and Apple are arguably the two biggest companies attempting to push HTML5 forward. Notably, both also dominate updates to the WebKit rendering engine (with both Safari and Google Chrome use). But both also seem a bit at odds with HTML5 because both have popular mobile platforms that use native applications not coded with HTML5. In recent weeks though, the two companies (which are in the middle of a war with one another) seem to be trying to show that each is fully committed to the open web.

HTML5Rocks features nine tutorials on HTML5 feature. And there’s a code playground to let you mess around with your own code. Obviously, all of this works well in Chrome — but it also works with Safari. That said, Google made sure to add in this note:

The presentation was originally meant to run in Google Chrome. Some experimental features might or might not be coded to run in other browsers for now. (Although you will cry out of happiness when you see so much running in IE with the Chrome Frame plug-in). If you want to run 100% of the demos contained in the presentation you might need to run Chrome with the webgl flag enabled.

Take that, Apple (and Microsoft).

Here’s how Google describes the site:

Because HTML5 and its related technologies cover so much ground, it can be a real a challenge to get up to speed on them. That’s why today we’re sharing HTML5 Rocks, a great new resource for developers and teams looking to put HTML5 to use today, including more information on specific features and when to use them in your apps.

While incredibly useful, Google Translate is also known for its occasional snafus. For example, an English to French translation of “videos on Vimeo” previously resulted in “des videos sur YouTube.” Another example of a wonky translation took place when Kai-Fu Lee, president of the search giant’s China operations, left the company.

Today’s questionable result comes from an English to Italian translation of “call us for free.” The phrase returns in Italian as “Telefonare gratis con Skype.” The reverse translation results in ‘call us for free.’

This doesn’t seem to work in other languages, so it could just be a glitch in the system. Or it could be a result of a crowdsourced effort to change the translation. We’ve contacted Google for comment. Regardless, it provides for a little lighthearted humor on a Tuesday afternoon.

Update: Google has confirmed that this was a machine translation error and not the result of a crowdsourced effort to change a translation. The translation has now been corrected.

Sonos stopped by our office in San Francisco today to show off their newest toy: the iPad controller app. Those familiar with the iPhone/iPod touch version of the controller will feel at home here, though obviously the larger screen allows Sonos to do some more creative music management things with the UI. It looks to be a pretty killer way to manage multiple Sonos systems throughout your home (it can manage up to 32 separate zones).

While the app looks polished and ready to go, Sonos says it’s still pre-beta. The plan is to have it ready to submit to Apple’s App Store by mid-August. Once approved, it will be available as a free download.

They see the iPad version of the app as the most social Sonos controller yet — great for parties. As to why you would buy a CR200 — their dedicated remote that costs $350 — instead of an iPad with this app, they note that the CR200 is still faster to use if you want to access your systems instantly. And the dedicated remote is going to stay in your home, if someone leaves with the iPad, you’ll have no remote.

Watch a video of it in action below. As you can see, it seamlessly runs two Sonos S5s (including the new black one), in two different rooms. Below that, find a video of Sonos telling us a bit more about the strategy behind these apps. Of note, they’re completely focused on Apple’s mobile platforms for the time being (meaning, sadly, no Android app is in the works just yet). And while they may be hesitant to say it, they’d clearly love for their systems to be available in Apple Stores.

For those who can’t wait for the iPad version, check out the iPhone version (which will work on the iPad) here in the App Store.

On June 9th, social gaming powerhouse Zynga launched its latest creation: FrontierVille. The game takes many of the gameplay elements found in Zynga’s smash hit Farmville and adds some of adventure and spontaneity (not to mention a Wild West theme) to help spice things up. Today, less than two weeks after launch, the company says that it has 5.2 million daily active users.

To give some context to that stat, it was only eight days ago that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced that the game had over 1 million DAUs. Zynga’s Farmville (which just had its one year anniversary) has around 18 million daily active users according to Inside Network’s AppData leaderboard. Treasure Isle, another popular Zynga game, has 5.18 million DAUs.

So why does this matter? Zynga’s Facebook games saw staggering growth last year, but this year its games’ popularity has leveled off (and in some cases, dipped). It’s imperative for Zynga’s future success that it can keep launching hits. At this point FrontierVille has a long way to go before it can match Farmville, but it’s off to a solid start. Still, my hunch is that Zynga will have to start launching games that are innovative — as opposed to iterative, like FrontierVille — before we see another game succeed on the same scale as Farmville did at its peak.

Some other interesting stats about the game so far:

• 10 Million people have created homesteads
• Half a million people have had their avatars get “married”
• 5 million settlers have visited friends and have completed 550 million tasks
• 2.5 million settlers have ‘hired’ a friend
• 6.5 million players have chased away 141 million snakes
• 3 million players have scared the bear (87 million bears have been scared away)



CrunchBase Information
Zynga
Information provided by CrunchBase

I’ve always had a soft spot in my necrotic heart for Sonos. In the face if iPods, Zunes, mobile phones, and everything else, they’ve kept pumping out great, compact products for folks with big houses. They’ve never pretended to be too high-class for the rest of us yet you basically use their products to create soundscapes, just like Disney World, Vegas, and the haunted house I made in my basement as a kid.

Sonos just announced their iPad app – probably available in August – that allows you to control your Sonos system on the iPad’s bright screen. The app allows you to browse your iTunes and Sonos collection, pick radio streams, and even set different rooms with different playlists. When I tested the Sonos kit I used to like to make my bathroom, for instance, the Drum’n’Bass room to ease evacuation.

Video after the jump.

ReputationDefender, an online security startup, has announced a $15 million Series C round led by JAFCO Ventures with existing investors, Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding to $24 million.

The startup, which just raised $8.65 million last year, helps you monitor your reputation on the Web and take actions to make sure that when someone Googles you they see you in the best possible light. ReputationDefender sells four different security products on a monthly subscription basis (MyReputation, MyPrivacy, MyChild, and MyEdge) which lets you monitor information about you across the Web, as well as in semi-private databases, and helps you remove inaccurate information or counter by promoting your own vetted profile.

The company also just bought Ziggs.com, a social networking site for business professionals and people who would like to ‘market themselves on the Web’. And ReputationDefender recently launched an application, PrivacyDefender, to help you navigate Facebook’s new privacy settings.

The company plans to use the funding for to develop new product and expand customer acquisition efforts.

Over the past several months, Foursquare has had a number of impressive stats for a startup. Some of them involved SXSW, some involved overall check-ins numbers, some involved deals signed. But at the end of the day, the most important metric for any service remains number of users. And Foursquare is doing pretty well there too.

The location-based service has just tweeted out that they’re now past 1.7 million users. Impressively, that’s up 100,000 users from just about a week ago. Also impressive from this angle, it was only two months ago that Foursquare passed one million users — clearly the rate of growth is increasingly quickly.

At this rate, Foursquare will surpass 2 million users in July. MyTown, another location-based network hit that number in May, but it’s more of a game than a standard location-based network. Another location-based network, Brightkite, hit 2 million users in February. Meanwhile, rivals Loopt and Google Latitude both have 3 million users.

At this rate of growth, Foursquare could surpass many of its rivals in terms of size fairly soon. Of course, Loopt with its new background-enabled iPhone app, and Latitude with its new API, may have something to say about that.

The latest streaming music service to launch is Rdio, which is backed by the founders of Skype. It lets you stream 5 million songs from all the major labels (some key indie bands are missing though), create playlists, and find music through other people. The problem is that it is rolling out slowly. You need an invite just to try it out.

Well, we just got 1,000 invites for TechCrunch readers. Just click here and use the code “RDIOTC01″

The invite is only good for three days, after which you need to subscribe for at least $5 a month to keep listening. But it’s worth checking out. From my earlier review of the service:

My initial take: Until Apple launches iTunes as a jukebox in the cloud, it could learn a few things from Rdio. While the new music streaming and download service has many shortcomings, it points to how digital music should be consumed on the Web and mobile devices.

Rdio is literally an online jukebox with 5 million songs which you can stream in full. It competes with Rhapsody and Spotify (which is not yet launched in the U.S.). You pay $5 a month for Web-only access, and $10 a month to access the service on a mobile phone through Android, Blackberry, or iPhone apps. Curiously, Apple won’t approve the latest update to the iPhone app. Finally, there is a small desktop AIR app that lets you go through your songs and sync to iTunes.

So sign up and tell everyone what you think of Rdio in comments.

As you may have read last night, Apple started emailing people who pre-ordered the iPhone 4 to let them know that it may arrive a day early. While the rest of us have to wait for June 24, those who opted to get the device delivered, should get it as soon as tomorrow, the email says. But actually, if FedEx’s tracking system is correct (and that may be a big “if”), some people may actually get the iPhone 4 today.

As you can see in the screenshot, FedEx is alerting some customers that the iPhone 4 is “On FedEx vehicle for delivery.” In this particular instance, this is an iPhone that has been sitting in Oakland for a day, so it’s not clear why it would be on a FedEx truck unless they were actually delivering it. Others on Twitter are seeing the same thing.

Also a bit odd is that the estimated delivery time in the example below still says June 24. Unless the FedEx truck is going to circle for the next two days, something is up.

Update: At least one person on Twitter is claiming that their iPhone 4 has been delivered already. Obviously, we’re awaiting proof of this. But other FedEx tracking details seem to suggest deliveries are happening as well.

Update 2: Here’s a user in the MacRumors forums who says they’ve gotten it delivered today — complete with pictures!

Update 3: And here’s another user who took a picture. This looks legitimate at this point.

Update 4: Another user who got it today is saying he can’t yet activate it.

Update 5: And you can count Loopt founder Sam Altman among those who got his early.

[image: twitpic/pep2009 and twitpic/gilcabrera]

We’re big fans of easy-to-use blogging platform Posterous, which has seen fast growth, revenue and impressive funding since its launch in 2008. Over the past six months Posterous has steadily added nearly a dozen innovative features to its publishing platform, including static page support, comment moderation, custom domains, and a media sharing service for Twitter. And it’s no secret that Posterous is hoping to be the go-to simple everyday posting platform for consumers. Today, in its quest for world domination, the startup is unveiling a massive switching initiative to help users transfer all content from other posting and blogging sites over to Posterous.

For the next 15 days, Posterous will announce a different service daily that will allow you to transfer your account, blog, videos, images and more over to the simple blogging site for free. First up: Ning. To switch, you simple give Posterous the URL of the Ning blog you want to move and your email address and Posterous will send you an email when they are done copying a site. You don’t have to have a pre-existing account with Posterous either to make the switch.

The switch over times will vary based upon size of site that is being converted, says co-founder Sachin Agarwal. Ten posts will only take a few minutes, but 1000 posts and large amounts of video and images (which Posterous will host) will take longer. The best part is that all of this work is done for you for free. And in case you don’t buy Posterous’ claims, here’s a testimonial page of beta users who have used the importing tools.

As for the platforms that Posterous will now offer switching from, Ning makes sense considering that many Ning owners who were using the network for free may be looking to switch after Ning shuttered its free service. Posterous is a nice alternative, with its enhanced customization features.

So which service is next in the switching plan? Agarwal and VP of Marketing Rich Pearson wouldn’t tell me but I think it’s safe to assume some of the platform that Posterous will target. While Posterous unveiled a “quick and dirty” converter for WordPress last year, Agarwal says it was fairly simple. It’s safe to assume that the startup will be launching a more comprehensive migration tool in the next two weeks. And it’s also safe to assume that TwitPic, Google’s Blogger, TypePad and Tumblr are also included in the lineup.

For Posterous, this is certainly an impressive campaign. Agarwal and Pearson say that this has been something the team has been working on for months. Clearly, Posterous has ambitions of becoming the defacto posting platform and is now making it significantly easier for users to switch. While the company doesn’t reveal number on how many blogs it hosts, Pearson saud that the site is growing in userbase by 20 to 25 percent each month. A little aggressive marketing could speed that growth up significantly.

Microstock photography giant Fotolia is moving to the desktop today with the launch of an Adobe AIR-powered desktop app to purchase stock photos. Fotolia currently has two million registered members who use the service.

Compatible with Mac OSX and Windows, the application puts Fotolia’s collection of over nine million images in a desktop app. The app has a number of features not available in Fotolia’s web app, including the ability to buy and download images with one click, a drag and drop interface, bulk image download capabilities, unlimited gallery creation and better search. The interface is comparable to a less-sleek version of iTunes. While the desktop app may not be something that an occasional Fotolia user will find useful, it is sure to be popular among daily users of the stock photo site.

Fotolia has a had a big year. The company took a massive round of investment last year from TA Associates last year and has been steadily growing its userbase. It reached one million registered users and five million images for sale last February, introduced microstock video in April, hired an iStockPhoto co-founder in May, and launched a royalty-free photo site called PhotoXpress.

The site also rolled out an add-in ribbon for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint 2007 that gives users instant access to the company’s vast library of images and vectors from within the application. And the company just launched an Animoto-like video slideshow site Flixtime.

When Google launches new services, they often gets a lot of hype (see: Wave, Buzz). Unfortunately, they don’t always live up to that hype (see: Wave, Buzz). But one service that Google launched last year definitely has: Google Voice. Sadly, it has only been open to those with invites. But starting today, it is open to all.

Google Voice started as GrandCentral, a startup launched in 2006 to revolutionize phone management on the web. Google quickly snapped it up in 2007 for over $50 million. For the next two years, it went through a metamorphosis. During that time, some wondered if it was yet another service that Google bought and let die. But in 2009, it emerged as the Google Voice butterfly.

The “early preview” of Google Voice that Google unveiled last year has since undergone a number of changes. Notably, SMS now works better, a Chrome extension makes it simple to keep on top of everything, and there’s a great mobile web app. Most importantly though, Google Voice now works seamlessly with all Android-based mobile phones. The solution is brilliant — and was the central figure in Google’s falling out with Apple (after they rejected the native Google Voice app).

Google says that there are now over one million people actively using the service. You can expect that number to balloon now that anyone can go to the site and sign up.

In fact, why are you still reading this? Go sign up. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Apple has sold 3 million iPads in 80 days, according to a release issued by the company today. The statement also reported that there are 11,000 iPad apps available for the device.

On May 31, Apple reported that it had sold 2 million iPad, showing that the company has sold one million more tablet devices in less than a month. The company only started shipping units to customers in countries outside the United States in late May, which could account for the faster growth in sales.

At the 2 million mark, Apple said the iPad had over 5,000 new apps for the iPad. Clearly this number has more than doubled, to 11,000 total iPad apps. There’s no doubt that iPads are flying off the shelves, as Apple sold a million devices in less than a month.

As previously announced, the iPad will be available in nine more – but still unnamed – countries in July and additional countries later this year.

Microsoft has just released an updated version of the Bing for iPhone app (iTunes link), and it brings two major goodies.

The first is a Google Goggles-like feature for visual scanning of certain objects, and secondly come search enhancements that take the engine beyond traditional searching to include status updates from your social graph.

In a blog post, Bing for Mobile group product manager Justin Jed writes about the new features.

You can now connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts and see combined status updates from your friends from within the Bing app. For any type of search from the free Bing app for iPhone and iPod touch, you will also be able to see both Web results and relevant results from your contacts across social networks.

Jed cites an example where you would do a search for a movie, after which you would get movie showtimes first and anything your friends on social networks may have said about it next. In addition, when you find something you like using the app, you can easily share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or through email.

The Google Goggles-type feature that I referred to earlier is called Visual Scanning in Redmond. The Bing app now lets you scan barcodes and cover art on the fly using your iPhone camera. Users can thus scan the barcode of any product or the cover art of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games, after which they will see descriptions and occasionally also reviews, prices and links to merchant websites.

The updated app also brings some improvements to the Movies section, where you can now get even more video and trailers and easier access to movie showtimes. Finally, a brand new Shopping section lets you find products along with prices and links to stores selling the products straight from the app.

Check it out and tell us what you think. I’m in Belgium, so Microsoft feels I should not be able to download and install Bing on my iPhone.

WizeHive, a group messaging and task management app is getting an upgrade today, with a revamped interface, new features, an iPhone app and enterprise-friendly tools. WizeHive combines microblogging features found in Twitter, project management features, and general collaboration and organizational features.

WizeHive’s interface has been streamlined to be easier to use. You can now include up to five workspace that can be included in clickable tabs, with a “more” button available for links to additional workspaces. Generally, tabs in the interface have become consolidated for a cleaner look and feel.

New features to the platform include the ability to tag data as a way to easily find pages and content in search. And you can now create an account and login using your google credentials. You can directly access and index Google docs from within WizeHive and create new Google docs that will remain within Google Docs but also be linked in the appropriate location from within WizeHive.

WizeHive is also taking its collaboration platform mobile with a free iPhone app that offers much of the same functionality as the web app. And the new version also includes 22 WizeApps, which are applets that add additional functionality to a workspace. For example, WizeHive has a Resume Manager edition that includes applets for capturing inbound resumes (from job boards), as well as applets that allow for collaborative rating, scheduling and review.

WizeHive offers a free entry level version and paid versions start at less than $50 per month. The bootstrapped startup has only raised $500K in funding. WizeHive’s online collaboration tool has received positive reviews thus far thanks to an easy-to-use and collaborative interface, and is steadily gaining traction as a competitor to SharePoint and other enterprise-friendly collaboration platforms.