Category: Tech news

It’s probably not a coincidence that Google is making a significant upgrade to Docs the same week that Microsoft rolls out Office 2010 to the public. Not to be left out, the search giant has modified sharing, visibility and the interface for Google Docs, which is also part of its Office 2010-competitor, Google Apps.

Google is now giving users more clear cut options for sharing documents: private; anyone with a link; or public on the web. All documents start out as private, with the creator as the sole administrator. You can then share your document by setting it as “Anyone with the link,” which allows anyone who knows the web address or URL of that doc to view it. You can set your document as ‘public on the web,’ which allows anyone to find the document on the web. Google says that Public docs are automatically indexed by search engines so they may appear in search results.

Google is also enhancing the visibility options for docs, making it fairly clear to the administrator which document is set to private, semi-private or public. The options now appear next to every doc title and in the docs list. You can also see the full list of editors and viewers by clicking on the ‘visibility option’ next to the doc’s title or on the Share button. And Google has improved the sharing interface and allows you to reset any link you’ve shared, so that you can move a document back to private even if you’ve shared the document.

It’s probably wise that Google has improved its sharing options, considering that Microsoft is now attacking Google in the cloud with the web-version of Office 2010. It should be interesting to see if the use of Word will gain traction in the cloud as Office 2010 is rolled out more widely.

Earlier this month, the founders of Skype (and Joost and Kazaa) soft-launched their latest startup, an online music subscription and download service called Rdio. It is still invite-only, but I’ve been testing it out for the last few days. 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.

One of the first things you do when you sign up for Rdio is match up your iTunes song library to the service, where it is stored in your collection. All of the songs which Rdio can match are available in your collection for streaming. One thing Rdio has over the original Joost video service at launch is that it is coming out of the gate with great licensing deals. I’d say it matched between 70 and 80 percent of my iTunes songs. All the major label artists are there, but it is missing some key indie bands like The Pixies and Vampire Weekend. Over time, these gaps should disappear.

Any album or song on Rdio can also be added  to your Collection, which has a handy bubble visualization showing the artists you play the most as the biggest bubbles. There is a list view as well. The Collection serves as a way to bookmark the songs you own or like the most. But there are other ways to find and organize songs, including search, album charts, recommendations, and playlists.

Rdio has a social layer built into every part of the service. Which brings us to the other thing you do immediately when you sign up: find friends and people to follow.  The reason you want to jump-start your collection with what is already in your iTunes (or Windows Media Player) library is so that other people can see what kind of music you listen to.

It is possible to find your Twitter or Facebook friends who are also on Rdio and follow them for starters (warning: you may be horrified at what your Internet friends actually listen to). You can create your own playlists or listen to other people’s playlists. Each song and album also has stats showing how many times it’s been played, as well as the number of listeners, reviews, collections, and playlists it is associated with. If you click on a stat, it shows you the underlying people, playlists, or collections, which is another way to find people to follow or playlists to subscribe to.  

Once you start following people that helps you find new music. The home page of Rdio highlights albums in heavy rotation among your music network (so don’t follow someone with crap taste in music just because you are Twitter buddies). You can also toggle to see just the music you’ve been playing a lot recently, or the songs popular across all of Rdio. Below the heavy rotation is the recent activity stream from you and your network on Rdio—songs played, added to collections, playlists created, etc. It is basically organized as a music stream. But unlike the text-only streams on Twitter, Rdio uses the album covers to make browsing the stream a more visual experience. Of course, when you click on an album cover, you get to listen to the stream as well. Rdio also uses your collection and listening history to recommend new music to you based on what other people with similar music taste seem to like. For each recommendation, Rdio will tell you the artist in your collection or listening history it matches.

As I mentioned, Rdio isn’t perfect. The navigation takes some getting used to. For one thing, there is no easy way to get back to the main home page. I found myself resorting to clicking on the Rdio logo at the top left for lack of a home button. From the homepage dashboard there are quick links to your collection, playlists, people you follow, and reviews (if you are into that). There are also links to your “queue” (which is a less formal type of playlist where you can just dump songs and albums you want to play continuously). The fact that there is both a queue and playlists seems redundant. That is, until you launch the desktop AIR app. All it does is play songs from your queue and ones you’ve purchased (MP3 downloads cost $0.99 to $1.29). It can’t access your playlists, search, or any of the social features.

The iPhone app is a more fully featured. It’s got your collection (which overlaps with the songs in your iPod app), playlists, search, and iTunes syncing. The social features are also missing, but perhaps that is what is in the yet-to-be-approved update. The idea of being able to choose from 5 million songs to stream to a device in your pocket is a powerful one. My jukebox in the sky should be accessible anywhere I am.

But would I pay $10 a month for that? I don’t know. That is 12 albums a year, and I don’t buy that many albums anymore. But I would pay $5 a month for the Web-only version. That seems to me to be the right price point. The way I would price it is if a Web-only subscriber ends up buying more than six albums a year on top of that Rdio should upgrade them for free to the mobile access plan. After all, the point of having so many songs at your fingertips with social recommendations built into the service is so that it is easier to discover great music. If Rdio helps me discover new songs I love with little or no effort, I would happily pay extra to own them as downloads.

Ultimately, the music industry needs to look at free or low-cost streaming services as a discovery mechanism which leads to album and ticket sales. Rdio is a good first step in that direction.

WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging software, has just released WordPress 3.0, codenamed Thelonious — the software’s thirteenth release in its history. Beta releases have been available for the last few months, but now it’s official. To give an idea of how popular WordPress is, version 2.9 was downloaded 10.3 million times.

Among the features listed in the official blog post: a default theme called Twenty Ten (the old default was looking quite dated), a lighter interface, and 1,217 bug fixes. Theming has gotten quite a bit of attention, with APIs that make it easier for theme designers to allow for customized menus, post types, headings, backgrounds, and more.

Another big change is the fusing of WordPress Multi User (MU) and the core WordPress install. WordPress MU is a fork of WordPress that allows for one install to administer multiple (even millions) of blogs, but until now it was separate from ‘regular’ WordPress. Now you’ll get the functionality of both from the same install.

One other interesting point: the WordPress blog notes that the team is going to “take a release cycle off” to focus on the things “around WordPress” as opposed to the platform itself. From the post:

Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless.

Here’s a video showcasing some of 3.0′s new features:

For a look at how WordPress has evolved, check out our post detailing WordPress 2.0, which we covered back in December 2005.

Less than a month ago I asked the MySpace Co-Presidents, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn (pictured left), if it was possible to effectively run a company with two equal leaders. Their answer – they’ve made it work. I asked if they were both there for the long term. Jones said “Assuming News Corp. will have us we’re going to stay heavily engaged.” I’ve added the video clip below.

Well, you know what they say about assumptions. Tomorrow MySpace will announce the departure of Jason Hirschhorn, we’ve heard from multiple sources inside and outside of MySpace. And we’ve also heard that Jones will be named CEO sometime soon, although likely not tomorrow.

The two were promoted to co-presidents in February when previous CEO Owen Van Natta was fired. Van Natta held the CEO spot for less than a year – he was hired to replace founding CEO Chris DeWolfe in April 2009.

Yes, it’s been musical chairs at MySpace. Or, a less charitable description: rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The company hasn’t just lost the cultural significance of being the top social network – a title they lost to Facebook long ago. They are also losing page views and users at a rapid clip. MySpace Music is hemorrhaging money to the labels. And their lucrative search deal with Google is ending in two weeks, and the company has yet to announce how they’ll replace that revenue.

For all those reasons and more, I’ve argued passionately that MySpace needs to be spun off into a private company. They can’t please News Corp. and find a way to win with users at the same time. Publicly Jones says he disagrees. Who knows what he thinks privately.

Update: Statement by Jon Miller, Digital Chief for News Corp.:

Statement from Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corporation Confirming the Departure of Jason Hirschhorn, Co-President of MySpace

Los Angeles, CA , June 17, 2010 — We fully respect Jason’s decision to leave and his personal desire to return to New York. As many people know, Jason is like family to me, and as expected, he’s done everything we asked of him and more. We’re incredibly grateful for the passion and enthusiasm he brought to the company. And as I know Jason agrees, Mike Jones has done an outstanding job leading MySpace into its next evolution and is the right person to take the reins. There are no plans to bring in additional management.

Leaks happen — especially in the mobile world. There are just too many people involved in the process of creating a mobile device to keep things under wraps. Take any given new phone’s OS installation package (known as its “ROM”), for example; when something is as easily copied and distributed as any other piece of software, it’s bound to find its way out eventually.

When these ROMs pop up on developer/hacker forums, it’s generally no big deal — in most cases, the manufacturer doesn’t notice or, if they do, don’t bother to do anything about it. Once someone makes an effort to gather up all these ROMs and distribute them from one unified outlet, however, things get hairy. Such is the case for the popular HTC ROM distribution site Shipped-ROMs, who allegedly just received a Cease & Desist order straight from the desk of HTC’s Legal Counsel.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

On Monday, Twitter rolled out Twitter Places, its attempt to add a layer of actual venues to its geolocation data. This was made possible by a deal with Localeze, a local business listing service with over 14 million businesses in their database. Now we’re hearing that Facebook has struck a similar deal with Localeze to roll out their own Places area in the near future.

Essentially, what we’re hearing is that Facebook will use this data to populate some new kind of fan pages for places, that businesses will be able to then claim on the network. This is in line with the information we uncovered back in May on Facebook’s mobile site. The code on that page (since removed) pointed to a previously unseen Places tab coming to Facebook.

That code also pointed to some check-in functionality coming to Facebook — obviously, that has yet to show up on the service. We’ve heard whispers that Facebook’s big location push may have been postponed due to the recent privacy flare ups. But more recently we’ve heard that Facebook was also missing a vital component needed for any kind of location service: place data. Obviously, this deal with Localeze would solve that problem.

Still, just how soon this new Facebook Places area would launch is not clear. One source thinks it will be very soon, another thinks it could be several weeks before all the data population occurs.

We’ve reached out to both Facebook and Localeze for comment, but have yet to hear back.

Reader Matthew just confirmed our worst fears: not only was the pre-order experience at Apple and AT&T a big pile of poopfail, they’ve started cancelling “orders made in error.” Why in error? Well, presumably because things have gotten so fouled with eligibility in their systems that folks are getting knocked out of the pre-order queue.

Here’s the email Matthew got today:

Your recently placed AT&T Premier order was cancelled. If you believe your order was cancelled in error, please call us at 1-866-499-8008 Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

Web Order Number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Thank you,
The AT&T Premier Team

Read more…

You’ve heard the term “betting the company,” but have you ever known anyone who has actually done that? I mean literally. As in, they’re playing poker with shares of the company on the line. Because that’s exactly what Yammer founder David Sacks and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis are doing at The World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

When Calacanis first tweeted about it, I thought it was a joke. He wrote, “Got a sick @WSOP Main Event Prop bet with @DavidSacks: 10,000 shares of Mahalo vs. 10,000 shares of @Yammer–whoever lasts longer #poker“. But I emailed Sacks to confirm, and sure enough, the bet is on. “Of course. Sucker born every minute,” Sacks wrote to us. He continued, “To be clear, these are personally-owned shares we’re betting.”

Of course, you have to assume they’re not betting the entire company. I asked Sacks exactly what percentage of Yammer 10,000 shares constitues. Not surprisingly, he declined to answer that. But you’d have to think it’s a relatively small share or the Boards of the two companies might have something to say about the deal. Can you imagine if Calacanis took a controlling stake of Yammer because he lasted longer in the World Series of Poker? That’d likely be worth a lot more than the grand prize if he won the entire tournament.

Obviously, this isn’t an official bet for WSOP, it’s a side bet the two men are making. This is a much more interesting way to trade shares than SecondMarket.

Some may recall that Yammer had a bad spell of downtime while Sacks was playing in the tournament last year. Calacanis has played before as well. Yes, it’s a little ridiculous.

We know that Verizon is launching Droid X on the 23 – at least when it comes to press access – but it looks like they’re announcing to the rest of the world as well, right now, via a Flash-rich teaser site that allows you to pop in your email for more info.

Read more…

Zohi Wiki, which originally launched in 2006, is getting an upgrade today, with additional collaboration features, access controls and more.

Zoho has added workspaces within Wiki to allow teams to have their own groups within organization wikis. Each workspace has its own administrative and customization options and can serve as a separate portal. Zoho has also added more in-depth access controls to wikis, which allows administrators to set permissions for Workspaces, multiple groups, individuals, domains, public, and for users within an organization. Admins can also assign separate permissions for edit, view, create and delete functions.

Mobile advertising company Apptera has raised another $10 million in VC funding, we’ve learned via an SEC filing. The startup’s previous financing round dates back to November 2008, also totaled about $10 million and came from investors such as Alloy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden International.

The company has yet to publicly disclose the new capital injection, but these types of follow-on rounds typically come from existing backers, with maybe one or two additional investors.

Founded in 2001 in Silicon Valley, Apptera operates what it refers to as a ‘Voice & Visual Mobile Advertising Network’, enabling the company to dynamically serve voice ads to callers and enhancing those calls with interactive visual engagements. Callers can opt in to voice ads and have special offers such as coupons and promotional codes, videos, even maps and directions sent direct to their phones, straight away or at a time scheduled in the future.

Publishers in its mobile advertising marketplace include movie ticketing services (such as Movietickets.com, Moviefone and Fandango), free-411 services (e.g. Jingle and AT&T), social voice services and blogs, and widgets on social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

At the help of Apptera we find Henry Vogel, the former eBay exec that was previously chief revenue officer of Quigo Technologies, the ad network company that was acquired by AOL in December of 2007. The rest of the members of the management team have a ton of experience from a variety of positions at companies like Yahoo, Overture, eBay, Meraki, Spot Runner, ESPN, Sony Pictures and iPass under their belts.

The tablet era has just begun, but Forrester Research is already predicting tablet sales in the U.S. will overtake netbook sales by 2012, and desktop sales by 2015. At the Untethered conference today in New York City, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps laid out her projections comparing tablet sales to netbooks, laptops, and desktops. She expects 3.5 million tablets (including the iPad and other tablets) to be sold this year, growing to 20.4 million in 2015. Meanwhile, she expects desktop sales to drop from 18.7 million units in 2010 to 15.7 million units in 2015.

As a percentage of overall PC sales, tablets will grow from 6 percent this year to 18 percent in 2012 (when netbooks are estimated to account for 17 percent of sales. The next year, in 2013, tablet sales are projected to outstrip desktop unit sales, 21 percent to 20 percent. By 2015, tablets will make up 23 percent of PC sales in the U.S., while desktops will be 18 percent and netbooks will be 17 percent. Only laptops will sell more in the U.S., with a 42 percent market share.

The big question is how much of the tablet market can Apple capture? It has already sold 2 million iPads, and could easily blow past Forrester’s 3.5 million estimate for this year all by itself. It is not stretch for it to get to 20 million by 2015 either. So is there room in this market for other tablets, or will Forrester need to increase its estimates?

These projections are for unit sales, not total revenues, but still the expectation that there will be more tablets sold in five years than any other type of computer is stunning. By 2015, the cumulative number of people using tablets will be 59 million, according to Rotman, which will be larger than the installed base of netbooks (but still just a fraction of the installed base of desktops and laptops). On a global basis, IDC also sees tablets and e-readers driving more growth than netbooks. Looks like it is time to stick a fork in netbooks.

For any e-retailer, product search is the foundation of a commerce platform. Many times, a consumer goes directly to the search box to find the object they want. And the ability to easily find products on a retailers site affects the consumer interaction and experience with their site and produces higher conversion rates. Google began powering search platforms for retailers last year, with the launch of Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites. Today, Google is launching the next iteration of Commerce Search which offers retailers a more powerful and less-expensive version of the product.

The first version of Google Commerce offered a variety of features that are optimized for retail and product search, such as parametric search, sorting of results, spell checker, stemming, and synonym suggestion. The newest version builds on these features, by offering a more in-depth search experience for users and merchants. As Commerce product manager Nitin Mangtani tells me, version 2.0 focuses on enhancing navigation and the user experience.

The Merchandising Dashboard: A new merchandising dashboard gives merchants more options within their search portals. Retailers can now rank products, so that certain products rank higher in search results than others. Additionally, retailers can feature promotions and sales within search portals within a given timeline. And retailers can add customized filters or ‘facets’ to search, and Google’s technology will present the appropriate results accordingly. All of these features can be implemented through a rules wizard that requires no custom code so a marketer or merchandiser could easily implement changes.

Search Improvements: Google is adding realtime query autocompletion, which is a necessary element of any retail site. And Google will customize auto suggestions for each site, depending on the product indexed. Google has also improved speed of search results in Commerce search, and claim that search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second.

Price Drop: Google is dropping the price of Commerce search to a pricing model that starts at $25,000 per year. Previously, Commerce search pricing started at $50,000 per year. Pricing is based on total volume of queries and items indexed.

Google Commerce search also integrates Google products like Google Analytics and Google Product Search. Using Commerce, retailers can measure clicks, conversion rates, number of transactions, average order value and other data via Google Analytics. And e-commerce vendors can provide a single feed of products and catelogue items that will power Commerce and indexing of their products on Google Product Search.

Retailers using Commerce search include Birkenstock, Smart Furniture and Coveroo. Google declined to release the exact number of retailers who are using the Commerce search product, but did say that Google is powered enterprise search for 30,000 sites currently. Google also offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations that want to add customized Google search functionality to their websites.

I’m curious if Google dropped their price because of a lack of retailers adopting the search product. As the retail industry steadily climbs out of the hole caused by the recession, I still think $25K is a lot to pay for search for smaller retailers. But it’s good to see that Google is dropping the price to allow for more retailers to use the product. And Google is pushing its product as an easily deployable, user-friendly way to integrate powerful search into a retail site. Google faces competition from Omniture, IBM, Endeca and others.

From Microsoft Bob to Edubuntu there have been a number of attempts at making computers of various sorts easier and more useful for young people. Another participant in this space is Kiddix, “a complete operating system and software environment for children, built from the ground up with your family’s needs and safety in mind.” Kiddix is built upon Linux, and aims to present things in a very “kid friendly” way. Through the end of June, Kiddix is running a “Pay What You Want” promotion, allowing you to pay any amount to buy their OS.

Read more…

What’s this, a European startup thinking global? TVLinks, an Internet TV guide and video search engine, exits stealth mode today, and says it wants to battle the big US search engines and TV listings sites.

It currently houses a database of over 30,000 movies, and 2,000 TV shows consisting of 80,000 episodes. In total it indexes more than 2,000 content provider websites, some of which it has formal partnerships with – US-centric Amazon VOD, Netflix and Google – while others are, presumably, being scraped or spidered via open APIs. The result is that a lot of content that shows up in search results is likely to be housed on their respective video sharing sites with or without the permission of copyright holders and/or geo-blocked.