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Okay, after our last post on Darth Vader and the iPhone 4, we’re getting pinged way too fast with all the videos we left out but should have included. So behold: the best of the iPhone 4 videos.
If you have any others you know of, be sure to let us know and we’ll throw them in here.
Regardless of what you think about the whole iPhone 4 antenna debate, there’s no denying that it’s fueling a massive amount of creativity on the Internet. We’ve got the iPhone 4 antenna song (which Apple even played at its press conference), the cute “End Call” antenna covering stickers, the College Humor take on the press conference, and, of course, the Taiwanese animation for Antennagate with light sabers.
The Taiwanese video features Bill Gates (or some other Microsoft guy) as Darth Vader. Vader also plays a pivotal role in new video today by Russell Arch. No, it’s not as good as the Taiwanese one (nor the iPhone vs. EVO videos), but it’s still pretty funny. It starts off slow, but it gets good at the end.
The choice lines:
See also: The Best Of The iPhone 4 Spoofs
In season 1 of AMC’s hit show Mad Men, Rachel Menken comes to the advertising firm Sterling Cooper because she wants to give her department store, Menken’s, a makeover, so to speak. She wants to transform it from a successful department store into an elite one. “What kind of people do you want [coming into your store]?,” Creative Director Don Draper asks Menken. “I want your kind of people Mr. Draper. People who don’t care about coupons — whether or not they can afford it. People who come into the store because it is expensive,” Menken replies.
Based on what we’re hearing, HP has been having similarly themed meetings in recent months. They want to transform themselves — from HP, the successful tech juggernaut, into Apple, the sexy one.
When you think of HP, what do you think of? For most consumers it’s either printers and sort of crappy, cheap computers that you get at Best Buy. But that’s not what HP aspires to be anymore, sources familiar with HP’s thinking are telling us. They want to be Apple. They want be the makers of high-quality consumer gadgets all connected by way of a digital ecosystem. An ecosystem they own and operate. One tied together by webOS.
While it should hardly be surprising to hear that any company wants to be Apple given that company’s recent success, HP is one of a very few — and actually maybe the only company with the required assets to potentially pull off such a makeover. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to — but it’s possible. And they know that, and that’s exactly what their strategy is going forward, apparently.
On the face of it, it may not seem to make a lot of sense. After all, HP makes nearly double the revenue that Apple does each quarter. But despite this, it’s Apple that actually makes more profit. And it’s Apple that has more than double the market cap of HP. In the eyes of investors, Apple is the up-and-coming rockstar, HP is the aging one. And they’re closely tied to their counterpart, Microsoft, who is also seen as aging.
And that’s what HP is trying to break away from.
WebOS is the key to all of this. It’s the software layer that HP’s hardware has been lacking — forcing them to go with Microsoft instead. But the Palm acquisition in April changed all of that. From the moment that happened, HP has made no secret that the reason for the deal was to “double-down” on webOS.
Just listen to what HP executive Todd Bradley had to say today at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, CO. “I think you’ll see us with a family of slate products, clearly Microsoft for the enterprise, and a webOS product,” Bradley said. “Our focus is working with still our largest software partner, Microsoft, to create a tablet, a slate, for the enterprise business,” he continued. What he’s doing there is carefully positioning HP’s relationship with Microsoft on new products going forward as being focused on the enterprise side of things. Previously, it was stated HP would do a Windows-powered slate for consumers. That is no longer the case. That tablet will be built to run webOS.
Does that mean HP is going to ditch Windows altogether anytime soon? Of course not. As the largest maker of PCs, HP is Microsoft’s largest customer. But for the new products HP is planning, it’s going to be all webOS. And on the desktop side of things, they’re working on webOS-syncing software that will run on Windows (and Macs), we hear. So again, they’re basically trying to recreate the ecosystem that Apple has.
HP executive Jon Rubinstein (the CEO of Palm) also confirmed at the same event today that webOS 2.0 is coming later this year. This new version is likely to be the first one that will start to tie all of these HP products together.
Speaking of Rubinstein, his pedigree here can’t be overlooked. He was the executive at Apple in charge of the iPod until he left in 2006. He’s the one who oversaw the framework for the ecosystem Apple has in place today. There was some talk leading up to the Palm acquisition if Rubinstein would stay or go — he’s apparently onboard with this new “let’s turn HP into Apple” idea. That shouldn’t be surprising given that this was the basic strategy at Palm with the Pre.
But Palm failed simply because they didn’t have the resources to do what they wanted to do (challenge Apple’s iPhone directly). HP does — and then some. And while HP is not a player in the mobile space right now, they plan to be once again with webOS.
From what we’re hearing, HP wants to create a seamless experience for all of their hardware. That’s PCs to notebooks to netbooks to tablets to mobile phones to printers. And they want to do so with a much more controlled product line than they’ve previously had. They want to move towards more premium products, ones with higher margins. That will make the profits go up, just as it has with Apple.
Of course, whether or not HP can make any of this happen is a pretty big “if.” One obvious problem with them being Apple is that they don’t have their own retail stores, like Apple does. HPs are sold everywhere from Best Buy to Costco, but those stores tend to attract people looking for bargains. And those that aren’t, buy Macs there.
Second, HP’s strategy in mobile phones will meet resistance not only from the iPhone, but from Google’s Android phones. But Google appears to be positioning Android as the sort-of Windows of the smartphone era. That is, they’re all about getting their software as widely distributed as possible. Like Microsoft with PCs, Google don’t make their own hardware for Android (though they had a hand in designing the Nexus One, which is all but dead now). HP would be making its own hardware to run webOS. Again, like Apple.
Android also poses a potential threat in the tablet field. But again, Google won’t be making this hardware. As I said at the beginning, because HP is a hardware maker that just happened to purchase a great piece of software in webOS, they have a shot at pulling off what Apple has. Whereas most other rivals, even Google, cannot. Android may be ubiquitous by this time next year, but the experience won’t be as seamless as it is within Apple’s ecosystem. And, HP hopes, their ecosystem. As Apple has proven, people are willing to pay a premium for that.
This is HP’s big bet on the future. They’re betting on the Apple way. And that’s the right way for them to bet because they’re a hardware company. With a shift towards mobile starting to take place, as well as new products like tablets starting to rise, HP seems smart to get ahead of this trend. They’re not Microsoft or Google where profits are in licenses and advertising, respectively. With the webOS buy, they’re much closer to Apple. The profits there are in premium products, buoyed by the seamless ecosystem.
That’s where HP is heading.
[images: AMC]
Disney and social gaming startup Playdom are in “very” late stage acquisition discussions, we’ve heard from, oh, about seven independent sources, including sources close to Playdom, over the last several days. Internally the two parties have referred to the deal as “Project Platinum” based on due diligence documents we’ve reviewed.
Some sources have said the deal is signed and in the closing process. Others say it hasn’t been signed yet and could still unravel.
Disney is already an investor in Playdom – last month we reported that Disney’s Steamboat Ventures participated in a new injection of $33 million into the company. Playdom has raised a total of $76 million, and the most recent valuation of the company was around $345 million.
We’ve heard a wide range of speculation on the price Disney is paying for Playdom but haven’t confirmed anything yet. It’s probably safe to assume it’s a multiple of that $345 million valuation, though. Zynga, Playdom’s much larger competitor, has likely been valued at more than $2 billion in recent financings.
Does the deal make sense for Disney? There are a number of arguments that it does. Disney is weak in the social space, and despite making investments in MMOs, such a the acquisition of Club Penguin in 2007, digital revenues continue to make up a tiny percentage of overall revenue.
Disney has exceptional brands, from characters to movies, that can benefit from having social games being built around them. Social games generate revenue, sometimes lots of it, and it’s also free marketing. Expect to see social games around movies being released in advance in the future.
Earlier this month Disney acquired Tapulous.
Reading over the press release for the new “Antenna Meter” application for RIM’s BlackBerry devices, I’ll admit that I was bored. Okay, so it’s exactly what it says it is: an antenna meter. But aha! The two companies behind the app, Xtreme Labs and Fixmo, know how to pitch it. It’s not an antenna meter, it’s a “death grip” meter. Immediately, I’m much more interested.
As you’re undoubtedly aware by now, “death grip” is the term given to smartphone signal loss when a phone is held in your hand a certain way (that covers the antenna). Notably, this has been an issue with the iPhone 4. But Apple called a press conference a week ago to basically say that the problem isn’t unique to their device. And in fact, they showed that it affects other devices by rivals as well. One of those was a BlackBerry device. And RIM was not too pleased about that.
But other than issue a stern statement citing RIM as a “global leader in antenna design” (and potentially taking down videos showing the death grip) we haven’t seen much out of them to prove how good their antennas actually are. That’s what this app intends to do. While the release doesn’t mention “death grip” specifically, it’s clear what this is aimed at. Fixmo’s co-founder Rick Segal cites the “noise and unfair implications leveled at Research In Motion” as the basis for this app.
The pitch to me was more straightforward, “We also have a feature that encourages you to try out different ‘death grips’ on the BlackBerry to see resulting fluctuations in antenna signal strength.”
Something tells me we won’t be seeing an app like this in Apple’s App Store anytime soon. But if you want to try it out for BlackBerry, you can go here on your BlackBerry web browser.
The Funded’s Adeo Ressi’s prediction that 2010 will be the year of the angel investor, seems to be coming true.
In the second quarter, venture capitalists invested $6.5 billion, an impressive 34% increase from the prior quarter. Not so impressive? The amount of money they pulled in. According to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association, venture capital funds only raised $1.9 billion in the second quarter— a 48% drop from the prior quarter. While VC fundraising can be somewhat cyclical, $1.9 billion is far lower than any quarter during the recession.
In fact, that’s the lowest level raised in roughly seven years.
On today’s episode of TechCrunch NOW, Ressi and I discussed this growing gap between VC investment and their ability to raise funds and what that means for the market as a whole. “Venture capitalists are living on borrowed time, no matter how you look at it there’s going to be a reconciliation,” he says. “They’re spending money from ages old today and in the future they’re going to have a lot less money at their disposal to invest.”
According to Ressi, the investment landscape is dramatically shifting, as venture capital becomes a less prominent asset class and a new generation of entrepreneurs-turned-angel investors fill the power vacuum. Amusingly, he says, he knows more and more venture capitalists who are tackling smaller angel investments, as they adapt to this new paradigm. See video above.
We’ll be sure to get the other side of this debate on an upcoming episode of TechCrunch NOW.
(Note: Great news! You can now now subscribe to the daily RSS/Podcast feed of TechCrunch Now by clicking on these links: 
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CloudCanvas, a startup incubated in the Founder Institute, has launched their free HTML5 image editing suite to the public today. The product aims to blend capabilities of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop into a single, easy-to-use web based offering.
CloudCanvas allows both novice doodlers and expert designers to create, store, edit and embed images into the suite. The suite, which supports both vector and bitmap images, includes a standard roster of simple image tools similar to offline image editing suites (i.e. Photoshop), including polygons, circles, painting, layers, brushes and others. And the suite includes more advanced editing tools such as bezier curves, blurring, drop shadow and bevel filters.
Additionally, CloudCanvas is integrated with Google Images search and DeviantArt libraries to import images into the suite and includes over 30,000 clipart and templates within the suite. The suite also includes 500 fonts ready to use on the web and support saving in PNG and SVG formats.
The virtue of CloudCanvas is that it supports HTML5; and doesn’t run on Flash. CloudCanvas even has an iPad optimized version for touch drawing and illustrating, allowing you to take images right from the desktop to your handheld and back seamlessly. While CloudCanvas is free, the site will eventually include premium features and media sales, such as fonts and stock photography, in the future. As a special incentive for trying the suite out, CloudCanvas is offering a prize of $500 for each of the best three original images created with the product by September 12th, 2010.
Of course, there are other powerful browser-based editing suites that CloudCanvas will compete against, including Aviary, and Photoshop itself.
Amazon announced today that it had reached an agreement with Andrew Wylie, head of the successful New York agency whose clients include such authors as Oliver Sacks, Salman Rushdie, and Philip Roth, as well the estates of William Burroughs, John Updike, W.H. Auden, and the like. Amazon and the Kindle e-book store will have exclusive rights to publish several books by authors Wylie represents, cutting all other players (such as authors’ paper book distributors) out of the deal. It’s a big win for Amazon, but the start of a painful period for consumers.
Picture all the e-books that are out there as being in a big pie. Amazon is cutting a piece of the pie out and putting it in their own pan. Pretty soon, the other players will be furiously cutting their own pieces out of the pie and isolating them in their own pans. The end result is a messy and fractured marketplace that’s difficult and confusing for consumers to navigate.
Analytics is a crowded space, with plenty of services looking to help you turn your visitors into engaged, paid customers. KissMetrics is the latest to join the fray, and it’s offering a solution that’s both straightforward and powerful. As it comes out of stealth, the company is also revealing its funding: in 2008 it closed a $1 million seed round led by True Ventures, and in mid-2009 it closed a $3 million round led by Polaris Ventures. The company also has investments from SoftTechVC, Felicis Ventures, and Angels including Dave McClure, Mark Goines, Shervin Pishevar, Bobby Yazdani, and Nils Johnson.
At this point, KissMetrics is built around one type of analysis: the conversion funnel, which shows you how many users are dropping off during your signup flows (and can hopefully help you figure out why). You can customize these graphs by tracking different variables, but Cofounder Hiten Shah says that you won’t find a dizzying array of other options. The goal, he says, was to get this one key tool to work very well before branching out (though other tools will follow).
KissMetrics started off around two years ago as an analytics service for Facebook applications, but shifted to its broader current model after noticing how many companies were building their analytics tools in-house. That story may sound familiar: the founders of Mixpanel, another analytics company, drew similar inspiration from their time at Slide.
So how does KissMetrics differ from Mixpanel and the other analytics services that are already out there? Shah says that other services generally track clicks and events, but that they don’t track users. KissMetrics, on the other hand, can be used to track the activity of a user even before they’ve even joined your site — it essentially builds an anonymous history for each user, and then associates that history with their username once they create an account. For example, if you were to visit a site five times without converting, but then visited a sixth time and did convert, the site’s owners can use KissMetrics to look back at the history of the first five visits to try to identify where they went wrong.
While this technology could potentially be used for things like cross-site advertising, Shah says KissMetricsonly creates these user histories on a per-site basis (he explains that this minimizes privacy issues). In the future, he says that KissMetrics products will evolve toward helping optimize marketing and customer acquisition.
The service is free for the first thirty days, then offers tiered monthly pricing plans based on how many events you’ll be tracking. These plans begin at $149 a month and go up to $699, with custom plans for especially large sites.
KissMetrics’ advisors include Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, Jeff Veen, Jeff Hammerbacher, and Ed Baker (CEO of Friend.ly), many of whom have extensive experience in analytics.
Make no mistake, we get some weird stuff sent to TCHQ, especially when it’s addressed to our Belgian reporter, Robin Wauters. Which is why I always make a point of opening his mail before it’s sent on.
Today, though, was a special day.
Today, wrapped innocently in tissue paper, came “Barbie Video Girl”: a genuine Barbie doll, featuring a hidden webcam in her necklace. It’s hard to get across in text alone how messed up this thing is, so I hopped on to Skype with CrunchGear’s John Biggs in New York for the first episode of a new video segment I’m calling “What’s Fucked Up In Toys… With John Biggs.”
Slightly NSFW video below.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it will award up to $122 million to create a Fuels form Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub led by the California Institute of Technology. The Hub’s goal is to develop ways to convert solar energy into chemical fuels and scale the technology for commercial use.
The project is in part inspired by the way plants produce energy, and will use artificial photosynthesis to turn sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into clean fuel. Researchers will be charged with finding ways to use technologies like light absorbers, catalysts, molecular linkers and separation membranes to transform sunlight into fuel, and the DOE aims to quickly turn the research into a viable product in the form of fuel that can go directly into cars without any additional processing.
Artificial photosynthesis is not a new technology, and researchers at MIT and the University of Rochester have been seeking solutions for some time. The DOE hopes the Hub will spark collaborations to make more progress in the field.
The Hub will have two locations: One on CalTech’s campus in Pasadena and one at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. Several other California universities will participate as well, including UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine and UC San Diego. Funding will be provided over five years, with $22 million awarded this year and up to $25 million per year thereafter.
Photo via Flickr by Jennifer Boyer
Here come the slates. Send in the slates. Todd Bradley, EVP, Personal Systems Group, for HP just announced that their Windows 7 tablets will arrive “this fall” — something we suspected after said slates showed up on HP’s website with SKU numbers and all. The rumored (and almost certainly real) webOS slates were touched on tangentially, with the non-answer that we can expect a “family” of slate devices. Jon Rubinstein pretty much confirmed that they’re coming out, but wouldn’t give any dates.
The Windows 7 tablets, supposedly called Slate 500s, will support pen and finger input, and according to Rubinstein are going to be targeted at the enterprise sector — a strategy we suspected after reports of the Slate’s death were shown to be exaggerated.
With their Chrome web browser, Google has always been obsessed with speed. And now they’re speeding up another aspect of it: how often stable builds are released. The goal now is to release a new stable version of the browser every six weeks — about twice as fast as they currently do, Google says. In other words, get ready for Chrome 6, 7, 8, and 9 coming soon.
So why is Google doing this? Because they’re creating new features so quickly and they want to make sure all users get them as fast as possible. These quick iterations also will allow Google to have more firmly set schedules for Chrome. And as a result, project managers will be able to set realistic goals for amount of work that can be done by a certain time.
But the most important thing that Google highlights may be the easing of pressure off of their engineering team. Under the old, longer release model, engineers would be pressured into trying to finish new features before a deadline or risk having them cut and not showing up for months. With the new release schedule, even if something isn’t ready to go in one release, it will only be six weeks until it makes the next one.
Google is also trying to downplay the rapid iteration of versions that will be coming:
Since we are going to continue to increment our major versions with every new release (i.e. 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0) those numbers will start to move a little faster than before. Please don’t read too much into the pace of version number changes – they just mean we are moving through release cycles and we are geared up to get fresher releases into your hands!
Google does not that this six week cycle is “running under ideal conditions,” so it’s possible it may slip from time to time. Still, it’s pretty exciting how fast they’ll be iterating now. And even if the version numbers don’t mean much, the other browsers are going to have to make sure their users know that, or it may look like Chrome is running laps around them.
Microsoft has just reported its earnings for Q4 2010 (their fiscal calendar is a bit odd). Given Apple’s blockbuster quarter announced on Tuesday, there was a lot of talk that Apple would surpass Microsoft in revenue for the first time in recent history. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Microsoft had its best Q4 ever with $16.04 billion in revenue (Apple had $15.7 billion in revenue last quarter).
Microsoft easily beat Wall Street estimates that they would see about $15.3 billion in revenues. Microsoft largely credits strong sales within enterprise of Windows 7 and Office 2010. Net income was also strong at $4.52 billion. And earnings per share were at $0.51. Both of those beat Wall Street estimates as well.
Microsoft says it has sold over 175 million Windows 7 licenses to date so far. They also tout the fact that Bing has achieved its 13th straight month of market share gain.
Since this was Microsoft’s fiscal Q4, they reported revenue of $62.48 billion for the year — a 7 percent increase from the 2009 fiscal year. Operating income, net income, and earnings per share were all up significantly higher at 18 percent, 29 percent, and 30 percent, respectively. The 29 percent jump in net income (up to $18.76 billion) is particularly impressive.
Investors, meanwhile, are giving Microsoft’s earnings more of a “meh.” So far in after-hours trading, the stock is down two cents (.08 percent). During the day today, the stock rose almost 3 percent ahead of earnings.
While some were predicting Microsoft revenues to fall behind Apple’s (though, for the record, I wasn’t), there was never a question that Microsoft would retain a big lead in income. As they’re primarily a software and enterprise company, Microsoft’s margins remain massive. Their $4.52 billion in net income easily beat Apple’s $3.25 billion.
That being said, it seems quite likely that next quarter Apple will surpass Microsoft in revenue. Assuming that iPhone 4 sales are huge and that the iPad continues to grow, Apple’s momentum in revenue is simply too great for Microsoft to keep up with. Apple may or may not hit $20 billion in revenues next quarter (they’re projecting $18 billion, but they always low-ball that number so they can beat it).
This past May, much was made of Apple passing Microsoft in market cap for the first time — giving Apple the title of most valuable tech company. That distinction is more ceremonial than anything else, however. But when Apple passes Microsoft in revenue, that will be significant. As I said, it will be more difficult for Apple to catch Microsoft in income because of Microsoft’s software margins (whereas Apple primarily makes money on hardware, which offer smaller margins, even though Apple’s are the best in the business). But the gap is closing there as well.
The Antennagate press conference won’t soon be forgotten. Good or bad, it’s now part of Apple’s history and will probably be remembered as the time Steve Jobs side-stepped an issue and instead pointed the finger at everyone else. No matter. College Humor put together a short video of what they think the press conference would have been like if Steve Jobs would have spoken his mind instead of trying to spin the situation. The best line? Oh, they’re all good especially the one about Gizmodo. Click through for the slightly-NSFW two-minute video.
