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So this is a little weird. iPhone 4 launch day is this Thursday, June 24. You know it, I know it, presumably, FedEx knows it. And of course, Apple knows it. And yet, they’re still telling customers that their new iPhones will be delivered on June 23.

It’s not unusual for FedEx to show screwy delivery dates in the online tracking information when a company (like Apple) has a hold on a product’s delivery until a certain date.  FedEx’s systems often simply reflect how much time it would normally take to deliver the product. But what’s odd here is that Apple is emailing customers telling them to be sure they’re around on the 23rd to accept their new iPhones.

And that’s not all. They also acknowledge that the tracking information may have a “later date,” but still say the 23rd will be the day.

We’ve gotten about four of these tips so far — all of whom received the email below. Twitter is also abuzz with these confirmations.

So could it be that FedEx will actually deliver the iPhone 4 a day early to those who pre-ordered it? I wouldn’t hold my breath, but who knows, even if Apple puts out the word at the last minute not to deliver these until the 24th, maybe some of the FedEx offices will screw up and deliver early.

Dear Apple Store Customer,

You recently received a Shipment Notification email from Apple advising you that your iPhone has shipped.

This email is to confirm that your delivery will occur on June 23rd. Although Apple and FedEx tracking information may currently indicate a later date, you can check the FedEx website the morning of the June 23rd to track your package to your doorstep.

In the event that you will not be available to accept delivery on June 23rd, it may be more convenient to use our pre-sign delivery option by visiting our Order Status website at http://www.apple.com/orderstatus.

Sincerely,

The Apple Store Team

Late last year we broke the news that social gaming startup Playdom closed a big round of funding at quite a healthy valuation: $43 million on a $260 million pre-money valuation. That’s not bad for a first round of financing.

But the march of the social gaming giants continues. Zynga raised another $150 million earlier this month. And now Playdom is set to announce an additional $33 million in funding – bringing their total to $76 million. This new money was added in a second closing of the Series A round at that same $260 million pre-money valuation, the company tells me.

Steamboat Ventures, Disney’s venture arm, is part of this round, and they generally only make investments of strategic interest to the parent company. Bessemer Venture Partners and New World Ventures also invested.

Playdom remains the largest social gaming network on MySpace (by number of installs), and continues to grow on Facebook and internationally. Lots more news coming from Playdom in the near future, we hear.

Sometimes a startup rolls out a new feature, and it just hits the sweet spot of what consumers are craving. It looks like Wikinvest has a hit on its hands with its new realtime portfolio tracker. Less than three weeks after its launch, Wikinvest is tracking $1 billion worth of real investments tied to the real brokerage accounts of about 10,000 members.

The Wikinvest portfolio tracker lets anyone link up their real brokerage accounts to Wikinvest so they can keep tabs on their actual holdings, which are updated automatically every time you make a trade. That way you don’t have to manually update your portfolio (which is what most finance sites make you do). Getting to $1 billion worth of tracked assets in such a short time suggests there is a real need for such a service. Social investing sites like Covestor and KaChing also let you track your real brokerage accounts, and even invest alongside other users—Covestor recently passed $100 million in tracked trades managed through its service.

The difference is that Wikinvest’s portfolio tracker is purely an information product. Wikinvest doesn’t hold or direct any of these assets. They are all in Etrade, Schwab, Ameritrade, Fidleity, and other brokers. But Wikinvest ingests the data and gives people one place to research and track all of their investments. Co-founder Mike Sha says the “vast vast majority of the adoption was from new users.”

One of the biggest requests for the product has been to add brokers who manage 401(k)s. Sha describes the pain financial consumers are feeling: “A lot of these financial institutions are really old school, whose wealth management products were centered around communicating with clients via phone calls and monthly/quarterly reports by mail. Times have changed and they’ve fallen way behind on their web-based self-service tools.”

The tech world is buzzing about iOS 4, the latest version of the iPhone operating system that Apple released today. And rightly so — it’s an improvement over the previous version in every way. In fact, once you’ve been using it for a while, it’s hard to go back to using iPhone OS 3.x. And there’s an unfortunate casualty there: the iPad.

I’ve been using developer builds of iOS 4 (then called iPhone OS 4) for weeks now. I’ve grown very used to using things such as the new app switcher and folders. In fact, I’ve grown so used to using them that when I switch back over to the iPad now (running iPhone OS 3.2), I can’t help but feel that it in some ways seems antiquated. Yes, I know that’s ridiculous for a device that’s not even three months old yet. But the feeling lingers.

I keep double-clicking the home button to bring up the app drawer, and nothing happens. And I’ve grown weary of navigating through pages and pages of apps when on my iPhone now, thanks to folders, I only have 3 pages (holding many more apps than I have on my iPad).

Obviously, this is a temporary problem, since iOS 4 is coming to the iPad. But it’s one many of us are going to have to deal with for months, since iOS 4 isn’t due on the iPad until the Fall (and there isn’t even a developer release available yet).

In some ways, this is reminiscent of the problem the Android platform has been having with regard to fragmentation. Some Android-powered phones can run the latest version of the Android software. Some can’t just yet (and some won’t be able to ever). I’ve had Android 2.2 on my Nexus One for weeks, but the EVO 4G still doesn’t have it. At least partially as a result, I find myself using the Nexus One a lot more. It’s just a better device, thanks in no small part to the better software.

There is some of this fragmentation in the iPhone line itself. For example, iOS 4 will not run on the original iPhone. But that device is also three years old. Most iPhones and iPod touches will be able to update to iOS 4 if the user chooses to do so. That’s not the case right now with the iPad — which again, is a little odd because it’s less than three months old. It seems almost as if Apple just decided to suck it up and launch the iPad knowing it would be upstaged by this new OS it can’t yet run, just a few months later.

But the problem is deeper. As I said, iOS 4 will eventually make its way to the iPad. But something launching on Thursday could be a bigger factor in making your new iPad feel a bit old: iPhone 4. The new hardware from Apple comes with two big new features your existing iPad is simply never going to get: double the RAM and a screen that is much sharper with a much higher pixel density.

As I noted after I got a chance to play with the iPhone 4 for about 20 minutes following the WWDC keynote, the new device kind of makes the iPhone 3GS feel like a toy. What I didn’t mention was how it makes the iPad feel. There’s no denying the hardware build quality of the iPad is great (much better than the iPhone 3GS and its plastic back, for example). But the screen of the iPhone 4 completely blows away the screen of the iPad. It’s even more noticeable than the difference between the iPhone 3GS screen because the iPad screen is so much bigger.

I would not be surprised if using the iPhone 4 and the iPad side-by-side on a daily basis is pretty jarring — in the same way that it’s jarring to switch from my MacBook Pro with the new high resolution screen to one of the older models without it. It’s not that the iPad has a bad screen — it doesn’t at all. It’s just that it’s a fairly major downgrade from the iPhone 4′s screen. And that again, makes the iPad seem a bit dated in comparison.

I didn’t use the iPhone 4 long enough to get a sense of how much the RAM will matter. But the fact that the iPhone 4 has 512 MB versus 256 MB for the iPad, should make a world of difference in things such as multitasking (again, when it eventually works on the iPad). And it should be fairly easy to tell the difference since both devices are running the same 1 GHz A4 chip. Again, I suspect this could make the iPad feel old when compared to the new iPhone.

Here’s why this really matters for Apple: the iPhone 4 likely points to the updates coming to the iPad in the not-too-distant future. Are there any doubts that the Retina Display and twice the RAM will make its way to that device? So why would you buy the iPad now if the device might get these updates in say, January? The proof will be right in front of your eyes on Thursday.

Sure, most average consumers may look past that. But I’d argue that it’s largely the more savvy consumers who have been buying iPads so far.

Of course, in some ways, this is just an extension of the same problem Apple users have faced for years now. You know a better version of the product is coming, so you have to decide if the time is right to buy now. The difference here is that the products lines haven’t been this fragmented in the past, with major upgrades so clearly pointing out deficiencies in another major product.

Apple could resolve half of this problem this Fall with a unification of iOS 4 for both iPhone/iPod touch and the iPad. But the hardware bifurcation between the lines may linger. I suspect Apple may try to ship new iPads in the January timeframe in the future, while it continues to ship new iPhones in the June timeframe to create a greater time gap between this split.

Facebook has been wooing the UK developer and media community over the weekend and today in London. It’s hard to believe that three months ago the social network was being pilloried in the media here for being perceived to have played some part in a brutal murder.

But at the first official Facebook developer day to be held outside California, Mark Zuckerberg and his European team pulled off a flawless event at London’s vast Barbican Centre, while throwing out a few hints about the future.

The most interesting was Zuckerberg’s hint that location based features were coming to the platform. To a packed audience he said: “We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon.” Whether that means integrating location data from the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla was not elaborated on.

Quora, a Q&A service founded by early Facebook employees that has generated quite a bit of buzz, has launched to the public. The service first made its debut on January 4, 2010, but was previously restricted to users who had been invited (or had requested an invite from the site). The news was announced this evening in an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Quora was attracting plenty of attention since the day it launched its private beta, but things really picked up in March, when we heard that the service raised around $11 million from Benchmark Capital at a whopping $86 million valuation (the WSJ says it eventually raised $14 million at a $87.5 million valuation, so there’s some discrepancy here that may be due to additional investors other than Benchmark). At the time, we sat down with Benchmark’s Matt Cohler and Quora cofounders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, who outlined their goals with Quora and how they would face looming hurdles.

Their biggest challenge is about to begin. Quora has generated attention not just because of its slick interface, but because of the extremely high quality of its answers up until this point — it isn’t unusual for someone to ask a question and have it answered by a top expert in the field within a matter of hours (or less). Likewise, questions about various Internet companies often attract answers from longtime employees. The big question now is whether or not Quora will be able to maintain that quality as it deals with an influx of new users. When we asked about this during our interview, here’s what they said:

Part of it is making it so you see the stuff that you care about but you don’t see the other stuff. I think a lot of services lately have done a better and better job of that. Users follow topics and people that they’re interested in and that information is highlighted for them.

In other words, the site is going to help users filter out questions and answers by signing them up for the topics they’re interested in (something the site seems to be quite good at now, but may prove more difficult as the number of questions and topics increases quickly). However, if quality begins to suffer, the site will clamp down once again on new signups. Quora founder (and former Facebook CTO) Adam D’Angelo shared some more details on this launch in an answer on his own site:

Previously, there were two ways to register for Quora. You could either get an invitation from an existing user, or you could enter your email address in the box on our home page, and we’d invite you as soon as we scaled our capacity up.

We’ve gotten to the point where we are confident that we can integrate new users as they sign up and maintain the quality of the site, and so we are opening up registration today. However, we put quality ahead of growth as a priority, and so we will change plans and limit registration as necessary to achieve that goal.

We are not opening up to search engines at this point.

Quora faces plenty of competition from incumbents like Yahoo’s hugely popular Answers service, though the answer quality there tends to be poor. Even more threatening is Facebook Questions, the Q&A service that Facebook is currently testing in private beta and could be a new Facebook “killer app”. That said, one user we spoke to said that the service felt different from Quora because it “seems to be more intimate/fun/terse than intellectual/useful/detailed”, which is where Quora’s strength has been so far.

You must have heard that the Nook and the Kindle, two of the world’s best-selling e-readers, have dropped their prices to below $200 — down to $149 for the Wi-Fi Nook and $189 for the Kindle. It’s bad news for e-readers that recently placed themselves at low price points to compensate for fewer features (like the Kobo I just reviewed), but of course good news for everyone planning on buying an e-reader soon. When I considered secondary features and the possibility of “bulk” e-readers, I concluded that these devices would survive but find themselves marginalized both in price and market share. That seems to be just what’s happening, though of course the tablet market is still emerging, and Google may have a few cards up its sleeve. The brief age of “premium” e-readers is ending.

What can you expect from the e-readers? Well, first of all they can and must cut the hell out of the price, and that’s what we’re seeing now.

Continue reading…

As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, iOS 4 is out and spreading across iPhones like wildfire. With it, comes the ability for third-party apps to run certain tasks in the background. One of those tasks is background location — an awesome feature which we previewed in our review of Loopt 3.0 earlier today. But Loopt has been in the location game for a long time — what about startups that want to get into location right now and support the newest functionality? SimpleGeo has you covered.

The location infrastructure startup is today adding to its array of options, iOS 4 location support. With it, companies will be able to implement background location services for iOS 4 with a few simple code tweaks. How easy is it to implement with SimpleGeo? Geofencing, the ability to track when a user crosses a certain location-based plane, will take about six lines of code, co-founder Joe Stump tells us. Background Tracking will take about 30 lines of code. From what I hear, this is much, much simpler than trying to write this stuff yourself. And this is all done in SimpleGeo’s cloud.

As an example, Stump tells us, “So you basically just say, ‘Track parislemon’ and we handle that in our API along with record history.’” “I can then come back and say, ‘Show me the last 10 places parislemon was‘,” Stump continues. Creepy? Sort of. Powerful and easy? Yes.

Another example is that when you switch neighborhoods with a location service, it could alert you that someone you know is around you (similar to something Loopt 3.0 offers). Or SimpleGeo’s data could offer you the ability to do something as easy as automatically know when you enter a new state and give you a message like: “Welcome to the Sunshine State.“

SimpleGeo hasn’t yet determined full pricing for this option, but Stump notes that the first million calls will be free. He gives a full technical overview of how exactly this all works in his post on the matter.

When we first wrote about BarMax in January, there was a lot of interest in the iPhone app for one obvious reason: it cost $999.99. While it may not have been the first $1,000 app (the useless gimmick app, I Am Rich, can claim that title), it was the first to seemingly be worth the high price tag. Apparently, users have agreed. As the app meant to help law students pass the bar exam is already profitable and ready to roll out a version to cover another state: New York.

The first BarMax was specific to California because each state has different bar exams. This second version will cover New York’s version — effectively doubling the number of people who will find the app useful. Between those two states, they’ll have almost half of all bar exam test takers covered, company chairman (and the guy behind the original idea), Mike Ghaffary, tells us. To be clear, this latest version will be a separate app from the first one (called BarMax NY), but that’s just as much because of app size limits — these apps have so much information in them that they’re over 1 gigabyte in size.

As I said above, the California version has done very well. Ghaffary says that over 100 students have downloaded the app so far. That may seem like nothing, but remember, we’re talking $1,000 here. That means the app has rung up over $100,000 in sales — in case it’s not clear enough, that’s the same as a $0.99 app being sold 100,000 times. In fact, these 100+ sales have been enough to make the entire venture profitable, Ghaffary says.

And the students who have downloaded BarMax clearly like what they’re getting for their money: the app has a 4.5 star rating in the App Store (out of 5 stars). Why are they so happy with a $1,000 app? Because it’s anywhere from 1/3 to 1/4 of the price of its main competitor, BarBri, which has dominated the bar exam test prep space for decade. Clearly, they’re shaken up by BarMax’s entry into the field. And again, BarMax was just in California so far, with New York in the mix now, they’ll have a whole other reason to worry.

And BarMax isn’t stopping there. With the money they’re making, they’ll be extending to other states as well. Next in the pipeline are Illinois, Texas, and Florida, Ghaffary says. They’re also hard at work on an iPad-specific version of the app, built from the ground-up. This will take a while to build out, but Ghaffary expects huge things from it when it’s ready.

Ghaffary also notes that not only is Apple comfortable with the pricing of BarMax, “they love this thing.” The fact that they’ve featured it in the App Store in recent weeks seems to prove that. Last week, the $1,000 app was #6 in the What’s Hot area of the App Store, and it’s the #36 in top grossing apps, Ghaffary says. And that doesn’t count the thousands of users who are downloading the free ethics exam (a separate exam you have to take) version.

Some of you may have read about the incident of a kid accidentally buying the $1,000 app. Ghaffary says they were ready to step up with a refund, but Apple beat them to it.

BarMax NY was submitted late last week to the App Store for approval, look for it soon in the store. Meanwhile, you can find the CA version here — but don’t click to buy by accident.

These are the stories that make my job worth all the hassle and stress.

Two guys create a company called Precision Polling that allows quick and easy phone polls. We write a story in January saying it’s like Survey Monkey for phones – “Precision Polling Is A Survey Monkey For The Phone.” And a few months later – today actually – Survey Monkey acquires them.

The size of the transaction isn’t being disclosed, althought Survey Monkey CEO Dave Goldberg tells me it’s relatively small given the stage of the company, and it’s a stock and cash deal. cofounders Guarav Oberoi and Charles Groom will stay with the company and continue to work from Seattle.

Survey Monkey now has about 20 employees in Portland and another 30 in Palo Alto. We estimated 2009 revenues at around $45 million. Not bad for a service that let’s people easily create Internet, and now phone, surveys.

Both CNN Money and MarketWatch have added curated stock and finance tweets to their sites. But they aren’t just showing unfiltered tweets based on a query or hash tag – instead they’ve turned to StockTwits, presumably for more relevant data.

Messages only show up on StockTwits if you add a “$” before a stock symbol, and the company also carefully moderates messages and blocks users who tend to spam. The result is a fairly clear, mess-free stream of rumors and trade information that some obsessed trader types may somehow find useful. At the very least it’s entertaining to read things like “@bradybrown Dammit… I go to a meeting and $AAPL falls off a cliff!!! WTH???”

CNN has added a StockTwits widget to each stock summary page (example). MarketWatch is using the StockTwits trending tickers widget, which shows hot stocks (as in, what everyone’s talking about, not necessarily what’s moving up or down in price).