The New Razer Blade Is The Gaming Laptop To Beat

Earlier this month, Razer launched the second generation of its ultra-high-resolution gaming laptop, the Blade. I’ve since gotten a few weeks to play with it and can confirm that its hardware lives up to the crazy QHD+ screen.
Like its predecessor, this year’s Razer Blade packs in a 14-inch, 3200 x 1800 pixel screen. It looks pretty from most angles and can get quite bright, and has a touch screen if you’re one of the Windows 8 users who actually takes advantage of touch-friendly menus. Photos and video really pop on the display — it’s not quite 4K, but considering it’s already past the point of not being able to discern pixels at reasonable distances, that’s not something anyone is going to miss.
Of course, what really matters is whether or not the new Blade can actually handle gaming at decent settings at the panel’s native resolution. The jump up to the Geforce 970M chipset has served the Blade well — I was able to crank graphics up to Ultra on a number of games and maintain 45-60 frames per second, only dipping into settings to turn off anti-aliasing or the highest motion blur settings.

Razer Blade Razer Blade Razer Blade  View Slideshow Previous Next Exit
Between the new GPU and a mobile Core i7 typically reserved for larger laptops, the Blade is more than just a good gaming machine. If you’re the creative type, it’s also a great device for photo and video editing. Again, that screen really rounds out the package if you’re going to use it for either of these.
With the exception of the screen, you could say the same thing about the performance of most gaming laptops, as high-end hardware is a prerequisite for the category. So it’s worth talking about how the Blade manages to stand out in a space where most competitors share the same specs.
The case’s aluminum body is aggressive on the outside and classy on the inside. The keyboard, trackpad and speakers are laid out similarly to a MacBook Pro. There’s a comfortable amount of space between keys, and you won’t accidentally hit the power button when you were going for delete. The trackpad is exceptional for a Windows laptop, with gesture support that doesn’t lag or mistake down for up. The left and right mouse buttons below the trackpad don’t provide a very satisfying click, but if you’re gaming on this thing you’ll probably use a separate mouse anyway.
While the black aluminum looks great when you take it out of the box, oil from your hands really stands out across the Blade’s surface. It took us a few minutes to scrub down the laptop each time we wanted to take pristine photos, so some may find this annoying.
On the part of the outer shell that most people will see, you find two bumps and a bright green Razer logo. If you’re incredibly self-conscious, be aware that it’s going to draw attention among a see of flat surfaces and Apple logos. As with the interior of the laptop, be prepared to see fingerprints on the outside of the Blade in most lighting conditions.
On the bottom of the laptop, there are long rubber strips keeping the Blade slightly elevated. That leaves room for the two fans to get hot air away from the hardware. During regular use, the Blade is essentially silent — but crank up the graphics on a game from the last few years, and they can get rather loud. As with the “meh” speakers, I don’t expect many gamers to notice, since the kind of people who buy a $2,200 gaming laptop probably have decent headphones for 3D audio or multiplayer communication.
Gaming on a laptop has always involved a trade-off between performance and convenience. You could pick up a desktop PC that absolutely crushes the Blade in gaming performance for less, and among laptops, you could get a heavier, uglier beast with better specs and save a few hundred dollars. But some people care about performance and aesthetics. For those gamers, the Blade is the best compromise available.

By: Unknown On 11:34

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Salesforce Shares Spike To All-Time High After Meeting Street’s Profit Estimate, Boosting Its Full-Year Guidance

Sometimes when a company reports in-line earnings, its stock price takes a knuckle to the temple. Other times, if a firm meets market expectations, it gets a nice pop in value.
Enter Salesforce the Latter. Today after the bell, Salesforce reported $1.44 billion in fourth quarter revenue, and adjusted earnings per share of $0.14. Both were dead in-line with market expectations. The company’s shares are up more than 6 percent in after-hours trading.
The company is currently trading at an all-time high. Tomorrow morning should be a watershed moment for the SaaS firm.
Is strong guidance pushing Salesforce higher? To a certain extent. The company raised its guidance, but only to levels that match market demands. Salesforce expects $1.48 billion to $1.50 billion in current-quarter revenue. The market expects the company to post $1.5 billion, so, both teams are mostly in agreement. It’s the same story when it comes to the company’s fiscal 2016 (current calendar year), with the company anticipating $6.47 billion to $6.52 billion in top line. The market? $6.5 billion.
So, all things seems to be skating along quite nicely. Aside from its nice 26 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the last quarter and strong cash generation, Business Insider’s Julie Bort makes a decent point: “Analysts were actually looking for a giant leap in profits over the year ago quarter when it reported $0.07 EPS on $1.15 billion in revenue.” That makes Salesforce’s meets-expectations quarter a little more enticing.
Given the above, I presume that Dreamforce will be as insufferable as always, provided that you live in San Francisco.
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SHARES0Share0Tweet0Share0000AdvertisementAdvertisementCrunchBaseSalesforceFounded1999  OverviewSalesforce is an enterprise cloud computing company that provides business software on a subscription basis. The company is best known for its on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, and went public in June 2004. Salesforce has been a pioneer in developing enterprise platforms through its innovative AppExchange .

By: Unknown On 11:19

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AirPR Sells Its PR Marketplace To The CHR Group

AirPR, a startup promising a fresh approach to public relations, has sold its PR marketplace to marketing agency The CHR Group.
The marketplace first launched in 2012 and offered to connect startups with the right PR representation. (It opened more broadly the following year.) However, it’s not AirPR’s only product — the company also launched an analytics platform to track a PR campaign’s effectiveness, and CEO Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer told me that’s what his team will focus on moving forward.
“I’d say that the vision of the company has always been to leverage technology to increase PR performance,” he said.
The marketplace was the first piece of that vision, but Fouladgar-Mercer said he realized the company needed an analytics product, if only to measure effectiveness within the marketplace itself.
Ultimately, it seems Fouladgar-Mercer found the analytics side more promising — for one thing, he said AirPR encountered a number of customers “who wanted the analytics product but didn’t necessarily need the marketplace.” Plus, going after ongoing analytics customers probably makes more business sense than pursuing one-off marketplace users.
In terms of how this fits into the broader landscape of PR industry analytics and data, Fouladgar-Mercer argued that most existing products are focused on tracking all the times your company or product get mentioned in the press.
“The next step after that, where we really focus, is measuring the value of PR — the efficacy of your various PR efforts all the way down to traffic to your site and revenue to your business,” he said.
AirPR’s analytics customers include Rocket Fuel and Rackspace.
The company isn’t disclosing financial terms of the deal, but Fouladgar-Mercer said The CHR Group made the best of multiple offers, and that it will continue to operate and grow the PR Marketplace while the CHR team is “also scaling their own business and focusing on being a leading player across marketing services space.”

By: Unknown On 11:04

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The Web: Headliner Or TV’s Supporting Actor?

Editor’s note: Chuck Fishman is the media, entertainment and publishing director for Acquia. Super Bowl XLIX was the most-watched television show in U.S. history. It was also the most socialized Super Bowl ever measured, with 265 million Facebook posts, likes and comments, and more than 28 million global tweets. Today’s TV viewer doesn’t just watch TV anymore — they scroll through Twitter and Facebook in real time, watch YouTube Videos, send Snapchats and pin to Pinterest boards.Their attention span is limited as they consume across multiple channels simultaneously, and the experience they create by consuming in this way is multi-dimensional, providing a unique opportunity for brands to meet them wherever they are — online or off.Many media companies are taking advantage of this opportunity through multi-channel engagement and second-screen experiences. Shows like NBC’s The Voice have rolled out live-voting programs to engage viewers not just through television, but through social and text, too. The approach of connecting with viewers through activities such as live voting is called the “lean forward” model, and seeks to capture consumer attention wherever the consumer is, whatever platform they’re on.The USA Network’s Modern Family Live employs the lean forward method as well, offering viewers a chance to compete live with other fans of the show to score points, climb the Live leaderboard, and hopefully come out on top with a prize pack from the show.The “lean back” model seeks to hold fan engagement beyond the time constraints of regularly scheduled programming. The Walking Dead is a great example of this — they introduced a post-mortem talk show, “The Talking Dead,” to keep viewers engaged even after the show has ended.Better Call Saul, a Breaking Bad spin-off, has a web experience separate from the show for Saul’s “legal practice” and offers viewers the chance to sign up to get emails from Saul direct to their inbox. The show also offers viewers a live digital component tied to the broadcast called a “story sync” at BetterCallSaulStorySync.com.All of these tactics are pre-programmed ways for networks to engage with their audiences through conversations that are happening around their programming — before, during and after.As media companies experiment with capturing viewer attention on- and off-screen, they must engage fans across channels.But what about the moments when a trending topic emerges unexpectedly, and media companies are caught unprepared? Super Bowl XLIX’s “Left Shark” is a prime example — he completely stole the show during halftime with Katy Perry, and arguably came out the biggest star of the game behind MVP Tom Brady. Left Shark now has 20,000 followers on Twitter.Some brands have famously succeeded at this — like when Oreo capitalized on the blackout during Super Bowl XLVII with this memorable tweet and associated tagline: “You can still dunk in the dark.” Yet there is still much room for learning and improvement. As media companies experiment with capturing viewer attention on- and off-screen, they must engage fans across channels — via social media, in-app experiences, live participation, interactive portals and more. They need to recognize that the only way for this to work is to capture audiences where they already exist. Building out an approach to do that is no simple task.With digital-native companies like Netflix, Showtime, Hulu and Amazon getting into the content production game, engaging audiences is critical. Networks need to find ways to continue the conversation not just during scheduled programming, but in between shows. To date, networks’ attempts at creating second-screen experiences haven’t consistently taken off.Second screen action often happens on social channels that networks don’t own, and therefore can’t control, but they do have the ability to capture and amplify what’s happening.Tools like Spredfast “Conversations” can help networks target their viewers through the right social channels at the right time, increasing and improving engagement. Janrain, a customer identity platform that pulls profile data from sources like Facebook and Twitter, realized the market need to deliver and curate social media. The firm just bought Arktan to be able to provide the second-screen content to media clients; current Arktan customers include Sony Music, WWE, A&E and Turner Entertainment. Marrying the profile data from Janrain with the social content from Arktan in a single solution allows these media companies to identify the fans that talk the most about their entertainment properties and then elevate these fans and their conversations to the entire audience.Another way media companies are approaching the second screen is to create original and exclusive digital video content that stands apart from linear broadcast programming. There is now a dedicated week for digital video content creators to shop their digital-only programming to advertisers called the “NewFronts.” The NewFronts line-up for 2015 includes a roster of publishers that are now producing quite a volume of video content, including Time Inc., Conde Nast and The Wall Street Journal. This original content competes with the digital extensions of any broadcast content, making it even harder to capture the attention of those on mobile or desktop platforms.While media companies are trying to leverage the second screen to reach consumers on digital platforms, major advertisers are also leveraging the same approach with some success. During the Super Bowl, Volvo created a Twitter competition around game day ads. “The Greatest Interception Ever” garnered 15,000 mentions for the brand and seamlessly blended television with social for a cross-channel, second-screen success. McDonald’s also launched its “Pay with Lovin’” campaign, tweeting out giveaways for other brands after each of their television spots aired. Those giveaway tweets were retweeted 5,000-10,000 times each, some even in excess of 10,000 times.So the question remains — how do networks and other media companies build interactive web platforms for today’s viewers?For one, they can start by looking at where viewers are spending the majority of their second-screen time and what they’re doing there. A 2014 Nielsen Digital Consumer Report said that 84 percent of U.S. smartphone and tablet owners watch television with a second screen in hand. That means that if executed properly, there’s almost double the opportunity to reach viewers that there once was. Then, media companies can meet the consumer in those places, delivering a personalized, targeted message that is much more likely to resonate.As new media content players enter the field and viewer habits change, it’s an exciting time in the world of entertainment — and it’s also a high-stakes moment for media companies. Brands that create engaging, on-target digital experiences and engage — and win over — audiences across channels will come out as the winners.

By: Unknown On 10:49

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If You Think Tinder Needs More Cute Pets, BuzzFeed Has The App For You

Oh, BuzzFeed. Don’t ever change.
The company just released what it says is its second ever mobile app, called Cute Or Not. As you might expect from the name, you’re asked to rate pets as (duh) cute or not, through a Tinder-style swiping interface. You can also upload photos of your own pets to see how they’re rated by other app users.
If you’re confused about why the company is launching a silly app like this (especially while building out its editorial team by hiring respected journalists), BuzzFeed Vice President of Product Chris Johansen knows where you’re coming from — he just published a blog post titled “What The Hell Are We Doing With Apps?”
The gist of Johansen’s post is that it’s become “increasingly apparent that shoehorning all the ways to experience BuzzFeed into one app doesn’t make sense,” so we can expect more one-offs like this in the coming year.
“We don’t see it as ‘unbundling’ as much as focusing,” he writes. “Instead of having one baseline for all types of stories and media, we need to build apps that can excel at providing the best experience for each.” (And yes, that means releasing a more serious, news-focused app, as well.)
I found this particularly interesting since the first time BuzzFeed really made sense to me was when then-COO Jon Steinberg (now at Daily Mail) pitched it as a modern version of the newspaper bundle, only it puts cute animals (rather than a fancy real estate or travel section) next to its serious news coverage.
A BuzzFeed spokesperson also told me that thanks to the acquisition of startup GoPop, the company now has two main app teams, one focused on the core BuzzFeed app and the other on experimental products. Cute or Not was a collaboration between the editorial and experimental mobile teams based on a previous project.
Anyway. The animals are pretty cute.

By: Unknown On 10:34

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Watch Tech’s Takeover of San Francisco’s Office Space In This Visualization

Here’s a visualization of all the major commercial real estate deals involving the tech industry and San Francisco’s SOMA district over the past three years, thanks to Stamen Design and broker Kalin Kelly, who finds space on behalf of tech companies and nonprofits.
The point of this visualization is not a surprise. It’s known that there are lots of tech companies in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco.
“What I wanted to convey with this piece was this huge trend or movement south into SOMA. Tech makes up 60 percent of the office space in the neighborhood,” said Kelly, who predicts that companies will start moving into the West SOMA area between 5th and 10th street. “Maybe 5 percent of space is actually available. There’s not a lot there and it’s slim pickings for growing companies.”
Kelly and Stamen Design’s founder Eric Rodenbeck sit at the intersection of a complex debate about how excruciatingly limited space should be used between tech companies, non-profits and the arts. Rodenbeck helms one of the leading studios in the field of data visualization and is buying up buildings to permanently set aside for arts groups like Counterpulse through a project called CAST, or the Community Arts Stabilization Trust.
“If you don’t have galleries and space for performances, there will be no there there to it,” Rodenbeck said.
His effort has been accelerated and complicated by an influx of tech companies into the city, which have pushed commercial office space rents to around $67 per square foot for top Class A space. That’s pretty much equal to the dot-com bubble peak.
The cost pressures are so intense that a deal to build a mixed-use project with housing and an arts center in the Tenderloin fell apart this week after two years of effort between the developer and the city government.
As recently as five years ago, the technology industry’s center of gravity was down on the peninsula, somewhere around Palo Alto. That’s where it has mostly been for the last half-century, although there was a group of dot-com era startups that were centered in the city 15 years ago.
So how did this migration happen? Some of it is part of a nationwide trend, where urban city centers have seen a 0.5 percent increase in jobs per year between 2007 and 2011 while the job creation in the periphery has declined or stagnated, according to this study by City Observatory.
Some of the migration is specific to the Bay Area. Job growth in Silicon Valley and San Francisco has outpaced almost every other metropolitan area in the country. The cities in the South Bay are equally stressed for both office and residential space, with Mountain View entering tense negotiations with Google as it prepares to announce plans for a new headquarters this week.
The industry’s biggest successes founded a decade ago or more like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn are all headquartered on the peninsula. But after about 2006 when Twitter was founded, the major companies start — and grow up — in San Francisco. Voters also altered San Francisco’s tax structure to be more in line with what other comparable cities do by switching from a payroll tax to a gross receipts tax.
As you can see on the map, there were a bunch of mid-size office deals in early 2012 from Airbnb to Yelp and Yammer. But the big one was Zynga in late 2012, when it moved into its 668,000 square foot headquarters around Showplace Square.
The office space biggest deals in 2012 include Zynga, Salesforce and Square.
That was followed the next quarter by Salesforce in several deals across the northern part of SOMA and Square in mid-Market. Uber follows that with another lease for 88,000 square feet the following quarter and Google ends up being the biggest commercial real estate deal of 2013.
2013’s biggest deal is Google’s lease for 372,000 square feet up around the Embarcadero.
Between Google, Dropbox and Pinterest, 2014 was a total frenzy with more than a dozen major deals, all involving at least a hundred thousand square feet of space. Not only did Twitter finally move into its mid-Market headquarters, Uber straight up bought land for its headquarters while Salesforce set itself up to anchor the city’s tallest tower in 2017.
2014 almost broke office leasing records in the city with major deals from Salesforce, LinkedIn to Uber going all-in on buying up land to build its own headquarters in Mission Bay.
Kalin said that venture firms and technology companies need to be more active in real estate policy in the city, with rents often being the top line item for startups after talent. She pointed to a recent listing in South Park where a broker was fishing for a $120 per square foot rate, which is double the going rate in the city.
“If startup founders and VCs were more educated about the market, we wouldn’t be seeing $120 per square foot listings,” she said. “Tech companies don’t have to be rampant gentrifiers. They can also contribute to the civic vitality of the city and keep it a vibrant place.”
Indeed, the city is still in the process of planning changes to the “Central SOMA” area that may shift industrially-zoned land to office use and boost height limits, which has myriad consequences for tech companies and non-profits alike.

By: Unknown On 10:19

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Nickelodeon Unveils “Noggin,” A Mobile Subscription Service For Preschoolers Arriving In March

Nickelodeon Unveils “Noggin,” A Mobile Subscription Service For Preschoolers Arriving In March | Kiko Labs Debuts A Series Of “Brain-Training” Games For KidsBrowse more...nickelodeonNickelodeon To Debut A Subscription-Based Video Streaming Service This SpringThe Wii remote, used for the spraying of paintThe Internet during a recession: Welcome distraction or ruiner of dreams?Browse more...Nickelodeon Unveils “Noggin,” A Mobile Subscription Service For Preschoolers Arriving In March
Nickelodeon today unveiled its new mobile streaming subscription service called Noggin, which will be aimed at preschoolers and priced at $5.99 per month when it launches next month. Parent company Viacom had previously announced the forthcoming service’s arrival in January, noting also that it would not require households to have a cable or satellite TV subscription in order to access its content.
Nickelodeon says that’s it’s also in discussions with distributors about making Noggin available to authenticated pay TV subscribers as a “premium complement.”
The service will first arrive as a mobile application for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch beginning on March 5, the company says.
Details of the service were introduced at Nickelodeon’s annual upfront presentation today, where the company confirmed some of the initial content Noggin will include. Several of its current kids’ shows such as Blue’s Clues, Little Bear and Ni Hao, Kai-lan will be available at launch, as will animations featuring Nick’s preschool characters Moose and Zee who pop up in between TV shows on Nick’s TV channel, offering short-form educational games that help kids learn letters, shapes, matching and more.
The company says that the streaming service will offer other long and short-form content, too, including titles like Allegra’s Window, Blue’s Room, Franklin and Friends, Gullah Gullah Island, Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends, Oswald, Pocoyo, Robot and Monster and The Upside Down Show.
If some of those shows don’t ring a bell – even though you’re a parent of a preschooler – it’s because they’re not among some of Nick Jr’s more popular programs, like Dora, Bubble Guppies, Umizoomi, Wallykazam!, or PAW Patrol. None of those top shows seem to be included in this new over-the-top subscription option.
Instead, it sounds like Nick wants to have the best of both worlds – it wants to keep current distributors happy while also tapping into the potential for additional revenue streams by targeting cord cutters with a paid mobile service. In fact, the company states that Noggin’s library will remain “separate and distinct” from Nickelodeon’s preschool content on its “existing distribution platforms.”
Or, in other words, the good stuff is elsewhere. Hopefully kids aren’t too picky about their favorite characters.
Meanwhile, the current Nick Jr. mobile app will remain intact following Noggin’s launch. This app is a “TV Everywhere” platform that offers both a live feed of current Nick Jr. TV shows and on-demand episodes available to pay TV subscribers. It’s also where you’ll find the network’s most watched and most loved preschooler shows.

By: Unknown On 10:04

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Chat App Viber Opens Its Games Service To All Users Worldwide

Messaging app Viber has quietly made its games service available for all users worldwide following a two month pilot in five countries.
The company, which was bought by Rakuten for $900 million a year ago, initially launched three games for users in Belarus, Malaysia, Israel, Singapore and Ukraine in December 2014. The titles — Viber Candy Mania, Wild Luck Casino and Viber Pop, links to which popped up in my app today — are standalone apps that link up to Viber to let users share scores, battle and generally interact with friends on the service.
The theory is that they can increase some users’ engagement with the service, and — most importantly for Viber — make money via in-app purchases for power-ups, additional lives, etc.
Viber CEO Talmon Marcos told TechCrunch that he is excited to bring the titles to more of Viber’s international userbase, which currently stands at 236 million active monthly users. Marcos declined to provide specific details about the pilot, but he did say that initial engagement data was “encouraging”.
Marcos added that Viber users can expect to see new games arrive soon, but for now the company isn’t giving away precise details of its plans.

Viber will be hoping that games can become a significant revenue stream in the same way that they have for other messaging app companies. In-app purchases from games account for more than half of Line’s revenue, while Tencent has seen its mobile revenues surge thanks to WeChat’s games catalog. Games have also helped Kakao Talk, which is dominant in Korea but has a weak global footprint, turn in profit since 2013.
Gaming harbors much promise for messaging app services, but there is some caution to be noted. Naver, Line’s parent company, missed its most recent earnings expectations after several key games on the Line platform underperformed. Line has since spread its focus and doubled down on its online-to-offline services with a new investment fund, and a series of initiatives including a Tokyo taxi service, a grocery delivery pilot and a TV service.
Viber currently draws revenue from games, sticker sales and its Skype-like international calling plans. Last year, it introduced a social network-like platform for public figures which could potentially make money further down the line.
One more certain expectation is that it will introduce commerce services, powered by Rakuten’s business, sometime this year. Viber’s userbase has grown steadily — it added 17 million monthly active users over the last quarter — but the service continues to run at a deficit.

By: Unknown On 09:49

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LocoMotive Labs, Maker Of Todo Math App, Raises $4M To Expand In Asia

Math can be fun, but try telling that to a small child stuck behind a desk doing endless drills and worksheets. Founded by a former game developer, startup LocoMotive Labs’ mission is to make learning mathematic basics entertaining for all children, no matter their learning styles.
Its flagship app, Todo Math, has already been downloaded 1.1 million times, and now the Berkeley, California company has picked up a series A of $4 million to expand into Asia.
The round was led by Softbank Ventures Korea and TAL Education Group and brings LocoMotive Labs’ total raised so far to $5.15 million. Returning investors K9 Ventures, Kapor Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund, Joe Gleberman, D3Jubilee, and Jerry Colonna also participated.
LocoMotive Labs will first focus on China because the country currently accounts for half of its new users. Its apps have already been downloaded 350,000 times there.
Founder Sooinn Lee was inspired to launch LocoMotive Labs by her son, who has special needs. After he was born, Lee and her husband, also a game developer, began to brainstorm ways to keep kids like him motivated once they start school. Todo Math and other LocoMotive Labs apps, however, are made for all kids between the ages of three and eight, not just those with learning disabilities.
“We come from Korea, where academic environment is particularly competitive and intense,” Lee says. “We thought, how could our son have a good experience in his early academic career? That was our motivation to start this company.”
LocoMotive Labs’ goal is to instill confidence in kids who might struggle with traditional exercises and worksheets.
“If they feel like failures at an early age, it gives them a negative self-concept. If they keep failing, they think ‘I’m done. I don’t like math,'” Lee says.
A Friendlier Alternative To Cram Schools
While there are many other math-learning apps available, Lee thinks of programs like Kumon as LocoMotive Labs’ main competition. Founded in 1958 in Japan, Kumon is designed to reinforce math and reading concepts with a series of worksheets and teaching sessions. After school programs like Kumon (often referred to as “cram schools”) are extremely popular in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other Asian countries (and also operate in the U.S.). But Lee says that paper worksheets aren’t the best way for very young children to learn math basics.
“As a game designer, I believe we can solve it in a much better way in the mobile era. Three year olds can touch and swipe before they even hold a pen,” she says, adding “games are designed for users. If they don’t want to play it anymore, it’s done. They give it a F and it’s done.”
To keep children engaged, Todo Math uses an exploration game with treasure boxes and other rewards that kids can unlock as they solve different levels of problems. LocoMotive Labs’ follows Universal Design for Learning concepts, which encourages educators to take different learning styles into account when designing teaching materials.
For example, children in the age group targeted by Todo Math are at widely different stages of motor development, so kids can either write or drag-and-drop numbers. The app also lets kids decide how math problems are presented. They can pick a word problem, play with tally sticks, or move around blocks. As they use the app, it will begin to tailor lessons to their learning preferences.
Bringing American Education To Asia
Todo Math is aligned with U.S. Common Core standards, but Lee says that early math curriculums followed by different countries aren’t too different (for example, Common Core has similarities with math education in Singapore and Japan). The process of localizing LocoMotive Labs’ apps for new markets will focus mainly on changing cultural references in word problems.
The bigger challenge of expanding into Asia, Lee says, is convincing educators and parents that mobile apps are a suitable alternative to paper worksheets and flashcards. Todo Math is already accepted by teachers in the U.S.—in fact, it is currently used in about 1,000 classrooms. Lee hopes that the program’s adaptability—and the fact that it keeps children engaged—will convince parents to use it instead of sending their kids to cram school.
One of LocoMotive Labs’ goals for its international expansion is to bring U.S. attitudes toward learning to Asia, where pedagogy often centers on rote memorization. While Lee acknowledges that the effectiveness of Common Core and other U.S. educational programs are widely debated, she says that Asian students can benefit from their focus on developing critical thinking skills.
“I know Asian parents and governments are still skeptical, but kids are learning in a new era. Schools still focus on memorization, but children can use tools like Google Search and access a larger way of learning beyond just memorizing answers,” she says.
 

By: Unknown On 09:34

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Samsung Filed The Most Patents In Europe In 2014, U.S. Led The Field By Country

While IBM is number-one when it comes to the number of patents filed in the U.S., in Europe, Samsung is leading the pack. Today, the European Patent Office released 2014 figures for patents filed in the region, which showed that the Korean company, and currently the world’s largest smartphone maker, filed 2,541 for the full year. In terms of countries, the U.S. dominated the list, with 71,700, or 26% of all patents, filed.
Overall, the number of patents filed in Europe grew by 3.1% in 2014, with more than 274,000 filings, a record number according to the EPO. In other words: in keeping with the expensive, lengthy, and high-profile legal fights that have arisen out of intellectual property disputes — and despite the many flaws in the system that need to be fixed (patent trolls being one of the biggest) — patents continue to be a power lever for companies trying to protect their businesses from competitors.
And yet patents are not the whole story. Apple, currently the world’s biggest company by profits, filed only 294 patents in Europe — like IBM, putting more of its emphasis on filing in the U.S. market.
The bigger picture for Europe is that it’s continuing to hold parity with the U.S. when it comes to patent creation (and potential enforcement), with patent filings at the EPO covering 38 member states.
“Demand for patent protection in Europe has been growing steadily, and is up for the fifth year in a row,” said EPO president Benoȋt Battistelli in a statement. “Europe continues to strengthen its key role as a global hub of technology and innovation for a growing number of companies from around the world. The rise in patent filings originating from Europe underlines the importance of patent-intensive industries as a solid base for the European knowledge economy: They foster Europe’s competitiveness, economic strength and employment.”
For the record, the U.S. saw just over 300,000 patent filings last year.
Here is a break-down of some of the top-line numbers in the report:
U.S. companies: Qualcomm on top
Breaking out U.S. only companies from the bigger list, it’s not IBM but Qualcomm that leads with the most patents, with 1,459 filed. The semiconductor giant is followed by Intel and United Technologies, the industrial conglomerate that makes everything from Black Hawk helicopters to fuel cells. Microsoft, Google and Apple rank respectively at 4th, 9th and 17th among U.S. companies filing in Europe.

Hardware leads the pack
In the EPO, it looks like the companies focusing on hardware are filing more patents in the region, with Samsung’s top position followed by European companies Philips and Siemens. LG and Huawei round out the top five. Interestingly, since Nokia has sold off the biggest part of its business — handsets — to Microsoft, the company has been focusing more on its intellectual property position, and that is being played out in the EPO, too. The company filed just over 1,000 patents last year.

As the center of the tech world, it’s unsurprising that the U.S. vastly outweighs every other country when it comes to overall patent filings. The second-largest country, the EPO says, is Japan with 48,400 patents, followed by Germany and China. Interestingly, China is currently rising the fastest of all of these, up 18.2% over a year ago.

Medical tech leads ahead of tech
Medical technology was the biggest single category for patents filed at the EPO in 2014, with 11,000 patents. However, if you combine digital communication with computer technology — two distinct categories but both falling under IT in a more general sense — these well exceed medical, with almost 20,000 patents filed between them.

By: Unknown On 09:19

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SamaUSA Rethinks Workforce Development For The Digital Age in East Palo Alto

Nestled between Silicon Valley suburbs with median multi-million dollar home prices, East Palo Alto is a 28,000-person community that can feel like it has been left by the wayside of the current tech boom. One-third of its adult residents don’t have more than a high school diploma and its unemployment rate is about double of what the neighboring communities see.
Some of this is the result of intentional and unjust policies and practices from more than a half-century ago, that I covered in this long piece last month. They were never really acknowledged and East Palo Alto was left out of the transformations that gave way to PC companies in the 1980s and then the Internet in the 1990s and beyond. Despite this, the city has a long history of political organizing.
Now as Facebook’s new Frank Gehry-designed headquarters and slow-growth policies from adjacent Palo Alto continue to put affordability pressures on the city, there’s this question of how to include this historically black, and now largely Latino, community in the current boom.
SamaUSA is trying to rethink workforce development for the digital age in the U.S. It’s an arm of the Sama Group, which was founded by social entrepreneur Leila Janah to connect people in Sub-Saharan African and South Asian communities to basic online work.
Two years ago, they started bringing their program to communities in the United States, starting with San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood. They have a program that teaches digital skills like social media marketing, how to use platforms like Elance and Odesk and job-hunting basics like doing resumes and cover letters.
They’re starting their first 10-week class in East Palo Alto this month, in partnership with JobTrain, a non-profit that’s been in the city’s surrounding San Mateo County for about 50 years.
On the surface, this sounds simple. But half of the program’s applicants don’t own a personal computer or laptop. Almost one-third of their applicants don’t have Internet at home — in Silicon Valley of all places.
“When we started, we couldn’t find anything that was really similar,” said Tess Posner, who is the managing director of SamaUSA.
There are lots of programs that reach out to and train people from structurally disadvantaged communities around the Bay Area, but they have different target demographics. YearUp, for example, trains young people in their teens and twenties who might not have had access to college or four-year universities to intern at tech companies like Yelp and Salesforce. Then there are lots of youth-focused coding projects like East Palo Alto’s Streetcode Academy.
SamaUSA’s program spans a wider age range. Three-fourths of their applicants are currently unemployed, with most of them suffering from chronic unemployment. Three-fourths of them live in households that earn less than $24,000 a year.
“Without exposure, people don’t know how to take advantage of the opportunities you see across the Bay Area,” said Posner, who worked on workforce development in the East Bay before joining SamaUSA.
At SamaUSA’s other sites in the Bay Area and rural areas across the country, the non-profit says its graduates have gotten online work contracts earning about $11.94 an hour in jobs from administrative assistance to data entry. Posner says their program costs about $3,000 per student and they have a goal of training 25,000 people in online work.
“In order to do that, we have to build something that’s highly scalable,” Posner said. SamaUSA’s pilots have been funded so far by donations from JPMorgan Chase.
“We want to provide that bridge between our students and tech companies that are right there,” Posner said.

By: Unknown On 09:04

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500 Startups Launches A $15M Korea-Focused Fund Called 500 Kimchi

With its extremely high smartphone penetration rate, speedy broadband connections, and advanced economy, South Korea is one of the richest breeding grounds for tech innovation in Asia. 500 Startups, which has already made several investments in Korean companies, is digging deeper into the country with the launch of 500 Kimchi, a $15 million fund that will focus on mobile companies.
500 Kimchi will be managed by investing partner Tim Chae, who says the fund’s goal is to not only provide promising startups with seed funding, but also bring them to the attention of other Silicon Valley investors.
“Korea is something we have been working on for a bit. Our first investment was in 2012 with a company called Shakr,” Chae told TechCrunch. “Korea is exciting is us because we feel like it is a perfect storm. It’s a developed economy and people spend a lot of money. Its mobile infrastructure and culture is second to none in the world.”
Korean startups also have the benefit of strong financial support from the government. The Korean government has said it plans to put $3.7 billion into fledging tech companies through grants and other programs over the next three years, which makes it the country that offers the most per-capita backing to startups in the world.
Chae points out that even though South Korea is a relatively small country with a population of just 50 million, its startup industry has already spawned several unicorns, including online retailer Coupang and messaging app Kakao. Both managed to achieve billion-dollar valuations even though they operate almost solely in Korea.
Other startups, however, are eyeing expansion into foreign countries. Chae says 500 Kimchi’s investment strategy will take a two-pronged approach. It will be a co-investor in seed rounds for mobile companies that plan to focus specifically on Korea, while startups that plan to go global will be brought into 500 Startup’s accelerator program in Silicon Valley.
“There are a lot of different sectors that have not been taken advantage of. Companies are being built in Korea with technology that is not being tried in the U.S. because of the sheer advances in bandwidth speed,” says Chae.
One example is a company in 500 Startups’ currently accelerator program called Spika, the maker of ShareON. The Android and iOS app lets users share files between devices without any downloads or lag time. For example, if one user has a 10GB movie file, they can instantly stream it to another device.
Products like ShareON are possible because bandwidth speeds are two to three times faster in South Korea than in the U.S., but they have potential to introduce their technology to other markets as local Internet infrastructure catches up.
Other South Korean companies 500 Startups has invested in include Between, Cream, Plugger, and Tapastic.
One of the challenges facing South Korean startups is the current lack of exit opportunities, but Chae hopes that will change as more Silicon Valley investors and companies began paying attention to the ecosystem.
“One of our initiatives is geared toward increasing awareness for Silicon Valley companies that are potential acquirers and bringing them to Korea,” he says.
500 Kimchi is the latest microfund launched by 500 Startups to focus on one country. 500 TukTuks, a $10 million fund for Thailand, was will close soon. Chae says 500 Startups may launch other country-specific funds over the next couple of years.

By: Unknown On 08:34

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Google Merges European Operations To Square Up To Regulators And Rivals

United we stand, divided we fall. So goes the old saying that search and mobile giant Google is now taking to heart in Europe, as it faces off with regulators and rivals in the region. The company is merging its European regional and product operations into a single unit, to be led by Matt Brittin, formerly the head of Google’s operations in northern and western Europe.
Carlo D’Asaro Biondo, who had been in charge of southern and eastern European business, will now lead on commercial partnerships across the bigger region.
The announcement was made at a presentation in Brussels, home of the European Commission, and one big sign of where Google is hoping the news will have an impact. The FT also reported news of the change yesterday evening.
The changes will help Google manage pan-European operations more easily — providing single points of contact for business partners doing business with Google in Europe — but it will also mean that Google will be able to provide more unified resources to cope with country-specific problems that come up on the regulatory front.
For its part, Google is also presenting the move as its own way of endorsing the Commission’s bigger push for single-market regulations, which essentially means a set of rules and administrative practices that will be consistent across all of Europe.
The company followed up moments ago with a blog post presenting the soft diplomacy side of the news. It is committing €25 million for digital skills training for small businesses, covering 1 million people, by 2016. “We’ll build a Europe-wide training hub to support businesses anywhere in Europe to get training online,” Brittin writes. There is also a video showcasing some of the inspiring ways that Google has already done this. We can’t bring ourselves to put it in here as it’s too much of a blatant commercial.
The split operations were first put in place years ago by former Google executive Nikesh Arora in a very Machiavellian move: the idea had been to divide operations so that regions would compete against each other more keenly, according to the FT.
These days, Google’s bigger competitive threat is coming in another form: regulators are going after the company from a number of angles, being propelled in part by an angry mob of businesses and consumers.
The list of challenges that Google is facing in Europe include accusations of Google being anticompetitive both in search; and in mobile (Android is by far the biggest mobile operating system, with share of over 80% in some markets). The company is also being probed on how it handles privacy issues — with new issues in data protection seemingly growing by the day.
The search case is particularly thorny one. Google dominates search in Europe, and it has been the subject of a long-running antitrust case lobbied by businesses that claim that Google has created an unfair advantage for itself in different categories of “vertical search” — that is, searches for results in specific areas like travel and news. Last year it looked like Google might actually get off the hook with relatively little impact, although the case then got reopened with deeper scrutiny.
Sources tell us that the latest on this is that Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt will be meeting with Margrethe Vestager, the new antitrust commissioner, next week to discuss the case.
On the side of more commercial problems, Google itself is not immune to encroaching competition, even as it dominates in search and mobile. One big area where it has fallen flat has been social, and while no one may ever beat Google at search, you have to wonder if at some point the goal posts may simply just change.
“Just talking with publishers the other day, many get most of their traffic from Facebook or Twitter, not from Google,” Brittin told the Financial Times. “We’re in a world where the dynamics and competition is speeding up.”
Put simply, bringing the company together in Europe is about presenting a unified front.
Search de-listing of personal data
One of the biggest areas where Google has been coming under pressure in Europe is last year’s so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling by Europe’s top court, the ECJ.
As background, the court determined that search engines are data controllers and therefore subject to European data protection legislation. Specifically it requires search engines to process URL de-listing requests from private individuals, when incorrect, out of date or no longer relevant information is foregrounded in the search results that are served for their name.
Google holds a massively dominant share of the search market in Europe so the ECJ’s ruling weighs most heavily on its business. Last year it set up an online form where individuals can make de-listing requests but it has continued lobbying hard against the ruling, characterizing it as ‘censorship’.
One complication is that the ruling requires search engines to weigh up and balance any public interest before agreeing to a de-listing request, so complex value judgements are required. This means case by case processing of individual requests — rather than the kind of algorithmic automation Google is so fond of.
The principle of a search de-listing right for personal data in Europe stands in obvious opposition to Google’s general business imperatives to gather as much data as possible on its users so it can improve advert targeting. But there’s an added fight for Google with European search de-listing because its current implementation of the law goes against the guidelines of Europe’s data protection watchdogs.
They want Google to de-list across the Google.com domain, not just the European sub-domains as it currently is. And, earlier this month, France’s national data protection authority told TechCrunch it will be requesting that Google implements worldwide de-listing — noting that it has powers to impose penalties for non-compliance by Google.
The European Commission is also the process of updating and harmonizing its data protection rules — with a new data protection directive being negotiated. The new rules, which will bring strictly penalties for non-compliance, are expected to be agreed by the end of this year.

By: Unknown On 08:19

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Opendoor Gets Another $20 Million To Simplify The Process Of Selling Your Home

It’s only been about three months since home-sales marketplace Opendoor has been open for business, but it is already making its market on residential real estate in Phoenix, Ariz. As it looks to expand into two new cities, the company has raised $20 million in additional funding led by GGV Capital.
Opendoor was founded by Khosla Ventures VC and former Square COO Keith Rabois and Movity founder Eric Wu to change the way real estate is bought and sold. For homeowners looking to move out of their homes, Opendoor offers a simplicity and speed of sale that is more or less unprecedented in the residential real estate market today.
By applying a certain amount of data analytics, Opendoor can very accurately determine the fair value of a home and quickly make an offer on it. That reduces the amount of time its takes to close a deal, while reducing the uncertainty associated with selling a house on the open market.
The average property sits on the market for more than three months (103 days!) waiting to be bought, and a number of home sales either fall through or get pulled from the market due to lukewarm interest. That’s not an issue with Opendoor, which can make an offer and purchase a home within three days of the seller entering information into its system.
Once that deal is completed, Opendoor handles all the traditional paperwork, inspections, and repairs necessary to make a home ready to be purchased. It goes through the process of getting a home sale-ready, lists it on various real estate sites, and deals with the time it takes to sell the property.
In its launch market of Phoenix, where Opendoor has been operating since December, the company is purchasing about one home each day, according to Wu. But it’s looking to expand quickly into two more markets — Portland, Ore. and Dallas, Texas.
To do so, it’s raised $20 million in a new round of funding led by GGV Capital, along with Khosla Ventures, the Mack Family, Thrive Capital, Caffeinated Capital, Sherpa Ventures, Haystack Fund, and Instagram’s Kevin Systrom. That financing follows a star-studded Series A round, which included too many big investors to name them all again here. GGV Capital managing partner Glenn Solomon, who has led investments in Pandora, Successfactors, Nimble Storage, Zendesk, Domo, and Square for GGV, will be joining Opendoor’s board of directors.
For Solomon, the investment was all about backing a “great team” that is tapping into a huge market opportunity. After all, he said, about 5 million homes change hands in the U.S. each year — but it’s not a great experience for anyone involved today.
“Anyone who sells a home knows that it’s a process that’s fraught with risk and there’s a high rate of homes that don’t even sell,” Solomon told me by phone.
But making things easier for sellers is just one part of the problem. While Opendoor is focused primarily on them currently, it seems clear that the company will eventually look more like a true marketplace, where buyers can also make purchases directly from it.
In the same way it’s built tools to provide more price transparency to sellers, Opendoor could make the buying process a lot more efficient. Doing so could save all sides a lot of time, and most importantly, save them money.
Of course, it will take them some time to get there. In the meantime, the company has a business that appears to be working, and plenty of money in the bank. There are worse situations to be in.
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SHARES0Share0Tweet0Share0000AdvertisementAdvertisementCrunchBaseOpendoor  OverviewWhy Opendoor?Whether you're accepting a new job, finding space for a growing family, or looking for something smaller, selling your home shouldn't be painful and time consuming. They are here to help.LocationSan Francisco, CaliforniaCategoriesReal EstateFoundersKeith Rabois.

By: Unknown On 08:04

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Google Starts Testing Mobile App Ads In The Google Play Store

Google announced this morning the launch of a pilot program which will allow mobile application developers the ability to advertise their apps directly within the Google Play store. These ads, which will initially be made available to advertisers already running search ads on Google.com, will also only be shown against Google Play search results. That is, they won’t just randomly appear in other sections of Google Play, like category pages or stuffed in the middle of Google Play’s Top Charts.
Instead, advertisers will be able to bid on ads that match a particular search query, like “hotel apps” or “coupon app,” for example.
Their mobile application would then appear at the top of the ranked search results returned from Google Play’s store, where it looks exactly the same as any other result except for the fact that it will be flagged as an ad via the small “Ad” button that appears under the app’s name.
As the company explains in a blog post this morning, its 100 billion-plus Google.com searches each month have improved content discovery for users and advertisers alike and now the search ads on Google Play will do the same for app publishers.
Specifically, the program will better allow newcomers and smaller developers the chance to compete and gain visibility in an app store that Google says now tops over a million applications.
Search Advertisers Are First To Test
There are few details being offered as to the program specifics at this time, because it’s only now entering pilot testing. For the time being, the ads will run just in the latest version of the Play Store mobile app on Android smartphones, not on tablets, or on the mobile or desktop web. And only a small number of consumers will actually see the new ads at first.
We understand that potential advertisers were identified automatically and invited to participate in the program via email, and those who chose to do so aren’t actually paying for their ads at this time. Rather, the pilot period is meant to allow the app publishers and users alike a time to test and provide feedback on a number of things, including the mix of ads, how keywords are targeted, how many ads are shown in the search results, and to what extent these Google Play ad campaigns will influence the Top Charts’ algorithms in the future, among other things.

That latter item will require careful attention, as an app maker buying app store ads could very easily boost their downloads at a rate that would otherwise push their app to the top of the  store’s charts. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean their app had grown popular with users, but rather that they had paid for the exposure and clicks. It will also be interesting to see how Google addresses click fraud in the new store, as competitors may try to eat through each other’s ad budgets.
We also understand that there’s no way for advertisers or users to opt into these trials at present. Google isn’t saying how long the program will be in pilot testing, nor will it give a broader time-table for a public beta or public launch. It also won’t confirm how many advertisers are in the initial pilot.
In addition, beyond being the means of selecting advertisers for the trials, there’s no connection between search ads on Google.com and those on Google Play at this time. It’s unclear if in the future, however, current search advertisers will be given preference to join the Google Play advertising program when it opens up to more participants.
Google’s Role In The Mobile App Age
It’s not surprising that Google is introducing mobile app ads into its app store ahead of rival Apple, given the nature of its core business. It’s actually a logical next step for the company in a world that’s increasingly mobile. After all, the move to mobile is becoming a threat to Google’s advertising business. According to data from Flurry, only 14% of the time users spent on their smartphones was in the web browser in 2014, down from 20% the year prior. And the web is where Google’s ads have traditionally appeared.
A number of tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo, as well as Google, have been targeting their mobile user base with ads that prompt users to download apps or re-engage with apps they already have installed. But Google will now be the first major OS maker that actually allows app publishers to advertise directly in its app store search results.

That being said, it’s worth noting that Apple, too, has experimented to some extent in this area. It has tested “ads” – if you can call them that – that appear against select search terms in its iOS App Store. These ads in the past have promoted Apple’s own products or features. For example, a search for “music” once showed a search result card for iTunes Radio before other results, and today a search for “maps” on the App Store points to Apple’s editorial collection of map apps. While not the same kind of “ads” that Google is rolling out, it’s clear that Apple also understands the value of being in that first position.
The question is now whether or not they’d also be willing to sell access to that spot, like Google is.
Also of interest, Google used today’s announcement of the Google Play ad pilot to offer an update on its payouts to Android app developers. At its I/O conference last year, Google said it has paid out $5 billion to app developers in year prior. Today, it says that number has climbed to $7 billion. While that’s still short of the $10 billion Apple recently announced, it does show that Google is closing the gap quickly when it comes to revenue.

By: Unknown On 07:49

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Docker Launches Its Container Orchestration Tools

Last December, Docker previewed its plans to launch a comprehensive set of orchestration tools for its container platform and, starting today, developers will be able to download and use all of these tools.
Together, Docker Machine, Swarm and Compose are meant to make it easier for developers and system administrators to create and manage their portable applications on top of the Docker platform.
Docker Machine, for example, allows developers to quickly spin up Docker on a variety of cloud platforms, including Amazon EC2, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, RackSpace Cloud and most of VMware’s platforms. Getting started with Docker on those platforms doesn’t take more than a single command. Without Machine, this whole process would have involved a number of manual steps.
Similarly, Docker Swarm provides developers with a native clustering and scheduling solution. The company argues that this allows developers to scale a Docker-based application “with the application development life cycle from one laptop to spanning hundreds of hosts in production.” Swarm supports existing host discovery solutions like ZooKeeper, Consul and etcd. It also integrates with other third-party orchestration tools, including Mesosphere. Support for Amazon’s recently launched EC2 Container Service, IBM Bluemix, Microsoft Azure and Joyent Smart Data Center is coming soon.
When Docker first announced this set of tools, a number of critics argued that it was building tools that compete with existing companies in its ecosystem.
“The truth is, Docker as a platform is about enabling the ecosystem because its core value is in application portability,” Docker’s VP of Marketing David Messina told me, adding that Docker’s list of partners really speaks for itself. He also noted that nobody is forced to use Docker’s own tools. Its APIs are open, after all, and Docker’s own orchestration tools use them, too. The company likes to call this approach “batteries included but swappable.”
Featured Image: Ivan Mlinaric/Flickr UNDER A CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)0
SHARES0Share0Tweet0Share0000AdvertisementAdvertisementCrunchBaseDockerFounded2010  OverviewDocker is an open-source engine, launched and maintained by dotCloud, that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere.Docker containers can encapsulate any payload, and will run consistently on and between virtually any server. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop will run at scale, …LocationSan Francisco, CaliforniaCategoriesDevelopment Platforms.

By: Unknown On 07:34

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Vurb Is Crazy Enough To Fight Google

AdvertisementGoogle Search was not built for mobile. It’s all about lists of web pages, but the small screen is ruled by apps. That’s why if Google launched today, it might look a lot like Vurb…which did launch today.
Vurb is a mobile search engine that pulls info from partnered apps like Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes, and deeplinks you out to apps like Uber and Google Maps. Rather than send you clicking through links, it cobbles together critical content and contextual suggestions into saveable, shareable, actionable cards. You could plan a whole dinner-and-a-movie night without ever typing or going back to your homescreen.
Whether challenging Google on search is brave or just delusional, only time will tell, but Vurb is surely one of the most audacious startups I’ve seen lately. And since investors love big, risky bets, Vurb has $10 million in firepower Redpoint Ventures and some A-List angels.
What’s encouraging is that Vurb manifests in the West a trend that China is already demonstrating: the future of mobile lies in uniting fragmented functionality from across the app ecosystem into a centralized hub.

A Portal For Mobile
On the web, Google’s conduit model worked fine. Everything was an indexable website that served many functions, and Google could use PageRank to deliver you to the right one. It could show a list of links, and let you pop open multiple browser tabs you could quickly switch between or even show simultaneously. It was easy to multi-task. It searched for information, you aggregated the answers.
Mobile is different. Information is trapped in siloed, single-purpose apps and walled gardens. Everything is being unbundled. App discovery in the crowded stores is a mess. Opening multiple tabs is a chore and so is switching between them since you can only view one at a time. Multi-tasking is clumsy.
All the app-switching you have to do to plan a night out across fragmented, unbundled mobile apps

That’s why Vurb wants to aggregate the answers for you.
It has some strong role models out east. As Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans detailed, Chinese apps WeChat (social) and Baidu Maps (location) are thriving by “bundling multiple services into one app”.
Evans explains that “This changes the layer of aggregation” from a phone’s home screen launcher to a single, multi-purpose app. This relieves users from discovering, downloading, and opening every app they need information from.
Vurb wants to be the portal for mobile. Yahoo and AOL reborn to return order to the appsphere after The Great Unbundling.
 0 To 100 Real Quick
Vurb’s ascent to become a legitimate challenger to Google search started in 2011. By 2013 it had raised around $2 million from Charles River Ventures, CrunchFund (started by TechCrunch’s founder), Atlas Venture, and DCVC, plus angels like Max Levchin (PayPal, Drew Houston (Dropbox), and Naval Ravikant (AngelList). When Vurb came out of stealth, it took the grand prize in the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Battlefield 2014. That clout helped it raise $8 million more led by Redpoint.
Since then, Vurb’s been testing and pulling in users of its waitlist. To focus on mobile, the startup scrapped its full-featured web version. “Mobile search is totally wide open, because everything is gravitating towards usage of apps” Vurb founder Bobby Lo tells me. His goal became to determine “How do we create a more cohesive mobile experience around finding, planning, and sharing information?”
The Vurb team, including CEO Bobby Lo (second from left) celebrate their TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 2014 win
Google has it’s own plan fix search, but it has to carry all its historic design baggage. So rather than completely redesign search, it’s focused on augmenting it with contextual suggestions through Google Now. For pulling in immutable facts and actionable info from your other Google products like Gmail and Calendar, Now works quite well.
But Google Now is editorially driven, so it will take time for its humans to learn how to deliver content about the long-tail of the web. It also doesn’t address saving and sharing searches. While Googling from home felt lack a natural solo experience, but on the go with mobile, search needs to be social.
Unlocking Mobile Search For Everyone
Today, Vurb opens its iOS app to the world with explicit support for searches of Places (restaurants, landmarks, stores), Movies, TV, Video, and Music. Events and shopping are two more verticals it plans to attack soon.
Here’s a run-through of what you can do with Vurb.

From the homescreen, you can search across all Vurb’s verticals or swipe to start browsing in a specific one. Say you searched for a movie like 50 Shades Of Grey. In-line on the search results, you’ll see IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and MetaCritic scores trying to warn you the film is awful. Tap through anyways, and you’ll get a full, rich media card with details about the film, showtimes, recent news, cast and crew info, video trailers, reviews, and options to deeplink to pages about the movie in other apps.
Tap through showtimes and you can bounce into Fandango to buy tickets. Once Vurb knows what theater you’re going to, it can contextually offer up suggestions of nearby restaurants, from fancy-pants bistros to holes-in-the-wall. Each eatery’s Vurb card can show reviews, an option to book through OpenTable, and deeplinks into Uber and Lyft to instantly call you a ride with the restaurant pre-populated as the destination.

All along the way, any card you come across can be saved into a “Deck” for later reference, and each card or deck can be quickly shared with friends. A swipe left reveals a friend selector that delivers mobile web links to the card or deck, plus an in-line image of it, so Vurb helps people without its app too.
Recipients can even like or comment on plans sent to them to help finalize a night on the town. Shoot friends a deck with a few movies and restaurants, and you have a full night laid out. Vurb hopes people will follow friends, tastemakers, and influencers and view the to check out decks of recommendations they’ve made public.
The Age Of Context
Lo beams that “It’s very different than traditional search with 10 blue links.” He knows it’s still a long shot, but is happy to take a swing for the fences. He says “VCs don’t want a 3X return. They want a 100X return otherwise this is a failure as an investment.”

To return that money, Vurb has plenty of opportunities. With search results comes the option for sponsored placement. And with developers pouring cash into app install ads on platforms like Facebook, Vurb could charge to suggest them for different tasks.
Lo concludes that the Internet started with the age of surfing the web through portals to browse one’s way to information, before evolving to search where we went to find information. Now Vurb wants to catalyze the next phase, the age of context, where information comes to you.

By: Unknown On 07:19

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Apple Took 89% Of Q4 Smartphone Profits With Android OEMs In A Race To The Bottom

Google’s Android has gobbled up market share world wide, now accounting for over 80% of all smartphone shipped globally. But when it comes to actually making money, Apple is eating all the profits as it continues its focus on premium devices. Today Strategy Analytics said that Apple in Q4 last year accounted for 89% of all smartphone profits, equating to $18.8 billion, with Android taking only 11%, or $2.4 billion.
The blow for Android is softened only slightly less so only by the fact that other platform players like Microsoft, Blackberry and Firefox seemingly made no profit at all.

The figures given here relate to profits generated by handset makers, not the services ecosystem and potential profits made by app publishers and others. Overall, smartphone profits were up 31.4% compared to the same quarter a year ago.
When it comes to who is performing best among Android OEMs, the results reveal growing competition for Samsung.
Neil Mawson, research director for Strategy Analytics, says the “three big profit drivers” for Android are Samsung, Huawei and Xiaomi.
“Samsung is the Android giant that delivers most of Android’s smartphone profits worldwide,” he tells me. Mawston says the company is not breaking out exact shares, except to say that “Samsung accounted for well over half of all Android smartphone profits globally in Q4 2014.”
As a point of comparison, in 2013, Samsung accounted for 95% of Android profits. That was a time where there was significantly more parity between Apple and the Korean handset maker both in terms of unit sales and revenues, with Apple accounting for “only” 57% of profit at the time.
The bigger picture seems to be that Android handset makers are in something of a race to the bottom at this point: the markets that are driving growth in smartphone adoption these days are emerging economies, where consumers are price sensitive. That’s leading to the production of a number of models that are pushing down the average sale price for devices, which long ago dropped below the $100 mark.
Apple may have missed the boat (so far) when it comes critical mass in market share in these developing markets, but it has more than made up for it by making a killing in places where it is strong. China is one such crossover example. While there is clearly a market for lower-cost and Android devices, Apple has been posting record sales in the country, reporting sales of $16 billion in the country in Q4. (China is not — yet — however overtaking Apple’s sales in markets like the U.S.)
In the world of smartphones, Android’s gains do not equal Apple’s loss. But Android’s gains might translate into Android losses down the line, Strategy Analytics notes.
“Apple’s strategy of premium products and lean logistics is proving hugely profitable,” Mawston writes in the report. “Android’s weak profitability for its hardware partners will worry Google. If major smartphone manufacturers, like Samsung or Huawei, cannot make decent profits from the Android ecosystem, they may be tempted in the future to look at alternative platforms such as Microsoft, Tizen or Firefox.”Featured Image: Ismagilov/Shutterstock

By: Unknown On 07:04

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Are You Ready For The Barcelona Meetup?

 Apple Took 89% Of Q4 Smartphone Profits With Android OEMs In A Race To The BottomWe’re less than a week away from the Pitch-Off in Barcelona and we’re excited to see you. If you’ve purchased tickets already, good for you. They are a rare commodity. If you haven’t then you’re kind of out of luck because the event is sold out. Special dispensations may be made if you contact us but I doubt we can help.
If you didn’t make pitch-off the cut, do not fear: just find us at the event and tell us a little about your startup. We’re happy to take cards and follow up.
Here are the contestants for the pitch off. They will have two minutes to pitch and four minutes of questions from TC Editors and a local judge. The winner will get a table at TC Disrupt Startup Alley in New York and the runner-up will get two tickets to the event. The contestants are:
Fueloyal
Kompyte
Avegant
Swytch
rendeevoo
Hirestack
EveryLayer
FACEmeeting
canguroencasa.com
Note: the event is sold out. We’re expecting an amazing turn out. I hope you bought your tickets early.
Date: Tuesday March 3, 2015
Time: 19:00 – 22:00. Pitch-off at 20:00.
Details: With open bar and tapas/snacks between 19:30 until 21:30 CET (last round).
Location: Ailaic, Passatge Utset 14, we will team up with the Dutch Mobile Networking Event that is the host.
Cost: €5.50
BUY TICKETS HERE
Thanks to the kind folks at DutchMobileNetworking this year’s Barcelona Meetup And Pitch-Off will be amazing. It’s great to have such a responsive and understanding partner. That said, they are handling all the sponsorship and still need your help. Please email myself at john@techcrunch.com or Caroline at caroline at dutchmobilenetworking.com.
Sponsors
Gold Sponsor

Vserv is a leading mobile marketing platform that delivers smart data led results to marketers, app developers, telcos and data partners. Powered by its award winning market first technologies, the company drives engaging mobile experiences for the emerging billion mobile internet users. Founded in 2010; Vserv has 500 million+ unique user profiles and a global footprint with offices across USA, UK, South Africa, India, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines & Vietnam.
Drinks Sponsor

ExoClick is a self-funded start-up launched in 2006 by CEO Benjamin Fonzé which he now runs with his brother Adrien (COO). Based in Barcelona, Spain, ExoClick is an innovative global ad network serving 125+ billion geo-targeted ads a month to web and mobile advertiser/publisher platforms via its proprietary software. The company is currently ranked as the 5th largest ad network in the world by W3Techs and is the only Spanish company to be ranked three times in the Deloitte Fast 500. ExoClick is also positioned at number 11 in the Top 20 Best Workplaces in Spain in the category of companies with between 20-49 employees (PYMES).

Backed by Andreessen-Horowitz, Samsung, Intel and others, BlueStacks is the leader in Mobile Marketing Automation. Started in 2011 and based in Silicon Valley, the company has offices in London, Tokyo and Beijing. BlueStacks’ App Player software enables any mobile app or game to run on PC. Pre-loaded on Lenovo and Asus computers, App Player recently crossed 85 million downloads worldwide.

Estrella Damm
Dutch Mobile Networking Event & Place
On Monday 2nd of March the networking event accommodates 300 Dutch-speaking visitors from the telecom industry that have access through a controlled guest list. The majority of the DMNE visitors are C-level decision makers in the procurement of telecom services, software and hardware. Besides the traditional successful networking event (Monday 2nd of March) DMNE offers visitors a place where they can retreat during event days. It is also possible to organise your own event here in consultation with the organisation. Registered visitors can also attend round table discussions and presentations from this location. Content (like trend updates) from the Mobile World Congress can be followed through the channels of mediapartners Executive-People and Dutch IT-Channel through news feeds, interviews and video updates.
Would you like to sponsor our event? Please contact Caroline at caroline[at] dutchmobilenetworking.com. She has helped organize the entire event so far and is handling the food, drink, and jazz (!!). We look forward to seeing you!

By: Unknown On 06:49

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