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02/20/12--09:00: Google developing Siri-like voice commands, proximity-based controls for Google TV (chan 1592482)

A patent filed by Google showcases a new technology that could enable users to control Google TV-equipped devices using their voices, reports Patently Apple. Using a specific smartphone app, users could be able to speak commands or queries that are then acted upon by a television, a set-top box, a DVD player or another device equipped with Google TV, according to the patent filing. The patent documentation also mentions an interesting feature where “the provision of the query to the television may occur when the user is within a set distance of his home also (e.g., by determining with GPS functionality on the smartphone that he is within 1/4 mile of the home), and the television may be turned on


02/20/12--10:05: Amazon may launch 10-inch Kindle Fire in Q2, new color E Ink reader next month (chan 1592482)

Amazon is reportedly preparing to launch a new 6-inch color E Ink eReader as soon as next month, followed by a 10-inch Kindle Fire tablet some time in the second quarter this year. E Ink Holdings has received initial orders for Amazon’s a 6-inch color eReader according to DigiTimes, a device that would be Amazon’s first eBook reader to feature a color E Ink display. The retail giant is reportedly looking to have more than 3 million color eReaders built each month, and shipments are scheduled to begin in March. In a separate report, DigiTimes reaffirms recent rumors that a 10-inch Kindle Fire will begin shipping in the second quarter this year. The report states that Foxconn has been awarded


02/20/12--11:00: Next-gen iPhone to launch in September or October, report says (chan 1592482)

Apple had traditionally launched a new smartphone each year in June or July, however this trend ended with the October launch of the iPhone 4S. Citing an unnamed source, Japanese website Macotakara reported on Monday that Apple’s next-generation iPhone will again be launched in the fall this year. The device will be released in either September or October according to the report, and Apple’s future smartphone launches will remain on a fall cycle in coming years. The report reaffirms an exclusive BGR report from last year, which stated that Apple will launch a new iPhone with a revamped antenna system and a unibody aluminum design this fall. Read


02/20/12--12:05: LG unveils the Optimus Vu, a 5-inch ‘phablet’ (chan 1592482)

LG on Sunday announced the Optimus Vu a week before the handset’s Mobile World Congress debut. The Vu features a 5-inch IPS display and is a hybrid between a smartphone and a tablet. The device is thinner than the competing Samsung Galaxy Note, coming in a 8.5 millimeters. “The Optimus Vu: was designed to maximize what customers could do with a smart-phone,” president and CEO of LG Dr. Jong-seok Park said. “By offering an optimal 4:3 ratio viewing experience, 5-inch display combined with superfast LTE technology, Optimus Vu: is just one example of what we can achieve when we combine our best technology with customer needs.” The “phablet” is equipped with a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, 8-megapixel rear camera, 32GB of


02/20/12--13:00: Apple reveals plans for solar farm at North Carolina data center (chan 1592482)

Apple on Monday updated the company’s environmental website with data from the past year, revealing new details surrounding its iCloud and Siri data center located in Maiden, North Carolina. Apple’s facility was awarded LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, making it the only data center of its size to have received the certification. “We know of no other data center of comparable size that has achieved this level of LEED certification,” Apple stated. “Our goal is to run the Maiden facility with high percentage renewable energy mix.” Apple plans to power the facility with the largest non-utility fuel cell installation and largest user-owned solar farm in the United States. Due to the increasing popularity of its products,


02/20/12--14:05: Samsung Galaxy Note now available for $299.99 from AT&T (chan 1592482)

The most massive Android phone Samsung has ever built is now available in AT&T stores across the country for $299.99 with a new two-year service agreement, or $649.99 contract-free. Positioned somewhere between a tablet and a smartphone, the Galaxy Note features a 5.3-inch 1,280 x 800-pixel Super AMOLED display, a dual-core 1.5GHz processor, an 8-megapixel camera, embedded 4G LTE connectivity and Samsung’s “S Pen” stylus. And did we mention it’s huge? BGR’s full review of the Galaxy Note will be published later this week, but AT&T subscribers looking for the biggest dose of Android money can buy should look no further. Read Image source: The TechBlock


02/20/12--15:00: Microsoft claims Google is bypassing Internet Explorer privacy settings (chan 1592482)

Last week, it was revealed that Google and other leading advertising companies had been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of unknowing Safari users. The Mountain View-based company maintained its innocence and claimed it “used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled.” Microsoft is now claiming that the search giant has used a similar technique to bypass privacy settings in Internet Explorer. By default, IE blocks third-party cookies unless the site provides a “P3P Compact Policy Statement” indicating how the cookies will be used and agreeing to not track the user. Microsoft claims that Google is improperly representing certain cookies, which allows them to pass through IE’s security without disclosing the company’s intent. Google has


02/20/12--16:15: Apple may launch revamped iTunes Store, App Store later this year (chan 1592482)

Apple may be working on an overhaul of its iTunes Store and App Store, according to 9to5Mac. Due to growing competition from music streaming services like Spotify and the growing popularity of Amazon’s online music store, the redesign of the iTunes Store is considered “a top priority for Apple.” The Cupertino-based company is looking to simplify the service and deliver a more user-friendly interface than the one afforded by its current design. The redesign will reportedly simplify content discovery, and it will “make the iTunes Store a much more engaging experience.” The revamped stores are reportedly scheduled to launch later this year. Read


02/20/12--17:30: Settlement reached in iPhone 4 ‘Antennagate’ suit (chan 1592482)

A settlement has been reached in a class-action lawsuit targeting the iPhone 4′s antenna and reception problems, reports CNET. U.S. residents who bought the handset will be offered either $15 or a free bumper case, however the offer is only valid for those individuals who did not take advantage of Apple’s previous offer. The settlement comes from 18 separate lawsuits that were consolidated into one, all claiming that Apple was “misrepresenting and concealing material information in the marketing, advertising, sale, and servicing of its iPhone 4–particularly as it relates to the quality of the mobile phone antenna and reception and related software.” Original buyers will be notified via email before April 30th, or they can visit www.iPhone4Settlement.com, although the site


02/20/12--18:45: Analyst charged with insider trading and fraud after leaking Apple sales data (chan 1592482)

A research analyst and a former executive who revealed insider information about Apple’s sales have both been charged, reports Reuters. Analyst John Kinnucan on Friday was charged with two counts of securities fraud, two counts of conspiracy and one count of insider trading from a civil case filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Between 2008 and 2010, Kinnucan allegedly paid insiders with cash, trips and other incentives for inside information regarding Apple. Kinnnucan then sold the information to hedge funds for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Separately, former SanDisk executive Don Barnetson pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and securities fraud. “I conspired with a consultant to provide confidential information with respect to


02/20/12--20:00: Microsoft details SkyDrive Metro app for Windows 8 (chan 1592482)

Microsoft on Monday announced that a SkyDrive Metro app will be available for Windows 8. Windows users were previously able to save files to the SkyDrive website and then had the ability to access and/or share them throughout the Web. The next release of SkyDrive, however, will combine the company’s Live Mesh synchronization service into the file storing and Web service. Microsoft’s Building Windows 8 blog states that the new SkyDrive Metro app will have “files integrated into Windows Explorer on the desktop, and have the ability to fetch remote files through SkyDrive.com.” The desktop file sync will support files up to 2GB in size, and will provide “easy drag and drop upload and download access to your data, offline


02/20/12--21:15: Most Ivy Bridge processors have not been delayed, report claims (chan 1592482)

Reports that Intel was notifying partners about plans to postpone mass shipments of Ivy Bridge processors turned out to be only partially true, according to VR-Zone. The new report claims that desktop processors are still on schedule and “only the dual-core [mobile] models have been pushed back.” The reason behind the the delay is said to be tied to the massive stock of Sandy Bridge CPUs Intel still has on hand. Intel reportedly has large quantities of leftover CPUs that have not yet been shipped to its vendor partners. The first dual-core Ivy Bridge models will not arrive until some time in May, meaning updated Ultrabooks won’t launch until early June. Read


02/21/12--02:56: Twitter Partners With Yandex, DataWind Off The Aakash Case, Google Dodged Cookie-blocks On Internet Explorer Too (chan 1592482)

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.

Twitter Partners With Russian Search Giant Yandex. Twitter has signed a deal with Russian search giant Yandex, to license their "fire hose" of tweets that are populating the network in real time. Until last July, Twitter and Google had a similar agreement, which powered Google's real-time search results. Yandex's new deal may help it edge ahead of Google, at least on the home front. --NS

Aakash Manufacturer DataWind To Be Let Go. Indian telecom minister Kapil Sibal has said the government will not renew its manufacturing order with DataWind for future versions of India's $35 tablet. For those involved with the Aakash project, this is the second shakeup in recent weeks--in February, Sibal announced that lead engineers at IIT Jodhpur--the original designers of the $35 tablet prototype--would no longer be involved with picking the tablet's commercial manufacturers. --NS

Google Dodged Privacy Settings On Internet Explorer. After reports last week that Google had snagged a loophole in Safari's security and devised a cookie workaround, Microsoft is claiming Google's gotten past security features on the Internet Explorer browser as well. Dean Hacamovitch, IEs VP, explained that though the mechanics of the bypass were different on IE, the results Google got were similar. --NS

--Updated 5:45 a.m. EST

Friday's Fast Feed: Twitter Launches Ads For Small Businesses, Google, Facebook Track Users On Safari, Amazon Overtakes Samsung As #2 Tablet Seller, and more!









02/21/12--04:09: Better Ways To Give It Away: Philanthropy 2.0 (chan 1592482)

Our distrust is very expensive.--Ralph Waldo Emerson

As the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation recently discovered, mixing mission and politics can cost an organization both credibility and dollars. Susan G. Komen, dedicated to the least controversial cause imaginable, eradicating breast cancer, lost the support of many core donors over its (since reversed) decision to end its relationship with Planned Parenthood, a national organization that provides women’s health care, family planning, and, incidentally, abortion services.

Ironically, given the scope of Komen’s mission and the size of the foundation, the Planned Parenthood grants somehow became the tail that wagged the dog. Last year, for example, Komen gave Planned Parenthood $700,000 to finance 19 separate breast-related programs. That donation, while generous, represented a tiny portion of its $93 million in grants. Yet these grants, however small, however mission-appropriate, were nonetheless sufficient to plunge the entire organization into crisis.

Komen’s decision was widely interpreted to be politically motivated, and this perception is at the crux of the organization’s debacle. Komen’s existing supporters expected the organization to be politically neutral. Public charitable organizations are supposed to be broadly embraced, broadly understood, broadly valued, and broadly and publicly supported. Many of Komen’s core donors therefore felt betrayed by what they perceived as a breach of trust, a misappropriation of charitable funds to accomplish a political agenda seemingly unrelated to the organization’s stated public mission: eradicating breast cancer.

The Komen crisis begs the questions that all of us struggle with when we give to a nonprofit organization: How do I make certain that my philanthropic dollars align with my own philanthropic goals and my core beliefs? How do I prevent my donations from being diverted to spending and programs that don’t accomplish the intended purpose of my gift? Can I trust a public nonprofit to act transparently and consistently in support of its stated mission?

Increasingly, affluent donors are answering these questions by taking control of their own philanthropy. Instead of writing a $100,000 check to an organization like Susan G. Komen or the Red Cross or any other large public charity, they are funding causes directly through their own private foundations and donor advised funds. With their own foundations, they can give that amount incrementally rather than in a lump sum, targeting effective and deserving grantees and monitoring their performance and continuing alignment with stated goals and objectives over time. Perhaps that’s why private foundations have seen such explosive growth in recent years. According to The Foundation Center’s Statistical Information Center, there are currently more than 76,000 private foundations in the United States--almost 33,000 more than there were just 15 years ago. 

The growing prevalence of private foundations reflects the life experiences and styles of many of today’s most prominent philanthropists. Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Ted Turner, and Warren Buffett didn’t follow conventional paths to success. Gates, after all, famously dropped out of Harvard. Is it any wonder that he, like many self-made business leaders, might harbor a healthy skepticism of big institutions? Is it any surprise that when it comes to their philanthropy, Gates and other entrepreneurs might want to harness their own business acumen, resources, and experience to accomplish a philanthropic goal instead of merely writing a check to a charity and trust that it will accomplish that work effectively and efficiently?

If there is a silver lining to the Komen controversy, it’s that it has motivated donors to take a harder look at how their dollars are spent by their charitable donees and how those organizations are led and governed. The impassioned reader comments and discussions that accompany each new Komen-related headline point to a new reality for nonprofits: Whether donors are writing small checks or making significant grants, I believe that they will demand increasing transparency and accountability from the recipients of their funds. On the public charity side of the table, organizations will need to remember and re-embrace the basic fact that when positioning themselves as public charities to gain broad public support and funding there is a trade-off around being able to assert and promote narrower, less publicly attractive agendas and objectives. That type of focus is better accomplished in the private foundation format. These are not negative developments.

As Americans, we are a famously generous people. We’re also famously self-reliant and innovative. Ideally, philanthropy should unite the best of our impulses with the best of our abilities, marrying purpose to efficacy. As the days of blind faith in large institutions--even the best-intentioned ones--come to a close, I foresee not a diminishment of charitable activity but the golden age of the philanthropic entrepreneur. Philanthropy won’t be hurt by this recent crisis but it might be revolutionized.

Related: How Howard Buffett Will Use His Grandfather's Recipe For Riches To Disrupt Philanthropy

For more leadership coverage, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

[Image: Flickr user Gabriela Camerotti]









02/21/12--04:30: BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 finally brings native email to RIM’s tablet (chan 1592482)

Right on schedule — sort of — Research In Motion announced on Tuesday that the first major update for its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is now available for download. The highly anticipated update brings a number of much needed functionality to the PlayBook, but the most notable additions are certainly the arrival of native email, contacts and calendar functionality. BlackBerry Messenger support is still absent from the PlayBook as RIM said it would be, but BlackBerry Bridge has been updated, plenty of new social functionality has been added and video chat has been enhanced as well. We took a hands on look at PlayBook OS 2.0 during the Consumer Electronics Show this past January and we can confidently say that if you own a


02/21/12--05:14: With Connect, Getty Images Leaps Into The 21st Century (chan 1592482)



Getty Images is getting with the 21st century today.

With its new Connect system, Getty is making it easier for web publishers and certain platforms like blogging tools to embed Getty's image products in their online publications than it may have been before. This is clever, definitely designed to boost revenues, and probably overdue.

Today's press release explains at length about Connect, pointing out how scalable it is, how comprehensive it is, and how it'll let businesses improve products, streamline workflows, reduce storage costs and "launch compelling new services." 

We spoke with Getty's SVP of Business Development Craig Peters to get a fuller explanation. "What Connect is is us announcing for the first time that we're exposing our technology, our metadata and our content to our customers--letting them have direct access to all that through our API and web service for the first time," Peters says, while illustrating a couple of different use-cases: A content publisher who could embed Getty's API in its CMS so that its own users could easily get access to Getty's high quality images, or a content provider something like IMBD which could now access Getty photos of movie stars in a more automated way, or a publisher that supplies automated galleries.

"It's something that can happen at scale," says Peters. "The client doesn't need to store millions of images on their side of things, they don't have to worry about what's the most recent image, so they're grabbing content immediately as it's available. So if they're writing a very timely story about the riots in the Middle East, or they're writing a story about anything topical like sport or entertainment, that content's available anywhere."

Zazzle, loveFilm, Facebook advertising partners, Weebly and Reach Local were all examples of who may be clients for this service.

This is also move to entice online publications away from using other sources of imagery for their products--everything from blogs to adverts to business-promotional pages and so on. We're talking about services where creative commons licenses permit sites like Fast Company to use images, perhaps user-submitted ones, to illustrate or decorate their content. Getty has over 60 million high-quality images of all sorts in its archives, accurately labelled and tagged, and would obviously like folk to use its images rather than anyone else's, for a small fee.

The company has long had a web-based mechanism for allowing use of the images, but it required a pretty manual manuever by the interested parties, whereby you had to go to Getty, find a relevant image, pay for it, grab the code to link it into your webpage and then paste it in. Every step like this is a potential barrier for frequent use of a Getty image instead of one from a different source--particularly if the different source is free. Getty of course prides itself on the quality of the images it offers--and in many cases it's possible to find a more fitting or beautiful image within Getty's stable than elsewhere. But why go through all these steps to use a Getty image, and pay for it, rather than choosing a free image? 

So Getty's now trying to add value to its process. By allowing firms like blog publishers to embed its code in the blog submission page of their CMS, Getty's making it technically easier for bloggers to chose a Getty image. And there's a definite bonus in the way Getty's Connect code suggests images dynamically--its engine pouring over what you write and then quickly matching your words to its heavily meta-tagged photo archive. That's a nice trick, and could be much more satisfying than typing keywords into Google, trawling through images that have the right permissions, and choosing one that approximately matches your needs.

If nothing else, this should bump up Getty's revenues, as people elect to choose the simply-presented Getty image over alternatives. Getty's keen to point out that over 40 firms, from media ones to digital media ones to advertising and print-on-demand companies are already using Connect to "yield value within their products and offerings."

Skeptics will say that there's nothing revolutionary here, and that Getty should have done it a long time ago--the API isn't spectacularly original technically, and you may have imagined that Getty should've tried to keep up with the vogue of online image use in order to keep its revenue streams healthy. After all, online publishing is changing everything from newspapers to magazines to advertising to TV, and has been for years.

But instead of trying to keep up with the leading edge, Getty in the past has chosen aggressive and arguably backwards measures. You could see its past approcah as a kind of digital NIMBYism that saw the firm trying to pursue small firms or individuals with punitive fines for abuse of its IP and even trying to half-assedly adjust the "fair use" behavior of the web by scanning millions of sites with PicScout software (a firm Getty bought in 2011) and sending threatening letters to people who are using Getty images, even if they're unaware it was infringing. Just Google "Getty Images law suit" to see what I'm talking about.

Of course Getty was simply protecting its rights and, as Peters explains, the company does represent copyright-owning photographers who "should be paid for their work."

And now with Connect Getty has "a way that makes it easier for people to consume the imagery in the proper way, with the right rights and have a formal relationship that allows them to build businesses and build services and integrate imagery." It's a good thing for the business, for the copyright owners and ultimately the photographers, Peters points out, and makes everything easier and more relevant. 

[Image: Flickr user mikebaird]

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.









02/21/12--05:20: How The Happiest People In The World Spend Their Money (chan 1592482)

People can feel trapped by their careers--whether it's because they're earning too little, are waiting for a big payout, or have grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Laura Vanderkam's new book, All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, offers a new approach to finances for a modern, more flexible reality.

Increasingly, the stories people tell me about their work and life choices break the conventional mold:

A twenty-something entrepreneur starts a business while holding down another job and living on friend’s couch.  He’s trading financial insecurity today for work he feels passionate about and a distant promise of a future payoff. A forty-something father of two with a stay-at-home wife walks away from a lucrative legal career without knowing what his next step will be because he can’t tolerate the stress and relentless hours any longer. A single mother of three gets laid off and decides to start a not-for-profit instead of finding another job in advertising.

Their unique journeys not only challenge the traditional wisdom about the path we “should” follow with our work and careers, but they also challenge the standard rules about money. And yet, they raise plenty of practical concerns: How is the entrepreneur who spends his twenties scraping by supposed to buy a house and two cars his thirties? How is the forty-something father supposed to send all of his children to private, four-year colleges and fully retire at 60 years old? How is the single mother going to afford weddings for each of her three daughters?

Work, life and money are intertwined intimately, and yet they’re rarely addressed together. As the traditional boundaries that used to define “work” and “life” disappear, the conventional beliefs related to money must also evolve.

This is the message of Laura Vanderkam’s new book, All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending (Portfolio, 2012). By taking on outdated money beliefs, Vanderkam offers a new approach to finances for a modern, more flexible reality. Some of the changes she advocates include:

Be more mindful about what your money could buy. Make purchases that improve your happiness.  For many, that means spending on experiences, not things.  Using the example of the money we have traditionally paid for expensive engagement rings and weddings, Vanderkam calculates how many trips, periodic bouquets of flowers, date nights, babysitters and hours of housecleaning that money could buy over the years.  These are services and experiences that, in the long run, could bring more enjoyment to a couple than a big ring and wedding.

The single mother who started the not-for-profit may not be able to pay for a lavish wedding for her daughters, but they will see their mother doing work she loves. This will not only set an example of happiness that will hopefully inspire the professional choices of her daughters, but help them prioritize how they want to spend their money.

Challenge the big house, big yard, two car "American dream."  Vanderkam points out that these purchases often come with a longer commute by car, more responsibilities for lawn care and housekeeping.  Studies show that none of these activities increase happiness.

Maybe the twenty-something entrepreneur won’t buy a sprawling house with a big yard and a three car garage.  Instead he’ll choose to buy only one car because he bought a smaller house closer to public transportation.  But he’ll be free to invest in and grow his business while having money left over for activities and experiences that have greater meaning to him like travel or eating out with friends.

Don’t just scrimp and save. Find ways to increase your earnings.  Yes, the increased flexibility in work and careers can be scary and unsettling, but it also provides new, exciting opportunities to make more money.  Vanderkam calls it the “1099 mindset.”  Even if you have a more traditional job, think about work the way freelancers or contract workers--people who get 1099s--do. If you are a teacher, tutor. If you’re interested in a topic, start a blog that you monetize. Be creative.

The forty-something father who walked away from his lucrative legal career was approached by his firm to consult on projects. He’s now thinking of other similar channels that will allow him to make money but give him the flexibility he wants to spend time with his children and enjoy the parts of his life he had no time for previously. Also, his formerly stay-at-home wife is exploring a number of different opportunities to bring in additional income.

Rethink retirement. In other words, don’t expect to ever retire.  Instead, embrace a second or “encore” career. This is what the single mother of three is doing with her not-for-profit. She sees herself leading this effort well past traditional retirement age.

Yes, work and life have transformed over the past two decades. With “All the Money in the World,” Laura Vanderkam is showing us that we have to update and evolve that way we think about money as well.  In addition to the book, you can connect with Vanderkam on her blog, on Twitter and on Facebook.

What do you think?  How have you found yourself rethinking the way to approach and manage money as your work and career have become less traditional and more flexible? 

Cali Williams Yost is the CEO and Founder of the Flex+Strategy Group / Work+Life Fit, Inc., flexible work and life strategy advisors to clients including BDO, LLP, Pearson, Inc., EMC, the U.S. Navy, Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Novo Nordisk. Yost is the author of “Work+Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right for You” (Riverhead/Penguin Group, 2005). Connect with Cali at the award-winning Work+Life Fit blog and on Twitter @caliyost.

[Image: Flickr user Pink Sherbert Photography]









02/21/12--05:35: iPhone 4S launches on China Telecom next month (chan 1592482)

Major Chinese carrier China Telecom announced this week that it will begin selling Apple’s iPhone 4S on March 9th. The popular smartphone will start at free on contract for China Telecom subscribers, and it will be available for purchase online and through authorized retailers. ”iPhone 4S has been an incredible hit with customers around the world,” an Apple spokesperson told The Loop. “We’re thrilled to be launching iPhone 4S with China Telecom and can’t wait to get it into the hands of even more customers in China.” Apple’s entrance into the Chinese market began with the iPhone’s launch on China Unicom, but this new China Telecom deal is seen as potentially having a huge impact on Apple’s position in the region.


02/21/12--06:00: Fasten Your Seatbelts. It’s Gonna Be A Bumpy Ride (chan 1592482)




02/21/12--06:06: Barnes & Noble takes on Kindle Fire with new $199 Nook Tablet; Nook Color drops to $169 (chan 1592482)

Barnes & Noble on Tuesday unveiled a new version of its popular Nook Tablet to compete directly with Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Lining up with earlier reports, the new Barnes & Noble slate features the same specs as the earlier Nook Tablet, however the device’s internal storage has been halved to 8GB. ”For any customer who likes to read digitally, watch movies or TV shows, browse the web, or help their kids read and learn through interactive books and apps, our new $199 NOOK Tablet with 8GB is the best product value on the market,” Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said in a statement. “NOOK Tablet is the highest-rated wireless media tablet in the 7-inch class, ultra-portable at under a pound,


02/21/12--06:41: Smile, You're On (Digital) Camera: TASER's New Police Minicam And The Cloud (chan 1592482)

TASER, best known for their electric shock guns, has a new product: Tiny, sunglass-mounted cameras that upload live footage from a cop's P.O.V. to the cloud. The idea? They will help prevent police brutality lawsuits and increase accountability.



Taser has unveiled a line of lightweight, cloud-enabled cameras for police officers to wear on the job. The new AXON Flex system attaches magnetically to Oakley sunglasses and uploads a nonstop stream of camera footage to the cloud. Although TASER made their product announcement just a few hours ago, they already have a customer... the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Police Department, which faces numerous charges of police brutality, has already ordered 150 cameras. Each camera stores approximately two hours of footage and has a 14 hour battery.

The 15 gram DVR at the heart of AXON Flex records a tamperproof stream of footage from the officer's POV (well, as long as it is turned on first) that is then automatically uploaded in encrypted form at the end of the officer's shift to the Amazon cloud-powered Evidence.com service. TASER CEO Rick Smith told Fast Company that “it's not just about storage, but about handling the security chain of custody.” Or, as he put it, “buying [these] cameras is cheaper than settlements” for law enforcement agencies facing brutality lawsuits.

Once on the market in late March, the complete package for the AXON Flex (including a DVR and a separate, iPod-sized wireless controller) will market for $950. This is TASER's second attempt to launch and market a cop-POV camera; the firm launched their first-generation TASER Cam--a headset-mounting video camera--several years ago. However, the TASER Cam is balky and uncomfortable for law enforcement to wear outside of special circumstances. The new AXON Flex is extremely comfortable--it weighs approximately the same as a Bluetooth headset and can either clip magnetically to special Oakley sunglasses or be affixed to an officer's hat, clothing or bike helmet.

The project owes a heavy debt to Hadi Partovi, a TASER board member and internet entrepreneur who largely joined the company to participate in this and similar projects. Partovi was previously a strategic advisor to Facebook and Dropbox whose iLike product was one of MySpace's last big purchases back in 2009. Partovi helped serve as a crucial bridge between Taser and the world of cloud-based technology and web development.

As soon as a law enforcement officer uploads video to Evidence.com, they lose control over the video. Individual users are unable to delete or edit videos already on the site; in order to avoid having damaging video ending up in an archive, individual officers will have to avoid turning their cameras on in the first place. Evidence.com's current package with TASER(for the TASER Cam) is currently used by over 500 law enforcement agencies nationwide. Video footage uploaded to Evidence.com is encrypted via RSA token and protected by SSL. Individual law enforcement agencies can set up their own security permissions to watch video uploaded by the AXON Flex; more liberal agencies can allow officers to login remotely and watch videos from home, while stricter law enforcement institutions could restrict Evidence.com access to individual secure terminals.



TASER's electric shock guns are already equipped with cameras that turn on whenever they are drawn. These new cameras, however, have greatly enhanced shooting time (even though two hours barely covers a shift) and could be attractive to police departments which routinely deal with brutality and wrongdoing complaints. Even though individual cameras are not cheap, the manpower and administrative costs of handling complaint-related paperwork are considerable for most law enforcement agencies.

BART's decision to adopt the AXON Flex gives a good example of why police departments and law enforcement agencies may order the cameras in bulk. The agency has faced widespread allegations of police brutality, and faced widespread outcry after pulling the Syria-like move of knocking cell phone service offline to prevent a demonstration from gathering at a San Francisco train station. Being able to film contentious encounters may well assist BART when dealing with future brutality allegations. In addition, providing the cameras to individual officers is a savvy community relations move due to the perception that the officers themselves will be monitored.

While TASER's product isn't a magic solution to solving the problem of police brutality and official wrongdoing, it's a step in the right direction. The fact that the cameras currently only record two hours of video is a problem, but technological innovations mean that this will likely be rectified in the future. While the cameras might make activists happy, they also depend on one critical interface requirement--the fact that a law enforcement officer has to manually turn the camera on in the first place. Individual law enforcement agencies may also be uncomfortable with giving up defacto control over their video evidence rooms to a private firm.

Lastly, like any other transformative technology, TASER's camera creates new technical worries that didn't exist before. Although Evidence.com appears to follow industry best practices for encryption and cloud security, there are still flaws associated with cloud computing. Putting law enforcement camera footage in one centralized online repository creates a tempting target for hackers and cybercriminals; this may well be a worry in organized crime cases where suspects have resources to launch cloud attacks. Still though, the cameras are likely to become a part of law enforcement toolkits nationwide.

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Email Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, here or find him on Twitter and Google+.









02/21/12--06:45: Microsoft Office for iPad gets pictured, launch expected in coming weeks (chan 1592482)

Microsoft is confirmed to be working on a version of its wildly popular Office productivity suite for Apple’s iPad, and The Daily managed to get some hands on time with the highly anticipated software ahead of its release. Microsoft Office for iPad will bring Word, Excel and PowerPoint functionality to Apple’s tablet — presuming the app is approved by Apple — and it is unclear if Microsoft has plans to add additional Office applications in the future. The app has a similar look to Microsoft’s OneNote app for iOS, which borrows largely from the Metro-themed Office software on the Windows Phone platform. The Daily’s report states that Microsoft plans to submit Office for iPad to Apple for approval in the


02/21/12--07:40: New iPad 3 images give us a better look at Apple’s redesign (chan 1592482)

We have previously seen images of the iPad 3′s reworked case design, however new images published on Tuesday give us a better look at the subtle differences we can expect from Apple’s next-generation tablet when it launches next month. The photographs, which were posted by MIC Gadget, reveal that the slate is between 1 and 1.5 millimeters thicker than the iPad 2, however it still fits in some iPad 2 cases according to the report. The iPad 3′s rear shell has a more gradual taper to the edges of the tablet, and it features a narrower bezel and larger camera lens compared to its predecessor. The iPad 3 is expected to be equipped with a 9.7-inch Retina Display, an 8-megapixel


02/21/12--08:35: Google responds to Microsoft’s accusations of Internet Explorer policy violations (chan 1592482)

Google on Monday responded to a new round of finger pointing, this time from Microsoft, which claimed Google was using falsified cookie policies to bypass certain security features in the Internet Explorer Web browser. The new accusations followed an earlier revelation that Google and other advertisers were using “a special code” to bypass Safari’s third-party cookie policies. Google had apparently heard enough, however, as the company issued a response to Microsoft’s allegations late Monday evening. Read on for more. “Microsoft omitted important information from its blog post today,” Google wrote in a statement. “Microsoft uses a ‘self-declaration’ protocol (known as ‘P3P’) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form. It is well


02/21/12--08:56: Why Clear's Dead-Simple List Stands Out In The To-Do Market (chan 1592482)

It's easy, it lets you swipe away tasks, and you literally can't get too detailed while using it. And Clear might just be the thing you need to make knocking out tasks fun again.



There’s a lot that’s interesting about Clear, an iPhone app that, at its core, makes gradient-colored lists of things. Its design has garnered a lot of kind words. In short, it breaks a whole lot of conventions, and it’s designed from the perspective of swipes, pinches, and pulls--things your fingers instinctively know how to perform on a glass surface.

But there’s something more interesting about Clear, once you get past how you use it, and that’s what you would use it for. For the past decade, and likely before that, the predominant jumping-off point for thinking about how people who work with distracting computers all day can track what they need to do has been Getting Things Done, often noted as simply GTD. David Allen’s system is centered around getting tasks written down, with proper context and step-by-step conception, so they aren’t in your head. It’s popular with technical-minded types, and, unsurprisingly, there’s a huge number of apps made by technical types that implement many of these ideas, with a huge variety of themes, interfaces, syncing features, keyboard shortcuts, and other things that make people like me eager to write about them. 2Do, Remember the Milk, Astrid, OmniFocus--the App Store runneth over.

But now that we're all a little more familiar with what it's like to have constant access to powerful data tools, and to the world at large, some app makers and tweakers have come to take a second look at productivity tools and wonder if it’s all too much. Some early enthusiasts see many modern “life hacks” and productivity tools themselves as distractions, and a counter-trend has been bubbling up in desktop software and mobile app design. Clear, clearly, is part of it.

“Whilst lots of folks swear by GTD, we wanted something that didn't need a book to explain a methodology or mindset,” wrote Nik Fletcher, product manager for Clear maker Realmac Software, in an email. “Something that felt as useful and effortless as pen and paper, but on your iPhone. 28 characters per task, most pressing at the top. Its enforced conciseness is deliberate.”

Explained another way, Clear is an app that aims only to, as Fletcher put it, “better pen and paper more than anything else.”  He adds: “A page of your notepad doesn’t have a ‘Create New Task’ button--you just start writing.” Paper is often claimed to be the best to-do list medium around, due to its persistence, spatial cues, and its ability to grab your attention. Clear doesn’t offer all that, but it also doesn’t let you hide tasks behind filters or nested trees. Everything in Clear is there, and probably needs to be addressed.



How to Know If You Need a To-Do Listectomy

Of course, abandoning your current task/ to-do list to try out a hot new minimalist iPhone app is the epitome of pseudo-meta-productivity. How do you know if it’s worth the transition time? For one thing, if your to-do list looks more like a delusional blue-sky wish list than a holding tank for your daily planner. To-do items have to be clear, concise, and specific to be do-able, and if your items aren’t there, a clean slate with a hard word limit might help.

The other way a Clear-like system might help is if your current system feels less like a meaty challenge and more like a whole-grain lentil patty--something that makes you feel like you’re doing the right thing, but isn’t very rewarding. It’s similar to decision fatigue, in which your best behavior short-circuits itself. Labeling all your tasks with the right context (”@email”), project (”+WebRelaunch”), and overly ambitious deadlines helps you know exactly what they require, but can also make them seem imposing, complex, and less fun to strike a line through. Very intentionally, completing a list item in Clear involves flicking it away, not check-marking or labeling it.

Fletcher wrote at length about the motivations and ideas that went into designing Clear, but the key mission was two-part simplicity: “We wanted the app to be fun, and above all quick to use.” Whatever your system, if it’s hardly ever those two things, then you’re just cataloging your problems, not creating an itinerary.

[Image: Flickr user robstephaustralia]

Follow Kevin Purdy on Twitter, and Fast Company, too.









02/21/12--09:23: Apple Rumor Patrol: Fatter, Faster iPad 3, Later iPhone 5, MS Office For iPad (chan 1592482)



iPad 3 Fatter

NextMedia has gotten ahold of what they're saying is an iPad 3 rear shell, and photos of this thing are all over the web. It's consistent with previous rumored hardware, but for the first time it gives a true sense of what the iPad 3 will look and feel like. The MICGadgets website has yet more examples of the hardware, and they've also released photos. 

What's it like? Pretty much like the iPad 2. It's so very similar that, based on the photos, it's unlikely to be an iPad knock-off (there's no SD slot, no USB socket or other non-Appley stuff), so we're inclined to see it as the real thing. But it is fatter, by maybe around 1mm, and this greater depth means the back face of the device is slightly more chamfered in.

So far, nothing major... except that many iPad 2-compatible pieces of hardware (things like stands and extremely form-hugging covers) won't fit. That'll cause all sorts of silly noise online for a while, with accusations that Apple is screwing third-party manufacturers. But it does mean that the internals of the device have changed significantly--Apple's too design conscious to make this change otherwise, and there already was a deal of spare room inside the iPad. And that means either a bigger battery, different hardware to deal with connectivity for LTE, or a bigger camera module (or various combinations of these).

The camera certainly does look to have a larger window, but we're skeptical Apple would opt to put in a higher-resolution camera that adjusted the iPad's profile to this extent. It means a bigger battery, to deliver more oomph for longer life, or perhaps to power energy-hungry LTE hardware or a much higher resolution screen.

iPad 3 Screen

That screen is now very well leaked. It's definitely coming with four times as many pixels as the current iPad--meaning its resoution is 1,536 by 2,048. That's incredible--and your brain may pop at the idea of playing an updated Infinity Blade on this thing (the game app Apple used to wow audiences about the iPad right back at the start).

It also reveals how Apple will try to combat Amazon. The iPad 3's screen will likely deliver text in e-books that is so very sharp and contrasty that it will make e-ink seem dim and inferior, which deals nicely with the original Kindle e-readers (although they may still work better in direct light). And the Kindle Fire's screen is just 600 by 1024 pixels, which will seem incredibly weak compared to the iPad 3's. If Apple, as rumored, also opts to use new IGZO tech in the LCD, it'll also out-perform most other tablet LCDs out there.

A5X System-on-a-chip?

A leaked photo of what's said to be an iPad 3 motherboard is causing some online discussion, as it's clearly labelled with an "A5X" system-on-a-chip, rather than the expected A6 ARM-based processor. Could the A5X be a quad-core version of the A5? Could it simply be an A5 updated and clocked to much higher speeds? 



At this point it's all speculation. It's possible the chip is a development of the A5 in the same way the iPad 3 would seem to be a development of the iPad 2, but we're thinking that super-high-res screen needs more beef than an updated chip can manage. The photo may be of a pre-development prototype, or Apple's chosen a strange naming convention.

iPhone 5 In Fall

Tallying with our thinking, and what an Apple insider told Fast Company last year, it's now definitely thought Apple will release an iPhone 5 in the September/October window. That's a little under a year since it revealed the iPhone 4S and disappointed many who were expecting a new look and feel--and it's consistent with the effort Apple must be taking to perfect the hardware.

iTunes Overhaul

Apple's also said to be planning a big-scale overhaul of both iTunes Store and the App Store experience. While this is a rumor, it's welcome news--Apple really needs to pay attention to these two pieces of software that have grown to encompass uses that they weren't really designed to cope with from the start. The iTunes Store is feeling old and clunky, and the App Store faces criticism for making it hard to surface new or better apps--despite being on the verge of serving up its 25 billionth app.

Would a bigger iTunes overhaul come alongside these changes? Arguably that's overdue too... but as of now the rumor winds don't carry such whispers.

Microsoft Office On iPads

From a leaked image, it looks like Microsoft is about to sleep with the enemy and launch Office for the iPad. Its own Windows 8 tablets are expected later this year, which puts the Office team at loggerheads with the Windows tablet team--with such in-fighting a famous issue for MS. But Apple's lead in the tablet field is all but unassailable for the near future, and Microsoft's exec team has probably decided that it can turn a shiny penny (or several billion) by selling its apps to execs who've bought an iPad but still yearn for the familiar embrace of their traditional business productivity software. MS detractors will shiver at the thought, but it will seriously dent allegations the iPad is a consumption-only app, it could sync nicely with MS's plans for an iCloud-rivaling SkyDrive app on the iPad, and the entire rewrite needed for Apple's OS would at least allow MS's coders to ditch some of the more famous Office unpleasantries.

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.









02/21/12--09:30: Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX review: Verizon’s smartest smartphone is still a tough sell (chan 1592482)

After years of trying to build a smartphone worthy of reinventing the world famous RAZR brand, Motorola finally launched a handset it deemed to be deserving of the moniker last November. The DROID RAZR was released on November 11th and was a marvel compared to the flip phone it modernized. At $500 on contract, the original RAZR touted a 176 x 220-pixel display, 5.5MB of internal storage, a VGA camera and support for data speeds up to 48Kbps. This new version of the iconic handset packed a 4.3-inch AMOLED display, a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, an 8-megapixel camera, 16GB of internal storage and blazing fast 4G LTE connectivity into a slender case only 7.1 millimeters thick. While the new RAZR was


02/21/12--10:25: Microsoft launches no holds barred anti-Google campaign [video] (chan 1592482)

“What happens when the world’s largest advertising business tries to sell productivity software on the side?” Microsoft asks users in its new Googlighting video. “Beware the Googlighting Stranger.” In response to what is undoubtedly increased pressure from Google’s cloud-based productivity suite, Microsoft has launched an all-out assault on Google and its cloud-based Google Apps product. According to Microsoft, Google’s productivity suite is a joke — a sad side project where Google moonlights in its downtime and uses unwitting corporations as guinea pigs — and businesses would be crazy to play Google’s game. ”Google Apps is an ever-changing solution with experimental features that can increase complexity and the need for change management and training,” Microsoft wrote on its Why Microsoft site. “When your business needs help,


02/21/12--11:30: Unauthorized Pokemon app reveals problems in Apple’s App Store (chan 1592482)

While browsing Apple’s App Store this weekend, you may have been surprised to see an iconic game sitting among the most popular iPhone apps. When a Pokemon Yellow app appeared in the App Store for $0.99, many unsuspecting users quickly jumped at the chance to finally have the highly-additive Nintendo RPG on their mobile devices. Those people would end up disappointed because the app was plagued by crashes, making it completely unplayable. What’s more, it was an unauthorized copy created by “House of Anime,” and Nintendo had nothing to do with it. The game peaked at No.3 on the App Store charts and garnered a one-and-a-half star rating with 1,352 negative reviews before it was finally pulled by Apple, Ars Technica


02/21/12--11:43: User Experience The Don Draper Way (chan 1592482)

Products, pages, profiles, and entire click paths are often narcissistic by design, taking into account the needs of decision makers and stakeholders over the customers they’re designed to entice. Instead, they should be designed to evoke emotions and trigger a desired effect, regardless of platform or device.



This is part 2 in an ongoing series. 

In the development of customer-facing products, apps, displays, and destinations, businesses often miss what are among the most critical elements for true customer engagement: evoking a desired experience and sentiment.

Businesses tend to have a narrow view of customer needs or expectations. And, rather than design to evoke human emotion, journeys are designed with a "mediumalistic" approach, where platforms and devices take precedence over the human connection or aftereffect. Products, pages, profiles, and entire click paths are narcissistic by design, taking into account the needs of decision makers and stakeholders over the customers they’re designed to entice. The need to plug into trends trumps the opportunity to innovate and improve the customer journey.

In addition to taking mediumalistic approaches, businesses fall victim to what I refer to as creative endowment. This is a phenomenon in which creative professionals bestow their ideas for campaigns where technology becomes the stage for imagination, without regard for the customer experience. Instead, these ideas, no matter how brilliant, are thrust upon customer senses--what they see, hear, and touch--for the sake of executing an idea rather than evoking a sensation or designing an outcome. Regardless of the medium, this isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. But, it is a problem. 

There is a cure to creative endowment, however. To demonstrate this point, I can’t help but think back to the Mad Men episode where Don Draper presented his touching concept for Kodak’s new wheel, “The Carousel.”

[youtube suRDUFpsHus]

In a dimly lit room and in a vulnerable voice, Draper took us on a touching journey: “Technology is a glittering lure, but there is the rare occasion where the public can be engaged at a level beyond flash…if they have a sentimental bond with the product.”

Draper told the story of his first in-house advertising job at a fur company and how his coworker, a copywriter named Teddy, explained the importance of combining "what’s new," with emotion, “He also talked about a deeper bond with a product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent. Switch it on...Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means, 'the pain from an old wound.' It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.” 

Nostalgia, indeed, is a potent play. In this gripping scene, Draper doesn’t push a creative idea for the sake of the idea; instead he takes technology and makes it human. He makes it so human, in fact, that as you watch the scene, it becomes intimate, and it becomes personal. As such, you’re reminded of your cherished memories, and for that moment, your experience joins the confluence of emotion, brand, and technology. 

Here’s the important part: That scene--or, let’s pretend that was really the campaign Kodak considered--was designed to do just as I described. And, that’s the point. That campaign as conveyed would take center stage where technology, media, design, and the overall experience would be designed to evoke emotions and trigger a desired effect, in any network or any platform or device.

The ConflUX of Technology, Creative and Emotion

Whitney Hess is s a world-renowned user experience strategist. It is her viewpoint that I appreciate as it aligns with what I believe to be the secret ingredient to engagement…empathy. Hess concludes that empathy builds empires. And in her presentation, "Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX," she shares something that is so profound, it serves as the very essence that most organizations miss in their engagement strategies: “User Experience is the establishment of a philosophy about how to treat people. Visual Design is the establishment of a philosophy about how to make an impact.”

In her article for UX Magazine, "Guiding Principles for UX Designers," Hess outlines 20 guiding principles that pave the way for frictionless engagement.

I’ll share 11 now and more later in the series...

Stay out of people’s way…provide an efficient experience.Create a visual hierarchy that matches people’s needs. Limit distractions and choices.Provide strong information scent.Provide signposts and cues.Provide context.Use constraints appropriately.Make actions reversible.Provide feedback during the experience…design is not a monologue, it’s a conversation.Make a good first impression.Be emotional.

This is the beginning of an important shift where neither technology nor creative will lead the strategy for developing and steering customer experiences. Instead, intention and aspiration become the North Star. Technology and creative merely become the enablers in the delivery of magical experiences and gratifying sentiment. 

The JUXtaposition of Empathy and Experience

As Hess says, “empathy build empires.” In UX, user experiences are interwoven with absorbing visual design packaged in a journey rich with empathy and desire. For UX to work, for it to mean something, architects must first feel it. See, I believe that effective engagement is inspired by the empathy that develops simply by being human. It takes a holistic approach to truly deliver an empathetic voyage. Design, channels, and devices are not enough. It takes a culture of customer-centricity to feel their challenges and ambitions and what it is that they need or do not know they need. It takes a vision, mission, strategy, and purpose. 

Leadership must reimagine the future of customer relationships and not only vocalize it, but express it as a working charter. It requires nothing short of a culture shift to truly appreciate the customer for not only what they can do but also in how they feel. 

Like so many things related to technology and new media, champions tend to push a bottom-up strategy. But, my point for this series is to complement the current groundswell by convincing executives and decision makers to lead top-down strategies that covey a vision for what customer experiences should involve. Then, and only then, we can inspire incredible UX to in turn bring that experience to life. Everything starts with defining a vision that articulates the view of the customer journey not just as you see it, but what it is that customer would appreciate, relate to, and value. 

Vision is device and platform agnostic. But as Mr. Draper reminded us, it’s “delicate, but potent.”

Next up: The emotional and cognitive pillars of UX. 

Related: Why User Experience Is Critical To Customer Relationships

[Image: AMC]









02/21/12--12:35: U.S. officials fearful over potential ‘Anonymous’ cyberattacks (chan 1592482)

The notorious “hactivist” group “Anonymous Operations” has the National Security Agency on edge, with the Agency’s director warning of the group’s dangerous growth. General Keith Alexander has warned that within a year or two, the group could have the ability to create a “limited power outage” through a cyberattack, reports the Wall Street Journal. General Alexander provided his assessment during a private meetings at the White House and has previously warned about the emerging ability of cyberattackers to disable or even damage computer networks. The warning highlights a growing federal concern over Anonymous’s activities, however cybersecurity experts have a different opinion on the potential threat posed by the group. Read on for more. Some federal officials believe that Anonymous could


02/21/12--13:20: How Googley Is Yandex Anyway? (chan 1592482)

The Russian search company has just announced a collaboration with Twitter. Here's how they're becoming more like Google--and also how they also zag with every Google zig.



Yandex and Twitter just announced a collaboration that would give the Russian search company access to Twitter's fire hose of real-time updates, news, and events. In our MIC 2011 feature (Yandex came in at #26), Yandex was growing "Google-style," sprouting add-ons and apps month on month. Yandex now has a video search service, a photo hosting site, and an advertising analysis tool. It runs primarily on advertising money. Recently it added an online payments system (Yandex.money). Sound like anyone we know?

But in the year since we last visited with Yandex, whose name derives from the phrase "Yet Another Indexer, has become anything but. It's taking over turf that even the maker of an autonomous car hasn't.

First for the familiar bits. In April last year, Yandex announced a program called Yandex.Factory, to invest in promising tech startups. "We are full of ideas, but it’s not always easy to do everything at once," Ksenia Yolkina, Project Manager of Yandex.Factory said at the time. "If we spot a young, talented team of like-minded people doing interesting and relevant things on the market, we are eager to support them in all possible ways, including financing.” An approach not unfamiliar to Google, which believes in investing in startups of all sorts through via Google Ventures. 

Also in April, Yandex announced they'd gotten into mapping--perhaps you've heard of Google's own mapping service. By June, though, Yandex released a planner application for routing trips via public transport. By August, they'd added a traffic monitoring service. But then it did something un-Googley and launched a taxi search service (also in app form!) to relay taxi hail requests to companies in Moscow, with plans to expand to other big cities. 

Then there's mobile devices, on which Yandex seems to be in direct competition with Google. In October last year, Yandex kicked off a partnership with Samsung to have its search engine installed as the default on all Samsung's bada-powered smartphones in Russia--40% of Samsung's total smartphone sales in the country. Yandex's ever-growing list of apps also placed prominently in Samsung's devices, offering up weather data, mail services, currency exchange rates, and more. It also inked deals with Nokia, HTC, and Microsoft to get installed on Lumia Windows Phones as the default search engine. 

In addition to launching local spin-off search services, part of Yandex's strategy seems to be to expand into non-English-speaking markets. In September, Yandex launched in Turkey for the first time, targeting an Internet-rich market that had a growing search need for local language content. "Rolling out this new product involved developing a number of new technologies, such as a technology for storing web documents in different languages and a document prioritization technology. We expect to make broader use of these technologies in the future," Arkady Volozh, Yandex CEO said at the time. By the end of January this year, their Turkey base had grown to 100,000 daily users.

Then there's the Twitter deal. Twitter's own interest in languages will be of good use to Yandex on this front. But then, it will also strengthen Yandex's core identity as a general search engine, allowing it to deliver results super fast, and super first.

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about technology and life. Follow on Twitter, Google+.

[Image: Flickr user Fiddle Oak]









02/21/12--13:30: Ubuntu coming soon to multi-core Android devices (chan 1592482)

Canonical announced on Tuesday that the popular open-source Ubuntu operating system will soon be coming to multi-core Android devices. Users will be able use Android on their smartphones and Ubuntu as a desktop once the device is docked with a keyboard and monitor. Both operating systems will run simultaneously on the same device and have the ability to share contacts, messages and other common services. “The phone experience is pure Android – it’s a normal Android phone,” Canonical stated. “When the device is connected to a computer screen, however, it launches a full Ubuntu desktop on the computer display. It’s exactly the same desktop used by millions of enterprise and home users on their Ubuntu PCs, and includes hundreds of


02/21/12--14:45: HTC Rezound and LG Spectrum now just $99.99 from Verizon (chan 1592482)

If you’re a Verizon Wireless customer or looking to become one, the carrier is offering two of its latest 4G LTE handsets, the LG Spectrum and HTC Rezound, for $99.99 each with a two-year agreement. Both handsets run a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and impressive qHD displays. When BGR reviewed the Rezound last November, we were impressed with the overall performance of the device and with the gorgeous high definition display in particular. It was recommended over Motorola’s DROID RAZR and Samsung’s Galaxy S II, although due to its lack of Ice Cream Sandwich it fell short compared to Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus. Subscribers will have until Monday, February 28th to take advantage of Verizon’s deals on the Rezound and Spectrum, which


02/21/12--16:00: LightSquared plans to lay off 45% of its staff (chan 1592482)

LightSquared announced on Tuesday that the company plans to cut its workforce by 45% in an effort to cut costs. ”This and other cost savings measures will allow LightSquared to continue to navigate the regulatory process as it works with the appropriate government agencies to find solutions to the GPS interference issue and bring its $14 billion privately funded wireless broadband network to more than 260 million Americans,” the company said in a statement to Reuters. Last week, the FCC announced that it would block the company’s planned 4G LTE network due to issues concerning GPS interference. LightSquared currently employs 330 people and according to Reuters, the company is not currently considering bankruptcy. Read


02/21/12--17:15: Samsung partners with Blockbuster for streaming movie service (chan 1592482)

Samsung has partnered with Blockbuster to stream thousands of movies to the company’s smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks, laptops, smart TVs and Blu-ray players, reports Smarthouse. The service will reportedly be rolled out in the United States and Europe in the first half of 2012, with an Australian scheduled to take place by early September. Samsung is also rumored to be developing a new global billing system that will allow users to easily log-in and pay for media content right from their devices. Blockbuster is the largest provider of rental movies in Australia, although in recent years the company has lost ground to both Netflix and Redbox. The deal is considered a win-win “for both Samsung, Blockbuster and Australian movie watchers,” according to Paul Uniacke the CEO of


02/21/12--18:30: Samsung announces the Galaxy Ace 2 and Galaxy mini 2 (chan 1592482)

Samsung on Tuesday announced two new additions to the company’s Galaxy smartphone line; the Galaxy Ace 2 and Galaxy mini 2. The Ace 2 features an 800MHz dual-core processor with a 3.8-inch WVGA display. The handset is also equipped with a 5-megapixel rear camera, VGA front facing one, Android 2.3, 4GB of internal storage and a microSD slot. The mini 2 comes with an 800MHz processor and a 3.27-inch HVGA display with a 3-megapixel rear camera, microSD slot and Android 2.3. Both devices also ship with Samsung’s ChatON, Social Hub and Music Hub services, allowing one-step access to social networks and over 17 million songs. The GALAXY Ace 2 will be available in the U.K. in April, and the GALAXY


02/21/12--19:45: LG announces L-style Android phones ahead of MWC (chan 1592482)

LG on Tuesday announced three more Android smartphones ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain. The “L-style” series will feature the Optimus L3 (3.2-inch), L5 (4-inch) and L7 (4.3-inch), three smartphones for design-conscious consumers. “Design is consistently the top or second most important factor for customers when choosing a mobile phone,” president and CEO of LG Mobile Dr. Jong-seok Park said. “With smartphones, we sometimes took a more functional approach to design but with L-Style we’re going back to our roots as a company focused on how our products fit into the lifestyle of our customers.” The “L-style” focuses on five major design elements: modern square style, “floating display” technology, more intuitive arrangement of keys,


02/21/12--21:00: Samsung’s iCloud competitor delayed, report claims (chan 1592482)

Samsung may be looking to launch its own cloud service to compete with Apple’s iCloud. The South Korean manufacturer originally enlisted Samsung SDS to develop the infrastructure behind the company’s new “S-Cloud” service, however it turned out to be unsuitable for the global market, reports ETNews. The company’s Media Solution Center (SMSC) is now reportedly looking to establish an infrastructure by utilizing proven commercial solutions from KT or even Amazon to help build its cloud network. The publication states that the service will more than likely be delayed due to the heavy modifications to its infrastructure. [Via Engadget] Read


02/21/12--21:30: Progress Report | Reinvent The Wheel (chan 1592482)

GOAL | Reinvent the Wheel PROJECT | Bridgestone "Airless Concept Tire"

Thesis Flat tires generate more than 3 million AAA calls each year, and blowouts can easily cause auto accidents. But what if tires didn't need air?



Method Bridgestone fashioned a prototype from recyclable aluminum, rubber, and thermoplastic resin, a material that's "strong enough to handle the [vehicle] load while at the same time easy to mold," says Hiroshi Morinaga, who manages the company's advanced-tire-technology department.



Results Because the interlacing spokes are curved and flexible--as opposed to the rigid metal in normal tires--it's easier for them to distribute pressure. "The bending stiffness supports the load," says Morinaga, noting that each wheel can withstand up to 660 pounds.

Remaining Challenges 1. Safeguard spokes Wayward debris can catch between the curves, locking the wheel in place.



2. Increase durability Because it's so malleable, thermoplastic resin sometimes breaks down in extreme heat and cold.

3. Don't pull a Michelin The Bridgestone rival's airless "Tweel" was thwarted because it would vibrate constantly above speeds of 50 mph, generating far too much noise and heat. "Those have not yet been issues for our tire," says Morinaga.

Future Plans The Airless Concepts are currently being tested on small electric vehicles (see below). But Morinaga says his sights "are ultimately set on creating a viable . . . alternative to conventional [car] tires," which are a $160 billion annual market.

[Illustration by Crystal Chou]

A version of this article appears in the March 2012 issue of Fast Company.









02/22/12--03:17: Google May Sell AR Glasses This Year, New Premium Ads Expected From Facebook, Apple Plans Second Enormous Data Center (chan 1592482)

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.



Google's Doodle commemorates 155 years since the birth of Heinrich Hertz, the first person to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. 

Google May Sell AR Glasses This Year. Long simmering rumors about Google's sci-fi AR glasses are coming to a boil. The New York Times has heard that the experimental products which could be able to to track locations, or identify objects being looked at, may be going on sale before the end of the year, costing somewhere between $250 and $600. --NS

New Premium Ads Expected From Facebook. Facebook may be launching tougher, more effective, premium ads later this month, which can be launched from a brand's Facebook Page, and targeted at any user. With Facebook's first Facebook Marketing Conference in NYC around the corner, it's likely these are the first of a few changes we can expect to see rolling out soon. --NS

Apple Plans Second Enormous Data Center. Apple has confirmed that it is building a second data center in Oregon on a 160-acre plot. This comes a day after the company revealed the shiny details about a solar and fuel cell-powered data center it's planning in North Carolina. --NS

--Updated 6:00 a.m. EST

Yesterday's Fast Feed: Barnes & Noble Announces $199 Nook Tablet, DataWind Off The Aakash Case, Google Planning Satellite Farm In Iowa, and more!









02/22/12--03:46: Skunkworks, Reorganization, And Other Tactics To Excel In The Digital Age (chan 1592482)



Outside of the technology sector, most of the large companies that I encounter are startlingly similar.

They're massively successful, indisputably recognized as world-class leaders by consumers and the business community. Their executives are all quite smart and good at what they do. They acknowledge the world is going through a technological revolution and that digital technologies are transforming their businesses. They know that to stay up to par, they have to lead in the Internet space, too. But for some reason they just can't get it done.

Here’s why: traditional organizational structures are ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the digital age. While they can execute like a fine-tuned machine against core business goals, they generally consist of a series of silos--and digital is inherently integrated. Management of what I call the Software Layer, a layer of technology that surrounds the core business and serves as the focal point of interaction with the outside world, requires a more unified approach.

I’ll demonstrate the mismatch through GlobalCorp, a hypothetical company. GlobalCorp has a division for each country in which it operates, and within each country, it maintains a different business unit for each kind of product it sells. Then it has separate organizations for its internal operational departments like sales, marketing, customer service, and so forth. Each group is set up to accomplish those specific tasks, and pre-Internet, this worked pretty well. Now enter the digital era. GlobalCorp needs to be able to interact with individuals through the Web, but no one has the authority to create a company-wide Web experience. As a result, each group goes it alone, implementing its own solutions. They mean well, but their efforts are often tailored to the sole interests of their own group. The needs of the broader organization are not considered.

Flip to the experience of Internet users. They go online to interact with GlobalCorp, one task of many that they’re trying to accomplish in their busy day. But the company’s digital footprint is so fragmented and disjointed, they’re unable to figure out where they need to click to get where they need to go, and they have an inconsistent brand experience. Neglecting user needs is the fastest way for companies to lose potential and existing customers, business partners, press calls, job candidates, and various other valuable interactions and relationships.

Two main types of unusable digital experiences result from management by traditional organizational structures. At the digital marketing agency I run, some clients come to us with more than 1,000 discrete websites for a single company. That’s a big problem. Another issue is when the company has one site, but presents the content in a way that matches its internal organization--even though most users aren’t familiar with a company’s internal structure and lingo. In both cases, users become confused and even stymied, unable to complete their intended digital interactions with the company. These problems become exponentially more deleterious as they surface in mobile, social, and other digital touchpoints.

The transition to an organizational structure that supports long-term leadership in digital can come to life in three phases, all of which can eventually run concurrently.

Step One: Launch a Skunkworks Project. This step requires the least amount of heavy lifting and political strife, yet it can produce tremendous results. A skunkworks project is an undertaking where a new, small, and nimble division is placed outside of the existing organizational structure, reports directly to a C-level executive, and is tasked with creating groundbreaking products and solutions that support user and business needs. Even companies structured to excel at digital, like Google, lean on skunkworks projects to nurture great leaps ahead. For non-technology companies, it can produce the big bang needed to fuel great momentum toward digital leadership.

Step Two: Implement Concentric Organization. Concentric organization requires that a small group of digital experts, perhaps some of the same individuals from the skunkworks team, develops and implements a company-wide digital infrastructure that, again, is designed to meet both user and business needs. This team must be a full-fledged, accountable business unit with its own P&L and performance goals, and it must have the authority to influence company-wide operations. Without these attributes, it often becomes a powerless internal agency responding to the whims of various departments. Its end product should be a system that allows large numbers of nontechnical employees to use digital tools to advance their specific business goals, which protects the external user’s experience by standardizing the output. Once developed, key digital team members should be exported to relevant departments throughout the company to aid in integration.

Step Three: Reorganize Comprehensively. The final step is to combine the online and offline functions of a particular area. For example, a single customer-service group should handle issues via telephone, email, and social media, and a retail merchandizing group should manage products in both the offline and online stores. The result is an organization structured around each stage of the relationship between customer and business.

When all three elements are working together, the company is unified by a strong foundation of clear digital business goals and tools, and can maintain a consistent and wholly usable experience for users, while producing cutting-edge digital products. But this machine, the Software Layer, won’t work for long without adequate leadership. One person acutely aware of user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility must remain in charge of the company’s entire digital footprint. Everyone “owning digital” is almost as destructive as no one owning it--it’s all too easy for factions to fracture from the whole, for the infrastructure to deteriorate, for top-level business goals to lose their weight, and for the user experience to degenerate. A company is a truly digital organization only when management maintains a keen focus on meeting user needs.

Author Aaron Shapiro is CEO of Huge and author of Users Not Customers.

[Image: Flickr user Dan Dzurisin]









02/22/12--04:26: Fast Talk: How Warby Parker's Cofounders Disrupted The Eyewear Industry And Stayed Friends (chan 1592482)

Meet Neil Blumenthal, cofounder and co-CEO of Warby Parker. He tells Fast Company how a pact over a beer at the company's inception helped its founders preserve their friendship.



Last year saw 500% growth for the online eyewear brand, Warby Parker. The company is disrupting prices in a business historically rife with mark-ups, all while advancing a social mission of bringing corrective eyewear to people who can’t afford it. Fast Company spoke with Warby Parker cofounder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal to discuss dentistry, data visualization, and friendship.

Give us a quick refresher on why Warby Parker is innovative.

We’re a new brand of designer eyewear, designed to let people express their personality while doing good in the world. We’ve made pricing simple--there’s one price, $95. And for every pair we sell, we distribute one to someone in need.

How have you kept prices so low?

Simply put, we bypass the middleman. We design our own frames under our own brand, and we work directly with suppliers. We avoid paying licensing fees, and we sell directly to consumers through WarbyParker.com. We started the company because we were sick and tired of radically overpaying for eyeglasses. It didn’t make sense to us that a pair of eyeglasses should cost as much or more as an iPhone. Eyeglasses were invented over 800 years ago and don’t contain rare minerals or state-of-the-art technology.

You founded Warby Parker with three friends from Wharton Business School. Was there a moment when you knew your were onto a good idea?

It was our first semester, the fall of 2008. We were in the computer lab between classes, having a conversation, and the light bulbs just went off. The next morning, we all quickly called each other. None of us could sleep the night before--we were all up thinking, “Is this a good idea?” Later that night, we ended up going to a bar, Roosevelt’s on 23rd and Walnut in Philadelphia, and we had that gut check where we all, over a beer, promised each other two things. One, that we were gonna work really hard on this. And the other thing we promised was that we were going to do everything possible to remain friends. We’d each read those horror stories about how founders quickly became enemies, and we didn’t want that to happen to us.

How did you implement the second promise?

We actually ended up putting in place a bunch of different mechanisms to help us remain friends. One was monthly 360 reviews between the four of us, where we’d come back to the same bar, and put each one in the hot seat. We would basically say, “You’re doing this great, this could be improved, and hey, when you email me a 10-page email at two in the morning, I want to punch you in the face.” I think that helped create a very productive and friendly working dynamic. We each made ourselves equal partners, and we created a vesting schedule, where equity would vest every month until we graduated.

And you guys are still talking to each other...?

Yes, the four of us make up the board. We’re still close friends, usually talk at least once a week, and go out pretty frequently together.

Warby Parker recently became a B Corporation. Can you explain what that is?

A B Corp is a stakeholder-driven business. For us, we consider our customers, employees, the environment, and the community in every decision we make. While we’re still trying to scale and be incredibly profitable, we won’t necessarily make a decision that will increase profits at the expense of our customers, employees, the environment, or the community.

Getting B Corp status can be a long, probing process; an executive once compared it to going to the dentist.

It’s a long process, but it’s something we took pride in. It’s something we were very happy to do. The dentist analogy I’m not sure I agree with. If you’ve built your company from Day One under this mantra, it’s very easy to answer the questions.

Do you think it’s important for companies who talk the talk about being ethical to apply for B Corp status?

If you’re claiming to be having a positive impact and not being transparent, you’ll be found out, and it will be company-destroying: it will hurt your ability to build relationships with customers, and impede your ability to recruit and retain talent. The idea that you can slap on a cause to a product or service--I think people are too smart and becoming too well informed for that to work. I think the status quo moving forward, in the next five years if not sooner, will be companies that do good, that are transparent, and that can withstand the scrutiny.

You have a staggering assertion on your site, that year-end reports don’t have to be boring. But it’s true: you transformed your year-end report into a series of fascinating interactive infographics.

The initial idea came because one of our designers, Jarrett Fuller, creates a personal annual report in the form of an infographic every year. We were just blown away by the response. We thought some people would find it interesting, but it was retweeted 2,000 times and led to our three highest consecutive day of sales--even more so then when we were in CBS Sunday Morning or the New York Times. For us it was incredibly exciting that people were that interested in taking a look under the hood, so to speak.

This interview has been condensed and edited. For more from the Fast Talk interview series, click here. Know someone who'd make a good Fast Talk subject? Mention it to David Zax.

Follow Fast Company on Twitter.









02/22/12--04:45: Half of all smart TVs sold aren’t even connected to the Internet (chan 1592482)

Internet-enabled televisions have become the next big thing. LG, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and Sharp, among others, offer TV sets with apps and Wi-Fi connectivity. Just because someone has an Internet TV, however, doesn’t mean he or she it using it. “People are buying connected TVs, but they are not all using them,” said Norm Bogen, vice president for digital entertainment at research firm NPD In-Stat. According to a survey conducted by In-Stat, only 47% of all people who own an Internet-enabled TV have it connected to the Web, reports TechNewsDaily. Among those that are connected to home networks, a majority of the TV’s features go unused. “I think that people like some aspects of smart TVs,” said Paul Gagnon, the


02/22/12--04:47: The Unexpected Way To Use Your Social Network Strategically (chan 1592482)



If it’s a clear night tonight, go outside about 9 p.m. and look west at the two brightest stars, beautiful as jewels, one above the other. Low to the horizon will be the planet Venus, the “evening star,” just beginning to set. Above Venus is the planet Jupiter, the gas giant with more than 60 known moons (and still counting). Now turn around and face east. Coming up off the horizon you’ll see another jewel, this one quite reddish; that’s Mars, the Red Planet (two tiny moons). On March 3 this year, our Earth (one giant moon) will pass closest to Mars, overtaking it in our orbital race around the Sun.

The solar system is a network of planets, each of which has its own network of moons, so it provides a picturesque (if inexact) analogy for social networks, which are also networks of networks. Everyone seems to be on the social media bandwagon now, with the most enthusiastic advocates often competing to build up their networks of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or LinkedIn connections.  

But rather than counting how many moons you have in your network, what you ought to be doing is figuring out how to get the most benefit from the right ones. And despite the hype, my own informal canvassing has convinced me that most of us aren’t very strategic when it comes to the best way to take advantage of the enormous potential of our own social networks. 

Suppose, for instance, you want to find a new career. Maybe you’ve recently had a job shot out from under you. Or perhaps you just think you can do better. Everyone knows, of course, that networking is the best way to find out about job openings and career opportunities (as well as most other business opportunities), but is there a smart way to use your network?

Yes there is, and most people aren’t conscious of it. Almost 30 years ago, a landmark study showed conclusively that the best leads for job opportunities are more likely to come from your more distant colleagues and friends, as opposed to your closest ones. This isn’t because your close friends don’t give you good recommendations, but because you and your other close friends are more likely already to know about the same job openings, while the job openings known to your more distant colleagues--those with whom you don’t interact very often--are not as likely to be known to your own friends, or to you. 

This principle, known as the “strength of weak ties,” has other strategic applications as well. Two venture capitalists have found, for instance, that investing firms that share information with others regarding potential investment prospects tend to gain access to a wider network of candidates--essentially leveraging their weak network ties, rather than focusing solely on strong ties. They also cite another recent study by other academics that shows VC firms concentrated in the traditional tech centers (Silicon Valley, New York, Boston) do better than other firms primarily because they "cast a wide, public net," harvesting the results of their weak ties.

Or consider the question of generating new business in the B2B space, or with regard to expensive, considered purchases. If you use a straight-ahead business-development plan, you’ll develop a laundry list of leads and opportunities to be followed up. While this can be useful, the truth is that a great deal of such business comes in via the referral of others. And how can you increase your access to such referrals? You guessed it--by concentrating on your weak ties, rather than on your strong ties. By developing your own network of industry colleagues and blog or Twitter followers, for instance, you get access to their connections with others. And one of my favorite strategies for B2B competitors is to prepare PowerPoint decks about the benefits of the firm, and then make those decks freely available on your own Website for download and unlimited use. However, this isn’t a tool for persuading the people who come to your site to buy, but for helping them to persuade others within their firm. In effect, you are arming these weak-tie prospects with the tools necessary to appeal to their own networks.   

And of course, the power of weak ties can hardly be overstated when it comes to generating creative or innovative ideas. All new ideas come from combining previous ideas and concepts. This is one reason why a group of people with completely independent ideas is likely to come to a better, more creative, or predictive conclusion than any single one of them acting alone, even the smartest member of the group. In essence, ideas and innovations themselves exist in a kind of network, with some ideas connected to others, clusters of ideas within other clusters, and so forth. Your best new ideas, and a company’s most breakthrough innovations, will come when you tap your weak ties by interacting with the disciplines you know less about, or the experts you rarely consult, or the people you associate with less frequently.

By contrast, the surest way NOT to have a creative breakthrough is to rely on all the experts you already know, and all the disciplines you’re already familiar with. One study of entrepreneurs showed they are more likely to have “deliberately exposed themselves to different sources of information, by striking up conversations on trains, for example, or maintaining a diverse range of acquaintances, to increase the odds of stumbling upon an interesting opportunity.”

Finally, even if all you’re trying to do is to advance your own career at whatever firm you’re working for, the “weak ties” argument will help you better appreciate which other executives you should be trying to add to your network. It’s long been thought that the best way to get ahead is to hitch your wagon to a senior star, but a University of Chicago business school professor’s book, Neighbor Networks, has debunked this myth. A summary of Prof. Ronald S. Burt’s book suggests “There is no advantage at all to having well-connected friends.” Instead, it is the managers who do the connecting that tend to earn demonstrably higher salaries. This is not because they become linchpins or hubs or gateways to power and information, per se, but rather because managers who maintain contacts in a diverse range of departments are getting a very healthy and intellectually stimulating “exposure to diverse ideas and behaviors.” According to Burt, “the way networks have their effect is not by getting information from people, but rather by finding people who are interesting and who think differently from you,” adding that it isn’t being in the know, “but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other.” 

So whether you’re interested in a better job, more business clients, or simply more creative ideas, it makes sense to think more strategically about how your network operates, and how you can better operate within it. If you want to be successful, you need to strategize how to make better connections with groups you don’t know much about, or how to craft analogies by combining different disciplines--business success and astronomy, for example.

[Image: Flickr user Carl Jones]









02/22/12--05:34: Fab CEO Jason Goldberg On When To Go Big (He Should Know) (chan 1592482)

In the last two weeks, the design flash-sale site has added five verticals and opened a site in Germany. Isn't that expanding kind of fast for a company that's not even a year old?



Fab has been a busy bee recently. Last week, the flash-sale site launched five new verticals. And now, the New York-based startup has snapped up Berlin-based Casacanda and opened up their first international site, Fab.de.

That's a lot of expansion for a company that's not even a year old.

Sure Fab is growing like gang-busters. After opening its digital doors in June, it grew to 1 million members in November and got to double that earlier this month. It's doing an average of $1.5 million in sales a week and plans to log at least $100 million this year. Along the way, the startup has scooped up over $51 million in venture funding, including a $40 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz in November.

But still, knowing when's the right time to expand is always a tricky call: Try to do too much too soon, and a nascent startup risks imploding under its own ambitions. But wait too long to get all your ducks in a row, and you might be overtaken by competitors. So how do you know when's the right time to start branching out?

We asked Fab cofounder and CEO Jason Goldberg how the company knew it was the right time to start expanding. Here's what he told us:

 

In the beginning, focus on just "one thing"

 

"We have this concept at Fab called the 'one thing,' which is: Do one thing, and do that one thing better than anyone else," Goldberg says. "We're almost religious about that." New opportunities pop up for Goldberg and cofounder Bradford Shellhammer all the time, but they say no to anything that isn't design-related. "We're very careful about [remembering] that moving in certain directions at a certain time [could be] too fast or would dilute our primary focus."

 

Let the metrics guide the growth

 

"At the end of last year, we looked at where were we on our trajectory. We ended the year with 1.5 million members. We were growing very quickly," Goldberg says. They had momentum, so they could start to think big when setting their goals for 2012. "One of them was to go from having about 3,000 products on the site per day to having tens of thousands," Goldberg says. "We wanted to get to a place where people say: 'I turn to Fab whenever I want something design-oriented.'"

The most logical way to explode the number of products was to add independent verticals. So the team reviewed the data to see which segments had the most demand. "There are categories on the site where we had clear evidence from our usage and from user behavior that our users wanted to see more, that were selling really well whenever we did it, but we just hadn't provided enough product," Goldberg says. That's how they came to the decision to launch independent shops for Vintage, Fashion, Kids, Pets, and Food, which started going live last week.

 

Leave international on the back burner until you have momentum at home...

 

It used to be that companies could take their time going international. They'd master their game at home, and then take it overseas when it felt right, usually many years later, not worrying much about competition from local startups. Starting up was difficult and expensive. Competing with a well-funded American firm was no easy trick.

No more. "It's faster, cheaper, and easier than ever to put up a website," Goldberg says. "There are copycats and clones everywhere." A U.S. company that takes too long to get its butt overseas risks finding the market saturated by the time it gets there.

Still, you don't want to move too fast. "I wouldn't think about it at all until you can say you've really started to figure out the business model, and you really can see some significant scale and growth," Goldberg says. "In our company, I was religious about not thinking about doing anything other than our 'one thing'--design in the US—until we could say we had begun to seriously figure that out."

 

…But once you have that traction, get moving overseas.

 

The flip side of taking your time is you don't want to wait too long to make your move. "In the German market particularly, we saw six Fab copycats emerging over the course of this fall," Goldberg says. "We had to make a decision pretty quickly: Do we want to get out ahead in the market or do we want to be playing catch up?"

One of Fab's investors and board members is Andreessen Horowitz's Jeff Jordan, who also has a piece of Airbnb and Pinterest. "Those companies had German clones very quickly, and now they are just playing catch up," Goldberg says. Fab knew if they waited too long to get overseas, local movers would define the game, and the New York company would have an uphill battle once it made landfall.

"Fab is an opportunity to build a brand for the ages," Goldberg says. "We really think we have an opportunity to build the global brand synonymous with design for years and years to come. That drove us to think international faster."

 

Acquire local companies so you can hit the ground running--but only if they're a perfect fit.

 

Once you've decided to go overseas, you face the perennial strategy conundrum: Build or buy. Build out a team and infrastructure of your own so you know it'll be perfectly suited to your needs, or buy up an existing company in the hopes of being able to easily retool it where necessary.

Buying an existing company often seems like the smart choice. It lets you hit the ground running. At least in theory.

The Fab guys decided that a local acquisition had to have three attributes. The local team had to be passionate about building a company just like Fab. "In Germany, it's easy to find people who are passionate about building a business," Goldberg says. "But we wanted to work with people who are passionate about building this business."

The team would have to have mastered the fundamentals of executing on the business. "We didn't want to have to teach them," Goldberg says. "Casacanda had solved a lot of the same problems we had solved."

And they had to have traction. Without that, Goldberg says, "you might as well build from scratch."

Fab found those three attributes in Casacanda. "We met five other teams here in Germany, and none of them had learned those lessons like these guys," Goldberg says. Fab snapped the company up for a reported $10 million in stock, and by earlier this week, Fab.de was open for business.

But despite the frenzy of activity in the Fab space overseas, moving this fast was never a sure thing. "If we had not been able to find a team like [Casacanda], we would not have gone to Germany for another six months," Goldberg says.

E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com's Silicon Valley reporter. Twitter | Google+ | Email









02/22/12--05:50: Foxconn accused of hiding underage factory workers before FLA inspection (chan 1592482)

Foxconn workers claim the manufacturer transferred underage employees to other departments or did not schedule them to work overtime in an effort to avoid discovery during the Fair Labor Association’s investigation of its facilities, reports AppleInsider. Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) project officer Debby Sze Wan Chan was told by two Foxconn employees that the manufacturer “prepared for the inspection” by hiding the child laborers. “All underage workers, between 16-17 years old, were not assigned any overtime work and some of them were even sent to other departments,” Chan reportedly said. Another Foxconn worker said she had recently been allowed three breaks a day during the audit, an increase from one. Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that the company


02/22/12--06:29: Rhapsody, Spotify, Netflix, And The 28-Day Waiting Game (chan 1592482)

The music industry may soon be acting even more like the film business and delaying streaming songs to avoid cannibalizing sales."Windowing," says Jon Irwin, CEO of subscription-based music streaming service Rhapsody, "[is] fundamentally the wrong thing to do."



New movies aren't available to Netflix subscribers until at least 28 days after they're released to the public (even 56 days in some cases). Movie studios use this practice of delaying releases, called "windowing," in order to stop subscriptions from cannibalizing DVD sales and rentals.

Soon, that same practice could become more commonplace in the music industry, where a number of popular artists believe "windowing" might offset any potential for subscription services to cannibalize single and album sales. It represents a huge obstacle for Rhapsody and Spotify, which are concerned with keeping their music libraries fresh in the eyes of iTunes-addicted consumers. And it's a a practice that Jon Irwin, Rhapsody's CEO, hopes to stop.

"Windowing," Irwin says," [is] fundamentally the wrong thing to do."

Rhapsody is the No. 1 subscription service in the U.S., and Irwin has seen plenty of big-name artists question whether it's better to release their albums on iTunes before Rhapsody in order to boost sales revenue. Coldplay, for example, released Mylo Xyloto in October, but it was nowhere to be found on streaming services such as Spotify and Rhapsody until earlyer this month. There was no official window that Coldplay agreed to--the band simply added it (quietly) to Rhapsody and Spotify several months after it went on sale.

"EMI, in this case, said, 'They're not releasing it for streaming; you can't put it up in your feed,'" Irwin recalls. "I said, 'Okay, well, are they going to?' And they said, 'I don't know.' We try to have a dialogue with the labels and the band management to understand why [they're] making this decision."

The reason was simple: "Spotify competes with download stores," Dave Holmes, Coldplay's manager, said in January. He was "very concerned" that subscription services would hurt Coldplay's sales--and who can blame him? The band set digital-sales records in the U.K. with Mylo Xyloto. Now that it's released on Rhapsody and Spotify, Coldplay stands to continue to generate revenue off the album each time it's streamed.

Irwin believes that theory is wrong. For one, he says there is no evidence that Rhapsody and Spotify have cannibalized CD or MP3 sales. If anything, he argues, streaming services help cannibalize pirated music. "I think [the "windowing" theory] is wrong because Rhapsody provides incremental revenue," Irwin says. "There are people who are going to continue to want to own and purchase music--those people who are buying it on iTunes are probably still going to buy it on iTunes. There are going to be people who want access and who would never pay--those people who are aren't buying it on iTunes are never going to buy it on iTunes. And there are people who, if it's not available on streaming, they're going to steal it. They're going to pirate it. They're not going to go out and buy it."

When asked if he could understand why a band as big as Coldplay might want to sell their music on iTunes first to make as much revenue as possible from album sales first, Irwin acknowledges that an album stream won't be worth as much as an album purchase. "But what happens to that album over time? That streaming revenue model goes on and on and on--it's going to compensate you forever and ever," he says. "You're trading analog dollars for digital pennies--maybe digital dimes--and hundreds of millions of plays will become billions of plays and trillions of plays."

Still, it will likely take sometime before streaming revenue becomes that significant--Rhapsody boasts just 1 million subscribers, and Spotify 3 million. Until it does, though, Irwin believes "windowing" isn't worth it, as it might "potentially alienate your fan base."

While Irwin believes artist adoption of streaming services is inevitable, some believe it could be the policy of "windowing" that is inevitable too. Music analyst Mark Mulligan anticipates that "windowing” will help artists release albums across various digital services. “That is a really easy way to mitigate a lot of the risk of streaming,” Mulligan told the Financial Times. “The relationship between streaming and the download could be the same as radio and the CD. Radio cannibalizes sales as well...but artists get many multiples higher on Spotify per play than they get on the radio.”

In this sense, perhaps the idea of "windowing" is out of the hands of Rhapsody and Spotify, which rely on artist and label content as heavily as Netflix relies on movies and TV shows from studios.

"I just fundamentally think it's the wrong thing to do, which would probably indicate what our behaviors will be," Irwin says, stressing so for a second time. "We don't have the choice because the labels and the artists are making the decisions about the content and the art that they create, and the rights they grant the labels, and what the labels can in turn grant to us."

Then he adds: "I don't really have a say in it."

[Image: Flickr user James Calder]









02/22/12--06:35: Apple defends rights to iPad name in Shanghai court (chan 1592482)

Apple on Wednesday defended itself in a Shanghai court against Proview International, which claims Apple is violating a trademark it holds on the “iPad” name, the New York Times reported. Proview’s allegations have prevented the Cupertino-based company from selling its popular tablet in numerous smaller Chinese cities, however Apple Stores in Beijing and Shanghai continue to sell the device. The four-hour session at the Pudong New Area People’s Court ended without any ruling from the district judge, though both sides reportedly presented new evidence in the case. Apple claims it acquired the iPad trademark from Proview in 2009. “We bought Proview’s worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago,” the company said in a statement. “Proview


02/22/12--06:57: Innovating Office For iPads: Or, Why Microsoft Should Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Apple (chan 1592482)



The tablet-based publication (tab-lication?) The Daily is embroiled in a fuss about its leak of plans to bring Microsoft's Office suite to the iPad. The Daily's convinced the software is for real, but Microsoft has issued a tissue-thin denial that actually confirms or denies nothing material. Meanwhile, the general feeling is that MS would be crazy not to expand its Office domain onto the best-selling tablet PC--one that's causing a computing revolution. But Microsoft is actually facing a stickier problem here.

It's about price and precedent.

MS would be foolish not to address the iPad App Store as a market space because Apple's tablet is continuing to dominate the scene, is likely to do so for a while, is affecting PC sales and is penetrating into business workplaces (with a recent survey saying 91% of business and IT pros using one for work). That's MS's traditional Office stomping ground. MS's own Windows 8-powered tablets aren't due for a while yet and will likely take a while longer to actually establish a decent market share, so delaying a tablet edition of Office until then could miss out on potential sales. It's also arguable that while Android is building its tablet market share, writing Office to be compatible with so many subtle variations of Android OS and hardware would be a lot more work than aiming at Apple's product. 

So, let's assume that MS really is developing a version of Office for Apple's iPad that embodies some of its own Metro mobile OS styling as the leaked imagery hints. Let's guess that MS may even build in some of its upcoming SkyDrive tech to facilitate cloud storage, thus boosting business-user productivity (when users later download that PowerPoint slide they were working on to their office PC) and competing with Apple's iCloud system. That sounds great, doesn't it? MS fans, or those merely chained to MS by years of having to use its products, will get their familiar systems on a new and very chic computing platform that's ideal for use while commuting and which will enable perfect compatibility with their PC apps at home or their desk.

Now--how does Microsoft price this code?

Apple already has its own business productivity apps on the iPad with Pages, Numbers and Keynote, and they offer compatibility with MS's system and interlock through the cloud to Apple's own desktop versions. If you use one iTunes account on several iPads, thanks to the way Apple's system works you only need pay once for these apps. They sell for a very reasonable $9.99 each, allowing Apple to continue its PR effort that points out how many apps you have to pay for on PCs are free, already installed or low-cost on its hardware.

Microsoft could easily price at or very near to the same point and compete directly, relying on the massive inertia the Office name carries.

But Office on the PC costs $119.99 for one user on a home PC for the lowest "Home and Student" edition, and $349.99 for the full "Professional" version. That's four times the cost of Apple's iPad apps for the entry level and over 11 times the cost for the top edition. It costs more still to install Office on a handful of PCs ($499.99 for the Pro version). So pricing the tablet edition at $30 for the full package could set a precedent among consumers to expect lower prices for the desktop software too. Which would hurt MS because Office is one of the world's best selling pieces of software and it makes up a big part of the company's profits (it may, or may not, have recently superceded Windows as the biggest contributor to MS's bottom line, and was credited with boosting a 6% rise in MS quarterly profits to $5.74 billion late in 2011).

So MS could make the tablet versions not fully-featured, arguing (perhaps without real basis) that the tablet environment isn't suited for the full workload of, say, Excel or that the hardware wouldn't support it. That sets a bad precedent for its own software on Windows 8 tablets then: Why buy a Win 8 tablet if the apps are already on the iPad cheaply, and why buy them at all if they don't work as well as the desktop ones? If MS then chooses to make the Win 8 versions of Office better than the iPad ones, this would be simply exposed as marketeering and could alienate a considerable number fo consumers who already love their Apple product. And don't forget the rumors about the upcoming iPad 3--its super high-resolution screen will best that on many PCs, and its hardware would thus seem perfectly capable of supporting as complex an app as Excel. It may even beat the upcoming Windows 8 hardware.

And Apple, seeing the app competition, could always spend a little effort to brush up its own iWork suite on the iPad to improve both functionality and cross-compatibility with Microsoft's software, and quickly nullify any added value in buying Office and maybe even Windows 8 tablets. After all, the iPad is very publicly applauded right now and who would spend $500 to $800 on one in March, complete with their familiar MS Office aboard, only to ditch it for an unproven Windows effort late in 2012?

Hence Microsoft is trapped in a version of the famous prisoner's dilemma, being forced to cooperate uncomfortably with its erstwhile "enemy" in order to make profits from the iPad's success, so both parties ultimately benefit. Its one true path out of the mess is to really innovate, and deliver such serious added value from the iPad edition of Office and the Windows 8 version that it actually attracts customers because of its exciting strengths and cool new features. Does that sound like a typical Microsoft solution to you?

[Image: Flickr user x-ray delta one]

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.









02/22/12--07:00: Verizon’s 4G LTE network suffers nationwide outage (chan 1592482)

We have received a number of reports this morning from Verizon Wireless customers complaining that the carrier’s 4G LTE network was down in various parts of the country. The carrier’s support forums have also been flooded with complaints from irate users who claim the service is down across the country, and Verizon customers service representatives have reportedly confirmed the outage to a number of subscribers. Verizon customers have suffered from data problems before — the carrier recently had three massive outages in a single month.


02/22/12--07:10: PlayStation's Jack Tretton On Today's Vita Launch [Video] (chan 1592482)

Today marks the American launch of the PlayStation Vita, Sony's latest handheld gaming device. We talk with Sony Computer Entertainment America president Jack Tretton about producing a dedicated game system in the era of smartphones and tablets.

[twistage 812c7148e967c]

FAST COMPANY: What are you feeling as the launch approaches?

JACK TRETTON: This is my fourth launch now at Sony. They never get old. I equate it to the Super Bowl. You only get to launch a few times in your career. And just like the guys that play in the Super Bowl you say, "Take a look around and make sure you soak it in." It's so incredibly exciting. You build up something for years and you get to see all the consumer excitement on launch day. And later, you look back over the course of the product's life cycle and all it's accomplished and you remember that launch date forever. February 22nd is going to be a lifetime memory for me.

As you have seen the Vita come together, what feature has surprised you?

I am amazed at how quick technology moves, in such a short period of time. If you think back to life without cell phones or other things and it is hard to remember. But being so close and so involved in the industry, I remember every ounce of innovation. I remember the first time I saw the original PlayStation. It just made my jaw drop and I said, "That's like nothing I have ever seen."

I think the great thing about the Vita is that I saw the promise in the original PSP of the ultimate portable gaming device for an older consumer, a console gaming experience with multimedia capabilities. And I think for it's time, in 2005, it was an incredibly noble effort. But it's great to sit here in 2012 and see really the culmination of what was the vision back in 2005. To have those dual analog sticks, and the front and back touch, and the front and rear cameras, and to really look at how beautiful that OLED screen is--and look at the power it has under the hood--it really is the vision we had back in 2005 brought to full life.

What game are you looking forward to playing on the Vita the most?

I'm a Hot Shots Golf addict. I am spending all of my spare time building up all my attributes. I am already online and competing in tournaments. I thought I would get there early and get ahead of the game. But I am amazed I wasn't the only one with that idea. I thought I would have to compete with some Japanese consumers who had a two-month headstart on me--but good old fashioned American ingenuity and Canadian ingenuity--you look at the top of the leaderboard, it's already a bunch of Americans and Canadians who had their hands on it for a week.

What would you say to those who feel that in this day and age of smartphones and tablets, a portable game system can't succeed?

I guess everybody is entitled to their opinion. My first assumption is that they are not gamers. If you're not a NASCAR fan--and I can't necessarily say that I count myself as the core NASCAR fan--the non-NASCAR fan, they'd say it's a bunch of people taking left-hand turns, waiting for an accident. If you are a NASCAR fan you would think that was incredibly ignorant and people don't appreciate the depth of it. I think the same is true about gaming.

If you are a gamer, you are not going to be at all confused when you get a Vita in your hands and you play something like an Uncharted: Golden Abyss; you are not going to be at all confused as to why there would be a market for a dedicated game platform. But if you're not a gamer, and you are not into that in-depth experience, and you don't spend the type of hours and dollars that gamers do playing it, then I can see where you would say, "Why would you need a dedicated portable gaming device when there are smartphones and tablets?" I would tell you, that quite frankly, that is not our target audience for day one. But the good news is that I welcome all those consumers in because just a few short years ago, those people didn't play games at all, but now smartphones and tables are whetting people's appetite for gaming.

I think they are more of a potential consumer for us in the near future, than they were back in 2005 when we debuted the PSP. I see it really being more additive to the ecosystem and we are trying to bring that PlayStation experience to those consumers before they get a hand on the Vita, with things like PS Suite where they can experience PlayStation quality gaming on an Android smartphone or on a tablet. It's not a part of the industry that we are intimidated by.

The 3DS had a rocky launch with a $250 price point and Nintendo lowered the cost. Are you worried the $250+ prices will also slow the market's acceptance of Vita?

I think at the end of the day, we are in a fashion industry and what drives people are the must-have item. It's what my friends have. It's where the best games are. I think software drives hardware. I much prefer a system that is $249 with a great launch library--we have 26 games and 100 games that follow that. If you play an Uncharted: Golden Abyss, you appreciate that $249 value immediately. If the contrast is that it is incredibly reasonably priced, but it doesn't have the software library, I'd rather make my way with the $249 pricepoint and the launch library. I think people will respond very positively to the price point.

If you had two minutes to show something from the vita to reluctant gamers, what would you show them?

Talking about it and even showing them video really doesn't do it justice. We have invested so heavily in our pop-up stores and promotional events, and actually bringing Vitas to retail and setting up full-blown displays, because you can't do it justice describing it. You have to put it in people's hands. As soon as people hold it, they are immediately drawn to the OLED screen. They get the nice comfortable feel in their hands. They see the dual analog sticks, the shoulder buttons, the d-pad, the things they are very comfortable with. And then the casual gamer will be very comfortable swiping and using the touchpad. And then that rear touchpad is going to appeal to the casual gamer and the core--for the first time, if you are a core gamer, all ten fingers can be in play, controlling different characters on the screen.

Our goal as gamers, is to get the most immersive experience possible, and to have as much control as possible and having it as intuitive as possible. And I think the Vita really marries those together. So what I would do is just let somebody hold it and not do a lot of talking. I would point out some of the key features they should notice right away. But I would really try to get them to spend some time with it and try one of the 26 launch games, depending on the genres that appeal to them. If they even got a passing interest in gaming, we got a good chance of getting them on board.

Ultimately, what is Sony's strategy with the Vita?

To me, the message is simple; the strategy is simple. First and foremost, it's not a debate to us whether there is a market there for us. I think we carved out a heritage in gaming. We know what we are talking about; we invested million in this dedicated portable handheld device. And then we evangelized to consumers, retailers, and to the development community--and I think they have responded very positively.

The target audience is a PlayStation owner, male, early 20s. Now, that's the center of the bullseye, that's not the entire target. But if you say that is the center of the bullseye, you've got all your PlayStation network attributes, all your trophies, all your friend lists that immediately crossover. You got cross-play opportunities using your PS3 content, cloud saves, picking your games up and continuing them on your PS Vita. And I think we expand the first circle out from that to non-PlayStation 3 owners, but core gamers, and that's an extremely large audience. And then we start to fan out to those consumers that even have a passing interest in gaming--and there is a Billion of them worldwide, 163 million in the United States.

So to me, the easiest question in the world is do you think there is a market for this, do you think the gaming industry is healthy and expanding. I think it is expanding like no other industry or other form of entertainment out there. To be focused on gaming, and to have a device that is just targeted to that audience, is extremely exciting to me. I think at the end of the day, every device has a core competency and ours is gaming. So if you are a gamer, check out the Vita. And if you are not a gamer, keep an eye on your friends, because you'll want one soon.

Want more?

Sony's Quest To Conquer Mobile Continues With PlayStation VitaSony Brings PlayStation Characters To A Live Action SpotPlayStation's Jack Tretton on 3-D Games and the Gamification of Business

Follow the author (@khohannessian), video producer (@adambarenblat), or Fast Company on Twitter.









02/22/12--07:25: Authorities take down another popular file-sharing site, arrest founder for piracy (chan 1592482)

Authorities in Germany recently executed a raid that resulted in at least two arrests and the takedown of another popular file-sharing service. German-language news site Heise Online reported earlier this week that German police arrested two men with alleged ties to file-sharing service Skyload.net, which was subsequently taken offline. The service’s owner, identified as 28-year-old Maik P., was taken into custody along with 25-year-old Marcel E., owner of Skyload.net’s Web hosting service. Both men have been charged with violating copyright laws and Maik P. is allegedly personally responsible for uploading and sharing more than 10,000 copyrighted films. The Skyload.net takedown follows the closure of one of the most popular file-sharing services in the world, Megaupload, which was taken offline last month


02/22/12--07:47: Brands Get Physical To Build Trust (chan 1592482)

From handshakes to hardware, intimate signals constantly affect us in life. As the world becomes increasingly digital, we are losing many sensory signals that once moved us. Here's what can companies do to reclaim these touching moments.



I’m sure you’ve had the experience of reaching out to shake someone’s hand, only to be surprised by a palm so limp that it feels more like a dead fish than a warm welcome. What was your immediate impression of the person? How, then, did you reassess them? If you thought it indicative of a weak character, you’re onto something.

Some years ago, researchers at the University of Alabama studied 112 male and female students whose handshakes were evaluated by four handshake coders. The coders had received one month of training and practice in shaking hands and evaluating handshakes before the study began. The students, who didn't know their handshakes were being evaluated, had their hands shaken eight times (twice with all four experimenters) and they also completed four personality questionnaires.

Results of the study, led by Dr. William F. Chaplin, showed that a person's handshake is consistent over time and is related to some aspects of his or her personality. Those with a firm handshake were more extroverted and open to experience, and less neurotic and shy than those with a less firm or limp handshake. What strikes me is that we are somehow intuitively aware of this personality evaluation filter, where something as simple as a touch significantly influences our decision-making processes.

Having worked with sensory signals throughout my career, I’ve come to appreciate how the smallest sensory details can have the greatest impact. Take, for example, the sound and feel of opening a bottle of water. You’re at least subconsciously familiar with the subtle click of a breaking seal. However, let’s say you’re in India, where the water bottles open silently. When I heard about the absence of the subtle click, I questioned the safety of the water. Apparently I wasn't alone: I remember reading about a competitive water bottler who took advantage of this, changed the top so that it clicks, and gained a competitive advantage in the water market place. People believe the water is safer. 

Signals across almost every aspect of our lives affect us. It’s interesting to note that, as we become increasingly digital, we are losing many sensory signals that once surrounded us. Others, however, often replace these. We’ve come to depend on a whole new set of tones as we key in numbers on an ATM or a cell phone.

In order to investigate just how important our senses are, I initiated a small experiment exploring people’s perception of an unknown brand, based on the type of media where they were introduced to it. I wanted to look at how different media formats convey indirect messages.  But, most importantly, I was interested in seeing if the physical presence of a media channel, such as a billboard, would affect a person’s sensory impression of the advertised brand.

We established four different sources: a billboard, a storefront, a print ad and a banner ad. The fictitious brand, Insursafe, claiming to sell insurance, was featured in almost identical fashion across all four media platforms. We then questioned 132 volunteers on which source inspired the greater impact regarding trust and sensory impressions. Then using only those volunteers who had indeed noticed the message, we discovered something quite fascinating. The more ‘physical’ the media channel was, the more ‘solid’ was the impression it formed in the respondents’ brains. The signage on the storefront was the most trusted, followed by the billboard. They outperformed, by far, the print ad and banner ad. Not only was there greater trust for the fictitious insurance company when viewed on a building or a billboard, the volunteers also expressed a stronger emotional relationship with it.

Perhaps more surprisingly, people also felt a stronger sensory relationship with the brand that they saw on the shopfront and the billboard. When asked what senses they linked with Insursafe, the storefront and billboard registered three times more sensory connections than the print or banner ad. Bear in mind that no one had ever heard of this brand before and exactly the same logo and message appeared in all four options.We have been led to believe that, as the world transitions to all things digital, we will naturally embrace whatever is on offer. This is far from true. Our brains regard a physical presence as a more reliable and trustworthy conveyer of messages and we also log more sensory impressions to the brand. Why, you may ask, is that so important? When I was conducting fMRI experiments for my book Buyology, I learned that the more sensory impressions a brand conveys, the more likely we are to remember it. This perhaps goes some way to explaining why that handshake is so important.

What occurs when we’re consistently deprived of sensory cues? My theory is that, for example, when we sit in front of a screen and push away at order-confirmation buttons, we need to find a way to compensate for the absence of touch.

So, as thousands of retail stores close their doors each day and hundreds of conventional media channels seem increasingly paralyzed by social media's magnetic appeal, contextual messages and data mining, it just might be that the large signage displayed on the local office building or the CBS Outdoor billboard is massaging your brain in ways that no banner ad can hope to compete with.

Of course, I never said that. My message was merely conveyed by a firm handshake, based on trust.

[Image: Flickr user my 2-dimensional world]

Read more by Lindstrom: We Know What You Want And When You Will Buy It

Martin Lindstrom is a 2009 recipient of TIME Magazine's "World's 100 Most Influential People" and author of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (Doubleday, New York), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best–seller. His latest book, Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, was published in September. A frequent advisor to heads of numerous Fortune 100 companies, Lindstrom has also authored 5 best-sellers translated into 30 languages. More at martinlindstrom.com.









02/22/12--08:10: iOS 5.0.1 bug lets users to bypass passcode and access iPhone contacts [video] (chan 1592482)

A new bug has been discovered in iOS 5.0.1 that provides unauthorized access to a user’s contacts on passcode-protected iPhones. The bug, which was discovered by iPhoneIslam, is not easily reproduced and requires the attacker to have a spare SIM card or access to the victim’s phone number. The method involves inserting and ejecting the iPhone’s SIM card, which will eventually bypass the phone’s passcode and give unauthorized access to the contacts and phone app. The attacker can then make calls, view call history, view contacts and use FaceTime. The threat is seen as a somewhat minor issue that Apple will most likely fix in an upcoming iOS update. [Via The Verge] Read


02/22/12--08:25: How To Pitch A Startup In Three Minutes (chan 1592482)



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Each year, Startup Riot gives entrepreneurs three minutes and four slides to pitch their business--the top three win coveted investor meetings. As hopefuls gather in Atlanta on February 22, founder Sanjay Parekh shares the winning formula.

Prepare for everything

TripLingo, a language-assistance app, formed just two weeks before last year's Riot--and won, thanks to ultra-preparedness. Where did they find the time? Says founder Jesse Maddox: "During those two weeks, we slept at the office."

Amp Up the Visuals

Last year, fraud-monitoring company Pindrop Security gave Parekh a preview of its presentation, which he called "clip-art bad." His impassioned plea led Pindrop to hire a designer; the new, appealing, and engaging slide show took second place.

Don't be dramatic . . .

In 2010, a professor named Charles Hofer presented a glucose-monitoring device and simulated insulin shock by fainting--twice. Too much, says Parekh. "I bet 99% remember he fainted, but how many remember why?"

. . . But Put On A Show

Schmoozing never hurts. Allan Branch, cofounder of LessAccounting (which won in 2010), perfected the art. "I told everyone: 'If you sign up today, I'll give you a free piggy-back ride for two minutes.'" You can bet he kept his promise.

[Illustrations By David Cowles]

A version of this article appears in the February 2012 issue of Fast Company.









02/22/12--09:01: Samsung Galaxy Note review: The smartphone that ‘Samsunged’ Samsung (chan 1592482)

You know what they say about guys with huge phones… They’re compensating for tiny data plans. Samsung’s Galaxy Note is a giant smartphone. Or a teeny tablet. After using AT&T’s version of this device for several days now, I’m still not quite sure which is the case. It handles voice calls like a cell phone and it runs Google’s Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread smartphone operating system, but it feels very much like a tablet and it includes a stylus, which hasn’t been seen alongside a smartphone in this hemisphere for quite some time. Somehow, however, Samsung manages to pull it all together into one interesting package that might not have been worth the $10 million introduction, but it could certainly find


02/22/12--09:37: Paul Graham: Why Y Combinator Replaces The Traditional Corporation (chan 1592482)



If Y Combinator is the next Pay Pal Mafia, then Paul Graham is Silicon Valley's godfather. Graham is the cofounder of Y Combinator, the investment firm that plugs seed money ($18,000 on average) into early stage startups in exchange for mentorship and access to its ever-growing network of alumni.

It's the latter benefit that's truly made Y Combinator a Valley powerhouse--YC's vast network of influential entrepreneurs that includes breakout Valley stars such as the founders of Dropbox and Airbnb. (We attempted to capture this network on our list of the Most Innovative Companies in Business with this fantastic infographic.) Early on, Graham envisioned this network as a "replacement for the traditional corporation."

"You know what’s great about the YC network? It gives the benefit of being part of a large company without being part of a big company," Graham says. "The problem with doing a startup--even though it’s better in almost every other respect--is that you don’t have the resources of a big company to draw on. It’s very lonely; you have no one to give you advice or help you out. In a big company, you might be horribly constrained, but there are like 1,000 other people you can go to to deal with any number of problems. Now [with YC] you have 1,000 people you can go to to deal with problems, and you don’t have all the restrictions of a big company."

The YC network, he says, now operates as a "distributed peer-to-peer replacement" for the traditional company. Comparing himself to an air-traffic controller, Graham says much of his time is spend making introductions and helping the YC community solve problems within the network. "Simon Willison, for example, the guy who wrote Django, was in a batch I think a year ago," Graham says. "So when someone had a problem with Django, we just introduced them directly to Simon Willison, and they’re like, 'Holy shit!'"

“As YC grows, the number of startups we’ve funded in the past keeps getting bigger," Graham continues. "This latest batch now has 317 startups-worth of people they can ask for help...It's very helpful for the founders. It didn’t really exist before. There are so many YC founders around now. It’s a small world: If I go to San Francisco and walk down the street for a few blocks, I will run into someone we funded."

Read more about Y Combinator and check out our infographic about the next Silicon Valley from our list of the Most Innovative Companies in Business.

[Image: Flickr user Mark Sebastian ; Thumbnail: Flickr user Al Abut]









02/22/12--09:43: Follow Up: Google's Goggles Come Into Focus (chan 1592482)

Google's working on a new device, a pair of augmented reality glasses that've been all but confirmed by the New York Times. We looked at this idea a couple months back--now here's what's new.

The New York Times isn't messing around with today's headline: "Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses By Year's End." Nick Bilton's convinced enough by info from his sources to really go for it. And the article's original pre-publish headline even borrows a little sci-fi iconography to spice things up: "Google to Sell Terminator-style Glasses..."

That's more or less what we said back in December when we included a clip from that very film to illustrate what an Augmented Reality system could ultimately be capable of.

Now, according to the Times's sources (who are "several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named"):

"...the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected “to cost around the price of current smartphones,” or $250 to $600. The people familiar with the Google glasses said they would be Android-based, and will include a small screen that will sit a few inches from someone’s eye. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including motion and GPS."

That's pretty detailed. Other leaks add yet more detail, describing a unique navigation system which uses head motions to scroll and click and a low resolution camera that views the world in real-time to feed data back to the wearer. They're not designed to be worn long-term; rather they are meant to be slipped on and off about as often as you'd dig a smartphone out of a pocket. Google's also said to be very concerned about privacy, and whether or not passers-by need to be aware they're being recorded by a camera. As for data, the idea is that the Android-powered specs will tap into Google software like Latitude, Goggles, Maps and so on--with the bonus that you'll be able to do things like check in to locations through the glassses interface itself.

Back in December we pointed the logic of this out--noting Google has "access to data that other AR firms can't compete with and it has the globe-spanning clout to actually change habits." We even guessed that we wouldn't be wearing them 24/7 and instead would "make it a habit to slip on a pair to aid with work, navigation or shopping." 

But where we suggested this was a gateway for Google to embed hidden adverts in the real world, all the while garnering data on the wearer's habits--data it can sell to add partners--the new leaked information implies Google is not looking at business models for the hardware. Instead the company sees them as an experiment that anyone can join. Only if they sell well and are well received will Google look at ways to monetize the system.

That sounds like a development from the way Google's monetizing Android. But really, it sounds more like what Google's going to do is see what data it can gather about its users without invading their privacy too much--if that's at all possible--and then slap ads everywhere they can. Just not at first.

[Image: Flickr user ladydragonflyherworld ]

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.









02/22/12--10:20: HTC Ville and Huawei Prism headed to T-Mobile according to leak (chan 1592482)

According to a leaked accessory sheet, the HTC Ville and Huawei Prism are headed to T-Mobile in the U.S. The sheet, a screenshot of which was obtained by TmoNews, provides little information outside of device names and “warehouse arrival” dates for various accessories. Accessories, which sometimes arrive weeks before a handset launches, are set to arrive for both devices in early April. BGR exclusively reported this past November that HTC will unveil the Ville at next week’s Mobile World Congress trade show. The device is rumored to be thinner than Apple’s iPhone 4S and will feature Android 4.0, Sense 4.0, a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon Series 4 processor, an 8-megapixel camera, HSPA+ and a 1,650 mAh battery. Read


02/22/12--11:25: Steve Jobs’s life laid out as a Facebook Timeline [video] (chan 1592482)

Whether you’re fan of Apple products or not, there is no denying the influence Steve Jobs had on the world. Simon Lau — a freelance Web, iPhone and iPad developer — built a tribute to Mr. Jobs using Facebook’s Timeline feature. Facebook’s Timeline replaces a user’s traditional profile page with life events, check-ins, new friends additions, photos and more, all listed in chronological order. Lau’s Timeline of Jobs, which was promptly removed by Facebook only to later be restored, features an array of photos and life events that highlight the Apple co-founder’s time on Earth. Hit the break for a video showcasing Steve Jobs’s Timeline. [Via Gizmodo] Read


02/22/12--11:40: Poisoned iPhone factory workers beg for reform in open letter (chan 1592482)

A pair of workers who claim to have been poisoned by toxins in a Suzhou, China factory while assembling touchscreens for Apple’s iPhone have written an open letter begging consumers to demand reform. SumOfUs, the organization behind the Ethical iPhone Campaign, released the letter in an email to the media on Wednesday afternoon. The letter was written by Guo Rui-qiang and Jia Jing-chuan, two former factory workers who urge consumers to sign SumOfUs’s petition and demand that Apple force its suppliers and manufacturing partners to improve working conditions at their Chinese factories. Both workers claim to have been poisoned by a chemical cleaner called N-hexane, and they have suffered neurological damage as a result. The Fair Labor Association is currently conduction inspections of two Foxconn


02/22/12--12:35: Patent shows Google may bring Android to desktops (chan 1592482)

Google may be in the process of bringing its mobile operating system to desktop and notebook computers, according to a recent patent filing. The patent, which was discovered by Patently Apple, showcases desktop control features similar to Apple’s multitouch MacBook trackpad and Magic Trackpad. The current Android operating system has been designed for touch commands and actions, however in the future it may be expanded to support different means of control, Google said in the patent overview. Using a multitouch trackpad, a user can “directly interact with graphical elements located at the current pointer location as if they are using a touchscreen device, and perform traditional touchscreen operations (e.g., dragging/flinging content, scrolling).” Following Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, it is believed


02/22/12--13:30: Nokia to unveil cheap Lumia 610 alongside high-end camera phone at MWC [video] (chan 1592482)

Nokia on Tuesday released a teaser video showing off the remarkable camera included on a handset it plans to unveil next week at the annual Mobile World Congress trade Show in Barcelona, Spain. The device is thought to be a high-end Windows Phone with a 12-megapixel camera that has surfaced in a number of earlier reports. A new report on Wednesday claims that Nokia has plans to announce a new cheaper Windows Phone at the show next week as well, however, suggesting that the Finnish phone maker plans to address multiple market segments with its Windows Phone announcements once again. Read on for more. During the Nokia’s first round of Windows Phone announcements, the vendor unveiled the high-end Lumia 800 and


02/22/12--14:05: HP reports Q1 earnings: EPS beats but revenue and Q2 guidance both miss (chan 1592482)

Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday reported its fiscal first-quarter earnings, which fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. Analysts expected the computer giant to pull in $30.75 billion and $0.87 per share, and while HP’s first-quarter earnings of $0.92 per share beat the Street’s consensus, revenue dipped 7% to $30 billion and missed estimates. “In the first quarter, we delivered on our Q1 outlook and remained focused on the fundamentals to drive long-term sustainable returns,” said HP president and CEO Meg Whitman. “We are taking the necessary steps to improve execution, increase effectiveness and capitalize on emerging opportunities to reassert HP’s technology leadership.” HP anticipates its second-quarter EPS to fall between $0.88 and $0.91, below Wall Street’s consensus of $0.95 per share. Read


02/22/12--14:11: Lindles: Jeremy Lin, Amazon Kindle, And The Rise Of Insta-Authors (chan 1592482)

Jeremy Lin has inspired a lot of rabid fans, magazine features, and six-figure book deal offers. But he's also fueled a new breed of lightning-fast e-book authors. Alan Goldsher, author of "Linsanity: The Improbable Rise of Jeremy Lin," is one of the fastest (and slickest).

In the days before web publishing, upstart sports stars, even those with searing 10-game streaks like Jeremy Lin's, were viewed largely in hindsight, their legacies captured in book form only after the immediate excitement had passed. But the rapid ascent of Lin has inspired e-book authors trying top climb the Amazon ranks just as quickly. 

While big publishers court the New York Knicks' 23-year-old point guard to write his memoir (industry sources say his advance could be in the neighborhood of $500,000), at least seven Lin Kindle books (Lindles?) have already been released. Several of the e-books repurpose publicly available biographical information on Lin or interviews conducted before he hit the big time. Lin didn't sit for For Linsanity: The Improbable Rise of Jeremy Lin by ESPN: The Magazine contributor Alan Goldsher. But that didn't stop Goldsher from writing a 15,000-word manuscript in 72 hours. In an email interview with Fast Company, Goldsher explained the frenzied process of putting together Linsanity while weighing in on the future of the instant e-book.

FAST COMPANY: How long did the entire process take, between the time you came up with the idea to when the e-book was published?

ALAN GOLDSHER: Hold onto your hats, kids: 72 hours to write a 15,000-plus-word manuscript, 36 hours for the fine folks at Vook to build the e-book, and then another 24 hours for them to arrange the distribution. So from conception to availability, we're talking just under a week. And Team Alan had full control of every aspect of the project, from content to design. It blows me away that we were able to bring it to life that quickly. And it blows me away even more that my brain didn't explode after I turned in the completed draft.

Why choose to write an e-book instead of, say, a longform web article? And how do the forms differ in your mind?

As a novelist and avid fiction reader, I have a healthy appreciation for a good story, and by story, I mean something with a beginning, middle, and end, and character development, and conflict, and obstacles to be overcome. Jeremy's path to the NBA has all that, and then some. Even though he's only been on the world stage for a month, his is a tale that deserves to be told in more than a blog posting, a magazine article, or a Wikipedia page, and I don't think anybody can argue with that. And while there's been some wonderful magazine and web stuff written about Jeremy to this point--that Sports Illustrated cover story is great, for instance--nobody's taken a cinematic view. To accomplish that, I interwove Jeremy's past and present, elaborated on some of the high and low points of his life, gave the whole thing a heap of color and context, and came up with a snapshot of a magical period that I hope casual and hardcore basketball fans alike will be happy to have on their e-readers for years.

Do you plan to alter or add to the e-book in any way if, for example, Lin agrees to an interview with you, or if there's a huge development in Lin's story?

There are discussions in the works to enhance the book with illustrations, videos, and the like, so if that all comes to fruition, I'll update the content, and we'll have it up soon thereafter. It'll be tough to pin down Jeremy for an interview--he just turned down a GQ cover story--but if people dig my book, he might hear about it, and if he hears about it, well, you never know....

What makes Lin's story well-suited to the fast-paced turnaround of e-book publishing?

It's playing out on an international stage, and there are new developments every day, but the old developments are gripping in and of themselves, which is why Team Alan felt this was a book-worthy, speed-demon project.

Were you inspired by any existing e-books that were released in a similar fashion?

I'm sure there are other e-books about developing news and/or pop culture stories that have had insanely fast turnaround times, but I don't know of anything that went down like this. (Speed-wise, it was a record for Vook.) Jeremy's practically a one-of-a-kind, which is why this kind of project doesn't happen on a regular basis.

Can you think of any other public figures who you would've loved to cover in this quick turn-around format had e-book technology been available earlier in your career?

What with her struggle to overcome almost losing her voice, Adele's story would've been ideal, and if I'd have had it ready to coincide with her amazing night at the Grammys, that would've been flat-out awesome. Also, Ryan Gosling has had an amazing 2011--we're talking three arguably good-to-great flicks--and if I could've gotten something ready when The Ides of March hit theaters in October, that would've been stellar. And even though Tim Tebow's memoir is still a best-seller, I think I could've put a novelistic spin on his season.

Do you expect to see more writers embrace this new model of instant e-book publishing, and why or why not?

I'll give you a big maybe on that one. I'm a freak in that I can put together a readable, hopefully enjoyable (and hopefully non-sucky) product in a relatively short time, and I don't know how many other Alans there are out there. But those who are so inclined would have a great time with it. It's exhausting as all hell, but at the same time, it's exhilarating and fulfilling. In terms of a writer's mental health, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it...but I wouldn't necessarily not recommend it, either.

What's next for you?

Over the next six months, I have three projects hitting the streets: an e-book-only sequel to my novel Paul Is Undead called Give Death a Chance, as well as a couple of parody novels that will be published by St. Martin's Press. And if folks enjoy Linsanity, I could be convinced to try something this nutty again. But I need at least a day or two to recover before I dive in.

[Image: Getty Images]









02/22/12--15:10: T-Mobile asks FCC to block Verizon spectrum deal (chan 1592482)

T-Mobile is urging federal regulators to block Verizon’s planned spectrum acquisition from SpectrumCo, a joint venture formed by Comcast, Time Warner and Bright House Networks. Verizon’s pending purchase could be worth $3.9 billion and would help the company build out its nationwide LTE network. In a filing late Tuesday, T-Mobile said the Federal Communications Commission should block the deal because it would place an “excessive concentration” of wireless spectrum in Verizon’s hands, reports the Associated Press. The AWS bands that Verizon is looking to acquire uses the same frequencies that T-Mobile uses for its HSPA+ network. T-Mobile claims that the nation’s No.1 carrier already has a large amount of spectrum and does not need any more, and T-Mobile can “quickly, more intensively, and


02/22/12--16:15: Google to sell Android-based heads-up display glasses by year’s end (chan 1592482)

The New York Times claims to have confirmed previous rumors stating that Google is developing Android-based glasses with a built-in heads-up display (HUD). While earlier rumors suggested that the glasses were not ready for a mass roll out, the Times quotes unnamed Google employees who said “the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year.” The HUD glasses will reportedly come equipped with a 3G or 4G data connection, a number of sensors including motion and GPS, and they are expected to cost “around the price of current smartphones,” or between $250 and $600. Read


02/22/12--17:30: ASUS Transformer Prime bootloader unlocking tool now available (chan 1592482)

As promised, ASUS has released a bootloader unlocking tool for the Transformer Prime. The tool is packaged in an APK that can be downloaded from the company’s website. Once downloaded and installed, the Transformer Prime will have the ability to run custom ROMS, however ASUS warns that unlocking your bootloader will void your warranty. “Once you activate the [unlock app] you will not be able to recover your ASUS product (“Original Product”) back to original locked conditions,” ASUS stated. “You also acknowledge ASUS does not guarantee service satisfaction to any Revised Product, including events involving paid service requested by you to be performed to the Revised Product.” Read


02/22/12--18:45: Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G to launch in late March for $149.99 (chan 1592482)

T-Mobile on Wednesday revealed the latest addition to the Galaxy-brand lineup of Samsung smartphones. Towing the line between mid-range and high-end, the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G is more than just a sleek smartphone with a whopping nine syllables in its name. The handset features a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 processor, a 3.97-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen display, a 5-megapixel camera capable of recording 720p HD videos, a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video chats, HSPA+ 42 compatibility and Android 2.3 Gingerbread. “The Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G is loaded with rich features and services to keep consumers entertained and connected virtually anywhere they want to go,” T-Mobile SVP of marketing Andrew Sherrard said in a statement. “Paired with T-Mobile’s fast


02/22/12--20:00: LG unveils Optimus 3D Max Android phone ahead of MWC (chan 1592482)

LG continues to announce an array of new smartphones ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress trade show. On Wednesday, the company unveiled its follow up to the original Optimus 3D, the Optimus 3D Max. The handset is equipped with a 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP4430 processor beneath a 4.3-inch 3D WVGA display that is protected by Corning’s second-generation Gorilla Glass. The Optimus 3D Max also features 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, a 5-megapixel duel-lens 3D rear camera, 3D video editing capabilities and NFC, and it runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread. LG, like many other companies, has promised an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich “shortly after the launch.” The Optimus 3D Max is slated to be released in Korea in March


02/22/12--21:15: Apple to build new data center in Oregon (chan 1592482)

Apple confirmed on Tuesday that it plans to build a second data center in Prineville, Oregon. The Cupertino-based company will build the server farm on a 160-acre piece of land it purchased for $5.6 million, reports KTVZ News. “We purchased the land and it’s for a data center,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said. The new facility will be very close to a data center Facebook opened last year. Crook County Judge Mike McCabe revealed that the social networking site “kind of helped recruit” Apple to Crook County and allowed the company’s representatives to tour its facility last summer. On Monday, Apple revealed its data center located in North Carolina was awarded LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council,


02/23/12--03:29: HP Reports Q1 Earnings, Dip In PC Sales, Apple, Google Agree To App Privacy Guidelines, Under The Sea With Google Seaview (chan 1592482)

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.

Obama Drafts Consumer Privacy Bill Of Rights. The Obama administration is working towards a legislation that will allow people to have better control on how their personal data is used on the Web. Among the principles explained in a white paper released yesterday, people are entitled to understand and access privacy and security practices, expect that their data is securely handled, and hold companies accountable if they flouted data privacy agreements. --NS

--Updated 6:30 a.m EST



HP Reports Q1 Earnings, Drop In PC Sales. In its Q1 earnings report, HP announced a 44 fall in income, compared to a year ago, and a 7% drop in net revenue. HP still keeps the world's largest PC business, but sales dropped 15% to $8.9 billion, with business declining in most of the company's other main divisions. It's the first full quarter since Meg Whitman took over as CEO of the company. --NS

Apple, Google Agree To App Privacy Guidelines. In the aftermath of the PATH user data debacle, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, RIM, and HP will implement a new system, aligning with California's Online Privacy Protection Act to protect user privacy on mobile apps. The companies agreed to display an app's privacy policy to a user before downloads begin, rather than after. --NS

Under The Sea With Google Sea View. Google is part of a project that will let you cosy up to the Great Barrier Reefs off the coast of Australia. With the University of Queensland and the Catlin Group, the project will collect images of the reef system up to 100 meters below sea level, which ocean enthusiasts can navigate through the project's webpage. --NS

--Updated 5:45 a.m. EST

[Image: Flickr user Cristiano Betta]

Yesterday's Fast Feed: Google May Sell AR Glasses This Year, New Premium Ads Expected From Facebook, Apple Plans Second Enormous Data Center, and more!









02/23/12--04:44: DROID Fighter and LG Cayman heading to Verizon according to leak (chan 1592482)

According to a purported internal Verizon memo, the LG Cayman and DROID Fighter will be heading to the carrier in the next two months, Droid-Life reports. Employee workshops are said to be scheduled to begin on March 29th and April 12th for the Cayman and Fighter, respectively, indicating releases will come shortly after those dates. With Mobile World Congress just around the corner, it is possible that both devices will be among several new handsets unveiled next week in Barcelona. For the time being, however, little is known about either handset. Read


02/23/12--05:25: T-Mobile reports big subscriber losses in Q4, says it will launch LTE in 2013 (chan 1592482)

T-Mobile on Wednesday reported earnings for the company’s holiday quarter, which saw the carrier lose 802,000 customers causing revenue to drop 3.3% to $20.6 billion. The Deutsche Telekom-owned company is the only major U.S. carrier that does not carry Apple’s iPhone, which it blames for the defections, however T-Mobile is looking to bounce back with the launch of a 4G LTE network in 2013. “Though we are not satisfied with the contract customer losses and the decreased total revenues, the quarterly margin improvement year-on-year was impressive,” said CEO of Deutsche Telekom René Obermann. “The spectrum gained through the break-up fee empowers T-Mobile USA to start LTE-based services in key US markets and strengthens its competitiveness.” The company is the last major


02/23/12--05:33: High-End Pinterest Competitor Fancy Launches Commerce Platform With Help From Jack Dorsey (chan 1592482)



With just 250,000 users, high-end Pinterest competitor Fancy may not seem like much competition at all to Pinterest, which boasts more than 10 million users.

But the New York-based startup, which features gorgeous products and allows users to "Fancy" them, has a few serious competitive advantages: The backing of PPR, the French conglomerate that owns fashion brands such as Gucci and Bottega Veneta, which led a recent $10 investment round at a $100 million valuation; a board that includes Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square and orginal Facebooker Chris Hughes; endorsements from celebrities like Kanye West; a tight-knit community of curators churning out top-notch content and charting the taste graph; and as of today, a social commerce platform that allows brands and merchants to sell products directly from Fancy.

"People are 'Fancy-ing' what they like, forming communities around these products or experiences, and now we allow merchants and brands to come in and fill that interest and demand in real-time, which no one is doing," says founder Joseph Einhorn. "Rather than go to Amazon or Google and searching for stuff I intend to buy, in the future in the commerce game, I think getting hotel destinations, finding cool products, or discovering fashion items will be done through the people I admire and trust. From a consumer perspective, I'm able to go to this website, where I'm finding out about the coolest stuff in the world, and instead of clicking, signing up, and giving my address and contact info to a million different websites, I am able to shop right inside, whether it's on the website or the iPad, iPhone, or Android app, and go all the way through to checkout in an integrated experience."

Einhorn calls this a "demand-driven commerce model." By crowdsourcing product interest, The Fancy enables merchants to see what consumers are most interested in, and then sell products directly to them based on that interest. Into a helicopter tour of Hawaii? You got it. A new style from Christian Dior? Click away.

Users might be used to seeing a "buy" button; now they might soon start seeing a "sell" button that allows them to quickly sign up for a merchant account, create product listings in those Fancy communities, and decide how much to sell the product for. Merchants can define price restrictions, set up group deals, and monitor transactions all from Fancy's straight-forward user interface. The service also allows merchants to create shipping labels on the fly.



"With these communities forming around experiences and products, our dream for the company is to have merchants and brands come in, and bid to fill that demand using our self-service tools," Einhorn says. "They can say, 'Okay, there's a lot of interest in this hotel destination or these sunglasses or this watch--I'm going to offer to sell my product or something competitive right in on this page."

Early tests of the system have gained significant traction. Fancy has already struck 400 brand partnerships, and sold 150,000 deals to consumers through the service, suggesting their is indeed for an on-site commerce platform on Fancy. The startup is exploring various ways business models, from more traditional affiliate revenue (taking a sales cut) to Groupon-like deal economics to a cost-per-action model along the lines of what Google employs. "The goal for us is to take these different transaction types and make them dead simple," Einhorn says.

Asked about Pinterest, Einhorn praises the site's growth and reach. But he suggests Fancy tends to showcase higher-end products and steer clear of non-commerce related content. (In other words, if a Pinterest community might form around Jeremy Lin, a Fancy community is more likely to form around an autographed jersey or skybox tickets to the Knicks game--though even that product and experience doesn't seem to fit in with The Fancy's higher-end content.) What's more, Pinterest allows users to breakdown interests to the most granular levels, where as The Fancy provides more general categories. "We wanted to make all the discovery through people versus through topic, which Pinterest has been great in doing--they slice and dice it really nicely by tags," Einhorn says. "But we wanted you to discover people to find the stuff through and not just say, 'I want to look at shoes today.'"

It seems the company, which started as an online database of products called Thingd, has become something more--and you can partially thank Jack Dorsey and Chris Hughes for that.

"When we got involved with Jack and Chris, they suggested that rather than populate our data through technical measures, we get people to populate that data. Why? Because when people let you know about a product or hotel room, then you know about the person it matters to, and that starts to trickle down to other people," Einhorn says. "Plus, it was Jack Dorsey who said, 'We need to come up with a name...that is a little less nerdy."

What a fancy idea.











02/23/12--05:34: Facebook's New, Entirely Social Ads Will Recreate Marketing (chan 1592482)

Leaked documents show Facebook making a radical departure from traditional online display advertising into a world where ads are conversations and brands automatically tell you which of your friends is already on their side.

Facebook appears ready to launch a new set of premium ad units, and, based on a review of documents which purport to describe them, the social network would seem to be doubling down on two core principles that mark fundamental departures from traditional advertising.

First, Facebook is making the new ads social by default, meaning they will automatically show users when their friends have already Liked the advertiser. And the new formats will draw their content exclusively from posts to brands' Facebook Pages, rather from advertising copy written independently.

Combined, these features make two statements about where Facebook believes the future of online advertising lies--at least in its particular universe. It is saying that ads based on content, rather than messaging, have a better chance of hitting home, and that ads involving tacit endorsements from the people you know have a better chance of capturing your attention.

"When people hear about you from friends, they listen," the Facebook materials say. "We'll expand your ad with stories from friends who have already connected." ("Stories" is Facebook's shorthand for a wide varitey of interactions on the site. In the case of ads, it seems to refer to the fact that the ads will display which of a viewer's friends have Liked the brand.)

Facebook has not commented publicly on the new ads (presumably they will discuss them at a marketing launch event in New York next week). But the materials describing the new units were posted to Scribd earlier this week. The news was first reported on GigaOm. The documents are below.

Facebook Premium Ads Guide Facebook Premium Ads Overview

In the documents, Facebook says it is scrapping most of the display ad units it has offered until now, replacing them with the new formats. The previous ad units incorporated some of the social and interactive elements, but the new ones are implementing those features in a more comprehensive way.

Each of the new units will include Like buttons and places for viewers to comment on the ads. When viewers click the Like button or enter a comment, those activities will be posted to the user's  friends' News Feeds. They will also be posted to the brand's Page. 

Similarly, each ad will include pictures of friends who have already Liked the brand. The Facebook documents say this will happen automatically, instead of as an add-on.

While Facebook had already been moving in these directions with its previous ad units, the decision to draw ad content from Page posts is the most significant new feature--and a potentially radical departure from conventional notions of advertising.

The ads don't simply repurpose content from brands' Pages. By giving users the ability to respond to the content inside the ad, just as if they had seen the content on the brand Page itself, and then by posting those responses to the user's friends' News Feeds, as well as on the brand's Page itself, the ads are acting less like traditional broadcast advertisements and more like viral mechanisms to expand and perpetuate the conversation off into the far corners of the social network, effectively giving the brand visibility in places it might not otherwise have reached and in a much more organic way than if it had simply plastered the site with a bunch of banner ads.

"Everything starts with great content from the Page," says one of the Facebook documents. "Paid, owned, and earned work seamlessly together."



Facebook believes that this ultimately will pay greater dividends for brands than conventional advertising. According to tests the company said it performed internally, the new ads produce 40 percent more engagement (usually meaning they get more Likes, comments, and clicks) and are 80 percent more likely to be remembered.

The company documents also claim the ads produce "signficant increases" in purchase intent, and it claims that viewers of an ad are four times more likely to purchase when they "see friends interact with a brand."

If the ads truly do deliver the results Facebook claims, that could mean the social network is slowly but surely finding the marketing holy grail of "word of mouth"--at scale. And if that's the case, it could have profound implications for the advertising industry as a whole.

The six new units are based on the type of content a brand would post to their Page. The Facebook documents label them as Status (a text comment), Photo, Video, Question (which replaces the old "Poll" ad format and which allows viewers to answer the question right in the ad), Event (ad viewers will similarly be able to sign up for the event right in the ad itself), and Link (which points viewers to content outside of Facebook).

The Facebook documents say that brands will continue to be able to target their ads as they do today, choosing to place their ads in front of any of Facebook's 845 million users who fit demographic and interest criteria selected by the advertiser.

E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com's Silicon Valley reporter. Twitter | Google+ | Email









02/23/12--06:00: Apple scores a win in Shanghai court, iPad sales to continue (chan 1592482)

A Shanghai court has rejected Proview International’s request to block the sales of Apple’s iPad, reports Reuters. According to the publication’s sources, the Pudong New Area People’s Court in Shangai on Wednesday issued a ruling in Apple’s favor following a trademark infringement complaints filed in Shanghai. While the decision only covers iPad sales within that city, the victory comes after the Cupertino-based company was handed a string of defeats in smaller courts throughout China. Apple has appealed a December judgement that saw a Shenzhen court rule in favor of Proview, and the hearing is scheduled for February 29th in China’s southern province of Guangdong. Read


02/23/12--06:21: Banjo's Sweet Tweaks Keep Your Social World (Literally) At Arm's Length (chan 1592482)



Banjo launched in late June with a simple mission: to end social media fragmentation. Rather than pull up dozens of apps--Facebook, Twitter, and so forth--to see what your friends are up to, Banjo streamlines your social networks into one slick experience.

In just a few short months, the app has rocketed to some 600,000 users, and today, Banjo introduces its next iteration that features an overhauled UI, an improved social algorithm, integration with iOS 5's notification center, and the ability to have users sign in with Instagram, Foursquare, and Gmail.

"We've added now a tremendous amount of networks to map our your social graph," says founder and CEO Damien Patton. "When your friend shares a photo on Instagram, for example, you're getting a notification that he or she is nearby. You probably wouldn't have seen it before--now you're not going to miss that opportunity."



The idea of Banjo has always been about social discovery--helping to make online social sharing potentially turn into offline interaction. By creating a location-based social network--or an "elastic network" as it's been called--Banjo bubbles up only social media from nearby locations. If you're in Times Square, for instance, what tweets or Facebook status updates or Foursquare check-ins are happening in that vicinity? Banjo enables users to find out in one convenient place.

With the app's upgrade, Banjo also aims to only surface "interesting" social updates. Its team of engineers, which includes at least one PhD behind Netflix's powerful recommendation engine, has been working to make the shared content much richer. "People wanted the content filtered--there was lot of irrelevant content showing up in Banjo," Patton says. "If someone checks in to a coffee shop on Foursquare, and if they're not someone you know or are interested in meeting, then who cares? If a check-in doesn't have a tip or a comment or a photo, and just says, 'I'm here at Starbucks,' is that interesting to you as a user?"

Though we've already seen some "elastic networks" fail due to a lack of interesting location-based content (Color, anyone?), it appears that Patton's strategy for Banjo is paying off. The network is now growing by more than 100,000 users per month.

The latest version of Banjo is available for iOS today, and is coming soon for Android.

[Image: Flickr user yooperann]









02/23/12--06:56: Ali Velshi's Work Flow: Mysteries, Motorcycles Keep The CNN Anchor's Work-Life Balance In Check (chan 1592482)

CNN's chief business correspondent doesn't have much downtime. When he's not anchoring, promoting his new book, or speaking on stage, Ali Velshi is attached to his BlackBerry answering emails and managing tweets. His daily work flow is all about juggling meetings and helping people manage money. Velshi tells me what keeps spenders and savers together, and which one he is. Plus, he reveals how mysteries and motorcycles give him work-life balance in his day.

[twistage a7e498c0b4947]

For more tips on building your personal brand and working smarter, see Amber Mac's Work Flow series.

Amber Mac is a best-selling author, TV host, speaker, and entrepreneur. She started her career as a web strategist at Razorfish-San Francisco and has spent years working as a tech broadcaster alongside TWiT.tv's Leo Laporte. She is also the cofounder of digital agency MGImedia, a well-known blogger, and the author of Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business.









02/23/12--07:01: Go Apple or go home? T-Mobile continues to flounder without the iPhone (chan 1592482)

T-Mobile USA on Thursday reported a rough holiday quarter during which the company lost a net 802,000 contract subscribers. In its earnings release, T-Mobile mentions Apple’s iPhone — a device is does not sell — a total of seven times, repeatedly blaming its poor fourth-quarter performance on the absence of Apple’s smartphone from its store shelves. “The sequential and year-on-year increase in customer losses is a result of intense competitive pressure from the launch of the iPhone 4S by three nationwide competitors in the fourth quarter of 2011,” the carrier said in its press release. Looking beyond the fourth quarter, however, T-Mobile said in a separate press release that it now has a “reinvigorated challenger strategy focused on making amazing 4G services


02/23/12--07:15: Fast Talk: How Truthy Maps Influence On Twitter (chan 1592482)

Meet Fil Menczer, the Twitterologist behind the political meme-analyzing site, Truthy. Yes, the name was inspired by Stephen Colbert.



Fil Menczer has quite a title. He is “a Professor of Informatics and Computer Science and the Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing.” For our purposes, though, he’s a leading Twitterologist, as the creator of the Stephen Colbert-inspired Truthy, a site that tracks how memes--often, specious political memes--spread on Twitter. Fast Company caught up with Menczer on the occasion of an update of the Truthy site, which is now more user-friendly.

FAST COMPANY: What was Truthy originally?

FIL MENCZER: Truthy was born mainly to look at “astroturfing,” or the abuse of social media to give the impression that there is a grassroots campaign where in fact there isn’t. After the 2010 elections were over, we used a lot of the data we collected to start asking questions about how information propagates in social media. Can we find regularities in these patterns? Can we understand the mechanisms that underlie these shapes?

And how has Truthy recently changed?

We got funded by a National Science Foundation grant to make Truthy into a public tool, something citizens can use. For example, reporters like yourself can access the data we have and really interact with the data to get a better handle on what we’re observing. We designed this in collaboration with the School of Journalism here.

So walk me through what we can learn about a given meme, say the hashtag #mitt2012.

We have access to a sample of Twitter’s data called the garden hose. It’s about a 5-8% sample, we think. When you search #mitt2012 on our site, you get data from our database regarding all the tweets that included that hashtag. For all those tweets, every one has a user that generated it. Then it may have been retweeted by some other users; when that happens, we connect those two nodes. Some nodes are small, and some big, based on how many times a user is retweeted.

For #mitt2012, the most influential person is @mittromney, which isn’t surprising. But then the second biggest is @norsu2...

You might ask, who is @norsu2? Why are so many people retweeting this person? We load a whole bunch of information about this user that was not available before. You can see this person generates a huge amount of tweets, and also you can see the partisanship of this person--we automatically detect if a person is right-leaning or left-leaning.

How do you do that?

Based on the structure of the network. When it comes to political conversations on Twitter, users are very strongly polarized, clustered into two groups. People on the left only retweet people on the left; people on the right only retweet people on the right. Say I’m a liberal, and I want to say something bad about Santorum. A lot of conservatives might read my message, but they’re not gonna retweet it. They might reply, saying “You asshole,” but retweet networks are highly clustered. We’ve found they let you accurately classify the partisanship of a user who tweets about politics with about 95% accuracy.

So essentially your tool helps us be more scientific about the way we assess influence on Twitter.

It lets any citizen become a researcher and analyze who is promoting an idea. We have to become a little less naïve about social media, just as with any technology. We have to realize there are people behind it, and if there is some political or economic interest, they will try to cheat. We want to drop some of the mystery behind social media and let people get a bit of a zoomed-out view. On Twitter, you can see your friends and who they follow, but it’s harder to get a fisheye view of what the collective users are saying about something. We hope to allow people to get that kind of view.

This interview has been condensed and edited. For more from the Fast Talk interview series, click here. Know someone who'd make a good Fast Talk subject? Mention it to David Zax.

Diffuse benevolent memes about Fast Company on Twitter.









02/23/12--07:40: Protestors to deliver poisoned iPhone factory workers’ letter to Apple shareholder meeting (chan 1592482)

SumOfUs, the organization behind the Ethical iPhone campaign, plans to deliver new petitions to Apple during its annual shareholder meeting on Thursday. Along with the petitions, the group plans to hand over a copy of a letter it distributed on Wednesday written by two factory workers who were allegedly poisoned while assembling iPhone displays. “Apple has a moral obligation to fully compensate workers like Guo Rui-Qiang and Jia Jing-Chuan and to take the hard steps required make sure that tragedies like this never happen again,” SumOfUs Executive Director Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said in a statement. “Ethical consumers won’t be fooled by whitewashing by organizations like the Fair Labor Association. We insist that Apple grant truly independent NGOs full access to its


02/23/12--08:45: Throttling unlimited data plans is pointless, study finds (chan 1592482)

AT&T’s questionable policy with regard to unlimited smartphone data plan holders recently found its way back into the limelight following a new wave of subscriber complaints. The nation’s No.2 carrier no longer offers an unlimited data plan to smartphone users, though many subscribers on its network still have grandfathered plans that provide an unlimited amount of smartphone data each month. Subscribers who approach the top 5% of unlimited data users in a single billing period see their data speeds throttled, however, and countless users have found that AT&T is now beginning to throttle users after less than 2GB of data usage in a billing period. According to a new study, subscribers are right to be furious at AT&T because throttling


02/23/12--09:40: Apple and Foxconn respond to ABC’s iPad factory expose (chan 1592482)

Apple and Foxconn have each responded to various claims made in ABC’s Nightline segment that took a look inside two Foxconn factories in an effort to shed light on their working conditions. Responding to a comment made by one worker who claimed she carves aluminum shavings from 6,000 iPad cases each day, Apple said this was likely the result of a miscommunication. “In manufacturing parlance this is called deburring. Her line processes 3,000 units per shift, with two shifts per day for a total of 6,000. A single operator at Ms. Zhou’s station would deburr 3,000 iPads in a shift,” Apple told ABC. Read on for more. ABC noted in its report that the starting wages at Foxconn’s factories are


02/23/12--10:41: Google’s Dennis Woodside appointed CEO of Motorola Mobility (chan 1592482)

Google has selected Dennis Woodside to head Motorola Mobility, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. Woodside was most recently President the Americas region at Google. Previous rumors had Nikesh Arora, Google’s SVP and Chief Business Officer, pegged to be CEO of Motorola, with Woodside replacing Arora following his appointment. According to his LinkedIn profile, Woodside has been an employee at Google since 2003. Read


02/23/12--10:59: Boku Enables Mobile Pay On Your Current Phone (chan 1592482)



Boku currently lets cell phone owners pay for things through carrier billing in over 60 countries. Usually these transactions are for small things--items like apps, ringtones, small-scale online purchases--perhaps because that's all users are comfortable with, unsure of how big their cell phone bill will be at the end of the month. That's all about to change.

Boku Accounts is built on top of Boku's global partnerships with companies like AT&T and Vodafone, and is designed to allow purchases in physical stores, which means it can be used for buying bigger-ticket items. It works via an NFC-powered sticker that users slap onto the back of their existing cell phone (smart or dumb variety), which connects to the ever-growing number of merchant terminals that support wireless payment. There's also a standard-format pre-paid plastic card that works in lower-tech payment terminals and also online or in-app, but which makes exactly the same transaction as would happen via the NFC sticker.

That means the service works pretty much anywhere standard credit cards are accepted, and also lets people send payments to other Boku users. Clients get a special online interface to their account, which lets them charge up the system with cash, and also lets them track where they're spending their money. But the system is framed by the cell phone carriers themselves, who'll issue the account in a branded format to their customers alongside their usual cell phone tariff.

Because there's a loyalty and rewards scheme in the mix, the system can be seen as an early play to gain market share in the mobile payments space ahead of the expected (and imminent?) mobile payment revolution.

It's also a symptom of how complex the mobile pay game will get, as it inserts the carriers themselves very much into mobile transactions--a place they want to be to exert power, gather data, and probably earn a fee. This is in contrast to other schemes like Apple's EasyPay, which circumvents carriers, credit card companies, and NFC tech to achieve a similar mobile pay solution, or Google's Wallet, which is an NFC solution also independent of carriers but very much controlled by Google--which also wants to gain access to all your transaction data. Boku's also placing itself as a rival to PayPal, which is trying to enable easy mobile payments through a different method, but which is also keen to insert itself into your mobile payments future.

Interestingly enough, MasterCard itself made an announcement yesterday that lets users of current-generation cell phones in developing nations perform a similar sort of transaction as that enabled by Boku's new system--including person-to-person payments and transactions in stores that are too remote to rely on existing point-of-sale technology. It's dubbed the Mobile Money Partnership Program, and it sees the credit card firm partnering with local carriers to try to target the 2.5 billion "financially underserved customers" in the developing world. Mung Ki Woo, Group Executive Mobile at MasterCard, spoke with Fast Company and noted that simple "closed-loop" mobile payment services have exploded across the developing world, because that's the way carriers and merchants have set things up: "That's something we want to change. This is what we're doing with this partnership program: We are reaching out to the different players in this market and saying bascially 'let's create this new generation of services which will allow the mobile money consumers to interact with existing accounts.'" It's a move to try to unify mobile payment in the developing world around MasterCard's technology, and Mung Ki added that some of the ideas may well find their way back to MasterCard's developed world mobile pay plans.

And so Boku's move--as well as MasterCard's new play--are a sign that mobile pay is quite definitely en route sooner rather than later. And, as we've noted, it may not all be great news for you and me.

[Image: Flickr user Simon Greig]









02/23/12--11:10: iConfess: Why an Android fan recommends the iPhone (chan 1592482)

Just over five years ago, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, a device that would change the world forever. The Macworld Conference & Expo keynote in 2007 is one that will go down in history. With its announcement, Apple reinvented the smartphone and put converged handsets on mainstream consumers’ radar. The iPhone seamlessly integrated music, email, a phone, a camera and Internet access all into one great device. I personally never had an interest in smartphones until the Macworld announcement, and countless others can likely make the same claim. There was just one problem, however… Apple partnered exclusively with Cingular in the U.S. for the release of the iPhone. At the time, Cingular was the biggest carrier in the U.S. with 58


02/23/12--12:15: T-Mobile to launch 10 LTE devices and iPhone-compatible 4G in 2013 (chan 1592482)

T-Mobile will have 10 LTE devices available by the end of 2013, and it will also roll out “4G” service that is compatible with Apple’s iPhone. The carrier’s 4G LTE network will span across 50 markets and utilize the 10MHz spectrum to support speeds up to 72Mbps, according to SlashGear. “Our 4G network will be compatible with a broader range of devices, including the iPhone” CTO Neville Ray said on Thursday, although he wasn’t clear on whether he was referring to HSPA+ “4G,” which might be compatible with the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and future iPhone handsets, or 4G LTE. The carrier will be shifting its HSPA+ network to the 1900MHz bands, however, which should increase compatibility with HSPA+ devices


02/23/12--13:10: Canalys: Android apps are too expensive (chan 1592482)

iPhone users may be more inclined to pay for apps than their Android-toting counterparts because apps in the Android Market are usually priced much higher, according to market research firm Canalys.The company on Thursday released the results of a survey that found Android apps to cost two and a half times more than iPhone apps on average. The top paid-for Android apps were priced “dramatically higher” than those on iOS for the iPhone. “In the US, to purchase the top 100 paid-for apps in the Android Market would cost $374.37 – an average of $3.74 per app – more than 2.5 times the cost of the top 100 paid-for iPhone apps. The top 100 iPhone apps would cost $147.00, or


02/23/12--13:13: The Smartphone Revolution Is Over (For Now) (chan 1592482)



Ahead of the Mobile World Congress event next week dozens of new smartphones are being revealed or teased to stir up the tech press, get potential customers excited, and, of course, drum up sales. Among the varied designs, operating systems, and technical specifications coming from a long list of manufacturers, one thing is clear--there's really not an enormous amount of innovation going on. The smartphone, it seems, has hit an evolutionary dead end.

As a case in point, look at the behavior of Chinese firm ZTE, which has revealed eight new phones ahead of the MWC show. With names like PF200, N910, and Mimosa X, the phones cover the spectrum from 1.2 GHz processors to 1.5 GHz, one sports a quad-core CPU, they run Android 4.0 or Windows Phone 7, they have different screen specifications and cameras, and so on. But they would all appear to be monolithic touchscreen phones, wide, tall and shallow front-to-back with a minimum of buttons and no distinguishing features that set them apart from a dozen phones from other Android and Windows Phone 7 makers. ZTE is trying the shotgun approach, or what you might consider product spam, to try to boost its revenues.

Panasonic has also revealed hardware ahead of the MWC, but it's trying to distinguish its Eluga device from the array of competing ones by adding in a couple of extras: As well as being pretty vanishingly skinny, it sports built-in NFC, connectivity to same-branded TVs, and is both dust- and waterproof. Those features are definitely a boon to many users, and may well attract consumers who've dropped previous phones into the toilet or out of their pocket onto a hard glass-shattering floor. But the Eluga is still a monolithic block with a large touchsreen, a rear-facing camera, and has Android running inside, and from 10 paces away you'd find it hard to spot in a lineup of its peers. Also Samsung has revealed its latest phone in its seemingly endless range of Galaxy smartphones, the Rugby Smart, and while it's distinguished by its low price, it's also waterproof and rugged, just like the Eluga.

Meanwhile LG's Optimus 4X HD has also been outed, and it's got a larger-than-usual 4.7-inch screen and a fast 1.5 GHz quad-core Tegra 3 CPU humming inside. But it's again a slab-like touchscreen, Android-powered smartphone like many others. The LG Optimus 3D Max, on the other hand, is the world's first with 3-D video editing--ready to empower people who use its rear-facing 3-D video-recording cameras and who enjoy its glasses-free 3-D display. But again, apart from the gimmicky 3-D it's generally similar to almost every phone we've talked about so far.

This image explains it all:



We've got the iPhone to thank. It set the pattern for the current smartphone paradigm because its design departed so radically from pretty much everything that had gone before--so much so that some people scoffed at the very idea that it could be successful. It's sold so very well and has transformed the entire market to the extent that it's inspired all of these iPhone-esque designs (some of which Apple accuses of all but cloning its ideas).

It's also the reason that MWC for this year and probably next will be very samey-samey, with all the innovation restricted to honing features like processor speed, screen technology for vividness, brightness, or pixel density, incorporating better camera technology, variations in the touch interface and the OS and the UI that controls how users interact with it. Phone CPUs will get more cores (and marketing folks may try to spin this to an unknowing public as a benefit, much as during the megapixel wars when digital cameras were becoming popular). NFC and other sensors and interactive tweaks will be added. That's all innovative for sure, but it's hardly revolutionary--it won't take mobile phone tech in an amazing new direction.

This is why Apple may give its iPhone 5 a radical design overhaul, to move away from its existing and previous looks, perhaps adopting a very curvaceous chassis. It's an aesthetic trick, and one a designer at Ciccarese Design has used to put together a concept graphic that while improbable technically is at least an aesthetic departure from the slab-like iPhone 4S (check it out at this link).

Nevertheless, even Apple's tweaks won't move the smartphone paradigm forward much. We're not complaining, of course--the mobile computing revolution is changing many aspects of modern life after all, and is enabling whole new industries to grow up. But maybe this stalled innovation is why Google is trying to invent something new with its augmented reality/mobile communications Android goggles, which is something really new (unless Apple aces it with isomething like an iVisor).

[Images: Flickr users philcampbell, Michel Schmid, and via Josh Heifferich]

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.









02/23/12--13:18: Alex Peake's "Code Hero": How To Scale Education The Right Way (chan 1592482)

Thiel Fellow Dale Stephens explains how "Does it scale?" applies to education.



In Silicon Valley, one often hears the question, "Does it scale?"

What a technologist means by this is: How can a specific technological innovation be applied in a broad manner to affect a wide range of people? If Google only searched two websites it wouldn't be terribly useful. But because Google scaled effectively to search the entire Internet, it became extremely engaging.

Technologists wonder the same thing about education. And projects like the Khan Academy have risen to prominence because they scale--a single video can be watched by millions of people. But while it's wonderful to give millions of people access to knowledge, we should be careful when scaling education.

Often educational experiences don't scale. I don't think you can replace the learning that comes from an intimate five-person discussion about Shakespeare with watching a video from MIT, the Khan Academy, or anywhere else. I don't care who makes the video, or how great a teacher the person is, having people to support and challenge your ideas is irreplaceable.

I become frustrated when people talk about OpenCourseWare or the Khan Academy as revolutionary. Don't get me wrong, both are doing wonderful things for education, but they still follow the same pedagogical model as the classroom--a one-to-many model. The student is a recipient of knowledge and only passively engaged. Certainly there are steps in the right direction--the Khan Academy now offers exercises and some interaction. I am thankful that resources such as these exist, but putting knowledge onto the Internet is only the first step. A revolution is when students become active participants in learning, improving, and sharing knowledge. A revolution is when students take on the role of teachers.

My friend Alex Peake, a fellow Hackademic who skipped college entirely, has built a game called Code Hero to help you learn how to code. What I love about Code Hero is that Alex has made the player an active participant in the game. Not only do you play the game, but as you play the game, you actually help build the game.

Alex has figure out the only way to effectively scale education--by turning students into teachers. As you progress through learning you are expected to share your knowledge. When we expect people to share knowledge, we take education offline and into the real world. It's wonderful to have knowledge available from MIT and the Khan Academy, but it's not the same as people getting together in the real world to discuss what they have learned.

There are more projects creating real-world learning groups that I'll share soon, but I want to mention one last thing about Code Hero: They are raising money on Kickstarter! One week ago they only had $19,000--less that one-fifth of their goal. Yesterday, they passed their goal of $100,000 and are surging ahead to $200,000. Donating just $13 gets you a free copy of the game to help you learn how to code.

If you're interested in learning programming or computer science, I encourage you to check out Code Hero on Kickstarter and consider donating. Even if you aren't interested in learning to code, I encourage you to check it out and watch them closely. The pedagogical model Code Hero uses--turning students into teachers--is one I think we'll see more of in the coming months.

Dale Stephens was homeschooled and then unschooled. Now he leads UnCollege.org. Perigee/Penguin will publish his first book about hacking your education in early 2013.

[Editor's note: Dale Stephens is one of the inaugural Thiel Fellows who stopped going to college in exchange for a place in an innovative mentoring program. Read more from Dale--and about PayPal founder Peter Thiel's education experiment--here.]

[Image: Flickr user maniwa_pa]









02/23/12--14:05: iPad pushes Apple to 26.6% of the mobile PC market in Q4 (chan 1592482)

Apple’s shipments of iPads and MacBooks in the fourth quarter combined to give the Cupertino-based company a 26.6% percent share of the mobile PC market, according to a report from DisplaySearch released on Thursday. Apple shipped a total of 23.4 million units, nearly three times the amount of No.2 HP. The iPad accounted for 18.7 million units and captured 59.1% of the tablet market. Amazon shipped 5.3 million Kindle Fire’s for 16.7% of the market, with Samsung shipping 2.1 million and controlling 6.7% of the market. ASUS shipped 1.5 million units for a 4.6% market share and Barnes & Noble shipped 1.1 million units for a 3.5% share. Apple’s fourth quarter notebook shipments came in at 4.6 million units for an


02/23/12--14:40: With 50 Million Tickets Sold, Eventbrite Finds Fresh Chunks Of Ticketmaster's Ankles Ripe For Nipping (chan 1592482)

After achieving two important milestones, what's next for Eventbrite?



The last time Fast Company caught up with the folks at Eventbrite, the online ticketing service was celebrating the opening of its first international office in London. Now, it has two more benchmarks to be proud of: It issued its 50 millionth ticket, and CEO and cofounder Kevin Hartz tells Fast Company that the company has hit a half-billion-dollar gross run-rate based on weekly sales.

For the uninitiated, Eventbrite aims to disrupt the online ticketing industry, which Hartz describes as "one of the last bastions of e-commerce that hasn't seen a lot of innovation." It looks to accomplish this by making online ticketing available for all events, no matter how big or small, while cutting down on the exorbitant service fees charged by traditional outlets like Ticketmaster, once considered the "most hated brand in America."

While Eventbrite isn't the only company working to change the way we buy and sell tickets, Hartz says he has his sights set on the kind of massive events giants like Ticketmaster have been traditionally expected to handle. For example, last September, Eventbrite scored one of its largest events yet when it ticketed a Black Eyed Peas concert in Central Park. It's also handling ticket sales for New York City's Governor's Ball Music Festival this June, featuring big names like Beck and Modest Mouse.

But wrenching business away from old mainstays--even ones people love to hate--is no easy task.

"A ticketing service has to be able to withstand the enormous amount of traffic that comes on very quickly," Hartz says, referencing a recent fiasco that occurred when organizers behind the Burning Man Festival tried to implement a fairer ticketing method to cut down on scalpers, but ended up crashing servers and leaving an estimated 75% of longtime participants ticketless.

In addition to handling larger events and expanding its international presence, Eventbrite is focusing data resources on transforming itself into the Pandora or Netflix of social events. "We have a data services team that's working on algorithmic recommendations," says Hartz. "So much like Netflix gives movie recommendations or Pandora gives music recommendations, Eventbrite will algorithmically deliver recommendations for great events."

So how did Eventbrite celebrate its latest milestones? "There's been a lot of cheering and clapping lately," Hartz says, describing the 14 60-inch LCDs around the office that display various live metrics. If the rest of Eventbrite's 2012 is anything like its January and February, we can expect a lot more cheering and clapping, and not just from Eventbrite's offices, but from Ticketmaster-haters around the world.

[Image: Mat Hayward via Shutterstock]









02/23/12--15:00: Tim Cook: Apple has more cash than it needs (chan 1592482)

During the company’s annual shareholders meeting on Thursday, CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that Apple has more money “than we need to run a company.” Apple’s board is currently engaged in “active discussions” about what to do with the $100 billion in cash it has on hand, hinting at the possibility of a dividend. “The board and management team are thinking about this very deeply,” Cook said. A dividend returns a portion of the company’s profit to shareholders, and the last time Apple paid one was in 1995 prior to the return of Steve Jobs. Investors have pushed the company to again pay a dividend, hoping it will boost Apple’s stock price by bringing in a new breed of investors, reports Bloomberg. “You


02/23/12--16:15: Samsung Galaxy S II sells over 20 million units in 10 months (chan 1592482)

Samsung announced in late September that the company sold 10 million Galaxy S II smartphones, and five months later the popular handset has crossed the 20-million shipment mark. The smartphone’s predecessor, the Galaxy S, took 17 months to reach the same milestone according to Samsung. When the Galaxy S II launched in April, it quickly became the company’s fastest selling smartphone. Sales are sure to slow in the coming months, however, with Samsung rumored to launch the highly anticipated Galaxy S III in April. Read


02/23/12--17:30: Google and other advertisers agree to honor ‘do-not-track’ browser feature (chan 1592482)

A coalition of Internet giants has agreed to support a “do-not-track” button that can be embedded in most Web browsers. The Digital Advertising Alliance, which includes Internet heavy weight Google, represents over 400 companies and will work to begin adopting and honoring the system within nine months, reports The Wall Street Journal. The feature, which is already implemented in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, will restrict the data that websites can collect about a user through cookies when activated. Even people who clicked on the button within FireFox, IE or Safari, were still being tracked, however, because advertisers and tracking companies hadn’t agreed to honor the system. Google is expected to update its Chrome Web browser by the end of


02/23/12--18:45: AT&T unveils waterproof, dust-proof Samsung Rugby Smart; $99.99 on March 4th [video] (chan 1592482)

AT&T on Thursday announced the upcoming launch of the Samsung Rugby Smart. The Rugby Smart is a waterproof, dust-proof, shock-proof Android smartphone designed for users who need a durable device that doesn’t compromise functionality (or look like a space-age phaser). Spec highlights include a 3.7-inch WVGA Super AMOLED touchscreen display, a 5-megapixel camera, a 1,650 mAh battery and Android 2.3 Gingerbread. “The Samsung Rugby Smart is perfect for active customers who need another level of durability with their smartphone,” said Jeff Bradley, senior vice president, Devices, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, in a statement. “It is water and dustproof and has all the features of a leading smartphone.” AT&T’s full press release follows below along with a video showcasing the


02/23/12--20:00: LG announces the Tegra 3-powered Optimus 4X HD (chan 1592482)

LG on Thursday unveiled its first quad-core smartphone, the Optimus 4X HD. The handset features a 1.5GHz Tegra 3 processor with a 4.7-inch True HD IPS display and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The Optimus 4X HD will also come equipped with 16GB of internal storage, 1GB of RAM, a 2,150 mAh battery, an 8-megapixel rear camera a and 1.3-megapixel front facing camera. “LG introduced the world’s first Dual-Core smartphone exactly one year ago and today we’re announcing the next milestone,” said Dr. Jong-seok Park, president and CEO of LG Mobile. “But speed in itself isn’t what makes LG Optimus 4X HD unique, it’s the benefit we’re bringing to customers with the HD multimedia experience in a mobile form factor.” Even with


02/23/12--21:15: ZTE to debut eight new smartphones at MWC (chan 1592482)

ZTE is looking to make a big splash at next week’s Mobile World Congress, bringing eight new smartphones powered by Android and Windows Phone to the event. The company had previously announced three Android smartphones, the Mimosa X, PF200 and N910. The Mimosa X comes equipped with a NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, a 4.3-inch qHD display, Ice Cream Sandwich, 4GB of internal storage, a microSD slot, a front facing camera and a 5-megapixel rear camera. The flagship PF200 will sport an unspecified 1.2GHz chipset along with a 4.3-inch qHD display, LTE connectivity, Android 4.0, an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. Meanwhile, the N910 comes with a 1.5GHz processor, Android 4.0, a 5-megapixel rear camera and 2-megapixel secondary