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Saturday 31 March 2012

Jordan Mechner, Creator Of Prince Of Persia, Finds Original Source Code In His Dad’s Closet


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Prince of Persia and Karateka, were two of the best action games of their era. Why? Because they gave us an inkling of what real, fluid graphical motion would look like in a few years’ time and, more important, were pretty much amazing if you were used to the Atari 2600 and River Raid. I remember playing Karateka before school at age ten, chopping my way through enemies on my way to save my sweetie and then, a few years later, playing PoP. Both were amazing.
Why? Because he created smooth, believable animation at eight frames per second on machines that were more suited to games like The Oregon Trail. He also created action games that led to realistic titles like Tekken that used real, human motion in order to add amazing realism.
A funny thing happened about ten years ago. The creator of these games, Jordan Mechner, apparently lost the original PoP source code and hunted all over for it, asking former Broderbund employees and digging through old files. The files – stored on 3.5-inch floppy disks – contained the original machine code for the game. The only way to actually play the game, until today, was to run an emulated, extracted ROM.
Mechner, however, just received a box from his Dad. In it were a few Amstrad cassettes of his games and, more important, the original Apple II source code. That’s right: PoP will be back in its original form as soon as Mechner figures out how to pull data off of the ancient disks and handle the 6502 processor code.
Says Mechner:
So, for all fifteen of you 6502 assembly-language coders out there who might care… including the hardy soul who ported POP to the Commodore 64 from an Apple II memory dump… I will now begin working with a digital-archeology-minded friend to attempt to figure out how to transfer 3.5″ Apple ProDOS disks onto a MacBook Air and into some kind of 21st-century-readable format. (Yuri Lowenthal, you can guess who I’m talking about.)
In short, it looks like PoP is back. This is a great day for 1980s motion-cap action/martial arts/run and jump games.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/jordan-mechner-creator-of-prince-of-persia-finds-original-source-code-in-his-dads-closet/

New Google Drive Leak Points To 5GB Of Free Storage, Release In Third Week Of April


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Evidence of Google Drive’s existence has been sporadically surfacing for months now, and MG reported last September that Google employees have been using the reborn service in-house for a while now.
Now, as the service’s supposed launch draws ever closer, we’re starting to get our first clear glimpses at what Google’s had under lock and key for so long. According to a leaked screenshot obtained byTalkAndroid, Google Drive could offer even more functionality than earlier reports suggested — if legitimate, then Google Drive users could have access to 5GB of free storage right out of the gate. Their mysterious source also confirmed to them that the service is on track for an official launch during the week of April 16.
It seems like a smart move that would best Dropbox’s 2GB of free storage and put Google on even footing with Amazon’s Cloud Drive (Microsoft leads the pack with 25GB of free storage in SkyDrive.) Still, the leak raises a big question — who’s actually got the story right?
TalkAndroid’s source sent them another screenshot earlier in the week depicting the Google Drive Windows client in action, and it specifically points out that users have access to 2GB of free storage (though they can “always buy more,” a phrase which reappears in this latest leak). What’s more, the logo depicted in that older screenshot appears to be the same one spotted by GeekWire in February, but this newest screenshot uses a slightly tweaked version that drops the red in favor of green. Is this the sign of a clever fake, or a last-minute rebranding effort on Google’s part?
Meanwhile, Om Malik seemed awfully confident when he reported earlier this week that Google Drive is poised to launch at some point during the first week of April, with Google offering their users only 1GB of free storage. His sources seemed to confirm the notion that truly voracious users can purchase more cloud storage from Google, though Malik’s sources wouldn’t go details like pricing and storage tiers.
It’s obvious that Google Drive is coming, and coming soon, but Google’s going to be playing their last few cards as close to their collective chests as they can. Still, with April fast approaching, I suspect the full story will be unearthed sooner rather than later.
Update: TalkAndroid’s source says that the service will launch during the week of the 16th, not necessarily on that day. I’ve changed the headline to reflect this.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/new-google-drive-leak-points-to-5gb-of-free-storage-april-16-launch-date/

It’s A Disney Party! DeNA & Disney Team Up To Launch Mobile Games Worldwide


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Disney and Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA announced a new partnership this morning that will see their first jointly developed mobile social games launched on DeNA’s Mobage social gaming platform, beginning later this month.
The first title to arrive, “Disney Party,” was released on March 28th to the Mobage network in Japan, which serves a mobile gaming audience of over 35 million. On April 2nd, a second title will arrive in Japan called “Disney Fantasy Quest.” These two games will involve Disney’s own characters, but will be followed by a third, (yet to be named) card game battle that’s based on Marvel Comics characters.

The two companies aren’t only focused on Japan, despite DeNA’s Japanese roots – the plan is to make all three titles available worldwide. Localized versions of the two games will arrive both as smartphone apps as well as on Mobage’s non-Japanese networks: Mobage Global for North America and Europe, Mobage China, and Daum Mobage for South Korea. They will be the first three jointly developed titles released outside of Japan.
In addition, the new agreement will also see Disney and DeNA teaming up on other efforts, including Disney movies, Disney TV shows and smartphone apps. Disney Japan’s president said at a news conference that he hoped the unnamed Marvel Comics game would help raise awareness in Japan where the characters don’t have a built-in audience, ahead of the film which opens in August. (The Avengers, perhaps?)
DeNA has been doing well as of late. The company posted a strong third quarter in February, which saw net sales up by 16%, boosting its valuation to $4.8 billion. It’s now working on building up its presence in the U.S., Europe, China and South Korea – and this Disney deal will certainly help.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/its-a-disney-party-dena-disney-team-up-to-launch-mobile-games-worldwide/

Social, Mobile Video Sharing App Klip Doubles Down On Visual Effects In New Version


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Klip, a mobile app that allows users to capture, share, discover and view videos, is debuting a new version of its iOS app that allows users to shoot videos with visual effects and filters in real-time. The company has also added seven new video effects to the app.
Klip, which launched in September, is focused on mobile video discovery and providing the highest quality video streaming around for iOS. You simply shoot a new ‘Klip’ or grab one from your Camera Roll and share it with the community, your friends on Facebook, Twitter, on your YouTube channel, or by email. Within the app, you can watch Klips from around the world, follow other Klippers, re-klip the Klips you think are worth sharing again, or stay on top of hot topics by following hashtags.
As Klip explains to me, shooting a mobile video with the effects on in real-time (as opposed to adding the effects afterwards) is a complex computer science challenge. The new effects added to the app include, Zenith (a retro tube TV effect in both color and black & white), a cartoon-like effect (Toon), Gotham, Cinema (an old time movie effect), HDR, Fisheye (mirror effect) and Voodoo. Klip is particularly proud of this effect, which highlights one color (green or red) and displays all other colors as black and white.
Klip has been steadily updating its app since launch last year, most recently adding suggested recommendations, and SMS functionality. And the startup just raised $8 million in Series B funding from Benchmark Capital, Matrix Partners and Alain Rossmann (the founder of the company).
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/social-mobile-video-sharing-app-klip-doubles-down-on-visual-effects-in-new-version/

Skolkovo: Cisco, Bessemer Venture Partners Put Millions Into Russia’s Latest Answer To Silicon Valley


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In the debate over whether there can ever exist “another Silicon Valley” and where, exactly, it would be, add in another contender: Skolkovo, an ambitious high-tech sprawl being built outside of Moscow, which this week announced the latest two companies to invest in its big idea: Cisco and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Bessemer has promised investments worth $20 million over the next two years into startups that are resident at Skolkovo, while Cisco has dedicated an unspecified part of a $1 billion injection it is making into Russia over a number of years to build an R&D lab in the area — part of big push from the government to take some of the technology know-how that Russia has been producing for decades and give it a significantly more commercial spin.
The Bessemer investment means that there are now more than 30 VCs that have committed to putting money into Skolkovo-startups. (One happens to also include Cisco, working with Russian VC Almaz.)
As a result of the agreement, Bessemer will get “priority access” to the Skolkovo Foundation project pipeline (not clear whether that will be over and above access by other VCs). It will focus on seed and Series A investments; and it will be able to potentially bring some of its own portfolio companies into Skolkovo. Its portfolio companies include the cloud-services company Parallels and group-buying club KupiVIP.
(Being resident at Skolkovo, which you get after applying and being accepted by the foundation, gives a startup financial support in the form of possible grants, but also a place to work and operational support.)
Just as Bessemer is joining a group of VCs, Cisco is not the first big IT company to pump money into the Russian tech ecosystem. HP has its HP Lab near St. Petersburg, and IBM, Nokia, Siemens and around 100 others have all signed up to invest in Skolkovo’s IT cluster (other clusters include biomedicine, energy, space technology and nuclear technology).
It’s still early days, so Cisco’s aims are suitably ambitious in their scope at this point: “Cisco aims to focus R&D in Skolkovo on high-impact areas of the business, including video and internal start-ups, using Skolkovo as the physical and virtual platform for innovation,” Cisco says. “This will contribute to transforming Skolkovo into one of the most advanced technology regions in the world.” Specifically the investment that Cisco has now committed will be used to build out a center on the Skolkovo campus and run an R&D operation there, as well as continued funding for training and education programs.
That speaks to another point: since Skolkovo was announced in 2010, not a whole lot has come out of it in terms of actual product while the building of it gets underway. Even so, people seem mostly positive that projects like this are the right step forward to improve the IT and tech economy in the country.
That’s because before Skolkovo, Russia didn’t have much in the way of an R&D environment as it exists in a place like Silicon Valley: in a throwback to Soviet days, R&D had been based on institutes and had “no commercial element,” said a spokesperson for Russian search giant Yandex. And at the same time, a lot of investment money and talent has been exported abroad, whether in the form of investments in Facebook, or Russian engineers contracted to work for startups elsewhere.
Some worry that having the government back the effort with millions of state money makes it potentially less stable: “As long as Skolkovo is supported by the government, it is viable,” one founder told me. “What if government changes its mind, or if there is a budget deficit?”
Others see the entry of all these international companies, like Cisco and Bessemer, as a route to leveraging that risk. “Yes, Skolkovo is pretty ambitious, and there is some political coloring because of the connection to [Russia's President] Dmitry Medvedev, but now he’s moving this into the hands of private businesses, and that’s the right decision,” said the Yandex spokesperson. “Sooner or later those businesses will ask for an ROI.”
Yandex, it should be pointed out, is one of the many other routes to getting funding and building out tech companies. It doesn’t have any involvement with Skolkovo itself but it has its own R&D operation as well as its own incubator, Yandex.factory. Its latest investment was a seed round in Israel-basedGBooking, focused on IT services for small businesses.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/skolkovo-cisco-bessemer-venture-partners-put-millions-into-russias-latest-answer-to-silicon-valley/

(Founder Stories) Kayak’s Paul English Discusses Big Wins & Important Strategic Alliances [TCTV]

Having recently posted its 2011 revenue numbers, Kayak.com’s co-founder, Paul English stopped by TCTV to tape an episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon.
In part I of this conversation, English describes serendipitously meeting co-founder Steve Hafner (who previously co-founded Orbitz), speaks to the importance of striking the right business partnerships and offers insights into how Kayak tests its products.
English says Kayak’s origins date back to 2003 when he was introduced to his co-founder Steve Hafner through a mutual contact. He tells Dixon the two immediately hit it off, went to a bar and “an hour later decided each to throw a bunch of money in” to start Kayak. English and Hafner then put together a board that included ”the original founders of Expedia and Travelocity.” English notes this leadership offered Kayak additional legitimacy in the eyes of the industry, as did the opportunity to “take over travel search for the AOL portal.” And says the AOL deal “got us a lot of attention because … we had an anchor tenant with a lot of traffic.”
Speaking further to the AOL partnership, English tells Dixon, “It is hard to get those deals but it is a huge emotional win and PR win for the industry. I think to tell people that you are an unknown startup, but you are powering … travel management for some big company, it gives you cred that allows you to then ask for other things, so I think it was really key to us in 2004.”
Make sure to watch the entire interview to hear additional insights, and be on the lookout for part II of this interview which is coming up.
Past episodes of Founder Stories featuring leaders of FindTheBest, Kiva Systems, TripAdvisor, Warby Parker, ZocDoc and many other companies are here.

DoubleTwist’s New Alarm Clock For Android Wakes You With Your DoubleTwist Tunes


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DoubleTwist, the maker of the popular suite of applications for syncing music and media between devices, has just surprised its users with the release of a new application today. And this time, the app branches out from the company’s prior focus on media management – it’s an alarm clock app for Android phones.
But on closer inspection, DoubleTwist Alarm actually does makes sense as an extension of the DoubleTwist brand, as the app is designed to wake you with music. In fact, it even connects with the company’s mobile Player app, allowing you to configure songs or entire playlists as the music you wake to.
The Android-only app has an attractive interface with big, bold numbers, and a number of expected features including the option to switch between analog and digital interfaces, support for multiple and recurring alarms, custom labels, and a built-in selection of alarm sounds to choose from. DoubleTwist users can also set up the app to work with the music they have in the Player app, if they choose.
There’s another nifty feature too: something called “SleepCycle,” which will suggest a handful of times you can wake up that correspond to full sleep cycles. By doing so, the idea is that you’ll wake up feeling more refreshed. Of course, since the app doesn’t actually know when you fall asleep, that functionality is going to be hit-or-miss in terms of results. But it’s kind of a cute thing to add.
The app costs 99 cents during its launch day special, but will double in price after the first 10,000 users. You can grab it from Google Play here.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/doubletwists-new-alarm-clock-for-android-wakes-you-with-your-doubletwist-tunes/

Netflix Sharpens Focus On DVDs With DVD.com, But Don’t Cry Qwikster. (It’s Staying)


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Netflix has been making a few moves to separate its DVD business more from its streaming operation, and today brings news of the latest move in that direction: the company has bought the domain name DVD.com, the company has confirmed to us.
The news raises questions of Netflix possibly getting ready to pull a Qwikster on us after all and separate its streaming and DVD businesses — something others have suggested it might do — but TechCrunch understands that there are no plans to spin off its DVD business into a separate company, Ã  la the Qwikster strategy of last year that so qwikly spiraled into a PR disaster for the company, and was then abandoned.
News of the DVD.com domain purchase was first reported by Domain Name Wire earlier today. We reached out to Netflix, which told us that this was part of its bigger strategy to improve user experience around its DVD rentals business, a service it offers only in the U.S.
“In the U.S. we look to provide a great experience for our members, those who have DVD only, streaming only and those who have both,” a spokesperson told us. Indeed, on Netflix some reviewers pinpoint specific features in DVDs that do not appear on the streamed editions of certain pieces of content — for example extra features, commentary, and so on. Similarly, the streaming comments often related to the actual quality of the streams — again, not so relevant for DVD users.
Ratings, we understand, will continue to remain centralized and go across both streaming and DVD versions of the same piece of content.
Last time around, Netflix qwikly saw the err of its ways in trying to separate those two parts of its business, so this time around it’s very unlikely to try to repeat the same thing again.
At this point the DVD business is actually proving more lucrative in terms of revenues for Netflix than the streaming business. In Q4, Netflix had 11.1 million DVD subscribers, which represented revenues of $370 million. U.S. streaming subscribers for that quarter were nearly double, at 21.6 million, but only had revenues of $476 million.
Of course, there is likely to be significantly more overhead in running that DVD business longer term. But for now it seems that streaming isn’t big enough to really stand on its own for the company. Also, there are very likely more promotional costs in building out that streaming business — that includes the increasing costs associated with getting exclusive rights to content in the face of a number of competing services from Amazon, Google and others also going for same users, and the same catalog of films and TV shows.
What this will mean, effectively, is that DVD users will eventually have their own web site to visit to order their DVDs and otherwise manage their subscriptions, rather than have to navigate through a Netflix site that will most likely be more completely given over to streaming promotions.
By separating DVD and streaming customers more, there seems to be a bit of a question mark over how successful Netflix has been in upselling those DVD customers to streaming. Perhaps that was the original idea, but by separating them even more, it seems to imply that those customers are being found elsewhere more readily. So why not make the experience for the DVD users a little nicer in the process?
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/netflix-sharpens-focus-on-dvds-with-dvd-com-but-dont-cry-qwikster-its-staying/

PayPal Teams Up With Gas Station Chain On A Payment App And Fuel Discounts


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There’s no shortage of apps that help people find cheap gas these days, but apps that let you pay for it? And ones that give you a discount for doing it? Sign me up. Regional gas station/convenience store chain Cumberland Farms has done just that with their new SmartPay app, which in addition to letting users pay without leaving their seats, offers them a $.05 cent/gallon discount.
Here’s how it all goes down: once a driver signs in with a PayPal account, they can pull into a supported Cumberland Farms location and fire up the iOS/Android app or the mobile website. From there, the app uses the device’s GPS to hone in on the gas station they’re parked at, users punch in their pump number and voila — their gas charges are sent to PayPal, and users get an email receipt.
Ready from the bummer? The pilot program is currently live at 50 gas stations in Massachusetts for now, though Cumberland Farms CIO Dave Banks hopes to get the company’s 600 stations across the East Coast and Florida tricked out in the future.
The app is novel and all, but what really gets me is the discount — the margins on fill-ups can be pretty thin, so it’s a bit of a surprise to see a company dip prices like that. If we dig a bit deeper though, the reasoning becomes a bit more clear — according to Innovation Economy, Cumberland Farms approached Boston-based startup Fig Card about integrating their mobile payment tech into local gas stations. Fig Card was subsequently snapped up by PayPal last April, and they’ve apparently being working on it since. As it turns out, PayPal is actually the one funding that nifty discount in order to drive awareness around the app, and Banks says it could potentially reach as high as $0.10 off per gallon.
Cumberland Farms isn’t the first company to try a mobile payments model — apparently, a chain of gas stations called Murphy’s started letting people pay for their gas via text message late last year. It worked, technically, but the onboarding process seemed like a real pain in the rear. PayPal and Cumberland Farms have touched on what seems like a pretty frictionless way to make this payment model work (and a way to incentivize it), now all we need is for everyone gas station in the country to start doing it.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/cumberland-farms-paypal-app-discount/

Second Prize Is A Set Of Steak Knives: MarGenius Is A Social Network For Networkers


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So you’re in town to follow up on some weak leads and your boss says you’ve got to stay put for a few more days because there’s an old lady out near Patton Road who is looking to buy and you call back and say you got to get back to HQ for some paperwork and your boss says “Make the most of it.” The only thing that counts in this world, friend, is getting them to sign on the line which is dotted. Am I right?
So you need some new leads, or at least some new people in your Rolodex. That’s wheremarGenius comes in. You import your Google or Microsoft address book and calendar (don’t worry, nobody else can see it) and it figures out if there are people you need to see and talk to near you, right in town there. Doesn’t matter if the lady near Patton Road’s crumb cake is from the store. You got four more new leads out of marGenius and you can give them a call or even schedule a meeting right from the app and ring a ding ding you’re up on the big board again, at least for a while.
And don’t tell me the leads are weak because they’re not weak. They’re solid. The app correlates people you know with people you know, kind of like LinkedIn, and then helps you introduce yourself. Mitch & Murray didn’t pay for these leads. You made these leads yourself. These leads are gold.

Founded by a small team in DC led by Saurabh Dharia and Sundeep Sanghavi, the app came about when the team members recalled ending up stranded in a strange city after a cancelled meeting. Instead of drowning their sorrows in Old Fashioneds, they decided to build a system that would ensure they never waste time out in Cedar Rapids again. They needed a method to network on the fly and thus marGenius was born.
Although not every meeting set up through the app will bring cash into the company, the networking opportunities it encourages are presumably priceless.
Unlike “free” social networks, marGenius is aimed at actually getting you some business, so they will eventually charge a small fee for use. You can use the app to plan trips, as well, by entering the name of a city you’re about to visit. Using marGenius’ opportunities engine, you can then figure out who’s who on the ground.
The app is in beta and supports data imports from Gmail, Hotmail, and Exchange. CSV support is forthcoming. And next time the boss asks you “You call yourself a salesman, you son of a bitch?” you can keep your head held high and your chin up and your eyes open and you can say to him “Yeah, I think so. And I know so, too, so stuff it.”
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/second-prize-is-a-set-of-steak-knives-margenius-is-a-social-network-for-networkers/

Keen On… Chad Mureta: How Apps Can Change Your Life [TCTV]


Back in 2009, Chad Mureta was an 18-hour a day real estate salesman living from one paycheck to the next. Driving home after a basketball game one evening, he hit a deer, flipped his truck over four times, mangled his arm and almost killed himself. Then, recovering in his hospital bed, Mureta – who knew nothing about technology or the Internet – was introduced to the app economy by a friend who gave him a newspaper article about how apps can generate significant revenue. When he got out of the hospital, Mureta borrowed $1,800 from his stepfather, built an app called Fingerprint Security Pro which eventually generated $800,000 in revenue. Mureta is now an app entrepreneur and, in good Tim Ferris style, travels around the world as a member of what he calls “the new rich”.
And you can be like Mureta, too! In his new book App Empire: Make Money, Have a Life and Let Technology Work For You, Mureta explains how the app business can transform all our lives. Earlier this month, Mureta came into San Francisco’s TechCrunch TV studio to explain not only how we can all become members of the new rich, but also to give his tips about the hot new areas of the app economy.

Amazon’s Appstore Generates More Revenue Per Daily User Than Google Play


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According to new data released today by mobile analytics firm Flurry, Amazon’s Appstore for Android is generating more revenue per daily user than the Google Android Market, which wasrecently rebranded as the Google Play store. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that Amazon vets apps for quality, runs promotions to entice users to return daily, and perhaps most importantly, is able to leverage its established user base of Amazon account holders who already have credit card information on file – perfect for one-click checkouts.
To generate its figures, Flurry examined a set of top-ranked apps that have a presence on all three stores: Apple, Amazon and Google Play. Combined, the apps average 11 million daily active users.
Flurry set the revenue generated in the iTunes App Store to 100%, then compared the relative revenue generated by Amazon and Google to that of the App Store. In doing so, the firm found that Amazon revenue is 89% of App Store revenue and Google revenue is 23% of App Store revenue. Or, in other words, for every dollar an iOS app makes, it generates 89 cents in the Amazon Appstore and 23 cents in Google Play.
The findings back up Flurry’s December report, which found the Android Market to generate 23 cents of revenue for every dollar generated by iTunes.
Flurry cites Amazon’s online retail prowess as reason for its success. “Amazon, who invented the one-click purchase, perfected online shopping with data, efficiency, and customer service,” says Flurry’s VP of Marketing Peter Farago. Meanwhile, running a store – whether digital or retail – is not one of Google’s core competencies, he notes.
The data speaks to Amazon’s potential (or really, its place) as a viable third ecosystem for developers looking to generate revenue, which leaves one wondering where the Microsoft/Nokia ecosystem will fit in. Can the mobile app ecosystem support it as a strong fourth player one day, too?
Farago tells us that Flurry believes it can. “We believe that Microsoft + Nokia have a lot of the key assets to succeed, from a powerful OS, hardware know-how and, most importantly, building robust third party developer support. We are bullish on their progress,” he says.
He also suggests that Amazon’s success may leave other players considering similar tactics – that is, forking Android to build their own Android-flavored OS and associated app store.
Samsung, specifically, is called out as one company that might see this path as appealing. Farago explains that most OEMs want to differentiate their software, if for no other reason than to please carriers which want unique phones.
“Software is the easiest way to achieve this,” he says. “If all hardware makers have the same software, then differentiation drops.”
With Amazon’s growth as a revenue generator for developers as well as a new hardware competitor, Flurry thinks Samsung may be considering its own Android fork.
“If you put together the idea that OEMs want differentiation and Amazon is now competing strongly against Samsung in the tablet category, as well as its ability to make revenue for developers, then a fork for Samsung becomes a real strategic choice to consider,” Farago explains. “Let’s also not forget that apps will soon be on TVs, where Samsung already has a strong footprint in hardware. Finally, Samsung has Bada. If they haven’t switched to that already, then it’s because Android is working for them well enough, until possibly now. If that’s the case, a fork of Android again looks like an alternative to evaluate.”
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/amazons-appstore-generates-more-revenue-than-google-play/

Inside Best Buy: An Anonymous Store Manager Speaks About Recent Changes


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From the outside, we early adopters see Best Buy as a dinosaur in a dying world. The company recently announced the closing of 50 stores in the U.S. and 400 layoffs, mostly in corporate. It would be easy to say “Good riddance” and ignore the slow decline of bricks and mortar, but I wanted to speak to someone inside the company.
I got a hold of a manager who wished to remain anonymous and was considered a solid and dedicated employee. I asked him what it’s like inside his store right now.
“Basically what’s going on is that we got to work and heard about the 50 store closings and we started wondering about job security. Immediately my reaction was ‘Oh, crap, what am I going to do?’” he said.
Management told the employees that the stores to be closed were “bottom performers” and that all of the job cuts were “almost exclusively at the corporate level.” In an organization as Byzantine as Best Buy – simply spreading news of the cuts will take a week as corporate talks to management, who in turn talks to the districts – the move to “cut the fat” heartened his employees.
Best Buy will also open 100 or so new Best Buy Mobile stores with a smaller footprint. There they will sell higher margin items like phones and mobile devices.
“It’s an $800 million cost reduction,” he said. Employees will also be part of a newer profit sharing structure, essentially “raising wages.”
“A lot of these trims are happening so they can expand the appliance market and the high end computer market along with custom integration and whole home networking,” he said. “I’m really excited about that. That they’re expanding that from West Coast to East Coast is a huge opportunity.”
Even the long-daunting price differential between online stores and physical Best Buy shops is slowly changing. For example, there is a new “unilateral merchant retail pricing” rule appearing in some distribution contracts which means a merchant cannot sell an item below the UMRP without facing a fine. This means Best Buy and Amazon would both be forced to sell at the UMRP and no lower.
“Works in huge favor for brick and mortar stores,” he said.
While he feels comfortable and he hasn’t been fired, he’s hedging his bets by going back to school. “Everyone was nervous,” he said. “Once they found the facts, they got more comfortable. We’re basically repositioning ourselves to be more like Starbucks. More, smaller stores and a focus on premium items.”
“It did shake me up a little bit,” he said. “Just in case something doesn’t go right I want to be able to do something else.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/inside-best-buy-an-anonymous-store-manager-speaks-about-recent-changes/

Evinar – A Google Hangouts For Facebook That Broadcasts Anything (Except The Audience)


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With Evinar, you can’t bring audience members onto a live streaming stage with you, but you can broadcast anything else. Evinar is a new Facebook Page app launching today via TechCrunch that lets you stream to a live audience nearly nearly any type of content, including YouTube, Ustream, Hulu, Facebook photos, Flickr, SlideShare, tweets, or uploaded text and images.
Evinar definitely lacks interactivity. You can’t collaborate or video chat with the first 10 viewers like on Hangouts, or pipe in the webcam streams of any audience member like promising startup OnTheAir. Plus you can’t stream your own webcam directly. Still, web celebs and thought leaders could use Evinar to connect with their fans in more ways than a standard video stream.
Hosts control Evinar from a separate web interface, while viewers watch via the Evinar app on the host’s Facebook Page. Setting up a broadcast takes just a few seconds, and then you can promote your Evinar event with tweets and Facebook updates, unroll the graphic curtains on your stage, and start broadcasting one of the supported content types. You don’t even need embed codes — just paste in a URL from your address bar and Evinar scrapes and embeds the content.
Evinar lets you broadcast to up to 50 viewers for free, so if you’ve got a Facebook Page you could watch YouTube videos with friends or show them your vacation photos. Premium accounts cost between $9 for 500 simultaneous viewers and $49 a month for 10,000. Hosts can allow viewers to freely text chat with them and each other below the video, or require messages to be approved before appearing.

Evinar co-founder Adeel Raza tells me he built the product because he thought Livestream and Ustream were too focused on streaming webcam feeds rather than other content types. The team proofed the idea for a Facebook Page to fan communication app with a group chat app called Clobby that it says has received 3.5 million installs. Ad revenue from Clobby is giving the bootstrapped company some runway, but it hopes premium account subscriptions will eventually support it.
For now Evinar’s biggest strength is that viewers don’t need to download anything or have a Google+ account to watch. Otherwise Hangouts is a better, much more interactive solution. The lack of a native, direct video streaming option in Evinar is a big annoyance, but the team tells me it’s currently building that functionally on top of the TokBox OpenTok API. The ability to watch from outside Facebook would be nice too.
My biggest gripe with Evinar, though, is that most of the content types including Facebook photos, twitter content, and SlideShare can only be broadcast from a paid account. If Evinar is going to grow, at the very least it needs to make these features available for all users to demo. So in conclusion, a cool app that could kill itself by trying to monetize too aggressively.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/evinar/

roupon’s Profit In 2011 Was Actually $22.6 Million Less Than They Previously Said


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Daily deals site Groupon today issued a pretty significant revision of the financial results itpreviously reported for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2011.
According to the company, it actually made $14.3 million less in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2011 than it previously reported — $492.2 million, compared to the previously stated $506.5 million. It also spent more in operating expenses than it previously said it did — resulting in its Q4 operating income and net income being $30 million and $22.6 million less, respectively, than the company initially said it was.
How did this mixup occur? Groupon said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the revisions “are primarily related to an increase to the Company’s refund reserve accrual to reflect a shift in the Company’s fourth quarter deal mix and higher price point offers, which have higher refund rates.” (Full disclosure: I’m not sure what that means.)
Not surprisingly, Wall Street was none too happy about the news. Groupon issued the revision on Friday afternoon after trading stopped for the week, but at the moment (2:45 PM Pacific Time) the company’s stock price is down 6.4 percent in after-hours trading. The company’s stock price as of market close today was $18.38, which was already well below the $20 share price of its initial public offering back in October.
Groupon’s accounting practices have raised many eyebrows in the tech and business worlds, particularly in the run-up to its stock market debut last fall, so this is not a completely unexpected situation. Going forward, though, the company vows that it has its financial house in order. Groupon’s CFO Jason Child said in a press release today: “We remain confident in the fundamentals of our business, as our performance continues to highlight the value that we provide to customers and merchants.”
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/groupons-profit-in-2011-was-actually-22-6-million-less-than-they-previously-said/

Girls Around Me” Creeper App Just Might Get People To Pay Attention To Privacy Settings


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Cult of Mac has a great write-up of an app for iOS called Girls Around Me, which essentially displays the public check-ins and profiles of girls around you. With a little shift in context it could easily be confused for a hot new startup (discoverability meets speed dating!), but no, it really is just a way for guys to creep on nearby girls who have failed to lock down their info.
It’s sad, but maybe something like this is what people need to shock them into understanding just how much information they put online.
The app itself is pretty much straight-up stalker material, but the fact is it uses publicly available information — information that, really, is being deliberately broadcast. There is a larger debate to be had about the nature of privacy and how information like location and profiles should be handled, and many subtle points to be made. But right now it seems that things must be done in broad strokes, and it’s mainly broadly offensive things like this app that will bring attention to the issue.
It’s perfect fodder for evening news debates: “After the break, we talk with our tech experts about a new app that lets you track women in your area without their knowledge.” And that’s a good thing: the more exposure the problem gets, the better. Many of the people being tracked by this app, male and female, haven’t even considered the idea that their movements might be tracked systematically by a stranger.

For example: all these options in Foursquare default to on, which is really fine, since after all the service is about sharing your location. And linking it to your Facebook or Twitter account is a natural step for many. But at the same time it’s easy to fail to understand that one is providing a sort of path that strangers can follow from a face on the street to a name, other photos, current location, and a number of other things.
Girls Around Me is a shortcut for creeps, but it’s not like it had to do anything illegal or complicated to get this information. A handful of public APIs is all it took to put a faces on a map and link them to a trove of personal data.
Apps like this one are distasteful, sure, but they are also important ways to show how exposed many of our friends and peers are. An understanding of social media is not prerequisite to its use, and many are ignorant of the level to which their actions and data are public. With any luck, Girls Around Me and its ilk will convince these people to take their own privacy seriously.
Update: Foursquare has reached out to say that the app was in violation of their API policy, so they’ve revoked access. I feel safer already!
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/girls-around-me-creeper-app-just-might-get-people-to-pay-attention-to-privacy-settings/

Hallmark Greets Digital, Acquires SpiritClips To Let You Send Photo/Video E-Cards


Hallmark SpiritClips
Photos and video can be even more personal than a handwritten card. That’s why Hallmark has just acquired SpiritClips, an online video production and streaming service that also makes personalized digital greeting cards. It looks like Hallmark customers will soon be able to create and send e-cards by uploading their own photos or choosing from video content created by SpiritClips.
Hallmark already has its own line of animated video e-cards, but they’re not very personalized. As more of our intimate connections happen online, the SpiritClips acquisition will let Hallmark stay relevant rather than living off its dead-tree printing business.
SpiritClips has been running a $3 to $5 a month subscription service where users could get streaming access to an array of heartwarming, family-friendly films and documentaries produced by the company and sourced from elsewhere. Customers could also create personalized digital greeting cards where they upload photos and SpiritClips then collates them into videos. Now its content, team, and tech will serve Hallmark customers.

The two companies were already working together, as SpiritClips is the official online, on-demand, and streaming-to-tv provider for Hallmark’s Hall Of Fame inspirational film series. Hall Of Fame has been delivering original content to TV since the 1950′s, and the SpiritClips production staff should make its films even warmer and fuzzier. The startup’s team will continue to operate from its California headquarters rather than moving in with Hallmark in Kansas City, Mo.
While services like Animoto may offer more powerful photo and video editing tools for creating e-cards, they could be too complicated for the average Hallmark customer. Hallmark could use SpiritClips to make it as simple as possible to create e-cards full of user generated content. That way Hallmark could could bring even its least-savvy offline customers into the modern age where 1s and 0s can express love.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/hallmark-spiritclips/

Here Are The Women of Y Combinator And They Are Awesome


I would normally rather have a root canal instead of write about the issue of women in technology. I just find most essays on this really tedious and obvious. (Sorry Alexia.)
But I do want to point one thing out. When I went to my first Y Combinator Demo Day three years ago, there was one woman. At this week’s Demo Day, there were six companies with one or all female founders among the 66 startups in the class.
I’m going to keep this post simple. No complaining. Less navel gazing. Just more role models. So here are the women of Y Combinator and they are awesome. (Update: We’re missing two at the moment, but they will be added soon hopefully. They are Tracy Young of PlanGridand Somaira Punjwani of MedMonk.)
And ladies, if you’re interested in joining the next class, the deadline just passed. But there are two classes a year, so the next one will come up soon.
Nikki Durkin, 99Dresses
Durkin wrote her first business plan when she was eight years old. As a girl growing up in the Australian countryside, she desperately wanted a horse. After begging didn’t work, she biked down to her local co-op, determined the price of hay, calculated out operational expenses and wrote a cost-benefit analysis, even sticking in a risks section just in case the horse died.
“Ever since then, I’ve been pretty good at figuring out how to get what I want,” she said.
At 15, she and her thirteen-year-old brother started their first online business called KultKandy, where they designed T-shirts and drop shipped them from China.
While in college, she came up with a concept around dress swapping. She put her idea on Facebook and sent it out to friends in Sydney. In less than three weeks, suddenly 20,000 women signed up from around the country.
“It wasn’t really planned out to the nth degree, but it really resonated,” said Durkin, who is now 20 years old. “Girls absolutely loved it.”
The idea was to have a market where women post pictures of their clothing and swap it. The seller would set the price and handle shipping costs. Instead of using a real currency, Durkin wanted to use a virtual one so that the experience would really feel guilt-free. She asked the community for a name for the virtual currency, and they came up with “Buttons,” for which she now charges $1 a piece.
Within four months, women had uploaded 4,500 dresses and sold 3,500. She hadn’t even heard of Y Combinator until a business adviser Matt Barrie, who is the chief executive of Freelancer.com, told her about it.
“I told him that I’d love to get into the American market but I didn’t have any of the connections or a tech team,” she said. She rounded up a technical co-founder, applied, got in and moved all the way from Australia to the Bay Area. “There’s a lot of potential here,” she said.
Olga Vidisheva, Shoptiques
After making her way to the U.S. as a teenager from Kyrgyzstan and Moscow following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vidisheva didn’t have much money to pay for living expenses and tuition at pricey Wellesley College. So she modeled on the side, doing everything from wearing Ben Sherman to appearing in vacuum cleaner ads.
Little did she know, that experience would pay off years down the road. Today she’s running Shoptiques, an e-commerce play that brings high-end boutiques online. Even before Demo Day, the company’s seed round was snapped up by three of Silicon Valley’s top tier venture firms including Greylock Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital.
Vidisheva’s modeling helped her understand how to present merchandise and do high-end photography for her clientele.
“Very highly curated models can work well,” she said, pointing to models like Fab, a design-centric flash sales site. “We’re creating a market for tastemakers.”
Shoptiques handholds sometimes very tech shy fashion boutiques onto the web. Vidisheva’s startup eats the up-front costs of building the e-commerce presence and photographing the apparel. The company sends these shops the shipping labels, provides the tracking analytics and handles payment processing. Naturally, Shoptiques intends to make its money back through a revenue share on sales. It’s just launched with 50 stores around the U.S.
Vidisheva isn’t just a pretty face. She graduate Phi Beta Kappa and was one of two women out of around 100 men in her investment banking group at Goldman Sachs. In business school, she researched the plan for what would become Shoptiques for well over a year.
“I saw this huge gap in the market,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been able to breathe if I wasn’t doing this business.”
Paul Graham, Y Combinator’s co-founder, paired her with some alums who were behind Anyvite, an events invitation startup that came out of a mid-2008 class. Dan and Jeff Morin were thinking about next steps with their company, and Graham suggested they meet Vidisheva. After trial run where they worked together for a few weeks, they joined full-time on the startup.
“PG is amazing at figuring out people who will work well together,” she said.
Elli Sharef, HireArt
Growing up in Colombia, Sharef was lucky to have a strong female role model right by her side. Her mother had a Ph.D. in economics
“She’s a strong figure with opinions and she was an intellectual,” Sharef said. “I never thought about being a man or woman. She just told me to be ambitious, to do my thing and try and build something good for the world.”
Sharef’s company is attacking the HR and recruiting space. She’s a co-founder of HireArt, which is trying to ease that first step of sifting through an impossible number of resumes.
HireArt has job candidates actually perform a series of tasks or do video interviews. For example, if an interview candidate says they are an expert in Excel, they can demonstrate their skills on HireArt by creating an Excel model using a dataset.
“I saw how hard it was to hire the right person. Everyone knows that the right person can 10X your team,” she said. “At the same time, it’s equally bad when you don’t hire the right person. It can be really terrible.”
HireArt’s site is growing 40 percent week over week and currently has 238 open positions. The company earns revenue every time a candidate is successfully placed, the way a good recruiter might earn a fee or a salary percentage if they find a good hire.
To get into Y Combinator, Sharef came together with a few friends from her university days at Yale: Dain Lewis and Nicholas Sedlet.
There’s a question of how easy it will be to scale HireArt’s model given the idiosyncrasies of hiring and finding a good cultural fit between employees and employers.
Sharef says that over time, the company will collect more and more data from employers about interview questions or tests that are strong predictors of success.
“We really try to work with data to understand which questions work the best. You can think about it like designing the SATs for different jobs,” she said, pointing out that one of her co-founders has experience working with huge data sets as a commodities trader and quant.
Kathryn Minshew, Alex Cavoulacos and Melissa McCreery of The Daily Muse
This trio met on their first day at consulting giant McKinsey. After finding that they worked well together through their two-year analyst stint, they started thinking about what to do next.
“While we felt like we got a lot of great training at McKinsey, we felt like there wasn’t a go-to resource for young women who wanted career advice,” McCreery said.
They had worked on a previous startup before, but then decided to start over with a new concept called The Daily Muse, a career resources destination for high-achieving young women. They packed it with advice on salary negotiations, interviews and how to manage people for the very first time.
But there was a lucrative piece that was missing — job search. Because the site had started attracting a small, but valuable audience of young women from top-tier universities, employers reached out wondering how they could recruit some of these visitors.
“Talented people choose jobs, not the other way around. So we realized there was a need for us to profile awesome companies,” she said. ”Women and men look at things differently. Women will go to a store and browse. But job search is built around knowing what you want and going after that.”
So The Daily Muse has these immersive company profiles, which tell the story of the company’s culture and explain what it’s like to work there. There are video interviews with current employees and professional photos of the office space. ”We want to be the go-to career resource for young, professional women, and now we’re also helping them discover cool places to work,” she said.
McCreery says that The Daily Muse already has 25 paying companies. Monthly fees are variable, but a ballpark range puts them around $1,500. Then there are another 70 companies that are on the waiting list.
Admittedly, any content-centric play is going to have issues scaling. But McCreery says the team has experience. ”We’ve never seen ourselves as just a media company and we’ve done scaled content before,” she said, saying that the site the team last worked on had 200 writers and a full-time editorial staff of five. The company is working on training three full-time employees to make the company profiles.

Why Google Might Be Going to $0


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Ken Lang could perform miracles. In 1990 we would head off to a bar near where we were going to graduate school for computer science, and we would bring a Go board. Then we would drink and play Go for five hours. At the end of the five hours, after a grueling battle over the board, I remember this one time when magically Ken would show up with two girls who were actually willing to sit down and hang out with two guys who had a GO BOARD in front of them. How did Ken do that?
Fast forward: 1991, CMU asks me to leave graduate school, citing lack of maturity. The professor who threw me out still occasionally calls me up asking me when I’m going to be mature enough.
Fast forward: 1994, one of our classmates, Michael Mauldin is working on a database that automatically sorts by category pages his spider retrieves on the Internet. The name of his computer: lycos.cs.cmu.edu. Lycos eventually spins out of CMU, becomes the biggest seach engine,  and goes public with a multi-billlion dollar valuation.
Fast forward: Ken Lang starts a company called WiseWire. I was incredibly skeptical. I read through what the company is about. “No way,” I think to myself, “that this is going to make any money”.
1998: Ken files a patent that classified how search results and ad results are sorted based on the number of click-thrus an ad gets. He sells the company to Lycos for $40 million. Ken Lang becomes CTO of Lycos and they take over his patents.
$40 million! What? And then Lycos stock skyrockets up. I can’t believe it. I’m happy for my friend but also incredibly jealous although later in 1998 I sell my first company as well. Still, I wanted to be the only one I knew who made money. I didn’t think it was fun when other people I knew made money. And, anyway, weren’t search engines dead? I mean,what was even the business model?
Fast forward: the  2000s. Almost every search engine dies. Excite, Lycos, Altavista. Before that “the world wide web worm”. Lycos got bought by a Spanish company, then a Korean company, then an Indian company. To be honest, I don’t even know who owns it now. It has a breathing tube and a feeding tube. Somehow, in a complete coma, it is being kept alive.
One search engine, a little company called Google, figured out how to make money.
One quick story: I was a venture capitalist in 2001. A company, Oingo, which later became Applied Semantics, had a technique for how search engines could make money by having people bid for ads. My partner at the firm said, “we can probably pick up half this company for cheap. They are running out of money.” It was during the Internet bust.
“Are you kidding me, “ I said. “they are in the search engine business. That’s totally dead.” And I went back to playing the Defender machine that was in my office. That I would play all day long even while companies waited in the conference room. (See: “10 Unusual Things I Didn’t Know About Google, Plus How I Made the Worst VC Decision Ever“)
A year later they were bought by Google for 1% of Google. Our half would’ve now been worth hundreds of millions if we had invested. I was the worst venture capitalist ever. They had changed their name from Oingo to Applied Semantics to what became within Google…AdWords and AdSense, which has been 97% of Google’s revenues since 2001. 97%. $67 billion dollars.
Don’t worry.  I’m getting to it.
(Yahoo won hundreds of millions from Google on the Overture patent even before Google amassed the bulk of their $67 billion in overall revenues from AdWords)
Fast forward. Overture, another search engine company that no longer exists (Yahoo bought it) files a patent for a bidding system for ads on a search engine. The patent office says (I’m paraphrasing), “you can file patents on A, B, and C. But not D, E, and F. Because Ken Lang from Lycos filed those patents already.”
Overture/Yahoo goes on to successfully sue Google based on the patents they did win. Google settled right before they went public but long before they achieved the bulk of their revenues.
Lycos goes on to being a barely breathing, comatose patient. Fast forward to 2011. Ken Lang buys his patents back from Lycos for almost nothing. He starts a company: I/P Engine. Two weeks ago he announced he was merging his company with a public company, Vringo (Nasdaq: VRNG). Because it’s Ken, I buy the stock although will buy more after this article is out and readers read this.
The company sues Google for a big percentage of those $67 billion in revenues plus future revenues. The claim: Google has willfully infringed on Vringo – I/P’s patents for sorting ads based on click-throughs. I remember almost 20 years ago when Ken was working on the software. “Useless!” I thought then. Their claim: $67 billion of Google’s revenues come from this patent. All of Google’s revenues going forward come from this patent. And every search engine which uses Google is allegedly infringing on the Vringo patent and is being sued.
Think: Interactive Corp (Nasdaq: IACI) with Ask.com. Think AOL. Think Target which internally uses Google’s technologies. Think Gannett, which uses Google’s technology and is also being sued. Think, eventually, thousands of Google’s customers who use AdSense.
Think: “willfully”. Why should you think that? Two reasons. Overture already sued Google. Google is aware of Yahoo/Overture’s patent history. The patent history officially stated that Ken Lang/Lycos already has patented some of this technology.  What does “willfully” mean in legal terms? Triple damages.
Why didn’t Lycos ever sue? After Lycos had its massive stroke and was left to die in a dirty hospital room with some uncaring nurse changing it’s bedpans twice a day, Google was STILL Lycos’s biggest customer. Why sue your biggest customer? Operating companies rarely sue other operating companies. Then there are countersuits, loss of revenues, and all sorts of ugly things. The breathing tube would’ve been pulled out of Lycos and it would’ve been left to die.
Think: NTP suing RIMM on patents. NTP had nothing going on other than the patents. Like Vringo/Innovate. NTP won over $600 million from RIMM once Research in Motion realized this is a serious issue and not one they can just chalk up to a bad nightmare.
(the beginning of the end for RIMM)
Guess who NTP’s lawyer was? Donald Stout. Guess who Vringo’s patent lawyer is? Donald Stout. Why is Donald Stout so good? He was an examiner at the US Patent Office. He knows patents. They announced all of this but nobody reads announcements of a small public company like Vringo. It’s hard enough figuring out how many pixels are on the screen of Apple’s amazng ipad 3.
Well, Google must have a defense? Even though their AdWords results are sorted by click-throughs in the way described by the patent maybe they sorted in a different way (a “work-around” of the patent), and didn’t infringe on the patent.
Maybe: But look at Google economist Hal Varian describing their algorithm right here in this video. And compare with the patent claim filed in court by Vringo. You decide. But it looks like the exact same to me.
Maybe: But does Google want to risk losing ten billion dollars plus having all of their customers sued. The district the case is getting tried in rules 70% in favor of the plaintiff in patent cases. Most patent trials get settled on the court steps.
Maybe: But then there’s still Microsoft /Yahoo search which, by the way, sorts based on click-throughs and has not been sued yet.
Guess what? Google’s patent lawyer is Quinn-Emmanuel. They are defending Google. Oh, and here’s something funny. Guess who Yahoo’s lawyer is? Yahoo is suing Facebook for patent infringement in the search domain. Quinn-Emanuel. So the same lawyer is both defending and accusing in the same domain. Someone’s going to settle. Everyone will settle. If anyone loses this case then the entire industry is going down in the same lawsuit and the exact same lawyer will be stuck on both sides of the fence. I’m not a lawyer but that smells. The trial is October 16 in the Eastern District Court of Virginia and will last 2 weeks. An appeal process can take, at most, a year.
I’ve known Ken for 23 years. I’ve been in the trenches with him when he was writing what I thought was his useless software. I watched his company get bought and we’ve talked about these technologies through the decades.
I’ve read the patent case. I watched Hal Varian’s video. Also look at this link on Google’s site where they describe their algorithm. Compare with the patent claim.  I have a screenshot if they decide to take it down. $67 billion in revenues from this patent. Imagine: double that in the next ten years. Imagine: triple damages.
Vringo will have an $80 million market capitalization post their merger with I/P. NTP won $600 million from RIMM using the same lawyer. RIMM’s revenues are a drop in the bucket compared to Google. And compared to 1000s of Google’s customers who will be embarrassed when the lawyer shows up at their door also. That’s why I made my investment accordingly. Is Google going to take the risk this happens?
I doubt it.
You can think to yourself: “ugh, patent trolls are disgusting”. But the protection of intellectual property is what America is built on. Smart people invent things. Then they get to protect the intellectual property on what they invents. Other companies can’t steal that technology. That’s why we have such a problem outsourcing to China and other countries where we are worried they might steal our intellectual property. Patents are the defense mechanism for capitalism.
Ken can perform miracles. But no miracle would save me. At the end of one evening of Go playing and beer drinking in 1990 we gave two girls our phone numbers. I don’t know if Ken ever got the call. I didn’t. But I guess I’m happy where it all ended up.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/31/why-google-might-be-going-to-0/

Jordan Mechner, Creator Of Prince Of Persia, Finds Original Source Code In His Dad’s Closet


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Prince of Persia and Karateka, were two of the best action games of their era. Why? Because they gave us an inkling of what real, fluid graphical motion would look like in a few years’ time and, more important, were pretty much amazing if you were used to the Atari 2600 and River Raid. I remember playing Karateka before school at age ten, chopping my way through enemies on my way to save my sweetie and then, a few years later, playing PoP. Both were amazing.
Why? Because he created smooth, believable animation at eight frames per second on machines that were more suited to games like The Oregon Trail. He also created action games that led to realistic titles like Tekken that used real, human motion in order to add amazing realism.
A funny thing happened about ten years ago. The creator of these games, Jordan Mechner, apparently lost the original PoP source code and hunted all over for it, asking former Broderbund employees and digging through old files. The files – stored on 3.5-inch floppy disks – contained the original machine code for the game. The only way to actually play the game, until today, was to run an emulated, extracted ROM.
Mechner, however, just received a box from his Dad. In it were a few Amstrad cassettes of his games and, more important, the original Apple II source code. That’s right: PoP will be back in its original form as soon as Mechner figures out how to pull data off of the ancient disks and handle the 6502 processor code.
Says Mechner:
So, for all fifteen of you 6502 assembly-language coders out there who might care… including the hardy soul who ported POP to the Commodore 64 from an Apple II memory dump… I will now begin working with a digital-archeology-minded friend to attempt to figure out how to transfer 3.5″ Apple ProDOS disks onto a MacBook Air and into some kind of 21st-century-readable format. (Yuri Lowenthal, you can guess who I’m talking about.)
In short, it looks like PoP is back. This is a great day for 1980s motion-cap action/martial arts/run and jump games.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/jordan-mechner-creator-of-prince-of-persia-finds-original-source-code-in-his-dads-closet/

Inside Best Buy: An Anonymous Store Manager Speaks About Recent Changes


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From the outside, we early adopters see Best Buy as a dinosaur in a dying world. The company recently announced the closing of 50 stores in the U.S. and 400 layoffs, mostly in corporate. It would be easy to say “Good riddance” and ignore the slow decline of bricks and mortar, but I wanted to speak to someone inside the company.
I got a hold of a manager who wished to remain anonymous and was considered a solid and dedicated employee. I asked him what it’s like inside his store right now.
“Basically what’s going on is that we got to work and heard about the 50 store closings and we started wondering about job security. Immediately my reaction was ‘Oh, crap, what am I going to do?’” he said.
Management told the employees that the stores to be closed were “bottom performers” and that all of the job cuts were “almost exclusively at the corporate level.” In an organization as Byzantine as Best Buy – simply spreading news of the cuts will take a week as corporate talks to management, who in turn talks to the districts – the move to “cut the fat” heartened his employees.
Best Buy will also open 100 or so new Best Buy Mobile stores with a smaller footprint. There they will sell higher margin items like phones and mobile devices.
“It’s an $800 million cost reduction,” he said. Employees will also be part of a newer profit sharing structure, essentially “raising wages.”
“A lot of these trims are happening so they can expand the appliance market and the high end computer market along with custom integration and whole home networking,” he said. “I’m really excited about that. That they’re expanding that from West Coast to East Coast is a huge opportunity.”
Even the long-daunting price differential between online stores and physical Best Buy shops is slowly changing. For example, there is a new “unilateral merchant retail pricing” rule appearing in some distribution contracts which means a merchant cannot sell an item below the UMRP without facing a fine. This means Best Buy and Amazon would both be forced to sell at the UMRP and no lower.
“Works in huge favor for brick and mortar stores,” he said.
While he feels comfortable and he hasn’t been fired, he’s hedging his bets by going back to school. “Everyone was nervous,” he said. “Once they found the facts, they got more comfortable. We’re basically repositioning ourselves to be more like Starbucks. More, smaller stores and a focus on premium items.”
“It did shake me up a little bit,” he said. “Just in case something doesn’t go right I want to be able to do something else.”
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/30/inside-best-buy-an-anonymous-store-manager-speaks-about-recent-changes/