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Tuesday, 27 August 2013
Time Warner Cable TV app brings live TV to Xbox 360
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BitTorrent Sync coming to iOS this week
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Lionsgate bringing 'Deadbeat' original series to Hulu next year
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TiVo Roamio Reinvents the Cable Box for the Digital Streaming Age
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Google Chromecast Gets an iOS App
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Epson launches MHL-enabled 1080p 2D/3D projector for $999
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Apple patent shares your music's tempo to start private dance parties
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Coinbase Removes 1% Merchant Fee For First $1 Million In Orders
Coinbase unveiled another incentive for merchants to start accepting Bitcoins. Starting today, payment processing is now free for everyone for your first $1 million in orders. After that, the regular 1 percent fee kicks in. While Bitcoin payment is still a novelty, removing the processing fee makes it a compelling alternative compared to PayPal’s fee (2.9 percent + $0.30 per transaction).
Coinbase provides all the tools you need to accept payments on your website. The API allows you to easily integrate Coinbase’s checkout screen into your website’s workflow. In other words, from the user’s standpoint, it makes paying in Bitcoins as easy as paying with PayPal, Amazon Payments or Google Wallet.
The company currently supports one-time payments, donations and recurring subscriptions. And if you don’t have Bitcoins on your account, Coinbase uses your regular bank account to purchase Bitcoins and pay for the transaction. Reddit and OkCupid already use Coinbase to process Bitcoins.
The two other advantages of accepting Bitcoin payments is that there’s no chargeback and transactions are instantaneous — a Bitcoin is just a chain of characters. Removing the merchant fee will appeal to merchants who handle micro transactions, as fees can add up pretty quickly when you take into account PayPal’s $0.30 flat fee.
There’s a catch. If you want to exchange your Bitcoins into USD, EUR or any local currency, you’ll have to pay 1 percent + $0.15 per transaction. It is still a lot cheaper than PayPal, but you have to take this into account. This is a non-issue if you’re ready to keep Bitcoins in your Coinbase account and use it for Bitcoin payments, but many high-profile websites will probably want to exchange their Bitcoins to reinvest the money.
One last thing to take into account: The value of a Bitcoin changes a lot over time due to volatility. And of course, it is still a very marginal currency. Before breaking the $1 million barrier, you’ll have to wait a long time. That’s what Coinbase wants you to think. Why wouldn’t you try Bitcoin payments on your website? Now it’s free.
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Chromecast's iOS app arrives, looks to make cross-platform living room magic
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WSJ: BlackBerry mulling spinning off BBM subsidiary, considering desktop version
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Engadget Giveaway: win an Amped Wireless WiFi router, range extender and adapter!
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Apple TV update brings apps for Disney, the Smithsonian, Vevo and The Weather Channel
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Uber takes its car service to Dubai, enters first Middle Eastern locale
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The 15 Countries With the Highest Smartphone Pentration
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Amazon extends its Associates program to Android app developers with new API
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Seriously Is A New Mobile Gaming Entertainment Venture Started By Former Rovio Execs, Seriously
Rovio built an empire out of a silly little physics-based game called Angry Birds. 1.5 billion downloads later, the company is thriving as an entertainment and merchandising brand thanks to licensing deals and distribution strategy, as well as a solid game.
Today, however, Andrew Stalbow, who was the man in charge of partnerships, licensing, animation and distribution at Rovio, alongside Petri Jarvilehto, Rovio’s former EVP of Games, has announced a new venture called Seriously. Seriously.
The Rovio magic remains in tact, as Seriously is aiming to use mobile gaming as a platform for entertainment franchises, though the new company is keeping mum about what these games will look like.
“We’ve got some excellent ideas we’re beginning to put into development, so we should have a game out by next year,” said Stalbow.
But the games themselves aren’t the important part. Though Seriously has a lot to live up to with the instant success of Angry Birds at Rovio, the company sees a greater challenge in taking on the same distribution and marketing strategy as Rovio.
“One of the most amazing experiences at Rovio was taking intellectual property and developing on top of it, or against it, like the launch of Angry Birds Star Wars for example,” said Stalbow. “Our experience in partnering up with different companies around the world has helped us understand integrating our own stuff into existing IP.”
Seriously will have two branches, one in Los Angeles dedicated to business developing and marketing, and the other in Finland where the games will be developed.
The major difference between Seriously and Rovio is that Seriously is taking a hard line on free to play mobile games, and banking everything on the entertainment experience that follows, whether it be merchandise, movies, TV series’, etc.
So far, founders Stalbow and Jarvilehto have seeded some of their own money into the investment, and begin shopping for institutional investment today.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/gu0t0f-s5TY/
Wrike Reveals New UI And Time-Broadcasting Feature To Keep Employees On Task
Wrike has updated its workplace productivity application Graphite, rolling out a new minimalist user interface and also the ability to broadcast the current work in real-time. The emphasis on a well-structured task view is designed to encourage workers to come back to the app and staying there longer.
The Graphite update has applied a crisp coat of Web 2.0 paint to the tired Windows Explorer style interface, and also heralds new features: project infographics, denser notification emails, and HTML5 desktop popup notifications.
The design changes and features are aimed at creating a more engaging interface that will encourage users to create and manage tasks, and collaborate on projects. However, it aims to do this in a subtle manner where the experience is not cluttered or bloated with features. Further, the ability to monitor what your colleagues are working on creates a reason to continually check into the application.
Wrike CEO Andrew Filev said the changes were designed to accommodate user habits while improving productivity. Earlier this year, it added real-time update capabilities to let employees manage tasks offline and online, to enhance the ability of workers to collaborate on documents both inside and outside of the app.
The user interface has emerged as a new front in the battle for worker productivity.
A collaboration tool for marketing professionals Brightpod is adding real-time updates to the activity stream, as well as allowing users to manage their marketing workflows public.
And major competitor Asana recently released announced integration with timesheet app Harvest, which allowed the users to track time by simply clicking a little stopwatch in the taskbar. This information is recorded in the user’s corresponding Harvest account. The looming clock creates an urgency to stay on track and complete a particular task. The startup, cofounded by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and with $38 million investment at its disposal, also released a version targeting enterprise customers, as a number of users were demanding the ability to expand the application into other parts of the business.
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MIT Students Design 'Sesame Ring’ to Replace Boston Transit Cards
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Google looks to boost Translate in Africa with Somali, Zulu and other languages
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Microsoft releases Windows 8.1 to manufacturers ahead of October 18 launch
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Hardware Startup Stops And Fits Showcased By Kickstarter Tales Of Founder Woe
If you had any doubt that chucking in your entire life and building that iPhone case with a bottle opener you’ve always envisioned (the perfect design, honest) would be difficult, look no further than a couple recent Kickstarter failures that have been a long time in the making for proof. The Levitatr Keyboard and the Syre iPod nano Bluetooth watchband are both projects that were germinated in the heady wild west days of Kickstarter’s first beginnings, before it started to tighten the reins on hardware campaigns, and they’re both case studies in what happens if even the most well-intentioned hardware startup goes south.
Kickstarter has never claimed to be a storefront by any stretch of the imagination, so projects running into problems and failing to deliver should be familiar territory to any and all backers at this point. Anyone who has used it for any decent amount of time knows that you will get projects that just don’t materialize, and you’ll get ones that do finally ship, but that also massively under-deliver. But sometimes, you get projects where the founders are so transparent about the problems they encounter that it’s worth taking special note of what went wrong.
Levitatr Failed To Get Off The Ground
One such project is the Levitatr keyboard. Originally conceived in 2011 as an iPad and tablet keyboard accessory, this project by James Stumpf impressed with a design whereby the keys would magically appear out of slick flat surface once the accessory was powered on. Designed by Dayton, Ohio-based entrepreneur James Stumpf, it met and surpassed its $60,000 funding goal in 45 days and seemed to stand a reasonable chance of shipping by its November 2011 anticipated shelf date.
Stumpf declared Levitatr a failure via an update for backers posted to Kickstarter on August 12, 2013. He cited overly ambitious goals for the product, a shortage of funds, numerous failed licensing negotiations and his own general inexperience as the major motivating factors behind the project’s failure. The money he gathered to fund the project was all spent on attempting to build it, Stumph says, and he’s offered up an itemized list of just where it went to prove it. Stumpf also claims to have incurred considerable personal debt in the process.
Levitatr collapsed because it was more concept than concrete, with a physical prototype that promised one thing that ended up being immensely challenging from an engineering perspective to deliver. Stumpf blames a lack of willingness to compromise as part of the reason behind the project’s failure but that really engenders biting off more than one can chew: promise only what you know you’ll be able to build at project outset, in other words.
Many Kickstarter projects simply disappear into the night, but Stumpf has gone out of his way to publish a long list of supporting documents via Dropbox to support his account of how things went down, and he has been good about keeping backers up-to-date on his trials and tribulations via update. Kickstarter is designed to be a space where things can go wrong, and I think Levitatr is a perfect example of the best case scenario you could hope for in a failure, since it at least provides some guidance for others looking at building a hardware startup company.
No Crown For The Syre
Another decent example that has maybe done a bit too much apologizing and not enough explaining is the all-but-dead Syre Bluetooth watch band for the iPod nano. Right away, you see the problem; this is a project that was built for Apple’s last-generation iPod nano, the small square one that fit nicely on the average person’s wrist. The fact that it hasn’t shipped yet, well after Apple has stopped selling that device, is definitely Not Good.
The Syre was intended to solve the major oversight of the sixth generation iPod nano by adding Bluetooth to the mix via a simple, low profile dongle embedded in a watchstrap accessory. The mock-ups that the project raised funding based on showed an attractive compact device that helped the project raise nearly double its $75,000 target in August, 2012. Then, later updates to backers showed a much different device as a final engineering prototype, which was essentially a rubber nano strap case with a large, unsightly Bluetooth dongle sticking out the end – essentially, all the value of its sleek design went out the window, and backers were vocally disappointed in the change.
Syre isn’t dead technically, but it’d be fair to say the patient isn’t showing any brain activity. Project founder Anyé Spivey posted an update today that describes the project’s status and go-forward options, and both are pretty grim. Apple’s decision to change the iPod nano’s design and introduce Bluetooth to the new model had an understandably negative impact on demand both from consumers and potential distributors for the Syre: like any other 6th-gen nano-focused product, it essentially now has an extremely circumscribed potentially audience and exactly zero growth potential.
Kickstarter is meant to help get projects off the ground that wouldn’t necessarily make it to first production on their own, not to provide the funds to underpin a business in the longterm, so even with $133K in the bank Syre faced problems with money right away. The design wasn’t finalized, engineering was still only sort of half-conceived at outset, and Spivey says he was “misled” by Apple’s Mi team and also had to spend a lot on simply locking down nanos for backers who selected a reward level where the iPod was included.
Since both these projects were conceived and funded, Kickstarter has made considerable changes to the way it handles hardware projects. The site is much more cautious in approving hardware campaigns to go live on the site, and requires that a functional prototype exist in each case. Generally speaking, far more hardware projects over the past year have been production-ready on Kickstarter than ever before, which is a good thing for the site, for backers, and ultimately for founders and creators as well. New rules or not, however, failure is still bound to be a flip side of this kind of startup funding (just as it is with traditional methods), and there’s a lot to be learned from the projects that go wrong.
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Windows 8.1 RTM Launches for Hardware Partners
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It's Official: Samsung's Galaxy Gear Coming Sept. 4
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Kickstarter coming to Australia and New Zealand 'soon'
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Samsung's Galaxy Tab 3 Kids get real, ready to 'make learning fun'
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Samsung's 55-inch curved OLED hits Europe this week for 7999 euros
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14 Ways 'Downton Abbey' Could Benefit From Technology
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Broadcom adds WiFi Direct to its embedded device platform, furthers our internet-of-things future
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ParaShoot wearable camera lets you shoot stealthily, monitor on a smartphone
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Goophone to launch $100 iPhone 5C clone, still KIRFing it
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Repix brings its photo editing prowess to Android, supports Samsung's S Pen and Air View (video)
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After 4M Downloads On iOS, Photo Remixing App Repix Lands On Android With Samsung S Pen Support
After garnering 4 million downloads on iOS in five months, Finnish mobile app developer Sumoing has released a version of its photo “remixing” app Repix for Android. Refreshingly, however, this isn’t just a straight up port. The app boasts support for Samsung’s S Pen, which ships with Korean device maker’s line of Note ‘phablets’ and tablets, enabling users to paint on their photos using a good old-fashioned stylus. That’s something that iPhone and iPad users can only dream of (well, out of the box, anyway).
Similar to the version iOS, Repix on Android offers a range of basic photo editing features, such as cropping an image or adjusting saturation, color balance and temperature. However, the app’s raison d’être is its suite of brushes that let you “remix” photos by painting various effects over the original image to turn even crappy-looking photos into something palatable. We live in a post-Instagram age after all.
The Android version of Repix includes a selection of 30 brushes, ranging from animated, light, grunge, color boosting and artistic styles, according to the company. In addition, there are a number of filters and frames, and the aforementioned editing tools. Another neat trick of the app is that editing is lossless, meaning that any edits, painting or filters can be rolled back, thanks to what Sumoing is calling its real-time “Rebeca” processing engine.
Finally, as well as support for Samsung’s S Pen, Repix for Android also has built-in support for Samsung Galaxy S 4 Air View technology, so that users can see the size of each brush by hovering their finger over the photo, thus getting a quick preview before they begin fondling their soon-to-be masterpiece.
Repix’s business model is a classic freemium play. The app is free, and in addition to a selection of built-in brushes, more brush styles are available via in-app purchasing.
Regarding the app’s seemingly impressive download metrics on iOS, as we reported back in late March, a week after launch Repix had seen 1.5 million downloads. Now tallying 4 million, growth, while still impressive, has tailed off significantly — the pros and cons of a successful launch and the associated PR.
However, I’m also told that of those 4 million downloads, 24% are “active” users, while the iOS app has seen 25 million images edited. And, crucially, Repix has thus far achieved a 5% conversion rate in terms of in-app purchases.
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Sony Teases New Waterproof Smartphone, Coming September 4
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Samsung exec confirms Galaxy Gear and Note III announcement on September 4th as images start to leak
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Sony teases likely Xperia Z1 Honami device on video, confirms September 4th arrival
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SMS Racing: si conduces no chatees
Enviar mensajes de texto y estar chateando mientras conduces no es que no sea fácil, es un auténtico suicidio como ya han demostrado numerosos estudios: se multiplica por 20 la probabilidad de tener un accidente, simple y llanamente.
SMS Racing [Mac, Windows, Linux] es un videojuego indie de concienciación donde se puede apreciar en primera persona ese «efecto despiste» sin poner la vida en juego.
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Logitech's G602 wireless gaming mouse packs massive battery life, 11 programmable buttons
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Microsoft to Give a White Xbox One to Employees
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ARM Acquires Internet Of Things Startup Sensinode To Move Beyond Tablets And Phones
As more reports of ARM-based Windows and Apple devices continue to fill the airwaves — the latest being reports of a Surface 2 and Nokia’s first Windows tablet, along with upcoming iPhone handsets — the Cambridge, UK-based semiconductor technology powerhouse is pressing ahead with its bigger ambition be at the heart of all connected devices: today the company announced that it is acquiring Sensinode Oy, a Finland-based startup that develops internet-of-things software. This is a bolt-on purchase: ARM says that for now it will continue to sell Sensinode’s NanoStack and NanoService products to existing and new customers.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
ARM’s move beyond smartphones and tablets — the two areas where you are most likely to hear its name these days, specifically in connection with companies like Apple, which designs its own ARM-based chips for its devices — is not a new one.
When its longtime CEO Warren East stepped down last year to be replaced by insider and former engineer Simon Segars, ARM emphasized how it was taking a long-term view of how the company would grow. The implication at the time was that it would be beyond the devices we typically refer to as “mobile” today, to cover cars, ovens and other appliances, factory robots, and really anything that you might need or want to be connected up in your work or leisure life — as the illustration here, taken from Sensinode’s site, illustrates.
“We take a very long-term view about our business, and we believe that now is the right time to bring in new leadership, to execute on the next phase of growth and to plan even further into the future,” East said at the time.
In that regard, today’s acquisition news is evidence of how this is playing out. ARM projects that there will be 30 billion connected devices by 2020. Compare that to the 8.7 billion ARM-based devices that were shipped last year, and combine that with ARM’s existing repution, and you can see why ARM sees this as a clear opportunity for the taking.
“ARM is dedicated to enabling a standards-based Internet of Things where billions of devices of all types and capabilities are connected through interoperable Internet Protocols and Web Services,” said John Cornish, executive vice president and general manager, System Design Division, ARM, in a statement.
You can also see how it’s important for ARM to continue pushing in this development against competitors like Intel, which is also hungrily eyeing up the IoT space.
ARM describes Sensinode as one of the “pioneers in software for low cost low power internet connected devices and a key contributor to open standards for IoT.” Those standards include creating the 6LoWPAN and CoAP standards for low cost low power devices; and contributing to IETF, ZigBee IP, ETSI and OMA standardization efforts.
This is a win for Sensinode because it gives the startup a much bigger platform and audience of developers who might build chips and devices on its technology. “By making Sensinode expertise and technology accessible to the ARM Partnership and through the ARM mbed project we will enable rapid deployment of thousands of new and innovative IoT applications,” notes Cornish.
This looks like it’s only ARM’s second acquisition ever. The first was just as strategic: it was in 2011 of Prolific, which developed nanotechnology software tools.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/rH6QWhIplVs/
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