Between the iPad’s blocking of Flash earlier this year and the huge wave of ad campaigns, open letters, and debates that followed, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the merits (or lack thereof) of Flash on the modern web. Today, YouTube software engineer John Harding took to the site’s official blog to weigh on the current status of HTML5 video support. The gist of it: while HTML5 is great, it can’t do everything YouTube (or most mainstream video sites) need.
Harding explains his thesis point by point, beginning with the need for a standard video format for HTML5. Politics, codec quality, and patent disputes have kept HTML5 from adopting a single standard for video content (H.264, the industry standard, has licensing issues). → Read More
Palm certainly has been working on getting their app store populated. They kicked off a promotion back in February, which is ending soon, and has resulted in over 400 developers splitting up their share of a million dollars. Palm is also trying to increase interest in their applications by offering a 50% discount on the majority of their catalog, starting immediately. The good news for developers is that they will still be paid the full amount, despite the discount given to customers by Palm. → Read More
Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we’ve learned. Bling Nation’s payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account.
Here’s how Bling Nation works. The startup partners with banks, who then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment. Bling Nation also partners with all of the local merchants in given town, to give them special “Bling Nation” credit card machines that will scan the chips. → Read More
Fresh off the boat from Sweden are a-JAYS’ new pair of affordable ear buds — the a-JAYS Three. The set is priced at $60, which is somewhat of a tough price point as it’s just above the cheap, impulse-buy mark and high-end ‘phones traditionally start north of $100. But we’re not here to discuse market pricing schemes. Nope, we’re here to find out how these headphones sound and feel because that’s what really matters. → Read More
Energy efficiency tracking company OPOWER added Hadi Partovi to its Technology Advisory Board and will open new offices in San Francisco next month. The Arlington, VA based company’s 10,000 square foot office in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood will have room for between 75 and 100 employees, a large part of which will be engineers. “We signed a two-year sublease because we hope to grow out of that space,” says CEO Daniel Yates.
In Partovi, OPOWER is getting an experienced advisor who will help build the company in its plans to grow from 95 to 150 employees total in the coming year. Partovi co-founded online music service iLike with his brother Ali, which they sold to MySpace, before leaving in April. Previously, Partovi founded Tellme Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft for a reported $800 million. Partovi also worked on IE5. → Read More
Don’t feel like spending the $30 on a nice case for your new iPhone — or maybe just want to be different? A little of this Sugru modeling clay may be the solution. Just make a few little nubbins, let it dry overnight, and boom, your iPhone is now protected from quite a lot of the common bumps and dings that tend to shatter iPhones. Pro tip: this technique works for any flat, fragile object. [via Gadget Lab] → Read More
Facebook is great for keeping up with friends. And of course brands are using it as marketing tool by creating Fan pages. But it can also be used by companies as a recruiting tool. I’ve written before anecdotally about how Citysearch uses Facebook ads for recruiting by targeting the ads at the hiring manager’s friends. Well, now there is a full-fledged Facebook app for that called Work For Us
Work For Us creates a tab on a company’s Fan page which turns it into a mini-job board. You can see an example here for BuildASign or SPG Creative Marketing. People can apply for the job right inside Facebook, or Like a job and there → Read More
So apparently the reception problems on the iPhone 4G are reaching levels where Apple feels they need to make sure their customer service people are aware of it. According to a document leaked to BGR, the problem isn’t with the phone (or the network) it’s that you’re not holding your new phone properly → Read More
After a brief hiatus, the founder of Etsy Rob Kalin reclaimed the CEO title in January of this year. During a brief interview at Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters, I asked Kalin, “Why do you think you deserve to be back as CEO?…Is there anything really unique about your vision that will take Etsy to the next stage?”
Kalin responded:
“Sure, so why do I deserve to be CEO is something that you gotta earn every day, so I definitely don’t take that title for granted. As far as where we want to go, to me the most important part of commerce is the social aspect of it. Social aspect drives the marketplace.”
Currently, Etsy is on track to record roughly $400 million in gross merchandise sales this year (versus nearly $200 million last year), Kalin argues that in just a few years Etsy could be in the multi-billion-dollar range— that is, if he can pull off his social strategy. In episode two of our profiles series, Kalin gives us a tour of Etsy, discusses profits, his social vision and why he stepped down in the first place. → Read More
You often hear about Amazon Web Services having some downtime issues, but it’s rare to see Amazon.com itself have major issues. In fact, I can’t ever remember it happening the past couple of years. But that’s very much the case today as for the past couple of hours the service has been switching back and forth between being totally down and being up, but showing no products.
Obviously, Twitter is abuzz about this — though there’s no word from Amazon on Twitter yet about the downtime. Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, all seem to be a go, according to their dashboard. The mobile apps on the iPhone, iPad and Android devices are sort of working, but it doesn’t appear you can go to actual product pages. → Read More
Foursquare, the geo-mobile startup everybody tried to invest in or buy, now has officially closed its Series B funding round. The “wire transfer heard ’round the world,” as board member Bryce Roberts puts it, was for $20 million, giving the company a $95 million pre-money valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, as previously reported, with existing investors Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating.
CEO Dennis Crowley says the fundraising was “a lot of work” and plans to use the money to staff up and keep adding to the product. “It’s all about building a team that can churn out new product,” he tells me. “We’ve been dreaming up these things for the past 10 years and now we have the opportunity to build them all.” The money will also help pay for more office space. His 27 employees are already too big for the startup’s current New York City offices, and Foursquare is about to move into new digs upstairs in the same building. “It’s awesome,” he says, “we can hear them building it upstairs right now!” He plans on hiring a lot more engineers. → Read More
We heard tell of the Optimus Popularis in May, but it had a completely different look. The new one, with its dedicated display bar and lack of number pad, is in my humble opinion a vastly superior design. The LED (not OLED) keys are, after all, totally customizable, and this saves a ton of money — that’s 20 less displays they have to put on the keyboard. And they can pass the savings on to the customers! Or not. It’s still going to cost nearly a grand. → Read More
Big news from Foursquare today. No, not that news (just yet). And okay, not really that big. Still, very useful.
Foursquare has given its friend request emails a nice upgrade today. Previously, all you would see is a text note that someone wanted to be your friend. If you wanted to learn anything about them, you had to click-through to their profile page on foursquare.com. But starting today, Foursquare has a new notification email system that includes the user’s profile picture and more importantly, an area noting what friends you have in common. → Read More
Maybe we should do a post all about what brands and devices Hulu Plus is not going to come to. It’d be shorter. Samsung, for its part, just announced that it too will be getting the premium TV service, on most 2010 Blu-ray players and TVs over 40″. You can download the app today if you’ve got the hardware, but it’ll just be sample content for now. You can request an invite to the preview period via the app. → Read More
Unsurprisingly, Salesforce is seeing rapid adoption of its social collaboration platform Chatter among its existing customers after launching to the public last week. In its first week of general availability, Chatter has been integrated by 10,000 of Salesforce’s 77,300 existing customers, or 13 percent of Salesforce’s customer base.
Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said in a statement: “We’ve never seen this kind of excitement around a product release before.” Chatter was made available to the public last week after four months in private beta. Announced last November, Chatter leverages what Benioff calls the Cloud 2, delivering realtime access to data and information, using social sources, such as YouTube and Twitter. → Read More
Google Social Search is a good idea. You take regular Google search results and intertwine them with related elements that your contacts have shared on various social networks. But there’s one big barrier to entry. In order for your contacts to automatically share elements, they have to link up their various social profiles to their Google Profile page. A lot of people are simply not going to do that. So Google is changing things up a bit and making it easier to get at social data.
Starting today and rolling out over the cource of this week, Google will begin looking at items you share on Buzz and crawling elements from those social networks to use in Social Search as well. For example, if you link up your Twitter feed to your Buzz page, even if you haven’t linked it to your Google Profile, you’ll now start seeing results from your Twitter social graph in the results. → Read More
The rumors were true. Today, Hulu is announcing a limited launch of Hulu Plus, an ad-supported, premium subscription service that will run $9.99 per month and includes HD access to full season runs of shows from Fox, ABC, and NBC. Better yet, Hulu Plus will work across a multitude of platforms, including PCs, the iPad, iPhone, some Samsung Blu-ray players, and soon, the PlayStation 3. The service is currently only available to select Hulu members who have been invited — you can request an invite here.
Even if you don’t have an invite, you’ll still be able to download a Hulu Plus application on the iPad, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 (it isn’t up on the App Store yet — we’ll update when it is). The application will feature a limited number of episodes, but you’ll be able to get a feel what the service will be like. Hulu says that the service wil launch broadly in the coming months. → Read More
Credit to Pocket-lint, a fine site, for comparing the Adidas Jabulani, the ball that’s used in the World Cup, and the Nike T90 Ascente, the ball that’s used in the English, Spanish, and Italian leagues. The ides was to see if you could find out, once and for all, if there’s something inherent in the design of the Jabulani that makes it fly all over the place. Conclusion? Maybe, but the balls are so damn near identical that in no way can you say, “Well, Adidas screwed the pooch here.” Remember: Fifa is ultimately in charge of the ball, so if there’s anyone to blame (or praise) it’s those bozos. → Read More
It’s 2010, and we’re still exchanging printed business cards. There are quite a few solutions to digitize the cards, but most existing scanners, for example, aren’t practical enough. This is where Pitrec [JP], a new handheld for digitizing business cards made by Japanese stationery maker King Jim, comes in. → Read More
Only a few months after the company raised $1 million in funding, Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analytics platform, has raised $4.5 million in new funding. We’ve confirmed the funding with Kontagent’s co-founder, Albert Lai. The round was led by Altos Ventures and Maverick Capital, with participation from Larry Braitman, cofounder of FlyCast and Adify. This brings the total amount raised by Kontagent to nearly $6 million dollars to date.
Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social interaction and other variables. The platform provides powerful A/B testing across any viral channel (a button, an invite or a notification) that sits inside Facebook. → Read More
