The pioneer of vertical media, they call themselves. And Glam Media, the publishing network with more than 220 monthly million uniques, announced today their “logical next play” – a vertical food network called Foodie that will offer a social, interactive network (Portal 2.0?) for food bloggers, critics, chefs and, of course, eaters.
But, as Glam’s co-founder and CEO Samir Arora told me when he came into our San Francisco studio today, Foodie isn’t just another of Glam’s vertical plays. → Read More
In a few weeks, Apple will unveil the next generation iPad, John Packowski of AllThingsD confirms today. If history (and carrier code) is any indication, it should go on sale shortly after that. Maybe even just a few days later. And that’s interesting because it doesn’t give developers a lot of time to prepare. And they’ll want to prepare for the higher resolution “Retina” display that the device will pack.
The situation is similar to the Summer of 2010. That year at WWDC, Apple unveiled the iPhone 4, the first device to feature a Retina display. That conference took place on June 7. The iPhone 4 first went on sale on June 24 — two and a half weeks later. That timeframe allowed some developers to get their apps Retina-ready, but for many it took quite a bit longer. Again, this year, the window may be even more condensed. → Read More
Ever since Steve Ballmer made that surprise announcement at CES 2011, there has been a lot of speculation about just how Microsoft would be bringing Windows to the ARM architecture. Would it be a whole separate line? Would it be compatible with old applications? Would it be cheaper?
Many of these questions have been answered in a long and technical post on the Building Windows 8 blog today, as Steven Sinofsky explains how they developed (re-developed, really) Windows On ARM, or WOA, and why they made the choices they made.
Some major points, for those unwilling to read: WOA will be totally incompatible with x86/x64-based applications; it will include a desktop only for Office apps and file management; it will be focused on portability, battery life, and “integrated quality.” → Read More
Facebook isn’t the only social network getting ready to monetize its mobile app with advertising. During today’s analyst call to discuss its fourth quarter earnings, LinkedIn executives said they will be introducing advertising to their mobile apps.
There weren’t many details offered — LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said only that the company has been putting the infrastructure in place, and now it’s ready to “start to introduce advertising in our mobile solutions.” → Read More
It was just a few days ago that news of a mysterious home-oriented Google device was being prepped for testing in the homes of 252 company employees, but the associated FCC filing left most of the specifics up in the air. Now, if a new report from the Wall Street Journal holds true, Google’s next foray into the hardware space could be all about pumping up those jams.
According to WSJ’s sources, the device in development is a “home entertainment system” that can wirelessly stream music throughout users’ homes. → Read More
If you played PC games in the 90s, chances are you played some of Tim Schafer’s work. He worked on the Monkey Island Series and Day of the Tentacle, later going on to create such classics as Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. He recently took to Kickstarter to try and score some funding for a new point-and-click adventure game, as most publishers would consider the genre more or less untouchable these days.
He figured there were enough people out there who wanted a new adventure game that they could scrape together $400,000. That was last night. They hit their goal in 8 hours, and are likely to break a million dollars before the end of the day. In fact, just since I started this post, I’ve had to adjust the headline to reflect an additional $50,000 $70,000 $100,000 that has been pledged. → Read More
This might just be the sweetest Valentine’s Day story I’ve ever heard. It’s definitely the sweetest Valentine’s Day story I’ve ever written.
Kaitlyn Trigger is a marketing director at Rally.org. She also happens to be Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger’s girlfriend of two and a half years (The 26 year old Krieger and 27 year old Trigger met at a friend’s house in October of 2009 and moved in together in October 2010). And my hero.
→ Read More
Professional social network LinkedIn just reported stronger than expected fourth quarter 2011 earnings today. Earnings came in at $0.12 per share. Revenue for the fourth quarter was $167.7 million, an increase of 105% compared to $81.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Net income for the fourth quarter was $6.9 million, compared to net income of $5.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Analysts expected the company to earn $0.07 per share on revenues of $159.72 million.
“Q4 once again exceeded our expectations for member engagement and business growth. It was a fitting end to a memorable year in which we reinforced our position as the pre-eminent professional network on the web,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. “We believe continued focus on our members and technology infrastructure positions us well for accelerated product innovation in 2012.” → Read More
“In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV this week welcomes a former California resident and current investor back to the west coast, where he and his partners have embarked on a new journey to build out a physical presence in Silicon Valley and San Francisco for one of the most dynamic business groups in the world.
Ajay Agarwal, a managing director with Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), is leading the charge of building his firm’s west coast offices and unveiling a brand new $600m fund, announced a few weeks ago in The New York Times. That’s a whole lot of money to invest in new consumer, enterprise, and mobile opportunities. This is sort of a personal homecoming for Agarwal, who went to Stanford years ago as a undergraduate computer science student and founded a company while he was in school. Now, after nearly ten years with Bain Capital in Boston, he’s leading his team here in California, comprised of Sahil Gupta, Indy Guha, and Adam Marchick, as it it were a startup, too. → Read More
Mobile app developer Rovio has famously turned its Angry Birds game into a popular toy franchise, but most other new-fangled gaming companies haven’t spent much energy going this route. But now social gaming leader Zynga is, per a big licensing deal with Hasbro. → Read More
Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high-speed Internet connections).
Their efforts to combat piracy are often draconian: threatening tens of thousands of people with lawsuits claiming obscenely high damages; attempting to coordinate their threats with consumers’ ISPs; and, most recently, supporting legislation like SOPA and PIPA that would undermine the fabric of the Internet. Hell, Universal once pulled down a 30 second YouTube video of a dancing baby because the baby had the audacity to dance to a Prince song.
Which is why my jaw dropped when I saw that VEVO, a property jointly owned by some of the biggest record labels in the world, was showing a pirated stream of an ESPN football game at its Sundance PowerStation venue last month — on no fewer than two televisions, and a pair of laptops. → Read More
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and the majority of us are likely scrambling to find that special gift. (The rest of us, meanwhile, are cursing couples.) A Valentine’s Day gift is usually more important than others because it’s a one-on-one situation, unlike Christmas or birthdays. Just one gift, to just one person — and it better be good.
With that in mind, I’d like to address an article out of AllThingsD this morning that sourced information from PriceGrabber’s Valentine’s Day Dashboard Report. The report took information from February 4 through February 5, finding that various tablets, TVs and phones are hot items for gift-crazed Valentines.
The information itself isn’t that intriguing, but it did get me thinking about handing out gadgetry as a gift. → Read More
It won’t stop with Google Search Plus Your World. When asked if we should expect more integrations of Google+ into Google products, G+ director of engineering David Glazer said at today’s Inside Social Apps 2012 conference, ”Yes, where it’s good for the user. I think there’s more places to make people happy by showing them content they care about.” At the first major speaking engagement about its social network, Glazer also discussed user acquisition, monetization, and support for brands. → Read More
As part of its 2012 US Digital Future in Focus whitepaper, comScore looked at the online ad landscape and found a mix of old and new names. The report includes a list of the top 10 display advertisers in the United States (all of this data is US-only), as measured by impressions. As in previous years, AT&T topped the list, but there’s a newcomer — Google, which delivered 40.4 billion ads for products like Chrome, Google Offers, and Google+.
Large brand advertising on the Internet is growing in general, comScore says. To quantify that, it measured the number of advertisers delivering at least 1 billion impressions per quarter. There were 145 advertisers in that league during the final quarter of 2011, up 38 percent from the same period in 2010. → Read More
Television is in trouble. Americans streamed 43.5 billion videos in December 2011, up 44% since December 2010, according to comScore’s 2012 US Digital Future In Focus report released today. The study also showed that 105.1 million Americans now watch videos online each day, up 43% from 73.7 million in 2010.
comScore says YouTube is largely driving this, and that average minutes per video view, average videos watched per user, and total ads streamed are way up as well. TV and film studios should take notice and consider how they can create companion content to engage this growing audience. → Read More
Some of us can’t be bothered to check in, but still want to find interesting people nearby. The challenge for developers is how to do this in a way that is both useful and not creepy. Glancee, available for both iOS and Android, gets closer to solving these problems than most I’ve seen.
The app lets you sign in with Facebook, then it shows you people within 100 yards, or one, two, or ten miles who have things in common. In some ways this sounds similar another app I recently covered, Highlight — but there are key differences, that will make each app appeal to different sets of users. → Read More
In December, Eric covered Open Home Pro, a startup that lets realtors sell homes via their iPads. Today, there comes a similar effort from Pixloo, except this service is designed for use by anyone – realtors and homeowners alike. With Pixloo, you can upload information about your home, including text, photos and even videos and then immediately export that data to major real estate sites including Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com and others, all for free.
→ Read More
The Pirate Bay, in many ways, is disappearing. It is one of the most popular torrent sites on the web and its database of millions of torrent files – essentially pointers to pieces of files hosted elsewhere – has long been the go-to spot for budding pirates around the world. While it still exists in spirit, the admins are now moving all of the torrent files off the site and are instead offering magnet links. This is an important distinction that will move the locus of general piracy from a single site to any number of sites, reducing the Pirate Bays importance as a source. → Read More
Remember when the iPhone app GLMPS launched last summer, seemingly heralding the start of a new image format that blended static photos and video? No? That’s OK. Today, there’s a new twist on the idea of reinventing the mobile photo, this time by turning static photos into animated ones. With the newly launched app called Cinemagram, you can turn your iPhone pics into animated gifs in a matter of seconds.
→ Read More
comScore has released its ‘explicit’ U.S. search data for January of this year and while Google and Microsoft Bring’s search share continues to grow, Yahoo’s share dropped both year over year and month over month. This comes after Bing overtook Yahoo in terms of search queries for the first time in December. While Bing grew slightly from December 2011 to January, Google reached its highest share since December 2010 this past month.
Google search queries increased 6% year over year in January, to 66.2%, compared with 65.9% in December 2011 and 65.6% in January 2011. Bing queries increased 21% year over year in January to 15.2%, compared with 15.1% in December 2011 and 13.1% in January 2011. Yahoo queries are on a downward spiral, decreasing 8% year over year in January to 14.1%, compared with 14.5% in December 2011, 15.1% in November 2011 and 16.1% in January 2011. Yikes.
→ Read More
