Since more than 30,000 people are coming here to Austin for South by Southwest, I figured I’d offer up a list of local companies that members of the digerati should take the time to meet while they’re in town. Austin has a ton of startups, but I tried to highlight the ones doing things that Austinites do well (such as enterprise social media efforts and hardware) as well as those I think are about to break out and become bigger.
A note to those folks following the manufactured Foursquare-Gowalla smackdown: Gowalla is not listed because most people have already met with Josh Williams, Gowalla’s founder, and I wanted to save room for some unknown Austinites.
March 1, 2010
The Few, the Brave — the Army iPhone App
If you work for the U.S. Army and spend all your spare time hacking the iPhone and Android or fooling around with HTML5, this is a contest for you: The Army’s Chief Information Office is launching a competition aimed at mobile and web apps, with cash awards totaling $30,000 and the chance to get your application the military seal of approval. The contest is a joint venture with iStrategyLabs, and is based on that company’s successful Apps For Democracy project, which was a joint venture with the Washington, D.C.’s Office of the CTO in 2008.
iStrategyLabs founder and CEO Peter Corbett describes on the company’s blog how the contest will work. It starts with a press conference and media (and blogger) roundtable on March 3 at the Pentagon with Lieutenant General Jeffery Sorenson (the Army’s chief information officer) and runs until May 15th. A total of 100 teams will be selected to compete for one or more of 40 cash awards totaling $30,000. Awards will be announced in June, with public demonstrations. The competition comes with a software repository (forge.mil), a cloud-based development sandbox, a collaboration space designed around an Apps for the Army group on MilBook (the Army’s version of Facebook) and a Twitter hashtag: #apps4army.
Corbett says the idea for the project came from O’Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly, who said on Twitter after announcing the competition that he had hoped to get the rest of the U.S. military involved as well, but wound up only getting the Army on board. The Army has been making some significant strides in the areas of social media over the past year or two, including the launch of CIO Sorenson’s Twitter account, which the lieutenant-general posts to himself (in contrast to many other government departments). It also recently released a surprisingly forward-thinking social media policy.
How AT&T Plans to Keep SxSW From Swamping its Network
Smartphones, including iPhones were all the rage at SxSW in 2009.
Last year, the hordes of South by Southwest-attending geeks toting iPhones blew out the AT&T network around the convention center in Austin, resulting in dropped calls and crappy connections for many attendees. The subsequent news coverage showed off Ma Bell’s network failures for the entire world (or at least the world that cares about such things.) This year, having activated more than 8.7 million more iPhones since last March’s debacle, AT&T is pulling out all the stops to make sure the digerati have the coverage they want during SxSW 2010. Here’s how.
- A Distributed Antenna System (DAS) at the Austin Convention Center: This system provides the equivalent coverage of eight cell sites, with 50 antenna nodes providing coverage throughout the venue. The system was completed in recent weeks.
- Beefing up the Cell sites: Austin isn’t the only city to benefit from this, but AT&T has moved from one radio network “carrier” to three in the city, which essentially enables the carrier to use more of its spectrum. My sources tell me this means AT&T is using about 30 MHz of spectrum for 3G rather than the 10 MHz that one radio network carrier would offer. And speaking of spectrum, the upgrade to the 850 MHz band that was begun in a rush during the last SxSW will also help, as will the upgrade to HSPA that AT&T completed across its network earlier this year.
- Three temporary cell sites: The carrier will deploy two Cells on Wheels (COWS), as well as add a third temporary site on an undisclosed rooftop. Those sites will provide AT&T Wi-Fi as well as 3G service, and are positioned where SxSW organizers and AT&T expect to see large amounts of traffic.
- Better Backhaul: AT&T was scant with details but said via email: “Compared with last year, we have added fiber-optic connections to more than quadruple the backhaul capacity of each of the eight cell sites that serve the event area, and temporary sites will also be served by extensive backhaul.”
AT&T worked with South by Southwest event planners to make sure the system in place will suffice, and it’s not turning its back on the event this year either. Last year, the complaints caught the carrier off guard, but for 2010 a team of AT&T network engineers will monitor the Austin network 24/7 throughout the duration of the event to make sure it stays up.
February 26, 2010
Remainders – The Things We Didn’t Post: Breaking News Edition [Remainders]
In today’s Remainders: news that’s breaking. Boxee Beta is available on Apple TV; Symbian^4 rears its ugly head; analysts analyze things and predict cheaper iPhones; Carly Simon reveals who was so vain; and a nation-sized iceberg breaks free in Antarctica.
Boxee On Your Apple Boxy
According to the Boxee blog, Boxee Beta is now available on Apple TV. If you had the Alpha version installed you can just update the Launcher, but if you’re going in fresh you’ll need to go through the atvusb-creator and then follow these instructions. H.264 playback is improved but still doesn’t have the benefit of hardware acceleration. More bad news: no Crystal HD support, yet, though the forums are already clamoring so there’s always hope for the next update. [Engadget]
IBM Improvements
At the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference in Seattle—sounds like a ton of fun, doesn’t it?—IBM announced a new algorithm that allows machines to process data at crazyfast speeds, reportedly reducing the cost of the dealing with gigantic sets of data by an order of two magnitudes. In a test, the new algorithm crunched through 9TB of data—a process that would normally take about a day—in about the time it’d take to watch one episode of Seinfeld sans commercials. Fast! IBM’s being tight-lipped with the details so no one’s quite sure how or where the improvements were made, but they seem pretty darn excited about it in their press release. So fast, so furious. [Seattle Times]
Symbian…Fore!
Symbian^3 isn’t even supposed to show up until sometime in the fall, but today videos showing a development version of Symbian^4 cropped up and they are none too exciting. You get some transition animations, some largely uninspired widgets, a droopy Dali clock and not much else. Don’t worry too much, though—Symbian^4 won’t be cropping up in its final version for another year or so. That leaves plenty of time for improvement. [SlashGear]
So Vain
Today, one of the most enduring questions in all of pop music came to a close. The subject of Carly Simon’s 1972 song “You’re So Vain” has been a topic of intense speculation since the song’s release, and ever since it came to light that Deep Throat was that one dude, there might not have been a higher profile case of mystery identity. Well, in a rerecorded version of the song, Simon answered the riddle…backwards. Playing the new record in reverse reveals the name of the vain individual to be David. As in David Geffen, the rich, bald fellow who headed Simon’s label, Elecktra, back in the early 70s. Apparently Simon felt the need to immortalize Geffen in song because the exec was giving Joni Mitchell, a labelmate, more attention. So anyway now it’s settled, and no one will think the song is about them again. [The Awl]
Burr!
Oh shit. An iceberg the size of Luxembourg, which, for those who don’t have a handle on their European geography, is about a third larger than Rhode Island, broke free of Antarctica and is now floating about on the southern pole of our planet. The thousand square mile ice cube could have all sorts of consequences down the line, depending on how it moves in the open water. One of them involves messing up the habitat of a huge colony of Emperor penguins that live nearby. Penguins are just about the cutest thing Antarctica has going for it and icebergs are probably among the worst, so this development is unsettling, to say the least. [Times Online]
Netvertible
In an announcement that no one was waiting for, Viliv confirmed the price of their S10 Blade netvertible: $699. Not exceptionally cheap for an Atom-powered, folding Windows 7 netbook with a touch screen. Also, you have to ask yourself: do you really want to be carrying around something that’s proudly marketed as a “netvertible?” Like the type of cars it’s styled after, I imagine the Blade will look nice but lack performance when the going gets tough. [Engadget]
Wow
A study commissioned by the Australian government on the risk of crime in virtual games was recently completed. As games like World of Warcraft and Second Life continue to thrive, and as their real world economies continue to grow, the AU Institute of Criminology thought it was about time to start setting up some guidelines for keeping virtual activity lawful. One particular, unusual aspect of the games that was given a close look: virtual rape. Apparently a Second Life rape in 2007 required Belgian police forces to patrol the online world to prevent further incidents, and several other instances have left authorities unsure of how to respond. Welcome to 2010, my friends. [Slashdot]
Analysis
Analysts, who are hardly ever wrong, are saying that come June Apple is going to announce new iPhones that not only have new features but are cheaper, as well. Analysts are traditionally reliable on these sorts of matters and there is plenty of evidence that Apple’s new iPhone will indeed be cheaper, perhaps even free. Oh wait a moment, I had that confused. No, actually, these are just the idle musings of a Morgan Stanley analyst and there is no evidence that these things will come to pass in June. Sorry about that! [Apple Insider]
More:
Remainders – The Things We Didn’t Post: Breaking News Edition [Remainders]
Forget “Brand Ambassadors,” Palm Needs a Hero
If Palm hopes to turn its business around, it needs better hardware and marketing, not the 200 “brand ambassadors” currently training Verizon Wireless employees mentioned in a please-don’t-panic memo by Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein to employees. Unschooled Verizon staffers are the least of the manufacturer’s problems.
The memo, which was initially reported by the Wall Street Journal, follows the company’s announcement yesterday that consumer uptake of its webOS handsets had been slower than expected, leading to weak orders from carriers. Rubinstein told employees Verizon had “recommitted” to help boost sales of the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, which the nation’s largest carrier launched last month. Rubinstein wrote:
“Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products.”
Rubinstein’s note also laughably cited “a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations.” That kind of marketing pales compared to Apple’s masterful TV commercials for its iPhone and the $100 million ad campaign for the Droid from Motorola and Verizon.
Such big-budget promotions are crucial in the superphone era, where a wide array of high-tech handsets can be had on the cheap. More importantly, though, it’s also becoming increasingly clear that consumers aren’t thrilled with either the Pre or the Pixi. So if Palm is going to get back in the game — a prospect that’s becoming less likely by the day — it will need to develop a gotta-have device and then back it with some serious marketing muscle.
February 25, 2010
PayPal Wants to Hitch Its Wagon to the Social Train
eBay CEO John Donahoe told a Goldman Sachs technology conference today that the company’s PayPal subsidiary wants to become the de facto payment engine for social media, the Wall Street Journal reports. “We want to be the platform on which some of these social-media applications get built,” he told the attendees, referring to Twitpay — a service that allows users to send payments via Twitter and was recently acquired (after failing to gain much traction) — as an example. PayPal has been trying to open itself up to developers in order to allow them to build payment more easily into their services and software, to that end launching a developers conference to talk about its open platform several months ago. And it has had some success attracting social networks, including Facebook, which said last week that it will use PayPal for transactions for virtual goods on the site.
Donahoe effectively pitched his service as the only game in town for large-scale social payments, saying:
The risk and fraud capabilities you need, the anti-money laundering…the ability to do it cross-border are very different things than just providing a virtual currency.
Facebook confirmed when it announced the PayPal deal that it was the complications of multiple currencies and international transactions that led it to choose the eBay unit as a partner, since 70 percent of its users live outside the U.S. It’s worth noting, however, that PayPal has had its own difficulties with international payments, as a recent ban on transfers to India illustrates. Donahoe also told the conference that he sees a growing demand for payments involving digital goods, and that PayPal has been talking to companies including Zynga, the leading maker of Facebook-based social games.
I see that trend, particularly in virtual goods, continuing. PayPal is well positioned to be the foundation for many of these digital goods.
The Facebook arrangement makes PayPal the engine behind Facebook Credits, an in-network payment scheme that the social network is pushing game makers and others to use, which gives Facebook 30 percent of the proceeds from each transaction. According to one analyst, such payments could become a $100 million business.
February 24, 2010
Scribd Goes Mobile With Long-tail Books
Scribd, the document-hosting service that calls itself “the largest social publishing company in the world,” has launched a series of mobile services and features for sending books and other documents to any portable device, including a set of open APIs, and according to CEO Trip Adler, the company plans to launch mobile apps for the iPhone, Android and iPad in the next few months. He also said that Scribd, which has about 50 million unique visitors a month, will soon have published more books than the entire U.S. publishing industry did last year.
“We’ve spent the last few years building a repository of 10 million documents,” Adler said in an interview in advance of the launch. “Now we’re launching a way to really easily read these documents on any mobile device. So whether it’s a PowerPoint presentation or a book or a homework project, you can now send that to any mobile device and read it there.” One of the problems with the e-reader market, he says, is that “people don’t really know what to buy, or what to read on them — with these new services, as long as it’s on Scribd you know that you can read it on any device.”
Scribd’s launch involves three separate products:
- A “send-to-device” option that will now appear at the top of every document the service hosts, which pulls up a list of all the devices Scribd can send to, including the Kindle, iPhone, Sony Reader, etc.
- The Scribd Open Platform for E-Readers (SOPED), a development platform and set of application programming interfaces that companies can use to integrate with Scribd’s mobile services.
- A series of mobile apps for the iPhone, Android, Kindle, iPad and other portable devices that make it easier to send and receive Scribd documents and books.
Adler told me that Scribd briefly thought about coming out with its own e-reading device, but “only for about a minute. It didn’t really make sense, because we’re a web software company, not a hardware company. So we decided to embrace as many different devices as we could.” Through a variety of different protocols — email, text messaging, etc. — the new “send-to-device” service supports the Kindle, the Nook, the iPhone, the Android, Windows Mobile devices, the BlackBerry, the Palm, the Onyx, the JetBook, the EZReader, the IRex and the Cool-ER. Adler said support for other devices will be coming soon.
Why ngmoco’s CEO Is Bullish on the iPad
Apple’s iPad, which is soon going to find its way onto the market, has drawn criticism and scorn from many a technorati. But Neil Young, chief executive and co-founder of San Francisco-based mobile gaming startup ngmoco, isn’t one of them. Not only does he think that the iPad will make netbooks pointless, he believes it will usher in new opportunities for companies such as his to build new experiences.
“Most negative reviews are from people who I think who were expecting a fundamental new technology, not a new user experience,” he said in a conversation with me. “I remember the same type of commentary around when the iPod touch launched.” Of course, as we all know Apple has since sold many millions of those iPod touches.
Young, who just closed a $25 million round of financing from Institutional Venture Partners and previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Norwest Venture Partners and Maples Investments, believes that a big portion of the mass market of buyers are going to find the iPad “magical.”
“The iPad is going to occupy a different part of a user’s life — it will be at the intersection of your home laptop and netbook and personal game console,” he said. Unlike most, who are going to rebuild their apps for the larger screen resolution, ngmoco has devised a three-step strategy for targeting the iPad:
- Adapt six of its major titles to iPad specifications and have them available for download alongside the device’s launch.
- Enhance its games to take advantage of the large screen real estate and also augment them with other iPad-specific features.
- Once iPad has scale or shows a trajectory of scale, build new applications specifically for that platform.
Young isn’t the only CEO of an iPhone games company who is thinking differently. William Volk, CEO of San Diego-based PlayScreen, explained to me that the iPad represented an opportunity to create a whole new kind of game. In a recent blog post Volk wrote,”The big screen and connectivity makes it a natural for social and team gaming. Think of board games, MMORPG’s and card playing.”
Like Volk and Young, I am very excited about the iPad, and am wondering what different types of apps can be developed for this new platform.
If you want to talk to me about these new experiences, apps or the iPad, drop me an email, connect with me on Twitter or simply leave a comment.
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):
Is There Any Demand For a True Gaming Phone?
See the original post here:
Why ngmoco’s CEO Is Bullish on the iPad
February 23, 2010
IPhone Game Startup Ngmoco Raises $25 Million in Funding, Snatches Up Top Developer [Apple]
Since switching from paid iPhone game apps to a free-to-play model with in-game purchases, iPhone game startup ngmoco has managed to raise $25 million in venture capital funding. That’s enough to buy up another top developer and expand even further.
Freeverse, the company bought up by ngmoco, is is behind paid iPhone games such as Skee-Ball, Flick Fishing, Flick Bowling, and Moto Chaser. There’s no word on whether the purchase will lead to a change in the sales model, but it’ll definitely lead to us seeing the familiar ngmoco logo even more. [Tech Crunch via Business Insider]
Read the original here:
IPhone Game Startup Ngmoco Raises $25 Million in Funding, Snatches Up Top Developer [Apple]
February 19, 2010
Skype-Verizon Deal: More Details
Skype and Verizon announced a partnership earlier this week that would embed the Internet calling service on Verizon’s smartphones. The partnership, at least to me, was driven by Verizon’s fear of the iPhone.
I wondered if the two companies had signed an exclusive deal. But during the press conference, when I asked Verizon chief marketing officer John Stratton and Skype CEO Josh Silverman about the deal, they both dodged the question. Then later during a conversation with Silverman, when I asked if his company would work with another carrier in the U.S. building a solution similar to the one being offered to Verizon’s customers, he declined to answer the question. “I cannot comment and speculate on this,” is what he said.
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