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Monday, March 5, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

The Everything Project: Building A Google For The Mobile Web App Ecosystem

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PST

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One of the biggest challenges we're facing as we move into the post-PC era is the challenge of navigating through a disconnected web of applications. Bought and sold as self-contained packages of code, apps are independent little creations, boxes you tap for specific functions. Single purpose beings.

Unlike the web, apps are not connected to each other through links (although they could be), nor are they yet accessible through next-generation discovery tools like Apple's Siri. And today's companies are so focused on helping push more and more apps on users through app discovery services, they're forgetting to solve the very real problem of providing a window into the existing ones. How do you Google a database of apps? How do you know which app to launch for the job at hand?

The solution to this problem could look something like this: The Everything Project, an engine that searches not for apps, but in mobile web versions of them.

Most of the app search services we've covered previously: (eg. Chomp, Quixey, Xyologic, Appolocious, AppsFire, Kinetik, Crosswa.lk, etc.) are about bringing new apps to your attention. But there are limits to how many apps you can manage. Not only do our mobile devices have hard limits in terms of storage space available for applications, each of us has our own psychological threshold as well. How many apps' names can you remember? Can you remember what they all do? Do you really need a native app installed for every website you visit, retail store you frequent, or online service you use?

Perhaps not.

We faced this challenge once before on the web. Links were once organized in directory structures, with websites categorized and placed into lists. This is very much how mobile application stores function today. (Need a game? Look in "Games." Need a Twitter app? Check out the "Social" section.) On the web, we soon realized that it was more efficient to search through an index of websites, and the result we needed was not necessarily a particular website, but the information it contained. How does this analogy relate to the mobile universe? Well, if you're looking for information about a topic, you may want to see tweets, hear a song, watch a video or read a news article, but you may not know which apps contain which information. And what's more – you may not have the right apps installed to do the job. This is perhaps more true if you're a new mobile user, still somewhat unaware of the thousands of apps available to you.

While there may always be those "special" apps you use every day, like email, Facebook, Instagram or Google Maps, for example, many of the other apps we access involve less occasional launches. Do we really need native versions of everything, or will mobile web apps do?

Enter, The Everything Project. (Note: this link only works on mobile devices.)

The new service is really an experiment about what a search engine for mobile web applications would look like. It comes from the creators of DoAt, the TechCrunch Disrupt finalist that was also an app search engine of sorts.

DoAt was an inkling of an idea – an alpha. The Everything Project (company homepage) is the beta. The company is rebranding, leaving DoAt and moving forward with this instead. Explains Co-founder Ami Ben-David, the company learned what users wanted from DoAt, and The Everything Project is the result. It’s a search engine, where results are apps. "You search like a search and you get your answers in apps. And when you're done, they [the apps] go away," he says.

It's pretty amazing, actually, which was the goal. "The intent was to create magic, something that regular people are really astonished by and happy with," he explains.

So how does this thing work?

For now, The Everything Project is a mobile website.  It works on mobile devices, whether iPhones, Androids, Windows Phones or anything else. Later, it will also be built as a native app for all the major platforms.

On the website's homescreen is a search box and in the background, somewhat Bing-like, there's an image. The background image slowly fades out and is replaced by another. Each features a link to a search for that topic. For example, Lady Gaga, Anonymous and Rick Perry were among the backgrounds when I first tested. Today, I see The Lorax, Taylor Swift and Tornado news. These are today's trending topics – the top searches on The Everything Project's engine. Obviously, these topics change over time, as people's queries change. The site is also featuring some of its sections (“tech,” “weather,” etc.) as homescreen backgrounds too.

Off to the side are The Everything Project's search "verticals." Where Google has Images, News, Videos, Maps and Shopping, The Everything Project has similar ones, like Social, Weather, Food, Movies, Shopping, News, Games and more.

Then there is the main search box. Like any search engine, you enter a query and the box will begin to offer search suggestions for you below as you type, based on others' searches. You can continue to enter your query or tap one of the provided suggestions to speed things up.

Now, for the results. This is where things get crazy.

Take, for example, a search for "Mitt Romney." Unlike on Google, which would return a list of links, The Everything Project returns apps. But not a list of available apps in the app store (i.e, those you could install on your device) or a list of apps you own. It returns a list of HTML5-based web applications you can use right now. And it lists them based on relevancy to your query, something the underlying semantic technology learns as more users search and tap on the app results. It also discovers the mobile version of the politician’s homepage, and lists that, too.

Now, tap on any app. In this example ("Mitt Romney"), maybe you'll choose CNN, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo News or MSNBC. Or maybe you're looking for something a little more offbeat, so you pick Reddit or Fwix or The Onion. The web app launches and the results quickly appear.

Really quickly, actually. The speed, a combination of mobile optimization, caching and some "secret sauce," was surprising. (Obviously, speed is affected by mobile connectivity. I tested on Wi-Fi.)

In some cases, The Everything Project uses the HTML5 app already available, but just as often, it launches a customized app the startup built itself. There are already hundreds of these custom apps from the thousands you can find through the service. For example, the custom Twitter app offers a specialized interface that shows you people who match your search query as well as tweets that match your query, but all in one window. If you tap on a tweet, however, you'll be redirected to Twitter's own HTML5 mobile app.

But sometimes, HTML5 apps alone can't do it all. In these cases, they're inter-connected with their native counterparts. For example, if you search for "Coldplay" then launch the Pandora app, you have the option to tap a button that launches the "Coldplay station" (Coldplay radio) in the native app.

A prompt appears allowing you to choose to launch the app you have installed on your phone or download the app from the app store. (This prompt will be eliminated when The Everything Project is a native app – it would then know if the app was installed or not.)

So what comes next? The end of the native app universe? Well, not quite.

"…A native app is always slightly better than an HTML5 app," says Ben-David, "but once a system like ours exists, suddenly an HTML5 is searchable, it can be part of an experience where people find it and use it on the fly, and then it becomes much more appealing."

Any developer will be able to add their own HTML5 apps into The Everything Project's open app platform when it publicly launches, and these, in turn, could become mechanisms for native app discovery. But launching those native apps could be an on-demand function from within The Everything Project itself, called up as needed. If anything, The Everything Project is an interesting take on what a marriage between the two worlds, native and web, would look like.

Is it a real solution for the coming app-ocalypse, which has overloaded our devices with native apps and made app discovery a source of real pain for mobile developers? I can’t say that I would go that far yet. The Everything Project today is still very much a beta, as even its own developers will admit.

But the project is definitely an interesting experiment, and that’s something which the app ecosystem needs more of.

P.S. For those of you attending SXSW, The Everything Project has mobilized all the keywords which people will search for in Austin, including names of venues, keywords (BBQ, “SXSW Music,” e.g.), hotels, and more. There’s also a great mobile version of the SXSW schedule which appears when you search for “SXSW” from the homepage. 

With $10 Million In Funding, All-In-One Security App AirCover Launches On Android, iOS

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 08:50 AM PST

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Mobile security services — tracking your device, or using your device to track others, or making sure you know who is tracking you — is a hot topic these days. But apparently, when it comes to actual usage of these apps, it’s not as extensive as you would think. Figures from Canalys estimate that only four percent of devices have some form of security installed and used.

That has led one entrepreneur to come up with a solution: put several of these services into a single app and try to make that into not a “nice to have,” not a “should have,” but a “must have” for mobile consumers.

This was the impetus behind AirCover, a new app out from Founders Den founder Jason Johnson‘s software company, BlueSprig.

The app is out today for Android and iOS devices, with a Windows Phone version due soon, too. (And sorry, BlackBerry users, but he says there are “no plans” to offer this for RIM’s devices.) These follow a beta launch back in December on Android, when BlueSprig also announced a $10 million round of funding led by Accel-IDG China.

Canalys’ numbers were backed up by Johnson’s own straw polls amongst his techie friends. “I was astonished at how few people I knew who used iPhone or Android devices had the “Find My iPhone” service or the Android equivalent installed, or even knew about it,” he said. He believes his developers have put “enough functions on there” that it will be seen as an essential tool.

Those services include “Family Safety” GPS tracking within pre-defined boundaries; “Battery Doctor” to manage battery life; “Cloud Backup” for contacts and photos; and “Device Found” which tracks your device and activates an alarm on it. On the Android version there are a few extras: an anti-virus service; a service that lets you see which apps access your personal data (one of those hot-button topics at the moment); and a system optimization to speed up the device.

While some of these sound like the kinds of things that have been, up to now, marketed very much for enterprise and/or power users of mobile devices, AirCover, says Johnson, is squarely aimed at mainstream consumer market. (He’s also promoting AirCover at SXSW; those who download the app get priority access to a big party he’s throwing on Friday, March 9.)

Users will be able to download the app from the App Store and the Market (and soon Microsoft’s Marketplace), with the app free of charge and offering an option to upgrade for an annual fee of $24.95 to expand the service: 2GB of free storage, for example becomes 5GB; and the number of people you can track goes up from two to unlimited.

Johnson says he expects 90 percent of users to opt for the free model, but to drive up numbers of downloads, he has another card up his sleeve for how to get this service into the hands of users: carrier deals.

He says that he is currently in negotiations with several tier-one carriers, in the U.S. and further afield, to preload this app on to certain Android devices (preloading on to the iPhone is out of the question). Those are relationships that he brings to the table from one of his past jobs, overseeing licensing services for Dolby.

Another thing he’ll be bringing from Dolby is some licensing nous: “It would be a per-handset fee with the price dependent on how much functionality the carrier wanted to enable,” he tells me. “Some will only want the free version, others will want to offer more backup storage, more frequent virus scanning, etc.”

Offering a mobile security service makes sense for a carrier: it gives the carrier a closer grip on its customers’ usage, and potentially offers a unique selling point to set a it apart from a competitor offering the exact same device for more or less the same price. Johnson expects news of carrier deals to come later this year.

The other eye-catching part of AirCover’s business model is that just about all of the development of the app has been done in China. At a time when good developers are in huge demand in the U.S. Johnson says that going to China has not only been an “apples to apples” comparison in terms of skills and execution, but has been about 10-15 times less expensive.

In other words, the ongoing story about Apple (and others, of course) making iPhones in China very much has a software counterpart.

“It is spectacularly cheaper and I plan on using as much Chinese software development as possible going forward,” he said. He says he is not the only one, and sees it as a “growing trend.”

Whether that will be seen a controversial or just a very clever way of making sure he doesn’t burn through his $10 million too quickly remains to be seen, but in any case Johnson tells me that he has big plans for how to develop the mobile security services going forward.

One idea, he says, involves working with a company that makes a special device that could be linked up with AirCover and used as a tracking instrument. That way you don’t have to feel bad when you decide that you shouldn’t be equipping your six year-old daughter with an iPhone or even a low-end Android device, just so that you can see where she is.

Rentcycle Becomes Getable; Launches In-Store Management Platform For Rental Shops

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 08:42 AM PST

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Attempting to bring a brick-and-mortar industry online is no easy feat. It takes time, investment, and a willingness to roll with the punches. San Francisco-based startup Rentcycle graduated from Founder Institute in 2009 with a mission to bring the “rentals industry” online, offering free, realtime reservations for consumers and cloud-based business management and product listing solutions for local rental shops.

After graduating from Founder Institute, the startup went through several beta launches, before raising a $1.4 million seed round from Collaborative Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Founder Collective, and Amicus Capital, as well as angel investors including Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and Chairman at Yelp, and Founder of Shopzilla Farhad Mohit.

Like Airbnb, Zipcar, and many others, Rentcycle has been looking to ride the collaborative consumption wave (or revolution) that has us sharing our cars, homes, and more. This was one part of the interest from investors that led to the startup’s funding last year, which also led to Netflix Founder Marc Randolph and Chuck Templeton, the founder of the popular restaurant reservation service, OpenTable, joining the startup as advisors.

Templeton’s involvement, as well Andreessen Horowitz Partner Jeff Jordan (who is the former CEO of OpenTable and led the firm’s investment in GrubHub), in particular has been valuable to the company, which, from the start, was given the tagline of “OpenTable for local rental businesses.” Today, this comparison with OpenTable goes a bit deeper, as the startup is unveiling a new in-store rental management solution for small businesses.

The cloud-based system will now be available to rental businesses both web and iPad apps, allowing businesses to organize inventory data, customer information, payments, and leverage realtime analytics. Like OpenTable before it, local businesses can manage their in-store reservations through the same system they use for their online reservations. The startup is also now offering an embeddable widget for rental stores, allowing them to add cross-industry rental to their website with a line of JavaScript.

This new strategy to offer local businesses a full in-store and online solution is being backed by a new name, as the startup is officially rebranding as Getable, with a redesigned website to boot. CEO Tim Hyer tells us that, among consumers, the startup had often been pegged as a bicycle rental platform, and while it does offer bikes, it also rents everything from tools and equipment, party and events supplies to sports equipment.

Hyer says that the collaborative consumption movement has proven that people, especially those in younger generations, are increasingly comfortable with the idea that they don’t have to own everything in their lives, especially when presented with the alternative of gaining access to something, rather than owning it. The new name is meant to give consumers the sense that any product is accessible, on-demand, from trusted rental establishments.

The startup’s rental management technology has been deployed with ten early partners throughout San Francisco, and Hyer hopes that the company’s new solution will bring it much closer to the core operations of local rental businesses. Again, the in-store system, which provides both hardware and software, is similar to OpenTable’s terminals, which manage table availability at the restaurant level and sync reservations across multiple channels.

The team wants its new rental solution to establish the same kind of indispensable relationship between rental businesses and their customers that OpenTable has been able to find between restaurants and diners.

Getable recently surpassed 100,000 unique rental listings in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has been forging partnerships with nationwide rental services like Rent The Runway and Adorn, which offer designer fashions on a budget as well as BorrowLenses, an on-demand photography equipment platform. This also brought Toygaroo to mind, and Hyer tells me that they’re currently in negotiations with the startup over the best way to bring its subscription toy rental service to Getable.

To date, the startup has processed $250K in rental transactions, a number which should grow as it rolls out its rental management technology. Getable is targeting San Francisco first, as it wants to reach critical mass in its home city before expanding nationally, although it tentatively has plans to roll out in other cities for later this year. Getable has largely flown under the radar since its funding in August, but with this new product and look, the startup is obviously looking to become a bigger player in the collaborative consumption space.

The rental industry, as a whole, is an $85 billion market, but most of the 65,000 rental businesses in the U.S. don’t have an online booking system. Even a corporation as large as Home Depot, offering rental opportunities in 2,200 locations doesn’t offer online booking because of all the disparate pieces that go into scheduling, like organizing a payment method for late fees, damages, a system for cancellation policies, etc.

Although P2P businesses like Airbnb have struggled with the new model they’re helping to create, especially in terms of insurance and damages, Hyer says that Getable has the unique position of being able to play in a space where most of the businesses they deal with are well-established and have had their own individual insurance policies for years. Instead of worrying about the dangers inherent to P2P rental, they can focus on becoming a full-service management solution as well as the online portal through which these businesses interact with their customers.

For more on Getable, check them out at their new home here.

Sorry Folks: Samsung Says No Galaxy S III Release In April

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 07:43 AM PST

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And the saga of the Samsung Galaxy S III continues. Late last week a pair of dueling reports surfaced with one stating that Samsung would announce (and ship shortly thereafter) their much-anticipated Android handset in April and another shooting the claim down.

Normally, this isn't a big deal — who doesn't enjoy a little back-and-forth every once in a while? — but Samsung Korea has taken to Twitter to officially put the kibosh on an April unveiling.

The news may come as a bit of a bummer for Samsung aficionados, especially after the company’s new flagship device was conspicuously absent at this year’s Mobile World Congress. If recent reports are to be believed though, the GSIII is looking to be worth the wait — if you haven’t been keeping up, it’s expected to feature a 1.5GHz quad-core Exynos processor, a 4.8-inch 1080p display, an 8-megapixel camera, and (of all things) a ceramic body.

While the Galaxy S III gets most of the attention, it isn’t the only device currently in the works deep in the heart of Samsung’s Korean headquarters. Samsung is also said to be slaving away on a new smartphone (tentatively dubbed the “Galaxy B”) that features a nearly bezel-less display, though the possibility remains that the two devices are actually one and the same.

Samsung was quick to debunk the April rumors, but they kept understandably mum on when we can expect to see their latest and greatest. On the upside though, Samsung made a point of playing the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” card — their tweet mentions that they'll be keeping people posted on the Galaxy S III's status via Twitter.



TCTV Interview: Mike Doughty, Author, Singer, Songwriter On The Future Of The Music Business

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 07:22 AM PST

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I had the distinct pleasure of bringing Mike Doughty, songwriter and author, into the TCTV studio to talk about his new book, The Book Of Drugs, his new album, Yes & Also Yes, and how the music business has changed during his long and tumultuous career.

You may remember Doughty as the leader of Soul Coughing, a band that brought cerebral trip-hop into the mainstream and defined a genre of music that focused on organic rhythms and complex, often impressionistic lyrics. As a lonely white boy in the 1990s, I nodded along to Ruby Vroom and Irresistible Bliss while writing COBOL code to head off the Y2K bug.

Doughty is past all that now – his book details the various and virulent ways his band members undercut and ruined the experience and, in turn, tore Soul Coughing down around Doughty’s ears. With his criticism in the back of my mind, it’s easy now to see the cracks in the acid jazz/”Cool G” facade. Soul Coughing is gone and he’s now a strong and melodic songwriter. He writes odes to women with unsingable names and celebrates second chances, building a canon that is upbeat but nostalgic. You get the sense that Doughty has come out of those dark years a better man.

In this interview we talked about his current success and how he made it out of the music business alive. He cites Napster as his primary musical savior. After Soul Coughing split, Doughty found that his solo album Skittish ended up on the file sharing site where his fans shared tunes and actually sang along to unreleased music as he toured with just his guitar and voice. These shared files and his loyal audience ensured Doughty a second act, but on his terms.

Nokia Discontinues Ovi Share Service, Users Have Until March 30 To Retrieve Content

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 07:13 AM PST

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Nokia today announced that it would discontinue its Ovi Share service. Ovi Share is a web service used by Nokia to host users’ content, but with the push toward the Windows Phone platform over at Nokia it makes sense that the company would choose to consolidate its core services.

Users of Ovi Share will have until May 30 to retrieve their content from the service, at which point all of the content will be no longer accessible. Users can download the entirety of their content through a Zip file, or pick and choose certain files to retrieve.

It’s also worth noting that users will not be able to upload content to the service after March 13, so if you’re a Share user we recommend nipping this in the bud. There’s no reason to continue using the service for an extra two weeks, and it’s best to just get all your stuff before you forget it’s there.



Crosswa.lk, The App Discovery Service Better Than iTunes Genius, Is Now An App

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 06:59 AM PST

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Mobile application discovery service Crosswa.lk has just debuted its much anticipated native counterpart, in the form of a new iPhone application. The app soft-launched over the weekend, allowing users to see what apps their friends are using as well as those that are popular on the wider Crosswa.lk network. It also allows users to quickly rate apps and receive recommendations of apps they might like to try.

As a self-described app addict, I’ve enjoyed using Crosswa.lk’s online service since its November launch. The user interface for the website is well-designed, easy to use, and feels more like a social network than an app search engine or app ratings and review site.

On Crosswa.lk, users can find and follow their friends, including those from Gmail and Facebook, and peruse the site’s popular and recommended users in order to fill out their network of personal app recommenders. To use the service, you sync your iPhone with Crosswa.lk, which allows it to build an online profile of your app collection. There’s even an iPhone emulator which shows how your apps would look, if installed on a phone. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t duplicate your personal organizational structure and folders.)

And, of course, there are the app ratings and recommendations – the key piece to the Crosswa.lk experience. You can “like” apps, give them stars, write reviews, share the app to Facebook or Twitter, and see how many of your friends have the app installed, too. It’s really the social recommendation component that’s most important here – when you discover a lot of your friends are using an app, you’re likely to try it, too.

Explains Crosswa.lk co-founder Thomas McLeod, the concept for the Crosswa.lk service came to the team after they faced their own app discovery challenges as developers. (The team’s other apps include Pagelime, Spypic, Spyvid, ControlShift, Cooties and Frametastic).

“As we got deeper and deeper into app development, we kept hearing from other developers that they had no idea how people found their apps, and honestly we were facing the same problem ourselves,” McLeod says. “We sat down and kicked around a bunch of ideas, and came to the conclusion that the number one way we were guaranteed to download an app was if a friend recommended it.”

And so, Crosswa.lk was born.

But as much fun as it is to use the online service, Crosswa.lk desperately needed its own mobile app. After all, if you’re building a service to help improve app discovery…well, you kind of need an app for that.

The new mobile version of Crosswa.lk brings real-time feeds of apps trending among your friends plus all those using Crosswa.lk. You can then filter this list by a large set of criteria, such as price, category, community (e.g. photographers, gamers, bloggers, etc.), ratings, most “liked,” and more. You can also use the app to access the various Crosswa.lk communities, or see which apps are on sale and what searches are popular now, find friends, rate apps, and, of course, get your own Genius-like recommendations.

Actually, scratch that last bit – Crosswa.lk’s recommendations are far, far better than iTunes’ Genius.

Oh, and one more thing – just in time for SXSW, Crosswa.lk’s app features a section called “Who’s Winning Austin” which will keep track of the trending apps at SXSW in real time. You’ll find this at the bottom of the Trending Apps section.

Crosswa.lk comes from the team at Imaginary Feet, whose other two co-founders are Emil Anticevic and Patrick Jackson. The company has a small amount of seed funding from a new firm called XOL Ventures, which happens to be four ex-AOL guys. (Disclosure(?): TechCrunch is owned by AOL).

You can grab the new Crosswa.lk app here on iTunes.

Louis C.K. On Social Media: “I Kind Of Hate It. I Think It’s Awful.” [Video]

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 06:20 AM PST

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I don’t think Louis C.K. is headed to Austin next week. He’s not a fan of social media and openly admitted on Conan the other night that he only has a Twitter account to sell his performances. That tactic has so far worked well for him. Social media fueled his successful experiment to bypass studios and sell a stand-up special online without any DRM nonsense — a model others like Jim Gaffigan are also now using.

The video is after the jump but in short C.K. feels people are living their life through twitter. Social media has replaced real life. You know these people: something exciting could be happening and instead of enjoying the moment, they’re live twitting the event to their 32 followers. Nobody takes in life unless it comes through *this*, he says. I agree. That’s part of the reason why I’m avoiding the SXSW social media circus next week.

ESPN Starts Opening The Doors To Its Data With Developer Center, First API Program

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 06:07 AM PST

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Geeks and sports together? It’s a beautiful thing. Well, at least that’s what ESPN is hoping with the announcement of its brand, spanking new Developer Center, which marks the first time that it will open its doors to third-party developers and provide access to its enormous array of editorial content, stats, and other data.

As Y Combinator Founder Paul Graham tweeted recently, APIs are self-serve business development. Many startups are catching on to the business development catalyst that APIs can be, but certainly few would say that ESPN, the self-tagged “world leader in sports,” needs as much help in that department as the many startups out there just trying to get off the ground.

That being said, this marks a big step forward for ESPN, and all those entrepreneurs and developers who have been itching to gain access to ESPN’s content. As one would guess, the sports behemoth’s new Developer Center is a web resource that allows developers to join the company’s API program for the purpose of gaining access to ESPN data to create new web and mobile apps for the rabid, sports-consuming public.

As part of the launch, ESPN is making its “Headlines API” available to the public, which will allow third-parties to tap into the site’s daily news stories and headlines, find content related to any ESPN story, create a “Top Stories” summary, etc.

The Developer Center also includes a Research Notes API, which is now only available for strategic partners, giving them access to ESPN’s archive of facts and figures compiled by the stats geeks in the ESPN Stats and Information Group.

It will also be launching several other APIs in private beta (only for select partners at this point), including its Scores and Schedules API that provides start times, venues, competiros, scores, and stats across every major sport, as well as a set of other APIs that offer standings, team, and athlete information.

Developers looking for access to an ESPN API can head over to the Developer Center now to request a developer key. access to an ESPN API can now go to the ESPN Developer Center and request a developer key. The ESPN crew will be at SXSW to meet with developers and give a tour of its new resources.

The launch of the Developer Center, Jason Guenther, Vice President of ESPN Digital Media Technology, tell us, is the culmination of 7-months of effort. The Developer Center has been in private beta since last fall, in testing internally and with a few select partners. Foursquare, one of these early partners, has been testing ESPN’s Research Notes API, allowing its users to check in to sports-related events to receive relevant factoids powered by ESPN.

What’s more, as MG reported back in August, Pulse became one of the first partners with which ESPN syndicated its content — other than its own, and the team tells us that Pulse — as well as Flipboard — have been instrumental as early adopters in helping to test its Headlines API while in beta.

Chris Jason, director of ESPN's API program, and Guenther said that its new Developer Center is “fundamental to its business strategy going forward,” and that they view its API program as “transformational.” And that’s not only because third-parties will be able to access its data to create a mind-numbing array of sports apps replete with ESPN data, but to ESPN’s internal development as well. The company now has one distinct resource it can point to when asked about its data resources, both internally and externally.

“As digital and TV are really starting to collide,” Guenther said, “making sure that we have a comprensive data strategy is extremely important.”

ESPN has been hosting a number hackathons to give developers an opportunity to access its data and create cool, sports-related apps, which you can check out here.

The team said that it is going to continue to pushing forward with its APIs, and will at some point in the not-so-distant future be launching a “Labs” section that will list products and product enhancements, and give fans opportunities to weigh in on what types of products or features they would like to see become part of the ESPN app ecosystem.

But, for now, ESPN is just concerned with lowering the barriers to innovation, and when asked about its plans for the future, Jason said, “first and foremost is to set our content free.” And what’s better than free data?

Fashion Outpost Nasty Gal Raises $9M From Index Ventures, With $28M In Revenue

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 06:02 AM PST

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LA-based online fashion outlet Nasty Gal has raised $9 million from Index Ventures, after being sought after by almost every VC in the Valley and beyond. Why was the startup so popular you ask? Well not many small businesses made $28 million in revenue in 2011, for one.

From eBay store to a 100 person-strong company, Nasty Gal began humbly in San Francisco as a way for super stylish founder Sophia Amoruso to showcase her eclectic vintage finds and fashion-forward contemporary picks. The unorthodox name comes from the eponymous Betty Davis (not Bette) song and is meant to embody the kind of woman who shops at the store: “unapologetically sexy” and “badass.”

As there are a multitude of meh online options for women’s clothing shopping, success in something like this is all about curation and maintaining cachet. Notable: I would actually wear a lot of the clothes I see on Nasty Gal, and the prices seem pretty modest for “high fashion.” All in all it reminds me of another Index Ventures Investment, ASOS, in terms of scope and target market. Amoruso compares it to cult British retailer Topshop.

Amoruso tells me that the company has been profitable since its early days as an eBay store, and that it brought in the aforementioned $28 million in revenue in 2011, growing 500% year over year since the very beginning. The company’s passionate and social media-savvy user base is remarkable: It boasts 150,000 customers, 500,000 Facebook fans, 30,000 Twitter followers, and 50,000 Instagram followers representing 50 countries, according to a release.

“We’ve been really interested in fashion and fashion has always been strong in Europe [where Index is based]. We had not seen anything like this in terms of groundswell and relationships with customers,” Index’s Danny Rimer told me over the phone. In addition to Nasty Gal and ASOS the firm has also invested in fashion-focused startups Astley Clarke, Editd, etsy, Farfetch, Go Try It On, Privalia, Stylistpick and Net-a-Porter.

An earlier report by Business Insider had pegged Nasty Gal’s valuation to be between $60-80 million, but Amoruso wouldn’t give comment, saying only that the valuation in the current round was “healthy.” Amoruso plans on using the funds for hiring, specifically for a VP of finance.

Nokia’s PureView Imaging To Appear On Windows Phone-Powered Lumias

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 05:58 AM PST

lumia-900

I doubt that you’ve forgotten about Nokia’s crazy 808 PureView phone with a 41-megapixel camera. How could you? It’s impossible to dismiss, even if the whole 41-megapixel figure is a bit misleading.

The only issue with it is that it runs on Symbian, a slowly but surely dying platform. Luckily, Nokia has confirmed that its PureView technology is headed to the Windows Phone platform as a part of the Lumia line.

Nokia’s VP of Marketing Jo Harlow confirmed the news to Finnish newspaper Aamulehti, but said that while she isn’t sure of a precise timeline, “it shouldn’t take long.”

We’d expect PureView to hit Windows Phone alongside the Apollo update, with which many cool new features will find their way onto users’ phones. Even more exciting, however, is what this means for Windows Phone. The camera continues to be a big focus among consumers, and one that leaps as far ahead as this PureView tech is sure to make waves.

Windows Phones have thus far really only had the Nokia name and the platform behind them. Spec/hardware wise, they haven’t been highly competitive yet. PureView may change that, at least in the realm of consumer awareness, and I honestly can’t wait to review one of these bad boys.

[via WPCentral]

Isis Reveals New POS Partnerships With Verifone, Ingenico And ViVOtech

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 05:35 AM PST

Screen shot 2012-03-05 at 8.44.04 AM

Straight on the heels of showing off their new mobile payments system, the carriers leading the Isis joint venture have announced new partnerships with payment solutions providers. At Mobile World Congress Isis revealed partnerships with Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard, and it seems we’ll now be adding Verifone, Ingenico, VivoTech, and Equinox to the list.

This should help spread the mobile wallet revolution and help enable NFC payments at a point-of-sale level. Obviously these types of partnerships and implementations will be necessary to the whole scale adoption of mobile payments.

Here’s what Isis CTO Scott Mulloy had to say:

"Payment systems suppliers provide critical infrastructure for the development of mobile commerce. Today's announcement is an important step in enabling NFC technology adoption throughout the mobile commerce industry. It also validates the open platform approach being offered by Isis across multiple business sectors.

Verifone is known for POS software, services, plus hardware, while Ingenico is focused on secure electronic transactions at point-of-sale. Meanwhile, VivoTech is an NFC-centric company and Equinox primarily handles transaction processing, so the partnerships make sense in terms of what’s needed for Isis to take off. It’s this trio that will work with merchants and vendors to set them up with the hardware needed to offer contactless payments.

Right now three of our top four carriers have signed on with Isis, including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Sprint, on the other hand, is on the Google Wallet team.

Android’s Now On Top For Mobile Browsing and Search, But Still A Challenger Elsewhere

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 05:24 AM PST

StatCounter-mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201102-201202

Android is currently the most popular platform in smartphone sales, and that domination is slowly but surely making itself felt in other aspects of the mobile experience — just as Google would have wanted it to be.

Some figures out from the number-crunchers at StatCounter have found that Android’s native browser has finally overtaken Opera to become the world’s most popular mobile web browser. Added to its very consistent domination in mobile search, that makes Google now one of the biggest forces in the mobile web as well as smartphone sales.

But other figures indicate that Android still has some way to go to overtake Nokia in existing mobile OS usage; and individual vendors making Android smartphones are equally still being challenged when it comes to topping both Nokia and Apple in overall sales.

StatCounter found that February 2012 was the first time that the number of phones accessing the mobile web from Android clients had overtaken that of Opera, a non-native browser that was one of the first to hit the market and is used on a range of devices — from lower-end feature phones to Apple’s iPhone (where a user can access it through an app).

As of last week, Opera said that around 160 million people use its mobile browser monthly: according to StatCounter that represents 21.7 percent of the market. Its share for Android, meanwhile, for the month of February is 22.67 percent.

Doing the math on these numbers, that works out to 167 million people using the Android browser monthly, with more than 737 million people accessing the web using mobile browsers overall.

That 167 million is a fair bit lower than the 300 million Android devices that Eric Schmidt last week said had been activated overall — and does raise questions about what significance activation numbers have compared to active usage. (And which figure is the most relevant for whom.)

StatCounter covers other areas of mobile usage (as well as regular Internet usage; you can see them all here). Some of these throw up some interesting numbers worth thinking about:

– If you want an idea of just how dominant Google is in mobile search, this graphic pretty much says it all: no one is even in spitting distance of Google’s 97 percent share of the market, and hasn’t been in the last year. Dismal news there for Yahoo, and Bing and all of Microsoft’s mobile efforts there if this is accurate:

– When it comes to mobile OS, Android is actually still not as big as Nokia — or Apple — in terms of active devices: Nokia is still taking a more-than 30 percent share of devices on its Symbian platform — reason enough for the company to keep plugging away at new devices and features for that line, even as it doubles down on its new line of Windows Phones.

– And when it comes to individual vendors, again, Nokia is still the biggest in actively-used smartphones. In fact, between February 2011 and February 2012, its share has only dropped by about one percent, despite some ups and downs. The next-closest vendor, and you shouldn’t be surprised at all here, is Apple, with just over 30 percent and rising. The closest Android vendor is Samsung, but while it is storming in overall mobile sales, in terms of actively used smartphones, it appears to be at only 14.91 percent.

Klout Starts Rolling Out Perks That Match Your Score, Partners With Gilt For Discounts

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 05:00 AM PST

klout

Klout, the startup that measures influence on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and other social media sites, is expanding the functionality of its Perks program. Klout Perks are exclusive offers or experiences, given as a result of your Klout score. For the first time, Klout is matching savings based upon a specific score.

The startup is partnering with flash sales site Gilt to allow Klout members to use their influence to receive a percentage off of their Gilt purchase that matches their Klout Score. For example, if your Klout Score is 81-100, you could receive up to 100 percent off of your purchase.

Klout and Gilt have also selected influencers across several categories, including fashion, interior design, social media, finance and parenting, and have asked them to curate a special sale to be featured across five of Gilt's properties, including Men, Women, Baby&Kids, Taste and Home. Curators include Loren Ridinger for Gilt Women's business, Art Jonak for Gilt MAN, Ciaran Blumenfeld for Gilt Baby and Kids, Erin Loechner for Gilt HOME and Pim Techmuanvivit for Gilt Taste.

It’s interesting to see Klout start matching scores with corresponding discounts. In the past, Klout has offered Spotify invites, free tickets on Virgin America, a laptop from Hewlett Packard and a weekend driving in an Audi A8. For Klout, it's a way to engage brands with the platform, and connect to users.

Troll Fighters: Article One Partners Raises $7M For Its Patent Research Platform

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 04:55 AM PST

Globe

You won’t have to go far in Silicon Valley to find someone who will tell you that the patent situation in the tech industry is a mess. While trouble has been brewing for a decade, the last year has been marked by a continuous stream of litigation, and some might say it’s beginning to take its toll on innovation. Take Yahoo’s recent threats to Facebook, for example. Back in September, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt warned that “overbroad patents will slow” the progress of the software industry, saying that the current state of patents in the U.S. was “terrible.”

At the time, Schmidt suggested that dealing with patents in a way that is more systematic might be beneficial to the industry, even broadly making reference to the idea of crowdsourcing. The Google Chairman isn’t alone in thinking this approach could help make a difference in the ongoing patent wars, evidenced by the growing community that is Article One Partners’ global patent research platform.

Founded in 2008 by inventor and entrepreneur, CEO Cheryl Milone, Article One Partners has become one of the world’s largest patent research communities, distributing requests for prior art research to more than one million scientists and technologists using a global, human-fueled search engine. Basically, the startup has built a global research community of patent experts that respond to requests from individuals or corporations, taking those requests and building reports aimed at enabling the company to make better patent-related business decisions.

The community is incentivized by monetary rewards, and researchers can earn between $5K and $50K for top-notch research on each project. Article One also offers $100 prizes for the most valuable submissions on each project, and allows researchers to participate in its profit-sharing program by earning points based on their involvement and activity in projects on the site.

Again, the idea is to leverage its 18,000-plus scientists and technologists to deliver obscure and hard-to-find patent and IP research to its clients, which includes 16 Fortune 100 companies, and 7 of the top 10 U.S. patent filers. Companies can then use this research to assess their patent portfolios, decrease litigation costs, and limit risks when developing new technologies.

It’s a unique approach to the “spaghetti plate” mess that is bogging down the industry, and one that continues to be appealing to investors. In 2009, General Catalyst Partners invested $3 million in Article One, and today the startup is announcing that it has raised $7 million in institutional funding from Alleghany Capital Corporation. This marks the second round of institutional funding by Alleghany, which invested $5 million in 2010, bringing the startup’s total funding to over $15 million.

Article Partners CEO Cherly Milone said that the company will use the new funding to drive “go-to-market activities” and help meet the demand of current and future clients, as well as expand (and compensate) its growing community of patent researchers, which more than doubled in size in 2011.

Obviously, there’s been some big patent activity in the last year, with Apple/Microsoft/RIM doing a deal to acquire Nortel’s $4.5 billion patent portfolio, and Google purchasing Motorola Mobility’s portfolio for $12.5 billion, but there’s also been a lot of patent trolling and disappointing litigation. To address this, Article One recently launched a “Litigation Avoidance” service that collects relevant information about prior art, focusing on pre-emptive action around specific patents to help identify and eliminate patents that don’t deserve protection. And guess who the first member of this program is? Microsoft.

It’s an interesting solution, because it’s clear even to those not intimately involved with patent and IP legislation that prior art and documented evidence of invention are to be found all over the world, but since there’s not one aggregated, easily searchable global source, crowdsourcing and a global community of experts can be an effective way to solve the problem.

For more on Article One Partners, check them out at home here.

Licensing Maven Mind Candy Signs Moshi Monsters Record Deal

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 04:46 AM PST

moshi-monsters-characters

Moshi Monsters is on a licensing roll these days. There have new toys, comics and now Mind Candy, the company behind it, has signed a deal with Sony Music on a 12-track album dubbed “Music Rox” which will feature songs from popular Moshi characters like Dr Strangeglove, Big Bad Bill and Sweettooth. This is just the start of a series of albums. Given that Sony has experience taking reality stars mainstream there’s no reason it can’t do the same with another bunch of monsters.

An estimated 60 million children between 6-12 years old now play the game and can’t get enough of the Moshi brand.

Jason Perry, head of Moshi Music and a former producer for McFly and The Pussycat Dolls, told The Sunday Telegraph: "Moshi Monsters has never released an album before so this is a big opportunity. The thinking behind it is that we don't want the company to just be a computer brand. We want to turn it into the number one children's brand."

The album will be on sale from iTunes from April 2.

Peer-to-Peer Carsharing Goes National With RelayRides’ Big Launch

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 04:00 AM PST

RelayRides founder Shelby Clark

Starting today, carsharing startup RelayRides is getting the chance to prove its model on a national scale. The company launched in Boston and expanded to San Francisco, but rather than continuing a gradual roll out from city to city, RelayRides is making the service available everywhere in the United States.

Companies like RelayRides and TechCrunch Disrupt winner Getaround offer a different take on carsharing than the one established by Zipcar and its competitors. While those companies own fleets of cars, RelayRides is entirely peer-to-peer — if you have a car, then you can make it available for rental when you’re not using it. RelayRides says the average car owner makes $250 a month from the program.

Since it takes advantage of the cars already on the road, founder and chief community officer Shelby Clark argues that peer-to-peer carsharing can have a big impact — after all, a fleet-based company couldn’t simply declare one day that it’s launching nationally.

That’s especially true in non-urban areas. For example, Zipcar doesn’t have any cars available in the Los Angeles suburb where I grew up, and it’s hard to imagine that establishing a fleet there would make economic sense anytime soon. Starting today, however, anyone there can make their car available for others to rent. Eventually, Clark says he’s hoping this will encourage people to “round down” on car ownership — so if you’re trying to decide whether your family needs two cars or three, you’ll go with two, because you can easily rent an extra car when you need it.

I’m guessing there will be some hiccups in the national launch, as hopeful drivers sign-up in locations where there are no cars available, or vice versa. Still, Clark says there’s already lots of interest, and that RelayRides has received thousands of requests for expansion.

“I think it’s just really exciting to say yes instead of say no,” he says. “It’s a big country, and I’m excited to get out of Boston and San Francisco.”

Previously, car owners had to install a RelayRides device that allowed renters to unlock the vehicles at the pointed time. For the national launch, Clark says the company is phasing this system out, and instead relying on something a little more straightforward — the car owner hands their keys to the renter. That has the added benefit of allowing the owner to actually meet the person who’s going to be borrowing their car. RelayRides has also announced a partnership with General Motors to use built-in OnStar devices to unlock and start cars, but that hasn’t gone live yet.

RelayRides’ investors include Google Ventures, August Capital, Shasta Ventures, and GM Ventures.

And in case you’re wondering, Clark has made his own car available through RelayRides. You can see him with his Mini above. In fact, it turns out that he and I are neighbors, so as soon as I sign up, I’m hoping to take it for a spin.

Semantic Web/Q&A Startup Beepl Loses Ex-TechCrunch CEO, Gears Up For Mobile App

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 02:56 AM PST

beepl

The drive for more information has long been fueling the growth of the Internet, but that rising tide is not automatically lifting all boats, as one company trying to ride the wave has seen.

Beepl, a Q&A startup co-founded last year and led by ex-TechCrunch writer Steve O’Hear, has now lost him as CEO over what TechCrunch understands to be a dispute around future strategy. O’Hear confirmed his departure to TechCrunch and says that he remains a minority shareholder and director — although given his departure as CEO he may be leaving that role soon, too.

It is not clear yet who is permanently replacing O’Hear as the CEO, but we have heard that the move comes at the same time that Beepl is pushing out a new release of its site and gearing up for a mobile app launch.

Beepl has so far had $400,000 in seed funding from Prague-based VC firm Credo Ventures and has people working in London as well Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

The startup came out of stealth mode in January to a decent amount of press coverage, promoting its service as a kind of Quora-meets-Klout proposition: you ask questions, and they get answered by experts or “influencers” in the relevant field using some algorithms created by Beepl to connect those questions to the right people.

The company even came up with a nice and simple hashtag, #ask, to push questions to Beepl from Twitter and other social sites. Those could have been the beginnings of a good growth plan — if there is growth to be found in Q&A.

But TechCrunch understands that O’Hear and Beepl’s CTO, Jan Paricka, did not see eye-to-eye on how the product should develop longer-term. Paricka is still with the company and, we understand, is now effectively running things. Ondrej Bartos from Credo Ventures remains a non-executive director.

The upcoming mobile app, meanwhile, is not yet live, and it’s not yet clear what form it will take (iOS, Android, web app?). Even with dozens of Q&A apps already out there — they include Ask.com, ChaCha, Thumb and, yes, Quora — it’s the right direction to target people who might be anywhere, not just at their PC, needing some information.

Aereo Actually Has A Shot At Beating The Broadcast Networks

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 02:22 AM PST

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If you aren’t paying attention to the unfolding Aereo case, you should be. It will have industry-changing consequences — if not now, in the not-so-distant future. Why? For those unfamiliar, Aereo is a New York City-based startup that, at a rate of $12 a month, promises to stream over 20 channels of local, broadcast television to consumers in the New York area.

As to how this works? Aereo essentially uses arrays of tiny TV antennas to capture broadcasts over the public airwaves (most networks have been forced by standards to update to high-def) and then transmits the signal to customers, who can rent out their own individual (tiny!) antennas. Of course, that signal is limited, as users are only able to stream one broadcast channel at a time. But, that signal comes streaming over the Web — straight to you — on any of your web-enabled devices.

Of course, as exciting as miniature TV antennas in the cloud may sound, the idea didn’t sit well with the major broadcast networks. In theory, Aereo raised $20 million pre-launch from IAC, Barry Diller and others because it expected legal push-back. Last week, the broadcast networks met expectations, filing two lawsuits and an injunction meant to not only prevent Aereo from launching, but also to require it to pay damages for violating the Copyright Act. The broadcasters filing the lawsuit include pretty much every major broadcast TV network one would care to mention. (You can find the lawsuit on Scribd here.)

In a somewhat similar approach to Slingbox, Aereo assumes it can get around legal barriers because it’s just tuning into live TV, not re-broadcasting it without permission (which would be summarily illegal), and is licensing one TV antenna per-person, to be streamed one broadcast channel at a time. Not on-demand content for mass consumption, which would be a no-no in this case. So, upon news of the lawsuits, Aereo promptly responded with a denial, saying that the broadcasters lawsuits did not “have any merit,” essentially the equivalent of … “thank you very much, we’ll see you in court.”

After reporting Aereo’s response to the lawsuits, we received a number of tweets basically saying “of course they’re going to get sued, what were they thinking?” While it may seem like a fool’s errand, Aereo is not the first startup to go down this road, nor will they be the last. Many of its predecessors have been sued out of existence by those very same broadcasters. But the stakes are high enough to be worth it, and Aereo is closer than those that have come before it to a model that could win in court.

When you get right down to it, the airwaves that television broadcasters use to transmit are public property. To oversimplify, the government allowed private radio to broadcast over our airwaves to serve "the public convenience and necessity," according to the The Radio Act of 1927. That right was given (not charged) to television broadcasters in licenses as part of the Communications Act of 1934. So it should be OUR right, should it not? Not exactly.

Things have gotten more complicated since, but fast forward to today, and cable networks are requiring millions of dollars to have their broadcasts transmitted. Naturally, the major TV broadcasters want some of the pie too, and have been demanding retransmission fees be paid by those cable, satellite, and telecom providers — and winning. As Daniel Frankel of paidContent has pointed out, these retransmission fees have become a big part of network broadcasters’ bottom lines.

Many of the cable networks are (in the big picture) hanging on by a thread, and so companies like Aereo represent a major threat to these bottom lines, which is why they fight them tooth-and-nail based on the old retransmission without consent argument. What’s more, being the holders of the government’s (qua public’s) license to public airwaves, both local and national outlets/networks have a big voice on Capitol Hill. They are a public service, they are massive, and so the government wants nothing to do with someone holding them up at gunpoint.

In relation to Aereo, one could consider the example of TiVo, which records live television for later viewing — or, tweak the language, for later re-broadcast. TiVo had to deal with legal issues when it first came on the scene, and then was of course eclipsed once cable companies were able to offer their own DVRs.

But what about the Internet? What happens now that TV content is starting to be captured on cable network cloud systems that allow viewers to capture, and rebroadcast live TV through their DVRs? Interestingly, Cablevision was able to defend its remote DVR network in court (against, who else? Broadcasters!) by saying that it was the same thing consumers had been doing for years themselves (taping live television, recording the radio) — just moved to the cloud.

If they had been recording and archiving every TV program out there, and then serving them on-demand, well yes that would have been illegal. Viewers had to initiate everything on their own, they had to seek out the content, choose to record and view it. So, the court ruled that Cablevision did not own the content on its servers, and was not infringing against the Copyright Act.

What’s being overlooked, however, is a recent landmark court ruling that has people chattering up a storm in Australia. It has direct application to Aereo’s case, and although (to be clear) the company hasn’t said so, I wouldn’t be surprised if this had in some way (in combination with Cablevision’s victory in court) been an inspiration for Aereo.

At the beginning of the month, Optus (the second largest telecom in Australia) won a landmark case in federal court allowing it to bypass the exclusive rights holders of broadcast content to essentially record TV online or on mobile through a cloud network and watch it back, just minutes after airing on live TV. Whoa.

This is especially relevant given Ruslan’s post on Sunday about how sports programming has been the last to push onto the Web in streaming form. The group disputing Optus’ cloud network was none other than Telstra, the Australian telecom company which had won exclusive rights to air the content of the Australian Football League (AFL) and National Rugby League (NRL).

That might not sound big to American viewers, but Aussies like these sports more than a little and understand just how lucrative those contracts were supposed to be for Telstra. And to add insult to injury, the AFL, NRL, and Telstra were ordered to pay Optus’ court fees.

Again, at the crux of the judge’s ruling on this was that he saw no essential difference in what Optus was doing with what people everywhere do to record their favorite shows, news, or games with their own personal equipment, like DVRs.

Of course, there will be appeals, and the court had not decided on the legality of Optus livestreaming that TV content to mobile devices — on whether or not that constituted a violation of copyright laws. Likely, this decision will drag on in appeals for the foreseeable future. Just as Cablevision’s case did. But, the implications could be seen clearly in the headlines bouncing around the Web, with some saying the ruling completely “changed the face of TV and Internet broadcasting.”

Well, in the Land Down Under at least.

The point is that these are examples (Cablevision/Optus) of two distinct, federal judicial systems finding no real significance to where digital recording happens, in the cloud, in a box, on a table, or from beneath the sea. As long as only one copy of the content being recorded is made, and it is only viewed by the person licensing that box (or in the case of Aereo, that pair of antenna), and thus not redistributed outside of that home, well … you see where I’m going.

There is, of course, no doubt that the broadcast networks aren’t following the same logic here, and their gold-plated legal teams will no doubt raise hell for Aereo. But, the fact of the matter is that Aereo seems to have a real shot to win this case, which could have a very real, very significant effect on digital TV broadcasting on the Web in this country.

That being said, there’s a very good chance that, even if Aereo wins the initial ruling, it’ll get so bogged down in appeals and legal issues over the next 1, 3, maybe 5 years that they never get a fair shot at building an empire. How far can $20 million go? Farther when you have Barry Diller on your team, but maybe not far enough? However, a victory would open the door, and give consumers of a shaky industry hanging by threads the real kick they need to cut the cord once and for good.

Why? Because you’re a human being, and you’re mad as hell and you’re not gonna take it anymore!

Gadgets Week In Review: Window Walking

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 01:00 AM PST
Posted by Ateev at 11:07 PM

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