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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Review: The Archos Gen10 101 XS Android Tablet

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 09:15 AM PDT

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Short Version: Want the Microsoft Surface without the Microsoft? Archos may have the device for you. This unique tablet/keyboard combo turns itself from traditional slate into an Android-powered ultralight in a few simple steps. Best of all, it’s going to get Jelly Bean in Q4 2012 so your investment, at least for a few months, will be sound.

The cons? It’s a little chintzy, a little underpowered, and the screen tops out at 1280 x 800 pixels. But can Archos, a stolid and staid tablet maker, create a breakaway hit?

Features:

  • Built-in keyboard
  • 10-inch LCD screen
  • OMAP 4470 CPU with PowerVR SGX544 GPU
  • 16GB Storage/MicroSD Slot
  • MSRP: $399

Pros:

  • Interesting, usable form factor
  • Inexpensive laptop replacement
  • Slim even with keyboard cover

Cons:

  • Doesn’t support Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) yet
  • Underpowered for many apps
  • Potentially fragile stand mechanism

You’re at your coffee purveyor of choice. You pull out what looks like a white slab of plastic and pull it apart. A few quick movements and you’ve placed one half of the slab on the table and pulled up a small stand. You fit the other half of the slab into an indentation and it connects automatically with powerful magnets. You begin typing as if you were on a real laptop and the customers sitting around you eye you admiringly and a little bit lasciviously. You are the hero of the cafe.

This life could be yours if you pick up the Archos Gen10 101 XS, a $400 tablet from Archos that doubles as a real ultralight laptop. In general, the 101 XS is a run-of-the-mill Android tablet with a twist. The XS joins the Asus Transformer as one of the first tablets to ship with a fully-fledged keyboard that turns the slate into an ultralight notebook in seconds. The question, then, is whether that is a good thing.

In my time with this tablet I’ve come to appreciate the 101 XS in theory if not in practice. Archos has done a great job of integrating the keyboard with this tablet and making it clear that you’re supposed to use this thing in ultralight mode. Powerful magnets hold the keyboard on the screen until you pull them apart and prepare them for docking. You then lift a little leg up out of the keyboard and drop the screen into a groove that is also magnetically active. At this point, the screen is pretty much stuck there until you decide to pull the whole thing apart. You can lift it, swing it around, and even pull it forward. The system will hold.

It is important to note that you must orient the tablet in landscape mode to attach it to the keyboard. You simply can’t stand this up in portrait mode because the edges are slightly rounded and the power and volume buttons are on the right side.

The build quality on the prototype model I tested was very good. The entire thing is clad in white plastic with metal inserts and the entire package fits together seamlessly. I honestly wouldn’t recommend carrying the device without the keyboard as it doesn’t take up much room and it acts as a screen protector when closed. The tablet weighs 21 ounces and is 0.31 inches thick.

The device has an HDMI out as well as microUSB on the side next to a microSD card slot. The keyboard can charge the tablet via a microUSB cable although it does not contain a built-in external battery.


The keyboard itself comes in the standard Chiclet-style that will be familiar to those already using tablet keyboards. There’s not much key travel and all of the keys except for shift, caps lock, enter, space, and tab are the same size. It has a very standard front-facing webcam that is so uninteresting that they don’t even describe its specs. It’s good for video chatting and that’s about it.


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The tablet runs a completely stock version of Ice Cream Sandwich and Archos promises upgradability to Jelly Bean at the end of the year. Given the hardware, the system is perfectly serviceable as a text editing and social media machine. Try to do anything else and you’re going to run into problems.

The tablet scored 1379 in Geekbench, which is fairly solid for an Android tablet. Considering the Nexus 7 maxes out at 1600, a score of 1379 should be just fine. Unfortunately, titles like Asphalt 6 HD stuttered during gameplay and the device lagged once you began opening and closing applications.

That’s fine, however, because the package includes OfficeSuite 6.1 Pro, a fairly capable office app that’s compatible with Word and Excel. Here is where the entire thing shines. Coupled with the keyboard you literally have a small word processing machine coupled with a spreadsheet and presentation editor. If you bought this to, say, play HD games, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. If you bought it to do work on the road, you could invest in worse.

The Good

The battery on the 101 XS is good, topping out at about one and a half days of mixed use. This drops precipitously when playing games or watching video but expect a good 5 hours of video time and about a day of regular use as a laptop/slate reader. Archos says they hit about 10 hours of regular web browsing although I saw about 12.

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Because the software is bog standard, what we’re really looking at is the hardware and I’m pleased to say the docking system is quite clever and very usable. As an ultralight laptop this thing is more than acceptable for basic office tasks and could replace a very low-end laptop in your bag.

It’s a clever, cool convertible tablet that attests to Archos’ willingness to experiment in the space.

The Bad

Archos is really good at making solid, boring devices. For years they made PMPs (until that market fell through) and now they make tablets. The 101 XS is clearly a flagship device this year but I worry that folks looking at other tablets – including the iPad – will find less to love in this one. First the screen is acceptable, but is built at such a low resolution that any other tablet looks amazing in comparison. Sure, there are plenty of 1280 x 800 pixel screens out there and at the price it’s still a good deal. However, if I’m going to be staring at a screen for hours editing and writing, I’d prefer a bit higher resolution.

Availability will also anger many. The device will be available in Europe in mid-September and then North America in November. By that time this thing will be an also-ran. Considering the planned Jelly Bean upgrade won’t happen until Q4 holidays I suspect Asus, HTC, and Samsung will run circles around this device, not to mention the Microsoft Surface which lands in October.

The 101 XS, then, feels like an experiment. It’s a successful one, to be clear, but its rarely wise to invest in a company’s trial balloon. I have a feeling that Surface-style devices will be the Next Big Thing™ in CE and this is just the beginning.

The model I used exhibited a few problems. For one, the metal skin scratched quite easily. A varnish will be applied to final versions to prevent this, but it was pretty egregious. The build quality is solid but nothing special. It’s not going to fall apart on you, but it’s not going to win any beauty contests.

You can also recreate this device with an iPad quite easily with a Keyboard cover. Although Archos will argue that you pay more to outfit an iPad like this, you also get more. The screen is better and the iWork apps are notably superior. Similar keyboards can be had for almost any Android tablet out there, including the Nexus 7. Arguably this case/tablet combo exists in a contiguous whole, so that’s a benefit.

The Bottom Line

It almost feels as if any overt recommendation would be moot in this case as the tablet will be facing stiff competition in the U.S. next quarter. However, if you’re in Europe feel free to check it out and compare it to similar offerings from other tablet manufacturers. It’s a bit underpowered but the price – a low $399 – and size make it a very interesting alternative to even an ultralight laptop with similar processor firepower.

The experiment here is a success. It’s up to you to decide whether this form factor is something you’re looking for in a tablet, especially considering upcoming alternatives in the space. I could definitely see myself using it on a short weekend trip if I had some Word work to do but beyond documents, presentations, and some spreadsheets, you may want to look elsewhere.

Y Combinator Alum BigCalc Makes Hadoop Easier for High Frequency Trading Firms

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

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Wall Street has been dealing with big data since before it was a thing. But the rise of algorithmic and high frequency trading is making big data even bigger and has led many firms to adopt the same free open source tools that tech startups and scientific researchers are using, according to Dharmesh Malam, CEO and co-founder of the Y Combinator alum BigCalc.

Many firms are using mathematical programming environments like R and MatLab, but those tools don’t scale well enough Malam says. So firms are adopting Apache Hadoop, the open source big data crunching system modeled on technology pioneered at Google. Hadoop distributes data across clusters of inexpensive servers. The MapReduce framework, a component of Hadoop, makes it possible to harness the collective power of these servers to solve difficult mathematical problems. But writing MapReduce jobs is hard, even for experienced programmers. BigCalc developed a framework called QuantCalc for programming on Hadoop using R without MapReduce specifically for programmers at high frequency and algorithmic trading firms.

There are other ways of using R with Hadoop, including RHadoop from Revolution Analytics and RHIPE. But Malam says QuantCalc is different in that it translates normal R code into the C++ programming language, which is much faster than R. Also, existing R on Hadoop solutions still require programmers to write MapReduce jobs in R, but QuantCalc abstracts that away and lets you write normal R code.

Malam and fellow co-founders Rikin Shahand and Chris Roebuck all met while studying computer science at Imperial College in London. After graduation they went on to work for different firms. Malam worked at Blackrock and later Fidelity London. Shahand worked for UBS. Roebuck worked for Barclays Capital’s Fund Solutions and later Credit Suisse’ Algorithmic Trading desk. Eventually they realized that they all had similar problems with scalability of R and usability of Hadoop and decided to start a company that solved that problem.

For now the product is geared entirely towards the problem domain of algorithmic trading and high frequency trading. Malam says that going after a particular domain make it possible to translate normal R code into MapReduce C++ code effectively. And the team’s knowledge of the industry make them uniquely suited to designing such a vertical solution. And of course the team’s contacts and credentials in the industry will make it easier for them to landing meetings with customers.

But he says eventually they’d like to expand their product to the broader financial market and beyond.

Lumosity Raises $31.5M From Discovery Communications For Brain Fitness Games

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 08:59 AM PDT

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Lumosity, a company that creates online fitness games, has raised $31.5 million in Series D funding from Discovery Communications with existing investors Menlo Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Harrison Metal and Norwest Venture Partners are also participating in the funding. This brings Lumosity’s total funding to over $70 million to date.

Created by neuroscientists from Stanford University, Lumosity develops games and exercises that aim to improve core cognitive abilities and enable users to remember more, think faster and perform better at work and school.

Lumosity currently has 40-plus games that focus on memory, attention, flexibility, speed of processing and problem solving. On average, Lumosity users experienced a greater than 10% improvement in working memory and greater than 20% improvement in divided attention after 10 hours of playing the brain games.

The company says it currently holds the world’s largest database of human cognitive performance; and it analyzes this massive amount of data to learn more about the human brain.

In the last four years over 25 million people have joined Lumosity, with 10 million joining in the last year alone. The company has paying subscribers from over 180 countries, has expanded to mobile with an iPhone app, and revenues have grown 25% quarter-over-quarter since its launch in 2007.

The new funding will be used towards further research into human cognitive performance, expanding reach and marketing and branding.

TriPlay Rakes In $15M And A New Oligarch Investor To Take Its Consumer Cloud To Europe + Asia

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 08:50 AM PDT

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TriPlay, a U.S./Israeli-based developer of cloud services that lets people consume music and other media across different devices, is today announcing a Series C round of $15 million to take its technology into new and emerging markets in Asia and Europe, and hire more people, including a CMO. Some $5 million of the funding comes from new investor Kenges Rakishev, a Kazakh businessman who has made millions in petrochemicals and more and is now using some of the proceeds to back tech companies. The rest comes from angel investors, including the CEO and founder Tamar Koch.

Users of TriPlay’s cross-platform streaming services number in the hundreds of thousands of users; with partners like Pelephone Musix and Conduit SendSMS, the figure goes up to 11.8 million. Now, the idea behind extending to emerging markets is that smartphone and tablet takeup is in earlier stages, which feature phones still driving sales for companies like Samsung and Nokia. This is rapidly changing, and given that smartphones and tablets have been major driver for cloud service uptake, it’s a good moment to pick up new users who are just starting to need those kinds of solutions.

That opportunity is one of the things that caught the eye of Rakishev. “TriPlay is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the growth in mobile usage and global demand for cloud services,” he said in a statement. Rakishev’s other investments include Net Element, which publishes a number of mobile sites but is also now planning to launch a mobile commerce service in Eastern Europe, so you can see the investment pattern here. Rakishev sits on the board of both companies.

While companies like Apple and Google have been developing their own cloud-storage and access services to complement their larger mobile businesses, TriPlay has benefitted from others having less developed strategies. Its flagship product, MyMusicCloud, has had particularly strong pick-up among BlackBerry users, helped in part because it was a featured app on RIM’s App World; it is also the only music-synching service preloaded on Toshiba’s tablets and personal computers. It integrates Dropbox and Google Drive among its storage options. At the moment, TriPlay says that Android and BlackBerry are its top-two most popular platforms for usage, but it benefits in general from fragmentation in the market, with users (Apple fanboys and girls excluded) rarely looking only to one platform for all their products.

CEO Tamar Koch says the company will also be looking for more partnerships with local players as part of its growth. TriPlay is the third startup founded by Koch: Orca Interactive was sold to Emblaze in 2000; Dotomi was sold to ValueClick in 2011.

In addition to letting users stream and update music collections across connected devices, MyMusicCloud also offers a catalog of 11 million songs, song lyrics and ringtones. Users can use the the service to share music on Facebook. The service supports 23 different languages.

MyDigipack, meanwhile, is a photo storing and sharing service that works much the same way as the music offering. It opened in beta earlier this year.

Mendeley’s Open API Approach Is On Course To Disrupt Academic Publishing

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 08:15 AM PDT

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Science and academia have to date been a little slower to react to the vast changes going on in the business world as we move to the cloud, big data and third-party app ecosystems. Most academic online networks remain locked up by academic publishers with expensive licensing agreements for universities. But that’s starting to change. The science publishing division of corporate giant Elsevier has created its own (closed) platform for apps to be built upon looking at the meta data around scientific journals. That data can range from how many times an academic paper is read, who reads it, and even to how influential each paper is considered to be in scientific circles.

On the other side is the three-year old upstart Mendeley. And the difference between the way it and Elsevier approaches the academic world is thrown into sharp relief today with the news that Mendeley’s third-party app eco-system is fast approaching three times the size of Elseviers’. This amounts to the difference between an open and closed approach to apps.

Mendeley’s ecosystem has now produced over 240 research apps drawing on open data from its database under a Creative Commons license. Those generate more than 100 million API calls to Mendeley’s database per month. While Elsevier now has around 100 third-party apps using its platform, it’s clear Mendeley is winning in the apps stakes.

The information fueling this ecosystem is being produced by the scientific community itself, putting a social layer over each document and producing anonymised real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. The applications can cover research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup, and discovery.

Mendeley's API also adds information about related research documents and public groups on Mendeley that the document is being discussed in.

Mendeley's tools now touch about 1.9 million researchers, pooling 65 million documents and claims to cover 97.2% to 99.5% of all research articles published. By contrast commercial databases by Thomson Reuters and Elsevier contain 49 million and 47 million unique documents, respectively.

However, each year universities have to pay licenses running to tens of thousands of dollars to access those databases. Mendeley's database is free under a Creative Commons license.

It’s also the only one that allows third-party developers to build their own tools with the research data.

The most popular apps built on Mendeley's platform include ReaderMeter.org and Total-Impact.org. These display a researcher's or a labs' real-time impact on the academic community.

In theory you could even now produce a “Klout for academics” based on Mendeley’s data.

Another, Hojoki, pulls updates from Mendeley and other productivity tools like Evernote and Basecamp into a common newsfeed. Kleenk allows users to create free-form semantic links between documents in their Mendeley library and share them publicly. And OpenSNP makes the connection between raw genetic data and published research.

Meanwhile, Elsevier has been trying to build a similar thing to Mendeley but their philosophy is the exact opposite. The API is not an open access one, but paid-for and closed, open only to paying university customers. They have put a lot of marketing behind it, holding ‘hack days’ etc. Their third party apps have now reached around the 100 mark – although they do allow for easier monetisation while Mendeley’s are free.

But Mendeley’s focus on open apps has won plaudits from the likes of Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels (also a former research scientist) who calls the growth of Mendeley’s app ecosystem “stunning and transformational for science”. Perhaps it helps that it's largely run on Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

Mendeley is also monetising while trying not to limit its growth. It does not get a cut of revenues from apps built on its platform as its model is on freemium use of its data dashboard. That said, Dr. Victor Henning, CEO & Co-Founder of Mendeley say’s it now pulling in “tens of thousands of dollars” per month in revenue and has “plenty of runway” for the next couple of years.

It’s thus done some initial sales of its real-time research impact dashboard to academic institutions. The first customers of Mendeley's data dashboard include the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Nevada, Reno, the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Council Japan.

To date it’s raised over $2 million from Angels Stefan Glaenzer, Alex Zubillaga and Ambient Sound Investments, who have also invested in a follow on round.

Mendeley has also expanded by acquiring SciLife, a German social network for professionals in the scientific community, for an undisclosed amount.

That was an interesting move as it pits it against Academia, also a social network for scientists.

Perhaps it’s fair comment that Henning says Mendeley’s realtime API approach is better than the famous quote about science progressing “funeral by funeral”.

Social Network Tagged Raises $15M; Revenue Grew 35 Percent To $43M In 2011

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 08:08 AM PDT

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Tagged, a social network for meeting new people, has raised $15 million in growth capital financing from Lighthouse Capital Partners and Comerica Bank. The company previously raised $9 million in funding.

Tagged was on an acquisition tear in 2011, buying hi5, Digsby, TopicMarks and WeGame. These acquisitions expanded the network’s reach to over 300 million members in 220 countries.

The company, which is profitable, says it grew revenue by 35 percent to over $43 million in 2011. And Tagged doubled its staff last year as well.

"The Social Discovery category has just begun its high-growth trajectory," said Tagged's CEO Greg Tseng. "While we are profitable and don't need capital to fund operations, we are also opportunistic and will use these funds to further Tagged's leadership and innovation in the industry. The growth capital will also enable us to make additional strategic acquisitions, accelerating us toward our next 300 million members."

Earlier this year, Tagged started its renovations on gaming platform hi5, emphasizing social discovery (i.e., meeting new people, rather than just connecting with existing friends). Last year, Tagged also launched its own in-house development studio because it found that the games that did the best achieved the company's aims were built by Tagged itself.

The new funding will be used towards product development and acquisitions.



Bag Week: The Ogio Rivet Messenger Bag

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 07:18 AM PDT

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I do not like the pleather look of the Ogio Rivet. It’s degrading. Childish. Cheap. But damn do I love this bag, which is actually made out of shiny black canvas.

We have reviewed a lot of bags at TechCrunch and it’s always been clear that Ogio knows the secret formula to a great bag. The Ogio Rivet is no different. It offers plenty of space throughout the well-made bag with enough smart storage pockets to secure everything from an iPad to the most delicate portable electronics (there’s a crush proof pocket).

The Rivet is rather large. It can hold up to a 17-inch notebook and so it swallows whole my 15-inch MacBook Pro. In fact unlike most messenger bags, there’s enough room in this bag to hold a notebook computer and a large DSLR — plus it does so with ease. The bag has a fleece-lined outer pocket labeled for a notebook, but the computer could also easily go inside the bag’s main compartment.

Ogio brags that the Rivet has a capacity of 1350 cubic inches. That’s huge while not being too big. Thankfully, like most Ogio bags, there are pockets strategically placed throughout to hold one’s accoutrements. A new crush-proof pocket rests under the top flap, offering a lot of extra protection for one lucky gadget.

I loaded up the Rivet and carried the bag around town for a few days. It performs admirably. I’ve used an Ogio Hip Hop messenger bag for nearly five years now. It’s my go-to bag. The Rivet has all the qualities I love — smart storage, comfortable strap — with additional space and new features like the crush-proof pocket. I just don’t like the pleather look.

To be clear the Rivet is not made out of pleather but canvas coated in what appears to be a very thin layer of rubber — like waxed canvas but not. The pleather look is deceiving. It feels great to the touch and the coating should make the bag water-resistant.

At $150 the Rivet is a touch pricey. But having used several Ogio bags over the years, I can attest to the brand’s quality. Recommended.

Bag Week is our yearly celebration of laptop bags. Being that they are, for the most part, quite boring, we don't find it odd that most folks settle for janky bags they get free with their laptops. Therefore we've created Bag Week, a service for you proud men and women of the laptop carrying world. We'll be talking about a panoply of travel and back-to-school sacks and if you have a favorite you'd like featured, drop us a line at tips@techcrunch.com with the subject line BAG WEEK. You can read all of our bag week coverage here

AT&T Defends FaceTime Over 3G Decision, Says It Isn’t Violating Net Neutrality

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 07:13 AM PDT

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AT&T ruffled more than a few feathers last week when it announced that only customers on the carrier’s new Mobile Share plans would be able to use iOS 6′s FaceTime over 3G feature. Almost immediately, people began to wonder whether or not this course of action put AT&T at odds with the FCC’s stance on net neutrality.

The company waited until today to issue an official response — AT&T SVP Bob Quinn just recently took to the company’s Public Policy blog to explain how the decision doesn’t violate FCC rules, but not without jabbing that those who questioned it in the first place.

“…In another knee jerk reaction, some groups have rushed to judgment and claimed that AT&T's plans will violate the FCC's net neutrality rules. Those arguments are wrong.”

How so, Bob? First, I should note that he’s clearly referring to a statement released on Friday by John Bergmayer, a senior staff attorney with Public Knowledge. According to Bergmayer, AT&T’s plan violates the FCC’s Open Internet rules, specifically one that bars carriers from blocking “applications that compete with the provider’s voice or video telephony services.” Quinn doesn’t quite see it that way, and argues in his post that the provision is meant to keep providers from preventing the downloading of those apps. Since FaceTime is built directly into iOS 6, he seems to feel that it doesn’t fall under those particular guidelines.

Quinn also mentions that since AT&T plans to be fully transparent about “the network management practices, performance, and commercial terms of their broadband Internet access services,” so there’s apparently no net neutrality violation on that front either.

Later on in the post, Quinn touches on something that has been pretty obvious to everyone watching these events unfold. He notes AT&T is limiting use of the FaceTime over 3G feature out of “overriding concern for the impact this expansion may have on our network and the overall customer experience.” It’s a sad truth that AT&T’s data service can get pretty sketchy in certain high-traffic areas, and it’s little surprise that AT&T would want to try and mitigate the strain that incessant video calls could place on its network. Still, as Chris Ziegler at the Verge points out, that’s exactly why the carrier introduced tiered data plans in the first place — seems like a pretty flimsy argument to make at this point.

Nikon Reveals The Android-Powered Coolpix S800c, Its First Camera With An Identity Crisis

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 07:00 AM PDT

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Nikon put plenty of speculation to rest last night when it officially revealed the Coolpix s800c, the company’s first Android-powered digital camera. Thrilling, I know.

The Gingerbread-powered point-and-shoot features a 16-megapixel sensor, 10x optical zoom, and can shoot 1080p video to boot. Of course, all of that takes a backseat to the 3.5-inch LCD touch panel on the camera’s rear end, which allows users to fire up apps and browse the web (thanks to a nifty embedded Wi-Fi radio). Nikon plans to launch the chubby little guy in the U.S. with a $349 price tag next month, but I have to wonder how many people actually want a device like this.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for blurring the lines between product classes, but moving in some directions just seems to make more sense than moving in others. Smartphone producers like Apple and HTC have been pumping up the cameras in their devices because they know their users are going to be carrying the things around anyway. Giving those users (and potential customers, naturally) a solid way to capture the moments that unfold around them is a major selling point, and that’s not going to change any time soon.

What Nikon seemed to do here was go in the opposite direction — it’s like the company’s product development team looked at their crop of cameras and pondered how to make them more like those newfangled phones everyone’s always clamoring over. The end result seems to work well enough on a technical level (Imaging Resources has a great write-up of their time with the S800c), and though I have plenty of doubts only time will tell if the Android gimmick will play out as well as Nikon seems to hope.

Piston Cloud Airframe — A Free Starter Package For Building An OpenStack Cloud

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 06:30 AM PDT

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Piston Cloud has built a free OpenStack distribution that is promised to include what is needed to evaluate the open cloud environment.

To really create a cloud environment and to make it useful, you can’t have it dependent on someone else to do it for you But just to get a cloud environment up and running is a task. And that’s the challenge that OpenStack faces. How to get people from working on OpenStack to working with OpenStack as Piston Cloud CEO Josh McKenty said in an interview last week.

Piston Cloud is approaching the problem by combining all the necessary pieces that go into building an OpenStack cloud. That means it has the compute, storage, networking, management and platform as a service (PaaS).

Airframe is meant to serve as a starter kit of sorts to give OpenStack a try. It’s a software package that can run on any commodity server. It is primarily meant for development and test or evaluation. The full Piston Cloud service is available as an upgrade.

Here’s a comparison chart comparing Airframe with what you get in OpenStack and Piston Cloud enterprise edition:

Airframe comes packaged with Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS from VMware. Interesting to see this integration. VMware is not part of OpenStack but Cloud Foundry is becoming the defacto PaaS in the market.

Piston Cloud competes in the private cloud market with the likes of Eucalyptus Systems, Cloudstack and providers such as Rackspace.

Airframe makes sense as a way to evaluate OpenStack. It gives the company a bit of a head start in abstracting OpenStack’s complexity. My bet, though, is that most providers will be offering this kind of evaluation environment soon.  Piston Cloud’s biggest challenge will be in continuing to break down the complexity of OpenStack. Until then, scaling any kind of offering will be slow as most customers will need lots of attention to get up and going.

Piston Cloud will give out Airframe on USB sticks at VMworld. A free download will be available August 30 on the Piston Cloud web site.

YouTube Brings Its Skippable Video Ads To Mobile

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 06:09 AM PDT

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Back at the end of 2010, YouTube officially launched its video ad format that viewers can actually skip. Today, it says 65 percent of the ads that play before videos are now skippable — and given that growth, it’s not surprising that YouTube is bringing the format to mobile.

Group Product Manager Phil Farhi tells me YouTube started to launch more ad formats on mobile about a year ago. Until now, however, the ads that played before mobile videos were traditional pre-rolls — in other words, you couldn’t skip them. Other ad formats under the broader TrueView umbrella were transferred to mobile earlier, but not the TrueView in-stream video ads, i.e., the skippable ones.

“The broad goal here is around aligning user experience and advertiser goals in a way that delivers a more accountable advertising platform to advertisers and the brand, as well as a better user experience,” Farhi says. (The “accountable advertising platform” bit comes in because advertisers only pay for ads that aren’t skipped.) He adds, “That model, the concept of only paying for engaged viewers who have a choice in what they watch, really applies across screens.”

YouTube says it has conducted a few small tests prior of skippable ads on mobile, but starting today, all TrueView in-stream campaigns will be mobile-enabled, as controlled through the AdWords For Video dashboard. The challenge, Farhi says, has been making sure that the controls work on the smaller screens of mobile.

As YouTube starts running more mobile campaigns in this format, Farhi says it will be looking at the data to see if users engage differently with different types of ads depending on the platform — if they do, YouTube may try to help advertisers optimize their campaigns so that their promoting the best content for each platform.

Of course, the big news for YouTube has been the fact that the YouTube app won’t come pre-loaded on iOS 6. As a number of writers noted at the time, the move could end up being beneficial for Google, which hasn’t been able to monetize the videos viewed on the pre-installed iOS app through advertising. (Instead, all of its mobile monetization efforts have come through the mobile web and non-preloaded apps like Vevo.) So the switch to a YouTube app that’s made entirely by Google, and that users have to install, is probably paving the way for a bigger push in mobile monetization.

Money Talks: Ginger Software Raises Another $5.4M Led By Horizon, Harbor Pacific For Speech Apps

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 05:59 AM PDT

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The emergence of the Siri personal voice assistant on Apple’s iPhone has brought a rush of interest to the area of speech recognition and natural language technology, and one beneficiary of that has been Ginger Software, a developer of speech technology that is today announcing a round of $5.4 million, $5 million of which will come from from two big-name backers, Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures and Harbor Pacific Capital. The funding comes less than six months after Ginger announced a round of $6.3 million. Total backing for the company now stands at close to $21 million.

Netanel Jacobsson, CEO of Ginger, tells TechCrunch that the funding being announced today is an extension of that earlier Series D round and will be used to develop more products using the company’s natural language processing platform. As part of the deal, Frank Meehan from Horizons becomes a board member. The remaining $400,000 comes from current investors, says Ginger.

The company, founded in 2007, has built up some well-known services such as its real-time Proofreading grammar and spelling checker, a text-to-speech service and English-as-a-second-language products. These remain the core of its business today. (The company has an “embarrassments avoided”  query counter, currently at around 922 million.)

But it is the future of where that technology might go that is potentially most interesting: the existing products work on an intelligent platform that understands crazy accents and nuances in meaning (yes, we’re looking at you, Nuance), with consideration given to things like local idioms and metaphors, “helping you to communicate like a native speaker,” the company says.

It is this technology that Ginger is now implementing in a “number of products” that go beyond the existing ones that Ginger has created and productized today. Jacobsson declined to give a timeline for when these will be hitting the market. But he did confirm that the mobile implementations of existing products like the proofreading one will be coming to mobile “by the end of this year.”

“Currently we only have desktop and browser extensions but there is no question that mobile is where everything is going and we are working on a number or mobile products to address this opportunity,” he told TechCrunch.

The recent round of funding, it seems, was initiated by Jacobsson, who joined at the time of the last round in February. He’d cut his teeth at AOL (owners of TechCrunch) and Facebook, helping the social network build its user base outside of the U.S., and it seems that this round of funding will be used in a strategic way to make bridges for Israel-based Ginger to move to markets further East.

“Ever since I first started to work with Horizon Ventures while still at Facebook back in 2007, I knew that I wanted to work together with them again,” he said in a statement. “Horizon’s unique passion for education and artificial intelligence coupled with a unique global network (especially in Asia) and a very strong ‘can do’ approach, was our main reason for choosing them as an investor.”

For its part, Horizon is carving out a position for itself as a VC willing to put its money onto some of the more cutting-edge areas in tech, using big-data tools to make machines more human-like.

One of Horizon’s more recent investments included a stake in Affectiva, which has developed a technology for reading people’s emotions automatically and parsing that into information that can be used to figure out all sorts of things, such as how content “reads” in different parts of the world, or whether an ad is having the effect that the brand wanted. (In that case, Meehan also joined the board, as he has done here.)

“The Ginger team has developed a very clever natural language processing platform that breaks the context barrier, can understand the probable meaning of a written sentence and interpret the most probable intent of the user,” he said in a statement. “This is not a simple task by any means, and their tech puts Ginger into a very select group of companies leading the intersection of artificial intelligence and learning. “

In A Push For European Expansion, Tag Management Platform BrightTag Has Gobbled Up SiteTagger

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 05:32 AM PDT

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In a push to “rapidly expand” into Europe and the UK, BrightTag, a platform that enables site owners to manage their online marketing tags/pixels more effectively and unlock the data that visitors provide, has acquired Cardiff, UK-based SiteTagger for an undisclosed sum.

The move will also see SiteTagger’s founders — Stephan Briggs and Paul Newbury — exit the company to focus full time on their new venture, the data-centric digital services agency Yard Digital, although the two companies do plan to work together as part of BrightTag’s partner program.

The acquisition, claims U.S.-based BrightTag, makes it the largest provider of tag management solutions across the globe, citing clients that include Gap, JetBlue Airways, Sainsbury's, British Gas, ASDA and Boots. It competes with a host of other tag management offerings, of course, including TagMan, another European player which we’ve covered extensively in the past.

SiteTagger launched in 2009 to help brands manage and deploy analytics, affiliate tracking and to provide other digital marketing services.

As for BrightTag’s European plans. It says that, along with the acquisition of SiteTagger, which forms the “centrepiece” of its strategy, it’s already made “significant” investment in client services, sales and marketing staff, including appointing James Sandoval as its SVP & Managing Director EMEA, where he’ll be charged with integrating the two companies and helping BrightTag grow this side of the pond.

BrightTag is VC-funded to the tune of $23 million (CrunchBase).

PayPal Partners With Discover To Bring In-Store Payments Platform To 7M Merchants In 2013

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 05:30 AM PDT

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PayPal has been steadily expanding its newly launched in-store payments platform to specific retailers, including Home Depot, Abercrombie & Fitch, JC Penney, Jamba Juice and a number of other retailers. But today, the payments giant is announcing a huge partnership which should help expand the presence of its payments platform in merchants and stores in a more meaningful way. PayPal is partnering with credit card company Discover to bring PayPal’s offline payments experience to more than 7 million merchant locations across the U.S., and potentially to millions of international merchant locations in the future.

Beginning in 2013, Discover will work with PayPal to enable merchants who accept Discover through the company’s terminals, to accept PayPal. The integration, were told by Don Kingsborough, PayPal's Vice President of Retail, will be similar in functionality to the PayPal implementations in retail stores.

So for merchants, anyone who uses Discover’s network and accepts the credit cards, will be able to turn on PayPal’s in-store integration to offer consumers a way to pay with their PayPal account. To offer PayPal, merchants will not have to install or upgrade existing point­ of ­sale hardware or software and consumers will know of this additional payments option through in-­store signage.

Basically, customers can either use a PIN code via their mobile phones or a special PayPal credit card that can be swiped, in order to deduct the payment from their PayPal accounts. The solution is appealing to retailers, because it doesn't require a significant investment in new technology, like replacing POS systems or installing some sort of NFC-based solution.

PayPal hasn’t yet released the pricing and rules for retailers, says Kingsborough. He tells us of the partnership, “This speeds up the ability to gain near ubiquity with merchants, so that consumers can use PayPal everywhere they shop.”

As part of the deal, Discover will be helping market the new integrations with specialized stickers and notifications for consumers in stores. Financial terms were not disclosed by either company. While Discover is one of the smaller credit card companies behind Visa, MasterCard and American Express, but PayPal says Discover is at about 95 percent of the US retail locations that Visa and MasterCard are accepted.

“We’re delighted to enable PayPal’s efforts to provide their U.S. customers acceptance at millions of physical point­of­sale locations by leveraging our unique payment services assets. The establishment of this relationship is a major industry milestone, which will help shape the emerging payments landscape by bringing together an established direct banking and payments company with a leading commerce enabler to create an alternative payments option for consumers at the point of sale,” said Diane Offereins, President of Discover Payment Services in a release. "This initiative will result in real change and innovation for the industry by bringing new technologies to the point of sale that benefit merchants and PayPal customers.”

And Kingsborough says that it’s unlikely that a similar deal will be struck with other credit card companies, including MasterCard or Visa. “We have a close relationship with Discover now, and we have solved the distribution problem in the U.S.,” he explains. He added, however, that there could be the possibility of partnering with another credit card company outside of the U.S.

Discover has been looking to expand its mobile wallet and in-store partnerships of late. Earlier this year, Discover announced a deal with BillToMobile to allow Discover's e-commerce merchants carrier billing as an option. The credit card company just announced a partnership with Google, allowing Discover customers to save their cards to Google Wallet. Discover now uses Google's Save to Wallet API to allow its cardmembers to save their credit card directly to their Wallet account from Discover's online account center.

For wallets providers like PayPal, partnerships with credit cards can help with expansion, marketing, reach, branding and more. For PayPal, the potential expansion to 7 million merchants is a big win (although it’s unclear yet how many of Discover’s merchants will choose to accept PayPal). And PayPal is in early stage testing with McDonald’s for an in-store payments implementation.

Typesafe Raises $14M From Shasta, Greylock, And Juniper To Commercialize Scala

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 04:30 AM PDT

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Typesafe, a company that makes it easy to build and deploy software built on the Scala software language, has raised $14 million in Series B funding led by Shasta Ventures with Juniper Networks (the Junos Innovation Fund), Greylock Partners and François Stieger (former executive at Verisign, Broadvision, and Oracle) participating.

Essentially, Typesafe does for Scala what Cloudera does for Hadoop. The company was actually founded by the creators of the Scale and Akka programming languages. The Typesafe Stack, which is compatible with Java, combines the Akka middleware framework, the Play web framework, and the Scala programming language.

It can be used for building large-scale, data-rich applications in Java and Scala and can scale to large workloads in cloud computing and virtualized enterprise datacenter environments. The company's Typesafe Subscription complements the Typesafe Stack with commercial support, maintenance, and operations tools. The startup also offers training and consulting services to help organizations and companies adopt Akka, Play, and Scala.

As Jason Pressman, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures explains, there is a “massive market adoption of Scala,” and Typesafe is in a good position to help take advantage of this trend.

So why would a company use Scala? CEO Mark Brewer tells is that Scala is a fully-functional and object-driven programming language that provides a more expressive way of typing code. "Typesafe allows developers to effectively develop robust applications that address the dual challenges of large-scale distributed "cloud computing" applications and massively multicore hardware platforms while still integrating seamlessly with the Java infrastructure," said Pressman.

With $4 Billion In Assets Under Wraps, FutureAdvisor Raises Another $5 Million From Sequoia Capital

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 04:30 AM PDT

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It’s been about two years since FutureAdvisor launched to advise people in managing their 401(k)s and other retirement accounts. In that time, it’s grown dramatically, and now analyzes $4 billion in retirement funds. With that in mind, the startup has raised a $5 million Series A round from Sequoia Capital to accelerate its growth, and it’s also rolling out a new tool to help users save on fees in their 401(k) portfolio.

FutureAdvisor co-founder Bo Lu told me that only the very rich can afford to hire professional investment advisors. But here’s the catch: Humans are notoriously bad at beating the market. Not only do they pick stocks poorly, Lu said, but they “charge you for the privilege of bad advice.” FutureAdvisor believes that it can do better, and has built a platform to help users make better investment decisions.

While it’s been around for about two years, FutureAdvisor only launched publicly about four months ago. Even so, it’s gotten some serious traction, as it now makes recommendations for more than 11 million Americans’ 401(k) accounts. That’s $4 billion in assets, and in aggregate, it expects to save those users up to $50 million projected over their lifetimes. It does that by suggesting better-performing investments for its users.

With growth like that, it’s no wonder Sequoia, after leading FutureAdvisor’s seed round, has put additional money into the startup. This round adds $5 million more to the startup’s coffers. Other investors include Square COO Keith Rabois and Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

In addition to the funding, FutureAdvisor announced a new feature that could help users save even more money, by showing them how much they’re losing in fees. Thanks to new disclosure regulations requiring companies to tell investors about fees associated with their offerings, FutureAdvisor has introduced a new 401(k) fee analyzer. It visualizes the amount of money paid out to mutual fund providers who manage various funds, and makes suggestions for other, similar investments that don’t carry the same fees. The new tool is available at www.futureadvisor.com/401k.

CouchSurfing Raises $15 Million Series B From General Catalyst Partners, Others

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 04:30 AM PDT

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CouchSurfing announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series B Round from General Catalyst Partners, Menlo Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network.

The new funding brings the social travel network's total funds raised in the past year to $22.6 million. CEO Tony Espinoza tells me the company now has nearly 5 million users in more than 93,000 cities after a very successful summer.

Along with its first-impression use of hosting travelers, CouchSurfing boasts over 40,000 interest groups that host activities. The company claims its users have had over 10 million face-to-face experiences in the past year.

"We were not 'in need of money,'" Espinoza says, explaining that the company was looking to raise in the next few years and the timing ended up working out now. He adds that the company now has the support to stay independent for the long term.

Espinoza joined the company 5 months ago and has focused on "building an amazing toolkit for travelers." He says CouchSurfing has "quite a bit" of infrastrucutral work to complete to support the next wave of growth.

"The growth will come, as it always has, by word of mouth," he says, noting that it will remain "a grassroots movement" with the capital and technology to support growth.

"The future of CouchSurfing is in this community," Managing Director of Menlo Ventures Shervin Pishevar tells me. "I think that's going to be quite a competitive advantage when you compare it to Airbnb. CouchSurfing turns Airbnb into a hotel chain, to me. Because they don't have that community."

Espinoza says the company will be rolling out new mobile and website features, including a new code base to increase speed and reliability and deliver more customized search results, starting in September.

Chasing Apple? Microsoft’s NeoMedia QR Code Patent Deal Puts More Focus On Geometric Boxes

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 04:24 AM PDT

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Following in the footsteps of Apple getting ready to launch its QR Code-based Passbook service, it looks like Microsoft is also giving some attention to QR Codes, the mobile barcodes that, when scanned, trigger actions like visiting websites or opening other content: NeoMedia, one of the early movers in this field, announced that Redmond has signed a worldwide licensing deal for all 74 of NeoMedia’s registered and pending QR code patents, covering ”many mobile barcode implementations used widely across the industry.” Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The move could suggest a possible new chapter for QR Codes. Critics have highlighted QR Codes for being ridiculous and never used – but they will be central to Apple’s Passbook ticket/coupon proto-wallet service that will be released in iOS6 later this year, and that could lead to more usage elsewhere, too.

But if that’s the case, it’s not clear how and if the Microsoft deal will be a part of that.

Microsoft could be licensing these patents because it wants to use the technology further in upcoming applications. But it could equally be because NeoMedia has approached the company over potential patent violations in existing services.

Microsoft has been pushing its own, competing Tag mobile barcode service, although late last year it announced that its Tag reader would become interoperable with QR Codes, as well as NFC.

NeoMedia is not a stranger to enforcing its patents. In April it filed a suit against mobile marketing company SpyderLynk for QR Code patent infringement: SpyderLynk actually uses pictures rather than scrambled codes that users can use to access further information, products — and potentially more.

The company behind that suit, as well as the Microsoft deal, is Global IP Law, which inked a deal last year with NeoMedia to help monetize its patent portfolio.

In the short announcement of the deal, NeoMedia did not disclose how these patents would be used — just how important IP is right now.

“The agreement between NeoMedia and Microsoft underscores the importance of intellectual property to our growing industry,” said Laura Marriott, CEO of NeoMedia, in a statement. “As mobile barcodes become a key fixture in the mobile marketing mix, it is important for stakeholders across the industry to ensure the solutions they employ leverage the relevant intellectual property in a responsible manner.”

The focus on patents comes as NeoMedia faces some issues monetizing its technology in other ways. According to its quarterly results for the period that ended June 30, NeoMedia had 25 million installs of its QR Code-reading app across iOS, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia devices — but revenues were down to $461,000 for the last quarter, from $767,000 a year ago.

NeoMedia says its current customers include handset manufacturers, platform providers, brands and agencies.

Companies like Apple and NeoMedia are pushing against very low market take-up. This year, research indicates that only about 11% of mobile-using adults will scan a QR Code, and among those only 60% will scan one more than once. Apple could also be looking at ways of making mobile barcodes more engaging, recently winning a patent that links the scanning directly with a “shopping list” purchasing action.

Storage Provider Nutanix Raises $33 Million And Shows Signs Of Readying For An IPO

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 04:00 AM PDT

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Nutanix has raised $33 million in a Series C funding round. The investment comes from investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures along with new investors Battery Ventures and Goldman Sachs.

The round gives Nutanix a total of $71 million in funding and positions the company for a potential IPO.

Nutanix plays in the software defined storage space — a relatively new category that reflects the considerable disruption in the overall storage market. Virtualization is so predominant that new forms of storage are required that can store the data from virtual machines.

Enterprise customers have long kept storage separate from the servers – faceless in many respects, administered by different teams that allocate storage as needed. Nutanix takes a different approach. It wraps that storage into commodity x86 servers, helping reduce the space needed for big box storage attached networks (SAN) and networked attached storage (NAS) environments.

Nutanix is riding a wave in convergence that comes as companies seek to consolidate their data centers while also increasing the speed and efficiency needed as data volumes increase in deeply virtualized environments.

The compute, the networking and the storage will increasingly be integrated right into the box itself. The new workloads demand it. Data increasingly moves from virtual machine to virtual machine as loads are directed across vast networks.

SAN and NAS systems from companies like NetApp and EMC have their strident followers but the new requirements of virtualized environments leave an open market for providers like Nutanix.

CEO Dheeraj Pandey said in an interview yesterday the company had a choice to package its technology itself as Apple does or make it available through original equipment manufacturer’s (OEM). They chose to take the Apple route. That has meant building out their own sales network. According to Pandey, the strategy has made it the fastest growing infrastructure startup of the past decade with 150 systems sold and 600 servers deployed with more than 3.3 petabytes of storage.

That growth is in part due to the relationship that Nutanix has with Fusion-io, the wildly popular server attached flash storage provider that is integrated into Nutanix systems.

Fusion-io had its IPO last year. Pandey said you can read between the lines about an IPO for Nutanix. Hiring Goldman Sachs says it all.

Nutanix still faces a steep battle. It will use the $33 million in funding to build a sales and marketing channel network. The company will need it. Nutanix will compete with multi-billion dollar companies such as IBM and EMC. These are companies which have their own plans for the new storage market and the channels to bring those products to market.

Opera Q2: Sales Up 32% To $52.1M; Mobile Surges, Desktop Flat, Google Deal Stays Put

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 01:23 AM PDT

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Opera Software, the Norway-based Internet browser company, today reported Q2 2012 earnings that solidified the company’s strength in mobile, and ongoing weakness in desktop usage in the face of competition from Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browsers: revenues were $52.1 million, up 32% on Q1 2011 and just about beating analyst expectations of $51.5 million. Within that, revenue from mobile consumers was up 168%, while desktop consumers were flat. Net income has dropped to $4.1 million from $5.1 million a year ago.

And while we still are hearing no more news on this rumored deal with Facebook, Opera had other (less exciting) news about another partnership with a Silicon Valley giant: it has extended its partnership with Google for it to continue being the default search option on both Opera’s mobile and desktop browsers.

Opera says it now has 200 million people using its mobile browser, a rise of 47% compared to Q2 a year ago. The company, which has in the past boasted about being the most popular mobile browser, has more recently seen competition from both Android and Apple’s iOS Safari browser. Among smartphones, is now in third position at 19% of the market, says StatCounter.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Opera wants to build on its mobile position through partnerships with the likes of mobile carriers. That initiative is seeing mixed results. Opera says users of its white-label carrier browser, plus those who co-brand with Opera Mini, now number at 39.8 million, growth of 145%, but revenues in that business were actually down by 24% to $10.4 million, with carrier licensing revenues up by only 3% to $9.2 million.

Opera has been signing deals with operators in less developed markets — deals with VimpleCom (Russia), America Movil (Latin America) and Airtel (India) together open Opera’s market potential to another 600 million users — so the idea perhaps is that even if Opera is making less money on these deals in the short term, they will benefit in the long run. In any case, operator deals is an area that Opera says it will continue to pursue.

In desktop, subscriber takeup remained flat. It stands at 55 million at the moment. Interestingly, Opera seems to be monetizing them slightly better (largely through advertising): sales were at $15.7 million, up 22% over last year. The company is not at all giving up on this space, it says: the emphasis looking ahead will be trying to build up browser usage in Russia/CIS, where it happens to already have some traction with consumers as an  alternative browser to Chrome and IE. At the moment, worldwide, Opera has less than 2% of desktop browser share.

Advertising — where Opera has made a number of acquisitions such as Mobile Theory and 4th Screen (Feb 2012) and AdMarvel (Jan 2010) — is proving to be an increasingly significant part of Opera’s business mix. Revenues in this area were up by 450% to $13.5 million, partly as a result of this inorganic growth. Impressions on its advertising network are not growing proportionately. They were up 92% on last year to 102 billion. That implies Opera is doing a better job monetizing that ad growth.

“Opera expects to generate meaningfully more revenue from this business in 2012 compared to 2011, as Opera ramps up revenue directly from advertisers and ad agencies via its mobile advertising network subsidiaries, Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising, and capitalizes on AdMarvel’s strong position with premium USA publishers,” the company noted today.

Google default search deal. This is not a new partnership, but rather an extension, to 2014, of a relationship that has been in place since 2009, the company noted in a statement. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will remain in place as the default search option across all of Opera’s products globally — Opera Desktop, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini.

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed but Opera notes that it also includes “promotion of various Google products and services.” That looks like it may already be kicking off: in its quarterly results statement, Opera points out that one of its chief aims in the quarters ahead is to push its position as a browser on Android devices. If successful, that may impact Google’s browser share in the emerging markets where Opera does best — but that might be a tradeoff worth making: Google could still end up picking up more Android users, who would still be bringing in search traffic through the Opera browser partnership.
Posted by Ateev at 10:08 PM

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