The Tech Pages

Apple’s OffTheCharts iPhone And iPad Sales

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:21:15 +0000

Sometimes you have to see things to truly appreciate their magnitude. Apple’s latest quarter was so massive that MG had to write two posts about it: $46 billion in revenues, 37 million iPhones sold, 15 million iPads. The chart above, which comes from Asymco (see a fully interactive version here), shows how unusual this quarter was for Apple.

Google Facebook Privacy — And You

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:48:30 +0000

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Like millions of other people, I got an email from Google this morning. It was entitled “Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service”. The first sentence describes the intent of the changes as shortening 60 policies into one, and improving their readability. Then there is a longer explanation captured in the graphic above. The email goes on to assert that Google has not changed its privacy policy and will not sell our personal information to third parties – “Our privacy policies remain unchanged”. So what is going on here? Facebook is the shiny object that Larry is focused on. This is a week where Sheryl Sandberg – Chief Operating Officer at Facebook – spoke at Hubert Burda’s DLD conference in Munich and stated that we were in the middle of 3 trends. First, a trend “from anonymity to real identity”. Secondly, a trend from “wisdom of crowds to wisdom of friends” and third, a trend “from being receivers of information to broadcasters of information”. See the video below for the actual points she made. It was a thoughtful and at the same time a polemical speech, a speech with a strong point of view. In thinking about Google’s privacy policy changes it helps to listen to Sheryl’s remarks and reflect on the context. Facebook is saying that the Internet as a pure information retrieval mechanism is dead. That the “readwrite” web that began as long ago as cheap web site hosting in 1998, has entirely replaced the read-only web. That the identifiable author has replaced the anonymous one. We are broadcasting and we are identifiable. That reading what friends say is now dominant in that world. Facebook envisages a future in which we all broadcast almost everything to almost everybody. Google’s problem. In that world, Google’s PageRank algorithm is seriously out of date. It promotes pages based on the number of links to it. Today, pages are no longer the unit of publishing. Far smaller items than a page dominate our senses. And those smaller messages are produced in huge quantity and in real time. So the signals that make something relevant have now changed. Facebook (and Twitter) have oodles of such signals. Google, until recently, had none. Google’s solution. The changes

FounderSoup Stanford and Andreessen’s New Startup Generator

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:22:40 +0000

A single entrepreneur alone is vulnerable to shortsightedness, to fatigue. But with a team comes diverse perspective, encouragement, and the wherewithal to push through problems. That’s why a group of Stanford computer science and business students started the Andreessen Horowitz-backed FounderSoup program. It’s designed to give entrepreneurs with an idea or a fledgling company a chance to pitch — not to raise funding, but to recruit co-founders.

At its first full-scale event on Thursday night I saw an effective model for fostering startups, and several brilliant ideas in healthtech and energy (reviewed here) that could turn into successful companies.

10 Ways Your Startup Can Hook Into Facebook Part I On The Web

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:58:52 +0000

Having already covered how startups can use search and Twitter to find customers, here’s 10 steps for finding people on another key marketing platform: Facebook

Facebook has evolved from a social network into the fabric with which much of the web is constructed: identity, product, data, experience and so on. Even if you chose to no longer use it as a social destination, you would still find immense value in it through your every-day web usage: registration, personalization, sharing, interaction, etc.

Let’s Get Personalized Moving Beyond Recommendations

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:31:51 +0000

Hank Nothhaft is the co-founder and chief product officer of Trapit, a personalized content discovery platform currently in beta. Trapit was incubated at SRI and the CALO project.

eBay’s recent acquisition of the recommendation service Hunch was an important score for the online retailer, giving it a way to mine the ever-mounting mounds of structured and unstructured data for more relevant and accurate consumer recommendations.

Gillmor Gang 01.28.12 TCTV

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:30:37 +0000

The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — debut the latest Google catchphrase to replace Do No Evil: We Really Don’t Care!

@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks, @tinagillmor

Motorola Droid Razr Maxx Review 4G LTE With Solid Battery Life Just Got Real

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:22:33 +0000

The Droid Razr Maxx by Motorola is a very special phone. You see, I had a bit of a thing for the Droid Razr when it first came out, but it wasn’t quite perfect. It felt a bit light, and I had trouble holding it in my hand since it was so big and so thin at the same time. Plus, battery life was a bust. It wasn’t awful, but it only lasted about nine hours, meaning most people would need to bring a charger along every day.

The Droid Razr Maxx throws all those problems into the trash can, and only gains about 18g and 1.89mm in return.

Apple Buy Hollywood That’s A Terrible Idea

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 01:53:13 +0000

Apple should not use its $100 billion in cash to buy, or buy into Hollywood. While it would most assuredly (ahem, cough) disrupt the system, it would not spur the kind of creative chaos and innovation that would lead to the Emerald City of any show, on demand, for free, to rent, or buy, or subscribe, and organized by taste or popularity, or you! In fact, Apple buying into Hollywood, would actually kill Hollywood. Here’s why:

Curebit Apologizes for Copying 37Signals “Stupid Lazy and Disrespectful”

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 01:41:16 +0000

That’s awkward: Just as it was announcing a $1.2 million round of funding, online referral startup Curebit was caught lifting designs and code from 37Signals, the company behind popular collaboration tools Basecamp, Highrise, and others.

The copying was called out on Twitter by 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson, who, after an exchange with Curebit co-founder Allan Grant, called the Curebit team “fucking scumbags.” It probably didn’t help that Grant’s initial responses didn’t seem particularly contrite — he defended the copying as a “quick test” and at one point told Heinemeier Hansson, “Chill dude ” (VentureBeat has a great blow-by-blow account of the initial controversy.)

Kindle Sales Growing Faster Than The Nook’s

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:20:23 +0000

Barnes & Noble may be challenging Amazon’s dominance of the e-book world, but the Kindle sales are still growing faster than the Nook’s — at least if you connect the dots between some of the numbers included in a recently-published article by The New York Times.