Nokia’s troubles today will be all but forgotten come next year, according to Richard Kerris, Nokia’s global head of developer relations. By spring, he said during an interview in Sydney, Australia earlier today, people won’t talk about the problems the company is having now. That doesn’t mean the next months won’t be hard for Nokia, but in Kerris’ view, the company will come out of this phase stronger than ever before. → Read More
Traffic jams are annoying, but they are also responsible for extra CO2 emissions and plenty of wasted productivity. Greenway, Germany’s entry into Microsoft’s 10th Imagine Cup student technology competition in Sydney this week, wants to do nothing less than put an end to traffic jams. To do so, the three-person team has developed a mobile app, which is basically a very smart turn-by-turn navigation system, and a cloud-based routing and tracking service that ensures that drivers use streets as efficiently as possible. Ideally, the Greenway team says, its app can cut driving times during peak traffic hours by half. What’s cool about the service isn’t the impressive underlying technology, though, but also the team’s innovative business model. → Read More
The finals of Microsoft’ Imagine Cup, the world’s largest student technology competition, are taking place in Sydney this week and StethoCloud, the Melbourne-based home team, is definitely making a good case for Australia’s growing tech scene. The competition’s theme challenged students to build apps that “help solve the toughest problems” and the Australian team decided to tackle childhood pneumonia, which – despite the fact that it’s highly curable when detected early – sadly still kills more children than measles, malaria and HIV combined. The key to survival, says the Australian team, is to detect the illness early, but that’s obviously not easy for community health workers or unskilled staff in developing countries. → Read More
Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is probably one of the world’s best-known student technology competitions and Microsoft itself likes to call it “the world’s premier student technology competition.” Every year, thousands of local teams compete to represent their country in the finals. Over the last 10 years, over 1.65 million students from over 190 countries have participated in the event in some for or another. Ever since the first event in Barcelona, Microsoft has hosted the Imagine Cup in a different city around the world. This year, the event is taking place is Sydney, Australia, where about 350 jet lagged students from 75 countries descended on the city’s convention center today to register, fine-tune their presentations and kick the event off in style. → Read More
Nielsen today announced its 2012 mid-year SoundScan numbers for the U.S. and the trends look pretty familiar: digital album sales were up 14% compared to the same time period last year and digital track sales were up 6%. Overall, music sales were up 6%, though overall album sales were down a little bit (-0.6%), as the sales numbers of physical CDs continues to drop. Still, Nielsen says CD album sales still accounted for 61% of all album sales in the last six months. That’s down from 66% last year, but still higher than most of us who live in the digital world would expect. → Read More
Waze, the Israel-based social navigation and traffic service, today announced that it now has 20 million users. That’s quite a milestone for any startup, but what makes this number so impressive is that the company also announced that it added half of its users in the last six month and continues to grow quickly. Just in the last month, the company said, it added 1.8 million new users to its community. All of these users, said Waze, have used the app to drive over 3.2 billion miles so far. → Read More
The Google+ project is changing Google. Watching the keynotes at I/O this week, it was hard not to notice how Google has become a company that doesn’t just want to catalog the world’s information anymore. The company has decided that it wants to be “delightful,” that its products should have a touch of “magic” and that just giving us ten blue links isn’t enough anymore. → Read More
Gogobot, the social travel site that recently passed the 1 million registered user mark, just launched an interesting redesign this week that turn the site’s homepage into more of an interactive magazine experience with a focus on photos instead of the site’s previous text-heavy design. As Gogobot’s founder Travis Katz told me earlier this week, the Gogobot team noticed that its users didn’t just use the service to plan their trips and update their friends, but that many of them also used the service just to browse photos. This, said Katz, became especially clear after Gogobot launched its mobile app earlier this year and allowed users to share and create virtual postcards from their trips. → Read More
Twitter’s Bootstrap gives developers an easy to use, grid-based and responsive framework for quickly designing prototypes and basic web pages, as well as production-ready interactive sites. With Foundation, product design company ZURB offers a direct competitor to Twitter’s product and the company is launching version 3 of its framework. This new version, which the company just announced at Groupon’s Schmonference, is significantly easier to customize and, as ZURB tells us, almost all of the CSS code has been rewritten to make it more polished and easier to restyle and modify as well. The Foundation team also rewrote some of the grid system – which is really the heart of the framework. → Read More
Making money in the online content business isn’t always easy, especially for publishers and bloggers who don’t have a huge audience. Besides advertising, there aren’t too many options for online publishers and even though it looked like micropayments would offer a solution a few years ago, they never caught on with the public. Today, Grou.ps is taking a stab at solving this problem. It’s launching a new program called LoveBucks that allows users to buy a monthly subscription (starting at $2.95/month) and then users can spend this money by clicking on the LoveBucks widgets on sites that sign up for the program. → Read More
YouTube’s comment section isn’t exactly known for being a hotbed of in-depth intellectual conversations. One of the reasons for this, some would argue, is the fact that YouTube still lets people post comments using handles like ‘cutepuppies99′ without having to reveal your real identity. Starting today, however, you will have the option to use your Google-wide Google+-based identity that will show your real name (or at least the name you are using on Google+) to all YouTube users. → Read More
Despite the fact that Google has been slowly launching more APIs for Google+, don’t expect the company to launch a full read/write API anytime soon. During a Google+ platform fireside chat at Google I/O today, Google+ VP Bradley Horowitz and other members of the Google+ team said that Google is still taking a very deliberate approach to Google+’s APIs. The company, Horowitz said, doesn’t want to “disrupt something very special” and “magical” by just opening up a full read/write API that would allow developers to write apps that can easily post to Google+. → Read More
Google today launched Chrome for iOS and it’s now available in the App Store. Don’t get too excited, though. While it’s a nice enough browser, it’s hobbled by Apple’s rules for third-part developers and doesn’t feature Google’s fast JavaScript rendering engine. Instead, as Google confirmed to us earlier today, it uses Apple’s relatively slow UIWebView to render web pages and that sadly means the browsing experience on iOS isn’t exactly optimal. Sadly, the browser feels a bit sluggish on iOS, something that obviously can’t be said about Chrome on any other platform. → Read More
Google is launching Chrome for iOS today. Many pundits assumed that Google was holding back Chrome from iOS because it couldn’t use its own rendering engine, however, Google just told us that Chrome will actually use the same rendering engine that Apple makes available to every other third-party developer on iOS. → Read More
Google+ is obviously a major focus for Google these days, but until now, the company hasn’t really focused on extending the Google platform beyond its own services and its +1 buttons. Now, however, the company is extending the Google+ platform to mobile with the upcoming release of its Google+ SDKs for iOS and Android. This new platform will allow developers to use Google+ sign-in buttons, sharing widgets, and the Google+ history API it quietly launched yesterday. Developers will also be able to pull in public Google+ content through the existing (but limited) Google+ API. In addition to these SDKs, these features are also now available as mobile web optimized social plugins. → Read More
Google just gave away a Chromebox, the desktop version of the company’s Chromebook laptops, to all Google I/O attendees. Besides being a venue for Google’s most spectacular launches (and jumps), Google I/O has also developed a bit of a reputation for all the products Google gives away to attendees. Yesterday, at the end of the first keynote, the company announced that every attendee would get one of Google’s newly announced Nexus Q media-streaming devices, as well as a new Nexus 7 tablet and a Nexus phone. Google calls these giveaways its “Android Developer Package”. → Read More
Google just announced that its Chromebooks will hit 100 Best Buy stores across the U.S. at its I/O developer conference today, and that’s just the start. The company also announced that it plans to expand this program to include “many more retailers” before the end of the year. → Read More
Google announced that Gmail now has 425 Million users at its annual Google I/O developer conference today. It’s being used by government agencies in 45 states and 66 of the top 100 universities in the U.S. have already gone Google. Google also announced that over 5 million businesses have now “gone Google.” This, says Google, includes a number of large companies, including Roche, KLM and others. → Read More
At its annual Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco today, Google announced that Chrome now has 310 million active users. Google’s Sundar Pichai also noted that globally, Chrome is now the most popular browser.
Two years ago, Chrome had 70 million users, said Google. Just a year ago, the browser had grown to 160 million users and now that number has almost doubled again. → Read More
The reinvigorated competition in the browser market over the last few years has definitely been a boon for users, but having a number of browsers with very high user numbers makes life a bit harder for developers who want to write extensions. Crossrider, which is coming out of beta today, aims to make things a bit easier for developers. The service offers a cross-platform development platform for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
CrunchUp & August Capital Party 2012
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