Jim Edwards / BI

I recently switched from using a Windows PC and Android phones to all-Apple products, all the time.

My new iPhone 5 and MacBook Pro are definitely really cool.

But when I was a PC/Android user (with an Acer laptop and phones by HTC and Samsung), Apple fans gave me the impression that angels sang every time they opened a MacBook, and that I’d never want to go back to the intolerably uncool world outside the iPhone.

Instead, I was surprised to learn that some parts of the Apple universe are a few steps behind the pace. Using Apple gadgets actually made my life harder, in some ways.

Article source: SAI http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/HwYqh_t3bGs/ways-apple-makes-life-harder-2013-5

Maptia

The whole Maptia crew in Morocco

The difference between a job you love and a job you hate is usually one thing: the company’s culture.

These days, lots of tech startups have adopted cultural perks like free food, pool table/games, and beers on tap.

But others have come up with new ways to make their companies great places to work. They’ve “hacked” their culture, according to this discussion thread on Quora.

Article source: SAI http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/wxiK2xJvmv0/10-awesome-ways-startups-have-hacked-their-company-culture-2013-5

Appcelerator

Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie

See Also

How Location-Based Services Are Transforming The Mobile Industry

Why Cross-Screen Marketing Is Set To Explode

The Tracking Solutions That Could Lead An Explosion In Mobile Marketing

Appcelerator, which makes a popular free mobile app development platform called Titanium, is now setting its sight on enterprises that build their own mobile apps for workers.

On Tuesday, Appcelerator launched a new mobile development platform for enterprises, which it’s selling as a service over the web. Unlike Titanium, which is just for apps, the enterprise platform includes support, training and service level agreements. 

It also includes analytics tech which tests apps while they’re being built, to make sure they’re performing well and no glitches make it into the final product.

Once apps are finished, Appcelerator hosts them and tracks usage and other stats. Appcelerator can show how many people are using an app at a particular moment. This tech comes from Appcelerator’s acquisition last November of Nodeable, a big data analytics startup.

Appcelerator’s platform satisfies enterprise marketing teams that want to see how their apps are being used, and IT teams, whose job it is to make sure they’re performing up to snuff, Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie told us.

“Mobile often ends up being the primary, and sometimes only, interface that a business’s partners and employees user to interact with the company,” Haynie said.

Appcelerator is selling its enterprise platform on a per-seat basis and also charging based on where it’s hosted. There’s a Starter edition for about $5,000 per user per year, which has everything but performance and testing analytics and is accessed on the web.

The full enterprise platform starts at around $12,000 per user per year when running in a “public cloud”, which means they’re sharing the hardware with other customers.

Appcelerator is also selling a “virtual public cloud”—where customers get their own hardware— for about $32,000 per user per year. 

All three options require a one-year contract.

Appcelerator has 450,000 developers and its apps run on 135 million mobile devices, or more than 10% of the world’s mobile devices. It is VC funded and has raised around $50 million so far.

Rumors swirled in February that Microsoft was going to acquire Appcelerator, but those never panned out. Haynie declined comment, saying “we are focused on building a great company right now and think there are huge opportunities in the market in front of us.”

Article source: SAI http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/boupGh6SuAE/appcelerator-intros-saas-platform-for-businesses-2013-5

Qihoo 360 has quietly launched an online shopping search engine in collaboration with Alibaba’s Etao, as the two firms partner up to step up efforts against rivals Tencent and Baidu.

The site, 360.etao.com, directs the domain to Etao, which will likely drive more traffic to Alibaba but, most importantly, it could develop into a high-profile service to rival Baidu’s dominance in China’s search market.

According to a report on Sina Tech, sources say that collaboration with Alibaba is a key strategy of Qihoo 360 going forward. “As a late entrant into the search engine scene, in order to get a greater market share Qihoo 360 has to spread out traffic and not accumulate everything in its own hands. This is why it has chosen to cooperate with a number of sites for vertical search engines, and Alibaba is one of them,” the report cited the sources as saying.

As of now, Qihoo 360 has already launched music, maps, software and medical search engines as it looks to close the gap on Baidu, which accounts for more than 80 percent of China’s search traffic.

Qihoo started off with security software before branching out into operating a browser and just last summer, launching a search engine. It has been very aggressive in taking on Chinese search stalwart Baidu — which has resulted in warnings of unfair play from regulars — and its roster of existing partners includes Sina, the firm behind China’s popular Weibo microblogging service. Now, this partnership with Alibaba will take the competition up a notch.

Earlier this year Qihoo 360 stated its aim of achieving 20 percent market share in the Chinese search industry by the end of this year and 40 percent by 2015.

Etao was launched in 2010 by Alibaba’s e-commerce site Taobao, as it sought to compete against Baidu in terms of online shopping searches. Alibaba is also striving to tap into the social market. It recently took an 18 percent stake in Sina’s Weibo in a bid to slow down Tencent’s WeChat success and also bought 28 percent of AutoNavi, China’s top mapping system, suggesting that it is focusing on maps as another prong of its social strategy.

Alibaba’s mobile business, Aliyun, launched a search service that will rival Baidu, and of course Google, on mobile.

Update: We contacted Qihoo 360 and were given confirmation of the partnership with Alibaba, but the company declined to provide further details at this point.

Related: China’s Qihoo sees profit fall to $5.6 million in Q1 2013, even as revenue climbs 58.6%

Image Credit: Peter Parks via AFP/Getty Images

Article source: TNW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheNextWeb/~3/s9jfpyPIQVg/

Tempo, a smart calendar mobile app, has released an update bringing improved controls around event scheduling and communication to its users. With this release, people can now invite attendees to meetings, share events with their contacts, and communicate using the Gmail app for iOS instead of the native Mail client app on the device.

A useful tool to help people prepare for their next meeting, Tempo was created at SRI International, the non-profit research institute in Silicon Valley — the same one that introduced the world to Siri and her travel-related sibling Desti. The concept behind the app is that it’s a calendar. It takes all your meetings and events and provides you with the necessary information to help you be more productive with your time.

Tempo takes details inputted by users and enhances it by curating data through services connected to it, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. The app will dig through emails, look at the location to pinpoint driving directions, and more.

With today’s release, users can now invite attendees to their events. Tempo will access your phone’s contact list and emails to find people that it thinks should be included. Anyone can be added to the event — similar to what is possible with both Google and Outlook’s calendar.

Additionally, users can now share events with people. This is different than the above new feature because when an event is shared, the recipient is not added as an attendee.

How this could come in handy is if you meet a friend and want to invite them to an event, say The Next Web Conference, they don’t need to scrounge online to find the details — through Tempo, you can forward the event details to them.

Finding the share option is a bit tricky.  It’s actually under the “Message” option when viewing the details of a specific event. And it’s not a polished execution as you might expect. When sharing, the details will be embedded into the body of an email and be delivered to the recipient through the use of the iOS’s default Mail app.

But while sending emails through the Mail app might be normal for some, there are those who would rather it be sent through a cloud-based service like Gmail. Today, Tempo is giving users an option to send communications right from the Gmail for iOS app.

Tempo is available for free, and competes with Fantastical, Sunrise, and other smart calendar apps. It recently became available in its first international country: Canada.

➤ Tempo for iOS

Photo credit: Thinkstock

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Samsung is investing in hardware after the company agreed to spend 53 billion won ($48 million) to acquire a 10 percent stake in fellow South Korean firm Pantech, the country’s third-largest maker of mobile devices.

The company announced — via Yonhap News Agency – that the deal will “help further solidify” its relationship with Pantech, and in particular their joint work around smartphones, tablets and other areas of hardware.

The duo already work together on semiconductor and display businesses, and, last year alone, Pantech is reported to have spent 235 billion won (around $211 million) buying electronics and components from Samsung affiliated businesses to order to build its devices.

The deal is quite unique in a sense, because devices from Pantech compete with Samsung’s range of smartphones and tablets, and it isn’t often that rival companies would collaborate in an investment deal such as this.

While the Pantech name is strong in Korea, where its sales trail only local rivals Samsung and LG, the firm has not tasted similar success overseas. At this year’s Mobile World Congress event, however, it caught the attention of media with the Android-based Vega No 6, the world’s largest full-HD smartphone, while its budget range — including the Discover, available for $50 on contract in the US — has garnered positive reviews.

Like other once strong electronics firms in East Asia, including most notably Sharp — in which Samsung is also an investor — Pantech has suffered financial issues of late. Last year, a five-year refinancing program was set up to managing its fiscal development, and Samsung’s investment will aid that.

With the deal, the world’s largest becomes Pantech’s third-largest shareholder, behind only chip-maker Qualcomm (11.96 percent) and the Korea Development Bank, which owns 11.81 percent.

The Pantech agreement follows Samsung’s decision to invest in Sharp in March. The firm agreed to spend 10.4 billion yen (around $112 million) for a 3.08 percent stake in Sharp, which will also grant it greater access to its technology.

Headline image via Jung Yeon Je / Getty Images

More to follow

Article source: TNW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheNextWeb/~3/pvZn-1aa74o/

Meet Jolla, the smartphone that almost never came to be.

When Nokia decided to jump off its burning platform a few years ago and go with Windows Phone, there were no people more disappointed with the decision than the hundreds of engineers that had been working on the company’s own mobile operating system, MeeGo.

These were developers that had put in countless hours to make MeeGo the platform of the future and the initial results were intriguing. The Nokia N9 was a beautiful phone (its core design would eventually be the basis of the first Nokia Windows Phone, the Lumia 800) with interesting functionality that, at the time, bested Android in utility. When Nokia scrapped MeeGo, these developers were out of a job and, worse, had the rug pulled out from under a beloved project.

So, they banded together to keep the project going. And the result is Jolla, a smartphone from Finland running an operating system called Sailfish, born on the legacy of MeeGo.

What Is Jolla?

Pronounced “yo-la,” Jolla as a company is the continuation of the “Mer” project. The Mer project was initially a fork from the Linux-based MeeGo designed to bring as much of the old Maemo operating system (MeeGo was formed as a conglomeration between two operating systems, Maemo and Moblin) to Nokia’s hardware as possible. Mer was eventually suspended when most of the development resources started going to MeeGo.

When Nokia dropped support for MeeGo, the Mer project was resurrected. It was intended to provide a new environment for the many developers and engineers who had worked on the open-source project, from Nokia or elsewhere. MeeGo itself morphed when it was began being supported by the likes of the Linux Foundation (backed by Intel and Samsung among others) and became Tizen. 

These old Maemo engineers just won’t admit defeat to their original dream and just realize that MeeGo/Maemo is, for all intents and purposes, dead. So now we have Jolla and a prototype smartphone searching for an audience.

The Jolla Smartphone

The first Jolla smartphone is a 4.5-inch, dual-core, 4G LTE enabled device with 16GB of internal storage and a replaceable battery. It runs the gesture-based Sailfish OS which, presumably, will operate a lot like the old Nokia N9 based on MeeGo Harmattan. 

Jolla is now available for pre-order and will be shipped first to European countries. The price tag is a reasonable €399 and Jolla expects to begin shipping by the end of 2013. Basically, Jolla is now asking people to support the project through pre-orders in a very Kickstarter-like fashion, imploring the community to get behind the project, or “The Tribe,” as Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon describes it. 

Based on Linux, Sailfish OS will be compliant with Android apps. This will allow Sailfish OS developers (the very small handful that currently exist) to port Android apps to Jolla, much in the same way that BlackBerry developers can port Android package files (APKs) to BlackBerry 10. 

The Drawback Of Open Source Democratization

Developers often complain that Android is a fragmented ecosystem. Too many different CPUs on different screen sizes from different manufacturers to make sense of it all. Yet, if you compare Android to what happened to the MeeGo community, Google’s mobile operating system seems tame.

Android always had a champion in Google to keep it on point. This contrasts with the Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo/Tizen/Jolla community that has had so many competing interests and egos that development has never really produced anything tangible other than a few interesting prototypes (like the Nokia N9 and now Jolla).

The Jolla group is essentially the most disillusioned of them all. Some have also called them the most creative and innovative while also being the most stubborn and arrogant. And now this team, finally, has what it wants – its own company and smartphone.

Article source: RWW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/q0-Yuccc8mQ/here-comes-jolla-yet-another-deviant-linux-smartphone

$1.1 billion. That’s how much your company is worth if it’s long on users and short on paying customers. Just ask Tumblr. Or Instagram. Each yanked down billion-dollar acquisitions despite making virtually no revenue. 

Is this a big deal?

Acquihires And Billion-Dollar Payouts

Some seem to think so. At least, for acquihires, the kissing cousin to the revenue-free-massive acquisition. For example, Pando Daily‘s Sarah Lacy slams the acquihire, arguing that

Lazy profit-seekers love these periods in the Valley. Why not? They can make money without having to actually build a company. It’s like a get-out-of-actual-entrepreneurship-free card.

Venture capitalist Mark Suster goes one step further, holding that acquihires actually have a corrosive effect on the tech industry:

You have been at Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo! for years. You have worked faithfully. Evenings. Weekends. Year in, year out. You have shipped to hard deadlines. You’ve done the death-march projects. In the trenches. You got the t-shirt. And maybe got called out for valor at a big company gathering. They gave you an extra 2 days of vacation for your hard work.

And that [jerk] sitting in the desk next to you who joined only last week now has $1 million because he built some fancy newsreader that got a lot of press but is going to be shut down anyways.

What kind of message does that send to the party faithful who slave away loyally to hit targets for BigCo? …

It says if you want to make “real” money  - quit.

Fair enough. I’ve been involved in three such acquihires, and I see their point. Acquihires send a signal that failure is OK and, indeed, profitable.

But the same holds true for the billion-dollar exits on chimerical revenues. They represent entrepreneurs cashing in on popularity contests without actually having done the hard work of monetizing that popularity. That is, they represent entrepreneurs making big-money success on little-revenue failure. 

The Downside To Making Money

And why shouldn’t they? It turns out that it’s very difficult to remain popular while charging for one’s service. LinkedIn has done it by charging recruiters. Google has done it by aligning relevant ads next to search results. But monetizing people’s inane pictures of their meals? Instagram didn’t even bother.

Pinterest is starting to roll out paid services. Foursquare, too, has been straining to make more money lately. Ironically, these noble efforts to actually sustain the companies on real revenue may make them far less valuable.

For one thing, monetization efforts can fail. Just look at Groupon’s gyrations as it has sought to turn a massive sales force into a profit-generating machine. It hasn’t been pretty, and it can turn off users who don’t want to be sold.

But more pertinently, the second a business starts to make significant revenue, it will start to be valued on real-world metrics like “profit” and “operating margin” and “sales,” not breathless potential based on “users” and “page views” and “social engagement.” It turns out that the multiples on the former are far lower than they are on the latter.

The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma

What to do? Entrepreneurs can’t really set out to build a revenue-free company that VCs will sustain indefinitely. So most are probably right to initially focus on adoption. Assuming they can get traction, it pays to continue to focus on adoption, because it’s harder to turn free-riding users into paying customers (or find businesses to pay for access to those users). So long as the venture money is flowing, why would an entrepreneur ever choose to fixate on the dismal science of making money? 

For me, I think if you’re not making profitable money then your future – and that of your customers’ – is always up for grabs. Whatever promises the purchasing company makes, they are the buyer, and you are the seller. As Dave Winer points out, this inevitably means they’re in control. Not you.  

Maybe that doesn’t matter. But it does mean we may be building disposable companies with little lasting impact. That doesn’t seem like a good thing.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

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Congress Wants To Take A Tax Bite Out Of Apple

Apple uses (probably) legal loopholes to avoid corporate taxes, Senate wigs out.

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If you’re a popular social sharing service not named Google+, you might be integrated into iOS very soon. According to a report in 9to5Mac, Apple is working on integrating Yahoo’s revamped photo service Flickr and the social video network Vimeo into iOS 7. The two services would join the two big social networks, Twitter and Facebook, in enjoying operating system-level integration into the iPhone and iPad.

That would mean that users could sign in with their Flickr and Vimeo accounts within the Settings app on their iOS device, just as they can now with Twitter and Facebook. Then when the user hits the share button in an app, the menu will include the services that they’ve registered.

iOS is expected to be detailed by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June. 9to5Mac noted that the decision to include two additional social services could be reversed before any announcement is made. But the report does make a lot of sense.

Such a move could be read as a bit more anti-Google maneuvering from Apple. After all, the company last year shed all iOS-Google tie-ins in iOS 6 with the exception of keeping Google search as the default option in mobile Safari. YouTube is available as a third-party app from the App Store, but it’s no longer the default video service in iOS. Apple could also take up the move to support Vimeo in response to Google allowing iOS developers to enable a setting in their own apps that automatically opens YouTube videos in the YouTube app, instead of mobile Safari.

But it’s also just as likely that Apple is simply increasing feature parity between iOS and Mac OS X. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has built-in Flickr and Vimeo integration, as well as Twitter and Facebook. Facebook integration also began on OS X and moved to iOS, so Yahoo’s photo service and Vimeo’s social video service could be following that same path.

Article source: GigOM http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/dTLgvHpEBjY/story01.htm