The San Diego TC Meetup Will Go Down In Exactly 10 Days, So Buy Tickets Now!

In exactly 10 days, TechCrunch will arrive in sunny San Diego, hungry for burritos and fresh talent. And today is the last day to apply for the pitch-off.

The TechCrunch San Diego Meetup + Pitch-Off will go down on Thursday, August 22 from 6pm to 10pm at Block 16, complete with a few fireside chats, a 60-second pitch-off competition, and a whole lot of beer.

Our past meetups, in New York, Austin, and Seattle, have been smashing successes, and we’re looking to have the same good time just north of the border.

These events consist of two equally important, but highly different parts. The first is the meetup itself. Tickets cost $5 and include a ticket for beer, so we kindly ask that you are 21+ to attend.

The second part of the SD TC Meetup is the pitch-off, which consists of startups pitching their wares on stage to a panel of judges in under a minute, with no visual aids or demoes of any kind.

If that sounds like your jam, you can apply be in the pitch-off here. We merely ask that you have a product in stealth or private beta until the time of the pitch off. Today is the last day to apply for a spot in this pitch-off competition.

Those chosen to participate will get one-on-one Office Hours sessions with Matt Burns, Greg Kumparak, Josh Constine, or myself. First place will receive a table in Start Up Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Second Place will receive 2 tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third Place will receive 1 ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt.

It should be a night to remember, but it’s only made possible with awesome sponsors. If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, please contact events@techcrunch.com

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Salesforce Ties Together Different Platforms With New Performance Edition

Salesforce.com has pulled together several of its platforms to create what it calls the Performance Edition. The new service will combine the company’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Salesforce Platform with Data.com, Work.com and its new identity service. Other services that are part of the package include its web-chat platform for connecting customers with customer service help and a knowledge engine for accessing articles and information.

Salesforce has shown signs that it would be integrating its various services. In July, the company launched “Sales Performance Accelerator,” which combined the Sales Cloud with Data.com and Work.com.

By adding identity service and a sandbox, the company can now offer a way to connect apps through a single authentication platform. The sandbox in turn serves as a service for testing apps before putting them into production.

Salesforce has historically treated its different services as independent entities. But with the build-out of its developer platform, the pieces are tying together. The only missing piece is Chatter, its news feed. But Chatter is getting integrated across all the platforms so it is likely just integrated in the overall offering.

Company executives have also emphasized the build-out of its platform for developers to create single-purpose apps that they call micro-instances. With the new Performance Edition, it is conceivable that developers can start to use the identity platform to create a linked network of apps built on the Salesforce platform.

Single-purpose apps have become popular with developers. Users want lightweight services that play specific roles. For example, Any.DO is a simple and cleverly designed app for getting tasks completed. Siasto plans to take a similar focus with its mobile strategy.

Salesforce is making its play to control more of the stack, with identity being the key to controlling more services, either their own or from third-party providers.

Okta serves as a major competitor in the identity race. It has advantages in terms of its established place in the cloud market and its relationship with Workday, which has helped it get some major enterprise deals.

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Birdseye Turns Your Email Into Art

When I think of Birdseye I usually think of delicious frozen peas. Now, however, there’s Birdseye the mail app, a simpler and more streamlined system for handling your mail.

Aimed at the email grazer rather than folks who get hundreds of messages a minute, Birdseye separates emails into folders where they are displayed in a graphically rich and easy-to-read way. Instead of, say, sliding through fifty Groupon emails, Birdseye will extract the text and images from these subscription emails and make them into a Flipboard-esque magazine. While the vast majority of us email nerds would argue that this is, as they say in the industry, a “horrible idea,” remember that not everyone’s mailboxes are full to the bursting point.

Birdseye Mail for the iPad from Birdseye Mail on Vimeo.

Created by Robert Spychala, a programmer who had a hand in the Barnes & Noble Nook and Nike FuelBand, the app is aimed at tablet users who are tired of ugly interfaces like Gmail and Mailbox.

“Birdseye is designed for a tablet first, not ported over from a desktop or web experience,” said Spychala. This allows Birdseye to take advantage of the iPad’s inherent characteristics like a beautiful visual screen in your hands and gesture friendly interface.”

Seed capital for the app came from DE-DE, a marketing startup accelerator, which gives you some idea why this app was built. However, this isn’t just for looking at marketing emails. The system also allows you to unsubscribe from emails right with the press of a button – a wildly useful feature – and the app will flow your regular emails into beautifully laid-out templates. It also uses Open Graph to bring in friend information from Twitter and Facebook.

“Birdseye also assigns a quick one-tap action distinct to each email format so you can handle your mail quickly and intuitively,” said Spychala. “For example a message from Facebook or Twitter about a new Friend Request or Follower would have a quick action of ‘accept and follow back.’ Or a calendar invite might be accept and add to calendar.’”

“We believe in Inbox Intuition. We want to create more ways to view and manage your email quickly and naturally without extra work,” he said.

The app is available now and is free. While it probably won’t help you handle the million-plus emails in your work mailbox, it might be a nice addition to your at-home browsing arsenal which probably already includes iReddit and Houzz.

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Disconnect, The Anti-Ad Tracking Startup, Now Has A Privacy App Specifically For Children (Built By An Ex-NSA Engineer

More than 1 million people are using apps and browser extensions each week from Disconnect, the anti-tracking, anti-ad targeting startup to block how third-party sites track your online movements and then serve ads based on those movements. Now it’s taking its campaign to the next generation. Today, the company is launching Disconnect Kids, a free iOS app designed specifically for children (and their parents) to help them control how their web- and app-browsing activity is used, and to educate them about online privacy in the process. It claims that it is the first iOS app designed to “prevent data about your web-browsing and in-app activity from ever leaving your device.”

And given the ongoing revelations about PRISM, the National Security Agency and Internet privacy, there is a kind of poetic justice in the app, too: the technology powering Disconnect Kids was built by Patrick Jackson, an engineer who previously worked for none other than the NSA and now heads up Disconnect’s mobile efforts (one of the company’s new hires after announcing a $3.5 million raise in June this year).

“We’re able to leverage the iOS platform to prevent invisible tracking services from collecting browsing history, in-app activity, location, and other info from a user’s iPhone or iPad,” he said in a statement. Casey Oppenheim, a co-founder at Disconnect, tells TechCrunch that both Android and desktop web versions of the app are also “in the works.”

The idea behind Disconnect Kids is to tap into the hundreds of mobile tracking companies that currently collect data about the browsing and app activity (usually to serve more targeted ads, but also for other purposes in the apps themselves). While a lot of controls have been put into place for apps aimed specifically at children, there is a whole swathe of apps and sites that are used by children as well as adults, which are not restricted in the same way.

“Disconnect Kids aims to close this loophole by letting you actively block major mobile tracking companies and the network connections they try to make to your family’s devices,” notes co-founder and ex-Googler Brian Kennish in a statement. “Until now, nobody had figured out how to stop personal data from leaving an iOS device.”

Disconnect Kids is not the first effort to make sites less tracking-invasive for younger users. There is the COPPA directive from the FTC that covers how apps and sites have to clearly state what information they use about minor users. In the U.K., the Office of Fair Trading is also scrutinizing and considering legislation over how freemium apps and games directed at kids are collecting information. There are also proprietary implementations like Zoodle’s Kid Mode, the Y Combinator-backed Kytephone, KIDO’Z and Play Safe, and every mobile OS now has parental controls built in.

Disconnect Kids takes this one step further to cover all apps used on a device, regardless of what other controls may oversee some aspects of browsing behavior. For example, Oppenheim explains, “COPPA allows sites and apps not directed at children (think YouTube) to continue tracking and targeting unless the site has ‘actual knowledge’ that a child is using the device, which sites and apps often don’t know. So our app is actually aimed at empowering families to pro-actively block tracking and targeting of children even on COPPA compliant sites and apps.”

For now, all of Disconnect’s products remain free and “pay what you want,” a model afforded by the startup’s B Corporation, semi-charitable status, also picked up earlier this year. In future, this could evolve to a more concrete business model, Oppenheim tells us. “It’s possible we’ll make future features premium,” he says.

That stands in contrast to Reputation.com, another site that is banking its business on the increasing consumer demand (and awareness) of data tracking. Its solution is to put all of that information into a “data vault” that users can then better control — which could potentially mean handing over to third parties anyway, but at least getting better compensated for it, and doing so with full awareness of what’s happening. The company has raised more than $68 million, and acquired a number of smaller properties, to make a business of this effort. “They raised a huge amount of money for that idea and I’m interested to see how it works out,” notes Oppenheim.

The Disconnect Kids app is designed with simplicity in mind — so in that regard, and considering that many adult consumers don’t think about or know much about how advertising tracking and targeting works, this could be useful for more than just children.

You can see the app in action in the video below:

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In The Future, Google Glass Makes Your Face A Trading Floor So You Can Never Escape Your Portfolio

More and more, wearable computing seems like a very bad idea that will only serve to make it impossible for any of us to disconnect for any amount of time at all. In case you need further proof, take a look at this concept video from Fidelity Labs, which is an early development partner for Google Glass. They’ve just launched Fidelity Market Monitor for Glass, so that watching your net worth rise and fall with the vicissitude of the stock market is now easier than ever.

This is the “first investing Glassware widely available for Google Glass,” the company says, feeding quotes and prices from major U.S. indexes at market close. The current feature set is pretty lightweight, but the concept video shows how it might expand in the future to offer account access, up-to-the-minute market information, news and stock pricing information based on image recognition of things like corporate logos.

Glass is exciting since it’s a brand new product category that could potentially bring about exciting changes in how we live, but it’s also sort of terrifying in terms of just how much it could drive us deeper down the digital rabbit hole. Watching the apps that come out for the platform will help us get a better sense of exactly what kind of dystopian future we’re headed for (or, depending on your perspective I guess, show us the utopia to come).

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Carrier-Backed Mobile Wallet Isis Ties Up With Chase, Amex, Ahead Of Nationwide Expansion

Carrier-backed mobile payments initiative Isis is gearing up support for its mobile wallet platform ahead of the nationwide launch later this year. Today, Isis is announcing Chase has signed on to be a part of the national rollout, following the pilot trials in Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City.

Chase cards supported by Isis now include Chase Freedom, Sapphire, Slate, and JPMorgan Palladium. Isis currently has similar deals with Capital One and American Express.

The cards, once loaded into the mobile wallet application on supported phones, can then be used by tapping to pay at NFC-enabled point-of-sale terminals. However, real-world adoption of NFC as a payment method has struggled due to a lack of ubiquitous support for the technology at checkout, as well as consumer confusion over supported phones and how to use NFC if provided. Plus, there’s also the fact that Apple has not adopted the technology in its own devices, including the iPhone.

Isis’s plan B may then involve gaining initial traction as a platform for mobile couponing and loyalty rewards – something the wallet app supports today through its merchant partnership program.

The news of Chase’s support comes just days after Isis announced a partnership with American Express, which will see its own payment application called Serve, integrated into the mobile wallet. Isis and Serve had been working together for over a year, and now mobile customers will be able to sign up for an American Express Serve account in Isis, then use it to pay bills online, or send money to family or friends. Serve accounts are something of an alternative to a bank account, but can be funded through existing bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards, or other Serve accounts.

Isis competes with a variety of attempts at building a functional mobile wallet, including Google’s own NFC-based application, Google Wallet, which has also had troubles at point-of-sale as well as refusal by carriers to support the app so they can move forward with Isis.

Largely, the success of mobile payments in the offline world — at least here in the U.S. — has come from those who avoid tying themselves to NFC. This includes startups like Square, which signed deals with Starbucks and Blue Bottle Coffee to power their payment-processing infrastructures, as well as online payments company PayPal, which has been integrating with point-of-sale system providers, and has established partnerships with dozens of retailers reaching tens of thousands of locations across the U.S. PayPal also has its own Square alternative, with PayPal Here, which recently expanded its U.K. trials.

Isis, jointly run by AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile, limits itself to NFC, which may prove quite challenging, then, in terms of consumer adoption. When an NFC terminal is not present, the fallback for Isis users is to pull out their card and swipe as usual. That’s also a deeply ingrained habit that will be hard to break, especially if the “pay by tap” method doesn’t seem to offer any sort of value add to experience from the checkout.

Isis announced in late July, too, that it would be rolling out nationwide this year, though it did not provide a launch date. The series of announcements, including last week’s around Amex and today’s around Chase, hint that the launch date for the platform is drawing near. Isis’s pilot debuted in October 2012, so perhaps the go-live date will also be October, in order to make it a full year between to the two launches.

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After Retrenching In Europe, Fab Raises Another $5M From ITOCHU Corp. In Series D Expansion, Aims For Japan JV By 2014

The march into Asia continues for Fab, the online design retailer that raised $150 million in Series D funding in June. Today, the company announced a further $5 million extension to that round from ITOCHU Corp., a general trading company whose VC arm, ITOCHU Technology Ventures, also participated in the main Series D tranche. Jason Goldberg, Fab’s co-founder and CEO, also notes that the two are also working on a JV that will bring Fab to Japan in 2014.

ITOCHU Corp. is something of an institution in Japan: as a sogo shosha it has been in business or 150 years and has the country’s largest network of third-party logistics warehouses.

“Fab is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies and the leading online design retailer in the US and Europe,” Shunsuke Noda, Chief Operating Officer of ICT, Insurance & Logistics Division in ITOCHU Corporation, said in a statement published on Goldberg’s blog. “We believe Fab has a huge potential to expand their business in Japan/Asia and we are very excited to work with Fab to realize their long-term vision of being the world’s design store.” Itochu’s VC arm has also invested in other startups such as Ooyala.

This latest injection less than two weeks after Fab announced an additional Series D extension of $10 million from Singapore’s SingTel, another strategic investor that will help the company expand in Asia.

The news of Fab’s sharpening focus on markets in the east comes at the same time that it has reigned in some of its growth in another international market: Europe.

The company in July laid off over 100 people based in its Berlin HQ — we actually heard closer to 150 at the time — a consequence, it says, of repositioning itself away from flash sales. That has also resulted the company also trying out other things, such as more social-media-minded Pinterest- and Fancy-style follower models to help users discover (and hopefully buy) things they might like. Today, some 40% of Fab’s international sales come from the UK, so it’s no surprise that the company is looking to diversify, both in terms of product and geography.

The gradual evolution of the company, however, has also put it into hot water with a Fab of a different stripe: the fashion e-commerce site JustFab is currently suing Fab for trademark infringement and loss of business.

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YC-Backed Casetext Takes a New Angle on Value Added Legal Research With Wikipedia-Style User Annotations

Why do law firms spend, collectively, billions of dollars on commercial legal research databases, when what they are looking up is law — which is in the public domain? How are these databases able to erect these enormously profitable paywalls? The answer is that they provide more than just the raw text of the law. They provide search tools and additional, value-added content on top of the law itself. The two legal research titans, Lexis and Westlaw, employ lawyers to read cases and other legal materials, categorize them, add commentary, and link them together. These services have legitimate value because they all save lawyers time, and time is money — especially in a profession that largely bills its clients in six-minute increments. That’s why these expensive tools exist, even in the Internet age. As one lawyer put it, after trying to get by on only free legal research tools, he tried Westlaw and was an immediate convert who now happily pays for the service.

Two young lawyers thinks they can disrupt the legal research giants by applying the lessons of Wikipedia and crowdsourcing their own comparable set of annotated law.

Joanna Huey attended Harvard Law School, where she was president of the Harvard Law Review, and Jacob Heller attended Stanford Law School, where he was president of the Stanford Law Review. They later served together as clerks for Judge Michael Boudin at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, and worked at law firms. Both were dissatisfied with the available research tools and their hefty price tags, which put the poor at a competitive disadvantage in the justice system.

Unlike many lawyers, neither Huey nor Heller are afraid of technology, so they decided to do something about it. Huey’s undergraduate degree is in physics, and Heller was a web developer before law school. They applied to Y Combinator, and were accepted. They’re now emerging from the program and ready to launch their company: Casetext.

The key idea behind Casetext is that the annotations that drive Lexis and Westlaw’s bottom lines can be crowdsourced. One obvious parallel is Wikipedia, with its hundred million man-hours of user contributed content, but Huey and Heller also point to Quora for its high quality answers by professionals and experts in various fields.

I asked Casetext’s founders why they thought they would be able to attract users to contribute. There are several aspects to their strategy. First, they focused on making contributing extra easy by concentrating heavily on UX. Users can very easily add tags to a case, or, more valuably, to paragraphs within a case. It’s also easy to link to other resources, including other cases or even outside materials like law review articles, which are the legal equivalent of scientific journal articles. Second, they’re hoping users will see some benefits in contributing content. Like Quora, users sign up with their real names, which incentivizes good behavior and means quality contributions can lead to real world reputational effects. Some early users — who the founders brought onboard by plain old hustling and tapping their networks — include well known law professors and lawyers. For example, Alexander Reinert, a law professor at Cardozo Law School, annotated Iqbal v. Ashcroft, a case he argued at the Supreme Court.

The core of Casetext – access to over a million cases, users’ annotations, and the ability to annotate – is free. So how will Casetext make money? Premium features. They’ve done some thinking and built features I haven’t seen in legal research before, like applying a heat map to show which parts of a case are most cited. (Ravel Law is another legal research startup that’s also innovating in search and display.) Even more basic planned premium features have value because the incumbent giants have simply missed them.

The one thing I could see holding Casetext back is its database, which is currently limited to the US Supreme Court, federal appellate courts, some federal District Court decisions, and Delaware. This is acceptable for some practice areas (such as patent litigation, which is exclusively in federal courts), but the great majority of lawyers practice in state courts, or at least have to deal with state law issues. The founders tell me California and New York are next, which makes sense because they’re the biggest legal markets, and more will follow.

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Path Opens Its API To 13 New Partners, Including PicStitch, Strava, WordPress, And Viddy

Path will now allow its users to share photos, videos, and more on its private social network, from a wide range of new API partners. Building on the success of its Nike+ partnership for sharing fitness data, Path is announcing 13 new apps that will hook into its network and get a “Share on Path” button.

For Path, the hope is to provide more ways for users to share content with others about what’s happening in their lives. And to give them the ability to more easily bring in content that they were creating anyway. With that in mind, new API partners include everything from social video network Viddy to multi-picture or collage editors like PicStitch, all the way to personal fitness app Strava. Other apps to join include WordPress, Bible, Papelook, Miil, Manga Camera and Otaku.

The company’s first API partner, of course, was Nike, which allows users to share their runs and general fitness levels for each day. That integration has been so popular that the company decided to allow more developers to take advantage of its API.

According to Matt Van Horn, VP of business development for Path, the company curated the list of partners to fit with its goal as a more personal or private social network. In the case of Nike, it found many users shared data on Path but not on other social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter. That’s because Path is generally more focused on bringing you closer to people you genuinely feel comfortable sharing with.

Some of the apps were chosen because people were sharing content from them into Path already. For apps like Over, PicMix and PicFrame, that generally meant saving a picture to their camera roll before uploading it again into Path. Or copying and sharing a verse from the Bible, for instance.

For others, there was no real graceful way to share certain types of content — like fitness logs. In that case, the Path team learned from talking to users that many were simply taking screenshots of their workout log and posting into the app. The startup will continue to allow other developers to apply, and will work with them to ensure a high-quality experience when sharing with their Path friends.

For Path, it follows a trend of adding types of content that match with things people were sharing anyway. For instance, it added the location content type after it noticed people were uploading photos of restaurants and other places they had been, sort of as a way of “checking in,” according to Van Horn.

And the company is trying to find ways to become a repository for all the best moments that they want to share. Last fall, it introduced a way to import data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It also improved its search functionality to allow you to more easily find those moments again.

Path has raised a total of $41 million from investors such as Redpoint, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Digital Garage, CrunchFund*, Jerry Murdock, Mark Pincus, Yuri Milner, Allen & Company, Greylock Partners, and a whole buttload of angels. But it’s in the process of raising more — up to $50 million more.

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* It’s really hard to keep track of all the CrunchFund companies, which is why I’m glad I have this laundry list of investors to remind me — and you — that CrunchFund put money into Path. But even though Michael Arrington founded CrunchFund and also founded TechCrunch, that has no basis on whether or not I want Path to succeed, or why I keep giving it $1.99 every week or so for more sticker packs.

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TestFlight Celebrates 400K Apps Beta-Tested With Rewritten iOS SDK, Android SDK’s Wide Release

Mobile app beta testing service TestFlight is seeing steady growth, with considerable progress being made during the last 90 days in terms of new apps uploaded to its platform. TestFlight, which is now owned by Burstly, has now seen 400,000 apps in total added to its service, which represents nearly half of the active apps on the iTunes Store, for a sense of perspective. Over 150,000 of those came in the last three months.

TestFlight’s previous 90 day best was 100,000, reported back in March, and so far the company has seen 15,000 Android apps uploaded since the beta launch of that SDK back in May. The Android SDK should start ramping up usage, however, as it’s now out of beta and available widely to the entire Android developer community.

The iOS version has also been completely rewritten, and is now more efficient and more stable, with improvements designed to help improve game performance while also gathering all the necessary crash reporting data and more. The new crash report features also include an ability to mark crash issues as resolved, and they feed more info around the context surrounding crashes to help developers fix them easier. Plus it’s now integrated into FlightPath’s analytics data around app performance, so you can see how crashes are affecting user retention rates and user flow.

Since its acquisition by Burstly in March of last year, TestFlight has been hard at work building out new products like FlightPath, boosting existing features with its Android expansion, and creating new monetization options for mobile developers via SkyRocket. The Burstly acquisition really lit a fire under the team and gave TestFlight legs to pursue its vision, something which co-founder Ben Satterfield explained as helping motivate the decision to sell the company to begin with.

“This is us believing in the bigger vision,” he told Josh Constine when the company was originally acquired. “[The original TestFlight] is a great product on its own, and we could have charged and gone scrappy with it month to month, but we want to wake up every day and go after something big.”

Traction to date seems to indicate they’re accomplishing that mission well, a little over a year later.

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Google+ Adds SoundCloud Embeds As It Slowly Opens Up To More Third-Party Integrations

SoundCloud, the increasingly popular service for sharing all things audio, today announced that it is now deeply integrated into Google+. While its users could already easily share links to Google+ from SoundCloud, Google+ now features a built-in audio player that lets you play audio files directly on an artist’s Google+ page. This marks the first time Google has enabled a third-party service to embed audio tracks directly in a Google+ post.

SoundCloud launched its integration with Google’s new Google+-based sign-in service in May and has since slowly deepened its integration with the service, culminating in today’s launch. This integration, SoundCloud says, will make it “easier than ever” for artists “to reach [their] audience by sharing sounds to Google+.” This also means that anytime you share a SoundCloud link to Google+, the new player will automatically appear.

Until now, SoundCloud links on Google+ would simply take you to the company’s website to play the file. The service currently has over 200 million active listeners on the site every month.

For Google+, this is a pretty interesting move, as it still remains a relatively closed platform. The new Google+ Sign-Ins make it easier for users of third-party services to share content on Google+, but for the most part, this doesn’t mean the content gets fully embedded in a post. I wouldn’t be surprised if today’s integration with SoundCloud would just be the first in a series of similar announcements.

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Why Microsoft’s 3D Printing Partnership Makes Sense

Microsoft has to remain relevant to hardware hackers. While they are necessary – no one can dispute the strength of Windows in the business world – they have, for the past decade, fallen slowly in esteem in the eyes of designers, makers, and artists. That’s why their recent partnership with Makerbot makes perfect sense.

Love them or hate them (and I know few people who hate them), Makerbot owns most of the mindshare when it comes to popular home 3D printing. While there may be superior or cheaper solutions out there, the Replicator is the “Kleenex” of 3D printing. They are a recognizable brand and they are probably the first see you find when searching for home printers.

Because 3D printing itself is still in its infancy, Microsoft clearly sees a way to grab the CAD/CAM community early by partnering with the current incumbent. While designers tend to use Macs, most CAD/CAM and engineering software is only available for Windows. Thus there is a ready-made audience for these printers in the hard sciences and, more importantly, an opportunity for Microsoft to grab that market share while maintaining an air of technical advancement.

“Shapes and basic CAD projects are easy to design for simple 3D printers,” said Lou Bojarski, a mechanical engineer who has been building robots using CNC machines and 3D printers for years. He sees Microsoft’s move as a way for amateurs and talented designers to begin creating 3D objects.

3D printing has long been the domain of hobbyists and open source zealots. That’s about to change. With the right partnerships, I think Microsoft can grab a piece of that pie and, even if it’s a small slice, that still makes the platform relevant for thousands of hardware hackers around the world

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Facebook Makes Mobile Pages More Functional With OpenTable Reservations Rovi TV Guide Info

Facebook’s on a mission to make mobile Pages more functional. Following a Yelp-ish redesign in April, iOS, Android, and mobile site updates coming today will add integrations with OpenTable to let you book reservations from 20,000 North American restaurants’ Facebook Pages, and Rovi to show you local TV airtimes for shows and movies. Facebook is looking to grow traffic and make Pages more important to businesses.

If Facebook can make its mobile Pages truly useful, it could outcompete more focused local information and discovery sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and Google search results. Giving people one more reason to open their Facebook app increases the chances they’ll end up checking their notifications, sending messages, and browsing the news feed where it sees ads.

By equipping the Pages with information and interactivity that move the needle for businesses, Facebook could also encourage them to advertise for their Pages. Businesses already spend a ton on Google Search, Yelp, and other ad platforms where they can reach people with purchase intent.

Most people don’t browse Facebook business Pages for fun. They’re there to get some crucial information. Facebook spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells me ”if you’re looking at a Page on a mobile device, it’s probably because you want to see if they’re open, or to call to make a reservation.” Facebook mobile Page browsers have the intent advertisers are looking for, so the social network is doing whatever it can to get more people visiting.

Useful, Not Just Social

“We want to be where diners are” Jocelyn Mangan, OpenTable’s VP of consumer products, tells me about the integration. Facebook is the latest of over 600 partner sites and services that funnel people looking for dining reservations to OpenTable. These referrals generate 5%-10% of OpenTable’s 12 million seats booked each month.

Similar to Yelp’s OpenTable integration, Facebook mobile Pages for restaurants don’t require you to visit OpenTable’s site or use its apps. Thanks to its API, the process of selecting your party size and preferred time to book a table happen entirely within Facebook.

To book, you just visit restaurant’s Page, and below its address and open hours you’ll see a panel alerting you “Reservations for two people available around 7:00pm”. Facebook automatically pre-fills the reservation form with your name, email, and phone number if you have one on file. Press the “Reserve” button and you get both on-screen and email confirmations, plus an option to cancel inside the Facebook Page.

If you’re looking for “Dinner and a show”, Facebook Pages can help you find some entertainment too. A new integration with digital entertainment information provider Rovi lets adds local networks, airtimes, and episode information to Facebook Pages for television shows and movies. That means you could go to the Breaking Bad and see it airs at 9pm PST Sundays on AMC, and the next episode is called Buried and deals with Walt covering his tracks as Jesse deals with guilt.

These kinds of integrations make Facebook Pages more than just a social hub or extra vanity presence on the web. They could actually make businesses money.

OpenTable charges restaurants $1 for each diner it delivers through its site or its partners, but those patrons spend an average of $43. If restaurants attribute that spending to Facebook, they might be more willing to buy Likes for their Page, Promoted Posts to boost their news feed presence, or other ads that drive people to Facebook Pages where they can make reservations. Meanwhile, if television shows see increased Facebook Page engagement correlating with ratings boosts, they might promote their Pages more during broadcasts.

Don’t expect these to be the last integrations Facebook does to boost the functionality of Pages. It doesn’t have an exclusive deal with OpenTable, so it could also work with services like UrbanSpoon’s RezBook to help out diners. Eventually, I’d expect Facebook Pages to provide options for just about anything that requires a reservation or appointment.

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Weak Touch-Based Laptop Sales Harming Windows 8′s Shot At Being The Next Big Platform

Windows 8 is a bet on touch. Microsoft, in the pre-iPad era, made the call that touch was next and that its core platform would support it properly; touch in Windows 7 was abortive at best. However, according to IDC, Microsoft’s fortunes in the touch wars are unimpressive, and perhaps even slipping.

IDC estimated that in 2013, between 17 percent and 18 percent of laptops sold would sport a touch screen. The company, as reported by ComputerWorld, now expects the tally to be lower, with only 10 percent to 15 percent of laptops sold in 2013 being touch-capable.

This isn’t good for Microsoft or Windows 8 itself. The Metro experience of Windows 8, and 8.1, is predicated on touch input. If you lack touch, you will not, in my view – which is based on hands-on time and extensive third-party anecdotal evidence – spend much time in the Metro side of Windows 8. That means less time in the Windows Store, of course, which harms not only Windows 8 as a continuing revenue source for Microsoft, but also as a functional development platform.

The more touch-enabled machines that Microsoft sells through its OEM partners and its Surface project, the better it is for Windows 8 itself. To see IDC revise its estimates downward is the opposite of encouraging. Also perhaps of note is the increasing lack of confidence in IDC’s new estimate. Its previous range was a 1 percent differential. The gap between 10 percent and 15 percent is half.

At this year’s CES technology confab, Intel said that any laptop that wants to call itself an Ultrabook (the strain of Windows-based laptops that are thin, light, and resemble the Macbook Air) must contain a touchscreen by the end of the year. Because of that, and the fact that Windows 8 is so much better in a touch environment, I expected the percentage numbers regarding touch penetration to be higher.

However, as ComputerWorld notes, the price delta between touch laptops and non-touch machines might remain too large to attract many consumers. Or maybe this is predicated on a lack of consumer demand rather than OEMs not building enough touch machines.

The average person doesn’t know, I would posit, that by paying more for their next machine, they can have a far better daily computing experience. The gist of this is simple: If price differential keeps consumers on non-touch machines, Microsoft’s Windows 8 bet makes less sense. If consumers aren’t touch-first, building a touch-first operating system doesn’t jive with the market.

But the market, you might argue, is in fact going touch. Yes, but the laptop market? The larger computing market — tablets, desktops, laptops, and smartphones — may be trending toward a touch future. But that doesn’t mean that individual components of the market will move at the same pace as others. The tablet market is by default touch, for example. Desktops are almost the complete opposite.

Still, Microsoft has made its bet that Windows 8 will translate across screens, working well on all computing form factors, albeit on smartphones in a less literal sense through the Windows Phone effort.
Pesky Consumers

It’s almost ironic that Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system would be dragged down by budget-conscious consumers: Those are the same individuals Microsoft used as a platform to hawk its new OS to developers as something worth paying attention to. Hundreds of millions of copies will be sold! The PC market is huge! But if the consumers who make up the massive PC market don’t buy machines that encourage use of the parts of Windows 8 that Microsoft specifically hoped that they would, well, then, are the numbers meaningful?

I’d say that in time, Windows 8 will grow into itself. However, in the face of a sliding PC market (the unit volume declines are material, and should be monitored), it isn’t particularly good for Microsoft to have its chief light flicker and spurt.

At the same time, we can recount a few truths that put Windows 8 into a more positive light: It has sold copies in the nine figures, has six figures worth of applications in its marketplace, and will sell tens of millions of touch-based laptops this year, and the U.S. PC market fell only 1.9 percent in the second quarter (again, IDC data).

So, the picture isn’t too bleak for Microsoft, but it is also not as rosy as the story that the company told to developers, and the press, in the lead up to the Windows 8 launch cycle.

Here’s your takeaway: Microsoft needs to better explain to the PC buying masses that touch is an important input tool for Windows 8, and one that is worth paying extra for. Also, OEMs need to get the price gap between touch and non-touch laptops down to the smallest possible smidge. If both parts of the PC market can do that, Windows 8 and OEMs will enjoy better sales and margins. If they fail, many will miss out on the new tools that Windows 8 and 8.1 provide, which would be a waste.

We’ll have more figures as the year continues, but for now, the PC market remains a troubled place for its traditional players.

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Firefox OS-Based ZTE Open Shipping Soon In The US And UK For $80 Unlocked, Orders Start Friday

How do you make a splash in the heavily entrenched U.S. and U.K. mobile markets, which are dominated by Android and iOS? Release a Firefox OS-based device for just $79.99 off-contract and unlocked, that’s how. Want to raise even more eyebrows? Offer it exclusively via eBay. That’s exactly what ZTE is doing with the Firefox mobile platform-powered Open “soon,” with orders apparently opening Friday.

ZTE announced the news via a press release on their official site today, saying the Open, which launched in Spain, Venezuela and Colombia earlier this year, will come to the U.S. and the U.K. via their eBay stores in both those countries in a unique Orange colorway later this year for just $79.99 (£59.99 in the U.K.), and will be “unlocked to allow use on all mobile networks.” The eBay sites both carry banners saying “bidding” will open Friday for the device.

The ZTE Open, for those who are unaware, supports 3G connectivity, has a 480 by 320 3.5-inch display, offers expandable memory via a microSD slot, packs a 3.15-megapixel rear camera and is powered by a 1.0 GHz Cortex-A5 processor. With those specs, it’s possible that we could be talking about a three-year old device, but the ZTE Open isn’t designed to blow away the competition in a specs race – it’s made to show what a phone can do with an OS based on open web standards while staying cheaper unlocked than most modern smartphones are on-contract.

Firefox OS and devices like the ZTE One and Alcatel One Touch Fire are designed to offer a lot of value to emerging markets, where traditional smartphones are priced too high to be attainable for many consumers. But the launch of the ZTE Open in U.S. and U.K. markets will show what kind of potential such devices have in established markets, where there’s bound to be some kind of need for a phone that won’t break the bank but that focuses especially on providing a solid mobile web browsing experience.

And at this price, I suspect a lot of American and British tech heads and early adopters will be picking them up too, if only for curiosity’s sake. Not to mention the orangeness of it all.

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Komoot Launches Its Hiking And Cycling Guide App Across European Regions

We’ve had apps to explore your cities like GetYourGuide, we had apps to track your runs like RunKeeper. Now a startup, Komoot plans to address the great outdoors with guides for cycling and hiking based not just on crowds-sourced material but by also pulling partner APIs and running an algorithm over those data sets around trails, landscapes, elevation and points of interest. Till now Komoot has concentrated on its home German market, but the startup is now launching its iPhone [iTunes link] and Android app (Playstore] in the UK and further European countries with its mobile outdoor guide which also features voice navigation (Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia as well as in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands).

Komoot has raised €1m from a German public fund and claims to be cash flow positive after two years. It claims to already be Germany’s most popular outdoor app with nearly two million downloads.

Markus Hallermann, founder of komoot says people use the app to plan cycling and hiking tours and customise them to their individual preferences. The app then calculates the difficulty of planned routes and summarises information like whether the trail is gravel or asphalt or features busy roads.

The app pulls data from OpenStreetMap, NASA, Wikipedia, and more, as well as user data from machine learning. Voice navigation – which they built themselves, no mean feat – and offline maps can be unlocked region by region. Competitors apps include Navigon, Skobbler and Naviki which provide cycling routes, but the quality of tours and information is less comprehensive and they don’t provide voice navigation.

The startup is based on a Freemium model where the first region is free. Further single regions can be unlocked for £2.49 (€ 3.59). A complete set containing all regions throughout Europe is available for £ 23.99 (€ 29.99).

The idea for komoot was born in 2009 during a joint tour in the Alps by the three founders Jonas Spengler
(31), Markus Hallermann (30) and Tobias Hallermann (28)

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BlackBerry Says It’s Looking For A Buyer (Or A Willing Partner), Forms Special Committee To ‘Explore Strategic Alternatives’

BlackBerry, the embattled Canada-based handset maker, today finally called a spade a spade. The company halted trading in its shares to announce what some might argue was inevitable: the company says it is now exploring strategic alternatives, including a possible sale or JV or other partnership. A committee chaired by Timothy Dattels and including CEO Thorsten Heins, along with Barbara Stymiest, Richard Lynch and Bert Nordberg, has been formed to look for alternatives.

“During the past year, management and the Board have been focused on launching the BlackBerry 10 platform and BES 10, establishing a strong financial position, and evaluating the best approach to delivering long-term value for customers and shareholders,” said Dattels in a statement. “Given the importance and strength of our technology, and the evolving industry and competitive landscape, we believe that now is the right time to explore strategic alternatives.” In effect, the company is basically saying “we tried that, and that didn’t work so now we’re calling it.”

BlackBerry has seen its share price fall by nearly 38% in the last six months. Currently it’s trading at $9.76 on NASDAQ, actually nudging up following reports last week there were reports that the company was looking to follow in the footsteps of Dell and go private.

The theory behind going private is that it can be a way of taking the company out of public scrutiny as it continues to try to restructure itself financially, and around the latest version of its mobile platfrom, BlackBerry 10. Yes, the BB10 platform is a major step change from previous generations of its software, but it’s possibly too late to make enough of an impact in a world currently dominated by Android and iOS — not just in terms of mindshare with consumers, but with developers and the rest of the ecosystem.

In the days following that report from Reuters, pundits have piped up to explain why going private may not be a viable option.

For starters, a turn away from the public markets may be more about majority shareholders then being able to more easily sell off assets, rather than restructuring with all that is currently there. Another glaring business issue is that the company is still selling more of its legacy BlackBerries than it is its newer handsets.

Indeed, so far, BB10 has not proven to be an instant home run. BlackBerry’s stock took a particularly bad tumble of nearly 30% just after its last earnings. In the quarter, which ended June 1, it reported sales of just 2.7 million BB10 devices.

In the wider league tables of smartphone sales, those building devices on Google’s Android have been running away with the show, with Andoid OEMs taking up nearly all of the top-five positions in Strategy Analytics’ latest report on smartphone shipments. (The lone holdout was Apple at just over 31% of shipments, with BlackBerry getting nary a mention in the report.)

Despite that, the company remains optimistic, even today.

“We continue to see compelling long-term opportunities for BlackBerry 10, we have exceptional technology that customers are embracing, we have a strong balance sheet and we are pleased with the progress that has been made in our transition,” Heins lists in his statement today, as he also sounded a note that signals more slashing in the meantime. “As the Special Committee focuses on exploring alternatives, we will be continuing with our strategy of reducing cost, driving efficiency and accelerating the deployment of BES 10, as well as driving adoption of BlackBerry 10 smartphones, launching the multi-platform BBM social messaging service, and pursuing mobile computing opportunities by leveraging the secure and reliable BlackBerry Global Data Network.”

What today’s news will do is once again start the rumor mill around who might end up shacking up with BlackBerry — another troubled handset maker very much needing scale? An untroubled handset maker but one that wants its own platform rather than continuing to use Google’s?

Still, before you start thinking that BlackBerry’s special committe will inevitably set things in motion for the levees finally to give over in Waterloo, the company also slips in the following caveat:

“There can be no assurance that this exploration process will result in any transaction. The Company does not currently intend to disclose further developments with respect to this process, unless and until its Board of Directors approves a specific transaction or otherwise concludes the review of strategic alternatives,” it notes.

That would surely be the worst-case scenario: BlackBerry admitting it can no longer go on like this, but still failing to find a decent route to get out of the mud.

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Wattpad Launches New Self-Publishing Crowdfunding, First Revenue Model For The Social Network

Wattpad, the Toronto-based social network based on writing and reading, has just announced a new crowdfunding platform called “Fan Funding” which offers authors on its network the chance to leverage their huge followings for raising capital towards creative works. It’s like a Wattpad-housed Kickstarter for creative projects, but there’s good reason Wattpad users would use it over the more established alternatives.

“For us, we are one of the first if not the first creative social networks that’s utilizing crowdfunding as one of our business models,” Wattpad founder and CEO Allen Lau said in an interview. “The reason that we’re different than Kickstarter is that if you want to start a project on Kickstarter, you basically ask your relatives, neighbors and friends to fund you, and then expect strangers to chip in. In our case, because we’re a social network ourselves, the writes that are participating in Fan Funding most likely have fairly sizeable fanbases already.”

Wattpad has a very active community, with over 16 million unique monthly views and around 4 billion minutes spent on site per month by users, according to the most recent numbers from Lau. And authors on the site have amassed considerable readerships: user MercyRose (Tara Sampson), for instance, who is one of the pilot users of the Fan Funding platform, has 55,316 followers, and managed to fully fund her project already, before the site has even had a public launch.

Fan Funding projects work on an all-or-nothing funding basis, and run for a standard 30 day term. Wattpad members pledge to the projects, and the story that is funded will always be made available for free on the Wattpad platform, so the core identify of the network as a place for the sharing of free stories remains intact.

“In our case, the product doesn’t necessarily have to be e-books or paper books that result,” Lau said, explaining how the platform might lead to other things as well. “It could be a movie script that you’re funding, and the end product could be a movie.”

Lau says that Wattpad has been considering a crowdfunding model for a while now, and the startup will take a 5 percent fee for every successfully funded project in revenue, after payments partner Stripe takes a 2.9 percent fee, plus $0.30 per transaction for each pledge made. It may be Wattpad’s first foray into earning revenue, but Lau says it won’t be the last, and there are other options the company is considering alongside Fan Funding.

So far, Wattpad has launched campaigns with three authors, including two currently in progress. For self-publishers, it’s a great way to fund projects without having to essentially “cold call” the way you often would on Kickstarter, and for the huge existing Wattpad user base, it’s a natural next step towards earning money from what might be a hobby or occasional pursuit. Rarely are late-stage revenue models such a natural fit, but we’ll see if the community is willing to pay.

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Apple’s Next iPad Will Indeed Inherit iPad Mini’s Thin And Light Good Looks, Reports WSJ

Apple’s next iPad will likely resemble the iPad mini, and lose some weight and possible some girth thanks to the same touch-panel tech that made the mini so… well, so mini. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple’s next iPad, which is currently in production with Apple’s supply partners, will use a film-based (vs. a glass-based) touch panel to save on thickness and weight.

It’s not something that should come as much of a surprise: early case design leaks (pictured above) suggested that the next 9.7-inch iPad would inherit the exterior styling of the iPad mini, and possibly go in for not only a thinner case but a thinner bezel and smaller physical footprint as well.

The fourth-generation iPad, and the third-generation device before it, are actually heavier and thicker than the iPad 2, something made necessary by the introduction of the Retina display in those later devices. Shaving weight and size isn’t only logical because of the iPad mini’s example, it’s also something that could help Apple considerably in terms of providing an upgrade incentive to existing iPad owners.

In all likelihood, a new iPad would occupy the same price point as the fourth generation device, which was introduced in October last year with a surprise refresh that improved the processor and added a lightning connector. Judging by recent reports, we could see the next iPad as early as September, and it might have a longer-lasting battery to go with its new design.

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Google Play Revenue Up 67% Over Past 6 Months, Fueled By Japan & S. Korea

Google’s Android app marketplace, Google Play, has seen significant revenue growth this year, fueled in large part by Japan and South Korea. In a new report released today by app store analytics firm Distimo, the company found that Google Play’s revenue grew by 67 percent over the past six months, while Apple’s App Store revenue grew by just 15 percent during the same time frame.

While these numbers reflect the impact Android’s massive market share is having on the app industry, it’s worth noting that of the two app stores, the Apple App Store’s market is still the largest, and continues to see more than two times the revenue of Google Play.

That latter figure varies a bit from an earlier report put out by competing analytics firm App Annie in April, which found that Apple’s App Store earned around 2.6 times more revenue in the preceding quarter. But not only do the firms’ methodologies differ in general, Distimo looked at the earnings of all ranked apps in the 18 largest countries over 6 months, while App Annie’s data was, as noted above, for the quarter.

That being said, Google Play’s revenue growth is notable. While only 25 percent of the revenue from the two stores combined came from Google Play in February 2013, this went up 8 percentage points to reach 33 percent by July.

Japan & South Korea Fuel Google Play Revenue Growth

Overall, the U.S. still spends the most money on apps, followed by Japan and South Korea, who were the main contributors to Google Play’s revenue share. After the top three, were the U.K., Australia, Germany, Canada, France, Russia, and Italy. (One interesting side note here is that in Russia, more money was spent in the App Store for the iPad, than in the App Store for the iPhone.)

In terms of the top revenue-generating apps this past month, Google Play’s list reflects its heavy footprint in Japan and South Korea in particular. Though King.com’s Candy Crush Saga still reigns at number one, it’s followed by Japan’s Puzzles & Dragons, two apps for South Korea’s Kakao at spots #3 and #5, and Japan’s LINE at number 4.

Meanwhile, the top revenue-generating apps in the Apple App Store, in order, were: Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Hay Day, Puzzles & Dragons, and The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth.

In terms of paid apps, Apple’s app store was largely games with the exception of WhatsApp in spot#4, while Google Play was a mix of games and utilities (like a keyboard, backup service, and launcher).

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Apple’s September 10 Event Date For Next iPhone Gets A Strong, If Unofficial Confirmation

If you’re in the habit of scheduling time off for key Apple product unveilings, it’s pretty safe to book September 10. The date was floated this weekend by AllThingsD for a press event and official unveiling, and now The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple has confirmed that date. Dalrymple, apart from being the father to an amazing beard, is also maybe the single-best informed outside source regarding Apple’s product event plans.

The date for the event will put it on a Tuesday just at the start of September, as AllThingsD reported. ATD itself is a pretty solid source, so there was little doubt that would be the day, but Dalrymple’s confirmation essentially makes things official – without, you know, actually making them official.

We’ll probably see the iPhone 5S at this event, which by all reports would look a lot like the iPhone 5 but might pack some improvements including a faster processor, a dual LED flash and a better camera, to name a few. We may even see an iPhone 5C released at the same time, which is the rumored name for a low-cost iPhone with a plastic back and essentially iPhone 5 internals. Remember too that Apple will likely launch iOS 7 officially at or shortly after the September 10 event.

Asymco’s Horace Dediu also has an interesting post positing pricing on an iPhone 5C, should we see one. He suspects we’ll see pricing in line with the iPad 2 and iPad mini, compared to the current generation iPad – that puts them at around the $450 to $500 range unlocked, which is definitely much more affordable than the current full price of iPhone 5 devices. Looks like we won’t have long to find out, providing Apple really does announce both next-generation devices at the same time.

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New Kindle Fire HD vs. Nexus 7: Who will win the 2013 mini tablet war?

It’s now been almost a year since the Kindle Fire HD was released, and as surely as fall follows summer, Amazon is preparing to launch an updated line of tablets to compete against the rejuvenated Nexus 7 and the (assumed) iPad Mini with Retina display. According to “trusted sources,” Amazon will be releasing new versions of the 7- and 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD and the entry-level Kindle Fire in September — and, if the trusted source is to be believed, the Kindle Fire HDs will come with very impressive hardware specs indeed.

With the new Nexus 7 already released, and receiving generally excellent reviews, how will the new Kindle Fire HD stack up?
Kindle Fire HD 2

According to a source who spoke to BGR, both the 7- and 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD tablets, and the entry-level Kindle Fire, will receive significant overhauls in terms of appearance, hardware, and software

.The existing Kindle Fire HD 7. This rounded edge will apparently become more ‘chiseled.’

All three tablets will lose their rounded edges and bezels and take on a more “chiseled” appearance, apparently making them more comfortable. The new tablets will be lighter, too, though we don’t have any exact figures.

On the hardware front, the 7-inch Fire HD will have a 1920×1200 display, 2GB of RAM, and a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC (clocked at around 2GHz, apparently). There’s a front-facing camera (but no rear-facing camera), WiFi (probably up to 802.11n), and various storage (16/32/64GB) and cellular options.

The 8.9-inch Fire HD will have a 2560×1600 display and a rear-facing camera, but otherwise the specs appear to be identical.

Software-wise, both tablets are apparently running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean internally, with Amazon’s usual customizations. Android 4.3 is still almost brand new, so we’ll almost certainly get Android 4.2.2 or 4.2.3 when the Fire HD tablets launch sometime in September.

Price-wise, Amazon will be trying to match its current line-up ($200 for the 16GB 7-inch model, $270 for the 8.9-inch). With Google’s Nexus 7 price bump from $200 to $230, we wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon follows suit — or, on the other hand, Amazon could well try to push the advantage

Kindle Fire 3

The Kindle Fire 3 will receive its own set of hardware and software upgrades. The display will make the jump to 1280×800 (up from 1024×600), and it will inherit the SoC that’s used in the current-gen Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (OMAP 4470, SGX544 graphics). RAM will stay at 1GB; and probably so will the price, at $160.

These might sound like fairly small upgrades, but it’s still almost a doubling in pixel density and CPU/GPU performance. It won’t match up to the Nexus 7 or iPad Mini, but at $160 it isn’t meant to compete — it’s meant to pick up all of those consumers who want to get in on the tablet thing while spending as little money as possible. (Considering the Kindle Fire is still Amazon’s best-selling product, it would seem there are a lot of people like this

Kindle Fire HD vs. Nexus 7

Just like last year, the big question is, should you buy the Nexus 7 or the Kindle Fire HD? And, just like last year, it’s a toss-up. If these specs turn out to be real, then the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 will have almost identical hardware specs, with the only real differentiator being the rear-facing camera and the software. If Amazon keeps the 7-inch HD at $200, then that would make a huge difference, too. Really, there isn’t a whole lot in it, unless you feel very strongly about the software (Amazon’s version of Android is really quite different from the stock experience, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing).

The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD, of course, won’t have much in the way of competition (except from the iPad Mini, I suppose, but that will be in a different price bracket) — and the Kindle Fire, at $160, will continue to mop up the remainders. I wonder where in this price range the Surface Mini will debut, too.

If all goes to plan, the new Kindle Fires should be announced sometime in September, and released soon after. Amazon has a tendency to release one or two new products each year, too, so we wouldn’t be shocked if CEO Jeff Bezos also has a surprise product announcement up his sleeve. An Android-based game console or set-top box, perhaps?

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HTC Hopes Robert Downey Jr. — And Some Internet-Friendly Humour — Can Drink Samsung’s Milkshake

Right now mobile maker HTC has a brand name that stands for ‘Has To Change’. So it’s hoping a circa $1 billion marketing campaign — starring actor Robert Downey Jr., of Ironman fame — plus an injection of Internet-friendly humour is the special sauce needed to lure consumers away from Android kingpin, Samsung.

HTC has just released a teaser (above) of its new ‘Here’s To Change’ campaign which will kick off on August 15, initially on YouTube, followed by cinema and TV spots. The initial focus will be on making noise about HTC’s brand itself, rather than trying to flog specific handsets, by playing around with what its brand name stands for — the teaser’s ”Humongous Tinfoil Catamaran”, will be followed up by the likes of ”Hipster Troll Carwash” and “Hold This Cat”, according to Engadget. It’s almost as if HTC wants 4Chan to get involved.

It’s been a torrid year for the 17-year mobile industry veteran. Despite garnering plaudits for its flagship HTC One smartphone, HTC has been battling an ongoing decline in revenue and sliding profits. Late last month it issued guidance that it’s expecting a loss in the coming quarter so it’s clearly going to get worse before it can get better. If indeed a turnaround is possible when you’ve fallen into these sort of revenue doldrums. Still, HTC isn’t throwing in the towel — publicly at least it’s stepping up its game with this much-needed marketing rethink.

HTC’s CMO Ben Ho, newly in post at the start of this year and just one of many senior-level exec changes at the company in 2013, said the idea is to get consumers talking about the brand. Which is a sea-change from its previous marketing modus operandi, in which HTC cast itself as the smartphone industry’s wallflower — with its “Quietly brilliant” slogan. By contrast Samsung went around willy-waving gigantic phablets and taking bites out of Apple fans – a much noisier (and far-better funded) marketing strategy that clearly delivered the goods.

After sending up its own acronym, the second phase of HTC’s new model marketing campaign — assuming, of course, it manages to go the distance, being as the campaign is slated to run for two to three years (which is a heck of a long time in mobile) — will apparently move on to showcasing specific HTC software features such as its Flipboard-esque BlinkFeed homescreen. The final phase will yell about how HTC products give owners an edge. RDJ has apparently been signed by HTC for two years, says Engadget, and the contract includes him having creative input, as well as appearing in the ads.

Can Robert Downey Jr. drink Samsung’s milkshake? Not a chance. Samsung’s multi-billion-dollar marketing budget dwarfs HTC’s spending, meaning it can buy up more shelf space in carriers’ phone stores to push more of its product into consumers’ hands (it has a lot more product to sell too, with a huge portfolio of devices servicing every price-point vs the few devices HTC has had to fall back on focusing on). But RDJ might at least be able to siphon off enough (cult) interest for HTC to sustain its business. Let’s hope so. The Android ecosystem is far richer for having HTC in it.

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Xiaomi Beats Samsung To Top China’s Smartphone Charts

Xiaomi‘s flagship smartphone, the Mi 2S, is the most popular phone in China, according to Chinese benchmarking company, Antutu.

According to Antutu’s data on “active device volumes”, the Mi 2S was the most popular phone bought by Chinese users in the first half of this year, followed by Samsung’s latest S4 device.

The Mi 2S is the successor to Xiaomi’s popular Mi 2 smartphone, which sold 7.19 million units in 2012. The Mi 2S was just released in April, at about the same time as the S4.

According to Antutu’s benchmarking tests, the MI 2 performed on a par with the S4, above the HTC One. Samsung’s latest Octa S4 was the fastest phone, leaving the MI S2 and S4 tied for second place.

Antutu pointed out that the Xiaomi’s relatively lower price to power performance was likely the reason for its success in China.

Samsung’s S4 costs about $600, while the MI 2S goes for less than half, at $277 (1699 RMB). The Mi 2 sold for $326 (1,999 RMB) last year.

Elsewhere in North Asia, Samsung’s 5.5″ phablet, the Galaxy Note II was the most popular phone in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Japan’s phone of choice was the Sony Xperia Z.

Part of the reason the Xiaomi hasn’t seen the same popularity outside its home country could be that the company has famously been low on supplies because it produces just enough stock for the forecasted demand.

Its CEO and founder, Lei Jun, said earlier this year that the firm only produces as many handsets as it expects to sell, and that it doesn’t intend to waste resources overproducing. This strategy has delayed delivery dates by about three to four months per batch, he said in March.

But Xiaomi has started ramping up production, it said recently. It just raised its sales target for this year to 20 million smartphones, from 15 million previously. According to reports, Xiaomi sold 7.03 million devices across its portfolio in the first six months this year, almost catching up to the 7.19 million phones (mainly the Mi 2) for the whole of 2012.

Update: It appears Xiaomi is chasing the charts from bottom-up, as well. While the Mi 2S is positioned as a premium device, its $130 (799 RMB) quadcore Hongmi phone sold out in 90 seconds today.

The company announced on its Sina Weibo account that the first 100,000 units of the phone, released at 12 noon on Tencent Qzone, sold out in a minute-and-a-half. (Spotted by TechInAsia)

It said that another 7.45 million reservations have been placed for the phone, as well.

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InsideView Raises $19M For Service That Adds Intelligence Into CRM Systems

Inside View has raised $19 million for its platform that aggregates information and then adds it into a customer’s CRM installation. The round was led by Split Rock Partners, with participation from the company’s existing investors, Emergence Capital, Foundation Capital, and Rembrandt Venture Partners. Overall, InsideView has raised a total of $46.4 million.

The company aggregates 30,000 sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Reuters, and SEC filings. It feeds this data through APIs into a company’s marketing or sales lead environment.

For example, InsideView for Marketing is used by customers to fill in data such as a contact’s title or other data that can be used to augment a lead profile. The data is presented within a customer’s CRM system and then fed into the underlying database. InsideView’s sales tool adds information that tells the sales person more about the prospect, the size of the customer and additional related insights.

The service takes into consideration the data models of various CRM platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM and other major providers. The company integrates data through a platform that is based on natural language processing (NLP), employing open-source technologies such as Hadoop, relational databases and specialized libraries for NLP.

InsideView is a modern version of contact information systems that emerged before the advent of APIs and the ability to push data across different systems and process through NLP. They compete with major providers such as Harte-Hanks, whch has made a fortune in providing data to enhance marketing and sales contacts.

The new breed of competitors are data-driven providers that integrate their services deeply into business platforms. A number of factors make the difference with these platforms but it is mainly speed that matters most. Routing sales leads with the right information has a direct correlation to sales. It’s velocity that makes the difference, if for nothing else than simply to get the job done and the sales in the door.

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One Hour Translation’s Patented Tech Enables Speedy And Accurate Real-Time Translation Of Online Content

Founded in 2008, One Hour Translation is one of the oldest and largest online translation companies, with more than 15,000 active translators in 100 countries who cover more than 75 languages. The Cyprus-based company processes 100,000 projects a month for customers ranging from large corporations (including Toyota and Shell) that need enterprise-grade multilingual content management systems to smaller companies in search of a more polished alternative to cutting-and-pasting content into Google Translate.

Over the last five years, CEO and founder Ofer Shoshan, who bootstrapped One Hour Translation, has seen an increase in demand for online translation as companies seek to diversify into global markets.

“When there are financial crises in certain markets, we see customers from those markets that want to start getting international customers,” says Shoshan. “In this context, the translation market has done well. It’s a huge market, worth more than $30 billion last year.”

Though there are many online translation services now available (including Gengo, Conyac and Dakwak), Shoshan says that One Hour Translation’s advantages are its scale, speed and patented technology.

The company’s proprietary products includes WeST (short for Web site translation), its latest offering. WeST allows administrators to add multilingual support to their sites by inserting a few lines of code. Once implemented, WeST maps all site text and automatically sends updates to human translators. This allows content to be translated on an ongoing basis. One Hour Translation’s Translation Memory cloud, another of its patented technologies, reduces the cost of translation by eliminating charges for repeated phrases. The company’s platform also allows real-time peer edits of translations for quality assurance.

Though technology facilitates the speed and accuracy of its translations, One Hour Translation’s most important resource is still its 15,000 translators, who have to pass an exam before they start working for the company. Translators only translate content into their native language and include people who specialize in copywriting and app localization, as well as legal, medical and financial documents.

Want to try out One Hour Translation? The company is offering free home page translation (up to 200 words to any single language) for the first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who use this link.

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After Years Of Bootstrapping, MyFitnessPal Raises $18M Round From Kleiner Perkins And Accel

MyFitnessPal, a service that allows users to track their calories and share that information with friends, has raised $18 million in its first round of funding.

This seems like one of those stories where a company goes years without raising any funding (MyFitnessPal launched in September 2005) before raising money from top-tier venture firms. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from Accel Partners, and Kleiner’s John Doerr and Accel’s Andrew Braccia are joining the board.

MyFitnessPal has previously said that it has more than 40 million registered users. As part of the funding announcement, it also says that its users have lost a total of 100 million pounds to date, and that over the past year, it has been adding 1.5 million users every month.

As for why it’s raising money now, co-founder Mike Lee told me that he and his co-founder/brother Albert Lee have always had “a thousand item to-do list, and we could only do three things on it.” Over time, he said, “things kept dropping off the list, which kept getting bigger and bigger.” So raising money will allow the company to expand the team and to add the features that the Lees have been planning. It also allows MyFitnessPal to put more resources behind its recent efforts to expand internationally, which doesn’t just involve creating translated versions of the website and app, but also support for local foods and units of measurement.

As MyFitnessPal has grown, a number of other services have sprung up to help users track their health, some of them creating their own devices and others relying on the smartphone. The company actually offers an API that helps it integrate with outside services.

“Clearly there’s this explosion of activity happening around the quantified self,” Lee said. “The amount of data that we will have about our personal health is only going to grow. … We really want to advance our ability to help users make meaning from all this data. We really want to analyze the data to help our users be successful.”

As for making money, even though the company has been profitable since its inception, Lee acknowledged that MyFitnessPal hasn’t taken a particularly sophisticated approach in this area thus far: “We have not been focused on monetization to date, especially for a bootstrapped company. We literally slapped ads on.” So he plans to do “a lot of thinking” around the business model — the key, he said, is that MyFitnessPal is addressing a real pain point for users

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ActiveNotifications Lets You Bring The Moto X’s Best Feature To Other Android Devices

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Moto X lately (full review coming shortly), and while the spec sheet isn’t to everyone’s liking, it packs some smart features that I’d love to see on other devices. Motorola’s motion-sensitive Active Display notifications is at the top of that transplant list, and thankfully a developer over on the XDA forums has already cooked up a pretty solid approximation with an app called ActiveNotifications.

The app was originally only available for devices running Android 4.3, and there aren’t too many of those floating around right now — unless you had a Nexus device or one of the two Google Edition phones you were just plain out of luck. A newly released update though broadens that playing field substantially, as it can now be loaded up on any device running Android 4.1.2. or later. In case you’re running an even older build (think Android 4.0) and don’t mind a little weekend troubleshooting, there’s also an alpha build for you to tinker around with.

I’ve spent the past few days fiddling with the app on both a Nexus 4 running Android 4.3 and Galaxy S 4 running Android 4.2.2, and you know what? It’s not bad at all considering these devices lack the additional hardware that makes the Active Display feature really shine on the X. Once ActiveNotifications is installed and you select the apps you want it to display notifications from, a familiar-looking notification shade will occasionally spring to life to show you what’s been going on on your phone. After that, it’s just the same as on the X: swipe up to select the notification and jump into the app, and swipe down to unlock your device normally. Throw in support for the proximity sensor so the display won’t fire up while it’s in your bag/pocket, and you’ve got yourself a pretty impressive knock-off (and I use that word with the utmost respect).

There are, as always, a few caveats to be mindful of (and the developer makes no bones about the fact this is an experimental app). It’s better to run the ActiveNotifications on devices that have AMOLED displays as only certain parts of your screen get lit up — running the app on the Nexus 4 caused the entire screen to light up, which won’t do your batteries many favors. ActiveNotifications can also only show one notification type at a time: you’ll see a Gmail icon for instance, but not a Facebook icon even if the messages hit your phone at the same time. Given the blistering pace of updates being pushed out though, it shouldn’t be long before the gap between ActiveNotifications and the real deal closes dramatically.

Motorola’s brass likes to talk up the additional processing cores in its X8 architecture that make features like Active Display work — one core is apparently dedicated solely to monitoring the phone’s myriad sensor data, which includes information on movement and spatial orientation. Even without those extra components, ActiveNotifications makes for an experience that gets pretty close to what Motorola has been trying to nail for the past year. Not bad at all for an app that’s less than a week old — you can check it out in the Google Play Store here.

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