The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Grilled Cheese, Beer, And Other Awesome Stuff: An Interview With GroupMe At SXSW
- Following Earthquake, Japanese Officials Fear Partial Nuclear Meltdown Underway
- (Founder Stories) Joel Spolsky On Startups: “Have A Co-Founder Otherwise You’ll Go Insane”
- Video: Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai Gives “One Year Update” At SXSW 2011
- Join Us For The TechCrunch/TUAW Reader Meet-Up At SXSW Sponsored By Peel
- Lightbox Photos Wants To Be Your New Android Camera App (SXSW)
- From “Businesses” To “Tools”: The Twitter API ToS Changes
- SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch: The Game Layer Is Coming (SXSW)
- Ask a VC: Mike Maples Defends Digg’s Honor and the Kno (TCTV)
- Jake Gyllenhaal Movie ‘The Source Code’ Markets Itself To Techies
- There Is No SXSW. The Perfect Extension For Those Not Here.
- How To “Win” SXSW: Hint – It’s The Same Answer Every Year
- This Post Has Nothing to do with #SXSW
- The Walled Garden Has Won
| Grilled Cheese, Beer, And Other Awesome Stuff: An Interview With GroupMe At SXSW Posted: 13 Mar 2011 09:20 AM PDT There are few things better than free beer. Mix that with melted cheese and toasted bread, and you have a combination that satisfies even the deepest of human desires. And they’re available just outside the main convention center at SXSW, both free of charge. The food is being provided by GroupMe, the group messaging app that, along with competitors like Beluga and Fast Society, has received plenty of buzz in the buildup to SXSW. We swung by their food stand for an interview with cofounders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci (and to grab some food for ourselves). Tune in to learn how things have gone for GroupMe so far in Austin, why they chose to give away grilled cheese sandwiches, and adventures in Phish concert parking lots. Oh, and sorry for calling it “South by”. I hate when people do that.        
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| Following Earthquake, Japanese Officials Fear Partial Nuclear Meltdown Underway Posted: 13 Mar 2011 09:19 AM PDT
On Sunday, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said a partial meltdown at the Fukushiman Dai-ichi nuclear complex, was likely under way. The partial meltdown follows a blast on Saturday at one unit of the complex, where operators are working to cool the reactor core by injecting seawater and boron into its containment vessel. Also on Sunday, according to the International Atomic Energy Association Japan’s Tohoku Electric Power Company (TEPCO) reported a state of emergency at a another facility, the Onagawa nuclear power plant; while its three reactors remained under control, the emergency alert was related to radioactivity readings in the area that exceeded allowable levels. Eric Talmadge and Mari Yamaguchi reported for the Associated Press:
While facing the terrifying prospect of multiple nuclear meltdowns in their country, millions of Japanese households remain without electricity, food and water currently. The natural disasters could have caused even more damage if not for Japan’s investments in advanced warning systems, and constant updating of building codes to deal with earthquakes, especially. Japan’s Meteorological Agency warned of strong aftershocks ahead; their website suggests a 70 percent chance of a magnitude 7-class earthquakes through March 16, 2011. As oil prices are skyrocketing, generally, and energy demands are rising the United States’ energy chief, Steven Chu, recently asked Congress to consider an American clean energy standard that would include nuclear along with renewable sources like solar and wind. The situation in Japan, however, underscores controversy around designating nuclear as a clean energy source.        
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| (Founder Stories) Joel Spolsky On Startups: “Have A Co-Founder Otherwise You’ll Go Insane” Posted: 13 Mar 2011 08:46 AM PDT All this week on Founder Stories, we’ve shown segments from Chris Dixon’s interview with Stack Exchange CEO Joel Spolsky, who also writes the Joel on Software blog. In the final rapid-fire Q&A video above, Spolsky doles out some advice to other startup founders, primarily “have a co-founder” to share the load, “otherwise you’ll go insane.” And “make sure you figure out who wons what,” he adds, and do that up front. As Dixon points out, the last thing you want is to have to explain to later investors why some guy named Frank who was only around for 3 weeks owns 30 percent of the company. (Disclosure: Host Chris Dixon is an angel investor in Stack Exchange). Spolsky also explains why he admires Bill Gates more than Steve Jobs, why his favorite charity is DonorsChoose (crowdsourced funding FTW), why he finds it easier to hire people in New York City, and dishes on the group think in Silicon Valley. Below is the entire 30-minute interview, or you can watch it in segments. In Part I, Spolsky talks about when to raise VC cash and how he seeded the original Stack Overflow community with the readers of his blog, in Part II he rails against what bad SEO has done to the Internet and why he chooses to go deep in each vertical site Stack Exchange rolls out, and in Part III he rags on Yahoo Answers. It’s worth watching the whole thing. Other episodes of Founder Stories are also now available on iTunes.        
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| Video: Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai Gives “One Year Update” At SXSW 2011 Posted: 13 Mar 2011 08:45 AM PDT
The short answer is that both the company and user-base have grown significantly. When I last spoke with him there were around 300,000 people using Foursquare to check-in and now there are over 7 million users. That, coupled with their recent loyalty deal with American Express, means we should be on the lookout for expanded services and features in 2011. Check out the video below for the update.        
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| Join Us For The TechCrunch/TUAW Reader Meet-Up At SXSW Sponsored By Peel Posted: 13 Mar 2011 05:25 AM PDT
Please RSVP here and remember that its at 201 E 5th St Unit #108 [Map] (It’s a big loft) from 6pm to 10pm. Expect food, booze, and music plus Peel’s own brand of Interactive TV featuring the Peel Fruit. Plus fun. Lots of fun.        
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| Lightbox Photos Wants To Be Your New Android Camera App (SXSW) Posted: 12 Mar 2011 03:21 PM PST
That means there is a space for a creator of ridiculously good Android apps. Step forward Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel with Lightbox, their new startup which has taken a $1.1 million seed round from some of the top VCs and Angels in the UK and US. A private beta of their first app, Lightbox Photos, launches this week at SXSW, with the founders in attendance handing out invitation codes to the private beta. The app will be presented at the Team Android Choice Awards. You can sign up here to get on the invite list for the app here.        
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| From “Businesses” To “Tools”: The Twitter API ToS Changes Posted: 12 Mar 2011 03:12 PM PST
In making these changes, Twitter also had to chance their API Terms of Service. And we thought it would be interesting to compare the old ToS to the new one. We can do that thanks to the magic of Google, which has a cached copy of the ToS dated January 3, 2011. Below, find the key redline changes. Overall, you’ll note that the document is now much more strongly and directly worded than it previously was. And it’s clear that user privacy is also more of a focus than before. But the key change may come in the first paragraph: January 3 version:
March 11 version:
Now perhaps you see why the ecosystem, the “partners”, are so enraged. (Note that this isn’t the full document below, just the sections with the main changes):
[photo: flickr/velo steve]        
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| SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch: The Game Layer Is Coming (SXSW) Posted: 12 Mar 2011 02:17 PM PST
SCVNGR has had a big week — on Thursday the site launched a spinoff service called LevelUp that combines some of the retention mechanics seen in location-based games with the steep deals offered by sites like Groupon. Priebatsch, who maintained an apparently super-human energy level throughout his talk, discussed how many of the gaming mechanics seen in the virtual world will be applied in the physical world to create a so-called “Game Layer”. “It’s brand new and has not been built,” Priebatsch says. “The last decade was the decade of social — it took connections between friends, family, and coworkers and put them online. It’s called Facebook. The social layer traffics in connections.” Conversely, Priebatsch says that the Game layer traffics in influence — “It will influence where we go, what we do, and how we do it.” Next, Priebatsch outlined how many of the principles we associate with games — levels, rules, rewards, motivated players, etc. — are exemplified by our school system. The problem, he says, is that school has an engagement issue: people are bored. Priebatsch explains that the under the grading system we’re all familiar with, there’s a constant possibility of failure. One bad day can drop you from an A to a B. This, Priebatsch says, is bad. “It’s a game mechanic, and it’s letting people lose in a game you don’t want them to lose”. His solution is a progression dynamic, where instead of being graded for each assignment and test individually, everyone starts at zero ‘experience points’ and then works their way up to higher levels. His next topic was one that’s also familiar to both students and games alike: cheating. The disincentive for students isn’t on cheating itself — it’s on getting caught. Under the traditional system it’s the teacher versus the students, and the students work out ways to cheat without the teacher noticing. But there’s a different solution. At Princeton, exams are not monitored by a teacher or TA. You walk into the classroom, your test is on your desk, and there’s a box to turn it in. The only rules: you have to sign an honor code, and complicity is a crime — in other words, all of the students are supposed to watch out to make sure their peers aren’t cheating. This has dropped the number of cheating incidents at Princeton from 400 to 2 cases annually. One of the more interesting topics Priebatsch covered were the faults currently seen in location-based games like SCVNGR, Foursquare, and Gowalla. In one telling pie chart, he showed just how few people, relatively speaking, are using these services (it’s a small slice of the pie). Priebatsch says that the big rule that these games have — users must be at a certain venue in order to check in — are too restrictive. They limit the number of people that can be engaged with, and the window of time that the service has to get the user’s attention. Another issue: reward schedules. Priebatsch explains that rewards have been shown to be very effective, leading to spikes in engagement and activity. But it’s not a perfect system — handing out rewards can set users up to expect them everywhere. Without the reward as an incentive, people often stop checking in (he points to the Gap/Facebook deal as an example, and says that he believes many of the users who participated in that deal have stopped checking in). Priebatsch closed out the talk with a demonstration of what he calls communal gameplay and communal discovery. Everyone in the keynote hall was given a colored card — there were a handful of different colors, and the cards were distributed at random. The audience was then asked to swap cards with their neighbors so that each row of seats was the same color. The audience was given 180 seconds to pull of the task, and they did it with a minute to spare. The feat, Priebatsch says, is an analogy for how much people can get done with decentralized leadership, applying local solutions to global problems. And somehow — Priebatsch didn’t really get into giving any concrete predictions — the ‘game layer’ is going to help make this happen.        
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| Ask a VC: Mike Maples Defends Digg’s Honor and the Kno (TCTV) Posted: 12 Mar 2011 01:38 PM PST
Enjoy! And check out our earlier interview with Maples and his three companies that got away here.        
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| Jake Gyllenhaal Movie ‘The Source Code’ Markets Itself To Techies Posted: 12 Mar 2011 01:34 PM PST Between movies being funded on Kickstarter, a critically acclaimed movie about Facebook, and Twitter basically serving as a backchannel for the Oscars, Hollywood increasingly has to reconcile itself with the Internet’s influence on storytelling as well it’s power as a distribution mechanism. Directed by Duncan Jones, The Source Code is a movie about a soldier who finds himself as part of a strange military project. The source code is literally a computer program which allows him to take over another man’s identity during the last few minutes of his life, in order to um, not blow up a train. What’s more interesting than the story line is the fact that the Summit Entertainment has built the Facebook game “The Source Code Mission” in order to promote the film, the first “cross-platform, trans-media campaign that transports audiences into the movie narrative using social media game play.” Okay but what does this buzzwordgasm mean? Well that fans can scan in Microsoft Tag codes they find on The Source Code movie posters and other sundry swag, or visit Facebook or the movie’s actual site (http://mission.enterthesourcecode.com/) in order to complete “social media tasks” which basically amount to posting thinly veiled promotion about the movie onto their Facebook walls. If a user completes all five tasks, their profile image becomes part of a “movie poster” on the Enter The Source Code website, Influencer Project style. While the actual “The Source Code Mission” game is not particularly engaging, it definitely an early sign of the new digital direction. And we took some time to speak with Director Duncan Jones (who has 40,000 Twitter followers!) and star Jake Gyllenhaal (who apparently is sneaking onto Twitter under an alias) about what they thought about the film’s hardcore interactive marketing push and the Internet’s effect on moviemaking in general.        
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| There Is No SXSW. The Perfect Extension For Those Not Here. Posted: 12 Mar 2011 01:11 PM PST
Not at SXSW is an extension for both Chrome and Firefox that alters Twitter.com to remove all tweets that reference the conference. But that’s not good enough. So the extension also blocks tweets from all those Twitter users known to be attending SXSW! It’s brilliant. It’s not perfect, but it’s close. And it’s easy enough to turn the extension on and off from Twitter.com (just click on the new link at the top of your stream that shows you how many tweets are being hidden due to SXSWness). From here you can also decide to just hide tweets with the hashtag #sxsw or #sxswi and/or the known attendees. And lest you think Lanyrd are just SXSW haters, they’re also the ones behind maybe the best (unofficial) SXSW guide for Austin. They’re just smart enough to realize that not everyone cares about the conference — or worse, that some people are forced to unfollow users to stop the influx of SXSW-related tweets. Other startups have extensions to selectively block tweets from your stream — Slipstream is a great tool for this — but Lanyrd is built for one purpose alone: nuking tech/film/music hipsters. You’re welcome.        
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| How To “Win” SXSW: Hint – It’s The Same Answer Every Year Posted: 12 Mar 2011 11:36 AM PST
Speculation as to which app will be the most used at SXSW this year is already well under way. No doubt, this is a question that is dominating any number of conversations among reporters, investors and start-ups, and is certainly a subject of increasing speculation here in Austin. Let's be clear: we do this every year before SXSW. But, this time the question would seem to hold an even greater level of importance. The difference this year is not which app or technology SXSW will help surface above the start-up noise, but rather which app will help SXSW take back control of the chaos it has unleashed. The trouble with SXSW reached a tipping point last year. The interactive portion of the conference has grown so much that people are beginning to question its value, or at least what SXSW Interactive now stands for. As Jolie O'Dell pointedly critiqued: "Too many people, not enough tech." In fact, I think it's safe to say everyone agrees that SXSW has gotten out of hand. But, really, it's not about the size, as Robert Scoble pointed out recently; It's about the tools to properly manage it. The Myths of SXSW SXSW is not the real world (unless of course you consider thousands of nerds jumping up and down as Kevin Rose throws Apple gadgets into the Diggnation crowd, a normal thing). The actual reality is that while SXSW may be some odd, fantastical microcosm that hints at possible mainstream success, the conference and how services perform here cannot be taken as any kind of barometer of scalable success. Why? Because the pain points of SXSW are magnifications and exaggerations of the real world, rather than the other way around. SXSW is about scaling down rather than scaling up, which is precisely why every year we speculate on which service will be the one that everyone needs to use. Twitter was successful in 2007 because so few people were using it. Those of us using it at the time were basically a small band of early adopters, who could follow and communicate with our equally geeky friends. The same can be said for Gowalla and Foursquare. Disregarding last year's "location wars," both apps were actually fun and useful precisely because they hadn't blown up yet. For example, I didn't find out about the infamous "Revolving Door" party until the next morning because no one in my small network of friends knew to go to the Hilton and check-in. But for everyone there, this was a defining moment in their SXSW experience. This is certainly no longer the case with Twitter, which has scaled to become almost entirely useless as an insider communication tool. Remember last year when Gary Vaynerchuk tweeted out the location of his wine party? Within minutes, hundreds of people lined up and Gary stormed out exasperated, in search of a larger venue to accommodate his followers. So when Scoble declares that we need to create the "MicroSXSW experience," he's actually declaring what has always been true. The question is really which service will enable quality over quantity communications and organization this year. Which app will provide the backchannel for you to meaningfully engage with your social network in the real world? Taking Back SXSW The app that "wins" SXSW this year will excel at three things:
For example, let's assume I see everyone talking about the Foodspotting Street Food Fest party on Twitter, so I head that way. A few seconds later, I get a push notification that a friend of mine has checked in there on Foursquare. Chances are I won't be able to find him in the crowd, so I shoot him a text message to meet at the corner. So far, so good. But, it has already taken me three different services to meet up with my friend, and there are still any number of barriers just getting there. After all, SXSW moves quickly, plans change, and you have to be able to improvise. To have a legitimate conversation with my friend, we will likely need to ditch the overcrowded scene and find a quieter place to talk. And once we've decided on a spot, I'll definitely want to round up some of my other friends to meet us. This all sounds simple enough, and in the real world it may be. But we've already determined SXSW is not the real world. While we constantly ask ourselves if a service can scale up, what we've come to realize at SXSW is that a service must also be able to scale down. Neither Twitter nor Foursquare hold the kind of value for users that they did when they garnered their SXSW acclaim. That is certainly not to say that they aren't useful – only that their usefulness is no longer particularly attuned to the pain points of SXSW. When I look back on my previous SXSW experiences, I remember the little moments – the 4:00am conversations over migas at Kerbey Lane, plotting new ventures in the Driskill bar, or watching the sunrise as we walked home to shower and do it all over again – these are the moments that define a successful experience at SXSW. The app and technology that wins SXSW this year will be the same that wins every year – the one that provides the backchannel to achieve actual social value amid the insanity of SXSW. This year, think small in a big way.        
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| This Post Has Nothing to do with #SXSW Posted: 12 Mar 2011 10:38 AM PST Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
I’m actually in Austin at the moment. It turns out this is “the year of group messaging” and since I’m a shareholder in the largest player in the space, TextPlus (7.7m monthly actives), I thought I should come here to represent. But … that’s all I have to say about that. With all these companies vying for attention & others just here to soak up the vibe I thought I’d write a much broader piece on how startups can make the most of their attendance at any conference or event. 1. Be very targeted in which events you attend Choose wisely. Don’t worry about all the folks bragging on Twitter, Instagram or FourSquare about being at the latest event. Feel good in knowing that while they’re at the latest conference, you can be back home stealing all their customers! 2. Do leg work before you get to the event The most experienced conference goers (bigger company ones) often book suites in hotels and plan meetings rather than attending any actual sessions. The single most important thing about a conference in my opinion is the fact that all of your important contacts are in one physical location. Don’t leave it to chance. Book ‘em. 3. If you sit on a panel, make sure you don’t suck Have a dialog with your fellow panelists. Don’t be afraid of some friendly controversy – it adds spice. Just be polite about it. And don’t be a panel hog – you might get to say more to the audience but if you care about your fellow panelists you’ll piss them off. I actually think one of the most misunderstood reasons to be on a panel is actually getting to know the other panelists rather than just talking to the audience. You have a certain bond after you’ve sat on a panel together. So don’t piss them off by hogging minutes for an audience that won’t remember you 5 minutes after you’re done. Grab business cards of the other panelists and follow up after the show. 4. Focus more on Lobby Conf than watching panels I spend 90+% of my time at conferences in the lobby and I always have. Yes, it’s partly due to ADHD. But really you want to be building connections with people. While the conference is going on there are always people outside the rooms in the lobby. That’s your best chance to get people that would ordinarily be really difficult to get a meeting with. 5. Consider staying out late, sleeping in If you gave me a choice between the late night cocktail and the morning keynote I’d be sipping martinis every time. 6. Schedule dinners Another similar strategy is with customers. If you invite 3-4 customers and 3-4 prospects to a dinner with 2-3 employees and some other interesting guests you’ll be doing well. Potential customers always prefer to talk to existing reference customers than to talk to just your sales reps. Final tip, sometimes a dinner can be too expensive for an early-stage company yet picking a killer venue is one of the best ways to bagsy high-profile people. Everybody loves to eat somewhere hot. So why not go in on the dinner with two other companies. That way you’re all extending your networks and splitting the costs. Plan dinner early enough that people can still get out afterward and do other events that may be going on. 7. Don’t get too wasted Save the boozy nights for back home. Or save it for the after party with your closest colleagues. But if you want to maximize your conference experience lay off the last few drinks. Oh, and don’t do crazy man dancing at the party. I see that often. It’s embarrassing. Worse than wedding dancing. You know who I’m talking about. 8. Don’t assume everybody remembers you 9. Get a wing man Don’t confuse this for just talking with your buddy for the whole event. That’s dumb. You’re there to network and connect with new people. Just use them as an effective way to hunt in packs. 10. Close the loop after the show Now after all this, don’t you feel better about not being in Austin?        
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| Posted: 12 Mar 2011 09:40 AM PST
Ten days ago Google discovered that apparently innocuous Android apps were in fact infested with “DroidDream” malware that included an Android rootkit, with the apparent intent of creating a smartphone botnet. It infected more than a quarter of a million devices before Google intervened. The thriller writer in me immediately began to wonder what would happen if black hats built a wildly popular game that doubled as a botnet beachhead. Imagine if Angry Birds was secretly the world’s biggest botnet: even without root access to its install base, those hypothetical black hats could grab private data from tens millions of people, and/or probably DDoS every wireless network in the developed world, especially if it ran as a background service with location access. That will never happen, of course: it’s what security guru Bruce Schneier calls a “movie-plot threat.” But it does illustrate that you couldn’t stop a Trojan app like that in advance. Android Market security is based on permission requests when an app is installed: such requests are routinely ignored, since nowadays almost every app asks for full Internet and SD card access. Ah, you might say, if only Android apps were vetted in advance, like Apple’s! In which case you should really stop kidding yourself. Most apps seem to be reviewed in an hour or less (after days in the queue.) Apple appears to check the libraries they link against, and maybe they can decompile to the original source code, too – though I doubt it – but iOS apps are written in Objective-C, which includes support for C itself, a language for which labyrinthine obfuscation has become an art form. Any developer worth his/her salt could write an iOS app that includes code whose use only becomes apparent when the app receives a secret signal. Once upon a time, not so long ago, people talked about how “walled gardens” (like AOL and CompuServe, back in the day) would inevitably lose out to the free, wild, open Internet – and most software was preinstalled, shrink-wrapped, or downloaded from a trusted site. But nowadays users download potentially untrustworthy software from trusted sites. (See also: the Mac App Store.) That’s why providers need the remote kill switch that Google used on DroidDream; that Apple has had for years, and is ready to use on “unauthorized” iOS users as well as apps; and that Intel is now building in at the hardware level, so that phones (and computers) running Intel chips can be killed with a simple encrypted SMS. Ten years ago people were horrified at the notion of Intel adding a unique ID to all of its processors. Today every phone has a unique ID, and yours is probably uploaded to apps’ servers multiple times a day. Not so long ago, people were outraged that Amazon could and did arbitrarily delete books from users’ Kindles; last week they clamored for Google to exercise essentially the same power. Giving all that power and control to Amazon, Apple, Google and Intel in exchange for security may ultimately be a reasonable and necessary tradeoff — but that kind of centralization of control still makes me more than a little uneasy. As the developing world adopts smartphones as their first and only computers, Android and iOS will increasingly dominate all Internet traffic. (What about RIM and Windows Phone? I expect they both have kill switches too, but really, who cares; wake me up when one of them has won next year’s war for third place.) Android is a walled garden just like iOS, subtler but no less forbidding. And you can’t even escape the app garden via your browser, because your browser is, in and of itself, an app. While we weren’t looking, the walled garden won. Photo credit: James Whitesmith, Flickr        
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A massive earthquake that struck off Japan’s northeastern coast on Friday— taking 1,200 lives, with thousands still unaccounted for and ten thousand feared dead by police — also damaged multiple nuclear power plants there.
At last year’s SXSW I caught a moment of Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai’s time 
It’s that time again: time to revel in Web 2.0! We’re teaming up with 
Although Android adoption is growing at a huge clip compared to the iPhone (not hard, since there are so many more devices and plans), iPhone apps still remain the benchmark for the smartphone app experience. In part this is down to the fact that many companies build an iPhone app first and an Android version some time later, which is often inferior in user experience. Part of the reason is that little things like the pull-down-to-refresh features that are often in Phone apps come default with the iOS platform. But to make that kind of feature work in an Android app you have to build it from the ground up.
Yesterday, Twitter made a swift and sweeping move to 
Today’s SXSW keynote speaker is 
By now, even if you’re not at SXSW, you’re likely 
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