The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- MXP4′s Bopler Games App Turns Lily Allen Songs Into (Social) Gaming Music
- Apple’s Subscription Bait And Switch
- Localytics Raises $2.5 Million For Mobile Analytics Platform
- Digby Lands $8 Million To Help Retailers Power Mobile Commerce
- TheNextWeb Conference Is Cleared For Landing – Will You Survive?
- BrightEdge: Majority Of Brands Do Not Have Facebook Or Twitter Accounts In Top Search Results On Google
- Another One Bites The Dust: Yahoo To Kill Buzz On April 21
- On-Demand Video Services Company Envivio Files To Go Public
- Concur Partners With, Invests $40 Million In India’s Online Travel Site Cleartrip
- SilverRail Raises Further $5M For Its Passenger Rail Ticketing Platform
- Metaforic Raises $8 Million To Combat Software Pirates, Hackers
- Dropbox Hits 25 Millions Users, 200 Million Files Per Day
- Burn Notice Prequel Goes All Dual Screen With Realtime Comments
- Wall Street Gives Larry Page A Big -1
- Backstage at Cirque Du Soleil’s ‘KÀ’: Part One – Setting The (Awesome) Stage
- OMG/JK: Flipping Through The PlayBook, Now In Stunning HD
- Hey Kids, What Time Is It?
| MXP4′s Bopler Games App Turns Lily Allen Songs Into (Social) Gaming Music Posted: 18 Apr 2011 09:24 AM PDT  Alright, who is up for a round of Lily Allen Tetris? Yes, that's right, now you challenge your friends to various games on Facebook and select the music as well. But this is about more than just background music. MXP4's new social music gaming app - called Bopler Games - uses the company's "automated level design" technology to automatically synchronize the game with the song, based on its melody, rhythm and structure. Translation: the difficulty of the game will reflect your selection in music. The application currently features 4 different games - including previously released Pump it, which hit 1 million users within its first month. MXP4 is also in the process of developing another 6 games, which should be released shortly.
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| Apple’s Subscription Bait And Switch Posted: 18 Apr 2011 09:07 AM PDT
When Apple announced back in February that The Daily would be the first subscription news app on iTunes, it was seen by other publishers as the model going forward. Some like it, some don’t, but at least Apple knows how it wants to treat subscriptions going forward. Or does it? Some subscription news apps seem to be in limbo right now while Apple figures out how to handle special situations. If you are a single-title publication like the New York Times, The Daily, or Businessweek, then it is pretty straightforward and the current rules apply. But what if you are a news reading app that brings together articles from many sources, some paid and some free? In other words, what if you are an aggregator app like Flipboard or Zite, but you want to charge a subscription for the app? How should that subscription be split up between the app and the publishers, and should Apple even be involved with policing those types of licensing and copyright issues? It’s all getting sorted out right now. One of the issues revolves around Apple’s rules for listing subscription apps under free apps. They obviously aren’t free apps, but it helps with the marketing and getting people to try them out if they can start out free. In order to justify the free app description, subscription apps must offer something of value for anyone who downloads the app—perhaps a free issue of a magazine, or free top stories. Then the in-app subscription unlocks the full experience. It’s a bait and switch because the apps become pretty much useless without the subscription. A free issue is a sample which becomes stale within a few weeks at most, then you have what amounts to a dead app on your iPad if you don’t subscribe. For aggregator apps that want to go the subscription route, it is not clear what the free portion of the app would be. Is it just the open RSS stuff that comes free, and the subscription unlocks and articles behind a paywall? Or maybe you get the full app for a week and it doesn’t update unless you subscribe. But then you encounter the bait-and-switch problem. Wouldn’t it be more honest if subscription news apps were listed under paid apps? Or at least under a new category: subscriptions.        
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| Localytics Raises $2.5 Million For Mobile Analytics Platform Posted: 18 Apr 2011 08:00 AM PDT
Localytics offers a comprehensive mobile analytics platform to help give app developers and publishers with real-time reports on how customers use their applications on Android, Blackberry, iPad and iPhone devices. The startup’s product can be used to monitor basic usage, custom events, and enables publishers to dynamically generate custom segments and chart results with hourly granularity. Today, Localytics is also unveiling a new premium offering, which includes a custom charting feature to build and share customized reports, additional analytics and more. time. Additionally, a new App We have a number of discounts for the service. Readers that enter TC35X6 as a coupon code when signing up here for Localytics Premium before April 30, will get 35% off their first 6 months of the analytics service. Localytics’s platform is being used by a number of well-known companies including News Corp., Skype, Bluefly, RueLaLa, Turner Broadcasting and more.        
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| Digby Lands $8 Million To Help Retailers Power Mobile Commerce Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:19 AM PDT
Digby’s Mobile Commerce product helps retailers create mobile websites that display rich product images and live catalogs, expands the ways they can buy from merchants and more. Digby also allows retailer to create native applications for iOS, BlackBerry and Android devices. Digby has a number of well-known retailers using its offering, including Costco, Toys "R" Us, The Home Depot, Lilly Pulitzer, and 1-800-Flowers. The startup also recently landed a deal with AT&T to power the telecommunications giant’s mobile commerce software platform for developers. The new funds will be used to expand global operations including sales, marketing, client services, research and platform development, and for new client acquisitions. As mobile commerce ramps up, there’s no question that more retailers will be looking to platforms like Digby to create a seamless mobile shopping experience for consumers. Digby could also be an acquisition target for a retail giant like eBay, so it should be interesting to see how the company performs in the coming year.        
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| TheNextWeb Conference Is Cleared For Landing – Will You Survive? Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:11 AM PDT
Speakers this year include Pablos Holman, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Dave Winer, Rudy de Waele, and Alexander Ljung among many others. A web conference would be nothing without a good old startup competition, and the organizing team have sent us the finalists that will be pitching the audience on stage. I’m one of the jury members that will be deciding which European startup takes home the prize, so I’m looking forward to seeing what these have in store:        
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| Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:00 AM PDT
BrightEdge reviewed the social media presence of the top 200 brands globally and found that close to 100 percent hold the top or near top rank in search results for the brand name’s website. But in these same brand searches, the company found that 70 percent of these brands did not have Facebook or Twitter pages in the top 20 results. For example, if you do a search for Nike, you won’t find its Facebook or Twitter page on the first page of results on Google. The same goes for IBM. But if you do a Google search for Macy’s, the retailer’s Facebook page is the six result. So how did Macy’s boost its search results for the Facebook Page? Albert Grouyet, VP of Product Marketing for BrightEdge, says that sometimes it comes down to subtitles and descriptions on the social media pages. If you take a look at the company’s Facebook page, you’ll see that the subtitle is “Retail and Consumer Merchandise.” On the other hand, Nike’s Facebook page, has the subtitle of “local business,” which Grouyet says isn’t SEO friendly for the brand. BrightEdge says that of the top 200 brands listed in the Fortune 500, approximately 68 percent had Twitter accounts that were not in the top 20 Google results. And about 71 percent had Facebook pages that did not appear in the top 20 results of a search for the specific brand name. Additionally, BrightEdge did not always find a correlation between the number of friends or followers and search rank. For example, the Facebook page of a leading photography equipment brand does not rank in the top 20 search results, despite having more than 160,000 Likes. Conversely, a leading auto manufacturer with only 17,307 fans has a Facebook page that ranks in the top 10 of search results. BrightEdge also looked at individual verticals and found that retailers are the most successful at optimizing their social media pages. Of the top 23 retailers, 13 have Twitter pages in the top 20 search results. The verticals that are currently least effective at optimizing social media are the finance and insurance industries. Only three of the top 43 financial and insurance companies have Facebook fan pages that rank in the top 20 search results. As more consumers look to brands’ Facebook and Twitter pages for news, coupons, customer service and more, it’s probably important for these companies to take the steps to make sure these pages are discoverable.        
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| Another One Bites The Dust: Yahoo To Kill Buzz On April 21 Posted: 18 Apr 2011 06:31 AM PDT
According to a message on the Buzz website: Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date, you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site. This was a hard decision. However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations. We appreciate your patronage. The Yahoo! Buzz Team. Buzz launched to the public in 2008 as a Digg-like site to aggregate what news stories are ‘buzzing’ on the web. It never really took off and clearly Yahoo felt that it was no longer worth maintaining. We originally heard that Yahoo was “sunsetting” Buzz back in December, as well as Delicious, AltaVista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks, and AlltheWeb. Of course, while we all assumed “sunsetting” referred to shutting these products down completely, Yahoo eventually publicly stated that it was looking to find a new home for bookmarking service Delicious, ensuring its survival for now. But earlier this year, Yahoo shut down MyBlogLog and AllTheWeb. Who’s next on the “sunsetting” list?        
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| On-Demand Video Services Company Envivio Files To Go Public Posted: 18 Apr 2011 05:31 AM PDT
Envivio on Friday filed with the SEC for a $69 million IPO. The company, which was founded over a decade ago, has evolved from video encoding technology provider to a company that strives to make video content universally available on any device, any network, at the best possible quality. In a statement, the San Francisco-based provider of on-demand IP video processing and delivery solutions notes that the number of shares to be offered, as well as the price range for the initial public offering of shares of its common stock, have not yet been determined. Indeed, the proposed IPO price of $69 million is an estimate, which helps Envivio calculate the SEC registration fee. We’ll update as soon as we learn more. Envivio says it currently works with 220 service and content providers for delivering an on-demand or live video service. For the 12 months ended January 31, 2011, the company booked just north of $30 million in sales, close to double the revenues logged the year before. Net loss during fiscal year 2011 was $2.5 million, down from $9.2 million during fiscal year 2010. Stifel Nicolaus Weisel and Piper Jaffray will be acting lead underwriters for Envivio’s IPO. The company plans to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol ENVI.        
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| Concur Partners With, Invests $40 Million In India’s Online Travel Site Cleartrip Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:20 AM PDT
Concur, a publicly listed provider of travel and expense management solutions, is teaming up with Cleartrip, one of India’s leading online travel portals. The deal encompasses both a strategic marketing partnership and a $40 million investment for a minority stake in the online travel company. With this investment and partnership agreement, Concur seeks to expand its existing customer base while also venturing into new territories for growth (the company this morning announced that it has established operations in India). The partnership with Cleartrip also provides Concur with access to travel content and technology, which it expects it to help better serve the burgeoning Indian business travel market. Concur will enable clients to capture Cleartrip-generated travel itineraries for end-to-end travel and expense reporting within its services, which the company says are used by more than 15 million people worldwide. Concur recently acquired travel organization and sharing service TripIt for up to $120 million.        
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| SilverRail Raises Further $5M For Its Passenger Rail Ticketing Platform Posted: 18 Apr 2011 03:40 AM PDT  SilverRail Technologies, the passenger rail ticketing platform, has raised a further $5m in a round led by PAR Captial. Previous investors include Sutter Hill, Grandbanks Capital, Brook Ventures and Accel Partners, with the London and Boston-based company having already raised $9 million in a series A round. SilverRail's non-trivial mission is to consolidate the world's rail ticketing systems into a single system and offer this up via an API, thus removing the complexity of selling rail tickets, irrespective of operators, geographies and currencies. It says it will use the additional funding to expand capacity by integrating with new rail carrier inventory systems.
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| Metaforic Raises $8 Million To Combat Software Pirates, Hackers Posted: 18 Apr 2011 01:18 AM PDT  Anti-piracy software maker Metaforic, based in Glasgow, California and Tokyo, has raised $8 million in a round led by Scottish Equity Partners. Existing backers Pentech Ventures and the Scottish Investment Bank's Scottish Venture Fund participated in the round. Founded in 2006, Metaforic offers two main products: MetaFortress, which helps software developers protect their applications against piracy, subversion and tampering, and MetaSure for secure information storage. 
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| Dropbox Hits 25 Millions Users, 200 Million Files Per Day Posted: 17 Apr 2011 11:28 PM PDT
It was in one of the early Y Combinator classes, now has 25 million users and 200 million files are “saved” daily, and more than 1 million every five minutes. That’s impressive growth from the 4 million users the company had a year ago (they had two million in late 2009). Dropbox enables people to sync files and media across platforms and devices, in order to have them available from any location. The service also allows people to easily and quickly share files with others. Dropbox provides users with 2 GB of space for free, and they can pay for more. People use dropbox for personal storage, file syncing between machines, and group collaboration on projects. They have desktop software for the usual OSs, and mobile access, that makes things run smoothly. They are much more tight lipped on revenue and profitability, though. Guesses range all over the place, but the company is certainly efficient with bandwidth and storage. They likely only upload unique files. Common files, like songs and movies, aren’t re-uploaded repeatedly. Whatever their revenue, the company is on a roll and will likely be getting a lot more attention in the near future. Perhaps even a large “DST-style” secondary round with liquidity for founders and perhaps investors. And this could be an IPO not too long down the road, too. Personally I’ve found the service to be increasingly useful as I use multiple machines. Efficient and easy cloud storage, along with the usual web services like email, make that fairly easy. Just a few years ago, not so much. Our first coverage of Dropbox, at a YCombinator demo day, is here. They’ve raised just $7.2 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and others. We did a particularly entertaining TechCrunch Cribs tour of their office a couple of months ago. My favorite Dropbox story though, and you can ask Drew this if you see him in person, is the time I found his unlocked iPhone sitting alone at a dinner table in Hawaii while he was off socializing a few feet away. So I did what anyone would have done. I set a password on the phone and put it back where I found it.        
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| Burn Notice Prequel Goes All Dual Screen With Realtime Comments Posted: 17 Apr 2011 07:52 PM PDT TV is just not the same without Twitter and Facebook chatter. Tonight’s prequel movie Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe comes with social chatter about the show on your laptop courtesy of Echo, the realtime commenting system. The USA Network launched this companion site, which pulls in comments, Tweets, Facebook status updates and Fan Page comments, as well as YouTube video and Twitpic photos about the show. Echo gathers it all into alive chat feed, which is then curated, and the best comments appear on TV. Prior to the show, actor Bruce Campbell answered questions online about the show. In the first two hours, 18,000 fans were commenting in the stream, hoping their comment would be plucked into the curated channel which was shown on TV. Yes, all of this harkens back to AOL chatrooms filled with minor celebrities, but this is realtime, dude. And the feedback loop is now plugged into the broadcasting system. Your Tweets will now be televised.
       
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| Wall Street Gives Larry Page A Big -1 Posted: 17 Apr 2011 07:21 PM PDT
Google’s first quarterly earnings with Larry Page back at the helm as CEO of Google didn’t go so well last Thursday. Revenues did rise an impressive 27 percent, but expenses grew an even larger 34 percent, partly due to across-the-board salary raises and ballooning talent retention packages. The next day, Google’s stock took a nosedive, closing on Friday at $530, almost $50 below its close on Thursday before the earnings call. More than $15 billion of Google’s market value, or about 8 percent, was wiped out, the biggest single-day drop since 2008. This reaction was not solely because Google missed Wall Street consensus earnings estimates by a three cents. It was also because of Larry Page. Wall Street investors fear Larry Page and the unknown changes he may bring to the company, which up until now has been one of the stock market’s most consistent earners. Page’s performance on the earnings call, or rather lack thereof, compounded these fears. He literally phoned it in, stating a few scripted words at the beginning of the call via telephone before handing it over to his CFO and other executives. Page didn’t even hang around to answer any questions, during a less than stellar quarter when the company is undergoing many changes internally. He would have been better off not even appearing at all. http://investor.google.com/webcast.html Page spoke for a few minutes at the beginning of the call, which interestingly is not yet available for replay on Google’s investor relations site. In an unconvincing monotone, he said (from my notes):
Schmidt and Rosenberg, the senior V of product management who is leaving Google, used to run the earnings calls. The analysts loved Rosenberg. And throughout the call his praises were sung by other executives as well. Page said nothing substantive about the management changes or the new direction of the company. The biggest question mark over Google right now is about its social strategy, dubbed +1. But the senior VP in charge of social, Vic Gundotra, was not even on the call. Instead, the call was led on the product sides by Jeff Huber, now head of Local, and Susan Wojcicki, head of Ads. It’s not that surprising that investors responded by giving Larry Page and Google a big -1. They voted by selling their stock. And maybe Page is fine with that. He wants to manage Google for the long term, not to please short-term investors. They’ll figure it out eventually. The problem is that doesn’t work unless earnings keep outpacing expectations and the stock keeps going up. If the stock keeps going down instead, then all of a sudden it does matter how Page treats Wall Street. Talent is attracted to rising stocks, and Google needs as much talent as it can lay its hands on to go after social, local, mobile, and other new markets.        
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| Backstage at Cirque Du Soleil’s ‘KÀ’: Part One – Setting The (Awesome) Stage Posted: 17 Apr 2011 06:40 PM PDT
Where once it was possible to fly to the middle of the desert, get absolutely wrecked on frozen margaritas and warm hookers and then return to civilization as if nothing had happened, today it’s impossible to so much as open a minibar here without someone taking a photo and broadcasting it on Facebook. Savvy to this new reality, even the most shitty hotel on the strip – which is to say, The Riviera – has a Twitter account. And yet, despite the millions of tweets and status updates that flow in and out of Sin City every weekend, Vegas remains a town to which technology simply cannot do justice. For a start, the hotels are temples to physical spectacle, filled with gigantic fountains, exploding pirate ships, gondola rides, showgirls, lions and tigers and reproductions of Michelangelo’s David (oh my). Every bar and casino has a theme – from Jimmy Buffet’s Margaretaville to the preposterous Pussycat Dolls lounge in MGM Grand. You could spend all day watching clips of this stuff online without even starting to understand what it’s like to be here. Even at the seediest end of the market – which is to say, the sex end – where, traditionally, analogue pleasures; strip shows, adult theaters, even hookers – have lost market share to Internet porn viewed in the comfort of one’s own home, the Vegas sex industry continues to thrive. “Passers” – commission-paid workers handing out flyers for escort services – line the strip, sometime three deep. Every casino worth its salt has a topless review and, of course, Nevada is the only state to offer legalized brothels. To paraphrase a travel-writing cliche, Las Vegas is a city of technological contrasts. Nowhere else on planet earth understands more effectively how to harness technology in order to deliver overwhelmingly physical experiences. And in Las Vegas, no experience better demonstrates that tech-reality hybrid than Cirque du Soleil’s ‘KÀ’. Go watch this video clip from the show. It’s incredible: two giant movable stages move above a gaping void; the main stage (“the sandcliff deck”) rotating from level to vertical and back again while a cast of characters jump and dance and spin and fly on, below and above it. The Los Angeles Times said the show “may well be the most lavish production in the history of Western theater. It is surely the most technologically advanced.” Jim Hutchison has some amazing photos of the sandcliff deck, and the rest of the set, here. But nothing on YouTube can possibly do justice to how it feels sitting in the audience during a performance. Each seat has two speakers built into the back to provide the deeply eerie effect of being surrounded by voices and noise throughout the performance. The entire auditorium is ringed by towering metal gantries, columns and walkways on which, before and during the show, characters stand, shrieking, yelling and playing drums. None of that, though, distracts from the sheer balls-out awesomeness of seeing the giant mechanical stages doing their thing. For a start they move silently – it really is as if they are floating in space. And the physical changes they undergo through the show – flat and covered in sand one moment; a vertical cliff face the next (hence “sandcliff deck”) – is more magical than anything David Copperfield ever managed to pull off. At one point in the show – just because it can – the entire stage turns into a kind of gigantic Microsoft Surface, on which – still vertical – the cast perform a fierce battle scene with horizontal and vertical running, jumping and flying. Each time a character lands, the stage explodes with light and colour. Oh, and then there’s an “arrow” scene, where archers standing on a gantry fire arrows into the vertical stage; arrows which then act as climbing pegs for characters to scale the wall, before jumping 70 feet into the void. Two years ago, I described seeing ELEW playing piano live on stage in San Francisco, and how it underscored for me the thrill of live experiences — and how those experiences will never, ever be replaced by technology. KÀ gave me the same thrill, but with the added bonus of seeing the amazing potential for technology to augment live performance. The technology in KÀ delivers real-world experiences that would have made our theatre-going grandparents’ heads explode. And then things got way, way more interesting. I guess someone at Cirque du Soleil is a fan of TechCrunch because, a few days after I arrived in Vegas, an email arrived from KÀ’s publicist, Jeff Lovari, inviting me to take a “TD tour” of the show. Which is to say, a backstage tour, during an actual performance, lead by KÀ’s technical director, Erik Walstad. Hell fucking yes. And so it was on Wednesday of this week, I found myself standing several stories below seating level, watching a succession of the world’s most talented acrobats jumping 70 feet from the top of a floating stage and landing on giant airbags not two feet in front of me. To explain everything I saw during Erik’s 90 minute tour would probably take me a dozen posts. Instead I’m going to try to cram it all into two: starting here will a few of the raw facts, and then followed up next week (schedules permitting) with a video interview with Erik in which I’ll ask him to explain exactly how everything works. Ok? Ok. Here we go… KÀ took almost a decade from conception to completion. Prior to the show’s opening, the stage from the previous show (EFX) was torn out and then the entire inside of the MGM Grand’s theatre was demolished, leaving just the walls standing. Then diggers excavated a pit deep into the ground to make way for the show’s main “void”, and the years-long task of constructing KÀ’s enormous set could begin. The distance from the lowest depth of the void to the highest point of the “grid” from which acrobats jump, fly and bungee, is 98 feet. The main sandcliff deck stage weighs 50 tons and can rotate 360 degrees and tilt from flat to 100 degrees. Watching the stage move from backstage, you’re struck by the amount of noise it makes: it’s virtually silent, a feat achieved by housing all of the hydraulic machinery on the roof of the building. The lengths taken to ensure the safety of performers are so extreme that they’re almost comical. At the start of the show there’s a brief scene where a cast members walks from one end of the stage to the other. To the audience, it appears like the safest feat in the world – the front of the stage is maybe two feet from the ground. If, however, they could see behind the performer, they’d realize that the drop on the other side of the stage is closer to 20 feet. As a result, as the performer walks, a series of hidden airbags, like those used by stuntmen, inflate and deflate to provide a cushion should he fall. It’s kind of amazing to watch, a bit like Penn and Teller’s classic Sleight of Hand Explained routine. Whenever performers are on any of the gigantic floating stages, an array of airbags – supported by two giant nets – sits up to 70 feet below them, ready to catch them when they land, either deliberately or (rarely) accidentally. Traditional safety nets can’t be used on their own because the performers are falling so fast, they’d simply bounce right back out again. Due to the large number of performers jumping and landing in quick succession, each airbag consists of a number of separate cells, each of which can inflate and deflate independently. When a performer lands, air is forced out of their target cell, which is then instantly re-inflated allowing the performer to stand up and walk away. At some points in the show, this happens several times a minute. In case the power should fail during a show, each of the airback pumps has its own uninterruptible power supply, good for half an hour, ensuring a safe landing even if all else fails. “Half an hour is probably enough time for someone to land” says Erik dryly. The arrow scene, where the sandcliff stage becomes a vertical climbing wall, is a variation of the old carvinal knife throwing trick. When each archer fires his dummy arrow, a matching “arrow” is propelled out of the walls’s surface, giving the illusion that it has hit its target. A little puff of “dust” completes the illusion. After that, though, things get more complicated as performers climb up and down the arrows while more arrows land and others disappear. To ensure the performers’ safety, each arrow (or “peg” as they’re called) contains a censor which prevents it from shooting outwards if someone is standing or laying on top of it (“otherwise they’d be impaled, which would be bad”). Likewise, the pegs can only contract with less than 20lbs of pressure, so if a performer is still hanging off one, it stays put. And if all that wasn’t enough, the wall also contains a bank of “emergency pegs” which can be shot out to form an escape ladder/bridge if anything goes wrong. Meanwhile, high about the stage, the technical team has come up with some other neat safety innovations. In the event that a wire or harness malfunctions, leaving a performer swinging above the audience, a fail-safe device automatically lowers them down over an aisle. “Otherwise we’d have to evacuate the whole auditorium to rescue one performer”. Each second of the show is perfectly choreographed, with a stage manager calling every cue: every inflated and deflated airbag, every jumper, every movement of the stages. I wore an earpiece during the show and the level of calmness in her voice – as theatrical chaos reigned on stage – was impressive. Even more impressive was hearing cues being given to performers who were in the middle of stunts: many of them wear earpieces too, so they know when it’s safe to perform certain jumps or falls. If you’ve ever watched air traffic controllers at work at a busy airport, you’ll have some idea of the concentration and coordination it takes to call a Cirque show. The KÀ Theatre seems like a world of its own, but it’s still connected in to the MGM fire detection system. Before every pyrotechnic stunt, the stage manager requests that MGM’s fire officer temporarily override the fire detection equipment in the theatre for the duration of the stunt; then it’s switched back on. This happens three or four times in every show. Because fire detection can only be overridden before a fire is detected, if someone actives a fire alarm anywhere in the shops or restaurants surrounding the theatre then all of KA’s pyrotechnic effects have to stop. Given that the closing of the show is a huge firework display, this can be something of a problem. For all the years of technical planning that went in to building the KA theatre, the designers only thought to include one stage elevator. As a result, technical staff and performers alike have to share the same elevator during the show. At one point of the tour, Erik and I shared an elevator up to the aerial grid with a gigantic man dressed as a warrior. It was a little weird. Ok, that’s all for part one. In part two, I’ll sit down with Erik and have him explain the finer technical details of how thew show works, how he became involved with it, and also – possibly – his love of traditional British narrowboats. Tune in next time.        
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| OMG/JK: Flipping Through The PlayBook, Now In Stunning HD Posted: 17 Apr 2011 04:30 PM PDT It’s time for a new episode of OMG/JK. And yes, the title above refers to what may be the greatest technical advance for TechCrunch TV since its inception last year: we’re now shooting the show in HD. Now you can almost see the drool coming out of MG’s mouth every time we mention the word “Apple”. It’s very exciting. This week we discuss the sudden death of Cisco’s Flip camera line and the launch of RIM’s new BlackBerry tablet. We also debate the new, ad-supported Kindle and whether or not Amazon will be launching a tablet of its own in the near future. Tune in! Here are some posts relevant to this episode:
       
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| Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:19 AM PDT
Part of the problem is the comparison to Facebook, which is said to be enjoying over a billion in revenue as compared to 2 digit millions for the Twitter cloud. One is leveraging a carefully curated cloud of friends and family; the other is a realtime news service on the front lines of the media transformation. As such, Twitter is more analogous to Netflix than it is to Facebook. If Twitter counted users as subscribers, they are 10 times the 20 million of the streaming service. But of those engaged enough to be analogous to paying subscribers, the numbers are likely more equal. All that's left is to identify what those frequent flyers do and how that might represent addressable engagement. Engagement, by the way, means show me the money. And Twitter doesn't have to explain how to make money in order to justify the value of the service. What it does have to do is clarify what it does and why that IP is uniquely and defensibly held by its executives and investors. It makes sense (at a surface level) to identify presumed success by examining the talents and track record of its executives. Keep in mind that Ev Williams sold his previous company to Google and is known to have been unhappy with what followed. As with a list of acquired CEOs including most recently Dodgeball's Dennis Crowley and Jaiku's Jyri Engestrom, Google's track record has been spotty. No more so than what happened with Yahoo and another string of acquisitions, but not the success Twitter is threatening. Twitter's IP is that it controls the worldwide realtime news information bus. Although the news business and other entertainment networks have been challenged by the move to the Web, and now the tablet, the social media that emerges will have huge economies of scale and formidable barriers to others' entry. Take a look at what Apple has done with its iPad lead, and how it appears ready to add cloud services. Who are the competitors in the social news space? Facebook? No real iPad app, though the iPhone one plays in the push notification alert business. The realtime nature is blunted by the lack of speed required to gain traction (your friends are still going to be there 5 minutes later) and the way Likes are implemented as a vote rather than a cascading viral retweet. No @mentions either, which not only provide a head's up to the mentioned but a social map to the group (implicit or explicit.) Google? So focused on killing Facebook by cloning that there's not even 20% time left over for Twitter. Microsoft? Oracle? Who? None of them care about news, or heterogeneous direct messages that span silos. But we care. Twitter DMs are simple, push notification compliant, and built on a namespace we've decorated with streams that define our interests, opinions, values, and relationships. Who else has this? Nobody. Meanwhile, the garbage about Twitter continues, to what end. Are competitors trying to eat away at the inevitability of a user-managed system of record? What competitors? Chatter? The only similarity there is how far ahead Chatter is in the enterprise, with its combination of viral incentive for creating and routing the status updates of the enterprise software and device grid, and a revenue cloud that ensures continued growth. I don't mind ringing our own bell, because to not do so is misleading. Mostly, the noise is a reflection of the lazy media. Faced with the choice of reporting what is a secret even to the direct participants or making it up out of whole cloth, reporters hide behind a lack of conjecture while pundits try to thread a needle of conservative guesses that are more likely to be vaguely true than not. The latter produces tons of predictions about decisions not being debated; the former reflects the conflicting recollections of eyewitnesses to the most forgettable of events. Here's my guess: the combination of Dick Costolo and Jack Dorsey together with the benign pressure not to sell of Evan Williams adds up to massive success when the iPad platform reaches its first stage of maturity. By maturity I mean an application ecosystem that thrives on the routing of addressable metadata-wrapped objects based on @mention-weighted push notifications. We are at an early stage where users are learning how to process poorly-hinted incoming pointers into the information stream, and in the process providing signatures of behavior that will inform the filtering substructure when they are broadcast in parallel to the objects they decorate. The good news is that these iterations are software-based not hardware-constrained. The relative stability of iPad 2 over, or next to, iPad 1, suggests the new computing platform is close to lift off. The signature of laptop-based information triage is multiple open windows or tabs, email and social alerts, and digest hints of the value of serial video streams. It's an effective interface, one that we can't yet replace with the tablet/notification paradigm. Or can we? The iPad presents a new set of primitives that taken together orchestrate an uber queue of social imperative. Namely, a dynamic list that emulates at a tunable process layer the kind of mental triage we perform routinely: is this actionable, is there an advantage to being timely, what value will this provide to someone monitoring my feed, the group's feed, related feeds, and so on. More: is this valuable regardless of the spread of the content, can it make access to the content more valuable as a result, does this value provide incentive not just for subscription but for creation of the original content and tuning of the contributors? On this week's Gillmor Gang, Foursquare boss Dennis Crowley bats away similar noise about The Death of Check Ins. He concludes the show with a pitch to the shrinking pool of developers, saying that contrary to fading, the company is focused on capitalizing on the opportunity in front of it. I never check in to Foursquare, preferring to lurk at the push notification level where the rhythm of check ins blends with @mentions and news alerts. But what Crowley and friends are building out is a fascinating version of that uber queue within Foursquare. In one view, you can surf nearby specials as vendors compete for attention with discounts. In another, you can explore different categories of venues in a given area. Two slices, two dices — new incentives for metadata creation that grow exponentially as they take off in popularity. As Mark Twain, or Yogi Berra, famously said, reports of Twitter's or Foursquare's death are exaggerated. There's way too much left from picking over RSS's carcass. No, seriously, I really mean that. There's way too much value lurking in Jack Dorsey's original pivot from a bike messenger dispatch service to be mined, and who better than Dorsey to lead the charge as the iPad drives the push notification queue into the new media vortex. It's two minutes past the Big Bang, and not enough time to grab the low hanging fruit. As Professor Irwin Corey, or Wavy Gravy, said Adam said to Eve: Stand back, I don't know how big this is going to get.        
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