The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- You’ve Got Facebook Fans, Now What? Booshaka Raises $1M To Ensure Your Posts Earn You Money
- Keen On… Jeremiah Owyang: Why The Internet Is No Longer A Conversation [TCTV]
- Maily For iPad Is Your Kids’ First Email Application
- LG’s Q2 2012 Earnings: $138M In Net Profits, Up 46% YOY, Phone Sales Still Lagging
- 24.9M Tablets Sold In Q2, With Apple’s Share Of That Now Over 68%, Says Strategy Analytics
- Task Management Startup Exec Now Lets Users Give Back By Donating Someone Else’s Time To Charity
- TeamGantt Is A Streamlined, Online Project Management Tool
- Y Combinator-Backed Sponsorfied Launches Tech That Matches Brands With Events Seeking Swag
- Despite Android Nearly Doubling Activations, iOS Still Leads The Enterprise
- Ticketfly Gets Ready To Rock Sporting Events, International, IPO With New $22M Series C
- The Droid X360 Is The Standard-Bearer For Counterfeit Chinese Products
- Stealth-Mode DC Lobby Group Internet Association (Google, Amazon, FB, eBay) Names CEO
- SnapKnot Relaunches With A Pinterest-Style Layout To Connect Brides With Photographers
- Google SEC Filing Details Why It Paid $12.4 Billion For Motorola
- Andreessen Horowitz Keeps Eating The Software World With $11.2 Million Investment In JavaScript Framework Company Meteor
- Google Gets Scientific, Adds A Voice-Enabled 34-Button Calculator To Desktop And Mobile Search
- Social TV Analytics Startup Bluefin Labs Hires Former Razorfish Chief JP Maheu As Its New CEO
- Payvia Debuts New Carrier Billing Platform, Offers Support For T-Mobile & Sprint
- Samsung Officially Brings Motion-Controlled Angry Birds To Select Smart TVs
- OS X Mountain Lion: Quick, Familiar, Cheap, And Drenched In iOS Goodness
| You’ve Got Facebook Fans, Now What? Booshaka Raises $1M To Ensure Your Posts Earn You Money Posted: 25 Jul 2012 09:31 AM PDT  It doesn’t matter if you have one million Facebook fans if they never see your news feed posts. That’s why SV Angel, Founders Fund Angel, and more have backed a $1 million Series A for news feed optimization service Booshaka, which is also launching a big product update today. The startup helps businesses identify their most active fans — especially the 10% generating 90% of the engagement — and incentivize them to leave even more wall posts, Likes, and comments. This feedback signals to Facebook’s news feed sorting algorithm EdgeRank that a business is high-quality and that its posts should be shown to a higher percentage of its fans. More impressions -> more clicks and awareness -> higher return on investment for businesses on their social media spend. This is social SEO, and it’s worth paying Booshaka for. A lot of people don’t realize that businesses only reach an average of 12%-16% of their fans with each news feed post. That’s because some might not be online around they time a post is published, but it’s also because of EdgeRank, which determines which posts are worthy of being seen. A big signal that goes into this relevance rank is how often a Page’s fans have engaged with it in the past. So if businesses want more reach in the news feed, they need to inspire their fans to be active, and then amplify their mentions of the brand through social ads. Booshaka accomplishes this with a product suite including analytics, evangelist recognition apps, and an Facebook Ads API interface. First, business give Booshaka permission to analyze their Page wall and identify their loudest fans. Pages can then install a leaderboard application on their Page that offers fame to those who engage most frequently. Booshaka’s Activity Feed app highlights the latest participants in the conversation, and an Activity Box app lets Pages ask fans to complete specific missions such as uploading a photo or checking in to a physical store. Pages can then reward fans for their engagement with virtual goods, badges, real product samples, and discounts. All these activities improve a Page’s EdgeRank. But here’s where Booshaka gets really smart. These actions automatically generate mentions of a brand that can be turned into Sponsored Stories ads on Facebook. These social ads that amplify word of mouth’s reach have proved to be influential and have stellar click-through rates. They’re also the only types of ads that can appear on Facebook mobile. Booshaka even tells brands how to target these ads by identifying Pages with similar fan bases who the ads would seem relevant to. Investors think news feed optimization (NFO) could a big business the way search engine optimization did. 120,000 Facebook Pages have already signed up for Booshaka’s help, leading to today’s Series A participation from SV Angel, PivotNorth Capital, FF Angel, Joe Lonsdale (CEO of Addepar and co-founder of Palantir), Peter Weck (co-founder of Keepsy and Simply Hired) and Rich Skrenta (CEO of Blekko). Brands have spent the last few spending millions on enterprise social marketing services who build them contests to net them new fans. But sometimes these are just fair-weather fans who are just looking to win prizes, and who aren’t necessarily potential customers. Even if they’re the right fans, they might never see a brand’s marketing messages if their EdgeRank is too low. Booshaka’s founder and CEO Erik Ober tells me “This first wave of the companies took advantage of the naive the market, [charging them to] acquire these huge audiences that don’t care. Now it’s our job to go out and find the people that are engaged and rally them around the conversation.” If Booshaka works, brands won’t need to buy more fans because they’ll be able to squeeze more ROI out of the ones they already have.
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| Keen On… Jeremiah Owyang: Why The Internet Is No Longer A Conversation [TCTV] Posted: 25 Jul 2012 09:25 AM PDT  Once upon a time, we were told that markets are “conversations”. But that’s all changed. At least if you listen to Jeremiah Owyang, a much respected “Internet Analyst” at the Altimeter Group. As Owyang explained to me when he came into our San Francisco studio, today’s Internet is now in what he calls its third “optimization” phase in which the online conversation has been replaced by hyper-targeted ads from companies like Google and Facebook. Indeed, Owyang told me, the big online battle today is between Facebook and Google over how our data will be controlled and leveraged. Unlike other analysts, Owyang is actually much more bullish about Google and Facebook. He sees Google goggles, for example, as a major screen type in the future and, in spite of the relative failure of Google + and SPYW, believes that search is intrinsically social. Indeed, he predicts that Facebook will soon look like Myspace in the way it will be plastered with annoyingly garish advertising. Owyang is also bullish about Adobe and Salesforce who, he sees, as having made impressive acquisitions in the social space. But the M&A market in social is closing rapidly, Owyang warns. It’s 1:40am on the dance floor when it comes to promising social companies being acquired, he says.
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| Maily For iPad Is Your Kids’ First Email Application Posted: 25 Jul 2012 09:13 AM PDT  Maily is a new iPad app launching today that aims to be your kids’ first email application. Because, you know, kids these days and their busy schedules. Ha! In all seriousness, Maily is a communications tool that lets kids easily share messages and drawings with family and friends through a simplified interface that even a small child as young as three can manage, at least according to early tests. The app very much reminded me of FamJam, the latest creation from 500 Startups-backed HighScore House, which debuted just last month. Like FamJam, Maily offers a variety of brushes, pens, stamps and lets you take a snapshot of the picture on the screen. Co-founder Raphael Halberthal tells me that there are more features in the works too, including the ability to add text using different fonts and the ability to send audio messages. I previously remarked that FamJam felt a bit busy for my tastes (it felt like Saturday morning cartoons, I said: loud, colorful and a lot to look at). Maily, however, goes in the opposite direction. It’s very basic with few controls. That means it will probably work better for kids on the younger side of the supported age range (3-8), but older kids might like FamJam because it “feels” like there’s more to do. For parents, a password-protected registration system lets them connect with Facebook to quickly sign up and add contacts, so kids’ will see photos of their family’s faces instead of just names when sending items via email. Parents will also need to know the contacts actual email addresses upon setup, as that information does not come over from Facebook. To send a message, there’s a button on the right which kids tap to be taken to the contacts list. And when the family member or friend replies, the kids are notified via an icon on the left of the app’s main screen, which takes them to their inbox. What’s somewhat surprising is that the Maily app comes from two founders, Halberthal and Tom Galle, both based in Brussels, who are not parents themselves. In fact, they’re not even married with kids on the way anytime in the near future. But they’ve really built something interesting here for that demographic. Given that their backgrounds are in advertising, I asked Halberthal where the inspiration came from for the app. ”We have lots of friends that have children between three and eight, and we saw that they’re really addicted to tablets and the iPad,” he said. “And we were pretty amazed.” He said that they realized there was not one communication system designed for kids of this age, so they decided to build one. Following eight months of effort, this completely bootstrapped app is now available, as something of a market test. If it takes off, both founders are open to relocating to the U.S., continuing development, and possibly raising funding to support further efforts. The app itself is free and will remain free, but Halberthal says the business model may eventually include in-app purchases or the ability to customize products from kids’ drawings. However, he stressed that these will never be displayed on the kids’ side of the system, only the parents’ dashboard. “And even if we consider at a certain point to do advertising, that would never appear in the kids’ environment,” he says. “That’s really fundamental for us.” The new app is a free download for iPad here.
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| LG’s Q2 2012 Earnings: $138M In Net Profits, Up 46% YOY, Phone Sales Still Lagging Posted: 25 Jul 2012 08:41 AM PDT  LG has been turning a corner of late, getting its mobile division out of a six-quarter-long rut. Today’s Q2 report outlines a 46 percent increase in net profits year-over-year at $138 million, though phone sales continue to be an obstacle. Overall revenues went up from last quarter, but are still down from a year ago. The handset division in particular had an operating loss of $49.5 million, which has a lot to do with the decline in feature phone sales. Smartphone sales, on the other hand, rose to 44 percent of all units sold, which is up from Q1′s 36 percent. It’s not expected that LG compete directly with the iPhone, but the company has to make a push against other Android competitors. In every review of an LG phone, we’ve been pretty sorely disappointed. Meanwhile, Samsung, HTC and Motorola continue to deliver premium experiences on Google’s mobile platform. Even so, LG truly does seem to be turning things around, albeit just barely.
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| 24.9M Tablets Sold In Q2, With Apple’s Share Of That Now Over 68%, Says Strategy Analytics Posted: 25 Jul 2012 08:40 AM PDT  One of the strong points in Apple’s quarterly earnings report yesterday was sales of the iPad. Globally, they were up 52% by revenue and 84% by unit sales, respectively to $9 billion and 17 million. In some new figures out today, Strategy Analytics notes that this translates to an increase in overall tablet market share for the company: Apple now controls 68.3% of the market, compared to 62% in Q2 a year ago, in an overall tablet market that saw shipments of 24.9 million units. So much for analyst predictions: here’s one (of several) that had forecast a decline in Apple’s market share. So why the reversal? It looks like the competition that many had been expecting to give Apple a run for its money has failed to materialize. But while Apple’s market share is the best it’s been in years, Strategy Analytics also cautions that overall the market has also witnessed its slowest growth rate since the first iPad launched in Q2 2010, a result of a slowdown in the global economy, it says. Microsoft, which will be releasing a new tablet-friendly OS in the form of Windows 8 later this year, has lost nearly 3% market share, according to figures from Strategy Analytics. Collectively, all of the others (that would be PlayBook, primarily) have lost 3.5%. And Android, meanwhile, has grown the number of units it has sold to 7.3 million compared to 4.4 million in 2011; but in the wider tablet market, that has only kept its market share level at 29.3%. “Despite high expectations for companies like Amazon, Samsung, Acer and Asus, the Android community has yet to make a serious dent in Apple's dominance of the tablet market,” said analyst Neil Mawston. “Unspectacular hardware designs, limited uptake of cellular models and a modest number of tablet-optimized services have been among some of the main reasons for Android's mixed performance so far.” Whether a more comprehensive global rollout from Amazon, and the launch of more models, will turn that around remains to be seen. In fact, Apple’s iPad share is not only going up; it’s the best it’s been in years — since Q3 2010, according to Peter King, a director at the analyst firm. The 24.9 million units sold works out to growth of 67% compared to the 14.9 million units shipped a year ago.
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| Task Management Startup Exec Now Lets Users Give Back By Donating Someone Else’s Time To Charity Posted: 25 Jul 2012 08:30 AM PDT  Task management startup Exec launched with a pretty simple premise — let users rent someone else’s spare time for a small fee of $25 an hour. That has enabled San Francisco-based users to outsource any number of tasks through its easy-to-use mobile interface, from having Ikea furniture put together to delivering various office supplies to cleaning someone’s apartment to dropping off dry cleaning. But now Exec is trying to use its system for good, by enabling users to outsource volunteer work to one of three local charities. This isn’t the first charity drive that Exec has put forth: In April, the startup lined up a number of popular startup founders who volunteered to let users rent their time. Over the course of a weekend, founders from companies like Parse, Reddit, Hipmunk, Sincerely, and yes, even Exec itself, took phone calls and Skype chats from interested users, who mainly asked them about, well, startup stuff. That fundraiser brought in more than $3,000 for DonorsChoose. But this time, instead of just sending money to various charities, the startup is proposing a novel way for its users to give back, by letting them pay for its Execs to stand in and volunteer their time. In other words, for those who want to volunteer but might not be able to find the time, Exec has got your back. They need only pick a charity, determine how much time they’d like to “volunteer,” and an Exec will stand in for them. They’ll do whatever needs to be done — whether it be updating donor records, to helping to plan fundraising events, or mentoring kids. For this campaign, Exec has picked three charities that users can contribute to: Mission Graduates, which aims to help local kids get into college; Appleseeds, a film that attempts to raise awareness of domestic violence; and Kids Enjoy Exercise Now, which sponsors sports for kids with disabilities. When asked why Exec chose those particular charities, founder Justin Kan responded by email: “We researched and contacted a bunch of SF charities and found ones addressing a range of issues that felt that they could utilize Exec hours at the charities. We wanted to pick local SF charities because we’re still completely SF-centric and wanted to give back to the community the customers are in.” San Francisco-based Exec was part of last year’s Y Combinator class — the third that Kan participated in. The startup recently raised a $3.3 million seed round of funding which included investors like Loopt co-founder Sam Altman, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, Parse co-founder Tikhon Bernstam, Gmail creator and Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit, Google board member Ram Shriram, Matt Ocko, Delicious creator Josh Schachter, and others.
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| TeamGantt Is A Streamlined, Online Project Management Tool Posted: 25 Jul 2012 08:17 AM PDT  Fans of Microsoft Project, rejoice! There’s now a way to recreate the fun and pleasure of creating Gantt charts in your browser, bringing that age-old managerial trick of “making another chart” to the Internet. It’s called TeamGantt and if you’re a project manager, it behooves you to make a Gantt chart about checking it out in the near future, setting milestones that include “launch browser,” “type teamgantt.com into browser,” and “nod sagely.” Then add “go golfing” and you’re set. In all seriousness, though, TeamGantt is project management for the post Office set. Built by Nathan Gilmore (29) and John Correlli (22), the system is entirely web-based and hand-coded. Their origin story is pretty cool. “We started working Saturdays in my basement at the end of 2009. I worked on the design and John would build the app. We started gaining interest and traction right away. We had a beta out in the spring of 2010 and launched officially in November of 2010. By August of 2011, the business grew to the point where we knew that if we really wanted to take things to the next level we would need to quit our jobs and go full time with TeamGantt. Since then, the business has taken off.” “We’re completely bootstrapped and profitable,” said Gilmore. “We have had interest from investors, but haven’t needed it yet.” They have 1,000 paid subscribers from the ranks of the Fortune 500 as well as creatives, event planners, and startups. There are plenty of alternative ways to make Gantt charts, including Office itself, but this is one of the more interesting online systems. You can share projects, chat with your team, and the UI has been streamlined to reduce noise and improve simplicity. “Design and usability are extremely important to us and has played a big role in the success of the app,” said Gilmore. The pair just added a daily email feature that reminds your team what they’re supposed to do at what time. The app also adds events to Google Calendars, iCal, and a number of other calendar systems. A 30-day free trial is available for lookie-loos and $10 a month gets you 5 users and 5 projects. A $79 a month business plan gets you unlimited projects and unlimited users, which is considerably cheaper than picking up a copy of Project for everybody. I, for one, have put a pin into planning on building a Gantt chart about upgrading our Gantt charts to TeamGantt ASAP before COB Christmas Day, 2015, after the blue-sky imagineering meeting we’re having in the Rhombus Conference room with the thought leading stakeholders from HQ.
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| Y Combinator-Backed Sponsorfied Launches Tech That Matches Brands With Events Seeking Swag Posted: 25 Jul 2012 08:08 AM PDT  Today, Y Combinator Summer 2012 startup Sponsorfied launches its tool that connects and manages the relationship between brands and the events or influencers they want to sponsor. See, we’re all trained to ignore ads, but get your product in our hands or enhance a real life experience for us and we won’t forget you. Top brands like Red Bull, Task Rabbit, and popchips are the first clients in the Sponsorfied private beta now that it’s out of stealth. By sorting out the mess of sponsorship management and installing feedback loops, Sponsorfied could make sure the next event you attend has a lot more free clothes, liquor, and food. You know, more fun. An Industry Aching For DisruptionSponsorship is a huge business the startup estimates, around $56 billion a year by the startup’s estimate, and spend keeps increasing. But it’s also grossly inefficient. Brands want to find events or influencers they’re target demographics attend or care about. Events and influencers (sponsees) have the attention of their attendees / readers / followers but need free products to delight them and money to pay for production. For example, TechCrunch has its Disrupt conference in San Francisco from September 8-12. We’ve got lots of powerful tech people attending and want to hook them up with food, drink, and swag. Meanwhile there’s plenty of liquor, snack, and enterprise IT companies out there who’d love to reach our crowd. Right now, most sponsorships are managed over phone and email. Brands and their marketing agencies are inundated with requests for sponsorship, but the inquiries often lack the necessary details. Plus, sponsors have little way of knowing the reputation of who they’d be paying or sending free product to. Neither know who’s available on the other side so its tough for brands and sponsees relevant to each other to get linked up. How It Works, And Who’s Gonna Make It HappenSponsorfied wants to disrupt this whole flow by handling everything over specially designed software that handles:
Sponsorfied’s co-founder and CEO Cullen Wilson tells me it plans to charge brands between 10% and 20% of what they pay and possibly a monthly licensing fee for the software. That means it only needs 10% to 20% of the market to become a billion dollar company. That’s a lot of behavior to change, though, so Sponsorfied will have to prove its software can cut down on staffing costs and produce more influential partnerships. The Sponsorsfied team of four co-founders is young, but has relevant experience and these guys are seriously fired up about the space. CEO Wilson previously co-founded a secure and speedy blog hosting platform called WordPress Engine. CTO Stuart Ross was lead developer for news site The Daily Dot as wells technical co-founder of TradeSparrow and MailKart. Baldwin Cunningham was a brand manager for the Zehnder ad agency, and David Matthews was co-founder of Spreadsy along with Ross. Sponsorfied has also brought on Rita Kanamkalam as VP of biz dev, a six-year marketing agency brand manager for companies like Smirnoff, Tylenol, and Citibank. She’s already helped bring companies like Pabst Blue Ribbon and Hype Machine on board. The squad has spent the last six months identifying the pain points of everyone in the business. They found potential clients experiencing massive friction trying to cobble together tools like emails, spreadsheets, Basecamp, and PayPal He tells me “popchips say they get around 200 requests a day for sponsorships. We’re going to help them manage that whole stream of inundation, and then all the sponsorships that go through will be managed right there. On email that would be total chaos.” Between ad-blocking software and our ability to tune out the little boxes all over the Internet, brands need to step their game up and Sponsorfied could help. With any luck, better communication will lead to richer sponsorships where instead of pimping out their names, brands actually solve our problems.
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| Despite Android Nearly Doubling Activations, iOS Still Leads The Enterprise Posted: 25 Jul 2012 08:03 AM PDT  This morning, enterprise solutions provider Good Technology released the results of its latest activation report which offers a snapshot of mobile device trends in the enterprise. The company found that, despite the fact that Android smartphone usage in the enterprise nearly doubled quarter-over-quarter, iOS continues to be dominant platform there, currently led by the iPhone 4S. The results further back up a report arriving earlier this week from mobile platform development company Appcelerator. It released data from a large survey of its developer community, finding that iOS has been surging ahead of Android, at least in terms of developer interest (53% said Apple was better positioned to win the enterprise, compared with 38% for Android). While the latter report spoke more to developer sentiment – also a good way to tell which way the tide is turning, Good’s report comes from actual activations of both smartphones and tablets from thousands of its current enterprise customers. It’s more of a “where are we now?” kind of thing. When we last looked at Good’s data was in January, when Android activations were only 35% of the total, compared with iPhone’s 65%. Today, Good says that Android activations reached 36.9% of total activations – a small bump, despite the fact that corporate use of Android phones and tablets grew 10% quarter-over-quarter. But Android activations have been slowly and erratically growing – 29% in Q4 2011, 32% in Q3 2011 and 25% one year ago in Q2 2011. Good attributed this quarter’s growth to the availability of new devices from Samsung. Meanwhile, iOS’s slight decline in growth was chalked up to “market saturation.” That’s what Apple’s earnings from yesterday indicated, too. Leading the way was this time around in Android activations was the Samsung Galaxy SII, which had 4.6% of the total, and ranked as the fifth most popular device in the enterprise. Behind it was the Droid Razr (3.2%), and both it and the SII beat out the older Apple models of the iPhone 3GS and original iPad, now seventh and eighth, respectively, down from fifth and sixth last quarter. The top devices, in order, were the iPhone 4S, the iPad (the newest iPad, which Good incorrectly refers to as the iPad 3), iPhone 4, iPad 2, the Galaxy S II, Droid Razr, iPad (original), iPhone 3GS, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and Samsung Galaxy Note. Yep, the phablet made a showing. In terms of tablet adoption, it’s no surprise to see the iPad in the lead, accounting for a whopping 94.5% of tablet activations. Android tablets, however, made a small gain – reaching 5.5% of total tablet activations, up from .07% last quarter. And here’s a surprise: Windows Phone even hit the charts this time around. While only accounting for 1.2% of overall activations, Good says that number may grow as the rollut of Windows 8 gets underway and more Windows Phone devices hit the market. As for who’s using all these devices, Good found the Financial Services industry to still lead with device activations up to 37.8% from 26.1% in Q1. The most notable shifts it found, however, were a big drop in deployments in Business & Professional Services industries, and an increase in use in the Government/Public Sector (up from 5% to 8%).
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| Ticketfly Gets Ready To Rock Sporting Events, International, IPO With New $22M Series C Posted: 25 Jul 2012 07:29 AM PDT  Ticketfly is not content playing second fiddle to Ticketmaster, so it just raised a $22 million Series C with each investor chosen for a strength they bring to the stage: Northgate – sports, SAP Ventures (the round’s leader) – international, Cross Creek – IPO, and Mohr Davidow – connections in Silicon Valley. The round brings Ticketfly up to $37 million in funding to disrupt event ticketing. CEO and co-founder Andrew Dreskin has lofty aspirations and tells me “A changing of the guard is at foot, the fundamentals of the ticketing space are experiencing great change.” But considering Ticketmaster has signed long contracts with clients, and is just half of the LiveNation juggernaut that owns venues and and artist management deals, Ticketfly will need to play its heart out to win the crowd. The San Francisco startup’s most recent challenge to Ticketmaster was the launch of the Ticketfly software platform for reserved seating venues last week. Until then it had only been able to support smaller general admission venues, facing off against the general admission-specific TicketWeb subsidiary of Ticketmaster / LiveNation. But now Ticketfly can vie for contracts with big stadiums and arenas. It’s already had a strong 2o12, increasing its client count by 65%. Some of the new money will go towards further developing the reserved seating platform so it can handle more complex venues and verticals such as sporting and performing arts events that use season tickets. Dreskin also says some cash will be put towards the company’s marketing and sales efforts. Ticketfly’s Series C, Note By NoteNow I know articles about startup funding can seem dry. They often just cite a long list of investors with no clue as to when they got in on the round. Luckily, this Series C was different. Ticketfly picked each investor to take advantage of a specific superpower of theirs. So I’m going to cover it differently too. Here’s what each investor offers: Northgate Capital – Ticketfly is mostly a music ticketing company right now, but it wants to get into sports. Thomas Vardell, a former professional football player for the San Francisco 49ers and other teams, has been one of Northgate’s managing directors since it was founded. Vardell’s sports connections could help Ticketfly break into the lucrative vertical. SAP Ventures - The investment arm of a European enterprise software giant, SAP Ventures has deep connections outside the United States. Most of Ticketfly’s clients are state-side, but it wants to expand internationally. Having SAP Ventures lead the Series C could smooth that expansion. Cross Creek Capital – Founded inside Wasatch Advisors which handles several mutual funds, Cross Creek Capital invests in late stage companies and preps them to go public. With a strong business and having now raised a Series C, Ticketfly is eying a public market debut that Cross Creek could help it reach. Mohr Davidow Ventures - A stalwart of the Silicon Valley scene, Mohr Davidow is doubling down after its Series B investment in Ticketfly. It will continue to give the company advice and assistance brokering partnerships with other startups. With over $37 million in funding, Ticketfly is ready to attack top-tier of the ticketing industry. However, Matt Shearer, vice president of its competitor TicketWeb is skeptical that Ticketfly will be able to “straddle the two worlds” of general admission and reserved seat ticket — segments Live Nation has split between two companies. Still, Shearer says Ticketfly’s ambitions “push everyone to get better, smarter, faster, stronger.” And if Ticketfly deems the challenge too great, it’s got options. Dreskin tells me there are “potential acquirers sniffing around.” [Image Credit: Muashley]
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| The Droid X360 Is The Standard-Bearer For Counterfeit Chinese Products Posted: 25 Jul 2012 07:26 AM PDT  Follow me here. The Droid X360 has the mind of Android, a body of a Vita, and branding of Verizon’s Android phones and Microsoft’s gaming system. Plus, the thing ships with 9 different emulators, allowing the owner to play games from Nintendo 64, Sony PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, Game boy Color, NES/FC, SNES, SEGA Mega Drive and SEGA Game Gear. The only way it could infringe on more trademarks would be if there was a Mercedes-Benz logo on the backside. A 1.5Ghz CPU powers the Android 4.0.4 install. There’s a 5-inch display up front, dual cameras, HDMI-out and a microSD card slot. The best part, at least to me, is the sad-looking 8GB sticker on the bottom of the device. Never mind that the device is essentially bursting with trademark infringements, the device seems to run rather well. And, as a PS Vita owner myself, I appreciate the form factor. No word on pricing but there really isn’t any reason to buy it. Just download an emulator to your smartphone and enjoy a little Kirby on the go.
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| Stealth-Mode DC Lobby Group Internet Association (Google, Amazon, FB, eBay) Names CEO Posted: 25 Jul 2012 07:12 AM PDT  A sign, if you needed one, of how big tech companies have become, how central they would like to be in the world of policymaking — and how they may be getting nervous about heavier regulation down the line: a new lobbying group is being formed called The Internet Association, with charter members reportedly including Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook. The group, due to launch formally in September, has made very little noise up to now, but today it announced the appointment of a president and CEO — Washington insider Michael Beckerman — to lead it in a more public effort. The news comes in the same week that it was revealed that Google’s budget for lobbying went up by 90 percent in the last quarter to nearly $4 million (on par with large telcos like Verizon), while Facebook’s went up by 200 percent to $960,000, according to Reuters. The Internet Association is being formed because, in the words of its new CEO, “The Internet must have a voice in Washington.” The group is planning a more formal launch, including revealing the names of its members and more about its purpose, in September. On first look, this association will be mostly a lobby group. Its purpose, according to a release sent to TechCrunch, will be “to advance public policy solutions that strengthen and protect an open, innovative and free Internet.” What makes it perhaps more noteworthy is that it looks like its ambition is to be the primary lobbying group for large tech companies. D.C. magazine the National Journal got the scoop on the news. It cited an unnamed source who said that companies already committed to the effort include Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook. TechCrunch has since confirmed that list with its own source. These companies, of course, also are involved with other lobbying efforts — both their own and around specific causes like broadband policy — but this could be the first group to represent all together on a general policy basis. Part of the effort is not so much to burst the bubble of influence in Silicon Valley that these companies have; as it is to try to make a more concerted effort to extend that influence to Washington, presumably to make sure that the companies get as lightly regulated as possible.
Prior to this appointment, Beckerman held a number of other advisory and policy roles in Washington. They included a job as deputy staff director to the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, the group that oversees U.S. telecoms and Internet policy. He had also been an advisor to Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), and before that Upton’s chief policy advisor.
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| SnapKnot Relaunches With A Pinterest-Style Layout To Connect Brides With Photographers Posted: 25 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT  The wedding space is blowing up here in tech, and for one very obvious reason. Almost everything about planning a wedding is pretty ancient. People build out complicated spreadsheets for their guest list, they are forced to search high and low for ways to spread around photos and invite-type information, and searching for vendors is about as accurate as doing a Google search for wedding photographers. But the technology is catching up to the process, especially on that last point about photographers, as SnapKnot. has undergone a major update to make sure brides have the very best images of their big day to look back on. SnapKnot has always made it easy for brides to search for photographers by location and budget. But what about the pictures themselves? In the latest version of SnapKnot, the user is welcomed to the site with a Pinterest-style layout. So now, not only can brides search by budget and location, but they can search through photographers’ photos to see which style fits the happy couple best. This gives the photographers a little extra exposure and marketing, and allows the bride to narrow down her photographer selection by something more than budget or location. SnapKnot has also integrated with Facebook to loop in any members of the bridal party that may help with planning or decision-making. This allows the bride and her team of lovely ladies to interact with the photographer and explain what look they’re aiming for. In fact, SnapKnot lets the bride and co. save their favorite photos on the site so that the photographer can see the type of shots the bride wants. Finally, wedding guests and family members can be invited by the bride to check out all the photos from the big day as the photographer uploads them to SnapKnot. Mind you, this is a separate process from the photographer’s profile and marketing strategy. While the photographer can choose to upload one or two photos of your wedding to add to his or her profile, the entirety of your wedding album will remain private to only those you’ve invited. The service is totally free to brides (as they’ll be paying the photographer anyway), but photographers can choose from tiered pricing depending on how many photos they want up, how many cities they want to market to, etc. Luckily for you wonderful readers, SnapKnot has been nice enough to give away one month free on their most expensive package, the $50 unlimited Diamond package (new Diamond members only). Just use the promo code TECHCRUNCH2. Click to view slideshow.
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| Google SEC Filing Details Why It Paid $12.4 Billion For Motorola Posted: 25 Jul 2012 06:58 AM PDT  In an SEC filing, Google spelled out why it paid $12.4 billion for hardware maker Motorola Mobility, in a deal that closed in May. $5.5 billion of the total price was for intellectual property, specifically “patents and developed technology.” Another $2.9 billion was attributed to cash acquired, $2.6 billion was for “goodwill,” $730 million for customer relationships and $670 million was for “other net assets acquired.” And in case you’re wondering, Google says that goodwill is “primarily attributed to the synergies expected to arise after the acquisition.” Yep, they said synergies. At the time of the original acquisition, Google said that the deal would help to “supercharge” the Android ecosystem, meaning that Motorola will continue to make Android devices under Google, obviously. However, in order to gain approval from China, Google had to remain “free and open source” for the next five years. In a blog post, CEO Larry Page talked about how the combination of the two companies would also “enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences,” – words that implied that Google would soon have a heavy hand in the new devices’ development, whatever they may end up being. Meanwhile, the patents that Google acquired through the deal would help Google fight off competitors Apple, Microsoft, and others. Oracle, for example, sued Google for copyright infringement in 2010, but Google won that battle in court this year. During this month’s earnings call, Google declined to give specifics as to its strategy with Motorola going forward, but the decent reviews of Google’s Nexus 7 tablet (built with ASUS) do demonstrate that when Google gets involved on the hardware side, it can produce devices that anyone would like…even Apple fans. We still don’t know what’s up with Moto’s Home business, though, and the filing didn’t provide any further clues in terms of Google’s plans there. But dollar amounts aside, the real reason why Google bought Motorola is spelled out quite plainly in the filing. “Intense competition,” says Google. (Ahem, Apple, right?)
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| Posted: 25 Jul 2012 06:30 AM PDT  Meteor, the company behind an application development framework of the same name, today announced $11.2 series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, with Matrix Partners also contributing. The investment follows Andreessen Horowitz’ record breaking $100 million investment in Github. The Meteor framework is free and open source and can be used for creating rich, Google Docs style applications in the browser. A preview was released last April. The company plans to monetize the product by selling enterprise support and services. Meteor was founded by ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis, MixApp co-founder Nick Martin and early Asana employee/MixApp co-founder Geoff Schmidt. David Greenspan, who co-founded AppJet (the company behind EtherPad) and went on to work on Google Wave, is another early employee. These are guys who know how to build richly interactive, real-time web apps. And they know painful it can be to develop modern, desktop-like apps for the browser. It takes a lot of work to build something like Asana, MixApp or Google Wave from scratch. In order to work correctly, these apps have to get browsers to do things they were never designed to do, like send data back and forth in near real time and refresh only certain parts of a page. Companies have to devote extensive engineering resources to solving these problems. The Asana team spent months working on a Meteor-like framework for its own use. Yet the demand for these types of apps is only increasing, especially as companies rely on web technologies to build cross-platform mobile applications. Meteor hopes to cut that valuable development time by providing a number of common, reusable open source parts that can be used both in the browser and on the server. But is there a business opportunity here? David Skok of Matrix Partners thinks so. He compares Meteor to JBoss, a company that sold to Red Hat in 2006 for $420 million. “When I invested in them in 2002, back when open source was less popular, JBoss had 5 million downloads and was doing $200,000 in revenue per quarter,” Skok says. “We were able to turn that into $65 million in annual revenue in 2006 when it sold to Red Hat.” To get there, Skok says Meteor will have to convince IT operations that Meteor is ready for the enterprise, because they’re the ones with the budget. “Enterprises don’t want to use something they’re not paying for,” Skok says. “They want a throat to choke when things go wrong.” To get ready for the enterprise, the Meteor team is buckling down on security and authentication, scalability and reliability. Meanwhile the company is surrounding itself with successful open source enterprise veterans. Joining the board is Rod Johnson, co-founder of Spring Source, which commercialized the open source Java framework Spring and was acquired by VMware. Skok will serve as an adviser to Meteor, as will Peter Levine, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the co-founder of XenSource, which was acquired by Citrix. Mojito a browser and server side JavaScript framework opens sourced earlier this year by Yahoo is the most comparable framework available. Both Meteor and Mojito rely on Node.js, an platform for running JavaScript on the server. Software development is a hot area for investors right now. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz’ GitHub investment, other related recent investments include Xamarin’s $12 million round of funding, Keen’s round of seed funding and Apigee and Mashery’s latest rounds of funding.
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| Google Gets Scientific, Adds A Voice-Enabled 34-Button Calculator To Desktop And Mobile Search Posted: 25 Jul 2012 06:08 AM PDT  Oh Google. Sometimes you’re so awesome. Google search has long featured a built-in calculator function but a recent update added a fully functional 34-button scientific calculator. Previously, when a user entered, say, 2+2, Google would simply display the sum above the search result. Now, when that equation is entered into the search bar, the answer pops up along with the new calculator. Best of all, this works in mobile browsers and voice search, too. This isn’t a stripped down calculator, either. It’s a full-power, voice-enabled scientific calculator with nearly all the functions of a tangible model. Plus, it doesn’t require two AAA batteries. This calculator even works with Desktop Voice Search. Simply click the little mic icon and state the equation; it works with both “what is the square root of 30?” and “square root of 30.” Or, to launch the calculator itself, say “calculator”. It seems to stumble on long, complex equations (or maybe I’m saying them wrong), but in the right situation, this voice-powered calculator could be rather valuable. This is just Google’s latest addition to its nerdy toolbox. The search bar already performed graphing functions. Now, with Google, Wolfram Alpha, and the sheer number of apps out there, there really isn’t any excuse for not being able to finish your math homework.
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| Social TV Analytics Startup Bluefin Labs Hires Former Razorfish Chief JP Maheu As Its New CEO Posted: 25 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Over the past year and a half, social TV analytics company Bluefin Labs has gone from being a stealth startup to becoming an invaluable provider of research for TV networks, brands, and agencies who want to delve into the social conversations that are happening around TV shows. Now, as it prepares to take its next steps forward, the company has hired veteran agency executive JP Maheu as its new CEO. Bluefin Labs provides detailed analytics around social messages that TV viewers send while watching television. It scours Twitter and other social networks in realtime to determine audience sentiment and affinity data around various TV shows. It can tell networks which shows viewers are most engaged with, what shows share affinity graphs, and the like. It can also provide pretty granular data around brand advertising, showing brands and agencies how viewers are responding to their adverts during different shows. Its research is used by more than 40 TV networks in the U.S., as well as a number of brands and agencies. Maheu tells me that networks were using its data during their upfronts, as a way to try to show how engaged their audiences are to boost CPMs. Brands and agencies are also using its data, in part to better help them target particular audience segments and measure the effectiveness of their TV ad campaigns. With Maheu at the helm, Bluefin will get a shot in the arm on the agency side, as he has spent the last several years in senior positions among a number of digital agencies. He served as CEO of Razorfish, where he led strategy and growth of the agency. He also served as chief digital officer of Ogilvy & Mather and most recently was Global CEO of Publicis Modem, the digital marketing unit of Publicis Worldwide and largest agency within the Publicis Groupe. Maheu replaces Bluefin Labs co-founder and former CEO Deb Roy, who is a tenured member of MIT Media Lab. He’s been on leave while running the startup for the last two-and-a-half years, but he plans to return next January. Roy will remain on as chairman of the startup, and will work with Maheu on long-range strategy for the company. Bluefin Labs has raised more than $20 million in funding, including a $12 million Series B round led by Time Warner Investments in January. Other investors include SoftBank Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Lerer Ventures.
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| Payvia Debuts New Carrier Billing Platform, Offers Support For T-Mobile & Sprint Posted: 25 Jul 2012 05:59 AM PDT  Today, a company called payvia is launching a new mobile payments platform for carrier billing. But unlike several in this space, payvia is not a new player in the mobile industry. The company was spun out from m-Qube, which started a transaction and carrier billing network in North America in 2004. Originally focused on supporting carrier billing for entertainment services (think ringtones, wallpaper, etc.), the goal with payvia is to help the company transition into digital goods and services. The company competes with a number of services, including Boku, Zong (now eBay-owned), Bango, Netsize, Fortumo, boxPAY, and others, and it has not been above suing its competitors for infringing on its patents in the past. But now, the goal isn’t just to fight the competition with intellectual property claims, it’s to take the upstarts head-on by offering a similar service. “Our focus is digital goods and online services,” says payvia co-founder Darcy Wedd, explaining the company’s focus in the mobile space. However, he adds, “the carrier networks are not ready to take that next step into physical goods,” – meaning, payvia can’t fully replace an online checkout system. Payvia will be made available to app developers, web app developers and online merchants who are selling digital goods, he says, and he teased that it already has two major brands signed up at launch. Unfortunately, payvia hasn’t been given the go-ahead to announce those companies’ names at this time, but Wedd says they are well-known brands that will be immediately recognizable to anyone. He couldn’t even give a hint as to what sort of company one brand was, saying doing so would be too obvious, but said the other brand is communications company with a platform for making phone calls. (He did mention “streaming music” several times during the call as an example, and the screenshot shows a generic music service as well. That’s not a confirmation of anything, just a guess.) For end users, payvia works both online and on mobile, offering an alternative checkout system where you provide your phone number to make a purchase, as opposed to entering credit card info. On mobile, it’s a two-click process, as the technology can auto-detect your device and phone number. On the web, you enter your mobile number and then you’re sent a PIN number via SMS which you key in on the screen. The business model is par for the course for carrier billing – a percentage of the transaction value is taken for each purchase customers make. Wedd says carrier contracts are confidential, but it offers “more favorable revenue splits” with merchants and developers than app stores, to give you an idea. But Wedd stresses that payvia’s big advantage here is its history of working in the space. “It’s mostly the heritage,” he says. “I think a lot of the announcements [from others] with the carrier connections are actually indirect,” he remarks, regarding the competition. “We are a large company, we do have long-standing relationships, we focus only on those direct connections, and that does set us apart.” Based in L.A., with offices in Boston and Seattle, payvia has 30 employees – small compared with M-Qube’s 120. But it’s in no need of immediate financing, as M-Cube is already a profitable company. Developers looking to integrate payvia into their own applications can use an API for online and mobile web carrier billing checkouts. After the launch of payvia’s initial merchants, an SDK for app developers will be made publicly available and will be free to download and install (Android-only, as iOS is not supported due to restrictions from Apple). Currently, payvia only offers billing on Sprint and T-Mobile, but Wedd says that the company will have “more to announce” when its first merchant partners make their debut.
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| Samsung Officially Brings Motion-Controlled Angry Birds To Select Smart TVs Posted: 25 Jul 2012 05:38 AM PDT  It was only a few weeks ago that we first heard about Angry Birds coming to Samsung’s Smart TVs, and it would appear that one of the most popular games in the world has now become available on select models. You see, Angry Birds has been revamped to work with Samsung’s Smart Interaction feature, meaning that the user will sling birds without a remote control or touch interface, as the game is entirely gesture-controlled. The Angry Birds game will work on Samsung’s 2012 LED 7500 Smart TV and up, along with the Plasma 8000 models. The company first debuted the game on the 75-inch ES9000 LED Smart 3D TV. As you can expect, this model comes with all of Samsung’s new “smart” additions, such as Smart Interaction, Smart Content and Smart Evolution, which lets you control the TV with your voice or gestures, share content across devices, and upgrade the TV. If you already own one of the LED 7500 (or ups) or the Plasma 8000, the Angry Birds app is available as a free download from Samsung’s Smart Hub. If, for some reason, you’re interested in the 75-inch ES9000 LED Smart 3D TV that Samsung’s just recently debuted, which packs Angry Birds right on the device, it’s expected to hit shelves in August starting $9,999. [via Big Picture Big Sound]
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| OS X Mountain Lion: Quick, Familiar, Cheap, And Drenched In iOS Goodness Posted: 25 Jul 2012 05:31 AM PDT  Trying to write a review of OS X Mountain Lion is tricky. First of all, I had already written a review back in February, when Apple legitimately surprised the world with the revelation that the ninth iteration of OS X was just about ready to go. Granted, back then I only had a few days to play with an early build. But it was already pretty solid at that point. Now, months later, I’ve had a lot of time to play with Mountain Lion, and I’m happy to report that it’s even more solid. But ending my review there wouldn’t do Mountain Lion the justice it deserves. It’s definitely the most polished and robust version of OS X yet. If you liked Lion, you’ll love Mountain Lion. If you didn’t like Lion, you’ll probably love Mountain Lion even more because it seems to fix a lot of the performance/quirkiness issues that some folks were having with the last version of OS X. I didn’t have any of those issues with Lion, so as someone who had started using an iOS device far more than a Mac, I liked Lion right from the start because it borrowed a lot of little ideas from iOS. And Mountain Lion expands upon that practice. So, unsurprisingly, I like it even more. It must be said that Mountain Lion isn’t really all that different from Lion — hence, the variation of the name (even though mountain lions are technically cougars — insert joke here). But unlike the jump from Leopard to Snow Leopard, which focused on performance and tightening code rather than features, the jump from Lion to Mountain Lion does pack some new goodies. Apple has already highlighted what they view to be the 10 key features of Mountain Lion, both in the original previews and at WWDC last month. I won’t spend time giving an overview of each of them again — if you’d like that, go here. Instead, I thought I’d talk a bit about my experience using Mountain Lion over these past several months. And point out the things I like the best, and a few things that I don’t like. Initially, I just had Mountain Lion installed on the review machine that Apple loaned me back in February. But as Mountain Lion quickly became more stable, I decided to install a developer build on one of my personal Macs as well. On a mid-2011 MacBook Air, there were no noticeable performance gains (nor is Apple touting any), but the machine did seem to wake up much quicker from sleep. More recently, when I installed Mountain Lion on my 2009 iMac, I did notice that my machine started up (and shut down) significantly faster, which was nice. Overall, that older machine has had no issues with Mountain Lion (though there are limits as to just how old a machine can be and still run the new OS). App compatibility has been surprisingly good. I actually haven’t found any with major problems due to the upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion. I’m sure there are some out there, but even apps that pushed out Mountain Lion-ready updates a little early seemed to work fine without the updates (the updates just added things such as Notification Center capabilities). Notifications are the most in-your-face and probably best new feature of Mountain Lion. We’re all used to dozens of apps on our machines alerting us to something. Now the process is streamlined in a very iOS-like manner. While there aren’t too many third-party apps out there that support these new notifications yet, Apple’s built-in apps alone make this a most-welcome addition. Those built-in apps now include Twitter in Mountain Lion. If you sign in (from the settings) with your Twitter account, you can now get notifications every time someone @replies you or DMs you. It’s fantastic. And while there is a button that enables you to tweet right from the notification area on the right side of the screen, when you reply to Twitter notifications, unfortunately you’re dumped into the web app (who knows what Twitter is doing with Twitter for Mac, which still has the old Twitter logo and non-Retina graphics). Also built-in will be Facebook. Oddly though, this feature won’t go live until the fall (with an update to Mountain Lion). Apple gave me a build with Facebook enabled, and it seems to work well. You can post with the click of a button just as you can with Twitter — and it works with Facebook’s more granular sharing settings (share with just your family group, for example). I assume Apple wants to give developers a little more time to work with this Facebook integration, as many of them will want to use it for things like Single Sign On for apps, and sharing. The fact that Chrome and Safari work with Notification Center is great news for web apps. I’ve been able to get alerts when I have a new Gmail message, for example. Chrome has had a similar banner system for some time, but the native OS X notification experience easily blows it away. Another feature that users are likely to notice pretty quickly is Gatekeeper. That’s a bit odd since it’s not really meant to be a forward-facing feature, but rather it’s meant to be more of a protection layer. But since the default setting is to block unsigned apps from the web, people are likely to hit it right away (since most developers won’t be properly signed at the launch of the OS). Don’t panic. This doesn’t mean you can’t install all of your favorite apps via the web with Mountain Lion, it just means that you’ll have to go into settings and hit a button to allow for unsigned app installs. I suspect we’ll see a little backlash against this early on simply because there won’t be a lot of developers signed up just yet. (And I can’t wait to watch parents try to figure out how to change the default settings.) I’m told some bigger ones, like Adobe, are already on board. But there are thousands upon thousands of developers out there that will want to get the certification (which only requires a $99/year developer account — there’s no vetting at first, it’s an honor system until you do something wrong). It may take a little time. Another new feature that I’ve run into time and time again in Mountain Lion is Documents in the Cloud. Because iCloud is now fully baked into the OS, you’ll find this feature as a part of everything from TextEdit to Preview. This also may be a bit jarring at first because it’s really blowing up the traditional notion of a file system, at least from a conceptual perspective. Rather than files residing in folders on some drive that you access through Finder, files are now simply documents within the apps themselves. That probably sounds more confusing that it is. It actually makes a lot more sense to do things this way — and again, it’s something borrowed from iOS. When you open a document-based app in Mountain Lion, you’ll be asked to pick which document you wish to open from a list of documents specifically tied to that app. If you want to open an outside document, you still can, but it’s a step away now into the folder system. Then there are the apps that have been ported over from iOS: Reminders, Notes, and Messages. Each is great provided you’re also an iOS (and by extension, iCloud) user, otherwise they may seem weak. Messages was released in beta form late last year as a replacement for iChat. It’s probably good that Apple did this because it was very wonky at first. In Mountain Lion, it seems much more stable. More importantly, messages delivery seems to actually work all the time now no matter which device you’re using. But for people who were used to iChat, with its more traditional IM ways, Messages will probably seem a bit odd. Even now, the iMessage/IM duality is sort of strange — am I supposed to close/delete messages after I’m done with “chat session”? Another killer new feature of Mountain Lion that I find myself using quite a bit is AirPlay. iOS users will know this well, and they should be thrilled to have this for the Mac now. A couple weeks ago, there was a sporting event that was being streamed live on the web, but wasn’t available on the iPhone/iPad. With Mountain Lion, I simply opened a browser window, hit one button, and my entire desktop was sent to my TV via my Apple TV. I put the video fullscreen and you couldn’t even tell we were routing this, wirelessly, through a computer. Magic. One feature I’m still not completely sold on yet is Safari. Apple’s web browser has been around for years now, and each year, Apple seems to claim it’s the fastest out there. The problem is that there are so many tests now tailored to different things, that it’s hard to know what matters. All I know is that in daily usage, Chrome still feels faster to me, so that’s what I use. But Apple has once again overhauled Safari to make it competitive with Mountain Lion. A couple key features rely on iCloud: iCloud Tabs and Reading List. It’s definitely nice to see what tabs you have open on other Apple devices, but Reading List feels less compelling in a world of Instapaper and Pocket. The biggest change you’ll find in Safari is the addition of a “Smart Search” bar — or an “omnibar”, to use Google’s parlance. That is, a unified top text bar that smartly handles both URLs and searches. Chrome has had this feature for a while, and it’s a welcome addition to Safari (though, oddly, it’s not a part of Mobile Safari). Also new is the Safari Tab View. This allows you to zoom out of any page and get a quick look at the tabs you currently have open. It’s a nice effect, but it’s simply not that practical. I’d much rather see Safari add something like pinned tabs, to make the tab situation more manageable. While I said that performance gains weren’t a concentrated focus for Mountain Lion, one area the OS X team did work on is smooth scrolling and hardware acceleration within Safari. The work shows. Overall, Mountain Lion feels like the most natural step yet towards the convergence of iOS and OS X. While Apple says there are now over 66 million OS X users, Apple sold nearly 50 million iOS devices just last quarter. It’s clear that OS X has to continue to creep closer to iOS simply because that’s what far more people know now. It’s hard to imagine how Apple will further refine OS X from here. Maybe they don’t — maybe OS XI (OS 11?) is next. Or maybe Apple has one more big cat left in the bag (in terms of nicknames, there really only are a couple left). For now, Mountain Lion will stand atop the mountain. It’s solid, polished, and perhaps most importantly, cheap. For $19.99 in the Mac App Store, you’ll be able to upgrade all your machines to Mountain Lion. You can upgrade both Lion machines and Snow Leopard machines, and they both cost the same price, which is great. If your machine is compatible, the upgrade is an absolute no-brainer. In a time when Microsoft is just about to upend their entire OS with their biggest change (and bet) yet in Windows 8, Apple has taken a much more refined approach. Perhaps they take some criticism for this, or perhaps they’re just being savvy. OS X remains a great OS. And sprinkled with some of the best elements of iOS, it still feels pretty fresh. Not bad for an eleven-year-old big cat. You can find OS X Mountain Lion in the Mac App Store here.
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