Random Post

Friday, January 3, 2014
no image
vine

Today, Twitter’s Vine has announced full web profiles for all of its users, something it has lacked until this point. It has also introduced a new TV Mode that lets you watch videos in full screen on your computer.


You can view videos, browse users’ back catalogue and interact with them on the web. This includes viewing your home feed, liking, commenting and sharing videos.


The profiles are roughly similar to those offered by other social services like Instagram, and should offer easier browsing of multiple Vines on the web. Previously, you could look at one video at a time but there was no way to jump from that video directly to a user’s other work on the web — but you could on the mobile app. This strikes us as a move made to support Vine creators — the segment of the app’s users that have made a craft out of the six-second clips.


Screen Shot 2014-01-03 at 11.55.41 AM


Vine had announced plans to create web profiles late last year, and offered reservations for custom URLs ahead of the launch. They’re now rolling out to all users.


This is not a full version of Vine for the web, as you can’t record videos with your webcam, but it does offer an easier way to give people access to all of your published Vines.


The new TV Mode is quite enjoyable, though it plays through your videos one after another, rather than looping. Given that loops are one of the core creative tools of Vine, I’d love to see a toggle that let you loop a video until you were done watching it. But there are ‘back and forward’ buttons and keyboard arrows work for this as well.


Screen Shot 2014-01-03 at 11.57.27 AM


Obviously Vine profiles on the web have been in the works for a while, but the TV Mode feels a lot like a (well done) reading of the user attraction to compilations of Vines on YouTube and other video sites. People obviously want to watch a bunch of Vines in a row, and this offers a way to do that. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rise in accounts created specifically to curate ‘best of’ compilations using the ‘re-Vine feature, for instance.


One way to encourage this could be to add a feature in the future that let users create ‘lists’ or collections of Vines separate from their home timeline. This could let them craft ‘compilation’ videos out of Vines in specific orders and around specific themes.


More to follow…







12:09 PM

Today, Twitter’s Vine has announced full web profiles for all of its users, something it has lacked until this point. It has also introduce...

Read more »
Posted by at 12:09 PM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
basis-carbonsteel

The quantified self movement has grown to the point where you could easily bedeck your limbs with thousands of dollars of tracking gadgets, and the race to measure your movement isn’t going to end any time soon. That’s why Basis — makers of an awfully accurate, wrist-worn health gadget — has rolled out a new version of the device just in time for the nerd hordes at CES to ogle it.


Well, perhaps calling it “new” is overstating things a bit. The updated, $199 Carbon Steel edition is a hair hardier than the original B1 and it’s better looking to boot, but the big draw is the addition of improved sleep analytics that can assign personal Sleep Scores and ultimately tell just how soundly a wearer is sleeping.


Let’s back up for a moment first: the original Basis had a leg up on competitors because of the sheer number of sensors packed into it. Rather than just installing an accelerometer to monitor motion, the Basis team tricked it out with sensors to measure a user’s heart rate and galvanic skin response, all in hopes of providing people with a clearer understanding of how hard they’re working. That array of sensors also means that users didn’t have to manually switch into a discrete sleeping mode, which has honestly always been a pet peeve of mine — I’d love to gain some deeper insight into what few hours of sleep I manage to get, but I tend to pass out before flipping the sleep switch.


Thankfully, owners of that first generation model won’t have to lose sleep over a feature disparity, as those sleep analytics will be available for the original B1 later this month.


Modified hardware and improved smarts are neat enough, I suppose, but they’re both indicative of a change in how fitness gadget creators have to approach the very process of designing their wares. As Basis CEO Jef Holove recently told PC World, expanding smartphone feature sets means that the feature bar for dedicated activity trackers has just been raised.


“When Apple released the iPhone 5 with the M7 processor, it became even more clear that many of basic functionalities of trackers would be assumed by users’ smartphones, creating a challenge for health trackers to do something more,” he said. He’s got a point: these days we demand that our smartphones do everything, and the companies that craft them are rising to that challenge. Right now we’re seeing plenty of iterative moves by these fitness-focused wearable tech companies — the mildly-refreshed Jawbone UP24 and Nike Fuelband SE spring to mind — but I suspect it won’t be long before the next generation of quantified self hardware begins to pull away from smartphones in earnest.







8:10 AM

The quantified self movement has grown to the point where you could easily bedeck your limbs with thousands of dollars of tracking gadgets, ...

Read more »
Posted by at 8:10 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
One lesson that's easy to learn if you've been through any natural disaster is that you shouldn't rely on classic means of communications like land lines, cellphones or Internet. Capacity gets challenged; infrastructure gets destroyed. Where I live, in brush-fire and earthquake-prone Southern California, neighbors have developed ham radio-based communications plans over the years that are geared solely towards communicating in a disaster. One area that I'm working on is text-over-radio.


5:39 AM

One lesson that's easy to learn if you've been through any natural disaster is that you shouldn't rely on classic means of com...

Read more »
Posted by at 5:39 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
kiwi-move

We’ve spoken to the folks from Kiwi Wearables before: Back in September we caught up with them at the Disrupt SF Hackathon, when they were preparing their platform and demonstrated what it could do with a sensor-laden prototype used as a gesture-based musical instrument. Now, Kiwi is ready to unveil its hardware, and make it available to consumers for pre-order.


The Kiwi Move is the product of its work to date, a small 1.6″ by 1.2″ gadget that’s only 0.35″ thick and weighs just a single ounce, but that contains an ARM Cortex M4 chip, a Bluetooth LE radio and 802.11b/g antenna, as well as an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer and thermometer. It has 2GB of onboard storage, and can last 4 hours streaming data constantly, or 5 days under normal, periodic use. There’s an LED for displaying light-based notifications, and it ships with four native apps, plus a basic programming tool, and plug-in support for other devices.


I spoke with Kiwi co-founder Ali Nawab and Ashley Beattie about the device and their goals with the campaign, which kicks off today and runs through the next couple of months. Pre-order pricing for the Kiwi Move is $99, but they’ll be more than that once the campaign ends. The team is looking to ship in July, 2014 if everything goes according to plan, and they tell me they’ve already seeded developer devices, worked out supply chain issues and even begun FCC testing (which is going very well) so they anticipate being able to meet their schedule.


The Kiwi Move ships with apps to begin with to prove to consumers its usefulness, though it’s designed to be used as a stepping off point for developer ambitions. Eventually, Kiwi will have an app ecosystem with developer partners, but off the shelf, it provides Kiwi Move (which does activity and movement tracking), Kiwi Voice (for recording voice notes locally and for voice-powered input on their connected devices), Kiwi Ingishts (metrics tied to activity and motion tracking) and Kiwi Gesture (a way to use the device as a motion controller for connected home devices or other device input).


There’s also support for third-party plugins, so that you can use it with Pebble, Philips Hue, Google Glass and apps including Strava and Run Keeper, as well as ‘When/Do,’ a basic user-oriented simple programming platform that lets people create their own actions with “if this, then that” style language to set the Kiwi Move to take steps when it detects specific contexts. It’s a way to make the many different functions Kiwi’s hardware is capable of work together in tandem with a minimum of user input.


I asked both Nawab and Beattie about the risks of trying to do too much when every wearable device so far has been relatively niche, but they argued the versatility of Kiwi Move is its greatest strength, rather than something that could potentially confuse their target audience. They say that they’ve made sure to present the Kiwi Move as something usable out of the box, and minimized talk of sensors and technical details. It’s a launch aimed specifically at users, and while developers will also be key to its success, it’s interesting to see a startup that wants to be a platform take this tack at this stage in their evolution.







5:10 AM

We’ve spoken to the folks from Kiwi Wearables before: Back in September we caught up with them at the Disrupt SF Hackathon, when they were ...

Read more »
Posted by at 5:10 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
Cloud storage is a fast-moving arena, with advancements including the ability to store files and folders in the cloud along with metadata on your PC replicating the actual file. The file isn't there and isn't taking up space, but you can see relevant attributes. Other cloud techniques include the ability to sync files only as you need them. In this week's All Things Appy, we take a look at the top five, free, must-have Windows desktop apps in the cloud storage category.


5:10 AM

Cloud storage is a fast-moving arena, with advancements including the ability to store files and folders in the cloud along with metadata ...

Read more »
Posted by at 5:10 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
spredfast

Social marketing company Spredfast is announcing that it has raised $32.5 million in Series D funding.


The round was led by Lead Edge Capital with participation from Austin Ventures, InterWest Partners, and OpenView Partners. The company has now raised more than $60 million.


Spredfast was founded back in 2008, and CEO Rod Favaron acknowledged that the social media landscape has changed dramatically since then. He said the first group of products was focused on social media “listening” and aggregating comments about a company. The second wave consisted of social publishing tools and agencies like Buddy Media and Vitrue, which were “acquired en masse.”


Favaron argued that Spredfast is really part of a third wave: “The whole time, what we’ve been focused on, we don’t think social is about building another web page for your company. It’s about having conversations with people who care about your brand.” For Spredfast, among other things, that means building a product that allows a larger group of people across the entire company to get involved in social media efforts, rather than a small, isolated team. (Features include audience targeting, social filters, shared calendars, and integration with other products for web analytics, social listening, ad optimization, and more.)


The company says it works with more then 300 brands including General Mills, AT&T, and REI. The average customer has nearly 120 employees who are managing the social presence of “40 brands or initiatives across 200 accounts.” In addition to continued product development, Favaron said his goals for 2014 include international growth — he said that while Spredfast has customers in more than 20 companies, the team is entirely US-based, and that’s going to change.


Favaron also suggested that the social marketing industry still has a lot of room to grow, and it sounds like he wants to keep Spredfast as an independent company to take advantage of that growth.


“We wouldn’t go raise if we were thinking short term,” he said. “We’re obviously thinking long term.”







4:24 AM

Social marketing company Spredfast is announcing that it has raised $32.5 million in Series D funding. The round was led by Lead Edge Capit...

Read more »
Posted by at 4:24 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
Haloband product

The rise of mobile has given me so much: 24/7 connections with friends around the world, information exactly when I need it, the ability to track my fitness and health goals. Unfortunately, it’s also given me a complex about my giant sausage fingers and their constant inability to navigate the tiny keys on my smartphone’s slippery touchscreen. Sometimes I think I should have just bought a BlackBerry.


When I read about Haloband on their Kickstarter page, I felt like the Shanghai-based startup was speaking directly to me: “Everyone has trouble in locking and unlocking smartphones. The frequency usually hurts phones’ screen and keys, as well as our hearts. So we decided it’s time to do something.”


Haloband is a silicone wristband that is embedded with NFC chip and lets you operate your choice of functions by tapping your Android smartphone on your wrist. It’s also linked to a cloud account, which lets you save your ID as well as information you can send to other mobile devices. After setting up your wristband with the Haloband app, you can use it to unlock your phone, take photos or send emergency alerts, among other options. To get an idea of what Haloband can do, watch their hilarious Kickstarter video embedded above (“I’m from the future. If you scan my wrist, you can get my business card information. This is my information, from my wrist, on your phone. Because I’m from the future.”)

Haloband Tap

The project has already raised almost double its $10,000 goal on Kickstarter and its early bird specials are closed, but you can still select from several options, starting from just $25 for a black or white Haloband. Funding closes on Jan. 16 and the bands are scheduled to ship in February.


Haloband was developed by a Shanghai-based team that includes a former Intel engineer and focuses on NFC technology. They plan to release an open API so other developers can create their own Haloband apps and help smartphone users wrist easy (rimshot).







1:40 AM

The rise of mobile has given me so much: 24/7 connections with friends around the world, information exactly when I need it, the ability to...

Read more »
Posted by at 1:40 AM 0 comments
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
 
Google Analytics Alternative