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Tuesday, January 21, 2014
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Evernote, which now has 4 million users in Europe, is stepping up its bid to pick up more. Today the company is announcing a new deal with Deutsche Telekom to offer Evernote Premium free for six months to mobile users across DT’s entire network, covering 12 markets and 57 million users, with a preinstalled Android app. (The full list is Albania, Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Montenegro, Macedonia, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, as well as Germany.) The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but this is an extension of a partnership between the two that started last year in DT’s home market of Germany.


That service offered one year of free access and clearly has been a success. Users who sign up for the service also get 1GB of monthly upload allowance, off-line notebook usage and accelerated picture recognition. Premium features also include Document Search, which allows users to search documents, presentations and spreadsheets within their Evernote Notebooks, and Reminders, which ensure users stay on track with all of their personal and professional projects.


“We are proud to have been able to put together and launch such a comprehensive international partnership across 12 markets in just four months. Partnerships like these enable us to provide our customers across Europe with access to an increasing number of innovative online services,” said Claudia Nemat, Board member for Europe and Technology at Deutsche Telekom, in a statement. “This is in line with our innovation goal of entering into partnerships to offer unique services that will increase both value for the customer as well as customer loyalty.”


“We are excited to be able to build on our existing partnership with Deutsche Telekom in Germany and extend our Evernote Premium offer to millions of customers across the DT footprint,” said Alex Pachikov, VP of Partnerships at Evernote. “This is an important milestone for the partnership. It now allows us to enrich the mobile experience for millions of subscribers across Europe. This enables them to capture and recall everything that is important to them across all of their devices.”

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itunes-radio

Apple has a couple of new patents today (via AppleInsider), including one for an audio and video media service that would switch intelligently and automatically between sources in order to provide users with a constant stream of stuff they actually want to watch and listen to, as well as helping them dodge ads. A second patent describes a new design for MacBook trackpad hardware that does away with the need for a physical button.


The first patent is potentially the most interesting, since it essentially paints a picture of a service like iTunes Radio, but with the added benefit that it can use multiple different services to source media, including online streaming services, FM radio and more. A user would create a playlist or station by expressing some preferences about what they want to see or hear (it’s designed to work with both audio and video content) and then sit back and enjoy as it switches between content sources when songs end, or when commercials interject.


To make it seamless, the service described in the patent could record content that fits a users demand on other channels if there’s a conflict in schedule, and also tap the user’s own offline library of media on their devices. Think of it like an intelligent channel surf, except extending across the range of Internet media sources.


The system takes into account various elements when determining what to play next, including metadata about the artist and track, volume, and even hue and color in terms of video programming. A user would control it via a GUI that resembles an FM tuner according to the patent, letting them tweak their preferences to alter the stream. It’s a very ambitious project, and one that seems likely to anger content partners since it can dodge ads on various services, but it’s still something that you can see replacing current methods of engaging with TV and music. Still, if this is on the horizon, expect it to require a lot more refinement and working out before it makes an appearance.


The other patent is for a touchpad design for MacBooks that gets rid of the physical button aspect entirely, but replaces it with a similar sensation. Currently, MacBook support both capacitive touch-based input and physical keypresses, but the keypress requires different amounts of force depending on where you strike thanks to a hinged design, and is subject to wear and tear since it’s a moving part.


Apple’s design replaces that with a complex force sensing system, combined with a means for providing tactile feedback that would emulate a hardware button press. This would have a number of advantages in terms of MacBook construction, from simplifying the hardware involved as mentioned, to saving space within the case of the notebook, which continues to be a key concern in building Apple devices in terms of providing more room for larger batteries and other components. Also, the force feedback used in the trackpad could be triggered by incoming email, letting it act just like vibration alerts on your iPhone.


This is a tech that would be handy, but people are very used to the feeling of Apple’s current trackpad, which is often described as among the best in the business. Still, force feedback on a notebook Mac would open up all kinds of possibilities and make sense to Mac users moving to the platform after getting an iPhone, so there’s a chance we could see it implemented in future designs.







4:24 AM

Apple has a couple of new patents today (via AppleInsider ), including one for an audio and video media service that would switch intelligen...

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As Verizon gears up to report its quarterly results later today, the company has jumped a little deeper into the TV services pool. It has acquired Intel Media, a group of cloud TV assets that includes the OnCue Clould TV platform. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but were reportedly in the range of $500 million when the deal was being reported in November 2013.


The deal follows another couple of other large, recent moves into TV and content distribution from Verizon — including acquiring content delivery network Edgecast for more than $350 million. It also included the acquisition of UpLynk for uploading and encoding video.


Intel Media includes 350 employees, and the acquisition will include all IP related to the OnCue platform. The 350 employees will continue to be based in Santa Clara with the management team — led by corporate VP and GM Eric Huggers — intact.


“We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved. Intel provided us with the technological know-how and resources to develop products and services that will fundamentally change the way we experience TV, and now Verizon gives us access to the marketplace and the ability to scale,” Huggers said in a statement. “It’s the next logical step, and we’re excited about the road ahead.”


The deal is expected to close in Q1 2014.


The move is an interesting one and comes at a time when Verizon continues to see declines in its tradition fixed-line voice business — that’s the trend that drove carriers like Verizon over to building out enhanced broadband services like its FiOS TV service in the first place, and those trends show no sign of abating. (We’ll see more on that later today when the earnings come out.)


The important thing here is that what Verizon is trying to do is to add on more features and technology to differentiate FiOS from the rest of the pack of paid TV services — in this case helping with search and discovery, interactivity and multiscreen services.


“The OnCue platform and team will help Verizon bring next-generation video services to audiences who increasingly expect to view content when, where and how they want it,” said Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam. “Verizon already has extensive video content relationships, fixed and wireless delivery networks, and customer relationships in both the home and on mobile. This transaction provides us with the capabilities to build a powerful, capitally efficient engine for future growth and innovation. We will have the opportunity to enhance, expand, accelerate and integrate our delivery of video products and services to better serve audiences on a wide array of devices.”







1:09 AM

As Verizon gears up to report its quarterly results later today, the company has jumped a little deeper into the TV services pool. It has ac...

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Monday, January 20, 2014
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namo media

It’s been nearly a year since I last wrote about Namo Media, the native ad startup founded by former Googler Gabor Cselle and backed by Google Ventures, so I caught up with Cselle today and he told me that the startup just launched an important new feature for publishers.


Basically, Namo now allows publishers to take easily adjust the placement of ads in their stream of content. Cselle showed me a web interface where, with just a couple of clicks, he could adjust where the first ad appeared in the stream, and then how frequently new ads would follow. Within a few seconds, those changes took effect in the demo app.


This marks a big improvement over the experience that Namo first launched with in November, Cselle said. Previously, Namo’s ad placements were “hard coded,” so any changes would require submitting a new version of the app. Publishers often test Namo’s effectiveness out by pushing its ads way down in the stream, so the old system made it tougher for them to display those ads more prominently once they saw it actually worked.


Now, with the new version of the Namo software development kit, publishers can adjust the placements as often as they want and they changes will go live immediately. There’s even an option for automated placements, where Namo tests out different variations and chooses the one that’s most lucrative.


Cselle’s vision is to deliver ads that fit naturally into the stream of content, overcoming the “banner blindness” that many of us have, while requiring very little work from the publisher.


One of the obvious models is Facebook — he said publishers are embracing the idea in part because they see Facebook’s mobile revenue — so it’s a good sign that Namo has enlisted Greg Badros, former vice president of engineering and products at Facebook (as well as a senior director of engineering at Google on ads and other products), for its board of advisors. (Other advisors include Russell Glass and Brian Balfour.)


I also asked about some of the recent discussion around native advertising, particularly columnist Bob Garfield’s claim that it amounts to “a racket.”


Cselle responded that most of the criticism seems directed at sponsored content, which Namoe doesn’t currently support. While its ads may be designed to look like they’re part of the content stream, they’re labeled as ads, and they point, most commonly, to app download pages, so no one’s going to be tricked into thinking that it’s editorial content. But surely Cselle is planning to add sponsored content features down the line? Well, maybe, or maybe not — he declined to comment on his product roadmap.


Cselle also declined to specify how many publishers Namo is working with. He would say that he’s working with large and small publishers, and that he’s happy with the result. He attributed a lot of the current interest not just to Facebook, but also to the recent announcement from Twitter-owned MoPub that it will be supporting native ads.







3:09 PM

It’s been nearly a year since I last wrote about Namo Media , the native ad startup founded by former Googler Gabor Cselle and backed by Goo...

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The Syrian Electronic Army isn’t much a fan of Microsoft it seems. After compromising Microsoft social accounts, and one of its blogs, the group today defaced the company’s Office Blog, directly following a redesign of the property.


As The Verge notes, the Syrian Electronic Amy had previously promised continued embarrassing shenanigans. Neowin published an image of the defaced blog, as did The Verge. The site has since been at least partially retracted.


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As part of prior harassment by the digital group, Microsoft admitted that some of its employees’ email accounts were compromised. Screenshots of mail were tweeted out, showing discourse between executives discussing the hacked social accounts.


It remains unclear as to how much, if any email from its staff was taken as part of the move. Microsoft at the time did note that no customer information was at risk.


Defacing the Office Blog isn’t much of an existential threat to Microsoft. But if the group’s claim today that “Dear @Microsoft, Changing the CMS will not help you if your employees are hacked and they don’t know about that. #SEA” bears true, the company could be in for more red-faced moments.


Neowin’s Brad Sams has the correct take on the situation:





These types of attacks typically are harmless to Microsoft, aside from the embarrassment, and are typically non-destructive in terms of deleting mass quantities of data. But, an intrusion is an intrusion and you would have thought Microsoft would have ordered all web property passwords to be changed after the first compromise, but here we are with the Office blog having been infiltrated long after the other properties were restored.



The group’s claims that Microsoft employees remain “hacked” is therefore somewhat hard to understand.


For now, Microsoft needs to clean house: This sort of excursion is embarrassing for a company that sells security products, and secured services to companies around the world that depend on their vendors to have their own digital houses in order.


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The Syrian Electronic Army isn’t much a fan of Microsoft it seems. After compromising Microsoft social accounts, and one of its blogs, the g...

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Microsoft is rolling out a fix for a troubled firmware update for Surface Pro 2. Many of those who installed the December patch saw battery-life issues and trouble with the sleep and shutdown functions on the tablets. Some users reported that battery power drained more quickly, and that their Surface either did not charge fully or did not show it was actively being charged. Others said their tablets shut down completely when closing the cover rather than going into sleep mode, or that they failed to go into sleep mode when the cover was closed.


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Microsoft is rolling out a fix for a troubled firmware update for Surface Pro 2. Many of those who installed the December patch saw batter...

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Joffrey clap small

Joffrey clap smallThe Internets are ablaze this morning after comments from HBO’s CEO about users sharing their HBO Go accounts. According to most reports out there today, the company couldn’t care less who you share your account with. Share your account with everyone! Free love forever! Hurray!


The catch: that’s… not quite what he’s saying.


Here’s the relevant clip from the BuzzFeed interview:


Now, he is saying that HBO doesn’t see account sharing as a problem for their business model. But if you listen to the entire video, it becomes quite clear that there’s a silent “…for now” at the end of each sentence.


The key bit (emphasis added):



Pleper: To us, it’s a terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers, and to us, it is actually not material at all to business growth.


BuzzFeed: So the strategy is you ignore it now, with the hopes that they’ll subscribe later…


Pleper: It’s not that we’re ignoring it, and we’re looking at different ways to affect password sharing. I’m simply telling you: it’s not a fundamental problem, and the externality of it is that it presents the brand to more and more people, and gives them an opportunity hopefully to become addicted to it. What we’re in the business of doing is building addicts, of building video addicts. The way we do that is by exposing our product, our brand, our shows, to more and more people.



Translation: it’s not a problem… until we decide it’s a problem. Then we flip the switch (“we’re looking at different ways to affect password sharing”) to make password sharing more challenging, and everyone we’ve gotten hooked (“what we’re in the business of doing is building addicts”) coughs up the cash for their own account.


Hey, kid — the first one’s free!


Is there anything wrong, or evil, with this strategy? Not really. In fact, it’s pretty damned smart. It’s like an indefinitely long free trial in disguise. With HBO currently set-up to be sold only as a premium add-on to a cable bill that’s generally already pretty massive, convincing someone to get their their own account is a pretty huge hurdle. If the alternative is people pirating HBO’s shows, HBO might as well get those people comfortable with the convenience of going through the official channels.


Just don’t expect it to last forever. They’re not “building addicts” for nothing.


2:11 PM

The Internets are ablaze this morning after comments from HBO’s CEO about users sharing their HBO Go accounts. According to most reports out...

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