New Technology News

Monday, February 24, 2014

Blink and you would have missed HTC Mobile World Congress announcements. The struggling phone maker unveiled two perfectly acceptable, perfectly boring mid-range phones and a Folding@home-ish smartphone app. Called “Power To Give”, the project is aimed at crowdsourcing spare smartphone CPU cycles to help cure diseases. Because why not.

But this isn’t all HTC has up its sleeve. HTC CEO Peter Chou teased that more is coming. During the company’s press conference, Chou repeatedly reminded attendees that it has an event coming up on March 25th. Don’t forget, m’kay. Hold out until March 25. That’s when the good stuff is coming (read: the next-gen HTC One).

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HTC revealed the HTC Desire 816 (shown above) and Desire 610. Both liberally borrow the HTC One and HTC First’s styling including front facing speakers, colorful casing and soft edges. The 816 sports a 5.5-inch display while the 610 uses a 4.7-inch screen.

Interestingly enough, the 816 is designed specifically for the China market and HTC says the device is made to “reignite the mid-market”.

Neither handset will likely break sales records. In fact they’re rather underwhelming compared to other new handsets. But if the price is right, these mid-range phones could help HTC recover some lost marketshare in emerging and developing markets.

Pricing hasn’t been announced yet on these phones.

Also, don’t forget about March 25th.

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HTC Shoots For “Good Enough” At MWC 2014, Teases Big March 25th Reveal

8:39 AM

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Blink and you would have missed HTC Mobile World Congress announcements. The struggling phone maker unveiled two perfectly acceptable, perfe...

French startup Lydia looks and acts a lot like Venmo — and it’s not a bad thing. Venmo is a great way to pay back your friends in a few taps without having to pay any fee. But its main issue is that it only works in the U.S. This is where Lydia comes into play.

“Lydia isn’t a payment technology, it’s just a new payment processor like PayPal,” co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche told me in a phone interview. “We use existing payment technologies, and in particular debit cards.”

Sending and receiving money is absolutely free. First, you choose the payment card that you want to use. Then you enter the amount and your passcode. After that, you can send a payment notification via email or text message. And it’s done. All your friend has to do is open the app to accept the payment.

Alternatively, after entering the amount you can ask your friend to scan a QR code with the Lydia app to receive the payment immediately. If you don’t want to keep any money in the app, you can withdraw it to your bank account — it’s free. Lydia doesn’t have any incentive to keep your money because it can’t make the money work due to regulations.

If Lydia pays the fees, how does it plan to make money? The startup bets on retail stores. Professional users can start accepting payments using Lydia. Every time someone wants to pay using Lydia, he or she opens the app, enters the amount and shows the QR code to the merchant. The cashier scans the QR code with a phone. This way, it doesn’t rely on the client’s cellular network.

Lydia Pro isn’t free. Merchants have to pay 0.3 percent per transaction and a monthly plan that starts at $6.70 (€4.90). It is still a lot cheaper than other payment processors.

“We had two possibilities. We could either have charged higher fees and reinvested part of them on marketing to gain new users,” Chiche said. “Or we could have made payment processing so cheap that your merchants become your marketing team — we chose the latter.”

Founded in 2011, the company had to work nearly two years on Lydia before releasing it in July 2013. It has raised $820,000 so far (€600,000).

The startup only has 20,000 registered users for now. But it has doubled its user base since December 2013. 1,000 retail stores have signed up to Lydia Pro — the biggest merchants already handle more than 1,000 transactions per month. The app is available on iOS and Android.

For now, Lydia is only available in France. But the company is ready to handle multiple languages and currencies — there is no technological or regulatory issue. France is just the starting point to test and tweak the app.

“When you are a startup, there is a motto that is dear to me,” Chiche said. “This motto is ‘don’t spread yourself too thin.’”

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Lydia Is A Fee-Free Payment App That’s Like Venmo For France

8:10 AM

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French startup Lydia looks and acts a lot like Venmo — and it’s not a bad thing. Venmo is a great way to pay back your friends in a few ta...

HTC is wacky – in a good way. The smartphone company is one of the few that still does things that surprise me, and today’s MWC announcements are no exception. Sure, the Taiwanese company introduced a new mid-range handset that’s par for the course, but it also unveiled a new app and service that puts your smartphone to work when it’s not in use, for the good of all humanity.

HTC’s new “Power To Give” program takes your One or Butterfly series smartphone (with more Android devices to get support later) and harnesses its processing power to help cure diseases, map proteins and generally tackle tough problems that only high-powered computers can handle. To get started with Power To Give, all you need to do is download a free app from Google Play, pick a project you want to contribute to, then plug in your phone to charge and connect it to Wi-Fi.

One million One smartphones add up to a single one-petaflop supercomputer (the first of which actually just became obsolete and was decommissioned last year), which means your smartphone alone won’t be single-handedly curing any diseases. Still, every little bit counts.

You may recognize this approach to crowdsourced computing: Sony used PlayStation power to run Folding@home project, which worked on synthesizing key proteins, and SETI@home harnessed distributed computing networks to help try to find alien life. I only hope that if my HTC One ends up being the tipping point in terms of finding ET, someone somewhere gives me credit.

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HTC Wants To Harness Your Smartphone’s Idle Power To Make The World A Better Place

8:10 AM

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HTC is wacky – in a good way. The smartphone company is one of the few that still does things that surprise me, and today’s MWC announcement...

Get ready, DC and NYC. TechCrunch is coming your way in March. Apply for the pitch-off and get your tickets below.

Hot off the heels of the fantastic Atlanta and New Orleans meetups, we’re pleased to announce our next round of meetups. Leena, Jordan, Sarah and myself are hitting Washington DC on March 18th and New York City on March 20th.

Tickets are just $5 and grant the holder to a night of pitches, drinking and meeting your local tech scene (21 and older only, please).

These events are part networking and part pitch-off. About an hour or so after we open the door, 15 of each city’s best undiscovered startups will have 60 seconds to pitch their company, startup or idea. Apply here for DC and here for NYC.

We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch editors and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the pitch-off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Second Place will receive two tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third Place will receive one ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt.

As always, if you want to sponsor contact our team at sponsors@techcrunch.com. There are a lot of opportunities for startups big and small.

See you next month!

Sell Tickets through Eventbrite

Event Registration Online for TechCrunch Meetup: New York March 20, 2014 powered by Eventbrite

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Announcing The TechCrunch Washington DC And NYC Meetups + Pitch-Offs

7:39 AM

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Get ready, DC and NYC . TechCrunch is coming your way in March. Apply for the pitch-off and get your tickets below. Hot off the heels of th...

The Blackphone, a security focused smartphone from Silent Circle and Geeksphone, is kicking off pre-sales today after an official unveiling back in January. The Blackphone is billed as the “world’s first smartphone which places privacy and control directly in the hands of its users,” which essentially means that it offers a forked version of Android called PrivatOS and comes pre-loaded with apps that offer special privacy features.

Blackphone retails for $629 for an unlocked handset, with specs that keep up with most standard Android gadgets in that range, including a 2 GHz quad-core processor, a 4.7-inch IPS display, LTE connectivity, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and an 8 megapixel rear/1.3 megapixel front camera. Those specs aren’t set in stone, however: official PR dictates that they could be subject to change before the phones actually start shipping later this year.

The privacy tools include Silent Circle’s apps, which include Silent Phone, Silent Text and Silent Contact for secure, private handling of each of those features via encryption so that only you and someone receiving said communications with a compatible device can access the contents. There’s also a Wi-Fi connection manager for greater security on public networks, and a software that makes it possible to securely remote-wipe your device, and facilitate its recovery.

Another selling point: PrivatOS will get updates directly from provider SGP Technologies, rather than relying on carriers to approve and deploy them, which could make for even greater levels of security. Plus bundled in your cost of device are multi-year subscriptions to a number of security services, including 2 years of Silent Circle, 2 years of Disconnect (secure/non-trackable search), 2 years of SpiderOak (secure cloud storage) and some gift subscriptions to Silent Circle so that your friends and family won’t have to sign up separately to talk with you ‘off the record.’

The Blackphone is clearly designed to capitalize on the general paranoia (and justified fear) invoked by the Snowden revelations regarding the breadth of government surveillance, but whether that will translate to significant sales remains to be seen. All those subscriptions sound like a lot of work if you want to keep up the cloak, but it could be worth it if you’re the type of person who doesn’t put a price on peace of mind.

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Privacy-Focused Blackphone From Silent Circle Goes Up For Pre-Order For $629

7:09 AM

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The Blackphone , a security focused smartphone from Silent Circle and Geeksphone, is kicking off pre-sales today after an official unveilin...

The Xbox One will soon be a bit cheaper ‘cross the pond. Starting this Friday, the Xbox One will be £399.99 in the UK. That’s a drop of £30 from its launch price. While the cut will certainly make the console a bit more attractive, the PS4 is still less expensive and raking up impressive sales numbers.

It’s unclear if the Xbox One will see similar price cuts in other markets.

Microsoft is currently locked in a price war with Sony. Even after this price cut, the base Playstation 4 retails for £50 less than the Xbox One. And Sony has the sales to back its strategy. Sony has sold over 5 million consoles worldwide and the system just went on sale in Sony’s home market of Japan. In the US Sony has sold twice the amount of systems than Microsoft. Price is one of the main issues.

Microsoft bundles the Kinect with its system. Sony has those who want motion controls buy them separately. And since not every gamer wants motion controls, this seems to be working in Sony’s favor.

This U.K. price drop signals Microsoft is at least re-evaluating its pricing scheme. However, since Microsoft treats each market differently, the system a U.S. or Asian price drop might not be imminent. But it’s coming.

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Microsoft Cuts The Xbox One Price In The UK

7:09 AM

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The Xbox One will soon be a bit cheaper ‘cross the pond. Starting this Friday, the Xbox One will be £399.99 in the UK. That’s a drop of £30 ...

Samsung is introducing its Galaxy S5 smartphone today at a special event in Barcelona, but you don’t have to be there to watch the announcement live – Samsung will be streaming the event live on its YouTube account and we’ll have the stream right here for you to watch, too, so bookmark this page and check back at 11 AM PT/2 PM ET to catch all the action.