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Monday, February 24, 2014
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The Samsung Galaxy S5 is here, and now we know everything about the 2014 flagship from the Korean smartphone maker. It’s pushing into phablet territory with a 5.1-inch, 1920×1080 display, and it comes with a fingerprint reader on the home button, as well as a heart rate monitor around back near the camera flash. The Galaxy S5 is also dust and water resistant, which may be the most useful new feature to ship on the phone.


Samsung’s Android 4.4-powered flagship doesn’t deviate that far from its predecessors in terms of case design, packing the larger screen into a larger chassis but sticking with a plastic (though there is a higher end metal variant) backing, rounded corners and a pill-shaped home button, but the fingerprint scanner and heart-rate sensor are significant hardware additions. The Galaxy S5 also seems to have a significant focus on health and fitness with this update, which could preface a similar move with the next generation of iOS software and hardware.


‘Seeing’ Your Heart Beat


On the new Samsung phone, the heart rate monitor will track your pulse and provide that info in S Health 3.0, Samsung’s fitness monitoring app, which already tracks steps taken and calories burnt. An optical heart rate monitor that works with your fingertip also appears on the new Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatches. For those who are curious about the inclusion of such a feature, Withings ships a step counter with a built-in monitor, which adds another dimension to health tracking and can be used in combination with other data to give a clearer picture of overall health.


Pay By Finger Swipe


The other big new hardware feature here is the fingerprint sensor. Many will no doubt accuse Samsung of copying Apple once again, but the fingerprint sensor here is quite different from Apple’s on the iPhone 5s. It can register three separate fingerprints, and registration takes eight swipes (it’s swipe-based, rather than asking you to hold your fingerprint down as with Apple’s). You can unlock the phone using fingerprint recognition, but also use it to authorize PayPal to make payments online – for anything. That’s much wider-reaching than Apple’s usage of fingerprints, which is limited to unlocking and to finalizing purchases made via iTunes.


Since it’s using PayPal, that means this could be used to pay for physical goods at retail, too, which potentially opens up a lot of mobile payments options for Samsung. All will depend on how easy the fingerprint tech is to use in practice, however, and how resistant it is to attempts to foil or dupe the security system.


4K Video And Adjustable Focus


Another highlight of the Galaxy S5 is the new camera, which now offers 16 megpixels on the rear – and video capture of 4k resolution (even though the screen on the device itself can only manage 1080p, or one quarter of that). The Galaxy S5 isn’t the first phone announced to have 4K video capture capabilities, but it is part of a limited early group, and that’s something that might be more appealing to consumers now that 4K TVs are becoming more affordable and consumers are looking around for content sources: at this rate, home videos could beat broadcast TV to the punch.


The new camera also has a slow motion function like in the iPhone 5s, as well as post-capture refocus selection, like in the expensive and cumbersome Lytro light field camera. This is another feature that should make its way to many mobiles this year, but it should definitely help Samsung sell some smartphones to shutter-happy mobile photogs.


Everything Else


Other specs for the Galaxy S5 include a microSD slot for expanding storage (which could work with the newly announced 128GB capacity for iPhone-beating storage) and a Download Booster software feature that combines LTE and Wi-Fi data connection for superfast downloading of larger files, though at the expense of your mobile data bandwidth. The rugged design means you can take it anywhere, but you’ll have to deal with a flap for the Micro USB 3.0 charging/power port on the bottom.


It packs a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, NFC, LTE, Bluetooth 4.0, and either 16GB or 32GB of storage, so no real surprises here.

11:09 AM

The Samsung Galaxy S5 is here, and now we know everything about the 2014 flagship from the Korean smartphone maker. It’s pushing into phable...

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Remember when Doom porting to obscure systems was a thing? You were only a true nerd once you had Doom running on your Ti-83. Now it’s Flappy Bird as witnessed by this C64 port.


As the product page notes, the game was coded by a Vietnamese developer, .Gears, and later ported to C64 by an indie game dev, Sos.


The overnight rise and demise of Flappy Bird only increases the app’s draw. It’s a dumb game, sure. My top score is just 17. But that’s part of the desire. I for one sleep well at night knowing there are at least several developers out there keeping the legend of the Flappy Bird alive by porting it to obsolete platforms.





10:39 AM

Remember when Doom porting to obscure systems was a thing? You were only a true nerd once you had Doom running on your Ti-83. Now it’s Flapp...

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More than a few people were surprised when Facebook said it would pay $19 billion for messaging app startup WhatsApp, but today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today said that he believed it was actually worth more. “If we can do a good job with WhatsApp [and] grow it, it will be a huge business,” he said today during a keynote presentation at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.


He also shed a bit of light on why WhatsApp, led by co-founder Jan Koum, became interested in a Facebook exit — by all accounts, a tie-up that Koum in 2012 claimed was not a route he would have wanted to take: it was because of Internet.org, the Facebook-led initiative to bring internet connectivity to developing economies.


“Why were we excited to do this together? It was the Internet.org vision and how we can connect the world,” Zuckerberg said. While Koum and WhatsApp also seemed to have had the same philanthropic motivation behind their world communications domination ambition, it would have not been possible for them to execute on it as easily as they will with Facebook. “If they did this as an independent company they would have had to focus on how to build the company out, to scale it, but now they can focus on how to connect the one to two billion people.” He emphasized that WhatsApp would remain completely independent but have access to all of Facebook’s resources to grow.


But one thing that may not grow anytime soon is Facebook’s portfolio of acquired messaging startups. Asked by someone in the audience whether he would try again for Snapchat — a company that Facebook apparently has tried to acquire more than once — Zuckerberg initially completely blanked the question. Then, when interviewer David Kirkpatrick brought it up a second time, he shed a bit more of an answer. “Look, when you’ve just bought a company for $16 billion (not counting the RSUs), chances are you are probably done with you acquisitions for a while,” Zuckerberg said.


“With you, I don’t know,” Kirkpatrick answered.


Today Zuckerberg also laid out a bit more detail about how he sees the role of Internet.org.


The idea, he said, is to develop a group of basic internet services that would be free of charge to use — “a 911 for the internet.” These could be a social networking service like Facebook, a messaging service, maybe search and other things like weather. Providing a bundle of these free of charge to users will work like a gateway drug of sorts — users who may be able to afford data services and phones these days just don’t see the point of why they would pay for those data services. This would give them some context for why they are important, and that will lead them to paying for more services like this — or so the hope goes.


“What they envision for carriers is that it will be up to them to decide what basic services might be free. Our model and what we’re trying to build is putting in an onramp is better for the internet and their models. It’s something that we can work out and have a lot of choice in,” he said.


Zuckerberg — who geeked out on specific references to how mobile networks can be built out and the financials behind Internet.org (there are three areas here, he said: the overall infrastructure, decreasing the amount of data that is being used, increasing application efficiently) — was straightforward in admitting that Internet.org won’t be a lucrative endeavor from the start. But he was also very optimistic.


“I cannot describe any model for the near term of how this would work for advertising model… I think we will lose money on this for a while,” he noted. “But we’ve been doing this for only a few months and people using data in Philippines [where Internet.org has partnered with Globe Telecom] has doubled since then… From what we’ve seen and rate of improvement we’re highly confident this will be profitable.” On the efficiency of data services alone, he used the example of Facebook itself. A year ago people used 14 megabytes per day on Facebook, he said. Now, with improvements in compression on their mobile apps, that’s now down to 2 megabytes. The aim is to bring that down to 1 megabyte next year. (Onavo and its data compression technology also comes into play here.)


Zuckerberg was speaking to a room full of carriers and he knew it. For someone who expertly helped lead his own company through fundraising and a public offering, now he’s turning his attention to getting buy-in from a new class of investors: he’s looking for between three and five more telcos to deliver national initiatives in new markets.





10:24 AM

More than a few people were surprised when Facebook said it would pay $19 billion for messaging app startup WhatsApp, but today Facebook CE...

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Here’s the TL;DR for MWC 2014: Nokia is doing Android, HTC is still quietly boring and Samsung is launching a new Galaxy S smartphone. It’s another year and another MWC. We’re live from the streets of Barcelona and all the news is right here.

10:09 AM

Here’s the TL;DR for MWC 2014: Nokia is doing Android, HTC is still quietly boring and Samsung is launching a new Galaxy S smartphone. It’s ...

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Twenty-one-year-old Spaniard Alba González Camacho was convicted of inciting terrorism thanks to some ill-conceived tweets about a far-left terrorist organization. She became the first person in Spain to be convicted of such charges for Twitter posts. González Camacho implored the terror group "Grapo" to murder politicians. Grapo was responsible for 80-some killings, mostly in the 1970s and 80s. The group has been more or less dormant since then, but a judge said that González Camacho's tweets were nonetheless "highly radicalized and violent."


9:38 AM

Twenty-one-year-old Spaniard Alba González Camacho was convicted of inciting terrorism thanks to some ill-conceived tweets about a far-lef...

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myanmarsquar2It can be hard for even the strongest entrepreneurs to succeed in cutthroat Silicon Valley. But throw in simmering civil conflict, an almost non-existent Internet infrastructure, a military junta that is still in the early phases of transitioning to democratic rule, and developers more familiar with ColdFusion than Ruby on Rails, and one might reasonably think that it would be nearly impossible for any company, let alone an Internet startup, to succeed in such an environment.


For Rita Nguyen, though, this is the everyday life of building the first social network in Myanmar. Nguyen is no stranger to the region or its conflict, born in Vietnam during the war and eventually fleeing to Canada with her family after the Republic of Vietnam fell. Nguyen would eventually study at the University of British Columbia, and worked in a variety of marketing roles early in her career including Electronic Arts, where she led the community management team.


While at EA, she was approached by a leading video game executive in Vietnam, who showed her the burgeoning startup scene underway there in 2009. After spending much of her life in Canada, Nguyen decided she wanted to spend more time in the country of her birth. “I decided to spend a year away from my career, knowing that it would not be my career long-term.” She wanted to build her own company, but didn’t know exactly what that would be and decided to go exploring.


Something must have clicked, because Nguyen has been working from Southeast Asia ever since. Vietnam is a “marketer’s dream” according to Nguyen. While Western consumer markets are saturated with messages, markets like Vietnam are much earlier in their development, and thus, a lot of products have never even been seen by the public before. This was even more the case in Myanmar, which Nguyen visited after the suggestion of a friend.


Building An Internet Startup In A Country Without It


Myanmar at first didn’t seem like the kind of place to build Rita Nguyen’s startup dream, but her interactions with locals propelled her to build a business in the country. “There was so little infrastructure, ” she observed, “but there was so much passion and interest in technology, and so much of it was untapped and unfocused.” Back during the military junta, which controlled the country from 1962 to 2011, much of the Internet was blocked, particularly to websites outside of Myanmar. That meant that the only way to access the Internet was using subversive tools to get around the firewalls, creating a generation of hackers that are now key to Myanmar’s startup hopes.


That hacker culture, though, remains quite elite. Total Internet penetration in the country hovers around 1 percent of the population, much of it concentrated in the largest city of Yangon. And while prices for mobile services have declined dramatically, they remain out of reach for most consumers in the country. Today, one of the few popular websites is Facebook, which is used less for communications (since so few friends and family are members), but more to share controversial news and discussion. Many files are still shared via Bluetooth on mobile devices. Yet, the new government has deep optimism that it can increase access levels to greater than three-quarters of the population over the next few years.


Given such a gestating market, finding a product to build was a challenge. A nationwide consumer culture does not exist in Myanmar, so there is a lack of guidelines and best practices on consumer tastes like in the West. Plus, “there were clones of everything, from Eventful to Yelp,” Nguyen notes, making it difficult to find an entry point. In the end, the difficulty of determining what consumers wanted was precisely the sort of problem that could be solved through technology.


Nguyen ended up developing Squar, a social platform that aims to create a community around content while actively collecting data on users and sharing analytical insights with advertisers. “There are 60 million people in the country, and no one knows anything about them,” Nguyen points out. Such a model is of course common in the West, but it broke new ground in Myanmar. She brought in two engineer friends and developed an MVP in May of last year, and a few short weeks later, Squar was in the Google Play store for Android.


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Finding Investors And Profit


One gauntlet facing startups in emerging markets is finding the necessary funding to continue operating. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley often perceive startups even from Portland and Boulder to be exotic, let alone from cities like Yangon or Karachi. This reality tends to encourage a culture of bootstrapping and a focus on profitability at all times, even in more developed innovation markets like Singapore and Korea.


Nguyen’s experience fundraising is typical of other frontier entrepreneurs who perceive a real culture clash between investors attuned to emerging markets, and those who are not. “If you talk to investors who do a lot in frontier markets, they very rarely ask how you are different from Facebook. But when you talk to people from the west, it’s the first question. They often think in terms of comparables, but the market just isn’t ready for it yet.” Nguyen notes that she didn’t have competitors in the marketplace when she started, and that there was no need for differentiation. “It’s actually just an awareness thing” in these early days. Nguyen’s startup remains one of the few venture-backed startups in the country.


Another misperception of frontier markets is that there is little money to be made outside the developed world. While the WhatsApp acquisition last week may change those views, it remains likely that VCs in the West will continue to focus on the American and European markets. Yet, there is incredible profit possible for companies that target emerging consumers properly. Nguyen notes that Starbucks and Korea’s Lotteria brands are now in the country, and are packed even at prices out of reach for most inside the country.


There is of course billions of foreign direct investment flowing into the country, much of it going to utilities and other nation building priorities. There were more than $1.8 billion foreign investment projects approved just during the spring and summer of 2013. But that money is failing to connect into the local startup scene. Nguyen is disappointed with the current state of affairs: “There are all of these kids who are passionate, and there is all of this money coming in, but it is not connecting.”


One bright spot, which might be surprising to those in the United States, is that the telecommunications companies have been in the vanguard in Myanmar, assisting with innovation and partnering with entrepreneurs to produce more apps and content. Most consumers in Myanmar have a pre-paid mobile service plan, which means that telco companies have to constantly encourage their consumers to return to refill their SIM cards.


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Longer-Term Development


Of course, it is still early days in the country. Nguyen says that, “no one really knows anyone there since it has been so closed. Everyone is trying to understand what is going on and what the consumer mindset is.”


She also hopes to build a pipeline of female engineers into the startup ecosystem. She says that the pipeline for female engineers is actually higher than that for males, but many women don’t go on to work in technology, but instead end up working in other roles. She is hoping to develop better outlets, and catch students shortly after graduation before they are lost in the labor market.


As with any startup, there are always clouds of risk on the horizon. Myanmar’s government has been supportive of opening the Internet, but as the stories out of Ukraine, Venezuela, and Thailand can attest, events on the ground can change very rapidly. While millions of consumers in Myanmar will gain access to the Internet in the next few years, there is no telling how they may behave or what they might desire. That is the excitement of building on the frontier, though, and people like Rita Nguyen wouldn’t have it any other way.


Images by Rita Nguyen with permission





9:24 AM

It can be hard for even the strongest entrepreneurs to succeed in cutthroat Silicon Valley. But throw in simmering civil conflict , an almos...

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AdStage, which allows advertisers to create and manage campaigns across Google, Facebook, and other networks, is announcing that it has raised $1 million in additional funding.


The money comes from previous investor Digital Garage and brings the startup’s total funding to more than $2.5 million. Co-founder and CEO Sahil Jain said the AdStage still had “a lot of money available,” but raising additional cash allows it to grow more aggressively. He argued that there’s a big opportunity right now as the online advertising market is “continuing to fragment,” turning a unifying product like AdStage into “the medicine in this space.”


The company launched its first product, AdStage Express, a year ago at the Launch conference. Then, last fall, it announced a broader platform, which Jain described at the time as “more of a one-stop shop” — an ad management tool that integrates with outside services, too.


Those integrations are now a real thing, Jain said. He plans to demonstrate the first third-party AdStage Apps on-stage at Launch today, specifically apps from Wordtracker, Unbound, and Optimizely, as well as the AdStage-developed Ad Scrambler, a tool for quickly testing the effectiveness of different ad variations.


AdStage is also expanding the platform with an app partnership program and platform API. Until now, the company was reaching out to each of its partners, but now it’s opening up, so any app developer can apply to integrate with the platform. (At the same time, Jain said he’s not interested in “becoming a marketplace business,” because he wants to keep the amount of apps manageable for customers.)


The company says its customers have 8,600 active campaigns across Google, Facebook, Bing, and LinkedIn, with 6,000 businesses signed up for the wait list. It’s currently charging a $99 a month, though Jain acknowledged that’s very much a temporary promotion and an experiment: “We’re not going to make this a billion-dollar business that way.”





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AdStage , which allows advertisers to create and manage campaigns across Google, Facebook, and other networks, is announcing that it has rai...

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