Zune HD Gets A Handful Of New Apps
Yes, you read the headline correctly. The Zune HD, which was recently rolled up and borged into the Windows Phone 7 brand, has received no less than nine new apps. We heard that the existing Zune games and apps would be ported to WP7, but perhaps during that process they decided to brush off a few that were still sitting in the box.
If you’re a Zune HD owner (bless your heart), the new apps should show up and be loadable if you’ll just open up your Zune player. I know I’ll be downloading these — my Zune HD is still going strong, and I plan to make it last for at least a couple more years.
Wrist Rehabilitation Robot Helps The Paralyzed (Video)
The patient-lifting RIBA II isn’t the only new healthcare robot from Japan we can show you today. Researchers at the Okayama University have developed a model that goes in a different direction: their robot [JP] helps people with spinal cord injuries or those recovering from strokes.The idea is to help patients move their wrists again, a task usually performed by physical therapists. Work on the robot began about six years ago, and the newest version has six joints and a pneumatic cylinder with actuator.
Patients can use the robot to “practice” moving their wrist after choosing between various levels of resistance. What’s cool is that a set of sensors can be connected to the muscles in the arm of a patient, simulating force feedback about wrist movements.
‘”Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”‘ – A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
I know, I know. I’m old. Worse than that, I’m nostalgic. In the past few months, I’ve written about my love for fountain pens, and traditional publishers, and paper books, and handwritten letters, and live theater, and downtown Las Vegas. Those who follow me on Twitter will have read about my enthusiasm for the New York Times Crossword, and hotel writing paper, and socializing with friends sans mobile phones.It’s cute to be the token Luddite at TechCrunch — but it’s also hugely disingenuous. I’m writing this stuff on Twitter, and on a hugely popular technology blog. You could cut the irony with a knife.
The truth is, I love technology. It’s rare that I dismiss or disparage a new gadget, app or company without trying it out at least once; and I certainly believe that – on balance – the more technologically advanced we become as a society, the better the world becomes.
And yet increasingly I wonder whether, for the sake of humanity, it might not be a bad thing if the earthquake comes and tips all of web 2.0 into the sea.
I should possibly explain.
The Internet — particularly “web 2.0″, with its communities and tagging and reuniting and friending and liking — was supposed to civilize us all. The idea was that by connecting the whole world through a variety of social networks and crowd-sourced standards of behavior (from reputation scores on eBay to Yelp reviews for dog walkers) – people would be driven to greater empathy for, and responsibility towards their fellow man. When Randi Zuckerberg sat on stage at DLD ’08 and told us the story of the Palestinian and Israeli children brought together through their joint membership of a Facebook group about soccer, we all shed a tear. Web 2.0 is working — it’s really working!
In the early days, the entrepreneurs behind these services really seemed to believe the gospel they were preaching. Anyone who has met Craig Newmark will testify that he lives and breathes customer service — turning down acquisition offers and obsessing over how his eponymous List can help connect communities in ways that enrich society. When they invented Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin really did dream about making the world’s data easier to access. Jimmy Wales, for all of his fixation with personal celebrity, really is passionate about a free and open encyclopedia, and has turned down a large amount of personal profit to realize that dream.
At first, Web 2.0 seemed like a perfect two-way street. Brilliant entrepreneurs who genuinely wanted to change the world built services that we all wanted to use. They became rich, and our lives became better connected. We were all in it together.
Fast forward just a handful of years, though, and something has gone very, very wrong with that particular social contract. We users have kept our side of the bargain — dutifully tagging our friends in artificially-aged photos, and checking in at bars, and writing reviews of restaurants. We’ve canceled our newspaper subscriptions, and instead spend our days clicking on slideshows of “celebrities who look like their cats” or obsessively tracking trending topics on Twitter. We’ve stopped buying books published by professional houses and instead reward authors who write, edit and distribute their own electronic works through self-publishing platforms. We’ve even handed the keys to our cars and our homes to strangers.
On the face of it, the entrepreneurs have continued down the same track too: inventing ever more Disruptive companies to further improve the world, and in doing so enjoying multi-billion dollar valuations and all the trappings of fame and fortune. Even richer have grown the angels, super-angels and VCs who carefully nurture young entrepreneurs, molding them into the next breed of Mark Zuckerbergs and Sean Parkers, reminding their charges that “what’s cool” is a billion dollars — and that every new user acquired is another dollar added to their eventual high score.
And yet. AND YET. You only have to look at a couple of mini-outrages that bubbled up in the past few days to realize just how misaligned the interests of some entrepreneurs have become with those of the human beings they rely on for their success.
This time last week, the musical world mourned the death of Amy Winehouse. Almost immediately, the Huffington Post approved a post by unpaid contributor, Tricia Fox, entitled De“Amy Winehouse’s Untimely ath Is a Wake Up Call for Small Business Owners“. We were all shocked, of course, by the callousness and cynicism of the headline — but we weren’t really surprised. We take it for granted now that the most popular online publications rely on search engine traffic for their survival. We know that, in many cases, “content” sites don’t employ editors to monitor what appears on their pages — and that those editors who are employed are encouraged to blindly approve any headline that name-checks a trending topic or two. Arianna Huffington talks a good talk about the democratization of journalism — but every so often we are reminded of the grimy truth: making money with online content is a question of attracting millions of eyeballs, whatever the moral cost.
An even more grotesque example of this was this week’s Airbnb scandal — the so-called #ransackgate (ugh).
Having been convinced by the company’s mantra of throwing open our doors to the world for monetary reward, a user by the name of “EJ” was shocked when a stranger comprehensively trashed her home. We’ll have to await the outcome of the police investigation to understand what really happened to EJ’s apartment, but what we know for sure is that Airbnb’s immediate, and subsequent, reaction was grotesque in its inhumanity. I’m not talking about the company’s initial apparent unwillingness to pay compensation — I’m talking about the behavior of the (unnamed) co-founder who wrote to EJ and asked her to remove her blog post about the incident, lest it affect the company’s ability to raise millions more dollars. From EJ’s blog…
‘I received a personal call from one of the co-founders of Airbnb. We had a lengthy conversation, in which he indicated having knowledge of the (previously mentioned) person who had been apprehended by the police, but that he could not discuss the details or these previous cases with me, as the investigation was ongoing. He then addressed his concerns about my blog post, and the potentially negative impact it could have on his company’s growth and current round of funding. During this call and in messages thereafter, he requested that I shut down the blog altogether or limit its access, and a few weeks later, suggested that I update the blog with a “twist” of good news so as to “complete[s] the story”’.Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we also know for sure that investors in the company leaned on publications like TechCrunch to stop reporting the story. Their ludicrous wail of protest: AIRBNB IS RUN BY NICE GUYS! IT’S NOT FAIR TO CALL THEM OUT WHEN THEY SCREW UP!
The question of whether Airbnb is run by nice guys is irrelevant. For all I know CEO Brian Chesky is a modern day Mother Theresa who had to break off his important work curing kitten cancer to deal with this growing PR nightmare. What’s relevant — and all too obvious — is that good old Brian and his co-founders stand to make millions, if not billions, of dollars from the success of Airbnb. His investors stand to make even more. That kind of wealth can easily drive the most saintly of us to behave in inhuman ways — to become so remote from reality and humanity that users like EJ become (at best) PR problems to be solved and (at worst) irrelevant pieces of data; eyeballs or clicks or room nights to be monitized in the pursuit of an ever greater exit.
And therein lies the real problem of web 2.0 — whether it takes the form of SEO-driven “news” or crowd-sourced accommodation. To make money — real money — at this game you have to attract millions, or tens of millions, of users. And when you’re dealing with those kinds of numbers, it’s literally impossible not to treat your users as pieces of data. It’s ironic, but depressingly unsurprising, that web 2.0 is using faux socialization and democratization to create a world where everyone is reduced to a number on a spreadsheet.
Sarah Lacy has written about how many of the current breed of silicon valley wunderkinds have been conditioned to behave like the movie version of Mark Zuckerberg, eschewing humanity and decency for personal profit and glory. Nothing either she nor I can write will reverse the trend — there’s simply too much money and power at stake. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t loudly call bullshit on those who use words like “disruption” and “revolution” and “democratization” as cynical marketing buzzwords simply to line their own pockets, only to retreat behind the barricades when the going gets rough. And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t mourn a not-too-distant past where technology entrepreneurs created things to make the world a better or more interesting place, not just because they wanted to make a billion dollars.
And above all, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remind the current breed of entrepreneurs and investors that, in the final analysis, a billion dollars isn’t actually all that cool. What’s cool is keeping your soul, whatever the financial cost.
Facebook Wants Your Unborn Child
Also, I dare you to come up with a better customer acquisition strategy than getting them hooked while they’re still in the womb!
Of course this very important news caused an Internet earthquake, and as the aftershocks hit mainstream media CNN split its screen into four! boxes (below) so four women who are experts on the subject of declaring that you’re pregnant could talk about whether the social network had gone too far. Meanwhile America is technically fighting two wars.
But maybe expectant moms like care about this stuff, and stuff? I mean how would I know? My uterus is currently as barren as the T.S. Elliot poem. Hoping to shed some light on the subject, I asked resident TechCrunch pregnancy representative Sarah Lacy what she thought about the Facebook change, “I couldn’t care less about it. Anyone who is remotely close to me already knows I’m pregnant.”
That horse has already left the barn, indeed.
Twitter Rolls Out An Improved, HTML5 Version Of Twitter.com For iPad
The app is full HTML5 and an improvement over the current one-paned experience of the Twitter mobile site on the tablet. Not surprisingly it is reminiscent of a hybrid of Twitter.com and the mobile apps and was based on Twitter’s HTML5 client for iPhone and Android, Twitter mobile engineer Manuel Deschamps tells me. The HTML5 web app will be rolled out to all users within the week, eh hem, beating Facebook which has yet to launch its own HTML5 initiative Project Spartan.
Says Twitter representative Carolyn Penner, “The HTML5 app provides a great option for people who prefer to use the browser over native apps. Its two-column view is consistent with the Twitter experience you’re used to (on Twitter.com), and it takes advantage of touch gestures and other device capabilities.”
Screenshot above.
Amazon’s Appstore: You’ll Make $0 When We Give Your App Away, And You’ll Like It
The post, titled ‘Amazon App Store: Rotten to the Core’, recounts how Amazon approached Shifty Jelly with the following secret offer (emphasis Amazon’s):
As you may already know, the Free App of the Day offer placement is one of the most visible and valuable spaces on the Amazon Appstore. We would like to include your app “[name removed]” in our Free App of the Day calendar. We have seen tremendous results from this promotion spot and believe it will bring you a great deal of positive reviews and traffic. It is an opportunity to build your brand especially in association with a brand like Amazon’s. The current price of this placement is at 0% rev share for that one day you are placed.Now, I vividly remember quizzing the people in charge of Amazon’s Appstore back when it first launched in January. I asked multiple times how exactly their free app of the day promotions would work. And I was very clearly told that even if Amazon decided to make an app free, developers would still be making 20% of their list price. In other words, they’d still make money. So much for that idea.
After extended internal debate, Shifty Jelly agreed to Amazon’s offer — they’d give away their app Pocket Casts for free for one day.
The results? They ‘sold’ 100,000 copies, for which they received nothing, and the sustained promotion they were promised was unimpressive: “the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day.” Now Shifty Jelly has to add servers to accommodate thousands of new users and has hundreds of additional support requests, with no additional revenue to show for it.
It’s completely ridiculous that Amazon publicly talked about giving developers 20% of the List Price only to later ask them to accept a worse deal — and that they’re now “putting really restrictive clauses at the bottom of their emails, saying that no one is even allowed to discuss these back door deals they are doing.”
That said, Shifty Jelly still had to agree to the new terms before the offer launched, and it’s not as if they just gave the application away to 100,000 people who would have otherwise paid for it — their report indicates that they were only selling a handful of apps on most days.
Other developers should take note: Amazon’s promised “tremendous results” may not do much to help your bottom line. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment.
For some background, here’s how Amazon’s pricing system works (from my previous post):
The biggest departure from the mobile app stores we’ve grown accustomed to involves pricing. Unlike Apple’s App Store and Android Market, where developers can set their price to whatever they’d like, Amazon retains full control over how it wants to price your application. The setup is a bit confusing: upon submitting your application, you can set a ‘List Price’, which is the price you’d normally sell it at. Amazon will use a variety of market factors to determine what price it wants to use, and you get a 70% cut of the proceeds of each sale (which is the industry standard). In the event that Amazon steeply discounts your application, or offers it for free, you’re guaranteed to get 20% of the List Price.
AOL Editions Delivers A Daily Briefing To Your iPad
AOL Editions is designed to be completed in one sitting. It pulls in 30 to 50 stories across different sections like Top News, Technology, Business, Entertainment, Sports, Local News, and Travel. You pick the sections you want, enter your zipcode, and it does the rest. You can further train the app each time you read an article by tapping on sources and topics you want to follow or hide. The app pulls out a few main topic tags associated with each story for which you can effectively give a thumbs up or down by tapping on a check mark or an X. The next editions will show more stories from those sources or on those topics. You also can add blogs or news sources via a search box on each section start page as well (but only from sources without paywalls, no New York Times articles appear, for instance).
The design and navigation are pleasing enough once you wait for a minute or so for your edition to be pulled together on the fly each morning. Readers are greeted by a big cover picture with an old-style magazine mailing label that states their name, town, and the temperature. Sections start off with large photos and headline typeface. As you flip through the articles, the layouts vary with headlines and excerpts in different column configurations. When you tap on a story, an in-app browser will open up and take you to the original webpage. If the source is owned by AOL (such as TechCrunch or Patch for local news), you get this nice effect that allows you to swipe through all the text within the app, but only half the page is moving because the photo and headline stay still.
In addition to flipping through the edition sequentially, you can also pull up sections to jump to them directly or a full list of articles. Articles can be bookmarked or shared via email, Twitter or Facebook.
It’s a solid effort put out by the mobile team under David Temkin and Sol Lipman from AOL’s West Coast office (which is part of Brad Garlinghouse‘s group). But I have one main issue with it and that is the timeliness of the news in its pages. For my realtime tastes, they can be a little bit stale.
In an attempt to deliver something that is complete and completable, AOL Editions pulls together your personalized stories at the same designated time every day. If that is 8:00 AM, any news that happens after that will have to wait until your next edition “arrives” the next morning (although there is a way to override that and assemble the next edition immediately). If I open AOL Editions and read what I perceive as yesterday’s or even this morning’s news compared to what I can get online, I’ll just stick to the Web.
I, admittedly, am a news junkie whose livelihood depends on being up-to-the-minute on every tech headline, but I don’t think it’s just me. People spot check news apps and sites against one another. News apps need to be as current as the Web. Those are just table stakes.
While there is a certain satisfaction to being able to complete an Edition (or at least skim every headline and excerpt), it wouldn’t be too hard to add a few updates throughout the day to each section. The Edition could be reassembled every time I open the app, not some predetermined time of day. The algorithm that selects what stories to present is based on clusters of similar articles across top news sources. There is no social stream component like you have in Flipboard pulling out the images and text behind Tweeted or shared links. The benefit of this is that Editions is less noisy than Flipboard, but it is also missing out on the timeliness of the social news feed. Again, there is a different way to do this. Instead of showing every shared story in my Twitter and Facebook streams, Editions could show only the ones which hit a certain threshold of likes and reteweets.
As the news-finding algorithm improves, so will the overall experience.
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