Google’s annual I/O conference in San Francisco kicks off this morning at 9am PT/noon ET and, as usual, the good folks from Mountain View are making a live video stream of the event available for all of you who can’t be there in person. Unlike other years, when Google ran two separate keynotes on the first two days of I/O, the company is only running a single keynote this time around. Last year’s skydiving antics definitely set the bar very high for this year’s event and so far, we haven’t heard how Google plans to top this today. We do expect to hear quite a bit about Google+, however, and the rumor mill also predicts the launch of the next version of Google Talk/Hangouts, some news about Compute Engine and, of course, Google Glass – the star of last year’s event. The keynote is scheduled to last for a whopping three hours, so grab your coffee, donuts or popcorn, kick back, and enjoy the show. If you can’t watch the video, you can also find our play-by-play live blog here . Read more »
Adobe Updates Edge Animate HTML Animation Tool With Motion Paths, Lets You Host Your Files On Adobe’s CDN
As part of its general update to Creative Cloud , Adobe today announced the latest version of Edge Animate , its timeline-based tool for creative HTML5 animations. While this is one of the minor updates on a day where the company launched new versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and virtually every single other one of its tools, Edge Animate is worth keeping an eye on, especially given that even though it’s still a newcomer in Adobe’s lineup, its focus on HTML5 makes it one of Adobe’s more cutting-edge tools as it switches its focus from Flash to web standards. In this new version, Edge Animate gets support for motion paths, for example, something Flash developers have long had access to. With this, developers can now use the tool to “animate elements along fully customizable, fine-grain motion paths for highly expressive movements,” as the company noted in today’s announcement. With this update, Adobe is also introducing template support in Edge Animate, so users can now save their custom templates for quicker access to their reusable assets. For developers who focus on mobile projects, this new version also adds support for left and right swipe events for mobile-focused projects. One of the coolest new features, however, isn’t even about how you create animations in Edge Animate. Adobe now allows you to host your Animate runtime files on its own content delivery network, which is powered by Akamai Read more »
Fly Or Die: Samsung Galaxy S4
Haven’t quite gotten your fill of the Galaxy S4? We haven’t, either. First came the announcement , then the obligatory berating posts about the crazy launch event, followed by the review , which brings us to this fateful judgement day. Will the Galaxy S4 fly or die? The answer is clear, and still multi-layered. There’s no doubt that the Galaxy S4 — packed to the max with the best specs in town — will sell more than its predecessor, the Galaxy S III. Not only does it have a 5-inch 1080p display, a speedy little quad-core Snapdragon 600 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 13-megapixel camera, but it has a whole bevy of new software features that are sure to delight and surprise. But what does the GS4 tells us about Samsung’s greater strategy Read more »
Audience Development Startup LinkSmart Raises $5 Million From Foundry And Costanoa
A little less than a year ago, a little company called LinkSmart launched to help publishers use text links to get their readers reading more. Now it has raised $5 million in Series B funding to take its technology for growing audiences and make it more widely available. The financing was led by Foundry Group and Costanoa Venture Partners, which was recently founded by former Sutter Hill Ventures managing director Greg Sands . LinkSmart was founded by former DailyCandy CEO Pete Sheinbaum, to help publishers grow audiences through in-text links. While web content creators have spent the last several years shoe-horning in all sorts of banners and sidebars and widgets, the actual text of most web pages is where audiences are usually most engaged. With that in mind, LinkSmart wants to give publishers the tools to better take advantage of that engagement, by providing a smarter way to analyze and link between content that they’ve created. There are three main aspects to its technology: analytics, to show publishers which pages could use more links and which they should link to; management tools to redirect links; and even technology to automatically add links to stories if publishers choose to use it. Read more »
Facebook’s Q1 Lobbying Spend Soars 277 Percent To $2.45M; Google Down 33 Percent
It’s no secret that the amount of time that tech companies are spending in Washington, D.C., is at a high . And money spent on lobbying has also been reaching peaks for a number of well-known technology giants, including Facebook. In the first quarter of 2013, Facebook spent $2.45 million on lobbying efforts, a 277 percent increase from $650,000 a year earlier. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Facebook spent $1.4 million on lobbying , so this is a big jump both on a quarterly and yearly basis. So what did Facebook spend on this quarter? International regulation of the Internet and freedom of expression; privacy and security policies and the education of these policies; education of online advertising; immigration reform; cyber security and data security; and discussions on tax issues and stock options. Read more »
The Nook HD and HD+ Get Google Play, Knocking Down The Wall On The Barnes & Noble Android Garden
The Nook HD and HD+ got a great update late last night (via Engadget ), as Barnes & Noble finally moved away from its closed and system-specific app and media ecosystem. The two Android tablets now offer Google Play, and new devices will ship with the app pre-loaded, while existing owners can get it via a software update over-the-air or via direct download. Other changes with this update include the introduction of some stock Android apps, including Gmail, Maps and Chrome (which replaces the Nook’s existing web browser as the default option). Essentially, Barnes & Noble is turning the Nook HD line into a very cheap Android tablet play, and not in the limited way it was doing so before. Where once the Nook brand was a reader first, with Android-powered full-color readers with some tablet functionality, now it looks like we’ll see Barnes & Noble embrace the tablet identity much more fully. Another sign that the book seller is banking on tablets as a much broader attempt at reaching customers is the fact that the Nook Tablet and Color don’t get the Play update, meaning we could see those left behind in terms of future hardware updates. Read more »
Good Technology Raises $50M On Its Road To An IPO
Mobile device management company Good Technology has raised $50 million, according to a Securities and Exchange (SEC) filing . A company spokesperson confirmed the fundraising but had no comment about the purpose of the raise. The SEC document says the company is seeking a total of $60 million. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Good Technology is backed by Oak Investment Partners , Draper Fisher Jurvetson , Meritech Capital Partners , DFJ ePlanet Ventures , DFJ Growth Fund , Rustic Canyon Ventures , Allegis Capital , GKM and Blueprint Ventures . In its E round, investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers , Benchmark Advanced Equities , Crosslink Capital and Broadview Ventures . Good Technology plays in the fast-consolidating MDM market. It provides enterprise mobility technologies across multiple platforms and security and management software Read more »
The Smell Of Coders In The Morning, Or, 10:30AM At The Disrupt NYC Hackathon [TCTV]
The Disrupt NYC 2013 Hackathon winners were just announced (congratulations, Rambler !) But amidst all the celebration, it’s important to remember that it’s been a very long and largely sleepless 30-hour road to victory for the 164 teams that presented onstage today. Watch the video embedded above to take a walk back in time to 10:30am Eastern Time this morning, 30 minutes before the presentations began. Bagels and coffee were the fuel of choice for our hackers, many of who were frantically putting the finishing touches on their projects and getting ready to take the stage and present their apps to the judges and their peers. The crowd moved quickly from the Manhattan Center’s third floor to the seventh floor, and the Hackathon’s energy palpably shifted from build mode to show-and-tell. Check it all out in the video embedded above. Read more »
Disrupt NY Hackathon Gets Hacked: Man Takes Stage And Uses His 60 Seconds To Disrupt Capitalism
When you’re a hacker waiting to take the Disrupt Hackathon stage, you’re probably just making sure that your project actually works. One gentleman decided to scrap his project completely and use his 60 seconds to discuss his political views, attacking large corporations for using your data to make money. The crowd was a bit surprised as he read a prepared statement from his iPad, but listened to what he had to say nonetheless. “Do we really need a new way to share our shit?” he began his talk with. And it got people’s attention: He urged the attendees to stand up against sharing all of their data, opting to sell their content for a price they set. After the Hackathon resumed its regular tech show-and-tell programming, I met Todd Bonnewell backstage to discuss what had just transpired and find out about the actual hack he scrapped to share his message. There you have it Read more »
Skip Google+ Sharing And Tweet Photos Directly From Google Glass With GlassTweet
We’re on the ground in New York City at the Disrupt Hackathon and there are a lot of interesting things being created. Since I’m walking around wearing Google Glass, I’ve obviously been looking for teams building apps for it. I met up with Jonathan Gottfried , Twilio’s Developer Evangelist, and he built a quick and dirty app called GlassTweet , which lets you share photos to Twitter, rather than the out-of-the-box experience of sending shots to Google+. Once you’ve installed the app and connected it to Glass and your Twitter account, a new contact comes up that you can share to, called “Tweet”: The excitement about developing for Glass reminds me of the early days on Apple’s App Store. Gottfried explained: “It’s a great platform and being able to create all of the fundamental apps for people is a tremendous opportunity.” #throughglass http://t.co/SKoMLapsgu — drew olanoff (@drew) April 27, 2013 #throughglass http://t.co/bn4ubb8ti9 — Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) April 27, 2013 There are only a few people testing GlassTweet out right now, but I imagine that small apps like this will be installed by most of the community who are looking for inspiration. It would be interesting to see a photo gallery of those who are using the app as well, perhaps with some geographic location attached to the photo Read more »