Indoor mapping software startup Meridian , continues to evolve their product strategy with a recent update to their offering . Called Zones , the company’s newest update to their indoor mapping platform — and indoor is the key word here — allows geo-fence style app push notifications to be scheduled, by drawing polygons on location maps. When customers with the accompanying app walk into one of those indoor areas represented by the polygon on the map…Bam! They get a push notification. To be sure, it’s a real marketing opportunity and a concept underserved by the current, mostly GPS-based location awareness model for mobile devices. Differentiators There are several geo-fencing platforms out there — PlaceCast , Digby Localpoint , Wifarer and ShopKick all come to mind — so what is the big deal here? Meridian’s VP of Marketing Jeff Hardison, believes there are several differences in the Meridian approach. First of all, this notification system will work even when the accompanying app is not open nor in active use — essentially working while the app is in background mode — without significant battery drain. Other geo-fence providers might be able to do this via GPS or cell tower triangulation, but not by WiFi sensing, which is how Meridian works Read more »
Google Says Its Chrome Browser Now Has Over 750 Million Monthly Active Users
Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android today announced that the company’s Chrome browser now has more than 750 million monthly active users. That’s up from 450 million users Google announced at last year’s I/O. This number, as far as we can see, includes both desktop and mobile users. Google launched Chrome in 2008 and since then, as Google proudly noted in today’s keynote, it has become the most popular browser in the world. It is also now, as Pichai noted early on in the keynote, a very important platform for Google that stands side-by-side with Android. Just recently, Google also decided to take more of the development process of Chrome in its own hands when it dropped WebKit and decided to start developing its own Blink rendering engine based on WebKit Read more »
Google I/O: Watch The Live Video Stream Here
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 »
Zoobean Grabs $500K From Kapor Capital & Others For Its Handpicked Kids’ Books Subscription Service & Online Shop
A number of startups have been trying their hand at subscription-based children’s books services, or something like a “Netflix for kids’ books,” so to speak. Today, another entry called Zoobean joins the flock, with the debut of its own handpicked catalog which parents can either subscribe to, or choose to just shop online like a standard e-commerce website. The company was co-founded by Jordan Lloyd Bookey , Google’s head of K-12 Education Outreach, and her husband Felix Brandon Lloyd , who is a former Washington, D.C., Teacher of the Year. Like the founders of similar services in this space, including the recently launched Sproutkin and The Little Book Club , for example, Bookey and Lloyd are also parents. “About a year ago, when our daughter was born, we were looking for a book for our son that would help him understand what it would mean to be a big brother. And in this particular case – we’re a multi-racial family – we were looking for something that might have kids that more resembled our family,” explains Lloyd. That challenge proved harder than they thought. Read more »
Google Translate For Android Can Now Interpret 16 Additional Languages By Camera, Adds Phrasebook Support
One of the coolest features of the Google Translate for Android app is that you can just point your camera at a text, tap the word you want to translate and get a translation back. Starting today , this feature supports 16 additional languages. Those are Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish. That’s in addition to Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, which the app already supported in its first release . Google uses optical character recognition and its machine translation tools to make all of this work. Read more »
Security Firm: “Syria Has Largely Disappeared From The Internet”
Page views served to #Syria via @ CloudFlare over a 15-minute period an hour ago: 6628. Page views served in the last 15 minutes: 3. — Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) May 07, 2013 War-torn Syria is reportedly experiencing massive Internet outages. Both Google’s transparency monitor and security firm Cloudflare are reporting near zero levels of traffic out of the area. This isn’t the first time the beleaguered nation has experienced Internet issues. Back in 2012, the Syrian government, in attempt to paralyze opposition rebels, cut the entire country off from the rest of the world . “Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet,” writes security firm, Umbrella, about the abrupt traffic stop today. Umbrella describes how such a cutoff is possible, “Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) 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 »
Ask A VC: Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi On What To Look For In A Board Member And More
In this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi . Volpi, who makes investments in both enterprise software and consumer internet companies, serves on a number of boards, including Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Foodily, and Storsimple. We asked Volpi what his biggest challenge is as the board member of a startup, and what entrepreneurs should be looking for in a board member. He also had some interesting perspective on the latest buzz word du jour, big data, and where we’ll see the most innovation taking place in the enterprise data space. Tune in above for more! 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 »