Oh, Kim Dotcom. You just never stop surprising us. Just hours after Twitter finally rolled out its long-awaited Two-Factor authentication feature to protect accounts, the Megaupload founder is claiming to have invented the entire mechanism… and he’s got a patent to prove it. “But they won’t even verify my Twitter account?!”, he says. The patent in question can be viewed here . Filed for in 1998 and published two years later, it lists a Kim Schmitz — Dotcom’s name before he changed it in 2005 — as the sole assignee. For the unfamiliar, two-factor authentication is a mechanism intended to make it more difficult for hackers to access accounts that aren’t their own. When a user attempts to log in to a service from an unrecognized computer, the service sends a one-time password to an alternative device (like, say, a cell phone) known to belong to that user. Read more »
Google Play In-App Purchase Revenue Growth Jumps 7X In One Year, Subscription Revenue Growing 2X Each Quarter
Google held a session today at I/O 2013 about how to make money on Android, and in the initial few minutes it shared some updated stats around Google Play revenues and how those are progressing. Not surprisingly, the big growth is coming with in-app purchases, though Google’s recently launched subscription model is also making headway. Google said that its in-app revenues through Play are up 700 percent since the same time last year, which is reflected in the top apps as listed by highest grossing titles in the Play rankings. Subscriptions, which just launched around 12 months ago, is also making headway, doubling inbound revenue each quarter according to Google. Some apps which use subscription as their exclusive revenue model are now cracking the top grossing list, like Pandora. The momentum is still clearly behind in-app purchase, and as a result Google suggested that there’s good reason to consider that as a revenue model when building apps Read more »
Google.org Donates A Total Of $3.7M To Spark Civic Innovation Using Technology
Today, Google.org’s VP, Matthew Stepka, announced that the non-profit arm of Google is going to be giving a large sum money to Sunlight Foundation and mySociety to promote civic innovation through technology. Specifically, its Civic Information API will help fuel new applications and services for places worldwide. Big and small. Here’s what Stepka had to say about the initiative: We’ve seen developers use our Civic Information API to bring election data to citizens in new and exciting ways. Our live election results maps have been viewed by billions around the world, bringing real-time transparency to elections in Egypt, Mexico, Ghana, and more. Last week, we launched the Kenya Elections Hub for citizens to access the latest news and resources for the country’s presidential election. Sunlight Foundation and mySociety will be given $3.7 million to continue their innovation in civic leadership. By helping communities engage in a closer relationship with their government, Google hopes that the world can have more “open and innovative societies.” Here’s what the money will be used for: We are providing $2.1 million to the Sunlight Foundation to grow their programs for open government data, with a focus on making civic information for U.S Read more »
If It’s Not In Graph Search, Facebook Hands Your Query Off To Bing
Facebook this morning unveiled “Graph Search,” a new search tool for finding people, photos, places and interests in a way that the social networking giant was very careful to point out is very different from web search. But, nearing the end of the press conference held at Facebook headquarters this morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quick to point out “one more thing”: Facebook has deepened its partnership with Microsoft to show searches that can’t be answered by the Web Graph through its Bing search engine. That means that while Facebook may not itself be getting into the traditional web search space, users will not need to go outside of the bounds of the social network — say, to a site such as Google — to do web search after all. Zuckerberg called Bing “a world class search engine” that he was happy to give his users deeper and quicker access to in the event that Graph Search cannot give them the best response. Here’s a bit more about the integration will look via a Bing blog post published this morning: “Now when you do a web search on Facebook, the new search results page features a two-column layout with Bing-powered web results appearing on the left-hand side overlaid with social information from Facebook including how many people like a given result. On the right hand side, you will see content from Facebook Pages and apps that are related to your search.” During a Q&A session following the press event, Zuckerberg expanded on the partnership. “We have a great partnership with the folks over at Microsoft… this [integration between Bing and Facebook] highlights the difference between graph search and web search in a way,” as Facebook results help make Bing’s results more social and Bing’s search allows Facebook users to find links to information they need. But he also added that he is not opposed to working with other search companies Read more »
In A Sea Of iPad Cases, Lazy-Hands Stands Out With Little More Than Velcro, Cloth, and Ingenuity
CES is all about the little guy this year. At least, for us it is . As easy as it is to spill a thousand words out over some new 300-inch floating TV that no currently breathing mortal will be able to afford, we aimed to route around the show’s bellowing giants and find the self-made gems so often lost in their shadows. Lazy-Hands is the epitome of one of these gems. Armed with little more than velcro, a humble booth, and a dash of ingenuity, they managed to catch our eye amongst thousands of competitors who were twice their size and nth as loud. The concept behind Lazy-Hands isn’t a complicated one: take a velcro patch and stick it to your device, wrap a couple of velcro-friendly loops around your fingers, and you’ve got an iPad (or iPhone, or Kindle, or whatever else, really) that clings to your hand wherever you might want to place it. It’s a simple product made of almost fundamental materials, and yet it pulls off something quite neat Read more »
Imgur, Reddit’s Favorite Photo Hosting Site, Now Serves Up Over 3.6B Pageviews To 56M Visitors Per Month
There aren’t very many bootstrapped startups that can claim the kind of stats that the popular image-sharing service Imgur, which won the Best Bootstrapped Crunchies award last year, can claim. Last month, it served up over 3.6 billion pageviews and 56 million unique visitors per month. When the company won its Crunchie last year, it had just hit 1 billion pageviews per month and was still run by a team of just three people. Since then, Imgur has hired four more engineers and is still adding to its team. We caught up with founder Alan Schaaf and COO Matt Strader earlier this week to talk about the company’s evolution over the last year. When Schaaf launched the site from his dorm room in Ohio with a post on Reddit in 2009, he said he wanted to create “an image hosting service that doesn’t suck.” That clearly worked. Today, the site gets over 255 million visits per month and the average user spends 11:30 minutes on the site and sees 14 pages per visit, Imgur tells us. Read more »
The Google Of The App Search Era Just Might Be Google
Only a few years in, and already the mobile application ecosystem has become an unfathomable jungle of applications – some 700,000-plus in the two top mobile app stores, Apple’s App Store and Google Play. And yet, we’re still waiting for the Google of the mobile app era to come in and save us from the mess that is today’s app market. A search engine that uses not just dozens of signals, but thousands, to help the everyday user connect with the apps they are searching for. It’s possible, though, that the Google we’re still waiting for is actually Google itself. There are independent app search companies already working on the app discovery challenge, of course. There are app-finding apps and search engines like AppFlow , Kinetik , Crosswalk , Discovr Apps , AppsFire , Xyo , Appolicious and Hubbl , to name a few. Quixey also this month signed a deal to power the app searches on Ask.com. And yes, Google, too, has quietly been offering its own “applications” search vertical, still tucked away underneath the “more” menu beneath the search box on the results page. But users aren’t searching for most of their apps on the web – they’re searching for apps on mobile. And when they’re searching on mobile, they tend to use the default app store apps on their device Read more »
It’s A Facebook And Google World On Apple’s App Store, Poke Hits #1 A Day After Its Release
Remember all of this excitement hoopla over Facebook’s latest standalone app, Poke , yesterday? You aren’t the only one that is interested, apparently. As The Next Web reports , Poke by Facebook has hit the No. 1 free app spot on Apple’s App Store, just a day after being released. Make no mistake about it, the big companies like Facebook and Google are going to have the best holiday season ever thanks to Apple and iOS. It’s very rare to see utility or social apps hold the top free app spot like Google Maps has over the past week , and like Facebook Poke probably will. It’s usually a game, or a boogers app that holds that down. Read more »
Why Did Government Santa Tracker, NORAD, Ditch Google For Microsoft?
Microsoft got an official Christmas present from the big man himself. No, not Santa–Uncle Sam. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which has delightfully perpetuated the myth of a flying present-giver on Christmas Eve since the 1950′s by ‘tracking’ Santa, decided to ditch its 5-year-old partnership with Google Maps in favor of Bing. “Google supported NTS [NORAD Tracks Santa] from 2007-2011 and helped increase NTS program awareness across the globe; NORAD is grateful for the partnership and the resulting success. This year, NTS and Google mutually agreed to go in new directions,” an NORAD spokesman told Search Engine Land. The abrupt change is a little perplexing, especially since Google eclipses Microsoft on most meaningful measures Read more »
Google+ Introduces “Communities” To Replace Old School Groups, Forums And Message Boards
Whether you use Google+ knowingly or not, meaning whether or not you actually engage on the destination site , you have to realize that the project has been a complete shift for the entire company as a whole. Even though it has a separate name and a separate URL, you simply cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that the social tools within the project have been weaved into Google’s biggest products Read more »