Google today launched Cube Slam, an open source pong clone that you can play against the computer or a friend in the browser. That by itself wouldn’t be all that exciting, but Google created this game to show off the power of WebRTC, Web Audio and WebGL.

For most people (or at least for developers), WebRTC is now synonymous with plugin-free video conferences in the browser and Cube Slam uses this to show you a live video and audio stream of your friend on a virtual screen while you’re playing.

Maybe more importantly, though, the game also uses WebRTC’s RTCPeerConnection and RTCDataChannel – two features most developers are probably not aware of – to send audio, video and all the “bits and pieces that keep the game in sync” back and forth between the two machines.

Google claims that Cube Slam is the ” first large-scale application to use RTCDataChannel, which provides an API similar to WebSocket, but sends the data over the RTCPeerConnection peer-to-peer link.”

For Google, the emphasis here is clearly on showing off the power of WebRTC, just like it focused on WebSockets with its Racer Chrome experiment, but it also wants to highlight what developers can do with WebGL and Web Audio.

The infrastructure for the game is hosted on Google’s Compute Engine and the code is available here.

Cube Slam is now available on Chrome for the desktop and Chrome OS. It’ll be available on Chrome for Android later this year, but you can already try it now by enabling the “WebRTC Android” setting in the chrome://flags menu.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

PlanGrid, a startup that hopes to replace blueprint printouts on construction sites with those that can be viewed on an iPad, has just released its latest app update. PlanGrid version 3.0 is designed to make it easier to find connections between plans, with an automatic hyperlinking feature, as well as improved collaboration with web-based markup.

Since being launched early last year, the startup’s app has been quickly adopted by a number of big construction agencies and major brands. It’s now been used on more than 35,000 different construction projects, including some major retailers you may have heard of — like Starbucks and Nordstroms. Its system now stores more than 2 million pages with blueprints — with more than 10,000 new pages being added every day.

With that in mind, the company hopes to accelerate growth with a few new features. First, it’s added automated hyperlinking between blueprints stored on the app, basically using machine learning to figure out which plans refer to one another and then creating links between them.

PlanGrid CEO Ryan Sutton-Gee said linking between various PDF files is usually the first monkey-type job that new recruits get, since it’s something that no one really likes to do. Since there can be up to 10 links per page and thousands of pages per project, being able to scan through and add those hyperlinks automatically will save tons of man-hours for PlanGrid customers.

In addition, PlanGrid has added a new feature that will allow users not on the app to mark up blueprints. App users are able to make notes which can be seen by all other users referring to the same plans. Now that ability will be available to those who are accessing blueprints through PlanGrid’s web-based viewing tool as well. That will allow those who are back at their desks to send notes to iPad users in the field, improving communication between the two.

PlanGrid has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Box, 500 Startups, Y Combinator, and Navitas Capital, as well as angels such as Suleman Ali, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Matt Cutts, Ray Levitt. The company now has 11 employees and is based in San Francisco.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Skyscraper launched last year as a pretty straightforward blog advertising service with a focus on helping bloggers make money through direct ad sales. That’s still a main part of its business, and it is currently serving up more than 1.5 million ads every day, but as its co-founder Paul Burger told me last week, the company’s focus is slowly shifting to becoming a full-service blog monetization service that “covers all bases.” Until today, Skyscraper was only available as a closed beta, but it’s now open for all.

Today, Skyscraper is also launching its integration with VigLink, a service that helps publishers turn their links to retailers into affiliate links without the need to sign up for all of the 30,000 retailers the service currently supports. Thanks to the partnership between the two services, turning this service on will take just a few clicks for existing Skyscraper users.

As Burger noted when I talked to him, this is just a first step in Skyscraper’s shift to offering a broader range of services. The team, which has now grown to four after the company raised a $500,000 seed round last year (and added a few vowels to its name in the process), realized that, while direct-ad sales are important for independent publishers, most use a variety of methods to monetize their sites. To do so, most use a multitude of services and constantly switch back and forth between them. In the long run, Skyscraper wants to become a dashboard for all of these services as it expands its offerings. One area Skyscraper is thinking about in addition to the VigLink integration, for example, is sponsored posts.

With today’s launch, Skyscraper is also making its new WordPress plug-in available for download, which will make it even easier for the vast majority of bloggers to get started on the service. One nifty feature of the plug-in is that it not only makes the integration easier, but also installs a widgetized version of Skyscraper’s media kit that bloggers can use on their “Advertise Here” pages to funnel potential ad clients directly to Skyscraper.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple had a bit of a head start when it came to mobile software sales, since it launched its App Store earlier than the Android Market — now called Google Play. The gap between the two, which was more pronounced in terms of initial downloads, has begun to close. Today both Play and the App Store announced very similar milestones.

Apple has been counting down to its 50 billionth app download for a while now. In fact, the assets were leaked via the Apple website backend code earlier today, so we all knew it was coming. Coincidence that it would land on a Google keynote day? That’s hard to tell, but Google had its own milestone to announce: 48 billion downloads announced onstage at I/O today.

The announcements give us a unique opportunity to compare download numbers from both stores on as equal footing as possible, and the result is a snapshot of two app stores that are neck and neck — at least in terms of straight downloads.

That doesn’t take into account paid vs. free apps, or how much revenue each makes from ads and other sources. But as you can see from the graph, it marks one area at least where Google used to trail considerably but is now catching up. Also the fact that Google’s Android OS now accounts for a majority percentage of global smartphone sales means it shouldn’t be surprising that there are a lot of people downloading apps.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One interesting thing to watch is how social networking platforms mature divergently as businesses around the world.

Sina Weibo, the public microblogging platform that has had a huge impact on online discourse in China, is veering down a path toward e-commerce and transactions after Alibaba took a stake worth $586 million in it last month. The platform is one of the two more influential social networks in China today, with the other being Tencent’s messaging app WeChat.

But unlike WeChat, Sina Weibo’s growth has slowed over the last year and its parent company Sina has had visible issues in monetizing the platform. (It feels a little bit like the heat Twitter had a few years ago for taking longer to bring in revenue-making products like promoted tweets and in-stream ads.)

“Weibo is pretty mature right now,” said Alibaba CTO Wang Jian in an interview. “It’s not in a fast growth period.”

In the Sina’s last earnings report, the company said Weibo made just under $50 million in revenue, or about 12 percent of overall advertising revenue. But investments in the company contributed to an $8.5 million operating loss for Sina last year.

Now with Alibaba’s investment, it looks like Weibo will take a different money-making path than its Western counterparts, which are more dependent on sponsored stories or in-stream ads.

“I think the best way to monetize Weibo is through e-commerce, not by ads,” Jian said. “That’s what I believe. That’s my personal thought. Weibo has a very good chance to integrate with the Alibaba business.”

It’s a win-win deal. Alibaba, which is veering toward an IPO, is China’s dominant e-commerce company and has an extremely data-driven culture. But it hasn’t been as successful with its own homegrown social networking efforts. At the same time, Sina isn’t widely considered to have the same caliber of technical talent as China’s other flagship Internet companies.

While Jian didn’t give a lot of detail on how they would integrate the two platforms, one could imagine that users could get targeted offers on goods and services related to things they’ve posted status updates about.  

“We just need time to find out how to have a synergy of data between the two companies,” Jian said. “Weibo just gave us a new challenge for that.”

As for Aliyun, the smartphone OS that Jian is overseeing, Jian says that he doesn’t think the platform will fit Weibo — which is sort of hard to believe considering that Weibo is a mobile-centric product.

“I don’t think Aliyun really fits the Weibo deal,” he said.  

While Tencent’s WeChat, which has surged to 190 million monthly active users over the past year, isn’t a direct competitor, Jian says it is in terms of other metrics.

“If you’re thinking about time that people spend on their devices, then you can say it’s a direct competitor. If you look at it from just a media perspective, I don’t think it’s direct competition. Two years ago, everyone spent time on Weibo, and now Weixin (WeChat) is becoming that app. It’s really a time spending problem.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too.

This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before.

It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon.

Personally, I’ve never found these social search results all that useful. Microsoft, however, clearly believes that this, in combination with what they are doing around semantic search, will allow it to continue to compete with Google, which seems to have de-emphasized social search over the last few months.

With its Scroogled campaign and “Bing It On” challenge, Microsoft has obviously been taking a far more aggressive stance against Google in recent months and it’s slowly adding new users. Currently, Google has a market share of about 67 percent in the U.S., and Bing is close to reaching 17 percent.

There have been some recent rumors, however, that Yahoo is looking to drop Bing as its search provider (Yahoo currently commands just under 12 percent of the U.S. search market with its Bing-powered search), but given the long-term deal between the two companies, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The saga of PeopleBrowsr vs. Twitter appears to have come to a close, AllThingsD reports. Last November, PeopleBrowsr took Twitter to court after the company had informed them that they’d be losing access to its full firehose of data. This was a move happening with nearly all third-party developers, but PeopleBrowsr contested that its four-year long relationship with Twitter could not be cut off that easily.

After a somewhat astonishing public back and forth between the two companies, it sounds like the terms of the out of court settlement will be that PeopleBrowsr keeps firehose data until the end of the year, at which time it will shift over to one of Twitter’s approved data partners, Gnip, Topsy or DataSift.

A Twitter spokesperson issued the following statement to us:

We’re pleased to have this matter dismissed with prejudice, and look forward to PeopleBrowsr’s transition by the end of the year off of the Firehose to join the ecosystem of developers utilizing Twitter data via our reseller partnerships.

While it’s not a win, it is the close of a case that kicked up dust from developers, some seeing PeopleBrowsr as fighting for the “little guys” who were slowly losing the access to Twitter’s data that they once enjoyed. This was not the case though, as PeopleBrowsr’s products, namely Kred, relies on this data to function. Basically, it had been paying Twitter $1M a year to keep their business going. That’s not little. There’s no word on what it will have to eventually pay someone like Gnip for the same access.

A spokesperson from PeopleBrowsr says that it’s “business as usual” now. Good, because it got really ugly there for a while.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Security firm Lookout has detailed a clever new bit of Android Malware lurking in the Google Play store. The good news: unless you’re downloading questionable Russian clone apps, you’re probably not affected. The bad news: that hasn’t kept it from being downloaded a few million times.

The new malware, fittingly dubbed “BadNews”, has been spotted tucked into 32 different apps from 4 separate developer accounts. Since Google Play only gives download numbers as huge ranges, no one can say exactly how many devices this has affected. With the lowball estimates, it’s around two million. On the high end, it’s as many as nine million. In reality, it’s somewhere in between the two.

As the BadNews bug appears to have been distributed as an ad framework for developers to use, it’s unclear how many of the infected apps were built primarily for malicious reasons. It’s quite possible that some of the apps were built by well-meaning developers who just made a bad decision on an ad provider.

While Google has been making an effort to crackdown on malware with things like Bouncer (which constantly scans the Play store’s apps for telltale signs of malware), it’s a never-ending (and very much uphill) battle. BadNews snuck into the store by posing as an ad network, only firing off the nasty bits of code by way of remote signal once it had found its way onto a bunch of devices.

So, what makes BadNews bad news? It does at least two things you’d probably rather your phone didn’t do:

• Fakes alerts encouraging you to download other infected apps, as well as things things like AlphaSMS, which hijacks your phone and silently signs it up for premium SMS services
• Sends your phone number and unique device i.d (the IMEI) back to the malware’s mothership

LookOut has the full list of known affected apps, with over half of them targeted at Russian users. The most popular, by far, is “Savage Knife”, a game meant to simulate 5 Finger Fillet — or, as it’s better known, “that dumb game where you try not to cut off your finger”. By the time it was pulled from the store yesterday, it had somewhere between one and five million installs.

Following LookOut’s report, Google has pulled all 32 known-infected apps for the store.

Malware? On Android?!

Preposterous. Wait, no. That’s not the word I’m looking for.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Y Combinator-backed Coderwall started out as a social site for developers to list their achievements and projects, but it has been moving into recruiting — first by allowing companies to build their own profiles and now with the launch of a new service called Pitchbox.

It’s a separate site from Coderwall, where developers describe the salary and work they’d want from their dream jobs. Then Pitchbox uses a combination of human curation and automation to recommend positions that they might be interested in, delivered as a personalized pitch. If the developer is interested, Pitchbox arranges for a 10-minute conversation with a developer at the recruiting company.

Founder Matt Deiters said this has a number of advantages over the normal recruiting process. For one thing, it avoids the random spam that developers often receive (and ignore) from recruiters. For another, it puts people who aren’t actively looking for new jobs in a position where they can still hear about opportunities that they’d be genuinely excited about.

“They are very complementary,” Deiters said when I asked why Pitchbox isn’t just a feature on Coderwall. “We had initially … thought about Pitchbox as being a product in Coderwall. As we evolved and added things around the community aspects of Coderwall, it kind of became its own network and its own community.”

Ultimately, Deiters said he decided that he didn’t want to have yet “another thing that we had to communicate” within Coderwall. At the same time, he said that the company has created “touch points” between the two services, for example by promoting Pitchbox to certain Coderwall members.

Deiters added that, thanks to the company profile feature (the profiles are free, but companies pay to promote them and add job listings), Coderwall’s revenue has been growing 40 percent “nearly every month” for the past six months, and in March, with the early tests of Pitchbox, it went up 10x. Coderwall is now profitable, he said. He also said that Pitchbox customers include YC startups, Dropbox and “a few Fortune 500 companies.”

As for how Pitchbox might expand, Deiters said there’s been interest from startups that want to recruit other types of positions. He wants to stay focused on developers for at least the next few months, but Pitchbox might expand after that.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The biggest change I’ve seen in the tech industry in the past decade isn’t social media, cloud computing, big data, consumerization or even mobile. It’s the mainstream acceptance of open source. Even 10 years ago open source was controversial. Back then “open vs. proprietary” arguments would still erupt at meetings and parties. Back then vendors spread FUD about open source. Today, every vendor wants to call themselves “open.”

Why is that? Writer Evgeny Morozov traces it back to Tim O’Reilly and his media/conference empire in a long piece for The Baffler published this week.

According to Morozov, O’Reilly hijacked Richard Stallman’s free software movement and turned it into the more corporate-friendly open source movement. From there, O’Reilly would go on to redefine web freedom as freedom for companies like Google to do whatever they want online, and to redefine open government not as a movement for transparency and accountability but as the need to give free data sets to for-profit companies.

Free Software, as the saying goes, is free as in speech, not as in beer.

The piece raises important questions about the Californian Ideology and how it influences policy — and about the consequences of sacrificing principles in the name of pragmatism. But I think Morozov misses some crucial reasons that open source supplanted Free Software.

Morozov sort of glosses over the differences between open source and Free Software. Free Software, as the saying goes, is free as in speech, not as in beer. The primary freedoms, as Morozov notes, are: “users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public.”

But most open source software — as defined by the Open Source Institute — is also free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation. So what’s the problem? The difference between the two movements is that Free Software is a social movement, and open source is a methodology. In an essay titled “Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software,” Stallman complains that the freedoms promoted by the Free Software Movement are not discussed by open-source advocates, and that because of that, the public in general remains deeply confused about what open source even means.

Morozov writes that the difference between the two is that free software emphasizes users and that open source emphasizes developers. But I would submit that free software is also primarily interested in developers as well, in that the freedoms it emphasizes are ones that matter to developers, but very little to the rest of us. That’s where the movement went wrong.

Sure there are a few non-developers who care about this stuff — activists and other security-conscious people have reason to want to study the software they use, or to have it reviewed by trusted networks. But try telling graphic designers that they should use GIMP instead of Photoshop because they can study the code, modify it and release their own version. Or try telling a data analyst why they should use Libre Office instead of Excel, or a musician why they should use Ardour instead of Logic. See how far you get.

All this raises the question: did open source eclipse Free Software because O’Reilly is such a gifted marketer, or because people just don’t care that much about the freedoms that Stallman cares about? Is it any wonder that developers are the primary users of free software?

Once companies and developers realized that you could use open source software to build products, the flood gates were open.

To hear the old timers tell it, it was Apache that won the mainstream over to open source by 1) providing a really good server (that happened to be free) and 2) having a license that made it very clear that a company wouldn’t be sued for using it for commercial purposes, even if they built some custom software on top of it.

Once companies and developers realized that you could use open source software to build products, the flood gates were open. The upside is that more people learned about open-source technologies and corporations paid for more open-source development. If open source hadn’t caught on, we might all be doing our blogging on proprietary content management systems coded in ColdFusion running on Windows servers and IIS.

An alternate picture of O’Reilly that emerges, looking over his history, is one of a pragmatist willing to make compromises to reach his goals. You can also argue that open government would never have gotten off the ground if it weren’t for the economic argument that open data could be used by private companies to stimulate the economy — we’re still waiting to see how that works out. Getting the mainstream to accept open source meant more Free Software developers getting paychecks, as well as selling more books and conference tickets. But it meant downplaying the ideology, and accepting only the software freedoms that were imagined by developers in the early 1980s.

I do prefer free as in freedom software, even though I’m not a developer, but there are a few other freedoms that matter more to me:

• Freedom to run software that I’ve paid for on any device I want without hardware dongles or persistent online verification schemes.
• Freedom from the prying eyes of government and corporations.
• Freedom to move my data from one application to another.
• Freedom to move an application from one hosting provider to another.
• Freedom from contracts that lock me in to expensive monthly or annual plans.
• Freedom from terms and conditions that offer a binary “my way or the highway” decision.

The first of those is certainly part of the Free Software Movement, and the others are promoted today by advocates for the open web, federated web and/or indie web and vendor relationship management. I’m sure there are many more freedoms I’m not thinking of, but the groundwork is there for a new Free Software Movement that’s more in line with the needs of the users in our time.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch