Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A guy walks into a watch store and a smartwatch business partnership is formed. OK, it’s not a funny joke; in fact, it’s not a joke at all. Secret Labs’ founder and CTO Chris Walker walked into the House of Horology store on Prince Street owned by neighbor Lawrence Layderman. A discussion about the future of watches led Walker to show Layderman a prototype of a state-of-the-art smartwatch he had already been working on for a year and a half.

Walker’s company had previously created the Netduino, an Arduino alternative that allows developers to use Microsoft’s developer tools. But as anyone who has ever seen most of those projects knows, they’re usually not known for their aesthetics. Walker knew he had to partner with a company that understood fashion, but he still wanted to maintain control over the project.

The partners launched a Kickstarter campaign for its Agent smartwatch, which blew through its funding goal in the first nine hours. Now, with less than a week before it closes, it has attracted nearly $900,000 from nearly 5,000 backers, many of whom will be picking up the American-made device for about $150 even though the watch is expected to retail for $100 more than that.

The Agent is a bit thinner than House of Horology’s beefy color-accented Bedlam line, key to attracting more upscale shoppers who will encounter the device at its store and other retailers. Despite this, it brims with state-of-the-art components. These include a charging coil to support the Qi wireless charging standard. One of its two processors is a new chip from ARM — the Cortex M4 – that won’t be shipping until the summer.

“We’ve effectively done for watches what Haswell has done for processors,” Walker says. The processors team with a next-generation Sharp Memory LCD for some of the best battery life in the category. Agent even supports a licensed version of the Monotype font library to display foreign language characters.

The team has also thought about how to protect against things not going so well. It can be restored via a button-press combination in the event a firmware update goes awry. In addition, it searched globally for a rechargeable lithium ion watch battery that wouldn’t explode if punctured, a concern for something kept so close to the body.

But some things will remain out of reach. For example, the team couldn’t yet find a color display that presented anything richer than pastel colors. And as for using the phone as a headset, Walker says the project looked into integrating a speaker or microphone to activate features, such as Siri, as the Martian watch does. But the team decided against it, with Walker characterizing taking a call through a watch as “the worst speakerphone experience you’ve ever had.”

The Agent may be loaded with the latest components. Technology, though, becomes available to many in successive generations and it’s easy to imagine a second-generation watch from one of the Smartwatch Class of 2012 upgrading beyond what the Agent has locked down. That said, not all watches are open platforms and, as many Kickstarter projects go, some only create development kits optionally after reaching a stretch goal or shipping.

Not so for the Agent, which was created with third-party developers in mind. Here, too, it is not the first. WIMM Labs worked on whittling down Android before being entering into an exclusive, confidential relationship with an unnamed company. MetaWatch, another Kickstarter alum, served as “a lot of the inspiration for what we did,” according to Walker. The Agent, though, relies on Microsoft .NET, which allows developers to use a wide array of tools to create apps for it, as well as take care of lots of things under the hood. That might not matter much for a watch face, but it could become more of an advantage as capabilities grow.

Despite this, don’t expect too much to differentiate Agent apps at launch. The Agent will be hosting the kinds of apps, including weather, golf swing analyzers and sleep and exercise trackers. Walker expresses faith that developers will create the kind of unforeseen titles that came to flood the Apple app store.

While the House of Horology support has helped with the design up front, it will be at least as helpful when it comes to distribution, a challenge that confronts many tech products after a successful Kickstarter campaign. As the steward of a young luxury brand, Layderman says that his consumers are now looking for a more well-rounded timepiece. While the first Agent is being designed as a unisex watch, interest from women is driving exploration into even smaller casings. The partners think that they can expand far beyond the current watch market to target retailers in the fashion space, phone accessory and electronic enthusiast markets.

Still, despite attracting dalliances from the likes of Sony and Motorola, as well as less ambitious efforts from Casio and Citizen, many of the smartphone-tethered smartwatch market entrants have attracted mostly crowdfunded startups, and the big ecosystem providers have all been rumored to be developing wristwear; Walker provides the classically optimistic take that their entrance will validate the category.

But the particular areas on where the Agent watch partnership has focused — Secret Labs’ development and House of Horology’s distribution — seem particularly vulnerable to the entrance of an Apple smartwatch. “Hopefully, we can all move this forward together. They’re welcome to call us,” says Walker. Still, for any new smartwatch, the clock may be ticking.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Distribution is a hell of a drug. In a product-obsessed town, it’s distribution that often proves most elusive, and when a person or platform can tap into it, they oftentimes move quickly to lock-in those advantages.

However, not all distribution is created equal. In today’s technology landscape, while thousands of startups pursue the dream of massive distribution, a few platforms and companies hold tremendous advantages in their own special, elite tier: Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, to cite the big ones.

These platforms confer great benefits to their owners and the ecosystem, and all is rosy until they decide to distribute and play favorites with their own goods at the expense of others. In the startup world, those moves can be frowned upon. The most recent example of this is a narrow but vocal strain of backlash in the Valley against Vine mini-movies blowing up in their Twitter feeds. Vine is a quick short-form video mobile app acquired pre-launch by Twitter and, given their new owner’s platform strength, was quickly distributed to a large audience worldwide (if they had an iPhone).

I personally enjoy Vine and, recently, a small set of my non-tech friends who have seen and tried the app enjoy the product and find it slightly more fun than a picture, in most cases. The chorus of backlash in the Valley, I believe, has less to do with the product, and more to do with the fact that Vine did not naturally grow (like Instagram), but rather benefited from “inorganic distribution.”

There are other examples of “inorganic distribution” under slightly different conditions. As Snapchat gained steam late in 2012, Facebook launched their own similar app, Poke, seeking to use their massive distribution and concentration of eyeballs to douse water on the Snapchat flame. As any iOS developer painfully knows, getting noticed by users in the iOS App Store is getting more and more difficult, and it’s not easier when Apple restricts which of its own native apps remain as defaults, especially when considering interoperability between apps. Google is slowly incorporating more editorial data (and sometimes, Google owns this data) as it returns searches for authors or restaurants, for instance (see: Zagat). And, Amazon recently made its dive into publishing after years of selling books, backing Tim Ferris’ new cookbook, much to the chagrin of big publishers.

In a textbook or business school case study, a platform’s incentive to inorganically distribute their goods makes perfect sense. It is a seemingly rational move. Right or wrong, in the world of startups, many believe that distribution should be earned without the PEDs of platform advantages. Up until it was acquired, Instagram was the poster child for organic distribution, an independent startup leveraging all the major platforms for its benefit and rising to the top by itself. Then, once it became a private entity owned by Facebook, different strains of power-user backlash have emerged, perhaps the result of the fact that now, as a property, Instagram has unfettered access to the drug that is Facebook’s distribution channels and can therefor play by different rules.

While there are no hard and fast rules for platforms to follow, the most recent backlash around Vine has less to do with the product itself, and more to do with the fact it was given an outsized advantage under Twitter’s wings while many other startups trying to crack the mobile video nut on their own.

“Inorganic distribution” may seem unfair, but it’s also a reality, and everyone building new products and hoping for distribution on other platforms should probably think twice about what the big platform owners could do. They could acquire an app in your category to distribute. They could copy and rebuild an app in your category to distribute. Or, they could limit the data access for apps in your category, making the thought of distribution moot. While it may seem unfair, all is fair game when startups rely on platforms for growth. As a result, and as always, product-builders seeking distribution should plan accordingly.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Toronto-based Venio is hoping to capitalize on healthy eating trends with a mobile app that allows users to set dietary restrictions, and then provides them with a customized set of meals depending on which ones during the day they want suggestions for. Venio culls its meals from noted food bloggers and quality content sources, in an effort to make sure that its content doesn’t bore or frustrate users.

The challenge for Venio, and for anyone attempting to provide a product that acts as a prescriptive tool when it comes to personal health, is not only to get users, but to get them coming back. Fad diets remain such because people aren’t great at sticking to schedules, routines and systems for losing weight or getting healthy. Others who have tried to gain traction in this space so far haven’t hit on breakout success, though Fooducate has decent traction in the Android market, and Meal Snap made a big splash when it came out initially, though we haven’t heard much about its traction since its launch in April of 2011. The point is, there’s no breakout star in this category, even though health and fitness apps and devices in general seem to be hot area for startups and apps over the last few years.

Venio, which launched on the App Store a little over two weeks ago, has already managed to sign on over 5,000 users, and the company says that its members have already recorded around 3,000 meals eaten as suggested by and recorded to their app. Thirty percent of Venio’s users are daily active users, which is “very high for the category,” according to Venio co-founder Jon Car-Harris.

“Health needs to be actionable and relevant to people in a busy time. Most things like calorie counting or a fad diet isn’t sustainable,” Venio’s Karim El Rabiey told me. “We’re going to make health helpful and relevant to you, to make it easier to maintain over a long period of time.”

To do that, Venio partners with top industry bloggers for quality content and a growing database of recipes that means people won’t see many repeats if variety is what they’re after. But it also plans on introducing a number of filters to make it easy for users to find exactly the kind of meal plan that bests suits their life. Planned updates will bring plenty of dietary preference options to help with that, adding to the current vegan and vegetarian filter choices.

“We’re bringing in more dietary restrictions for people, so it’s really possible for anyone to have their meals catered to them,” Car-Harris explained. ”We’re going to have gluten-free in there, we’re adding all the types of vegetarianism, and basically every type of major allergy in there, too.”

Longer term, that will mean opening up partnerships with Atkins, The Sonoma Diet, and other meal plans that have different rules and means for losing weight and staying healthy. These could bring in additional revenue, depending on how they’re structured, and the team says they’re currently looking at introducing those elements sometime next year, owing to the sales cycle timeline of forging these partnerships.

Venio offers people analytics on their progress, tailors meal plans to gender, age, height and weight and is even working with restaurants and grocers to establish a Venio standard by which shoppers can check how the food or meals they’re purchasing meet the nutritional requirements of their planned meals. Platform expansion is also in the startup’s product plans, though for now, a mobile app seems to be the best and most useful way to get users active when and where they eat their meals.

The startup has ambitious plans, but its biggest challenge will still be making sure it can not only sign on new users, but also keep them around and engaged. There’s remarkably little evidence out there to suggest that consumers are willing to adopt a meal planning app with any kind of scale, but Venio is banking on the fact that that’s just because no one’s given them the right tool yet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ever since I/O and the unveiling of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the blogosphere has been measuring Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet. The verdict in almost every case is good, including our very own iPad lover’s take.

John and I thus found it only fitting to bring the little 7-inch tablet into the studio for Fly or Die. The tablet, with a 7-inch IPS 1280

Editor’s note: Nadav Gur is the founder and CEO of Desti, a virtual personal assistant for travel incubated by SRI. Previously, he was founder and CEO of Worldmate, the first mobile travel app.

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

–Albert Einstein

Since the launch of Siri on the iPhone 4S last year, the media has been abuzz with the potential implications of what’s next – from Google’s Eric Schmidt commenting that Siri poses a great threat to Google, to countless articles by VCs and thought leaders.

Has artificial intelligence finally come of age? And is it ready for broader applications in industries ranging from travel to finance? Are we destined to grapple with fast-following Siri clone after Siri clone, or will the category evolve?

Siri excels at setting reminders (and a little less so at ordering Scottish lunches). But is she ultimately more than a better front-end for basic smartphone functions?

This post is about changing how we use computers to manage knowledge, and not just information.

Knowledge = Information + Meaning

You may “know” that it’s 100 degrees out there today, but unless you also know that 100 degrees equates to meaning that it’s hot, that piece of information is pretty useless.

To understand the concept of “100 degrees”, one has to know the meaning of 100 degrees and the concept of hot. That sophistication is called domain knowledge. Domain knowledge allows one to give meaning to information. As a result, the value one gets from knowledge helps make better decisions. The cashmere sweater stays home today.

With knowledge comes understanding, which helps users make better choices. Better choices mean fewer mistakes, and an increase in productivity.

Better Search Through Understanding

This focus on meaning is the foundation of semantics and semantic search (an oft-abused term), which ultimately means searching for concepts, not keywords.

Over the last 10+ years we’ve all been conditioned to expect search engines to basically match keywords to documents. We then receive a list of a gazillion links of pages that include some permutation of our keywords. It is then the user’s job to manually sift through all of these listings in the hope that one of them is a good match.

It goes without saying that this is a lot of work. A semantic search engine, on the other hand, would attempt to understand what we’re looking for, and then retrieve the best results, whether or not the specific words we used are mentioned or not. The real promise of this approach is that by understanding our intent, we will get more relevant and more accurate results.

Part 1 is to understand what the user is asking for, and part 2 is to understand what is discussed on a particular page. Siri has made strong headway into literally understanding you (voice to text) but more importantly about deriving meaning from what a user has just said.

The Holy Grail is to take this ability to understand what people asked for and to also understand what’s written across the billions of pages comprising the Internet.

Instead of “organizing the world’s information” you’d be organizing the world’s knowledge.

Understanding what people are asking or saying and converting it into usable meaning is a huge first step towards making heads or tails out of the billions of pieces of information scattered across the web.

The traditional way of interfacing with information, whether with keywords or by refining searches with sliders, menus, or widgets just doesn’t cut it anymore. To truly unleash the power of search is to use natural language, in voice to text or even text to text. With this new paradigm of starting a search we will be able to better unlock the value that is hidden in unstructured data and provide infinitely better results.

This is why the natural language front end of Siri, a forerunner in the category, is such an existential threat to Google (or at least their existing keyword-based search).

Google understands this better than anyone else, and their recent announcements of the forthcoming Google Semantic Search is a direct response.

The Rise of Vertical VPA’s

The immediate next step is to help systems develop domain expertise, and this is no easy task. Even for the brightest people domain knowledge is something that can take decades to achieve, and even then people can’t be a true expert on everything.

Such is at the core of advancing us beyond the search paradigm of today’s digital information to an age of Virtual Personal Assistants.

SRI, who of course developed Siri from decades-long research on the CALO project, understands that for VPAs to be truly useful, they need to be focused on a specific domain of knowledge.

SRI actually has developed that full core technology and begun systematically applying it to specific veriticals. It was recently unveiled as the foundation underlying BBVA’s Lola, a virtual personal assistant for banking. My company Desti was likewise incubated at SRI, and is built on top of the same stack.

We’re creating a trusted advisor who can take a user’s travel intent and provide directly relevant answers and actions, all tailored specifically to that individual. According to Google, the average user visits 22 sites prior to booking travel. Planning a trip can be unnecessarily frustrating and time consuming.

What if planning your travel was as easy as interacting with a friend from the area you plan to visit, one whose on-the-ground recommendations cut through the clutter with aplomb, and who knows what you enjoy?

SRI’s overall VPA play is our well-reasoned effort to apply the Siri concept in a way that enables it to be adapted to specific domains or verticals, encapsulating the specific language, knowledge and reasoning that are unique to each.

Instead of teaching an assistant to be all things to all people, we are teaching one virtual assistant to be a bank teller (Lola), another one to play educational games (Kuato), and yet another to be a travel agent.

This is an extraordinarily difficult challenge, but one that is finally becoming a reality. The proof will be in the pudding of course — in how well we instill domain expertise in each new venture.

Summary

We want a VPA that understands us as individuals — that leverages our past for our present. A VPA has deep domain knowledge, and can finally move us beyond a big list of blue links.  Software really can provide us with real and expert assistance when and where we need it most.

What we’re seeing is a paradigm shift on multiple levels, one that will play out more profoundly over the coming year than it did the last. We’re on the cusp of an entirely new thing:

• Managing info => Managing knowledge
• Matching keywords => Matching concepts
• Serving “searches”  => Serving “actionable intents”

At the end of the day, what people really want is to be…understood. That starts with a conversation, and it gets better when that conversation begets a real relationship — one based on mutual respect, a shared language, and a certain intimacy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The search engine Blekko just launched ROCKZi, a visually compelling way to consume and interact with the fresh content that users care about the most. After selecting the category that you want to read (Geekery, The BiZ, Glitterati…), you are presented with articles in a grid view reminiscent of Flipboard on the iPad. You can upvote the article with the “This RockZ” button and leave a comment. Users can submit new articles and share them on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. On top of that, you accumulate karma points with every action.

However, don’t be fooled by the different product names — Blekko and ROCKZi go hand in hand to improve the human-curated experience that made the search engine popular in the first place.

ROCKZi was first conceptualized by a Blekko engineer during an internal hackathon and then developed into a full-scale product. “We didn’t want to present fresh content in a traditional news search kind of way by launching news.blekko.com and putting a search box there,” co-founder and VP of marketing Mike Markson says. “Blekko is all about curation — people want to curate, you just have to give them the right set of tools. The other goal with ROCKZi is to take the curation aspect out of the hands of just the power-users and hand it to the everyday users,” he continues.

Indeed, Blekko users have been identifying quality content in vertical categories called slashtags since the day it launched. It then allows users to refine queries with /news, /tech or /blogs for example — those slashtags are the keystone of ROCKZi as well. “Rather than making slashtags a searchable database, we wanted to turn it inside out and provide it as a feed,” Markson says. In addition to leveraging Blekko search assets to constitute ROCKZi’s news sources, news categories are searchable. Putting it another way, it is a less intimidating way of using slashtags by simply selecting the category you are interested in as a first step. Finally, ROCKZi uses Facebook Connect to show you the content your friends have submitted or liked and their area of expertise.

The website is now live and mobile apps are on their way. Blekko has raised around $50 million and, according to Markson, it had 5.5 million users in June. When it comes to monetizing the service, they are considering putting ads next to ROCKZi search results the same way they do in Blekko.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Pokin Yeung founded two startups, GeckoGo and Askomatics, and is currently blogging and helping out various other startups. Follow her on Twitter @pokin.

Just over a month ago, a random conversation with another startup founder over lunch turned into a full-blown research project.

“You and I are both first-born children,” I mused to my friend, “I wonder if that had any influence on why we chose to start businesses.”

I theorized that first borns were often given more responsibility growing up, and wondered if this role served as training wheels for building startups. I also wondered if our upbringing had an influence on things like when we start, what we start, or how much money we raise — and ultimately, how successful we are with our businesses.

Four weeks, a survey of 318 founders, and a lot of data-crunching later, here are my conclusions:

Family Matters

1. Your birth order does influence the likelihood you will be a founder.
   If you’re a first-born, you are more likely to be a founder — 55 percent more likely than the population distribution. Just under half (46 percent) of our founders were first-born children, and I fit into this category. If you come from a two-child family, this effect is larger. You’re 63 percent more likely to be a founder than the second born child.
2. If you’re female, this effect is huge.
   Female first-borns are 118 percent more likely than second-born females to be founders if they come from a two-child family. I fit into this category, too. Maybe the capricious nature of sibling relationships combined with the leadership (read: guess-who’s-in-trouble-if-something-happens-to baby-sis) role gives us more comfort in the rock-and-roll world of starting companies.
3. Second-born children are slightly more likely than the general population to be founders, but beyond that the chances actually decrease.
4. Third-born or later children are 52 percent less likely to be a founder.
5. Only children are underrepresented, and it’s statistically significant. Only children have been described as “First Borns on Steroids.” They are typically more likely to become CEOs and be hyper-achievement oriented.  Yet they are underrepresented in our study.  Could it be that only children prefer to rule larger, more established companies?  Or is it something about the uncertain dynamic of having siblings to fight with that gives first borns the skills and motivation to take the leap?
6. There is no correlation between your birth order and your chance of raising money or having a successful exit.

Startups run in the family

The data suggest that your parents can shape your inclination to become a founder – especially if your mom was an entrepreneur and you’re a girl. Female entrepreneurs are 1.4 times more likely to have a mom who was also a founder. Over 50 percent of our founders surveyed have a parent who had also started a business, and 14% of respondents have a brother or sister who’s taken the leap.  So it seems having a good role model matters — especially for females. Organizations like Women 2.0 are a good start, and more access to mentorship programs during the formative years could make a big difference in bringing more female founders into play.

Higher education or trial by fire?

Startup founders have to do a lot of multi-tasking, but two things that don’t seem to mix are school and startups. Most founders tend to wait till school is done before starting their first business.  In general, by the time founders are 25

• 74 percent of you had started a business if you didn’t have a college degree.
• 55 percent if you had a bachelor’s degree.
• 24 percent if you had a graduate degree.

Also, 50 percent of you waited till after 30 to start your first business if you had a graduate degree.

How else do you compare against the population?  For starters, you overachieve.

Startup founders in general tend to overachieve. You are 6.4 times more likely to have skipped a grade, and 6 times more likely to start some sort of business endeavour (selling candies, anyone?) while still in school. Across the board, startup founders are more likely to more likely to do things like play sports, play a musical instrument, or hold a part-time job while still in high school. Maybe it’s a desire for learning, general well-roundedness and drive for growth that creates the motivations for founders to strike out on their own?  Or maybe it’s a curiosity about the world. Lots of potential theories and areas of further research.

So what next?

The specific circumstances that push founders to take the leap definitely involves more than the sequence in which founders arrive to their families, but it does seem clear that once you become a founder, you stand to quite strongly influence future generations to come.

There were other interesting areas of research, including the types of adversity faced by startup founders growing up, and it’s what I want to dig into next. If anyone is interested who didn’t participate in my study before, I’d love to ask you some questions here.

[top image via flickr/sdminor81]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

All the major map apps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Mapquest have walking directions as a standard feature, but the folks at Lumatic don’t think they are good enough. It is creating mobile maps designed for pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transit. Originally a TechStars company called Omniar, serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog, Lookery, Mashery) joined as CEO a year ago.

He recently raised a seed round of $800,000 from Joi Ito’s Neoteny Labs, 500 Startups, Chamath Palihapitiya, Allen Morgan, Ted Rheingold, and other angels.

Lumatic has an Android app which works right now only in San Francisco. When it gives you directions, it chooses routes which are optimal for walking, cycling or public transport. As you walk through the streets, the app displays a street-view with photos and arrows pointing in the right direction.

The app is built on top of Open Street Map , but the user experience is centered heavily on using photography, landmarks, and visual cues to help people navigate cities. Fighting Google Maps in this category is going to be a tough slog, but if the app can gain a following there plenty of money in local commerce and advertising to make it a worthwhile pursuit.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here at the 2011 Crunchies, Imgur, the photo-sharing site made popular by the Reddit community, won the category of “Best Bootstrapped Startup.” And given the traffic numbers the startup is seeing, it’s easy to see why. According to Founder Alan Schaaf, the site sees 30 million uniques per month and a billion pageviews. (Yes, a billion!)

Schaaf admits that the startup is sort of  ”under the radar in the tech community.” But there’s clearly a large demand for an image-hosting site that doesn’t focus on personal or professional photos, but on other types of images.

“I like to think of an image as different from a photo,” says Schaaf, “you would put your photos on places like Facebook or Flickr, but if you just have an image – which can be like a screenshot, a meme, something you hacked together in PhotoShop – you need a place for those too. We want to be that place.”

The full backstage interview is below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After reporting Q4 2010 earnings yesterday, AT&T has published additional statistics on the number of mobile broadband connections the telecommunications company has facilitated in the last quarter. The company says that in terms of emerging devices (this includes non-phone wireless connections), 2 million connected devices were added to the network in the quarter.

Included in this category are what AT&T refers to as embedded computing devices, which are tablets, netbooks and laptops. AT&T says that more than 6 million connected devices have been added to the network over the past five quarters. The total number of emerging devices, including postpaid and prepaid embedded computing devices, connected to the AT&T network – both for consumers and businesses is nearly 11 million.

Business users and consumers can use AT&T wireless connection plans for more than 940 specialty devices, including eReaders, netbooks, digital photo frames, personal navigation devices, telematics, home security monitoring and smart grid devices. The company says its wireless network will add support for a number of additional devices this year, including Vitality’s GlowCaps, which are pill caps designed to help patients take medications regularly through a series of reminders, including light, sound, text message and phone call alerts.

AT&T will provide a wireless plan for the Pandigital Novel eReader and the new Garmin GTU 10. And AT&T says that it has signed an agreement with BMW to add a suite for safety and infotainment services to the car company’s future models.

Of course, as the iPhone arrives at Verizon, wireless connections via non-phone devices could be a growing business for AT&T. The company saw 27.4 percent growth in wireless data revenues, up $1.1 billion versus the fourth quarter of 2009, driven by messaging, Internet access, access to apps and more.

It should be interesting to see if this particular sector will continue to grow for AT&T.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch