Jolla, a Finnish startup formed in response to Nokia’s decision to ditch MeeGo in favour of Windows Phone, has finally taken the wraps off the smartphone hardware that will be paired with its “unlike” Sailfish UI. Being a startup is challenging enough in any business sector but Jolla is seeking to compete in the fiercely competitive smartphone space, going up against giants Samsung and Apple who hold the majority of the market in a pincer grip. So it’s hard not to dismiss their efforts as too late. But it’s a lot harder to accuse them of doing too little.

Jolla’s strategy for fighting the mobile industry’s Goliaths is all about standing out by doing things different. Today’s hardware underlines how this startup is hoping to disrupt the concept of a single flagship device — such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 — that’s hankered after and owned by millions yet with only a little variation in case colourings to tell the difference between each one.

In seeking to break down software homogeneity with its Sailfish UI and a business model that encourages working with third parties to develop new types of smartphone experience that loop in others’ data, Jolla is also taking aim at hardware commoditisation via a cross-over feature in its debut device that it’s calling the Other Half. The Other Half refers to removable hardware shells that snap on to the back of the handset and can be changed and customised by the user. But the feature goes further than interchangeable shells — which is not at all new, dating back in spirit to early Nokia mobile phones of the 1990s with their removable facias, and more recently to a device like Nokia’s Lumia 820, which has a coloured and swappable backplate.

Jolla’s Other Half isn’t just decoration but links to the software on the handset — using an unconfirmed bridging technology that sounds to my ear like NFC — allowing content on the phone to be tied to the addition of a new shell, or even for new physical features to be incorporated and supported.

Jolla’s Marc Dillon, now head of software but until recently CEO, gave some examples of how the Other Half feature could be used — noting that this is about opening up the back of the device for others to come in and augment.

“You have the processor side of the device, the power side, the engine, and then the Other Half is about adding to that. This is a new kind of media where it could be anything from your favourite artist could release their latest album on the other half of the Jolla device, and then when the user buys this they have a physical thing from their favourite artist then when they snap it on to the other half of their Jolla device, then everyone can see it, that they support and love their artist and then on the inside they could get the content. They could get maybe special content, that could only be released in this format like videos or links to websites or tickets or special offers, things like that but because of this interface between the two halves,” he told TechCrunch.

“It can not only be media, it can be very simple things — so maybe you have a colour palette, so when you go out of an evening you might have a different colour depending on your outfit and that colour then carries through to the software updating the Ambience of the device. So you might have — if you have a green dress, you might have a green device and then you have green icons and green Ambience [Sailfish UI theme] on your phone. But it can also be more interesting — you can add features. Like the camera is a good example, the native camera of course has a flash but maybe you’re going to a party and you want to have a big flash so you can take pictures in the dark at a nightclub. So really the imagination is the only limit here.”

“Instead of having a device with some bulky things attached to it or some things sticking out the side of it to extend the capabilities of the device, or to add content, we’re giving a new way for users to actually design and co-create with us new ways of using the device,” Dillon added.

“Of course we will be offering a choice of Other Halves for the user to buy but this is a place where we want to see others get involved. Designers can design Other Halves for the device, engineers or hackers or techies can design new interfaces and maybe add physical hardware features that they wish they had on their device but might have a smaller market than to deserve having a whole entire device,” he said. “We talked about 3D printing them today. So it could be those kinds of things, but really we’re offering a new kind of interface for a device so that people can really take their imagination, and I believe there will be a lot of third parties and a lot of people who have a lot of great ideas in order to help you use the Other Half of the Jolla device.”

The Other Half may be a bit of a clumsy name but it’s a savvy move that taps into the custom hardware trend that’s growing off the back of the rising profile of 3D printing. That said, it does of course remain to be seen how much interest Jolla can spark for others to get involved in co-creation with only one device to its name and that device not launching for another six months. It will need enough traction to get the co-creation party started.

The idea to link the hardware and software has been part of Jolla company discussions and plans since the beginning, according to Dillon. “It’s been something that we’ve been planning and working towards the whole time. The Ambience was a hint of how this can come together,” he noted, adding: ”Hardware like many things, it’s become a commodity, so the problem with commodities is it generally forces things down — things become kind of lowest common denominator… We set out to make the greatest device that we could, and we understood that the software and the user experience is key because that’s where the value comes from in the device and the hardware is the realisation of that, it’s a productisation of the software.

“So we kind of took this tack, then of course the hardware has to be fantastic it has to support the software and support the user and be something the user can be proud of and my belief is that when people see the Jolla device they want to see what’s inside.”

“This iteration, the direct stuff here, has been about a year in development. It started getting really good for me about six months ago and I’ve been using the device for a while now, and it’s really started to feel fantastic, when the hardware and the software have come together. They were done by the same designers and the same people so it has been kept in mind that the two go together, that the two have a synergy the entire time. We’ve had a roadmap the entire time as well so we’ve had a set of hardware specifications to work with,” he added.

It’s worth flagging that Jolla is not the only mobile maker to take an interest in 3D printing and custom hardware, even if it’s taken that further by creating a link between custom hardware and phone content. 3D printing is something Nokia has done with the Lumia 820 shell, for instance. Dillon said Jolla may also look to open source the 3D design of the Other Half, telling TechCrunch “I could see that happening”.

Asked specifically about the bridging technology between the hardware shell and the software, Dillon declined to give specific details, saying: “There’s a number of options here but there is a connection between the Other Half and the software. And of course all of that needs to be open as well.”

Asked whether the device will launch in the U.S. he said Jolla is looking at other markets but opting for Europe and China first. ”We’re starting with Europe and China and we will be extending to other markets as we go. We’re in the delivery phase at the moment so we’re building the infrastructure, and the logistics in order to be able to deliver and care for the users of the device, and we’re of course going to look at other markets as we go.”

“It’s the target to get the Christmas market in Europe, Chinese New Year. That’s the big milestones,” he added. “The most important thing is we come out with a fantastic product… When we’re shipping at the end of the year if it’s a fantastic product then it’s really going to resonate and I think we’re really going to have a lot of demand.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the first half of 2013, Facebook has made a number of moves to improve its platform for entertainment and lifestyle applications.

New Timeline sections give users a place to save and display their favorite books, movies, TV shows and music. Developers can use new common Open Graph actions like “want to watch” and “want to read.” Users can share what they’re listening to, eating, feeling and more through structured status updates. Graph Search lets them find content and recommendations through friends and others. And a deal with Rovi gives Facebook a detailed database of information about movies, TV shows and celebrities

We spoke to Facebook Manager, Strategic Partnerships Ime Archibong about the new opportunities for entertainment apps on the platform, Facebook’s expanding role in content discovery, and how Open Graph can represent our offline activities and memories. The following is an edited transcript from that interview.

Inside Facebook: So it seems like a good time to talk to you now with the the new Timeline sections, News Feed and Graph Search all launched. Let’s start by talking about the state of Facebook’s entertainment platform.

Ime Archibong: I’m really excited about the suite of assets that are available for apps right now, in the entertainment space particularly and in the music space, which is one of the things I’m most excited about. You have things that are great for users. Take sections in the Timeline redesign that came out. Users now have a home for where their music consumption goes, and I’m pretty excited about that.

News Feed continues to be an important piece of distribution property for apps. With the redesign and the prominence of the music section coming out, that’s another huge asset. Graph Search. I think we’re still a ways away from where we’re going to go with Graph Search, but there’s no mystery that Open Graph actions will be showing up in Graph Search at some point, and that’s going to be a good source of traffic for these entertainment apps.

And I like what we’re doing in mobile right now. The new pages redesign is slick, it’s user-centric. If you think of that as a music artist’s home base in the Facebook ecosystem, and as we make it more engaging for users, it’s a good piece of real estate for artists themselves. I look at all these assets starting to stack up and how they come together and make us a meaningful distribution platform for these apps.

What were some of the observations and insights since the start of Open Graph apps and Timeline that that led to these changes like the new About page sections?

One of hypotheses we had when we started with apps like Spotify for instance was that people want to share and publish back what they’re listening to in a way that will round out their identity. We had a decent home for it with profile and aggregations that were showing on Timeline, but now we have a great home for it, and we’re really honoring that content. Someone can dig down deep and see what’s trending with you right now, what you’ve been listening to a lot, or get a good snapshot of what historically is important to you. That just feels right to me.

I moved a few weeks ago, and I was trying to downsize so I took all my books, all my CDs, all my DVDs and I literally went to my Timeline section and put in “Catcher in the Rye,” “Heart of Darkness” and so on. And then I put these things in a box to give to goodwill.

There’s always been this conversation about how as things move toward digital we lose this attachment and ownership of content. But I think we fill a pretty big void there. This (Timeline sections feature) shows how I’m emotionally attached to this Mary J. Blige CD or this Jay-Z CD without me having to take it every place I go in some form factor I don’t even listen to anymore. So it’s just observations like that that influence product and design and made us do some very interesting and compelling things for users.

For the distribution channels like News Feed and music feed, and why that became more prominent is because historically Facebook has been a hub for where people talk and have conversations around music. Music is inherently social and we just got to be sure it’s a compelling product for people to discover stuff and for artists who can get their stuff out there. That music feed is fantastic and I’m excited to see how we continue to evolve it.

The music feed is definitely one of the most compelling of the feeds. It always has been really advanced in terms of showing the power of Facebook’s data for recommendations and discovery. The key is, though, can you get that in front of people and will they click over to it? It definitely has more prominence than before, but it’s existed for a long time without people knowing about it.

One of the things I’m excited about is mobile and the prominence (the music feed) can have at the top there. Half a billion people access Facebook through the mobile application and that is what’s going to be in front of people. Making sure that we get the stories right and hit discovery in this environment is exciting.

So that addresses music, but what are the most interesting opportunities for other entertainment apps and platforms?

Going back to sections, I think things like books and movies are more tied to your identity than music in some sense. The fact that you consumed something like a book or a movie, the time investment that you put in there, is more than you do with a song. So the sections are important for those two media types. It’s like the bookshelf I had in my apartment for years.

How does your team measure success and judge where you are since f8 and the launch of Open Graph apps?

I would say we’ve been successful and we continue to want to do more and more work to take it to the next level clearly, but I think what continues to get us excited is being the No. 1 source of traffic for apps, whether that’s on the desktop or increasingly more mobile. We’re happy that a bunch of people are out there trying to solve the problem, but going back to the point of the different unique assets that we have, we think we have a unique opportunity to be the major source of traffic for these music apps or video apps or book apps. So that’s the ultimate goal and what gets us super excited to come to the office everyday.

What would you say that you try to instill to those platform partners as far as how they should be building for Facebook and what you can offer them back?

There’s a couple different pillars. One of the things for a lot of these partners for a number of years has been the identity piece. There are a lot of people (before Facebook) that didn’t think about what a media consumption product that knew who the consumer was could be. You have their name, where they’re from, who some of their friends are. And when you can go and build a product with that rich social information, it changes the bounds of what you can do as a designer, a user experience person, a product person. Then, there’s no lie we’ve been a great source of distribution. I think a lot of the smaller partners and apps that we worked with in this media space have seen great success.

What types of companies or experiences do really well? Is it those new experiences or the existing players integrating Facebook into what they have already?

It goes both ways. One of the models we had for our team was ‘We want to make social companies big and big companies social.’ The folks that have done really well are the ones that have leaned in and bought into the vision and understand that we move at the fastest pace of any platform or technology company that touches so many people and developers. Folks that can move really fast with us know that at the end of the day every meaningful metric to them, what they’re trying to get out of the integration, is going to be up and to the right.

We’ve seen it play out with something like Songza, really small team, leans in, wants to be along for the fantastic ride, willing to pivot and move really quickly with Facebook and take advantage of the stuff that we launch. And we see it with big companies like Clear Channel with iHeartRadio (which it owns). Massive, massive old school radio technology company and they sat down with us two years ago and said ‘yeah this is a mission, something we want to do.’ And iHeartRadio has seen tremendous success on the Open Graph and continues to grow and do well.

What are the types of companies that should be developing for Facebook and building into the Open Graph that aren’t yet? Is there a theme to the type of companies that aren’t but should be?

I would say, if you are a company that is building a product that is inherently social offline, that looking into the Open Graph and the hooks of the platform is where the opportunity is. We saw that with the fitness app ecosystem that sprouted up recently.

So, I’m not really a runner. I’m more of a team sports person, but all of a sudden I’m trying out this Nike fitness app and my friends are cheering me on as I run and it’s like ‘ooh ok, people are actually paying attention.’ People talk about running marathons and they run faster or it’s more enjoyable because you have the crowd there cheering and giving you support. The fact that I can now do that with just my phone, my earbuds and my Facebook friends? That my mom can cheer me on from North Carolina and my aunt can cheer me on from Kenya? That’s fantastic and great and turned me into a runner. Whether it’s digitally or a person giving me a thumbs up as I’m running by, that starts to change things. I think that was the most exciting thing for me, seeing something offline change as a result of the online integration that a company chose to do with Facebook because it is inherently social.

I think if you’re an app where you see an offline behavior that can be changed, enhanced or supported by doing it at scale, breaking down geo-boundaries, that’s where your opportunity is to plug into the Open Graph.

Yeah, I’m still waiting for a really good social book club app that takes advantage of the ability to make asynchronous experiences feel synchronous, so where I can see where a friend is in a book, leave notes for them, see what they say about something.

That’s exactly it. That’s an offline experience, that book club that people love to have. That’s exactly those folks that should be leaning into the platform.

So we’ve talked about Facebook’s role for app discovery and these new feeds and Timeline and Graph Search. There have always been opportunities for people to serendipitously discover things in News Feed, but now it seems like there are more ways for people to purposely discover content. To what degree do you guys want to be that source for serendipitous discovery versus — or together with — that intentional discovery?

The launch of Graph Search launched us into that foray where someone can come do the pull model of discovery. I know exactly what I’m looking for, I can now go type it into my search and find it. Historically in Facebook we hadn’t quite put that into the forefront or made it a great user experience, but we did the push model really really well. We’re going to continue to do that well. I continue to be excited about how good we will get at that, especially when it comes to these different content types like music. I keep going back to this idea, which is the different assets that we have at our disposal to make sure and knock that push discovery to an experience that’s really exciting for users. But yeah, our role is going to be interesting to see how it plays out. The push is going to be big for us, but as Graph Search scales out more that is going to be a good use case.

It definitely seems like Facebook is one of the most obvious companies that should be doing this for people, but then it seems like you’re in a tricky position because then what is the role of third-parties? Many of these apps start out or were created for that same sort of discovery purpose. I think of Rotten Tomatoes bringing in your friends and letting you share what you want to watch and helping people discover movies. How do you see the role of these third-parties in push and pull discovery and how does that balance with what you guys are trying to do?

You’d have to talk to each of these companies to figure out strategically what’s most important to them. Let’s default back to music again. I think if you talk to some companies, they’ll tell you that the consumption experience is the most important thing to them. They want to be where people go when they either download music or are streaming music. And once that happens, they’re happy. As a result of that philosophy, wherever the music discovery happens, whether it’s inside of the app or Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, they don’t care as long as they’re driving that consumption experience. And then there’s going to be folks that understand and really like the discovery aspect. They’re building follow graphs and want to do the pull-push model for music or video or whatever it may be.

I think the role we play with the first bucket is clear: we want to make sure we’re a major source of traffic for those folks and we’re driving as many eyeballs to apps, websites, wherever that consumption experience can happen. For these other folks, they can use Facebook Login, they can get identity and friends and figure out how to use those things on their side for discovery. Most recently, we’ve opened up ‘want to watch,’ ‘want to listen,’ ‘want to read’ as an API that a Goodreads, a Netflix or a Spotify can go and hit so that when you log in as a brand new user and you’ve already told Facebook you want to read or watch or listen to these things, boom, here they are. So I think we play a role in both worlds, and it’s going to be a case by case thing depending on whether they’re focused on consumption only or discovery and consumption.

What do you find are the biggest barriers for companies to decide to go ahead and build on the Open Graph and create these experiences? For the people who aren’t, why aren’t they?

Sometimes it just boils down to engineering resources. At the end of the day, they’re making prioritizations and judgment calls. I won’t speculate what one company is deciding versus another, but a lot of times it comes down to prioritization and have they have to go do business and they know what they need to focus on. We talk to a lot of these folks and we have great relationships with all of them. How they integrate Facebook, whether it’s in a lightweight way or a very deep way with the Open Graph, there’s just a spectrum of options that they’re always weighing and considering versus the priorities they have on their side.

But what about those companies that aren’t even started or wouldn’t even come up with these ideas on their own? Are you guys going to companies and saying, ‘hey, what if you did this?’ Like, I’d want to go to AMC and tell them to hook in Open Graph with their membership card program to share what movies people are going to see. Do you guys go out and do those types of things?

We love to brainstorm.

So when  you come to companies with pie-in-the-sky ideas and give them ways they could be like Nike, too, how do they respond?

They’re typically well received. My team focuses on non-game partnerships so we can go and have conversations with companies like Delta. Big, big, traditional company. When you go in, you don’t know what to expect. We could paint them the craziest social vision right now and they’re either going to be way over here (not getting it) or they’re going to kinda get it, or we sit down and we’re pleasantly surprised. Delta has a new mobile app and iPad app that has Facebook integration and login. They’ve been super progressive about how social ties into what has historically been somewhat of a transactional industry.

What does the app do with Facebook?

First and foremost it’s identity. Then they’re looking at how you can leverage friends and social connections as your’e going from one destination to the other. They have an in-flight app that shows you the map of the ground of where you are at any given moment on the plane and shows you where your friends are. So you have conversations like that which are pleasantly surprising.

You brought up the idea of travel, and that’s a big area for apps. For Facebook, it sort of went from games to now we’re really in this entertainment, fitness, lifestyle phase, which travel fits into. Are there sights on what the next big category might be?

For one thing, categories pop up. You know, someone could go out tomorrow and build that book club app we just talked about and before you know it, book club apps are what emerges on the platform. The developer ecosystem just forms around these different ideas and concepts, so for us we want to keep building the foundation and the tools and the infrastructure so that any offline experience or even online experience that is interested in social can go and do something meaningful for their company, for their industry and also for over a billion users.

And another thing — this is for me personally and also more broadly here inside these walls — we’re still really focused on the media space. The job’s not done there. Even sitting here in the last couple minutes we’ve talked about all the different assets that could be helping the discovery of apps. Really nailing that experience and getting that right is something we remain excited about.

Do you guys ever talk about the potential for apps that are private? So many of these apps are about sharing with friends, but how do you feel about apps that for things that people don’t necessarily want to share but they want to document or save in a structured way. Say like Weight Watchers, which is personal but might be something people want to have saved as part of their identity and milestones on Timeline. Do you ever talk to companies like that with experiences which maybe aren’t super social but are really important to people?

Identity is definitely one of the pillars of Facebook that has always been there and really emerged with the refresh and push of Timeline. That’s exactly where that space lies. We could enumerate and talk about apps for a while that might make sense, whether it’s Weight Watchers or my financial information. I could potentially see a world where we get there, but I think in order to get there we need to focus on the most social industries and app experiences that make sense so that users understand this is a place where you can save, represent, collect whatever it is that is important to you as a person.

On top of that, one of the things I’ve been most proud about with Facebook is the work that we’ve done around privacy to make sure that people are saving, publishing back, sharing to Facebook, you do have the granular controls of saying ‘I want the whole world to understand and know I love Mary J. Blige, but I only want me, myself and I to know that I love Justin Bieber.’ And maybe I want to save that because 10 years from now I want to come back and look at what kind of phase I was in there, even if it’s just for myself as a keepsake.

So, in my move recently, I pulled a cassette tape — the first cassette tape I ever had, ‘Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt Em’ MC Hammer — and I can’t play this anywhere, but I’ve been keeping it and dragging it along because it represents the first thing that I got that was musical. I remember the Christmas I got it. So I added it to my music section, and maybe it’s only me right now, but nonetheless it’s there and it’s there for me to keep.

To learn more about this topic, join us at Inside Social Apps in San Francisco June 6-7. One of our sessions is “Going Social with Entertainment and Commerce Apps.” The panel will highlight the social features that best drive engagement in these apps.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs.

I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs, the guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the tech industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies in the world.

There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please read/watch our entire interview then reevaluate. He had a quick start with his first Mac product interactions being at age three. As a child growing up in Gainesville Florida, when asked what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, he agreed to basically do anything (anything was help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted for an internship at Apple. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project.”  7-days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? As an intern Apple awarded him a cash bonus, what VP of iPod at the time and eventual Nest co-founder Tony Fadell said was something, “He had never done before.”

Apple

After school he returned to Apple and spent the next few years working on the firmware for iPod nano and iPod classic. After his first weekend back at Apple, and spending Saturday and Sunday getting moved in and buying furniture, his manager approached him saying, “Where have you been?” Matt responded, “I went to buy furniture.” He replied, “You should have been here.” He responded, “Oh. I didn’t even know!” Matt said that this, ”Set the pace for how iPod would be for the next five years.”

In December 2005, Matt and a small team started working on the first iPhone concepts in a project called “Purple.” At the time no one in the company knew what was going on, not even some of their own managers. They built the initial prototype in four months. It wasn’t good enough so they started again.  That second version was the one Steve Jobs would unveil on stage at MacWorld in January 2007. Four weeks previous to that, 25-members of the team went to China hand-building from scratch each of the first 200-devices to be shown at MacWorld. The team was divided into day shift and night shift to hit the deadlines, working through Christmas and returning after New Year’s Day.

The Founding of Nest

After shipping the iPhone, Matt led work on Nano, Shuffle, and parts of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV projects. By late 2009 he had hired 40-people and managed teams building these products, all in his mid-late twenties. That fall he had a two hour lunch with Tony Fadell, his former boss at Apple who had left in 2008. Matt told Tony he wanted to start a company. “What do you want to do?” Tony replied. “I want to build a smart home company.” Tony’s response? “You’re an idiot. No one wants to buy a smart home, they’re for geeks.” But it turned out Tony was already building a smart home in Tahoe, with solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, and more. Tony honed in and focused on a single idea. “Why don’t you just build me a thermostat?” Matt replied, “Why not? We could build an iPod?” Tony responded, “We’ll do it in six months.”

Tony and Matt have what appears to be the ideal co-founder relationship, stemming back from his early internship days at Apple. “We think very much alike, to the point where we complete each other’s sentences. I don’t know if I would be able to do it without him.”

But was this the idea to risk a promising future at Apple on? Matt had elevated from intern to Senior Manager in just a few short years. “The more we dug, the more we realized, this is a company we must go start. We could save 10% of energy, solve an epic problem, no innovation, multibillion dollar market. Why would we not do this?”

Matt quit his job in Spring 2010, rented a garage in Palo Alto, and started cranking in secret. Matt would visit with old colleagues and say “Hey will you quit your job? Will you come work (for free) with us on a new project I can’t tell you about?” The first ten hires worked for free for six months before finally raising money in October 2010. They bootstrapped with money from Tony and some from Matt. “We were all working basically severn days a week, twelve hours a day, it was crazy. Not everyone was living in the office – people have families, so they’d go home for dinner and then come back. It was craziness.” Everyone worked on Thanksgiving only taking a few hours off. Matt claims no one got divorced over the extreme conditions adding that “all the wives are happy now.”

Still no one knew that Tony was even involved. “In the early days when we were fully stealth. “We had no website, no LinkedIn, we had nothing. Zero outbound communication. I wouldn’t even tell people that (Tony was involved). For all they knew, I was the only founder. To get people in the door the first time meant I did a lot of lunches, a lot of coffees to get people excited. I wouldn’t tell people on the first date – I’d show a little leg, but I wouldn’t go all the way.”

So here is Nest, in stealth, building an incredibly difficult hardware/software product, with limited funding, but still managing to assemble a killer engineering team, in the midst of a talent war with Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, and Twitter exploding all around. “It was a mixture of my old team at Apple, my old professor from CMU and a few folks from Tony’s early days at General Magic twenty years earlier. One guy was a VP at Twitter, one was running Microsoft User Experience. Unlike most startup teams the average age of our team was about 40. I think I was the youngest.”

A year after raising a Series A from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed, Shasta, and others, they shipped their first product. This spring Nest was widely rumored to have raised $80MM at an $800MM valuation and shipping 50,000 thermostats each month. This company that was in a garage in 2010 is now +200 employees, and selling products in Lowe’s, Apple Stores, Best Buy, and about half their inventory is sold online. The company is not without controversy, having been sued by Honeywell for patient infringement, and as one friend in the home automation industry recently told me, “Everyone is watching Nest.” They also recently acquired venture backed energy dashboard MyEnergy.

Building HARD-ware

Nest launched their first product a year after raising Series A, 18-months after their inception, with 75-employees and having spent $10MM. “That’s with a team of extremely senior guys who have all done this a dozen times before. The difference between doing it a dozen times before at Apple, Samsung or Google and doing it on your own, is that there’s no backup. At Apple we worked on the project for a year, got it ready and hand it over to the operations team to go scale and shoot to the moon with. We all had roles we played at previous companies and that all went out the window at Startup Land. You have an HR hat, facilities hat, janitor hat, doesn’t matter, you have do it.”

Is it any surprise that there are so few hardware startups the Valley? Or that most entrepreneurs choose an app or a website over a hardware device? Entrepreneurship is hard enough not to have to layer in these complications. Matt adds, “I don’t believe I could build Nest if Tony and I didn’t have all that experience at Apple. It’s really hard to pull off fully integrated consumer electronic devices. It’s also really expensive to build a consumer electronic product. You have to build prototypes but you have to build tools. You have to get a manufacturing line set up. You have to front inventory costs. It’s crazy expensive.”

When our interview finished a few weeks ago, I walked Matt out to his car. It was 9pm, and he was cheerfully headed back to work for yet another late night at Nest. After hearing about the culture and work ethic at Nest, his attitude simply reminded me of how he described working a holiday a few years previously. ”That’s what it takes,” he casually said. And if you really want to change the world I couldn’t agree more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Snackchat! Taco Bell tweeted, “We’re on Snapchat” last night, urging their Twitter followers to add them for a “secret announcement” some time today. This is the first major brand to use Snapchat to reach customers, and could signal the beginning of Snapchat’s monetization.

Snapchat is an ephemeral photo messaging application that raised a $13.5M Series A in February. Taco Bell reached out to Snapchat on Twitter yesterday; after a couple of responses from Snapchat (below), Taco Bell announced that they’re on Snapchat at the handle “tacobell.”

@tacobell lol yes we should. Just had a delicious Doritos locos taco last night

— Snapchat (@Snapchat) April 30, 2013

@tacobell okay! If you send an email to support@snapchat.com we’ll make sure it gets to the right place!

— Snapchat (@Snapchat) April 30, 2013

In December, when Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel told me the company was prototyping monetization features, I wrote about the most likely ways the company could monetize:

With a very captive audience, Snapchat could have very profitable ads. Imagine a picture snap once a day or every 10 snaps where you have to hold the image and view the ad for five seconds before using the app more. Or an advertising video snap that played on its own for 10 seconds, instead of you holding it down to view.

The problem with most mobile ads is that they take up too much of the screen at random times (Facebook app newsfeed, anyone?) and both mobile and web ads are ignored by users as they adjust to where the ads are located and just scroll past them.

Snapchat could offer advertisers a highly engaged user for a very brief period of time.

The most interesting part of this Taco Bell development is that the company asked followers to add them on Snapchat. There are two settings for “Who can send me snaps”: friends and everyone. Snapchat sends all users, regardless of their settings, video snaps on holidays like Christmas and New Years. If Taco Bell is asking users to add them, it means they’re–at least for now–only sending snaps to people who add them. But, at least from the tweets above, it looks like there’s been some sort of collaboration between Taco Bell and Snapchat so far. 

Taco Bell doesn’t need Snapchat’s help to snap people who have friended Taco Bell. So the logical next step would be sending snaps to everyone, the way Snapchat sends holiday snaps to all users–regardless of settings and who they’ve friended.

This could be a very lucrative revenue source for Snapchat. Rather than banner ads covering part of the screen in snaps, users could ignore snap ads and simply not open them. But I think a lot of users, myself included, would open most of the snap ads out of curiosity. And obviously, an opened snap reaches highly engaged eyeballs, as it fills the whole screen, with the user physically touching the ad.

Of course, some users will be pissed off by ads invading their Snapchat inboxes, a far more private space than the public streams of social networks. For now, Taco Bell snapping to their “friends” is an interesting first step towards monetization.

I’ve Snapchatted Spiegel and Taco Bell asking for comment (seriously). I’ll update the post if I hear back and once Taco Bell sends out their surprise Snapchat announcement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Two years ago I was very excited by the possibilities of the Wii U. I instantly fell in love with the idea of the tablet/joypad game controller and saw all sorts of possible uses. It seemed like it might well be the console that could do it all, from first-person shooters to real-time strategy, and also lots of funky stuff like drawing games, things to do with cameras and so on. I also loved the notion that I might finally be able to play Call of Duty without having to fight over TV time with my wife.

I wondered aloud whether this play for an Ultimate Platform could be both the start and the end of something, and privately hoped that it would overcome some of its initial confusion and become interesting. Having largely mined the casual market to death with wibbly-wobbly party games and yoga simulators, it felt like a good time for Nintendo to start talking to its fans again and regenerating the marketing story that had got it so far. Concerns had long been raised among gamers that Nintendo had turned its back on them, and they felt that the company was not interested in them anymore. So Wii U seemed to be all about Nintendo finding its way back to them, but also dragging all of its newfound casual friends along for the ride.

But it seems the fans have already decided that for themselves, and Nintendo’s attempt to reignite the old flame is falling on deaf ears. Not only are sales of the platform very weak, it just has no buzz. Aside from the usual anticipation of a new Zelda, all the column inches about Wii U these days are about how poorly it’s selling, how shoddy some of the technology in it is, and how the premium games that it’s trying to attract all look cut-down in comparison to “proper” versions. Nobody, it seems, thinks that the controller is a big enough deal to really get excited. And to make matters worse, the casual market of Wii isn’t particularly interested either.

Like that other recent dud, the PS Vita, you know it’s all gone wrong when a platform is just not featuring in any conversations. Nobody’s thinking of making games for it, fans are generally not getting excited for it, and folks forget that it exists. Oh that, they say. Did that ever come out? What I find myself wondering, however, is why this has happened so fast to Wii U.

The console has only been available for three months and its first titles were mostly well-received. ZombiU was interesting, and many a Twitterite noted how Nintendoland was perhaps a little odd but full of user-created art and other neat stuff. The prospect of games on the horizon was also welcome. Then in the wake of Christmas it was all very silent. Sony started rumbling about PS4, Microsoft about Xbox, and the whole microconsole idea started to gain traction. Somewhere along the way we just kind of forgot about Nintendo entirely. Outside of the usual fan circle, nobody seems to be factoring the system into their thinking.

It’s possible that this is all because of the Wii/Wii U brand mixup. Six years ago the Wii was the hot ticket, and you could not buy one without sacrificing your firstborn. It was based on a very simple yet compelling idea (wave hand, something happens on screen) and extended this idea out with some very smart accessories like the Wii Fit. And yet three years ago, developers were already grumbling that Wii felt like it had peaked. Third-party games didn’t really sell well, and the technology was more limited than it initially appeared. Worse, the scuttlebutt around the campfire had it that most users who were buying Wiis were really only playing them for a week or two and then shelving them until birthdays and Christmas rolled around.

In many ways then, Wii may have already been a dead brand to most players, and selling them something that connected to that brand may have felt quaint. What certainly didn’t help was that the system seemed like (and still seems like) an add-on for your Wii. When the console was first announced in June 2011 there was mass confusion over what it actually was. At first it seemed to be a peripheral, much as Wii Fit had been. Then it slowly came to light that, no, it was a console. But not exactly a successor to the Wii, as it was aiming for a much more sophisticated kind of gamer. So we had the vision of the Wii brand trying to be all about fighters and shooters, and yet hold onto its casual roots.

Wii U is not the first Nintendo system in recent memory to try and fail to extend an existing audience. The 3DS tried much the same trick, building on all that DS love and hoping to convince the world that 3D was going to be the next big thing. The world remains unconvinced about that and is not inclined to pay a premium to find out. However Nintendo was able to backtrack via a large price cut and save the DS market. With Wii U, though, it feels different. Pivoting toward the core was probably a decision made from knowing what the attach rate and margins of casual games tend to be compared to fanfare, and yet still. Perhaps the Wii brand had already aged so much that the new system just needed a new story to tell.

Then there’s the technology. Although Apple and Nintendo are similar in many respects one of the big differences between the companies is that Apple has always tended to build sweet systems for the upper end of the market, so their devices are more expensive but also of better quality. Nintendo, on the other hand, tends to be cheap. In areas such as battery life, the number of gamepads the system can support, the slapped-together feeling of its online offering, difficulties with transferring saved games and so on, Nintendo created an air of ineptitude around the Wii U launch that refuses to go away.

There’s also the sensation that the competition has passed Nintendo by. While Sony’s recent conference may have produced mixed impressions (from those who think it was a great console launch, to others like me who think it showed a stark failure of vision), there’s a sense that the game is now Microsoft’s to lose. For all its woes, Kinect largely became the more interesting peripheral story, and many expect Microsoft to make a big announcement that will win the next generation soon. Nintendo, perhaps, needs to be bolder than it has been with Wii U. Perhaps it should have cut the console chord entirely and been a purely portable system (with better battery life). Perhaps Nintendo should not have worried so much about backwards compatibility (does anyone use their Wii Fit any more?) and instead focused on one core verb to define the new system.

Or perhaps it’s because Nintendo didn’t think small enough. Those pesky iDevices are becoming near universal, with their free games and such, and the taste for gaming, which is even more portable, is only growing. Likewise, microconsoles are emerging as a potential super cheap console with all the fun games you could imagine for cheap. Perhaps Wii U needed to be that simplistic and inexpensive.

It feels as though Wii U is the result of a company becoming trapped in a box of its own making. Nobody seems to want an ultimate console, or if they do they don’t want Nintendo’s version. The question before the company is whether the system can, or should, be saved. With only three months on the market, it is extremely unlikely that Wii U will be shelved, but it certainly needs adjustment. Whether in terms of a large drop in price or a revision of the technology, something big needs to be done.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at his Startup Blog, BothSidesoftheTable.

Creating awareness for your brand and products is one of the lifebloods of technology startups yet in a world where so many companies are being created it becomes difficult to rise above the noise.

Ever notice how some companies tend to be in the press all the time and your big new product launch struggled for inches?

Mostly it’s because your marketing campaigns suck.

Or more directly – they are likely narcissistic resuscitations of your newest features or bragging points that nobody but your marketing team and your mom care about.

I recommend that companies move beyond narcissistic marketing to what I call “point-of-view (POV) marketing.”

Here’s what I mean …

Let’s start with what it takes for a journalist to want to write a story. Here’s what’s going through his/her head:

• Is this story “newsworthy” or am I being asked to publish a press release?
• Do I have an “angle” from which to write the story (first company to do X, company does biggest X, consumer behavior is doing X)?
• If I’m covering a company can I get evidence of what the competition is doing so the story is balanced?
• Do I have data or facts to present so the story has legs?
• Can I get sources to talk on-the-record or off-the-record to lend credibility to the topic?
• Will I have information that other journalists don’t have (otherwise known as a “scoop”)?

But mostly they’re thinking, “Will my audience even care about this topic?”

The ultimate measure of success for a journalist is viewership so if nobody cares about your shitty little company and the story you’re trying to pitch then the journalist doesn’t want to publish. And it’s their judgment that becomes the ultimate arbiter of this.

And beyond eyeballs they also care about “journalistic integrity” (aka their reputation) so they want to be sure they’re not being gamed. That’s why having long-term relationships with journalists matters and why having people close to the journalist who can vouch for your

So how exactly do you break out then?

If you start with a POV rather than product features / functions or your own internal news story you’re already a long way down the track of answering the above questions. The idea is that you put out information with data and a point-of-view and that becomes the story rather than you.

Why would I want to have a POV rather than talking about my cool new features?

The major battle for press is a battle for “mindshare” and it’s exactly the reason I blog. I am a VC. I hand out money. How differentiated is that? But through expressing points-of-view I can raise above the consciousness of my customers (entrepreneurs and limited partners who invest in VC funds) in ways that I couldn’t without breaking through the noise of the hundreds of others of VCs who also have money.

Think about Luma Partners. They are an investment bank that targets the technology & media sectors. They basically help companies get sold and help buyers determine which companies to buy.

Their website proclaims,

“LUMA Partners is a different kind of investment bank. We provide strategic advice to digital media companies in a manner that reflects how corporate development is actually done. This more strategic approach produces better outcomes for acquirers and target companies alike.”

Can you imagine that ever getting inches in the press? Or somebody reading that and thinking “Yeah, I get it. Let me be sure to use me some Luma Partners. They’re different. More strategic. Must call. Now. Dialing.”

Of course not.

But everybody knows Luma Partners in our space. Why?

Because they produce the “LUMAscapes” which are essentially visually guides to all of the major players in a technology market. It’s brilliant.

Every corporate buyer of technology and/or technology companies knows the LUMAscape and uses it to figure out which vendors they should consider. And thus every technology company in that space fights to be sure they’re on the LUMAscape.

And every time a new LUMAscape is published it is newsworthy. Why?

A journalist has a visual chart they can use. That chart has information on it. Some people were added to the chart. Others were removed. There’s drama. Intrigue.

It doesn’t talk about Luma’s strategic approach. But everybody knows that Luma produced it.

Now of course there’s a lot more that goes into building a brand like the fact that the founders of Luma have long reputations in our industry and people respect them. Plus they run conferences with the top people (which is another form of POV marketing by the way).

But mostly they break through the noise of many other investment banks by having a POV.

One of the masters of this in the startup technology world is Flurry. Consider this blog post titled, “Christmas 2012 Shatters More Smart Device and App Download Records.” In the post they list four charts with data showing how Christmas day is a huge driver of downloads for mobile applications (obviously because many people get new smartphones for the first time). It’s why every major mobile app developer gears up for the holiday season by trying to be as high as possible on the charts because when the newbies come searching for popular apps in the app stores you get a huge additional bump if you’re already high in the charts.

Flurry doesn’t talk about all of their analytics features and functions. They offer a point-of-view about their market. And they back it up with data. And journalists eat that shit up because it has all that they’re looking for: facts, charts, an angle, news, something that their readers care about, etc.

And Flurry always gets mentioned. So when somebody is going to the purchase aisle and thinking about buying a mobile analytics platform they have the brand recognition that matters.

Final example. PwC. They sell accounting services. You can imagine the press release, “New innovative model allows us to do audits differently than the competition!” Or I guess that was the slogan for Arthur Andersen. Ouch. Kidding!

But look at what PwC actually does in this report, “CEO Surveys for Business Growth” which has a POV, two charts and a video to watch. They have configured the charts to be easily downloadable and sharable directly from the page and the video to be embeddable. Their marketing team ought to gets some pats on the back. Making it extra easy to copy charts / data just increases the lift the story gets.

By publishing your data on a blog (as in the case of Flurry and PwC) you get the added benefit of driving traffic back to your website as the journalists often link to the “full report” and thus you get all of the SEO juice to drive future search traffic also.

So next time you’re thinking about how to get coverage for your new downloadable widget that third-party vendors can install and instantly get optimized gobblygook for some feature they didn’t know they needed and want a journalist who doesn’t give a fork about optimized gobblygooks and frankly doesn’t even understand that that is … think about leading with POV marketing instead.

When you get your potential customer talking about your brand, linking back to your website to learn more and show curiosity that’s when you want to hit them with, “have you ever thought about …?” But by then that person is a qualified lead that has shown enough interest in your website to pay you a visit.

If you want more marketing & PR tips I summarized a few of them over here on my blog, BothSidesofTheTable and I’ll add to the mix over time.

And I’m sure it’s not lost on you that my tips and my blogging are, in fact, POV marketing. After all, my money has the same president on it as everybody else’s in the US.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Austin-based re:3D just started a Kickstarter campaign for the Gigabot, a large-format 3D printer designed to build things on a 24x24x24 inch built envelope, allowing you to make much larger objects than you can with similar printers like the Makerbot. You can get the bot kit for $2,500 or a pre-assembled unit for $4,000.

The company was looking for a $40,000 pledge and has already surpassed $60,000, so there’s a good chance this thing will ship in time for when you need to build a 13,824 cubic-inch Christmas present.

The team launched the project at SXSW, and the company is founded by Samantha Lynne Snabes and Matthew Fiedler and a number of others with experience in manufacturing and design. They write:

It prints primarily in PLA right now because it does not have a heated build plate, but there are plans to offer that option in the future. While PLA isn’t ideal for some industrial situations, the plant-based plastic is still very usable and workable.

You can check out the project here or just imagine what it would be like to print out your own head, to scale, in corn-based resin.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Finnish startup Jolla is open for business. That’s the message CEO Marc Dillon was putting out, loud and clear, during two on-stage appearances at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona last week. Not a bad amount of stage time for a first time MWC attendee and a mobile upstart that hasn’t sold a single handset yet because it’s still busy making its first phone.

The sales pitch Jolla is taking to carriers and consumers is that Android has become too dominant and is commodifying the industry, while Apple’s platform is too closed and controlled. Jolla’s MeeGo-based Sailfish OS exists to offer choice, to bring something different to an industry it argues is stagnating under the Android + iOS duopoly.

“At the moment there’s not a lot of choices for consumers in the mobile space. There’s not a great deal of innovation,” Dillon tells TechCrunch. “I think that you have this duopoly with basically two operating systems and essentially two manufacturers. There’s a lot of manufacturers in the Android space but Samsung [dominates].

“We are providing a unique product with a very fresh user interface. We’ve given a tremendous amount of thought and work into making something that’s powerful yet easy to use. And we’ve also created an operating system for our devices that’s very portable. It’s easy to put onto different hardware so we’re able to give something that will allow consumers to have another choice.”

Jolla – a Finnish word meaning a small boat, which is pronounced ‘Yol-la’, rather than ‘Jo-la’ — now employs some 60 staff. The company was formed by ex-Nokians back in 2011 who left when it became clear Nokia was abandoning its efforts with MeeGo to focus fully on adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone for smartphones. So the collective experience of Jolla’s team is another key sales strategy for this startup. “We have 600 years of product creation experience with 60 guys,” was how Dillon pitched it during an on-stage Q&A at MWC.

The first Jolla-branded handset will be launched in time to capture the Christmas and Chinese New Year market, according to Dillon – making Q3 a likely timeframe, although “second half” is all he will be nailed down to. “We’re starting in China, then we’re going to Finland, then we’re going to penetrate into Europe,” he says. The U.S. market is not on the radar as yet, as he says the patent landscape there “raises a barrier” of entry to newcomers. (He’s especially critical of overly aggressive use of design patents.) “At some point as we move along I’m sure we’ll go into the U.S. market but it’s not one of our first starts,” he adds.

Jolla’s strategy to target China first is thus down to both the size of the market but also its relative openness to newcomers. The startup signed a deal with Chinese retailer D.phone last summer to be its distributor there – a key plank of its China play. D.phone has some 2,000 retail shops that will be carrying Jolla hardware, according to Dillon.

“Even a small share [of the Chinese market] is a great business. It’s a 300 million device market… It’s also a dynamic market. You can get to the CEO level very very quickly — if you have something to talk about, if you have something to say. You can get decisions made very quickly and you can actually get a lot of action very quickly.”

While Jolla has enough funding in the bank to be able to build its first phone it still needs to prioritise, like any startup, which is why it’s focusing on the “phone first” – and a high-end phone at that. That’s a business decision not a technical limitation of the Sailfish OS.

“Sailfish can go to a very feature-phone-oriented thing, all the way to… a high-end look and feel device,” says Dillon. Asked about other types of devices like tablets, he says Jolla is “talking to partners and potential partners” — but remains fully focused on the phone for now.

“This is our first device. We want to make it as good as we can, and we want to release the best device that we can,” he says. “The most important thing is to get the best product out that we possibly can and make sure that we do this with our hearts, with as much love as we can and I believe that people are going to feel it when they try the device.”

Will Jolla’s handset hardware be refreshingly different to all the iClone slab phones on the market today? “It’s going to be gorgeous hardware. I’ll put it like that. I wish I could show you.”

Building Jolla-branded hardware is not its only strategy. The startup has two other business models: it wants to license the Sailfish OS to other companies to put on their own hardware; and it wants to sell its skills in device-building to companies that might want to build their own phone or device but don’t necessarily have the expertise.

As an example of the latter model, Dillon says Jolla could work with a data-rich company like Foursquare to build a Foursquare phone that bakes its social, geolocated data throughout the experience. Or with a startup like Deezer to create a branded, music-oriented phone. Jolla would be able to offer third-party companies a device that has their brand “all over it and incorporates it in a way that’s unique”, he says.

If they’d have talked to us a year ago they’d have a beautiful Facebook phone today

What could a Foursquare phone built atop Sailfish do? It could let you – for instance — see who your friends are with and also where they are when you look in the contacts section of the phone, says Dillon. “That’s just really simple stuff, but there’s a huge amount of synergies that we can get. The architecture of Sailfish makes it easy to get onto different hardware and to have different types of user experience.”

What about a Facebook phone based on Sailfish? “I think if they’d have talked to us a year ago they’d have a beautiful Facebook phone today,” he says.

“Hardware’s hard, software’s hard, putting them together is really hard. This is our core competence,” he adds. “We’ve been doing this for a very, very long time. And we don’t have this cash-cow — we have a brand but we don’t have to protect it the same way that some other guys viciously protect their brand.”

Of course a Foursquare- or Facebook-branded Sailfish phone is just speculation and ambition at this point. Dillon is in Barcelona with his sales pitch to woo partners and carriers to think about alternatives to Android skinning or forking. But Jolla’s ambition is backed by a considerable level of funding now – to the tune of €10 million in capital from a private consortium of investors. And last month, a Chinese company also paid €1 million to take a 6.25 percent stake in the startup, valuing it at around $20 million.

Jolla is also establishing an ecosystem around Sailfish. Last October it announced an alliance of industry partners, based out of Hong Kong, which will back the OS and have committed to contributing €200 million to help accelerate the growth of the Sailfish ecosystem. Despite this focus on building its own ecosystem, Jolla is not walling itself off — Sailfish will support Android, Qt and HTML5 apps. But nor is it giving up on native apps: last week it released the Sailfish SDK with the aim of encouraging developers to build apps that dig deep into the OS features.

There’s no doubt Sailfish is entering much more crowded waters than Nokia could have, had it released more MeeGo devices rather than abandoning the OS altogether (releasing the N9 to, effectively, a locked cupboard in Espoo before canning any successors). Alternatives to Android and iOS now swimming around in the smartphone space trying to make a splash include big-name plays (albeit still with marginal market share), such as Microsoft’s Windows Phone and BlackBerry’s BB10, and also smaller fish taking the open source route – such as Mozilla’s Firefox OS, Canonical’s Ubuntu OS and the Samsung- and Intel-backed Tizen OS. And of course Jolla and its Sailfish. All these smaller guys were out in force at this year’s MWC.

Some tensions were also in evidence between the little guys, during a shared panel session featuring Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker, Jolla’s Dillon and Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth. Mozilla’s Firefox OS grabbed a lot of limelight at the show, garnering considerable carrier support for its open web HTML5-only approach. Mozilla is taking an ideological stance against native apps. But Dillon and Shuttleworth argued on stage that native apps and individual ecosystems are still important. (Shuttleworth called native apps “the domain of passion”, while Dillon said native is needed to make a device that “works magically”.) Mozilla’s Baker was publicly dismissive of their chances “for mass adoption for the ninth separate native app platform” – saying: “I wish you good luck!”

(As an aside, Jolla’s Sailfish sounds like it was deliberately named to contrast with Mozilla’s Firefox – water vs fire; swimming/sailing vs running; the quicksilver fish vs the wily fox; not to mention the “small agile boat” (Jolla’s meaning in Finnish) vs the lumbering Mozilla dinosaur…)

“HTML5 is not going to provide a really good device-level user experience at its current state today,” Dillon reiterated during our interview when asked about the importance of building an ecosystem around Sailfish. “There’s still a need for native applications and there’s a need to make things easily portable from one platform to another — if we exclude ecosystem.”

Jolla is supporting Qt (and Android) to encourage more native Sailfish apps to be built by making it easy for developers to port and then customise existing apps. “People are starting to port different applications and they’re able to find that it’s quick and it’s easy,” he says. “[Developers] can take their existing application engine and put a Sailfish UI on it very easily.”

He won’t be drawn into predictions of how many native Sailfish apps the OS will have when the first Jolla device launches but says having Android compatibility “lowers that barrier of entry a great deal”. “We’re getting a lot of interest from developers – I can’t say the exact number but I know that as the device comes out it’s also going to grow very quickly,” he says.

Dillon spent 11 years working at Nokia, including as principal engineer on MeeGo, but isn’t keen to discuss why Nokia abandoned the OS that has now morphed into Sailfish, saying only that he wishes them well – and that the company has been very supportive of former employees moving on to start new technology businesses (Nokia’s Bridge program). Building something new is also inherently easier for a startup than a big company, he adds.

Jolla’s Sailfish UI

While Jolla doesn’t yet have any hardware in the market to sell, its Sailfish UI was demoed at the Slush startup event in Finland back in November. Its focus is on usability, with pulling and pushing gestures used to navigate and select/view content, allowing a lot to be achieved with one-handed interaction.

The platform also supports true multitasking, with currently running apps appearing as interactive tiles on the homescreen that support app interactions — for example a media player app can be paused directly from the tile with a swiping gesture, without having to dive into the app itself.

Gestures are used throughout the UI, with a pull-down and push-up homescreen, allowing more functions and apps to appear the more you move it. Items within apps can also be selected by pulling down until the desired item is selected, while pushing across the screen is used as a back gesture, to return you to the prior screen. Pushing from the side also reveals off-screen content — so you can glimpse at things like notifications.

Another focus in Sailfish is personalisation, with a feature called Ambience that lets users select a photo from their gallery to use as a background but which is also used to customises the UI’s theme colours to corresponding shades – resetting the whole look and feel.

To my eye Sailfish has some UI similarities with BlackBerry’s new gesture-heavy multitasking QNX-based OS, BB10 — and even some Windows Phone-esque features — but Dillon rejects comparisons with rivals, saying any similarities to BB10 are “surface” only, and adding: “I think we have some very different looking stuff.”

“Multitasking is part of the heritage of MeeGo. You can do multitasking on your desktop — it’s not that revolutionary of an idea but how you implement it is. I think that’s one of the things that we have unique advantages there,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of work on making it really easy to use and one term that people use a lot [about Sailfish] is it’s fast to use because you can switch between things very quickly — and you can do a lot of actions on the device in a very short time.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A billion dollar business? Maybe not. Despite lofty projections for Facebook Gifts from analysts, reporters, and me, a new report picks apart public statements from the company to suggest it sold a maximum of 667,000 gifts in Q4 2012, and maybe a lot less. Sure, it’s early days, but it may take Facebook a while to build Gifts into a game changer.

Correction: The original version of this article was predicated on incorrect third party report by Aggregift. It suggested Facebook earned a maximum of $1 million in revenue and sold 267,000 Gifts in Q4 2012. by working back from the fact that Facebook collected $5 million in revenue in Q4 2012 between Page Promoted Posts and Gifts. In reality, the $5 million announced on the earnings call was from Gifts and the more nascent User Promoted Posts product, about which less sales data is available, which prevents the type of analysis shown in the report. This article has been heavily edited to improve accuracy.

Facebook launched the ability for friends to buy each other real-world Gifts in September, though it wasn’t rolled out to all U.S. users until December. That means it certainly didn’t get all of Q4 to rake in ecommerce cash. Still, it was the Christmas season, and Facebook hawked Gifts in the Birthdays sidebar and at the top of the mobile feed, plus with a big call-out to buy last-minute holiday presents.

The social network has kept the performance of Gifts close to the chest, and tried to calm hype about it. On the Q4 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said:

“I do want to temper near-term expectations a little bit on revenue coming from other areas like Gifts or Graph Search…Payments and other revenue also included around $5 million from sources outside of games primarily user promoted posts and to a lesser extent from our new Gifts product. While we remain excited about the long-term potential of commerce on Facebook, current revenue from user promoted posts and Gifts is very small, and we expect 2013 contributions from these initiatives to remain very small given current run rates.”

Facebook stated that it earned $5 million in Q4 2012 revenue from non-game payments, specifically Promoted Posts “and to a lesser extent from our new Gifts product.” That could be interpreted to mean Gifts equated to a maximum of $2.5 million in revenue in the quarter.

At the end of November Facebook said the average amount spent per Gifts purchase was $25. While Facebook has not disclosed its revenue cut, this research uses 15% as a ballpark figure. When you crunch the numbers, you find that Facebook could have sold a maximum of 667,000 Gifts at $25 each.

The dealbreaker statistic is that at most, just 0.4% of Facebook’s U.S. users bought a Gift in Q4. Estimates like my now overzealous-sounding $1 billion in yearly Gifts revenue are predicated on Facebook averaging as much as one gift sale per user per year. Facebook has to find a way to make Gifts much more mainstream if it’s ever going to be a material contribution to its bottom line.

The somewhat disappointing stats confirm Mark Zuckerberg’s statements and might further dash hopes for Gifts to become a meaningful money-maker for the social network. They also explain why it’s been injecting new call outs to purchase them and discounts to lure in new buyers.

Last week Inside Facebook reported that Facebook appears to be scanning status updates for words about new jobs, pregnancies, and child births, and encouraging the author’s friends to buy them Gifts. Then yesterday, CNET reported that Facebook is offering some users up to $4 off a Gifts purchase of $5 or more. Meanwhile it’s launched the Facebook Gifts Card, a slice of plastic that can be loaded up with credits to physical stores like The Olive Garden and Target.

With time as Facebook learns more about commerce, Gifts could become a more natural and frequently used part of the social network. But right now, pushing so hard to get people to give Gifts instead of saying Happy Birthday or congrats on the new job feels a bit smarmy. If it’s not making hundreds of millions of dollars on Gifts, it might not be worth putting money before friends.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The technology industry has gone barking mad. Last week I got pitched by a dog named Mitzi. “We are Europe’s BarkBox“, yapped the excitable dachshund, before explaining that UK-based Fings For Fido is a subscription service where each month dog owners are sent a box of “canine goodies”, such as dog treats, toys, and grooming products. Alternatively, the startup offers one-off boxes as a way to sample the service or marketed around a particular calendar event, such as a Christmas box or one for Valentine’s Day (yes, even our four-legged friends adhere to Cupid’s timetable, apparently).

The concept isn’t new, of course. Along with BarkBox in the U.S., there’s BestFriendBox, while Fings For Fido has a direct competitor this side of the pond in the form of the recently launched PoochPack. However, it’s the type of products that end up in each box and the community feel of the site that Fings For Fido claims sets it apart from the competition.

“Our edge on the other UK markets is our approach”, yaps Mitzi, no doubt wagging his tail. “We are not just looking at getting cheap product delivered to the customer via a subscription. With our dog behaviourist we want to make sure that what we are sending our customers is actually better for your pet.”

The dog behaviourist — whatever that is — that Mitzi refers to is actually one of Fings For Fido’s co-founders. “She gives us key guidance on what is beneficial to a dog and what is just a marketing gimmick.”

In addition, curated content, such as free articles offering pet advice and an active social media presence, plays an important supporting role. “We are really trying to create a real community around our brand and give passionate dog owners a place to discuss and share their experiences with dogs”, yaps Mitzi.

And, in an effort to “give back”, the company has aligned with the organisation “Hounds for Hero’s” in the UK by promising to donate a portion of its profit to the charity from each Fings For Fido box sold.

Bootstrapped and soft launched last November, Fings For Fido began by purchasing the contents of each box from suppliers as would any retailer. However, with the subscription model catching on in the UK and raising awareness amongst the pet industry, the company says it’s now being approached by suppliers, such as independent pet bakeries and various other dog products who want in on the action and see it as a good marketing opportunity.

Fings For Fido’s tech (what little there is) is bespoke, too, shunning an off-the-shelf e-commerce solution to enable it to add additional features such as QR codes on each box that link directly to a feedback page, essentially creating a 360 degree loop that circles online to offline and back again, and helps suppliers and Fings For Fido itself learn more about what works and what doesn’t. The company has also been experimenting with “flash sales” on its Facebook page, with some success.

“The pet and specifically the dog market is a highly emotional and passionate space, people love their dogs and like to spend money on them,” adds Mitzi, sounding less and less like a real dog.

“In the UK and Europe getting new and exciting products has predominately been left to the pet owners in that they had to search for and find new products, and make a decision about how good the product is for their pets. We want to solve that by offering new and exciting products to these owners via a monthly goodie box, so they get the latest, most nutritional product delivered directly to their doors,” he says.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch