Apple was granted a patent Tuesday by the USPTO (via AppleInsider) that describes a system for implementing multi-touch in a mobile device even when there the display itself isn’t actively showing any images. It’s a neat trick, and one that could help portable gadgets save battery life by not invoking the most battery-hungry element in their construction nearly as frequently.

The patent also notes that the screen doesn’t have to be off for these no-look commands to work; a user could do things like swipe a finger in circle to change volume or tracks, for instance, even while a display is active. That adds new control options, but also makes it possible to both remove external buttons should a design benefit from that, and also make the device easier to use when in a pocket or clipped to an armband or waist during a workout.

While the display is inactive, the patent describes that it could use gestures that mirror the button press actions on current iPod and iPhone headphone remotes. So, a single click could play/pause, a double click could skip tracks, and a long press could call up Siri, for instance.

In terms of recognizing when touch is and is not wanted, the patent suggests implementing a special mode that would allow it to both keep the screen dark but also receive touch inputs. This might involve a way to activate a mode between a full lock and a completely on and active device, which can be selected specifically for when a user is commuting or using the device while working out, but disabled when there’s risk of accidental touch.

It’s an interesting patent, and one which Apple has shown off as working with its previous iPod nano design, which essentially featured a square display and little else in terms of physical buttons. The trick might be making this work in such a way that it still completely eliminates any chance of accidental input – the lock screen concept is synonymous with touchscreen devices for a reason, after all.

Not activating the screen as much as possible is the key to prolonging device battery life, though, so it’s good to see Apple looking at ways to deal with that primary limiting factor. It’s no e-ink display built into the back of a smartphone, but it’s something.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last October, Minecraft creator Mojang followed in the footsteps of Rovio’s Angry Birds franchise and inked a deal with specialist children’s publisher Egmont — for book and magazine publishing rights for the virtual world block-building game that has sold close to 10 million copies. Today Egmont has now revealed the first paper-based Minecraft products it will be launching in September. The publisher acquired global rights to Minecraft, excluding the U.S.

The range includes four guidebooks covering various aspects of the game: The Beginner’s Handbook, The Redstone Handbook, The Combat Handbook and The Construction Handbook, plus a Minecraft Annual, Minecraft Poster Book, and All About Minecraft Magazine. The handbooks will be priced at £5.99 each, while the annual will retail for £7.99 and the poster book for £9.99.

As well as including developer-related content from Mojang, Egmont plans to run a competition for Minecraft fans to win the chance to have their designs featured in the Poster Book. It said it is also in discussion with a number of “superfans” about them contributing to the titles.

Here are full details of the range of Minecraft publications:

Minecraft – The Beginner’s Handbook

For beginners who find themselves alone, in a mysterious new world, full of hidden dangers, with only minutes to find food and shelter before darkness falls and the monsters come looking for them, The Beginner’s Handbook might just save their lives, giving novice players the knowledge they’ll need to survive and make it to the next level.

 

Minecraft – The Redstone Handbook

Handbook two will allow fans to wire up and get connected to one of the most complex areas of Minecraft – Redstone. In The Redstone Handbook experts will guide players through all aspects of working with this most sought after mineral including: mining, smelting, using repeaters, circuit components and circuit designs.

 

Minecraft – The Combat Handbook

The Combat Handbook will teach fans everything they need to know to defend themselves from attacks in Minecraft. It will include tips from Minecraft experts and step-by-step instructions on building forts, setting traps, crafting armour and weapons and how best to prepare for one-to-one combat with hostile mobs and enemy players.

 

Minecraft – The Construction Handbook

The Construction Handbook will showcase all the awesome things that people have built in Minecraft. Ranging from building detail like arched windows and spiral staircases in a castle to outstanding rollercoasters and the infamous cow launcher, this book aims to inspire fans with step-by-step tutorials to build particular elements of grander projects.

Minecraft – The Annual 2014

The Annual will celebrate the limitless possibilities of Minecraft. Packed with step-by-step instructions for exciting builds and projects, tips from the experts, cool things to make, games to test your brain power and codes to unravel, it’s everything Minecraft fans have been waiting for.

 

Minecraft – The Poster Book

Packed with iconic pictures from the world of Minecraft, fans will be able to immerse themselves in the epic world of Minecraft in the Poster Book! Packed with awesome artwork to display on bedroom walls, the pull-out posters will include images of the scariest creatures, impressive landscapes, striking scenes and some of the most jaw-dropping constructions ever created in Minecraft.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When we last caught up with Getable, the startup formerly known as Rentcycle, it was announcing that Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph was joining Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro and OpenTable founder Chuck Templeton on its board of directors.

In becoming Getable, the startup began moving away from its original mission: To bring the entire rental industry online by offering free, realtime reservations for everyday renters and business management tools for local rental shops. Re-branding, it took a page from OpenTable, expanding its support for business owners by offering cloud-based management tools and in-store hardware to help them manage reservations, organize inventory and so on.

But that didn’t quite stick, or rather, through the process, Getable has identified a more appealing opportunity. Today, the startup is unveiling a new product (and another new direction) aimed at the largest segment of the rental industry: Tools and equipment. As part of this transition, Getable is becoming a mobile-first business and has created a product that is geared exclusively to general contractors and those to whom they rent their construction equipment.

Considering there are over 10M general contractors in the U.S., the tool and equipment category represents a $32 billion market and one that’s projected to reach $46 billion by 2016. While that’s still a sizable market, it’s a fraction of the $85 billion rental industry, which includes tools, party supplies, sports equipment and more — the one Getable was initially targeting when it launched as Rentcycle back in 2009.

But Getable founder Tim Hyer tells us that, over the last year, the tool and equipment industry has far and away been its most active and loyal category, so Getable is now opting for a new, albeit-related direction: Solving the inefficiencies in the tool and equipment rental space with a dose of mobile technology.

Of course, when a startup pivots multiple times in the course of its first couple of years, it’s bound to make investors, customers, writers and the company itself a little nervous. Traditionally, pivots, although often trumpeted by the media as brilliant, positive strategic moves, are, of course, inherently a sign that the startup was ill-positioned from the start.

On the other hand, generalizing is a dangerous sport, and each case is unique: Oftentimes, changes in direction or pivots (to go with the over-used buzzword du jour), are just what a stagnating company or product needs to jumpstart its team and its business. Many entrepreneurs will tell you that pivoting or tweaking until a startup finds product-market fit is not only advisable, but can be the best course of action — depending on the concept, the team and the market itself, of course.

But, pivoting, like acq-hires do have a tendency to be overplayed as “wins” for the startup in question, when in reality, an acqui-hire or a pivot inherently represent “settling” or “failing” — even in a world where 90 percent of the game is failure.

In Getable’s case, Hyer is relieved, as he believes that the startup has finally found a problem their solution can solve, and pent-up demand that scalable mobile technology can solve (potentially with high margins to boot). The founder also tells us that, over the last several months, Getable received a couple of acquisition offers, which, if he and the team didn’t believe had gold at the end of the tunnel, they might have opted to sell and try again.

It also helps that the startup’s investors are on board and willing to back its new direction. Getable quietly announced today that it has closed its second round of financing — a bridge-style seed round of $1.8 million — which brings the startup’s total funding to $3.2 million. Investors in the round included Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, Promus Ventures and Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital — who has also backed companies like Uber and StyleSeat.

The startup will use its new capital to beef up its engineering team and build out its mobile product for contractors. The new construction rental product is currently in alpha mode, as it works with a few strategic partners on product development, Hyer tells us.

The iPhone app will be designed exclusively for contractors to help them complete equipment management both on and off the job site, including the creation of new reservations, requesting service and maintenance, pick-up and drop-off scheduling and visibility into what’s happening on the job site in realtime. The idea is to build a realtime connection between rental merchants and their customers, the founder says, in much the same way Uber connects its drivers with those in need of a lift.

To help jumpstart its new direction, Getable has hired Mikael Rogers as its new CTO. Rogers was most recently at Yammer, where he was the company’s Developer Advocate. Prior to that, he held positions at OSAF, Mozilla and CouchOne and founded his own startup in Gather, along with being an active supporter of the node.js community and helping to organize and launch the annual NodeConf.

Of course, while the startup is looking forward to getting new blood in the mix, it also means that Getable co-founder (and previously its CTO), Ludo Goarin, will be leaving the company.

Pivots and exits aside, both present and departed co-founders think that Getable is in the process of positioning itself much more effectively and now has the chance to actually build a sustainable, revenue-generating business. Going the B2B route is key — and an underutilized strategic route. Everyone wants to build the $10 billion consumer business, a la Dropbox or Instagram.

“It’s funny, because construction truly represents the original mobile workforce, so it’s hard to believe that contractors and construction workers lack access to great mobile products that help them manage such key components of their jobs,” Rogers says of Getable’s new direction.

For more, find Getable at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Michael Weinberg is vice president at Public Knowledge where he focuses primarily on copyright, issues before the FCC and emerging technologies like 3D printing. Follow him on Twitter @mweinbergPK.

Mashups are one of the great art forms of our time. Easy and accessible digital tools have allowed anyone to remix videos, music and photographs into their own original works: Mashup culture has produced fantastic music, critical video, and delightful cultural artifacts of all kinds.

However, mashups are ultimately limited by the nature of their source material. The types of things that mashups draw from – videos, music, photos – are also the types of things that are protected by copyright, which means mashup creators need to take copyright into account when creating their works. Sometimes, because of rules such as fair use, the creator does not need permission from the person who owns rights to the source material. Other times, mostly because the work falls outside of the scope of fair use, the creator does need permission. The requirement for permission inevitably prevents some mashups from being seen by a wide audience and makes it harder for creators to make money.

Enter 3D Printing

There are plenty of reasons to be excited about 3D printing, but one of them is that it moves beyond the world of things protected by copyright. When you step away from your computer screen and look around, you realize that the physical world – the real world – is full of real, physical things that are not protected by copyright. In fact, the world is full of things that are not protected by any sort of intellectual property right at all. That means that you can take them and do whatever you want with them. And that includes mashing them up.

One of the best examples of this so far is the Free Universal Construction Kit (below). The kit remixes 10 different construction toys into adaptors that make them interoperable. These toys are functional objects so they are outside of the scope of copyright. While some of them were patented when they first came to market, patents only last 20 years. That means that most of the toys are no longer protected. As long as you stick with the toys that are no longer protected by patent, you can remix them to your heart’s content.

The Free Universal Construction Kit is just the beginning when it comes to remixing things. Easy-to-use tools like meshmixer allow people to remix things just as easily as they remix songs or videos. And unlike those songs or videos, many of the things will not be protected by copyright.

One of the keys to this next generation of mashups will be a strong understanding of how copyright interacts with physical objects. While copyright will not protect functional objects, it will protect decorative ones. Understanding functional vs. decorative will mean the difference between a mashup encumbered by copyright and a mashup that is in the clear.

Public Knowledge’s latest whitepaper, What’s the Deal with 3D Printing and Copyright? should help everyone begin to understand what is protected by copyright and to start thinking about what is not protected by copyright. That second category includes a lot of things just waiting to be remixed and mashed up.

[Image: F.A.T. - Free Art & Technology]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s executives could soon be enjoying their own private airport space ahead of winging their way to various far-flung locations around the world, according to a news release from the Mineta San Jose International Airport (via MercuryNews). Signature Flight Support, in tandem with a company called Blue City Holdings which represents Google’s fleet of personal aircraft, will likely be awarded a 50-year lease on San Jose Airport’s West Side, in order to build a 29-acre, $82 million facility to house Google’s executive aircraft and those of other clients.

In the news release, the airport expresses its intent to recommend that Signature be granted the lease, which will see it construct a “full-service, world-class fixed base operation” on the site. The physical facility itself should occupy over 270,000 square feet on the 29 acre plot, according to the proposal, and will include an executive terminal, hangars for storing aircraft, ramp space capable of accommodating large business jets and aircraft maintenance facilities. In exchange, Signature and its partners will pay $2.6 million in annual rent, a minimum of $400,00 in fuel fee revenues, minimum annual taxes of $70- to 300,000, around 200 jobs during the construction phase, 36 jobs directly on premises and around 370 total jobs created.

Google’s fleet of aircraft included eight private jets spread across Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt alone, according to news revealed back in December 2011, owned and operated by an independent company formed by the three executives apart from Google. Google almost definitely has more aircraft than that overall at this point, and establishing their own close-to-hand place from which to operate, maintain and store those means of transportation likely just makes more sense at this point that whatever other arrangements they previously had in place.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Q&A network Stack Exchange, announced today via blog post that he’s launching a new startup called Discourse, which offers an open source platform for running discussion forums.

The full name of the company is actually Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., and its goal is indeed to improve the quality of online discussion. However, Atwood writes that he’s following a very different strategy from Stack Exchange, which aims for “the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers”:

Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.

After spending four solid years thinking of discussion as the established corrupt empire, and Stack Exchange as the scrappy rebel alliance, I began to wonder – what would it feel like to change sides? What if I became a champion of random, arbitrary discussion, of the very kind that I’d spent four years designing against and constantly lecturing users on the evil of?

I already built an X-Wing; could I build a better Tie Fighter?

In other words, while Stack Exchange tries to help users find the best answer to a given question, Discourse tries to support a broader discussion without falling victim to the trolling and spam that afflict many other forums and comment threads.

Apparently, Atwood and his team have been working on this for the past year. The system is designed for “hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers,” and of course it includes moderation tools. Other features highlighted on the Discourse website include just-in-time loading, notifications whenever someone mentions you, the ability to remember where you were reading in a thread, automatically expanding links, and more.

Citing the popular open source blogging platform used by sites like TechCrunch, Atwood said that it’s “not a stretch” to say that he wants to create “WordPress for forums.” He also announced that he has raised funding from First Round Capital, Greylock Partners, and SV Angel. (Atwood told me that he’s not disclosing the funding size.)

Discourse offers its software for free, with plans to charge for hosting and other enterprise services later on.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We brought you a video back at the end of November that showed off Massoud Hassani’s mine-clearing device, the Mine Kafon, based on a wind-powered child’s toy. Now, the Afghan industrial designer has taken the suggestions of a number of our commenters and put the project on Kickstarter. Hassani is looking for £100,000 to make the Kafons and document the process.

While the Mine Kafon is cheaper to produce than more traditional methods of clearing minefields, owing to rather simplified construction using bamboo that harnesses wind motor for locomotion, Hassani still needs startup funds to get the project going at a scale where it will be useful to residents of his home country of Afghanistan, and other war-torn locations where there are still hundreds of buried mines left to be cleared. The Kickstarter project is designed to take Hassani’s concept and make it a practically deployable device.

The funding will go to bettering the engineering of the basic prototype, including improvements to GPS accuracy and improvement of overall durability (the Kafon is intended to survive multiple mine detonations, not just one), as well as mold-making and fabrication costs. It also accounts for money set aside for providing backer rewards, which include lamps designed by Hassani which use the same mold that creates the Mine Kafon’s feet. Finally, some of the budget will go towards a film documenting the construction and deployment process.

This is one of those rare hardware Kickstarter projects where backers won’t walk away with the shipping device (though you do get a 1/4th scale model at the £5,000 pledge level). But the point is that for most who back this, you won’t likely be in a position to actually need the Mine Kafon’s services. Usually there’s a degree of risk with backing Kickstarter projects, but in this case, even if it helps put only one Mine Kafon on the ground, the risk is more than justified.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of articles by Brad Woodcox that explores the patent system for entrepreneurs. The first examined the basics of the system. Woodcox is a technical specialist focusing on startup development for Novak Druce + Quigg, an intellectual property super boutique law firm. Follow him on Google+ and Twitter.

Now that you have background knowledge of the patent system (at least within the U.S.), we can analyze probably the most difficult question: “Should you pursue patents for your company or invention?” Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy or direct way to answer this question. Each business is unique and requires an individual analysis. This article discusses some frequently asked questions and presents an analysis framework that may be useful for you to explore the applicability of patents for your business/invention.

Given the significant costs of obtaining a patent, should you spend any of your limited capital on them?

It depends. A patent will not directly make your company’s product or service more successful, but it can have a positive financial impact on the business. The best way to analyze your situation is to look at what a patent could do for your company and how it would fit into your company strategy. This self-analysis should include product, finance, and market/competition elements.

For many Internet startups, the timeline to make it or pivot and try something else is often 9-24 months. With a standard patent application taking three-plus years and 80 percent to 90 percent of startups failing in that timeframe, most startups will not be around long enough to enforce the patent.

Given the startup failure rate and patent timeframe, should most Internet startups skip patents?

Not necessarily. A patent (or portfolio of patents) may be useful for both successful and unsuccessful companies. For successful companies, the reason is clear in that patents can be used as an offensive or defensive tool against competitors. An example of this is the patents that are being asserted in the smartphone industry by companies such as Apple and Samsung. For unsuccessful companies, the patented innovations can still hold tremendous value.

An example is Internet search engines. There have been dozens or even hundreds of Internet search engines, but most failed, as Google became the dominant search engine, even though they weren’t the first to market. Some of these now-defunct search companies had patents on innovative elements for search engines that Google later licensed or acquired (see Google acquires Cuil patents). Other large-scale examples are companies, such as Nortel, Novell, and Kodak, that faced financial challenges and were able to sell or are in the process of selling their patent portfolios for billions of dollars. Hence, a company can use patents as a tradable asset, perhaps even earning a profitable return which otherwise wouldn’t have occurred.

How can you determine whether your patent will be valuable?

This is difficult to expound. At the highest level, the patent must be regarding a topic in which other people or companies are interested. You can design the most amazing product, but if no one wants, needs, or buys the product, then it isn’t worth very much. While this sounds trivial, innovation bias can affect intelligent inventors and entrepreneurs. Other factors to consider are:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple has reportedly begun work on a huge new data center facility in Prineville, Oregon, according to local reports from the Oregonian (as spotted this morning by Wired). The new facility will be built on a 160 acre plot of land Apple purchased from the local county for $5.6 million in February, and the first phase of construction will reportedly cost $68 million, with the eventual completed facility spanning two 338,000 square-foot buildings and probably costing a lot more to complete.

The appeal of Oregon’s tax incentives and relatively affordable energy grid have drawn the attention of more than just Apple. Google, Adobe, Amazon and Facebook have all constructed or are constructing data centers in Oregon communities. Facebook’s data facility is actually located right across the road from Apple’s planned facility, in fact. Previously, Apple built data centers in North Carolina, another state known for its tax breaks and in Reno, once again lured by around $89 million in tax incentives.

iCloud is the commonly cited reasoning behind the construction of these various facilities, and there’s no question that that’s a growing need. Apple revealed back in July that it now has over 150 million iCloud users, having added 25 million of those between April and July. It’s very possible we’ll hear that number has grown again by a considerable factor when Apple once again details its quarterly earning next week. That many users running iCloud backups of their iOS devices, storing photos via Photo Stream and accessing iTunes music and video libraries in the cloud definitely comes with significant server demands.

Apple has been vocal in the past about its desire to make the cloud the new central focus of its overall efforts. “We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud,” Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs said at the 2011 Worldwide Developer Conference. To do so reliably and consistently requires a massive data storage and server infrastructure, and Apple’s clearly not wasting any time getting that piece in place.

Even beyond iCloud, there are other areas where Apple might need additional data center facilities in the future. Some evidence suggests it could debut an all-streaming radio service similar to Pandora, for instance, and Apple’s shouldering a lot more responsibility for iOS Maps now that it’s taken Google out of the equation. It also seems to be intent on beefing up Siri and that service’s capabilities, which in turn will lead to higher data demands on a feature where outages are often high profile.

Increasingly, Apple’s business is the cloud, and that’s an area where it has faced challenges in the past. Luckily, it looks like the company is eager to make sure that a shortage of physical resources won’t cause it any more headaches in the long term.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

E-commerce, by its very nature, is an online business, but you can’t always get away from the expense of bricks ‘n’ mortar entirely. And so it is that the Samwer brothers‘ Zalando, which originally launched as a Zappos clone but has since expanded from shoes into general fashion, has announced that it’s secured long-term debt financing of €40.7 million (approx. $52.6m), from Commerzbank, Sparkasse Mittelthüringen and KfW Bankengruppe. The new capital will be used to fund parts of the “interior fittings” of its new logistics centre as the company continues to gun for scale.

Of note, it follows another (undisclosed) round of funding, as recent as this August, that saw J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Quadrant Capital Advisors added to Zalando’s list of backers with each owning around 1% of the company.

Other investors in Zalando include the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet (owning 44%), Holtzbrinck Ventures (13%), Tengelmann Ventures (8%), Investment AB Kinnevik (16%) and DST Global (9%).

According to today’s press release, the construction site for the company’s 78,000 square meter warehouse in Erfurt opened in December 2011, while the extension to the building is expected to be completed in summer 2013.

Furthermore, the financing package ensures a ‘revolving credit facility” to support the company’s business operations.

Following a well trodden path, launched in 2008, Zalando has since expanded from shoes to more general fashion. Starting in its native market of Germany, the e-commerce site is now live in 12 markets and is set to add Poland and Norway to that list too. To service those multi-European markets, it needs a logistics base that scales — and today’s new debt financing should provide the capital needed to achieve that.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch