When serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavky launched Fon in late 2005, his goal was to blanket the world with easily-accessible, crowdsourced Wi-Fi. While the service hasn’t quite made it everywhere yet, Fon has just announced that they now have over 5 million hotspots in operation across the globe.

It’s a pretty impressive number considering that other big Wi-Fi networks like Boingo advertise “over 400,000” hotspots in their network, but it’s made even more notable when you consider each of Fon’s hotspots is essentially a person who decided to share their own Internet connection.

The signup process is a novel one — in order to access the full list of Fon hotspots out there, users have to share their own Internet connection first with the help a special wireless router. Non-sharers looking to get their own wireless Internet fix can take part in the fun too, but it comes at a cost — they have to pay a fee in order to access a Fon hotspot, part of which ends up with the hotspot’s owner.

Much of Fon’s growth can be attributed to strategic partnerships with companies like SFR, British Telecom, and Belgacom, all of whom have folded support for Fon’s network into their consumer-facing hardware. With other partnerships in the works, Varsavky says on his blog that he expects Fon’s growth to continue unabated:

“This year, I predict that Fon will grow its number of hotspots by at least 50 percent, so there is lots of work ahead to make sure this happens.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fujitsu once said that it didn’t have any plans to launch mobile handsets outside of Asia, but that strategy appears to be changing rapidly. Today comes a report that the Japanese handset maker — which makes both Android and Windows Phone-based devices — is planning to start selling its devices in Europe, with a debut to take place next week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The news comes after Fujitsu said that it also planned to sell devices in the U.S. market either this year or 2013.

It’s not clear whether Fujitsu will lead on an Android or Windows Phone line of devices — or whether it will opt to sell both. A story in the FT that reported the European launch did not specify which devices would lead the charge. There are pro’s and con’s to both:

Android is by far and away the most popular smartphone OS at the moment — with more than 50 percent marketshare as of Q4, according to Gartner — but while that means good news in terms of apps and other services for users, it would also pose a challenge for Fujitsu to create something that stands apart from the pack.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone, meanwhile, is a lot less common, leaving more room for Fujitsu to shine — but it’s also significantly less popular with developers and the consumer public. Gartner’s Q4 figures gave it a 1.9 percent share, while the Windows Phone app storefront currently only has around 50,000 apps, compared to the hundreds of thousands of Android.

The issue of needing to be distinctive when entering new markets is not one that has gone unnoticed by Fujitsu itself: “We don’t want to be just another mobile phone,” senior EVP Hideyuki Saso told AllThingsD back in January. “We want to be special.”

Fujitsu was one of the first handset makers to sign on to Windows Phone “Mango”, and it was actually the first handset maker to ship a Mango device. It’s been a key partner for Microsoft in its bid to make more of an impact on consumers in the Asian market. Some of the more innovative “different” elements of its hardware, though, have come through on Android: waterproofing, very thin devices, and zany colors, like pink.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures. You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla. All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized.

We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically (one can start a web startup or write an Android app with no more than a student credit card!) and raw computing power is taken for granted.

What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. Many of these new startups will be the usual poor clones or feature add-ons to Facebook and Twitter, or poor attempts at doing one feature or another better than Zynga, or applying LinkedIn to a small vertical.

A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of technology or for the team (acqui-hires). But that does leave the question: What else new has the potential (nothing is certain!) to be truly disruptive or establish a new category in the domain of consumer Internet/mobile/services (which to me are fast becoming interchangeable)?

The post-PC always/everywhere platform will be defined by the many variations of mobile, always available, silent complementary standbys (like home or personal networks and agents) and more. A new category to me means doing something old differently enough to have it become a large business or have substantial impact among users.

AirBnB and Instagram would be examples of companies whose categories existed prior to their entry, but they are meaningfully different. Likewise, LinkedIn was not the first professional social network but it had substantial new impact and business potential.

Personally, it is hard to see all the areas in which some disruptive or large new segment idea will take off, but it is clear that there are many. So when going fishing for these, I have defined certain pools that are more interesting than others in which to fish. I call them the “unhyped dozen” (to go with my energy investing activities, which I call the “clean dozen”) and am hoping the readers of this post can add another dozen. Treat them as potential fishing ponds rather than predictions. Some of these areas will end up pretty unremarkable and others unmentioned here will surprise us (so, to you entrepreneurs, hang on to your idea I failed to mention).

So here they are, with some examples drawn both from inside and outside of our portfolio to illustrate what I mean:

1. Data Reduction or Filters (Siri, Donna, Recorded Future, and many others): “Reducing, filtering and processing data streams to deliver the information or action that is relevant to you.” The web has been expanding what we have access to. It is time for tools (our proxies or agents on the web) to start reducing the amount of information coming at us. News or article feeds, TV shows, YouTube, “must watch” emails — these can all be prioritized for us like our proxy was a virtual assistant who knows our current context and our preferences. Even serendipitous feeds will have a higher probability of being interesting. More of “do what I mean,” instead of “make me spell it out in detail” interfaces, will prevail. Siri is a start, but a great application could go much further and reduce, prioritize, and recommend my to-do list according to the time I had, instead of always making me feel I was behind and driven by external interrupts and priorities. Advertisers could approach our “proxies” directly and the proxies could decide if something is of interest to us—automatically separating “wanted advertising” from spam. Meanwhile, the level of data reduction will be based on our specific context, our current priorities, our social networks and our interest networks. Underlying this is the evolution of A.I. and advanced machine learning — which I discussed in a separate post — and even big data analytics.
2. Big data or Analytics (Ness, Billguard, The Climate Corporation, Kaggle, Datasift): “Analyzing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data to deliver unique services or analysis.” Per the OATV website, so many of the most transformative applications today rely on massive cloud databases — often generated by user participation — with meaning extracted from that data by predictive analytics and powerful machine-learning algorithms. We see the back-ends of many of these applications becoming the functional equivalents of subsystems in a kind of internet-scale operating system driving not just the web but mobile devices. Location, social networks, identity, and personalization are just the tip of the iceberg. There will be countless new types of data streams and new ways to make data useful. Fundamental data utilities and applications will be built on these and a lot more information and data reduction will be extracted from this hairy-looking big ball of often-unstructured data. New data sources will become valuable, as will new technology for scaling data, new algorithms, and new ways of connecting people and devices. Bionic software apps (another OATV idea) that supplement or are supplemented by humans in conjunction with big data could become newer versions of Mechanical Turk by Amazon. All these will be part of user utilities, business services, health diagnosis, credit, fraud, risk, education, advertising targeting, user relevant services and much more. The colors and text chosen for menus and buttons will depend upon data analysis, as well as discount offers and a lot more. Much has been written about big data and it and may be getting past the unhyped label! There’s a lot going on already – Tellapart, Factual, Ayasdi, Explorys, Platfora, and Metamarkets come to mind, but there are many more.
3. Emotion (Foodspotting, Ness, Instagram): “Services that evoke strong emotions in users,” which is often a component of other categories, can also be enough of a driver to be mentioned separately. I include here the applications that because of their emotional appeal are adopted more rapidly or easily (more pull from users than push to them) as a major component of the application. Some will be useful services (Ness, AirBnB) and in others the emotional appeal itself will be the “product” (Angry Birds, Foodspotting. Fotopedia). The power and leverage of this class of applications are making designers the essential ingredient of a startup’s founding team and “experience” design (instead of just user interface design) a key skill and product offering. I might lump new classes of games into this category though I consider games an established category and I am trying to focus on new, surprising areas in this post. The line is hazy though. One could reasonably put gamification of everything from health to education to training to shopping as a new emotional tool for applications.
4. Education 2.0 (it’s early, but Altius, Khan Academy, CK12, Udacity): “Education models that dramatically reduce the cost and increase the availability of quality learning.” The puzzling question is why education has not already changed. My guess is we have not experimented enough with non-linear, rapidly evolving, out-of-the-box approaches but have instead tried to force-fit ‘multi-media textbooks’ and other traditional (often broken) ideas into the “computerized” model. We have also had too much punditry from experts in education instead of just trying hundreds of new ways of doing things. This is starting to change; it makes me optimistic that what has not worked so far can now work, especially given the role gamification can play in increasing student interest and social can play in increasing peer and teacher support and assistance. I believe past attempts have failed because of the specific tactics they adopted instead of the overall strategy of new modes of education. Data analytics on what works can also help here. We can re-imagine credentialing as one of the side outcroppings of online education. For instance, Interview Street expects that a programmer’s performance on their ACM “programming puzzles” could be used as alternative credentials if they never went to an Ivy League school. Add your work on Github and an employer may prefer you to a Princeton computer science grad even if you went to Banaras Hindu University in India. Meanwhile CK12 can get you credit for any time spent during high school helping other students, as part of your application to Harvard, provided you use an online study help group or application. And Altius gives high school students who did not get serious about college until too late a second chance to re-credential themselves and get into over a hundred and forty colleges—basically a second chance to get your grades up! Even more extreme, in a separate post I also examine if we could get to self-driven education in high school and focus on job-targeted skills learning without college degrees (nursing or plumbing anyone?) and more.
5. TV 2.0 (Miso, Flingo, Maker Studios, both first and second screen apps as well as content production & sourcing): “TV as an interactive and social experience both on the primary and the second screen.” Most U.S. Internet users, I am told now, have a second screen in front of them when watching TV. Whether it is true or not, it soon will be, and the interaction that is possible will allow for all kinds of creativity and user engagement shows/applications/techniques. More importantly, program production, be it video for TV, audio for radio, or text for next-generation news formats (tomorrow’s “newspapers”?) could be crowdsourced or gamified. This allows for new personal brands to emerge (much like the Drudge Report or Politico or some YouTube channels that are emerging now). Better experiences for users, better targeting for advertisers, more access for programmers and the creative types are all likely. Your proxy or agent prioritizing your viewing or reading queue will be an adjunct area. The big guys and the small guys meanwhile will battle for newer first screen experiences and applications.
6. Social Next (intersecting with all the interest graph stuff and verticals like Github, Coursekit, and Researchgate): “Social as a useful and productive part of lives—enabling collaboration and deep community building around the world in specific areas.” I include here new uses of social such as Github to do a cooperative task or the kind of social learning Coursekit and others are trying to encourage. I suspect we will see the power of social harnessed for many applications beyond just the Facebook friends network or the Google+ circles implementation. Beyond the few examples cited above, it is hard to envision all the specific vertical applications, though LinkedIn is just another verticalized social application and I expect to see more of those. Some would say social is a part of most applications/uses, though there is a difference between adding social functionality to e-commerce and applications uniquely enabled and defined by social experience.
7. Interest-based networks (where Meebo is pivoting to, Twitter, Snip.it, State): “User driven content that maps to people’s interests both for a better user experience and better targeting.” I was impressed by a post by Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin on interest graphs and why they are different from social graphs. I do think a number of startups will either target interest graphs to create a network different from Facebook’s and others will use these graphs as monetization strategies. Social is about friends, while interest is about your interests and the two may or may not intersect. For instance, my daughter’s startup Teethie is trying to do intense conversations around your passions. I see interest-based networks as different from social networks (friends versus interest-focused activities) and I consider interest more easily monetizable and more susceptible to the emergence of innovative new applications.
8. Health 2.0 (Jawbone UP, Nike Fuelband, Empatica, BodyMedia, MC10, Fitbit, iBike, Recon, Withings, Alivecor): “Exponentially growing data will yield personalized lifestyle suggestions, improved outcomes, predictive diagnostics and applications we can’t imagine.” Health applications will flourish in many directions and are laid out in a separate post. From more data (especially more baseline, or “healthy” data), “health”-care instead of “sick”-care, more DNA and proteomics data, to mobile-based “second opinions” substituting for doctors and more traditional health systems, we will see an influx of non-sick status data and applications leading to what is called the Quantified Self. You cannot improve what you cannot measure, and these days you can measure just about everything – external factors from pace to distances covered to altitude, and internal factors from heart rate to blood glucose levels to sleep patterns and much more. Alpha geeks have been hacking together solutions to track various types of personal data for years, but with the advent of open source hardware, cheap sensors and smart mobile applications, we believe that there will be a new class of applications unlocking the value of this data. And, in doing so, they will reshape the understanding of our own health and the health care industry as we know it and probably provide a lot of fun, games and motivation along the way. All this data will be complemented by artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.
9. Internet of Things/Universal ID/NFC/Smart sensors (a technology with the applications still to emerge): “Sensors and authentication technologies which will interconnect everything and remake our interaction with the world around us.” Sensor networks aren’t just for cargo containers anymore. Sensors have found their way into every aspect of our lives — whether it’s the phone in our pocket, the digital photo frames on our desks or the barcodes embedded with information in our local grocery stores, often complemented by NFC, Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi and other networks. The network of things is supposedly growing faster than any other network, social or otherwise. We’ve just begun to scratch the surface on the kinds of applications infrastructure needed to harness its full potential. Meanwhile,the management of identity, privacy, security and verification is a huge theme for the next decade and hasn’t yet been addressed much beyond the Facebook login, which makes it exponentially easier to take advantage of people’s online personal data/money/(and privacy which some will complain about). There is probably a completely disruptive way to reinvent online presence and verification, beyond the universal ID system (albeit an offline system with online instantiations) being pioneered in India.
10. Personal Collaborative Publishing (Pinterest, Tumblr, storify, Snip.it): “Truly free press with no barriers to entry and personalized interest-based curation.” This trend seems to be moving forward fairly rapidly. I’m not sure if it will become more or less verticalized or what new dimensions will emerge but the potential clearly remains promising. Self-publishing on Amazon is becoming real, removing the gateway of traditional editors and the tax of traditional business models. Where will this lead? Books, especially non-fiction, can become more interactive, crowdsourced (ck12.org), social and collaborative.
11. Utility Apps (Siri, Seatme, Ifttt, Uber, and many, many more): “Leverage device ubiquity and context to deliver valuable services.” It goes without saying that we will continue to see more and more utilities that are just plain helpful to us. I do wonder how many major new categories of utilities there will be. Ideas anyone, for major new categories? Utilities will provide personal assistance, productivity and maybe even decentralized work (new clones of Mechanical Turk or Skype!). They will aggregate experts into marketplaces (see below) or crowdsourced services or just plain telemedicine and remote reading of your radiology scans (yes it is hard to separate any of these applications into clean areas – overlap is inevitable). One of the evolutions we will see is that these utilities (and other real/virtual crossover areas like gamification) will require less, not more, input from us as they evolve – as the virtual bleeds into the physical, the enhanced experience will become more seamless and a natural part of activity. In a few years it will seem ridiculous that we had to take out our phones, open an app and type something in order to check into a location in order to activate a daily deal—how awkward! Personal transformation might be a “utility” combination of the Emotion, Education 2.0, and Health 2.0 categories, but we are still trying to tackle the problem of how to use all of these new tools for personal transformation, be it habit forming (e.g. learning, meditating) or physical metamorphosis (e.g. losing weight).
12. Marketplaces & Disintermediation (Interview Street, Kaggle, Etsy): “Remove the middle man, increase market efficiency and produce better results, faster“ Marketplaces are about economic efficiency (and active engagement) and more and more of them will keep emerging. My favorite new marketplace is Kaggle, where 13,000 data scientists can compete with their talents and the best ones can benchmark themselves and hopefully get paid accordingly. There will be more of these, unconstrained by the additional friction, the overhead (which is really a tax) or the constraints often placed by traditional gatekeepers. Gatekeepers who collect “taxes”, because of their lock-in, have the most to lose from the freedom that comes from connecting buyers and sellers directly without intermediaries. I wonder when more intermediaries will be disintermediated even beyond marketplaces, and I’m looking forward to it. Why does Tom Freidman need The New York Times to get readers, or can a Washington Post writer just get publishing and distribution services and develop his own loyal audiences as the SBNation bloggers have done? This possibility seems quite plausible in the face of news filters that are tailoring content to user preferences. Deep user preference through big data analytics will reduce the need for the Times’ editorial staff, and editorial work will become a more specialized and more valuable function. By reducing friction and increasing access between producers and consumers of content (and reducing the number of “broker” jobs which are essentially unproductive types of work and friction on the whole system), next-generation marketplaces and disintermediation could expand the rate of development and rate of quality improvement across a wide variety of fields. In the end it means more creative people trying to create – and a much more transparent way to select for excellence and improve on it.

Of course, it is hard to classify any startup into a single category. Kaggle is both big data and a marketplace for data scientists. Ness is at its core a big data analytics play but its appeal is primarily emotional. Many in fact are more often than not enabled by the new mobility and capability in both phones and tablets.

So, what have I left out?

I chose not to define mobile or tablets as a category but it clearly is a major driving force behind much of this innovation; mobile is the theme that underlies the concept of “post-PC” or “always/everywhere.” The emergence of new languages like HTML5 (which I suspect will soon turn into new, hopefully cross-platform standards through the addition of traditional operating system services like inter-process communication) will enable more innovation, which will sell more devices, and drive even more innovation. Other capabilities like sensors around always/everywhere devices will enable health, the Internet of things and other functions. Compasses, GPS sensors, accelerometers, touch interfaces, voice, and image capture all open the door for rich new experiences. I consider all of these enablers rather than categories by themselves.

I ignored areas like cloud computing, because they are not new anymore (though still a source of significant innovation and a source of services that can be drivers of innovation). Given the consumer orientation of this post, I also ignored the changes in enterprise that consumer technologies are driving. That trend I suspect will continue to accelerate and surprise.
There will be both large permanent innovations and categories established as well as passing fads (especially in gaming). I don’t list games as a “new pond” here, though it will continue to grow and surprise us in categories—whatever the next Angry Birds/Farmville phenomenon will be—while gamification will become pervasive in everything from education to health to shopping. Given the similarity to social’s ubiquity, I admit a slight inconsistency given that I’ve included new classes of social applications labeled Social Next. Both gamification (separate from gaming) and social may become basic tools that enable many of the areas I mentioned. Still, I cite some examples of what defines Social Next versus adding social functionality to an application like e-commerce.

I also did not focus on e-commerce given its already substantial popularity. Still, we will continue to see innovations in this area, especially given the different optimizations that are possible on new sized screens like mobile phones. I expect e-commerce to be disrupted by many of these ponds—and the move toward all commerce being e-commerce creates massive potential. For instance, what’s the potential impact on local merchant expertise getting supplanted by mountains of behavior data, curation and social recommendations? I wonder what will happen to local or hyper local products; will that be the domain of the traditional large players or Internet players given their scale and greater access to data versus the local merchants? That question is in the hands of the data analytics and data reduction applications. Will some local merchant expertise get supplanted by disruptive data analytics and reduction in some categories, while other services and certain products from local merchants get enhanced?

Then there are payments; I think it is possible that we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg in a potential rethink on payments. We as investors have seen Square take off at an unprecedented rate (so far) for a payments startup, but in terms of relative scale, even Square is dwarfed by Mpesa — it is 20% of Kenya’s GDP already (using a totally different model than Square). Meanwhile in India, their UID system could remake the concept of “cash”. Feel free to include or exclude payments and even next-generation currency from the “new new” categories that are emerging. Diablo 3, a next-generation role-playing game from Blizzard, will be the first game to have a double-world auction house: you can use real-world or in-game currency to sell and buy items. Is this another sign of new currencies, or is it just a fancy loyalty program which gets you to buy more—the reincarnation of airline miles?

Facebook has validated another category I haven’t mentioned, “Timeline”, and others are looking at “health timelines.” This is a feature that will show up everywhere and, to me, is more of a tool than an application. There will also be technology services like Singly and Dropbox that allow applications with new utility and features to be built. NFC may also just end up as a basic service technology, but I listed it above in the hope that it enables a new class of applications. There are probably other universal features that will initially look like applications.

Then there is the Maker movement. Makers are enthusiasts who hack and modify the world around them in interesting and whimsical ways. Tools and services that used to be inaccessible to all but large manufacturers are now available to everyone. Foreign factories that were impenetrable before are now an email away. Design software costing thousands of dollars per seat is freely available (or very cheap). Hackers are mixing all of these elements together and re-imagining entire industries from the ground up.

As with technology movements before it, the Maker movement has laid the groundwork for what will be the next industrial revolution based around personalized fabrication from one-off runs with 3-D printers to at-scale manufacturing. I am not yet sure that this will be a category in the next 2-3 years, but it will happen sometime. I do want my sofa custom-made for the size of my living room, in custom colors, and maybe a custom design while cutting out all the expensive intermediaries in the supply chain. As an example, I recently came across an intriguing example of crowdsourced design for custom vehicles and automotive parts by Local Motors.

While talking about new tools or technologies I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a category of entrepreneurs I find particularly intriguing: “The under 25” who don’t know what they don’t know, mostly have not worked at what traditionalists would call a “real job” and are not afraid to try new things. They are often most creative in their thinking and willing to try things and tolerate failure. Peter Thiel’s “20 under 20” is an extreme example of this as are the many Y Combinator startups. I’m very excited about what the next few years will bring — the rate of change is accelerating and the possibilities are endless!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The mundane Address Book was big news this week due to the privacy fiasco, but here’s a post about an impressive address book app with a different approach to privacy. Cobook is a Mac contact management app that’s simple, powerful and actually fun to use. The software, made by a boot-strapped startup, is now in a free beta test, with 60,000 downloads since it launched at the end of January.

Cobook is what the Mac OSX Address Book should be. It sits in the menu bar or can be undocked and instantly synchronizes with Apple’s Address Book. Any data entered into Cobook gets synced to your other computers and devices. Because it’s a native app, adding contacts, assigning tags, and editing contact info is very quick. Your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn contact info can also be pulled in, and if you hover over it, a pop-up window displays your contacts’ Facebook info, Tweets, or LinkedIn profile. It’s the fastest way to read a contact’s info, much quicker than using any of those websites.

The address book controversy has focused on iOS apps that upload users contact data without their knowledge. For an address book app, you purposely want your data uploaded to the cloud so it can be viewed anywhere. So I was a little surprised when I installed Cobook and got a warning saying:

“Cobook cares about privacy. All your data is stored locally on your computer only, we don’t have any access neither to your data nor accounts. In fact we don’t even have any servers, except for a component that collects bugs.”

Cobook still lets you access your data everywhere, since it’s based on Apple’s Address Book and that’s where the syncing happens. You use iCloud, Google or Yahoo contacts to sync.

In the past, I’ve had problems syncing Apple’s Address Book, so I use Google contacts. To use Cobook with Google, I first needed to sync Apple’s Address Book to Google and wound up with three contacts for everyone. But, Google’s “Find and Merge Duplicates” feature fixed that.

And cleaning up bad contact info is fast and easy, much more so than with Google contacts or Apple’s default app. With 1,000 contacts, I never got around to it. But, Cobook has some neat features that make cleanup easy, such as viewing all contacts with no phone or email address.

One warning. Definitely backup your contact data before you do any syncing. Yeah, we know we should do this but often don’t. You will thank me later if you follow this advice just in case you run into any issues. I didn’t follow my own advice and lost half my contacts when I added a laptop to sync Google contacts with the Address Book. But, Google has a “Restore Contacts” feature that lets you travel back in time with your contact list and that restored the lost contacts.

I was able to get Cobook loaded on 2 laptops and a desktop, and via Google contacts, with an iPhone and iPad. I did run into one problem when I added a phone number in Cobook and it went to Google, but not to the iPhone. Hours after notifying Cobook’s support about the problem, they released a patch that fixed it.

The man behind Cobook is Kaspars Dancis, Founder and CEO of Codo. He worked at an enterprise startup that got acquired by a large company. After working at the big company for a few years, he decided he would rather work at a startup in the consumer space. Dancis wasn’t personally happy with any of the existing contact management solutions, and says he chose to “scratch his own itch.”

Dancis is now working on the project fulltime along with a team of three, in Riga, Latvia. He started building it last April.

Dancis says his vision is to make contact management something you don’t need to worry about. He says that just like Dropbox is for files, and Evernote is for notes, he wants Cobook to be for your contacts, so they are everywhere easily and quickly accessible.

Cobook is expected to come out of the free beta period by the end of March. The pricing hasn’t been set.

While Cobook is Mac only right now, they have a broader vision. Future plans include a PC version and mobile versions on iOS and Android. They might do some type of syncing service, where your data does get uploaded. Dancis says any such syncing would involve client side encryption so if contact data is stored on a remote server, it couldn’t be read without the user’s key.

Cobook faces competition from well-funded Xobni, which recently released a new iPhone app. Xobni, which launched at TechCrunch 40, also pulls data from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But it doesn’t have a native app. It runs as Gmail and Outlook plugins on the desktop and laptop.

Another competitor is everyme, now in private beta.

Here’s a video demo of Cobook:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Social product review site gdgt is announcing a key hire today as the startup continues to try to innovate on technology product reviews. Gdgt has brought on Marc Perton, the former Executive Editor of Online Media for Consumer Reports (basically the guy who oversaw the Consumer Report’s online strategy), as its new Director of Content. Perton also previously worked with GDGT co-founders Ryan Block and Peter Rojas at Engadget.

Along with this new talent, gdgt is debuting freshly revamped product pages, which Block says are built to make it super easy and fast to get criteria-based review data, comparison shopping information (via Amazon right now, with additional retailers coming soon), specs, and other product intel.

You can see an example here.

The site has also turned on Amazon shopping links (and are collecting affiliate fees) and will be adding more retailers soon. As Block explains to us, this year gdgt will be focusing even more deeply on solving a big problem in the personal technology space, which is product reviews. And he says there’s much more innovation to come in the future.

Last Fall, gdgt started syndicating its crowdsourced product data, user review data, Q&A and discussions across related Engadget content.

GDGT, which is definitely NOT being bought by CNET, has $3.72 million in funding from True Ventures, betaworks, Spark Capital, AOL Ventures, and others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Once upon a time wireless carriers offered unlimited data plans. Consumers signed the contracts, got their iPhone or Droids and went on to enjoy the smartphone revolution. Along the way streaming video and music hit it big and social media exploded into new demographics. All these things require data, but no worries — the carriers said we had unlimited data. Consume all you want, they said.

But then a glowing lightbulb appeared above some carrier’s executive’s head, suddenly realizing data is an untapped source of massive revenue. Unlimited plans were replaced by tiered data and fear-mongering marketing campaigns were launched to scare consumers into buying more data than they need. Carriers allowed current subscribers to keep their unlimited plans but they aren’t safe forever. Now AT&T is aggressively throttling users in an attempt to purge users from the open data bar.

The sad thing? AT&T is targeting their best customers with these attacks, many of which have plenty of better options now.

Throttling isn’t new. Verizon and AT&T started the practice in mid-2011 in a move they claimed would relieve network congestion. They said a tiny percentage of users were taking advantage of the unlimited plans, consuming dramatically more data than they should. Then yesterday, an AT&T big wig blogged about the explosive mobile data growth the company saw over the last five years.

That’s always the excuse for data throttling. It’s the same one used by broadband providers for capping plans. But unlike landline ISPs, consumers signed a contact with wireless carriers. This contact has a significant early termination fee to protect the carrier against a loss if the consumer decides to leave — a fee which AT&T doubled last week. But where’s the ETF when the carrier wrongs the consumer?

Occasionally carriers bend contracts just enough to open a hole large enough to allow subscribers to leave without penalty. But escaping is not something easily accomplished. The subscriber often has to say exactly the right thing to a specific customer support agent. It’s nutty.

AT&T is reportedly ramping up its attacks on subs with unlimited plans, sending text messages warning of excessive data use (when it’s not excessive) and stating that their data pipe will be partly closed. It used to be that a crazy amount of data was used in order to be throttled. Now the threshold is much lower. AT&T is warning consumers sooner, sometimes when a subscriber hits around 1.5GB of data. But this isn’t about network congestion, this is about selling data plans.

You see, AT&T just rolled out new data packages. $30 now gets you 3GB of data, $50 gets you 5GB — it’s easy to remember and sell. But if AT&T’s network is so congested, why are they selling larger buckets of data?

They’re trying to get people off of the unlimited plans.

The sad part, which bothers me greatly, is that AT&T is attacking their better customers. Unlimited plans went away in mid-2011 so these subs have been with AT&T for some time. Owners of the iPhone 4 are likely on unlimited plans. With the iPhone 5 launching this summer, they have the option of going elsewhere. AT&T clearly forgot the old sales adage of “it’s more expensive to get a new customer than keep an existing one.”

AT&T, leave your subs alone. Stop fucking with them. They signed a two-year agreement with you, held up their end of the bargain with the expectation that you would do the same. Clearly your network is fine. You’re selling large data packages so it must be up to some (sub-par) standard.

But even if my plea goes unheard (which it probably will), hopefully the free market will work properly and your anti-consumer practices will result in a loss of subscribers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The professional networking space has been heating up over the last few years, with a number of players vying for control of our digital resumes, job and employment searches, and career buildings. For all intents and purposes, LinkedIn controls the mindshare, but a couple of newcomers are beginning to give the leader a run for its money. The first is BranchOut, the professional networking service built on top of Facebook, which, like everything Facebook, has been growing like gangbusters since its inception in 2010.

Then there’s San Francisco-based Identified.com, a professed “data and analytics company” that development its eponymous “Identified Score” to measure how “in demand” users’ professional backgrounds are to companies — right now. Of course, both companies have a long way to go before they catch up to LinkedIn, which, going on Q4 numbers has a membership of 150 million-plus registered users. (Not to mention that Viadeo has over 40 million.)

LinkedIn, though, has been the prime mover and professional networking platform of record, surprising many with its continuing, steady growth (and beating Wall Street’s expectations) as a public company.

Of course, in comparison, BranchOut has the benefit of the behemoth that is the 850 million-strong Facebook network to help bring to its professional networking service to the masses (now at 300 million profiles and 10 million registered users). But Identified Co-founder Brendan Wallace is asking questions: Do we really want to use Facebook for professional networking? Do Facebook profiles make for good resumes? According to Wallace, only 8 percent of Facebook profiles have enough information to make them valuable sources of recruitment.

Using Facebook profiles as a launchpad is important, but the Identified Co-founder wants to leverage Facebook data to turn its profiles into more complete professional profiles by adding the educational, employment, and demographic data Facebook is inherently missing. By using Facebook Connect, Identified has been scaling its own roster of profiles very quickly.

The co-founder says that the startup’s database has been growing at three to five percent per day and is doubling in size every three weeks (and they’ve recently grown their staff from 30 to 65), today standing at about 180+ million profiles. Of course, it’s one thing to pull Facebook metadata and turn those into Identified professional profiles that are largely static, it’s another to be drawing active, engaged users — these users have to be adding the kind of educational, employment, and demographic data that turns them into something more.

While still small compared to LinkedIn and now even BranchOut standards, Identified today claims to have 1.5 million+ active users. Which, in contrast, is something considering the startup launched 5 months ago.

What’s also of note? Competitive interest. Wallace says that the company has seen more than a few LinkedIn employees sign up for and become active on the site. In fact, according to its data, 165 LinkedIn employees have logged into Identified and created profiles in the last 30-days (81 in the last week). This includes Founder Reid Hoffman, CEO Jeff Weiner, Robby Kwock Head of Corporate Development, and Steve Cadigan, Head of Talent.

For the uninitiated, Identified analyzes the work history, education, and demographic data of Facebook users, tracking the hiring behaviors of a slew of companies to measure what’s currently “in demand” through its ranking system, which gives a unique score to every user based on how appealing their metaprofile will be to employers.

It can be reductive in a way familiar to Klout, but the intent is to bring an element of gamification to the site, allowing people to pit themselves against their friends to become the top ranked engineer or blogger in their respective categories, for example. That’s how they encourage people to come to Identified and get excited about maintaining their profiles, adding data, and using it as a true hiring platform.

The reason they’re porting Facebook profiles to their own database (Identified is going to continue until they have all 850+ million, by the way): Again, Facebook is one of the biggest platforms in the world, period, but obviously in terms of professional information, it’s still pretty shallow. It has the largest professional network (in terms of ported profiles), thanks to BranchOut, but most people don’t like the possibility of marketers and employers looking at their information on Facebook, seeing what they’re sharing among friends, etc. Some feel that the two are too intricately connected.

So, while the metadata from Facebook becomes a great foundation for professional information, taking care of the basic stuff, but it doesn’t approximate a resume. Along with accessibility through Facebook’s API, the reason that Identified wanted to start with Facebook, says the co-founder, is that Facebook “had the millennials.” LinkedIn’s professional network tends to have a higher average age (for users), and Wallace said that he wants to go after the young professionals, which, on average, have far more connections and are more diligent about forging those connections than older users.

Of course, while Identified would like to compete toe-to-toe with LinkedIn, it doesn’t want to go too far. Because this business, really the consumer web, is all about data, and LinkedIn has a large and very valuable data set. If Identified is able to gain access to LinkedIn’s data in the same way it has for Facebook, its own resource will increase exponentially in value. Of course, it may have a difficult time convincing LinkedIn that this is a good idea. LinkedIn did just acquire Rapportive … acquisition material, anyone? Better that than stealing more of your employees.

Really, to continue its growth and become an actual competitor, Identified has to provide that extra context around user profiles, and enable users to get feedback from employers on what they’re looking for, and what they think of their profiles. The gamification layer has to go above and beyond the other two, so that engagement stays high, and young people continue competing with their friends to improve their professional footprint, and perceived virtual reputation. Again, it’s a fine line to walk, but certainly possible, and it’s off to a pretty good start 5 months into the race.

For more, check out the company at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: David Hewitt is VP, global mobile practice lead at digital agency SapientNitro.

Mobile strategy is about more than just phones. Mobile platforms and engagement strategies in our digitally enabled world need to support all marketing initiatives, both offline and online, and be truly multi-channel. Mobile maturity is one area, however, where brands and agencies are playing catch-up with consumer demand.

A siloed approach to mobile has been commonplace over the past couple of years. Many agencies have supplemented traditional creative with mobile ads that lack a larger strategy, subbing out app development that offers no real value and failing to thoughtfully consider the best platforms and devices for mobile campaigns.

For example, Shazam recently made a splash by enabling second screen synchronization with the Super Bowl broadcast, and the company says it saw record engagement during the game. Unfortunately, problems arose because not all hub pages were optimized and users had to complete Bud Light’s age verification screen on a screen that was not touch-friendly. Considering the large number of iPhones participating, it should have also linked straight to the promoted song on iTunes, instead of emailing it a day later. It’s likely that there was a lot of user drop-off, especially given the three-step process.

Missed opportunities like this will become less common over the next year as brands and agencies fight to stay ahead of the curve, proving 2012 will be a game-changer for mobile.

This shift to a more optimized mobile experience is not merely because the industry is a year older, but because enough agency and brand leadership are seeing a critical mass of mobile and multi-channel initiatives bear fruit. Marketers are realizing the growing risk of doing nothing.

This year, the market demands a more entrepreneurial mindset. Mobile is not just the hot topic of the moment — it’s the future. Embracing this reality requires a shift in thinking and many brands still do not have a mobile or encompassing digital strategy in place. Moreover, many agencies are still growing a set of basic mobile capabilities. Creating both smartphone and tablet-optimized experiences, along with the increasing need to pick platforms and develop apps, is becoming the norm.

Last but not least, 2012 is begging for brands to truly integrate mobile with commerce and CRM programs, and create new integrated experiences for in-store, at home and on-the-go.

While 2012 brings a new confidence to place bigger investment bets in mobile, here are some tips and trends to consider:

• Look at all of the touch points and device considerations that surround a mobile campaign. Consider environmental conditions like in-store Wi-Fi, device detection and fallback tactics such as developing SMS or mobile web alternatives to more specialized mobile tactics.
• As mobile becomes more integrated with other touch points, the need to get store Ops and IT involved becomes a critical success factor. Pick an agency that knows how to work intimately with all facets of your organization.
• On the flip side, some agencies and platform providers are so bent on serving every device that the entire experience gets ‘dumbed down’ so far that it doesn’t engage anyone effectively, especially the smartphone crowd that is more likely to participate. Know what devices to optimize for and how far to take it. Remember not to just look at today’s device penetration for a market, but also the consumer behavior that goes with it and where the trend lines point.
• As the promise of enterprise mobile solutions and point of sales integration continues to heat up, plan for concepts and pilots that set a bigger stage for follow-on investment.
• 2012 will be the year of getting websites and relevant marketing assets optimized for tablets, not just smartphones — especially as tablets continue to heat up for mobile commerce and chip away at market share for everyday PC tasks.
• ‘Big Data’ is back as a buzzword and unsurprisingly so; the more multiple channels are connected, the more we need data to serve up the right experience to the right prospect and customer. There is a lot of opportunity here with location-based service integration and better behavioral and preference-based targeting. However, most of the real benefits won’t be realized until 2013-2014.
• As most direct consumer brands have a mobile app of some sort, expect to see enhancements that bring context aware features, embedded loyalty, and in some cases pre-paid and mobile wallet capabilities.
• Much of 2011′s mobile marketing budgets were still made up of slush fund ad budgets. Expect to see more purposeful campaigns and sizable budgets set aside for mobile.
• Look to work with agencies and partners that don’t just put a person in the room that ‘gets mobile’ but has shown they can deliver it across channels and touch points.

Various agencies and brands sit in very different places across the mobile and multi-channel maturity curve. In 2012, those that don’t figure out mobile will really start to show their declining relevancy to today’s consumer.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Padma Rao’s analytical marketing skills have made a big impact at more than one company in the Bay Area, and now she’s bringing a decade of experiences to her new role as an entrepreneur in residence at Foundation Capital.

Her most recent efforts helped turn a gaming startup into a booming public company.

Few people realized it at the time, but in late 2008 and early 2009 social game developer Zynga had figured out how to get a great return on investment from Facebook advertising. The social network had developed its ad system over the previous few years to the point that it was able to deliver ads closely targeted to users’ interests — but most people hadn’t realized that yet, so prices were cheap.

Rao joined Zynga at the beginning of 2009 to help lead the development of its marketing platform. An engineer by training, she took a look at the few third-party ad bidding tools available for Facebook and decided the company needed to build its own. She did the same for its user email system. The market timing turned out to be perfect. Zynga had also just figured out how to monetize casual-style simulation games, and in quick succession over the course of the year, it launched hits like FarmVille, Café World, PetVille and FishVille. As I detailed in this December article, the inexpensive growth it got via ads and social communication features during this period brought it up to traffic levels that it has worked hard to pass even today.

“I like having the technical chops to understand what needs to happen and why — and to understand why something might take a long time,” she tells me. “It makes a big difference, especially in online marketing, which is actually a very technical business. Having that background has saved me more than once… my approach is, if a tool doesn’t exist, we’ll build it.”

Zynga wasn’t the first place she’s done this. During a three year stint at Gap earlier last decade, she discovered that getting results from direct marketing were taking up to two and a half weeks. So she created a tool that would deliver results in 30 minutes. “This didn’t just mean faster results, it meant iterating faster, it changed the business” she explains. “It’s all about getting the right tools for people.”

She’s becoming an EIR for the same reason a lot of other product people do, including her new Foundation EIR colleague and former Twitter product head Anamitra Banerji. “I’ve had my head down working at companies,” she says, “and I’ve never taken the opportunity to see everything that’s out there.”

So what is she working on at Foundation? She’s actually already been doing some consulting work with social browser Rockmelt and other startups already. But she’s far from deciding whether to join or found. “I want to stay on the consumer side of things, and obviously mobile is fascinating — there’s lots of functionality that’s not probably not leveraged like it could be…. My dream is to start something, but I don’t want to do it just for the sake of doing it. If I find something great that someone else has started, I’m not going to ignore that because ‘I want to be a founder.’”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While Samsung’s new low-key approach to MWC may have some gadget fans feeling blue, Microsoft’s plans for MWC just made things much more interesting. The company has begun to send out press invitations to an event at this year’s Mobile World Congress where they will officially launch the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

The invitation is understandably light on details, but the event is slated to take place between 3 and 5PM CET.

Though members of the tech press have managed to get some hands-on time with early builds of Windows 8 in the past, the consumer preview is a considerable milestone for Microsoft in that the general public will finally get their chance take the new OS for a spin. The new Metro UI, seen above, is one of the most striking new additions to Windows, but other changes run much deeper than that. Compatibility with ARM processors is a first for Windows 8, and a renewed focus on getting the OS onto devices with different form factors means that Windows 8 isn’t just a rehash of the same old Microsoft philosophy.

Not that the general public would even notice that. They’ll be much to busy poking around with the build’s preloaded apps and games to bother checking under the hood.

That Microsoft would choose to put their latest OS in the hands of the public at a wireless conference is a bit of head-scratcher when you consider their very public exit from keynoting at CES. Recent reports point to deep connection between Windows 8 and the forthcoming Windows Phone 8 mobile platform though, and what better way to make that connection concrete than at Mobile World Congress?

Developing…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch