Another day, another acquisition by Yahoo.

Yahoo said this morning it’s acquired PlayerScale, a California-based startup that makes software infrastructure for cross-platform gaming. Financial details haven’t been disclosed.

PlayerScale, which was self-funded and cash-flow positive as of this past January, was founded in 2011. According to a VentureBeat article also from January, the company had a staff of 14. It’s not clear yet how many staff are involved and will be joining Yahoo — we’ve reached out for details and will update this with any information we receive.

The four-year-old PlayerScale says its platform now has more than 150 million players, which marks significant growth from just this past January when our own Anthony Ha reported the platform had crossed the 100 million user line. For now this does not look like a straight acqui-hire situation, as both Yahoo and PlayScale say the gaming platform will remain active post-acquisition and continue to be developed.

Here is a statement provided by Yahoo PR:

“The team has built an incredible gaming platform that is used by over 150 million players worldwide. We intend to continue to support and grow PlayerScale’s technology, and we look forward to building great new experiences on Yahoo! using the PlayerScale platform.”

And here is PlayerScale CEO Jesper Jensen‘s blog post on the deal:

“Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!

Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.

We have spent the past four years growing a three-person startup into a product that powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and we are adding over 400,000 new users every day. In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent. With Yahoo!’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.

Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.

- Jesper Jensen”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google and Facebook working together? They’re actually friends, in no small part thanks to Erick Tseng. The former Android leader, now Facebook’s mobile product manager, today launched the official Facebook For Google Glass app. Here he tells me about how a tiny team designed the app around simple photo sharing and Facebook’s strengthening relationship with Google.

Josh Constine, TechCrunch: What was it like getting Facebook involved in the Glass program?

Erick Tseng, mobile product manager for special projects at Facebook: It was great. I used to work at Google [as the lead product manager on Android until 2010]. We’re very close, but I have a personal relationship with a bunch of folks on the Glass team. It came out of a pretty informal chat with folks on that team. We both quickly came to the conclusion that it would be pretty awesome to get Facebook on Google Glass.

It all developed in just a few months. Two engineers built the whole app. There were no formal designers. Just me project-managing it. We got early access to some developer hardware and Google Glass prototypes. We had a very small team build a prototype [of our app]. We liked what we saw, showed it to Google, they liked what they saw, then we productized it. It was fun to work on a new platform like Google Glass.

“Our starting principle was the user experience”

TechCrunch: What was it like working on a fast-moving development platform like Google Glass? How do you think about what features to include in Facebook For Glass?

Tseng: From a developer perspective, our starting principle was the user experience. What functionality makes the most sense when you have a device like Glass sitting in front of you? What we came up with was the idea that we wanted to do things very simply and easily. You don’t want a lot of text. We started playing with it and saw photos as a very powerful user interaction with Glass. It’s natural that when you take photos on Glass, you want to share them with the people you care about. We wanted to make the photo uploading process as quick and easy as possible, so we focused on that use case. 

As we were playing with Glass, we were really impressed with voice functionality, so we added in the ability to speak a photo description that gets added to your photo.

TechCrunch: There’s a lot of other functionality you could have added. Did you run into constraints on the Glass platform?

Tseng: To be fair, it wasn’t all that much of a constrained platform, considering we wanted to do photo sharing. Photo-taking on Glass is very fast. It’s just one click to share, and one more to decide who to share with. It’s going to be an evolving platform and we’re excited to see what Google has for developers. My expectation is that over time a lot of the user functionality will get easier. 

“When you have an opportunity like this, you jump in with eyes wide open”

TechCrunch: What was it like working on a moving target, where you might not know what the device your app eventually launches on would be able to do?

Tseng: It was fun! When you have an opportunity to jump in on an emerging category like this you jump in with eyes wide open, knowing there will be some dynamics before things start settling in. We went in fully aware that this is very early and still in development, but the opportunity to build on Google Glass was quite thrilling.

We always like to think of massive scale and how we can increase happiness in our users live. With Glass, even though it’s very early, it does feel like the natural evolution of where computing is going. As it evolves from the desktop to phones to computers we wear all over our bodies, it behooves us to start only on any technology like this so we get an early glimpse of what users want.

TechCrunch: There’s no way to read the feed or get notifications on Facebook For Glass right now. Did you consider the balance between building an immersive experience and one that might interrupt and overwhelm people?

Tseng: I think it really comes down to how a device like Glass will continue to evolve in our daily lives and the role it will play. We wanted to keep it simple, but it was a no-brainer that photos are a very enjoyable use case. Starting with that was a very straight-forward decision. We’re excited to see Google’s feedback and get people to tell us what they think, what they wish the device could do in addition to photo uploading and we’ll take that into consideration.

TechCrunch: What’s it like being at Facebook and working with Google? Is there any of the animosity people think there is?

Tseng: We love working with the Google Glass  team. From the very first conversation I had with the team when we said “Wouldn’t it be great if we did this?” to launch was just a couple months. That’s a testament to both teams working very closely together to get this shipped.

More broadly, it’s often forgotten that we have a great relationship. Facebook is one of most popular Android apps today. We already work very closely on that experience as well. And then Home is the latest manifestation of that relationship.

TechCrunch: What about your previous arguments about data portability and who can import whose email contacts or social graph?

Tseng: Data importation? With the Glass team that never came up at all, so I haven’t even thought about that in this context.

TechCrunch: Is wearable computing the future of social networking?

Tseng: No, I think social networking is a broader concept. It permeates everything we do in our lives. Wearable computing is a way of helping you connect more closely and see context about what’s around you, but I think it’s a misnomer to say it represents the future of social networking.

TechCrunch: Are there specific Google Glass features you’d like to see?

Tseng: Oh yeah! I’d like to keep some of those secret for now. We want to surprise folks when they come out. This app is really our first foray into anything like a Glass form factor. We expect to learn a lot.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Get ready for a whole lot more Pebble. The smartwatch company just announced several software enhancements for the Pebble and a $15M Series A led by Charles River Ventures. Pebble is not going to sit around, scared of iWatch rumors. They’re plowing forward on their own accord and committed to providing the best platform possible for developers and consumers.

“We are pledging to support the developers hacking on Pebble,” stated Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky told me in an interview. “We want to make the Pebble the go-to place for developers.” And with that the company released its first SDK last month and is following it up today with several big improvements.

The cash injection will be used to increase the company’s software engineering team’s headcount and allow the company to scale to meet still-growing customer demand. CVS’ Partner George Zachery is joining Pebble’s board of directors, a move that excites Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky.

“George is the one that shared our vision of wearable computing,” Eric told me in a chat this morning. Several angels also participated in the round, but Eric indicated that Charles River Ventures funded the majority of the Series A. This round of funding joins the $375k the company previously received from four angel investors, including Paul Buchheit, a partner at Y Combinator, and Tim Draper of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And don’t forget about the $10.3M Pebble raised on Kickstarter.

“The tremendous response we received from Kickstarter backers validated our belief in the value of a smartwatch as a wearable computer, but also in the value an open platform brings to truly personalizing the watch to their daily activities”, said Migicovsky, Pebble’s founder in a released statement today. “This new investment will help us build out the Pebble development ecosystem and deliver on Pebble’s extraordinary potential.”

Pebble is still working on fulfilling the 85,000 orders placed on Kickstater. To date 70,000 have reached early supporters. “It’s pretty crazy thinking there are 70,000 Pebbles out there,” Eric told me proudly. “Tens of thousands” of additional orders have been placed, Eric said.

The company is aiming for retail availability in four to six months.

Pebble also announced several software enhancements for its smartwatch today. The SDK, which the company appropriately calls the PebbleKit, enables third party apps to send and receive data from the smartwatch.

This two-way communication is a huge step forward for the smartwatch, allowing the watch to display a large variety of information including weather and sports scores or even act as a remote control for the phone itself. Until now, apps were limited to basic functions like just display a watch face or displaying a simple game of snake.

Pebble also released the Pebble Sports API, enabling developers to build GPS-enabled smartwatch apps similar to the RunKeeper app announced a couple of weeks back.

Since releasing its initial SDK back in April, Pebble states the kit was downloaded over 8,000 times, resulting in over 5,000 unique watchapps with 300,000 installs during the last month. Owners are clearly hungry for more Pebble features.

The Pebble was supposed to usher in a new era of productivity by strapping a communication device to our wrist, but the initial feature set was limited even with the first SDK release. However, Pebble is keeping at it and today’s funding announcement and software development release should result in a big harvest of fresh apps.

“Everyone is talking about wearable devices,” Eric explained. “We’re very happy that Pebble is a platform people can build on today.”

Wearables is the next big thing. There’s no denying that. Even if Apple skips the iWatch device, Google Glass and others are pushing forward the thought of wearable computing. But the Pebble is here today and developers have latched onto the platform, outing custom watch faces, games, and apps. With the Pebble, the future is here now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jackthreads is a Thrillist company that features clothes and accessories for men. The style is all over the place – goofy t-shirts sit next to nice blazers and jackets – but it’s decidedly urbo-hipster in the design and sizing. Full disclosure: I try my damnedest not to buy their stuff but I still find my self idly clicking through and buying age-inappropriate streetwear. It’s pretty addicting.

That said, they’re going gangbusters.

The company will see $75-100 million in revenue this year and their iPhone app just passed 2 million downloads. The app has been a consistent top free lifestyle app and it pushes millions of pageviews and sales sessions. “It’s a huge driver for the business in every single way,” said CEO of Thrillist Media Group, Ben Lerer.

“The native app experience killed for us,” he said. “It drove tens of millions of dollars of revenue.”

They have just launched a new iPad app that acts as a catalog for their daily deals and pushes notifications when new sales are added. Lerer is excited about the new platform and has seen mobile usage explode.

“We anticipate the highest conversion rate on any channel,” he said. “I know I’m buying more frequently on the iPad. Mobile is a huge driver for the business in every single way.”

Given that Jackthreads is one of Thrillist’s most profitable properties and thanks to solid growth over the past few years, it’s clear that Lerer and team have found the goose that lays the lightweight golden track jacket with scorpion detail on the back.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer has been placed in “administrative segregation,” prison shorthand for solitary confinement for “investigative purposes.” Supporters believe he was locked down and given no Internet access because of his ability to send Tweets to a third party who relayed them on his private account. Auernheimer has not sent electronic messages since April 8.

In a letter acquired by the Daily Dot, Auernheimer writes:

His pro bono attorney, Tor Ekeland, has not been able to contact Auernheimer since his lockdown.

Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison for programmatically scraping user information from a public AT&T website and sharing it with Gawker.com. He entered prison with much fanfare and attempted to blog from behind bars until his lock down.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Though Foursquare is now busy trying to take on Yelp, one of its more rewarding, but personal, use cases (now that the fervor around badges and mayorships has died down), is its ability to add insight and data around your check-ins. Often after registering your location, the app rewards you with a little encouragement or commentary via a pop-up message. Today, the service is making these little moments shareable with a new button that lets you edit and post that message to Facebook, Twitter and more.

For example, you might learn that you hadn’t been at some airport since last December, or it’s your third day in a row at a favorite location. In Foursquare’s blog post about the feature, it gives the example of a user who wants to brag about hitting the gym three days in a row. (Though let’s get real, we’ll probably see more people posting about their ongoing bar streaks, don’t you think?)

The update may seem to be a minor one on the surface, but it’s one that could encourage more of Foursquare’s users to return to the app more regularly in order to post and share rather than try to win a mayorship crown or some other tired prize, like a badge. These things were fun at first, but the excitement has worn off. But Foursquare still needs a steady stream of data to keep its local recommendations current and accurate.

The feature also ties in nicely with the new movement in “quantified self” devices – where users are trying on items like the FitBit or Jawbone UP, for example, in order to track and learn more about their daily activities through data.

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, in fact, expressed an interest in the quantified self space, during an interview he did with TechCrunch last week at Disrupt NY. Though he had dismissed the rumors about Foursquare developing wearables of its own, he did say that this is an area Foursquare would like to further explore.

Also of note, Crowley used an auto-checkin utility recently, when he ran the Boston Marathon (ahead of the attacks), which let him track his progress mile by mile – so he’s clearly a fan.

Foursquare is actually sitting on a goldmine of personal data through its historial check-ins, but prior to now, the messages taking advantage of that info have been ephemeral – you would see them and then hit close, nothing more. Today’s update is the first step towards letting users better interact with Foursquare’s data store, if only by posting it to social networks or saving images to their Camera Roll.

The new feature is available for iPhone and Android.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As the days go by and developers get their hands on Glass, the basic apps that we need to survive in the wild and share our photos are popping up. Today, Glass To Facebook is available for those who want to post the moments captured with Glass to the social network. It’s the first third-party app that allows you

The setup is similar to that of other third-party apps like GlassTweet, but requires you to give Facebook permissions to post to your timeline. It only takes a few seconds to get going:

After you’ve turned on the Glass To Facebook sharing contact within MyGlass and approve the permissions on Facebook, you’re ready to start posting:

Just take a photo and choose the Glass To Facebook option:

The nice thing about the app is that it creates a photo album for you that will start piling up your Glass-taken photos:

Your photo shows up like any other one would in your friends’ News Feed, too. This means that all of those annoying baby pictures that you see on the daily will now come from the vantage point of the parent’s face. Exciting, I know. On a serious note, it’s nice to see photos from Glass being brought to networks other than Google+, which was the only out of the box option.

While we haven’t heard anything recently about an official Facebook Glass app, we’ve heard that there’s a team of four working on something. What could Facebook look like for Glass? We know that there won’t be ads, since Google isn’t allowing them on the Glass platform as of right now. Aside from that, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Poke pop up on the device.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

China is investing $810 million into the development of Beidou (BDS), the navigation satellite system that it is positioning as a rival to the U.S.-developed GPS.

According to China Daily, the money will be used to build an industrial park that will house 30 to 50 companies focused on developing an ecosystem for Beidou. Based in Tianjin, the industrial park is expected to welcome its first 20 companies in June.

The Chinese government not only wants Beidou to eventually dominate China’s $19.2 billion navigation service sector, but also sees it as a way to make China’s military less dependent on foreign technology. This would protect the country if the U.S. decided to deny it access to GPS and also potentially give it a strategic advantage. As DefensePolicy.Org writes, “Aside from the commercial applications of Beidou, the placement of an independent global navigation system would give China a considerable strategic military advantage in the event hostilities should break out in the Asia-Pacific Region. Most notably, such an advantage would be useful in countering foreign naval forces and with particularity those of the United States.”

Beidou can also offer China more quotidian advantages. For example, developers hope that the system will allow taxi drivers to quickly locate nearby passengers, which in turn would cut down on emissions and improve the capital’s air quality. Watches synced to Beidou navigational satellites can identify a user’s location within 10 meters and clock synchronization signals to within 50 nanoseconds.

In a March interview, the chief commander of China’s lunar exploration mission Chang’e-3, Ye Peijian, said that Beidou will achieve full-scale global coverage by around 2020 and will be able to provide highly accurate and reliable positioning and navigation with the aid of 35 satellites. China has so far launched 16 navigation satellites.

Beidou has been used by the Chinese government and military for transport, weather forecasts, fishing, forestry, telecommunications, hydrological monitoring and mapping since December (it originally launched on a trial basis back in 2003), but more than 95 percent of navigation terminals used in China still rely on GPS. According to industry statistics cited in China Daily, the total output of China’s navigation service sector in 2012 topped 120 billion yuan ($19.2 billion).

In addition to its navigation and timing functions, Beidou’s terminals will also be able to communicate with the ground station with short messages in Chinese characters. China’s government hopes that its language functionality will allow it to grab 70 to 80 percent of domestic market share away from GPS by 2020, and also allow Beidou to gain traction in other Sinophone countries.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In Q4 of last year, Facebook’s mobile MAUs surpassed desktop for the first time in its history. That trend continued in Q1 2013 with 751M MAUs. This is what we learned with today’s release of Facebook’s Q1 results.

Despite claims earlier this month, Facebook didn’t lose users, but gained 2M. Asia continues to be the largest area of user growth, according to the slides provided by Facebook today. During the earnings call, COO Sherly Sandberg mentioned that mobile ads are performing well particularly in Asia.

Here’s a full rundown for Q1 year-over-year user growth:

- Daily active users (DAUs) were 665 million on average for March 2013, an increase of 26% year-over-year.
- Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.11 billion as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 23% year-over-year.
- Mobile MAUs were 751 million as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 54% year-over-year.

As you can see, the overall growth of monthly active users is incremental from the past quarter:

Something we’d like to find out is if certain age groups are growing faster than others. Some feel that even though the social network is an essential utility for many all over the world, the younger crowd might be starting to spend time socializing on other platforms. This was of course one of the reasons that Facebook acquired photo-sharing app Instagram last year, since the younger crowd had flocked to it as their sole social network. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that Instagram’s community is growing faster than Facebook did when it was at a similar size. There’s another reason.

The mobile user growth kicked up its ad revenue numbers as well, accounting for 30%, or $375M.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

During their work with patients, doctors will frequently contact colleagues with questions, trade horror stories, or converse about treatment methods. There isn’t really a technological solution to streamline this daily back and forth, but that’s what Share Practice aims to bring.

Founders Dr. Andrew Brandeis and Alex Kawas built an easy-to-use mobile app to serve as a sort of Wikipedia-meets-social-networks. Share Practice, just announced at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, allows doctors to ask questions and receive feedback quickly from other verified doctors in their field rather than having to take out their phone to just call, text or email someone one at a time.

The San Francisco-based company raised $500K, and I spoke with Dr. Andrew Brandeis about why he built it and what the opportunity to disrupt the industry was. There is a lot of good that an app like this can do, but I had some questions around the privacy and security aspects of a service like this, to which Dr. Brandeis shared his thoughts:

TC: Can you tell us a bit about your verification process for bringing Doctors onto the app? Of course, you’d want the best weighing in on these very important issues.

Dr. Brandeis: We’re using Doximity.com to verify doctors.

TC: Do you have any concerns about the potential of bad information being passed around? This is an issue for any social service, as we saw with the AP’s Twitter hacks, but this could be life or death.

Dr. Brandeis: Doctors are not anonymous on Share Practice. they will have a reputation. If they promote good stuff, they have a better reputation. The opposite is true, as well.

TC: Do you have any plans to get this in the hands of medical students or perhaps create a version just for them? Perhaps they can read information only and not share until they are finished with school.

Dr. Brandeis: Medical students are important as they are thirsty for this tool. Yes, we plan to give them access to consume the data, but not contribute it. Residents, however, are our most valuable demographic. They are doctors, learning and sharing rapidly. We’re working with groups to figure out the best way to include them.

TC: Can you share an experience where this app, while testing it, has actually saved you hours of research, or did something that you didn’t think about when first creating it?

Dr. Brandeis: Absolutely. I have a patient with recurrent UTIs; none of our treatments worked. I went to Share Practice and learned about Fosfomycin, a powdered antibiotic rarely used. I Rx’d it to my patient, and it worked perfectly. She’s happy, I’m happy, and I upvoted it on Share Practice. Then a friend of mine learned about it for a similar patient situation and emailed me to thank me. Worked like a charm.

TC: Will there be a version for patients to see how their doctors fare in interacting with the community? Meaning, could a doctor participating in Share Practice become a badge of honor?

Dr. Brandeis: We may eventually open it up to patients to consume the data, only if it won’t dissuade doctors from producing it as they are. That’s our priority. We’re a doctor-focused app, not another consumer one. For now.

TC: Talk about the business model. Will doctors pay for this?

Dr. Brandeis: It will be free for doctors. We monetize by learning what doctors think, why they think it, and what they are saying to each other. For example, every Walgreens knows that Dr. A Rx’d Lipitor for high cholesterol, but they don’t know why he chose that over another choice. We do. That info is valuable to drug companies, but it’s also valuable to insurance who can make coverage better if they know one treatment is more effective than another. That is especially important in the world of professional supplements, where we have a hard time making heads or tails of popular therapies.

TC: Will this data be turned into market research reports or become available for scientists who are looking for the latest diseases and health issues to focus on?

Dr. Brandeis: Absolutely. If we can spot trends and see what is working where and why, why not use that to direct research dollars. There are all kinds of off-label uses for drugs, herbs and supplements that will get proper research dollars when we learn that 10,000 doctors are using them in the same way for the same thing. Imagine that world.

The alpha version of Share Practice is in the hands of 200 users, with the team tweaking the app along the way. Dr. Brandeis tells me that the company is about six weeks away from a formal launch, but once it’s available, it’ll be filled with information about as many illnesses and their diagnoses as possible.

While at first blush this seems like a “Facebook for Doctors,” there are bigger opportunities with Share Practice. When you bring together smart and talented people and have them interacting in real time, the data collected along the way could make an actual impact in the world. Imagine if you’re suffering from a new strain of the flu with the same symptoms seen in most patients — if your doctor hasn’t encountered someone with the strain yet, they might not know how to treat it. This app could change that almost overnight.

During today’s demo at Disrupt NYC 2013, Brandeis showed the app off and fielded some very interesting questions from the judges. It seemed like they were pleased with what they saw:

Sure, Share Practice will require a lot of trust from the participating doctors, as well as actual usage, but if anyone knows what doctors truly need during their on-shift hours, it’s another doctor.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch