Like you and a lot of other people in the Valley, I read the blogs snarking on the Valley, because nothing is funnier than making fun of people just like us, technology elite who download hot apps, ringtones and backgrounds all day and all night – all on our separate phones reserved for daytime and nighttime.

It makes you feel like you’re part of a community instead of a tiny speck of dust in the vast cosmos with no reason for existing beyond randomness.

The best one lately is a Tumblr called Jesus Christ Silicon Valley (note the double meaning), and its most dazzling, scathing piece is this relatively mild one about how silly and vain people’s avatar profile pictures are. Yesterday’s piece on the Tumblr acquisition was also pretty good.

You’ve probably heard the news. No, you’ve definitely heard the news, because it’s Monday and you’ve been reading tech blogs all day, slowly burning your investors’ money. “Keeping tabs on the industry,” of course.

It’s funny because it’s true. Because I am curious and because I like the writing when it’s not too ragey, I dug around a little for the blog’s author. Not too hard obviously (this is TechCrunch after all) — just on Twitter and Quora. The Quora question, which is followed by Keith Rabois, postulates that Jesus is one of us. Just a slob like one of us.

“The secret lies within the pages of the blog itself. Someone so pathologically clever with hints of self-deprecation would hide where least expected: among the very targets referenced.”

Hmm … Perhaps he or she is one of the people lambasted in the profile picture post? That must be it! Who though? Hunter Walk? Tony Conrad? Sheryl Sandberg?

And today, I got a response to my Twitter request for an email: An email sent “To the Direction of Alexia Tsotsis” from “jesus94306@gmail.com.”

From: Jesus Christ

Subject: Greetings, To the Direction of Alexia Tsotsis.

Date: May 21, 2013 9:30:28 PM PDT

To: alexia@techcrunch.com

I am Ivan Moltobov, student in Ukraine.

I am big admiring fan of Tech Valley, and writing about love for Tech Valley on the Jesus Christ Silicon Valley tumblr blogspot by wordpress. You like? What is meaning of word “cock?” Sound funny, Americans seem to enjoy. I write much cock words, get many pageviews, exchange for Bitcoin, buy yak.

American dream to own many yaks.

(I searched and TechCrunch has yet to ‘print’ the phrase “cunty little cumdrops.” What’s with that?!)

Well, now we have “printed” that phrase, Ivan. Moltobov is unGoogleable, in case anyone was about to.

[Image via]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Baidu, the search giant often referred to as the “Google of China,” is reportedly developing its own version of Google Glass, according to a article in Sina Tech (link via Google Translate). We’ve contacted Baidu for comment.

Testing of a prototype has reportedly already begun. According to the Sina Tech article, Baidu Eye has been in development for “several years” by a team under the direction of Baidu’s chief product designer Sun Yun-feng. The wearable gadget is equipped with tiny LCDs, voice control, image recognition, bone conduction (which allows sound to be conducted to the inner ear through the bones of the skull), and can also function as a standard pair of eyeglasses. Furthermore, developers will reportedly have access to Baidu’s cloud ecosystem to create apps for Baidu Eye. News Web site QQ.com also reported that Baidu has been working with Qualcomm to develop technology that will extend Baidu Eye’s battery life to 12 hours.If Baidu Eye does indeed hit the market, it can offer Baidu a big boost as it seeks to diversify its business away from online search. Though Baidu still holds about a 70 percent share of China’s online search market, it faces competition in that arena from upstarts like Qihoo.

Image via Sina Tech

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

San Francisco’s Flurry initially got its reach through offering a basic package of analytics that more than 95,000 different developers snapped up.

But as the iOS and Android ecosystems have matured, app makers are getting more sophisticated. The biggest ones often juggle 30 to 40 ad networks and marketing channels, and need to understand which ones perform the best.

So Flurry’s rolling out user acquisition and crash analytics today. The company’s crash analytics lets developers get automatic alerts on new errors and common crashes. They can then diagnose where these errors are originating from with full stack traces including symbolication.

The company’s user acquisition analytics helps app marketers understand how much they’re spending for users on different cost-per-click and cost-per-install advertising campaigns and e-mail marketing campaigns. They can evaluate the users they get through these different channels based on how long they end up staying with an app, how often they engage with it or how much they spend on it.

Both are free and are part of the same analytics SDK that developers regularly use. The user acquisition or marketing analytics are available now on both platforms, but crash analytics is in beta for Android and will come out for iOS later this month.

In crash analytics, Flurry faces off against Crashlytics, which Twitter recently acquired. In user acquisition analytics, Apsalar’s ApScience looks at marketing campaigns to see how effective they are. Similarly, there are a host of game-centric service providers like Chartboost and Playhaven that may veer in this direction as well this year.

Flurry build its crash analytics solution with Plausible Labs, which is the creator of the Open Source PLCrashReporter, already relied upon by thousands of developers. Flurry says it improved that reporting solution, by no longer requiring developers to keep track of dSYM files, implement custom configurations that include symbols and increase the size of their app to get actionable crash reports.

As for the company itself, Flurry recently took $25 million in funding led by Crosslink Capital, the late-stage firm that backed Pandora ahead of its offering. The company, which has been around since 2007, used analytics to cultivate relationships with thousands of developers, which they later parlayed into an advertising business that now produces about $80 to $100 million in revenue every year.

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China’s ZTE is planning to ship more high end smartphones this year in a bid to boost its profit margins and revenue. In an interview with Reuters, Lv Qianhao, head of ZTE’s handset strategy, told the news agency that making affordable phones has taken its toll on the company’s bottom line. ”We would like to raise the percentage of mid- to high-range smartphones. That’s the direction we’re heading,” he said.

ZTE was the fifth largest global smartphone maker in Q4 2012, according to analyst IDC, taking a 4.3 per cent share of the global market — just behind Sony with 4.5 per cent and Huawei with 4.9 per cent. Samsung and Apple took slots one and two, with 29 per cent and 21.8 per cent marketshare respectively.

Reuters notes that ZTE’s narrow margins were a contributory factor to the company flagging a net loss of up to 2.9 billion yuan ($467 million) for 2012 last week.

Lv said ZTE expects to ship more than 50 million smartphones in 2013, exceeding an earlier forecast, and up on the 35 million smartphones it shipped last year. Smartphones made up 60 per cent of its overall consumer device sales in 2012, and ZTE believes it can raise that proportion to 70 per cent this year.

When it comes to tablets, ZTE said it has struggled to compete against rival slates made by Apple and Samsung. ZTE shipped just 560,000 tablet PCs last year — short of its goal of more than doubling sales to one million. Lv declined to give an estimate for this year, according to Reuters.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider ActiveState recently scored a sweet deal with HP: It is the official PaaS for the entire HP cloud business.

ActiveState won the HP deal through the strength of Stackato, its PaaS that uses Cloud Foundry to offer a distributed developer platform. ActiveState executives say it hardened CloudFoundry for the enterprise. This means Stackato offers additional languages and provides more hypervisor and infrastructure support, as well as application lifecycle tools and monitoring capabilities.

Stackato is packaged as a virtual machine and can run both in a private data center and a public cloud environment. That’s the appeal to HP – Stackato has dual capabilities.

Stackato’s strength is that it was built with a “security first” approach, which makes it appealing to enterprise buyers. It supports multiple programming languages, enabling developers to push apps from their desktops to different cloud environments. That might mean a public cloud service, a hybrid one or a deployment that is entirely on-premise.

That gives Stackato the opportunity to leverage HP and its massive customer base. But therein also lies the problem. ActiveState could get ensnared in the roiling internal politics that are pitting HP’s traditional server business against its cloud strategy. The fissure is apparent in the recent departure of Zorawar Biri Singh, HP’s head of cloud computing. But it’s also connected to HP’s deep ties to the traditional enterprise hardware and software market where it makes the majority of its revenues.

HP is the global leader in x86 server sales, so the company faces a paradox: sell more servers and attract businesses to a public cloud service. A customer doessn’t need servers if it uses a public cloud environment. HP can get better margins if it sells into the traditional data-center market. These days, like a lot of companies, HP postions this as a private or managed cloud strategy.

But the bigger challenge for ActiveState may come with Cloud Foundry, the PaaS developed by VMware. It had once been promised as an open-source PaaS platform. Developers loved it. But there was always this question about VMware’s true intentions? Would it really support an open-source effort and foster a community?

Sacha Labourey, founder and CEO of PaaS provider CloudBees, said that when Cloud Foundry was released, he was extremely bullish, but then it made no sense after awhile. What was the real strategy? Cloud Foundry represented an open-source services play. But virtualization software made VMware a power in the enterprise. The company increasingly looked to that power base to establish a cloud strategy. Cloud Foundry seemed out of place.

Fast forward to December of last year and what does VMware do? It spins out Cloud Foundry, creating the Pivotal Group under the direction of Paul Maritz, EMC’s chief strategist.

Today, Cloud Foundry is a big question mark in the PaaS market. There are rumblings of a fork. AppFog, Tier3, and Uhuru all rely on it. Adopting a fork would mean a deep investment in engineering for the company that took that path.

But if any company can manage these waters, it’s ActiveState. Founded in 1997, the company is well-established as a provider of development tools for dynamic languages. It has the engineering resources to manage a Cloud Foundry fork if it chooses to do so.

In the meantime, the PaaS market is still quite nascent. HP may be able to leverage its vast customer base, but the customers using PaaS are very few.

Labourey says companies need to try a service like AWS and build a stack on it. Using AWS helps developers see the differences between services and software plays, and it will help them see that a PaaS can remove a lot of the complexity inherent in developing custom stacks.

Bart Copeland, president and CEO of ActiveState, says Stackato can provide speed and simplicity on-premise and in the cloud. The PaaS can provide the dual capability that companies seem more comfortable with using.

ActiveState will increasingly compete with Cloud Foundry while using its technology. How that competition plays out will depend a lot on ActiveState’s success with HP and the direction Cloud Foundry takes as part of the Pivotal Labs group.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Car-sharing service Wheelz is kind of like Zipcar, but instead of owning a fleet of vehicles itself, it’s making cars that are owned by regular folks available for rent. Founder and CEO Jeff Miller says Wheelz is “building a community marketplace that connects people who own a car with people who need access to a car.” According to him, there are about 250 million cars in the U.S., most of which are parked all the time.

Wheelz aims to make those parked cars available to those who might not own one, when they need a vehicle. To do so, it installs a hardware device into all cars, which allows renters to unlock and access those cars via its mobile app.

Not only is Zipcar kind of a competitor, in the sense that it also provides on-demand access to vehicles via the web and mobile apps, but it was also lead investor in Wheelz. So what does the Avis purchase of Zipcar mean for Wheelz, and the on-demand car-sharing market in general?

“What we’re seeing is a greater shift towards mobility services, away from just a single one-car-to-one-person ownership model,” Miller said. “Avis… making an investment and acquiring a car-sharing company is making a pretty big statement around the direction in how the overall car-sharing industry is growing.” Avis isn’t alone: automotive companies like Mercedes-Benz and BMW are launching their own services for on-demand car services and fractional ownership of vehicles.

Check out the video above to hear more about how car-sharing is changing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

To most companies, the two or three letters coming at the end of their URL probably don’t make a huge difference (with exceptions). However, the company behind the .co domain has been working to change that. In the words of vice president Lori Anne Wardi, it’s trying to turn .co into “the domain about innovation.”

The company is taking another step in that direction today with the launch of its membership program. Most top-level domains, said CEO Juan Diego Calle, don’t offer “any value whatsoever other than the utility.” Calle wants .co to be more than that, so his team worked with partners to put together a package of benefits that companies get for setting up shop on .co.

Those benefits include free passes to Startup Weekend events, free tickets to other events like Eric Ries’ Lean Startup Conference and 500 Startups’ Warm Gun Conference, free access to co-working spaces (like New York City’s Projective and London’s Co-Work), free SEO consultation, and discounts on both live and online classes at General Assembly.

If you’re part of a startup trying to pick out your domain, those benefits could push you in the direction of .co. And they also help with Calle’s aim to turn .co into a real resource and community for entrepreneurs.

For now, .co will offer benefits to the first 1,000 customers who sign up at the membership site. The company will continue to tweak the program over the next few months before officially launching at the next South by Southwest.

Calle also said the number of .co domains is now approaching 1.4 million. Those include the co-working spaces mentioned above, 500 Startups, and a number of big tech companies that use the .co domains as a way to create URL shortcuts.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Understanding relativity is hard but playing games is easy. What’s a physicist to do? Why, make a game about walking near the speed of light, of course, silly!

A Slower Speed Of Light is a game/simulation that allows you to exist in what amounts to an environment where you can reduce the speed of light. By picking up colored orbs you slow light down more and more and you approach the speed of light

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player’s own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay.

The game, using the Unity3D engine, recreates the following fun speed-of-light quirks:

Considering I have literally no idea what any of those things mean in real life makes this simulation quite valuable in understanding relativity and high-speed travel. It also makes for a trippy good time while smoking various substances and/or drinking a lot of 4 Loko.

The game is free and open source. Gerd Kortemeyer, a physics educator, and the folks at MIT Gamelab, including programmer Ryan Cheu and designer Ebae Kim, built the simulator to offer a closer look at the weird stuff that happens when you really and truly start thinking about faster than light travel.

via bb

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ever wonder what it would look like to travel at the speed of light? The folks at MIT’s education games lab have created a simple 3D simulator to teach the masses about the counterintuitive principles of one of physics’ most important concepts: special relativity. The professionally-designed, yet simple first-person game places users in a Lord of the Rings-looking town and slows down the speed of light as scattered light “orbs” are collected throughout the level (video below). The goal of the project was to make something familiar that was very unfamiliar: the laws of special relativity. What would they look like in a familiar setting?,” says Sonny Sidhu, A Slower Speed of Light’s Game Producer.

As the 100 orbs are collected, gamers increasingly experience counterintuitive principles of traveling near the speed of light

• The Doppler Effect – objects become more blue, red, or rainbow colored in accordance with the light spectrum
• Length Contraction – objects warp and bend in space
• The Searchlight Effect – “increased brightness in the direction of travel”
• Runtime Effect – the ability to see the past through the light that is yet to hit the eyes of those in the future

In total, the game took me about 14 minutes to play and seems like a worthwhile introduction to any serious discussion about special relativity. The educational value of the game, itself, seems more in motivating students who would otherwise dismiss a physics lesson as too abstract, or to attract creative-types to science. The math and concepts of space-time aren’t tackled, nor are the implications for scientific experimentation.

Staying true to MIT’s origins in the open information movement, A Slower Speed of Light will encourage other game designers, “targeted for release as a free, open-source package in 2013, to allow others to produce more simulations and games about traveling near the speed of light.”

If you don’t understand special relativity already, don’t expect to become educated after playing the game. But, if you’re interested in experiencing special relativity, the game will certainly satisfy that itch. Readers can download the game here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

To become even more of a destination for casual gamers, AOL overhauled its portal Games.com with new personalization and discovery features today. They also made it cross-platform, with certain titles becoming playable on tablets and mobile phones.

“We saw a lot of growth and movement in the gaming space over the past year,” said Games.com’s general manager John Fox. “We have distribution and we have a great domain, and if you put those together, we can create a rich community and an experience that flows across all screens.”

He says that Games.com sees between 2.5 million and 3 million unique views every month in the U.S. That’s not huge, considering that many of Zynga’s games individually see that many players every day on Facebook, but it’s not an insignificant amount for a mid-size or small developers.

Indeed, AOL has signed up some of the better known mid-size gaming companies as partners like Big Fish Games and Arkadium. Fox says other partners are coming soon. In total, there are 5,000 free online games that come with the site, along with several mobile titles too.

In the re-design, Games.com gets a social bar on the right-hand side that shows recently played games, recommendations and favorite titles. On the bottom right-hand corner, there’s a leaderboard where players can get easy access to badges, points, rankings and their gaming history. Players can jump into games with a single-click or opt for full-screen gameplay.

Games.com also becomes cross-platform with this retooling. Gamers can play HTML5-based titles from phones or tablets. Even though Facebook tried and then abandoned an HTML5-centric strategy for third-party games, Fox says AOL is still making an investment in this direction with partnerships with several HTML5 developers.

AOL isn’t the only gaming company to pursue a web destination strategy. Zynga has also been moving off Facebook with its own portal and then there are plenty of independent, venture-backed companies that have had standalone and profitable gaming destinations for a very long time like Sweden’s King.com and Seattle’s Big Fish Games.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch