It’s been about five years since Echostar acquired Sling Media, but the company — which revolutionized place-shifting technology that allows users to stream live TV anywhere, on PCs, mobile devices, and tablets — continues to innovate. The latest innovation includes capabilities that take advantage of secondary devices that TV viewers are using while watching TV, as well as media-sharing features that go beyond the typical TV watching experience.

Sling customers who have bought the most recent generation of its products will have the ability to now sync photos and videos through a connected USB drive. Specifically, those customers will a new Slingbox 500 will be able to connect their existing media to the device, navigate it with Slingbox mobile apps, and view it on the TV. Users can also make that media available in the cloud with the SlingSync technology, which allows them to archive and store the content remotely.

In addition, Sling is releasing the Slingbox Companion, a second-screen social TV app that will be rolled out for Slingbox 500 customers, but will be available for Slingbox 350 users further down the line. The app is focused around content discovery — specifically, helping users to find shows based on their interests. The app then works like a remote, connecting to the Slingbox to choose a selected show.

While Sling has rolled out its own new products, the company is also working with pay TV providers — for instance, sister company Dish — to make their set-tob boxes Sling-enabled. And those Sling-enabled STBs and DVRs carry with them some of the new features that Sling is announcing in its standalone products. For instance, the focus on discovery and media sharing, which are available as part of the new Dish Hopper with Sling, which was announced at CES yesterday.

Anyway, Sling continues to innovate, which is fun, because really innovative companies in the video space are rare to find. And that Sling continues to do so while also part of a bigger corporation — a bigger corporation in the video delivery space, of all things — is a breath of fresh air.

Am I editorializing? Probably. Is that so bad? Hopefully not.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The e-sports juggernaut keeps on trucking: live-streaming video platform Twitch is partnering with Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) to incorporate in-game live streaming to PlanetSide 2, SOE’s forthcoming MMO (currently in external beta). The pair say it’s the first in-game one-click live streaming integration of Twitch’s service — allowing players to live stream their gameplay to Twitch with minimum fuss. Twitch now has more than 20 million gamers watching e-sports on its platform.

PlanetSide 2 is the first title in the Twitch and SOE partnership — with more expected down the line: SOE said it plans to incorporate Twitch into “future relevant titles”.

Here’s a screenshot of the Twitch/PlanetSide 2 integration

The feature is scheduled to be deployed in an external beta game update for PlanetSide 2 players to begin testing this weekend — so expect a flood of Auraxis-based ground and air combat streams to hit Twitch. Twitch added that it’s in discussions with other large games developers and publishers to incorporate its live streaming service.

John Smedley, President, Sony Online Entertainment, noted that more than 21 million minutes of PlanetSide 2 gameplay have been streamed already, and said the company is keen to grow this by making it even easier the process. “We’ve gone out of our way to make the interface extremely easy to use and allow players to cast with just one-click,” he noted in a statement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zimride’s local, on-demand ride-sharing service, Lyft, has gotten a lot of positive press since launching as an alternative to cabs and Ubers in San Francisco. But it’s always had some legal, regulatory, and safety questions hanging over it in the two or three months since it launched in private beta. Now that’s the service is available to all, Lyft taken one big step toward answering the question of what happens if someone gets into an accident while a Lyft passenger is in the car, by securing supplemental insurance for all its drivers.

Lyft says it will now provide drivers with excess liability insurance of $1 million for any incident that occurs while a passenger is in the car. The policy doesn’t cover collision damage, but will offer protection above and beyond drivers’ own liability policies. It’ll be available free of charge to every Lyft driver while transporting a passenger booked through its platform.

While peer-to-peer marketplaces like Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, and others make it easier for users to more efficiently share assets and skills, there’s always the potential for abuse or unintended consequences. (Zaarly co-founder Eric Koester wrote up a good primer on Quora about the types of issues peer-to-peer marketplace startups face, which can be read here.)

This is a lesson Airbnb learned more than a year ago, when one of its users had her home burglarized and vandalized by another user. Since then, many of these marketplace startups have worked to insure users in situations like this. Airbnb added its own insurance guarantee last year, and has since extended its policy to cover up to $1 million in damages in the case of similar vandalization.

Lyft says it carefully vets all the drivers, claiming that fewer than 5 percent of applicants get accepted. But accidents are bound to happen, and any marketplace startup is just one horror story away from horrible press coverage and the possibility of regulation and legislation designed to shut services like it down.

The company’s new insurance policy should provide a little extra peace of mind to passengers considering worst-case scenarios when booking a ride in a stranger’s’car for the first time. It also shows that Lyft takes the well-being of its drivers seriously — enough so that it’s willing to add excess liability insurance in the case of accidents that might happen. And by showing that it’s protecting drivers and passengers with $1 million in supplemental insurance, Lyft might be able to better navigate some of the regulatory issues it could face down the line.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tweek aims to turn the social graph into a TV Guide by letting the user discover what his/her friends like, connect with people whose taste he/she trusts and providing direct access to live and on demand content. Launched in May for the iPad and iPad first, in Germany and the UK, it pulls in information from iTunes, Vimeo, YouTube and Crackle in the UK and similar outlets in Germany.

Tweek was incorporated in September 2011 by Sven Koerbitz, Klaus Hartl and Marcel Due, but we caught up with head of marketing Nadia Boegli at the recent Tech Open Air event in Berlin. She says Tweek’s new version coming down the line will incorporate new algorithmic suggestions, not just what you see in your social graph.

In the UK Zeebox is doing very well on ‘social TV’ but focuses on the user interaction during the broadcast, not the planning beforehand, which Tweek does.

You can grab the iOS app from this iTunes link.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The team at GroupMe has certainly had an impressive ride so far — after winning the Disrupt NY Hackathon in 2010, they quickly locked up some funding, and were eventually acquired by Skype.

So what’s next for GroupMe co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci? As it turns out, they’re looking to get into the group-buying game, and to that end they have just launched a new service called Experiences by GroupMe into private beta. Its goal: to simplify the process of getting people together and doing cool things in the real world.

Here’s how Experiences works. Upon taking a look at the Experiences site, users can select from a handful of carefully-curated events to attend with their friends. Once an experience has been chosen, that user is given a unique URL to spread around, though each experience is typically designed for a set number of participants. That user also has access to a “plan” page, which lets them keep tabs on who’s attending and how much time is left before they lose the experience.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to see that the service also ties in with GroupMe — when a user selects an event and friends begin locking in their spots, a GroupMe group is created for all attendees so they can stay in touch with each other through the booking process and beyond. That GroupMe group is also used to deliver notifications about new attendees, though they’re also sent by email just to be safe.

Perhaps the best part? Each participant in an experience has to use a credit card to fork over their share of the cost, but only has to pay when all of an event’s slots are filled. Thankfully, this means the process of wrangling payments is much neater (not to mention less contentious) here than it is in meatspace. Like most other group-buying services out there, GroupMe will take a percentage of the sales from each transaction, though the team has other (secret) monetization ideas in the works too.

It may seem like a quite a stretch from the group messaging focus of the GroupMe app, but the founders look at both services as variations on a theme.

“We have the luxury of accumulated knowledge about how groups work,” Hecht told me. “Experiences is a natural progression from where GroupMe started, because we’re not only helping groups communicate better, we’re helping them buy better.”

For now, Experiences is only open to users in New York City — their sales, marketing, and business development teams can only do so much. The team fully expects that to change down the line though, and they’ve confirmed that users will eventually be able to create and share their own Experiences in due course. There’s plenty more in the works for Experiences too — co-founder Martocci hinted at other potential features down the line (think event recommendations and the like), but for now the team is focused on “getting the product out there first and iterating like crazy.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s been a few months since Orbotix’s pearlescent smart ball finally started making its way out into the real world, and the team behind it has just announced that another major retailer will be carrying their slightly-pointless gadget.

Move over, Brookstone — the Sphero is now available in Apple’s online store and in a handful of their carefully-crafted altars of consumerism.

The Sphero, if you’ve managed to miss our previous coverage, is a small robotic ball that you can control from your smartphone or tablet. In addition to being able to take the thing for aimless drives around the house, users can fire up (or even develop) apps for the Sphero that turn it into a mobile gaming accessory rather than just a $129 toy.

And really, I imagine that’s where most of the fun will come from down the line. Orbotix is currently criss-crossing the country to drum up developer support for the Sphero, so with any luck the smartphone-controlled-robotic-ball-that-could will only get better with time.

Still, its usefulness is downright questionable, but the pint-sized robo-sphere has managed to please both preschoolers and presidents alike. That’s got to count for something, right?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In case you were wondering: Ron Conway says he will not be running for mayor of San Francisco.

Apparently that was on Mike Arrington’s mind when he interviewed Conway and SV Angel partner David Lee on-stage at Disrupt today. He said he heard from more than one source that Conway is considering a run “somewhere down the line,” and asked flat-out if that’s true.

“That’s a rumor I can assure you is false,” Conway replied. “There’s an old saying: ‘Never say never.’ I actually believe in that saying, but I will never run for mayor of San Francisco.” Had he explored it at all? “Not for a nanosecond.”

The idea isn’t quite as out-of-left-field as it sounds. Conway has been visibly involved in civic issues recently — apparently he met with Senator Chuck Schumer recently to discuss SOPA/PIPA and immigration issues, and along with current Mayor Ed Lee and former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, he recently helped launch a program called sfCITI aimed at helping the tech industry and the city work together. (In fact, Conway’s relationship with Mayor Lee seemed close enough to prompt a largely critical Bay Citizen article printed in The New York Times.) When grilled about how much of his time he’s “throwing away on government work” (Arrington’s words), Conway estimated that it was 20 percent.

On the mayoral question, Conway’s response might seem pretty definitive, but Arrington wasn’t satisfied. He asked if Conway might be lying. (Conway: “I would never lie to you about this.”) Later, he asked again Conway was running.

“Last time I checked 10 minutes ago, I was not running for mayor,” Conway said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Well, that was fast. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer just announced on Apple’s Q2 2012 earnings call that the company’s iCloud service has attracted 125 million users in the roughly six months since the service launched.

It seems like just yesterday that Oppenheimer revealed that the service had 85 million users, and the service’s subscriber base continues to grow at a seemingly steady pace.

As The Next Web notes, Apple CEO Tim Cook also revealed just two months ago that the service had hit 100 million users — that breaks down to an average of over 13 million new iCloud users since January.

That growth probably has something to do with the scores of Apple devices that the company has sold between January and now. Apple reports that they’ve sold a total of 35.1 million iPhones and just shy of 12 million iPads, and while those numbers are down thanks to the downright ridiculousness of their performance in Q1, it’s still indicative of a hell of a quarter.

Sadly, Oppenheimer made no mention of how many of those millions of iCloud users are actually paying customers, as opposed to people simply taking advantage of the free 5GB of storage at their disposal.

Still, Apple will find no shortage of competition in the cloud going forward — incumbents like SkyDrive and Dropbox aside, Google’s own newly-revealed Drive service may give iCloud a run for its money down the line. Though Google Drive hasn’t yet found a foothold in iOS (they have currently have clients ready for Windows, OS X, and Android), Google’s clout and ties with manufacturers may make theirs the mobile cloud suite to beat.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s a good reason Apple let Mountain Lion out of its cage this morning with no fanfare or event. Like Lion, the improvements are minor at best and some less than useless. Lion hasn’t sold particularly well, and few of its “improvements” have caught the attention of the public, except when they try to scroll down and it goes up. Personally, I thought being able to resize windows from any edge was worth the price of admission alone, but the rest, not so much.

And now here is Mountain Lion, a collection of iOS apps and features already available elsewhere. And a shady “security” feature that by default prevents you from getting apps from any source but the Mac App Store.

Apple-flavored versions of Growl and SimpleNote, great. A desktop version of Game Center, a network built around mobile gaming. Why? And you can now tweet things from anywhere, super easily. Except 95% of your tweets are done either in a client, on your mobile, or within a browser, where there is already a wealth of plugins and bookmarklets. A chat client. A screen-casting thing that requires an Apple TV, and can prohibit some content from being transmitted. The share button might be nice.

And Gatekeeper – kind of a heavy name for a single setting. It’s not a serious security feature, just a way to shunt people into the Mac App Store by default (we worried about this back in 2010). It wasn’t long ago that Facebook and Google were facing withering criticism for similar “defaulting” strategies. The shoe is on the other foot today, though as usual it’s really more a philosophical problem than a practical one. Just change the setting.

I’m not trying to be overly negative, here. I like my Mac. But neither Lion nor Mountain Lion (also known as the Puma or Panther) has made me excited about using it. On the contrary, I’m worried about it. The features added have been increasingly imitative, restrictive, and questionable from a user-experience point of view. I know there are big changes coming down the line, and I look forward to them, but these holdover releases are toothless.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

First, a word of caution: the Manhattan Research survey that yielded this data was performed online, so that’s going to skew the results straight away. But even taking that into account, it’s powerful data.

According to the survey, just over a quarter of all doctors in the EU — primary care and specialist — use an iPad for professional purposes. That’s a big number for a device primarily aimed at content consumption and not hardened against a hospital environment.

And it seems that the doctors in fact do use it primarily for content consumption: a quarter of their “work online time” is spent on it (55% is still on a desktop), looking up articles, showing online resources to patients, and so on. Right now the market for iPad-oriented productivity software for healthcare appears to be more or less wide open; doctors are using the device (40% planned to buy one in the next six months as well), but more as a portable web browser than a care accessory.

There are some medical apps and services coming to the iPad, but the medical establishment isn’t very quick to move. Many hospitals still use systems from the 90s or before because of the effort and money that would be involved with upgrading. And standards for privacy, emissions, documentation, and so on have to be consistent as well, something that doesn’t happen overnight.

For the moment, the iPad is simply a useful portable screen on which a doctor can pull up relevant info for a patient, browse recent journal articles without going back to their office, or do some light email. It will take a long time for development to catch up with the needs of the community, but this foot in the door by Apple could become extremely valuable a little ways down the line.

[via TUAW]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch