MakerBot and OUYA announced a partnership today that will allow gamers to print their own OUYA game console cases at home. The partnership will see OUYA create 3D design files for Thingiverse.com, MakerBot’s 3D printing design repository, which are designed to be used with the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D printer.

The OUYA Game Console Enclosure design created by MakerBot allows OUYA console owners to print their own case, which includes a lid and a spring-loaded button for housing the hardware. They can also be printed on the MakerBot Replicator 2X Experimental 3D printer for those who want to use ABS instead of PLA to print their designs.

It’s a move that brings an advanced level of customization to the OUYA, which is already based on an open-sourced development kit, which, while it limits developers in some ways, allows for a wide range of flexibility. The addition of home 3D-printable hardware elements makes for yet more personalization options, and could make for additional opportunities for game creators to develop case mod tie-ins for their titles.

MakerBot says on its website for the OUYA console kit design that it can be opened with a user’s own 3D printing software to make modifications and additional customizations, so we could see much more than the standard Yves Behar-sourced cube with a rounded edge at the bottom.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new report from the Wall Street Journal just out say that Google has made more major executive staffing and organizational changes today, breaking up the Maps and Commerce units, with SVP Jeff Huber stepping down from his position in charge of those divisions.

The news comes just a day after Google announced another major shakeup, by replacing Andy Rubin with Sundar Pichai as the head of its Google Android division. Huber, whose official title had been SVP of Geo and Commerce, has been with Google since 2003. Huber will move to Google X, which is the experimental division headed by Sergey Brin where Google works on its more ambitious projects like Google Glass.

Google’s Mapping unit will now become part of the Google search division, led by SVP Alan Eustace, and commerce will join the advertising team under SVP Susan Wojcicki, according to the WSJ. These changes were announced within Google alongside the change around Andy Rubin, Pichai and Android leadership.

Huber earned the title of SVP of Commerce and Local in 2011, moving from a previously held position as SVP of Engineering. It’s worth noting that Google announced yesterday that it was shutting down the Search API for Shopping, in order to shift focus to building a “better shopping experience for users through Google Shopping.” Overall, the company seems to be making moves to streamline its product offerings (killing some beloved services in the mix), as well as the management team and internal organization.

Frederic suggested yesterday that exiting Android chief Rubin might also be finding a place at Google X. The company seems to be putting more investment into that department, perhaps based on recent interest in high-profile projects originating form that unit like Google Glass and driverless cars. Staffing up what is arguably the most exciting center of innovation at Google could be a nice byproduct of making sure the management team and overall corporate structure is as efficient as it can be.

Huber tweeted the following from his personal account, confirming the shift:

Finishing up my first decade at Google, and excited to begin the next one at Google X. What would you like to see X do next?—
Jeff Huber (@jhuber) March 14, 2013

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Social commenting platform Livefyre has raised $15 million in funding led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and included existing investors Greycroft Partners, Cue Ball, HillsVen Group, and ff Venture Capital. This brings the startup’s total funding to $21 million.

Livefyre’s commenting system, which we recently switched over to here at TechCrunch, originally launched back in 2009. Users can post comments in real-time in a more discussion-like format. The platform also integrates social logins from Facebook and Twitter, and you can embed websites, YouTube videos, Flickr images, and other media in the comment stream. Users can also like share or reply to conversations.

The company says that its network of content sites using its commenting system reach more than 120 million people and deliver over 1 billion live content streams every month with 10 million registered users commenting.

And Livefyre has expanded beyond just a commenting system for blogs and websites. Livefyre also offers a live-blogging tool product, and a full features, brand-focused commenting platform called StreamHub. Beyond the liveblogging and commenting platform, StreamHub provides the ability for brands to live chat, and create custom applications. A Curate feature allows companies to add live content from elsewhere on the social web to their sites. So you could embed a live stream of tweets to a web page, and you could also set up a number of rules around the stream — if you only want photos, or if you only want tweets from within a certain geographic area.

It’s this set of comprehensive offerings, says Founder and CEO Jordan Kretchmer, that is helping differentiate Livefyre from Facebook Comments and Disqus. “We aim to be a whole community platform, and comments feed into this. We’ve come up with ways for people to interact besides comments and we see comments as to be one piece of puzzle. We want to offer the full stack,” he tells us in an interview.

As for the funding, Kretchmer says that it will be used to accelerate product development. Livefyre will soon be expanding the product line more into mobile, as there are huge opportunities in this market. Two of Livefyre’s customers, Bravo TV and Showtime, have built-in the commenting system to their second screen experiences. The startup will specifically be expanding functionality available in mobile SDKs, native app development and more.

Additionally, Livefyre has created a Labs group and will be dedicating more resources to some of the experimental products.

Another big feature in the works is new moderation and quality control systems, that makes the automatic filtering of content easier for moderators.

“Livefyre is exactly the sort of Social Media opportunity we love ,” said Paul Matteucci, General Partner at USVP in a release. “The Livefyre team has built a unique and flexible platform that addresses the needs of an impressive set of customers, who want to interact directly with the communities they build for their brands and content. By focusing on their customers’ requirements Livefyre is driving long-term revenue growth, while leading the next iteration of the social web.”

Besides TechCrunch, other Livefyre clients include FOX Entertainment, The New York Times, CBS, The Daily Beast, FOX News, AOL and NBC Universal. In fact, the company says that Fox Entertainment experienced a 10x increase
in engagement around comments and social shares. American Idol saw a 20x increase in engagement for their season finale using Livefyre to drive live conversations and social aggregation.

Commenting is still a competitive space, and companies like Disqus are trying to innovate at a rapid pace. But Kretchmer doesn’t seem too worried. The company hit its revenue and bookings goal last year and is expected to double that this year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

YouTube first launched its Data API back in 2007, and it has since become the video giant’s most popular API in terms of request volume. Today, YouTube announced that it has officially opened version 3.0 of its API to all developers.

The new APIs bring a number of important changes to bear on its current feature set, including client library support, improved tooling, reference documentation and integration with Google’s API infrastructure. It’s also now officially using JSON instead of XML encoding for, as YouTube says, “greater efficiency” and in pursuit of actually returning what you ask for.”

On top of that, the new API introduces Freebase integration via topics and universal search and, for those developing social media management apps, YouTube now offers channel bulletin and subscriber list management. The former especially could help solve a real pain point for YouTube’s user experience, considering that many of us are likely familiar with the less-than-satisfying results that are produced in search results.

With its new Topics API, developers can specify Freebase topic IDS rather than using search keywords. In its blog post this afternoon, YouTube gives the example of the topic ID, “/m/02vx4,” which would come in handy for tagging content related to soccer content, rather than having to come up with the right keywords. On top of that, because the API offers a universal search feature, developers can quickly match their topic of choice to channels, playlists and videos in one request (example here), which removes a good deal of friction from the whole process.

With v3.0, YouTube also aims to help developers lower their apps’ bandwidth requirement (by only returning what you ask for with its new “part” parameter) — along with the improved efficiency that comes from its new default JSON encoding. To that point, YouTube says that version 3.0 supports Google API tools like its API console and its reference documentation now allows developers to “scroll down to the bottom of any reference page to try the new API.” Pretty cool.

All in all, YouTube calls this its “biggest overhaul to date,” and as YouTube product manager Hunter Walk said via tweet, this is a clear sign that YouTube is getting serious about providing deeper support to its developer ecosystem. There are already a number of recognizable apps and startups taking advantage of YouTube’s API and, with v3 today, the company may very well see a renewed interest from developers.

No mixed messages to developers from @YouTube — we <3 you. here's an even more powerful API v3 apiblog.youtube.com/2012/12/the-si…

—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) December 15, 2012

A handful of startups have implemented the new API, which YouTube is leveraging to showcase its new capabilities. Showyou, for example, has integrated the Topics API to allow its users to discover related videos by clicking on topics associated with the Showyou feed, while YouTube audience development startup Tubular Labs has begun using v3.0′s subscriber list to let content creators and publishers get a more nuanced view of their audiences. [More examples here.]

There’s a lot to play around with in YouTube’s new data API, and it’s still in the experimental phase, so there are likely more changes to come. But, as of now, it seems that the changes open the door to new pockets of growth within its developer ecosystem. By adding the ability for clients to post bulletins to subscribers through third-party apps, for example, this could jump start the YouTube marketing developer industry — much the way Facebook did when it offered its publishing APIs for pages.

For more on the announcement, find it here or introductory playlist here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s a busy day for Mozilla today. The company just announced that its Firefox OS Simulator, which it officially launched just three weeks ago, is now stable enough for a formal 1.0 launch.

In addition, Mozilla also just announced that it is bringing per-window private browsing to Firefox. For the time being, this feature is only available in the experimental Nightly versions of Firefox, but it will find its way into the stable release channel early next year.

Per-windows private browsing allows users to open a private windows without having to close their entire browsing session. Currently, Firefox users who want to launch a private browsing session have to close all of their tabs (they can return to them after they end their private browsing session).

In addition, Nightly users will be able to open links in a private window by right-clicking and choosing the “Open Link in New Private Windows” option.

As Mozilla points out, adding this relatively small feature was actually a “huge project” as the team had to redesign the existing private browsing system from scratch.

The current Nightly version of Firefox 20 is scheduled to move to the slightly more stable Aurora channel in early January and will continue to make its way through Mozilla’s release channels from there.

Firefox OS Simulator 1.0

The Firefox OS Simulator is an extension for Firefox that allows developers (or anybody else who is interested in trying out Firefox OS) to test their apps for Mozilla’s new mobile operating system without having to get a compatible phone.

While this is a 1.0 release, Mozilla still considers this to be a preview, “both because the Simulator is new and because Firefox OS itself is still in development.”

If you want to give it a try, just download the extension and you should be good to go. The screencast below also gives you a detailed explanation for how to get started with the simulator.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This ia a guest post by Tim Panton, a senior engineer at Voxeo labs.

I’m in the middle of the desert in Nevada – a dusty, half-naked guy walks up to me:

- “You have working cell service here ?”
- “Yes, we built our own.”
- “I have to make a call, can I use it?”
- “Sure.”

He makes a call to sort out a family emergency and then heads off back to his camp with a working mobile phone.

We are at Burning Man – an annual festival of ephemeral art and radical self-sufficiency.

It’s an odd place to find a soft middle-aged English phone geek. I’m still a bit surprised to have found myself there.

There is literally nowhere else on earth where you can run an experimental mobile phone network with a potential 30,000 users and get away with it. Nowhere else can you learn so much in as short a timeframe about people’s relationship with their mobile phones or what makes a mobile network tick. I’m exceptionally grateful to my friends at Range Networks who run the Papa Legba camp, designed the OpenBTS software we used to build the network and who provided most of the hardware too.

We provided a service covering >30k people over ~7 sq km from 5 basestations.

Try that with wifi.

Many of those calls were in-network calls or SMS messages, meaning someone at Burning Man was communicating with another Burner in the desert. These were typically logistical calls, “Meet me by the giant steampunk octopus,” or “we need 6 more bags of ice.” In addition, we registered over 7,500 calls through Tropo out to the “default world”. Inside the Papa Legba network, each user had a unique, self-assigned 6-digit phone number, with Tropo providing the critical bridge between our experimental network and the global carrier network that powers the rest of the world’s communications.

Every year we do this, we learn new lessons. Last year we learned that a cloud telephony API (Tropo in our case) works best if it is run inside the carrier’s network, a lesson we applied when we partnered with Deutsche Telekom who recently announced that they are offering the Tropo API on their network. This means that, for the first time ever, over 100k Tropo developers can now run their apps (with no changes) inside a carrier network.

This year’s lesson is about customisation, we used our position inside the network at Burning Man to change the user’s experience of the phone service, we created web-style metrics to see what worked and what doesn’t. You simply can’t do that stuff if you aren’t right in the centre of the network, being on the edges doesn’t cut it. We have already been busy applying that knowledge to the Tropo APIs we offer our customers and partners in the near future.

By bringing web-style user-centric thinking to the telephony space, we allow web developers to manage realtime audio sessions just as easily as they do web sessions, often in the same app. Our work on the Phono project and with webRTC is also directed to this goal, getting the vibrancy and fun of web development into the world of realtime communication, because sometimes (as the dusty guy above will attest) only voice communication will do the job.

If you want to know more about the technicalities of the Papa Legba network there is a wiki full of geekery – or listen this Friday at 12pm EST to the weekly VoIP Users Conference call (VUC) where I’ll be talking about it with other telephony geeks.

(Images Copyright Mark Peterson, Johnny Diggz)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When most of us play video games, our greatest accomplishment is the mound of Cheetos dust we can collect in a single sitting. At MIT, researchers have hacked the Microsoft Kinect’s laser into a wearable chest sensor that creates a floor-plan as the user moves throughout a building. The immediate use case, reports MIT News, is for emergency personal who could benefit from a real-time map as they explore unfamiliar buildings. Even better, the system memorizes where the wearer has been, so it could alert firefighters if they are accidentally backtracking or need to find a their original way out.

Mapping data is collected by a chest-bound laser that sweeps for terrain and walls in 270-degrees around the wearer as he or she moves about a room. “Every few meters” a camera collects hundreds of visual images on colors, contours, and shapes to augment the laser’s mapping. An accelerometer keeps track of where the user is looking and moving, and a barometer gages the floor level by micro-changes in air-pressure.

Check out MIT’s video below to see the experimental device in action:

Via Gizmodo Via Ubergizmo

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is probably not the Google+ API you have been waiting for, but Google just announced the launch of version 1.2 of its Hangouts API, which comes with a number of significant new features for developers who are building products on top of Google’s group video chat service. In addition, Google also just launched private messages in Hangouts as an experimental feature.

Hangouts API 1.2

Among other things, the updated API now gives developer more control over which guests in On Air hangouts appear during a video broadcast. Google itself uses this feature for its Hangouts On Air Cameraman app. The updated API now also provides developers with more information about a hangout, including the topic, preferred locale and the YouTube ID for the recorded video.

Other new features include the ability to add sound to a participant’s audio stream. Google says this could be used to add a laugh track, applause, music or a sound notification to a video stream.

There are a number of smaller changes as well and you can find a more detailed rundown of all the changes here.

Private Messages In Hangouts

As for the experimental private messages in Hangouts, which were developed by Google Interns Mairin Chesney and Anthony Tordillos, the feature pretty much works as you would expect it to. To send a private message, you just type ““/to [their name] [your message]” to get started. Tordillos also notes that “you don’t need to type their full name, just enough so that it’s not ambiguous who you mean. Type “/users” to see the nicknames you can use for each person in the Hangout.” This feature should start rolling out in the next few hours.

Google, of course, still remains hesitant to roll out a full read/write Google+ API. Given Twitter’s recent changes to its API, now would probably be a good time for Google to start giving developers more opportunities to develop on top of its social platform, but given the recent public statements by the Google+ team, chances are that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The process of recruiting volunteers is a pain felt by the entire American electorate: citizens are quick to hang up on complete strangers begging for their time and campaign organizations, as a result, are perpetually short-staffed. Amicus, a Y Combinator nonprofit volunteer-recruitment platform, may have found a clever way to ensure that citizens are only contacted by trusted friends. Amicus scours public and private databases and matches names up with their volunteers’ Facebook friends, assigning volunteer outreach only to those who have a personal bond between the caller. “Amicus’ friend-to-friend connections enhance our traditional outreach program and make it easier to mobilize our supporters online,” said Jared Schwartz, Director of Digital strategies, AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S.

The heart of Amicus is an online dashboard that presents volunteers with a ready made list of friends that need to be contacted, complete with a leaderboard, badges, and other gaming elements to incentivize the thankless job of political and charitable outreach.

Efficiently collecting an army of canvassers is essential for boosting support, as experimental Political Science research has found that face-to-face contact is the only reliable way to increase voter turnout (boosting participation by about 7-10%). If Amicus can reliably get more boots on the ground for campaigns, they’d be a force of nature.

But, does the evidence support Amicus’ assumption that friends are better than strangers at influencing our civic involvement? Solid evidence shows that our associations are indeed influential. One clever study by David Nickerson of the University of Notre Dame found that voting is “contagious” between family members, by measuring whether or not the individual who did not answer the door for a canvasser also decided to vote. Another experimental study [pdf] found that neighboring canvassers are twice as effective at boosting turnout than strangers.

But, perhaps the most interesting research relevant to the Facebook generation is that close friends are much less politically influential than weaker friendships. “Close friends may be close friends in spite of their wrongheaded views, and regardless of their obnoxious political preferences,” write authors Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague. Our best friends are forged as a result of childhood location, family ties, and life events. Those who we just want to have a beer with are likely chosen because we enjoy their company and conversation.

In other words, the very “friendships” that Amicus finds through Facebook are precisely the ones that are best for recruiting political volunteers (because, who is close with all of their +1,000 Facebook friends?). CEO Seth Bannon says that early results show that Amicus bumps volunteer acquisition by 50%, which jives with prior research. Given the relatively low-cost of their digital solution, and the potential impact of their platform as more organizations begin using it, Amicus is certainly a startup to keep on the radar.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s a little-known stipulation in Amazon’s 3G browsing, available primarily on their e-ink devices. Ostensibly, downloading items over 3G is completely free but browsing the web using the device’s weird and slow experimental interface is capped at 50MB. Most users have never hit that cap and there haven’t been many reports of actual notifications.

That’s recently changed. One user of the Kindle Keyboard 3G noticed the message when he was browsing the web in Canada. He received a message that said he could only browse Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and the Kindle Store. Wi-Fi access was unaffected.

In the terms of use, Amazon notes:

This could be a reaction to folks tethering their Kindles, resulting in a tragedy of the commons effect where some users are using a piddling amount of data while others are blowing out Amazon’s allocations in a few hours.

via Digital Reader

Article courtesy of TechCrunch