A brain drain at a big tech company is never a good thing, and when a lot of that departing talent consists of high-level execs moving on in rapid succession it’s bound to look like curtains to outside observers. That appears to be the case at HTC, which is losing a lot of senior execs according to multiple reports today from The Verge, CNET and Engadget, and a source has pointed us to yet another recent high profile departure.

We’ve learned at TechCrunch that HTC Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Greg Fisher departed the company just a few short months ago to Amazon. Fisher is among a growing list of known execs leaving HTC, including people on both the product and marketing sides of the equation. What we’re hearing suggests that the company is facing a lot of internal turmoil and politics, which is frustrating employees across the board.

The Verge reported earlier today that HTC’s Chief Product Office Kouji Kodera has departed as of last week, which is a considerable staff shift given that Kodera probably spearheaded HTC’s recent line of critically well-received devices, including the HTC One X and this year’s HTC One. The company has also seen the departure of Global Communications VP Jason Gordon, Global Retail Marketing Manager Rebecca Rowland, digital marketing chief John Starkweather and Eric Lin, manager of product strategy with the past three months.

And when it rains it pours, as HTC Asia CEO Lennard Hoornik confirmed to have left today, and Elizabeth Griffin, the Head of Global Digital Service for the Taiwan-based smartphone maker also reportedly hopping into the lifeboat in favor of a position at Nintendo (out of the frying pan and into the fire?).

This sizeable outpouring of talent comes at a crucial juncture for HTC, as it has just launched the HTC One, a flagship that CEO Peter Chou has literally staked his job upon. Chou so far seems to be secure in his position at the company, but if this trend of executive departures, he could soon wind up on his own at the top. Chou is apparently not the man people would like to have in charge, however, as The Verge reports that he and his tendency to make snap decisions are what’s behind this outbound tide of senior staff.

The HTC One is reportedly selling at a decent pace after a slow start, but HTC’s other sizeable bet, the First which comes pre-loaded with Facebook Home, looks to be on life support at best, if not entirely discontinued already.

If HTC is bleeding from the head, it’s possible it’s bleeding from the body, too. We’ve seen evidence to suggest that could be the case in the past, and we’ve also heard that it’s not just senior people who are looking towards greener pastures. It’s unlikely that we’ve seen the end of these leavings, either, so in the meantime we’ll be watching to see who’s next into the lifeboats.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Porn is the new Tumblr. It seems that everyone with a CS degree and a little free time is trying to cash in (or at least dabble) in the world of online sexuality, a happenstance that I’d chalk up to the ubiquity of boobies online and the potential for perceived riches. But what inspires a pair of designers and artists to create a site that essentially catalogs every NSFW GIF they can find?

I had to find out.

To be clear, the site [THIS IS A NSFW LINK. DO NOT CLICK IT AT WORK OR EVER] is very NSFW. It’s also quite basic – you simply press your mouse button to slide through one image after the other in a cavalcade of protuberances and pneumatic efforts that brings to mind Chaplin’s Modern Times crossed with Skinemax. Seriously. Don’t click the link. It’s porn. Instead, let’s talk to Raj and Katie, founders of the site. They preferred to remain somewhat anonymous.

John Biggs: Why did you guys make this?

Raj: Serendipity. In the beginning, in order to ramp up on some new technologies, I built a webapp to pull the most popular animated gifs from the web and present them one after another. I honestly expected kitties, Batman, and Kermit the frog. Instead, the gifs ended up being 99% porn. The next day, I told 6 friends about this happy accident, and by the end of the week, we were getting 200 unique visitors daily. Chris (the designer) has since transformed my clever hack into a polished user experience, Kevin (the hustler) is exploring innovative business models, and Katie (the ballerina) has helped forge our brand and identity. We use the site ourselves, and we’ve just been kindling the fire – it feels like the project has taken on a life of its own.

These are some of the responses to our site on Reddit.

@TheWorstDrug that is…..AMAZING! Is it just for this particular one or will all of em eventually be like this?—
Mirza-A (@Mirza_A88) May 11, 2013

@TheWorstDrug You're a magician with your site! Had to slap myself in the face to stop being hypnotized by it. Damn youuuu!! —
Rabbit Sweet (@brabbitsweet) May 07, 2013

@TheWorstDrug opened it up @ work and lost all my concentration… This is the worst drug… Luv it—
Texas proud (@tompaul64) May 06, 2013

JB: Who are you guys?

Raj: I’m equal parts hacker and guitarist at heart, Chris is an artist, Kevin is a hustler, and Katie is a choreographer. We’re a group of friends, and we each bring unique talents to the table. We love working together. At the moment, we’re building a porn site. Next time, we might record a rock album.

Quick story: A few months ago, we were trying to figure out where to take our product, so I issued Chris a No Fap Challenge. I asked him to not spank it to any porn site other than The Worst Drug for as long as possible. Chris lasted 3 days. He came back to me and told me that he couldn’t get off without video – so along with animated gifs, HTML5 video became our next major feature.

JB: There seems to be a trend of women working on porn startups. Why?

Katie: As porn becomes more mainstream, disrupting the current tech is fair game for anyone who isn’t afraid of it. This includes the kind of savvy and self-governing women who would abandon their kitchens and venture into the tech world in the first place. That’s my guess anyway. For me it was happenstance that the content was porn. These GIFs reveal the usually obscured popular content of the Internet. Imagine observing the planet from a distance, swiping through what we look at, laugh at, get aroused by, and share with each other. I was initially surprised, even shocked, that what we captured was basically all porn, but then I had to laugh. I love this big world of happy, normal, clever, horny people. We’re sexy.

JB: Why porn? Why now?

Raj: We’re driven by a particular philosophy. Recent studies have shown that there’s little correlation between porn use and deviant/risky sexual behavior. Researchers have also been looking into why porn is addictive. I’ve been trolling on 4chan for years, and I think that watching porn makes you a better person. It’s always my belief that knowledge is more powerful than ignorance, and porn is a particular type of knowledge.

Also, there’s nothing in our algorithms that limits our content to porn. Our site simply pulls in the most popular animated gifs as determined by web users around the world. It just happens to be the case that these gifs are all porn – we’re reflecting the world back at itself.

JB: How will you make money?

We don’t know – do you have any money?

We’ve bootstrapped ourselves so far, and we’ve been able to cover our operating expenses. For the moment, we’re focused on building the best user experience that we can.

Unrelated: Our name (The Worst Drug) reflects the addictive nature of the site. Chris chose our logo font because it looks like something that you’d see on a bottle of prescription pills – and it feels a little dirty, but still somehow clean. Our ‘u’ is a forward arrow key, as you can hit that key instead of clicking the image.

JB: Do your parents know what you’re doing?

Raj: My parents have no idea what I’m doing. My parents have never had any idea what I’ve been up to. They still don’t know that I once stole a nice pen from K-Mart in 6th grade. (I hope that my parents don’t read TechCrunch.)

Katie: Yes, and my mom loves the site! She’s offered suggestions for the UI, and she’s even Tweeted about us to her 17 followers. Her response is flattering, but I question her taste, because I also showed her Two Girls, One Cup, and she thought it was hilarious and didn’t throw up in her mouth at all.

JB: What’s your favorite kitten picture?

See above.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC, the digital book and college book joint venture with Barnes & Noble and other investors, according to internal documents we’ve obtained. In this plan, Microsoft would redeem preferred units in Nook Media, which also includes a college textbook division, leaving it with the digital operation — e-books, as well as Nook e-readers and tablets.

The documents also reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue its Android-based tablet business by the end of its 2014 fiscal year as it transitions to a model where Nook content is distributed through apps on “third-party partner” devices. Speculation about the plan to discontinue the Nook surfaced in February. The documents we have are not clear on whether the third-party tablets would be Microsoft’s own Windows 8 devices, tablets made by others (including competing platforms) or both. Third-party tablets, according to the document, are due to get introduced in 2014.

Nook e-readers, meanwhile, do not appear to fall into the discontinuation pile immediately. Rather, they’re projected to have their own gradual, natural decline — following the general trend of consumers moving to tablets as all-purpose devices.

Microsoft and B&N representatives declined to comment for this story.

A deal to buy the digital assets of Nook Media is the natural next step for Microsoft, which first announced a plan to work with Barnes & Noble on its Nook devices and content in April 2012, ponying up $300 million at the time to help. That plan included an additional $180 million advance to develop content for its Windows 8 devices — which Nook has been doing.

To date, there have been 10 million Nook devices sold, including both tablets and e-readers, with more than 7 million active subscribers. Microsoft has seen limited interested in its Windows 8 devices (although it says it has sold more than 100 million licenses for the OS to date). Currently the Nook app is available on every major platform, including Android, iOS and Windows.

Nook Media split from the retail arm last October with a $300 million investment by Microsoft for a 16.8 percent stake in the company. The partnership was aimed at getting B&N content on then-nascent Windows 8 tablets. At the time, President of Digital Product at Nook Media, Jamie Iannone, said “It’s hardware, software, content: everything Nook is part of Nook Media. There will always be a long-term relationship between Barnes & Noble and the Nook business.”

Nook’s decline seems to have helped alter company strategy. Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio proposed buying back the whole of the company’s retail operation.

The documents TC has seen values B&N at $1.66 billion. When Nook Media was first formed, the valuation of that division alone was $1.7 billion. When Pearson invested $85 million at a 5 percent stake in January, it was valued at $1.8 billion. If the deal goes through, Microsoft’s $1 billion purchase will be well below the price it had originally bought in at.

Projections in the document, which are based on company filings and management discussions, show the Nook unit bringing in total revenue of $1.215 billion for fiscal year 2012 (which for Barnes & Noble ended April 30th), for a loss of $262 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). It expects revenue to fall to $1.091 billion in fiscal year 2013, for a loss of $360 million as tablets are phased out — and estimates revenues to gradually recover, up to $1.976 billion by fiscal year 2017, for EBITDA profit of $362 million.

In the meantime, the Nook division has taken a beating this year following a slow holiday season. The new models have sold at a discount for weeks at a time and their flagship 10-inch Nook HD+ fell from $269 to $179. Kindle is offering the Fire HD for the same price. The hardware, while in many ways superior to Amazon’s, seems to have fallen behind in the race to market share and revenue. If Microsoft steps in, the dedicated e-reader race between the stalwart B&N and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon could be over.

John Biggs contributed to this article.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

And so it begins.

Another season has come and gone, and with it comes yet another TechCrunch Disrupt NY, complete with Hackathon. Sure, Disrupt doesn’t technically start until Monday, but the Hackathon is the fuel on the fire of the Disruptive flame, and it starts right now.

Of all the Disrupt Hackathons that have ever occurred, this year’s NY Disrupt Hackathon is the biggest we’ve ever had, with over 1,000 hackers piling in to the Manhattan Center in Midtown NYC. But it’s not just attendance that’s up — we have some of the biggest names in tech as API sponsors and cash prizes for the winners that are out of this world.

Here are some of the API sponsors our hackers will be working with: Yammer, Wrigley, Visa, Twilio, Samsung, Pearson, NewAer, Microsoft BizSpark, Microsoft SkyDrive, General Motors, Crunchbase, Appery.io, and AT&T. Most of the prizes come in the form of cash, with some API sponsors handing out up to $5,000.

If you’re chilling here at the Hackathon with us, here are the important deets you need to know for the day:

API Workshop Schedule

• 2:00pm – Facebook
• 2:30pm – Box
• 3:00pm – Evernote
• 3:30pm – Foursquare
• 4:00pm – Amazon Web Services
• 4:30pm – New York Times
• 5:00pm – Microsoft BizSpark

Wifi Password

Network: DisruptNYC_5
Password: disrupt13

For those of you who are unfortunately not in attendance this morning, make sure to stay tuned to the TechCrunch home page as we’ll be updating with coverage from the Hackathon throughout today and tomorrow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve been getting all sorts of new info since we first ran our story about Google dogfooding ”Google Shopping Express,” its same-day Amazon Prime and Postmates competitor. While we originally reported that the service would be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime – so $69 or $64 a year – we’re now hearing that the pricing is still in flux.

While Google irons out the kinks, we’re hearing, Googlers are getting the product for free if they sign up for membership — with non-members paying $4.99 per delivery. The company has lined up eight stores in the Bay Area, according to our sources, and we’ve heard from two sources that omni-store Target is part of the coterie.

We were also forwarded the email below, supposedly from Google PR, that names Babies”R”Us and Nob Hill Foods as other Shopping Express partners, with the focus group including local stores of all sizes. I’ve emailed Google, Target, Nob Hill Foods and Babies”R”Us for confirmation. I’m pretty sure this will be the first and last time I email Babies”R”Us for confirmation for anything.

While we still have little idea when Google plans on launching the service, the below email does say that the test is now available for all Googlers. And might be coming soon to a Babies”R”Us near you.

Hi,

As you may have seen, there was a leak last night about Google Shopping Express, including several very specific product details. Our PR team is working to quiet this down, but we need your help — please don’t add fuel to the fire by discussing or even confirming Google Shopping Express. If you are contacted by a member of the press, please follow normal procedures and refer them to press@google.com.

But wait, you asked me to ship to my home to help you test … so what about spouses and roommates? We trust your judgement. If your roommate writes a tech blog or works for a company in this space, please don’t ship it home. But if you feel it’s safe, then by all means, we still really need your help dogfooding this.

Get free same day delivery with Google Shopping Express

After weeks of testing, we’re now excited to open Google Shopping Express to every Googler in the bay area including temps, vendors and contractors.

Save yourself a trip to the store and stock up at places like Target, Nob Hill Foods, Babies “R” Us and more. Googlers who sign up early for a free membership will receive free same day delivery for one year! Non-members pay $4.99 per delivery per store.

*************

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last year, Onswipe noticed that despite considerable growth for the Kindle Fire during its first holiday sales season, interest seemed to drop off pretty quickly a month or so after all the gifts were unwrapped. This year, it wanted to see if the same held true for two leading Android-based tablet platforms, to see if it couldn’t back up the Apple claim that most tablets using Google’s mobile OS quickly fall into disuse.

The results saw a considerable jump for both Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 tablet devices during the year’s peak shopping season, with Onswipe traffic from Fire tablets jumping 51.84 percent immediately following the holiday, and the Nexus 7 experiencing a 136.77 percent increase in share. One month later, the Nexus 7 had already shed 25.68 percent of the traffic it gained from the holiday, however, a number which Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste called “significant.”

The Kindle Fire, however, actually gained traffic, adding 18.01 percent on top of its existing growth one month after its holiday bump. Baptiste says this is a sign that consumers are responding better to the latest generation of Kindle Fire hardware, in part because of new device designs like the Kindle Fire HD, and in part because of an improved software experience and media ecosystem from Amazon. Google, he says, needs to learn from the Kindle Fire’s example and focus on improving its next-gen Nexus slates, both in terms of hardware specs and software experience, in order to accomplish the kind of sustained traffic increase next year that the Fire managed this time around.

The big winner remains the Apple iPad, however, as despite growth by Android tablets from major rivals, the iPad retains a massive 91.96 percent of overall tablet traffic, meaning it has “nothing to worry about” in the foreseeable future in terms of challenges from other makers, according to Baptiste.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We need to face facts: WebOS is dead. Barring the unwavering support of the enthusiast community, the former mobile OS will never become a commercial product and, LG investment or no, the possibility of WebOS surviving a sale is nil.

WebOS is no more, has ceased to be, is bereft of life, and it rests in peace. It is an ex-OS.

HP is going through the same doldrums all PC makers are facing. Had they put a modicum of energy into updating the TouchPad and the WebOS mobile line, they probably could have made it out of the horse latitudes of the downturn, but as it stands they jettisoned an amazing amount of valuable cargo, including support for the WebOS team. What LG is supposedly buying is a readymade stack for their smart TV offerings and not a real OS. What HP is selling is dead weight.

TV operating systems are about as low as you can go in the graphical environment game. TVs face a snails-pace upgrade cycle, are orphaned by their makers, and are nearly invisible to the consumer. Slapping WebOS into a TV is tantamount to sticking it onto a medical device – you’re assured a slow and steady obsolesce.

The last big news out of WebOS came over a year ago, with the release of 3.0.5. The Community Edition wiki was last updated in August. If there is such a thing as a zombie OS, this is it.

It’s over. Even if the rumors are true, that LG would even consider picking this thing up over, say, using a ready-made Android stack is a testament to the fire-sale price HP would consider and, more important, LG’s efforts to grab some of that enthusiast cool. After all, LG is fighting Samsung for mind and market share and a little WebOS magic could (but won’t) pull them partially out of a deep hole. But don’t bet on it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — take advantage of the East Coast blizzard to toast some marshmallows on the fire. First up is the Series A drought and impact of the cloud on startup funding. Next, the big pivot to Spoilerland, aka Binge TV.

House of Cards is having just that impact on the television industry, collapsing the mid tier pay networks into an environment much like planes stacked up over Newark. It’s Breaking Bad followed by Mad Men followed by Arrested Development and so forth. How the broadcast networks get past the new air traffic controllers is anybody’s guess, but Netflix continues to confound the experts and delight the customers.

@stevegillmor, @dannysullivan, @borthwick, @kevinmarks, @kteare

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Got your grains of salt at the ready? Good. Rumors of a more extravagant Chromebook have been making the rounds for months now, but the new, supposedly leaked video the new touch-friendly Chromebook Pixel may provide the first real glance at what Google has been working on behind closed doors.

The video was spotted by Chrome buff François Beaufort, and it certainly looks flashy enough — it exhibits and level of polish and clarity of message that’s notably absent in most fan-made mockups (though some of them are getting very good). The video doesn’t offer much in the way of hardware specifics aside from noting that the display plays home to 4 million pixels, which Beaufort believes means a screen resolution of 2560 x 1700.

For what it’s worth, the information laid out in the leaked video jibes with some earlier reports of a touch-enabled Chromebook. Last November, the China Times claimed that Google was planning to launch a Chromebook with a 12.85-inch touch display, and noted that the search giant (and not a hardware partner like Samsung or Acer) had placed orders with ODMs Compal and Wintek.

The implication at the time was that Google would be bypassing its usual slew of hardware collaborators completely in favor of crafting and selling its own gadgets. Interestingly enough, the Chromebook Pixel video states that it’s a new kind of computer “designed entirely by Google,” suggesting that Google may have done just that. Naturally, Google declined to comment when asked if the Chromebook Pixel was indeed a real product.

The story behind how this video came to light is perhaps just as outrageous as the product being shown off. It was found on a YouTube channel owned by Slinky.Me, a Mountain View company whose states mission is to build the “world’s largest visual guide” — whatever that means. Slinky.Me was apparently was hacked a few hours ago, and the secretive Chromebook video was posted to the company’s YouTube account shortly afterward.

But why would a company working on what appears to be a fairly static visual guide have access to a promo video for unreleased Google hardware? Well, it would seem that part of the team’s work also involves crafting promo videos like these pro-Google ads that were uploaded to their collective Vimeo account this past week. None of them seem all that high-brow — not nearly as much as curious Chromebook Pixel promo anyway — but they hint at some sort of working relationship between Google and Slinky.me.

Adding fuel to the fire is Slinky.me’s CEO, one Victor Koch who claims on his LinkedIn account that he is (or was, if he’s not the type to update regularly) a software engineer at — you guessed it — Google. A quick look at his Facebook profile seems to shed a bit more light on the situation, as he refers to himself there as an “ex-Googler.” We have been unable to confirm with Google that Victor Koch was a former employee, and Mr. Koch wouldn’t respond to the Facebook messages I’ve sent him so for now this facet of the story is still a bit murky.

Naturally, someone attempted to clean up this leak as best they could as soon as the supposed hack went down. The video no longer exists on YouTube, and the elusive Mr. Koch issued a public apology (and tagged Google co-founder Sergey Brin) on his Google+ account for the video’s sudden exposure. This case has many of the earmarks of your typical botched release, but I imagine we’ll soon get official word on the Chromebook Pixel’s veracity — Google I/O is just a few months away, after all.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you watch one paranoid fever dream video of a missle-blown New York set to a Muzak version of “We Are The World,” make it this one. While the prospect of mass nuclear annihilation isn’t funny, what is funny is this video from the official North Korean propaganda corps that shows a sleeping NK citizen dreaming of Glorious Missiles Of The Fatherland winging their way to New York where they destroy a stylized Manhattan. The biggest problem? The footage is stolen from a Modern Warfare 3 cut-scene.

In the scene the dreamer notes that “It seems that the nest of wickedness is ablaze with the fire started by itself,” which, given that the game was developed in California, is mostly true. However, with all that talk of North Korea’s amazing film production capabilities and excellent cinema, it’s odd that they wouldn’t render their own scenes of absolute destruction, possibly by making little models of Brooklyn and crushing them under the feet of Pulgasari.

Sadly, the other videos in the official North Korean YouTube channel are pretty boring unless you totally like smelting and power plants. It will be interesting to see real cinema come out of this country in the next few years as, just perhaps, international pressure finally caves in this gulag.

via Forbes

Article courtesy of TechCrunch