Facebook has started to roll out support for emoji in all posts and comments on desktop and mobile, a company spokesperson tells us.

Previously, emoji — a standardized set of emoticons and picture characters – were available for Facebook Messenger, but not within status updates, comments or other posts. Facebook started offering some chat emoticons in comments on desktop last year, but this wasn’t the full emoji set. Now, users have more flexibility in sharing smileys and other icons across Facebook, whether it’s a check-in, photo caption, group post or some other message or comment.

The social network has made a number of moves recently to bring more ways for users to express themselves through small pictures. There are the new structured status updates where users can share what they’re feeling, eating, drinking, watching, reading or listening to. And the new stickers for mobile messages.

These features, along with emoji, help users communicate in new ways or say things that might be difficult otherwise. They can also add a bit more fun into the service, which at points has been seen as a cold or sterile platform compared to the flash and flexibility of other social networks. When Facebook released the Poke app, which was sillier than its typically utilitarian features, we wondered if it was a sign of more to come. So far this year it seems that Facebook is lightening up and giving users new options that are popular in other apps.

The latest emoji support for posts and comments was built a Facebook hackathon last week and began rolling out to users on Tuesday. To create emoji characters, a user must enable the emoji keyboard on their phone and in their web browser. For example, ShowMeEmoji is a useful extension for Chrome users.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Software quality assurance testing on Android devices is far easier than it was just a year ago, at least according to one of Asia’s largest mobile app developers, Animoca.

The Hong Kong company has produced over 300 apps since it started two years ago, and just shot past 150 million downloads collectively. It produces mainly Android apps.

Last year, Animoca’s testing process for its apps covered a whopping 400 Android devices. Today, this number has been slashed to just a quarter of that, largely because of standardization in the Android handset industry.

According to Yat Siu, CEO of Animoca’s parent company Outblaze, most phones have become standardized on Samsung’s base hardware, thanks to the Korean manufacturer’s cornering of the component market.

Besides making its own branded devices, Samsung provides parts for a huge array of other devices. In 2012, Samsung was the world’s biggest manufacturer of NAND Flash (31 percent), DRAM (38 percent), and display components (25 percent).

The evolution of Android’s platform over the years has also made it a lot more flexible for app developers on the software side of things, with fewer variants of Jelly Bean than Gingerbread, he added. Together with hardware standardization, this has really eased the amount of testing that Animoca has to do today.

“Japan is the outlier in all of this—they have the strangest phones, and each one is a little different from the other. The rest of the world is mainly quite similar, based on Samsung hardware,” said Yat.

Phones are also getting better. He said that the 400 testing devices from 2012 were mainly made up of low-end handsets. “You have to cater to low-end devices because otherwise, you cancel out your biggest audience. But all the new hardware is pretty kickass, and more and more devices are getting very capable,” he said.

Animoca employs about 100 people working just on its apps, and has operations in Korea, the Philippines, the US and China. Its strategy is to flood the market with apps hitting different niche markets, rather than try to create a “Supercell-style or Angry Birds blockbuster” hit, said Yat.

Some of its titles, Star Girl and Pretty Pet Salon have pretty much reached hit status, but the company is focused on churning out a higher volume of app varieties, in the hopes of casting a wider net for loyal fans. “Those become paying audiences,” he said.

While Star Girl is enjoying millions of downloads, it’s still a niche app. “It targets girls, you share clothes and virtually flirt with guys. It’s not a Candy Crush,” said Yat.

The company has grown about four times in the past 12 months, although he wouldn’t say how much revenue it brings in now. “Frankly, we grew because Android grew as well,” he said, referring to Android’s growing market share. “That’s why Korea and Japan are big markets for us, because they are strong Android bases,” he said.

Animoca produces iOS versions of some of its games, but remains focused on Android, where ARPU is “very comparable” to iOS. Users in Japan and Korea tend to spend most on apps, said Yat.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Flash may be dead, but Adobe’s Flash Professional has already gone beyond just being a Flash tool and it’s getting a major update today. The new version, Adobe says, has been “rebuilt from the ground up to be faster, modular, extensible, reliable, more focused and more efficient than before.” That’s quite a promise, but new version does indeed sport quite a few new features and improvements.

The company has re-engineered Flash Professional as a 64-bit application, which should make it more stable and allow users to easily manage multiple large files.

The app, which Adobe says is now far more responsive, now also allows Flash developers to export their content in high definition video and audio, “all without dropping frames.”

The tool now also sports a streamlined user interface to make dialog boxes and panels more intuitive. Users can now also choose between a dark or light interface.

With this new version, Adobe is introducing enhanced HTML5 support – something most of us probably don’t think about when we hear the word “flash.” The enhanced HTML publishing support now uses the updated Toolkit for CreateJS, meaning the service now features new functionality for buttons, hit areas and motion curves.

Also new in this version is support for real-time mobile testing. Developers can now test and debug their content by connecting multiple iOS and Android devices to their computers via USB and quickly see how their designs work on a real device.

Other new features include a more powerful code editor, which uses the Scintilla library. This new editor, the company says, will allow users to search across multiple files and features a new “find and replace” panel. Also new are code profiling in Adobe Scout, a real-time drawing tool, and an unlimited size for Flash Professional’s pasteboard.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Munich-based startup and TechCrunch Disrupt NY Battlefield contestant KISI Systems is launching its Indiegogo campaign today. KISI and KISIBox together comprise a keyless entry solution that lets users provide timed, revokable access to their own apartments on an as-needed basis. It’s the perfect complement to collaborative consumption services like Airbnb and TaskRabbit and in general a very useful addition to any household.

KISI takes its cues from enterprise-grade tools that allow businesses to control who can and can’t gain access to a facility – co-founder Bernhard Mehl explained that he and his co-founders decided it was an idea that would make perfect sense when applied to a consumer setting, too.

The KISI system is a combination of hardware and software, with a set price of $479 up front when it hits retail. Initially, backers can get it for $249 for the first Indiegogo supporters, and the best part is that the service is included with the hardware purchase, so this isn’t something that you end up necessarily paying for on a continual basis. There is a SaaS model planned as well, for people who’d like access to premium features, but Mehl says that in general, they aren’t interested in making homeowners feel like they’re renting the locks on their doors.

“We stripped an enterprise product down to a consumer-friendly version, and provide very easy-to-use key-management tools, so we have a web app and you can manage or see who accessed your apartment, or who currently has access on their smartphones,” Mehl says. “It’s a more decentralized or democratized access, so that it’s not the house owner who controls all the keys, but the resident themselves.”

KISI is designed for apartment tenants primarily, and can be made to integrated with your intercom system to provide complete building access from a web-based dashboard. Mehl says that where in the past this has been accomplished through sharing of hardware keys, that’s a dramatically outdated prospect, since it involves granting a type of access you can’t easily revoke, at least not without changing your locks. The platform is why KISI isn’t just another Lockitron, providing things like integration with an intercom system, and a record of when keyholders have accessed your apartment, and for how long.

The big opportunity for KISI is to take advantage of the rise of services like Airbnb, Exec and TaskRabbit, and collaborate with those companies to help provide temporary access to service pros who might only need it for a few minutes, a week or an afternoon.

“All the hardware parts are installed in your apartment, and you can open even the front door of the house with your smartphone, and yet nothing changes for anyone else who has physical key access” he said. “Up to now, you had to change the whole system to get automated access, but the cool thing is that we’ve managed to accomplish that without requiring a complete overhaul.”

KISI has already impressed enough to win an entrepreneurial startup grant from the German government, and they’ve won various prizes, including from the NYCEDC, which provided them with $25,000 for the “Next Idea” award.

KISI will launch in New York City and Munich first, and will then expand to other markets after that. It doesn’t replace existing standards like Z-Wave, but works with them, and can also be used in combination with existing devices like Lockitron, so there’s opportunity for it to grow into existing home automation systems.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Digitizing existing paper processes is nothing new. Think of all the photo sharing or document conversion services that are out there. They took what was once a paper-only process and changed it completely. But there is one historically paper-based service that a Columbus, OH startup is aiming to bring into the digital realm in a way that it hasn’t been before.

TicketFire is an app that allows ticket holders to scan the their paper event tickets, and then share, sell or transfer those tickets to other people also using the TicketFire app.

It’s an interesting idea and it offers several benefits and improvements over the current process. The coolest feature in my mind is the ability to buy or sell a ticket after an event has already started.

For example, if two people are already inside a venue for a show or sporting event, one person could sell their seat ticket to the other person, halfway through the event — effectively, upgrading their seat, at a possibly reduced cost. That is a great idea and I’m curious to see, in practical terms, how it plays out.

A few other services out there, like Flash Seats or StubHub, have similar offerings but neither are as streamlined for rapid, mobile ticket transfer as is TicketFire.

In any event, I had a moment to catch up with Tanisha Robinson — half of a two person team (including Eric Kerr) who created TicketFire — to talk about the app, how it works and where it is headed.

——–

JD: Give me the scoop on TicketFire?

TR: TicketFire is a mobile app — right now only on iOS — that allows you to take any live event ticket (concert, sporting event, etc.) and scan the paper ticket into you phone so it becomes a digital ticket. Once it’s a digital ticket you can share it, use it, re-sell it without having to keep track of your piece of paper any more. So we’re kind of bringing the paper ticketing industry into the mobile era…um, without trying to take down Ticketmaster. That’s the short version of what we do.

We launched in the app store in January. We’ve seen pretty good adoption. TicketFire’s been used at the [NCAA] Final Four, Madison Square Garden, Premier League Soccer, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, The NHL. So, we’re seeing broad usage and we feel like it addresses a lot of the frustrations around having to be responsible for a physical token. It’s meant to be a little bit disruptive to this really old-school industry that hasn’t evolved in a couple of thousand years.

JD: Ok. That’s a pretty cool idea. What’s Ticket Master think of this…of you guys re-distributing their tickets, potentially?

TR: We don’t know yet. We’re hoping to partner with them. We’ve been making some in-roads but we don’t have a formal opinion from them yet. We hope that they bless it.

JD: What if they don’t? I mean, have you prepared for that?

TR: Ticketmaster and Live Nation own the industry and I think paper tickets aren’t going anywhere and our hope is to work really well with Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Our process is patent-pending…

JD: So maybe you could be acquired by them?

TR: I mean, Ideally. Absolutely. There are definitely a lot of opportunities for the data around knowing who goes to what show and not just who bought four tickets somewhere. Ultimately I think there are a lot of marketing and data opportunities with the app.

JD: Are you allowed to re-sell a ticket today or is that considered scalping?

TR: We’re not actually re-selling. It’s simply that we are the technology that allows you to convert a paper ticket into a digital ticket and then magically move it around without having to have a creepy Craigslist interaction.

JD: Ok so lets say I buy a ticket and I digitize it, but then I can’t go so I sell it to my friend, I can only sell it for the price that I bought it, through your system.

TR: No, we don’t regulate the price at which people sell those tickets. It’s kind of like StubHub. StubHub is simply a platform and people buy and sell them for whatever they want to sell them for. So for us, we are the platform, not the vendor. It’s a ticket exchange, but it allows people to not have to meet in person.

JD: Ok, so then I just digitize it using your platform and I receive money in cash or from PayPal or whatever from someone else, outside of your system.

TR: Yep. Exactly.

JD: So I could scalp it, but TicketFire doesn’t have anything to do with that.

TR: Exactly

JD: So I don’t exactly know how StubHub works. Is it similar?

TR: StubHub is an eBay company that is basically a market place to buy and sell tickets. It can be person-to-person, ticket broker to person, but Ticketmaster themselves do not sell on StubHub. The problem with StubHub is that often paper tickets can only be FedEx-ed. So the ticket window closes the second FedEx can’t get you those tickets in time for an event. The other thing that we think is cool is that because the ticket window can stay open it ‘s actually possible to buy tickets when you’re inside the venue already. So you could upgrade seats. This would allow sellers of tickets to say ‘this game is already halfway finished, and if I can get $50 for these great seats I’ll do it. [Maybe leave early]. So it’s actually possible to upgrade your seats from inside the venue, because you can move those tokens around.

JD: Oh, so you could buy half of a ticket, prorated sort of, while you are already in the venue.

TR: Yeah, you could buy a ticket and the seller could be thinking “well I could still get some money out of this” and you could get the ticket digitally transferred to you and move seats.

JD: That’s interesting. But here’s another question I have. I remember — going way back here — Napster didn’t sell anything but they were a facilitator and they were shut down because of that. So how is this different from say, something like that? I mean, are you worried about that?

TR: Not really because it’s not licensed content. And there are precedents. There are a lot of ticket market places, people sell tickets on eBay. I mean some states are pretty heavily regulated but for the most part it’s a widely know industry for re-sale. We are simply a platform for all of that. We’re not super worried about that.

JD: That’s true. I guess it’s not content. It’s a utility. Another question… do you store the tickets on servers or is it complete pass-through from person to person?

TR: We do [store them]. Basically each ticket has a unique ID. So if you transfer your ticket to you friend and they download it… you can no longer access that ticket. So we do move them around.

JD: So you scan your own ticket, dump it into TicketFire, then you can no longer get to it again. But you have the original paper ticket? What’s to stop you from fraud?

TR: So it’s the same problem with Ticketmaster. You can download your ticket as a PDF and print multiple copies if you wanted and there’s nothing to prevent you from doing that today.

JD: Whoever gets to the venue first, right? They still only let one ticket go in at the venue.

TR: Exactly. And that’s Ticketmaster’s rule on it. If there’s any sort of discrepancy they refund the original purchaser and kick everyone else out. So it’s not something the existing ticketing industry hasn’t seen before. But at least this is a way to contain it and have some data on who’s actually using them.

JD: They kick people out?

TR: Yes, that’s the ticket policy.

JD: How could they find someone inside of an arena?

TR: I guess it would be based on the disputed seat.

JD: Oh yeah, I guess for a place with seats. Not a general admission kind of place.

TR: I mean, if people want to scam on tickets, they can anyway, with the existing infrastructure; without TicketFire.

JD: So is there anybody else doing this? Who is your competition? Do you feel like you are first to market with this?

TR: We feel like we are. Most ticketing startups are focused on competing with Ticketmaster. We feel like we fit really well inside the existing [system], which is paper and barcode scanners.

JD: When do you plan to go to Android platform?

TR: We’re in the midst of raising some money now to go to Android. We’re pretty specific about who we want to raise money from. We want strategic partners from inside the industry.

JD: Who all is involved in your business?

TR: It’s just me and a guy named Eric Kerr. He’s the technical co-founder and developer.

JD: How many tickets have you processed?

TR: I haven’t checked in a few days and since I don’t have a factual answer at this time, I’d rather not say.

JD: I mean like ballpark. Are we talking about thousands, or tens of thousands or hundreds?

TR: I’d say at least in the thousands.

JD: Ok, here’s another question. Can all venues redeem a digital ticket with their scanners even on a phone’s reflective screen? Laser scanners don’t always work on reflective screens.

TR: So far, we’ve only had a couple of instances where there was trouble. Typically with any digital ticket, it’s like “is your brightness turned all the way up” and that usually resolves it. For that vast majority, we haven’t had any problem with the tickets functioning with Ticketmaster’s barcode scanners.

JD: Wait, does Ticketmaster provide scanners to all the venues or something?

TR: They do. Yep.

JD: Wait. To like, all venues?

TR: Not to all venues, but to all their partner venues (which is like probably 90% of them).

JD: Back to the reflective screen question. If the venue has an older style laser scanner (that will reflect off the screen) what happens? Do the tickets have a number or something that can still be hand keyed?

TR: yes, they do.

JD: Do you guarantee that Ticket Master will take the ticket?

TR: We can’t do that yet but that’s why we are hopeful for some strategic partnerships

JD: Ok, so what happens if person A sells a ticket to person B for $50 and they transfer it between them via TicketFire, but then Ticket Master doesn’t let person B into the venue? What happens then?

TR: So basically if it won’t scan, then Ticketmaster enters the barcode and as long as it’s a valid barcode number then it’s not an issue.

JD: But what I mean is, for whatever reason, there’s a dispute. Maybe the guy at the counters is like “What’s this? Where’s your paper ticket?” What happens in a dispute?

TR: I don’t know actually. We’re pretty new and our hope is to have strategic partnerships in place so that we can guarantee the tickets.

Oh, Flash. Remember when there was still a little reason to believe that it wasn’t a dying medium? When the angry Android masses swore up and down that the absence of Flash would be the death of iOS… only for Adobe to kill their Android effort after just a year?

The shambling corpse of Flash takes another punch to the face today, with game engine Unity announcing plans to drop support.

For the unfamiliar, Unity is a pretty friggin’ awesome game development engine, used in releases like Rovio’s Bad Piggies, Temple Run 2, and a host of other games. I used it pretty heavily to build my Augmented Reality TARDIS project, as well.

One year ago, Unity began work on a feature that allowed developers to export their Unity projects to a Flash SWF file. While the company plans to keep Flash support around until the next major Unity release, the only work they’ll be putting into it moving forward is bug fixes.

Unity CEO David Helgason has a full post on his reasoning here, but his three-part logic is pretty straight forward:

• Unity doesn’t see Adobe as being committed to Flash anymore
• With things like mobile support and Adobe’s crazy Flash revenue sharing requirements being announced and then quickly abandoned, Developers have seemingly stopped trusting Flash
• Developers seem to be moving away from Flash, so Unity would rather focus on improving their own web player, which has suddenly found its footing amongst Facebook developers

As you might expect, the comments on the Unity post have turned into a bit of a war zone, with much of the heat thrown by those who somehow haven’t moved on since the summer of 1999.

It’s been fun, Flash. We had some good times on Newgrounds back in the day. You’re still my favorite platform for video playback until HTML5 gets its W3C wings. But it’s sleep time soon, okay?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There are very few platforms that have are something that you use on a daily basis, let alone on a minute by minute basis. Team communication platform service, Convo, is one of those for us at TechCrunch.

Today, the company has released an update for its essential iOS app, something that we use here quite often to communicate about everything you can think of. Since using the service, our team has generated over 100,000 interactions, averaging 1,200 of them a day, with 95% of our team present on the platform on those days. Its desktop version is completely in real-time, acting like a threaded IRC chat.

The service overall isn’t without its faults, but it’s difficult to build team and enterprise software that can make everyone happy. One of the top complaints that we had was about its iOS app, which was lacking proper iPhone 5 and retina support, along with some general usability issues. Today’s app udpate is all about speed, commenting and a slicker design that will help you get through all of the threaded discussions your team is having since you checked in last.

The feed

This is the most important part of Convo, especially when you’re on the go. In today’s update, you’re able to scan and refresh the main feed quickly, and when you tap on the comments for any given thread, they slide over from the right. This is a huge improvement from the previous version, which loaded the thread into a new page:

That update alone will save time, as you can jump back and forth between threads that you’re participating in and make decisions on whether to get involved in one quicker. Additionally, you’ll be able to “Like” things, which is a passive way of saying that you’ve seen something or agree with something, depending on how your team uses it.

Images are also clearer thanks to the retina support and complete overhaul of how they’re displayed. Depending on how you use the service, images could play a huge role in the conversation that you’re having. If you’re having a conversation about a piece of artwork for your app, seeing images at the highest resolution possible are the only way that you’ll be able to make a decision on whether to use them or feedback that you might have for your designer.

Cleanup and sharing

In addition to the feed overhaul, Convo has been cleaned up and designed from scratch for iOS. One of the issues that we had was how the app acted in low or no connectivity situations. For example, if you were to enter in a long comment but have no connection, your comment would be lost. It was a maddening user experience that we complained about, and the Convo team was clearly receptive to fixing our pain.

The other feature that made its way into this update is a bookmarklet that will let you drop links into Convo right from Safari. This is a trick that a few other apps have been using for a while, but given that we do what we do here at TechCrunch, sharing links is essential. This is another one of those things that we complained heavily about, so it’s nice to see the feature.

Search has also gotten an upgrade, which is important to do on the fly when you’re trying to go back and find a conversation that might have taken place hours, or even days ago.

As I mentioned, Convo isn’t without its faults, especially on the web where it still uses Flash, but for $9/seat monthly, you really can’t go wrong. Competing services like Salesforce’s Chatter and Microsoft’s Yammer lack the real-time aspects of Convo’s desktop and web apps, and with this iOS update, I suspect that we’ll see our mobile interaction increase as well. We were able to get our entire team onto the platform really fast, and that’s rare when you have a team that has numbers over, say three.

As you can see from the chart below, the onboarding process was pretty quick and luckily required minimal training:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’m all for open source and freely sharing code, but there are also occasions when it’s necessary to hide some of the mechanics behind a web-based application. That’s where JScrambler comes in, a Portuguese startup that’s launching version 3 of its service today. JScrambler 3 allows developers to obfuscate their source code for mobile and desktop web apps so it’s almost impossible to read. The web-based service, which offers both free and paid plans, takes either individual files or your whole project and makes sure that it becomes much harder to read and maintain by a non-authorized third party.

So far, the JScrambler team says, it has processed over 120 million lines of code and has users in 106 countries. Pedro Fortuna, the co-founder and CTO of AuditMark, the company behind JScrambler, believes his service will be especially appealing to Flash developers who are now moving to HTML5 and JavaScript.

“Although many Flash developers acknowledge that it is an easy to reverse-engineer language, the psychological effect of being a compiled language makes many of them more comfortable.” As developers move to writing applications for the mobile web and away from Flash, products like JScrambler 3 will likely just gain in importance for many developers who aren’t comfortable with the idea that their code, which is executed on the user’s machine, is essentially sent in clear text.

According to the JScrambler team, developers may want to use its service to “discourage code theft and reuse, hide algorithms, enforce license agreements, and to add an extra layer of security.”

Here is what running code through the service looks like in practice:

There are obviously quite a few other other JavaScript obfuscators and similar tools on the market, but JScrambler does seem to offer the most complete solution. Out of the box, it should work with most of the standard libraries, too, including Ember.js, Cake.js, fabric.js, Dojo GFX and SproutCore.

Today’s release introduces a number of new code transformations, as well as a new subscription package for professional users who need to support for mobile and desktop apps, and a general redesign of the service’s user interface and documentation. Besides its web-based service (and an API for hooking into it), JScrambler now also offers enterprise users the ability to run the service on their own servers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While Apple’s app store and Google Play have long had leaderboards for the most downloaded and lucrative apps, there hasn’t been that much transparency around engagement after the download.

Heyzap, a Union Square Ventures-backed startup that runs a mobile gaming network, has stepped in and decided to build one. The startup, which was founded about four years ago and originally centered around Flash games, has moved onto mobile platforms (pretty much like every other game developer over the past few years). They have an app on Android with about 10 million installs that lets gamers add friends in their favorite titles and share tips and badges.

From those 10 million installs, they say they’ve been able to gauge the size of different developers’ active userbases. So from that, they’ve launched Heyzap Trends, a live leaderboard that estimates active usage. The standard iOS and Google leaderboards mainly focus on downloads or installs and then revenue over specific time periods (although Google Play’s rankings are said to factor in some engagement data).

They say they get play data for about 80,000 games on the Android platform, which is shared by people who have the Heyzap app and are logged into it.

Even games that aren’t integrated into Heyzap’s network get their play data recorded by this, said co-founder Immad Akhund. That’s partially because of Android’s open nature.

“The openness of the Android OS is allowing for more unique and interesting experiences for users,” he said in an e-mail. “I think this is going to be a trend going forward as mobile apps reach maturity and differentiate through deeper experiences hooked in to the OS layer.” (As a sidenote, Facebook’s Home app is a perfect example of this openness.)

To me, the data seems reasonable. Heyzap’s leaderboard, for example, says that King, the European arcade gaming company, has 54.7 million monthly active users. Last month, King said it has 49 million monthly actives on smartphones and tablets, including iOS.

Similarly, Storm8, a Silicon Valley-based freemium gaming company that runs a label called TeamLava, has about 14.2 million daily active users, according to the leaderboard. Storm8 said it had 10 million daily actives back in January.

Also, Subway surfers apparently has 7.6 million daily actives on Android and its maker, the Danish developer Kiloo, said it had 26.5 million daily actives last month on both iOS and Android.

Just to make a note, Heyzap’s numbers are non de-duplicated. That means if the same person plays more than one game from a single developer, they’re counted more than once. It’s not an unusual metric: even when Zynga reports daily actives in its quarterly earnings reports, those figures are not de-duped. Instead, they report a separate metric called “monthly unique users,” that doesn’t double count people. 

Akhund said they might do non de-duped counts in the future. We “…felt for now it made sense to count the user twice as it is double the engagement and monetization opportunity,” he said.

Heyzap is backed by $8 million in funding from Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Joshua Schachter, Christina Brodbeck, Founder Collective and Qualcomm Ventures. This “Trends” project faces off against other companies like Sequoia-backed Onavo, which is trying to do a “Quantcast for mobile apps” via active usage data they collect through mobile data compression apps. They are for now, iOS only. Heyzap, in contrast, is games and Android only.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The news about Google Glass just keeps coming today. After announcing that Glass is about to ship and releasing the Glass Mirror API documentation, Google has now also posted the full spec sheet for the Glass hardware. There are no major surprises here, but it’s nice to finally get to see what those users who will be able to buy the Explorer editions will get for their $1,500.

Glass will work with any Bluetooth-capable phone, but it looks like the only way to use GPS and SMS through Glass at this point is through the MyGlass companion app, which requires Android 4.0.3+. It’s not clear if or when Google plans to ship a companion app for other platforms.

The display, which is obviously the highlight of the devices, will have a resolution that “is the equivalent of a 25 inch high-definition screen from eight feet away.” In its developer guides, Google says photos should have a 640x360px resolution, so that’s probably also the resolution of the Glass display, though Google interestingly doesn’t note this in the specs.

The first version of Glass will also feature a 5 megapixel camera that can also do 720p video. Glass will come with 16GB of Flash storage of which 12GB will be usable (and synced with Google’s cloud storage service). The company says the device should have enough battery power to last a full day “of typical use,” but it also warns that features like Hangouts and video recordings are more battery intensive.

The coolest feature, however, is probably the bone conduction transducer, which will transmit sound from Glass to the inner ear through the bones of the wearer’s skull. Thanks to this, users won’t have to use a regular headphone to use Glass.

Here are the full specs:

Fit

• Adjustable nosepads and durable frame fits any face.
• Extra nosepads in two sizes.

Display

High resolution display is the equivalent of a 25 inch high definition screen from eight feet away.

Camera

• Photos – 5 MP
• Videos – 720p

Audio

• Bone Conduction Transducer

Connectivity

• Wifi – 802.11b/g
• Bluetooth

Storage

• 12 GB of usable memory, synced with Google cloud storage. 16 GB Flash total.

Battery

One full day of typical use. Some features, like Hangouts and video recording, are more battery intensive.

Charger

• Included Micro USB cable and charger.

While there are thousands of Micro USB chargers out there, Glass is designed and tested with the included charger in mind. Use it and preserve long and prosperous Glass use.

Compatibility

• Any Bluetooth-capable phone.
• The MyGlass companion app requires Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or higher. MyGlass enables GPS and SMS messaging.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch