Meet Lumu: a digital light meter for photographers that plugs into the iPhone’s headphone jack as a smaller and smarter replacement for traditional analogue light meters. It’s used in conjunction with Lumu’s app — being demoed in prototype here at hardware alley at Disrupt NY – to help photographers figure out the best camera settings for their current location.

Lumu is not going to help you take better photos on your iPhone — it’s a tool for standalone cameras that have ISO, aperture and shutter speed parameters that can be manually set. The startup, which hails from Slovenia in Europe, plans to kick off a Kickstarter funding campaign in about a month. The Lumu device will cost $99.

“It’s the world’s smartest light meter,” says co-founder Benjamin Polovic. “The existing light meters are large, bulky and very expensive. With Lumu, the main processing is done on the iPhone, so we use the iPhone’s power. It also doesn’t use any batteries, it’s powered from the iPhone.

“You take your iPhone or your iPod and plug it in and it’s going to recognise it, and it sets all of the parameters for your unique environment. So you put in your ISO that you use in your film or your digital camera, the aperture you want to use and then it calculates the time.”

The photographer then needs to manually input the suggested settings into their camera but Polovic says the group is thinking about making a Bluetooth dongle so settings can be wirelessly sent to a digital camera. “We’re excited to get some ideas from Kickstarter when the campaign launches,” he added.

As well as showing the light level and exposure value for the current lighting conditions, the app lets users store pre-sets for individual geotagged locations so they can easily revisit them later. It will also include an auto mode, and a filter-style feature that will tell users how to achieve effects such as bokeh (background blur). 

Polovic said Lumu’s hope is to inspire more people to start digging down into their camera settings. ”We love photography, we want to make it better, we want to introduce it to people who don’t necessarily know how to use cameras because they are quite complex. We want to make it simple,” he says.

The startup has been developing Lumu for about four to five months, according to Polovic. Down the line, it plans to launch an SDK so developers can create other apps using the light sensor — giving the example of an app that wakes the iPhone’s owner when it starts getting light, for instance.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

AT&T just released its first-quarter financial statement. Things are looking good at Ma Bell where profits are up although revenue missed expectations. The company managed to get more consumers to sign long-term wireless contracts, and best of all, wireless margins increased on the back of smartphone sales where they accounted for 88% of the company’s sales in the quarter.

In short, smartphones are ringing in the money for AT&T.

AT&T has long sought after the best smartphones. From the iPhone to the original Lumia 900, and most recently, to the HTC First, AT&T seemingly strives to have the latest and greatest smartphones.

I’ve often criticized this strategy, pointing to these exclusives when devices fail to capture a large market share. While the limited release might hurt the device’s sales, AT&T clearly isn’t suffering.

With this quarter’s numbers in the ledger, 72 percent, or 48.3 million, of AT&T’s postpaid phone subscribers owned smartphones, up from 61 percent, or 41.2 million, a year earlier. AT&T sold 6 million smartphones during the first quarter, which is a record and even more impressive considering there wasn’t a major smartphone release during that time.

As AT&T continues to hone its game, wireless margins grew driven by improved operating efficiencies and further revenue gains from the company’s lucrative smartphone subscribers. Its first-quarter wireless operating income margin was 28.0 percent versus 27.8 percent in the year-earlier quarter.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Samsung Electronics may purchase mobile memory chips from South Korean rival SK Hynix for devices including the Galaxy S, said J.K. Shin, head of Samsung’s mobile business. If the deal goes through, it will be a boon for SK Hynix, which currently counts Apple as one of its top DRAM chip customers and saw it shares slip 2.8 percent on Thursday after another Apple chip supplier, Cirrus Logic, warned of a reduced product forecast from one of its customers.

Though Cirrus Logic did not name the customer, the company is seen as a key indicator of demand for iPhones and iPads because at least 90 percent of its business comes from Apple.

Samsung is itself the world’s biggest maker of DRAM chips and has counted on its own internal supply of memory chips for Galaxy series smartphones, but chips are in increasing demand, with price rising and supplies dwindling as more mobile device makers prepare to upgrade their flagship products by boosting memory storage capability.

Turning to SK Hynix means that Samsung can avoid supply disruptions for its Galaxy S4 smartphone, which is set the launch this month. Its predecessor, the Galaxy S3, ran into supply chain problems shortly after its launch, but in that case the components in question were parts like handset casings, not chips.

Ensuring that there are enough Galaxy S4 handsets to meet consumer demand is vital if Samsung wants to meet the upbeat sales forecast for the phone, which is seen as the main challenger to Apple’s iPhone. Jefferies analyst Peter Misek has written that Samsung plans to build 100 million Galaxy S4 units, and that the component and manufacturing needs for the Korean tech giant’s flagship smartphone may take resources away from the iPhone.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over the last several years, HBO has been making its streaming video product more attractive to users by adding more and more devices that users can stream its programming on. At the D: Dive Into Media conference today, HBO President and COO Eric Kessler said that the company is enabling AirPlay streaming for its HBO apps, enabling iOS users to stream video from the iPhone and iPad to the Apple TV.

The addition of AirPlay comes a few weeks after a report surfaced that HBO would be rolling out a standalone app for the Apple TV. Not quite, but close.

Getting on Apple TV itself would mean building an app and getting its distributors on board with authenticating on that device. That’s been a sticking point on certain platforms — like Roku — where it has an app, but not every cable or satellite provider has agreed to provide a login system on the device. But with the launch of AirPlay streaming, the company will be able to serve customers who have multiple products in the Apple ecosystem. It is, in a sense, taking advantage of a workaround.

While fans of HBO shows will be thrilled with this news, there will still be others who don’t — or won’t — subscribe to the service, due to the cost of paying for a cable bundle. But Kessler said the company has no plans to introduce a standalone service online without going through cable or satellite partners. That’s mostly due to the marketing and distribution help that it gets from those distributors. At the same time, it’s looking at ways to engage younger viewers who might not already be cable subscribers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Research In Motion is once again the target of a rumored acquisition. Lenovo’s CFO Wang Wai Ming said in an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos that the Beijing company is eyeing the BlackBerry maker as a potential acquisition target or strategic alliance partner.

The news comes less than a week after RIM CEO Thorsten Heins told German newspaper Die Welt that RIM is still undergoing a strategic review, with the possibility of licensing BB 10 to other manufacturers and selling its hardware production unit. And last August, Bloomberg reported that IBM “made an informal approach” to acquire RIM’s enterprise-services unit–the heart of BlackBerry’s business–amid intensifying rumors of an acquisition.

“We are looking at all opportunities–RIM and many others,” Wong told Bloomberg. “We’ll have no hesitation if the right opportunity comes along that could benefit us and shareholders.” Wong added that Lenovo has already spoken to RIM and its bankers about various combinations and strategic ventures, though it is unclear when exactly Lenovo would put in a bid.

RIM has been looking at its options since last year, when its market share took a beating from the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy. On Lenovo’s side, a shrinking PC market has kept it from growing after it bought IBM’s PC unit in 2005.

RIM’s stock price fell to a low of $6.22 in September, but has since nearly tripled due to speculation over the results of a strategic review and buzz over RIM’s long-anticipated BB 10 phones, which will finally debut in less than a week. If the BB 10 takes off as RIM hopes, one option is to focus on licensing the OS to rivals like Samsung.

Other rumored suitors for RIM over the past two years have included Amazon back in 2011, and Samsung, which repeatedly denied rumors of a deal last year.

A takeover of RIM by a Chinese company would certainly raise security questions–especially for the company once described as a Canadian “crown jewel” by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. And back in July, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins said that the company has pulled back from expanding its China operations because of concerns over protecting its sensitive networks.

The deal could also face regulatory hurdles in the U.S., where government investigations into spyware have already created massive hurdles for two other Chinese telecommunications manufacturers, Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp. But a deal focused on just hardware instead of key IP and software might have an easier time making it past regulators.

Lenovo has been on an acquisitions kick lately as it seeks to pump new life into its business as PC sales wane. This month it completed a purchase of Brazilian computers, moible and tablets maker CCE. Its other five acquisitions in 2011 have included the purchases of Essen, Germany-based maker Medion, and the PC unit of Tokyo’s NEC Corp.

RIM has been emailed for comment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — go beyond the usual scenarios in examining the symbiotic relationships between Apple’s more proprietary model and Android’s open heritage. Those looking for a more scholarly version of this dialogue should look to Doc Searls’ recent Life Management piece for sustenance. But those who enjoy the emergent presence of a shared perspective might find it in the last half or so of this episode.

CES may have been presiding over the collapse of the PC, as the mobile device wave overwhelmed Wintel. But the speed with which the two silent partners have captured our attention and spawned a new generation of muscle memory continues to startle. What Steve Jobs decried as copying and theft as Android took the handoff from the iPhone and ran with it may someday be seen as the opening of a spirited competition that drove a generation of transformation. In other words, two heads are better than one.

@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You can’t say I didn’t give it an honest try. It was over a year ago now that I tried switching from an Android phone to the iPhone. The main reason I had waited so long was my tether to Google Voice – I’m all in there after porting my phone number to them a few years ago. And Google Voice never worked natively on the iPhone.

Until Sprint, that is. Their partnership with Google let me use my Google Voice number as my Sprint iPhone number, bypassing Apple completely and letting me use Google Voice natively for SMS, phone log dialing, etc.

So I switched to Sprint and enabled Google Voice and I thought all my problems were fixed (putting aside Sprint’s awful signal and data issues). I even got one of those Sprint Airwave boxes to get a signal at home. I was committed to making this work.

It doesn’t work. It never really has. I give up now.

Phone Calls: If I initiate a call from Google Voice in the browser to my iPhone everything works great. If I initiate the call directly from the iPhone, then about half the time my caller id shows my Google Voice number, and half the time it shows the original Sprint number. It tends to do this in bunches, so as soon as I think it’s settled on one number or the other it switches on me again. People have no idea who’s calling them, and eventually they end up storing both my phone numbers and it’s a mess.

SMS: Same thing. If I text from the browser it’s all good. But when I use my phone it mostly uses the original Sprint phone number. Text messages sent to my Google Voice number sometimes, but don’t always, show up on my phone. Text messages from my phone only show up in Google Voice in the browser if the phone happened to use the Google Voice number that time.

A common (daily) sms exchange with me looks something like this:

You: Hey Mike
Me: Hey
You: Who is this?

That’s because they send a SMS to my GV number. It was forwarded to my phone (which sometimes happens, sometimes not). I respond but Sprint uses the old Sprint number, so it sets up a whole new thread on the other person’s phone. They have no idea who I am.

Then we have a whole discussion about it being me and how Google Voice is weird and oh yeah there went another five minutes of my life.

None of these issues are new, they’ve plagued the partnership since the beginning. I just kept hoping they’d fix it.

It’s clear they aren’t in any hurry to fix it, though, and I’m done. It’s time for me to cycle back to Android anyway to keep current on that platform.

So I’m unboxing that Nexus 4 that Google sent me last month and I’ll get Google Voice running natively on that in no time.

As for home service, by the way, that whole OBiTalk with Google Voice thing was a big bust, too. It worked except it didn’t ring. Meaning if I happened to pick up the phone when someone was calling I’d get a good connection. But that was a loser’s game and I kept missing calls at home. So I switched to Vonage.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In mobile device rankings, Samsung continues to pull ahead of the rest of the field as the leading mobile handset maker, and the leading smartphone maker specifically. But when it comes to mobile advertising — a key and growing area of monetising content on mobile — Apple continues to be the engagement champion. Mobile ad network Adfonic says that Apple in Q3 accounted for 37% of all mobile ad impressions on its network, with Samsung the second-most popular at 24%, and the rest trailing some ways behind.

It will be interesting to what happens in Q4: In its AdMetrics report, Adfonic notes that Apple increased its lead over Samsung by three percentage points without much impact from the iPhone 5, which only hit the market at the end of the period. So one way of charting iPhone 5 popularity will be to see what kind of an impact it has on Apple’s ranking in the current Q4 quarter. But at the same time, Adfonic’s CEO points out that Samsung, too, is rolling out new devices  that may also raise its share:

“It is significant that, even though Samsung is making huge inroads in device ownership and gaining mobile advertising share, it is still losing ground to Apple. And these results don’t take into account the impact of new Apple devices such as the iPhone 5, the iPad Mini and the new iPad, which will be felt during Q4,” he noted. “Meanwhile new Samsung products such as the Galaxy S3 Mini will also start to appear. It’ll be very interesting to see how the Apple v Samsung rivalry plays out during Q4.”

Apple and Samsung were the only two to see their shares of ad impressions increase compared to Q2 — yet another sign, if one was needed, at how these two have continued to become the two to beat in the market.

Number three on Adfonics’ list, Nokia, had only an 8% share of impressions, and is in decline, although not as much as RIM, which declined by 4 percentage points to slip into fourth position. Indeed, looking just on ad impressions alone, you can see the argument for consolidation among some of the less strong handset makers.

When it comes to handsets, Apple continues to keep its leadership in impressions effectively based on one model, the iPhone; Samsung dominates with seven handsets in the top 10 slots. Ultimately, this points to iPhone users still being a magnet for advertisers, as well as for consumers when it comes to using devices for apps and mobile web services.

Adfonic adds that another reason for the strong performance. Advertisers actively select which devices to target their ads to on Adfonic’s network, and their preference for Apple and Samsung could be because of the two have loaded more features into their devices that the advertisers themselves are adopting more in their campaigns, for example gyroscopes for more interactive, rich media ads.

Clear for Mac had a unique challenge in making its way from the iPhone to the desktop, since Clear was obviously built with iOS in mind.. In fact, its primary appeal was the fact that it largely did away with control elements inherited from the desktop, dropping buttons in favor of gestures made commonplace thanks to the success of iOS. So bringing it to OS X, and keeping Clear recognizable while addressing the needs of mouse and keyboard users, presented quite a bit of a challenge.

Phill Ryu, CEO and co-founder at Impending, which created Clear in conjunction with Realmac Software and Helftone, told me that figuring out how to make a product that works as smoothly on the desktop as it’s designed to on mobile was the big challenge with bringing Clear to OS X.

“iPhone is a very, very elegant platform,” he said. “You do almost everything with it just by touching things. So Clear iPhone really worked that angle while keeping things extremely simple, and that’s how mobile apps should be. The Mac platform is if anything defined more by the myriad of ways people use their Macs. It’s almost 30 years old, there is a lot of stuff built up, and it is by nature less elegant, more complex, more feature-filled.”

That meant that Ryu and his team had to tackle Clear’s OS X design in a way that stays true to Clear’s simplicity while dealing with more variety in user input preferences. “In a way with Clear Mac it felt more like trying to tailor a glove to fit tightly on a variety of hands and shapes – mouse lovers, gesture addicts, keyboard only users, and I think we found a way to do it,” he said. “You’ll have to see for yourself.”

I’ve been using Clear for Mac for a little while now ahead of its release, and I think Ryu and his team have indeed nailed it. Whether you’re generally glued to your MacBook’s trackpad, or operating with keyboard shortcuts and a mouse (I do both, depending on whether I’m working from home or the road), Clear’s user experience shines. It also retains its good looks and impressive audio effects, and all of its personality.

Clear for Mac provides iCloud syncing of tasks between itself and a user’s iPhone client, but there’s another app that does that, and it now ships with OS X and iOS: Reminders. I asked whether Ryu felt Clear would hurt by facing GTD competition pre-installed on Apple’s devices. He admitted that Clear has a higher hill to climb in terms of attracting user attention, but overall felt the competition would be beneficial.

“We clearly have a very different point of view on how this kind of app should be designed and used, and I think that raises eyebrows and gets some attention,” he said. “Reminders might just introduce a lot of people to the idea of using a specific app to manage their lives and things to do. Then we can introduce them to something a lot nicer.”

Clear for Mac is available now on the App Store, with limited time pricing of $6.99 for the first 24 hours. It’ll be up to $9.99 beginning Friday for a brief period, and will eventually go back to its full price of $14.99 after that. If you want a task manager that feels refreshing in a world of relatively similar, staid options, this is definitely among the best options out there.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Path, the iPhone-based social network from Facebook alum Dave Morin, comes to the iPad today with a brand new app designed to take special advantage of Apple’s larger-screened devices. The new Path offers iPad-specific features, like a landscape mode which provides a mosaic view of daily activity, and more detailed information about individual updates, and a map view providing a bird’s eye look at daily network comings and goings.

When viewing Path on the iPad in standard portrait perspective, it looks and works a lot like its smaller-screen sibling, albeit with more emphasis on images, which work very well on the iPhone but even better on the iPad. But turning the iPad to landscape orientation reveals Path’s exciting new moments overview, which takes the most interesting posts of the past day from your network and lays them out as boxes of varying size, with larger ones representing things you’ll likely find more engaging. Path uses a special algorithm to determine what might be most interesting to any given user, and founder Morin told me in an interview that it should come up with a different layout every time you shift your iPad from portrait to landscape, meaning you’ll never see the same thing twice.

Users can also access much more information at-a-glance on specific activity, thanks to additional screen space. Path now provides a lot more insight into each update in a single, unified view.

“Because we have so much more screen real estate, we add much more context to every moment,” Morin explained. “So we’ll show you the weather, and a map of where the update was posted, and for songs we’ll show you a chart of what the top songs by that artist are, and which of your friends are most interested in that artist. We actually add quite a bit of context and browsing capabilities that you don’t get on the iPhone.”

There’s also a new “reports” feature which lays out all of the location-based updates from a user’s network on a map, letting them see daily comings and goings of their friends all in a central location. Morin says it’s interesting to see the difference between his network’s daily activity during the week, which tends to concentrate in and around San Francisco, and during the weekend, which sees a lot of people coming and going via airport.

As for why the iPad, and why now, Morin expressed a strong belief that Apple’s tablet represents the next stage of personal computing. In fact, he suggested the iPad is best thought of as the car to the PC’s horse-drawn carriage.

“I think it’s really clear that the iPad is the future of the personal computer,” he said. “Tim Cook made that pretty clear last week, when he said that [Apple] sold more iPads during an entire quarter than anyone in the PC industry sold PCs.”

In addition to being a key device to the future of computing, Morin also said that an iPad version will help get Path in front of new and different audiences, and noted that the company had always wanted to tackle an iPad-specific design. This version was designed by a team assembled expressly for the purpose of creating something tailored to iPad, separate from the iPhone product team, and he says that’s the approach Path will take going forward, with unique approaches to each different platform where Path appears. As for timing, Morin admitted that the iPad mini’s launch provided an optimal release window for Path’s iPad app, and said it really does shine on the iPad’s smaller screen.

Asked about further development of partner plans along the line of Nike+ integration, Morin said that for now the team is actually more focused on “working with Apple and bringing new experiences like this to the iPad mini” and hasn’t been concentrating on that side of the business. He did reveal that this is only the first of “a bunch of cool stuff” still to come for Path, so we should expect to see more changes on the heels of the iPad app.

Note: The app may take a while to propagate to the App Store, so keep checking if you’re not seeing it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch