Google today launched version 1.1 of its open source Go programming language. It’s been more than a year since Google launched version 1.0 of Go. The language, which puts an emphasis on concurrency and speed, has seen three maintenance releases since then, but the team has been conservative with bumping up its version numbers. This new version, however, the Go team writes, introduces a number of significant performance-related improvements that warrant the new version number and existing Go code should run noticeably faster when built with Go 1.1.

Version 1 was meant to show that Go had arrived at a level where users could expect a certain level of maturity and stability, as well as compatibility with future releases. Today’s release, the team says, lives up to this promise. It introduces a number of significant languages and library changes, but all of these remain backwards-compatible. “Very little if any code will need modifications to run with Go 1.1,” the team writes.

Among the changes in this new version are, “optimizations in the compiler and linker, garbage collector, goroutine scheduler, map implementation, and parts of the standard library.”

The new version also introduces method values, makes some changes to return requirements (which should lead to more succinct and correct programs, Google says), as well as a new race detector, which can find memory synchronization errors.

Over the last few months, Go has definitely seen an impressive increase in developer interest and quite a few companies have now adopted it as their go-to language for problems that can benefit from Go’s support for concurrent programming. CloudFlare, for example, uses it in production to run important aspects of its Railgun software, Bitly uses it to power some parts of its infrastructure, as do Heroku and an increasing number of startups and established companies.

While Dart, Google’s browser-based replacement for JavaScript seems to have trouble catching on, the company is clearly on to something with Go and the language, which was first conceived in 2007, looks to have a bright future ahead of itself as developers look for a modern language with built-in garbage collection and concurrency.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Anthony J. Lombardi practices patent litigation and patent prosecution at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP. He also provides counseling to clients on prelitigation strategy, portfolio development, patent monetization, and licensing activities.

A clear legal standard for determining patent-eligible subject matter remains elusive. On Friday, the Federal Circuit, in CLS Bank International v. Alice Corporation, ruled that an invention involving software for a computerized trading platform does not constitute patent‑eligible subject matter. The decision — which spanned 135 pages — by a 10-member en banc panel of the Court included seven separate opinions, but not the clarity many had hoped for.

Alice’s computerized trading platform patents were at issue in the case. Those patents describe a process for two parties to exchange obligations, such as stock trades, which are then settled by a trusted third party.

The focus of the legal proceedings was Alice’s patent claims. Positioned at the end of a patent, claims are numbered sentences that define the scope of protection afforded by the patent. Among other requirements, the subject matter of a claim must comply with section 101 of the patent laws.

Section 101 defines patent-eligible subject matter and reads: “Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.”

Alice asserted a variety of its patent claims in the case, including claims written in method, system and computer-readable-media claim formats. However, Alice’s asserted claims generally share the same underlying premise — that of software for exchanging obligations between parties through a computerized trading platform and using a third party to handle settlement of the exchanges.

What Guidance Did the Court Provide for Software Patents?

A majority (seven of the 10 members) of the Court concluded that Alice’s method and media claims are not directed to patent-eligible subject matter. The Court split 5-5, however, on Alice’s system claims. A split means the lower district court’s ruling, which found Alice’s system claims patent-ineligible, stands. A majority (eight of the 10 members) also agreed that Alice’s method, media, and system claims should rise or fall together when determining patent eligibility.

The majority consensus ends there. A majority of the Court, however, failed to reach agreement on the reasoning behind these conclusions.

Judge Lourie, in an opinion joined by four judges (Judges Dyk, Prost, Reyna and Wallach), found all of Alice’s asserted claims drawn to patent-ineligible abstract ideas.

In his view, Alice’s method claims are directed to nothing more than the abstract idea of reducing settlement risk by effecting trades through a third-party intermediary. This, he said, is a “disembodied” concept without any real-world application. Computer-related aspects of the claims — including steps for creating records to store data, using a computer to adjust and maintain those records, and reconciling those records at the end of a trading day — in his opinion failed to add anything of substance that would save the claims.

Judge Lourie similarly grouped Alice’s media and system claims in the same boat with Alice’s method claims. He characterized the media claims — although defining physical storage media — as nothing more than the same underlying method of reducing settlement risk “in the guise of a device.”

He then questioned whether structures found in the system claims—including “a computer” and “a data storage unit” — could justify a different approach for those claims. In his opinion, they did not. He reasoned that the computer-related limitations failed to provide any “meaningful distinction” from the computer-related limitations found in the method claims.

In a separate opinion, Chief Judge Rader said he would have found the system claims patent eligible. Three judges (Judges Linn, Moore, and O’Malley) joined in that part of his opinion. In Chief Judge Rader’s view, the issue was “whether a claim includes meaningful limitations restricting it to an application, rather than merely an abstract idea.”

Applying that rationale, he reasoned that the structural limitations in Alice’s system claims (e.g. limitations drawn to “a computer” and “a data storage unit”) brought those claims into the realm of patent-eligible subject matter. However, in the remainder of his opinion (which only Judge O’Malley joined), Chief Judge Rader concluded that Alice’s method and media claims are patent-ineligible abstract ideas.

Judges Linn and O’Malley, in a separate opinion, said they would have also found Alice’s method and media claims patent-eligible for the same reasons expressed in Chief Judge Rader’s opinion regarding Alice’s system claims. Additionally, they noted that several technology companies, in amicus (friend-of-the–court) briefs, expressed concern about what they viewed as widespread proliferation and aggressive enforcement of low-quality software patents. In responding to that concern, Judges Linn and O’Malley said Congress, and not the courts, is the proper avenue for developing special rules for software patents. For example, they speculated that Congress could limit the term of software patents or devise rules for limiting their scope.

Judge Moore, in a separate opinion (in which Chief Judge Rader and Judges Linn and O’Malley joined), said she would have found the system claims drawn to patent-eligible subject matter. She also wrote that the uncertainty in court decisions over this issue is “causing a free fall in the patent system.” If all of Alice’s claims are not patent-eligible, she conjectured that “this case is the death of hundreds of thousands of patents, including all business-method, financial-system, and software patents as well as many computer implemented and telecommunications patents.”

In a separate opinion, Judge Newman shared the majority view that all of the claims stand or fall together. She would have found Alice’s system, method and media claims patent‑eligible based on the plain language of section 101.

Chief Judge Rader offered an additional opinion captioned “Additional Reflections.” There, he emphasized that the Court should focus on the language of section 101 and indicated it is unlikely that innovation is promoted by the subjective standards for evaluating patent eligibility expressed in the panel’s opinions.

What’s Next for Software Patents?

The Federal Circuit has ruled, but the dividing line between patent-eligible software and patent-ineligible abstract ideas has not come into focus. Some may say the landscape remains in a similar state as it was before the Federal Circuit’s decision: some software claims might rise to the level of patent-eligible subject matter and others may not.

The CLS Bank case is likely to undergo Supreme Court review. The Supreme Court may view the Federal Circuit’s fractured decision as an opportunity to consider software patenting again. Whether a clear dividing line will emerge remains to be seen.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Check out this must-read deck on digital brand strategy from ad agency giant Wieden + Kennedy (198K views). It’s particularly relevant to social commerce because it tackles one of the biggest myths in social media – that people actually care about you as a brand or service.

Coming from the ‘get-real’ camp of Byron Sharp (How Brands Grow), Wieden + Kennedy suggest that the fastest way to fail in digital is to use the language of human relationships to frame what you do.  Terms like ’engagement’, ‘commitment’, ‘communities’, ‘love’, ‘fans’ are vanity terms and bad metaphors for self-deluded brands who think consumers buying from them or clicking their like buttons actually really care about them.  They don’t. Get over it.

Human relationships are complex and vital, brands are trivial and incidental. Which is way only 1 in 5 people (the desperate, lonely and compulsive) think they have ‘relationships’ with brands.  The digital challenge is not about creating ‘relationships’ – it’s about serving people.

We couldn’t agree more.

Pointless Digital

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Way back in March of 2010, Swype launched a super private Beta of its then totally mind-blowing (and now often imitated) swipe-to-type Android keyboard. While they’ve since shipped it out-of-the-box on dozens of handsets, opened the Beta to pretty much anyone, and sold for $100M, they’ve never gotten around to ditching that Beta tag — until today. (Three years in Beta? Who do they think they are, Google? ZING.)

This morning, Swype hits the Google Play store for the first time.

Swype will actually launch on Google Play in two separate versions: a free trial version that’ll work for 30 days, and a 99c version that, of course, works forever. The company says they’ll roll the two builds into one eventually, but didn’t want to worry about the complexities of In-App purchase stuff in this first release. Also, don’t be surprised if that 99c price goes up after a few weeks.

Though the Swype Beta program has been open to just about anyone with a passing interest since June of 2010, getting it onto your handset has always been a pretty convoluted process. You needed to punch in your email details (they later dropped this requirement), configure your handset to allow app downloads from third-party sources, then rig up an installer which did all the required system tweaking. It wasn’t brain surgery, but it wasn’t nearly as easy as hopping into the Play Store and tapping “Install”.

Meanwhile, the competition has flooded in. While Swype (now a division of Nuance) focused on partnering with OEMs to get its keyboard installed on handsets at the factory, alternatives like SwiftKey, SlideIT, and ShapeWay were happy to go straight to the consumer. Hell, even Android’s own official built-in keyboard picked up a similar feature as of version 4.2.

So are they hitting the Play Store too late? Perhaps — but it seems they don’t mind.

“Yeah, we might be late. That’s an honest concern,” Aaron Sheedy, Nuance’s VP of Mobile Product, told me in an interview, “But the adoption of smartphones is still just so huge, and there’s a whole generation of people just coming online. Our language coverage is such that we’ll do really well in the [international] markets; we’ve got [support for] 62 languages, plus a bunch of dialects.”

And if they are too late? It doesn’t matter too much. OEMs like Samsung and Nokia are still paying the company licensing fees on every Swype-enabled handset, and they see that being their primary source of revenue for quite some time.

(As for when Apple is going to give in and Swype-ify the quickly antiquating iOS keyboard: while the company says they’ve met with Apple every few months to give’m heck for the state of their keyboard, there hasn’t been any official progress on that front.)

If you’ve already got Swype installed on your handset, the version hitting the Play Store today should look much like what you’ve grown accustomed to. It does pack at least three features that were previously exclusive to Beta users, however:

• “Living Language”: Swype will automatically detect where you are when a phone is turned on and add local words to its dictionary (like Singlish words if you’re in Singapore).
• Smart Touch: If you regularly tap between two keys rather than directly on the one you mean, Swype will automatically adjust to your sloppy key presses and tune its predictive texting accordingly.
• Smart Editor: In addition to predicting what words you’re about to type based on those that you’ve typed so far, Swype analyzes full sentences as soon as you punch in the punctuation. If it spots a word that doesn’t generally work in that context, it’ll underline it and offer up the word it thinks you mean if you tap it.

Swype hasn’t hit the Play Store just yet, but it should be up within the next hour or so. We’ll update this post with a link as soon as it goes live.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The president of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Fady Chehade told the Wall Street Journal that the organization will launch Chinese character options for top-level domains in the second half of this year. (A top-level domain is the part of the Web address after the dot, so the Chinese characters would replace the .com, .net, .org’s, etc. that you see in most Web addresses).

The roll-out is part of ICANN’s plan to introduce address endings in characters other than the Roman alphabet. Other languages in the works include Arabic, Korean, Russian, and Japanese.

The announcement marks a change in tune for ICANN, which was created in 1998 by the U.S. Department of Commerce to manage domain names. The organization has resisted previous efforts by China, Russia and other countries to control Internet addresses, and been criticized for not letting each country manage their own Internet addresses. In December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications, China was among a coalition of countries, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, that submitted a proposal to gain more sovereignty over Web addresses, which faced opposition at that time from other nations including the U.S., Germany and the U.K. Critics said that allowing different countries to manage their own Web addresses could potentially lead to charges being placed on data transmitted over international boundaries.

According to the WSJ, the language additions are “part of ICANN’s push to reduce global opposition to its regulatory power by leaving behind its U.S. roots and becoming a more international organization.” Another sign that the organization wants to work more closely with China includes the launch of an “engagement center” in Beijing to collaborate with the government on issues like URL trademarks.

Chinese characters can already be used in the main part of a Web address, but after ICANN rolls out its new changes, companies and organization will be able to add Chinese character address endings. According to ICANN, both Tencent Holdings and Sina have already applied for the extension .weibo in Roman and Chinese characters. Other major Chinese Web companies that have bid for new extensions include Alibaba Group and Qihoo 360.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The leader of Zuckerberg’s high-profile immigration lobby has already a statement of “regret” for ambitious language in an early prospectus on its goals and tactics, “Given the status of our funders and quality of our team, we will drive national and local narratives to properly frame our agenda,” reads the leaked memo, obtained by Politico.

The prospectus reportedly reveals that the group called “Human Capital”, with founding members Bill Gates and Andreessen Horowitz Investor, Marc Andreessen, has goals to use the group’s own reputation and websites to push their political message, just like companies did when they blacked out their sites in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

“Several prominent leaders in the tech community, operating solely as individuals, continue to work on forming an issues advocacy organization that would seek to promote issues such as comprehensive immigration reform and education reform,” the group’s leader, Joe Green, told Politico in a statement, “However, some of the information contained in this email is outdated and not representative of the kind of work this organization will perform. Moreover, I regret some of the language in the email was poorly-chosen and could give a misimpression of the views and aspirations of this organization and those associated with it.”

Politico also reports that group will not be named “Human Capital”, nor have Gates or Andreessen signed on.

The leak is being received as some PR misstep for the group, but I don’t see how anything in the memo is shocking. Lobbies leverage a group’s reputation and resources to push political messages, almost by definition. Nor is using the tech community’s captive audience of billions of users particularly novel. Beyond the SOPA protests, Google exploits its website to promote marriage equality (with adorable videos)

To a lesser extent, tech companies attempt to influence behavior. Facebook encourages users to vote and be an organ donor. Apple used to plaster “don’t steal music” on iPods. Perhaps even more transparent, the Bay Area (i.e Silicon Valley) funneled more cash to President Obama’s campaign than either Los Angeles (Hollywood) or New York (Wall Street).

Moreover, there are plenty of existing tech lobbies, such as The Internet Association, Engine Advocacy, TechNet, The Silicon Valley Leadership Group, and the Consumer Electronic Association, all with nearly identical support for more high skilled immigrant visas.

The memo’s language is brazen, for sure, and reveals that tech CEOs are aware of their own power. The group was supposed to launch this month, right before a draft of a comprehensive immigration reform bill hits Congress for debate. I suspect that everything is still on track, because no one in Washington DC will be surprised that people want to use money and power to influence law.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Famo.us, the Javascript framework designed for building crazy rich (yet super fast) interfaces in pure HTML5, is making two announcements out of the HTML5 Developer Conference in San Francisco this morning: the framework will be free to developers thanks to a few “huge hardware vendors” taking interest, and it’s getting a physics engine.

We’ve written about Famo.us a time or two before, but for those who missed it: Famo.us was started in 2011 by Steve Newcomb, just 3 years after his language processing company Powerset was snapped up by Microsoft for $100M and rolled into Bing. While it confused a few of the judges when it debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012, Famo.us went on to raise a four million dollar Series A just six months later.

In a way over-simplified nutshell: Famo.us pulls off a whole lot of clever trickery to allow web developers to tap the GPU of a device (be it that of a computer, smart TV, tablet, or a phone) for calculations, no plug-in required. To the developer, that means being able to build interfaces that are simultaneously richer and faster. To the end user, that means super snazzy user interfaces without having to install any plug-ins.

Check out a demo of a Famo.us-powered UI below (or check out http://www.famo.us yourself.):

So with a few million dollars raised, how will Famo.us start bringin’ the money in?

They could charge developers. For-pay frameworks aren’t unheard of, though they tend to be the exception. That’s not Famo.us’ plan, though. As of this morning, Famo.us has confirmed that their framework will be free to developers for “as many … apps as you’d like, for as many users as you’d like”.

Instead, Famo.us is relying on the interest of a few huge hardware vendors who are looking to Famo.us to power their UI on future devices. They’ll build (or help build) the UIs, then charge the vendors for licensing. Additionally, Famo.us will offer optional enterprise add-ons (think analytics, or the ability to record/replay user sessions to see how they navigate your design).

Exactly which hardware vendors have taken an interest here is currently under strict lock-and-key — but we can certainly narrow it down a bit. There are only so many “huge” hardware companies with the financial swagger to make something like this worthwhile. Apple is out (they’re all about native code, and that’s probably not changing anytime soon), so it’s presumably one of their direct competitors.

Finally, Famo.us is also announcing that their framework, which has thus far been focused solely on rendering, has picked up a physics engine along the way. Steve says they set out to find a physics engine that fit three criteria: it had to be fast, it had to work on mobile, and all of the data had to render to the Document Object Model in a way that left it Google-friendly. When they couldn’t find one that matched all of the above, they decided to build their own.

It may seem strange for a framework that’s meant primarily to be used with interfaces to offer up physics functionality — it’s not a game engine, after all — but it makes sense: when you’re working with objects being thrown around in space (be it 2D or 3D space) it’s hugely advantageous to be able to work with forces that parallel the real world, like mass, gravity, and drag.

Plus, it fits hand-in-hand with the way Steve explained Famo.us to Anthony Ha just last month:

“We built a shitty game engine which is basically the best app engine ever built”

Famo.us is currently in Beta sign-up mode, and Steve says they have around 27,000 developers waiting to start building. Interested developers can find the sign-up page here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google Translate is a very useful tool for when you are travelling internationally but sadly, that’s also the time when you are least likely to have an always-on connection to the Internet. Obviously, there are a number of offline translation apps available, but if you are partial to Google Translate and you use an Android phone, you’ll be happy to hear that the latest version of the Google Translate app for Android (2.3+) now lets you download offline language packages for about fifty languages.

You can now simply select [Offline languages] in the app menu and see all the language packs available for download. You just need to download the language packs for the two languages you want to translate between and you are good to go. Google notes that these packs are “less comprehensive than their online equivalents,” but even a smaller dictionary is more useful than not having one at all.

Google also offers a Translate app for iOS, but it’s not clear when (or if) this version will get an offline mode, too.

While the offline mode is obviously the main feature in this new version, the app now also allows you to translate vertical text in Chinese, Japanese and Korean with your camera. Google added support for using camera input to translate texts last August and added basic support for translating Chinese, Japanese and Korean this way last December. This could be a killer feature for Google Glass, too, and it’d be a surprise if the Google Translate team wasn’t working on this already (especially given that Google Translate’s Josh Estelle is already a Glass user and that Translate has made some cameo appearances in Google’s Glass promo videos).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Things are moving fast in the world of Babbel, the language learning startup out of Germany which has been scaling its international presence since we first started covering them back in 2009. Today Babbel is announcing a $10 million Series B funding round led by Reed Elsevier Ventures. Other investors include Nokia Growth Partners as well as existing investors, IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft via its VC Fonds Technologie Berlin, and Kizoo Technology Capital.

The funds will be used to accelerate international expansion and develop all platforms, especially mobile on the back of 200% growth per year since 2011, they say, reaching 15 million users. Owned by Lesson Nine GmbH, Babbel previously raised a total of $2.2m in equity and debt.

Last week it bought PlaySay, a TC Disrupt finalist that focused on creating mobile apps that turned the process of learning languages into a game – think “Draw Something” for languages. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Berlin-based Babbel is now used in over 190 countries, but its strongest base remains Germany, so it needs to expand in Europe, the U.S. and emerging markets. To help, it has number of relationships with different hardware manufacturers, platform providers and media.

Speaking to TechCrunch, founder Markus Witte said he hopes to push into France, UK, Italy, Spain and Brazil. “We definitely need to acquire talent. In the U.S. I guess we would need a team on the ground. The money will go into building the team and ramping up marketing. We’re in the consumer market, so getting channels like TV right is a challenge.”

He said Babbel was not “joining” Reed as this was not a “strategic investment, it’s a financial investment.” He confirmed that the founder team of himself, plus Lorenz Heine and Thomas Holl, are not ‘taking money off the table’.

Babbel offers over 6,500 learning hours for thirteen languages across web, iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows 8. Total app downloads have been over 8 million.

Tony Askew, General Partner at Reed Elsevier Ventures joins the board and says: “The startup has grown rapidly… and has built a large subscriber base which generates positive cash flow. It’s… well-positioned for explosive growth in the rapidly growing category of mobile and online language learning.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yandex, Russia’s ‘homegrown Google’, is adding an English interface to its Yandex.Translate app for iOS, along with support for more language translation pairs, in order to widen the app’s appeal and start building an international user-base. The original app launched in December with a Russian interface, offering translations between Russian and eight languages, including English, Ukrainian, Turkish, Czech, Bulgarian, Romanian and Serbian.

As well as adding an English version of the app, Yandex has increased the supported English translation pairs from three options before (English<->Russian, English<->Ukrainian, English<->Turkish) to eight, with the addition of: English<->Spanish, English<->German, English<->French, English<->Italian and English<->Czech.

The majority of the app’s current translations – more than 85% – are between Russian and English, according to Yandex. And 98% of all downloads come from Russia and Ukraine. But the company claims there is “considerable interest” from mobile users in the U.S., China, France, the U.K. and Israel, which it hopes will grow now that it’s adding an English UI. In tandem it is also releasing a version of the app with a Ukrainian UI.

Yandex’s original online translation service rolled out two years ago, and the app is powered by the same machine translation technology. It automatically detects the source of the language, rather than the user having to specify from a list. Other features includes real-time translations as the user types, and a proprietary predictive text technology to reduce typo-based errors. There’s a text-to-speech component, powered by Acapela, along with the ability to sound translated words.  And while the app needs an Internet connection to function, translation history is stored locally on the device and can be accessed while offline.

The (free) Yandex.Translate app has had more than 150,000 downloads since its launch in December 2012, according to the company. It says it’s getting almost 40,000 downloads every month on average, and serves more than 15,000 users — generating more than 100,000 translations every day.

Yandex has slowly been ramping up its efforts to push beyond its traditional stronghold of Russian and its neighbouring countries, while also bolstering its position in its home market.

Last year, for instance, it extended the reach of its digital mapping service, maps.yandex, launching international maps for Europe and the U.S. While in its home market the company launched its own Internet browser and an Android app store in a bid to keep Google at bay.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch