A few weeks ago, Chris Dixon tweeted something thought-provoking:

What were the last Hollywood movies you saw about technology & the future that were optimistic? They seem to be systematically dystopian.

I happened to be sitting in a movie theater waiting for Iron Man 3 to start, so I tried to come up with a good counter-example. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. Then the pre-movie trailers starting playing. The new Will Smith (and son) flick, After Earth: dystopia. The new Guillermo del Toro flick, Pacific Rim: dystopia. Even the new Superman flick, Man of Steel, could be classified as a technological dystopia (more below).

Sure, there are some films — mainly smaller indies — that in some ways are starting to buck the trend. But overall, Dixon (and Peter Thiel, who Dixon says he got the idea from) are right: Hollywood seems to hate technology. Why?

My initial thought is simply that dystopia sells. It’s the same reason why the mainstream media covering technology tends to harp on the downsides of new tech, sometimes to the point of fear mongering. They are tracking you! They want to know your location! They want to record you going to the bathroom!

Most people are predisposed to fear what they do not understand. Hollywood’s futuristic films are simply playing to this fear in the same way that horror films are packed with moments meant to startle you.

This is nothing new. In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis — the very first feature-length science fiction film — told of a 2026 where the lower class workers power the technology for the upper class. In 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still saw aliens bring a giant robot to Earth that would destroy the planet if humans couldn’t get their act together. The 1960 version of The Time Machine (based on the H.G. Wells book) had technology (nuclear weapons) destroying civilization. 2001. A Clockwork Orange.

Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.

Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.

To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:

Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.

The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.

We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook place pages now include an option for users to give star ratings to businesses and locations directly from their page on Facebook.com, even if they haven’t been to the location.

Previously, users could rate places from the Local Search section of the mobile app, and only if they had previously checked into the location or been tagged there. Facebook would also use the desktop sidebar to randomly prompt users to rate places they had been. We hadn’t seen a way for users to rate any place at any time they wanted until now. This enables users to go back and rate the places they might not have checked into on Facebook, but it also opens the door to rating manipulation. For instance, a business could ask friends or incentivize fans to give them five-star ratings.

This feature on desktop pages also gives users an easy way to change their rating. Before, the only way we could find to change a place rating was to do so through the activity log, but it could be difficult to find the rating among all of a user’s other actions. Changing a rating is not possible to do from the mobile app.

We also noticed that unadministrated pages now include a way for users to rate and recommend the place. Unadministrated places are often cities, public parks or local businesses that haven’t claimed their page on Facebook.

Although Facebook has had a “recommend this place” feature since 2011, it has only recently begun to emphasize ways for users to share more feedback about the locations and businesses they visit. The social network is also developing the same for content, with users now able to rate books, movies and TV shows as of this week. All of this is building Facebook’s potential as a local search and entertainment discovery platform, and has implications for the businesses and organizations that manage their presence there. More user generated reviews and ratings gives page owners a bit less control over what is displayed on their page and the sentiments revealed there. These ratings could also begin to influence Graph Search and News Feed distribution, introducing another factor for marketers to consider and optimize for.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Indoor mapping software startup Meridian, continues to evolve their product strategy with a recent update to their offering.

Called Zones, the company’s newest update to their indoor mapping platform — and indoor is the key word here — allows geo-fence style app push notifications to be scheduled, by drawing polygons on location maps. When customers with the accompanying app walk into one of those indoor areas represented by the polygon on the map…Bam! They get a push notification.

To be sure, it’s a real marketing opportunity and a concept underserved by the current, mostly GPS-based location awareness model for mobile devices.

Differentiators
There are several geo-fencing platforms out there — PlaceCast, Digby Localpoint, Wifarer and ShopKick all come to mind — so what is the big deal here? Meridian’s VP of Marketing Jeff Hardison, believes there are several differences in the Meridian approach.

First of all, this notification system will work even when the accompanying app is not open nor in active use — essentially working while the app is in background mode — without significant battery drain. Other geo-fence providers might be able to do this via GPS or cell tower triangulation, but not by WiFi sensing, which is how Meridian works. This means that once the WiFi network the location is using is recognized, that network can “wake up” the app and send push notifications when different Zones of the store are passed through.

Most importantly, per Meridian’s secret sauce and strategy, this works with Wi-Fi triangulation for indoor maps and can function at a sensitivity of about 10 feet. This gives the system an advantage in locations where GPS antennas often fail — like, say, in a casino under ground parking garage.

Recap
To recap how Meridian’s technology works, the company has built a CMS and rapid app building platform so that partnered companies can upload maps of their locations into the CMS.

Once their location maps are digitized and uploaded to the CMS tool, the geo-fences can be drawn on the location maps. The new or existing WiFi hotspots in the locations are then coupled with the map data.

Accompanying mobile apps — also built with this system — can access the map data in order to display accurate indoor maps, based on location. Now the push notifications have been added to the mix.

Software Development Kit
You may have uncovered what could be seen as the Achilles Heel in the strategy, in that a brand’s native app must be built with Meridian’s app rapid builder technology (another offering they have). That could seem like a limitation for brands that already have their own app, and don’t want to rebuild with Meridian’s proprietary app-building tool.

However, Jeff said the team is currently piloting an SDK approach for the Zones platform, so brands with existing apps can use the new push notification system with an existing app. This will be deployed in the coming months.

Meridian is currently wrapping up live pilots with The Bellagio in Las Vegas and also with Fernbank Museum. They’ve also received some recognition from Cisco as a best of breed provider of indoor mapping technology and Cisco has actually integrated some of Meridian’s technology into their own hardware platforms.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cisco Meraki, which offers cloud-managed networking solutions, announced a partnership with Facebook last week to include Facebook Wi-Fi in its new Presence platform for businesses to gather location analytics and promote engagement among visitors.

Facebook Wi-Fi is a service that allows businesses to offer customers free Wi-Fi after checking in on the social network. It began as a hackathon project a year ago and gradually rolled out as a local experiment with a few businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now it’s a full-fledged commercial product thanks to the Meraki partnership.

The integration with Presence gives business owners access to Facebook page insights with aggregate demographic information about the customers who check in. The check-in also results in increased exposure for the business and leads users to a business’ Facebook page, which could lead to more Likes or interactions. It could be a useful feature for local businesses, retail locations, the hospitality industry or large events and conferences, which want to learn more about their visitors and generate word of mouth.

For now, Facebook Wi-Fi is only available to businesses through Meraki wireless products. The Presence platform, which includes other real-time location analytics and an API to connect with CRM systems, is included free with the Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN. Meraki says configuring Wi-Fi with Facebook login only requires two clicks in the Meraki dashboard.

Businesses also have the option to allow users to skip the check-in step if they don’t want to share their location on Facebook.

More information is available from Facebook’s Help Center and Meraki.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Though Foursquare is now busy trying to take on Yelp, one of its more rewarding, but personal, use cases (now that the fervor around badges and mayorships has died down), is its ability to add insight and data around your check-ins. Often after registering your location, the app rewards you with a little encouragement or commentary via a pop-up message. Today, the service is making these little moments shareable with a new button that lets you edit and post that message to Facebook, Twitter and more.

For example, you might learn that you hadn’t been at some airport since last December, or it’s your third day in a row at a favorite location. In Foursquare’s blog post about the feature, it gives the example of a user who wants to brag about hitting the gym three days in a row. (Though let’s get real, we’ll probably see more people posting about their ongoing bar streaks, don’t you think?)

The update may seem to be a minor one on the surface, but it’s one that could encourage more of Foursquare’s users to return to the app more regularly in order to post and share rather than try to win a mayorship crown or some other tired prize, like a badge. These things were fun at first, but the excitement has worn off. But Foursquare still needs a steady stream of data to keep its local recommendations current and accurate.

The feature also ties in nicely with the new movement in “quantified self” devices – where users are trying on items like the FitBit or Jawbone UP, for example, in order to track and learn more about their daily activities through data.

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, in fact, expressed an interest in the quantified self space, during an interview he did with TechCrunch last week at Disrupt NY. Though he had dismissed the rumors about Foursquare developing wearables of its own, he did say that this is an area Foursquare would like to further explore.

Also of note, Crowley used an auto-checkin utility recently, when he ran the Boston Marathon (ahead of the attacks), which let him track his progress mile by mile – so he’s clearly a fan.

Foursquare is actually sitting on a goldmine of personal data through its historial check-ins, but prior to now, the messages taking advantage of that info have been ephemeral – you would see them and then hit close, nothing more. Today’s update is the first step towards letting users better interact with Foursquare’s data store, if only by posting it to social networks or saving images to their Camera Roll.

The new feature is available for iPhone and Android.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TenFarms, a startup working on a couple of interesting mobile product ideas, just announced that it has raised $2.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors.

The company has already released its first product, Photopoll, which allows users to share photos (you can pull them from your camera roll, Amazon.com, or Instagram), tell stories around those photos, and ask their friends for opinions. There are lots of other polling apps, but when founder and CEO Nils Forsblom showed me Photopoll, he emphasized the ease with which users can share multiple photos. The app has attracted a largely female audience, he said, and it will be tailoring the experience to that audience with future releases.

More interesting to me is what TenFarms is working on next — Adtile, which delivers mobile ads that don’t interrupt the user experience until someone chooses to view them. If you’re browsing an app with a stream of content, some of that content might have an Adtile icon, and if you tap on, say, that photo, it will flip over and show a related ad.

Will anyone actually tap on the ads? Forsblom said that he’s been happy with the results from the early tests, though he declined to offer any specific numbers.

Forsblom said this approach has some big advantages over other types of mobile advertising. For one thing, he said the ads themselves offer a good user experience. For example, one ad he showed me not only highlights a relevant product, but also maps out the location of nearby stores and allows users to call those stores. He said the experience is designed natively for iOS, and he argued that it’s almost wrong to call it an ad — it’s more of “an app within an app.”

The other advantage is targeting. Adtile will allow advertisers to advertise in apps in a specific topic or vertical, and they can also target by geography. Even better, Forsblom said, “We understand what’s the product or thing that it’s showing — when you flip [the content] around, there should a very, very close relationship with with the ad itself.” At the same time, he cautioned, “None of these things are ever perfect.”

Forsblom said he won’t be selling Adtile units directly, but instead working with ad networks. He also said that he wants to experiment with different pricing models, so that it’s “more democratic” and the ad that gets served isn’t always the one that comes from the advertiser with the biggest budget.

Before TenFarms, Forsblom founded Fruugo, a shopping startup that seems to have flamed out despite raising $48 million in funding. In a recent interview, Forsblom said that after taking on investors at Fruugo, he was “basically powerless”: “That was my biggest mistake, giving those voting powers to the investors and basically just being an employee of the company.” That’s why he said he’s being careful and retaining control this time around.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As Facebook continues to encourage users to rate the places they’ve been, the social network is testing different language for its five-star rating scale.

After a user has checked into a place or been tagged in a post with location, they may see a “Rate These Places” module in the right hand side of Facebook.com. When users hover over the stars, they can see what each rating means.

Some users are seeing stars one through five defined as: ”would never recommend to a friend,” “probably wouldn’t recommend to a friend,” “might recommend to a friend,” “would recommend to a friend” and “would definitely recommend to a friend.”

Others see “really don’t like it,” “don’t like it,” “like some things about it,” “really like it” and “love it.”

In the past, we’ve seen the scale as “really don’t like it,” “don’t like it,” “like it,” “really like it”  and “love it.” Others could be in rotation as well.

These different definitions could lead some users to be more or less likely to add their rating to a place, and they could influence the rating a user ultimately gives. For instance, a user might not want to give a place a three-star rating if three stars means “like it,” but they might if three stars means “like some things about it” or “might recommend to a friend.”

Facebook began asking users to rate the places they’ve been in October 2012. Users could only rate places on desktop, and only when Facebook suggested places in the sidebar. Then in December 2012, Facebook launched a mobile location search product called Nearby, though it recently renamed this to “Local Search.”

Users can rate any of the places they’d checked into by visiting a place’s page, as seen to the right. However, to avoid manipulation of ratings, the option won’t appear unless the user has previously indicated on Facebook that they have been there. Users can change their rating via the activity log on their Timeline, but not from mobile. Unfortunately, there is no way to sort the activity log to view all ratings, so if a user rated a place a while ago and wants to change their rating, it might be difficult to find again later.

Below is an example of the “Rate These Places” module along with all its star rating definitions, sent to us by reader Matteo Gamba:

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

There were plenty of promising startups showing off at Disrupt NY 2013’s Startup Alley (one of them even became a Battlefield finalist as an audience choice), but none managed to yank on the ol’ heartstrings quite as much Tapgram. Long story short, Tapgram is a social service that aims to dramatically simplify the process of communicating for people who have trouble doing it otherwise.

Rather than force people to peck out responses, Tapgram lets them respond by tapping large, simple icons that signify moods — the yawning face means you’re feeling a bit sleepy, and and you can probably guess what the big purple frowny face signifies. Nestled below that grid of faces are four severity modifiers so you can temper or emphasize the message you’re trying to send. After all, there’s a considerable difference between feeling a little groovy and extremely groovy (and before you ask, those are indeed real options).

Switching over to the location menu lets those users tap even more big bright icons to share places they’ve gone to, are thinking about going to, or want to go to. From there, those messages get pushed into a stream of activity for friends and loved ones to keep track of, and a quick change in the settings automatically pushes those messages to connected Facebook newsfeed.

But why take such a simplistic approach to communication? Well, for some people, it’s much easier than the alternative. That’s the case for Tapgram creator Ruble’s mother. After having a stroke she has been has dealing with a condition called aphasia that prevents her from processing language as the rest of do, which makes more traditional modes of communication woefully complex. His name could sound familiar if you’ve been keeping tabs on thoughtful accessibility hacks — Ruble was also responsible for a Kinect project that used Microsoft’s gesture-tracking camera to help his mother send emails, a hack that ultimately led to Tapgram’s creation.

It’s simple, sure, but Ruble says it’s been very effective not only for people dealing with aphasia. So far, the service has been available as a public beta for the past four months or so and counts people with autism and those coping with traumatic brain injuries among its hundreds of users. As you’d expect from a beta service it’s all still a little rough around the edges, but it works mostly as intended and Ruble pointed to the possibility of native apps down the road to help make the experience of communicating via Tapgram a little smoother. If nothing else, it’s already helping some people (and the folks that care about them) communicate easier, and that’s worthy of some praise in my book.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While Foursquare has been the most hyped location startup out of New York, there is actually another startup that is growing a real business from serving merchants with about 150,000 locations globally.

Yext has quietly grown to 200 employees through a platform that makes it easy for brands and small businesses to manage their location data across more than 50 search engines, mapping companies and on Facebook. They’ve raised more than $65 million to date after spinning out and selling an older pay-per-call business to IAC, in favor of going after this opportunity.

CEO Howard Lerman thinks of his company as the “quiet location giant,” which could eventually become one of the New York tech scene’s serious IPO candidates.

They’re making their connection to the Facebook platform even more seamless today with the launch of Yext Sync. Through a mobile app, businesses can manage their Facebook Pages, whether they have one or one thousand of them. It’s designed so that a local employee at one of a franchise’s hundreds or thousands of locations can update the page with real-time content like photos or status updates.

“If a Starbucks barista is interacting with customers every day, why can’t they manage the local Facebook Page?” said Yext CEO Howard Lerman. He said that Facebook is now a growing source of local search; according to a study from Neustar, Facebook has about 13 percent of local searches now.

The app they’ve built, called Yext Sync, kind of feels like any other social networking app where you can just add photos or updates to a stream (which ends up being the Facebook page). Facebook actually has its own Pages Manager App, but it isn’t multi-platform, Lerman says.

“When a business or brand posts into Yext, it appears not just in Facebook, but also, optionally on our network of 50 sites,” he explained. “So, post once, and it updates more than 50 platforms with one touch. This is better than updating each platform individually.”

Yext is looking to have 300,000 locations on its platform by next year. They have a subscription model with tiers that range from $149 a year to $499, depending on the number of sites a business wants to manage.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch