Just about six months ago, Uber won a big battle with D.C. regulators to have its on-demand car service approved for operation within the nation’s capital. But new regulations from the D.C. Taxi Commission could severely hamper the company’s ability to offer low-cost services in the district.

Last December, the D.C. City Council voted to approve a legal framework that legitimized mobile e-hail applications there, as long as those applications followed certain rules. It defined a new class of for-hire vehicles (taxis and sedans) that could use mobile apps as a way to connect drivers and passengers.

The unanimous City Council vote followed a year of negotiations with local regulators to get its services approved for usage within the district. (The very public fight even included a sting operation by D.C. Taxi Commissioner Ron Linton in which he took an Uber and then handed over a variety of fines to the driver.) Still, after a whole lot of back-and-forth, it seemed like Uber was finally in the clear.

New regulations approved by the D.C. Taxi Commission last week could be a setback in the progress that Uber has made there, however. Among other things, those regulations would require mobile e-hail applications to integrate with the payment processor that is used within local taxicabs. That’s a non-starter for Uber, which currently has its own payment processor for in-app payments, and it could mean the end of UberTAXI in the city.

Another set of rules, which is being considered now, would ban cars that weighed less than 3,200 pounds. That would keep Uber from offering fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, which would affect its ability to offer its lower-cost UberX service there. With the possibility of UberTAXI and UberX being shut down, the company would only have its legacy black car and SUV businesses in the city.

Other regulations that Uber disagrees with would require Uber and other e-hail providers to hand over data related to rides that were booked using mobile applications. According to Uber, another rule could give the Taxi Commission the ability to choose whether or not apps are approved for usage in the city, and unilaterally keep Uber and other services from operating there.

For its part, Uber has tried to once again mobilize its users to reach out to D.C. officials and petition the local government. It’s asked users to email and tweet at Mayor Vincent C. Gray, and has put up a petition on Change.org. That petition has already received more than 2,500 signatures, with 5,000 needed.

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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

Hot damn, the Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon was great. Even with the hackathon over and the winner declared (Way to go, Rumbler!), we keep finding more projects we want to highlight.

Built in just 24 hours, Game Of Tones is a proof-of-concept game that, with a bit of work, could teach you to play the actual guitar (versus, say, Rock Band — which, while a great game, is about as effectiv

Game Of Tones works in unison with a real-life electric guitar, paired to the computer through a line-in converter. As you strum, notes are fired from the neck of your on-screen hero’s guitar. Different chords result in different attacks, currently represented as notes of different hues. Strum an A, and blue notes fire out; strum an E, and red notes are fired.

In its current, proof-of-concept state, Game Of Tones is a bit simple, but the team says they want to build it out into something bigger. Right now, your character (modeled after the game’s co-designer Jeff, which fellow co-designer Roman says was a change that came “while he was in the bathroom”) stands in place, firing notes to blast away at a pile of physics enabled boxes. The focus of the first 24 hours was to get the game’s engine (Unity) recognizing the guitar input and differentiating the different chords.

The team says they’d like to expand the concept into something more, mentioning the possibility of some sort of forever-runner platformer with enemies vulnerable to different chords, or a multiplayer shredding battle.

Check out the team’s on-stage demo below. While Murphy’s Law went into full effect when a wiggled cable lead to some technical woes, I made sure to pull ‘em backstage for a better look — be sure to check out that video, as well.

Game Of Tones On-Stage:

Game Of Tones Backstage Interview:

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IDC is the first of the big analyst companies to come out with quarterly mobile device shipment numbers that indicate Q1 as the first quarter where smartphones have outnumbered more basic feature phones in worldwide shipments: in a total market of 418.6 million devices, 216.2 (51.6%) were smartphones. But it is was a kind of tipping point of another sort, too: it is a sign of how Apple is not the juggernaut that it once was.

(BTW… for those of you keeping track, this is not the first quarter where Android has all but dominated the top-five rankings, save Apple’s presence. That happened in Q4 2012, according to IDC’s figures.)

Samsung shipped nearly 71 million smartphones in the quarter, giving it a market share of almost one-third of the whole of the smartphone sector (32.7%). Apple, meanwhile, shipped 37 million devices — just over half as many as Samsung, for a market share of 17.3%. With all others in the top-five — LG, Huawei and ZTE — still with less than 5% market share apiece, Samsung and Apple remain a strong top-two.

But looking at the pattern of growth something else comes out: Apple only grew its volumes by 6.6% over the same quarter a year ago. In fact, in that regard, that growth puts it far behind not only Samsung (at 60.7% volume growth), but also behind LG (110.2% growth); Huawei (94.1%); and ZTE (49.2%). As a point of comparison, Samsung and Apple were more nearly level a year ago, in Q1 2012, (44 million versus 35.1 million in Q1 2012), and respectively saw growth of 267% and 89% in shipment volumes — the only two that increased:

Today:

A year ago:

As we’ve pointed out before, shipments to those who sell devices are not the same thing as sales to users, but it is an important barometer for where the wider market is going. (The most recent figures from Kantar Worldpanel, which track sales, spell out how the difference between Android-based and Apple sales is not as wide as 2:1 in every market, but is in fact significantly wider in some.)

It’s notable that Nokia, BlackBerry, and HTC whose shipments were on the decline last year but still enough to keep them in the top-five, are now out of the picture altogether. It also shows that Nokia’s sub-10 million sales of smartphones, with 5.6 million Lumias, are not big enough figures to break out of the sizeable ‘others’ category.

With Apple still shipping more than three times as many devices as its next-closest competitor, LG, even if things continue as they are today, it will likely still be some time before it gets overtaken by the others in the list. Its performance also was enough to keep it in place as the world’s third-largest mobile handset maker overall, in a list otherwise dominated by companies that make both smartphones and feature phones:

IDC notes that LG, which shipped 10.3 million smartphones in the quarter, a rise of over 110% over the year before, was helped by three factors in the last quarter. The first of these was the popularity of the Nexus 4 device it created with Google; the second was the success of its lower-priced L Series (15 million sold in this category alone since launched); and the third was its LTE line. These three point to how those Android handset makers that can create strong enough and distinctive handsets that are set apart from the rest of the Android crowd can continue to pull away from the crowd.

Apple’s iPhone brand has never been seen as anything other than premium, and true to type, it is still not playing at the same level as others smartphone industry in creating new models that aim at the “cheap smartphone” market.

CEO Tim Cook did not discuss the prospect of a new, low-cost device, on Apple’s earnings call this week — the focus remains on selling older models, namely the iPhone 4, in markets like China as a route to bringing new smartphone users on to the platform. Other handset makers like Samsung, Nokia and many “others” are building out portfolios that hit not only at high-end users but those looking for entry devices priced at closer to $100 or even less. Some handset makers, specifically in emerging markets, are targeting only this market.

On the other hand Cook also left open the possibility that whatever comes next may be something different altogether: the “really great stuff” coming out in the autumn and in 2014 could be another iPhone. Equally, it could be something else altogether, and not a handset at all.

Image: Flickr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After booting out app discovery and promotion platform, AppGratis, from the App Store earlier this month for violating two clauses of its developer T&Cs, Apple has now followed up with a second blow to the business — by killing its ability to send push notifications to existing users of its app. AppGratis has claimed it has some 12 million users of its app. (<1 million of whom have so far signed its petition against the App Store ban.)

The move was reported earlier by French publication JDN which said AppGratis informed subscribers that Apple had killed notifications in an emailed newsletter. TechCrunch has obtained a copy of the email sent to (Italian) AppGratis subscribers — the first part of which is embedded below. As well as explaining to subscribers why they haven’t received a push notification from the app that morning, it urges them not to panic, and says AppGratis will be launching a daily special offers newsletter to keep them informed about app offers:

AppGratis’ daily deal business model involves taking money from developers who wish to promote their apps to its 12 million users and negotiating deals so that apps or in-app content is free for the duration of the offer. These sponsored apps are promoted along with unsponsored editorial picks selected by merit, according to AppGratis. However the company has faced criticism for how it operates and, more generally, for blurring the line between app discovery and app promotion.

The two App Store clauses that AppGratis fell foul of relate to third party app promotions and using push notification for direct marketing. Whether AppGratis was banned for being too similar to Apple’s App Store is another possibility — however other app discovery services have not been banned from the App Store, suggesting it was the way the business was operating — not the general category of business — that was a problem for Apple.

In a blog post today, AppGratis’ CEO, Simon Dawlat, expands on the company’s strategy to try to circumvent Apple’s App Store ban, saying it will be going back to its roots by launching a newsletter and is also readying an HTML5 web app (another way to circumvent the App Store’s walls):

…we’re back to our roots. A crazy cool daily newsletter with millions of subscribers, that will very soon be complemented by the newest and nicest HTML5 WebApp you’ll ever see. Two things we fully own, and that no one can take away from us. So when I stated a week ago that the reports of our death were greatly exaggerated, I wasn’t kidding. Not kidding at all. AppGratis is just getting started.

For all its fighting talk, the removal of push notifications is another hammer blow for the business — or at least its iOS business. (One can also wonder if Apple will cut AppGratis’ affiliate program soon too.) AppGratis could, of course, also concentrate on growing its Android app business (which launched in August 2012). It has had to adapt its business model for Google Play T&Cs, though, offering price-cuts rather than full price drops to free as apps that drop their price to free have to stay free.

In today’s email to subscribers, AppGratis writes that “those with long memories will continue to remember to check the app”. But without the ability to push daily deals to its users, it’s unlikely to be able to generate the concentrated ‘bursts’ of downloads that enabled it to propel apps up the App Store rankings. And forecasting, as Dawlat describes it, App Store ranking was a core part of its sales strategy to its app developer customers. (Earlier this week Business Insider published an AppGratis sales document detailing pricing and ranking estimates for App Store ranking in different countries where it operates.)

Going forward, AppGratis will have to rely on emailing its subscribers (and no one likes to be spammed via email too often) to inform them of offers. And, once it has its web app up and running, hope to persuade existing users to migrate to and keep checking that — without the ability to send native push notifications to them to generate the clicks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tastebuds, the London-based startup that matches people based on their musical tastes, has been kicking around for a while now. A graduate of the accelerator Springboard (now TechStars London) back in 2011, the company has ploughed along bootstrapped ever since — garnering a not-too-shabby 100,000 registered users along the way. Now the company looks like it’s finally set to step on the gas. Today it’s announcing a $600,000 seed round from Black Ocean, which will be used to launch mobile apps, grow its developer team, as well as formally launching in the U.S.

In addition, Tastebuds is currently developing features to connect members offline through gigs, festivals and music meetups, thus building on its existing online-to-offline social networking proposition.

Originally positioned as a dating site that focused on music as a way of matching prospective dates, Tastebuds appeared to have hit onto something, gaining a reputation for its ability to reach users who wouldn’t normally consider doing the online dating thing. Accordingly, it says that almost half of its users haven’t used a dating website before. However, that appears to have only taken it so far. Online dating is one of the most competitive spaces with very high user acquisition costs and high user churn. So, perhaps smartly, the startup has since broadened out slightly and can now be thought of as a competitor to services like Badoo, along with the usual online dating suspects.

“We first launched as a dating service but we’ve grown way beyond the dating use case,” says co-founder Alex Parish. “The site is designed to make it as easy as possible for people to meet others who share their tastes, in whatever capacity. It’s obviously working in a dating respect as we’ve had numerous weddings off the site.”

To build your profile on Tastebuds, you search for and select your favourite bands/artists. Alternatively, you can import data from your Last.fm account or import your Facebook music-related “Likes”. In addition, you add the usual demographic information required for social networking, along with, crucially, your location — the end goal is to meet people offline, after all. You also get to state if you’re looking for a date or just want to meet like-minded people. Tastebuds then begins displaying potential matches, including which artists you have in common, so that you can start conversing.

You can also “Like” users so that their Tastebuds status updates show up in your news feed, such as what they’ve recently listened to. You can also see any gigs they are planning to attend if they’ve linked their SongKick account.

Finally, last May Tastebuds launched a Spotify app, which essentially embeds the service inside of the streaming music site. As one of the first apps on the platform, around half of its users have come via Spotify, although this has petered out somewhat. “When we launched we were registering thousands of users per day from the app,” says Parish. “This has dropped since the number of apps [on Spotify] has ballooned but the app is still significant for us, making up around a quarter of daily registrations.”

Tastebuds is free to join, although the company has experimented with a number of premium micro-features, such as “Incognito mode”, which hides your online status and enables you to browse profiles anonymously. However, it isn’t ruling out a more standard recurring subscription model in the future. “We’re also going to investigate the possibility afforded by offline events and live music,” says Parish. “The focus until now has mostly been on growth and achieving the right product-market fit.”

As for what’s immediately around the corner for Tastebuds now that it has money in the bank, Parish says that, along with much-needed mobile apps and growing the team, the company is busy “building technology to help people meet offline at live music events which we’re really excited about.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Action.IO, a startup promising to make it easier to create, configure and share development environments, just announced a new name — Nitrous.IO — and $1 million in seed funding.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Draper Associates, CrunchFund, 500 Startups, TIBCO Software, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Golden Gate Ventures, and Peanut Labs co-founder/CTO Prosper Nwankpa. (TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a partner at CrunchFund.)

“Having analyzed their tweets, I’ve discovered the four things developers hate the most: wasted time, configuration bugs, hard drive crashes, and airport security,” said Bessemer partner David Cowan in the funding press release. “Nitrous.IO just fixed three of them.”

Co-founder and CEO AJ Solimine told me he and his co-founders (VP of Engineering Arun Thampi and CTO Peter Jihoon Kim) first developed the product to address the challenges that they themselves faced trying to synchronize development across a team and between home and work. When a new developer joins a company, Solimine said it’s usually “a very time-consuming process” to make sure all of their software is updated and that they’ve installed all the correct libraries. Similarly, in a programming class, your “first week’s homework is getting your machine configured.”

With Nitrous.IO, on the other hand, people can “skip all of that,” he said. There’s a cloud package where companies get “a nice, lightweight, centralized way” to manage employees’ development environments, and where developers can jump in immediately and start coding. It also allows them to code from anywhere on multiple devices.

Thampi said most of the usage so far is in programming classes and workshops, as well as among hobbyists, because Nitrous.IO is “not properly mature enough” for most companies to rely on it. Business use is definitely one of the goals, he said. Thampi also argued that Nitrous.IO is a perfect complement to Chromebooks, since “Chrome OS doesn’t include a full file system to set everything up.”

Over time, Solimine added that he wants to build more features that distinguish Nitrous.IO from other web development tools.

“We don’t think of ourselves as a web IDE,” he said. “We’re actually building a full-fledged web development platform. That will become more clear with future releases.”

As for the new name, the team said it was an attempt to avoid any litigation with another company that has the “Action” trademark. There haven’t been any threats, but it seemed best to avoid the possibility. And the team liked the idea of a company name that recalled racing video games, where the “nitro” button gives you a quick burst of speed.

The company is also announcing that Tobias Lütke of Shopify and Joe Stump Sprint.ly have joined its advisory board.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Say what you will about Dish Network, but the Colorado company’s brass has some moxie.

The satellite media service provider has been trying for years now to link up with notable national wireless carrier to help operate a mobile service to sell alongside its current offerings, and according to a recent report from Bloomberg, Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen has approached T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom about the possibility of a Dish/T-Mobile merger.

In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on Dish’s potential push into the wireless market, the saga has enough bumps and twists to rival a soap opera. This is far from the first time that representatives of the company have made these sorts of overtures towards major wireless carriers and their parent businesses. Just prior to the collapse of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger in December 2011, Dish Network CEO Joseph Clayton pointed out the possibility of striking a deal with T-Mobile in a bid to bolster Dish’s coffers and light up its own wireless service.

“We want to use it to create a national wireless network, video, voice and data,” Clayton told Bloomberg at the time. “The voice part, we’ll need some help with.”

In the event that the merger didn’t pan out (and we all know how that went), Clayton also said that Dish had considered a similar partnership with the folks at Sprint. Despite later rumors that AT&T was considering a Dish acquisition because it was just so hard up for spectrum access, Dish opted to make an unsolicited $5.15 billion offer to ailing network operator Clearwire… less than a month after Sprint announced that it would purchase the parts of Clearwire it didn’t already own for $2.2 billion. At this point the three parties are still trying to hash things out, but things don’t look too promising for Dish — Clearwire has accepted $160 million from Sprint over the last two months, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that Dish is officially out of the running.

That said, Ergen doesn’t seemed gutted by the prospect of losing against Sprint for control of Clearwire. “If for some reason Clearwire is not an option for us because that’s just the way the circumstances go, then we think we have other alternatives,” he noted during Dish’s most recent earnings call. Chairman Ergen and CEO Clayton have done well to set up as many contingencies as they have these past few years, but Dish’s future in mobile is still unclear and it could be months before there’s any more progress to announce.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google has quietly rolled out an update to its Google Search app for iOS, and before you get your hopes up, I’ll go ahead and tell you that there’s no “Google Now” anywhere to be seen.

The update does, however, bring with it some minor bug fixes. Other than that, the update isn’t all that exciting. In fact, it’s downright disappointing.

Rumors had been swirling for a while that Google has plans to bring Google Now over to iOS. A video even leaked in mid-March showing an alleged promotion for Google Now on iOS, saying it was built right into Google Search for iOS.

There was some back and forth after that, with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt saying the ball is in Apple’s court with regard to when we might actually see Google Now on Apple’s platform. He played a similar game with Google Maps months ago, when we were all ready and waiting for Google to swoop in after Apple’s Maps product on iOS 6 was a flop.

Apple then responded saying that Google had not submitted any Google Now application to the App Store. Of course, that didn’t exclude the possibility that Google would push out Google Now through an update to Google Search.

Alas, Google Search has been updated and there’s no Google Now to show for it.

Of course, Google could still push out Google Now through the Search app, and probably will if this video (which looks pretty legit) is to be believed. Unfortunately, today just isn’t the day.

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“Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think your password,” explains a UC Berkeley School of Information press release about new research that utilizes brainwaves to authenticate users instead of passwords of numbers and letters. With a $100 consumer-friendly brainwave-reading headset, the Neurosky MindSet, Professor John Chuang found that the mere task of concentrating on one’s breath was enough to uniquely identify them.

Brainwave devices, or Electroencephalograms (EEG), measure electrical activity along the scalp, in the form of wavelengths known to be associated with certain moods, mental states and behaviors. For decades, cognitive scientists have used EEG devices as therapy for a range of mental-health issues, from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) to post-traumatic stress disorder.

As technological advances shrunk the size and cost of EEG devices, a small cottage industry of consumer products, like the Neurosky, have brought the possibility of therapy and mind-controlled computers into the home. The image above is our own Anthony Ha wearing Neurosky-enhanced cat ears that rotate when the user is paying attention.

The next phase of “passthought” research will reportedly focus on finding thoughts that are user-friendly. In one test, Chuang asked participants to imagine performing an action of their favorite sport, but “they found it unnatural to imagine the movement of their muscles without actually moving them.”

Before security hawks cheer the arrival of theft-proof passwords, researchers have been able to “hack” people’s minds. Another team at Berkeley found that they could extract data, such as ATM PINs, by identifying when users were thinking of familiar information.

So if passthoughts ever become mainstream, it might not be wise to have your signature thought be something incriminating … just think about handing off candy to a baby.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch