As part of Facebook’s growing push to simplify its advertising offerings, the company announced Monday that the commonly-used page post link ads will become easier to use and customize.

Page post link ads are usually a brand’s best bet to drive conversions from Facebook, and the company wants to make them easier to create. One of the main complaints from advertisers regarding this ad unit is the lack of customization available. Advertisers previously have been unable to upload a new and optimized teaser image to accompany the ad, so Facebook built this capability and launched it Monday.

Additionally, Facebook simplified the flow for unpublished page post link ads and improved the process of creating an ad.

Facebook announced changes to the creation of page post link ads in a blog post:

Choosing the right image is essential to creating a great ad, so we’re are rolling out image customization for Page post link ads across all of our interfaces, which means more flexibility for advertisers in choosing their creative. With this feature, advertisers can upload any image they believe will drive the most conversions to their website (rather than Facebook’s automatically sourcing a thumbnail image based on images on the linked site). Image customization is now available via the Page composer, create flow, Power Editor and the API.

Facebook is continuing to do more in the realm of unpublished posts, so that way brands can create an ad without having to promote an already-published post. Now the page post link ad has received this treatment.

Since advertising is a highly visual endeavor, Facebook reworked the flow for creating a page post link ad, so advertisers can see how it will look not only in the News Feed, but in the sidebar, as well. This way, advertisers can choose what kind of ad they want to publish:

We know Page post link ads in News Feed can outperform domain ads on the right-hand side, and we want to encourage marketers to take advantage of this enhanced performance for off-site conversions. So now when a marketer enters an offsite link as the ad destination, rather than defaulting to a right-hand side format, we’ll automatically allow advertisers to choose a domain ad for the right-hand column and/or an unpublished Page post link ad for News Feed. This removes the guesswork when transitioning from advertising on the right-hand side to advertising in News Feed.

Advertisers: How do you feel about the changes to the creation flow of page post link ads?

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

The MacBook Air was the only new Apple hardware to be announced and launched at WWDC this year (besides the new AirPort Extreme), and while it isn’t a big change from the previous version, it packs some crucial improvements that really cater to the Air’s existing strengths. The 2013 Air is really Apple pushing the envelope with its ultraportable, and that has helped make one of the best computers in the world even better.

Basics (as tested)

• 1440 x 900, 13.3-inch display
• 128GB storage
• 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5
• 4GB of RAM
• 0.11-0.68 inches thick, 2.96 lbs
• 802.11ac Wi-Fi
• 12 hours battery life
• $1,099

Pros

• MacBook Air portability/construction still amazing
• Next-gen Wi-Fi great for LAN transfers
• All-day battery life literally lets you forget the power cord at home

Cons

• Still no Retina display
• Could use more ports

Apple hasn’t changed the MacBook Air’s physical design since its last major update a few years ago, but the sleek, aluminum chassis isn’t showing its age. Sure, thinner computers have emerged (though the Air is still thinner at its tapered end) but the fact that PC form factors are really only just now catching up speaks volumes to the quality of the Air’s industrial design.

Apart from overall good looks, the Air has a tremendous leg up on most computers in terms of size, weight and portability. If you haven’t yet used one for any sustained period of time, you’ll be absolutely blown away. Going from the 13-inch MacBook Pro to the 13-inch Air is like leaving the past behind and joining the future; big leaps in computing design are seldom so observable, and so noticeable in terms of your daily usage.

A concern with many who aren’t familiar with the Air is that the thin and light chassis won’t be durable, but having used both the 11- and 13-inch as my daily working computer for months at a time, while jumping from desks to various remote working locations, I can attest to those fears being unsubstantiated. The Air may not feel quite as rock solid as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, for instance, but it isn’t fragile by any means.

Apple has improved the Air in key areas with this redesign, and that’s where it makes sense to focus, based on the understanding that the previous version was already one of our favourite computers. Apple has focused on changes that should have the biggest impact, like the new Intel Haswell processors, the much speedier flash storage, a near doubling of battery life, and networking speeds that embrace 802.11ac, a tech on the verge of becoming conspicuous in consumer goods.

Of these changes, the one with the greatest impact for the average user will be the new, all-day battery life afforded by the 12-hour capacity built-in pack (on the 13-inch Air; the 11-inch also gets a boost, but should afford you 9 hours, not 12). Apple is also testing battery life under more demanding conditions now, which suggests that if people go to extreme measures to conserve juice they might be able to get past that 12 hour mark. And indeed, I was able to eke out around 13 hours at least once, with screen brightness dialed down and other battery drains like Bluetooth disabled.

The battery is truly remarkable. In standby mode, I haven’t yet even begun to scratch the surface of how long it can last after a week of usage. It really sips power when managing background tasks, and that should improve even further under OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which adds even more battery-conserving features to Apple’s desktop OS. The Air still ships with Mountain Lion, but you can bet Apple’s engineers were working on the upcoming OS X release when they were developing the new Air hardware.

Even without the extreme measures, this is a computer that you can forget is unplugged without fear of running into dire problems. If you’ve got a charge in the morning, and provided you aren’t doing anything too demanding that’s burning CPU cycles, you should have enough to get you through a reasonable mobile workday. Which is to say, we’re nearly at the point most people really badly want to be in terms of their MacBook’s battery life (short of limitless, endlessly clean and cool energy).

And the other upgrades help as well; the MacBook Air I reviewed was the 13-inch base model version, which retails for $1,099, but it come with double the internal storage standard vs. the 2012 model (128GB vs. 64GB), and Apple says that its new type of flash is a better performer, beating the previous generation’s storage performance speed by up to 45 percent. Certainly in testing the Air near-instantly recovered from sleep, and side-by-side with my top-end 2011 model, was snappier with nearly every task – likely also helped by the next-generation Intel Haswell processor.

Some nice new features on the MacBook Air that add to the computer in small ways are the addition of dual mics, which greatly improves call quality for things like FaceTime when you aren’t using headphones, and the new Intel HD Graphics 5000, which gives you around a 25 percent bump in performance over the Intel HD 4000 graphics chipset used in previous generations.

The other big new step-up in terms of features is the 802.11ac Wi-Fi networking card, which is complemented by the new AirPort Extreme router that offers the same. It’s a technology that’s becoming more and more commonly available on other routers, too, so it’s a very nice-to-have feature on the new Air, even if you can’t take advantage of it just yet. Still, in my brief tests with LAN performance over 802.11ac, I found that transfer times for files between computer and network-attached storage on the new router were just about halved vs. 802.11n speeds, though still lagged far behind wired Ethernet transfer times of course.

The new MacBook Air isn’t a dramatic change, but it is a very good one. I’ve fallen in love with Apple’s Retina displays, so if I have one complaint about the computer it’s that there’s no ultra-high resolution display, but incorporating that kind of screen in this generation would’ve likely meant trading a big chunk of that new battery life away, and also increasing the price tag by around $400-500. For those who value the portability, flexibility and economy of the Air above all, the 2013 edition definitely hits all the right notes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As we continue to see more details brought to light in how the government requests and uses information about what we do on the web and on our mobile devices, an ex-Googler and a consumer rights attorney who have dedicated themselves to helping users remain private have raised some funding to do this better and in more places.

Disconnect, the startup behind the Disconnect.me extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers, which lets users of Facebook, Google and Twitter keep themselves from being tracked by third party sites, and the Disconnect 2 app that covers some has raised a $3.5 million Series A round.

At the same time, as a measure of dedication to its principle of being positioned not for profit but for social good, Disconnect has been designated as a B Corporation, a semi-charitable certification. With the tax breaks and other help that this offers, it will let Disconnect dedicate time to raising awareness and campaigning as well as to creating for-profit products.

“As a B Corporation, we’re able to spend more time than a traditional company on activities such as consumer education, petition drives, and close collaboration with non-profits,” Gus Warren, a former Venture Partner at FirstMark Capital who is part of Disconnect’s executive team, noted in a statement. “Disconnect is committed to benefiting not just shareholders but all stakeholders, including the public.” Warren will run the company’s New York office.

This most recent round of funding was led by FirstMark Capital, and comes on the back of a $600,000 seed round announced in March 2012. That round was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from Charles River Ventures, and angels including David Cancel, Mark Jacobstein, Ramesh Haridas, Vikas Taneja, Chris Hobbs, and Andy Toebben.

Founders Brian Kennish, formerly an engineer at Google who left to work on this full-time, and Casey Oppenheim, a consumer rights attorney, say the startup will be using the funding first of all to help with the launch of Disconnect 2 for Safari and Opera browsers.

Disconnect 2, launched in April 2013 as a Chrome and Firefox extension, blocks some 2,000 third-party websites that track you across the web. That vastly expands the power of the service that initially focused on a handful of portals Disconnect.me first kicked off when Kennish was still at Google and created the Chrome extension for Facebook specifically, in October 2010.

Kennish notes that Disconnect 2 has gotten more than 250,000 new users since launching in April and that all the startup’s apps combined have more than 1,000,000 weekly active users. Within the current range of software, it is charged on a pay-what-you-want model. “Like Humble
Bundle,” says Kennish, who adds, “Some of our upcoming releases will also include freemium
features.”

In addition to helping block some 2,000 third-party sites that track users’ browsing histories, the Disconnect 2 extension also helps filter out malware and encrypts data that you share on sites “to prevent wireless eavesdropping.” The company also promises that by cutting down on a lot of the tracking noise, users are actually able to see faster-loading pages and use 17% less bandwidth on average.

“Increasingly, people want to know who’s tracking them online and want to have a say about what information is being collected about them,” Oppenheim noted in a statement. “Our software is designed to put users back in control so they can decide how their personal data is used,” adds Kennish.

Longer term, the company also hopes to focus more on protecting users around the various features of data mining. “We’ve always thought one of the biggest threats to people’s online privacy is just how big data mining is getting,” noted Kennish. “There’s so much personal data being collected about us in so many places now and all that data is susceptible to being used in ways we don’t want. So our goal is to help people minimize the unwanted collection and use of their data. We started by tackling third-party tracking because most people don’t know their browsing history is being tracked by thousands of invisible websites they’ve probably never even heard of.”

The company is also becoming increasingly focused on security services? “We think there are way
too many holes in online consumer security, which recent events have made even more obvious, and we want to help plug some of those holes.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When we last left off with the Loog Guitar by Rafael Atijas it had blown past its funding goals on Kickstarter in early 2011 and shipped with much fanfare making it one of the first successful Kickstarter projects on our radar. In the interim it’s become a mini-phenomenon and, most important, people have started using the three-stringed instruments to record albums.

Case in point: Pip Blom is a 16-year-old singer-songwriter who wrote an an entire record using the Loog. You can listen to the whole thing on Bandcamp and she is selling the albums to pay for a trip to Teenage Kicks, a band camp in Vlieland in the Netherlands. In short, it’s a crowdfunded project that helped student complete another crowdfunded projects. To paraphrase an old lady: It’s crowdfunding all the way down.

The music itself is quite charming and well-recorded and Pip herself is ready to appear at the Glastonbury festival, if they’ll have her.

Short Stories by Pip Blom

This cool connection shows the power of crowdfunding. Rafael wanted to make a fun, inexpensive guitar for kids and he was able to depend on the kindness of the Internet to help him make it. In turn, Pip can use that same guitar to follow her dream just as any student with a Loog can learn a few chords and make some really nice music. When people talk about the value of crowdsourcing, this is what they mean: the little accidents that connect people to help push the state of the art forward. It’s not just a pre-order engine, it’s an engine of creativity.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Are you in Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, or Slovenia? Have I got a treat for you. In an effort to spread the good word about TC in the rest of Europe, I will be rolling through Sofia, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana at the beginning of July for a series of informal meet-ups. If you’re in those cities, I want you to attend!

Assisting in the planning is Netokracija / Netocratic, the “TechCrunch of Southeast Europe.” They will provide us with locations and more specific timing but as it stands we expect to have some free beer, lots of sunshine, and a great chance to talk about your startup in an informal setting. We’ll also be scouting for Disrupt entrants for Disrupt Berlin in October.

At each of these events I’ll talk a little bit about TechCrunch and getting the attention of media outside your own country and we can talk startups, entrepreneurship, and funding all night long. We’ll also hold a mini-Pitch Off with the winner getting a Startup Alley table at Disrupt Germany. You can apply here. If you’re chosen you’ll join one of ten startups on stage for a two-minute presentation about your startup. There will be no PowerPoints and the presentation is English only, so get your elevator pitch ready!

The locations are nearly final and you’ll find them on the Plancast pages below:

To RSVP for Sofia on July 1 click here. Co-hosted by  Netokracija / Netocratic & Eleven
To RSVP for Belgrade on July 2 click here. Hosted by Netokracija / Netocratic.
To RSVP for Zagreb on July 3 click here. Hosted by Netokracija / Netocratic.
To RSVP for Ljubljana on July 5 click here. Hosted by Netokracija / Netocratic.

Interested in sponsoring the event? Please contact organizer Ivan Brezak Brkan, head of MemeMedia, directly. We’ll have much more information soon, but until then RSVP and get your product ready for our Southeast Euro Trip!

Special thanks to our main sponsor, the .me domain.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I don’t know what to believe about the world anymore. First of all, how does an NSA contractor have the ability to wiretap anyone, ANYONE, from an infrastructure level to a legal level? Is the legal part that “terrorism” is important enough to bypass a court? Is the infrastructure part that the data is available on the NSA’s servers somewhere, and this guy who worked at Booz Allen for three months was given clearance for it? How did this happen?

This part isn’t clear for me, though Michael Arrington has some plausible theories.

Still, I and the rest of the world, six days after the first story broke, have little idea whether this AIM, Facebook Messenger, Paltalk conversation you and I are having is directly accessible to the U.S. government, which, at anytime — and whether or not anyone has clearance — can look at it (Hi guys?!). What we do know for a fact though is that the NSA sucks at PowerPoint. 

Whistleblower Edward Snowden says you can wiretap Obama if need be, but the NSA has done a poor job of expressing that impact through its PRISM PowerPoint presentation. Exactly how much access the government has to company data is completely belied by its shitty graphic design skills.

“The top banner with the logos, it’s horrible, you cannot avoid it,” French PowerPoint designer Emiland De Cubber, who turned the government’s laughable deck into something more design-friendly (above), tells me. “You cannot say it’s bad — for someone who is not a designer to not know design at all. But you can say you didn’t think very much about what you wanted to say. It’s sad. Because people did not think about those slides.”

And their eventual audience of, I dunno, 2 billion or so people.

De Cubber is, yes, a PowerPoint slide designer who believes the U.S. government could have conveyed its message more effectively through visual design: “Half of the people don’t care about design, but the other half do care about it. It’s like a PowerPoint cliché, and not as threatening as it actually is.”

And his opinion on the guy who leaked the terrible slides in the first place? “He’s in a good place to be TIME Man Of The Year.”

Stop spying on us, American government.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Flashlight apps are a testament to the power and simplicity of modern technology. Power outage because of a hurricane? There’s an app for that. Need to stealthily kill a mosquito without waking up your partner? There’s an app for that, too.

Actually, there are more than 1,000 in the App Store alone, many with 5-star ratings, because flashlight apps, which turn the flash of your iPhone camera into a literal flashlight, are awesome. Flashlight apps make you feel like your phone is more Swiss Army knife than Twitter receptacle.

With that innocuous seeming icon on the left there, Apple essentially just mass-exterminated every flashlight app in the App Store. It will be adding its own Flashlight to iOS 7 Control Center, the feature accessible with a swipe and a tap. Versus apps that take so many clicks to open you might as well wait for your eyes to adjust to the dark.

Apple routinely turns to the developer ecosystem for “inspiration” for its own products, thus killing said inspiration. Hence the cliche question, “What will happen if Apple (or Google) does this?” at almost every VC pitch meeting. But in most cases, like Filters taking on Instagram and iTunes Radio taking on Pandora, the stakes are higher.

Of the 50 flashlight iOS apps that exist in CrunchBase, only one, made by i4software, is funded.

“We are certainly concerned about this announcement by Apple, as it could affect our core revenue stream. However, we believe that, just like Instagram will survive the addition of filters to the Camera app, our Flashlight app will flourish,” said the very hopeful i4software co-founder Michael Zaletel. “Flashlight will lack brightness control and will require two steps to access. Our app features INSTANT-ON just by tapping the icon on your home screen.”

Okay.

Flashlight apps, being utility apps, weren’t that big an opportunity to begin with — the only business model being paid ads or downloads. They are also easy to build, which explains the slew of them in the App Store. “This is the curse with utility apps,” said one investor who wished to remain anonymous. “You don’t pay tons for utility stuff, as its value can’t increase a lot over time. You pay at cost plus a bit more. Like the bills you pay every month.”

Still, Apple Flashlight’s gotta sting hard for i4software, iHandy, Jason Ting Utilities and friends just like Apple’s Weather app hurt this guy who made a similar Weather app, which Apple held up for review as it quietly built its own. “According to Apple, no one wanted a flashy weather app. They were so certain of this, they built one themselves.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At its WWDC developer conference today, Apple announced the next version of Safari which will launch with OS X Mavericks. The new version, Apple’s Craig Federighi, will feature significantly improved JavaScript performance which Apple says will beat Chrome and Firefox. Safari will now also support OS X’s new Power Nap feature, which will significantly reduce the browser’s power consumption.

On the user interface side, Safari now features a new homepage with access to your bookmarks, but most importantly, it will feature a new sidebar. This sidebar now gives you access to your bookmarks, but also your reading list. One new feature for the reading list is the addition of shared lists.

Apple is also adding iCloud Keychain to Safari. This is essentially a cloud-connected password manager for Safari that seems to work a bit like Lastpass. It’ll support passwords, but also save credit cards and other information.

Other new features include one-click bookmarking and a new look for Reader.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

It’s been six months since PlayJam’s GameStick started its off-again, on-again Kickstarter campaign that netted it nearly $650,000 — well beyond its $100,000 goal. While it attracted less than a tenth of the funds that its predecessor OUYA nabbed for its Android-based home game console, things have moved apace with the two-piece, controller-hosted console that plugs directly into the HDMI connector of a TV that should be shipping to backers next month.

“Thirty days felt like thirty months. We were so unprepared for it,” said PlayJam CMO Anthony Johnson, who notes that stretch goals such as a charging dock were conceived out of thin air in a matter of hours before they even knew if they were feasible.

The GameStick straddles worlds with different rules. Traditional consoles fix a platform essentially in stone typically for five or more years. The stability of the platform itself is a response to PC gaming where configurations are all over the map. This has been the inspiration for NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience addressing the issue from the PC side and Valve’s Steam Box(es) on the console side. On the other hand, its ARM processor and Android operating system hail from the world of smartphones where updates are an annual occurrence in a state of constant leapfrogging.

PlayJam plans to take advantage of the rapid progress in chip architectures. The company wryly notes that one of the few advantages of being based in the UK helps enable it to have a close working relationship with ARM. In this respect, the GameStick is kind of a no-frills vanilla equivalent to NVIDIA’s pricey Shield handheld, which costs $349 and which PlayJam characterizes as “a reference platform for Tegra 4,” a laudable but niche attempt by a chip company to get into the consumer device business.

GameStick, on the other hand, will be profitable at $79 while yielding a palatable retailer margin. And since the primary electronics are in the stick and not the controller, the former can be updated independently, and the company plans to keep offering new sticks to enable richer game experiences.

Which, in some cases, it could use. PlayJam’s 12-year history is in super-casual TV-based games distributed through cable operators and moving into smart TVs. That understanding of the power of distribution has helped lead to an agreement with GameStop, although GameStick, of course, lacks any way for physical distribution. The scaling up of smartphone-quality games to the bigger-than-tablet screen results in games that may be fun to play but don’t necessarily impress graphically. And like so many Android apps, the quality varies widely.

That said, GameStick, OUYA and another similarly inexpensive entrant from BlueStacks have some opportunity to capitalize on the pick-up-and-play home gaming market that the Wii resurrected only to stray from with the more complex and disorienting Wii U. In fact, the company is hoping to stand on OUYA’s shoulders; unsurprisingly, developers have found it a relatively easy port from that Android-based game console to PlayJam’s CMO Anthony Johnson. “It’s a new category. You need to validate the market.” Compared to the platform variation in designing for smart TVs and pay TV operators, Android’s level of fragmentation is pure bliss to PlayJam.

GameStick may be cheap. But its success will depend on if they are willing to come back to the TV for gaming experiences that may not be significantly more engrossing than what they can already get on their mobile phones or tablets. This will be particularly true if TV manufacturers and handset companies can better communicate the ability to project phone displays onto televisions via standards such as Miracast (which GameStick supports) in order to play the games that they’ve already downloaded or purchased. In that case, PlayJam will be happy to move its store to other platforms.

GameStick will launch with 100 titles and the company promises it will ramp quickly from there. For consumers who value the tactile controls or may not want to drain down their phone battery as they play on the big screen as well as for the company’s equally embryonic competitors, it’s game on.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For most beginning hardware hackers, Arduino is hard and Linux/Android is easy. The folks at UDOO, a Kickstarter project that ends tonight, aim to solve that by mixing the best of both worlds. The UDOO device contains an ARM processor (dual or quad core) as well as an Arduino microprocessor. This allows you to program the Arduino using the tools you’re familiar with including a standard embedded Linux install and the associated command-line software.

The UDOO contains both and ARM cortex-A9 CPU and the hardware on a Arduino DUE. This includes 54 digital I/O pins, an optional SATA connection, and a number of other pin-outs and connectors. This part of the board allows users to add all of the shields and accessories associated with the highly evolved Arduino environment to the equally evolved Linux and Android environments. Think of it as a Raspberry Pi you can upgrade.

The UDOO also includes a Wi-Fi module, USB ports, and 1GB RAM. The dual core model costs $109 while the quad core costs $129. They’ve already surpassed their funding goal with 25 hours to go.

It looks like a great way to harness the power of Arduino using tools that geeks know and love. It is, as they say, two great tastes that taste great together thanks to complex interoperability and a rabid fan base for both platforms.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch