Today, Google announced that its conversational search that is available for its Android and iOS apps would be coming to the desktop within the Chrome browser. Until now, you could search for things using your voice…but you couldn’t ask questions.

Now, you’ll be able to keep your mic open without clicking a button, by waking Google up with the prompt “OK Google.” This is similar to the prompt that wakes up Google Glass.

You can say things like “Show me things to do in Santa Cruz” and get results quickly, and with the context that you need to take an action. It’s very similar what you can do with Google Now right now. The familiar voice will respond to you, answering your question. That’s what Google Search is all about now, asking questions.

Without having to worry about “how” to search for something and asking a simple question, you can get more done, faster. That’s Google’s goal. You’re not going to get answers to all of your questions, but the company does collect information about those failed searches. It gets smarter, like all of their products.

Will you sit and speak to your computer? Asking it questions? It sounds odd, but no more odd than talking to a microphone on a pair of lensless glasses.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

GoPollGo, a real-time polling tool that lets brands and media properties collect and analyse feedback, has announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo. The news comes just one week after the search giant announced the acquisition of mobile personal organization app Astrid, as part of its ongoing acquisition spree. It comes at the same time that Yahoo has confirmed the acquisition of travel site Milewise. For now, GoPollGo says that it will be shutting down its services on its site, as well as its embeddable widgets and mobile app.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. While Milewise is joining Yahoo’s operations in New York, GoPollGo will be at its Sunnyvale HQ.

“Today Milewise and GoPollGo joined the Yahoo! mobile team. GoPollGo created a cool social polling app and the team has joined our mobile org in Sunnyvale,” Yahoo told us in an emailed statement on the two deals. “Milewise created a great app to make travel planning easier and personalized. They have joined our New York mobile team.”

GoPollGo, which was launched in 2011 and has received some $425K in funding from IdeaLab and CrunchFund (the VC run by TC’s founder Michael Arrington), has run millions of polls in its time. In January this year, after launching an iOS app, the company released a beta of a premium service it called Promoted Polls. Like Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, this let pollsters pay a little extra to insert their questions into a stream of other, non-paid polling questions.

For now, it’s not clear how GoPollGo’s technology is going to be used in the startup’s new home. The three founders, Ben Schaechter (a former developer at TechCrunch), Sam Grossberg and Paul Kompfner, are relatively vague about this point in their note on the site: “We’re so excited to bring the knowledge and experience we’ve gained at GoPollGo to Yahoo!” they note. “We share an enthusiasm for building delightful user experiences, and we couldn’t be happier to join forces.”

But you can see where this might fit into Yahoo’s wider business strategy if it does get used. For one, the company is trying to increase ways to keep users interested in its content and more engaged, the current buzzword for the digital ad industry. GoPollGo has done things like power polls that ran on ABC.com’s site alongside the presidential debate. The idea is that these polls, instead of seeing users jump to other sites to watch coverage and how people interact, or turning off altogether, they stay tuned in there with the poll being one way to keep their interest up.

On the other hand, it’s interesting that GoPollGo had already introduced a paid service with Promoted Polls. With companies like Google and Facebook largely dominating online advertising right now in areas like search and display, smaller players like Yahoo (similar to Aol, TechCrunch’s owner) needs to get more innovative and creative with how they target would-be advertisers with services that they will pay for. Adding polls as, effectively, another marketing/advertising unit would be one way to do that.

Interestingly, the whole area of polling has been one that others have eyed, but have been less than successful in tackling. Facebook launched, and then pulled, a Polls product between 2007 and 2009. Then a follow-up/adjacent product, Questions, was similarly launched in 2010 but then shut down in October 2012, effectively giving in to competition from the likes of Quora. Most recently, Facebook’s foray into canvassing opinion, the ability to create threaded comments and replies on Pages, can effectively be used as a template for Q&As (bringing to mind Reddit’s AMA events), and, yes, polls.

More to come. Note on GoPollGo’s site is below.

GoPollGo Team is Joining Yahoo! Mobile
We are excited to share some big news: We’re joining Yahoo! For two years, we’ve worked incredibly hard to make it as easy as possible to get feedback from friends and followers. It has been so rewarding to build a product that scaled up to millions of people and supported large media properties and diverse brands — all while staying true to promise to deliver fun, engaging, real-time experiences.

We’re so excited to bring the knowledge and experience we’ve gained at GoPollGo to Yahoo!. We share an enthusiasm for building delightful user experiences, and we couldn’t be happier to join forces.

Huge thanks to all our users, partners and customers who helped us realize our vision. As of today, we’ll no longer be supporting GoPollGo’s properties on the site, embeddable widgets or mobile app. If you have any questions or want to get in touch, shoot us an email to hi@gopollgo.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here’s a startup hoping to fill the gap left by the demise of Facebook Questions: French-Belgian startup Poutsch, now based in New York and exhibiting here at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley, has built a platform for tracking opinion data by crowdsourcing market research, which is incentivised through a free-to-use-and-browse social opinion network.

The startup describes itself as a “question & opinion” platform — rather than a Q&A play like Quora. “The difference is we’re not looking for one answer,” says co-founder Felix Winckler. Poutsch’s platform takes the temperature of whatever its users are curious enough to ask about — so everything from ‘what’s your favourite fruit pastille?’ to ‘are you still using Mailbox?’.

Poutsch’s platform lets users ask, answer and view questions, read opinions and look at charts displaying how the data breaks down by variables, such as location, gender and age. They can also follow other users and share their questions to their own network to keep the opinions flowing in. As you’d expect for a site that needs user-generated content to function, Poutsch is free to use, as well as for third-party sites to use its widget to embed polls. The ultimate aim is to monetise the platform by selling opinion data to advertisers, marketers, product manufacturers and so on, says Winckler.

Poutsch launched a public beta back in January. An iOS app is due soon. It says it’s acquired “thousands” of users — both individuals and organisations — to date but won’t be more specific. It’s currently live across 160+ countries.

The big challenge for Poutsch will clearly be acquiring enough users to generate the volumes of data it will need to monetise its platform. The most answered questions on the site mostly have only a few hundred responses apiece, while many trending questions have just tens of responses, so there’s clearly some work to do there. But it’s still in beta — with a “hard launch” due in about a month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ask A VC is back this week with NEA’s Pete Sonsini. You may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show. We’re also asking readers to make a short video of your question, upload the video to YouTube and send us the link via email or in comments. We’ll try to include the questions in the show.

Sonsini joined NEA in 2005 and is the co-head of the firm’s enterprise software practice group, focusing on early-stage investments in the space. He is currently. Previous investments include Xensource (acquired by Citrix Systems) and Teracent (acquired by Google). He is currently on the board of Engine Yard, Eucalyptus Systems and a number of others.

Prior to joining NEA, Sonsini was senior director of Strategic Alliances at VMware where he struck the company’s OEM deals and grew annual sales through OEMs from $0 to $40 million in four years. Prior to VMware, Sonsini ran product management at Mirapoint and also served in various sales and marketing positions in Hewlett-Packard’s server division.

We’re excited to ask Sonsini about where he feels the next disruption is taking place in the enterprise software world, and which startups are prime acquisitions for some of the enterprise incumbents.

Please send us your questions for Sonsini here, send us your YouTube video or put them in the comments below!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

(Image courtesy of Steve Troughton-Smith)

I’m no great fan of Apple’s Passbook, but it seems at least a few people at Samsung have taken a shine to the same general concept. Earlier today, Samsung officially outed a new Samsung Wallet app at its Developer Day here at MWC that will allow users to store coupons, membership cards, tickets, and boarding passes on their smartphone. Sound familiar?

The concept doesn’t just sound familiar, it looks familiar too — the brief video below (courtesy of Frandroidtube) highlights an application that includes some skeuomorphic design touches that seem awfully Passbookian. Developers itching to tinker with Samsung Wallet can have a look at some early API and UI guides, and Samsung’s Wallet developer page says the API can be used starting on March 7th — just ahead of the company’s big New York Unveiling of the Galaxy S IV.

Now despite what the name suggests, there’s no way to actually use Samsung Wallet to pay for anything — there’s no support for anything like in-person NFC transactions here for now. That’s not entirely surprising since Visa noted that Samsung was a member of its Visa Ready partner program, and that the Korean company’s forthcoming Android smartphones will ship with support for Visa’s payWave wireless payments.

Still, there’s another level at play here. According to The Verge, Samsung’s apparent lack of interest in enhancing its Passbook lookalike with NFC may ultimately just be a concession to merchants who don’t want to invest in new hardware. While NFC is just as buzzy here as it seems to be every year, it still hasn’t won over everyone — PayPal president David Marcus is no great fan himself, stating time and again that NFC payments are a shortsighted step in the market that will soon be leapfrogged.

But there are some other questions to chew on here too. Apple and Samsung are the two of the world’s most popular, most prominent, and most influential smartphone companies — what happens now that they’ve both effectively said that smartphones need to be wallets? Only time will tell, but if Samsung pushes out a Galaxy S IV on March 14 with Samsung Wallet in tow, the rest of the world’s OEMs and smartphone designers may feel the pressure to follow suit in one way or another.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple entering the games space has been a topic of discussion for a long time. Some people think they already made their move and it’s still playing out. Some people think they are yet to drop the bomb. Most oversimplify the issue.

There’s a funny thing, though, about the way proponents of Apple (I say this without denigration) cheerlead their champion. In a lot of ways, there’s already an Apple in the games industry: it’s the games industry. Apple is filling the position in the games industry that Android fills in the mobile world.

Part of what makes it problematic to discuss is that is that it’s really difficult to disentangle content from platform these days, both in mobile and gaming (and mobile gaming, for that matter). The complex network of relationships, channels, and emerging methods for distribution make practically every comparison apples to oranges.

I’m not going to unravel that knot just now. I’ll get to the nut of the issue instead of dancing around it.

One of Apple’s greatest strengths, something that it understood early and has exploited continuously, is the value of the premium platform — including hardware, of course. They were always, and remain, the premium choice in consumer tech. As others have put it, this moots certain comparisons: you can’t, they say, compare a Ferrari to a Toyota. And that idea is not without legitimacy.

So it’s funny when the opposite seems to apply for the games industry. There’s already a premium product out there: the triple-A games produced by huge studios like Ubisoft, EA, Valve, and so on. The Xbox 360 and PS3, and soon the Xbox 720 and PS4, or whatever they’re called, have always been and will continue to be the premium platform — something that has worked well for Apple elsewhere, and something they’ll never be in the games space.

Why? Here’s that content-platform thing again. Apple simply isn’t a triple-A platform for games. Sure, there are great games on it, good-looking games, expensive games. And millions of people play them. But let’s not kid ourselves.

Notice that almost everything relating to the success of games on iOS is in terms of numbers downloaded and hours played. In like wise, one could say that YouTube is far more of a success than Hollywood, based on viewer hours. In a way, it’s true! But what is iOS’s Godfather? What is its Shadow of the Colossus? Angry Birds and Infinity Blade are arguably is the closest thing to either. Talk about comparing a Ferrari to a Toyota.

In the other corner is a premium platform with exclusive, popular content — the very thing Apple was when Android entered the scene. And now Apple is playing the scrappy underdog, eating up all the low-end users, winning on volume instead of quality. It’s the same strategy that provokes such venom against Android! Thousands of options, barely differentiated, priced to sell, with wildly varying quality, except for a few high-end flagship items – am I talking about Android handsets or the games in the App Store? Hard to tell, isn’t it?

And of course, that’s a recipe for success, as either Apple or Google can tell you. But again, as either can tell you, it’s hardly a recipe for total domination. For that, one must control the vertical and the horizontal.

All the same, it’s funny to see the bottom-up strategy of the App Store and Android reviled one moment and then praised the next.

So far, so obvious. But the unknown creeps in when you consider how platforms may evolve over the next five years — which is about what we can realistically expect for the life of the next consoles, with increased entropy due to changing markets.

The platform/content thing enters again, bringing with it quite a bit of uncertainty. How long is Call of Duty and its ilk going to remain a console exclusive? It’s practical now, and I’m willing to speculate that it will be practical two years from now. After that, things get more hazy.

The way people acquire and play games is changing in a serious way. Will the next consoles have huge hard drives to store downloaded games? Will they stream them over high-speed internet? Will they integrate with smartphones? Will they use discs? Will they allow used games? Will they replace your set-top box? Will they be open to hacking? The answers to the questions are maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, and that’s hilarious. And there are a lot of other questions that will need to be answered before we can really start making predictions.

What about Microsoft, whose long-term three-screen plan is in serious jeopardy? What about Sony, which is in many ways falling to pieces (not in all cases a bad thing)? What about Google, which is a total wildcard? What about the publishers, who know which way the wind is blowing but can’t abandon ship yet?

There are too many variables to say with any kind of assurance how things will be in a few years. Apple will continue to make its play for the living room, but supplanting the consoles is out of the question (not that many have advanced this notion). But it isn’t going to enter the space in a way that requires them to abandon the last five years of app and device development, and they’re not going to compete directly against an opponent that offers a product they can’t hope to match. They may like to lead the charge, but they’re no Leeroy Jenkins.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

To “enable you to send us your questions, concerns, and feedback about privacy”, Facebook today launched “Ask Our Chief Privacy Officer”. Questions submitted through the form on Facebook’s Privacy Page will be answered once in a month in a Note by CPO Erin Egan. It’s one alternative for having your voice heard that Facebook announced would replace the recently abolished policy voting system.

Egan announced the feature this morning in Washington, DC at Facebook’s “Data Policy Day”. In her note about the launch, she admitted “We also understand that issues about privacy can be complex given the fast-moving nature of technology.” That may be a bit of an understatement. Facebook gives people an unprecedented way to communicate publicly.

To use “Ask Our CPO”, visit Facebook’s Privacy Page, click the “Ask Erin” box beneath the Timeline Cover, fill out the form, and hit ‘Submit’. Egan will then address a selection of the questions in a monthly Note published by the Privacy Page. Additionally, Egan will be available to answer questions in a regular live streamed video conference.

As an example of what you could learn from Ask Our CPO, Egan answered a few common questions about Facebook’s thoughts on privacy in her announcement of the feature. She looked at “

• How does Facebook think about privacy when building its products?
  Short Answer: Systematically thanks to a cross-functional privacy team and company-wide privacy training
• How do you personally use Facebook’s privacy settings to share?
  Short Answer: “Some people want to share everything with everyone, some want to share far less and with a small audience, and most fall somewhere in between.” Egan uses Facebook Lists to share with specific friends, and “Only Me” to privately scrapbook photos of her kids.
• Does Facebook sell my private information to advertisers?
  Short Answer: “No…We use the things you do and share on Facebook, including demographics, likes and interests to show ads that are more relevant to you.”

Theoretically, being able to ask questions gives user less of a voice than the old policy voting system. But in reality, the voting system was broken. An astronomically high 30% of Facebook users had to vote to make their decision binding, which was never going to happen. For example, in Facebook’s final policy vote about whether it should abolish voting, less than 1% of users voted.

Voting wasn’t necessarily productive anyway because there was an underlying problem with privacy on Facebook: People don’t fully understand it. Hopefully, Ask Our CPO can address this. The impetus will be on Facebook to promote the monthly answers to questions, possibly with notices in the form of sidebar or news feed ads.

Otherwise many people will continue stumbling in the dark when it comes to Facebook privacy. The social network needs people to understand and trust it so they’ll be willing to share more information that can earn it money and make Facebook more interesting to their friends.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Aydin Senkut, my first guest on Ask A VC, sat down this past week to talk about the Series A Crunch and general state of the venture world; his investment strategies and of course, to answer your questions. Senkut says that there is a crunch when it comes to Series B and C funding,  especially following the explosion of seed funding over the past few years. And Senkut, who was Google’s first product manager, has a unique perspective on how entrepreneurs should approach VCs for funding.

We also chatted about what he thinks about the funding environment outside the U.S., Senkut’s thoughts on crowdfunding platforms and more. Tune in for his answers above.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In a recently released survey meant for Xbox Live users, Microsoft got a bit curious about people’s smartphone preferences. Fair enough — they’ve got some skin in the game, after all — but there was something slightly amiss about how the question was framed. What the designers of the survey didn’t seem to realize is that there’s no such thing as an HTC Titan III… or is there?

HTC’s Titan series of Windows Phones was meant to draw crowds with their large screen sizes, but the Titan brand hasn’t yet been stuck on a Windows Phone 8 device. Some (like the folks at CNET) are drawing comparisons between the Titan III and another as-yet unreleased device, the HTC Zenith. It’s hard not to, really — back before HTC officially pulled back the curtains on its pair of Windows Phone 8 devices, a report from The Verge pointed to the existence of three new Windows Phones from the Taiwanese OEM. The entry-level and mid-range models eventually saw the light of day as the HTC 8S and 8X respectively, leaving a glaring hole where that third flagship-tier handset was apparently supposed to go.

The Zenith’s purported spec sheet raised more than a few eyebrows — an unspecified quad-core processor was said to run the show, and the device was said to feature a 4.7-inch Super LCD 2 display and support for 42Mbps HSPA+. That emphasis on sheer screen size is a trait featured by both previous Titan models, as the name sort of implies — Titans I and II both had 4.7-inch Super LCD panels, so it wouldn’t be a shock to see the Titan III moniker get slapped on another device of that size.

Of course, there’s a another, much simpler possibility here. Marketing research types devote plenty of time and attention to couching their questions just the right way, but it’s still possible that the choice in question is just an unfortunate typo that has riled up certain geeky parts of the web. It’s worth noting that AT&T is running some holiday promotion on the Titan II in an attempt to move old hardware, so it’s possible this whole kerfuffle is an attempt to delve into the effects of holiday promotions on device sales or awareness. Or something. Either way, it’s something to be on the lookout for — HTC has never been the most security-conscious company out there, so expect a deluge of Titan III leaks in the weeks to come if it’s actually real.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ask A VC, the TCTV show where you put VCs in the hot seat, is back, and I’m going to be hosting the show. I’m really excited about helping you get to know some of the investors behind the companies we write about on a daily basis.

We’re kicking off the series with Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut. With the recent chatter around the Series A Crunch, and reported shift in investor attention to enterprise apps vs. consumer; there’s a lot to discuss with Senkut, who has invested in more than 80 companies.

So how does this show work? You ask questions either in the comments or at askavc(at)TechCrunch(dot)com and we’ll ask them of our VC guests.

A little more about our guest this week: Senkut is the founder and managing director of Felicis Ventures, an early stage fund. The fund, which focuses on startups in the health, education, mobile, e-commerce, and enterprise sectors, has invested in Rovio, Shopify, Wildfire (acquired by Google) Practice Fusion, Mint (acquired by Intuit), Chomp (acquired by Apple), and Karma (acquired by Facebook).

Senkut just raised a new $70 million fund, turning a super angel into a boutique fund. As of June, the firm’s portfolio companies now generate $800 million in annualized revenue, and the total enterprise value from all of the firm’s exits is about $1.2 billion.

Prior to starting Felicis Ventures, Senkut was a senior manager at Google, responsible for strategic partner development and account management in Asia Pacific (including Japan). Senkut joined Google in 1999 as its first product manager to launch Google’s first 10 international sites, its first online search licensing products and its first Safe Search.

So please send us your questions for Senkut at askavc(at)TechCrunch(dot)com or put them in comments below today or tomorrow!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch