Google revealed Hangouts, its unified text, video and multimedia messaging platform yesterday during its epic three-hour I/O keynote, but while the platform pulls in Google Talk, Google+ and other sources, it was apparently missing SMS integration. Incorporating texts from your carrier is on the way, however, according to Hangouts and Chat community manager Dori Storbeck, who said as much in a reply to a question  (via 9to5Google)about SMS integration on Google+.

The integration will go a long way to truly unifying communications via the service, which is available on Gmail, Android, iOS and Chrome right now. SMS feeding into the Hangouts stream also means that it borrows a trick from what Facebook has added to Facebook Messenger with Chat Heads on select hardware devices, and it also provides Google with a fairly strong feature advantage over competitors including dedicated mobile messaging providers like WhatsApp and Kik, which don’t pull in content from SMS sources.

When SMS does arrive, expect it to make its way to Android only, as there’s not much developers can do to build in SMS on iOS, as those permissions are not open. Hangouts also dropped XMPP in Hangouts, which doesn’t bode well for Google IM on other platforms and in other apps, but it looks like the company is pretty open to building other protocols into its own service.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Telefonica is today announcing a deal with Samsung that will see it make an even bigger move into the area of carrier billing. Samsung will integrate the carrier’s billing backend directly into its own mobile services, meaning that the Telefonica customers (it has 316 million worldwide) who use the Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps portals on Samsung smartphones will be able to buy apps, music, videos, books, games and more and charge them directly to their phone bills.

The agreement, which will use Telefonica’s BlueVia payment APIs, is a significant one for Telefonica. So far it has inked deals with app portal operators, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and RIM, and with billing providers like Bango; this effectively closes the loop for it by securing a deal with the world’s largest handset maker, although a recent deal to help the carrier finance the procurement and distribution of BlackBerry devices could point to Telefonica gearing up for a similar deal with that handset maker, too.

In addition to Bango, Telefonica also works with BOKU, where it led a $35 million investment last year. It’s not clear how this deal with Samsung will play out between these two rival billing providers. In the past Telefonica has been vague on the subject, saying that it will work one or the other depending on the situation.

Telefonica has been especially bullish on trying to come up with a way to get a piece of the action on apps and other content that is getting purchased on smartphones and tablets. Apple’s early move into the area with its very popular App Store (just this week marking its 50-billionth download) set a precedent for all but cutting carriers out of the picture, with Apple handling the payment on its own platform and then dividing up resulting revenues with the app publishers.

Mobile advertising alongside often-free apps is one other area where carriers and others have tried to play, although these revenues are still small in relation to those collected from downloads and in-app purchases.

But the promise of carrier billing, as we have noted before, is that it not only offers carriers a look in to the growing pot of money being made from smartphone content, but it also provides a route for publishers to better target consumers in parts of the world where smartphone usage is growing rapidly, but payment card penetration is not so much.

The carrier framework can be used not only for consumers who take monthly plans, but also for prepaid accounts, with each purchase deducted from there, as already happens with phone minutes, data bytes and SMS messages. This is an area where Spain’s Telefonica, which has more users in emerging markets in Latin America than it does in any single market in Europe, can hope to gain a foothold with its carrier billing offering, even if it has (so far) missed the boat in more developed markets.

Nevertheless, this deal will be implemented in phases, starting first with a rollout with Telefonica’s subsidiary in Germany “in the coming months.”

“We strongly believe that carrier billing has the potential to drive the monetisation of digital content,” Wayne Thorsen, vice president of Global Partnerships at Telefónica Digital, said in a statement. “Partnerships like this allow us to harness the power of the billing relationships we have with our customers to make it easier for them to consume content on their tablets and mobile devices.”

For Samsung, meanwhile, it gives the company the ability to promote its own content portals as easy to use — one way of driving more users there instead of to Google’s services. As Samsung tries to further differentiate itself from the other OEMs using Android, and Google itself, little things like this could help it along the way.

“Samsung is committed to ensuring that our customers have choice and convenience when purchasing content on our devices,” Lee Epting, VP of Media Solutions Centre Europe for Samsung Electronics Europe, said in a statement. “Our partnership with Telefónica Digital allows us to deliver yet another easy and convenient purchasing experience to our Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps customers.”

Telefonica and Samsung are not strangers to each other in the area of new services; they have co-invested in the latest round for semantic, real-time search startup Expect Labs.

Photo: Flickr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A handwritten note is becoming a lost art in the age of email, Facebook, SMS, and more messaging apps than you can count. But if anything, that rarity has only led to increase its value and perceived thoughtfulness, even as our penmanship skills decline. Today, a startup called Postable is bringing back the “handwritten” note with a service that allows you to type in handwriting fonts, then print to high-quality card stock.

Postable got its start back in 2011, when co-founders and lifelong friends Scott Potash and Jesse Blockton grew tired of all the thank you notes they had to painstakingly handwrite. However, instead of immediately launching a service that took thank you card creation to the web, they first decided to target one of the bigger hurdles with building such a service: the fact that people don’t have each others’ mailing addresses anymore.

In March 2012, the team launched a free, online address book service. “The easiest way we thought to get people’s addresses would be to ask them to give them to you,” explains Blockton. “It’s just a simple, friendly crowdsourced address book.”

This original service, which became popular with brides, new parents, and others about to send out a lot of thank yous, provided users with a custom URL (www.postable.com/name) which they could send out to friends and family along with a personal request for mailing information. Recipients would click the link, fill out a form, and later the complete address book could be downloaded in variety of formats, including Excel, as a text file, or they could just print labels directly.

This free service grew to “tens of thousands” of users, though the company won’t disclose exact figures.

Today, the second phase of the plan comes into play, as Postable launches thank you cards. At launch, there are around 100 different cards to choose from, sourced from 24 different indie designers with whom Postable has a revenue sharing deal touted to be at “double the industry standard.”

When you go to type out a card on Postable.com, you can select from one of 12 different handwriting fonts, or 10 different stylistic fonts, if you’d rather not try to give your card the appearance of a handwritten note.

The cards themselves can be printed on a few different card stocks, including Crane’s Lettra, cotton paper, and a “brown bag” recycled card.

The service itself has also been designed to make writing out your notes as easy – if not easier – than doing it by hand. After you click on a recipient’s name, Postable autofills the “dear so-and-so” portion of your note, for example, and the spacing and font size automatically adjust as you type.

Cards cost $2, plus standard postage, which is often less than the “real” cards you buy individually at the store. However, frugal shoppers know they can find packs of lesser-quality thank you cards for less at any drug store – so Postable may not work for those pinching pennies.

A number of services have stepped in to make letter-writing and card-sending more convenient for those of us whose cursive skills are largely forgotten. For example, services like Red Stamp, Sincerely, Apple’s Cards, Lettrs, Inkly, and many more help fulfill this need. But some of these services come at the space with a mobile-first mentality, in the form of an app. Postable is a bit different because it’s not targeting the one-off note jotted on the go (though that’s supported), so much as it’s going after those who have a mountain of cards to send – such as after a wedding, for example.

That tends to work better on the web, with a larger keyboard to type upon. That being said, Postable plans to release native apps in time. But for now, the service works well on iPad in the browser.

By the end of the year, the company also plans to offer a broader selection of styles and support for different occasions beyond just the “thank you” note.

Based in New York, Postable has raised $500,000 from friends and family.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zapier, a service that automates tasks between online services, has launched a tool that monitors 200 APIs, sometimes catching an outage before the provider does.

The new tool monitors the uptime and downtime of every API on Zapier. It is designed to monitor the realtime status of popular web APIs and their impact on customers that use the Zapier service or just want a good resource to monitor how APIs are behaving. Each API can be monitored via SMS, instant message, email or any number of methods that are supported by Zapier’s core product.

Zapier Co-Founder Wade Foster said they developed the monitoring service, because, while vendors often provide performance dashboards for their main products, they don’t do so for their APIs. This is true for such services as Amazon, Desk.com and 37Signals. This can be a problem as APIs are now the glue for connecting apps. The shortcoming leaves consumers in the dark when APIs go down, Foster said in a recent email discussion. For example, the Google APIs had an outage, which Zapier discovered almost instantly.

Here’s the Hacker News thread documenting the outage. “My co-founder is the top commenter there,” Foster said. “The subsequent comments were what encouraged us to release this publicly.”

He said the dashboard has been public for about a week. Almost everything is always up which speaks to the quality of applications that are being built these days.

This is a pretty cool service. It’s important, too, especially for app developers who will often monitor multiple APIs that integrate with their apps.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google is well known for its regular bouts of spring cleaning when it kills off a number of products in one fell swoop, but it also sometimes makes quick changes in between the bigger announcements. One of those has now hit its portfolio of SMS-based products aimed at users of lower end devices: Google has quietly closed down SMS Search.

People began to notice the service stop working on Friday, and asked about it in one of Google’s Product Forums (good thing those haven’t been closed down yet) and on Reddit. Jessica S., a Google employee, set the record straight:

“Hi everyone,

Closing products always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Streamlining our services enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people’s lives.

Thanks,
Jess”

For those of you who didn’t use it, SMS Search was a service Google had created that let users send search queries by text message to a short number, in this case 466453. The search results would also come back as text messages. These would not be links to further web pages, but actual information, playing on the many services that Google offers on its desktop search portal for things like currency conversions, weather and local listings. This was mainly intended for feature phones without data connections:

But the search could also be used on smartphones:

Google’s SMS services page hasn’t removed a link to SMS Search yet, it goes to a 404 page.
Trying to find a picture of how SMS Search looked, I came across (on Google) a link to its Canadian SMS Search page, which appears to still have an active link, but as Ghacks points out that won’t work because it uses the same short code number as the U.S. service did.

In some regards, you can see why Google would choose to axe SMS Search. The number of feature phone sales is on the decline worldwide as more and more people make the shift to smartphones.

In the last quarter of 2012, Gartner says the number of mobile phone sales worldwide was a 472 million units, compared to 478 million a year ago, but at the same time smartphone sales increased by 58 million to 208 million (it has yet to release its quarterly figures for Q1 2013).

It could be that Google is simply doing this to stay one step ahead of the times. Or it could be that, as with other products like Google Reader, it was not getting enough use of the service.

For now, Google’s other SMS products that let you check your calendar, update your Blogger blog, check your Gmail, and send and receive SMS text messages through Google Voice, appear to still be working; but users will inevitably start wondering if these will be next on the chopping block.

We’re reaching out to Google to ask and will update as we learn more.

Photocredit: SEORoundtable

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A few days ago I landed in England and, expecting little, slipped an old UK SIM card into my phone. I’d bought it when living in London five years ago, and hadn’t used it in more than a year. But to my amazement it was still active — as was the money I’d added to its pay-as-you-go account 16 months earlier…and then I received a friendly text message informing me that my data costs were now £1 per 100MB. Another SMS popped up when I emerged from the Channel Tunnel in France a few days later, informing me it would cost me 8p to send texts and 7p per minute to receive calls.

Can you imagine any of that happening with an American phone company? Or Canadian? North American carriers generally expire pay-as-you-go accounts after 90 days of inactivity, and it’s at best a struggle to get them to support data at all, much less seamlessly, much much less at that price. (Which isn’t even that great, by global standards; in India two years ago I was charged $1 for a full gigabyte.)

As for roaming, you’re very lucky to get American or Canadian pay-as-you-go accounts that can roam across that vast undefended border at all, and if you do, they’ll charge the proverbial arm and a leg. That same UK SIM card worked just fine in Kenya last year, and as I type this I’m about to land in Turkey, where I expect to receive another text informing me that my UK pay-as-you-go number continues to work just fine outside the EU, albeit more expensively. (Update: yep.)

What’s wrong with this picture? Why are America and Canada so unbelievably awful? Yeah, I’m being anecdotal, but there is all kinds of data to support the notion that cell service there is outlandishly expensive compared to almost all of the rest of the developed world. (And worse than a lot of the developing world, too.)

Part of it is laissez-faire capitalism run amok. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a staunch defender of capitalism…that is, well-regulated capitalism. Until 2008 that was a hard row to hoe among many of my friends, but that recent embarrassing spate of financial cataclysms have made it much easer. Why is my UK SIM card relatively cheap to use in France? Because EU regulators insisted on it. Why are America’s carriers so parasitical, predatory, gouging and user-hostile? Because they can be, which in large part means because their regulators (including, alas, Canada’s CRTC) don’t insist on much of anything.

Oh, sorry, no, my mistake. They do insist on perpetuating this state of affairs. Consider the recent breathtakingly wrong decision to make it illegal under the DMCA to unlock your phone. This was one of those classic bureaucratic catastrophes: every individual step that led to it doubtless made sense to the people involved, who were too close to their system to take a step back and notice that its actual outcome was complete insanity. If anything it should should be illegal to lock phones, not unlock them. This is regulatory capture taken to new heights of Stockholm-Syndrome madness.

And yet. At the end of the day the true power lies not with the carriers, but with their customers. Alas, American and Canadian customers seem to have been hypnotized into a kind of learned helplessness where they just sit there and silently accept locked phones, bloated Kafkaesque pricing plans, insane roaming charges, Android phones stuffed with crapware, and two- or even three-year locked-in contracts.

But they don’t have to. That’s what’s so infuriating. You too could buy an unlocked phone — an unlocked Nexus 4, which is a terrific phone, costs all of $299! (And I have high hopes that Google’s rumored new X Phone initiative will be even cheaper.) You too could switch to T-Mobile’s monthly pricing plan, or Straight Talk’s, instead of signing a contract. You’d more than make back the upfront costs of the unlocked phone in less than a year. And if enough people did it, the carriers would be forced to compete on quality and improve their pricing, rather than rely on their customers’ passive despair.

The logical conclusion is that if your phone is locked, or if you’re on a multi-year contract, then you have no right to complain about your terrible carrier — because you’re part of the problem. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” In fact, you’re ruining it for the rest of us. Thanks.

But it’s not too late for redemption. Just repeat after me: “I solemnly swear that I will never buy a locked phone or sign a multi-year phone contract again.” And when your current contract expires, do just that. Maybe, just maybe, with your help, we can finally defeat these gargantuan economic tapeworms called AT&T, Verizon, Rogers and Bell — and finally catch up with the civilized world.

Image credit: Tapeworm, by Rhys Ormond, on Flickr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’d been hearing whispers as of late that Twilio is meeting with VCs to raise another round, and I just got the good word from a very, very solid source.

I’m told that Twilio is in the process of raising a Series D, with a goal of raising around $50 million.

The talks are still rather early on. In fact, when I first got wind of the round last week, the first folks I asked were shocked that we’d already heard about it. At this point, it sounds like Twilio is aiming to close the round within the next 2 to 3 weeks. The total amount raised might change by then, but $50M is the current target.

Wondering what the heck a Twilio is? Twilio lets developers easily build things that require phone functionality. Want to build a customer service line with menus narrated by Morgan Freeman? Sure (note: bring your own Morgan Freeman. Also, someone please do this. I’ll totally write about it.) Want to build a tool that’ll text you the second Netflix’s Arrested Development revival season goes live? Already done. If you need to programmatically do something that goes down over the phone — be it SMS, voice calls, or VoIP — Twilio can probably do most of the leg work with just a few lines of code.

Twilio is actually one of my favorite companies in the valley right now, for at least two reasons: they make a damned cool product that in turn enables other damned cool products to be made, and very few people seem to realize how well they’re doing. While their CEO Jeff Lawson seems to prefer keeping their financials hush, every whisper I hear about the company suggests that they’re quietly kicking ass.

Amongst other good signs: the company is hiring like mad, to the point that they just (as in, this week) had to move into a much bigger office. They actually couldn’t find a ready-to-go office in SOMA with enough space for their growing team, so they spent the better part of the last year retrofitting a spot on Harrison Street that once served as a paper/textile factory.

Twilio has raised $33.5M to date, having most recently closed a $17M Series C at the end of 2011. If they successfully raise $50M, it’d be an injection roughly 1.5x larger than everything they’ve raised so far.

When I first started digging around this story, no one I spoke to could seem to agree on which VC firms were involved. Turns out, Twilio is just talking to a lot of firms. Two names that seem quite certain to be in talks at this point are Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners — which makes sense, as USV has been re-upping with Twilio since their Series A, and Bessemer has supported them since their Series B.

Keep an eye on these guys, if you’re not already. If things keep going as they are, I’d bet on them going public within the next year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google Glass is still very much a pre-release product, but a new update today (via 9to5Google) edges it closer to a shipping device, thanks to some core functionality additions that you’d expect to see in consumer Google hardware. The “XE5″ update adds inbound notifications from Google+, so you can see direct shares, comments and mentions, as well as comment and +1 those updates. There are also now Hangout notifications, as well as faster transcription, and a long-press to activate search function available throughout the UI.

That’s not all, as there’s also better crash reporting (important if you’re beta testing a product for imminent consumer release) as well as international number dialling and SMS support, better and more accurate battery info reporting, a new sync policy that’s designed to stop you dipping too far into your data policy and your battery life, and general improvements.

Google has been shipping Glass Explorer Edition sets to its initial group of pre-launch customers, who have each had to pay $1,500 for the privilege. So far, the reviews of the pre-launch gadget have been mixed, with tech evangelist Robert Scoble singing its praises on high to anyone who will listen (“1. I will never live a day of my life from now on without it (or a competitor). It’s that significant.” is how he starts his review), to extremely negative thoughts on the subject by entrepreneur Andrew Chen.

Yet all of these opinions are on a device not yet meant for public consumption, and with this update we see how far Google still has to go to get things ready for the big debut. Which, going by recent accounts, is still quite a while off, with a 2014 target date per Eric Schmidt. Watching the update path now is a good way of tracking what Google is focusing on with getting Glass launch-ready, however, and it’s no surprise that it wants to provide deeper hooks to its social networking efforts early in the game.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“im ddeleting the internet [sic]“: A telling re-blog from a teenaged girl on the blogging platform turned social networking site Tumblr, in a chain of re-postings that had her pondering Tumblr’s impact on her life twenty years from now, when her passing, immature thoughts become fodder for a discussion among her boss and colleagues at some imagined future workplace.

The fact that Tumblr speaks to this younger demographic, and in particular teenage girls slightly more so than boys, is known. Why that is the case is something which many are still scratching their heads over, even as Tumblr begins to focus on generating revenue from this very audience, whose online behavior makes it tricky for advertisers who want to connect.

“How do teenagers waste hours upon hours consuming Tumblr?“, a confused parent once asked on another time-wasting site, the Q&A resource known as Quora. The top answer, posted by “Anonymous,” claims to be from a teenaged user of Tumblr, though it could just as easily be a sneaky marketing ploy from the startup itself. But it speaks some truths nonetheless.

Tumblr, wrote the poster, “seems like a freedom, as weird as that may sound.”

“Unlike Facebook, I have a clean slate,” this person explained. ”I really have found myself starting to have my own opinions. These, in some cases, greatly differ from relatives or friends, people who used to greatly influence my opinions.”

Whether or not “anon” was a real Tumblr user, or even a real teenager, it’s an apt enough explanation as to why the site has found footing among the young and hormonal. Though worries that a boss might peruse online indiscretions may one day come to pass, Tumblr users often use pseudonyms or only first names, making their blogs harder to find by the prying eyes of parents or HR, for that matter.

Tumblr doesn’t owe its success among teens solely because of its pseudonymous qualities. That helps, but, more simply, it has become the digital upgrade to that demographic’s earlier tools for cut-and-pasted self-discovery: the repurposing of media and content to reflect their interests and fandoms, likes and hates, newly forming opinions, and more.

Read through teenaged Tumblrdom as a grown-up, and you’ll soon feel very, very old.

“i haven’t had my phone on ring for like 3 years,” muses ”Aubrey,” who also once reblogged “what the frick is friendster.”

Don’t worry, Aubrey, you don’t need to know.

~~~~

The real answer to the surging teenaged use of the site lies not in the lengthy Quora explanations, but in the examples of the odd, offbeat, and yes, sometimes inappropriate content kids are sharing.

Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, upgraded cursors, and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on Tumblr that the company even began experimenting with GIF-based ads.

The teen blogs are also reminiscent of MySpace, featuring often same general gaudiness, and the spewing of content on top of content, like the layers of photos and other decorations teens used to tack up on cork bulletin boards and bedroom walls.

Tumblr now serves that purpose, and more.

~~~~

At the risk of dating myself, I’ll reveal that I was teenaged in the pre-Web era. We didn’t have Tumblr then, but rather composition notebooks, glossy magazines, and scissors. We had mean girl-like cliques to rebel against, passions, complaints, and in-jokes. We liked boys. We worried about our looks and clothing and hairstyles. We dissed our teachers and our parents. We wrote short stories. And we expressed ourselves on paper with scrapbooks, torn magazine collages, and shared notes in passed around “slam books.” (To be fair, we weren’t writing truly awful things, really – that’s just what these books were called.)

Now children have the Internet. And Tumblr has become their platform for those universal, familiar urges at self-expression falling somewhere in between the diary, the slam book and the cork board. Notes on Tumblr blogs range from mundane (“ive been telling myself ill start my homework soon for the last 4 hours,”) to the confessional (“a cute necklace for school tomorrow” which accompanies a picture of a noose – a note whose message would terrify parents and other adults, but appears to only be commentary on the horrors of high school life).

~~~~

According to Pew Internet’s study from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64, and a (surprising) 1 percent of those 65 and older do.

Demographic data from Quantcast further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34. Then the numbers taper off. Site users don’t tend to have kids of their own, make somewhere between $0 and $50,000 (66 percent do), have either no college (41 percent) or college backgrounds (48 percent), and tend to reflect an ethnically diverse makeup, where there are more non-white users. (Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans, and “other” all beat out the Caucasian segment.)

Now Tumblr is seriously looking to monetize this audience, proffering a platform for brand advertising which CEO David Karp last week explained is meant to be a place for advertisers to “build amazing, interactive ads.”

“We have a story that really, truly stands apart from the other big networks right now,” he said. Other networks are harnessing user intent, then pointing users to little blue links. “Creative brand advertising has had nowhere to live on the web,” he said. Ten out of the ten top Hollywood studios advertise on Tumblr now, Karp also noted, while speaking, too, of ads that inspire people to go out and purchase, designed by imaginative types who went into advertising because of their “Mad Men-like aspirations.”

He may have played down the demographics’ role in Tumblr’s advertising equation during this discussion, but the site’s teen audience is too powerful to ignore: there are some 30 million U.S. teens with over $200 billion in buying power. They might not all be on Tumblr, of course, but if brands can reach a portion of this group, they have the potential to tap into a non-trivial source of disposable income from heavy-duty consumers. After all, the U.S. is Tumblr’s top traffic source.

Tumblr’s future, for now, seems to be closely tied to its young adult demographic, their whims, and perhaps even their historical aversion to online ads. This audience has grown up connected, is often skeptical and cynical when it comes to brand advertising, and tends to toe a fine line between wanting to express their individuality and wanting to fit in.

It’s not an easy group to reach, which makes Tumblr’s revenue potential tricky to pin down. Too much or the wrong kind of advertising, and a fickle teen audience may find a new home elsewhere. Though Tumblr is now home to over 100 million blogs, if a good chunk belong to teens, it’s difficult to count that as serious traction –  today’s teens are less committed to their digital creations than adults, having already invented methods like “whitewalling” and “super-logoff” to erase and hide their Facebook pages, and are now turning to “ephemeral” messaging apps like Snapchat, which delete their communications upon viewing.

They understand just how easy it is to deactivate an account, walk away and begin again. Content is disposable, and the web is an impermanent platform to build upon, they’ve found. These are decidedly radical views.

For Tumblr, the shiftiness of the very group it has found a home among is one of the riskier aspects of what appears to otherwise be a strong, fast-growing and potentially very valuable service. Its revenue plan is to provide a blank slate to its users and advertisers alike (“…we want to give [advertisers] the space to do anything – a four-second loop, an hour and a half video, a high-res panorama,” Karp explained last week.).

But Tumblr will need to be careful with the results of those advertisers’ efforts. Overdone marketing messages could sour Tumblr’s most engaged users on their online hangout. Done well, however, Tumblr could endear itself to its reblog-happy user base even more, connecting aspirational imagery and content with those who are still young enough to dream they can spend their way into new feelings. Whether they’ll eventually end up “ddeleting” those feelings or not.

(Image credit, top: kootation.com; edited version)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

To use text messaging and navigation on Google Glass, users currently have to pair it with an Android phone and install the Glass companion app on their phones. This will change very soon, however, one of the Google representatives in its New York office told me when I picked up my own unit yesterday afternoon. Glass, the Google employee told me, will soon be able to handle these features independent of the device the user has paired it to (and maybe even independent of the Glass companion app).

While Glass will happily work with any iPhone over Bluetooth or use any Wi-Fi connection to get online, iPhone users are currently unable to get turn-by-turn directions through Glass – one of its killer features. Those direction are pretty useful while you are navigating a new city and they do show off the power of location-based apps on Glass, but the software will currently balk if you ask it to give you directions while it’s connected to an iPhone.

In this context, it’s worth noting that one of the myths surrounding Glass is that it is independently connected to the Internet. That’s not true, however. Instead, Glass users need to have a tethering plan for their phones to connect Glass to the Internet. In the eyes of your wireless provider, Glass is just another device that uses your phone’s personal hotspot feature. This means Glass shouldn’t have to depend on any application that runs on your phone, so the original restriction of making navigation and SMS dependent on the companion app was always a bit odd.

While Glass has a built-in compass, it doesn’t have its own GPS receiver and depends on the phone to provide it with location data. It looks like this was just a function of the beta state of Glass, however, and that we can expect it to soon be fully functional, no matter the device it uses to connect to the Internet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch