A few months ago, Google announced the Windows Start button-like app launcher for Chrome on Windows, and with it, a way to easily launch Chrome packaged apps, a new way to write apps that are based on Chrome and web technologies but behave like native apps.

These packaged apps for Chrome are based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, but they behave like native apps and have access to Chrome APIs and services that aren’t available to regular sites. Until now, developers could upload packaged apps to the Chrome Web Store and test them, but the apps weren’t discoverable in the store. Starting today, users on the Chrome Dev channel will be able to easily find and install these apps.

This is likely just a prelude to a wider release of packaged apps. In today’s announcement, Google also notes that, for developers, “now is a great time to get some early feedback and polish your app before Chrome packaged apps become more broadly available.” At its I/O 2013 developer conference later this month, Google will feature at least three different sessions about packaged apps, including one about upgrading web apps to packaged apps.

As Google notes, most of the packaged apps in the Web Store are “works in progress.” This, the company says, is the reason for only making them available in the Chrome dev channel right now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For years now, Google has offered its Google Maps Engine to enterprises who want to visualize their custom geospacial data and starting today, anybody will be able to use a subset of this functionality thanks to the launch of Google Maps Engine Lite (beta). This new tool, Google says,  will allow any mapping enthusiast to “create and share robust custom maps using this powerful, easy-to-use tool.”

Maps Engine Lite allows users to upload small spreadsheets with locations and visualize them on a map. They can also compare up to three different data sets for, the company stresses, non-businesses purposes.

These custom maps can have multiple layers and users who don’t have any spreadsheets they want to upload can also manually draw lines, mark specific areas and set place markers. Google offers a total of nine base maps, including its usual satellite and terrain maps, as well as styles that emphasis city boundaries political boundaries and highways. Maps Engine Lite also offers about 150 different icons that you can be used to mark specific places.

To help new users get started, Google also published a tutorial that offers a few sample data sets and a set-by-step guide to publishing a custom map.

Google says it will still offer My Maps, its earlier custom mapping tool for the time being and My Maps users can import their maps into the new Maps Engine Lite. Over time, however, Google product manager Beth Liebert writes in today’s announcement, My Maps will be “incorporated into Google Maps Engine Lite.”

For now, Google is officially labeling Maps Engine Lite as a ‘beta’ and it’ll only be available in English for the time being.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The big enterprise companies are starting to put pressure on the startups in the growing field of data analytics. But the pressure is not as much related to innovation as it is to using their marketing muscle to build software stacks they can sell to retain existing customers.

Drawn to Scale Co-Founder Bradford Stephens sees this in his experiences, especially compared to last year when there were maybe three different companies marketing a Hadoop distribution. But just this week alone, EMC, Intel and HP all announced their own distributions.

Out of all this, we are hearing a lot of talk about why one comapny’s Hadoop distribution is so much better than a competitor’s. In our conversation, Stephens talks about the competition, the growing pressure on startups to do more than innovate and start bringing in business in face of the larger threats from the legacy vendors.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Disney executives are on-stage right now at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, where they just announced Disney Infinity, a game platform that is set to launch in June.

The details of the platform are still emerging, but Co-President of Disney Interactive John Pleasants has already shared the big ideas. Infinity will “bring together the best of Disney IP, past, present, and future.” It won’t just be a single game, but also but rather a “new, interactive gaming platform” — more like a toybox allowing consumers to create the environments and stories that they want. It will be cross-platform, available on consoles, mobile devices, and online, and it will also incorporate physical figurines.

Pleasants said the “playsets” launching in June will incorporate three different Disney franchises: Monsters University, The Incredibles, and Pirates of the Caribbean. The launch will including other, yet-to-be-announced characters, he added.

Disney Chief Creative Officer John lasseter took the stage after Pleasants, where he emphasized the idea of of Infinity as a toy box. He said he initially resisted the idea of throwing all of Disney’s characters into in one game, but he warmed up to it when he thought of it as kids playing with different toys together.

John Blackburn (yes, there were a lot of John’s on-stage today), CEO of Disney’s game studio Avalanche, offered more details about how it will work. There are two big components to the platform, he said. There are the physical figurines, which you can place on the pad to determine which characters get “teleported” into the game. Then there’s the software, which includes “play sets” — gaming experiences based on specific franchises. Each of play set includes game mechanics specifically designed for that universe — the Pirates of the Caribbean set, for example, focuses on sailing between different islands. The environments and characters are still customizable, but they’re meant to be “true to property”, so you won’t see Mr. Incredible showing up in the Pirates set.

Then there’s the “toy box”, an environment for “mashing up” different franchises. In demonstrating the toy box, Blackburn showed off an adventure mode, which introduces players to the basic mechanics, plus a simple logic editor that allows them to modify how the game works using a point-and-click interface.

Naturally, both the play sets and the toy box will support multiplayer mode.

Updating

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When all-touch tablets and smartphones hit the market, the logical evolution was touchscreen keyboards in the same QWERTY array we’ve grown accustomed to. Many of us have gotten used to it, thanks to predictive text, but we can all agree that the experience could be better.

SnapKeys, a startup that has rethought the whole touch keyboard thing quite a bit, is today launching a beta app that will totally revamp the typing experience on touchscreens. SnapKeys Si focuses predominantly on the predictive bit of typing, as opposed to the pressing of virtual buttons.

In fact, most of the keys on the SnapKeys keyboard have been tossed out. Instead, there are four buttons, each representing three different letters. On the far right of the screen, there’s an invisible spacebar and on the left there’s an invisible backspace.

Any letter that isn’t displayed on a key is chilling out in between the keys.

Once you learn where the 12 letters are on the new keys, you simply type without looking and SnapKeys Si gets everything right for you.

According to SnapKeys, the letters that aren’t displayed on the SnapKeys Si keyboard are actually only used about 18 percent of the time. Clearly, for something used so little, those keys sure do take up a lot of screen real estate while surfing, texting, emailing etc.

The main goal of SnapKeys is to give the user all the viewing space afforded by the size of the screen, without making any exceptions for even a single key.

That’s why, once you’ve gotten used to SnapKeys Si, the entire keyboard can be set to invisible.

Eventually, the company can serve ads and offer a premium version of the app for users who want an ad-free experience. Either way, users will still be seeing more of the content on their screen thanks to SnapKeys.

Download the beta here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sony is expected to approve a plan to invest around $642 million (50 billion yen) in Olympus. As the Japanese manufacturer of cameras, optics and reprography products is currently facing a trial for having hidden investment losses for the past 20 years, it has been looking for a potential investor for months. By injecting that capital investment, Sony will become the largest shareholder.

After rumors of a Panasonic investment in June, Reuters confirmed from three different sources that Sony and Olympus are ready to announce an investment that would represent 10 percent of the capital.

Olympus reported a net loss of $630 million (49 billion yen) for the last fiscal year, mainly due to wrong financial decisions and the repercussions of the past scandalous affaire. Today, the company and three former high ranked executives pleaded guilty. Over a couple of decades, around $1.7 billion of losses were faked.

Olympus announced in June that it would cut 2,700 jobs and scrap 40 percent of its factories in order to reduce cost. Last quarter, the company reported a 60 percent drop in operating profit.

With that investment, Sony will become the largest shareholder and the two companies will create a new business unit focused on medical equipment. As a brand new market for Sony, it is a way to diversify its revenue.

Yet, last quarter, despite $19.2 billion in sales, Sony’s operating profit was down 77 percent to only $79 million. Standard & Poor’s downgraded Sony as well, which could make investment more difficult in the future.

As Vic Gundotra said in another situation, “two turkeys do not make an eagle.” When it comes to Japanese investments, they are often hard to understand for a foreigner. Two companies following a downward trend won’t find an easy solution by partnering. It remains to be seen if they can now focus on producing innovative new products.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Socialcam topped our list of growing Facebook applications by daily active users with 4.4 million new DAU. There were a few other video apps, dating app Zoosk, website integrations, Pinterest, and several games, horoscopes and more.

The titles below grew between 300,000 and 4.4 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Socialcam	8,300,000	+4,400,000	+ 113%
2.	Zoosk	3,900,000	+3,120,000	+ 400%
3.	Click Video	2,800,000	+2,060,000	+ 278%
4.	Yahoo! Social Bar	4,500,000	+1,700,000	+ 61%
5.	Horóscopo Diário	1,700,000	+1,640,000	+ 2,733%
6.	9GAG	1,600,000	+1,470,000	+ 1,131%
7.	Pinterest	2,500,000	+1,400,000	+ 127%
8.	Chill	1,300,000	+990,000	+ 319%
9.	Norton Safe Web	850,000	+820,000	+ 2,733%
10.	Zynga Game Bar	840,000	+820,000	+ 4,100%
11.	Horóscopo do Dia	550,000	+520,000	+ 1,733%
12.	Candy Crush Saga	1,800,000	+500,000	+ 38%
13.	Mynet	800,000	+500,000	+ 167%
14.	Scribd	1,000,000	+440,000	+ 79%
15.	Bubble Witch Saga	6,400,000	+400,000	+ 7%
16.	Zapkolik	1,200,000	+350,000	+ 41%
17.	Mystic Ice Blast	350,000	+320,000	+ 1,067%
18.	Daily Horoscope	320,000	+310,000	+ 3,100%
19.	Marvel: Avengers Alliance	1,500,000	+300,000	+ 25%
20.	Skype	2,700,000	+300,000	+ 13%

Socialcam beat out the next-highest app, dating service Zoosk, by more than 1 million DAU. Other video apps, Click Video and Chill, also made the list.

The Yahoo! Social Bar is picking up daily active users again after a temporary dip. The comedic site 9GAG is also growing after a period of decline. A pair of Turkish sites, Mynet and Zapkolik made the list. Then there were three different horoscope apps, in Spanish, Portuguese and English. These apps usually post automatically to the feed once used.

Games were led by the Zynga Game Bar, followed by Candy Crush Saga. Then the Timeline Pinterest app made the list, in addition to a computer security app and file sharing site.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Microsoft just announced that Windows 8 will come in three different flavors: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT. Windows 8 will be the mainstream consumer edition. The Pro version will bring a number of features that most mainstream consumers don’t necessarily need to Microsoft’s next operating system. These include encryption, virtualization, PC management and domain connectivity. Both Windows 8 Pro and the mainstream consumer edition will be available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions. Microsoft will also offer an enterprise version of Windows 8. Microsoft has not shared any details about the pricing of these editions yet.

Windows 8 Pro, according to Microsoft, was designed “to help tech enthusiasts and business/technical professionals obtain a broader set of Windows 8 technologies.”

The RT edition – which is meant for machines that run on ARM chips – will come with touch-optimized editions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. While there will likely be desktops that will run Windows on ARM, this edition is mostly geared towards tablets (though the other Windows 8 versions can obviously also run on x86-powered tablets).

Until now, it also wasn’t quite clear if Microsoft also planned to include its Media Center in Windows 8. Judging from today’s announcement, Media Center will only be an option for Windows 8 Pro users and will be “available as an economical ‘media pack’ add-on.”

Microsoft will also offer an enterprise version of Windows 8 that will include all of the features of Windows 8 Pro. This version will also feature a number of tools “for IT organization that enable PC management and deployment, advanced security, virtualization, new mobility scenarios, and much more.”

While this new lineup doesn’t quite offer the simplicity of Apple’s approach, it does at least cut down the number of choices compared to Windows 7. For Windows 7, users currently have the choice between Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. Microsoft also offers an enterprise version of Windows 7, as well as a Basic version for low-end machines.

You can find a full feature comparison on the Windows blog.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We have covered the one or the other Hello Kitty gadget in the past, but it’s been a while since the last notebook featuring the popular cartoon cat. But now Japan’s Mouse Computer is selling the so-called LuvBook S, [JP], an 11.6-inch laptop with Hello Kitty all over it. It has been co-developed with Hello Kitty maker Sanrio and luxury goods maker Swarovski.

Swarovski designed the body of the laptop (the Hello Kitty face and heart you see below is made of about 1,100 Swarovski stones):

These are the three different wall papers buyers can expect:

Screensaver and box:

Spec-wise, the LuvBook S features an 11.6-inch LCD with 1,366×768, an Intel Core i3-2330M CPU (2.20GHz), a 500GB HDD, 4GB memory, Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0+HS, a 1.3MP web cam, a USB 3.0 slot, two USB 2.0 slots, an SD card interface, and an HDMI port. The LuvBook S runs on Windows 7 Home Premium (64bit/SP1).

Mouse Computer has already started selling the device in Japan (price: US$900). Visit specialized sites like the Japan Trend Shop or Flutterscape if you really want to get one shipped outside Japan.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ll admit that I’m a middling photographer at best, but that doesn’t stop me from buying all sort of expensive gear. Photojojo’s new iPhone accessory appeals to that same sense of camera gear lust in me but on a slightly smaller scale. The iPhone Lens Dial is an iPhone case with three different lenses mounted on the back, so you’ll never have to go long without indulging your fisheye fixation.

Just snap your iPhone 4 or 4S into the Lens Dial’s matte black body, and you’ll have three different lenses at your disposal: a 0.7x wide angle, a 0.33x fish-eye, and a 1.5x telephoto. It’s pretty sturdy too — the Lens Dial is made out of aluminum, so in the event you drop it at least the phone inside should survive.

Photojojo has been making iPhone-friendly lenses for a while now, but they all required you to pop the lens off and stow them somewhere else when you were finished. The Lens Dial (as you may have guessed by the name) allows you to rotate between each lens as needed, and you’re welcome to leave the whole shebang on if you don’t mind lugging a brick around.

Part of the fun about using the iPhone as a camera is that it you get pretty impressive performance with a minimum of know-how. Photojojo’s Lens Dial adds some fun new capabilities to the iPhone’s already-solid camera, but it comes at a price: the Lens Dial will set customers back $249. Worth it? Tough call, but if you’re like me, you’re already searching the couch for loose change.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch