As AT&T comes under the gun for blocking Google’s new video chat app Hangouts on its cellular network, the company is today hoping to put a better spin on the news by offering a new statement detailing its changing position on support for pre-loaded video chat apps. During the second half of 2013, AT&T says it will begin to enable pre-loaded video chat applications over cellular for all its customers, regardless of the customer’s data plan.

This is a change from the carrier’s current position, which requires that customers pay for AT&T’s Mobile Share or Tiered plans, or soon, unlimited subscriptions (with LTE devices), in order to use pre-loaded video chat apps, like Apple’s FaceTime, for example, or those from Samsung and BlackBerry.

Here’s the revised statement, sent to us this afternoon by AT&T communications, as an update to an earlier inquiry on the block:

“For video chat apps that come pre-loaded on devices, we currently give all OS and device makers the ability for those apps to work over cellular for our customers who are on Mobile Share or Tiered plans. Apple, Samsung and Blackberry have chosen to enable this for their pre-loaded video chat apps. And by mid-June, we’ll have enabled those apps over cellular for our unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices from those three manufacturers.

“Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by yearend.

“Today, all of our customers can use any mobile video chat app that they download from the Internet, such as Skype.”

From the sounds of it, that means Google won’t have to first “enable” (ask for permission?) in order for Hangouts to work. Even though it’s a pre-loaded app, it will just begin working regardless of the customer’s current data plan.

The problem AT&T had with Hangouts, presumably, is that the app replaces the Google Talk application that shipped by default on Android devices. That means the app is “pre-loaded,” and for pre-loaded applications to run over AT&T’s cellular network, the OS or device maker involved had to first work with AT&T on the matter, per AT&T policy.

And from the statement AT&T released last week, it seems that perhaps Google did not do so:

“All AT&T Mobility customers can use any video chat app over cellular that is not pre-loaded on their device, but which they download from the Internet. For video chat apps that come pre-loaded on devices, we offer all OS and device makers the ability for those apps to work over cellular for our customers who are on Mobile Share, Tiered and soon Unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices. It’s up to each OS and device makers to enable their systems to allow pre-loaded video chat apps to work over cellular for our customers on those plans.” [Emphasis mine]

The situation is not necessarily one of bandwidth concerns at this point, since Apple’s FaceTime is already enabled for MobileShare and Tiered customers following a similar controversy. At the time of its launch, Sprint and Verizon enabled FaceTime, and AT&T rolled out access only to select customers following net neutrality complaints.

In Apple’s case, the company left FaceTime support up to carrier discretion, and apparently Google did the same. And as is par for the course, the app is reportedly working just fine on Verizon, just not on AT&T right now.

That will continue to be the case until later this year when the change is made, though no exact date was given.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a guest post by Mario Zelaya, Managing Director at Majestic Media, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer & digital marketing agency, specializing in custom apps and promotions for web and mobile.

Marketers are starting to focus more on social media efforts, realizing that it’s an important piece of the marketing puzzle. They’ve started to use social media, but only as an extension of a traditional campaign or as a small marketing initiative on the side. Many of them are hesitant to rely too heavily on social media. They’re willing to let social media ride in the car, but they’re reluctant to give them the keys.

According to a report released by Social Media Examiner at the end of 2012, 83 percent of marketers have said that social media was important to their business. However, the CMO survey released in February found that marketers are only allocating 8.4% of their budget for social media.

Many believe that in order for a campaign to succeed, it always needs to be integrated across different channels. This is simply not the case. At Majestic Media, we’ve seen time and time again that a fully digital campaign, or even a fully social campaign, can reach hundreds of thousands of consumers, achieving millions of social impressions and engagement, and generate a tremendous amount of traffic.

Majestic Media recently launched a social campaign for Maple Leaf Foods, promoting their new product, Bacon Portions. It was a simple Facebook Application that allowed users to pledge to “Never Waste Bacon” and enter for the chance to win a year supply of bacon.  Yes, bacon.  Not a brand new car, $25,000 or an extravagant trip, simply bacon.

The campaign was launched organically on Facebook, posting on Maple Leaf’s Facebook Page for current fans to see. Within 12 hours, we had reached 3,458 pledges. Following the launch, Maple Leaf Foods started a small paid campaign on Facebook consisting of Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories. Within a week, we saw nearly 19,000 pledges and #NeverWasteBacon was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in Canada.

Facebook was the primary focus, but Twitter and Instagram also played a large part in the success of the #NeverWasteBacon campaign (which is still running).

Maple Leaf was able to gain a huge amount of traffic without incorporating traditional mediums like radio, TV, or print. They were able to generate such a large amount of organic traffic because they took the time to build an audience. They spent time interacting with their followers and provided them with engaging, relevant content.

Social media has the power to drive a major campaign, but only if you do it right. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many brands blame a failed Facebook campaign on the social network, rather than the fact that they didn’t take the time to prepare.

Social campaigns can be wildly successful if you have the right strategy in place, give people the incentive and the encouragement to share with friends and spend the time listening and building up your audience to ensure what you launch is inline with what they want to engage with.  Campaigns don’t always need to be fully integrated and rely heavily on paid media to be wildly successful.

Mario Zelaya is the founder and managing director of Majestic Media, Canada’s first Facebook Marketing & Technology agency. His extensive experience on the Facebook Platform includes building out social strategy, campaign ideation, app architecture, and social design for brand clients such Volkswagen, Kia, General Motors, Mazda, Gatorade, Hot Wheels, Infiniti, Nissan, Visa and many others. Majestic Media has executed over 200 large-scale campaigns and works with big brands and agencies in helping them to get results and ROI through campaigns that are social by design. Follow Majestic Media & Mario on Twitter @majesticmedia @zelaya.

Mac app Minbox launches to the public today, attempting to differentiate itself from competitors through speed and ease of use. The app allows Mac users to send files directly from their desktops — either through attaching the files or through a very simple drag-and-drop feature through the Minbox icon in the top-right corner.

As you can probably tell from the demo video above, Minbox hopes to gain traction in the file-sharing space through being faster and more nimble than competitors. According to Minbox founder Alexander Mimran, the service is twice as fast as Dropbox for uploading and sharing files (you don’t have to wait for the file to upload to send).

“Our main speed difference is that we upload direct to S3 from the client,” says Mimran. “We use multi-thread file uploading, we compress files, and a host of other things.”

Although Mimran has no data for YouSendIt, Minbox is by default faster from this user’s perspective — YouSendIt basically forces you to log in to the web version to send something, makes you copy/paste your recipient’s contact information and, if you want to send a file larger than 50MB, you’ll have to plunk down $9.99 per month.

While YouSendIt does have a Mac app that ostensibly makes file sharing from your desktop easier, I’ve yet to figure out how to send a file from the app. I think I might have to pay it so the option to share isn’t grayed out, like below. Again, not particularly fast.

“The cloud-storage space is focused on ‘backup’ and ‘sync’, but a large component is neglected… that’s ‘send’,” says Mimran, whose background is in product and design, where speed of sending files is acutely important. “We all send files on a daily basis and believe there are still too many pain points associated with the process — we’re focused on easing that pain.” Mimran maintains that Minbox’s “killer feature” is the ability to share a file by right-clicking on it, a functionality that Dropbox recently axed.

The product, which began its life as a Mailbox-esque smart iOS email client, is free no matter how large the files you’d like to send are: “GoPro users love Minbox!” Mimran says.  He  plans on eventually charging users for any file storage beyond 30 days, which highlights that the startup wants to focus on file sharing and not storing. Mimran concedes that Dropbox handles storage better anyways: “We’re about the ‘Send’!”

Eschewing the idea of shared folders, Minbox does okay on the “Receive” part of the equation as well, with email notifications when something is sent to you and a mobile and desktop view that allows you to visually scan through sent photos in a grid format, even when RAW files, even without a Minbox account. If Dropbox is your favorite photosharing app, you understand how useful this is. Eventually he’d like to build a Minbox feature that allows recipients to browse inside a zip file without having to open it, so you can manage these sorts of files on your phone.

The company has already raised $900k to accomplish its goal of sharing files the fastest. Completing an angel round in early 2012 of $100k from George Babu (ex-Rypple) and friends, and then another round of $800k in May of 2012. Seed investors include George Zachary at CRV, David Cohen at Bullet Time Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Rho Ventures and angels Jeff Zucker, Matt Ocko, Tim Young (Socialcast, About.me), Ben Chestnut (Mailchimp) and others.

Mimran is also a hustler. Again, in case it’s not obvious from that demo video going straight for Dropbox’s jugular. He had a spreadsheet full of journalists he contacted for this launch, and cold-called Apple to get his app through the door, “Like up and down the [phone] directory.” He also showed up at random publications’ offices to pitch, though not ours. He was actually invited to ours.

Users can sign up for Minbox here, and the service will give you an ETA for entrance based on your time of entry and how well their servers are doing. Really.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BrandYourself is expanding its efforts to take on the big names in the online reputation market (particularly Reputation.com) with the launch of a new version of its service.

The company started out as a fairly simple self-service tool for trying to improve your presence online, for example by creating a website and other content to push down undesirable results when someone Googles your name. (It has become increasingly focused on Google results over time.) The basic service is free, but BrandYourself charges $10 a month for additional features and usage.

With BrandYourself’s freemium, self-service product, it seemed to be serving a difference audience than Reputation.com, but now the newer startup is challenging its more-established competitor in a direct way. With a recently-launched concierge service, users aren’t just presented with a list of to-do items for improving their Google results — they can also pay BrandYourself team members to work with them on a strategy and actually do the work for them. So if, say, you don’t have the time create and maintain your own personal website, BrandYourself create and maintain one for you. And co-founder and CEO Patrick Ambron said that where Reputation.com can cost thousands of dollars per month, BrandYourself’s concierge services can cost as little as $200 or $300.

Why the dramatic price difference? Ambron insisted that it’s not because BrandYourself delivers lower-quality, cheaper work — he showed me one of the websites created for a BrandYourself customer and it did look like a real personal page. In contrast, he showed me content that he said had been created through his account with Reputation.com, and it was basically just an empty template. (I emailed Reputation.com to discuss how the company saw itself stacking up against BrandYourself, but I did not receive a response.)

The big difference, Ambron said, is that existing online reputation services are built around a model of high acquisition costs and low retention rates — they pay for a lot of advertising to attract customers, and those customers don’t stick around for very long, so the companies have to charge high rates. BrandYourself, on the other hand, can treat its free tools as the marketing funnel for its paid version and concierge service. Plus, Ambron said that with lower prices, customers can use BrandYourself on an ongoing basis.

“We’re really trying to fix the online reputation space, ” he said. “Until it was only meant for rich people and it was notoriously ineffective.”

In addition to the concierge service, BrandYourself is launching a new interface that makes it easier, among other things, to submit links that you want to promote in your Google results. And there’s a new report card showing users BrandYourself’s score of their current search results, the progress that they’ve made with the service, and details about who is actually visiting your BrandYourself website.

The company says it has been used by more than 200,000 people. It has also raised more than $1.5 million in funding and is now based in New York City.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While it was missing the skydiving antics of last year’s event, Google’s I/O keynote last week wasn’t short on product launches. In between the splashy updates to Google Maps, Search, Android and everything else Google announced, the company also briefly talked about Web Components for a few minutes. While Google’s Sundar Pichai noted that it’s still early days for this technology, he also said he believes that “the vision for it is clear” and that it will allow developers to build “elegant user interfaces that work across all form factors.”

Web Components are clearly a topic that’s close to the heart of a number of Chrome developers. Many of them, for example, cited it as one of the Chrome features they are most excited about at a fireside chat later in the week.

A number of Google engineers are also working on Project Polymer, which aims to write a web application framework that’s built upon the idea of Web Components and will allow developers to use the ideas behind Web Components on browsers that don’t even feature all of the necessary technologies yet.

The fact that it made an appearance during the keynote, right next to WebGL and other more established web development techniques, makes it pretty obvious that this is a technology that Google believes has the potential to change how developers write web apps going forward.

So what is this all about? Essentially, Web Components give developers an easier way to create web sites and recyclable widgets on these sites with the help of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript they already know. The ideas behind Web Components have been around for a while (and a few years back, Microsoft backed a similar initiative that never got any traction), but even today, this is still a topic that’s pretty foreign to most.

Building large, single-page web apps with a smart component models isn’t easy today. Web Components help developer encapsulate they HTML, CSS and JavaScript so it doesn’t interfere with the rest of the page and the page doesn’t interfere with it.

It’s worth noting that, for the time being, developers can’t rely on this to work in all browsers. Chrome Canary includes support for Web Components, but it’s hidden behind a number of flags. Mozilla will likely start adding support for it in Firefox soon, too. Most importantly, though, the Polymer project aims to bring the concept to all browsers with the help of a polyfill.

Web Components relies on four pieces – the template element, decorators (which apply templates to CSS), custom elements (which allow developers to create their own elements) and the Shadow DOM (which sounds ominous, but which really just defines how all of the other pieces play together and shield the other three pieces from the regular DOM if necessary).

Putting all of this together, including Custom Elements, developers can suddenly create their own HTML tags like after creating them using the tag. they can also extend existing elements. In addition, Web Components also allow developers to more easily separate content from presentation and the Shadow DOM ensures that the styles you create for the rest of your site don’t interfere with the widgets you build using Web Components.

All of this sounds pretty dry, but if it catches on – and there is no reason to think it won’t – this will change how developers write web apps (Google’s Eric Bidelman calls it a “tectonic shift for web development”) and there are some inherent advantages to Web Components that will also help it speed up the web browsing experience for users. In the end, though, this represents a completely new way for writing web applications and it will probably take a bit before the repercussions of this evolutions fully sink in.

If you want to take a deeper dive into this topic, take a look at this presentation here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sometimes, more medical information is a bad thing. The influential United States Preventive Services Task Force recommends against most women getting genetic screenings for their susceptibility to breast cancer. Why? Because the tests are imperfect: for every woman who gets tested for genes associated with onset breast cancer, even more will falsely test positive, leading spooked patients into needless surgery or psychological trauma. Super cheap genetic testing from enterprising health startups, such as 23andMe, have complicated cancer detection for us all by increasing the accessibility of imperfect medical information.

After discovering a mutated BRCA1 gene, known to increase breast cancer 60 to 80%, actress Angelina Jolie’s underwent a radical preventive double mastectomy. Her brave confession in the New York Times brought much needed attention to breast cancer awareness, but it’s dangerous in the hands of a statistically illiterate population.

For instance, as New York Times statistical guru, Nate Silver, once reminded me, while breast cancer mammograms are 75% accurate, a woman who tests positive only has about a 10% chance of actually getting cancer. Since the vast majority of women don’t have cancer, there are far more women who will falsely test positive (here is a helpful blog post with the numbers worked out). Most importantly, surveys reveal that many people don’t understand the math behind false positives in cancer testing, and may make uninformed decisions as a result.

The same math holds true for the mutated BRCA1/2 gene of Jolie’s confession: researchers estimate that a tiny 0.11 to 0.12 of women have the faulty gene. “I believe in doing genetic testing for BRCA1/2 with appropriate counseling,” writes University of Southern California’s David Agus, one of Steve Jobs’ cancer doctors, The answers are not simple in this case and require experienced professionals to discuss with the patient.”

Traditionally hundreds, if thousands of dollars to test, a cottage industry of cheap genetic testing has sprung up. 23andMe, one of the most popular, offers the service for as little at $99, and has even dared to weigh in on the BRCA controversy on the company blog.

Citing a new study that found no negative emotional consequences from patients after learning about their BRCA1 mutation, the 23andMe blog concludes, “The findings are important given that a frequent criticism of direct-to-consumer testing is based on the assumption that it causes either serious emotional distress or triggers deleterious actions on the part of consumers,” wrote the blog.

“Given the absence of evidence for serious emotional distress or inappropriate actions in this subset of mutation-positive customers who agreed to be interviewed for this study, broader screening of Ashkenazi Jewish women for these three BRCA mutations should be considered.”

Sometimes, however, voluntary surveys don’t tell the whole story. Time, in their cover story on Jolie’s decision, recounts the tale of one woman who likely had unnecessary preventative surgery after learning about a genetic defect. ““She freaked out and had a bilateral mastectomy,” said Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, who worried that this patient’s particular mutation was not as troubling as she worried it was.

Interestingly, TIME’s author, Kate Pickart, argues the financial costs of genetic testing has stall mass run on genetic tests. Even a new provision under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) only mandates 100% insurance coverage for patients with a family history of genetic flaws.

But, at just $99 (and probably far less in the future), financial barriers are crumbling. This isn’t to say that genetic screening is bad, it just complicates things for the rest of us, especially those who don’t understand statistics. The more women get tested, the more false positives exist, the less confident patients and physicians become in a course of action.

Maybe our only hope out of this cheaper testing spiral is technology that makes detection more accurate and more predictive. One promising solution is a new bra that constantly monitors deep tissue for cancerous signs (below)

So, perhaps, before long, we will innovate our way out of this dilemma.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Apple has a good deal of cash. And, in the Valley, the startup ecosystem — for many reasons — wants to see Apple spend that cash. As their cash pile continued to grow as their stock price and market cap soared, Apple’s inability to provide robust software services combined with opportunities to expand their reach through acquisitions has become a fancy parlor game which includes every stripe of public and private investor imaginable. On top of this, pumping even a small percentage of cash pile into acquisitions could provide another pool of much-needed liquidity for founders and investors alike. While it all makes sense on paper, part of what makes Apple “Apple” is that they operate how they want to — not how the market wants them to. Recently, in response to a variety of pressures to do something, to do anything, Apple announced a two-part share buyback. There are many explanations for this financial strategy, and while the Valley may have their own armchair financial analysts with a Twitter account, I reached out to some friends who actually work in technology banking or at techonology-focused hedge funds and asked them to send me a paragraph on their perception of the move. Because of the world these folks work in, I’ve reproduced their answers below anonymously, as they are not permitted to publicly share their opinions on such matters:

Technology Investment Banker: With the amount of cash stock piled by Apple, and mainly overseas, it was only a matter of time until the water would break, especially with activist investor David Einhorn ruffling feathers. Apple did something very standard and not uncommon, but on a large scale the way Apple likes to do things. At the end of the day I feel Apple’s actions represent the following four points: (1) Increased Shareholder Value: There are many ways to value a profitable company but the most common measurement is Earnings Per Share (EPS). If earnings are flat but the number of outstanding shares decreases. . Voila! . . A magical increase in period-to-period EPS will result; (2) Higher Stock Prices: An increase in EPS will often alert investors that a stock is undervalued or has the potential for increasing in value. The most common result is an increase in demand and an upward movement in the price of a stock; (3) Increased Float – As the number of outstanding shares decreases, the shares remaining represent a larger percentage of the float. If demand increases and there is less supply, then fuel is added to a potential upward movement in the price of a stock; and (4) Excess Cash: Companies usually buy back their stock with excess cash. If a company has excess cash, then at a minimum you can bank that it doesn’t have a cash flow problem. More importantly, it signals that executives feel that cash re-invested in the corporation will get a better return than alternative investments. This is definitely a positive sign for the company going forward. Customers and investors should feel confident with these events transpiring that Apple will continue to deliver value to both parties respectively.

Technology Hedge Fund Principal: Since Apple has around $150B cash on the books (70% of which is foreign), it’s clear they need to do something with this cash because it’s just wasted sitting on the balance sheet earning low interest rates. People have assumed the market would respond well to Apple making acquisitions, especially in software and services, particularly in cloud and mobile software. While they have reaped the benefits of profits in mobile hardware, the value going forward is at the application and services layer. Other hardware manufacturers are catching up, if they haven’t caught up already. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to have an appetite for these types of acquisitions. Another option is to buy back shares, a proven way to deploy cash, though doing so sends a signal that they are a mature (read: not growth) company. Tactically, buybacks can decouple EPS growth from new product lines, and Apple could see 2x its buyback investment in earnings growth as a result. Ultimately, Apple has withstood significant pressure from the investment community to do something with the cash, especially as growth has slowed. (Venture arms, since you asked, are not an effective use of capital for a corporate player; I see the share repurchase as a much more responsible use of proceeds.

Hedge Fund Partner #2: Apple had four basic choices of what to do with their cash, remembering that apple has a duty to its shareholders: (1)  Do nothing (status quo), which makes zero sense. given that they have ~$145Bn in cash and are adding ~ $40Bn in cash annually assuming zero growth earnings earning; (2) Strategic acquisition or expansion, though Apple will be hard pushed to effectively put either their cash hoard or future cash flows to use to do this; (3) a one-time special dividend and increased annual dividend; or (4) a share buyback (or various form of it). Only options #3 or #4 made any sense to me and I assumed it was only a matter of time before they did something. #1 is out as they are would not be meeting their shareholder responsibility and #2 is out simply because of scale.

I see the share buyback as positive for three key reasons: (1) Apple stock is currently very cheap. My back of the envelope calculations conservatively value them at $500-$550/share, so they are effectively leveraging and creating additional shareholder value here until the multiple recovers to fair value. What’s more is that management knows a lot more than what we all do, so they should be able to calculate their own value in two to three years fairly well, and I assume they saw this as a positive. (2) Because Apple issued bonds to finance the deal rather than using cash, this way they will not need to repatriate taxable offshore cash to perform the buyback and they will likely get a bond rate the crazy low prices. Bottom line, they are saving shareholders cash, although at some point they will need to find a way to address the offshore cash, so perhaps they are waiting for another tax holiday. And (3), assuming the market reacts rationally, a buy back signals that managements believes in stock and the story and believes that this will generate returns that will outperform for long-term investors, something that a cash hoard did not address at any level and effectively generate returns far in excess of what could be achieved in any other safe manner.

More often than not I do not like share buybacks. often management does this to boost their own salary bonuses (EPS biased etc) or simply follow bad advice and follow the investment banking herd, but this time I liked Apple’s share buyback at this share price and multiple and applaud the debt financing way of doing it, I would have applauded it more if they had also issued a $40 special dividend.

Hedge Fund Partner #3: The view is Apple has stopped being an innovator. While they were at the forefront of technology, people bugged them to use their cash for a dividend or buyback and they could say “no” because the stock price was going up on leading edge innovation. Once Jobs passed away, Tim Cook hasn’t been able to keep that going, and if anything they are now playing catch-up to Samsung or even Google. When you aren’t innovating and you have $150B in cash, a board has to find ways to keep investors happy and one tactic is to conduct a massive buyback. Showing they are returning money to shareholders, creating a new base if “capital return” investors rather than growth investors. It’s all a game to prop up the stock price, money is cheap because of Bernanke, so it’s an easy way for them to please shareholders without much cost to the business. In general, I think that Apple is falling behind and trying to figure out how to regain their lead, and I’m not sure if its possible any time soon.

Technology Stock Investor: They’re doing the buyback because: 1) they have an unprecedented amount of cash ($140+ billion) that’s earning nearly nothing; 2) the stock is down nearly 40% from its high and shareholders are angry; 3) the stock is cheap on every financial metric, signaling that buying shares is a good use of cash if you believe in the long-term growth of the company.  The company does not appear to want to do a large acquisition or massively increase its capital expenditures.  They don’t “need” to hold that much cash. So the company had a very inefficient capital structure ($140+ billion of cash and no debt). Equity investors (who, in the end, own the company) sooner or later demand to get returns on their companies’ cash. Capital markets are competitive, and if management doesn’t give investors great reasons to own their stock, investors will go somewhere else. AAPL is facing slowing revenue growth, margin pressure, and uncertainty about their next major product line. A management team that is perceived as unfriendly to shareholders is another reason for investors to sell the stock. The buyback is a big gesture by management that they understand their shareholders’ concerns, in addition to likely being a good investment.

Photo Credit: Eddi 07 / Flickr Creative Commons

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its five million registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200 million+ monthly active users, and some 600 billion in and outbound messages – but Hike’s growth is  impressive when you consider it’s only just over four months old. WhatsApp, of course, has been around for almost four years.

Mobile messaging is hot property right now, with tech giants like Facebook and most recently Google bent on owning the messaging space. The reason for all this interest in cross-platform chit-chat is that mobile messaging looks poised to steal social networking’s crown jewels: aka the cool factor, and thus the user engagement (Hike incorporates social status updates and emoji-based moods into its messaging app, to hang on the social chain). But the idea that there can be one ultimate mobile messaging winner — or one player as dominant as Facebook in the full-fat social networking space — seems unlikely. And that’s what Hike is banking on to disrupt WhatsApp and keep Facebook Messenger and its ilk from crashing its just-getting-started party.

There’s no doubt that local market realities intercede much more on mobile than on the traditional social networking playground of the desktop, especially in emerging markets where device, network and carrier variations influence how people communicate based on how they can afford to communicate. Those complexities provide an opportunity for local app makers to triumph over goliath outsiders if they build fixes for the local market, argues Hike.

“Given how competitive this market is we do feel that in about 3 or 5 years from now you will have somewhere between three to five players globally that own parts of the messaging space in the world. You’re already seeing it right now, you have Line in Japan, you have Kakao in Korea, you have WeChat in China, you have WhatsApp in South America and Europe, you have of course Facebook message or iMessage dominating in U.S. and WhatsApp growing there too. In India of course WhatsApp is the dominant player but we’ve come on to be a very strong number two in just four months,” says Hike creator Kavin Mittal.

“We can see that with communication if you solve local problems in the market there is room for a local player to win the market completely.”

Hike is one of the latest contenders to jump into the mobile messaging space, albeit with a few neat tricks up its sleeve that it’s confident will allow it to grab significant share in its chosen markets — namely India, and other similar emerging markets in place like Indonesia, the Middle East and Africa. Some 60% of Hike’s registered users are in India, 40% globally led by the Middle East and Germany (despite its emerging markets focus, Germany was actually the first market to spike an interest in Hike — which its creator puts down to it having 128bit encryption over Wi-Fi and Germans looking for a “much more secure solution to WhatsApp”).

On the neat tricks front, Hike has baked a patent-pending SMS conversion tool into its app to take advantage of fragmentation in the Indian market caused by low distribution of data-capable smartphones. So this is not just about incorporating SMS messages into a unified app — as Google plans to with its Hangouts app – but about making sure a data message can still reach someone who doesn’t have data, via the SMS channel.

Mittal explains that in India, even where people own smartphones they may not have data enabled, or  may sporadically turn data off to save money. SMS is therefore still a key comms channel that needed to be brought into the loop. This fragmentation was the problem the app’s creators were setting out to solve with Hike. They have also done this in as low cost a way as possible by building a system that ensures it does not send cross-network SMSes (which incur a termination fee in India) but routes same network to same network.

“The idea behind Hike… is it works free globally. Hike is available on iPhone, Windows, Android S40, S60, very soon BlackBerry now as well. But in case you don’t have a phone than can install Hike, or let’s say you have a phone but you don’t have data, I can still message you from Hike for free. We convert the IP message into an SMS and it’s free for me as a Hike user, to which you can reply back to – and the reply comes back straight to my inbox making messaging very  seamless. So I have one app for all my friends,”  Mittal tells TechCrunch.

Another future trick — due to launch on June 10 — is something that will allow users who have turned off their data to still be notified that they have a message waiting for them, presumably so they know to turn data back on. “At this point in the market there’s no way to notify you when you have a message waiting on one of these applications. So we’re launching something on June 10^th that’s going to solve this problem, so no matter where you are – no matter if you’re online or offline – you’ll be able to communicate via Hike with your friend all the time,” he adds.

Hike is funding the conversion cost of sending the SMSes itself —  in the Indian market, with a view to extending it to other emerging markets with similar dynamics — so that is one of its largest sunk costs at the moment, according to Mittal. But its monetisation strategy is based on building off that base in another way. The shift Hike’s creators are ultimately calculating on is the movement of consumer spending in its target emerging markets away from carrier ‘value add services’ — paid for infotainment SMSes and so on — to data-based content and entertainment.

That’s where Hike sees its future profits, by fleshing out its messaging offering to supplement the bread and butter of social comms with “content that’s very relevant to the local market” – much as the Line messaging app is already doing with entertainment content such as stickers and games.

“India is a country of 20 countries. There’s so much diversity, cultural differences, dialects, languages that one has to cater to and given that this is a big entertainment market there is no doubt we’re going to go down the route of enriching messaging around content,” he says. “If you look at why you message it’s around a piece of content, topic, video, something new you’ve found, something funny. And India it’s much more prevalent than other markets so we’re definitely going down that route, there’s no doubt about it.”

Hike is also looking to work with carriers to share some of the SMS conversion cost, with the benefit for carriers being that Hike is acting as an IP pusher, turning mobile owners into data drivers — and data is ultimately where carriers in these emerging will be making their future revenues from too.

“Given the traction we’ve had in the Indian market we’ve seen a lot of interest from the operators who want to work closely with Hike and figure out how to expand and grow the traction with Hike because what we’re doing for the operators is we’re introducing a lot of people to data,” says Mittal. “What one can also do over SMS is send photos, videos and so forth, so if I’m on Hike and do  SMS I can send you a picture and you get a link on SMS so you can open it on a browser, so we’re striking deals in the Indian market and the emerging markets like Middle East and Africa where the cost is not only bourn by us but by the operator too.”

Hike is starting out with more resources than most startups, being created by BSB, a 50:50 Bharti Softbank joint venture, that acts as a “quasi-strategic incubator”, as Mittal puts it. Bharti Softbank invested $7 million into Hike about a month ago — a measure of how much traction the app had managed to achieve in a few short months. BSB projects get their first round funded by the parent companies if they achieve enough traction.

Going forward, Hike will likely look outside for funding, says Mittal — assuming it can keep on growing, and reach its goal of at least 10 million registered users (“our internal critical number”), which it views as the baseline required before starting to think seriously about monetisation.

“By the end of the year we’ll be in a positon to raise money from the external market. The reason we’re doing that is the VC market in India has less of an appetite for taking massive risk.  Because one of the first questions to ask is ‘hey guys why are you building another messaging app?’ And we were pretty certain that if we did what we did we’d get the traction and so far we’ve proved it,” says Mittal. “We’re in a point where we have the $7 million but we will look outside, even possibly the West Coast for funding.”

Mittal won’t put a figure on Hike’s active user base but says it’s “amongst the highest we’ve seen in the industry and definitely way above 50%”. ”We feel there is a room for a local player to dominate markets like India, Africa and China and so forth,  and take care of the local needs, and that is something we’re working on. That’s the big philosophy we have at BSB,” he adds.

India’s technology-adoption stratification poses a huge challenge when you’re trying to build an app that lets people talk to whoever they want. A challenge that, ultimately, gives the local kid a toehold over global mobile messaging players, argues Hike.

“The market kind of splits India into three sort of broad demographics, the top part really mimics the U.S. population  — 30, 40 million people – they’re really switched on, they know about the Internet, they have smartphones and so on and so forth; there are about 150 million people that are experimenting with the Internet, but they have a lot of churn there because the Internet is still not a utility for these guys; and then you have a billion people at the bottom of the pyramid that have no clue whatsoever the Internet even is,” says Mittal.

“As you go further down in India, how do you tackle the one billion people? No one knows but we’re in India here, so we’re the guys to figure it out.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not most–homes.

I was skeptical to begin with: after all, I thought, Chrome is acceptable when you’re online, but I’ll be spending much of my travel time offline, which probably makes it a non-starter, right? — So I devoted most of my Chromebook’s (bizarrely spacious) 320GB hard drive to an install of Ubuntu. Which I then never used even once.

I suppose I would have if some kind of critical work emergency had come up: after all, I’m (mostly) a software developer by trade, and ChromeOS isn’t much of a developer platform. But that didn’t happen. Good thing, too, because Linux-on-the-desktop seems as ugly and frustrating as ever for someone, even a deeply techie someone, who just wants to get things done.

ChromeOS, though, is both very pretty and almost painless. Its biggest problem is that out of the box it naively insists that you’ll be online all the time–even though it can be perfectly serviceable while disconnected. You may not have known that nowadays both GMail and (most) Google Docs can work just fine offlne.

And if you didn’t, well, Google sure isn’t about to proactively tell you. You actually have to make a point of seeking out, installing, and then activating Offline Gmail and Offline Google Docs from the Chrome Web Store. Why ChromeOS doesn’t prompt you with this option as part of the onboarding process is truly beyond me. Similarly, why on Earth are “Gmail’ and “Offline Gmail” two separate apps? Google may be full of incredibly smart people, but they can also be insanely myopic when it comes to end users.

Once those were up and running, though, my Chromebook was a charm to use under almost all circumstances. Offline, I could write documents, check old email, and even play a few free games from the Chrome Web Store, although most Chrome games still seem to require an initial server connection to start up. And online, of course, the world was my oyster.

Did I have access to all the features of, say, Word or Excel? Hell, no. (You still can’t create a Google Docs spreadsheet when offline, either.) Was it an all-guns-blazing gaming experience? Again, no, although Chrome’s rapidly evolving Native Client ought to keep matters improving here. What I could do, though, was email, play a few games, surf the Net, communicate (via GChat or Google Hangouts, which worked excellently), and write documents — which unless I’m much mistaken is pretty much everything that most people use their computers for at home.

ChromeOS still needs better, and simpler, offline support; and I’d like to see more diversity of available hardware; but once those two things are addressed, which shouldn’t take long, I would happily recommend a Chromebook to my parents the next time they upgrade. In fact I’d happily recommend one to anyone who wants a small second laptop for travel, or who doesn’t need to do serious work on their home computer.

Long ago Neal Stephenson, when comparing operating systems to vehicles, described MacOS as a hermetically sealed day-glo VW Beetle; MS Windows as a clunky two-tone station wagon; and Linux as the product of a horde of dreadlocked hippies who spent their time building M1 battle tanks and giving them away for free. Which sounds great at first, but who actually wants to drive a tank?

Well, if I may extend that a little, ChromeOS is like a sleek, shiny Airstream trailer built around that same M1 engine. There are many things it can’t do, and a bunch more at which it’s very clumsy, but within its bailiwick, casual exploring, it’s both very attractive and awfully comfortable.

I don’t think Stephenson’s original analogies quite hold any more, though. Nowadays OS X is more like a Porsche…and Windows is a gas-guzzling pickup truck, or a cube van that makes disturbing noises whenever it corners. Still suitable for work, but not particularly great for either road trips or sub/urban living — and nowadays looking nervously over its metaphorical shoulder at the flotilla of drones and self-driving cars on the horizon.

Image credit: Dan McCullough, Flickr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Any programmer or blogger knows that when you work on the Internet, on a computer, it’s easy to gain weight. Tech office pantries are stocked with Red Bull, candy, chips and even things you wouldn’t think were too unhealthy, like protein bars. Protein bars are basically injections of sugar. That’s why they taste like a Snickers.

But what no one talks about is that the “Startup 15″ or 40 is avoidable if you put in the effort, not to diet, but to be healthy.

Because she is constantly around tech geeks and herself works online, blogger Darya Rose, who is both my friend and the wife of Google Ventures Partner Kevin Rose, is acutely aware of this pain and has a solution: Foodist, a way to stay healthy without going crazy dieting.

Reading her book a couple of weeks ago, I came across a passage that struck me as truth. In “Instagram, A Parable,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom described a breaking point in his work/life balance as he tried to build the company. If you’re shoving down burritos in between database sharding, you probably can relate:

“We never ate healthy at the release,” recalled Systrom. “At least in the beginning, we’d be so into our work that crafting a salad out of arugula and radicchio just wasn’t going to happen midday.” Instead, they’d opt for the local food trucks or burritos near the office. Without their even realizing it, weight started to creep on.

“We were looking at old pictures from Instagram, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, you look so young,’ and I was like, ‘What does that mean? Do I have gray hair? That was like six months ago,’” Systrom explained. “After that I kept telling myself, ‘I’ve got to get healthy again.”

Systrom had gained 25 pounds between Instagram’s launch in October of 2010 and its first 10 million users. “I bought a scale one day and realized my weight was up to 235,” he writes in Foodist. ”And I had never been this heavy in my life. I used to be 210, and I was like, ‘That’s not okay.’ But I knew I was not going to pull a sorority girl and just eat salad, because I love food. I can eat less, but I’m not going to stop eating food I like just to lose weight. That would make me unhappy.”

How did he do it? Exercise, by waking up earlier, making sure healthy food options were available in the Instagram office, the buddy system and saving indulgences for the real deal. He also packed a gym bag before bed, like a true hacker of life. “I knew that if I didn’t pack my gym bag with the clothes I was going to wear the next day, I wouldn’t make it to the gym. I also needed to lay out my workout clothes. I’d wake up in the morning and just make myself a deal: ‘Listen Kevin, all you need to do is put on those clothes and you’ll wake up on the drive to work and you’ll be fine.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch