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Last year, Snapchat took its first big iterative step with the launch of Stories, which let users string together all of their snaps from the latest 24 hours into a single, fluid narrative. The company has since gone on to add text and video chat, transforming it from a simple photo-sharing app into a full-fledged messaging platform. And today, Snapchat is digging even deeper with the… Read More
Just one day after Google launched its SSD-based persistent storage volumes for its Cloud Platform, Amazon today announced a very similar service for its users. With its new General Purpose SSD volumes, Amazon now offers a middle tier between its standard hard-disk-based storage options for its Elastic Block Store (EBS) and its more expensive Provisioned IOPS volumes, which already used SSDs. Read More 
The biggest problem in 3D printing is mass production. While prototyping one or two items per day is fine for small manufacturers, what if you want to customize hundreds or thousands phone cases for Google’s Project Ara phone? Read More 
The world’s largest social network is trying to plug any hole in its dominance – it bought Instagram to shore up its place in photo-sharing, WhatsApp to expand its messaging and it attempted to buy Snapchat late last year.
When that project to buy the hottest new thing for teenagers failed, and its own usage amongst younger teens began to decline, it turned to its Creative Labs team to try to make its own at home.
Read more
Would force the FCC to protect neutrality
Privacy International exposes mass surveillance of UK internet users
Here at Re/code we’re still soaking up all of the fascinating stuff we saw onstage and heard in the halls at our first annual Code Conference.
But we want more! So we’re bringing our show to New York. You should join us on September 4.
Like our first Code/Media event we hosted in Santa Monica, this is going to be an evening of live journalism, featuring interviews with some of the most interesting people in media, both old and new. We’ve got two excellent speakers to announce, with more to come:
*ESPN President John Skipper runs America’s most valuable cable network, at a time when cable is stronger than ever — but may also have hit its peak. Skipper, whose channels get the highest subscriber fees in cable, has every incentive to keep the traditional pay TV model intact. But he’s also trying to experiment with alternative strategies. Later this year, for instance, his stuff may be available on an “over the top” Web TV service from Dish; he’s also mulling selling soccer directly to fans over the Web, Netflix-style.
*Time Inc CEO Joe Ripp runs America’s biggest magazine company, which just left its longtime corporate home. Now his job is to convince readers, advertisers and Wall Street that a print giant has a digital future. He has plenty of skeptics, which is why we’re eager to hear him make his case in public.
If you’ve been to one of our events before, you know what to expect when we host these things: In-depth, unscripted interviews onstage; lots of interesting people to meet sitting next to you. And if you’ve never made it in person, here’s your chance.
The caveat is that the Steelcase WorkLife Center , where we’re putting on our show, has amazing views of Manhattan, but a limited amount of seating. Tickets will go fast, so you should get yours here.
We’ll have more speakers to announce this summer. See you soon.
There are plenty of companies large and small vying to serve as a smartphone owner’s home screen.
With Terrain, launching on Tuesday, Samsung is offering up yet another option.
Terrain comes not from Samsung’s massive mobile operations, but instead from David Eun’s Palo Alto-based Samsung Accelerator, which launched last year.
In fact, Terrain is the first product to see a public release from the accelerator. Terrain offers users a list of cards that provide shortcuts to information, content, social network feeds, frequently accessed information and settings on the device.
“They are like CliffsNotes for your phone,” says Dwipal Desai, founder and CEO of Terrain, which is funded by Samsung but operates like its own six-person startup.
Swiping from left to right brings up the sidebar, while a swipe from right to left brings up a list of all apps, arranged alphabetically in a way that Desai said can be more useful than the standard Android means of sorting. A swipe up opens a local search option that looks for contacts, settings or anything else on the phone — but doesn’t query the Web.
“Search with Android is Web first,” Desai said. “We wanted search that is phone first.”
Terrain joins of a host of home screen options, from those that come preloaded by device makers to Facebook Home and other third-party software options. Desai said that the company chose to focus solely on the home screen, rather than both the lock screen and home screen, because lock screen replacements are less useful for users protecting their phones with pass codes.
Despite coming from Samsung, Terrain faces an uncertain path if it is to move beyond a lab project. Terrain will be made available free from the Google Play store and works with all Android phones running 4.2 or later. However, Samsung has no big distribution deals in place and is relying basically on word of mouth to let people know about the effort.
And while it is open for app makers to plug into, developer interest is likely to be scant unless Terrain first develops a decent-sized base of users. Desai acknowledged that he does face something of a chicken-and-egg problem, but said Samsung will look to craft some deals to make sure that its Terrain is not a desert.
A San Francisco startup has developed a wearable device that monitors breathing patterns and a mobile app that suggests adjustments, promising to allow users to control stress levels or otherwise improve their states of mind.
Or as the press release says in a cereal-box-worthy claim, Spire helps people “have a balanced and focused day.”
But the product arrives in a cluttered wearables market where similarly vague wellness assertions have yet to translate into broad consumer demand.
The company scores points for bothering to deliver a health tracker that measures something other than steps, sleep and calories. It's far from clear, however, whether consumers will pay good money for tips on a task they’ve managed since exiting the womb.
Starting Tuesday, the company is accepting preorders on its website at a cost of $119.99. Spire, which is in discussions with additional retail channels, plans to deliver the first products in September. The normal retail rate will run $149.99.
The company has raised about $1.5 million from Rock Health, Stanford University's StartX and undisclosed angel investors.
Spire resembles a smooth gray stone, if smooth gray stones came with belt clips. It slips on near the hip and measures respiration by tracking abdominal movement.
The smoothness and consistency of breaths as well as the inhalation-to-exhalation ratio can reveal periods of tension, relaxation and focus, the company says. If users take shallow breaths for an extended period — while, say, grinding through a story on deadline — the iOS app might remind them to take deep breaths, clear their mind or release tension.
If it sounds more like a yoga teacher than a doctor, that’s no accident. As with most wearables, the company hasn’t earned approval from the Food and Drug Administration, so it can’t make medical-grade diagnoses or weighty health claims.
But the company insists the product is based on sound science. Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Neema Moraveji is director of Stanford University’s Calming Technology Lab, which studies how products can mitigate the effects of stress.
During moments of tension, the body releases stress hormones, the heart beats faster and the lungs pick up speed, he said. Breathing is one of the few physiological symptoms that we can exercise direct control over, particularly when we’re made aware that it’s out of whack. That, in turn, helps the rest of the body return to a normal state.
“Skin sweating, you have no control over,” Moraveji said in an interview. “But respiration sits at the conscious/unconscious border.”
The device also tracks steps and body position. It comes with standard wearable sensors, including an accelerometer, as well as a few the company declines to discuss. They’ve applied for a patent to protect the technology (which means nothing more than what that sentence says).
The package includes a mahogany cork wireless charging dock that looks like a fancy drink coaster. The app connects via Bluetooth low energy, promising a light impact on battery life. When open, it registers every breath in real time by appearing to fog up.
So who's their target customer?
"In a sense, it's everyone," said Jonathan Palley, co-founder and chief executive officer. “But where we see the beginning is people who identify with the idea that feeling healthy at the end of the day is about more than fitness.”
Walker & Company, the startup founded by Foursquare vet Tristan Walker to create health and beauty products for people of color, has landed a Series A investment of $6.9 million led by Andreessen Horowitz. The round also includes funds from Upfront Ventures, which led the seed round, as well as Collaborative Fund, Daher Capital and longtime Apple retail exec Ron Johnson.
The company unveiled its first brand, Bevel, in December, selling a kit consisting of a shaving razor and shaving accessories targeted to men of color and others who struggle with irritation and razor bumps when shaving.
Now the 13-person company will use the new funds to expand the editorial content it produces; explore how it might start selling its products in physical retail stores; continue to invest in personalized customer service help; and eventually start working on new product development.
“Something special is happening and it's just up to us to make sure we’re not doing anything to sacrifice our relationship with our customer,” Walker said in an interview.
Andreessen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan is joining Walker on Walker & Company’s newly created board of directors. The company has now taken on more than $9 million in total investment.
Three of the big battlegrounds in personal technology today are music services, artificial intelligence, and smart physical devices that aim to make common hardware objects around the home brainier. This week, I reviewed an ambitious product that aims to meld all three of these trends — Cone, an intelligent Wi-Fi speaker that its maker calls “the world’s first thinking music player.”
Cone comes from a San Francisco startup called Aether Things, and was unveiled at our Code Conference last month. It goes on sale June 23 for $399 at the company’s website.
I’ve been testing the Cone on and off for weeks prior to its public debut, and since. It’s a handsome device, very different from other speakers, and does indeed show signs that it can use some degree of artificial intelligence to learn your musical tastes and habits. But it can also be frustrating, needs improvement, has limitations, and requires time and dedication to work as advertised.
[Sorry. This video cannot be displayed in this feed. View your video here.]From the front, Cone looks like a traditional whole-room speaker, with a large, round, black grill. But the differences end there. There’s a nearly invisible button in the middle of the grill that’s used to control aspects of the device, like play and pause. More importantly, pushing the button allows you to issue voice commands, like “Play ‘Graceland’ by Paul Simon.”
And — also nearly invisible — there is a rotating black rim around the speaker grill that you twirl to skip songs or to entirely change the type of music it plays, depending on how far you spin it. A short spin skips to the next song in an album or a song by another artist in the same genre. A long spin switches to a different type of music altogether.
From the rear, the Cone looks even less like a traditional speaker. Two copper-colored volume buttons sit toward the top, and the whole device is sharply tapered down to a copper-colored end cap. This houses the on-off switch and a power jack.
Rear view of the Aether Cone
There are no inputs or outputs for either traditional audio cables or a wired Ethernet connection. That’s because the Cone is meant to stream music wirelessly from cloud services or, if you prefer, from an Apple device using that company’s wireless AirPlay feature. It can’t be directly connected to a home-theater system.
At launch, the Cone can only play music from one streaming service, Rdio, which costs $10 a month for an unfettered subscription. It also connects to Stitcher, a service that streams podcasts and radio stations. The company hopes to add more services, and also plans to offer a white-and-silver model later this year. It’s also tightly tied to Apple products. A Mac or iOS mobile device is needed to set it up, and its companion app is iOS-only. The company says it’s working on Android compatibility, but has no timetable.
I am not an audiophile, so I can’t offer a detailed critique of Cone’s sound. I found it inferior to the lowest-end Sonos speaker, the $199 Play 1, which I own, but it was more than adequate for pleasant listening, especially with rock, pop and country music. It can be cranked up loud enough to fill a room with sound.
Unlike the Sonos, Cone is battery-powered and is meant to be movable from room to room, though it’s not fully portable like a small Bluetooth speaker. It weighs about three pounds and is about six inches tall, wide and deep. During my weeks of testing, I found it easy to move around my home, and used it comfortably in the family room, kitchen, study and back porch.
The company says that, if you use it a lot for several weeks, Cone will not only figure out what music you like, but what you like to hear at different times in different rooms. It does this using the device’s built-in firmware plus the company’s algorithms in the cloud.
In my tests, Cone did deduce that I am a big fan of singer-songwriters from the ’60s and ’70s, and defaulted to those artists. And first thing in the morning, it often, but not always, went to NPR, which I like to check at that time. But training Cone to display all its claimed wizardry apparently takes much more time over consecutive days than I was able to devote to it. It never seemed to tailor its suggestions for me by location, or day of the week, as the company claims.
Aether makes a big point of saying that because of its built-in smart controls, Cone doesn’t need to rely on an app or remote control, like other speakers. It has no dedicated remote control.
But it does have a minimal app. This app is largely meant to solve a problem in Cone’s design — there’s no screen, and the unit lacks the ability to speak. So, you have to rely on the app if you want to know what song Cone has chosen to play, especially if it isn’t one you recognize.
I found the app, which is still being polished, to be buggy. In normal use, it would smartly switch to a nice visual of the album being played, and would allow you to swipe to learn more about the artist or see and play the songs on the album. But too often the app failed to detect the song being played, or seemed to freeze. It also has no controls for skipping songs — you have to use the rotating rim for that.
The Aether Cone App
The company says it’s working on adding a “what’s playing” voice feature and others, such as the ability to tell Cone if you like or dislike a song.
And that brings up another limitation of Cone. Though it looks like, and plays like, a whole-room speaker, you really have to use it as a personal device, well within arm’s length, to operate the spinning dial and give it voice commands. If you are with others and want to crank up the volume, it will be too close to your ears for comfortable listening.
That said, once it figured out what I liked, it did a good job of playing a string of songs that matched my tastes. If I asked for “Hotel California” by The Eagles, it would play other Eagles songs, and tunes by artists like Crosby, Stills & Nash, Carole King, James Taylor and Paul Simon.
When I gave the dial a big spin to hear something entirely different, it would start playing Beyoncé, the Strokes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and, in one case, Yo-Yo Ma.
The biggest frustration was using voice commands. As on so many other devices and software that rely on voice input, Cone missed the mark too often. It never could recognize the singer-songwriter “J.D. Souther,” and when I asked for the pop band “Fountains of Wayne,” I got the hip-hop artist “Lil Wayne,” which is quite different.
I see Cone as a work in progress. It’s a fascinating new take on a music player, but I would only recommend shelling out $399 for one if you’re willing to spend a lot of time training it, and to put up with errant voice commands and a limited app.
Rob Wilson/Shutterstock
AT&T Inc will exclusively carry Amazon.com Inc’s long-rumored smartphone that is expected to be launched on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the plans.
Amazon.com revived speculation about its next major product earlier this month, using a mysterious YouTube video and website post to announce a June 18 “launch event” in Seattle to be hosted by Chief Executive Jeff Bezos.
The Journal and several tech blogs have reported that Amazon may be working on a phone with a three-dimensional display.
AT&T was the exclusive partner of Apple Inc when it launched the iPhone in 2007.
Hilch/Shutterstock
Practice Fusion, one of the largest providers of online electronic health records, plans to name a chief financial officer on Tuesday, in a move that often signals early plans for an initial public offering.
Courtesy: Practice Fusion Robert Park, CFO of Practice Fusion
The San Francisco company picked up Robert Park, previously vice president of Chegg. He helped take the online student hub public last year.
Asked whether they’re preparing for an IPO, the company provided the following statement.
“An IPO could definitely be in Practice Fusion's future, but we're focused primarily on the here and now: continuing to grow our platform, reaching all corners of the healthcare ecosystem and delivering on our mission to connect doctors, patients and data to drive better health and save lives.”
The prepared quote from Chief Executive Ryan Howard also did little to dampen the possibility of going public.
"Last year we tripled revenue and more than doubled our staff,” he said. “Adding Park to our executive leadership team positions us well for the next stage of our growth."
A successful offering could be a big payday for investors including Kleiner Perkins, Artis Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and others.
Last year, in an effort to prove that TV was the perfect medium to show off Twitter’s efficacy, the San Francisco social communications company created The Social TV Lab with giant media buying agency Starcom MediaVest Group to measure the impact of tweeting on brands.
In not much of a shockeroo, the results of this research effort to gauge “second-screen” behavior — which has become increasingly important to marketers, as they seek to find ways to get consumers interested in their products in the ever-noisy media landscape — showed that the use of Twitter increases engagement, awareness and, perhaps most importantly, sales.
Whether advertisers will believe this research is an open question. Among their likely questions to SMG and Twitter: Is it repeatable and scalable? Can it be proven beyond SMG’s clients? Does it move the needle far enough? Most importantly, are there clients that stand up and endorse the methodology?
The problem in the nascent stages of the sector is that there is a range of measurements that advertisers need to make bigger moves into social media spending, data they also need to be standardized. The challenge is further complexified by the difficulty of measuring real-time data in the burgeoning mobile environment.
But making it so is critical to Twitter, which has courted TV — and to a lesser extent, other media — quite adroitly, presenting itself as a partner instead of a competitor, even though it will quite clearly be an ad competitor at some point. That has been the focus of Twitter sales head Adam Bain and his team, who have been pitching ad products theoretically designed to augment traditional advertising — again, instead of competing with it.
Thus, The Social TV Lab. Twitter and SMG unveiled their data to Re/code at Cannes Lion, a giant advertising festival taking place on the French Riviera this week.
“Results confirm that content is paramount, and social TV is here,” said Twitter and SMG in a statement. “The opportunity to use it to enhance and amplify brand experiences for today’s multiscreen multitasker is only getting bigger. And, brands need to take notice.”
You think?
Hopefully this is true for Twitter, which is actually performing relatively well in the marketing arena; it is going to do more than $1 billion in ad revenue this year, even with all the concern about its small user base. That said, Twitter is still an experiment for most of the advertisers spending that $1 billion, which is why those concerns about the small user base are real and not just a figment of Wall Street’s imagination.
As part of the effort to get real numbers, the pair said it used a number of data points, including “Nielsen’s Brand Effect for Twitter, Datalogix’s matched household modeling, [and] Twitter’s in-Tweet surveys to track results spanning 15 U.S.-based SMG clients’ brand campaigns as well as general social TV engagements.”
According to their report:
1. Twitter + TV = Increased Brand Awareness vs. TV Alone. For brands that used Twitter alongside their TV advertising, the study found on average a 6.9% increase in awareness for exposed audiences and significant increases for exposed and engaged audiences across awareness, intent and favorability measures.
2. Twitter Amplification = Sales Lift. For the brands that measured sales impact, we saw sales increases of 4% on average in households exposed to ads on Twitter and TV vs. just TV ads alone.
3. The Twitter / TV Multitaskers Are Here — and TV Ad Recall is High For Them. Only one-quarter of tweeting occurs during the ad break, and it was highest during reality shows (27%). This supports existing Twitter research that found viewers who are actively engaging in social media while viewing TV are genuinely paying attention to both screens, as TV show tune-away is less and ad recall is higher for TV Twitter multitasks. Television ad recall was also 13% higher among Twitter users versus non-multitaskers.
4. Real-Time TV Content Engagement Is on Twitter. Tweeting about events/shows is higher (20%) than "general browsing" about a specific event/show (15%). In addition, most tweeting happens when something in show/game/ad is worthy of a tweet (70%).
In an interview last night with Bain and SMG CEO Laura Desmond, the pair said that they will continue to hone the data to help prove to marketers that adding on all kinds of social media will help — or, in Twitter’s preferred lexicon, “amplify” — their advertising.
“We have always felt that Twitter integrated advertising into its core product better than anyone else,” said Desmond. “We need these consumer insights to build better plans for marketers … and we really need to get much better data on how to use Twitter and other social media.”
Bain added: “Advertisers have the gut but not the data that it works, so we need to continue to bring them proof.” In addition, he noted, marketers need more information about what kinds of tweeting works, including the effectiveness of incorporating more video, photos and things like coupons into the messaging. “We need to offer a full spectrum,” he said.
Of course, not everyone is down with Twitter being the medium to spur digital advertising. In late April, NBCUniversal* research chief Alan Wurtzel said that the effect of Twitter, as well as Facebook, on ratings during the Winter Olympics was not as strong as expected. As Peter Kafka noted: “Wurtzel saw lots of chatter about Sochi on social media, but none of that seemed to translate to increased viewership.”
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo refuted Wurtzel, noting to analysts: “Our Twitter and TV strategy, and our investment into that thesis, was very much based on data that we saw informing the two-way complementary relationship between Twitter and TV.”
* NBCUniversal is an investor in Revere Digital, the parent company of Re/code.
Reuters / Brendan McDermid
Apple has reached an agreement to settle a civil class action suit related to e-book pricing, according to court documents filed on Monday.
The documents, filed Monday, indicate a deal has been reached, but don’t spell out terms of the arrangement. The plaintiffs in the case had been seeking as much as $840 million in damages.
“The parties write to inform the Court that the Class Plaintiffs, State Plaintiffs, and Apple have executed a binding agreement in principle to resolve the Class litigation, and the damages phase of the States' litigation,” plaintiff’s attorney Steve Berman wrote in a letter to the Denise Cote, the federal judge presiding over the case.
Although the parties have come to some sort of agreement, Apple is still appealing the court’s ruling from last year that Apple was liable for violating both federal and state antitrust rules and the letter to the court says “any payment to be made by Apple under the settlement agreement will be contingent on the outcome of that appeal.”
The judge signed an order agreeing the plaintiffs in the case will have until July 16 to file the proposed settlement terms.
An Apple representative declined to comment; Berman did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
Apple has maintained it has done nothing wrong and has fought efforts to have a court monitor oversee the company’s compliance.
