In an effort to encourage activity in the Canadian venture capital community, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has set aside C$400 million (US$407 million) to stimulate private-sector investments in the country, Global News reports. Harper admitted during a news conference that Canada’s venture capital markets have been faced with “mixed results” over the past 10 years, especially during the recent economic crisis. His Venture Capital Action Plan sets aside C$250 million for new funds in cooperation with provinces or investors. An additional C$100 million will go toward pre-existing funds and C$50 million will be put into “high-performing Canadian venture capital funds,” according to the report. The money will be disbursed over the next seven to 10 years. “Our government firmly believes strong action is required to bolster the available risk capital in Canada,” Harper said, while on the set of “Dragon’s Den“, a television show that features entrepreneurs pitching to venture capitalists. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty noted that the plan’s focus is to help keep young entrepreneurs in Canada rather than seeing them head to America or to big corporations. The Canadian government is open to a little outside help. In a statement on Monday, it said that one of its goals was to get more experienced fund managers operating in the country, possibly by “attracting foreign expertise and capital to Canada’s venture capital market.” The action plan was tipped as early as last March, and investor Sam Duboc is slated to play an advisory role to the $400 million fund. Canada saw some VC action in the 1990s, but investments have trailed off since the dot-com crash. The ensuing decade has been relatively quiet. $400 million is a hefty start, but it might not be big enough to jump start the industry. New Democratic Party Finance Critic Peggy Nash told Global News that the plan amounted to “just peanuts.” Canadian tech executive Adam Chowaniec told The Globe and Mail last year that the country would need an additional $1 billion a year in VC funding to keep up with the US. With lots of Canadian startups, including Hootsuite, Kik and Clarity, coming onto the scene, let’s hope Harper’s $400 million gets the ball rolling. Image credit: Rogerio Barbosa / AFP / Getty Images
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Web backup service Dropmysite is making a big push into Japan after it announced a partnership with GMO Cloud. The deal sees the Japanese hosting company — an arm of the GMO Internet Group – invest in the Singapore-based startup and begin reselling its email backup service Dropymyemail in the country. The deal is for Dropmyemail Business, its solution for small business and enterprise users rather than consumers. GMO Cloud counts more than 130,000 businesses as customers in Japan and it says it has 6,000 sales partners in the country. That’s going to give Dropmyemail a huge boost in visibility, but the company also has a global footprint. Dropmysite founder John Fearon tells TNW that this is the company’s first official public partnership and it will “help us expand globally”. The two companies are also jointly developing a smartphone app for Dropmyemail. The app will lean on GMO’s Cloud resources and Dropmyemail’s technical knowledge and is expected to be released “within a relatively short timeframe”. Fearon reveals that the app will be global, but the companies may also release a localized version for customers in Japan. The investment figure has not been disclosed, but the company says it is ‘six figures’ and it takes Dropmysite to more than $1 million in funding to date. It’s worth taking a moment to explain the difference between Dropmysite and Dropmyemail. Dropmysite is the registered company and the Web backup service of the same name was its first product. Dropmyemail is a service that was introduced later and it quickly became the company’s most popular product. Today it handles 3TB of data, Fearon tells us. The Dropymysite chief says there is another “big deal” coming up which the company is preparing to announce, and we can expect more global partners to come aboard in due course. “We expect to grow our VARs [value added resellers] substantially in the next year, that’s really important for our B2B marketing efforts,” Fearon explains. Last year was a big one for the company, which first caught our eye at the Echelon 2012 event in Singapore. Dropmysite focused on the US as it bought Orbitfiles in June and then opened an office in Dallas — its first in the US — in August, while Dropmyemail got a range of new features, including a Dropbox-like attachment management feature. ➤ Dropmysite | Dropmyemail Image via dannyboyd / Flickr
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Apple has announced that the WiFi + Cellular models of its iPad mini and 4th-gen iPad will arrive in China this Friday, January 18th. In its release, Apple also said that these iPad models are now available in 100 countries worldwide, making it one of the company’s fastest international rollouts ever. The models will be available through Apple retail stores, the online store and select Apple retailers. The carriers supporting the cellular functions of the iPad mini and 4th generation iPad include China Telecom and China Unicom. Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the iPads were coming to China just a few days ago in an interview with reporters on a visit to the country. At the time, Cook admitted that a longer approval time for the cellular versions of the products did put them behind schedule. Cook said at the time that China would eventually become Apple’s largest market, eventually hosting 25 stores. Currently, Apple has 8 stores in four cities. China accounted for 15% of Apple’s revenue in its last fiscal year. The non-cellular editions of the iPad mini and 4th-generation iPad arrived in China on December 7th. If the prices remain consistent, then they should retail for the following: iPad mini WiFi + Cellular  16GB RMB 3,488 (US $561) iPad mini WiFi + Cellular 32 GB RMB 4,288 (US $690) iPad mini WiFi + Cellular 64 GB RMB 5,088 (US $818) iPad ’4′ WiFi + Cellular 16GB RMB 4,688 (US $754) iPad ’4′ WiFi + Cellular 32GB RMB 5,488 (US $882) iPad ’4′ WiFi + Cellular 64GB RMB 6,288 (US $1,011) Image Credit: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
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Canada-based Rogers Communication announced that it had signed an agreement to secure Options to “purchase Shaw [Communications'] Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum holdings in 2014.” In addition, Rogers also acquired Shaw’s cable system in Hamilton, Ontario. But Shaw said it will be buying the remaining one-third percent stake from Rogers in TVtropolis, a specialty channel owned by both companies displaying iconic TV shows from back in the day. With the potential purchase of Shaw’s AWS spectrum holdings, Rogers says it will be able to maintain its leadership position in Western Canada, where it currently has a significant share of the wireless market. Shaw says its AWS spectrum holdings cover 188 million MHz POPs including 20 MHz across British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba, and 10 MHz in select British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Northern Ontario markets. Any purchase will have to be reviewed and approved by Industry Canada and Competition Bureau — the agency that originally held an auction for AWS spectrums in 2008. Rogers says that if approved, the earliest this transaction could go through would be 2014. Since Shaw purchased its AWS spectrum holdings in 2008, it has reportedly struggled to enter the market. In April 2011, the company announced that it would be slow down the building of its wireless network as it considered its technology and strategy options. In January 2012, it postponed its launch until later in the year. In doing so, it has allowed other Western Canada-focused companies like Telus establish a foothold into long-term evolution (LTE) networks that many smartphone users are becoming quite used to. Besides being owners of TVtropolis, the two companies signed a long-term distribution deal of all of Shaw Media services, including top-performing channels and on-demand rights to Global TV coverage. Signed in November 2011, this deal ensured Shaw’s programming would be available not only on-demand, but also online and on mobile devices, through linear, VOD, broadband, and mobile rights. The deal is said to be worth C$700 million with $50 million going to Shaw as payment for the Option to purchase its spectrum holdings. Rogers says: Final consideration for the spectrum will be payable if Rogers exercises its Option and the spectrum licenses are acquired, and will take into account the terms of the services agreement  between Rogers and Shaw. The Option will be exercisable from the date on which regulatory approvals permit such exercise and the transfer of the spectrum licenses until expiry in March 2015, subject to extension in certain circumstances. The transactions are not conditional on the closing of any other transactions and remain subject to customary conditions, including applicable regulatory approvals as referred to above. Photo credit: John Moore/Getty Images
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Microsoft-owned Yammer has just opened up its new headquarter office in the mid-Market district of San Francisco. Co-founders David Sacks and Adam Pisoni cut the ribbon to celebrate the new office space. With the move, the company joins other tech giants making the area home to their employees, including ZenDesk, Twitter, and One Kings Lane. Previously located near the CalTrain station at 410 Townsend Street, Yammer had rapidly outgrown its space. By the end of the year, it inhabited at least two floors and lacked the necessary conference room space for its teams to be productive. Today, Yammer is inhabiting a space encompassing 80,000 square feet and enough room for at least 400+ desks. Its San Francisco office has 330 employees right now, with 445 stationed globally, including its New York City office, which Yammer opened last summer, and in London. The reception area at Yammer. Yammer invited us to take a tour of its new offices and we found it to be large and spacious. We took a tour of the place at the same time the employees were arriving for work and many, if not all, were seeing it for the very first time. There are dozens of conference rooms of varying sizes and enough common space area for people to congregate and work. Yammer says that when it was looking for new space, it wanted to focus on those two things, in addition to making the office more transparent and all on one floor. Yammer’s new office furniture While the San Francisco city government has passed tax incentives to keep companies in town, Yammer says that those tax credits did not motivate it to select its new office space — rather, it says it was an added bonus. Apparently, the company’s real estate/facilities team had been scouting for new offices over the past few years and had found its Market Street location quite appealing. This morning, both co-founders, Jason Rodrigues, Yammer’s controller, and San Francisco Board of Supervisor Jane Kim, took part in a ribbon-cutting ceremony to officially open up the office. The entrance to Yammer’s new headquarter office On a wall, Yammer has hung its TechCrunch50 award. Yammer’s desks span for as far as the eye can see. Yammer’s new office is filled with much more artwork compared to its previous one. It tells us that during a hack day, many of its employees created different art pieces to describe the company. Aesthetically-speaking, the workspace is quite fitting of the company. It’s very much adorned in Yammer blue and has the company’s personality in every detail. Yammer has provided top-of-the-line equipment to its employees in order to better do their jobs, including monitors in every conference room with cameras to conduct video conferencing, standing desks for everyone, and countless other services. Yammer conference room The company is now a part of a historic part of San Francisco, taking shelter in a building that had been largely left unoccupied for the past 50 years. See also: Microsoft-owned Yammer quietly introduces Facebook-like live chat feature, Yammer unveils the Open Graph for the enterprise, to help make business apps more social,
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Amazon on Monday announced its Instant Video app has arrived on the original Nintendo Wii. You can download the app now from the Wii Shop Channel. The news means if you use Amazon for your video needs, and you have Nintendo’s Wii console, you now have access to more than 145,000 movies and TV episodes available to purchase or rent from Amazon’s Instant Video library. Furthermore, if you’re an Amazon Prime customer, the app lets you stream more than 33,000 movies and TV episodes for free. Just like on the Wii U, Amazon has made sure the console’s controllers can do more than just hit play. The Wii Remote Plus controller lets users browse and search for titles. Other features include: Smart lists such as Recently Watched, Watchlist, Genre Recommendations, and Your TV Shows that allow youto easily manage their viewing choices. Your Video Library gives you access to purchases from Amazon Instant Video on the Wii or any of the hundreds of other devices enabled for Amazon Instant Video. Parental Controls and Kid Zone features that allow parents to manage access to age appropriate content and also easily navigate specific categories to find family-friendly programming by age. Whispersync lets customers seamlessly switch from one device to another. Start streaming a movie on Kindle Fire, then pick up right where you left off on your Wii console. “Since it arrived in November of 2006, Wii has been a cultural phenomenon,” Duncan Orrell-Jones, Senior Vice President of Network Business at Nintendo of America, said in a statement. “With more than 40 million units purchased in the U.S. alone, the addition of Amazon Instant Video means more choice across a significant portion of the American entertainment landscape.” Back in November, Amazon launched the app for Nintendo’s Wii U console. Since sales haven’t particularly taken off for the Wii’s successor, Amazon probably figured it should support the original Wii as that one sold like hotcakes. Image credit: Vangelis Thomaidis
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To kick off 2013 in the Windows Phone app world, Microsoft has announced a new contest called Windows Phone Next App Star for developers. The top prize is a featured placement of the app in a Windows Phone prime-time TV ad in the US. The announcement comes along with a great tidbit on Windows Phone app ecosystem progress. Todd Brix, Senior Director of Windows Phone Apps Team, shared with TNW that Windows Phone app downloads and developer revenue have doubled in the last 60 days. The whole point of the contest is to bring more developers to the Windows Phone paltform, though for the luck winners it will likely also mean increased app visibility. Although the ad in question will be in the US, the contest is open to Windows Phone developers worldwide. To participate, registered developers simply have to visit and opt-in at the Dev Center by March 5. Microsoft will do the rest: it will enter your catalog of published apps in the competition. If you haven’t yet developed a Windows Phone app (or you want to make tweaks to an existing app), you have 50 days to publish it in order to be eligible. The app submissions will be judged based on an equal weighting of user ratings and app quality, including implementation of new Windows Phone 8 features. Microsoft will start with picking 64 entries, and then host a head-to-head, bracket-style competition with public voting (ending on April 8), narrowing down the playing field to 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and finally the grand prize winner. If your app submission doesn’t end up being the top winner, Microsoft says there will still be thousands of dollars in prizes for the developers of the 64 apps that get selected, including a Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone and a one-year free Dev Center subscription. Here’s Microsoft’s pitch: This isn’t just about picking the most popular app in the Store. Windows Phone Next App Star is about giving developers a shot at being the next big hit. You don’t have to be a longtime developer on the Windows Phone platform — even a newcomer can win fans and win big. The only real requirement is that you are 18 years of age. If you’re interested, check out the official rules (PDF). See also – Microsoft says Windows Phone 8 increased app submissions by 40%, to keep full staff on for holidays Image credit: Paolo Ferla
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Aside from its traditionally difficult-to-reach target demographic and rapid growth, one of the most interesting aspects of Pinterest is its potential to become an e-commerce giant. Pinterest already has access to heaps upon heaps of data, but the startup has yet to publicly tap into its user’s shopping tastes and purchase intent. As such, even with limited options for developers, third-party services are stepping in to fill the void. Shopmine is one such startup operating atop Pinterest, and although it’s still in its early stages, the company has our attention. At its core, Shopmine turns Pinterest into an email subscription of shop-able items plucked from your feed. The items are harvested from pins posted by those you follow, but are vetted for purchasability — so if you find something that piques your interest, you won’t have to scour the Web for items that were never even available (or were limited edition/custom-made). For a fashion-focused Pinterest user such as my girlfriend, Shopmine’s emails might look something like this: Clicking on an item brings you to Shopmine’s product page, which reveals which users pinned the item. Over time, Shopmine has plans for more sophisticated product recommendations. Currently, the company is exploring affiliate links as an income source. Shopmine makes Pinterest shop-able, and after using the service ourselves, we see potential in its simplicity and useful recommendations. Try it for yourself via the link below. ➤ Shopmine Image credit: Jupiterimages / Thinkstock
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According to UBS, Microsoft likely sold 1 million Surface tablets during the holiday sales cycle. This is down from the analyst’s previous sales estimate of 2 million units for the product line. Things to keep in mind: at an average selling price of more than $500, given that Touch and Type cover push the Surface past the $600 mark, just for the holiday season the Surface is more than a half billion dollar business for Microsoft. It will be a billion dollar enterprise this year, several times over by the end it seems likely. This is key for Microsoft, as business units in its enterprise use the billion dollar mark as a benchmark: it’s the point of having ‘made it.’ Thus, the Surface team will join the other large Microsoft divisions in its first full calendar year, and first consecutive twelve months. In Redmond, this is success. The company obviously wanted more. 1 million Surfaces is a fraction of the supply numbers that were floating about earlier in the last few months of 2012; Microsoft had hoped to sell a multiple of the 1 million figure. As its CEO Steve Ballmer noted, the company hoped to sell “a few million” Surface tablets in the “coming year.” If he meant the 2012, or the first 12 months of the device isn’t clear. That said, if the Surface project had failed to reach 7 figures in its first go with consumers, it would have been an embarrassment. However, akin to the Windows Phone project, the Surface enterprise is one that Microsoft intends to invest in for the foreseeable future. Thus the million units, while not spectacular by any measure – Apple is expected to have moved 20 million iPads during the same period – is enough of a start; the market didn’t repudiate the device wholesale. Naturally, Windows 8 plays a role in this; like the Surface, sales of Windows 8 have been enough, but not fantastic. 1 million Surfaces is 1 million more tablets than Microsoft has sold before. It’s no where near enough, but it will suffice for now. Companies with more than $50 billion in cash can afford to invest. Top Image Credit:  BUILDWindows
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Update: Trading has resumed, with Dell skyrocketing 15% in short order, following the news. Trading of popular computer manufacturer Dell was halted today following news that the company may be taken private by perhaps two private equity companies. According to Bloomberg, a number of large banks have been contacted about financing a potential offer to buy the company. Dell, worth around $20 billion at last count, is a key original equipment manufacturer of PCs that run Microsoft’s Windows operating system. That said, the company has had a difficult few years, through economic slowdown, and margin pressure. In its most recent quarter, Dell had revenues of $13.7 billion, and net income of $475 million. The company has around $11 billion in cash, implying a market valuation of its operations – less that cash amount – of under $10 billion. That is a very rough metric, as it doesn’t take into account the company’s debts. There is a bit of irony in this, as Michael Dell famously said of Apple, during its down period, that “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Dell retains an ownership stake of 15.7 percent in the company. In 2010, he stated that he was open to the idea of the firm becoming a private enterprise once again. Global PC shipments are slipping, presenting a difficult market for Dell. The company has diversified from its core business; still, the firm’s lion share of revenue still comes from the creation and sales of laptops and desktops; its forays into smartphones did not fare well, with its Windows Phone line canceled after a single sales cycle. Given its cash position, proven revenue, and brand power, that Dell is a target for private takeover is hardly surprising; the company, off the public market, could revamp itself without care to short-term earnings, perhaps rebuilding the firm’s profits for a future, second IPO. If and when buyers are named, TNW will bring the information to you. Expect the purchase price to a be a fat premium on the company’s earlier trading range. Top Image Credit: Dell Inc.
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Late on Sunday, Microsoft announced it would be releasing an emergency patch for Internet Explorer to patch a security hole used to breach Windows computers in targeted attacks. On Monday, as promised, the company shipped the update, which all Windows XP users and below should install immediately. Here’s Microsoft’s guidance (more details in Microsoft Security Advisory 2794220): The majority of customers have automatic updates enabled and will not need to take any action because protections will be downloaded and installed automatically. For those manually updating, we strongly encourage you to apply this update as quickly as possible. [I]f you previously applied the Fix it offered through the advisory, you do not need to uninstall it before applying the security update released today. However, the Fix it is no longer needed after the security update is installed, so we are recommending that you uninstall it after you have applied the update to your system. The reason we say Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 users don’t have to bother with this patch is simple: IE9 and IE10 are not affected. Windows 8 comes with the latter, Windows 7 with the former, and Windows Vista users should all upgrade to the former. The IE zero-day flaw first came to light late last month after security firm FireEye detailed that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) had been hacked, and was hosting malicious content as early as December 21. Security researcher Eric Romang found that microturbine systems producer Capstone Turbine was also a victim since at least December 18. After that, Avast let us know that multiples sites around the world had been targeted as well, and then the reports just kept flooding in as other security firms dug deeper. Microsoft responded by issuing a security advisory on December 29 (a Saturday!) and then followed up the Monday (December 31) with a temporary one-click “Fix it” tool. Running was supposed to prevent the vulnerability in IE6, IE7, and IE8 from being used for code execution, without affecting the user’s ability to browse the Web. On January 8, the first Patch Tuesday of the New Year, Microsoft did not release a patch for the flaw, leading to speculation on whether users would end up having to wait till February. Thankfully, that did not happen, though it’s not clear what exactly spurred Microsoft to quicken its pace. When it released the temporary “Fix it” solution, Microsoft said it had “observed only a few attempts to exploit this issue” but nothing widespread. We noted at the time that Microsoft was monitoring the Web to see if the exploit starts being used more broadly (beyond targeted attacks), and only then would the company likely rush out a patch. The other possibility is that Microsoft’s Fix it solution simply wasn’t good enough. Exodus Intelligence security researchers claimed they had figured out how to bypass it; Microsoft told TNW at the time it was aware of the claim and reached out to the group for more information. We have contacted Microsoft to see what spurred the company to release a patch before the next Patch Tuesday. The company did note on Monday that it has “seen only a limited number of attacks through an issue in Internet Explorer 6-8, but the potential exists that more customers could be affected” but didn’t go into further detail. We will update this article if we hear back with more. Whatever the reason, old IE versions can now be patched. Meanwhile, it’s great to see new IE versions were safe all along. Update at 2:00PM EST: “On Jan. 14, 2013, we released a security update to fully address the issue described by Security Advisory 2794220,” Dustin Childs, group manager of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, told TNW. “While the impact has been limited, for increased protection customers should apply the update as soon as possible if they do not have automatic updates enabled.” In other words, Microsoft finished testing the patch and deemed it safer to get it out than to sit on it any longer. Image credit: Miguel Saavedra
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Mere days after releasing Chrome 24 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Google on Monday announced the release of Chrome 25 beta. Among the new features is a new tab page with a search box, voice search support via the new Web Speech API, and the blocking of silent extension installation. The Web Speech API is a new JavaScript API that lets developers integrate speech recognition into their web apps. After you install the new beta, you can try it out yourself over here: Web Speech API Demonstration. The voice search support is something Google has been pushing hard on Android phones but wants to bring to the desktop more and more. The company envisions users dictating documents, controlling game characters, and even having a freestyle rap battle. More to follow.
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We have some good news for your Monday: email privacy as a legislative priority and actionable issue is not dead. It was with some sadness that we reported that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) would not be amended to better privacy for individuals users of electronic communications in the last Congress. The idea of improving the safeguards for private communication was one to be applauded, not dismissed. Key to the issue is the fact that the ECPA is decades old legislation, and that under its regulations any email that is more 180 days old and has been read can be accessed with nothing more than a subpoena. The goal was to change that requirement to a formal warrant to access any electronic communication. The idea, however, is not dead. According to The Hill, it merely went dormant in between Congressional sessions: [Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy's] top technology priority will likely be to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to require that police obtain a warrant before reading people’s emails, Facebook messages or other forms of electronic communication. It will have a much higher chance of passing as his chief priority than as simply one of many agenda items for the committee. In the Senate, previously, the concept passed. However, it failed to pass House Republicans who worried about its impact on police work. This is a clear-cut issue that balances individual privacy and the ability of law enforcers to move quickly. TNW falls on the side of individual liberty at the expense of ease of government oversight of our private lives. As the issue progresses, we’ll keep you informed. Top Image Credit: Zoe Rudisill
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Just one month after Netflix nabbed exclusive access to Disney’s first-run films in a multi-year deal, the video-on-demand (VoD) service announced a deal with Warner Bros. Television Group last week that will make it the exclusive online home for 2012-13 seasons of a slew of dramas. And now it seems Netflix is beefing up its TV content even more with the news that Turner Broadcasting and Warner Bros. Television Group have inked a multi-year agreement with Netflix, covering complete previous seasons from the Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. Animation, Adult Swim and the TNT drama Dallas, from Warner Horizon Television. As with the Warner deal announced last week, this will apply to Netflix members in the US only, and from March 30 this year, they’ll have access to complete past seasons of the likes of Adventure Time, Ben 10, Regular Show and Johnny Bravo, while Warner Bros. Animation’s Green Lantern will become available in the Just for Kids section. Launching at the same time will be Adult Swim shows such as Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sony Pictures Television’s The Boondocks and Childrens Hospital from WBTVG’s Studio 2.0. Back in December, Amazon inked an exclusive licensing deal with Turner Broadcasting and Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution for two of TNT’s series. And with the myriad of VoD services that are coming to the fore, it’s all about content acquisition now, as the competitors look to stand out from the crowd. Of course, exclusives are pivotal to this. And from January 2014, Netflix will be getting sole-access to season one and two of the Warner Horizon Television-produced TNT series Dallas. “The industry has evolved so that TV Everywhere and subscription video on-demand services can coexist with the appropriate windowing strategy, while allowing for more content flexibility to meet consumer demand in the changing digital landscape,” says Deborah K. Bradley, senior vice president of program acquisitions for Turner Broadcasting. “We’re happy to offer our popular programming to Netflix members, as SVOD services have become another way to grow audiences and can introduce new viewers to our programming.” Turner Broadcasting System is a Time Warner company, creating branded news, entertainment, animation and young adult content, as well as sports media environments on television and other platforms for consumers around the world. Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock
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Just one week after Pulse announced it had passed twenty million users, the digital news aggregation magazine rolled out Pulse 3.0 in early November, a wholly redesigned app with new features and a new design. Two months on from that, Pulse is about to get a lot more social with yet another not-insignificant update to its iOS and Android apps. Indeed, with the new versions of the apps, users will be able to sign-in to their Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr and Facebook accounts, which will reel in all the content from their social networks and put them together in one place. The content from these services have been formatted specifically for Pulse, with redesigned story-views for photos and videos. Just to recap briefly, Pulse takes your favorite news and media sites and transforms them into an interactive mosaic. It’s a little like Flipboard. Launching two years ago for iPad, Pulse later arrived for iPhone/iTouch and Android, bringing beautiful news-browsing to the lion’s share of the mobile market. And back in June last year, it transcended its reading roots by introducing thirty new video-focused channels, before adding a mesmerizing Web app aimed squarely at Windows 8 tablets. “Two years ago, when Pulse launched, we saw a lot of people painfully switching between different websites or apps to read their news,” says Pulse co-founder Akshay Kothari. “They would open up a lot of tabs in their browser or create a folder with a lot of publisher apps on their phone. Pulse set out to make lives easy by getting the best news content in one place. “Fast-forward to today, we now see a lot of people painfully switching between social networks to get their favorite content,” he continues. “But, hopping across social networks is so 2012, and who wants to live in the past? With the latest Pulse update, for iOS and Android, you can browse your favorite social feeds in one place, with one clean interface. Welcome to the new age.” To add your social feeds to the new versions of Pulse, tap the blue Add Content button at the bottom of the left navigation bar, swipe to Social or What’s New, then tap the icon to add your feed to a page. The updated apps should be hitting their respective stores shortly. ➤ Pulse: iOS | Android Feature image credit – Thinkstock
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The tablet market appears to be having a negative affect on worldwide shipments of traditional PCs, Obvious Corporation’s curated discussion platform Branch opens to all, and Eric Schmidt stops by China after his controversial North Korean trip. It’s all in today’s Daily Dose. You can catch The Daily Dose every Monday through Friday right here on The Next Web. Be sure to hit the subscription button of your choice below to get The Daily Dose as soon as it’s available. The tablet effect? Worldwide PC shipments fall to 90.3 million in Q4 2012: Read more Curated discussion service Branch launches publicly with highlights, activity feeds, Spotify support: Read more After North Korea trip, Google’s Eric Schmidt swings by China to woo Android developers: Read more   
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Nest Labs, the learning thermostat company, has appointed Tom vonReichbauer as it’s new CFO. The announcement was made today by founder and CEO Tony Fadell. vonReichbauer comes from Tesla motors, where he served as Director of Finance for the last 4 years. vonReichbauer brings a history of financial positions at other automotive companies like Ford and Volvo. “Through his leadership and involvement in financial and strategic planning and public and private financing,” says Fadell, “Tom helped Tesla grow into a major player in the global auto industry.” Tesla has shown impressive growth lately, with founder Elon Musk saying that “”I’m hoping we’ll have a profitable quarter this year…shame on us if we can’t achieve that,” at the Detroit Auto Show earlier today. In addition to a new CFO, second Nest employee Shige Honjo has been promoted to VP, Program Management and Manufacturing. As is the case with Fadell and co-founder Matt Rogers, Honjo is an ex-Apple employee who acted as Lead Engineering Program Manager for several ‘early generations of iPhone’. More to follow Image Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
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Done Not Done attempts to differentiate itself from other to-do list apps by positioning itself as an app for things you want to do, rather than things you have to do. While that in itself is a somewhat weak differentiator, digging in a little reveals something that isn’t really a to-do list app per se. It’s more of a bookmarking app that helps you remember all those books, movies and songs you keep meaning to read, watch and listen to. Available for the Web and iOS, Done Not Done also serves as a diary of sorts, helping you remember the content you’ve consumed. How it works You have to create an account in the first instance, which is quick and painless. Once in, you’ll be presented with a blank canvas which you populate with things you’d like to watch, listen or read. The idea here, is that whenever a friend recommends something to you, you search for the item in the app, and you add that item to your ‘Not Done’ list. You can then switch it easily to your ‘Done’ list when you finally get around to it. While the current iteration of Done Not Done is nice, there is room for a bit of improvement. For example, it would be good to be able to attribute a date to a ‘Done’ event, so you can remember exactly when you watched that film. Now, you can actually manually add in notes for each entry, which could be a date, but it would be good to be able to filter content by date, so you can check all the movies you saw in January 2013, for example. Plus, there’s room for having more content associated with each movie, book or piece of music. As it stands, there’s really just the name and cover image. It would be good if it could tap into an IMDb-type database, or Wikipedia even, to read more about an item from within the app. There’s plenty of similar apps out there already. Flickd Movies (iOS) is a pretty slick way to remember movies you don’t want to miss, while Showy helps you track your favorite TV shows and tick off episodes as you watch. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the IMDb app for movies, which has a built-in Watchlist feature to store all those movies you plan to get ’round to watching sometime. It’s probably also worth mentioning the similarities between this and Recall, which is a beautiful way to remember good music, movies, books and more. Recall, however, costs $2.99 and offers a slightly broader list of media items than Done Not Done, including apps. Moreover, Recall alerts you when your favorite artist releases a new album, for example, and it offers a richer array of features. But for a first version, Done Not Done isn’t bad at all, and I think this could eventually evolve into a much different app. There’s certainly a lot of room for new features and integrations, with more ‘verbs’ on the roadmap, including ‘play’, ‘eat’, and ‘visit’. It’s probably also worth noting the social element of Done Not Done. You can connect with friends through the app (leveraging Facebook and Twitter) and get recommendations directly from them, and you can share your public bookshelf of all your saved stuff. You can also see what things you and your friends haven’t yet done, and ‘Buddy Up’ to do them together. Done Not Done was built in partnership with Betaworks and Fictive Kin, and we’re told it’s the first of “several exciting products” they plan to announce in the coming months. ➤ Done Not Done: Web | iOS Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service.
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Kaspersky on Monday published an extensive report identifying and detailing a sophisticated espionage campaign pushing malware since May 2007. The spy operation targeted “several hundreds” of government and diplomatic organizations mainly in Eastern Europe (especially former USSR Republics) and Central Asia, but also in Western Europe and North America. Among the victim organizations were embassies, consulates, trade centers, nuclear research centres, as well as oil and gas institutes. The vast majority of infections were based in Russia (Kaspersky identified 35), followed by 21 in Kazakhstan, 15 in Azerbaijan, 15 in Belgium, and 14 in India. Six infected machines were found in the US. “During our investigation we’ve uncovered over 1000 unique files, belonging to about 30 different module categories,” Kaspersky’s report stated. “The attackers managed to stay in the game for over five years and evade detection of most antivirus products while continuing to exfiltrate what must be hundreds of terabytes by now.” The malware the attackers use is highly modular and customized for each victim, who is assigned a unique ID so that each module he or she receives is tailored to them. Each module is designed to perform various tasks but the end goal is to steal a variety of documents, including PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, and ACID files. The last one is key: the attackers engineered their malware to steal files encrypted with Acid Cryptofiler, an encryption program developed by the French military now used by several countries in the European Union and NATO to encrypt classified information. The malware doesn’t just extract files (including those that have already been deleted), but also snatches emails, records passwords and keystrokes, takes screenshots, as well as steals browsing history on Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera. The main objective is to gather as many sensitive documents as possible, and to do anything to make that easier. In fact, some of the modules are plugins for Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader that help the attackers re-infect a machine if the threat is detected and removed by antivirus scanners. The threat also grabs contacts, call history, calendars, text messages, and browsing history from smartphones, including iPhones, Android phones, and Windows Mobile devices (specific manufacturers Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and HTC were also named). The attackers steal documents during specific timeframes, at the end of which a new module configured for the next timeframe is sent down from the attackers. Despite the malware’s sophistication, Kaspersky said the attackers’ methods used to infect systems are very basic: they use a simple spearphishing attack, sending malicious emails to people within the targeted organizations containing malicious Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word documents. Upon execution, the documents gave the attackers full access to victims’ machines through well-known security exploits; though it’s not clear if this was done out of laziness or in an effort to hide the bigger picture of the massive campaign. Kaspersky said the attackers used more than 60 domain names and several server locations (mainly in Germany, Russia, and Austria) to manage the network of infected machines. Yet all the command-and-control (C&C) servers are set up in a chain with three levels of proxies to hide the location of the “mothership” and prevent investigators from tracing back to the final collection point where all the stolen documents, keystrokes, and screenshots are processed: The security firm said it believes the perpetrators were Russian-speaking, but that they likely were not supported by a state. Instead, the criminals are probably looking to sell the valuable intelligence to governments and others on the black market. Researchers discovered several Russian words embedded in the malware’s code. For instance, the word “zakladka” which can mean “bookmark” in Russian (and Polish), but can also be a Russian slang term meaning “undeclared functionality” or a “microphone embedded in a brick of the embassy building,” appears multiple times. The word “proga,” another term common among Russians which means program or application was used frequently as well. The company said it named the campaign “Operation Red October” (Rocra for short) after the Russian submarine featured in the Tom Clancy novel The Hunt For Red October, because one of its partners passed on a sample of the malware in question back in October. Since then, the security firm has been finding variations of the malware, with the earliest created in 2007 and the most recent component having put together as recently as last week. Image credit: Srinivasan Murugesh
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Video and photo slideshow creator Animoto is celebrating its fifth birthday today and to mark the occasion, the company has announced that it has surpassed six million registered users and 30 million created videos. That alone should be plenty of reason for the firm to celebrate, however the Animoto team has also revealed today that it has secured US Patent number 8,347,213 for its “Cinematic Technology” and released a brand new video editing style, entitled “I Love NY”, which it claims is “its most cinematically advanced video style to date”. The “Cinematic Technology” which the new patent refers to is essentially the process at the core of Animoto. Once you’ve chosen all of the necessary content, as well as a video style created by Animoto, the website or app does all the heavy lifting for you, ordering the clips and editing them down so that it matches the music and/or your voice perfectly. The result is a high quality edit or slideshow which shows all of your work in mere minutes. “Throughout our five years, we’ve maintained the same vision—to inspire people to share their lives using the magic of video,” said Brad Jefferson , CEO and co-founder of Animoto. “We deeply believe that video is magical when done right, and we’re proud of our pioneering role in democratizing the ability to create great-looking video.” A demo of the new “I Love NY” video style is available from the company’s website, and shows user content edited on top of recogniseable New York settings, such as the side of a building, billboard or taxi roof advertisement. It looks pretty impressive, and is likely to be a hit with anyone who has ever travelled there. Interestingly, the video is also one of the first times we’ve seen the company’s new branding, which ditches the sharp cornered “a” character for a much subtler series of overlaying triangles. You can read a bit more about it in a short post published by Jefferson on the Animoto blog earlier today. In November last year, we reported on the introduction of “Best in 2012”, a new feature from Animoto that allowed users to reflect on eveything they’ve done over the last 12 months. By signing in with your Facebook account, the service essentially took your top moments, determined by the social network’s Open Graph, and spliced it together into a minute-long video. Founded in 2006, Animoto is based in New York City, and also has an office in San Francisco. Users can download the company’s app to either an Android or iOS device, or try the free version of the service online. If you want to produce anything longer than 30 seconds though, you will need to sign up to one of Animoto’s price plans, which start at £2.50 per month, or £30 for the year. ➤ Animoto | iOS | Android Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service.
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Since coming into the public eye nearly one year ago, Obvious Corporation‘s Branch is now open to the public, and has launched a number of features including highlights, a new activity feed, Spotify Integration and more. Diving deeper, highlights are Branch’s answer to likes, hearts, favorites, etc. The company details that it felt the need to rethink its mechanism for positive feedback, and felt highlights were the perfect way for users to showcase anything worth reading, be it “interesting, controversial, original, thoughtful, or funny.” Moving down the list, Branch’s new activity feed shows you “who’s listening.” The startup explains that it was “inspired by the illuminating analytics of a dashboard, the community of Twitter’s Connect tab, and the jovial vibe of Foursquare’s feed.” Now, users will be able to see when other users “watch or view your branches, highlight something you said, or watch or join your groups.” Branch isn’t a place for lurking, it seems. Branch has also introduced a new way to start conversations, which encourages users to “write like they talk.” The company details that it wants “sharing your ideas on Branch to feel just like sharing your ideas around a table with friends.” Lastly, Branch has integrated with Spotify and Soundcloud, for discussions involving music. It’s likely that additional third-party integrations will compliment other areas of discussion as well. We’ve spent time with Branch while it was in its private beta stage and were impressed by some of the insightful conversations held on the site. The service has an interesting dynamic, but up until now, the greater public has yet to explore it. We’ll have to wait and see how sticky it is in the long run. Branch was originally known as “Roundtable,” and was the second project that Obvious jumped into after forming. The first was Lift. ➤ Branch Image credit: Siri Stafford / Thinkstock
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Google has announced that it’s making a $2.65m donation aimed at the energy industry, this time to the Energy Foundation to help “support policy reforms that will lead to more intelligent energy use.” “One of the best parts about working at Google is the chance to use the Internet and digital technology to help us all manage energy better,” explains Michael Terrell, Senior Policy Counsel, Energy & Sustainability at Google. “We’ve seen big changes in recent years to the way we watch TV, use phones, read and listen to music, yet how we use electricity hasn’t changed much in decades. “What if instead of a monthly bill we had access to more real-time and actionable information about our electricity consumption?,” he continues. “What if our appliances, air conditioners, and lights adjusted automatically to use energy more efficiently and save money? If we did this in every home it would help improve the reliability of the grid and save billions of dollars.” So, while smart meters and programmable thermostats go some way towards making this possible already, Google’s looking to challenge rules that govern electricity distribution given that they “were written for last century’s grid.” Google says it supports three key areas with its grant, one of which is smarter electricity rates that actively encourage consumers to be more efficient, and shift their electricity use to times when it’s cheaper, and perhaps even produce their own on-site energy. Google also says it would like consumers and businesses to have better access to electricity markets, and be compensated for their efforts in cutting energy consumption. Ultimately, Google notes it would like open data policies that give people access to their own energy data, so they can see exactly how much they consume per appliance, and share this information with third parties who offer related tools and services. “These policy reforms,” says Terrell, “coupled with the new technologies now being deployed on a large scale, can empower consumers to make smarter energy choices, improve real-time management of the electricity grid, and help facilitate more renewable energy all while lowering overall costs.” Google has a history of putting money into renewable energy projects. In December 2011, we reported on its $94m ‘clean energy’ investment, incorporating four new solar power projects, while back in November it reported a $75m cash outlay on a 50MW wind farm. The Internet giant claims it has given out almost $1B to the renewable energy sector so far, Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock
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Convertro, a cross marketing and media attribution service that measures how successful an advertising campaign is using a tag system on clients’ website, has announced the closure of a Series B funding round worth $5 million today. The investment will be used to “ramp up” the company’s sales and marketing operations in New York, Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, although specific cities or locations have not been specified. Bessemer Venture Partners and DAG Ventures led the funding round, the former of which led the Series A round back in 2009. As a result, Convertro has raised $10 million to date. It has not been disclosed today if any other companies participated in the Series B funding round, however. Convertro is, at its core, in the business of tracking and analysing user behaviour online in order to dissect how they’re interacting with advertisements and marketing campaigns. This is done across multiple devices and platforms, giving its clients, which include leading sports leagues and top apparel brands, greater insight into where and how they’re being successful. The firm’s website explains the process: “Convertro begins with a universal tag deployed on all pages of your website, and a view-through pixel added to all your display inventory; these enable us to capture data at the most granular level. Unlike pretty much everyone else, though, we preserve data at this micro level when it comes time to formulate insights and optimizations.” Users can then look at this data to see how customers are interacting with their website, apply attribution models, and use different viewing modes to filter the effectiveness of each advertisment by day and geography. The product us then rounded off by a range of “optimization recommendations” that clients can use to change their marketing strategies on the fly. On top of this is cross-channel optimization, which addresses the performance of a particular website section in the context of others. This means that multiple marketing channels don’t take the credit for the same conversions and optimizations, and changes can be made so that it improves the company’s products as a whole – rather than just one part of it. Jeremy Levine, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners said: “In a complex media environment in which consumers might have multiple touchpoints with a company across numerous devices and channels before they convert, it’s imperative that marketers know which of those interactions influences the final purchase.” Convertro says that it uploads 144,000 marketing events every second into its database, and has more than 40 million users every hour. To data, it claims to have recorded “billions of dollars” in transactional revenue for its customers. Bessemer Venture Partners, meanwhile, is a global venture capital firm which has helped incubate and support technology companies including Skype, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Image Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
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Canadian consolidation as ‘technology incubator’ Intertainment Media and mobile mapping specialist Avenza today announced that they’ve banded together to acquire assets from Poynt, a struggling maker of mobile, location-aware search and advertising products. Intertainment and Avenza will both acquire Poynt’s platform and patents, split 50/50, for an undisclosed sum, and the companies have established a new private company to operate the asset. The bidding for Poynt’s assets had been ongoing for months now. From the release: Poynt has a number of early stage patents granted in their key business areas and a vast international user-base of its popular mobile application. Localized mobile marketing has grown significantly in the past few years and the Poynt application has had tremendous growth globally as a leading mobile application on industry leading mobile platforms, such as, BlackBerry, Apple, Android and Windows. Poynt claims its platform is used by more than 16 million people in 10 countries to look for nearby retailers, restaurants, events and offers. Financialy though, the company has been struggling for a while, as its archive of news releases shows, leading to today’s announcement. In fact, Poynt had filed for bankruptcy back in July 2012. The new private entity will focus on the development of geo-based localization opportunities for consumers and businesses and for the two owners to ‘accelerate patent protection efforts’, which I suspect is a euphemism for ‘shortly kicking off a series of fresh lawsuits’. Poynt had previously entered into a ‘IP protection partnership’ with WiLAN and its subsidiary Gladios IP, putting them in charge of managing and monetizing its patent portfolio. Anthony Pearlman, president and COO of Intertainment Media has been appointed by the partners as CEO of the new enterprise. Image credit: Thinkstock
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Jinni, a ‘semantic discovery engine’ designed to help consumers find ideas for movies to watch, has announced seven new deals which will see media companies around the world offer its service to their customers. US cable TV operator Time Warner is the biggest name amongst the new deals. They’re joined by Walmart-owned online video service Vudu; Bouygues Telecom (part of major French media and telecoms company Bouygues Group); Spain’s Prisa TV; Nordic Pay TV provider C More Entertainment; Asian giant SingTel, and South African pay TV provider Multichoice. We first looked at Jinni back in 2009 when it entered public beta. The service uses deep metadata about movies, such as mood, tone, plot, and structure to help recommend suitable titles to users. As new titles are added to Jinni’s ‘Entertainment Genome’, they are indexed via automatic analysis of user reviews and synopses, using natural language processing. At CES last week, the company announced a new voice-powered engine that understands natural language. This will allow users to talk to their TV and say, for example “I want to watch something funny about an obnoxious boss,” or “Is there anything witty and romantic on TV tonight?” and be served relevant recommendations. Previously signed licensing deals for the technology include Microsoft and Belgium’s Belgacom. With so much competition for consumers’ eyeballs when it comes to offering movies these days, it makes sense for media companies to offer the most compelling product they can, and smart recommendations can be a big part of that. It remains to be seen exactly when and how Jinni recommendations will be integrated with each of the news licensees’ services. Image credit: Sean Gallup / Getty Images
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