You are here: Home / Archives for Startup

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: Facebook buys Karma

May 21, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Lost amid all of the noise about Facebook’s huge IPO was the fact that the company is continuing to address a shortcoming in the mobile app space. It has purchased a company called Karma that has developed an e-commerce platform as part of its overall presence.

The management team at Karma has already developed one successful app and the current focus, on gifting, seems to be a good match since Facebook has a huge amount of personal data on users and can now send alerts about anniversaries etc and recommend gifts and send users to Karma. The terms of the deal were not revealed in the announcement made on Karma’s blog but the company’s founders have had success in creating other successful apps.


Samsung’s Galaxy S3 sees strong preorder demand
Samsung, the leading smartphone developer in the world is about to see a nice spike in sales if reports are correct about pre availability demand for its Galaxy S3. According to a report from the Korean Economic Daily, forwarded by Mashable there is already a 9 million unit demand worldwide.

That is very impressive, especially considering the company’s factories can only crank out 5 million units a month, and I am assuming that is for all handsets not just this model. I hope they have been building the devices for the last few months.

China gives Google a thumbs up on Motorola
The long wait is over for Google with the company finally gaining approval for its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility. The approval, which came from China’s Anti-Monopoly Bureau, had followed a delay in which the agency had requested more information.

This approval was the last before the deal can go through and give Google access to Motorola’s huge patent portfolio and manufacturing capabilities. According to a report from the AP the deal has a condition- Google must make the Android operating system available for free to mobile device users for the next five years.

Motorola faces possible ban in US
To counter the good news coming out of China, Motorola was on the losing side of a judge’s ruling the Motorola did infringe on a patent held by Microsoft. The ruling came from the US International Trade Commission and has the result of banning Android-powered smartphones made by Motorola from being imported into the US.

While the ban will not go in effect until July, it is likely that Motorola will seek a licensing deal rather than eliminate the technology. With Motorola having recently won a ruling against Motorola regarding different patents they could just sign a cross licensing agreement, but right now no word on what its plans are.

Apple seeks to block Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 in US
If this sounds familiar well… Apple is following up a win in US Appeals Court that said a ban should probably have been imposed on Samsung for copying features from Apple’s iPad, Apple is now once again asking for that ban in the United States.

It could be a negotiating ploy since as has been reported here and elsewhere the two have been ordered into a settlement talks that will feature the top executives from both companies and it appears likely from this piece at Electronista that no action will occur until after the settlement talks are over.

EU regulations will apply to Android and iOS apps
Apps that are downloaded to devices running both the iOS and Android operating system are subject to the European Union’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, officials from the Information Commissioner’s Office said.

The rules regulate, but do not prohibit the use of technologies such as cookies and require that users provide informed consent. This will require the apps to inform the user that it is downloading a cookie and provide them with the option to not have them loaded in their device, according to an article in Computing.co.uk

Is a 10-inch Kindle in the works?
Increasingly rumors are surfacing that the next generation of devices from Amazon will include a model with a 10.1-inch form. The move would make it a more direct competitor to Apple’s existing iPads as well as to the rumored smaller iPad that has been talked about for months.

According to DigiTimes the pad is expected in the third quarter of this year and that at the same time the company is likely to kill its 8.9-inch pad that has been on the drawing board. Around this time Google is also expected to bring out a pad to help heighten the competition even more.

Apple loses round in e-book case
A United States District Court judge has denied petitions from Apple and several of its largest e-book publishing partners to dismiss a lawsuit against them. The lawsuit claims that the companies conspired to illegally price fix e-books. This case is similar to, but separate from the one filed by the Department of Justice against the same companies.

New Kickstarter project trying to get light on a dark subject
A company called Scrap Pile Labs has developed a docking cable for iPads and iPhones that has a built-in LED that allows for easy use at night. Called CordLite it is now seeking funding at the site Kickstarter and the developer is seeking to raise $70,000. If it succeeds the company expects to ship the cables in September.

While the initial focus is on Apple’ products the company said that it plans to develop for other platforms as well and has a microUSB cable in prototype but that production costs are scheduling issues it will be some time before that sees the light of day.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, Facebook, FTC, Google, iPad, iPhone, Kickstarter, Mashable, Microsoft, Motorola, Samsung, Startup, Tablets Tagged With: , , , , ,

Neva-The Talking Ski Poles may be coming to Your Slopes

May 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

There is another interesting item over at Kickstarter that is seeking funding and I think one of the things that the project highlights is how increasingly easy it is becoming to network everything, even items that you might not have considered such as ski poles.

A company out of Salt Lake City called SlopeScience is touting Neva, which it calls the evolution of the ski pole by adding wireless communications capabilities to so that it can talk with your smartphone and relate information to you while you are skiing, and just as important, so you do not have to remove your gloves.
Seeking to raise $100,000 it has so far gathered 80 backers and raised $12,218 towards its goal. In case you have forgotten if you do not reach your goal you get nothing and the funding round ends June 6.

The poles will feature the ability to display when a call is coming in and a simply swipe can ignore or answer the call, Text messages can also be displayed. It leverages SlopeScience’s capabilities and can show your slope angle and aspect when used with a Google Earth plug-in. The company hopes that future versions will have text to speech capabilities as well.

The basic device includes a low powered Bluetooth adapter for communications with the smartphone, and is capable of talking with both Android and iPhones. There is a 0.96” OLED display that is capable of being read in bright sunlight. The rechargeable battery is good for three days on a single charge.

I have a semi humorous vision of the completely connected athlete of the future. Say that they are a skier. Smartphone securely packed away in a pocket with no need to get it out. They have goggles that provide a clear image of the terrain and can connect to the phone and listen to music.

Then they have on their Pebble watch so that they can connect to the phone, view the menu at the snack bar and see what their friends are texting from the beginning slops. I do believe that with all of the emerging options it will be interesting to see which technologies and products pan out and which ones do not. There is no doubt in my mind that used properly some of these products will certainly enhance the outdoor experience.

Filed Under: Apps, Kickstarter, Outdoor Activities, Recon Instruments, Skiing, Smartphone, Startup

Facebook gains Mobile App Developer Team ahead of IPO

May 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Mobile consumer app developer Lightbox, known for its Lightbox Photo mobile app, has announced that it is joining Facebook, but that Facebook did not purchase the company. Still it looks as if it is shutting down its operation and will release as open source portions of its code.

Seven employees will join Facebook but no user data or technology will come with them. The deal, is not that surprising although before the IPO is a bit of a surprise. Facebook is just days away from its IPO and it has talked about mobile apps pretty much non-stop for the last few weeks.

Demand to be included in the IPO is great, and it was recently reported that the company recently is raising its initial public offering from $34 to $38 a share, a move that will raise as much as $12.8 billion and give the company a valuation of as much as $104.2 billion.

Some cracks in the IPO facade
While it has been relatively smooth sailing for Facebook and its executives doing its pre-IPO road show, they have run into a few issues and more seem to be bubbling to the surface. At the most obvious level is its admission that it has almost no revenue from its huge mobile presence and that will be its top priority going forward.

This of course is very important to app developers looking to leverage Facebook’s huge presence in the mobile space. How will Facebook seek to monetize this area and will it tap app developers as a potential source?
http://marketday.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/15/11702548-is-facebook-worth-the-price-analysts-split?lite

As should be expected with an event that has generated as much attention as the IPO, there are two sides to the analysts positions on the company, with some saying that the valuation is simply too high for a company with this type of business model while others say it is not high enough. Will it have the staying power of AOL and Second Life or Apple and Microsoft? Who knows and we will probably not know for years to come.

Of course the fact that Facebook’s offer of 337.4 million shares is already oversubscribed says a lot about the impact of these types of warnings. Hold on, it has just been reported that the company is adding an additional 85 million shares to the offering, bringing the value of the IPO to an estimated $16 billion.

However its mainstream model has taken a high profile hit this week when General Motors said that it would cease advertising on Facebook. The giant car maker revealed that it had spent a total of $40 million on advertising, with $10 million going directly to Facebook, yet it sees no real results from that effort. Instead it will continue its use of the free pages that Facebook provides.

A second troubling sign could be seen in the results of this recent Associated Press/CNBC poll that shows a large number of people see Facebook as a fad. Of course I have to wonder if that was also true with the automobile and the telephone? Still 51% also have a favorable opinion of the company and the difference in opinion on a wide variety of topics facing the company is strongly divided, with users much more favorable to the company than non-users. The poll has a wealth of data that can be seen here.

So why do we care about Facebook here at Mobile Sports Report? Well take a look for a sports league on it. It has the usual such as the NHL and NFL but also a huge number of sports that might not readily come to mind such as Foosball and Disc Golf. Many sites list apps or other programs in links. It presents a huge opportunity for app developers to leverage social media to enhance and advertise their products.

One recent example of that opportunity is that the Facebook travel app Gogobot has just hit 1 million registered users, according to Mashable. Now fad or not but 900 million users, or whatever the number is now, is a huge market and something that a developer wants to exploit. As with all markets it is good to know the positive as well as the negative.

Filed Under: Apps, Facebook, Mashable, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data, Startup, Top News Tagged With:

Viddy Lands $30m in Series B-Is it the next Instagram?

May 11, 2012 by 2 Comments

Viddy, an increasingly popular mobile video app developer has closed an impressive round of funding with a deal that raised $30 million from industrial investors, a sum that matches its 30 million registered users.

This is the second round of funding with Viddy closing its Series A last February after raising $6 million in a round that was led by Battery Ventures and included Qualcomm and Greycroft Ventures. The funding came from a number of high profile venture capital companies with New Enterprise Associates, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, and Battery Ventures all contributing to the current round.

The company said that the additional funds will be used to help it grow by hiring additional engineering talent, develop additional products and expanding its offerings overseas.

Viddy is one of the leading players in the mobile video market, fighting with rivals Socialcam, Klip and Mobli for the crown, but with this type of funding interest it seems likely that more will enter the field or at least seek to raise the level of awareness for their technology.

Currently the company’s app is only available for Apple’s iPhones and even with only that segment of the market its appeal is very strong, with an estimated 30 million users, a tremendous achievement for a one year old company.

The comparisons to Instagram are growing, and speculation has the company’s valuation at anywhere between $200 and $340 million, depending on what time of the day you look. There is no doubt that a technology like this would be very nice as part of a larger overall offering from Facebook, Twitter or even something browser related like Bing or Google.

Filed Under: Apple, Apps, Battery Ventures, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, Klip, Mashable, New Enterprise Associates, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Startup, Venture Capital, Viddy Tagged With: , ,

Friday Grab Bag: Are Replacement Refs in the NFL’s Future?

May 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Mashable does a nice job showing how fast eight technologies have penetrated the US market since the telephone was patented in 1876. The speed upon which each succeeding generation of technology grows is interesting as many of them piggybacked on older technology. I mean you cannot have these technologies until electricity reached all of the country.

I was interested to see how relatively slowly the Internet caught on compared to mobile phones, but I guess that is partly due to a number of issues from slow connections early on, lack of a substantial amount of meaningful content ( I mean at one time one of the most popular site on the internet was watching a coffee pot) and emerging rival modem standards that helped confuse non-technical users.

From the charts it looks as if it is possible that the two emerging fields, tablets and smartphones are headed to being the fasted technologies adopted to date. Smartphones make sense since they are an extension of an already known commodity but tablets are a relatively fresh start. The data covers the past five years and the numbers from the next five look to be very interesting.

NFL still not produced evidence on Saints bounty program, NFLPA claim
The NFL Players Association continues to claim that it has not been given “specific, detailed evidence of player involvement in a pay-to-injure program.” Domonique Foxworth, president of the NFLPA has an opinion piece in USA Today in which he stated that punishment demands evidence and the league is not willing to produce it.

He claims rather than produce the evidence the league has used media leaks, pr campaigns and character assignation to manipulate public opinion.

Apple wins one
Apple, on a recent losing streak in the legal department won a case this week when a judge threw out the Proview Electronics Co.’s trademark lawsuit against Apple. The case, which has bogged down Apple in China, has ruled that Proview cannot sue Apple in California.

The case revolves around Apple’s purchase of the iPad trademark from Proview and then Proview claiming it did not sell the rights to the iPad name in China. The two are reportedly looking at a cash settlement but are far apart on the terms.

St. Louis Blues sold
The NHL Board of Governors has approved the sale of the St/ Louis Blues hockey team to Tom Stillman, a beer distributor, for an estimated price of $130 million. Stillman has been a minority owner of the team since 2007, Yahoo! reports.

The team has been for sale for the last two years, ever since the current ownership group, led by Dave Checketts and his Sports Capital Partners Worldwide, started to look around. It had originally been looking for investors to buy out Towerbrook Captal Partners which held 70% of the team but could not find investors.

Google wins a bit more in trial versus Oracle
After a jury ruled that Google did infringe on Oracle’s API copyrights but could not reach a decision on if that action was protected by the ‘fair use’ doctrine that allows copyrighted material to be used Oracle asked the judge to throw out Google’s ‘fair use’ defense.

The judge declined saying he did not think that it would be correct for him to rule in favor of Oracle. Experts now expect at least a partial retrial of the first portion of the case.

Who do Crowdfunders Invest in?
We have started talking a lot about crowdfunding, but mostly in relation to just a very few efforts, and yet that industry is starting to emerge as a huge source of funding for startups, enabling a wide variety of developers to get seed money and more to launch products.

Well if you were interested in a breakdown by category of where the money is going at Kickstarter wonder no more because there is now a great graphical breakdown of the effort. A few interesting facts-50,000 projects have sought funding since it opened its doors in 2009 and film and video is the top pledge earner, with $60 million pledged to date. There is a host of interesting information so head on over and take a look.

Replacement officials in the wins for NFL season?
Fox Sports is reporting that the NFL has started to look at replacement officials for the upcoming season in case it cannot reach a new agreement with the NFL Referees Association- currently the talks are at an impasse.

The league is asking its officiate scouting department to help identify potential replacements with an eye out for recently retired college officials as well as current officials at a variety of levels of the sport including semiprofessional leagues. The NFL used replacement officials in 2001 at the start of the season.

Smart Shoes the next trend in computing?
Computer scientists from e Telekom Innovation Laboratories, the University of Munich, and the University of Toronto have taken a step forward on a research paper on the next generation of wearable computing with the publication of a joint paper entitled “ShoeSense.”

The gist of the paper apparently calls for the development of sensors that would be placed in shoes that have the ability to understand customizable hand and arm gestures that are then relayed as commands to a smartphone. Users would be able to then send messages without appearing to while in meetings, at dinner and other places that it is not always appropriate to do so on the handset.

Nielsen looks at smartphone owners in US
A recent report from Nielsen shows that smartphone ownership continues to rise in the US and is now the preferred handset of more than 50% of Americans, actually 50.4%, up from 47.8% in December 2011.

Android is the dominate operating system with a 48.5% market share then followed by Apple’s iOS with 32%. Research in Motion’s Blackberry platform has 11.6% followed by Windows Mobile, Windows Phone and then others.

Filed Under: ABC, Android, Apple, Fox Sports, Google, Kickstarter, Lawsuit, Mashable, NFL, NHL, Nielsen Ratings, Oracle, Smartphone, Yahoo Tagged With: , , , , ,

SensoGlove Provides Digital Feedback to Golfers

May 10, 2012 by 1 Comment

I love sports gadgets, even ones for sports that I no longer play such as golf, hence the attention to issues such as watches that tell me where I am on the course or ski goggles that show me how high my last jump was.

I have somehow missed the digital golf glove called SensoGlove from a company called Sensosolutions, based in Aachen, Ger. The glove addresses an issue that can plague golfers, well aside from just about all aspects of the sport, but this one has to do with grip, both placement and pressure. The glove is designed to provide feedback after each swing.

The feedback is produced by a 1.2-inch LED digital monitor that is connected to sensors that are placed through the gloves. The glove has the ability to provide feedback at speeds of 80 times a second so that you can review your entire swing. It also provides audio feedback as well, warning you that your grip is too tight. I do wonder if this might distract you at an important part of your swing if you are not used to it.

The glove has the ability to show you which fingers are gripping too tightly or not enough which allows a user to adjust their grip accordingly to improve their game. The overall purpose is to relax your swing and so help you get a better drive through the ball and so greater distance.

The gloves, available in June, come in all of the usual sizes from small to extra large and for both men and women. They are available in both left handed and right handed configurations as well. The company said that the latest version, which are available for $89 with existing users able to purchase replacement gloves for $22.48 have a longer battery life and more sensitive sensors that earlier versions.

It is interesting to note that among the testimonials for the product on its site is a pair from Tiger Woods back in his prime. Considering all of the criticism that he has come under this season maybe he should return to his roots and use the products again.

Filed Under: Apps, Golf, SensoGlove, Sensosolutions, Startup Tagged With: ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »