A full 7.5 million years later, it arrives at the answer: 42.

Google appears to be referencing that bit of geek cult humor in a new device, the H2G2-42, that it is currently submitting to the FCC for regulatory testing. H2G2 is a Wikipedia-ish guide to “life, the universe, and everything” inspired by Adams’ books.

There’s little data available about the device, but Google does say it is a “media player,” and a “fixed base station” with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, which would make it almost certainly a replacement for Google’s failed Nexus Q. The Q was Google’s ”first social streaming media player” that met with almost universally negative reviews, underwhelmed users, and is no longer for sale.

Source: FCC

Google device H2G2-42 is in FCC testing

One change that seems likely: It appears that the H2G2-42 will allow users to plug in external monitors via provided USB ports:

Source: FCC

Google’s H2G2-42 may be connectable to external monitors

As The Verge notes, Google’s new streaming music app broke compatibility with the Nexus Q. The Google Play Music All Access product is impressive, enabling personalized “radio stations” and inexpensive streaming music. Google calls it “radio without rules,” and it seems reasonable that Google would want a shiny new device to go with this major new music push.

Photos are not yet available and more details will have to wait until 45 days after certification. And it’s unlikely that a music streaming device will be the ultimate answer to the ultimate question.

But meanwhile, enjoy:

Image credits: Google, FCC

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More than 20 million students currently use Google Apps, and another 10 million are soon to join, thanks to a deal with Malaysia.

As students and schools are increasingly storing more of their data and documents in clouds of Google’s servers, Backupify recently announced that it has tripled its education user base, with more than 40,000 new education users since January of this year. Schools are using the cloud-based backup service to ensure critical data is archived and safe, even if it would be accidentally deleted or lost on Google’s servers.

Education is a notoriously slow adopter of technology, but Google Apps is growing quickly, if not virally, doubling over the last two years. And the current 20 million users include seven million inside the U.S. alone — led by Oregon that adopted Google Apps in all K-12 classrooms in 2010.

And sometimes, they’re using Backupify because they have to:

“Millions of students and educators around the world are currently using Google Apps to enhance collaborative learning,”  Backupify CEO Rob May said in a statement. “The education sector is ahead of other industries in this regard, but faces unique compliance requirements for data privacy and retention that demand an effective backup strategy.”

To celebrate the recent growth of Google Apps for Education — and their own growth — Backupify put this infographic together:

Image credit: John Koetsier/Venturebeat

The new TrackingPoint sniper rifle doesn’t fire when you pull the trigger. Rather, it fires when it knows it will hit the target you’re aiming at. And then streams video to the included iPad mini to allow you to share your hunting or sharpshooting experience with Facebook, YouTube, or maybe even Al Jazeera.

Now, the company says, everyone can be an expert marksman.

“With TrackingPoint, even a novice shooter can become an elite long-range marksman in minutes, accurately and effectively engaging targets out to 1,200 yards,” the company said in a press release.

That’s good, if you’re a hunter and you want to “ethically harvest” game by making immediate kills shots. But it’s also incredibly dangerous, since now inexperienced shooters can be as accurate — or more accurate — as trained military snipers from almost a mile away. The potential for terrorism and targeted assassinations is obvious.

The shooter simple tells the rifle what he or she is aiming at by locking a laser on the target. The gun’s built-in laser range finder, compass, environmental sensors to gauge wind speeds, inertial measurement unit, ballistics computer, and networked tracking engine then engage. But the rifle only fires when you’re holding it in exactly the right direction to hit the target, ensuring that even the unsteadiest and untrained hands can deploy death from a distance. And every shot is recorded and streamed to your nearby iPad.

“Think of it like a smart rifle. You have a smart car; you got a smartphone; well, now we have a smart rifle,” company President Jason Schauble told NPR.

Hunters are excited by the possibilities, apparently.

Source: TrackingPoint

XS1 is the largest-caliber Precision Guided Firearm (PGF) available today.

“When I first saw this system, I knew immediately that I had to have one,” said the first owner of a TrackingPoint rifle. “As a sport hunter and professional marksman, I see the TrackingPoint technology as an excellent way to ensure more ethical harvesting of game and to share the thrill of the hunt with anyone. I cannot wait to make amazing shots of my own.”

The Austin-based company that makes the TrackingPoint rifle calls it a “Precision-Guided Firearm (PGF),” carefully avoiding any reference to “snipers” or “sniper rifles.” But the size and weight of this deadly weapon — 27″ long, over 20 pounds loaded — make it a very unusual hunting rifle. I’m no firearms expert, but several sites I’ve checked indicate that average hunting rifles weigh in at 6-12 pounds, and that a rifle of 20 pounds or more is “just too heavy for general purposes.”

Ergo, it’s a sniper rifle.

TrackingPoint has made some efforts around safety. The sophisticated tracking scope that makes the rifle “smart” is password-protected, according to the company’s CEO, so while the gun will still fire without an authorized user, it won’t allow access to all the intelligence that could make a weekend warrior into an instant Marine sniper.

The company made its first deliveries this week, and due to “overwhelming demand,” has set up a web-based application process to get on the waiting list. We can only hope that the application process doesn’t allow any deranged individuals to access this type of deadly weapons.

And, no matter how smart these rifles are, the question is: are they wise?

The popular and fast-growing blog service is mulling a $1.1 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo. But while the massive blogging powerhouse only pulled in $13 million in revenue in 2012, and raised $125 million at a lower $800 million valuation, Tumblr CEO David Karp feels $1.1 billion is too little.

I guess it depends what yardstick you use.

If you look at an Instagram-style deal, which was originally around a billion dollars but eventually, due to Facebook’s stock market woes, came in a little lower, he might be right. But that deal had one thing going for it that Tumblr does not.

Instagram chief executive and co-founder Kevin Systrom had multiple suitors, while Tumblr only has one.

That’s because, as Forbes reveals, Yahoo is currently negotiating under a lockup. So even though Facebook, Microsoft, and potentially other acquirers are interested, Yahoo has at least a period of time in which it is the only one on the dance card.

In addition Tumblr, which famously hates advertising and only started trying to make money after five years in existence, is in a bit of a pickle, as its $125 million in funding is running out, giving the service only a few-month window in which to raise a new round or find a sugar daddy.

That’s likely a strategic error on Karp’s part, who has said that advertising “really turns our stomachs.”

Tumblr only started to get serious about ad revenue in mid-2012, and is only planning to roll out its third major ad product — pay per view, in which you pay to get others to view — sometime later this year. Being more aggressive on monetization would have given Tumblr more runway to make a leisurely decision about an acquisition, or made the company more attractive to investors if it tried to raise another funding round.

There’s no question, however, that Tumblr is a traffic powerhouse. It ranks ninth on the list of most-popular U.S sites, and with 217 million global monthly unique visitors and 74 million million posts each and every day, the site is both huge and fast-growing. Few companies could monetize its 108 million blogs, 51 billion posts, and 16 billion monthly pageviews as well as Yahoo.

So while Yahoo is likely to come up a little, Karp could pick worse partners. And he might do well to finalize a deal sooner rather than later.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem

When was the last time you went to a tradeshow?

How did you measure the impact that the event had on your business or personal goals?  Attending tradeshows is more than just cruising the aisles and looking and exhibitor booths. Understanding the inherent mechanics of trade shows, executing a well-defined game plan, and measuring the results in your professional life can make the difference between a useless visit and a game changing trip.

And, of course, going to interesting shows and great places more and more often.

Attending a trade show is an investment

We exhibited at AWS re:Invent in November 2012, making a major investment to meet Amazon Web Services (AWS) users in order to help them improve and optimize their cloud infrastructure.

For an attendee the ticket price cost $1,000 just to set foot in the door. Put airfare, hotel room, and a decent expense budget into the picture and an attendee could easily spend $4,000 – $5,000.  For a show attendee justifying an investment like this, both in terms of hard cash and time, is hard if not impossible to achieve.  Especially when managers and other staff see an empty desk for a few days.

Or is it?

Break down the expectations from the event and consider an active game plan (both during and after the event) to measure the time and money ROI the event cloud potentially deliver. Let’s take a closer look.

There are two main areas that a trade show can show a valuable impact on the company: knowledge and deals.

Gaining knowledge

Many tradeshows offer breakout sessions to learn from experts in a specific field of work, industry or vertical.  Think of an accelerated course to capture knowledge that could improve your ability to solve specific issues, learn best practices, and improve workflow analysis and overcoming issues as they come along.

But breakouts are not limited to your direct line of work.

For example if you’re on the sales and marketing side, attending breakout sessions of an IT, cloud, or IT operations event can help improve your knowledge of the everyday flow your customers and prospect are experience. Leveraging this knowledge cloud have a direct impact on your day to day operations (e.g., improving cloud availability for DevOps) or give you added insights on how to engage your customer base (e.g., understanding what factors are important for DevOps to address when improving availability).

Deals, deals, deals

The objective here is to show measurable value in starting new deal flow, accelerating conversions in the pipe, and improving value from existing business. There are a few methodologies to include in your in-event game plan to ensure you allocate the optimal amount of focused time:

• Reach out to everyone related in your industry and start booking meetings
  Take an assertive approach and book 15-30 min time slots based on the objective you want to achieve.  Don’t stop until you get an answer.Total time investment: 50%
• Book sessions with exhibitors in advance
  This is important. Randomly cruising show floor booths is not a preferred strategy unless you’re open to discuss partnerships. Consider that each booth potentially represents months of planning and budget negotiation, meaning that each staff member at the booth is focused on building new business themselves.   Booking time in advance will ensure a decent amount time to carry out your main objective rather than randomly pulling someone out of their booth.Total time investment: 40%
• Cruise the show to understand the landscape.
  Some of your time must be invested in cruising the show to better understand the landscape, identifying potential partners, keeping tabs on competitors (both future and current), and staying in touch with associates.Total time investment: 10%

Understanding the underlying mechanics of a trade show and putting the right game plan to harvest the value at the show — and execute when you return to the office — can help you win budget each and every time you hit a new show.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service designed for Windows  Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud users. Offering a business view into a company’s public cloud operations, Newvem actively tracks cloud health in order to help reveal and solve cloud irregularities related to cost, security, utilization and availability.  Follow Cameron at @cameronperon.

photo credit: fidelramos via photopin cc

That means that yes, at some point you’ll be able to run your little WordPress-powered blog on the biggest server farms on the planet. But it also means that major companies will be able to use Google’s famously reliable services to run their enterprise-scale “big data,” backend, and, yes, consumer web projects, all in the PHP language that that is increasingly penetrating corporations.

I talked to one of the three founding fathers of PHP and current Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans, about the implications for PHP.

It’s a busy time for the Gutmans, the open-source programming language, and Zend, the company Gutmans formed to offer commercial support and tools for PHP. Engine Yard just recently added PHP to their Platform-as-a-Service as well. And Zend is expanding quickly in the enterprise as it has recently released integrated development tools for cloud-enabled mobile applications.

But Gutmans, though busy, is thoroughly upbeat.

And for good reason: The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet. And in that support is a massive implied compliment to PHP — the first non-Google programming language to be supported by Google App Engine — and a potentially major boost to Zend’s business.

VentureBeat: Did Google talk to you before adding PHP to Google App Engine?

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012.

Andi Gutmans: I don’t know how to answer that. I was aware that they were going to make that announcement … I’ve worked with the product manager on the project before.

VentureBeat: Google didn’t formally brief you?

Gutmans: Let’s put it this way: It’s not a surprise that a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) player that’s serious about gaining market share added PHP support. Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

But in the past few months, there’s been a real attitude from Google that we’re going to go and compete with Amazon and with Microsoft, and we’re going to do it all fronts. They’ve become very aggressive on differentiating on performance and billing.

VentureBeat: What does this announcement say about PHP?

Gutmans: We have internal jokes about PHP’s web penetration and have used the stat that PHP runs 39 percent of the web because it was the only number we could get from Netcraft.

But I love Google’s stat, that 75 percent of the web runs PHP. No one knows the web better than Google.

If they’re trying to gain market share and gain it quickly, there’s no other language to do it with. And this is the first non-Google language they’re supporting.

VentureBeat: How’s that feel? And how are your customers reacting?

Gutmans: I’m definitely excited about it.

When any player does something like this — especially Google — it’s a huge validation. We got emails from some of our largest customers, saying this is great … it gives our enterprise customers a higher sense of confidence. And that stat that 75 percent of the web runs PHP is great for Zend – anything that is good for PHP, by proxy is good for Zend.

In addition, they said that PHP was their top-requested feature, which means the developer community was very supportive of us.

VentureBeat: Will you offer Google App Engine Support within Zend Studio, so developers can publish to Google right from within their Zend development environment?

Gutmans: We don’t know yet … it’s early and we’re exploring what kind of relationship we can have with Google.

We do support Google Compute Engine — that’s a full integration and some of the larger companies who run PHP already use it — but Google App Engine is just launched, it’s still in experimentation mode.

VentureBeat: What took Google so long to add PHP support?

Gutmans: I can’t speak for Google, but my assumption is that I felt that Google App Engine in the first few years was something they knew they wanted to do really well but … they kinda went down the simple easy route.

But we’ve seen a significant acceleration in the past 12 months. This will be a $20 billion market by 2016, and they moved from testing the waters to being very very aggressive right now.

We recently surveyed 5,000 PHP developers, asking them where in the cloud do you think you’ll deploy. Fifty-one percent said Amazon Web Services, but Google was 21 percent … and we just support Compute Engine right now.

It wasn’t even on the list last year, so that’s a big jump.

VentureBeat: What does this mean for the little guy building in PHP or hosting a WordPress blog?

Gutmans: I think it gives another option for the guys who do the small stuff, who are using shared hosting for $20/month.

What’s really great for the small developer is that it’s a nice value proposition — you can start at a lower cost. And, it’s a modern platform versus shared hosting, which is quite constrained.”

VentureBeat: So what does this mean for PHP overall?

 Gutmans: The number of requests that Google got from developers was very very significant. It exemplifies what we’ve been talking about … that PHP is very broadly adopted, but also by enterprise.

And that is driven by web, mobile, and cloud, which is where PHP’s sweet spot is. We’re seeing a strong tailwind behind us.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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The advertising industry’s top kudos show, the Clio Awards, gave Google the advertiser of the year award for 2013 for creativity and excellence in advertising this week.

Here are some of the best examples:

Google Fiber — and toy cars:

Build with Chrome — and Lego Sydney Harbor Bridges:

100,000 stars (go forth and explore):

And, of course, no gallery of great Google ads would be complete without Dear Sophie:

Image credit: Google; Hat tip: Mashable

Today, not that much has changed.

After debuting close to $40 and cratering to just under $18 in August, the stock has somewhat stabilized in the $25 region, down 30 percent from its opening-day high. And along the way, the story emerged of how Facebook tried to hide some of the mobile risk inherent in its business and how the company panicked and botched its IPO by using vague positive language in its public prospectus and, apparently, specific negative information about slowing revenue growth to institutional investors privately.

Not to mention the $100 million paid to banks to stabilize the stock — on top of $176 million in IPO fees — for efforts that ultimately failed. And technical glitches that cost the NASDAQ $62 million in compensatory fees.

All of which negatively affected the overall IPO market.

That all said, however, Facebook has seemingly nicely recovered from the disaster — at least from a business fundamentals perspective. Revenue growth was strong in its latest quarterly earnings release, with the company booking $1.46 billion in revenue for Q1 2013, compared to about $1 billion a year ago. More importantly, mobile was significantly up, accounting for 30 percent of ad revenues, and Facebook singlehandedly accounted for 6.5 percent of all online ad dollars spent in the U.S.

Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty good nevertheless.

And the company has massively beefed up its advertising options. It’s now posting retargeted ads right in the news feed, once sacrosanct territory. And in a move aimed directly at advertising giant Google, Facebook has launched a self-serve tool that allows advertisers to target its users based on what they actually buy and want to buy offline … which is a significant move to targeting the intent graph that Google hits so well by virtue of being a search engine, but Facebook has often missed since its visitors are on the site to meet and greet people. In addition, as soon as July, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads in the news feed, a product that it will be charging major brands millions of dollars for.

All of which is having an effect.

The consensus recommendation for Facebook is currently a buy, with a price target of $34. Most analysts are in the Strong Buy category, with few or none in the dreaded Underperform or Sell slots. And in the past four weeks, analysts have revised their earnings estimates upward by a factor of 6 to 1.

So there’s a lot of positive in Facebook’s future, and there’s a ton of potential. But it’s still challenging when analysts compare Facebook stock with other internet high-fliers like LinkedIn or Yelp, which rose 148 percent and 48 percent in their first years, respectively.

But at least it’s better than Groupon and Zynga, both down around 75-80 percent.

And, I would argue, while there are a ton of challenges and many very significant competitors — primarily Google — the future for Facebook is bright.

Even if the public start was a stubbed toe.

Now, after passing Pentagon tests, the devices are actually approved for use.

Before authorizing any devices for use in security-conscious military environments, the military requires a very specific and detailed implementation and deployment plan. A large part of that is the creation of policy for approved use as per DoD Directive 8100.02, which says that cellular devices are not allowed into areas where classified information is discussed, stored, or processed without written approval.

And until that happened for the Apple devices, the hundreds of thousands of phones and tablets were in administrative limbo.

“Most of them have not been deployed and are still sitting in a warehouse,” a source I talked to a month ago said. “They haven’t yet been able to build an implementation guide on how to use them.”

Today’s decision, however, paves the way for the U.S. military to actually use the devices in secure areas, and potentially expand their purchase order. It marks a turning point away from BlackBerry devices, which have been considered more secure, and which to date have formed the vast majority of government-issued mobile phones.

The problem with clearing smartphones for use in top secret environments is that they are, essentially, full of radios: Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular.

“With standard consumer devices, there’s no way to prove that the Wi-Fi is turned off,” my source told me.

One solution the DoD had previously implemented for iPads was to hand them off to a second party after delivery from Apple to crack open the cases and “snip the Wi-Fi radio” to disable it, and then close them up again. Apparently, the DoD reached a special agreement with Apple to maintain warranty eligibility, which would normally be voided after opening the case.

Today’s approval, however, is for a version of iOS 6 that has likely been customized by Apple and certified by military technologists to ensure security compliance without actually having to snip wires.

Interestingly, according to Bloomberg, the military plans to create its own app store for military applications, which would allow DOD personnel to use commercial hardware but employ tested and approved applications.

photo credits: The U.S. Army via photopin cc, Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Working with video rental stores in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Domino’s stamped DVDs with heat-sensitive thermal ink and scented varnish. Since DVDs and Blu-Ray players tend to get hot during operation, the discs warm up throughout the movie. By the time the movies ends and you pull the disc out, you’re both seeing an image of pizza on the DVD … and smelling what you could be tasting.

And, in thermal ink, a message invites you to enjoy your next movie with a “hot and delicious” pizza from Domino’s.

Here’s the video:

That’s simply a brilliant marketing campaign. And a very savvy mixture of both high and very standard technology.

While broadband has killed the video rental store in North America and much of Europe, Brazil’s Internet is not quite so robust, according to the marketing agency that created the campaign for Domino’s. So unless you’re wealthy or in a neighborhood with good Internet, chances are, you’re still using DVDs.

photo credit: bunchofpants via photopin cc

Voiding your warranty, apparently, is as simple as running five short commands. To run those, however, you need a higher-resolution way of communicating with your Google Glass device than the touch-sensitive screen on your specs.

“Fortunately, this is an Android device, and like most Android devices, it has a Bluetooth chip,” Google engineer P.Y. Laligand said today at the chat on hacking Glass.

Source: Google

Glass is just Android, underneath.

So he simply turned on Bluetooth, paired an external keyboard, opened up a terminal window, and typed five commands in ADB, or Android Debug Bridge:

1. $ adb reboot bootloader: (Allows you to access the bootloader)
2. $ fastboot oem unlock: (Removes security precautions, erases user data, and … voids your warranty.)
3. $ fastboot flash boot boot.img: (Replaces the boot image)
4. $ fastboot reboot: (Reboots back into a normal state)
5. $ adb root: (Finally, you have root access and access to all the data partitions)

These are not steps to be taken lightly, according to Google engineer Hyunyoung Song.

“Even though there are recovery methods, there is a chance that you could get stuck in a state from which it’s not easy for your device to be recovered,” she said. “And Google will not support you.”

Google Glass owners who have taken the lives of their $1,500 Google Glass Explorer Edition devices in their hands and bravely gone where few dare, however, have done some exceptionally cool things. One has installed standard Ubuntu Linux on Glass and now programs on Glass using Emacs, a text editor. Another has created an avatar that mimics your head motion, bobbing around just as you do while talking and gesturing.

Source: Google

Danger, Will Robinson! Voiding warranty now!

And Google — while not supporting you if you brick your device — encourages developers to play around in root mode, hacking new apps and experiences which can be then brought into the Google Glass ecosystem.

“Now you’re in root mode,” Song said. “Play around and go nuts with whatever you want to do.”

For the faint of heart, there will be a safety net at some point. Google will be releasing the standard Glass system images, which can be used to recover bricked devices.

Probably.

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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As research indicates that the U.S. is an increasingly difficult place for foreign founders to come and build companies and founders tell horror stories of the massive challenges they faced dealing with byzantine U.S. immigration policies, Canada is burnishing its reputation as open for business — and open for new residents.

Canada’s new startup visa has received a huge amount of attention in the U.S. as the the global war for talent heats up. Senators such as Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) have tried to address the situation via legislation like the Startup Act 3.0, but that’s a slim hope after deaths of 1.0 and 2.0.

Source: Wikipedia

Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism.

The Startup Visa provides immediate permanent residency in Canada if a founder meets just three criteria. An applicant must:

1. Secure an investment from a designated Canadian VC or fund
2. Demonstrate English language proficiency
3. Have at least one year of postsecondary education

This weekend, Canadian member of parliament and Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney is in Silicon Valley promoting his country’s Startup Visa.

We chatted with Kenney about the visa’s goals, his intentions, and the U.S. immigration system.

VentureBeat: What’s the ultimate goal of the Startup Visa?

Jason Kenney: We want a pathway for the world’s best and brightest to come to Canada and to harness that drive and innovation to be at the cutting edge of the modern economy.

VentureBeat: Why are you coming to Silicon Valley right now?

Kenney: The U.S. immigration system is dysfunctional, and it’s really difficult for talented immigrants to stay in the U.S. permanently. I’m coming to further raise the profile of the program and send the message that Canada’s open for business.

If you’re a young startup entrepreneur having trouble renewing your visa, come here! We offer immediate permanent residency.

VentureBeat: What’s the response been so far?

Kenney: There’s been a great amount of interest, but we only opened for applications on April 4, so it’s too early to tell. We will issue up to 2,500 per year, but I don’t anticipate it will be fully subscribed for the first year because it’s still new.

I know there’s a huge pent-up demand in the U.S., and I think the word is going to spread virally: If you want to stay permanently in NA, think of Canada.

VentureBeat: You’re offering permanent residency to anyone in who secures an investment. What about those who fail?

Kenney: Many countries, such as Australia, only offer temporary resident status. In Canada, we’re going to give you the “green card” right up front.

We know full well the rate of failure in startups is high, but if they come up here and don’t succeed, they have demonstrated they they have high human capital. And in the long run, their chances of succeeding and building a successful enterprise are high.

We want Canada to become a magnet for people like that.

VentureBeat: Why is Canada a good place to come build a startup?

Kenney: We have really strong tech sectors in Kitchener/Waterloo, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and a few other places, an increasingly strong venture capital industry, and very well-run industry associations, angel associations.

Plus, we have the lowest business taxes in the developed world, and the strongest fiscal position in the developed world.

In terms of macro-economic terms, that’s important … Canada weathered the storm of the economic downturn better than any other country.

In addition, we have an immigration system that works, which means you have access to global talent … and human capital is even more important than financial capital.

VentureBeat: Any other message for Silicon Valley?

Kenney: While here we’ll be meeting with the CEOs of many major IT companies just to emphasize what a great place Canada is to invest in.

I think we’re really going to kick this into hyperdrive.

photo credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE via photopin cc

And Windows Phone could jump into second place quicker than you think.

While they’re not Android or iOS-style numbers, Windows Phone sold 7 million units in the first quarter of 2013 for 3.2 percent market share, according to the latest IDC report. Meanwhile, BlackBerry sold 6.3 million units, down a third from the previous year, for 2.9 percent market share — less than half of its share just a year ago. Market leader Android took its customary massive 75 percent of the market, and Apple’s iPhone slipped from 23 percent global market share in 2012 to 17.3 percent share.

“Windows Phone claiming the third spot is a first and helps validate the direction taken by Microsoft and key partner Nokia,” the IDC’s Kevin Restivo said in a statement. “Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alterative to Android or iOS.”

Those further gains are possible over the next year or two as Microsoft’s primary phone parter, Nokia, transitions to an all-smartphone lineup.

Part of Apple’s quarterly weakness was the company’s lack of any new hardware or significant new announcements. That made Apple slip to its lowest global smartphone market share in years, now less than a quarter of Android’s size, with only 37.4 million iPhones sold to Android’s 162.1 million. But systemically, Apple is falling out of the race for smartphone supremacy. And that puts Apple at risk of being in Microsoft’s sights for the number two position in the global smartphone market share battle.

How?

Nokia is going all in on Windows Phone — mostly by necessity — and now accounts for 79 percent of all Windows Phone sales. The Finnish company has sold over 20 million Windows Phones to date, which is not bad, considering the challenges of Android, iOS, and Microsoft’s stutter-stepping from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8.

Source: IDC

Global smartphone market share, Q1 2013

But the real opportunity for both Microsoft and Nokia will come as Nokia continues its transition from feature phone sales over to Windows Phone. The company still sold something like 55 million feature phones in the first quarter of 2013, and while those cheap phones are going largely to developing nations, they will transition at some point to Windows Phone.

Those feature phones sales are decreasing, and the transition from cheap feature phone to somewhat more expensive Windows-based smartphones will decrease them still more, but they will be higher-value sales.

And, they might just be high enough, depending on what Apple does in the region of a cheaper iPhone, to catapult Microsoft to number two.

Image credit: Microsoft

“Enterprises’ need for public cloud is much different than startups,” Newvem CEO Zev Laderman told me yesterday. “Azure is exactly the perfect extension of the data center.”

Newvem is well-known for its Amazon Web Services offerings, offering startups optimization services, security checking, and overall cloud management — including the first-ever iPhone app for managing your cloud services. Now, Laderman said, the company is returning to its roots in enterprise with a similar offering for Azure. It’s the fruit of an 8-month effort, and it’s a signal that Microsoft’s cloud offerings are hitting a needed an lucrative market niche in a way that Amazon is not.

“Azure is a billion-dollar business,” Laderman says. “Azure is Microsoft’s best-kept secret in the enterprise.”

Newvem’s new offerings on Azure include visualization of your cloud costs, inventory, and usage trends, methods to create dynamic views of your cloud usage and align them to business objectives for very granular optimization recommendations, and pattern-recognizing tools that identify and highlight consumption patterns, such as regular peaks, bursts, and trends.

Private beta participant Linkury agrees, saying that Newvem for Azure gave the company “visibility into specific Windows Azure inventory that we use,” and that “it’s a great time-saver and has helped us to better plan and forecast our usage.”

Source: Newvem

Your cloud dashboard.

The lure of Azure, according to Newvem, is that Microsoft is already huge in the enterprise, and corporations can seamlessly move workloads between owned servers and cloud servers as required. So a company that begins a speculative new project can start serving its computing needs on Azure and then, once workloads stabilize, move the workload into the corporate data center.

That helps enterprises be as nimble and quick to market as startups, since projects can begin immediately without the need for purchase, installation, and configuration of owned hardware and software solutions. But it also enables enterprises to manage costs effectively. If the project isn’t successful, there’s no unused hardware left lying around. If it is, and if via Newvem’s optimization offerings IT management determines that costs could be lower in the data center, projects can easily be moved back inside the four walls.

To Laderman, that’s a key differentiator between Amazon and Azure.

“That’s important for Microsoft,” he says. “They win both ways, because they’re both in the cloud and in the enterprise.”

Source: Newvem

Your cloud utlization heatmap.

Microsoft is very “partner-centric” and has been a key supporter during the 8-month project, Laderman says, especially Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s general manager for Azure.

Microsoft is supporting Newvem in its enterprise marketing channels, will put Newvem’s solution in the Azure store, and will help Newvem go to market via joint sales efforts … all indicators of Microsoft’s commitment to deploying its cloud solutions in the enterprise, and partnering with companies who have complementary services.

“SimulTV puts the social in TV – literally – by merging the second screen with the first,” the company says.

The second screen is the biggest phenomena in traditional media, supposedly. Forrester says that 85 percent of tablet owners in the U.S. check social media while watching TV. It’s such a big phenomenon that TV Guide rolled out an app to see what’s playing, watch whatever’s on, and also tweet, post, and blog about it. And that Apple is rumored to be releasing a mini-TV tablet to enable an iOS-style second-screen experience.

Of course, when I go to watch TV, I go to chill, or to immerse myself in a story … not to tweet about it or share. But I am, admittedly, not 20 anymore.

For those who want to stay socially connected while watching the big game or the last episode of can’t-miss-TV, SimulTV’s solution is to combine both screens, right on the web. So your football game, Twitter conversations, Facebook messages, online search, and text and voice chat with others on SimulTV who are watching the same thing as you.

“If you’re using two screens, you have to take your eyes off the football game or reality show you’re watching and go to your second screen when you want to complain about a penalty or celebrate with your friends when your favorite contestant wins the game,” Steve Turner, founder and president of SimulTV, said in a statement. “That means you are either watching or interacting, but not doing both.”

There’s something to what he’s saying.

I tried the service myself, and besides the fact that it’s Flash-based — at least the code that asks for control of your microphone and webcam in order to participate in on-site chat — and fairly processor-intensive, it seems useful and a better solution than a standard two-device second-screen setup.

Currently, there are only a few channels, but by this summer, SimulTV promises to have more than 100 channels, including ”top channels” from Latin America, China, Japan and Europe, plus 5,000 video-on-demand titles. The service is HD-quality, with picture-in-picture for the truly ADHD social TV aficionados, and according to the company, takes only half the bandwidth of typically required.

Most importantly, however, SimulTV is a service that — depending on the channels the company actually brings on this summer — allows you to cut the cord and simply use your computer or tablet to watch TV.

The service will be free initially, and eventually will cost between $5 and $20.

Image credit: John Koetsier

Josh Stevens is CEO of corporate wellness company Keas. 

[Editor's note: Stevens Comcast Ventures' Michael Yang will be debating the topic of educating employees on health benefits at HealthBeat 2013 next week. See Yang's story: "Health assistants can make patients smarter and employees healthier."]

I have met with over 200 enterprises in the last year. About half did not provide PCs, smartphones or Internet access to their employees. At first, this may not come as a surprise, because many roles in corporate America do not require online access to “do the job.”

However, a lack of online access to help employees enroll for benefits, change their healthcare plan or modify their 401K means that employees are far less likely to use or even be aware of the benefits they have. This digital divide hurts the employees and the company they work for.

This is particularly true when it comes to health care. The companies I visit with are self-insured, paying for their employees’ healthcare. When I visit with a CEO, CFO, or CHRO, it’s usually to consult and help the company drive up employee participation in and use of the health and wellness benefits available to them.

When I ask, “How many of your employees have email and online access?” the conversation usually gets awkward as the employer realizes that many employees who are eligible for benefits don’t have effective online access to understand and use them.

A number of enterprise employers are still communicating with digitally unconnected employees via posters in the cafeteria like they did a decade ago.

Why is this a problem?

Those who have online access have access to tools and resources about how to improve their health and lower their risk factors. Those who don’t are left in the dark and may therefore be at higher risk.

Today, the average American self-insured employer pays $10,000 for an employee’s health care per year. Seventy percent of that amount, or $7,000, is absolutely preventable. But that that requires an effective wellness and prevention program.

Our estimate for the cost of getting employees online is about $100 per employee per year.

Netted against the $7,000 of health costs that can be prevented, the investment is well worth the opportunity — up to a 70x return.

Company-wide initiatives, such as biometric screenings and HRAs to lower healthcare costs, can’t achieve meaningful impact if the most basic communications can’t reach the workforce.  Those unconnected and at risk are blue-collar workers — kitchen staff, drivers and janitors — who often comprise a large part of a company’s workforce.

Here are five tips for designing and implementing company-wide information access systems that reach everyone in the organization:

1. Understand that access is key
   Company-wide should mean company-wide. Ensuring communication reaches every employee is essential. That may mean putting a smartphone, tablet, or mobile device in the hand of every worker.

2. Develop a plan to get connected
   Determine the best online program to implement and the best strategic approach for rolling it out to everyone in the organization. Create a detailed roadmap and assess possible barriers to widespread adoption.

3. Provide hands-on interactive education
   Engage the workforce with inclusive classes and step-by-step instruction. Make it fun, get people interested, foster group involvement so everyone can learn the same way and understand what the benefits are.

4. Find applications that are easy to deploy
   Program upgrades and enhancements must be simple to roll out company-wide in a timely way.

5. Provide tracking and reporting to see where it’s gaining traction
   Have a program that tracks progress in a clear and compelling way, and decode that data to identify best practices and areas for improvement.

photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives via photopin cc

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has asked Microsoft to remove its homebrew YouTube app from the Windows Store immediately, and the search giant requested that it delete the app from Windows Phone users who have already downloaded it.

Essentially, Microsoft built a YouTube app for Windows Phone because Google refused to permit Windows Phone users to connect to YouTube. As Microsoft’s Dave Heiner posted, “Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube … Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do.”

In response, Microsoft created its own YouTube app.

The problems with that, according to Google, are three: the app enables users to download YouTube videos, prevents ads from being shown, and plays videos whose owners have set to only play on certain platforms. Microsoft’s app, Google says, violates the YouTube terms of service, and uses the YouTube logo in a way that contravenes the company’s branding guidelines.

Source: Microsoft

The YouTube app, by Microsoft

This is an ongoing battle that has been slowly heating up since well before January of this year.

The solution would seem to be fairly clear: Google should make a compelling YouTube app for Windows Phone, just as it already does for another smartphone competitor, Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. Why it chooses not to is not exactly clear, although it may just have something to do with the fact that, via patent licensing agreements with Samsung, LG, Acer, and others, Microsoft makes perhaps $5 per Android device sold. And it can’t help that Microsoft has hit Google where it hurts on Android and privacy, which, up until a couple of weeks ago, truly sucked.

Microsoft has since released an official statement, basically saying they’d be happy to work with Google to resolve any issues, as long as Google will reciprocate.

“YouTube is consistently one of the top apps downloaded by smartphone users on all platforms, but Google has refused to work with us to develop an app on par with other platforms. Since we updated the YouTube app to ensure our mutual customers a similar YouTube experience, ratings and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive.  We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs. In light of Larry Page’s comments today calling for more interoperability and less negativity, we look forward to solving this matter together for our mutual customers.”

Surely, we can all get along here?

Google is in no danger of losing its mobile operating system hegemony … as the company announced today, it recently hit 900 million Android device activations.

By Dr. Michal Tsur, a serial tech entrepreneur, and 

We live in a world where young, ambitious women will now contend with a new, and sadly pressured life question – are you “leaning in”?

While Sheryl Sandberg, the second in command at Facebook and author of recent bestseller Lean In, and her ambitious following of female professionals have a nuanced understanding of the concept, in common speak, the words “lean in” convey something too simple, intense, and aggressive.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” writes Sandberg in the book.

Sandberg, who is trying to launch a social movement to empower women, is admirable and certainly has wisdom to offer. However, the intensity and pressure conjured by her phrase is not the right message we should be sending to female youth. In fact, remember old high school basketball coaches barking at us to lean in? Sandberg’s message is reminiscent. “Lean in ladies! Be aggressive. Run faster. The quarter is almost over. No taking a rest now!”

The words themselves were designed to motivate us to work harder and faster; to win.

Yet, unlike basketball games, careers are not broken into quarters. They are more of an evolving marathon filled with twists and turns. The opposite of a sprint. And while muscling forward may help one win a basketball game, it’s not clear that more energy, effort, and aggressiveness is what will get women into the boardroom.

What we’ve realized in debating the message of “lean in” while looking at the careers of people like Sandberg and Mayer, is that something big is lost in the colloquial phrase that Sandberg is championing. We must redefine the phrase to convey a vision that is as big in spirit and excitement as it is in raw ambition.

As Sandberg herself states, success depends on a fair bit of luck. Both Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Sandberg had the good fortune to jump on the Google train in the early days. And Sandberg’s COO role at Facebook has catapulted her into tech godliness that was largely unpredictable.

Yes, smart negotiation, ambition, and sponsors were important. But, what distinguishes Sandberg, and what we’ve learned from our own careers is that success is also about creating, recognizing, and seizing opportunities.  It’s about putting oneself in a position that maximizes luck.

Let’s look at Sandberg. She had the confidence to jump between jobs with the government, the World Bank, and tech companies, following a varied and non-linear path. Mayer grabbed the CEO opportunity at Yahoo despite being pregnant, and knowing that she’d be following a long series of executive failures.

In our own careers, it’s been the opportunities that came from new connections made in school or at a conference, or from invitations to write, speak, or create, that pushed us forward.

And at Kaltura, we look at examples like Becky, one of our key project managers, who, after being told that she didn’t have enough technical experience or background, decided to take a leap, jump into a technical job and learn engineering basics on the side in order to make a career transition.

Or Charly, who, with no degree or any technical background whatsoever, led customer support at one of our competitors and later joined Kaltura as a key account manager.  Yes, these women fought hard to get ahead, but what really sets them apart is that they identified a passion, took risks, and seized new opportunities.

What we see in these examples are ambitious women that “leaned in” to advance their careers and families simultaneously. The message of “lean in” should not be to push harder, as Sandberg argues, “put your foot on the gas pedal and keep it there.”

The key, rather, is to be mindful, intentional and clear-eyed about possibilities that emerge in life and work. It is about not being guided by fear, but rather knowing your passions, being bold, and taking risks. And for women who are nearer to the top, leaning in is about being conscious of setting precedent and shaping institutions in ways that will also create paths for younger women.

So, to women (or men) who feel compelled and inspired by Sandberg but also scared about the implied added pressure to constantly push higher and farther – take a breath.  There is a way to lean in and achieve success with levity and spirit. Lean in to life. Opportunities will emerge.

The key is to be confident and aware enough to see them.

Dr. Michal Tsur is a serial tech entrepreneur, having co-founded online security firm Cyota and open-source video platform Kaltura, where she is currently president. Leah Belsky is a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where she contributes on online collaboration and technology policy, and is currently SVP Operations at Kaltura.

photo credit: Victor1558 via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s countdown (err, up) to 50 billion apps ended today with one lucky winner, as yet unannounced, bagging $10,000 in iTunes money for apps, media, and more.

It’s a good thing Apple hit the number today, because if they waited even another week, the Cupertino company might have been second-best to Google’s Android. At Google’s developer-focused I/O conference today, Google’s Hugo Barra announced that Google Play has just passed 48 billion app installs — and had a massive 2.5 billion just last month.

Just as Apple has done before for major app store download thresholds, it’s giving away the $10,000 gift card to a lucky iOS user who downloaded the 50 billionth app. In addition, 50 lucky people who where the next to download an app have won a $50 gift card — even if they don’t know it yet.

Don’t go rushing to try to be one of those 50, of course … there are about 1,000 app installs on iOS each and ever second.

This is probably the last major app install number that Apple will trumpet to the skies, as Android will be making the big news from now on. At the same Google I/O conference, Android chief Sundar Pichai said that Android has now reached 900 million device activations — far more than Apple.

I’m in the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Ontario, which just added a new 283,000-square foot, $160 million research facility to its existing two buildings.

“We work on the science of the small,” executive-in-residence Rob Crow says. “We sit at the junction of pure research and technological innovation.”

The new facility, which will accommodate some of the Institute’s current 200 researchers as well as provide space for an additional 200 over the next year or so, took seven years to build, mostly because it needs to be completely insulated from outside radiation, vibration, and contamination.

As Martin LaForest, a senior manager at IQC explained, vibration — and sound — is the movement of molecules. And molecular-level nanotechnological assembly is tough to do when things are moving.

That is why the Institute has 3 feet-thick concrete floors and a completely isolated foundation that goes down 30 feet underground to bedrock. And why the building took seven years to complete.

Source: John Koetsier

Martin LaForest

“This is the second-biggest quantum computing center in the world,” Crow says. “We’ll double in a few years and are recruiting experimentalists right now from all around the world.”

The world’s biggest quantum computing lab is in Singapore. China is building two facilities. Pittsburgh is just starting its own, and Russia has invested $100 million in building yet another quantum computing institute.

Why all the fuss and bother?

“The holy grail is a general purpose quantum computer,” Crow explains. “That will be many many orders of magnitude more powerful than all the computers in the world today.” (Maybe even powerful enough to serve as the brain for a Cylon, as a recent Forbes profile suggested.)

A quantum computer calculates using quantum mechanical phenomena, essentially using what Einstein called the “spooky” nature of tiny particles, such as photons, to exist in multiple contradictory states at the same time. Critically, that enables quantum computers to calculate certain problems much more quickly than classical computers like the one you’re using right now. For instance, while standard computers represent data via bits that can be either on or off, or a 1 or a 0, a 10-quantum bit computer or 10-qubit computer, could simultaneously represent data in 1,024 states.

Source: John Koetsier

T

“Small quantum computers already exist,” LaForest says, but adds that ”we will be many years to a useful quantum computer.”

That’s what the Institute is all about, and that’s the “holy grail” the researchers are seeking. It’s also why Mike Lazaridis of BlackBerry fame (and fortune) funded the development of the institute, and set up a $100 million venture capital fund to commercialize products and technologies discovered at the facility.

There have already been multiple spin-off product and companies, including one called  Universal Quantum Devices that makes a time tagger for photos, which can accurately count and tag the arrival of individual photons, and another device, the world’s smallest chip for making entangled photos, which are critical for quantum communication studies.

In other words, LaForest says, we’re in the pick ax-and-shovel phase of the quantum era:

“Some of the most important tools are the ones you have to build yourself, and then you sell them to labs around the world working on the problem.”

Once the mission bears fruit, however, as Crowe is confident it will, the results will be immense. Much better simulation capabilities, new technologies for biological studies, better weather and climate modeling computers, amazing cryptography capabilities, and quantum sensors that could map the interior of the earth for geological exploration are just some of the possibilities.

And, even cooler perhaps, a Star Trek-like medical tricorder.

“We actually think we can build one of these things now,” says LaForrest. “Now we’re almost to the point where we can do MRI on the molecular level.”

And maybe, that’s even thinking small. Because the quantum computer, in spite of its potentially sub-atomic size, is a big, big deal.

“We are trying to be the first to build the quantum computer,” says Crow. “When we do it, and we will do it eventually, it’s going to be bigger than the moon landing.”

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Where’s Steve Ballmer doing the monkey dance when you need him? OK, wrong company. But instead of doing a creepy developer dance, Google’s showing its developer appreciation with five major new features to make more money.

Cold hard cash — now, that’s love!

Google Play product manager Ellie Powers — no relation to Austin — shared the new features of Google Play Developer Console at Google I/O in San Francisco today.

1. Optimization tips: Google automatically generates optimization tips based on what your app does and what users are doing with your app. For example, if your app is selling well in Russia but it’s not localized in Russian, Google will suggest you localize your app.

2. App translation service: Getting translations can be tough, so Google has introduced a new app translation service right in the Developer Console. Simply pick the app, select the language, and pick a translation vendor. Your translations will arrive in about a week.
   

   Source: John Koetsier

   Ellie Powers

3. Usage metrics with referral tracking: “We want to give you all your metrics in the same place,” Powers said, so Google will now show you all your user metrics right in the Developer Console as well as in Google Analytics. This will roll out later this summer. And if you’re using campaigns to promote your app, referral tracking helps you understand which ads are most effective — and integrates with Google Analytics, showing you your google Play referral flow.

4. Revenue graphs: A new tab in the developer console supplies a summary of your app’s revenue, globally or per-country.

5. Beta testing and staged rollouts: If you want to test new features, Google Play now supports beta testing and staged rollouts. Developers can start with a small group of alpha testers, and then roll it out to a larger group of beta testers — using Google Groups, of course. Feedback from these groups only goes to the developers.

Image credit: Google

“Google is very fortunate to have two large open platforms … two fast-growing platforms,” Pichai said, referring to both Android and Chrome, the world’s most popular browser.

Two years ago Android had just 100 million activations, and just a year ago, Android reached 400 million. Today, at 900 million, it is still more than doubling annually.

But there’s still a long ways to go, Pichai said.

“There are seven billion people on earth,” he said.

In other good news for its mobile operating system, Google’s Hugo Barra announced that Google Play has now passed 48 billion app installs. That’s massive — and it comes just as Apple is announcing its drive to 50 billion installs. But the growth on Android is massive and increasing, with a staggering 2.5 billion app installs just in the last month.

In addition, developers are making more money.

“This year we paid more money already to developers on Google Play than all of last year,” Barra said. “And revenue per user is 2.5x what it was a year ago.”

This isn’t even a race.

Second place is LG, with 2.5 percent of the device profits from Android smartphones, and third place is “Other,” with everyone else lumped in to a tiny 2.7 percent share.

“Samsung is, for now, the undisputed king of the global Android smartphone industry,” Neil Mawston, Strategy Analytics’ executive director said in a statement. “We believe Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google does.”

Globally, Android smartphones accounted for 43 percent of the overall smartphone industry’s profits, the report says. Those profits reached $12.5 billion in just the first quarter of 2013. And due to an ultra-efficient supply chain, “sleek products,” and successful marketing strategies, Samsung has captured almost all of that 43 percent, or $5.1 billion.

Now the question in the Android ecosystem is this: Is Samsung more powerful than Google?

According to Strategy Analytics, perhaps.

“Samsung has strong market power and it may use this position to influence the future direction of the Android ecosystem,” Mawston says. “For example, Samsung could request first or exclusive updates of new software from Android before rival hardware vendors.”

Samsung, which shipped 400 million phones in 2012 and 82.2 million phones, tablets, and laptops in the first quarter of 2013, is clearly on a roll. Android has 75 percent global market share, and Samsung has a massively dominant position within the Android ecosystem.

People are just trying to get the best long-term deal, says Stephen Baker at the NPD Group:

“In a quarter without a major product launch from either of the two market leaders, consumers refocused their attention away from the postpaid wars and toward finding the best value for their dollar.”

Those two market leaders, of course, are Samsung and Apple. But Apple is hardly even a participant in the prepaid market.

The portion of the market sold prepaid has been increasing for years, says Baker.

“Sales of prepaid smartphones doubled from the previous year, continuing a string of more than 12 quarters of triple-digit sales increases.”

Apple’s share looks tiny, especially in a U.S. market where it has dominant market share, but it has quadrupled year-over-year since the first quarter of 2012. However, with the prepaid market growing so quickly, Apple’s latest –and typically expensive — phones have not been the big sellers. Rather, it’s the year-old iPhone 4S that is Apple’s leading contender in prepaid, just as one of Samsung’s top prepaid sellers is the now somewhat aged Galaxy S II.

Even outdated models get pricy — the iPhone 4S can cost $400 to $600 unlocked and brand-new, while the Galaxy S II can be between $300 and $400. But consumers make up the heavy upfront cost by saving on cheaper plans, potentially saving hundreds, if not a thousand dollars over the lifetime of their phones.

For Apple, however, capitalizing fully on this fast-emerging market trend means bringing out a cheaper iPhone that can be sold as a new, current model-year device at a price point closer to Android models from Samsung and LG. And Samsung has some work to do, too — while its market share remained stable from 2012 to 2013, competitors such as Apple and HTC have gained share.

Where are people buying prepaid phones? Mostly at retail, NPD says.

“Prepaid has proven to be a real winner for national retailers,” said Baker. “The easy purchase cycle and grab-and-go nature of the product play into the strength of large-format stores. Certainly, companies like AT&T recognize this shift in purchasing as they ramp up their focus on prepaid phones with their recently announced ‘Aio’ product branding initiative.”

The case, which was filed in April 2012, is finally coming to trial in June. And in new documents that the government filed, the attorney general paints Apple as the ringmaster. All of the other original codefendants, including Harper Collins, the Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster, have already settled with the government, leaving Apple as the sole defendant.

As the saying goes, them’s fightin’ words. And Apple is fighting back.

“Apple has not ‘conspired’ with anyone, was not aware of any alleged ‘conspiracy’ by others, and never fixed prices,” the company stated in a reply to the suit last year.

The trial is set to begin on June 3.

Source: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

Apple CEO Tim Cook and iBooks

The DOJ is pointing to an email from Steve Jobs, in which he told Rupert Murdoch of News Corp to “throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99” as evidence to the contrary.

But Apple says that it was simply establishing the currently accepted agency model of pricing, in which publishers set the price and e-book stores simply sell at that price. That contrasts with the wholesale method of publishing, in which retailers buy books from publishers at whatever price they can negotiate and then sell the books to consumers at whatever price they wish. That is, of course, the model Amazon prefers.

Legal experts such as antitrust author and University of Hartford professor emeritus Dominick Armentano have said that Apple is likely to prevail, since the seller in an agency model market does not actual set any prices. In other words, if there was price-fixing in the agency model, it would have to be undertaken by the publishers themselves.

The bigger question here for Apple and its fans is how Apple used its power in mobile apps to strong-arm publishers such as Random House into agreeing with the deal. According to the DOJ filing, Apple blocked approval of an e-book app from Random House in 2010 until the publisher signed the agency deal.

That’s clearly dirty pool, and using power in what was then an almost all-powerful Apple smartphone ecosystem to influence — or compel — partner behavior in the ebook market.

Image credit (Tim Cook): Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

But, he adds, Google co-founder Sergei Brin tells him he’s a better CEO because he says less.

Page lost his left vocal cord over a decade ago after a bad cold and a hoarse voice that never really recovered. Doctors couldn’t explain the problem, never identifying a cause, and assured him that losing the other vocal cord was a virtual impossibility. Fast forward to last year, and again after a cold and a hoarse voice, Page learned that his right vocal cord now had limited movement also.

Both injuries resulted in vocal issues — the first in a slightly weaker voice than normal, and the second with even more impact — but Page says he’s been able to recover, at least partially:

Thankfully, after some initial recovery I’m fully able to do all I need to at home and at work, though my voice is softer than before. And giving long monologues is more tedious for me and probably the audience.  But overall over the last year there has been some improvement with people telling me they think I sound better.

But Page, who says he’s actually feeling quite lucky overall, also says that having paralyzed vocal cords may have made him a better CEO. Why? As co-founder Brin told him, Page is forced to choose his words more carefully … which probably gives him the time to think through what he wants to say before saying it, and also reduces the number of occasions in which thoughtless words cause damage.

I’ve heard that personally on Google earnings calls — Page speaks a little slowly, a lot softly, and with carefully-selected, well-chosen words.

As a result of these challenges, Page came into contact with a Harvard doctor, Steven Zeitels, who is leading a research project on vocal cord paralysis. The problem is relatively rare, he says, and there’s not enough information currently to help doctors learn more about it, and to treat it.

The project is starting with a patient survey to “gather information about the prevalence and extent of vocal paralysis and paresis” from people who have similar problems.

Page’s journey surfaces the question: would every CEO be better by saying less?

Image credit: Google Zeitgeist video

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Or, at least, where they’re the most open about displaying their antisocial views.

The picture doesn’t look good for the Eastern states, although admittedly the bulk of the population is there as well. Areas in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama show up bright red on the map, as do areas in more central states Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota.

The map is part of a larger project, called the Geography of Hate, by Humboldt State professor Dr. Monica Stephens. The data that forms the map comes from an analysis of every tweet posted between June 2012 and April 2013 that contained at least one of 10 designated “hate words,” including dyke, fag, chink, gook, wetback, and cripple.

Source: Hate Map

California seems relatively hate-free

But while the original list of tweets was generated by a machine, every single one of the 150,000 tweets containing one of the target words was individually examined by undergraduate students. As the project description states:

Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing “hate words” as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To protect the identity of potentially racist, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted Twitter users, the tweets were aggregated up to the county level, and counties with high levels of hate speech were colored red on the map. Areas with moderate levels — though still higher than the national average — are varying shades of blue, and unshaded areas were below the national average.

Smaller towns seem to have a higher incidence of hate speech — in Virginia, for example, Palmyra is more hateful on Twitter than Richmond. And in Louisiana, New Orleans and Baton Rouge are less hateful than smaller towns nearby.

Image credits: Geography of Hate

In other words, PayPal is all in.

PayPal Here, which offers a triangle dongle to compete with a certain rival’s Square, offers a mobile dongle that you can attach to smartphones or tablets to take payments on the go. But it’s also now a pre-integrated solution for existing point-of-sale machines from multiple vendors such as ERPLY, Leaf, Leapset, NCR Silver, ShopKeep, and Vend.

Source: PayPal

PayPal’s triangle

“The cash register has been a familiar sight for generations, but it’s time to replace it with a modern solution,” PayPal says.

While PayPal was late to this particular game, it has quickly added partners like Home Depot and Abercrombie & Fitch, and, after being available just in North America for some time, recently entered the UK. And the company absolutely crushes all other competitors — including Google, MasterCard, and Visa — in consumer awareness for its digital wallet services.

But the real juice in this latest program is the free payment processing for the rest of the year. That’s huge to merchants who are looking to squeeze a few extra percentage points of profit out of typically skinny retail margins. Payment processors can easily take one to three percent of a company’s gross sales, right off the top.

Merchants can also skip the cash register upgrade and simply go directly to an iPad solution with PayPal Here running as an app, in which case PayPal Here can connect wirelessly to a cash drawer and printer.

“Facebook won the MySpace battle because of better and more immediate interaction with people,” Eric Covino says. “The more they get away from that, the bigger the concern.”

Covino is the founder and CEO of CreativeSignals, an online marketing firm that buys Facebook ads, among other things. And he’s not impressed with the new of the impending autoplaying video ads that Facebook is rumored to be adding in the next few months.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s clean, uncluttered new News Feed.

As soon as July, according to some reports, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads right in your news feed. You’ll only see one video ad from one company a day, but the positioning right in your news feed — and the fact that they may be autoplay ads– makes it a risky move. That’s very different than Facebook’s existing video ad proposition, as Wired notes, which is on brands’ own product pages.

The rationale, however, is the pot of goal at the end of the digital rainbow.

“They’re looking to push out millions of dollars of ads,” Covino sayw. “The price per spot is definitely north of a million.”

The challenge, for Covino, boils down to user experience. MySpace bit the dust because of a horrible user experience cluttered with ads. Facebook, which just added retargeted ads in the middle of your news feed, initially had just one ad per page. The social network moved to four in 2011, then to six, and has tested up to 10.

The pressure, especially now that Facebook is a publicly-traded company, is to increase revenue. And there’s also pressure from advertisers, who want new and better ways of splashing their messages in front of social media users.

“With both Facebook and Twitter, you have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them,” Covino told me. “I’m worried about the user experience … they keep interrupting people.”

Facebook, of course, is not unaware of these problems, and they test almost everything they do with small groups of Facebook users before migrating the changes slowly to others. So if there is a significant user backlash, Facebook will know, and it will be able to course-correct.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg announcing the updated News Feed

The question, however, is whether the tension between cash and user experience will be resolved in a way that solves both problems.

Covino’s not so sure.

“The core problem of all this is that you have to overcome the psychology of what your users think your service is,” he says.

In other words, people come to Facebook to connect with friends, not necessarily with brands. That is probably largely true, but people are also connecting strongly with companies on Facebook — especially local community businesses. In fact, Facebook trumpeted just a month ago that its users have made more than two billion connections to local businesses, view their Facebook pages 645 million times a week, and comment on them 13 million times a week.

And Facebook fans have never been more valuable to brands — BMW fans are worth $1,613, Starbucks fans $177, and Coke fans are worth $70 to their respective brands.

The core question, to Covino, is how long they’ll stay that way.

“All these things are great, and they sound great, but can that money overcome psychology?” he wonders. “I’m extremely skeptical.”

While analysts, Wall Street, former Apple employees, and, yes — journalists — have been raking Apple over the coals for its agonizingly slow product release cycle and lack of response to the growing market for larger screens, Tim “no new products until this fall” Cook has held his fire.

That’s probably at least partly due to the fact that that “growing” market might indeed be growing, but not all that quickly. In fact, according to mobile advertising company Tapjoy, fablets only make up a tiny 4 percent of the market.

“Fablets don’t fill a market need that is most valuable to end users,” Brian Sapp, a director at Tapjoy, told me yesterday. “They fall in a gray area … the device manufacturers want to make larger screens, but most users just don’t care.”

Source: Swipe Telecom

Swipe Telecom’s 5-inch F3 fablet.

Tapjoy is a pretty credibly source of mobile market data — the company’s monetization solutions live in tens of thousands of apps, and thereby on over a billion devices globally, the company told me. That’s a big sample size from which to draw conclusions.

“Users,” Sapp concludes, “want a phone that fits in their pocket.”

This data very likely comes with regional lumpiness to that data, with fablets being more popular in some areas (I suspect Asia, for one). But 4 percent is not a big number, and it’s not the kind of massive market that Apple typically looks for.

In addition, Apple is much more concerned with making great products than flip-flopping in the wind of what’s popular du jour. And usability experts point out that already on iPhone-sized screens, some areas are hard to manage one-handed and to both access virtual controls and initiate standard on-screen gesture motions.

Which, of course, makes fablets two-handed beasts.

One caveat, however.

While fablets may be a small slice of the market, phones that are bigger than iPhone are not. The supersuccessful Galaxy S III and Galaxy S4 are both bigger than iPhone 5. And Samsung, which shipped 400 million phones in 2012 and 82.2 million smartphones, tablets, and notebooks in the first quarter of 2013, knows something about what customers want, too.

“Market share is important and unit share is important,” Cook said on the company’s last earnings call. “But we’re all about customer experience and enriching lives.”

Which means it is very likely that a larger iPhone will be coming at some point in 2013, closer to fall. Just not as big as some pundits might like.

And … it probably will still fit in your pocket.